Wit's End Read online

  Constance Wellington was among the cultists who visited the meeting. She stationed herself at the punch bowl, ladling it out as requested, but serving herself liberally too. She was perhaps fifty years old at the time. She and Addison spoke at length about the history of the cult and also about its current difficulties. Then, lowering her voice, Constance said she thought she knew who the firebug was.

  “I was only seventeen,” Addison told Rima. “And I had this ridiculous picture of me scooping all the boys on the arson story. So I gave it way too much credence. Also, I didn’t know anything about Constance at the time. Riker came over, which shut her right up, just like something in a mystery novel, except that in a mystery novel she’d be dead later that night, which she wasn’t, only drunk.

  “And then she turned out to be the kind of person who always thinks she’s solved the case, even when there isn’t a case to solve. I’m betting everyone in Holy City knew who was starting the fires, and it was only a mystery to us on the outside.”

  Constance became flirtatious, and her flirting took the form of offering free kittens to many of the male reporters, until she fell, ass over teakettle, off the porch. Riker was found the next morning passed out in a redwood grove behind the old firehouse. There might have been a reporter or two as well, sprinkled like salt over the ground somewhere.

  Fortunately, Addison told Rima primly, the night had been a dry one.

  Chapter Nine

  (1)

  Rima’s suspicion was that Addison had left out some important details, and she was more right about that than she would ever know. In Rima’s mind, the story was primarily short on information about her father. Had he been one of the frat boys sniggering about naked women? Had he been among those offered free kittens? Had he and Addison fallen in love at first sight? The only question Rima could bring herself to ask was the one with kittens in it. Addison didn’t remember the answer.

  “He was allergic to cats,” Rima said sadly. She herself had had a catless childhood as a result, even though her father was rarely home and she could have kept the cat in her own bedroom and you would have hardly known it was there.

  “We stayed up that whole night talking,” Addison said. “One of those nights. I told Bim things I’d never told anyone. I told him that I wanted to be a writer. You don’t know, but back in those days, I could have been sixty instead of seventeen, and they’d still be calling me a girl. No one would have trusted me with a newspaper story, much less thought I could write a book. There was no reason to take me seriously.

  “I read somewhere that behind every successful person is someone who believes in them. You don’t need more than one, but you have to have someone. For me, that was your father.

  “Later, lots of people believed in me. After I started to publish. But Bim was the one who believed in me when there was no reason to.”

  Addison finished the bit of her martini that remained. She paused a moment, staring into the empty glass. “Say,” she said. “If your father didn’t talk to you about Holy City, why did you want me to buy that book?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “How did it get on the top of my pile?”

  “I don’t know,” Rima said.

  Addison waved her hand for the bill. She paid it and they walked back out into sunlight. She looked old, or else Rima was noticing and usually didn’t. Direct sunlight could do that. Make the plants grow. Make the snow melt. Show a woman’s age. Addison’s eyes were red, and the skin beneath them drooped like a hound’s. “We were good friends until he married,” she said.

  “You’re my godmother,” Rima reminded her. By which she meant that the friendship had not, in fact, ended with her parents’ marriage. So it hadn’t ended because of her mother. Rima’s best guess? It had ended because of Ice City.

  “I guess Bim didn’t talk about me much,” Addison said.

  (2)

  Rima’s emotions at this moment were really complicated. She felt bad for Addison. It would have been nice to be able to say that Addison had been important to her father, since the reverse was obviously true.

  She felt defensive of her mother and her mother’s generous, reasonable soul. She wanted to tell Addison that whatever had happened, her mother was innocent of it. But it seemed cruel to say this, given that the only other suspect in the destruction of the relationship was her father.

  Rima had a sudden memory of the time after her mother’s death, of her mother’s sisters, swooping in with their luggage and their sobbing. Her mother was the baby of the family. She should have outlived them all. Rima saw her aunts in the kitchen, doing the dishes and making plans for guests to gather at the house after the funeral.

  She saw Oliver on the floor under the breakfast table. He’d put the large dining room tablecloth over it to make a tent. Rima was trying to coax him out. Her reasons were selfish. She thought she could get through her mother’s funeral if she had Oliver to take care of. If he stayed home under the breakfast table, all the weeping faces would be turned to her.

  “She won’t come.” Rima’s aunts were reassuring each other as if Rima and Oliver weren’t right there, Rima crouched on the floor with a cookie, which might have worked if Oliver had been two years old and a dog. “She wouldn’t have the nerve to come, today of all days.”

  Rima knew they were talking about the famous A. B. Early, mystery writer and godmother. Rima’s mother might not have been the jealous type, but the wicked sisters, on her behalf, had enough jealousy for the three of them.

  Mostly, Rima didn’t want to be the one talking. She wanted Addison to tell her about her father. She didn’t want it the other way around. The truth was that Bim had mentioned Addison only rarely and, at the end of his life, not at all. So she told Addison that her father hadn’t talked much about anything in his past.

  In his defense, you had to note that Rima hadn’t asked. When she was young, her father was her father, and no one to be particularly interested in. His stories, when he told them, usually reflected well on him. The details would change—he was working after school in his father’s print shop, he was a volunteer tutor for underprivileged children, he was in high school, he was in college, he was abroad, he was at home—but the fundamental plotline was tiresomely predictable: He appeared initially to be wrong, but turned out in the end to be right.

  These stories were told for their instructional content; useful things for Rima and Oliver to learn were hidden inside like candy in a piñata. Rima did her best to ignore the lessons. She’d never quite forgiven her father for living, while her mother died.

  To that crime, he had now added dying himself.

  It had been nothing like the clean and tender death scenes Rima knew from movies. No deathbed confession. No final words of wisdom. No mention of moving toward the light or seeing his wife and son waiting for him beyond it. No pale but translucent faces.

  Early on, his doctor had talked to both him and Rima about the mind-body connection. Medicine could do what medicine could do, but a positive outlook was also medicinally prescribed. These instructions prevented both of them from saying aloud that he was dying, prevented Rima from asking him much of anything about his life (which would have amounted to the same thing), as she was finally interested enough to do, until he was so doped on morphine he could no longer speak.

  A few days after his death, Rima found an envelope with her name on it in his desk. She opened it expecting—something. A letter with the good-bye that hadn’t happened. Financial details, a memory, advice for her future. Something to show that he hadn’t given up on being her father just because he was dead.

  What she found was his final column, with instructions to publish it posthumously. In the column her father wrote about what a beautiful and terrible world it was. He spoke of the great good luck enjoyed by his generation of middle-class Americans. How abundant their lives had been. Oceans and jungles still teeming with animals. Plenty of food and the whole world of cooking to choose from—Ethiopian one night
, Thai the next, French the night after that. Medical marvels. Martian explorations. The blue ice of the great glaciers. How they had seen a man walk on the moon. Witnessed the creation of a whole new world in the Internet. He said that he believed (and feared) that they might well have been the luckiest people in the whole history of humanity. Far luckier than their sons and daughters.

  Her father moved then to his personal good fortune. He had seen the best and the worst of the world, but its treatment of him had been more generous than he deserved. He expressed his gratitude for the way he’d been privileged to live, thanked the people who read him and the people who wrote to him, all the people he’d never met who had allowed him to matter to them. He spoke of his own death only to assure them that he was at peace with it.

  Thanks for all of it, the column finished.

  It’s been real.

  Only it wasn’t. It was a brave, and to Rima’s mind unconvincing, performance. Would you, her father had asked her once, long before he was diagnosed, want to be remembered as you were? Or as better than you were?

  As was often the case with his columns, Rima preferred the unedited version. She didn’t much like the man in the column, with his peaceful, grateful death. She didn’t like how he didn’t say a word about the loss of his young wife, his only son, but claimed instead to have lived a lucky life. Or at least compared with most.

  (3)

  Rima was perpetually offended by the suggestion that luck should be graded on the curve. Of all the false comforts she’d been recently offered, the most poisonous was the one that told you to be grateful that you were better off than some. Why would anyone think that your own pain should be lessened by the thought of someone else’s?

  She loved her real father, a man who did not go peacefully to his death. (And if so many people hadn’t conspired to make a lingering death look better than it was, would Rima have been so unprepared for how it turned out to be? All she had ever seen were the quick, unexpected ones. Naturally she’d imagined this would be an improvement.) At the end, her father had dreamt repeatedly of children, of the terrifying children he’d met in his life—the children of Pol Pot, Colombia, Sudan—and these dreams grew more frequent and more vivid with his rising dose of morphine. He sweated and sobbed, smells and liquids leaking from every orifice, as he begged invisible people to put down their guns. Rima couldn’t decide if the morphine was worth whatever relief it might be bringing.

  She’d held his hand and tried to take him somewhere else. She told him he was camping; they were on a camping trip she remembered from before her mother had died.

  They’d rented a canoe and gone out on the lake, her mother in the front, her father steering from the back, and she and Oliver safe between the two, pretending to paddle sometimes, but mostly not. They’d seen a snapping turtle, four deer coming down the bank to drink.

  There’d been a hammock near their tent for reading books in, and the food had been camping classic—roasted hot dogs on sticks, potatoes buried in the coals to bake. The potatoes had charred on the outside while remaining raw in the middle, but Rima and her father and mother had eaten them anyway.

  Oliver had given his potato a name, which was his usual method for getting out of eating something. Imbue it with history and personality until you’d have to have a heart of stone to make him eat it. He’d made a hat for his potato out of the aluminum foil.

  As Rima talked, her father had quieted. “I’m awfully tired,” he said then. “Could you carry my pack for me?”

  Apparently he was on a different camping trip. There’d been no backpacking on hers. But Rima said of course she would, she had it now, and they could stop and rest under a tree whenever he wanted. Before she finished the sentence, he was back to the horrors, and nothing she said could reach him.

  Still later, Rima discovered that he’d assembled his own memorial website. He’d posted his favorites of his own columns, plus photographs and dispatches from his earlier career. The site could burn forever, like Kennedy’s eternal flame. A hundred years from now, there Rima and her budding sexuality would be.

  My father had been a public figure for so long,” she told Addison, “I think he kind of forgot that he had a private life too.” She hoped Addison wasn’t hurt, but couldn’t tell. Rima had tried so hard not to feel hurt herself when she realized that her father had, in fact, put a lot of thought and effort into saying good-bye. Just not to her.

  The man she loved had worried about leaving his daughter alone, even if he never said so. If she ever wanted to get even, she would do so by remembering him the way he had wanted to be remembered instead of the way he was.

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  (1)

  When she was little, Rima used to play a game that she’d gotten from a book. You walked around the house holding a large mirror in front of you, pointing up. You weren’t allowed to look at the ground beneath your feet. You looked only into the mirror. This transformed the terrain most familiar to you into something new and strange, a fantasy-land hidden in plain sight above your head in your very own house. You couldn’t get anything like the same effect simply lying on your bed looking upward. You had to be seriously disoriented—up down and down up.

  Rima had been playing the mirror game one day when she saw something on top of one of the kitchen cabinets. She had to put the footstool on the counter and climb onto both to reach it. Her mother walked into the middle of this. “For goodness’ sakes, get down from there,” she had said. “You’ll break your neck. One more thing to charge to Addison’s account.”

  The object turned out to be Addison’s wedding gift to Rima’s parents, an antique silver samovar. It was a wedding Addison had not attended. The samovar was engraved on the bottom. Rima ran her finger over this. The wedding date and then the words: One is silver. “What does it mean?” Rima had asked, and her mother sang to her. Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.

  This didn’t exactly answer the question. Rima’s mother put the samovar back on top of the high cupboard and, to the best of Rima’s memory, took it out again only when she was cleaning the shelves, which is to say, never.

  This maybe had nothing to do with Addison. Rima’s mother disliked essential household chores bad enough, never mind the optional ones. Silver tarnishes. And Rima remembered her mother as distinctly not the jealous sort. Her father traveled so much. He’d covered Vietnam before Rima was born, and the Peace Talks in Paris. Cambodia later. Nigeria. The reunification of Germany. Baghdad. Madrid. Her mother never seemed to mind—always happy to see him come home, the two of them constantly touching each other in small ways, a hand on the back or the knee, a hand in a hand.

  But her mother also seemed happy when he left. And busy. For Rima and Oliver, pancakes at dinner and a general relaxation of the house rules compensated for his absence. Not that they would have made the trade. Just that they were okay with it.

  Their father went to dangerous places; he flew on planes; he interviewed murderers; he was much, much older than their mother. The chance that he would die someday had occurred to Rima, which meant the notion had been shared with Oliver. They thought of all the times he’d arrived like Santa Claus, with sugar skulls from Mexico, polished rocks from Thailand, wood clocks from Germany. Rima and Oliver would be so sad when he died. But they would be okay. What mattered was their mother.

  Rima’s mother was beautiful in a sixties sort of way—a Joan Baez with long, thick hair, nose slightly hooked, Gypsy eyes. Rima had the same eyes, which is why Martin had admired them. Her mother was a photographer who did portraits of families in front of fireplaces, brides looking out windows, kids under Christmas trees. She did dogs, birds, and horses, but her passion was old railway stations. On weekends the three of them would drive to Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, so she could take photographs of people arriving, people departing, people waiting, or, if there were none of those, empty stations. Rima, Oliver, and their mother would stay in hotels,
eat hamburgers, go to whatever movie was showing at the cinemaplex. They would sleep, all three of them, in a single room and often in a single bed. Her mother had seemed to need no one’s company but her children’s.

  The reverse could not be said. As Rima grew older the weekend trips interfered with birthday parties or sleepovers, or with nothing at all, only Rima was increasingly reluctant to tag along. Kari Spector, a popular girl at her school, a high-status female if there ever was one, might call on a Saturday morning, ask whether Rima wanted to hang. If Rima was gone, Kari would move on to Siobhán McCarthy, and then all the next week at school there would be oblique references to things Rima had missed, jokes she wouldn’t understand, boys she hadn’t met. The next weekend it would be Siobhán whom Kari called first. Rima’s whole life ruined so that her mother could take another stupid picture.

  Stupid. Who was Kari or Siobhán to Rima now? What wouldn’t she have given for one more trip with her mother and Oliver, one more night in a stale little room with one double bed, the mattress so scooped out that the three of them would wake up in a heap in the middle, push apart, roll together all night long.

  At first Rima had kept the mirror game to herself. By the time she taught it to Oliver, it had become much more intricate. The world in the mirror was now an actual place. It had a name—Upside-down Town—and a history that Rima was always adding to. Queens, of course, in honor of Alice’s Through the Looking-Glass, and also because who doesn’t like a story with queens in it? Plus a mirror image of Rima (and now Oliver)—kids who looked just like them, but were otherwise opposite in every way.