Althea and Oliver Page 26

  “I wasn’t looking at his—”

  “Sure you weren’t.”

  Matilda has her back against the tub; Althea’s is against the door. Their legs are outstretched, bare feet nearly meeting in the middle. Heat radiates from the moldy baseboards. Matilda points her toes at Althea, who does the same, until the grimy tips touch.

  “So today’s the day, right? You excited?” Althea asks.

  “Yup. Today’s the day.”

  Though New Year’s Eve is not until tomorrow, friends of the Warriors are slated to begin arriving sometime that afternoon for their legendary annual New Year’s Eve party, the Champagne Derby. The derby starts with a trip to the liquor store and the purchase of every kind of sparkling wine cheaper than eight bucks. It inevitably concludes with profuse vomiting and abject misery, but the time in between is said to be a party so fierce, so robust, like a conveyor belt of laughter and good feeling that delivers fun to every individual faster than fun can be processed by the human brain, that it is worth even the most brutal physical punishment the following day.

  Christmas had been quiet, almost nonexistent, the house’s residents making grudging pilgrimages back to their respective families. Matilda invited Althea to go with her, back to Queens, but she had demurred, insisting she would be glad to have the house to herself for the first time. Instead, Althea found the place unbearable—eerily quiet and claustrophobic, like the cracked walls and filth were closing in on her, even Mr. Business hiding in a closet somewhere. She called Garth to wish him a merry Christmas, inventing a list of presents she’d received from Alice and a recent trip to the hot springs. She was so lonely she called Alice, but there was no answer in Taos.

  After that, she made a command decision: She took the subway into Manhattan by herself for the first time and went to an all-ages show at ABC No Rio, hoping to find relief pressed up against a stage, covered in the sweat of strangers and dodging their fists and elbows, but the show was strangely unsatisfying, too sparsely attended for a decent mosh pit to form, a handful of straight-edge boys with shaved heads menacing other members of the audience.

  New Year’s, she’s been assured, will have a real sense of occasion. “It makes up for Christmas,” Gregory had promised her.

  “I feel weird,” Althea says.

  “Why?”

  “I’m not going to know anyone.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. You didn’t know us a month ago, either.”

  “Sounds so strange when you say it like that.”

  “How is it? First New Year’s away from home? Away from Oliver?” Matilda asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I bet we could find you someone to kiss at midnight. If you’re interested.”

  “I’m not.” She leans her head back and closes her eyes, listening to the shower pound the dirty tub. “Can we go down to the boardwalk?”

  “I wish. I’ve got to make vegan baked ziti for a dozen people who are going to be here in a few hours.”

  “You know you love it.”

  “I do.”

  “Then why don’t you seem more excited?”

  Matilda sighs. “New Year’s is our holiday. It’s like the Christmas you have with your friends, the family you pick. So once a year everyone comes in from out of town and we hang out for days, and that’s how it feels, it feels like we’re family, like we’ve all thrown in our lots together and it’ll always be like this. Of course, then it’s over and the thing I look forward to all year is finished and it’s just winter and there’s nothing to be excited about until springtime. But for a couple of days, you know, it’s pretty great.” Matilda brushes the hair from her eyes. “I do hope this weather changes, though. The sunrise on New Year’s Day is one harsh fucking mistress. Easier to handle when it’s overcast.”

  Pulling her knees to her chest, Althea balls herself up like a napkin. “Cheer up,” she says. “Today is going to be the greatest day of our lives.”

  • • •

  In the kitchen, Ethan is paging cautiously through her sketchbook, which Althea thought was safely tucked between the couch and the wall. Pouring herself another cup of coffee, she makes like she doesn’t care, eats a fistful of granola over the sink, and watches everyone else building some kind of sculpture out of empty beer cans in the backyard.

  “You know I write stories,” Ethan says, stating it like a fact, like something she was actually supposed to have known. She waits. “They’re not really stories. They’re like outlines? For comic books? Or graphic novels? Me and Dennis were supposed to work on one together, but he bailed.” Althea stares into the sink. A single soggy carrot peel lingers in the drain. “I had most of the characters worked out, some of the story.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to serve in the park today?” she finally says.

  “I am. And you’re coming with me.”

  “I am?”

  “Unless you’re busy? Or have other plans?”

  So Althea layers as best she can, in a T-shirt under a thermal under her filthy, falling-apart sweatshirt under her puffy vest. She puts on two pairs of socks and meets Ethan in the front hallway, where he is wearing one tennis shoe and pawing through the pile for its mate.

  “You should tie the laces together when you take them off,” she says, holding up her united combat boots. “That way they don’t get separated.”

  “You’re not going to be warm enough in that.”

  “This is what I’ve got.”

  Ethan rolls his eyes. “Of course.”

  “Don’t give me your put-upon face, okay? I’m not complaining.”

  “Come on.” He takes her elbow and steers her toward the staircase.

  She follows, hesitating in the doorway of the room he shares with Gregory. There are books everywhere, leaning against the walls in unstable-looking towers and stacked up on the dresser and the windowsill. It smells like lemons and clean laundry, not the sweaty boy socks Althea expected, although the can of air freshener on the nightstand implies that this is not achieved naturally. Mr. Business, curled up on the pillow in a small furry comma, meows at the intruders through squinty green eyes. The covers are thrown back on the bed, exposing the imprint of Ethan’s body on the sheets. Something about it is uncomfortably intimate, and Althea looks away.

  He rummages around in a plastic bin on the closet floor until he finds a green knit hat with earflaps and matching mittens that unsnap to reveal fingerless gloves. The hat and mittens have eyes. He hands them to her. “Is that supposed to be a frog?” Althea asks.

  “Matilda gave these to me as a joke.” She pulls on the frog ensemble, and Ethan goes back to rooting in the closet. He emerges again, this time with a scuffed black trench coat. “It’s not real leather,” he says. “It’s just some piece of crap I found at a thrift store, but Matilda lined the inside with fleece.”

  Slipping it on, Althea gets a big whiff of the fake leather, and the scent reminds her so much of the couch in her basement at home that she can’t speak for fear of crying. It isn’t homesickness or longing so much as it is a painfully tactile reminder that it had all actually happened, she had wrestled with Oliver on that stupid couch and slept on it after he left her and shared meals on it with her father while watching Jurassic Park and trying not to contemplate the mess she’d made of everything. All of that had been before. That’s what kills her. She had a before, and now she’s in the after, and it wrenches her heart inside her chest that such a break has been made and she doesn’t even want to go back.

  “Are you okay?”

  Showing Ethan any weakness would surely be a major tactical error, so she sacks up and breathes through her mouth. “I bet I look ridiculous.”

  “But in a good way.”

  • • •

  The park is empty. They set up their table in the middle of the vast expanse of white as the wind whips hollowly around
them. Althea stations herself behind the collard greens, stamping her feet to keep some feeling in her toes. Ethan reads V for Vendetta and ignores her.

  “No one’s coming today,” she says after half an hour. “Why don’t we just pack up and go home?”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “What’s the point of standing here in the cold if no one’s going to show up?”

  “The point is to be consistent. That’s how people know we’ll be here when they need us.”

  Althea sinks into a crouch and starts making a small round pile of snow. “Tell me about this comic book of yours,” she says.

  “What do you know about diamonds?”

  “I know they’re all in a vault at De Beers and they’re not really worth anything.”

  “How do you know about that?” he says.

  Althea is annoyed by his surprise. “I don’t want to shock the hell out of you, but we have books in North Carolina, too.”

  Ethan opens his mouth to say something nasty, she can tell by his expression, but he changes his mind and starts over. “So I had this idea to do a story about a heist. About a bunch of thieves who boost all the diamonds from De Beers. Not because they want to fence them, but because they want to give them away. Destroy their value, destroy the monopoly.”

  “How would they do it?”

  “It would have to be an inside job.”

  Without looking up, she agrees. “And you’d need a pretty principled bunch of criminals to steal all those diamonds and just give them away.” Unsnapping the tops of her mittens to free her fingers, she molds a set of back legs, then carves away the snow on the sides to make the frog’s belly more defined.

  “Well, that’s the thing,” says Ethan. “They would all be tempted. That’s the point. They’re ordinary people. But eventually they would all realize they had the chance to really do something good, instead of just getting fat and rich.”

  “When I first heard the story, I didn’t think the guy at the top was fat and smug. I imagined”—she pauses, reaching back to that day in the hallway with Valerie—“I imagined him tall. With a pocket watch. And lonely. Sneaking down into the vault at night to look at his diamonds.”

  Ethan produces a wet sound of derision from the back of his throat. “Please.”

  “You read too many comic books,” she says, rounding out the frog’s back and giving more arch to the neck. “The diabolical archvillain, the guy rubbing his hands together, the guy who loves being so evil? That guy doesn’t really exist. Nobody ever thinks they’re the bad guy. I know that whole Robin Hood thing has a lot of appeal, but it’s a little too easy, don’t you think?”

  “So you think it’s a bad idea,” Ethan says.

  “I just think it shouldn’t be so simple. What if the guy at the top was your inside man? What if he decided to get rid of all the diamonds? Maybe something happens and he thinks he doesn’t deserve them anymore. But he can’t just disband the empire. So he has to make it look like a heist.”

  “A redemption story. Interesting. Is that a frog?”

  Carefully fashioning two tiny snowballs for eyes, she affixes them to either side of the head. “It doesn’t look right.”

  “Here.” Squatting beside her, Ethan bites the tip of his glove and wriggles his hand free. “He needs toes.”

  Althea watches the vapor clouds of Ethan’s breath as he adds webbed feet to the hind legs. The very tip of his earlobe is exposed below his black knit cap. His pale neck has turned bright red above the place where it disappears into his scarf. She can see the snowy park reflected in the lenses of his glasses, and behind them his blue-gray eyes, which never stray from the ground.

  “It’s five toes in the back, not three,” she says, correcting him. “And four in the front.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “We dissected frogs in biology last year.”

  “Excuse me?” someone says behind them.

  They’re interrupted by a man with long hair plaited into two dark shiny braids. He’s wearing a Mexican blanket poncho-style. A taxidermied crow sits on his shoulder.

  Ethan leaps up. “Sorry about that,” he says.

  Althea spoons the collard greens onto a plate; Ethan serves the carrots and fake turkey.

  “Look out for him,” the man says, gesturing to the bird. “He used to be alive.”

  Surprisingly, Ethan engages him as he eats and allows the man—Gray Wolf, he calls himself—to deliver a lengthy dissertation on his ex-wife and former career as a studio recording artist. He’s about to launch into his history with the Hells Angels—“Once you’re a Hells Angel, you’re a Hells Angel for life, trust me, you wouldn’t want to die by my hands”—when he stops himself. “But that’s a conversation for another time,” he says, nodding toward Althea. “Not fit for talking about in front of a lady.”

  “Some other time, then,” says Ethan.

  Gray Wolf smiles. “You got it.”

  After he leaves, Ethan turns to Althea. “That’s why we stay, even when it’s freezing and we think no one’s coming.”

  She nods, chastened.

  “Now we can leave.” He covers the aluminum trays, carefully sealing all the edges.

  Althea detaches the banner from the front of the table. “I could draw it. The diamond story. If you wanted to write it, I could do the drawings.”

  Ethan dismisses the idea with a quick shake of his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not? You saw my sketchbook. I’m good.”

  Going around to the other side of the table, he takes one end of the banner and meets her in the middle so it folds smoothly in half. “Do you have any idea how long something like that would take? How involved it would be, working out the story and the panels and doing all the art?”

  “It’s not exactly like I have a dearth of free time to fill.” Angrily snatching the sign away from him, she finishes folding it herself.

  “And what about when you leave? What then?”

  “Who said anything about leaving? Look, I talked to Matilda. I know you called people back in Wilmington, I know you asked around about me—”

  “Tough shit. This isn’t witness protection.”

  “You want me to leave, right? You were pissed from the minute I walked in the door and you can’t wait for me to go. Am I cramping your style? Have I inconvenienced you somehow? I’m trying to contribute and be helpful, but you just can’t stand having me around.”

  “I’m saying that you won’t stay. That you’ll get tired of not having your own room and having to stand here in the park with me—”

  “That part I’m getting pretty fucking tired of already.”

  “It’s a matter of time before you get on the phone with your dad and tell him you want to come home. It’s happened before. It happens all the time. You’ll want things to go back to normal.”

  Even in the middle of this ridiculous fucking argument, when she would like nothing more than to put her hands around his pasty little neck and squeeze, a warm glow spreads through her stomach and she laughs.

  “What’s so funny?” he asks, sounding strangely unsure of himself, like he thinks she’s laughing at him.

  “Nothing,” she says. She can’t tell him because she knows how bizarre it will sound if she says it out loud.

  It just feels so good to have someone to fight with again.

  chapter fifteen.

  OLIVER’S PLAN STOPS HERE. Standing on this porch, confronted with the house where Althea’s been staying, while Will is swaying on his feet, barely able to keep his eyes open.

  “We’ve got to get you back to St. Victor’s,” says Oliver.

  “I’m not leaving until I know you’ve found her.”

  “We know she’s here. I can take you and then come back.”

  “We don’t know what’s waiting for u
s at the hospital. If you take me in, you might not be able to leave again. You can’t just drop me off and say that you have errands to run. For all we know, your mother could be there by now. Go knock on that door. We’ll take it from there.”

  “Goddamnit.”

  “I told you it wasn’t finished with me. It was just waiting until I was finally having a good time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll live. Now go on.”

  Oliver takes a tentative step toward the door. Inside the house, someone is haltingly arranging chords on a badly tuned electric guitar.

  “‘Oh, Mr. Business, if you’ll be my baby, I promise, I won’t give you scabies,’” the singer proclaims, then stops himself short to call out a question. “Hey, what’s the patron saint against scabies?”

  “Saint Radegunde,” someone answers. “Good luck finding something that rhymes.”

  Oliver looks back at Will, standing on the snow-covered lawn below him.

  “What?” Will asks.

  “I just realized I have no idea what I’m going to say to her.”

  Marching up the steps, Will rings the bell in three short bursts. “Think fast.”

  Oliver can hear the house take a collective breath—“Is someone at the door?” “Go see who it is.” None of the voices sound like Althea. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” he says.

  “Too late.”

  A girl answers the door. She’s short and blonde and wearing an oversize Replacements shirt as a dress. Oliver pegs her as a handful of years older, and despite her diminutive stature she has an air of authority that reminds him of Nicky. Something in the way she’s sizing him up with her sharp green eyes makes him extremely aware that this is her house, and he’s standing uninvited on her porch. She doesn’t say hello or ask what she can do for him; she just stares and waits for him to speak.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Hello,” she replies. She doesn’t even look at Will, keeping her eyes fixed on Oliver.

  “I’m looking for Althea.”