Wilde Lake(82)

The bigger question for Lu is whether she will be speaking as a sister, or the county state’s attorney.





MAY 25


“I guess this day is for you, dear Father.”

AJ raises a beer—a local one that he brought to the barbecue, presumably brewed from ethical hops. Whatever those are. But their father shakes his head. “Memorial Day is for those who died. I merely served. You can toast me in November.”

“Of course,” AJ says. “Of course. My bad. It’s not like I wish you were dead.”

He seems a little loopy to Lu, but it’s probably jet-lag. AJ was at the Sydney Writers Festival and he arrived at BWI only yesterday afternoon. Although his memoir about his wanderjahr is several years old, it was a bit of a sleeper hit in Australia and a big publisher there has just brought out a new edition, with an introduction by some hot-shit novelist that Lu has never heard of and a new afterword by AJ and Lauranne, all about how individuals matter, small changes, blah, blah, blah.

Lu scrapes the leftover baked beans and corn from her plate into the trash and endures two withering glances from Lauranne—one for the paper plate, the other for the lack of composting. She glares back, unhappy they are dining on the screen porch. The day is shockingly hot, a misery, especially coming as it does after two perfectly pleasant spring days. But AJ and Lauranne said they preferred to be outside in “real air,” and they were the “guests,” so the family has congregated here. At least her father had the good sense to install ceiling fans on the porch. And the twins keep leaving the porch doors open, so the house’s downstairs AC unit—one of three required to cool the house—whirrs and groans, sending puffs of cool air toward them. Lu is simultaneously grateful for every artificial breeze and despairing of the utility bill. She keeps thinking the heat will back off when the sun goes down, that the planet has simply not absorbed enough of the sun’s warmth to torture them into the evening. But, so far, there is no respite.

There is, however, that deeply layered fecund smell of the suburbs. The light grassy scent of lawns, the darker fragrances from the trees. Lu may want to believe she’s a city person, but she is, at heart, a child of the suburbs, a child of this suburb, and she can’t live without yards and trees and flowers. Their first two years as a married couple, she and Gabe had lived in the treeless yuppie playground that was Federal Hill in the 1990s and she was secretly miserable, then ashamed of herself for being miserable. But she missed these smells.

“You want to take a walk with me?” she asks AJ, as the sun—finally—begins to set. “Around the lake?”

“I’m sooooooo tired, Lu. I’m still on Australian time. My body’s living in tomorrow.”

“That’s the price of being a visionary,” she jokes. Then, in a lower tone of voice: “Please. I want to hear about the status of your, um, project. The one we discussed all those months ago.”

A lie, but it will take at least forty-five minutes to stroll around the lake in this heat. She figures that they will have exhausted the topic of AJ’s fatherhood by the time they reach the dam—only yards away from the events of Graduation Night 1980.

It turns out that AJ doesn’t want to talk about fatherhood or IVF or rented wombs. He is full of Australia, practically a travelogue on the topic, and a pedantic one at that. “As we head into summer, Australia is on the cusp of winter . . .” Oh, really, dear brother is that how the Southern Hemisphere works? He speaks of how expensive it is, pontificates on its island-country-continent status, praises its food, its sense of ecological responsibility, its rich cultural life.

“The primary cultural export I remember from Australia is the Wiggles,” Lu says. “Although they were fading by the time the twins were born. The Wiggles and Mel Gibson. And now there’s a new Mad Max movie. Nothing ever changes—until it does. What’s happening with your baby plans?”

“Not much. We thought we had a surrogate, but it didn’t work out. Ridiculous falling-out over the silliest thing. I don’t know. She didn’t like us, that’s the bottom line.”

Oh, so she met Lauranne, then? But Lu holds her tongue.

“I saw Davey Robinson the other day,” she says.

“Where?”

“At his church. I went to see him. Something very weird came up.” She fills AJ in, as briskly and neutrally as possible. Somehow, she knows he will argue with her. And he does.

“Life is full of coincidences, Lu. For all you know, Fred could just be f*cking with you.”

“True. But Davey lied to me. He told me that Nita’s pastor shared information about her sick grandchild. She—Nita, Jonnie as she’s known now—doesn’t even have a pastor. I think she tried to shake Davey down last fall, threatened to go public with the story of the events of Thanksgiving 1979, and he did whatever was necessary to keep that from happening. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“It makes sense because you’ve decided to link these facts. Rudy Drysdale killed a woman. That woman lived across the hall from Nita Flood. His intended victim might have been Nita Flood. It might not have been. You’re imposing a pattern on events because that’s what our minds are trained to do. Nita didn’t tell you anything. Davey didn’t tell you anything. Rudy is dead.”

“Davey told me that Rudy had a crush on Nita, in high school.”