Turtles All the Way Down(34)

“The parasite believes itself to be the host,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

—

As we walked up to the Pickett house, I could see two place settings at one corner of Davis’s huge dining room table. A candle flickered between the settings, and the first floor of the house was lit a soft gold. My stomach was all turned around, and I had no desire to eat, but I followed him in. “I guess Rosa made us dinner,” he said to me. “So we should at least have a few bites to be polite.”

“Hi, Rosa,” he said. “Thanks for staying late.”

She pulled him into a big bear hug. “I made spaghetti. Vegetarian.”

“You didn’t need to do this,” he said.

“My children are grown-ups, so you and Noah are the only little boys I have left. And when you tell me you have a date with your new girlfriend—”

“Not girlfriend,” Davis said. “Old friend.”

“Old friends make the best girlfriends. You eat. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She pulled him down into another hug and kissed him on the cheek. “Take something up to Noah so he doesn’t starve,” Rosa added, “and do your dishes. It’s not too hard to wipe dishes clean and put them in a dishwasher, Davis.”

“Got it,” he said.

“Your life is so weird,” I said as we sat down to eat at the table set for two, with a Dr Pepper in front of my spot and a Mountain Dew in front of his.

“I guess,” he said. He raised his can of soda. “To weird,” he said.

“To weird.” We clinked cans and sipped.

“She acts like a parent,” I said.

“Yeah, well, she’s known me since I was a baby. And she cares about us. But she also gets paid to care about us, you know? And if she didn’t . . . I mean, she’d have to find a different job.”

“Yeah,” I said. It seemed to me that one of the defining features of parents is that they don’t get paid to love you.

He asked me about my school day, and I told him I’d had a fight with Daisy. I asked about his day at school, and he said, “It was okay. There’s this rumor at school that I killed not only my dad, but also my mom . . . so. I don’t know. I shouldn’t let it get to me.”

“That would get to anyone.”

“I can take it, but I worry about Noah.”

“How is Noah?”

“He climbed into bed with me last night and just cried. I felt so bad I loaned him my Iron Man.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“He’s, just . . . I guess at some point, you realize that whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can’t actually protect you from getting hurt. Which is one thing. But Noah is starting to understand that maybe the person he thought was a superhero turns out sort of to be the villain. And that really sucks. He keeps thinking Dad is going to come home and prove his innocence, and I don’t know how to tell him that, you know, Dad isn’t innocent.”

“Does the phrase ‘the jogger’s mouth’ mean anything to you?”

“No, but the cops asked me that, too. Said it was in Dad’s phone.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, my father is many things—but a jogger is not one of them. He thinks exercise is irrelevant, because Tua is going to unlock the key to eternal life.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, he believes Malik is going to be able to identify some factor in tuatara blood that makes them age slowly, and then he’s going to ‘cure death,’” Davis said, using air quotes. “That’s why his will leaves everything to Tua—he thinks he’s going to be remembered as the man who ended death.” I asked him if Tua would really get all of his dad’s money, and he laughed a little and said, “Everything. The business, the house, the property. I mean, Noah and I have plenty of money for college and everything—but we’re not gonna be rich.”

“If you have plenty of money for college and everything, you’re rich.”

“True. And Dad doesn’t owe us anything. I just wish he’d, you know, do the dad stuff. Take my brother to school in the morning, make sure he does his homework, not disappear in the middle of the night to escape prosecution, et cetera.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You say that a lot.”

“I feel it a lot.”

He looked up at me. “Have you ever been in love, Aza?”

“No. You?”

“No.” He glanced down at my plate, then said, “Okay, if neither of us is going to eat, we should probably go outside. Maybe we’ll catch a break in the clouds.”

—

We put our coats back on and walked outside. It was a windy night, and I tucked my head into my chest as we walked, but when I glanced over at Davis, he was looking up.

In the distance, I could see that two of the poolside recliners had been pulled out onto the golf course, near one of the flags marking a hole. The flag was whipping in the wind, and I could hear the white noise of traffic in the distance, but it was otherwise quiet, the cicadas and crickets silenced by the cold. We lay down on the loungers, next to each other but not touching, and looked up at the sky for a while. “Well, this is disappointing,” he said.