House of Wonder Read online

  I turned another plate out into the trash, pressing hard against its white underside with my palm to compress what was beneath it. Looking at the strata of belly-up plates, I took a small breath. “What do you mean?” I asked, though I was fairly certain I knew.

  “I mean, he’s probably on the Spectrum.”

  The Spectrum.

  I rubbed the back of my hand hard against my forehead, then flipped on the faucet. “Yeah,” I said. “Probably.”

  “Did your parents ever have him evaluated?”

  “I don’t know, Mags. I think it was different when we were all growing up,” I said tersely, dumping the dregs of coffee from the bottom of the pot into the sink, watching the clear water wash away the muddy brown. “I know he saw some doctors,” I conceded. “I don’t know much more than that.” In truth, I could replay every word of those tense conversations between my parents. I’d be lying still in bed, listening, praying that Warren was already asleep. I don’t know why you see our son as a problem that needs to be fixed, my mother would say. But Warren didn’t fit easily into any preexisting boxes, at least not any that were around when we were in high school. And after we graduated, Warren slipped out of the purview of those with the ability and will to find one.

  Maggie leaned against the counter, her arms crossed in front of her as she rolled around a thought. “He totally reminds me of Lenny Martels,” she said. Then she looked at me, realizing the statement needed explanation. “He was a kid I went to high school with.”

  Shutting off the water, I placed the coffeepot in the drying rack. “Every high school had a Lenny Martels,” I said. “Ours was my brother.”

  • • •

  Turning onto Royal Court, I saw a new real estate sign on the lawn of another home in the neighborhood with Lydia’s smiling face and sharp-looking white teeth. Jesus, I thought. If she was such a good Realtor, wouldn’t she have sold a couple of these by now? Though King’s Knoll was one of the more affordable neighborhoods in Harwick, the glut of homes on the market had made buyers picky. And as I drove down the stretch of road to my mother’s house, I counted four that were currently for sale, two of which were listed by Lydia. They all seemed to have freshly painted trim and porches graced with mums and pumpkins and big sun-bleached stalks of harvest corn. Their lawns were raked and their walkways swept and the brass of their doorknobs gleamed. They were all gussied up, as if King’s Knoll were a singles bar. In that metaphor, I supposed my mother’s house was the old lady at the end, in blue eye shadow and fishnet stockings, the one who’d rinse her dentures in the gin and tonic before telling you about the time she danced with Frank Sinatra, about what a looker she used to be.

  As if to prove my own uncharitable point, I stared down the end of the street toward 62 Royal Court. At first, all I noticed was that something was very different. I found myself leaning forward, squinting toward what my mind read as a great collective absence as the car drew closer. My eye moving from void to void, I saw that the garden globes and lawn flags were all gone, the grass barren and brown beneath the spots where they had stood. On the porch, there were a few decorations—an autumnal wreath on the door, stone bunnies on the steps—but the bulk of my mother’s things had vanished. My God, I thought. Where’d it all go? I was craning my neck in an attempt to gain a better vantage point when I caught sight of her, suddenly visible in the far corner of the backyard. Mom’s hair was pulled back in a kerchief, she wore her maroon parka, and she was swinging a weed whacker, leaning back against its power as she annihilated unruly patches of turf.

  I pulled up in the driveway and shut off the ignition, still watching her.

  “What’s Nana doing?” asked Rose from the backseat.

  I waited a moment before answering. “It looks like she’s cleaning up,” I said, then opened my car door.

  I moved to unstrap Rose, keeping my eyes on my mother, who had yet to look in our direction.

  Rose and I padded together over the grass, which had begun to yellow with the cold nights. “Mom!” I called, though she couldn’t hear me over the din of the motor. She was making wide sweeps, her face determined and eyes focused, like a child with a sword too powerful to wield. “Mom!” I called more loudly, my approach feeling oddly tentative.

  Finally she swung around, aiming for the patch of foot-high grass that had circled a statue of Saint Francis of Assisi, and caught sight of us. Her surprise sliding into acknowledgment, she shut off the weed whacker and rested its bottom portion on the ground. “Hey, you two,” she said, as she tried to smile, tried to catch her breath. “What are you doing here?” She didn’t sound displeased to see us, but an underlying anxiety lined her face and rounded her shoulders.

  I tilted my head toward the house. “We came to see how Warren’s doing,” I said. My face was expectant as I waited for her to explain the clearing of the yard, but she just smiled gently. “He’ll be so happy to see you.” Then she moved, preparing to go back to work.

  “Mom,” I said, resting my hand on her arm. She looked at me with her shocking green eyes, looking as if she feared the question that I hadn’t yet asked. “Did you get rid of some stuff?”

  She took a deep breath, her words drifting out the other end of it. “Yeah . . . I figured . . . It was time to clean up a little bit,” she said, her gaze moving around the neighborhood as she smoothed down her kerchief. In it, she looked like a relic from a different time—when women rubbed their husbands’ feet and got vacuum cleaners for Christmas and dreamed of being beauty queens.

  Noticing my mother’s eyes catch on something behind me, I turned to see Mr. Kotch on his bicycle passing along the street in front of our house, moving as silently as a ghost in the dim, clouded daylight. He was a slight man, with pale skin that seemed sapped of blood. His eyes didn’t move from our house.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked. There was something disconcerting about his attention.

  My mother looked unsettled by it as well, though she offered him a wave, which he returned with a single lifted hand. “He’s been doing a lot of biking,” she said, her face still tense. “In the neighborhood.”

  We both watched him pedal up the street until he turned onto Squire Lane. “You know, they’re talking about reopening the quarry.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. Bill and Carol Kotch’s son Danny had been a year ahead of Warren and me, part of Bobby’s graduating class. A week before he was to leave for college, he died after jumping into the quarry located past the woods behind the park. Bobby had been there. Since then, the quarry was sacrosanct. No one mentioned it, let alone discussed making it operational.

  “I know,” said Mom, shaking her head, her focus shifting back to the lawn equipment in her hands. “It’s terrible.”

  “Here,” I said, reaching for the weed whacker, “why don’t you let me do this.”

  Mom swatted away my offer. “I’ve only got a little more left,” she said. “You just go see your brother.” She glanced at Rose, then squatted down so that they were nearly eye to eye. “You know your uncle Warren had an accident, right, honey?” she said, nodding as she spoke. She clearly wanted Rose to be prepared for the state of Warren’s face.

  “Yeah,” answered Rose, “Mom said he’s all like”—her fingers swirled around her face—“purple.” Rose clearly thought purple was a strange but fabulous color to be.

  Pulling Rose into her arms, my mother buried Rose’s face against her chest. “You are just the sweetest thing.”

  “Has he told you anything?” I asked. “About what happened?”

  My mother looked up and shook her head.

  Rose and I started toward the house while Mom went back to her weed whacking, as singular in her attention as before. Uncomfortable with what we did and didn’t know about what had happened, I wondered if it was such a good idea to bring Rose after all—welcoming her into the house that sometimes seemed as if it could swallow
you up. As we neared the front porch, I heard the steady build of an engine’s motor, and looked toward the street to see the mail truck pull away; it always came late to Royal Court.

  “Come on,” I said to Rose. “Let’s bring Nana’s mail in for her.” Rose found the efforts of the United States Postal Service thrilling and we made a ritual of getting the mail together at home. Her eyes would widen in delighted surprise as we opened the box and—lo and behold—it contained mail.

  I slid out what appeared to be a large stack of bills atop an even larger stack of catalogues. “Can I carry it?” asked Rose, reaching and bouncing on her toes. I looked down at the top envelope, which bore the MasterCard logo. I sometimes worried about my mother’s finances, as her job at the department store couldn’t be very lucrative, particularly when you factored in the temptation of her employee’s discount. But her house was paid off, and though she never discussed it in detail, my father’s father had left her a sizable sum when he had died, a fact that hadn’t sat well with my father or especially Lydia. Warren contributed, too, giving my mother any income that he didn’t spend on his planes.

  “Hold it like this,” I said, helping Rose curl the stack against her chest. We began walking toward the house and Rose regarded her charge seriously, looking down at the mail instead of in front of her. “Careful, monkey.”

  I pushed open the front door. Rose stepped in before me. “It’s us!” she called.

  “Uncle Warren is probably in his room,” I said. I was about to suggest that she wait in the kitchen while I went to check on him, but Rose had dropped the mail at her feet and was already bounding up the stairs.

  “Uncle Warren!” she called. Getting to his door before I could, she swung it open and stepped right in. “Uncle Warren,” I heard her say, a sympathetic scolding. “I thought you were supposed to be purple.”

  The upstairs of 62 Royal Court was still wallpapered with the same blue floral pattern that had been there since we were children, and was still illuminated by the brass and etched-glass lighting fixtures. My old room had been turned into a guest room that was making the slow slip toward storage closet, but Warren’s bedroom was still Warren’s bedroom.

  The walls were painted navy blue and his bed was neatly made with a forest green plaid comforter. There were still some posters from our childhood on the walls—a faded print of the solar system, and one of deep-sea fish with crafty lantern lures hanging in front of their jaws. On his bookshelf were rows of National Geographic in chronological order, their yellow spines lined up tidily. Our grandfather had given Warren his first copy when we were nine and had renewed the subscription each year for his birthday until he died when we were eighteen. Now the magazines were a gift from my mother. And Jenna, she’d always write. And arranged on his dresser and perched on the shelf of his closet, each angled just so, in their bright, candy-slick colors, were his planes. He built them himself and there were rarely fewer than a dozen. They weren’t replicas or models; they were original flying machines, conceived of and designed in my brother’s own mind.

  I leaned against the doorframe. Warren was sitting upright on his bed, his feet resting on the floor in front of him. The bridge of his nose was swollen, and the tender crescents of skin beneath his eyes looked as though they’d been swept with purple. The wound that started at his forehead and intersected his brow was slick with ointment and pink where the stitches met. But all traces of blood were gone, and Warren appeared almost childlike, his hair light and clean, his skin freshly washed. He was looking at Rose, a curious smile on his battered face.

  “How you doing, War?” I asked.

  Warren ignored me, his attention focused on Rose, whose nose was crinkled with confusion and concern as she took in his injuries. “Did you fall off the swings?” she asked.

  Warren’s eyebrows drew together, and he gave a reluctant chuckle. “No,” he answered, his hands at his sides and pressing on the mattress beneath him.

  “Then what happened?” she asked, her voice a squeak.

  Warren paused. “Maglons,” he said. Maglons. Hearing the word was like time travel.

  “What’s a Maglon?” asked Rose, her stare darting between Warren and me.

  “A bad guy,” I said, the phrase drifting from my lips.

  “Oh, I’ve got those in my class at school,” said Rose, like she could tell us a thing or two about Maglons.

  Warren gave Rose a playfully skeptical expression. “You have Maglons?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Rose, meandering over to one of Warren’s planes, fingering its functioning door. “Tucker is the biggest Maglon ever.”

  “Hey,” came Mom’s voice from downstairs in the foyer. I hadn’t noticed that the buzz of the weed whacker no longer sounded from the backyard. “Who left this mail here?”

  “Oh,” I called back, making my way back out to the hallway, my arms crossed over my chest, “we grabbed it on the way in.” I leaned over the banister. “Rosie dropped it.” Mom was bent over, quickly gathering it up, ignoring the catalogues but looking carefully at each envelope before putting it back into the pile. “Sorry, Mom.”

  “And this is everything?” she asked, not looking up. There was an edge to her voice.

  “I think so,” I said.

  I watched her sift through the stack again; then, finally satisfied, she pushed herself up and briefly met my eyes. “Can you ask Warren if he wants a snack?”

  Five minutes later, Rose and Warren were seated at the kitchen table, eating pistachios; my mother stood at the window, reading the instructions for a new electric sink buffer (“It says it removes surface stains and bacteria”); and I was leaning against the glass doors to the deck, flipping through e-mails on my phone and paying loose attention to the conversation.

  Warren was explaining to Rose the physics of opening a stubborn pistachio shell. “You just slide another shell into the crack,” he said, as he demonstrated his method for using the leverage of a discarded shell. “And twist.” And though his lesson fell on largely deaf ears, Warren seemed to appreciate being in the presence of someone who thought his face might look the way it did due to a fall from a swing. “Another,” commanded Rose, still chewing, her palm outstretched.

  “Can I have another, please,” I corrected.

  My mother plugged the electric sink buffer into the socket and squeezed in a generous dose of the complimentary cleansing gel. “It says to make sure the water is off,” she said softly and to no one in particular before pressing a button and bringing the buffer to life.

  She was thoroughly engaged in her task when the doorbell sounded. Warren made no outward acknowledgment, but his body stilled, as if to devote all his physical resources to the sense of hearing. I looked at my mother, who glanced back at me with what appeared to be an oversized electric toothbrush humming in her hands. Who could that be?

  “I’ll get it,” I said with a sigh. I pushed away from the door and, sliding past Warren and Rose, made my way into the foyer. I expected UPS or maybe some lucky sap selling Omaha Steaks door-to-door. In short, I expected anybody but Bobby Vanni standing there holding a tinfoil-covered casserole dish.

  “Bobby!” I said. Immediately, my mother’s house and its things, the things I had begun not to see, sped to the foreground of my mind.

  He looked at me for a moment before the corner of his mouth lifted into a smile. “Hey, Jenna.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I came by to check on Warren.” My eyes flitted down to the casserole dish in his hands. His followed. “My, uh . . . my mom wanted me to bring this.”

  My face warmed. There was something dear about Dr. Robert Vanni running around the neighborhood delivering his mother’s baked ziti.

  Bobby dropped his chin with a low, hushed laugh. And for just that split second, there was nowhere I’d rather be than standing at the front door of my mother’s house.


  “Bobby!” I heard my mother call from behind me. Clearly, since tending to Warren, Bobby had taken on hero status at 62 Royal Court. “You are so sweet to come. And, oh!” She had caught sight of the ziti; her hand was over her heart.

  “It’s from my mother,” explained Bobby.

  Mom looked at me as if to corroborate the goodness of the Vannis. “Bless her heart,” she said softly.

  For an awkward moment, the three of us stood in silence until Mom scooped the air in front of her toward her chest, beckoning Bobby forward. “Why don’t you come in?” she suggested.

  “Thanks,” he said, stepping over the threshold. “I won’t stay long.” He looked at me, his eyes kind and knowing. “I’d just like to say hello to Warren.”

  Mom took a breath and smiled her pageant smile—it was her armor, her protection; her defense against judgment of any kind. “Aren’t you sweet?” she said. And she led Bobby back to the kitchen.

  “Here,” I said, reaching for the casserole dish as he passed, “let me take that for you.”

  “Warren!” called my mother, in the June Cleaver voice that she used only to address Warren while in the presence of company. “Bobby’s here to see you!”

  Bobby walked into the kitchen and I followed. “Hey, Warren,” he said, as he approached my brother without hesitation, rounding the counter and already assessing his recovery. “Let’s see how this is doing.” Bending toward him, he swept his gaze over Warren’s face, clinically, professionally.

  Warren gave me a look from the corner of his eye, determined to hide his smile—to at least seem as though he minded the attention—as Bobby continued his inspection.

  “This is looking good,” said Bobby, focusing on the gash, on its spidery closures. Then he moved to Warren’s nose. “You’ll have some bruising for a while.” His voice was low, as if the conversation was between only him and his patient.