Bluff Read online

  “Natalie?”

  “What?” I said.

  “So is this the part where you tell me you’re in?”

  6

  It was true, by the way, about the helicopter. I still remember my father talking about his boss’s aerial commute as if wealth had nothing to do with it. As if it were nothing more than a matter of shrewd time management.

  “All that traffic on the Jersey Turnpike, at the tunnel. What a waste of time and money,” my father would say. “Victor Flowers arrives at his office in fourteen minutes.”

  If you didn’t fear flying and had enough money maybe it made sense. My father would have known. He was a numbers guy, even if he didn’t look like one: six-foot-three and thick everywhere. He’d taken accounting courses at Union County and Fairleigh Dickinson, delivering those pianos to pay for it, and he wasn’t far from a degree when debt and lower back pain finally got the better of him. He dropped the coursework and took a job at the Flowers Corporation as a bookkeeper, hoping to work his way up. And he did—far enough, some half a dozen years later, for us to receive an invitation to the Memorial Day party that Mr. Flowers threw each year at his waterfront home in the Highlands.

  I was excited to go. At eight years old I believed that all mansions held secret rooms and hidden treasure. And my mother loved the shore, though when Memorial Day came, she said she wasn’t feeling well. Too many hours on her feet, she said, doing inventory at the bookstore.

  So it was just my father and me. Driving south on the parkway, he told me that Victor Flowers used to be a rock-and-roll singer before he went into business and made millions of dollars. And his foundation, Notes for Kids, donated musical instruments to schools that couldn’t afford them.

  “Is he nice?” I asked.

  My father chewed on his lip before answering. “Victor Flowers is an impressive man.” He must have realized his answer had little to do with my question, because he added, “He’s been good to our family.”

  I let it drop and listened to the radio. I could tell my father had a lot on his mind, because he was muttering to himself. I thought about how I wouldn’t know anyone at this party, and wished my mother had come. But once we arrived and got out of the car, my anxiety was quelled by all the amazing smells: grilling meat, salty air, freshly cut grass, and everything in bloom.

  We walked toward the driveway, where the break in a line of high hedges gave me a view of the home where Mr. Flowers lived.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  “Whoa is right,” my father replied. I deigned to let him take my hand, and together we followed a path around the side of the stone mansion to an immense yard where kids were running and playing games like Frisbee and soccer and Wiffle ball.

  I was hungry for everything—for whatever was sizzling on the grills, and the green grass, and the bay shimmering in the sunlight beyond the high bluff, and the trees along the perimeter of the property that were ideal for climbing, and the laughter. Our Plainfield apartment was dark and heavy by comparison. My parents often talked about moving to a house with a yard. Soon, they told me. Which would have been fine. Even better would have been if our apartment could feel the way it used to. Lately, my parents either argued or avoided each other, and being at home felt like riding down a slide in cold weather and knowing that whatever you touched next would give you a shock.

  Like today. Somehow I knew, not in my brain but in a deeper part where the guts were, that my mother wasn’t actually sick. She was only pretending.

  A thin, smallish man came our way. My father said, “Honey, I’d like you to meet Mr. Flowers.”

  Mr. Flowers was dressed like my father in khaki pants and a button-down shirt. His sleeves were rolled up to just below the elbows, and his forearms were tan. His hair was dark brown, almost black, and cut short, and his face was so smooth it appeared slippery. Mr. Flowers shook my hand and smiled and said it was a pleasure to meet me. His voice was as smooth as his face. I wanted to ask him to sing a song—I’d never met a professional singer before—but I knew I couldn’t.

  Mr. Flowers said to my father, “I was hoping you and I could talk in private.”

  My father’s slow nod looked resigned, as if he’d been expecting this request. He watched the scene around us for a moment before saying, “You’ll be okay here for a few minutes, won’t you, Nat? There’s plenty of kids.”

  Of course there were, but I didn’t know any of them.

  “Dad.”

  “I promise I won’t keep him long,” Mr. Flowers said, and my father smiled and mussed my hair a little, and they went off toward the house.

  I smoothed my hair and fixed the part, then walked across the lawn to get a better view of the bay far below. My mother would have gone crazy over this view, with the New York skyline across the water to the left and, straight ahead, the Atlantic Ocean going on and on. Not to England. That’s what everyone always said, but I knew from the globe in my bedroom that if you went straight across the ocean from here you’d end up in Morocco.

  From behind me, I heard: “You’re Big Bird.”

  I turned around to face a sandy-haired boy with sun-peeled shoulders. He wasn’t in my class, but I half recognized him from school. That’s where kids had started calling me that. My hair wasn’t yellow, it was brown, and long, but I was a head taller than most of the other kids. I hated being so tall, especially for a girl, and I could think of nothing worse than being compared to a huge, big-beaked bird—a boy bird—that acted like a three-year-old.

  And the worst part? The name fit. I was exactly like a dumb big bird that could hardly balance on her own two legs.

  The boy called out to some other kids. “Look”—he pointed at me—“it’s Big Bird!”

  It was bad enough hearing it at school. For the name to follow me here, now, was unbearable. My eyes filling with tears, I hurried toward the house in my stupid dress shoes to lose myself in the crowd standing on the wooden deck. But everyone’s eyes felt heavy on me, so I let myself into the house.

  I was standing in the largest kitchen I’d ever seen. I ignored some grown-ups holding tilted cups and laughing with each other and went deeper into the house until I was alone in a room with leather sofas and a black grand piano in the corner, its cover open. On a shelf attached to the wall lay an electric guitar that someone had written on in an illegible scrawl. On another shelf was a saxophone, and on other shelves I saw a clarinet, a trumpet, a trombone.

  I wondered if any other instruments were hidden in the house, in other rooms. It started to feel like a treasure hunt, and I was ready to begin searching when I heard, through a door, a voice that sounded like my father’s when he was explaining something important to me.

  I approached the closed door and listened. Definitely my father. He had told me to wait outside, but I knew he’d probably let me stay with him if I promised to sit still and keep quiet. My hand was reaching for the doorknob when I heard another voice.

  “Oh, Dan, if you can’t even do to this one simple thing, then I don’t know what.”

  And then came my father’s voice again: “You know I haven’t been comfortable with any of this. But this. It’s … I mean no disrespect.”

  “You don’t, huh?”

  “No. I’m just being honest. It’s—”

  “It’s nothing. It’s accounting.”

  “Victor, we both know what it is.”

  “It’s what I say it is. Less than nothing.”

  And then came the strangest part. I distinctly heard my father say: It’s laundry. It’s laundry, and I’m not doing it.

  For years after, I believed the two of them had been arguing over who would do the laundry. After all, my father sometimes had that same argument with my mother. Even after I learned what money laundering was, it took me a while to paste that new information onto the old scene from my past and finally go: Ah.

  “I’d be very careful, Dan,” Mr. Flowers was telling my father. “This is way above your pay grade.”

  “It’
s criminal activity,” my father said.

  “Watch it,” Mr. Flowers said, and my eyes widened. My body stiffened. I knew from hearing my parents argue how easily a simple disagreement could explode into something larger.

  My father started speaking slowly, softly, and I realized I was wrong about having heard him talk this way before. This was new. He was trying to keep his voice from shaking. This, I suddenly realized, was what my father sounded like scared.

  “I gave you a career,” Mr. Flowers said. “Are you that ungrateful? Are you that naive?”

  Mr. Flowers wasn’t shouting. His voice was like frozen water. I understood now why my father hadn’t answered my question in the car. Mr. Flowers wasn’t nice.

  My father’s reply was so soft I could barely hear it. “I have a family,” he said. “I just can’t.”

  I heard the unmistakable sound of a fist against a hard surface—a table, a desktop—but that was the extent of Mr. Flowers’s outburst; his voice stayed under control. “I can make you do it. I don’t have to ask.”

  “I’m sorry,” my father said.

  “I really wish you had any sense at all in that giant head of yours,” he said, apparently done with back-and-forth conversation. “But you don’t, do you? You’re just a big dumb ape. I need to get something from the other room.”

  I heard footsteps coming and ducked around a corner just as Mr. Flowers came out of the room, shutting the door behind him. He turned and went the other way.

  A moment later I heard, coming from inside the room, a sickening thud, followed by a grunt. Then it all repeated.

  A man’s deep voice—not my father’s—said: “Get up.”

  I hadn’t known anyone else was in the room with my father and didn’t wait around to find out who it was. I found my feet and, heart pounding, I ran back through the kitchen and outside again, where bright sunlight assaulted me. I cut a path between adults on the deck and kept running to the cool grass, where my legs gave out and I spent the next few minutes trying to catch my breath and slow the beating of my heart.

  I waited, terrified that my father would never return to me. But soon Mr. Flowers and my father emerged from the house, along with a third man, shorter than my father but thicker in the neck and in the arms and everywhere. He wore the same nonexpression my father did when he watched Westerns on Sunday afternoon TV.

  Mr. Flowers and my father seemed to be talking calmly. At one point, Mr. Flowers touched my father’s arm. None of it made any sense. I wished I’d never entered Mr. Flowers’s house. It was an ugly, mean house. A horrible house. Bad things happened there.

  Spotting me, my father waved me over. When I approached, he smiled but it was more like a grimace.

  “Have you eaten?” Mr. Flowers asked.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “Thirsty?” he asked.

  I was so thirsty. But I didn’t want anything from him. “No.”

  Mr. Flowers removed a large coin from his pocket and bent down. “Natalie, this is a silver dollar. Have you ever seen one before?”

  The only dollars I’d ever seen were paper. I shook my head.

  He held the dollar between his thumb and fingertips.

  “Watch,” he said, and reached over with his other hand to take the coin. He slowly opened up that other hand. The coin was gone. When he reached up toward my face, I stepped backward in fear. His hand followed me. “The dollar, Natalie—” I felt the hair covering my ear being tickled. “It’s in your ear now.”

  He lowered his hand. The coin lay in his palm.

  I knew I was supposed to say something, but his fingers in my hair had felt like worms. I glanced at my father, whose hand gently covered his ribs, and back at Mr. Flowers.

  “Here,” Mr. Flowers said, handing me the coin. “It’s yours now.”

  I stared at him.

  “What do you say, Natalie?” my father prompted automatically.

  “Thank you,” I mumbled.

  “You’re welcome,” Mr. Flowers said. Then he turned to my father and, in his smooth tenor, he said, “I’m glad we had a chance to talk, Dan. It’s good to know where a person stands.” He smiled. “You two enjoy yourselves.” Then he left us to greet some new arrivals.

  My father touched my shoulder. “Are you having an okay time?” he asked.

  I burst into tears.

  “Honey.” My father bent down to me, grimacing a little. “Honey, what is it?”

  Past my father, I could see a couple of the other kids watching us. “I’m so thirsty,” I said.

  “Okay, sure, sweetie,” he said. “Then let’s get you a drink. And food, while we’re at it. All right? Let’s get you something to eat.”

  We filled a plate of food for me, and a cup of iced tea.

  “Aren’t you eating?” I asked my father, but he said he wasn’t hungry.

  We carried everything to a spot on the grass closer to the edge of the property, farther away from the shouts of kids, the smack of bocce balls hitting each other, the clang of horseshoes.

  I ate, watching the water and saying little. He only touched his ribs a few times. I started to feel better. I knew no one would call me Big Bird as long as I was with my father. We walked a little, went to the edge of the bluff, and stood facing the water. I told my father about Morocco, but he just grunted. When the afternoon breeze shifted and the air began to cool, the first guests began to leave. “Okay, kid,” my father said, “let’s hit the road.”

  We waited for Mr. Flowers to finish saying good-bye to several guests. There was a tall stack of identical gift-wrapped boxes, and he was handing the boxes to kids as they were leaving. Mr. Flowers shook my father’s hand. I looked around for that other man, the one who’d hurt my father, but he was gone.

  Mr. Flowers turned to me. “This is a magic kit,” he said, lifting one of the boxes from the stack. “If you work at it, you can learn to fool anyone. Would you like that?”

  I nodded because I knew I was supposed to.

  “Trust me,” he said, “the world is full of endless possibilities.” He smiled. “Can you say that to me?”

  I glanced at my father, but he was watching something beyond us.

  “The world is full of endless possibilities,” I mumbled.

  But I must have satisfied our host, because he said, “Good girl,” and smiled. “You should always think big like that.” He lowered his voice. “Your father, he doesn’t think big. He doesn’t want to give you all this.” He gestured to his house, his whole property.

  “Victor,” my father began.

  “He would rather you look out your window at a slum than at the sea. Isn’t that right, Dan?”

  My father’s lips were locked tight.

  Mr. Flowers offered me the wrapped box. It was large but surprisingly light.

  “Thank him,” my father muttered.

  I thanked him.

  “It’s my pleasure, sweetheart,” Mr. Flowers said. “And Natalie?” He waited until I was looking at him. “You take care of your dad?”

  “Listen, Nat,” my father began. “Mr. Flowers. He can …” He shook his head. “It’s just how he is.”

  We had descended the bluff and were heading toward the parkway again. I’d waited as long as I could before unwrapping the gift and was now turning the box over in my hands, examining the pictures and reading the words that promised everything.

  Change milk to water!

  “Natalie?”

  “Fine.” I hated Mr. Flowers. That other man had done the hitting, but somehow I knew it was Mr. Flowers’s fault. When he gave me this present, I should have told him I didn’t want it. Now that I had it, I knew I should throw it into the kitchen trash can the moment we got home. The trouble was, I wanted it.

  Read your friend’s mind!

  “Mr. Flowers didn’t mean anything,” said my father, who by the next day would be not only unemployed but unemployable, on account of Victor Flowers floating some well-placed rumors about my father’s financi
al ethics and mental stability.

  When we got home, I mumbled hello to my mother, who was paging through a magazine on the sofa, and rushed to my bedroom to open the magic kit. I touched the dice, the cards, the segments of rope and small plastic contraptions.

  Do the impossible!

  Down the hall, my mother and father began to speak quietly. It wasn’t long before their talk turned to harsh whispers and then to arguing. All I knew about the nature of their argument was that it wouldn’t end soon.

  I opened the pack of cards. I played Crazy Eights with my mother sometimes, but I had never taken the time to inspect the intricate strangeness of the designs, nor had I paid attention to the feel of the cards’ crisp edges against my fingertips.

  When something downstairs smashed—a glass? a dish?—I gasped, because that was something new.

  The world is full of endless possibilities, I whispered to myself, touching the cards, laying them on the carpet, turning them upside down, noticing they looked the same no matter which way they faced.

  The world is full of endless possibilities. I said the words as if they were magic. I was desperate to believe, and so I did. The world was full of endless possibilities, and I vowed to be the one who did the impossible.

  7

  As I got out of my car with a sack of groceries and lightbulbs, Harley was leaving the apartment building in her green scrubs and white canvas sneakers.

  “It’s freezing outside,” I said. It was still technically the afternoon but the sun had already dipped below the apartment building across the street. “You want a ride to work?”

  “I’m never cold,” she said. “Thanks, though. Hey, guess what? I found a forever home for Mustard.”

  I assumed forever meant until the new owner realized the dog was a ruthless killer. But I didn’t want to ruin Harley’s good mood.

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “It is.” Her smile faded. “Let’s hope it goes as easy for Jasmine.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone found her wandering on Route 1.”