Relative Strangers Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  The best things in life always seemed to be doled out in limited portions. Por ejemplo, this Friday’s curriculum-related Spanish treat, an orange and almond cake, was absolutely to die for, but split twenty-two ways, it was kind of tragic.

  I pressed my finger into the last tender crumbs and sugar-dusted almonds as I watched the end-of-day announcements on the screen at the front of the class. Girls’ basketball game today against Jefferson, which I already knew — my best friends had boarded a bus for it an hour ago. Rotary Club would be selling “scrumptious” pink-and-white cookies at lunch Monday to raise money for breast cancer. Last call for senior baby photos for the yearbook, which were due a week ago. Ugh. Though a lot of seniors hadn’t turned in a baby photo, there was only one member of the yearbook staff who was remiss: me.

  It wasn’t my fault — I had no idea where Mom kept old photos, and so far I’d had no luck getting her to dig them up. Mementos and sentimentality were hardly her forte, and anything that took away from her painting time was an annoyance. Still, how long did it take to locate some photos in our tiny house?

  When the bell rang, I gathered my things, tossed my plate into the trash, and headed out of the classroom. I pulled out my phone as a stream of noisy hallway traffic swept and bumped me along and tried to send Gab and Leila a “good luck at the game” message, but it was an extravagant fail:

  FOOD FUCK TONIGHT!

  I sighed. So close.

  When I reached the south exit, I pushed open the doors and filled my lungs with fresh, cold air, my destination: Laroche’s Parisian café.

  The path was so familiar I could have forged it blindfolded. Not much ever changed in Maplebrook except the price of gas, posted in crooked numbers in front of Jolly Earl’s Gas and Tire Shop. (Jolly Earl died years before I was even born, but why change a perfectly good sign?)

  Icy water seeped into the cracks of my weathered boots as I walked past Morty’s Kold Kutz, home of the town’s most inexplicably beloved, boring sandwiches and my place of modest employment; past Tina’s Thrifty Treasures, which was the source of most of my wardrobe (but also the occasional find: an antique medicine bottle or first edition of a classic novel); under the green awning of the vacuum cleaner repair shop, where dripping icicles hung like sparkling stalactites in the late winter sun. I reached out and knocked a few down with my fingers as I passed. They shattered like crystal on the wet sidewalk.

  I crossed Second Street and slipped into the café — or almost into the café. The perennially defective door clamped shut on my backpack before I cleared the entrance and pinned me there like a butterfly on a board. Even better, this confounded the infernal someone has entered the café bell, which managed to get stuck and trill in rapid-fire like a burglar alarm. It took me two tries to yank myself free of the door, finally silencing the bell. I plowed resolutely ahead to the counter, my face burning.

  Eli chortled from behind the espresso machine.

  “Why don’t you people get that damned door fixed?” I muttered as I slipped off my backpack.

  He gave me his lopsided grin. “And miss an entrance like that? That was stunning.”

  Half of my friend’s paltry weight derived from sarcasm, I was certain. Short and slight, he leaned on piercings, black hair dye, and a love of macabre subjects to give him substance, but the veneer was thin. Underneath he was as fragile as the antique china cups he served coffee in. I was not exactly bulletproof myself, but next to Eli I felt strangely solid — emotionally and also physically. Willowy I was not.

  I stared into the glass case at the croissants, my Achilles’ heel. Laroche’s were a darker brown than I’d seen anywhere else, almost chestnut. They made an audible crackling sound when you bit into them, flakes of gold fluttering down like autumn leaves, and then the tender inner striations stretched seductively. The flavor was butter to the tenth power, and the ones I worshiped harbored in their depths a channel of intense bittersweet chocolate.

  Eli came over and grabbed a pair of metal tongs in the pastry case, clamping down on a chocolate croissant with all the tenderness of an ax murderer. Several precious, buttery shards fell loose.

  “Hey,” I objected. “A little respect?”

  He plunked the croissant onto a plate and shoved it toward me. “I’m an enabler. I’m feeding your addiction.”

  I gave him the steeliest gaze I could muster — not easy when you have the brown eyes of a Labrador puppy. Or when you actually love the object of your glare with all your heart.

  I missed Eli. I missed the lit mag, missed being his assistant editor — or, as he called me, his “lit hag.” I’d been at his side since my freshman year, when I’d meekly tiptoed in for a first recon and he announced, “Brown-nosers need not apply.” I was intrigued by his individuality, his unapologetically dark outlook, his love of Sylvia Plath. I also felt sorry for him, because he was kind of a loner and people made fun of him and his “gay goth” style, not that he appeared to care. Motherless, he appealed to my maternal instincts, although our relationship was not exactly reciprocal. He was more like a pet cat: I fussed over him and he basically ignored me.

  And then he graduated last year, and I left the lit mag, which was nothing without him, and joined the yearbook staff instead — which was also nothing, but at least I had no expectations. Now Eli spent his nights writing his novel and his days pulling espressos and cleaning up after customers — “the Philistines,” he called them, especially the ones who ordered complicated drinks with flavored syrups and never tipped.

  For this he threw away a scholarship to Swarthmore. But it was a means to an end: he was only doing it to save enough money for a summer writing program in Iowa he hoped to get into — one he was convinced would connect him with people who would help him elevate his novel to Pulitzer levels and make publishing introductions for him.

  I was eager to graduate and move on — probably to U of Illinois, which was hardly the private, lush Collegiate Gothic Utopia I longed for, but it required the least of the dollars we did not have.

  I pulled some money out of my pocket, but he waved me off as he always did when no one was watching. “Thank you,” I said. And I meant it. By my estimate, Eli’s bad business practices were saving me in the neighborhood of fifty bucks a month — a substantial portion of my meager Kold Kutz earnings.

  I pulled off a little bite of croissant, whose yeasty, chocolaty aroma was the culinary equivalent of a siren song, and laid it on my tongue. If they made communion wafers out of Laroche’s croissants, I would be the most devoted Catholic in town.

  Eli shook his head. “Is there anything in life you love more than those croissants, Drools?”

  I ignored the nickname. “This is a bad time to ask,” I said, closing my eyes as that familiar swoony feeling hit — a butter buzz. I knew it would be wise to exercise some restraint where these were concerned — but the flesh, it is weak. “They have it all,” I told him. “The richness of the butter, and the sweet and bitter of the chocolate.”

  “So that’s your trifecta. Rich an
d sweet and bitter.”

  “Stop analyzing me. Can I have some coffee?”

  He took a cup — real antique china — from a hook on the wall. Its pattern was tiny flowers in shades of fuchsia and indigo, offset by splashes of green and yellow — slightly chipped and of English provenance. The saucer he laid it on was Austrian — scalloped edge, blackberry and rose design. No two items matched at Laroche’s. It was one of the things I loved about the place. Where nothing matches, everything can belong.

  Long hours spent examining the seemingly endless rotation of dishes at Laroche’s had sparked in me an interest in antique china, leading me down endless rabbit holes of research. While other kids were binge-watching comedy and sci-fi shows, I was mainlining Antiques Roadshow, reading historical fiction, and fantasizing about eating my way through old European cities as I searched for treasures, perhaps as a higher-up for Sotheby’s.

  Eli poured coffee one shade past midnight into the cup and handed it to me. Then he pulled a book out from a shelf under the counter and laid it down in front of him. I leaned over to look at it. Encyclopedia of Death and Dying. Classic Eli. He opened it to an entry on decapitation, complete with a charming sketch of Marie Antoinette’s liberated head.

  What was this death obsession? Was it research for his novel? Or just a hobby? Or did it go deeper? Was it because of his mother? “Eli?” I hesitated. “How old were you when . . .” I trailed off. It was a hard sentence to finish. “When your mom . . .”

  “When my mom died?” he said, without looking up from the book. “Five. Why?”

  “I was just wondering if you have a lot of baby pictures. There aren’t a lot of me. Do you think that’s normal?”

  Eli snorted. “You’re asking me what’s normal? I don’t know. People are weird.”

  “But do you have a lot of baby pictures?”

  He nodded. “Tons. My mom must have had the camera surgically attached to her. Me and my weirdo ears.”

  I smiled. They did stick out a bit.

  “There aren’t as many after she died, though.” He went back to his book. “Maybe it’s a mom thing.”

  Not all moms. Mine had hardly documented anything — sometimes it seemed like she didn’t even care. “I’m glad you have all those pictures,” I said, feeling bad. If I envied someone whose mother died when he was little, I probably had some rethinking to do.

  He gave no indication of hearing me, but when I peeked over at his book, I saw what had captured his attention: diagrams of death by hanging. “Hey, Eli. Do you know why it’s called ‘bone china’?”

  “Hm?”

  “It’s actually made out of bones.”

  It took him a second to register, but then he blinked and looked up. “Wait, what?”

  I grinned. “Animal bones. Thirty to fifty percent.”

  His jaw dropped. “Get out.”

  “Swearsies.” I held up my fingers in what I was pretty sure was some sort of Scout oath configuration.

  His eyes widened. “How did I not know that? Oh my God, I am so putting that in my book.”

  As he turned to regard the now-interesting dishes on the wall, I took my croissant to the counter along the window. Made of scarred, waxy mahogany, the counter at Laroche’s was reputedly salvaged from a nineteenth-century bar in Paris when it underwent renovations. Eli is convinced that this counter, having seen over a hundred years in a Parisian bar, once held the drinks of all the greats: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Camus . . . it was a piece of history.

  Right now it was a piece of wood on which to place my croissant. I pulled out some homework, but I didn’t get far. Pacing myself with croissants was kind of a challenge, and I liked my coffee piping hot, so I was quickly left with empty dishes and unsolved math problems.

  I took my dishes to the counter, where Eli failed to register my presence. He was once again buried in his death book. “Well,” I said, “I’m headed home to search for artifacts from my past.”

  He nodded absently, never lifting his eyes from the book.

  “But I won’t find them,” I told him. “Because of the fire.” Nothing. “Yes,” I continued, more loudly, “the very terrible fire that took down my whole house last night.”

  Another nod.

  “In fact, I died of smoke inhalation. This is just my ghost visiting you to say good-bye. Good-bye, Eli.”

  “Bye,” he echoed.

  I would have admired his concentration, except for the fact that I wasn’t the most interesting thing — the story of my life. I pulled on my coat and left.

  The sun was sinking as I headed home, and the temperature along with it. I huddled into my coat and stepped up my pace. Halfway there, my phone dinged with a message from Leila. Halftime and we are down by 12, ugh. Meet us at Mario’s after the game? Will text you on the bus on the way home. Pray for us.

  I messaged back, Prayer submitted to the patron saint of lost basketball causes. And yes to Mario’s! You saved me from another night of gruel. Probably Hamburger Helper; my mom stocked up on the stuff like the apocalypse was imminent. I could defrost ground beef with both hands tied behind my back. In desperation, I’d started adding things to spice it up: mango chutney, goat cheese, crushed potato chips . . . I was the true Hamburger Helper.

  As I approached my house in the last violet gleam of daylight, I cringed at the peeling paint and splintered window frames. Our rented ranch house had benefited from no updating since it was built fifty-plus years ago. It was basically a teardown waiting for the housing market to rally.

  My mom did her best — I knew that. But I was not so noble that I was grateful simply to have a roof over my head and the steady presence of a parent. No, I wanted more. Always more. Our house was a thing of sadness, and our dispassionate mother-daughter team wasn’t exactly Disney Channel material. She worked a job she didn’t care about to rent a house she didn’t care about, and the rest of her time she spent painting, which was, as far as I could tell, the only thing she did care about. She was good at it, too — she’d actually sold a few. I had inherited none of this talent, but despite (or maybe because of) that, her work was a marvel to me. There was Mom the mom and Mom the painter, and I had a hard time conflating the two.

  Inside, I found a note from her waiting on the kitchen table: Going to Harbach’s, then meeting up with some people. Home around ten or so.

  The art store: her personal paradise. I could never feel such passion for a place that had no food.

  I texted her, I NEED A BABY PHOTO.

  I glanced at the clock — it was a few minutes before six. Gab and Leila would probably be back from the game around seven-something or eight. I went into the living room and gazed at the four photos of me on the bookshelves.

  There was one of me as a newborn, looking like all babies look (too nondescript for the yearbook). One of me at about three, looking like a mini version of my current self (too old to use for the yearbook). My third-grade photo, which I despised but she liked. And my freshman-year photo. Kind of random, the collection. Or maybe a reflection of how often she had bothered to think about these things — i.e., almost never.

  What she did have were photographs of other things. Unusual skies. Blurred reflections of trees in water. Weird things, like rusted-out old phone booths and bits of broken glass in dirt. I picked up an uncharacteristic photo — a sunrise over a lake. It stuck out from the rest because it seemed like a touristy, every-person kind of photo, not an artist photo. I slipped it out of the frame and turned it over. She had written something on the back in her tiny, perfect, font-like script. I walked closer to the lamp to read it.

  It said Day 50. The date was inscribed underneath. It was about a year and a half after I was born.

  I turned the photo back over. Where was this taken? We could never afford vacations. And if she was taking photos of lakes and sunrises when I was eighteen months old, wouldn’t she also have taken pictures of me? Where were they?

  A surge of nervousness fluttered through my belly as I consid
ered the unthinkable: snooping. Trying to find the damn pictures myself. I had been bugging her for weeks, and this on top of the many times throughout childhood I had asked for baby albums. She had never produced any. Moreover, her excuses and reasons just did not add up.

  My mom didn’t care that much about “stuff” in general — that much I understood. She was always arguing with me over things I had wanted to save (she compromised by allotting me one box, which she actually labeled useless things). I kept it in my closet — beloved items of outgrown clothing, shells and sea glass from the beach at Lake Michigan, toys or books I’d had a special attachment to. . . . Apart from papers I wrote or art projects I’d done — things I had made seemed to be an exception to her whole DUMP paradigm — I’d always had to lobby to preserve the pieces of my past I wanted to hold on to. And for whatever reason, I was as attached to “things” as she was keen to let them go.

  I glanced at my phone to confirm that she still hadn’t responded to my text, then tiptoed to her studio and flipped on the wall switch. The bright track lighting made me squint. I moved carefully, peeking around the room. There was nothing in there that wasn’t art or art-related. Even the closet was piled with supplies and canvases.

  Next I ventured into her bedroom and approached her closet. I had never so much as snooped for Christmas presents before, and we didn’t share any clothes, so the designation of “hers” vs. “mine” had always been a clear line. Breaching it was terrifying, and yet I pressed on, compelled by a need that went beyond yearbook staff obligations.

  I slid the mirrored door open and peeked inside. There were a couple of boxes on the top shelf, and not much else. The boxes were labeled with spans of years too recent to be of interest except for one, which just had Milwaukee written on it in small letters.

  Milwaukee was where my mother grew up. It was, as far as I knew, where we lived when I was a baby. Was it with her mother? I wasn’t sure. She didn’t talk about her parents — her mother had been dead for years and, from what I’d gathered, there was no love lost between her and the father she hadn’t seen or heard from since she was small.