A very inconvenient scan.., p.28
A Very Inconvenient Scandal, page 28
“Like Pandora’s box,” Simon said.
“Exactly like that.”
“But the last thing in the box was the little angel. Hope.”
“I always forget that part.” She went on, “Simon, you must have heard about people trying to contaminate food. Don’t they do that to try to sue food companies?” He nodded. “So what do they put in it?”
“All kinds of disgusting stuff, Frankie. Scraping from infected wounds. Cat feces. You don’t want to hear this. Insecticide. Bleach. Ground-up prescription pills. Lots of times, though, it’s just ordinary stuff. Salt or salt water. Way too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.”
When they parted, Frankie was reluctant. She wanted to cry out Take me with you! I want to be rich-rich and go to charity balls and swim in the pool and take pictures of daisies. Take me back to that house with the beautiful porch under the stars! Never mind that bespectacled Canadian guy behind the curtain. He’ll be better-off.
Then she rushed home to Gil and Atty.
When Gil saw her, he shoved a mug of tea into her hands and heated up a piece of quiche from the last of the frozen things his mother had made at the time of the wedding. As he did, he related how he had watched the social worker search every drawer and cupboard, dumping half of the unopened boxes from the pantry into a large white plastic bag and sealing all the open containers, from milk to ketchup to applesauce, in clear plastic bags that they labeled and placed in cartons with cardboard dividers.
“It was awful, Frankie,” he told her.
Then Mack and Ariel came home. Mack went into his study and closed the door. Gil said he was pale, his face stubbled. Ariel began throwing clothes for herself and Ben into a gym bag. She would take a shower and go right back to the hospital. She was crying, and when Penn showed up, she asked him where the baby food from the freezer was, and Penn said maybe the cleaner had thrown it out accidentally, but not to worry, that there was more in the carriage house—which he went over and got for her.
“He did what?” Frankie said.
“He went and got the baby food, and Ariel thanked him, but she was crying so hard by then that Penn said he would drive her back to the hospital.”
“He gave her the frozen baby food they made?”
“I guess she didn’t want Ben to have hospital baby food.”
“Where is she now?”
“They left. Your dad is going back in a few minutes, I guess. He was going over some checklists left about what was seized. I feel sorry for him, Frankie. He looks terrible. It would be awful if this ended up on the news, but even the gossip... For an academic, gossip is death.”
Frankie knew Gil was still talking as he turned away from her to change the baby. But she didn’t hear him. She sprinted, if you could call it that, across to the house and took two of the little jars of homemade baby food from the freezer. They looked exactly the same as the ones she had given to Simon. The date on the label, just over a week before, was exactly the same, written with the same Sharpie marker in green. That didn’t mean anything. Bad deeds such as these were planned carefully. People sat up, fevered eyes open in the darkness. If they were smart, they planned the next step, and three moves on from that, like chess players. If they were crafty enough, that kind of sleight of hand would be exactly what they would do.
Frankie rushed back to their cottage. After putting the containers in the freezer, she said, “Oh please. Give Atty to me. I feel like I haven’t seen him in months.”
Her rosy dark-haired son molded himself gratefully into her arms and pushed against her breast to be fed. Think, Frankie instructed herself, the baby’s suck a force that tethered her to earth. Think before you do anything else. If a social worker was interviewing Ariel because they suspected she somehow poisoned Ben, surely they wouldn’t let her bring poisoned food from home and give it to him under the doctors’ noses. Right? That had to be right.
Poisoned food?
Ariel, she thought. Ariel!
Let it be okay, she pleaded with a glowering universe. Let all this please be okay. Let Ben be okay. And I promise that it stops right here. How many times had she rolled her eyes at people who prayed for good grades on the LSAT or for their periods to come or to find their grandmother’s pearl ring...as if fate were a personal genie to be summoned in a time of need.
Though it was not full spring, the sunset was lurid, the gulls crossing in the air making their raucous appeal. She heard her father’s car crunching along the shell drive. Her phone rang.
“Frankie, it’s Simon Land. I’m finished with this job you asked me to do. I got to it quicker than I thought. I know how important it is,” he said. “Do you want to meet?”
“Do you have the contaminants written down? I can come there and get—”
“Frankie, there were no contaminants of any kind. Peas, carrots, apple. No chemicals, no impurities. This is probably as safe for a baby to eat as baby food can get.”
“Did you—”
He interrupted her. “Just to be safe, I did a separate sampling from every one of the ten containers and the three bottles. Same result for every one of them. Nothing.” He added, “I want you to know that I’m not a forensic chemist. This is a food-science lab, and it’s possible that we don’t have the capacity to find something unless it’s obvious. I’m just saying it wouldn’t hurt to give these samples to the social worker or the police, if they get involved, if you have any more of them.”
“I will, if I have to. Simon, thank you so much. I can never thank you enough.”
“I hope it puts your mind at ease.”
“It does. I feel silly now, as though I’ve been some kind of village lady in a British mystery poking around in the rhododendrons looking for clues.”
“I admire you for it, Frankie. You care.”
“I’m paranoid...and way too nosy.”
“Nosy, paranoid people care too.”
Frankie rebuked herself. How could she ever have suspected Ariel of any wrongdoing? Except when it came to choosing a husband, Ariel was kind and sane.
She left to go for a walk, to clear her head, and as she left the cottage she saw a brand-new car in the driveway at her father’s house, dark maroon in color. She inched closer. A Lexus. Had Penn bought a car? Then out of the house came Carlotta, clad in a long silver jacket with matching pants, a string of pearls interspersed with bright blue stones hanging almost to her waist. Her long thick hair was now short, in a fashionable, edgy chop. She waved gaily to Frankie as she removed a suitcase from the car.
Was she back? Was she visiting? Frankie wasn’t sure what to say, and she felt vaguely guilty about all those photos she and Ellabella were perusing. She simply waved. Then, repenting, she turned and said, “Well, hi. It’s been a while.”
A month, but Carlotta, perhaps not surprisingly, simply shrugged.
“So,” Frankie went on finally, “I had to move some of your boxes and bags. They’re all in my friend Ellabella’s garage. It’s fancy and climate-controlled so you don’t have to worry. I’ll help you move your things into the condominium as soon as the renters are gone. I think we may have dropped a couple of your file boxes, but I put everything back as best I could. It’ll just be a few days now, right?”
“We’ll see,” Carlotta said, in a surprisingly acerbic tone. “I’ll be staying put here with Ariel and Mack until Ben is better, at least. The poor little guy.”
Frankie walked over to the car, detecting that unmistakable new-car scent.
“Do you need any help?”
“I’m fine,” Carlotta said.
On the back seat were an Apple computer bag and a caramel-colored Birkin bag—not that Frankie would have known what a Birkin bag looked like if she hadn’t recently seen Ellabella’s. Why had she ever thought that Carlotta didn’t have money, Frankie asked herself, even before she knew about her widow’s gifts? She answered her own question: people who lived on communes and picked beets didn’t drive a Lexus or buy a new Mac laptop...or did they? Maybe it was a rental car. Maybe it was borrowed. Maybe whatever was in that computer-store box was the only new thing Carlotta had purchased in years. Penn was right: what it was possible to know about Carlotta was exactly nothing.
“You know, I might see if Ariel would sell the condo,” Carlotta was saying. “Then I could get something a little more modest. I could sell the land where the old cabin used to be too. That location probably means it’s worth good money now. Do you know any Realtors?”
“My dad does,” Frankie said, her mind thrumming. Carlotta didn’t own the condo, Ariel did, right? And she didn’t know about all the things that Sailor had told them. Or did she? “So that stuff I moved, are you moving it back for now?”
Carlotta said, “I’ll get Penn to move it. I really am looking forward to having a place of my own, though. I need some privacy, heaven knows. But I can wait a little longer. I probably should get on over to the hospital.”
“Ariel will be really glad to see you. She hasn’t been able to reach you for weeks now.”
Carlotta said, “Hmmm. I’ll mention that real-estate thing to your dad today.”
“Maybe not today,” Frankie said. “If Ben doesn’t improve today, they’re going to transfer him to some special diagnostic unit at Boston Children’s.”
“Right!” Carlotta said. “I’m sure he’ll be fine.”
Why was she so breezy? Frankie chided herself. That was simply Carlotta’s way. And...how did she even know how sick Ben was? Who had she been talking to? Did she think that the illness was genetic, much like what Ariel had had as a child, and did she know that Ariel had shared her own history with Ben’s doctors? Or did she know even more? That was impossible. She hadn’t been around for weeks. Ben hadn’t even gotten sick again until after Carlotta left.
Frankie decided to call Ellabella, the only person with whom she didn’t feel like a fruitcake for divulging her creepy suspicions.
What was Carlotta up to, after all?
At the time of her wedding, Carlotta had regaled everyone with the story of weathering a massive storm on a fishing trawler. “This was a big boat,” Frankie remembered her saying. “A big boat with twenty men and only two women. One was the cook, and one was me. The cook had two sons on the boat, fishermen, one was about eighteen and one was a little older. So this storm comes up, four in the morning, and the old guys say it’s as bad as anything they ever saw. Lightning and thunder and wind just screaming. That big boat was bouncing around like a tub toy, and huge waves were washing over the deck. Stuff breaking, stuff falling off the shelves. People were puking. And suddenly this woman, Rena, says to me, ‘This is horrible and I’m having a baby.’ I think, why would you come out on a fishing boat if you were pregnant? And I said, ‘Are you sick to your stomach? Go below and try to lie down so you don’t slip and fall.’ But she says, ‘I’m having a baby right now!’ And she was! We’re about a hundred miles from nowhere at all, off the Grand Banks, and she’s in the bunk, and I’m yelling for people to bring me scissors, and she’s screaming, and she pushes out this little baby girl, she’s perfectly fine, Rena says, thank you. Two hours later, the storm was over, and she’s making pancakes.” She added, “All I can say is, she was lucky I once studied to be a nurse.”
It was a great story. How Grandpa Frank had loved that story! And like every one of her stories, it offered not one single syllable to explain Carlotta’s role in the matter.
That was always the one thing no one could ever really explain.
14
“Lots of people have hidden lives,” Ellabella said. “Haven’t you ever heard those stories about men who have two families in the same neighborhood?”
“I hear about stuff like that, and I always think the wife has to know, but she’s in denial,” Frankie said. “I would know.”
“Think about it. Mack was always taking off. He could have had a second family in some island nation. Or in Chicago for that matter.”
Frankie began to laugh. “That’s all I need. I feel like this is a curse of the cat people or something. You saying it is going to make it true!”
Ben was apparently well again, his symptoms having once more disappeared as mysteriously as they’d arisen. He was crawling all over, and Ariel’s relief, both at having her baby and her mother back, was like a light around her.
They were lounging in Ellabella’s rooms, and Frankie could not stop teasing her about their opulence. “If I ring for tea, will a faithful retainer come? With a heated pot?”
“No, but I’ll get us some tea if you want. You look worn-out—not to be insulting.”
“I am worn-out. Women used to lose a tooth when they had a baby. I still have all my choppers, but I could sleep eighteen hours a day, like a dog. And now it’s time to go back to work.”
Earlier that morning, an uncharacteristically balmy day in May, finally able to squeeze into her wet suit, Frankie hired a pilot to go out with her while she began experimenting with the way she would take pictures for a private commission, a pair of triptychs of seals made from consecutive above-and-below the surface shots. Frankie was not a fan of seals: they were inquisitive and aggressive, and where they were, sharks followed. But the collector was very free with his money, gratefully accepting the first crazy figure that Frankie threw out, so she had no choice. There were adult and juvenile seals all over the place, and it was past the time of day that sharks favored for their brunch. The pilot was a very nice guy from Woods Hole who was training in excavating crash sites with a view to identifying the remains of crew members who might have been listed only as missing for fifty years or more. His family lived on Cape Cod, where his mother and father were both ministers. The pilot was considering becoming a minister also. When Frankie pointed out the irony of her using her father’s boat while simultaneously not speaking to him, the young man said he would pray for them. Frankie nearly laughed, until she saw in his face that he wasn’t kidding.
She would take any help she was offered.
At the same time she was practicing the way she would take the photos, she had decided to do something else she’d promised: testing and rating a new tankless diving system that used a battery-powered compressor to supply breathing air to divers through air tubes. Dubbed Aqua Spiritus, this wasn’t by far the first of these systems. But this new one had the advantage of being so light and portable it was almost like carrying a briefcase. The ease of using it—and how it could extend diving times without any threat to the diver—made it a pretty enticing alternative to even the lightest tanks. She ended up loving the device.
When Frankie got back to their dock, she was surprised to find Carlotta sitting on the little side pier, dangling her feet in the cold water. “I have to ask you a favor,” she said without preamble. “I want you to help me talk to Ariel about selling the condominium. She’s avoiding the subject with me.”
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Frankie said as she paid her helper extra because he’d agreed to clean the boat for her, a rare luxury.
“I just want her to see my side,” Carlotta said. “She’s been able to keep the rent from that place for all these years. Now I’m going to need a place to live, and it’s only fair.”
Fair, Frankie thought, didn’t begin to address it. This was another of Carlotta’s blithe assertions which, as Penn described them, sounded as if they meant something but really didn’t.
“Oh, and Frankie, one of these times, can I come out and watch you again? I’m very good at driving this boat.”
“You’ve driven my dad’s boat? On your own?” She wanted to say Does he know?
“Sure,” Carlotta said. “He was fine with it.”
This Frankie doubted at a cellular level, but she said nothing. Mack had a hard time even with her or Penn using his precious boat, but perhaps he was mellowing with age. “Sure,” she said, trying to be mellow on her own. “It’s fine if you come out with me again.” She then, reluctantly, asked Carlotta if she and Ariel could come over for dessert that evening.
To Ellabella, Frankie said, “I am pleading with you to come too. Please just come for a little while.”
“What can I do?”
“You’re just really good at reading people. I can’t tell if Carlotta is on the level or not. She seems like she’s entirely ordinary but not one word about where she was for the past couple of weeks. She doesn’t say, I was on a business trip buying rare stones for my new jewelry business... or I went to an ashram for a silent retreat. Nothing. I suspect it has to do with the Peace Patch Orchard that I saw on that file, so I looked it up.” She waited. Ellabella seemed preoccupied. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”
Ellabella said, “I’m going to guess. It’s probably this big vegetable-and fruit-growing commune in Alaska where they grow cabbages the size of pumpkins and pumpkins the size of Mini Coopers. And it’s all presided over by a woman who says she came from another galaxy and her three sons, who apparently came from this one because they each have about ten wives.”
“You already knew!”
“Just good investigative reporting,” Ellabella said. “It took all of two keystrokes.” The sons, Ellabella further pointed out, were always getting in trouble for plural marriages and underage brides.
“Well, the only things in Carlotta’s Peace Patch folder were some flyers advertising the vegetables—and believe me, those zucchini were pretty obscene—and some stuff about the vegan-food company they’re starting. Oh, and a copy of a little essay from a magazine about the ups and downs of communal parenting. That’s when your biological mother is only one of the people who raise you.”
