White Elephant Read online

  Grant closed his eyes and rolled them. Hopefully Suzanne would see the next house, love it, they’d sign the contract, and that would be it. Finito. No more being stuck in a car with Nina Strauss. She put on such a nice face, but she wasn’t nice. “Davenport-Gardner,” she’d said, her expression mocking when they met this morning. “Hyphenated . . . Both of you?”

  What if he were cast as Nina Strauss in a play? He’d wear a wig—a Ruth Bader Ginsberg wig, if such a thing existed. Nina’s hair was black and lay flat like spray paint against her scalp and was twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck. He looked down at his lap, practicing the smile that looked too large for Nina’s face. Her entire being tightened up when she smiled, not just the tendons in her neck, but practically even the skin on the backs of her hands. She looked about fifty, but he suspected she was younger.

  He tapped his fitness tracker to check the time, steps, calories, and heart rate, even though he’d checked it when they got in the car. Then he tapped it again. In just a few short days he’d be starting his new job at a small law firm in Rosslyn, Virginia. He would be the low man on the totem pole, the new kid in town, a stranger. The idea made him want to go running back to his firm in Richmond, where they wore khakis and shirtsleeves when they weren’t in court and he knew all the judges. He touched Suzanne’s elbow for courage. She didn’t reach back for him, but nor did she pull away. They were making progress.

  He’d made some bad decisions in his life—he’d be the first to admit it—but he’d made some good ones too. Becoming a lawyer had been a good choice. A more responsible choice than becoming an actor. As a child Grant had reenacted entire sitcoms for his mother while she cooked dinner. Those pockets of time before his father got home from the family hardware store were among the sweetest of Grant’s childhood.

  A slight, pleasant vibration in his pocket. Grant fished out his phone to find a text from Marie. Going for coffee. The usual for you?☹ It was weird to think she was still working at Fitzpatrick, Oppler and Moore, while he was up here, about to start from scratch. Marie, a childhood friend, hadn’t even planned on going to college, much less law school, but he’d inspired her. “I figured if you could do it, I could, General,” she’d told him after she aced the LSAT. He’d put in a good word for her after she’d taken the bar, and the firm hired her, just like that. They thought they would spend their careers the way they’d spent their childhoods, side by side.

  Have a double espresso for me—spiked with vodka, he started to write, then reconsidered, and just sent back an emoji of a yellow cat with a fat blue tear dripping from its eye.

  “Hi, honey bunch,” Suzanne said, her voice loud, and for a moment Grant felt buoyant—but she was talking to her phone, not to him. “How are you doing? Is Grammy making dinner?”

  Grammy, Suzanne’s mother, was taking care of their son, Adam, while they house-hunted. She lived around the corner from their house outside Richmond, close enough to look after Adam every day. Strangers—well, older strangers—sometimes mistook Grammy for Adam’s mother, a compliment Grammy laughingly mentioned every time it occurred. Grant always wolf-whistled in support, but Suzanne just uttered a taut, “So you’ve told us, Mom.”

  Grammy had offered to move to the D.C. area to help out with Adam, but Suzanne turned her down. Grant pointed out that they’d miss having a babysitter on call, but no amount of lobbying on Grammy’s part could convince Suzanne otherwise.

  “Addy wants to talk to you,” Suzanne said, handing her phone back to Grant.

  Grant’s heart took wing. “Hiya, buddy!”

  Adam retold the story Grammy had just read to him in minute detail, and recounted the moves of the Scrabble game they’d played. Scrabble. The kid was five! Grant listened, happy, simultaneously admiring the back of Suzanne’s head: her long neck, her long silky hair. He loved all of Suzanne’s long-ness—her long feet, her long thighs and calves too. So what if she was taller than him? It was just by an inch, easily overcome if he wore shoes with a very slight lift and she wore flats. Suzanne Gardner was a catch: student government president, president of the Young Entrepreneurs’ Club, a woman who had gotten a full academic ride to college and attended a prominent business school. She was a gifted athlete to boot. He used to get winded climbing the stairs before he started running with her. Suzanne was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Everyone said so.

  Adam begged him to make the noise, so Grant obliged, making a raspberry with his lips. Adam laughed and laughed. He loved it when Grant put his lips to Adam’s belly, their nightly ritual, but this was the best he could do from afar. Suzanne gave him a sidelong glance, her expression pained.

  If Suzanne was the best thing that had ever happened to him—and she was, she totally was—Adam was the best thing he’d ever had a hand in creating. True, Adam felt more like Suzanne’s creation than his own, but he’d decidedly played a significant role. Adam looked like Grant, like a mini, skinny, Grant, but his brain was Suzanne’s. Grant’s sisters had that brilliance too. Grant wasn’t stupid—he’d done well in the classes that had interested him, and got surprisingly high scores on his college and law school exams—but he didn’t have that razor sharpness. And he made mistakes.

  Adam loved him though. Grant taught him show tunes and talked to him in cartoon voices. They wrestled like puppies and stirred their ice cream into soup. Adam tended toward serious, like Suzanne—which made making him laugh all the more fun. Soon—as soon as Suzanne gave him the go-ahead—he was going to introduce Adam to the old sitcoms—shows from his childhood and even further back, from the dawn of the television era. It was an education of sorts. Not as fancy as learning to play the piano or learning French, but an education in popular culture, and valuable in its own right. Suzanne thought exposing Adam to screens of any kind was like exposing him to a virus—a harmful, if not fatal, one. Grant went along in the interest of marital peace. Maybe she was right. Who knew? Adam was certainly just about perfect so far. And just-about-perfect Adam adored him. It was a heady, precious feeling to be adored by a child. One day he would no doubt realize that Grant didn’t shimmer the way he and Suzanne did, but that day was a long way off. Maybe ten years. Five or six at least. Grant wiped the spittle off the phone and handed it back to Suzanne.

  They turned off the highway and onto a wide road that was thick with traffic in both directions. Nina tuned the radio to a classical station.

  “Music to distract us from the fact that D.C. is a commuter’s nightmare . . . ?” Grant murmured.

  Nina smiled as though she wanted to sink her fangs into his flesh. “So tell me about your little boy.”

  “He just graduated from preschool cum laude,” Grant said.

  Nina stifled a laugh. Had she? Was it a laugh or was she just clearing her throat? Suzanne creased her brow at him. They had a non-bragging pact.

  He couldn’t abide by it though. How could he? “Gifted,” Grant said.

  “Gifted!” Nina said. That time it was definitely a laugh. “Does he like soccer?”

  Neither he nor Suzanne responded. In this department, they knew, they had neglected Adam to the point of possible abuse. They had never enrolled him in a soccer-for-toddlers skills course, had never exposed him to any ball sports—much less one that forbade the use of one’s hands. Soon there would be no catching up.

  “Willard Park’s seventh-grade team is the only coed middle school team in the county. My son, Mark, is on it. Not only that,” she said, making them wait for the clincher: “I think they’re playing today.”

  She turned down a shady street with well-spaced Victorians lined up on either side. Grant could practically feel the car swell with her pride. There were sidewalks, a park with a playground, and a soccer field full of children in jerseys and shin guards. Parents sat along the sidelines on a vast field. They passed what looked like a church with a TOWN HALL sign below a stained-glass window, and parked near an old house that, upon further examination, turned out to be part café and part post
office.

  “Welcome home,” Nina said, sliding her elegant car to a stop.

  JILLIAN SAT AT THE SIDE OF THE SOCCER FIELD PULLING BLADES OF grass out of the ground one by one. If she slid a blade up by its root without breaking it, that was good luck, and if she did three of them in a row, Willard Park would win the game, she told herself, knowing it wasn’t true. There were two minutes left and the other team was killing them. Jillian had been sitting on the sidelines since the start of the game, unlike Lindy Cox, who’d been playing the whole time. Jillian’s mom wasn’t missing anything by not being there. Where was she? She came to every game, even the away games. Car accident, sleeping pills, heart attack.

  Mark Strauss, the hottest boy in Willard Park, was goalie. He was a terrible goalie, but the real goalie had stomach flu or something. Mark’s hair, cinnamon colored, hung down into his face. He flipped his head back so he could see. Jillian tried to catch his eye but he was studying the tops of his cleats.

  The other mothers were there—a couple of dads, too, but mostly moms. Chandra Sharma’s mom was there, as were both of Simon Washington’s dads. Mrs. Santos had brought all three of Luis’s little sisters, who were watching the game as intently as if the seventh-graders were professional soccer players. Lindy’s mom was on a big, striped blanket, her hair yellow in the sunlight; Lindy’s brother, Jakey, drinking sodas and eating chips, beside her. Jillian’s stomach growled. Her mom always brought a boring snack like apples and peanut butter, but it was better than nothing. Hostage situation, alien abduction.

  Lindy raced down the field with the ball neatly tucked between her feet, her hair flying out behind her like birthday party streamers.

  Trip, Jillian thought, but Lindy kept right on going. What did Lindy have against her? Did she stink or something? Sofia was the only one who would have told her, and she was an ocean away.

  Mark’s mother, in her usual black suit, walked over to the field with two strangers. There must be a house for sale—she never came to games. Look up, Jillian told Mark through ESP. She’d read a book about it, and it was real. A tall boy on the other team had stolen the ball from Lindy and had sent it toward the goal. Look out!

  She watched Mark the way she’d watched the film of President Kennedy’s assassination in her English class last fall, with a dark sense of inevitability. Her teacher had shown it to mark the anniversary of Kennedy’s death. The kids thought it was cool—gross, but cool—but the parents went crazy when they heard about it. They bombarded the school with angry calls and letters about the inappropriateness of it until the teacher resigned. It was too bad because he’d been one of the nice ones.

  Mark yawned up at the trees. Meanwhile Lindy took off after the ball, her teeth bared. She threw herself between the ball and the goal and tried to block it. The blade of grass in Jillian’s hand broke. A cheer went up from the other team just as the whistle blew.

  “IT STARTED OUT AS A STREETCAR SUBURB AT THE TURN OF THE LAST century,” Nina narrated when they were back in the car again, the home team having lost rather spectacularly. Suzanne took it all in. She wasn’t sorry she’d agreed to one final stop for the day. Not sorry at all.

  Nina was talking about nuts. The streets were named after them. The street they were on, Almond Avenue, was clearly the showcase street, wide, with old, well-maintained houses where trees grew tall and swings hung from high branches. They passed a Victorian with a wraparound porch, where two little girls sat on a swing, a dog at their feet. Suzanne imagined the girls away, replacing them with herself and Adam. Then she put the girls back again. What could they possibly find in their price range here? Everything was so much more expensive around Washington. She’d known it was going to be bad, but not this bad.

  Nina rolled down the window. “Hi, Madeline. Your puppy is getting so big, Jordan!” The girls looked at her as if they had never seen her before. If things were better between her and Grant, Suzanne would have caught skeptical eyes with him—but they weren’t good. Not good at all.

  “Peanut, Hazelnut—you name a nut, we’ve got it. We’ve even got a Brazil Nut Street. Willard Park is very multiculturally oriented.”

  “Multicultural is good,” Grant said, possibly just to show that he was awake.

  “It was quite progressive in the sixties. One of the houses was a commune even, but most of those folks are gone now, retired or . . .” She stopped herself. What had she kept herself from saying? Dead?

  Nina slowed down as they drove by a series of little older houses, many with porches, most somewhat run down. “These are our Sears houses. Aren’t they just darling?”

  They were darling. They were small—quite small—but darling. Could they buy a very small, somewhat dilapidated house in a perfect neighborhood? Would it be like buying a lesser property in Monopoly? Baltic Avenue wasn’t worth much, but it got you on the board.

  Nina sped up as they drove by the ranches and split-levels, as if she wanted to drive right through them. “It was really only after World War Two that the town began to grow in earnest. We’re up to nearly thirteen hundred residents these days.”

  They passed what looked like a one-room schoolhouse, which turned out to be a children’s library, and a bandstand decorated with red, white, and blue bunting. “It’s so Norman Rockwell,” Suzanne said.

  “Right?” said Nina.

  Grant said, “Yeah. A little eerie. Remember the Twilight Zone episode . . . ?”

  Nina jumped in, telling them about the cherry blossom beautification program. She waved to a little boy examining the sidewalk with a magnifying glass, then slowed down to let them admire the wooden train, big enough for kids to climb on. “Willard Park is a place for the imagination.”

  “That little fountain,” Suzanne said. “Can people picnic there?”

  “It’s a favorite spot.”

  “Mmmm,” Suzanne purred. She didn’t even know she could purr.

  “We have a snowman-building contest after the first snowfall. All the kids go home with a ribbon. There’s a children’s bicycle parade on Labor Day, a town pride day in July, caroling in December . . .” Nina sped up, racing by a street that had potential.

  “Let’s go down there,” Suzanne said.

  Nina coughed and shook her head. “Well, there’s some construction . . .”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Tunlaw it is,” Nina said, turning right.

  “Tunlaw,” Grant said. “How is Tunlaw a nut?”

  “Good point! I never thought about that. Is it a nut?”

  A man biked past, a bright yellow bicycle helmet on his head and a reflective safety vest over his shirt. “Hi, Ted,” Nina called out the window. “Ted and Allison live—” Nina began, but Suzanne had seen the apocalypse.

  They were all silent as they drove by this property, with its looming white house.

  It was oddly bright surrounding the house, the sky vaster seeming, like the skies out west. It took Suzanne a minute to understand what was wrong. It was more than just the size of the house, it was that the trees were gone, their freshly sawn stumps left behind like amputated limbs. A woman with curly auburn hair sat on the curb in front of the yard, legs crossed, as if she were meditating.

  “Did a tornado . . . ?” Suzanne said.

  Nina’s smile tightened, her eyes a little wild as, apparently, she considered how to respond—but a man’s scream interrupted her. It was a lingering scream, a scream of obvious anguish. The man with the yellow bike helmet tumbled off his bike and onto the lawn.

  “Is he hurt? Can you stop the car?” Grant said.

  Nina stopped, but it was a slow stop.

  The meditating woman sprang up, embracing the fallen biker. Grant wheeled the bike out of the road. “You all right? Need a hand?”

  Nina motioned for him to get back in the car. “His mother died,” she whispered when he got back in. “They just got word.”

  “How sad,” Suzanne said.

  “Sad,” Nina said, bowing her head. “Very, very
sad . . . but she was old.”

  Nina pressed the automatic lock, sealing them in. “Off we go! To your dream house. I think it’s just around the corner,” she said, speeding away from the scene of the crime.

  3

  AUGUST 31—EVENING

  Nick Cox sat on the couch in the media room, images from the television flickering in the dark. He thumbed through the channels with the remote. He had the biggest flat-screen TV on the market—not just HD, but ultra HD. It was like a movie theater. Better than a movie theater, really, because of the leather couch and the surround sound, and the absence of popcorn-eating, candy-wrapper-crumpling, soda-spilling strangers. He and Kaye usually spent their evenings here after she put Jakey to bed, but she got the yawns around ten. The leather was cold without her.

  Rex, their German shepherd, nestled beside him, licking Nick’s hand constantly and thoroughly, dedicated to the cause. Ordinarily Nick did not care for dogs that licked, but Rex was one of a kind. He liked watching TV as much as Nick did—especially when dogs were on: he would wag and bark. He wasn’t much of a watchdog. He was more likely to lick a stranger’s hand than bite it. He slept in their bed, on Nick’s side, which made it hard to get in a comfortable position, but what was he going to do? Put him in the garage?

  Officially the dog was Kaye’s. She’d asked for a puppy for her birthday. Nick hadn’t wanted one—the last thing he needed was a yard full of dog crap—but Kaye looked so disappointed when he gave her the tennis bracelet. “I need him for security,” she said, eyeing the Millers’ house. “That brother gives me the willies. He stares.”

  “He’s all right,” Nick said.

  “I’m lonely, too, with the kids in school all day.” She said it in her baby voice, and he, feeling a little turned on, gave in.

  She probably was lonely. She’d had a bunch of girlfriends when they lived back in Beaufort. There was always some woman or other sitting on the couch or poolside when he got home from work, sometimes a whole squad of them, sitting around, laughing. Northern women seemed to be afraid of getting caught enjoying themselves. Kaye had tried to make inroads in Willard Park last spring, hosting one of those toy parties, but it had been a flop. She still had a closet full of plastic buckets and stacking toys no one wanted.