“Oh. I didn’t know that. I know it’s wrong to indulge in criminal activities, but I do like those black-and-white-striped suits and matching caps that convicts wear. They’d make excellent pajamas. Do they let you keep them once your time is served?”
“Convicts wear orange jumpsuits that zip up the front now. The cut is not slimming, and a redhead like you should steer clear of head-to-toe orange,” I say.
“I will never hitchhike again.”
Miraculously, Frank and I arrive home without being discovered by Mimi, and well before the stuffed shells are ready to come out of the oven. “That looks delicious,” Frank says as I pull the pan out of the oven and slump, exhausted and relieved, against the counter. “Why aren’t you wearing any shoes?”
Xander disappears for days, without explanation. It is none of my business what he does with his free time, which is of course every hour of every day. Still this seems vaguely impolite, particularly when I have prepared a dinner for four centered on a kale-feta casserole that Frank hates but Xander loves.
The upside is that when Xander returns he has new, lunatic photographs to add to Frank’s collection in the gallery. When I ask Xander where he snapped a shot of what appears to be a woman’s back bearing a shoulder-to-crack tattoo that matches the mural she’s standing in front of, he says, “She’s just a friend.”
I come to fetch Frank and Xander from Dream House, where they are curating the collection for just an hour, they promise, until it is time for Frank to come in and do his homework. An hour has passed, then another half. When I let myself in through the side door to the garage, opening it sucks an unidentified flaming cinder out into the driveway. I chase it down and stomp it out, then go back in.
“What was that?” I ask Frank, who is leaning over the railing holding a tissue. He’s wearing the seersucker suit with the watch chain across the vest plus his straw boater, and looks for all the world like a passenger using his hankie to wave good-bye as he departs on the Titanic.
“I am setting tissues on fire and letting them drift to the floor.”
“What? Why?”
“To observe air currents. It’s a science project Xander invented to keep me busy.”
I am up the ladder before you can say stop, drop, and roll. “No more,” I say. “Give me those matches.”
“Xander said it’s all right. The garage floor is concrete.”
“It’s not all right. Give me the matches.”
Once I make Frank turn out his pockets and take off his hat and shoes and socks so I can be sure he has no matches concealed on his person, I go looking for Xander. He is sitting cross-legged on the bed, wearing headphones and sorting through photographs. At first he laughs at me. When he can see that I find nothing about this situation funny, his response is, “Relax, Alice. Let the kid be a kid for once.”
In late October, Frank and Xander plan an elaborate, supposedly surprise birthday party for me. Frank, of course, can’t keep his mouth shut about it. So, in secret, I exhaust myself helping Frank make preparations that Xander “plans” but seems unwilling or unable to execute. The big night comes, and no Xander. He is kind enough, however, to leave Frank a note, which Frank eventually finds in his pocket and shows me. “I don’t do birthdays. X,” the note reads. Which means X does not see the gigantic fluffy white coconut cake he told Frank I would love. Nor the elaborate fake candles Frank insisted we make out of drinking straws fitted with crayon-drawn flames with glued-on sparkle.
To protest Xander’s absence, Frank has a gigantic tantrum. I have sparkles in my hair for a week. It is longer than that before we see Xander again.
I am twenty-five years old now. But still not old enough to know better.
I hate coconut cake.
I almost forgot this one. Or I keep trying to forget this one. Xander and Frank are on the piano bench, finishing up a duet. Mimi stands behind them, one hand resting on Frank’s head in that proprietary way mothers have that tells the world that this child is hers, she loves this child and this child loves her right back. Her other hand rests on the nape of Xander’s neck. It’s telling me something, but I’m not sure I want to know what.
( 15 )
THE SAD PART about this stretch of the story, after my birthday and before Christmas, was how much Frank missed Xander. With Xander gone, Frank refused to touch the piano, and it wasn’t worth the struggle to convince him that he should. When he wasn’t at school all the kid wanted to do, ever, was hang out in the Dream House, sitting on the edge of its world, chin propped on one of the intermediate slats of the railing and legs dangling over the side, as if he were on a bridge, fishing.