“Let’s go find one,” I said.
“Dr. Livingstone might not have found the source of the Nile,” Frank mused as we pulled away from the curb, “but he did find Victoria Falls. Which he named after the queen of England at the time. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” I echoed.
“The indigenous people of the area knew about the falls already, of course. They called it ‘The Smoke That Thunders.’ I wonder whether you could pull out somebody’s eyeball with a suction-cup arrow.”
See? Just like any other kid.
THE COSTUME STORE Frank decided we should go to turned out to be in one of the seedier parts of Los Angeles. The store windows on Hollywood Boulevard were filled with flashing lights and mannequins wearing the barest suggestions of clothing, costumes for more unsavory adventures than Frank had in mind. “This neighborhood was once the epicenter of all things glamorous,” he said. “Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The Egyptian. Cocktails at Musso and Frank’s. Strobe lights for premieres and limos lined up around the block. Now look at it. I can’t.” He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. Frank’s eyes were shut tight and he walked with a hand on my shoulder so he wouldn’t fall off the curb. No idear.
He relaxed a little when we reached our destination, though I did have to stand between Frank and the rack of rubber zombie masks. As it turned out, the store didn’t carry Robin Hood circa Errol Flynn or circa anybody else. “But,” the woman working the counter said, “we do have Peter Pan.”
Frank tried it on and assessed himself in the mirror. “This will do nicely,” he said. “And should we ever return to the hospital, I can wear this to take my friend Tinkerbell out to lunch.”
On the way home, Frank asked, “By the way, what happened to that box from Xander?”
TO DISTRACT FRANK from the question of Xander’s box I decided to let him use his birthday bow and arrow set as soon as we got home. As it turns out, there is nowhere more fun to live when you have a high-quality suction-cup bow and arrow set than a house made of glass.
Most afternoons when Frank “came home from school” he’d rush in, change into the Robin Hood/Peter Pan ensemble, and run out hoisting his quiver to his shoulder. He figured out pretty quickly that height improved trajectory, so he created an imaginary parapet by opening the moon roof of the station wagon and standing on the backseat. After opening and closing it a few thousand times, the roof got stuck open. I didn’t want to bother Mimi with matters that weren’t life-and-death, so we took it to a mechanic without mentioning it to her. The mechanic told us the repair would cost more money than I had to front for it, so I told him we’d have to wait. “You sure?” he asked. “I don’t want to be the voice of doom, but February is square in the middle of the rainy season.”
“We have a garage,” I said. Even if we never put the car inside it.
Aside from his imaginary parapet, Frank also favored a perch among the branches of the shade tree just outside his mother’s office window. He’d discovered that he almost always hit his target if he drew a bead on the window through the Hula-Hoop hanging there. I decided not to stop him after I helped gather up his arrows and noticed that he’d used a red Sharpie to draw a heart inside all the suction cups.
I’d been so sure I’d put those Sharpies where he’d never find them, in a Ziploc taped inside the toilet tank above water level. The kid couldn’t be trusted with permanent markers. He drew on everything, including the soles of his mother’s socks. Also hearts. I discovered that sorting laundry. Mimi had taken to leaving hers in a bag outside her door every few days with a note attached. Wash. The only way we knew she was still alive in there were the bags of laundry and remains of meals on trays she left outside her door. And the typing. Typing, typing, typing.
“WHEN IS YOUR birthday, anyway, Frank?” I asked at breakfast one day.
He stared a full minute before asking me, “Are you going to say ‘knock knock’?”
“What do you mean?”
“You must be joking. You know when my birthday is.”
“How would I know?” I said. “Nobody ever told me.”
“You know my birthday. You know it by heart.”
“No I don’t,” I insisted.
“Yes you do,” he said. “You just don’t know that you know it.”
“If you don’t tell me when your birthday is, how will I make arrangements?” I asked.
“My mother will take care of everything.”
My mother would have taken care of everything. She might not have been able to give us a glass mansion on a hilltop, but every year on my birthday, without fail, she made me a beautiful cake. Some kind of chocolate. I can close my eyes and smell it right now. Forget “Nuit de Bel Air.” Make my fragrance “Toujours Chocolat.”