9. Some Dead Monk
Roman
Did I get legs in my lap? Or even just to watch her walk around the house in my shirt, which turned out to be, according to my body, the garment a man most wanted to take off a woman?
No. She made breakfast for herself and Delilah and disappeared with it, and when I saw her again, she was wearing her now-clean T-shirt and shorts and holding my shirt, buttoned up primly and on its hanger.
In my bedroom. Every window and the accordion-style doors were open to the air, and I was hauling the sodden carpet out from under the bed when she came in. She tossed the shirt onto the bed and rushed to help even as I said, “I’ve got it.”
“It’s heavy,” she said. “So is this bed. What is this mattress made of?” As she, yes, attempted to lift the whole thing. With a stitched hand.
“Stop,” I said through my teeth. “I’ve got it.”
Did she listen? Of course not. She said, “I’ll tell you what. You lift the top corner of the bed, and I’ll slide the rug out from underneath. Once we do both top corners, you can hold up the end, and I can?—”
I stood up and glared at her. “It’s heavy,” I said, enunciating carefully so she’d know I meant it, “which means I’ll do it.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I helped you get Delilah up the hill yesterday, remember? What’s different?”
“That I was helping you, not the other way round.” I could hear how stupid it sounded, but out it came anyway.
She gave a faint snort. “That you discovered I’m good-looking, you mean, once I wasn’t covered in mud, so now you have to impress me.”
“No,” I lied, “it’s?—”
I didn’t know what I was going to say, because she was pretty much bang on, but fortunately, she didn’t give me a chance to say it. She talked right over me. “You’re too intelligent a man to have that much stupid ego. Figure you’ve already impressed me, stop fighting me, and let me help. I let you help. I let you rescue my cousin and drive us about two hours to the hospital and buy us dinner and?—”
I sighed. “All right. I’ll hold up the top corner and you pull out the carpet. Still trying to work out how you complimented me and insulted me in the same sentence, though.”
She smiled. Her smile was something to see. She’d done her hair in a thick plait—to get it out of the way, I guessed—but as she had no fastener and no comb, it was a very soft plait with little pieces coming out around her face. Every bit of her was what you wanted on the bed, not pulling a filthy, sodden carpet out from under it. And then she crouched, stuck the leg with its stitched knee out beside her like a rugby halfback at the back of the breakdown, and said, “Lift,” in the commanding tone of, yes, a rugby halfback.
She didn’t stop there, either. She told me to help her roll the carpet, hefted her end to stagger outside with it, then informed me that I should probably collect all the carpets out here and hire a specialty firm to collect and clean them, “because I’m guessing they’re all wool, like this one, and you don’t want to ruin them with amateur equipment and the wrong chemicals. You can find a cleaner online. There’s bound to be one in Dunedin, or maybe Queenstown. That’s rich, right? We couldn’t even camp in Queenstown, it was so expensive. Look for one that specializes in Persian rugs. They’ll be the best.”
I said, “How do you know it’s wool? Maybe it cost me eighty-nine dollars and is made of plastic.”
“Yeah, right. I’d help you haul out the rest of them, but it’s going to take me a while to find all our possessions and clean them off, and you want us gone today.”
“Yeh,” I said, “about that?—”
“And I want to be gone today, too,” she said. “I’m going to look around your kitchen for some rubbish bags, if that’s all right.”
She was at the door when I asked, “Where’s Delilah?”
“I told her to rest. She still has a headache.” And she was gone.
Summer
“What the hell are you doing?”
It was a roar. I jumped about a mile, which was a bad idea, because the roof of the van, which was curved and made standing awkward to begin with, buckled and I almost fell, and then the van shifted. Just a little, but enough to make me grab for an upside-down front seat, hold on, and experience some cardiac arrythmia.
It was Roman, of course. He was outside the van, crouching to look through the broken-out windshield, saying, “That doesn’t look one bit stable. Why are you risking it?”
“Excuse me,” I said, doing my best to regain my balance in all ways. “We were both in here yesterday, remember? I was hoping there was more still in here than there actually is. I found a few things—my toothbrush, miraculously, because the bathroom doesn’t have a window and nothing could fly out, and my shampoo and so forth—but none of the important things. The momentum from the van rolling seems to have catapulted it all out. Then everything washed down the hill in the storm, and I—” I had to stop and breathe a couple of times. “I need a shovel. A rake. Something to help me find stuff under the mud. I should have picked up my purse yesterday when I saw it, and Delilah’s backpack, too. Why didn’t I?”
“Because you were trying to save her life,” Roman said. “And that thing’s too unstable. Get out and let me do it.”
I ignored him. “Well, in any case, they’re both gone now.” I steadied my voice and held up a gumboot. “I found one of these. Delilah’s. A pair of jeans, also Delilah’s. A few shirts. Some pots and pans and cutlery, although I don’t have anything to cook on or a table to put it on anymore. Do you have a rake?”
I was sure he was going to sigh. I said, “Look. I know this is not your problem. But I— what do I do in a foreign country without my passport or my driver’s license? Or my bank card? I have to find my purse, or?—”
I couldn’t help it. My throat was closing, the wave of panic threatening to crash over me. I’d been holding it at bay, trying to be methodical. Trying to be rational. Now, I sank to my haunches, put my palms against my head, which hurt—I’d forgotten about the stitches, and the bruising, too, which hurt like crazy every time I bent my knees, nearly making me cry out—breathed in, and breathed out. “Sorry,” I muttered. “Possibly a … a panic attack. I’ll figure it out. I’ve handled worse.”
“Worse than losing all your possessions,” Roman said. “Worse than being down to a pair of sandals and some shorts.”
“Yes.” I stood up again. “And I bounced back.” Another deep breath. “Rake?”
Roman
I tried to get her to let me do it. She wouldn’t. I even said, “How about if I look for your things, and you start mopping the mud out of my house? Can’t say fairer than that. You’ll notice I have gumboots. I’m wearing them.”
She said, “I have to do this, though. I’ll help you mop your floors. I need to clean your car, too, but I have to do this first. I’m the one who knows what’s out here. It’s not even ten yet, and it won’t get dark until nine tonight. That’s plenty of time. I just have to be systematic about it. I just have to?—”
“Fine,” I said. “Getting the rake.”
I got a shovel, too, went all the way down to the bottom of the hill, and started working my way up, tossing things into the rubbish bag as I found them. The ground was a mess, the plants flattened and the earth still sticky underfoot, but when I spotted something like a tail sticking out of a fern, pulled on it, and realized it was the strap of a backpack, I got a surge of satisfaction.
“Hey.”
I looked up. Delilah, slipping and sliding down the hill in mud-covered trainers and the shorts and shirt she’d worn yesterday. She’d fallen on the way, because one side of her was muddy again.
I held up the backpack. “Hey yourself. Looking better this morning. How’s the head? This yours?”
Her face lit up. She didn’t look much like Summer—she was darker, even shorter, and had an elfin look to her instead of Summer’s—well, radiance—but she had a personality all her own, a bit of a tough-girl thing that Summer, for all her briskness, lacked. “Thanks,” she said, and grabbed for it. “Wallet. Passport. Bank card. Maybe I’ll be able to go to college after all and won’t be thrown in debtor’s prison. Is there debtor’s prison here?”
“No. You’re thinking about England, and you’re about two hundred years too late.”
“I guess it’s like the States, then,” she said, “and they just make your life miserable instead. I probably shouldn’t have used part of my so-called inheritance from selling our crappy mobile home on a ticket to New Zealand, but Summer used almost all of hers on the campervan and then crashed it, and she keeps paying for things, so …” She stopped a minute, then said, “I need to buy us a car, but if I suggest it, she won’t let me. I could do it on my own, though. Too bad my education didn’t include lessons in buying a car. Why don’t they teach you anything useful in school? I know how to change a tire, and I even know how to swear because the spare’s got a leak, but that’s not exactly helpful. I know you have to bargain, though, and I could do that. Call the guy an asshole and walk out. I just need to know how you figure out if it’s a decent car so you don’t end up crashing it down a hill after it dies. Which was totally my fault, by the way, because I was steering, and Summer hasn’t even mentioned it. Another reason I have to buy the next one. Do you know how to do that? Buy a car?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Excellent. Tell me.” She reached into the front pocket of the filthy pack and felt around. “It’d be better if I could record you doing it. If I were Zen like you, I’d have had my phone in here instead of in my lap like a total addict, and it’d be here now. There’s probably a quotation about that. Thrift or prudence or being in the moment or something. Don’t tell me. I hate quotations.” She fossicked around some more and came out with a pen and little notebook, then slung the muddy pack over her shoulder. “I’m taking notes. Tell me how to buy a cheap used car. Do not quote some dead monk.”
I paused with my hand on a broken plate, then shoved it in the rubbish bag and took a few more sidesteps up the hill, kicking my way into the muddy slope for purchase. “To seek is to suffer,” I told her over my shoulder. “To seek nothing is bliss. But you probably do need a car. Easier if I just help you do it, probably.”
“What did I say about quoting?” She scrambled up after me.
“Couldn’t help it. You set yourself up for that. Bodhidharma. Monk. Died in the fifth century.”
“I am not writing that down,” she said. “I’m forgetting it immediately, because it’s stupid. But you’d do that? Help me get a car? Really?” She studied me more closely, like a deceptively perky squirrel, the kind that looks cute until it starts fighting the birds for what’s in the feeder. “I’m wondering why. Summer thinks you’re hard-nosed. You know why she thinks that?”
“Because I am?” I shouldn’t be amused, I should be annoyed that instead of cleaning out my waterlogged house, I was knee-deep in sticky mud and wielding a shovel, but I couldn’t help it.
“Nope,” she said. “If you were hard-nosed, you wouldn’t have taken us to the hospital. You’d have dumped us at the fire station. That wouldn’t even be hard-nosed. It would be normal.”
“Not for Kiwis.”
“Nope. She thinks you’re hard-nosed because you didn’t want to fuck her.”
“Pardon?”
She didn’t appear especially abashed. “I’m guessing you know the word. All right, have sex with her. Which makes you gay, probably, because every guywants to have sex with Summer. Not just because she looks the way she does, but because they can tell she’s not going to say yes. She’s a challenge, which is sick, but there you go. Reality.”
This was not comfortable. “That’s some view you have of men,” I said.
“Right? Wonder where I got it. There was this one motel owner who wanted to give us free rent. Summer told him that she was worth a whole lot more than five hundred a week, and she was so far out of his league, he couldn’t even see the boundary. You should’ve seen his face.” She stopped. “Wait. You’re not helping us because you want to fu— to have sex with me, are you, because I look about fifteen?That’d be so skeevy. You’re probably forty-five.”
“I’m thirty-nine, thanks,” I said.
“More than twice as old as me. No, thanks. Anyway, I’ve slept with exactly one guy and it wasn’t all that fabulous, so good luck with that, unless you’re into women who don’t know what they’re doing. I was raised by an ex-hooker, is why. Summer’s probably great at it—you don’t marry super-high-end guys if you’re not great at sex—but she won’t do it. So you know.”
I picked up a gumboot, possibly a match to the one in the van, tried to sort out how to answer all that, and settled on, “You’re too young for me, no worries. And your cousin’s very beautiful.”
“Yeah, obviously, even since she’s gained weight. She says she’s never going on a diet again, now that she’s not with Felipe and doesn’t have to be Barbie. Being beautiful is ridiculous. You’d think, yay, you’re beautiful, job done, but if you’re, like, professionally beautiful, there’s all this maintenance. It’s serious business. Way too much work. Thank God I’m not, except I don’t believe in God. Thank the universe I’m only semi-good-looking, I guess.”
So many questions. I said, “Barbie?”
“She looks like one, doesn’t she?” Delilah said. “She actually used to be one. That, or a Disney princess. Cinderella or Rapunzel, because of the hair, then Elsa at the end, once Frozen came out.She made great money with Elsa, even better than Barbie. You can’t believe what you can charge for that, especially in Seattle. You need a place with plenty of rich people. Rich people with no judgment.”
“Rich people want to meet Barbie?” A scratched frying pan and, farther up, another gumboot, bringing the count to three. “Is this a …” I didn’t want to say “fetish.” The mind boggled.
“Their daughters do,” Delilah said. “Theme birthday parties, with wholesome acting and nauseating smiling kindness, leading little girls in soaring, optimistic song and telling them that a dream is a wish their heart makes. It’s revolting. She had a whole rack of costumes, but Barbie was the easiest. Regular clothes, just shorter and tighter. Or sluttier, depending how you look at it. You’d be surprised what Barbie outfits look like on a woman who actually looks like Barbie. That’s how she got into software engineering, though. Isn’t that bizarre? She’s Barbie at a birthday party, and next thing you know, she’s got an SAT coaching business and is majoring in software engineering. Well, not as bizarre as the time it turned out to be a bachelor party, and they wanted her to be a Barbie stripper. I didn’t even know what a stripper was. I was about five. My aunt was ready to call the cops when Summer came home and told us, because she was still underage. Summer said nothing would happen to them, though, and you know she was right. They’d just have asked what Summer was doing there. Probably arrested her.”
“What?” I said stupidly.
“I remember it mainly because Summer was so pissed. You’d think she’d be crying, having to escape from all these drunk guys telling her, ‘Unzip it, Barbie. Show us what you got,’ and pawing at her. Instead she kneed the one who grabbed her and yelled at them that she was a child and they were committing sexual assault against a minor, and stormed off. She was kind of a badass then, believe it or not. She looked like she’d cried, too, because her makeup was smeared—especially her lipstick. I remember she looked like a clown. But she said she didn’t. Probably true. She’s a lot tougher than she looks. Obviously it was traumatic, though, or I wouldn’t remember it so well.”
This was the past, and it wasn’t my business anyway. I breathed my reaction out, spotted something yellow up the hill and did some more sideways hill-kicking to get there, dug it out, and held it up.
“Summer’s purse!” Delilah said. “She’s going to be stoked. Not that there’s much in there.”
“Good,” I said, throwing it in the bag, and then, because I was still stupidly worked up over long-ago trauma to a woman I barely knew, “How did the software engineering happen, exactly?”
“Oh, she was in college then, doing the Barbie and Elsa thing. Did a big birthday party for some Microsoft exec’s kid, and he started talking to her afterwards. Probably creepily, even though Summer never says, but in the midst of his whole pretend-fatherly schtick, he told her she had a good brain and asked what she was majoring in. She said math, and he told her she should change to computer science, that there were more jobs and more money in it. He told her to call him and gave her his card and said he could get her an internship, but she didn’t, so obviously it was creepy. She has pretty good radar.” She picked up a mud-smeared book and tossed it into my bag. “I’m talking a lot. Must be trauma.”
I said, “So she didn’t get an internship.” It was probably intrusive, hearing all this when Summer hadn’t wanted to tell me anything, but here Delilah was, freely volunteering it. Besides, you never turned down information.
“Nope. But he also told her that with her SAT scores—what kind of older guy hits on a college girl by asking about her SAT scores? At his daughter’s birthday party? A geeky guy who never got the cheerleader, I guess—that she should be tutoring rich kids, not playing Barbie. So that’s what she ended up doing. She got into college admissions counseling, too. She had a whole business. Much entrepreneur. She kept on doing it all through college, along with her internships, until she went on the show. Summer has what you’d call an overdeveloped responsibility gene. Like, that’s her jam, being responsible, which is why I’m here with her, obviously. She didn’t think she should leave me alone, even though I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. It’s also why she still lived at home after she could’ve moved out. My aunt stopped having to work in fast food on nights and weekends once Summer had those gigs and just did the house cleaning. Cool for me, because somebody was usually home when I was a little kid. Especially since my mom was in prison. Cooking meth with her loser boyfriend. I got lucky.”
My head was spinning. “The show? What show?”
“I’ll tell you later. If you help me pick out a car. That’ll be, like, the Arabian Nights. Leave them wanting another story. It’s like I can’t stop talking, though. It must be the near-death experience, or the concussion messed up my frontal lobe and erased my impulse control. I’m usually much darker than this. I need to go show Summer that you found her purse. She’s going to plotz.”
“Pardon?”
“That’s Yiddish. It means faint with excitement.”
“You’re Jewish, then?”
“No,” Delilah said. “I told you. I’m nothing. I just like Yiddish.” And headed up the hill.