The Summer We Fell Apart Page 27

  Shelley talked about the estimates the auction house had come up with. Christie’s was sending a rep the Monday after Thanksgiving to supervise the crating of the paintings along with other un-stretched canvases and a few miscellaneous items for shipment to New York. The sketchbook that Finn was casually thumbing through bore an estimated price tag of $75,000. This made Kate take a seat at the table across from him and oversee the handling. Her concern wasn’t altruistic; she had gotten this far with Shelley and, by default, Ben, and she wasn’t about to let anything happen to tarnish her accomplishments. She knew that despite her position as lead attorney in the office, if she screwed this one up, Ben could shuttle her back to defending celebrity sex tapes and cutting deals for fools to go to rehab instead of jail.

  Finn had more energy after going through the sketchbooks and his mood had lifted. He mentioned that he was looking forward for the week to begin because that was when the crew he had hired to help with the demo on the main house was to arrive. He seemed anxious but less moody. By the time they’d had coffee and dessert, Kate was sober enough that she felt okay to drive home. She was surprised that Finn retreated back into his bad mood, and as he slumped in the passenger seat, it reminded Kate of their drive home from the airport. He kept checking his cell phone, flipping the lid open and shut, dialing for voicemail, and then disconnecting the call in disgust. She wondered then if she had really heard him on the phone earlier in the day, if it hadn’t, as she thought dismissively, been a dream. But she knew that in his current mood he wouldn’t answer her, so she didn’t even try.

  When they got back to the house, Kate announced she was going to take a bath. Finn, stretched out on his bed with an arm flung over his face, didn’t comment. When she emerged an hour later, Finn and her car were gone. She tried his cell phone but all she got was voicemail. She sat at her desk and attempted to work, and when that didn’t divert her attention, she paced. Where the hell was he?

  By four in the morning, Kate felt a little frantic. Repeated attempts to reach him by cell had gone unanswered. She considered calling Shelley but then told herself that was ridiculous. He wouldn’t be there and she would just be dragging a client into their personal drama. Kate had worked so hard to put all this behind her that she couldn’t believe all it took was Finn taking off to bring it back: flashes of staying up all night taking care of Amy and George when they were really little, putting them to bed and watching the Tonight Show and then the Tomorrow Show with Finn until the station signed off with an image of the American flag waving in the breeze, accompanied by an orchestral version of the national anthem. All the while she waited for headlights to crisscross the windows of the den, signaling that either her father or her mother had returned after an argument that had spun out of control, before she’d sneak up the back stairs to bed. She’d be damned if she was going to do that now with Finn.

  She took the flashlight Finn had hung on a cord from a hook by the front door and stormed down the gravel drive to the main road. But once she got there, she stood frozen, just inside her gate, peering down the deserted road for the first sign of a car. She wanted to do something, but the idea of risking her life on foot to search the darkened streets of Silver Lake for her brother seemed an unwise choice. While she considered what to do, she noticed that some of her more enthusiastic neighbors had already put up strings of twinkling white Christmas lights along the gates that arched over their driveways and she thought how strange that Christmas came here without benefit of snow or cold.

  After a while, Kate made her way back to the house. She was sitting on her bed in the dusky peach light of the early morning when a car pulled into the drive. She twisted around and peered out the window in time to see the driver’s-side door swing open and her brother stumble from the car. He had taken a few steps toward the house before he remembered to shut the door, so he had to return, bobbing and weaving, back to the car. He lifted his leg up in the air, nearly falling over, and kicked the door shut.

  When he saw Kate sitting up in the bed, he slurred, “Don’t give me any of your old shit.” Then he disappeared into the bathroom and slammed that door as well.

  After a few minutes, during which Kate alternated between wanting to kill him and needing to see if he was alive, she rapped her knuckles against the bathroom door. “Hey, Finn? Finn? You okay?”

  There was a mumble of unintelligible words and then she heard the toilet flush. She waited for the door to open but when it didn’t she knocked again. This time Finn flung the door open wide before she had a chance to put down her hand. He pushed past her and fell onto his bed facedown.

  “Finn?” Kate tried again. The light in the room had deepened to a fireball of orange as the sun rose. “Damn it, Finn?” She walked over and shook his shoulder even though she knew there was no sense in trying.

  He rolled over onto his back but didn’t open his eyes.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Does not matter.” As he spoke, he spit, but he didn’t make any move to clean off his chin.

  While Kate realized that Finn was in no condition to reason, she wasn’t about to stop. “I’ve been up all night worried sick. You took my car! Finn!”

  His eyes fluttered open and he labored over his words, finally getting out, “You don’t own me,” before his eyes closed yet again.

  “As far as I can see, you don’t own anything, including that car. If you’re going to fuck yourself do it somewhere else.” Kate was shaking. It was anticlimactic to scream at her brother’s inert form. She wanted someone to go up against. “Goddamn you, Finn, fight back!” she shouted.

  When Finn didn’t respond, Kate kicked the bed and felt her toes crunch hard against the wooden frame. Tears came to her eyes and she bent down to massage her foot when she saw Finn’s cell phone lying on the floor. She picked it up and began scrolling through the calls. He didn’t have anything in his address book, so the unlabeled numbers meant nothing to her. She went over to the computer and Googled a few of the area codes: Boston, predictably, but why Reston, Virginia? New York City, but she didn’t recognize it as their mother’s number; maybe it was their brother, George? Certainly never Amy. That seemed to be the one thing that Kate and Finn had always had in common.

  Frustrated by the lack of information and struggling with the need to know more, Kate realized she could plug the numbers into the computer and possibly come up with names to go with them, but she couldn’t bring herself to breach her brother’s privacy even further, no matter what he had done to piss her off.

  Kate left Finn passed out on the bed and spent the day and most of the evening in downtown Silver Lake. She set up her laptop at a table tucked under the eaves in a coffee shop and was surprised at how easy it was to get work done while Christmas carols thrummed as background accompaniment to the ever-changing clusters of people at the surrounding tables. A change of scenery also seemed to quiet the chorus of voices in Kate’s head, which chanted I told you so every time she thought of her brother.

  When she returned home, the house was dark and Finn was huddled under the blankets. He obviously was sweating out the booze because the entire place smelled like the floor in a bar at closing time, and she went around opening the windows until the air was tinged with eucalyptus. Frankly, Kate didn’t know which smell was worse.

  She poked his shoulder to make sure he hadn’t poisoned himself past the point of no return. When Finn grunted and rolled away from her offending finger, Kate was satisfied that, at least for today, he was alive.

  Despite the lack of sleep in the last twenty-four hours, Kate was restless and in search of something—she just didn’t know what, so she went into the kitchen and opened a package of crackers. She stood at the sink, messily chewing the saltines one by one, allowing the crumbs to gather in the drain as she inventoried the decline of the lemon tree outside the window.

  What was left of the fruit was almost entirely black. The now-leafless branches were crusted over with a foaming fungus that
caused them to collapse under the remaining weight. Disease had rotted the tree from the inside out.

  Kate went outside and found the handsaw that Finn had left on the bench next to a machete with a bright red handle. The machete reminded Kate of the tool their father once used to mark a path through the grass on the way to the swimming hole. The bench was partially covered by the steep pitch of roof, and even though Finn had purchased a huge plastic bucket to protect the tools, they rarely made it back inside the bucket.

  When Kate got to the lemon tree, saw in hand, she reached out and touched a branch and recoiled instantly as her fingers sunk into something soft and smooth, the texture resembling butter only fuzzy and warm. She knelt down and wiped her fingers through the crushed grass beneath her feet, and when that wasn’t sufficient, she used the cuff of her pants. Close to the ground, the smell of fermenting lemons was overwhelming. It was a sweet, sick scent that immediately clogged her nostrils and caused her to gag. When she was able, she stood and walked away from the tree in an attempt to gulp some fresh air but it was no use—the smell lined her nasal passageway so that every breath was tainted.

  She approached the tree with the saw raised, as if the tree had the ability to fend her off and fight back against her attack. Tentatively, she set the blade against the crotch of a branch and flinched as she felt the first of the saw teeth dig into the bark. The saw seemed to shred the semisoft wood until finally, after several awkward thrusts of the blade, the branch hung by a fine filament of once-healthy bark. With one last pull of the saw, the branch fell to the ground with a swooshing sound. After that, Kate attacked the tree with a ferocity she didn’t know she had. The branches fell fast and easy, piling up beneath the tree until in the end a five-foot stalk was left covered all over with the knobs of phantom branches. With her foot and the tip of the saw blade, she pushed aside the fallen branches so that she could get the saw as close to the base of the trunk as possible. The trunk, barely five inches in diameter, was so rotten at the core that the saw blade was covered in drippy black goo. With each thrust of the blade, Kate had to stop and wipe it off in the grass to unclog the teeth.

  Eventually, the saw was so gummed up it was rendered useless, so Kate kicked the trunk of the tree where she had made her cuts. It toppled to the left easily and without fanfare, just a slow-motion release as its landing was buffered by a pile of branches. Panting, Kate tossed the saw into the pile before she went back into the house to wash her hands at the kitchen sink.

  Blisters had already begun to form where she had gripped the saw and they stung as the water hit them. She looked out the window, surprised by her own reflection and nothing more. She turned off the water, blotted her hands dry on her pants, and crossed the room in the dark, crawling into the cave of blankets on her bed. As she listened to her brother bubble and snort in his sleep, blissfully unconscious, she felt an unfathomably vast, hollowed-out grief for what she’d done.

  The next day, Finn acted like absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had happened and Kate was too spent to confront him. If Finn noticed the decimation of the lemon tree, he didn’t say anything. They avoided each other, and so the mood was subdued while they involved themselves in separate projects. Finn was up at the main house, getting ready for the work crew, and Kate was back at her stacks of files, when Shelley pulled into the drive, toting a basket of leftover turkey sandwiches.

  Kate could sense that she immediately knew something was up between them; she had tried to raise a brow in Kate’s direction but Kate had refused eye contact. Finn picked at his sandwich with lackluster attention until finally Shelley packed up the leftovers and placed them in their refrigerator. Finn walked her out on his way back up to the main house. Through the curtainless windows, Kate watched them deep in conversation by the truck. She saw Finn nod several times and then Shelley reach out and touch his arm in acknowledgment of whatever he had agreed to before she engaged the clutch and put the truck in reverse.

  Later in the afternoon, Finn came into the house and asked Kate to give him a ride to Shelley’s. He had offered to help her with a project, but he didn’t add any details and Kate didn’t ask. It took all she had left in reserve not to remind him that she was paying him to work on her house, not Shelley’s. The woman was wealthy and lonely, which in Kate’s opinion was a horrible combination. Years of being usurped by a larger-than-life personality and then a few more spent tending to his illness had left her socially adrift. Kate did not want Finn to be her lifeboat. As they pulled into Shelley’s driveway, Kate couldn’t help but think that after Finn was done with the house and had gone back to his life, Shelley would be gone as well. Though Shelley was her client, as far as Kate was concerned, it was Finn who fostered Shelley’s matronly attentions. Without his presence, Shelley would be forced to look elsewhere.

  As Finn unfolded from the passenger seat and shut the door, Kate put down her window and called, “I’m going downtown. Can you get a ride back from Shelley?”

  She had just at that moment decided that she could not go back to the house and sit in the stink. The office would be blissfully quiet with everyone gone for the holiday weekend. All of a sudden she felt a rush of fondness for the long evenings she had spent there not so long ago. Kate didn’t wait for a response. If Finn could take her car and disappear for hours, he could figure out how to get home.

  Around nine, after ordering Thai for dinner, Kate sat slurping the curry at her desk. She had just gotten off the phone with Ben, making sure he knew she was in the office. That kind of information would certainly not hurt her quest for partnership, and whether Ben heard her or not, the subliminal message was almost more advantageous.

  Ben was coming into town before the holidays and wanted to have a reception for their clients sometime that week. It would, after six months, celebrate the opening of the firm’s L.A. office and Kate hoped, although he didn’t come out and say it, her partnership as well. She envisioned by then that at least some of the work would be done on the main house. She was excited to show it off to Ben. A house signified a commitment to California that Kate was sure Ben would appreciate. After all, she had been ambivalent at best when he had offered her Los Angeles. But Kate knew the move had been strategic. If she had insisted upon staying in D.C., she might as well have started looking for a new job. She was always amazed when people acted as if their lives were beyond their control, every move, every job, a whim that caught their fancy. In comparison, Kate’s life felt like it played out on a chessboard.

  When her cell rang a little after eleven, Kate ignored it. She was deep into a brief by a new associate and she wanted to finish it, post suggestions and corrections, and leave it on his desk to be taken care of first thing Monday morning. Unfortunately, whoever was calling was not taking no for an answer. When she finally got up and walked across the room to pick her cell up off the chair where she had tossed it, she recognized the number as Shelley’s home line.

  Most likely it was Finn, and she didn’t feel like getting into it with him. She tossed the phone down but before she got across the room it began to ring again. She grabbed the phone and turned it off and threw it down on the chair. Just as she made it to her desk, the office line began to ring and she picked it up.

  Shelley dispensed with any pleasantries when she said in a breathy voice, “Finn is gone.”

  “What?”

  “Your brother took my truck to the store six hours ago. He’s gone.” She coughed. “You know what else is gone? Two sketchbooks and a rolled-up canvas from the studio. The portrait in blue? That’s gone. Gone.” Shelley’s voice escalated into a nearly nonhuman decibel.

  Kate felt the curry rise dangerously in her throat, as if she’d been punched in the stomach. Six hours? Finn could be anywhere by now. “Have you tried calling him?”

  “What do you think?” Shelley wailed.

  “Have you called anyone else?”

  “You mean the police? No. No not yet. But I’m pretty damn close.”

  “C
an you start from the beginning? Please?” Kate tried hard to keep her voice neutral and professional, but it was nearly impossible.

  “We were just sitting around, talking, after he hung the lights.”

  “Lights?”

  “Christmas lights,” Shelley said. “Does it matter?”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Well, somehow we—he—decided more lights were necessary—I really wanted to do it up because I haven’t in a few years, you know? And maybe my grandchildren are coming to visit from Connecticut and I just wanted everything to be…oh shit.” She cried, “Why did he have to steal those sketchbooks? Does he need the money? Do you think this has something to do with his ex-girlfriend getting married?”

  Kate didn’t know where to go first. She froze at the use of the word steal and as far as an ex getting married, she had no idea what Shelley was talking about. “Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

  “Okay, well, the sketchbooks and the painting had nothing to do with him going to the store to get more lights. So what do you think he was doing?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate stammered. “But what makes you so sure he took those things from the studio? That someone else didn’t come and take them before? Or maybe you misplaced them?”

  “That’s where we were sitting and so I left it unlocked. Your brother likes it in there and I guess so do I. It makes me feel like my husband is still around.” For the first time since Kate had known Shelley, she sounded old and tired.

  “Shelley…”

  “Kate, I gave him a credit card. If he doesn’t show up soon, I’m going to have to do something.” Shelley said quietly, “I have to.”

  Kate cradled her head in her hands as she tried to collect her thoughts. Did last night have something to do with all of this? She jumped up and began gathering her bag and briefcase, shoving in papers as fast as she could. “I’m on my way to you. Promise me you’ll wait until I get there, Shelley, please.” It took all of Kate’s will to add the word please. Asking a client for a favor like this? If this hadn’t been her brother, her advice would have been to call the police and report the truck stolen. She was just praying that by the time she got back to Silver Lake, Finn would be back at Shelley’s with a reasonable explanation. He just had to be.