White Cat

Page 4

I open my mouth to say that I do, but my brother’s gloved hand on my arm stops me.
“You ready?” Philip asks lightly, still smiling.
I shake my head, gesturing around me at the lack of any bags, the scattered schoolbooks, the unmade bed. Yeah, sure, Philip has finally shown up, but it would be nice if he’d asked me if I’m all right. I almost fell off a roof. Clearly something is wrong with me.
“Need some help?” Philip offers, and I wonder if Valerio notices the edge in his voice. In the Sharpe family the worst thing you can do is be vulnerable in front of a mark. And everyone who isn’t us is a mark.
“I’m good,” I say, grabbing a canvas bag out of the closet.
Philip turns to Valerio. “I really appreciate you looking after my brother.”
This so surprises the hall master that, for a moment, he doesn’t seem to know what to say. I guess that few people consider calling the local volunteer firemen to drag a kid off a roof as great care. “We were all shocked when—”
“The important thing,” Philip interrupts smoothly, “is that he’s okay.”
I roll my eyes as I shove stuff into the bag—dirty clothes, iPod, books, homework stuff, my little glass cat, a flash drive I keep all my reports on—and try to ignore their conversation. I’m just going to be gone a couple of days. I don’t need much.
On the way out to the car, Philip turns to me. “How could you be so stupid?
I shrug, stung in spite of myself. “I thought I grew out of it.”
Philip pulls out his key fob and presses the remote to unlock his Mercedes. I slide into the passenger side, brushing coffee cups off the seat and onto the floor mat, where crumpled printouts from MapQuest soak up any spilled liquid.
“I hope you mean sleepwalking,” Philip says, “since you obviously didn’t grow out of stupid.”
CHAPTER THREE
I PUSH BRUSSELS SPROUTS around my plate and listen to my nephew scream from his high chair until Maura, Philip’s wife, gives him some frozen plastic thing to bite. The skin around Maura’s eyes is dark as a bruise. At twenty-one, she looks old.
“I put some blankets on the pullout couch in the office,” she says. Behind her are grease-spattered cabinets and paper-strewn laminate countertops. I want to tell her that she doesn’t need to worry about me on top of everything else.
“Thanks,” I say instead, because the blankets are already in the office and I don’t want to rock the boat of Philip’s hospitality by seeming ungrateful. I don’t, for instance, want to point out that the kitchen is too warm, almost suffocating. It reminds me of the holidays, when the oven has been on all day. And that makes me think about our father sitting at the dinner table, smoking long, thin cigarillos that yellowed his fingertips, while the turkey cooked. Sometimes, on bad days, when I really miss him, I’ll buy cigarillos and burn them in an ashtray.
Right now, though, all I miss is Wallingford and the person I could pretend to be when I was there.
“Grandad is coming tomorrow,” Philip says. “He wants you to go over to the old house and help him clean it out. He says he wants it all fixed up for Mom, when she gets out.”
“I don’t think that’s what she wants,” I say. “She doesn’t like people messing with her stuff.”
He sighs. “Tell that to him.”
“I don’t want to go,” I say. Philip means the house we grew up in—a big old place stuffed with the many things our parents accumulated. No garage sale was left unplundered as they grifted their way across the country each summer, while we kids stayed down in the Pine Barrens with Grandad. By the time dad died, the junk was so piled up that there were tunnels instead of rooms.
“Then don’t,” Philip says, and for a moment I actually think he’s going to look me in the eye, but he addresses my collar instead. “Mom can take care of herself. She always has. I doubt she’s even going back to that dump when she finishes her sentence.”
Mom and Philip have been on the outs since the trial, when he reluctantly bullied witnesses to help her defense team. Philip’s a physical worker—a body worker—who can break a leg with the brush of his pinkie. I don’t think he forgave Mom for being convicted despite him.
Plus the blowback made him pretty sick.
I sigh. Unsaid is where I’m supposed to go if not with Grandad. I very much doubt Philip is planning on letting me stay. “You can tell Grandad I’m only his manservant till I get back in school. And that’ll take me a week, at most.”
“Tell him yourself,” Philip says.
Maura folds her arms across her chest. It’s so strange to see her bare hands that I’m embarrassed. Mom hated gloves at home; she said that families were supposed to trust one another. I guess Philip believes that too. Or something.
It’s different when the hands belong to someone I’m not related to, even if she is my sister-in-law. I try and force my gaze to her collarbone.
“Don’t let him bully you into staying at that creepy place,” Maura tells me.
“We used to live there!” Philip gets up and takes a beer from the fridge. “Anyway, I’m not the one telling him to go.” He pops the top, takes a long swig, and unbuttons the neck of his white dress shirt. I see the necklace of keloids, where his maker cut across his throat to symbolize the death of Philip’s previous life, and then packed the wound with ash until it scarred in a long, swollen line. It looks like a flesh-colored worm coiled above his collarbone. All laborers, minor crime bosses, have them. Just like a rose over the heart showed you were one of the Russian bratva, or like a yakuza inserts pearls under the skin of his penis for every year in jail. Philip got his scars three years back; now all he has to do to see people flinch is loosen his collar.
I don’t flinch.
The big six worker families came into power all down the East Coast in the thirties and have remained that way ever since. Nonomura. Goldbloom. Volpe. Rice. Brennan. Zacharov. They control everything, from the cheap and probably fake charms dangling near lighters on convenience store counters, to tarot card readers at malls who offer little curses for twenty extra dollars, to assault and murder done for those who can afford it and know who to pay. And my brother’s one of the people you pay, just like my Grandad was.
Maura looks away from him, gazing dreamily out the windows at the mostly dead stretch of grass outside the apartment. “Do you hear the music? Outside.”
“Cassel wants to stay at the old house,” says Philip with a quick, quelling look in my direction. “And there’s no music, Maura. No music, okay?”
Maura hums a little as she starts collecting the plates.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“She’s fine,” says Philip. “She’s tired. She gets tired.”
“I’m going to go do my homework,” I say, and when neither of them stops me, I go upstairs to Philip’s office in the loft. The couch is made up with new sheets, and the blankets she promised are piled on one end, so freshly washed that I smell the laundry detergent. Sitting in the leather chair in front of the desk, I spin around and switch on the computer.
The screen flickers to life, revealing a background screen littered with folders. I open a browser window and check my email. Audrey sent me a message.
I click so fast that it opens twice.
“Worried about u,” it reads. That’s it. She didn’t even sign her name.
I met Audrey the beginning of freshman year. She usually sat on the cement wall of the parking lot at lunch, drinking coffee and reading old Tanith Lee paperbacks. One time it was Don’t Bite the Sun. I’d read it too; Lila had loaned it to me. I told her I liked Sabella better.
“That’s because you’re a romantic,” she said. “Guys are romantic—no, really. Girls are pragmatic.”
“That’s not true,” I told her, but sometimes, after we started dating, I wondered if she was right.
It takes me twenty minutes to write back to her: “Home for wk. Looking forward to lotsa daytime tv.” I hope that it conveys the right amount of nonchalance; it certainly took long enough to fake.
Finally, I hit send and groan, feeling stupid all over again.
Most of the rest of my email that isn’t spam are links to the video of me clinging to the Smythe roof that someone already uploaded to YouTube, and a few messages from teachers, giving me the week’s assignments. I take the latter as a sign that all is not lost in terms of getting back into Wallingford, despite the former. I still have last night’s homework to finish too, but before I start, I want to figure out how I’m going to convince the school to forget all about the incident on the roof. After a little bit of Googling, I find two sleep specialists within an hour’s drive. I print out both addresses and save both logos as jpgs on my flash drive. It’s a start. I take it for granted that no doctor is going to put his reputation on the line to guarantee I won’t sleepwalk again, but I can find a way around that.
I am feeling pretty cocky, so I decide to tackle weaseling out of Grandad’s cleaning plan. I call Barron’s cell. He answers on the second ring, sounding out of breath.
“You busy?” I ask.
“Not too busy for my brother who almost took a nosedive. So, what happened?”
“I had a weird dream and started sleepwalking again. It was nothing, but now I’m stuck at Philip’s mercy until the school realizes that I’m not going to kill myself.” I sigh. Barron and I were on the outs when we were kids, but now he’s practically the only person in my family I can really talk to.
“Philip pissing you off?” Barron says.
“Let’s put it this way: If I stay here long enough, I am going to kill myself.”
“The important thing is that you’re okay,” Barron says, which is satisfying, if patronizing.
“Can I come stay with you?” I ask. Barron’s at Princeton, studying pre-law, which is pretty funny because he is a compulsive liar. He’s the kind of liar who totally forgets what he told you the last time, but he believes every single lie with such conviction that sometimes he can convince you of it. I don’t think he’ll last half a minute in court before he’ll make up something outrageous about his client.
“I’d have to ask my roommate,” he says. “She’s dating this ambassador, and he’s always sending a car to take her to New York. She might not want more stress.”
Yeah, like that. “Well, if she’s not there a lot, maybe she won’t mind. Otherwise, maybe I can do some couch surfing.” I lay it on thick. “There’s always the bus stop.”
“Why can’t you stay with Philip?”
“He’s farming me out to Grandad to clean the old house. He hasn’t said so, but I don’t think he wants me here.”
“Don’t be paranoid,” Barron says. “Philip wants you there. Of course he does.”
Philip would have wanted Barron.
When I was about seven, I used to follow a thirteen-year-old Philip around the house, pretending we were superheroes. He was the main hero and I was his sidekick, the Robin to his Batman. I kept pretending to be in trouble so he could come and save me. When I was in the old sandbox, it was a giant hourglass that would smother me. I was in the leaky baby pool being chased by sharks. I would call and call for him, but it was always Barron who finally came.
He was already Philip’s real sidekick at ten, good for taking care of things that Philip was too busy for. Like me. I spent most of my childhood jealous of Barron. I wanted to be him, and I resented that he got to be him first.
That was before I realized I was never going to be him.
“Maybe I could just come for a few days,” I say.
“Sure, sure,” he says, but it’s not a commitment. It’s stalling. “So, tell me what this crazy dream you had was. What made you go up on the roof?”
I snort. “A cat stole my tongue and I wanted to get it back.”
He laughs. “Your brain is a dark place. Next time, just let the tongue go, kid.”
I hate being called a kid, but I don’t want to argue.
We say good-bye and I plug my phone into its charger and plug that into the wall. I email my completed assignments.
I’ve started opening random folders on Philip’s computer when Maura comes to the door. There are lots of pictures of naked girls lying on their backs, pulling off long velvet gloves. Girls touching bare breasts with shockingly bare hands. I close the obviously misfiled etching of a guy in crazy-looking pantaloons wearing a giant diamond pendant. As scandalous stuff goes, it’s all pretty tame.
“Here.” She holds out a cup of what smells like mint tea. Her eyes don’t quite focus on mine, and two pills rest in her palm. “Philip said to give you these.”
“What are they?”
“They’ll help you rest.”
I take the pills and swig the tea.
“What’s going on with you two?” she asks. “He’s so odd when you’re here.”
“Nothing,” I say, because I like Maura. I don’t want to tell her that Philip probably doesn’t want me alone in the house with her or his son because of Lila. Philip saw my face, saw the blood, got rid of the body. If I was him, I wouldn’t want me here either.
* * *
I wake in the middle of the night with a raging need to piss. My head feels fuzzy, and at first I barely notice the voices downstairs as I stagger down the carpeted hall. I pee, then reach to flush. I stop with my hand on the lever.
“What are you doing here?” Philip is asking.