The Uninvited Page 7

  He didn’t answer. His mind was reeling. Five hundred bucks, he thought. Where would he ever get five hundred bucks? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he would.

  “You can count on me,” he said.

  Her smile softened. She shook her head in amazement and respect. “Whoever that girl is I smell on you, she is one lucky lady.”

  He didn’t bother to argue with her. Kind of liked the idea that there could be a girl-a lucky girl-who was his alone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jay sat in bed listening to Gabriel Zouave’s Sang-Froid on his iPod, reading the score along with the music. The oversize manuscript was propped against his knees. He had seen the premiere, heard Zouave talk about it. Jay dreamed of writing something this good-this big. But right now all he wanted was for the music to take him away. He did not want his mind to wander. Did not want to think of Mimi down the hall.

  There was a knock on his door. He paused the iPod, instantly felt a panic attack coming on. He waited. The knock came again, softly. He glanced at his alarm clock: 11:45. It would be her. She’d want to talk about what happened. About the video footage: her own image on her own camera captured by an unknown watcher. His unknown watcher. Had to be. It seemed fatherhood wasn’t the only thing he and Mimi shared.

  He wasn’t sure he could face this right now. But it surprised him, bothered him that only half an hour after saying good night, how much he wanted to see her again.

  “Jay?”

  He let out his breath. It was only Mom. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved.

  “Enter.”

  The door opened and there was his kind mother in her terry-cloth robe and sheepskin slippers.

  “Am I disturbing you?” she said. He had to laugh.

  She gently closed the door behind her, crossed the room, and sat on his bed. She patted his foot, under the comforter.

  “That a good read?” she asked.

  “Yeah, a real thriller,” he said. He held up the score so she could see the cover. She took it, looked at the open spread, and shook her head. “I can’t imagine how you do it,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I can’t imagine how you take out somebody’s tonsils.”

  “Tonsils are a piece of cake. But reading all these parts. And you actually hear it in your head, don’t you?”

  Jay pointed to his earphones.

  “I know, but you do read scores. I’ve seen you.”

  Jay placed his iPod on the bedside table. “Zouave told me the only time music was ever perfect for him was when he read it. No one’s flat; no one plays too loud. Perfect balance. Perfect harmony.”

  His mother nodded in an abstract way, as if perfect harmony was something she didn’t see a lot of at the clinic. She handed him back the score. There was a shift in the expression on her face. He closed the score and dropped it to the floor beside his bed.

  “Pretty weird night, huh?” he said.

  Lou nodded. “You might say.” She brought her hands together in her lap. “I thought I should tell you I phoned Marc.”

  Jay wasn’t sure what he had been expecting her to say-something about Mimi, no doubt. “Really?” She nodded. “You know how to reach him?”

  She nodded but with her chin pulled in as if this wasn’t quite the response she had expected. “He’s at the same number I reached him at when you wanted to use the house on the snye for band practice, back in high school. He still pays property taxes on the place, which means he’s on the township roll. Jo found his address and phone number easily enough.”

  Jay thought about the balding man in the shades. He imagined him in the same cafe, as if that was where he lived, with a glass of wine in one hand and a phone in the other, talking to Lou.

  “What’d he say?”

  Lou folded her bathrobe over her knee. “Well, he was a bit surprised.”

  “That makes a whole bunch of us.”

  “He remembered that he had given you permission to use the house but that it was a long time ago. Seven years, I told him. He also knew you’d gone out west to school.”

  “How’d he know that?”

  “I wrote him,” said Lou.

  “Jesus! So you two are like buddy-buddy and I don’t even know about it?”

  “What do you think, Jay?”

  That was the sixty-four-million-dollar question. What was he supposed to think? “My father suddenly crash-lands right in the middle of my life via this pretty much grown-up daughter-aka my half-sister-and now I find out my mother is all palsy with the guy.”

  “Nonsense,” she said.

  “Mom!”

  “Keep your voice down, honey. There is one very tired, equally discombobulated young woman down the hall trying to sleep.”

  Jay didn’t need reminding.

  “Marc and I are anything but palsy-walsy. I have communicated with him precisely twice in the last umpteen years-three times, counting tonight: once, back in… whatever it was… 2000?-when you were in tenth grade-to ask if you could use the house on the snye for the band; then once again to let him know you’d graduated from high school, summa cum laude and valedictorian of your class. Bragging rights. And tonight to let him know our present situation.”

  Jay didn’t dare speak. He could feel words as sharp and belligerent as sticks and rocks piling up behind his teeth. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was so angry about; he just was.

  “He’s fine about you being there, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

  That helped a little. But not much. It had been a very long time since Jay had thought of the house on the snye as belonging to anyone else but himself. Now it was as if his hold on the place was being threatened from every side.

  “What about her?” he said, nodding toward the spare bedroom.

  “That’s for you two to decide-you and Miriam.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s what Marc called her. He thinks it’s up to you guys how you deal with this. And I agree.”

  Jay crossed his arms, leaned back, and banged his head a couple of times against the backboard. “I dunno, Mom. I can just barely wrap my head around having a sister. But sharing a place with her?”

  His mother smiled sympathetically. “Marc thinks there might be something she’s running away from.”

  “What? She rob a bank?”

  Lou shrugged. “More personal, I’m guessing. He wouldn’t say. Or didn’t know.”

  “Or didn’t care,” said Jay.

  He looked away, knowing his mother would be regarding him attentively and wishing she wouldn’t. Her hand was still on the comforter, stroking his foot. He slid it out of her reach. She didn’t speak and eventually he glanced her way again.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “What do you think?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not just Mimi. Something’s up. Something’s been bothering you for a while.”

  Jay rolled his eyes. “Like my life, for instance?”

  Lou smiled.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  “No,” she said. “I would say your life was pretty good.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “You’re going away in just a couple of months. Back to school. You’re going to love that.”

  “I know. Of course I will. And I am a fortunate child. Believe me, I do realize that. You know I do.”

  “But?”

  “But…” He couldn’t tell her what was going on up at the snye. He could talk to Lou about almost anything, but not this. Not something she might see as threatening. And it was threatening, though he didn’t want to see it that way.

  “You take life very seriously, Jay,” she said. “It will always be a bit of a burden for you. But I wouldn’t be much of a mother-let alone a doctor-if I didn’t know that something’s been on your mind for a while now.”

  Jay looked at her frank expression. Nothing really ruffled her. Hell, she worked in the ER: crash victims, heart attacks, mortally wounded children. Why couldn’t
he talk to her?

  “Are things okay with Iris?”

  “Sure. Of course. Why shouldn’t they be?”

  Lou shrugged. “Just probing,” she said.

  Jay glowered, without having any noticeable effect on her attentive smile.

  “Is she still coming home this summer?”

  Jay nodded. “In a week or so.”

  “Good.” Lou grinned. “What a surprise this is going to be for her.”

  Jay didn’t bother to comment. Right now Iris just seemed like one more thing to have to try to juggle, and he had run clean out of hands. He slid a little down in his bed, hoping his mother would get the hint and leave. She didn’t move. She was staring across the room at nothing.

  “She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” said his mother.

  “Who? Iris?”

  “No.” Lou shook her head. “Iris is pretty. I adore Iris, as you know. But I was talking about Mimi.” His mother smiled at him in a way that made him think that she could see clear inside him, all the way down to thoughts he was trying very hard to hide from himself.

  PART TWO

  The room was quiet, but Mimi was there, up there, just beyond seeing. She wasn’t talking, but he could sense her, hovering nearby, like an angel. Maybe she was an angel. Maybe he had died without knowing it and this black hole was hell with her only an arm’s length away. So close, if he could only move his arms.

  “I know you’re there,” she said, her voice quiet. “I think you can hear me.”

  She had found him.

  She had found him, but he couldn’t do a thing about it, couldn’t say anything, couldn’t move. She would go and he wouldn’t be able to stop her, or follow, or call after her.

  “I want you to come out from there,” she said. “I think you’re hiding, Cramer, and I want to talk to you, okay?”

  And this was the hardest thing of all, he thought. Because all he wanted in the whole world was to talk to her and it was beyond him. She was beyond him. And maybe it would be that way forever.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Despite the avalanche of shocks and surprises, or maybe because of them, Mimi slept like a baby. The revelation that capped the evening-that someone had used her own camera to shoot footage of her-had stunned her speechless. Luckily Jay had been right beside her. She had grabbed on to his arm for support, and he had taken the camera away from her, gently, before she dropped it, as if it were a grenade with a loose firing pin. It was his serious eyes as much as his strong grip that held her up. And his eyes seemed to say, Let’s keep this our secret.

  “Good of him not to steal the JVC,” Jay said when they were alone. But the look in his eyes said what Mimi was thinking. It wasn’t good. It was intimidating.

  They were in the guest room; he’d gone out to get her fresh towels, and just as he returned, her cell phone rang. She didn’t answer it, and, luckily, Jay got the hint and left her alone, pulling the door shut behind him.

  She had gone to bed, missing the comforting sound of traffic, of car horns and sirens. Of cabbies arguing with drunk passengers.

  The next thing she knew she was waking to birdsong and a radio playing classical music softly somewhere off in the blond house.

  She pulled up the blinds and looked out at the garden. Jay came into view, walking from around the corner of the house in jeans and a ratty denim jacket, heading down toward the river with a carpenter’s tool belt hanging around his hips, the hammer tapping against his thigh.

  “Very Village People,” she murmured.

  Jay was also lugging an orange-colored case, which she supposed contained some kind of power tool. He loaded it into the forward hatch of the kayak. Then he undid his tool belt and lowered it into the hatch as well. He was going to do some carpentry work up at the snye, she gathered, and as soon as she realized this, she recalled the secret entrance, the storm door hidden behind the shed, and the phantom who had been using it to gain entrance to the little house. The same phantom, presumably, that had borrowed her camera. Her shoulders sagged.

  Jay looked as if he were about to leave. She grabbed her NYU hoodie from the muddle of clothes she had thrown on a rocker and raced for the back door, pulling on the sweatshirt as she went. She called him from the step as he was about to launch the kayak. He stopped, looked back at her. His expression wasn’t quite impatience. It was the expression of someone too polite to be impatient.

  She wondered how he had gotten the kayak back from the snye and then realized that it was not the same one he had left up there. The one they had hauled into the house had been completely yellow. This one was yellow on top but the hull was white.

  Jay looked up at the sky. It was overcast. There was a bit of chop on the river caused by a stiff breeze. Mimi breathed in; the air was fresh, and the grass was wet with dew or maybe it had rained. She didn’t often get to go outside in just her nightclothes and a hoodie. The garden was closed off, private. It felt liberating.

  She joined him at the riverside. He didn’t look like he’d had much sleep. She kicked the kayak lightly with her bare toe. “You buy these things by the six-pack?” she asked.

  He didn’t smile. “It’s my mom’s,” he said.

  “You’re going to have a marina up there at this rate.”

  “I can tow the other one back. I want to get a lock on that door as soon as possible.”

  “Figured. I can drive you, if you give me two minutes.”

  He looked her up and down and frowned as if to say it would take more than two minutes for her to get ready.

  “I didn’t know you wore specs,” he said.

  She held out her arms and twirled around, presenting herself for inspection. “This is your new sibling in the morning: bed-head, sarcastic glasses, and bad plaid pajamas.”

  Jay tried not to smile, mostly succeeded.

  “You have a bad night?” she asked.

  He looked out at the river and took a deep breath. “I’m not much of a morning person,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  He looked out at the river, pinched the bridge of his nose. “Didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “It’s just that I want to get up to the place and deal with this thing.”

  “I understand. I want to help. Could I drive up and meet you there?” His eyes got shifty-looking. She spoke slowly to him, as if language was the problem. “Jay, I know you need to go batten down the hatches, but we need to talk. And, anyway, I could help. Maybe not with the hatches, but with… you know. Stuff.”

  He puckered his brow. “Stuff?” he said.

  Mimi rolled her eyes. “I’m smart and resourceful and… something else. Oh, right-fearless!”

  “You looked pretty scared when you saw yourself on the camera.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ve got to admit, that was special, wasn’t it? Give me a break.”

  Jay raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ve been around, Jay. I’m not some bimbo. Besides, I’ve got an idea.”

  “An idea?”

  “Yeah. It involves motion detectors, infrared cameras, and land mines, but we can improvise.” She coaxed a grin out of him, but she was working overtime.

  He sighed. “So we’ll talk,” he said, “when I get back.” He looked at his watch, showed it to her. It was nearly ten. “I should be back by one.”

  “Great! We’ll do lunch,” she said, all perky-eyed. “I’ll head into town and find something. Is there a sushi bar? Just kidding.”

  Now Jay just looked worn-out.

  “Okay?” she asked.

  “Okay.”

  “Good. I’ll make lunch for everyone.”

  “It’ll just be us. Mom and Jo went to Ottawa, won’t be back until dinner.”

  “Lunch for two, then.”

  “Cool.”

  Then he started to push the kayak into the water.

  “Oops!” said Mimi.

  He stopped and turned around with a what-is-it-this-time look on his face.

  “The security system,” she said, poin
ting back toward the house. “How do you work it?”

  Jay showed her how to arm the system and then took off.

  Mimi explored the house, which she finally had all to herself, just her and the radio. Then she took a shower and went back to her room to get dressed. There were a series of framed drawings on the wall above the low dresser. They were lively Conte crayon sketches of rocks. She knew those rocks. She leaned close to see her father’s scrawl of a signature in the lower right-hand corner with the year ’82 after it. Six years before she was born. These rocks had gone on to big things. Literally. Mark’s first major show in New York featured these very same rocks, nine of them in all, but painted huge-boulder size-and ganged up in diptychs and triptychs. She had read about it in an article in Artforum: “Soto-The Stone Age.” Part of her father’s long history.

  She sat on the bed, her hands in her lap. She felt good. Rested. Seeing these sketches made her feel as if she belonged here somehow. She would ask Jay if they could share the house at the snye. It wasn’t his fault-or hers-that they were both here. She’d stay out of his hair. And it would be good to have two people there, really.

  She got up and started sorting through her clothes. She had understood Jay’s caginess with her. It was kind of a weird variant of waking up after a one-night stand. Now there was a thought! He’d get over it. So would she. Had to.

  But then what about her need to be alone? She had a lot of thinking to do, in somewhere other than New York. Somewhere Lazar Cosic wasn’t.

  Decisions. Oh, well. For now she would be this useful sister who went out and found something nutritious for lunch. She turned to her suitcases.

  What to wear? Something serious. Something that said, This girl is not a freak. This girl means business. This girl is reliable. She started sorting things out. Did she own anything like that? But after another moment of sorting, the idea of what to wear to impress her brand-new brother had gone clear from her mind.

  She was missing something. A silver-framed photograph of Jamila and her at the Hassanalis’ summer place on Long Island. They were goofing around on the beach, mugging for the camera. She hadn’t forgotten to pack it. She remembered wrapping it in her pink polka-dotted top. The top was still there. But the picture was gone.