His guilt about the fraudulent green houses was working overtime, creating stalkers that weren’t there, making him cast a suspicious eye at everything from a baby monitor to traffic patterns. Besides, the only people who knew about the PVC pipes were complicit in one way or another, so who would come after him for that? And why? No one. No reason. No worries.
He watched the rearview the rest of the way home.
‘She’s scratching her head. All the time. Didn’t you notice?’
Mike watched Annabel picking through Kat’s hair. ‘No,’ he admitted.
‘It’s been going around school, and she seems to be the first in line every time.’ Annabel firmed Kat’s head beneath her grip, angled her into the strong bathroom light. It was late, and they were all tired. ‘Stay still, monkey.’
‘Don’t be mad at me,’ Kat said. ‘It’s not like I said, “What can I do to bug Mom today? Oh – I know. I’ll get head lice.”’
Mike set down his keys on the kitchen counter – he’d just dashed out to the drugstore – and pulled the treatment bottle from the bag.
Kat eyed the ominous red label. ‘What’s in that stuff anyways?’
Mike held up the bottle, squinted at the ingredients: ‘Gasoline, skunk juice, battery acid-’
‘Mom.’
‘He’s kidding.’
‘But there’s bad stuff in it. It’ll give me skin burns. And mutation.’
‘It won’t make you mutate,’ Annabel said wearily.
But as usual their daughter outnegotiated them, so they wound up using a home remedy Annabel found online – mayonnaise combed through Kat’s hair, turban-sealed with Saran Wrap. The getup accentuated Kat’s smooth features, the smiling elf face. Mike went into the master bathroom to dig mayo out from under his nails and listened on the monitor to Annabel singing Kat to sleep, the lullaby sweet and soft and, as always, way off key. ‘Lay thee down now and rest, may thy slum-ber be blessed.’ He smiled to himself before remembering the dirty black Grand Marquis he’d managed to convince himself was a tail, and he pictured how the milk shake had flown from Kat’s hand when he’d hit the brakes at the streetlight and – Shit.
The lizard.
He rushed out to the truck, finding the peanut-butter jar wedged beneath the passenger seat. The baby lizard, dead inside, thin and curled like a feather.
He carried in the jar as Annabel emerged from Kat’s bedroom. She said, ‘I laid a hand towel over her pillow so-’ She caught sight of the jar.
‘She wanted to keep him,’ Mike said.
Annabel shrugged. ‘How else will she figure it out?’ She crossed her arms, leaned against the wall. ‘Do we tell her?’
They’d been through it with hamsters and goldfish and a frog, but as Kat had grown older and more aware, each time seemed to be worse.
‘Yes,’ Mike said. ‘Have to.’
‘I know. You’ll do it?’
‘Sure.’
Mike set the jar down in the hall, entered, and sat on the edge of Kat’s bed. She peered up at him, puckish and vaguely alien in her mayo wrap. He pressed his fingertips into the comforter. ‘I will never lie to you, right?’
She nodded, and immediately the image of those buried PVC pipes came at him, the lie of the cover-up, the lie of the houses, the lie of the coming award. But this was not the time for that. This was the time for an eight-year-old and a dead lizard.
‘Your lizard died.’
‘Dead?’ She blinked. ‘Like, lizard heaven?’ Despite the wise-crack, her bottom lip trembled ever so slightly. A flash of remorse moved across her face, but then she bit her lip, forced it still. ‘Well, you can say “told you so” now.’
He hated to see how well she could rein in her emotions. He looked down at his hands, trying to figure out a way in. The Bad-Parenting Game?
‘We don’t talk about feelings,’ he said. ‘We swallow them and cram ’em down inside of us so they turn into hidden resentments and fears.’
Kat half smiled, her eyes glassy, and then her face broke and tears fell at once, spotting her cheeks. ‘I want my baby lizard not to be dead.’
He hugged her, rubbed little circles on her back, and she sputtered a bit against his shoulder. Finally she pulled back. ‘Can I see him?’
He retrieved the jar, and she held it in her tiny hands, tilted it so the lizard slid stiffly around the twig. ‘What happens to his body?’
‘Well, we can bury him in the backyard and-’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Zach Henson.’
It took a moment for Mike to pluck the name from memory – fifth-grader, leukemia, last year. Mike and Annabel had gone to the funeral just to shake hands with the parents and helplessly say the only thing one could – ‘If you need anything.’ After, they’d sat in the truck in the church parking lot, awed into a muted sort of terror, Annabel weeping quietly, him gripping the wheel, watching the relatives trickle by, faces chapped, posture eroded. As usual, Annabel put words to his thoughts and said, ‘Anything else I think I could live through, but if something happened to her, I think I would die.’
Now, Mike cleared his throat, set his hand on Kat’s tiny knee, and said, ‘Zach’s body has probably gone back into the earth by now.’
Kat scratched at her head through the sheath of mayonnaise and cling wrap, her face somber and thoughtful, and asked, ‘What if you and Mom die?’
‘We’ll be fine. You have plenty of time to worry about stuff like that when you’re older. Your job right now is to be a kid and have fun. We will always protect you. Until you can protect yourself.’
Kat rolled over, poked the pillow in the spot where her polar bear used to sleep. ‘But what if you just disappear one day, like your parents did? What would happen to me?’
The question cut the breath off halfway down his throat, and it was a moment or two before he could reassure her and kiss her good night. Walking down the hall to bed, he could have sworn he heard the buzz of that blowfly, portending ill, but when he turned, there was nothing at the seams of the ceiling except darkness.
Chapter 11
Mike’s oversize, pixelated face greeted him and his family one step into the Braemar Country Club. Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times article, blown up to the size of a door and mounted on foam, leaned against the entrance to the main dining room. Lined beside it like enormous dominoes were similar clippings from the state’s other major papers, giving the effect of tabloid wainscoting. Itching in his eight-hundred-dollar suit, Mike paused, uncomfortable.
Despite the newspaper photo’s clearly showing Mike’s heterochromia, the journalist had referred to his ‘blazing brown eyes,’ ignoring the fact that one of them was technically ‘blazing amber.’ But the oversight was nothing next to the fraud at the core of the politicized hype – Mike’s receiving an environmental award for houses that shouldn’t have passed the green code. Scanning the puff piece, which praised his work to the ozone-depleted heavens, Mike felt a rush of guilt and – feeling his daughter’s tiny hand in his – shame.
Annabel finally tugged at his arm, breaking him from his thoughts. Reluctantly, he entered, nodding at various well-dressed folks, many of whom beamed at him with recognition. Kat kept pace, clutching her backpack full of books, which she’d brought in case she got bored. Waiters circled with glasses of champagne and hors d’oeuvres he couldn’t recognize. He popped a pastrylike item into his mouth just to have something to do and scanned the crowd for a familiar face.
Kat had already engaged Andrés’s kids in a game of tag. Annabel looked stunning in a red dress with a cutout back. He watched her drift effortlessly into a circle of heavily made-up women, moving with the grace bestowed by a proper upbringing and natural confidence. The woman was a marvel; each situation brought out a new facet of her. But even as he watched with pride, her ease seemed only to underscore how out of place he felt. It seemed the one place he fit in effortlessly was with his family.