“She died,” he said. “A long time ago. I don’t want to talk about it.”
After he left I lay there listening for I don’t know how long to Xander play something that I finally realized was the theme from Chariots of Fire. Had Frank asked him to learn that one? I’d never watched that movie with the kid but I imagined he must like the Jazz Age English menswear in it very much.
YOU COULD COUNT on Xander sometimes as long as you remembered not to make a habit of it. After our first day of The Three Musketeers Cut Class, he disappeared again. No notes, no postcards, nothing. It didn’t seem to worry Frank this time, or even bother him much. I think he was so relieved to be free of school that nothing else mattered. As for me, if I believed Xander wouldn’t vanish again, I was kidding myself.
Those abbreviated Southern California winter days Frank and I spent wandering through Los Angeles were a recap of our halcyon time last summer before Xander was in the picture. I chased Frank through museum galleries. We went to the little municipal airport and looked for the yellow biplane. We kicked through the freshly raked sand at the playground. We even went to the beach, where Frank rolled up his Tony Curtis yachting chinos and waded into the gray surf. He stood there for a long time with the waves lapping at his ankles and a look of powerful concentration on his face.
“Let’s go, Frank,” I said finally. “It gets dark by rush hour now and I don’t want to get stuck in that.”
“Not yet,” he said. “I’m busy.”
“Doing what?”
“An experiment.”
“Are you trying to see how long you can stand barefoot in cold ocean water before your toes fall off?”
“No. I am thinking very hard about Paula. I want to find out if the power of my thoughts, boosted by the naturally occurring electricity found in salt water and the intrinsic energy of the tides, will enable my brain to connect with hers.”
“Huh. Interesting. Could work I guess. How will you know if it does?”
Frank looked at me like I wasn’t the sharpest blade in the drawer. “I’ll hear her voice in my brain, answering my question.”
“I’m sure she misses you a lot, Frank,” I said.
“I know that. That wasn’t my question. I asked Paula to name her favorite Warner Brothers musical from the 1950s. All those lunches together, and we never talked about that.”
I DISCOVERED THAT walking around with a school-aged child on a school day outside of school is a nerve-wracking adventure. Particularly if you don’t have a flair for truancy and the kid you’re with is as high visibility as Frank. People asked questions. I had to have my excuses lined up.
“Parent-teacher conferences,” I used when people were paying attention to my answer. Also “doctor’s appointment.” “Religious holiday” required checking a calendar before we left in the morning. When I could see people were more interested in staring at Frank than in listening to what I said, I trotted out “Power outage.” “Measles outbreak.” “Fire in the canyon.” “Coyotes on the playground.”
I also fielded a lot of the questions like the ones I used to ask. “Is he from another country?” “Is he on his way to a film set?” And of course, “Does he always dress like that?” Now that I knew more of the answers I found myself falling back on Mimi’s “Some version of it.” I didn’t know how else to explain Frank in twenty-five words or less.
ONE AFTERNOON A week or so after Frank went AWOL, we were parked around the corner from the house while he changed into his I’m-just-a-regular-California-school-kid mufti in the backseat. I stood on the curb with my back to him to give Frank his privacy. A blond woman carrying a cardboard box and leading a little boy by the hand walked past us. I know this is the kind of thing that happens in neighborhoods across America every millisecond, but seeing a pedestrian in the hills of Bel Air in the middle of the afternoon is an event worth noting. Nobody walks anywhere in that neighborhood, particularly at that time of day.
“Hi,” I said when she passed. I was so busy trying to study her discreetly that I hardly saw the kid. She was very pretty, but that wasn’t why I was staring. Something was so familiar about her.
“Hi,” she said, smiled and kept walking. I inspected my cuticles until she was halfway up the block, then looked again. She had a choppy haircut, either expensive or self-inflicted over the kitchen sink, and a tattoo on her neck. Something jarred loose in my head. Was she the “friend” from Xander’s photograph? I kicked myself for not getting a better look at her face.
After Frank finished changing, we rounded the corner and drove up to the gate. I could see somebody waiting in the driveway. As we got closer I saw it was the same girl, facing the entry keypad as if she expected to be buzzed in any minute. Her little boy was on the sidewalk, cuddled up against the wall in a piece of shade.