Now Cory knew what Alby had been doing in the driveway that morning, why he was so low to the ground and why his mother hadn’t seen him. “Oh my God,” he said, and he dropped the notebook and ran downstairs, pushing through the front door without a coat on, peering hard at the ground all along the strip of brown lawn to the side of the driveway.
The turtle was there in the grass, easily camouflaged. It had been there this whole time, but no one had thought to look. No one had remembered it even existed except for Cory, who picked it up now and cradled it against his cheek, saying, “Slowy. Slowy.”
The shell felt dry and cold; the turtle was dead, he thought, and that was fitting, that was appropriate. Slowy and Alby were like Romeo and Juliet, and should have been buried in the same casket. A boy and his turtle, packed together for all eternity.
As Cory stood with the flat bottom of the turtle pressed to his face, he felt a rumble from inside the shell that was like the vibration underfoot when a subway train approaches. The turtle was waking up from its hibernation, or perhaps its deep grief. It reached out a pale, mosaic-textured arm and lightly raked Cory’s cheek, as if waking him from his own long and fitful sleep.
The next day he contacted his father in Lisbon at the relatives’ carpet store, telling him in a loud and bursting voice that Alby’s death hadn’t been Benedita’s fault after all. “See, he was lying on the ground studying Slowy,” Cory said, and though he was sure his father would say, “I am so glad to hear this. I’ll be on the next plane home,” Duarte simply said that he needed to stay in Portugal for now, and that he would be in touch when he could.
Over the weeks that followed, his father was only in occasional touch. Cory took scrupulous care of Slowy, making sure his box was clean and that he had ample water and food, and taking him out on the carpet in Alby’s room, beside the bed where Cory now slept at night, because there was actually some consolation to be found in lying on superhero sheets in a bed that his grown body filled from stern to bow. In the mornings he made breakfast for himself and his mother; he suspected if he didn’t feed her, she wouldn’t eat at all. He made sure she took the medications she’d been prescribed; he checked her arms for scratches; he did the grocery shopping at the Big Y; he drove her to see Lisa Henry, the social worker she’d been assigned; he kept her company; he played the Portuguese card game Bisca with her at the kitchen table and usually let her win.
One evening when they were playing cards the phone rang and a voice said, “Hello, this is Elaine Newman. Is Benedita there?”
“I’m sorry, she can’t come to the phone,” Cory said, for his mother never wanted to talk on the phone anymore.
“Are you her husband?”
“I’m her son.”
“Ah. You have such a deep voice. Your mother cleans house for me,” the woman explained. “I teach at Amherst College. My family and I were in Antwerp during my sabbatical year and now we’re back. I told your mother I’d be in touch when I returned. I hope,” she said with a worried little laugh, “she held Thursday mornings for me, like she said she would. I should warn her, though: the place is a mess.”
It really was. Cory arrived at the house that Thursday at nine a.m. After all, they did need the money. The Filipina housecleaner Jae would have been shocked to see Mr. Cory in pink rubber gloves, scrubbing a toilet, he who had never learned how to clean up after himself at all. He spent a lot of time savagely working on the Newmans’ toilet and the mineral stains in their tub and the grove of dust beneath their enormous four-poster bed, whose nightstands held two different kinds of books. Professor Newman’s side had a thick hardcover on it called Van Eyck and the Netherlandish Aesthetic. Her husband’s side had a paperback mystery with raised letters and a bloody knife on the cover, called The Mice Will Play. People’s marriages were like two-person religious cults, impossible to understand. By the time Cory had finished the entire house, and collected the cash that had been left for him on the Caesarstone counter beside the Sub-Zero, whose surface he had carefully wiped down with Weiman stainless-steel cleaner, he felt flushed with industry.
“You take after your mom,” said Professor Newman with admiration when she called that night.
The job was his now, every Thursday morning, and he took surprising pride in the simple act of cleaning up, something he had never really thought to do before, because it had been done for him by his mother his whole life, and then, briefly, by Jae. Once in a while, when Greer had come over during high school or later on during college vacations, she’d automatically picked up the gym socks that Cory had left around, or his sports drink empties. He’d had a lifetime of being catered to and cleaned up after by women, but he only now realized this.
Sometimes when he was vacuuming Professor Newman’s Persian rugs or ripping an old ratty Princeton T-shirt into strips to use for dusting, he thought about Jae Matapang, and felt unaccountably sorry that he had barely spoken to her in Manila, she who had touched all his intimate things, who had braved his filth. Once he had tried to have an extended conversation with her, but it had been extremely awkward. As she bent over the toilet in the shared bathroom, scrubbing away the pinkish-brown halo left by the urine and shit of all of them plus the vomit that had flown out of McBride one night after they all stayed out too late doing shots with clients at the Long Bar at the Raffles Makati, Cory approached her and said, “Uh, Jae?”
She looked up at him, startled, lifting the dripping loop of a scrub brush. “Yes, Mr. Cory. What is it?” Jae was tiny and game-hen bony in the grayish windbreaker that she wore all the time, her hair pulled back with a net like someone working a fast-food fryer.
He flushed. “Oh, I was just seeing if everything is good.”
She gazed up at him. Finally she said, “No. Some things are not good. Some things are evil. Some people. The terrorists in Mindanao.”
She had taken his question literally, having never heard the colloquial question about whether everything was “good.” He just nodded in awkward acknowledgment, then she swiveled her focus back to her task, plunging the brush again into the toilet in this apartment that Cory and Loffler and McBride kept like this in part because they were so busy, and in part because they could.
At home each day now in the house where he’d grown up, Cory learned to clean up the place the same way he did for Elaine Newman. He cooked dinner for his mother every night too. Not only had he never cleaned up after himself before; he had also never cooked a real, full dinner in his life either, unless it was a box of Ronzoni spaghetti and a jar of Ragú. Every day he began to look through his mother’s Portuguese-language recipe cards, which at first were as incomprehensible as Alby’s “scientific” notes. Soon he’d cracked this code as well. “OL” was óleo, “oil”; “UP” was um pouco, “a little”; and on and on. Cory was pleased with his code-breaking abilities, and the food came out surprisingly tasty. He was now a housecleaner, companion, and cook. He was bringing in a small salary, the house was in good shape, and there was decent food to eat. His mother might never really recover, but she ate and she lived.