—
She did the same thing on Thursday, when Cole simply left his office unlocked for the night, and again the following Wednesday. It would look better if they were downloaded on more than one occasion — less like sabotage, more like porn addiction.
Meanwhile, she told the following story to her classes, to Chantal, to three different colleagues, and to all the college students she could find who’d stayed in town as lab assistants or nannies: “You won’t believe this, but I’ve heard one of our summer kids has Cole using the Internet! He needed to buy pants, but he hates running into students in the stores, so apparently this lovely young woman showed him how to shop online at L.L.Bean. Really she did it for him, but he was sitting right there. He was worried about getting lost on the Internet, so she showed him the ‘Home’ button. He goes, ‘So I just click my heels together three times?’ He said he was going to look up White Sox scores. I think he might be hooked!”
Her colleagues believed it, even Chantal believed it, because despite Zee’s abiding hatred for the man, she’d been careful never to say a quotable word against him, careful to throw him an acerbic line when she passed his office.
If anyone teased Cole about online shopping he’d respond that he never used the Internet — but they’d take it as another of his jokes, more crustiness on top of the crust that was Cole.
—
On Sheridan Road, the traffic was stopped. No way to turn her Subaru around. She waited and cursed her luck and tried to see what kind of flashing lights those were, so far ahead.
When the cars finally oozed forward, she rubbernecked with everyone else. A fire truck, and, in front of it, a little black BMW, its hood charred and smoldering. No collision, no dents. Just one of those burst-into-flame scenarios.
She wouldn’t have recognized the man who sat folded on the curb, head in his hands, if it weren’t for the blue medical boot on his foot, the crutches stacked neatly at his side.
15
Doug turned in Melissa Calls the Shots just twelve days overdue, and after he’d finished some quick revisions for Frieda he received an actual two thousand dollar check in the mail, followed by the contract to complete two more books before the end of summer. One was another Melissa book, this time about her work backstage at the school play, and one was a Cece book. “I loved the detail about her poetry business!” Frieda said. “I think you’ll have a great ear for her.”
The whole week had been hot, but Doug made himself exercise anyway, circling the grounds and stretching. Behind the big house, he stopped to do the back releases Dr. Morsi taught him, then stepped on the fountain lip to stretch his hamstrings.
Miriam had been digging at the back of the fountain, and he nearly stepped in the hole. Apparently she’d been out here breaking old plates when she noticed a different shard, a red and white one, sticking out of the dirt. She’d pulled it out and dug around and found more — not just that one pattern but dozens of other colors of porcelain and glass and terra cotta. She’d excavated about two cubic feet back there. Her own archeological dig. “It’s like the house is giving me pieces,” she said. “Like they’re growing from the ground.” (“Or like someone had a really bad temper tantrum once,” Zee said. “And broke all the china in the house.”)
He’d remembered to bring bread crumbs, and he dropped them in the three koi ponds. How long did koi live? Eighty years? These ones were enormous and mottled and drowsy, and he liked to imagine Edwin Parfitt feeding them his leftover breakfast.
At the south end of the property, he toed helplessly at the foundations of the studios Gracie tore down in the seventies, when they were past repair — the long one that must have housed several artists, and the small one behind that. Both lay far enough back that the remains weren’t eyesores, and Gracie seemed content to wait for erosion and vegetation to swallow them. Even farther in the woods stood a granite statue of a squatting bear, about three feet high, moss covering its right flank. Doug sometimes rubbed its head for good luck. What else were statues for? The one surviving studio, on the other end of the property behind the vegetable gardens, had long ago been converted to a groundskeeper’s shed, but Zee remembered her father referring to it as the composer’s cottage — which was the only reason Doug hadn’t cut through the padlock and scoured the walls for Parfitt-era graffiti.
As he rounded the big house, he saw Sofia heaving paper grocery bags from the back of her van to the garage floor. The driveway was eerily empty: Gracie and Bruce off on separate golf dates, the Subaru with Zee in the city, Case’s BMW zapped by the Greek gods. Doug offered to help, but Sofia shook her head. Then she said, “This is ridiculous that Mr. Breen wants.”
There must have been twenty bags, from several different stores — Jewel, Dominick’s, Sunset, Don’s. He righted a Jewel bag that had fallen and saw it was full of blue cylinders of Morton’s table salt. So was the next bag over, and the next.
“He is for the end of the world,” Sofia said. “On the New Years.”
“He’s… stockpiling salt for the end of the world?”
“Is for take the water out of the food.”
“Wow.”
“Yes, is wow.”
Doug held up his hands as if to say, Hey, he’s your employer, not mine. Although Sofia probably saw them all as family, saw Doug as part of this entitled clan as much as anybody. And really, he was. Who was he kidding? Yet as he headed back to the coach house, he felt the urge to call over his shoulder that he’d gone to a crappy public school, that he never had a decent bike, that he was raised on off-brand TV dinners.
Up in the kitchen, he opened a beer and watched Sofia out the window. He could hear her grunting from all the way up here. No, that wasn’t right. She was too far, and it was coming from downstairs.
He went back down and found Miriam sobbing on the sunporch, her face folded into her arms on her card table. He tried hard to walk away.
“Hey,” he said, “hey.”
“I’m sorry, this is so embarrassing.” Miriam sat up, still sobbing, and wiped her face with the bottom of her T-shirt. He was surprised she didn’t leave makeup on it — he’d been told women from Texas wore makeup at all times. “This is so stupid.”
“I can leave,” he said.
“It’s — did you hear what happened?”
“Case’s car? Yeah, we all heard.”
“Oh. No, not that. John F. Kennedy Jr. He was flying his own plane last night, with his wife, and it crashed in the ocean.”
“They died?”
“This is the silliest thing to be crying about. I guess I was just a little bit in love with him. Like everybody else, right? I mean, I just always thought someday I’d at least get to meet him, and we’d have a really great conversation.”
Doug was thinking, on one level, about the Kennedys, about little John-John saluting his father’s coffin. On another, much louder level, he was realizing: Miriam is crazy. Miriam is absolutely bat-shit crazy.
He should have seen it before, in the bizarre, clashing mosaics covering the sunporch floor, in her cutting scraps from cracker boxes, her smashing empty wine bottles and saving grape stems. He looked closely now at the two big pieces on the floor. The one that was nearly finished centered around a blue sundress covered almost entirely by other, tiny things — paper, wood, broken plastic toys, beads, a clock hand, pen caps, dried flower petals, paper clips — so that they constituted another dress, a beautiful one, with swimming lines and arcs of light. But there was something insane about it, something that screamed “outsider art,” the kind of work made by someone who lived in a cabin and produced her best pieces when she went off her meds.