Slide - Kyle Beachy [18]
four
several days later I came home to find a second package waiting on the kitchen island. White box, flat and rectangular, sent from abroad. Par avion. I shook it and listened. I set it down and glared at it. My mother entered through the side door, her hands caked with dark brown earth and face like birthday candle flame, a shade of red stretching well beyond this single moment.
“Sonny boy. That came for you today.”
She went to the sink to wash her hands. My mother's feelings for Audrey were less than clear. The natural wish to see her only son made happy set against the stealthy undercurrents of rivalry, and the protective factor, the inevitable distrust. With my father it was perfectly simple: he liked Audrey. Adored her. That first dinner together, all the questions he had prepared for her, and how his face alit at every question she offered back. From that first visit between freshman and sophomore years, Audrey was exceedingly good at this. She knew to ask about the additions to the house and to ask about law, funnel what she knew of public health into a series of questions about first Richard's legal practice, then about SLH! once he took over as director. And she knew enough to never ever ask about Freddy.
I watched my mother use the small brush to get underneath her nails. Now she handed me a steak knife and stood on the other side of the island. She could, if she so chose, stand there forever. I cut through one end of the box and removed a single rectangular object encased in bubble wrap.
A picture,” she said.
Dammit, she was right. A picture of the two of them outside a beautiful European chateau on top of a hill above this green-yellow tableau of trees and hills and fields and far far in the background the gray pinprick of a farmhouse. The whole scene illuminated through Jesus Christ cloud break, just so nicely beautiful it might have been painted. The picture was set in a hand-carved frame of some dark ancient wood, intricate squiggles and beautiful tiny flowers. I examined closely the setting, the margins between chateau and sky, looking for signs of forgery or enhancement. But the colors were real. Scenery: real. Girls: beautiful. And one of them: bisexual.
My mother found her reading glasses. “Who is that with Audrey?”
“Carmel,” I said.
“She's very pretty,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “And a robot.”
Before Audrey and Carmel's friendship, I knew Carmel as everyone else knew her, the gorgeous and lithe girl from Long Island, olive-skinned and enchantingly standoffish. She spent that first year running through boy-men, obliterating them. I saw three of my personal friends fall by her hand, crumble into pathetic heaps and then take months and more to claw their way upright. Women, once her interest in women became known, fared no better. She was not wicked and she was not cruel. She was not governed by malice. All she was was immune to what anyone might call humanity. She was a robot.
The photograph's subject was more the terrain than the girls, but the delicacy by which they'd been set toward the bottom right corner was worrisome. For someone had taken this picture, some person with whom I was now irrevocably linked, the photo-taker a surrogate me, and I surrogate him. Or her. Or him.
Audrey's other friendships remained loose affairs with little given or taken. She had her family at home and me in her bed. By the spring of sophomore year, Carmel had become the third. For a time I had to remind myself that Audrey having a friend this close was a good thing. But there was something almost promising about this variety of selfishness. Clutching at her like a boy in a sandbox unwilling to share his favorite toy I demonstrated my love. Add to this the manner in which we moved on from the cheating, confident, recklessly