The California Dashwoods Page 6

  “There is a school here, right?” he asked. “I mean, we definitely need to look into that.”

  Marianne hummed and shrugged. “Probably.”

  Elliott needed to draw up a list, because nothing would get done if he waited for Abby and Marianne to get around to it. His dad had laughed at him once, telling him he was making a rod for his own back. It didn’t have the impact it should have, though, since at the time they’d been eating dinner by candlelight because his parents had forgotten to pay the power bill. Twice. Elliott’s childhood had been a sort of low-level chaos like that. Picking up the phone, he’d never known what it might be about. An unpaid bill, a forgotten appointment, a teacher, or some stoner guy they’d met on holiday in Tibet four years ago letting them know he’d just gotten off the bus in Provincetown and could someone come and pick him up? And none of it mattered, since they had enough money to make sure it didn’t matter, but still, couldn’t anyone ever write a fucking reminder?

  It mattered now, though.

  Elliott was damn sure it mattered now.

  “Don’t you ever get angry?” It was Ned Ferrars’s voice in his head.

  Elliott ate the rest of his grilled cheese and left the table to make room for Greta and Abby. He pushed open the door and went outside, then sat on the small landing at the top of the stairs.

  It was cold and still drizzling. Down in the narrow yard, a few little birds hopped about, ruffling their wet feathers and picking through the scant grass for insects or seeds or whatever it was they were chasing.

  For all that he had sometimes envied his parents—and Marianne—their reckless, heedless, joyful way of living, that’s not who Elliott was. He’d tried, but he just wasn’t the type of person who could blow off a few bills and laugh when the power was cut off, or the gas was, and declare it an adventure. It annoyed him because it was so unnecessary. It was such a simple thing to avoid having happen. You paid your bills when they came in. You wrote your appointments in a calendar. You packed umbrellas just in case.

  “It’s just a bit of rain, Elliott!”

  Cold drizzle slid down the back of his neck into his shirt.

  Just a bit of rain, and here he was sitting in it. Okay, so maybe he was a little like his parents. That whole thing with Ned, for example. Francesca would have thrown them out anyway, so there was no point blaming himself for that. And it had been fun, in a crazy sort of way, to just give in to the moment like he had. To do something wild and unexpected and hot.

  Elliott smiled to himself as he thought of Ned, and watched the little birds hopping around in the rain.

  ***

  Elliott’s nap caught up with him in the middle of the night, when he awoke and was unable to get back to sleep. He stared for a while at the unfamiliar pattern of light on the ceiling. The rain had picked up while he’d slept and it now beat steadily on the roof. It was cool, and Elliott debated whether or not it was worth getting up to dig around in the dark for a blanket. Probably not. He didn’t want to wake anyone.

  He heard the muffled sounds of Abby snoring from her room. The girls’ room was quiet.

  Elliott thought of Norland Park. He wondered if he would miss it for the rest of his life. Not just the more-than-generous dimensions of the house, but the fact that everything Elliott was had been discovered in the sanctuary between its walls. It was more than a house. It was family, and it was happiness, and it was home. Would this tiny apartment ever feel as warm to him? It was hard to imagine it could.

  Every milestone in Elliott’s life had happened at Norland Park.

  Birthdays, Christmases, and rites of passage like getting ready for his first school dance. Then, a few years after that, getting ready for his first school dance with a guy. Elliott had first been kissed in the gardens of Norland Park, when he and Sean were shooting hoops behind the old carriage house. He’d lost his virginity the following week when Sean had come for a sleepover. Two awkward, fumbling sixteen-year-old boys. It’d been more or less a disaster.

  Elliott’s thoughts drifted to Ned.

  Not a disaster. Well, the entire surrounding shit-fight had been a disaster, but the actual part where they’d gotten each other off pressed up against Elliott’s awful painting? Elliott smiled at the memory. A mess, but not a disaster.

  He shifted against the thin mattress of the foldout couch. The springs wheezed a little, but didn’t squeak too loudly. Still . . . he could hear Abby snoring through a closed door. He wasn’t going to . . .

  He reached down and cupped himself through his pajama pants, and his dick twitched with a sleepy sort of interest.

  No.

  He didn’t even know where his lube was packed.

  He rolled onto his back and put his hands behind his head.

  He missed his dad, but that was like a low-level buzzing in the back of his consciousness, and had been since Henry died. It was the sort of thing Elliott didn’t believe would ever really heal. It was the sort of thing he would learn to live with, because that’s what people did. It was just . . . Elliott wanted to skip the part where he figured out how to deal, and just get to the end where he knew. He wanted to skip this part, where he was sleeping on a foldout couch in a tiny two-bedroom apartment on the other side of the country. He wanted to skip to the part where his memories of his dad made him smile, not hurt.

  Grief was exhausting.

  There was a lot of guilt mixed up in there too. A part of Elliott had been glad when Henry died. And he told himself it was because Henry wasn’t in pain anymore, but wasn’t it also that Elliott didn’t have to deal with it anymore? With the chemo, and the hospital, and the sheer fucking agony of waiting for the inevitable. It was done now—it was over, and they could move on.

  Selfish.

  Was it like this for everyone?

  “Time,” Ned had said, and that seemed like the sort of thing everyone said, but coming out of Ned’s mouth it hadn’t sounded like a platitude. It had sounded like he cared. That might have been nice to explore. A thing with someone who cared.

  Elliott didn’t feel cheated or anything for having missed out on the college experience, but it had been socially isolating being at home for the last three years while Henry got sicker and sicker and his needs became the first and the last thing Elliott thought about every day. So maybe it wasn’t just relief he’d felt when Henry died. Maybe there was some panic there as well, just a little, just a tiny voice in the back of his head wondering what he was supposed to do now. He’d fallen gratefully into the role of peacekeeper with the Family—right up until the Ned incident—but now what? Once he got Marianne into college and Greta into school and Abby into a place where she could function again, what about him? Who was he when all that was done? Would he even recognize himself anymore?

  He wanted . . . He didn’t know what he wanted. He wanted a long-term future, but the idea of what that would look like was vague and nebulous and shrank into nothing when he weighed it against what he needed to get done in the short term. He wanted to be happy?

  Jesus.

  Kill the fucking question mark.

  He wanted to be happy.

  Except Elliott wasn’t sure what that looked like either.

  He watched the pattern of lights on the ceiling.

  It didn’t matter yet if he didn’t know any of the answers. He knew what he had to do in the short term, and that was enough. The rest, he’d figure out along the way. It was a process.

  “Time,” Ned had said, and Elliott figured that was the answer to most questions in life after all.

  He closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep.

  Their first full day in Barton Lake—a Wednesday—dawned bright, with only a few clouds smudged across the sky. Elliott woke before his mother and sisters, thanks to the sunlight streaming directly through the living-area windows and hitting him in the face. Curtains. They needed curtains. He took the opportunity to grab the first shower in the tiny bathroom. He’d claimed the narrow windowsill as space for his toiletr
ies, seeing as Abby and the girls had already managed to stuff the vanity cabinet full, and also covered the entire surface around the sink.

  Although small, the bathroom was light and airy, and the hot water soothed away all the stiffness remaining in Elliott’s back from the long drive. Elliott shaved under the shower, and then toweled himself dry and dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. He padded barefoot back outside, only to find Greta awake, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, glaring at him from underneath a bird’s nest of tangled hair.

  “Elliott, I really need to pee!” She barged past him into the bathroom.

  “Good morning, Greta,” he murmured as he made his way to the kitchen.

  A few minutes later he heard the toilet flushing, and Greta shuffled into the kitchen where he was making breakfast. She hip-checked him. “Good morning.” She wrinkled her nose. “Are we having grilled cheese again?”

  “It’s literally all we have. We’ll get more groceries today.”

  Greta nodded and covered a yawn with her hand.

  Abby surfaced while Elliott and Greta were eating. “I got a text from John this morning. He wants to know if one of us will mind the shop with him today.”

  “I will!” Greta declared.

  “No,” Abby said. “You and I are going to enroll you in school. I thought Elliott or Marianne could do it.”

  The door to Marianne and Greta’s room was still closed.

  “I’ll do it,” Elliott said. “What time?”

  “Ten.”

  Of course a shop like that didn’t open early. Elliott was surprised it actually had enough business to sustain itself. Who put healing crystals and incense on their weekly shopping list? Okay, so people like Abby were totally into all that stuff, but regular people? Nobody else needed a constant supply of sandalwood dhoop cones and wizard figurines, surely.

  “Can you and Greta get some groceries today?” Elliott asked.

  “Sure,” Abby said. “I’ll write a list. Do you want anything in particular?”

  Elliott shook his head, and rose from his seat so Abby could take his place at the little table. “Oh. Maybe some lemongrass tea?”

  Abby threw him a smile. “As if I’d forget to buy my baby his favorite tea!”

  “I thought I was your baby,” Greta groused.

  “You are all my babies,” Abby said.

  “I’m your favorite though, right?” Greta asked, wide-eyed and innocent.

  “You’re all my favorites,” Abby said airily.

  Greta rolled her eyes, and Elliott hid a smile as he sat down on the couch. Greta was always trying to trick their parents into declaring her the favorite. It had never worked with their dad, and it was never going to work with Abby either. She was wise to Greta’s tricks.

  Elliott scrolled through the news on his phone, and wondered if any of the wifi networks showing belonged to the shop. There was one called Crystalz, which sounded like it had potential, but also sounded like it might belong to a seedy strip club or something. It was the fault of the Z, probably. The network was password protected, so Elliott made a mental note to ask John about it later. He’d rather not blow through all his data if he could be using John’s wifi.

  After breakfast, Abby and Greta dressed and headed off to enroll Greta at the local school. Greta looked particularly thunderous and uncooperative, which meant she was more nervous than she wanted to let on.

  “Give ’em hell, Greta,” Elliott said. “But not too much hell.”

  That earned him what looked to be an unwilling smile before Abby ushered her out the back door and down the stairs.

  Elliott set about unpacking his scant boxes. He moved his clothes into Abby’s room and took over half the closet. Not ideal, but it’d work for a while. The Naked Blue Lady was leaning on the wall behind the bed. Elliott considered himself long ago inured to her, but she looked even bigger and more confronting resting on the floor. World’s Most Disturbing Headboard. They could charge people money to tangle up in blankets and roll around on Abby’s bed until they were free, and call it a rebirthing experience. The crystals-and-wizards crowd would probably go for it.

  The squeal of the pipes in the bathroom alerted him to the fact that Marianne was up. Elliott moved back out into the living area and tried his best to fit the rest of his stuff on the small set of shelves under the window. What wouldn’t fit on the shelves stayed in the box beside them.

  It was workable, but Elliott really needed to look into getting an actual paying job—actual health insurance would be nice too—and then moving everyone into a bigger place.

  “Oh, wow,” Marianne said, trailing out of the bathroom and into the kitchen wearing only a towel. “Do we seriously only have grilled cheese for breakfast?”

  “Mom’s getting groceries today.”

  “Ugh.” She stood and dripped on the floor for a moment longer. “I think I saw a coffee shop yesterday. I’m going to buy a bagel.”

  “Make sure you do it before ten,” Elliott told her.

  “Why?”

  “We’re minding the store today, apparently.”

  “Ugh,” Marianne said again, and finally headed off into her bedroom to get dressed.

  ***

  “And this,” John announced as he concluded the tour of the crowded little shop, “is the cash register! She’s a bit temperamental, so you need to smack her on the side to get the drawer to open. You’ll soon get the hang of it!” He beamed at a dubious Elliott and Marianne. “Let me show you how to run a charge card.” And then, barely thirty minutes later: “Right, then! You seem to have a handle on things. I’m taking the day off!”

  And that was it.

  The bells above the shop door jangled as John made his escape into the cold, fresh air outside, and then Elliott and Marianne were alone, and in charge.

  Elliott eyed a smoking stick of incense, and then picked the small brass stand up and shifted it further down the counter.

  “Ooh!” Marianne exclaimed, ducking out from behind the counter to inspect the rack of books nearest them. “Look, Elliott! A Beginner’s Guide to Tantric Sex.” She plucked the book off the rack and turned it over to check the back. “It’s thirty dollars!”

  “Who would—”

  “Seems like a solid investment,” Marianne said with a grin. “It’d pay for itself in mind-blowing orgasms, right?”

  Elliott sighed.

  “Although . . .” Marianne flicked through the book. “Who’d want to have sex for like twenty hours at a time?”

  “Twenty?” Elliott asked. “Hours?”

  “Wouldn’t you get hungry?” Marianne paused on a page. “Do you think chafing would be an issue? It can’t be penetration that whole time, right?”

  “Sometimes I wish I’d been born on the repressed WASP side of the family,” Elliott told her.

  “Liar.” Marianne put the book down again and began to browse the shelves. “So do you think we’ll get any actual customers, or—” She straightened up as the bells on the door jangled and an older couple stepped inside. “Good morning!”

  Elliott sat on the stool behind the counter and watched as Marianne spoke with the customers. She was always good with new people. Better than Elliott, at any rate. Just like their parents: every stranger was a new best friend. She chattered away happily with the older couple—tourists—and directed them toward the shelf of figurines carved by local artists from crystal sourced from the caves up past the springs. She sounded like she’d lived in Barton Lake her whole life. Not bad for someone who’d only read the same tourist map these people had. Her friendliness encouraged them to spend over eighty dollars on little crystal figurines of a deer, a wolf, and a bird.

  “This is fun,” Marianne announced a while later as she trailed a feather duster along one of the shelves. “Remember when we were little and we had that toy grocery store with the plastic counter and register and everything?”

  Elliott smiled. “I remember Mom threw the register away and said we shoul
d give all our groceries away for free because capitalism was evil.”

  Marianne laughed. “Right!”

  Elliott’s smile faded. He dug around in a small basket of worry stones beside the register, and found one that was marked down to a dollar. There was a crack in the sloping indentation on its surface. Elliott held the stone and rubbed his thumb over it, mapping the dimensions of the crack. It was almost soothing in a way. Cracked. Imperfect. Still solid. Elliott was almost tempted to pay a dollar for the thing. He slipped it back into the basket instead.

  He wondered how Abby and Greta were doing at the school.

  “Have you thought about college?” he asked.

  Marianne looked up from her dusting. “Well, it’s not like we’ve got the money for it, is it?”

  “No.” Elliott rolled his shoulders. “There are community colleges, though. With payment plans. And there are loans and scholarships.”

  “I probably won’t go.”

  “You should.”

  “Well, so should you,” Marianne said. She raised her eyebrows. “You gave up college to help look after Dad, so why shouldn’t I do the same to help look after Mom?”

  “Because I’m already doing it, Mar.” Elliott rearranged some brochures on the counter: Visit the Hot Springs and the Crystal Caves! At Beautiful Barton Lake! The same Comic Sans and rainbow lettering as the tourist map. The Barton Lake Tourism Board needed to lift their game.

  Marianne wrinkled her nose. “College will still be there in a year. I mean, Dad just died, Elliott.” She held his gaze, a strange longing on her face, as though she was willing him to understand something she couldn’t quite articulate.