Invisible Boy

by Cornelia Read

I leaned back in through the passenger window before she’d put the car back in gear. “Anybody halfway normal would consider us total freaks, you know?”

  Cate smiled at me, a little sadly. “This is one of those weeks when ‘normal’ seems like a delusion of grandeur.”

  I came up out of the subway station in Union Square and hooked a right at the Gandhi statue.

  I couldn’t see all the way to the Hudson, but it still seemed as though the clear, warm western light spilling toward me had bounced sparkling across the river on its way.

  I turned up the volume on my Walkman, the mournful second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh in Teddy’s honor.

  I zoned out for the next few blocks, trying to think of nothing but the music until I’d turned into our building’s courtyard—no damaged children, no evil grown-ups.

  I hit the tape’s Stop button and pushed the headphones down around my neck once I’d crossed the threshold into our apartment, calling out, “Hi, honey, I’m home!” to whomever might be kicking back in the living room’s brazen apricot glare.

  This was greeted by a lackluster chorus soon revealed as Sue, Pagan, and Astrid herself—all sprawled on the sofa.

  Sue and Pague were in post-work shorts-and-flip-flops mufti, but Astrid was still wearing her quilted black jacket, with sunglasses on top of her head.

  “What do you, sleep in that thing?” I asked her.

  Astrid looked up at me with those limpid eyes, the circles beneath them stained coffee-dark with fatigue.

  She shivered inside the coat, drawing it closer around her too-

  slender frame. The problem wasn’t what she slept in, but whether she’d slept at all.

  “Maddie,” she said, “do you think I should go to Rome?”

  It turned out she’d already been there for over an hour, asking that question over and over of Pagan and Sue while they gritted their teeth, waiting for my return. Astrid overwhelmed me inside ten minutes, and I’d excused myself to the kitchen for a fortifying beer.

  Pagan ducked in behind me seconds later, while I was still rattling through drawers in search of a bottle opener.

  “Nutty Buddy’s gotten kind of, um, nuttier,” she said.

  “I’m worried about her,” I said, popping the cap off my Rolling Rock.

  “What’s the deal with Rome?”

  “I think it has to do with the guy she didn’t marry.”

  “You should ask her. Or maybe just stick her in a cab for the airport. She’s exhausting.”

  “You think it’s too much coke?” I asked.

  “Too much something.”

  “It’s not like she’s got a runny nose or anything.”

  “Maybe she’s shooting it,” said Pagan.

  “You think she’d seem this tired?”

  “Heroin, then? Who the hell knows.”

  “What do I do?” I said. “She’s my friend, and I don’t know how to fucking help.”

  “I’m not sure you can.”

  “That’s so fucked up. Just… wrong.”

  “Maybe you should call her husband.”

  “I don’t know him at all. And the whole thing’s so weird because now he’s Dean’s boss.”

  “How ’bout her mother?”

  I’d only met the woman once, and she hadn’t struck me as the kind of person with much of a shoulder to cry on—if she were even in the country, which she seldom was. At most she might begrudge her daughter another sable coat.

  I looked at Pagan. “It’s like I’m watching somebody who really matters drifting out to sea, and I’m standing here on the beach doing nothing.”

  “You have to talk to her.”

  “What do I even say?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Pagan. “Maybe that part doesn’t matter.”

  The pair of us walked back down the dark hallway.

  “So, Astrid,” I said, “what’s with the sudden desire to switch continents?”

  “Do you think Christoph loves me?” she asked.

  “A man charters a plane to Southampton two weeks ago so he can marry you,” I said. “I think that’s evidence of high regard, don’t you?”

  “I can’t tell if he really loves me, Madeline,” she said.

  “Astrid, how could he help but love you?”

  She pulled down her sunglasses to cover her eyes, slumping back into her dark velvet cocoon.

  “Astrid,” I said, “you’re the most beautiful woman in every room you’ve ever walked into, and you’re great fun, and you’re very, very smart. If the man doesn’t love you, he’s an idiot.”

  “So you think he doesn’t?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said. “In fact I think he seems absolutely smitten with you, from what I saw at dinner.”

  “What does Dean say?”

  “I’m sure he’d say the same thing. It just seems so obvious, you know? Your husband loves you.”

  Sue rolled her eyes and edged out of the room.

  “Should I go to Rome?” Astrid asked again.

  “What’s in Rome, Antonini?” I asked.

  “He hasn’t called.”

  “Which is not exactly surprising considering you married someone else the minute he was out of town.”

  “I could fly there this weekend,” she said.

  “What would you tell Christoph?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if I’d tell him anything.”

  I couldn’t discern whether this was buyer’s remorse or merely a bid for general reassurance. The fact that my husband now worked for hers made the whole thing even more fucked up to navigate.

  “Astrid, what do you want me to tell you? I don’t know what you want.”

  “I want to know whether you think I should go to Rome,” she said.

  Pagan stood up.

  “I have a song for you,” she said, patting Astrid on the shoulder.

  She walked over to the stereo and cued up a CD. Seconds later the B-52s were singing “Roam If You Want To” at very high volume.

  Astrid smiled but didn’t look very reassured.

  “Look,” I said, “it’s getting dark out. Why don’t I get you a taxi home? I bet Christoph’s home by now, and you can call me in the morning at work, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, pulling her hood up and getting creakily to her feet.

  I walked her downstairs and was relieved to find a cab pulling up to the curb right outside.

  I bundled Astrid into the backseat and told her everything would be okay, hoping I was telling the truth.

  “Do you think I should go to Rome?” she asked again as I was about to close the door.

  “I think you should sleep on it. If you still don’t know in the morning, we can talk about it some more.”

  I shut the door and patted the cab’s roof, then watched it whisk her away down the darkening street.

  I raised my bottle of Rolling Rock in salute, wishing her safety in whatever journey she’d embarked upon.

  “Toasting the city, Bunny?”

  I turned to find Dean walking toward me down the sidewalk.

  “Thank God,” I said, hugging him. “I thought you’d never get here.”

  18

  You have some really fucked-up friends,” said Sue when we were all back splayed out across the living room, having called Mykonos for delivery of baba ghanoush and hummus and souvlaki, agreeing we were all too communally exhausted to consider walking anywhere.

  “I can’t believe she was here, too,” said Dean. “She drove out to the office in New Jersey twice today.”

  “After you called me this morning?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “That woman needs a fucking job,” said Sue.

  “Or a fucking life,” added Pagan. “I mean, go to fucking Rome already. Who fucking cares?”

  “I’m worried about her,” I said.

  “Why don’t you worry about world peace or something, Maddie?” asked Sue. “I mean, use your energy wisely.”

  “Oh,
right, because the pursuit of world peace is such a historically non-frustrating endeavor,” I said.

  Pagan laid her head down on the arm of the sofa and closed her eyes. “What. Ever. I’m just so happy she isn’t talking at me anymore.”

  We heard the rattle-and-clink of someone wrapping heavy chains around a bicycle.

  “Hark,” said Dean, “the dinner bell.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t until we’d paid the delivery guy and opened up all the various containers across the coffee table that I started relating my adventures out in Queens that day.

  “I wouldn’t have known what Melmac even was,” said Pagan, scooping up a bite of lamb and tzatziki with a wedge of pita bread.

  “I don’t know why I did,” I said. “It’s not like I really watched that show. I mean, maybe a couple of times when I had the flu or something. I don’t even remember.”

  “It’s your photogenic memory,” she said. “Only this time there was some purpose to the useless trivia your brain is flypaper for.”

  “Photogenic?” asked Dean.

  “Old joke,” said Pagan. “Long boring explanation.”

  “Who’s got the salt?” I asked.

  Pagan picked up the shaker from down the table and set it on the napkin beside my plate.

  I started shaking the white gold generously over my food.

  “You haven’t even tasted it,” said Sue.

  “Why ruin the first bite?” I replied.

  Sue said, “I want to know more about the cemetery. Who do you think killed the little boy, his mother?”

  Pague and I said “Boyfriend” simultaneously.

  “But if he’d been beaten up a lot before?” asked Sue. “I mean, does anyone even know how long his mother’d been with the boyfriend?”

  “I have a hard time picturing a woman doing that much damage, just from the upper-body-strength perspective. His rib cage was totally—”

  “We’re eating, here,” said Pagan.

  I shrugged. “Sue asked.”

  Pagan pointed her pita at me. “Funny, I didn’t hear her say, ‘Could you please cause me to be overcome with extreme nausea.’ ”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “You should be.”

  Ah, sisters.

  Sue turned to Dean. “So how’s the new job?”

  “Interesting,” he said. “I’m liking it so far.”

  “What do these machines do, anyway?” asked Pagan.

  “Tell you how much shit there is in a sample of water. Microbes have to breathe, so you measure their respiration and figure out your level of contaminant.”

  “I’m so glad I went to film school,” said Sue. “I have no idea what you just said.”

  “They don’t seem to work. Christoph keeps blaming the ignorant American workforce lacking proper respect for holy Swiss inventors in lab coats. I’ll find out next week.”

  “Next week?” I asked.

  “They’re sending me to Houston on a service call Sunday night. Looks like it’s time for a fresh set of coveralls.”

  “Pinstripe or herringbone?” I asked.

  “Herringbone,” he said. “More slimming.”

  Sue went out for a game of pool with some pals, and Dean wandered off to bed.

  Pague and I decided to have one more beer before we went to sleep ourselves, after turning off the lights in the living room to stop the evil orange from searing further into our eyeballs.

  Our lone streetlamp threw a soft glow in through the room’s two windows, the fire escape’s locked gate casting long skinny shadows across the ceiling.

  “Tell me more about the kid,” said Pagan, taking a sip of beer.

  “His name was Teddy Underhill.”

  “So he’s a distant cousin or something, right?”

  “Might be. I mean, he’s black.”

  “Which means maybe our family owned his family,” she said. “Ouch.”

  “Doesn’t rule out being related.”

  “Of course not. How’d he end up in the cemetery?”

  “We don’t know.” I took a sip of my beer, then told her about the hotel by LaGuardia and how close Mrs. Underhill lived to Prospect.

  “His mother told the cops she’d been out on a job interview,” I said, “but Skwarecki doesn’t believe it.”

  “Skwarecki?” asked Pague.

  “The homicide detective chick.”

  “Why doesn’t she believe the mother?”

  “Says she looked like a crackhound.”

  “How big was the kid?”

  I held my hand about six inches above the surface of the coffee table, and Pague shivered.

  “I’m kind of struck by something,” I said.

  “What?”

  “How you and I immediately blamed the boyfriend. Nobody else did—Sue and Dean, Cate this afternoon.”

  “How ’bout the cop?”

  “Skwarecki’s totally down with the boyfriend angle. I could just tell. But it being my default response freaked her out a little.”

  Pagan shrugged. “That’s just our life.”

  “Stepfathers, sure,” I said. “But I got spanked once. Mom and Michael were having a dinner party and I kept stomping my feet on the mattress and chanting ‘Fee fi fo fum’ really loudly for an hour after they’d put me to bed.”

  “I would’ve thrown you out the window.”

  “Right? I mean, it’s not like we were beaten, ever.”

  “No.”

  “Or, you know, molested.”

  Pagan didn’t say anything.

  After a few seconds the quiet took on a scary gravity.

  My little sister took another swallow of beer.

  I was cold all of a sudden. That creeping chill I’d felt back in the cemetery, when Skwarecki described the last time Teddy had been seen alive. I looked down to see all the little hairs on my forearms standing straight up.

  “Pague?”

  “That whole thing with Pierce,” she said.

  “ What whole thing with Pierce?”

  “I told you about it.”

  “I’d totally remember you telling me anything to do with that stupid pompous arrogant sorry-ass piece-of-shit skeevy butthead,” I said.

  My sister scootched her back down against the sofa, nestling her head into the top of a nubby-tweed pillow. She hooked a big toe under the coffee table to pull it closer, then stretched her bare feet across its surface.

  A lone car swept past in the street below.

  I turned sideways to face her, hugging my knees to my chest.

  She looked up at the ceiling. “It’s weird.”

  “What’s weird?”

  “That you don’t know,” she said. “I could’ve sworn I told you years ago.”

  19

  Icould’ve sworn I told you years ago.

  Maybe thirty seconds elapsed after my sister said that—half a minute during which pretty much every nuance of Pagan’s and my entire childhood crashed through my head.

  I was eleven when Pierce moved into our house. Pagan was nine and a half. Mom split up with our dad in 1967, and with our brother Trace’s father in ’72.

  Pierce came on the scene following her yearish-long stints dating a very sweet seventeen-year-old guy, then a newly divorced South African mathematician whose kids we played with on the weekends he had custody.

  We were pretty cool with it all, frankly. The only still-married parents we knew were Mr. and Mrs. Neare, who knocked back highball glasses of vodka-spiked green Hi-C from 7 A.M. onward, every day.

  By the time the schoolbus returned their kids they could barely maneuver the Victrola’s needle onto their next bullshit-Republican Mantovani record.

  All the other moms hung out in each other’s kitchens, half of them with toddlers in their laps. They laughed over coffee or glasses of wine, comparing notes on the vagaries of vanished men and the fifties myths they’d been raised believing the worth of: monogamy or the rhythm method or the Stock Exchange.

  T
hat was the surface of things. The version Mom told at cocktail parties back east, illustrating how much better everything was now that we’d abandoned Long Island for California.

  Mom didn’t talk about how there was never enough money, or how bright the kitchen lights seemed in the middle of the night as she emptied ice trays into a dishtowel to soothe some other mother’s black eye or bruised throat.

  They’d tiptoe back outside to lift sleeping children tenderly from some broken-down station wagon’s backseat, the blankies still clutched in tiny fists, fat cheeks flushed with the warmth of footie pajamas.

  Like I said, most of the time we were pretty cool with that life, me and Pagan. But we got out as early as we could. I scored a scholarship to Mom’s boarding school, and Pagan was treated to a year in Switzerland by her godmother.

  I was fleeing the miserable daily grind of Pierce in our house, but I never imagined he had anything to do with my sister’s exodus.

  I was the kid he hated: the bitch, the smart-ass, the “put-down queen.”

  The man enjoyed playing favorites, telling me I was fat and ugly compared to my lithe, dark-haired mother and sister.

  I’d envied my sister, the beloved child: Pagan-the-graceful, Pagan-the-good. The kid who’d never blurt out a sharp phrase, unable to resist the sheer snapping delight of the words in her mouth.

  She was not a constant, involuntary, green-eyed-blonde reminder of Mom’s first husband and his utter indifference to our financial upkeep.

  Pierce lived in our house for five years. He gave Mom $150 a month, and pointedly begrudged every single lightbulb, chicken thigh, paper towel, bowl of cereal, or gallon of gas that money purchased.

  He’d paid goddamn child support to two goddamn ex-wives, and he was goddamned if he’d pick up the slack for any deadbeat asshole who didn’t fucking care enough about his own goddamn kids to make sure they went to school with goddamn shoes on their goddamn feet.

  Unless it was something for Pagan.

  But I’d gotten it totally, utterly wrong: the premise underlying

  everything I remembered.

  And I should have known,

  I should have known,

  I should have fucking well known

  .

  I flashed on an afternoon when I was thirteen or so, sitting in the backseat of Mom’s car.