Benji leaned out the window and waited for what followed, waited for more, but nothing came. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
The boy stared up at the house, the pleasant picture made by the dormers and chimneys and pillared porticos, the pearl-gray paint that was almost the same color as his car. “Do the Fishers live here?”
“Pull around back,” he said to Cat, feeling mildly heroic in his promise to handle this. He swung his door open and gruntingly heaved himself out of the car, tapped the sun-warmed roof to make Cat go, then took a few wobbly steps closer to the boy. “Who’s asking?”
“Me? I’m Max. Max Davis.” He swiped the hair out of his eyes and for the first time met Benji’s gaze head-on. Had they met before? “What happened to you?”
“Long story.”
The boy blinked. “I’m looking for Claudia?”
“Claudia’s my sister.”
“You’re?”
“Her brother.” Benji felt entitled to give the kid a hard time until he stated his business.
“Is she here?”
“You’re about twenty years too late. She hasn’t lived her since, ah, you do the math.”
“1990.” Max nodded, plunging his hands into his commodious pockets to play an anxious, rattling song of keys and change. “I figured she wouldn’t be here, but this was the address they had on file. And there are about sixteen million Claudia Fishers on Google. I wasn’t even sure Fisher was still her last name.”
Twenty-two years. No sooner had Max uttered the year than Benji, with the startling suddenness of having a blindfold pulled from his eyes, could plainly see. 1990. It was the only number Benji needed to solve the equation. He didn’t need Max to tell him who “they” were or what their files contained. He didn’t need to summon the memory of the year Claudia disappeared between college and grad school, the entire year she refused to come home. The variables fell ineradicably into place in front of him. Max’s eyes, Max’s mouth. He hadn’t met the boy before, but nevertheless Benji had seen him. He knew that mouth. He had that mouth. The same as Claudia’s. The same as their father’s.
“Oh my God,” Benji whispered.
“Yeah. Oh my God.” Max swallowed. “I’m.”
“I know. I know who you are.”
He was, among other things, the reason Nick Amato had proposed, the reason Claudia’s first love had ended in a fit of flames, the reason Benji drove her to the most discreet clinic she could find and then, when she couldn’t go through with it, the reason she refused to show herself to her parents for an entire year.
“What did you say your name is?” the boy eventually asked.
“Mine?” Benji answered from far away. “Benjamin.”
“Benjamin,” the boy repeated, then, through a winsome but not yet certain smile, “Uncle Ben?”
Benji’s laugh started slowly, warming up like a motor on a cold morning. “Benji,” he said.
“Benji.” Only then did Max step forward, ignoring his uncle’s outstretched hand and pulling him into a tight and pleading hug. “Benji,” he said. “I can work with that.”
~ ~ ~
Moonlight paints the room. I stare out at the rain. The water that streaks the windows is mirrored by mercurial little rivers running over the floor. She is out there. Somewhere, like Lear, Jane is out in the storm. What would she do to find me at this window, her daughter in this bed? Claudia stirs. She cries for her mother, but already Jane is not who she means. If Jane came back now, Claudia would not know her. What are you doing up? Evelyn asks, as if she, too, has been up for some time. She tucks the blanket round the girl and struggles to prop herself with a pillow. She isn’t yet used to her new size and puts a hand on her round belly as she tells me to come back to bed. She doesn’t ask why I’m out of bed in the first place. I climb under the covers and look across at her. We are carved in marble in the moonlight, none of us moving for a long time. Eventually, she reaches out to put her hand on my chest. She’s not coming back, she says. The weight of her hand is impossible, but still I nod. There is a saying about the love of a good woman. And Evelyn is good, but she needs something I carry inside of me to die. There is not enough room for it here. She sees it circling above us like a hawk, casting shadows, never letting us out of its sight.
6
She let the call go to voice mail. Benji. Flying his war flag against their father. Or surrendering his pride to ask for more funds. Not this morning, Claudia thought. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock, but the day seemed half over, leached away by one distraction after another. She woke at six, determined to review her designs for the downtown outpost of Selkirk and Sons Funeral Home, but already she’d lost two hours to a scrimmage with her contractor who tried unloading on her a shipment of substandard glass. Then there was Oliver. Oliver, retreating to the gym for a cold shower since she turned her back on his morning advances. “It’s been five weeks,” he whined. “I’ll settle for a hand job.” But what made a man less fuckable than settling? And it couldn’t have been five weeks. Could it?
The Selkirks had awarded her the commission because she had no intention of transplanting their safe (read: stale) Upper East Side mortuary to a hipper zip code and instead insisted on a sweeping glass atrium atop a midrise of multimillion-dollar lofts. Strange placement perhaps, but the obscenely rich died south of Fourteenth Street, too, and when they did, Claudia convinced her clients, they’d want a less stuffy stage for their final departure. They would appreciate her soaring chapel of torqued Serra-esque steel, set under a pristine dome of Manhattan sky. Metal and light. Body and air. Permanence and something as ephemeral as a passing cloud. Her drawings spread beneath her on her dining/drafting table; she stood like a sea captain studying her maps, trying to decide the best course, when the phone rang again. Benji’s third call in thirty minutes.
She could turn it off, but why should she have to? Why couldn’t the world simply leave her alone?
“What?” she said, jamming the phone to her ear and tossing off her thick, geometric glasses in defeat.
“Why haven’t you picked up?”
“I don’t know, Benji. I guess I have nothing to do today but annoy you.”
“It’s working,” he snarked before shifting gears. “We have to talk.”
“Now’s really not—”
“There is no good time for this.”
She felt a real pulse of unease under the drama of his pronouncement. And Benji loved a dramatic pronouncement.
“What’s the matter? Is it Mom?”
“They’re fine. They’re them. This isn’t about them.”
“Then what’s it about? I’m working.”
“I’m just going to come out and say it.”
“Good.”
“I mean, it’s nothing I can prepare you for.”
“Benji!”
“It’s him,” he said.
“Who?”
“Him, Claude. It’s him!” He might have been using his voice to punch a hole in the wall, the jabbing fury of that one word.
She stepped backward, hoping a chair was there to meet her, and sat down hard. A silence wove itself between them, hundreds of miles away from each other yet caught in the same stifling cocoon.
“You there?” Benji asked.
She took her hand away from her mouth and asked, “How do you know?”
“Why would he pretend? We’re not Rockefellers. Plus, you’ll see. There’s no mistaking this kid. He looks just like you. Us.”
“Oh, Benji.” She felt as if she’d been slapped awake to find herself in the middle of a daredevil stunt, a sudden circle of fire surrounding her, her terror, her outright inability to jump through it. “What does he want? What am I supposed to do? I can’t.”