Fifty Mice Read online

  “You’re the daddy. That’s what Mommy said,” Helen adds to fill the silence, less sure of herself.

  “I’m not, though,” Jay says, so regretful that it surprises him. “Not really.”

  “Yes, you are.” In Helen’s tone he hears Ginger’s familiar Don’t contradict me. “You are,” Helen repeats. “That’s what you are now, and Mommy’s Mommy and I’m . . . me. Helen.”

  “It’s parts in a musical, isn’t it? Just for the show. You can’t make something so just by saying it is.”

  Helen looks at him fiercely, with a small child’s intractable conviction. “You can if you want to.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “What?”

  “If I don’t want to make something so just by saying it is.”

  Helen is quiet. Then, in a pretty good eight-year-old’s imitation of Jay: “Yeah, well, but once you get past that—”

  Jay laughs. “—Clouds?”

  Helen nods, solemn but pleased: “Clouds.”

  Behind them, the sun is, in fact, curtained by a cloud and the light level dips and their reflections dissolve and now Jay can clearly see the baroque cerise velvet chaise longue featured prominently in the front display. He muses: Who on this island would buy that? He thinks: If everyone here is like me, hiding, holding back, trawling through the murky waters of their past for memories someone else needs, and tending to pointless businesses existing only to give legitimacy to the lie—

  —how is that different from real life?

  The ferryboat horn bleats a faint, last good-bye as it clears the speed buoys, its dark, departing shape barely a punctuation on the seam between the sea and mainland. Dunn and the boat-rental guy have gone into the kiosk.

  Helen steps up next to Jay, and takes his hand and presses her nose against the window and makes a low animal noise in her throat.

  “Why did you tell me Ginger wasn’t your mom?” Jay asks, fishing. “The other day?”

  “I don’t know.” Helen probes her nostril with a wiggling finger, and then gestures royally to the chaise with the other hand. “That’s pretty. It’s, like, for a princess, from a castle. I’d want to have it in my room and lie on it. But not be Sleeping Beauty. And I don’t like the color. Do you think it can talk?”

  Jay is still back with her reveal: “What did you mean, Ginger’s not your mom?”

  “What?”

  “Helen—”

  “I don’t know. I just said it.”

  “Who’s your real mommy?”

  Helen takes her hand away, won’t look at him. She breathes out and fogs the glass and draws a circle with two dots and cat ears before the condensation evaporates. “You don’t want to be my dad?”

  Jay no longer has an answer for this, everything has become so involute. So layered and confusing.

  Gold-brocade curtains cascade around either edge of the chaise. A neon sign that tilts down overhead past the awning from the second-floor hotel spells VACANCY backward and gleams and trembles in the pair of filigree mirrors bookending the chaise.

  After a while, Jay wonders aloud what color Helen thinks it should be. Helen says she doesn’t know, but suggests pink, her color default.

  Jay frowns at the chaise. “That is pink.”

  “No. It’s just light red.” Bored: “Can we go now? I think Mommy’s making cookies.”

  “Ginger?”

  “Mommy.” She looks at him, challenging him to deny her this. He won’t.

  The sun behind them blazes again, cloud-free, and Helen, as if quoting (Ginger, probably), turns away, declaring: “Family is everything.” She walks out into the sunlight and away down the street.

  Jay stays for a moment, staring at his reflection, which seems, suddenly, a stranger to him. By the time he moves, Helen is marching off, small, happy again, singing at the top of her lungs and tunelessly: “Family is everything,” with the chorus, “that’s the way it’s going to be.”

  “You got it all figured out,” Jay says.

  “Yep.” Helen skips ahead, turns, and walks backward, facing him, smiling. “It was really really really hard. But you know what? It doesn’t even matter what I say, because things just are what they are,” she sings, making up her own musical, “and they’re not what they’re not—that’s what I say so it’s so,” after which she launches into another monologue about good Jenny and bad Jenny that takes them all the way to the end of the street and around the corner.

  | 17 |

  SMOKE FROM A BARBECUE, thick and black, roiling, eddies alchemical around John Public and his snorkel, mask, and tongs, flipping chicken and pouring some of his beer on the red-hot coals of the Weber grill, causing even more smoke, smoke so dense it drives even the few nicotine diehards and their ringleader, Magonis, back into Jay and Ginger’s bungalow from the patio behind it, where they’ve been communing with a pack of Kools.

  The little house overflows with guests: some federal agents (known and not), and a potpourri of island full-timers (in-program and oblivious to it) Public has encouraged Ginger to invite; a casual neighborhood housewarming party for all appearances, good form now that they’ve been here for more than a month, with music blaring, white and red meat, potato salad, a potluck of appetizers, much beer consumed, pretzels and crackers and chips and trail mix getting macerated into the floor and the Fed-who-calls-herself-Sandy making frozen strawberry margaritas nonstop in a blender, her sneakers starting to stick to the linoleum.

  In the kitchen, Jay and Helen leak tears while carefully chopping tomatoes and peppers and the offending yellow onions under the watchful eye of garrulous Barry Stone, who’s been tasked with wrangling the avocados for the guacamole but is concurrently giving a lithe, hard, leathery Avalon divorcée in a black tennis skirt the bum’s rush.

  “So, you know, I’m thinking—and, well”—shifting his weight so that his shoulder angles closer to her—“frankly, it’s a thought that comes over me in so many situations involving a gathering that parties, you know”—he leers— “. . . wild.”

  Heavy-lidded, she furrows impossibly pencil-thin brows: “You think this is wild?

  “I sold a house,” the woman confides, dropping her voice to a murmur, “to a famous celebrity—I won’t say who—recently, I can’t divulge details, but let us just say that men and women, girls really”—she plucks a grain of mascara from her eyelash and studies it—“in the infinity pool,” she adds, “the only infinity pool on the island, but you can’t see it, totally secluded, so . . .” She smooths her skirt and crosses her arms under her breasts, lifting them. “Completely naked and unabashed. Men with augmentations and women labially sculpted in the spirit of what my plastic surgeon calls the Barbie. ‘Libertine’ is a word you might use. Wild,” she concludes, and then, husky, “you have no idea.”

  At the sink, Ginger, watching everything, eyes bright, shucking the husks off corn: the odd angles of Barry and his assignation as they pose and posture like fashion models, mid-shoot: the protective curve of Jay’s back as he helps Helen: and through the back doorway, Public darting in and out of its frame, grill smoke blowing off-patio now, and Public, mask up, snorkel dangling, in deep consultation with Leo, the French special forces vet. “Transi de froid” is what Leo keeps barking.

  Jay watches Ginger watch.

  Barry smiles faintly. “We are what others decide we are. Right? I mean, hey, reality, it’s consensual. Right? What the doctor says. And vice versa. So, it’s like, from their point of view, au naturel, plumped and tucked in the amniotic embrace of the watery infinite . . .” He shrugs and lets his murky insinuation hang.

  “Well, no,” the lithe woman disagrees. “Some real is not negotiable. I’m a Realtor, whether you or anyone else agrees that I am or not. It’s not up for discussion, it just is. I don’t believe in body modification. And my current Realtor’s reality is somebody keeps stealing my golf car
t from behind the office. It’s annoying.”

  “Stealing is a consensual relationship.” Barry’s chin goes sagely up and down. “Isn’t it? And for whoever’s doing the taking of your cart, I dunno, their reality might be more in the vein of you lending and them borrowing. Wouldn’t you agree, Jimmy?”

  Jay blades away onion tears with the heel of his hand and looks at them, caught short, wondering if it’s possible the Feds know about his inner-island sorties, or if this is just Barry stumbling around in the dark, running into things.

  “I thought your name was Jay,” the Realtor says, twining long brown legs and raising up on the balls of her feet like a dancer.

  “Well, yeah. In almost every reality but his.”

  Barry laughs. “J. J for Jimmy,” he tries to explain. Then, gesturing to the onions piling up in front of Helen on the cutting board, “Mince, don’t chop. Mince.”

  Jay holds Helen’s hand and guides the knife until she finds the rhythm of it again.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be letting such a little one handle that big sharp knife,” Barry parents.

  “Have you met Bob’s wife?” Jay asks the Realtor, gesturing to the blender, and hardworking Sandy. The lithe woman has not; she smiles emptily and abruptly drifts sideways as if she’d been meaning to do it for a while now, opening up the space between her and Barry.

  Dropping the last of the corn into boiling water on the stove, Ginger, watching this, too, locks eyes with Jay and then walks out of the kitchen.

  “Ball and chain,” Barry jokes, brittle. “And my name’s Barry,” he tells the Realtor, “he’s just—” Spell broken, the Realtor keeps sliding away.

  Jay nods, “—Confused.” Then, softly: “Bob?”

  “Barry.” Real anger palpable now behind that easy grin.

  “Whatever.” Jay jerks his head to the doorway, and Barry follows him out like a puppy into the narrow hallway, where it’s dark and cool, and beyond which the living room blooms with flaxen shafts of eventide sunlight, and in which a group of the locals is starting to form a limbo line.

  “What the fuck?”

  “I don’t know, Barry, I just thought, as long as we’re going to pretend to know each other,” Jay says evenly, “why don’t we pretend that we’re at a barbecue together? You know—hot dogs, hamburgers, potato salad, corn on the cob, Feds up the ass: barbecue.”

  Barry laughs too hard, his smile a conceit, eyes darting to make sure no one has overheard this. “Feds! Jesus, Jimmy.”

  Jay murmurs, “Feds swarming in the backyard like summer fireflies.”

  “They’re getting tired of your little game,” Barry counterpunches, desperate to reclaim the higher ground. “You know that, right? The thing is, they’re beginning to think that, yeah, maybe you don’t know shit, in which case—”

  “Bullet in the head, disappeared into the ocean? Magonis already used that.” Jay’s swagger is a charade and he can’t sustain it. “The thing is, it’s not a game. Whatever ‘they’—or you—think ‘it’ is.”

  Jay waits and watches while Barry tries to process the honesty of this, and, finding that he can’t, just discards it and resumes his clumsy role as blunt-force provocateur: “Public’s gonna fuck you up. Just wait.”

  “Okay.” Jay looks into the bright light and the limbo line. “I guess nothing else to do, then, but have a safe-house-protected pretend beer. And dance.” Jay hands him an icy, dripping Corona from a cooler on the floor. Barry takes it, his broad up-with-people friendliness abruptly vacuumed into a tight, sinister half-smile.

  “Beer looks real enough to me, James,” Barry says. He holds the beer high, tips it, as if in a toast.

  “Yeah,” Jay says, “no doubt. But I’m newer at this. You ask me who’s on first and I still say: everybody. Everybody’s on first.” And with that he slips past Barry, and goes down the cool, dark hallway where the teacher who wrote the Pied Piper book and lyrics is all dolled up and explaining to the actress whose name he’s afraid to ask (and which Ginger has told him, because she asked, but he immediately forgot it: Jean, or Joan something. Bennett? Falcone?) that “Goethe wrote a poem based on the story that was later set to music by Hugo Wolf, and he incorporated references to Faust, but I didn’t think that was grade-appropriate, so I made the rats friendly and the kidnapping an object lesson in fairness.” Jay feels the actress squeeze his arm with her bony fingers as he slips behind them, so close he can see the faint threads of multiple surgical scars behind her ears, where someone took up the slack in her face and left her with the smear of edamame-shaped smile and tissue paper cheeks that turn to him, his uneasy reflection twinned in her pale blue eyes. He doesn’t hear her response, but knows it’s gentle and, to the best of her ability, heartfelt, whatever it is. Nodding in acknowledgment, he finds himself looking back down the hallway, where Barry has disappeared, but in the sliver of open doorway that exposes the bedroom he can see Ginger talking to Public, animated, unhappy, gesturing with her hands, the whole language of her body resistant to whatever he’s asked.

  Now the limbo line snakes out onto the front porch, back through the living room into the dining room, where, furniture pushed aside, bongos pop and bodies shimmy in the hands of the new zip-line twins from Altadena, a bamboo pole is strung between two Avalon yacht club weekender swingers, and who but Sandy, slithering, back bent, is underneath it, knees wide in her baggy cargo shorts, bare feet duck-flat and what appear to be saline implants tenting her Hawaiian shirt like mini-Matterhorns, while Magonis, caged by his chrome walker, leans and sings:

  Put de lime in de coconut, she drank ’em both up

  She put de lime in de coconut, drank ’em both up—

  Then it’s Public under the horizontal pole, arms winged, pinwheeling, spectators howling, clapping, his sensible federal man shoes scuffing panicky until finally he just falls back on his ass.

  Said, “Doctorrrrrrr . . .”

  The party warps and whirls, a carousel of bodies and emotion, a rousing success, its odd moil of Feds and informants and islanders and artifice well matched to the fade and muddle in Jay’s head and yet concrete and real in a way that worries him, in a way that rattles the foundation of everything concrete and real that’s come before.

  Barry under the limbo pole.

  Stoic Leo tucked in a corner with the Realtor, her bare heel hooked around his fake leg, her skirt clinging static to his hip, he’s murmuring French into her ear as an excuse to get his lips that much closer to their goal.

  Magonis in a syncro-shimmy mambo with the old actress suddenly, their gray eyes locked, her teeth perfect, his hair jumping like a small animal up and down on his head.

  And Helen in the kitchen doorway, watching, archiving, ever-vigilant even as, behind her, Sandy powers down frozen margarita directly from the blender itself.

  Someone wraps her arms around Jay from behind, and whispers, lips soft and breath hot against his ear, and he turns in to Ginger’s tight embrace, surprised, astonished, really, the strange familiar closeness of her, not at all sure that he’s heard what she said. And Public joins the howling shrink for the song’s refrain:

  —you drink them both together,

  and then you feel better—

  Jay is searching Ginger’s face for a clue: she’s tentative, ashen-faced, grim. Jay asks, “What?”

  “You need to get out.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not safe for you here. Go.” She keeps looking away, anxious, keeps track of Public, in the crowd, his back turned to them, arm around Magonis, singing.

  “Where?”

  She kisses him, suddenly, hard, on the lips, with longing and desperation. Her smile is heartbreaking, her eyes dark, fierce, decisive.

  He wants to ask her what she and Public were arguing about, but she can’t seem to bear to look at him afterward, and she’s dead serious when she says, end of subject: “Anywh
ere, Jay. Go. Please. Just run.”

  • • •

  Much later, shock of the stillness, the quiet darkness, the party finished, food eaten, sharp miasma of smoke left on everything, sticky floor, guests long gone, bags of trash heaped on the back porch and the house left empty except for the three who live there.

  Just run.

  Deep in the unlit front closet, Jay quietly rummages through the boxes stored here, looking for and finding a box within a box. He opens it and removes his old wallet and some keys. Behind him, Helen walks back and forth through the bright frame of the kitchen doorway, helping Ginger clean up, as Ginger gently murmurs to fill the odd quiet Helen carries with her.

  Just run.

  He puts the wallet in one pocket and the keys in another and steps out of the closet, softly closing the door.

  • • •

  In a soft glaze of the next morning’s sunlight Jay’s eyes slit open to the sound of Ginger and Helen leaving for school. He rolls and turns and stretches up to look over the back of his sofa: through the rippled glass of the bay window he can see distortions of the girls descending the hill flutter, flatten, refract, and disappear like a fata morgana.

  Showered and dressed, he sits at the kitchen table eating cold cereal and smells the faint remainder of Ginger’s perfume and stares at the many crayon drawings of clouds fixed to the refrigerator with magnets.

  He shivers with a gathered melancholy that surprises him.

  • • •

  Mid-morning the bell over the video-store door jangles and sunburned Sam Dunn flip-flops in to drop a big cardboard box on the counter, dust shedding from its sides. His guayabera shirt reeks of Humboldt shaggy. The day is hot already, a hard, grinding, disquieting winter heat blowing off the high desert and across the channel.

  “Asian Trash Cinema,” Dunn announces. He spills the contents—mostly Chinese pirate DVDs—on the counter in front of Jay. “I picked these up in Thailand coupla years ago. Blood Maniac, Innocent Nymphs, and Leech Girl. Freedom from the Greedy Grave. Twist. Pom Pom and Hot Hot with Lam Ching-Ying and Bonnie Yu”—he sorts through them quickly—“this one, Green Snake—which for some reason is called Blue Snake in Hong Kong—it’s about snake sisters who want to be human,” and then, as if he anticipates Jay’s reservations, “Hey, Maggie Cheung and Joey Wang give each other baths. Damn.” He steps back, hands up, switching to a soft-pedal. “Okay okay okay, yes, they’re mostly just plain kick-ass chop-socky films, but some are modern classics, and so I’m betting more than a few of these island yacks’ll go for ’em big-time, and you and me, dollar a disc, we split the rentals. Pure cash profit.”