“Anyway what?”
“Nuthin’.” Thomas didn’t want to say that he felt that his mother was watching him and that she would have been upset to see him with some prostitute or drug addict.
“Oh, baby, yeah,” Connie said through the wall.
“Do you want to sleep with me?” Clea asked. Her tone was both serious and soft.
“I’d like to try,” Thomas said.
“I bet we could find some condoms in Connie’s bathroom.”
17
Raela Timor took her place at an ebony dining table that was so large it took up almost the whole dining room, and that room was twenty feet wide and thirty long. The family of four was at the north end of the table, with Kronin Stark — still in his tailor-made suit, still wearing his red silk-and-gold tie — at the head. When Rita the maid served Raela her sliced pork roast and red cabbage, the girl thanked her but did not pick up her fork.
“You gonna eat that, sis?” Michael asked.
He hadn’t been home in a week, but he could tell that there was something wrong. His court-appointed guardian, Maya, was drawn and haggard, while Kronin looked even more menacing than usual. Raela, as always, was beautiful. If anything she was even more ethereal, slighter, even closer to taking off on the slightest passing breeze.
“I’m not that hungry,” she said.
“You should eat,” Maya suggested, worry stitched into the words.
“Maybe later.”
“Eat your food,” Kronin Stark growled.
“Is that an order?”
“You damn well better believe it’s an order.” The master of the house spoke in his deepest, most threatening bass tone.
Michael felt a quailing in his chest.
Raela rose from her seat.
“Sit down,” Kronin commanded.
“I will not stay at a table where men are cursing at me,” she said.
With that the girl walked out of the room. Michael thought that she seemed a little uncertain on her feet.
“Raela,” Kronin called, his voice filled with sudden grief.
But the woman-child left the room without looking back.
“What’s wrong with her?” Michael asked.
“Shut up and eat your food,” Kronin snapped.
Later that evening Michael found his sister in the upstairs living room. She was knitting him a sweater made from a skein of uncolored raw silk that was specially imported from Tibet by one of Kronin’s thankful business partners.
Raela was always happy to see her brother. She cared for him more than anyone, at least until she’d met Eric — and now Tommy.
“What’s wrong with Stark?” Michael asked. “He’s like a grizzly.”
“It’s nothing,” she said, not interrupting her stitch count.
Though Michael was the older sibling, he knew better than to make demands of his sister. He brought out one of his economics texts and sat there vainly trying to plumb the secrets of money and how it made and destroyed men’s lives.
A half an hour or so later, Kronin Stark lunged into the room. He was still wearing his suit but had discarded the tie. His feet were prone to swelling, so he wore slippers instead of shoes.
“Leave us alone, Michael,” Stark said, while his eyes bored into the downcast girl.
Michael stood, and so did his sister.
“You stay,” Kronin ordered.
“I’m not your damn servant,” she said, barely raising her voice. “And neither is my brother. If you want to talk to me, do it with Mikey here.”
Michael felt like a bug he’d once seen on the nature channel. Beneath the sand a hypersensitive subterranean snake was stalking him while from behind came the shuffle of a small rodent that had picked up his spoor. He’d die if he ran and die if he stood still. Michael had turned off the show, unable to bear it because of his identification with the insect.
“I will not be bullied by you,” Kronin said to the queen of his heart.
“I’m not the bully.”
“What did you do with that money?”
“It’s my money, and I can do with it what I please.”
“Not ten thousand dollars.”
“Why not? Didn’t you put it into my account? Didn’t you tell me that you trusted me to make sensible decisions?”
“I don’t know if I trust you anymore.”
“I’m tired,” Raela said then. “I’m going to bed.”
“Eat something,” Kronin said, no longer loud or a bully.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’ll die.”
“Everything dies.”
Michael was beyond understanding this confrontation. He was unaware of Eric’s relationship with his sister. He hadn’t heard much from his friend since the funeral. Michael had called Eric, but that phone number was disconnected and he’d taken a leave from UCLA.
Raela walked out, leaving the older man seething and the younger one perplexed.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Kronin asked Michael.
“No, sir.”
“Why not? You brought him into this house.”
“Who?”
“That Eric Nolan. He’s bewitched her. She’s taken all the money I gave her and given it to him.”
“To Eric? Why?”
“Talk to your sister. And if you want to keep coming here you’d better make her listen to reason. The only reason you are suffered in this house is because of her.”
Michael had always known that he was not a true member of the family. Maya never wanted him, and Kronin hadn’t adopted him. Everyone loved his sister, not him. But no one had ever spoken these words. No one had ever told him that he was worthless. And so, even though he revered Stark and loved his life among the rich in Bel-Air, Michael went to his room and packed up his few things. He drove away from the Stark residence with no intention of returning.
Six blocks away his cell phone sounded.
“Hello?”
“Come back home, Michael,” Maya said into the receiver.
It was the first time she’d called him in well over a year. He disconnected the call.
A few minutes later the phone sounded again. Michael wouldn’t have answered except that it might have been his sister.
“Yes?”
Kronin Stark’s voice boomed into the young man’s ear. “Michael.”
Again he disconnected the call.
Michael drove for many miles that night, taking the same path that Christie had when she’d made her fateful decision. He couldn’t have known where Christie had gone, but there he was. He stopped at a motel outside of Twentynine Palms and gave them his credit card.
“Do you have another one, son?” the silver-haired proprietor asked. “This one’s being declined.”
The room was only twenty-nine dollars a night, a promotional offer for the off-season. Michael had enough money to last him a week.
He went to his room, which opened onto the parking lot, and sat on the lumpy mattress, amazed that Kronin had canceled his credit card so quickly. This made Michael feel insubstantial. It was as if his whole life had been jotted down in light pencil and at any moment it could be completely erased. He had no mother or father, no one who loved him.
“Do you love me?” he had asked his sister when he was seventeen and she was eleven. He asked because he needed someone to care, and he believed that he saw his love reflected in Raela’s eyes.
“I would die for you,” she replied.
That night he went across the highway to the Monster Bar and ordered a beer. It was a small bungalow under the huge, looming shadow of a billboard in the shape of a Gila monster. The reptile’s fat red tongue lolled lasciviously.
The woman behind the bar was named Doris Tina Warren. Her lower lip had been deeply cut from side to side, and the scar was like another, fatter lip bulging out from the first one.