When Jeremy gets home, his father is making upside-down pizza in a casserole dish for dinner.
Meeting writers is usually disappointing at best. Writers who write sexy thrillers aren’t necessarily sexy or thrilling in person. Children’s book writers might look more like accountants, or axe murderers for that matter. Horror writers are very rarely scary looking, although they are frequently good cooks.
Though Gordon Strangle Mars is scary looking. He has long, thin fingers—currently slimy with pizza sauce—which are why he chose “Strangle” for his fake middle name. He has white-blond hair that he tugs on while he writes until it stands straight up. He has a bad habit of suddenly appearing beside you, when you haven’t even realized he was in the same part of the house. His eyes are deep-set and he doesn’t blink very often. Karl says that when you meet Jeremy’s father, he looks at you as if he were imagining you bundled up and stuck away in some giant spider’s larder. Which is probably true.
People who read books probably never bother to wonder if their favorite writers are also good parents. Why would they?
Gordon Strangle Mars is a recreational shoplifter. He has a special, complicated, and unspoken arrangement with the local bookstore, where, in exchange for autographing as many Gordon Strangle Mars novels as they can possibly sell, the store allows Jeremy’s father to shoplift books without comment. Jeremy’s mother shows up sooner or later and writes a check.
Jeremy’s feelings about his father are complicated. His father is a cheapskate and a petty thief, and yet Jeremy likes his father. His father hardly ever loses his temper with Jeremy, he is always interested in Jeremy’s life, and he gives interesting (if confusing) advice when Jeremy asks for it. For example, if Jeremy asked his father about kissing Elizabeth, his father might suggest that Jeremy not worry about giant spiders when he kisses Elizabeth. Jeremy’s father’s advice usually has something to do with giant spiders.
When Jeremy and Karl weren’t speaking to each other, it was Jeremy’s father who straightened them out. He lured Karl over, and then locked them both into his study. He didn’t let them out again until they were on speaking terms.
“I thought of a great idea for your book,” Jeremy says. “What if one of the spiders builds a web on a soccer field, across a goal? And what if the goalie doesn’t notice until the middle of the game? Could somebody kill one of the spiders with a soccer ball, if they kicked it hard enough? Would it explode? Or even better, the spider could puncture the soccer ball with its massive fangs. That would be cool, too.”
“Your mother’s out in the garage,” Gordon Strangle Mars says to Jeremy. “She wants to talk to you.”
“Oh,” Jeremy says. All of a sudden, he thinks of Fox in Talis’s dream, trying to phone him. Trying to warn him. Unreasonably, he feels that it’s his parents’ fault that Fox is dead now, as if they have killed her. “Is it about you? Are you getting divorced?”
“I don’t know,” his father says. He hunches his shoulders. He makes a face. It’s a face that Jeremy’s father makes frequently, and yet this face is even more pitiful and guilty than usual.
“What did you do?” Jeremy says. “Did you get caught shoplifting at Wal-Mart?”
“No,” his father says.
“Did you have an affair?”
“No!” his father says, again. Now he looks disgusted, either with himself or with Jeremy for asking such a horrible question. “I screwed up. Let’s leave it at that.”
“How’s the book coming?” Jeremy says. There is something in his father’s voice that makes him feel like kicking something, but there are never giant spiders around when you need them.
“I don’t want to talk about that, either,” his father says, looking, if possible, even more ashamed. “Go tell your mother dinner will be ready in five minutes. Maybe you and I can watch the new episode of The Library after dinner, if you haven’t already seen it a thousand times.”
“Do you know the end? Did Mom tell you that Fox is—”
“Oh jeez,” his father interrupts. “They killed Fox?”
That’s the problem with being a writer, Jeremy knows. Even the biggest and most startling twists are rarely twists for you. You know how every story goes.
Jeremy’s mother is an orphan. Jeremy’s father claims that she was raised by feral silent-film stars, and it’s true, she looks like a heroine out of a Harold Lloyd movie. She has an appealingly disheveled look to her, as if someone has either just tied or untied her from a set of train tracks. She met Gordon Mars (before he added the Strangle and sold his first novel) in the food court of a mall in New Jersey, and fell in love with him before realizing that he was a writer and a recreational shoplifter. She didn’t read anything he’d written until after they were married, which was a typically cunning move on Jeremy’s father’s part.
Jeremy’s mother doesn’t read horror novels. She doesn’t like ghost stories or unexplained phenomena or even the kind of phenomena that require excessively technical explanations. For example: microwaves, airplanes. She doesn’t like Halloween, not even Halloween candy. Jeremy’s father gives her special editions of his novels, where the scary pages have been glued together.
Jeremy’s mother is quiet more often than not. Her name is Alice and sometimes Jeremy thinks about how the two quietest people he knows are named Alice and Talis. But his mother and Talis are quiet in different ways. Jeremy’s mother is the kind of person who seems to be keeping something hidden, something secret. Whereas Talis just is a secret. Jeremy’s mother could easily turn out to be a secret agent. But Talis is the death ray or the key to immortality or whatever it is that secret agents have to keep secret. Hanging out with Talis is like hanging out with a teenage black hole.
Jeremy’s mother is sitting on the floor of the garage, beside a large cardboard box. She has a photo album in her hands. Jeremy sits down beside her.
There are photographs of a cat on a wall, and something blurry that looks like a whale or a zeppelin or a loaf of bread. There’s a photograph of a small girl sitting beside a woman. The woman wears a fur collar with a sharp little muzzle, four legs, a tail, and Jeremy feels a sudden pang. Fox is the first dead person that he’s ever cared about, but she’s not real. The little girl in the photograph looks utterly blank, as if someone has just hit her with a hammer. Like the person behind the camera has just said, “Smile! Your parents are dead!”
“Cleo,” Jeremy’s mother says, pointing to the woman. “That’s Cleo. She was my mother’s aunt. She lived in Los Angeles. I went to live with her when my parents died. I was four. I know I’ve never talked about her. I’ve never really known what to say about her.”
Jeremy says, “Was she nice?”
His mother says, “She tried to be nice. She didn’t expect to be saddled with a little girl. What an odd word. Saddled. As if she were a horse. As if somebody put me on her back and I never got off again. She liked to buy clothes for me. She liked clothes. She hadn’t had a happy life. She drank a lot. She liked to go to movies in the afternoon and to séances in the evenings. She had boyfriends. Some of them were jerks. The love of her life was a small-time gangster. He died and she never married. She always said marriage was a joke and that life was a bigger joke, and it was just her bad luck that she didn’t have a sense of humor. So it’s strange to think that all these years she was running a wedding chapel.”