Turtles All the Way Down, Page 3

  "What?"

  "We've got no choice but to damsel-in-distress this situation, Holmesy," she said, and then brought the rock down with all her force onto the hull of the canoe, splintering the green paint and revealing the fiberglass below. She flipped the canoe back over; it immediately started taking on water. "Okay, now I'm gonna hide and you're gonna talk to whoever is coming in that golf cart."

  "What? No. No way."

  "A distressed damsel has no companions," she said.

  "No. Way."

  And then a voice called out from atop the gabled wall. "You all right down there?" I looked up and saw a skinny old man with deep lines in his face, wearing a black suit and white shirt.

  "Our canoe," Daisy said. "It has a hole in it. We're actually friends with Davis Pickett. Doesn't he live here?"

  "I'm Lyle," the man said. "Security. I can get you home."

  FOUR

  LYLE USHERED US INTO HIS GOLF CART and then drove us down a narrow asphalt path along the golf course, past a big log cabin with a wooden sign out front identifying it as THE COTTAGE.

  I hadn't visited the Pickett estate in many years, and it had grown even more majestic. The sand traps of the golf course were newly raked. The cart path we drove on had no cracks or bumps. Newly planted maple trees lined the path. But mostly I just saw endless grass, weedless, freshly mown into a diamond pattern. The Pickett estate was silent, sterile, and endless--like a newly built housing subdivision before actual people move into it. I loved it.

  As we drove, Daisy struck up a wholly unsubtle conversation. "So you head up security here?"

  "I am security here," he answered.

  "How long have you worked for Mr. Pickett?"

  "Long enough to know you're not friends with Davis," he answered.

  Daisy, who lacked the capacity to experience embarrassment, was not discouraged. "Holmesy here is the friend. Were you working the day Pickett disappeared?"

  "Mr. Pickett doesn't like staff on the property after dark or before dawn," he answered.

  "How many staff are there exactly?"

  Lyle stopped the golf cart. "Y'all best know Davis, or else I'm taking you downtown and having you booked for trespassing."

  --

  We rounded a corner and I saw the pool complex, a shimmering blue expanse with the same island I remembered from my childhood, except now it was covered by a glass-plated geodesic dome. The waterslides--cylinders that curved and wove around one another--were still there, too, but they were dry.

  On a patio beside the pool were a dozen teak lounge chairs, each with a white towel laid out atop the cushions. We drove halfway around the pool to another patio, where Davis Pickett was reclining on a lounger. He was wearing his school polo shirt and khaki pants, holding a book at an angle to block the sun as he read.

  When he heard the cart, he sat up and looked over at us. He had skinny, sunburned legs and knobby knees. He wore plastic-rimmed glasses and an Indiana Pacers hat.

  "Aza Holmes?" he asked.

  He stood up. The sun was behind him, so I could hardly see his face. I got out of the golf cart and walked over to him.

  "Hi," I said. I didn't know if I should hug him, and he didn't seem to know if he should hug me, so we just sort of stood there not touching, which to be honest is my preferred form of greeting.

  "To what do I owe the pleasure?" he asked, his voice flat, neutral, unreadable.

  Daisy walked up behind me and held out her hand, then shook Davis's forcefully. "Daisy Ramirez, Holmesy's best friend. We had a canoe puncture."

  "We hit a rock and landed on Pirates Island," I said.

  "You know these people?" Lyle asked.

  "Yeah, it's fine, thanks, Lyle. Can I get you guys anything? Water? Dr Pepper?"

  "Dr Pepper?" I said, a bit confused.

  "Wasn't that your favorite soda?"

  I just blinked at him for a second and then said, "Um, yeah. I'll have a Dr Pepper."

  "Lyle, can we get three Dr Peppers?"

  "Sure thing, boss," Lyle answered, and took off on the golf cart.

  Daisy's glance at me said, I told you he'd remember, and then she wandered off. Davis didn't seem to notice. There was something sweetly shy about the way he looked at me, glancing at, and then away from, my face, his brown eyes bigger than life through his glasses. His eyes, his nose, his mouth--all his facial features were a bit too big for him, like they'd grown up but his face was still a kid's.

  "I'm not sure what to say," he said. "I'm . . . not good at chitchat."

  "Try saying what you're thinking," I said. "That's something I never ever do."

  He smiled a little and then shrugged. "Okay. I'm thinking, I wish she wasn't after the reward."

  "What reward?" I asked, unconvincingly.

  Davis sat down on one of the teak loungers, and I sat across from him. He leaned forward, bony elbows on bony knees. "I thought of you a couple weeks ago," he said. "Right when he disappeared, I kept hearing his name on the news, and they would say his full name--Russell Davis Pickett--and I kept thinking, you know, that's my name; and it was just so weird, to hear the newscasters say, 'Russell Davis Pickett has been reported missing.' Because I was right here."

  "And that made you think of me?"

  "Yeah, I don't know. I remember you telling me--like, I asked about your name once and you said that your mom named you Aza because she wanted you to have your own name, a sound you could make your own."

  "It was my dad, actually." I could remember Dad talking to me about my name, telling me, It spans the whole alphabet, because we wanted you to know you can be anything. "Whereas, your dad . . ." I said.

  "Right, made me a junior. Resigned me to juniority."

  "Well, you're not your name," I said.

  "Of course I am. I can't not be Davis Pickett. Can't not be my father's son."

  "I guess," I said.

  "And I can't not be an orphan."

  "I'm sorry."

  His tired eyes met mine. "A lot of old friends have been in touch the last few days, and I'm not an idiot. I know why. But I don't know where my dad is."

  "The truth is--" I said, and then stopped as a shadow flashed over us. I turned around. Daisy was standing over me.

  "The truth is," she said, "we were listening to the radio, heard a news report about your father, and then Holmesy here told me she had a crush on you when you were kids."

  "Daisy," I sputtered.

  "And I was, like, let's go see him, I bet it's true love. So we arranged for a shipwreck, and then you remembered she likes Dr Pepper, and IT IS TRUE LOVE. It's just like The Tempest, and okay, I'm going to leave you now so you can live happily ever after." And her shadow was gone, replaced by the golden light of the sun.

  "Is that--really?" Davis asked.

  "Well, I don't think it's exactly like The Tempest," I said. But I couldn't stand to tell him the truth. Anyway, it wasn't a lie. Not all the way. "I mean, we were just kids."

  After a minute, he said, "You almost don't even look like the same person."

  "What?"

  "Like, you were this scrawny little lightning bolt, and now you're . . ."

  "What?"

  "Different. Grown up." My stomach was kind of churning, but I couldn't tell why. I never understood my body--was it scared or excited?

  Davis was looking past me at the stand of trees along the river's edge. "I really am sorry about your dad," I said.

  He shrugged. "My dad's a huge shitbag. He skipped town before getting arrested because he's a coward." I didn't know how to answer that. The way people talked about fathers could almost make you glad not to have one. "I really don't know where he is, Aza. And if anyone does know, they're not gonna say anything, because he can pay them a lot more than the reward. I mean, a hundred thousand dollars? A hundred thousand dollars isn't a lot of money." I just stared at him. "Sorry," he said. "That probably sounded dickish."

  "Probably?"

  "Right, yeah," he said. "I just mean . . . he'll
get away with it. He always gets away with it."

  I was starting to respond when I heard Daisy return. She had a guy with her--tall, broad-shouldered, wearing matching khaki shorts and a polo shirt. "We are going to meet a tuatara," Daisy said excitedly.

  Davis got up and said, "Aza, this is Malik Moore, our zoologist." He said "our zoologist" as if they were normal words to say in the course of everyday conversation, as if most people who reached a certain standing in life acquired a zoologist.

  I stood up and shook Malik's hand. "I take care of the tuatara," he explained. Everyone seemed to assume I knew what the hell a tuatara was. Malik walked over to the edge of the pool, knelt down, lifted a door hidden in the patio's tile, and pressed a button. A reticulated chrome walkway emerged from the pool's edge and arched over the water to reach the island. Daisy grabbed my arm and whispered, "Is this real life?" and then the zoologist waved his hand dramatically, gesturing for us to walk across the bridge.

  He followed behind us, across the metal bridge to the geodesic dome. Malik swiped a card near the glass door. I heard a seal break, and then the door opened. I stepped in and was suddenly in a tropical climate at least twenty degrees warmer and considerably more humid than the actual outdoors.

  Daisy and I stayed near the entryway while Malik darted around and finally emerged with a large lizard, maybe two feet long and three inches tall. Its dragon-like tail wrapped around Malik's arm.

  "You can pet her," Malik said, and Daisy did, but I could see scratch marks on Malik's hand indicating that it didn't always like being petted, so when he turned it toward me, I said, "I don't really like lizards."

  He then explained to me in rather excruciating detail that Tua (it had a name) was not a lizard at all, but a genetically distinct creature that dated back to the Mesozoic Era 200 million years ago, and that it was basically a living dinosaur, and that tuatara can live to be at least 150 years old, and that the plural of tuatara is tuatara, and that they are the only extant species from the order Rhynchocephalia, and that they were endangered in their native New Zealand, and that he'd written his PhD thesis on tuatara molecular evolution rates, and on and on until the door opened again, and Lyle said, "Dr Peppers, boss." I took them and handed one to Davis and one to Daisy.

  "You sure you don't want to pet her?" Malik asked.

  "I'm also afraid of dinosaurs," I explained.

  "Holmesy has most of the major fears," Daisy said as she petted Tua. "Anyway, we should get going. I've got some babysitting duties to attend to."

  "I'll give you a ride home," said Davis.

  --

  Davis said he needed to stop by the house, and I was going to wait for him outside, but Daisy shoved me forward so hard I found myself walking alongside him.

  Davis pulled open the front door, a massive pane of glass at least ten feet high, and we walked into an enormous marble-floored room. To my left, Noah Pickett lay on a couch, playing a space combat video game on a huge screen. "Noah," Davis said, "you remember Aza Holmes?"

  "'Sup," he said, without turning away from the game.

  Davis darted up a flight of floating marble stairs, leaving me alone with Noah--or so I thought--until a woman I hadn't seen called out, "That's a real Picasso." She was dressed all in white, slicing berries in the gleaming white kitchen.

  "Oh, wow," I said, following her eyes to the painting in question. A man made of wavy lines rode atop a horse made of wavy lines.

  "It's like working in a museum," she said. I looked at her and thought about Daisy's observation about uniforms.

  "Yeah, it's a beautiful house," I said.

  "They have a Rauschenberg, too," she said, "upstairs." I nodded, although I didn't know who that was. Mychal would, probably. "You can go and see." She gestured toward the stairs, so I walked up, but didn't pause to examine the assemblage of recycled trash at the top of the staircase. Instead, I took a quick look inside the first open door I came to. It seemed to be Davis's room, immaculately clean, lines still in the carpet from a vacuum cleaner. King-size bed with lots of pillows, and a navy-blue comforter. In a corner of the room, by a wall of windows, a telescope, pointed up toward the sky. Pictures on his desk of his family--all from years ago, when he was little. Framed concert posters on one wall--the Beatles, Thelonious Monk, Otis Redding, Leonard Cohen, Billie Holiday. A bookshelf packed with hardcover books, with an entire shelf of comics in plastic sleeves. And on his bedside table, next to a stack of books, the Iron Man.

  I picked it up, turned it over in my hands. The plastic was cracked on the back of one leg, revealing a hollow space, but the arms and legs still turned.

  "Careful," he said from behind me. "You're holding the only physical item I actually love."

  I put the Iron Man down and spun around. "Sorry," I said.

  "Iron Man and I have been through some serious shit together," he said.

  "I have to tell you a secret," I said. "I've always thought Iron Man was kind of the worst."

  Davis smiled. "Well, it was fun while it lasted, Aza, but our friendship has come to an end." I laughed and followed him down the stairs. "Rosa, can you stay until I get back?"

  "Yes, of course," she said. "I've left you some chicken chili and salad for dinner in the fridge."

  "Thanks," Davis said. "Noah, my man, I'll be back in twenty minutes, cool?"

  "Cool," Noah said, still in outer space.

  --

  As we walked toward Davis's Cadillac Escalade, which Daisy was leaning against, I asked, "Was that your housekeeper?"

  "She's the house manager. Has been since I was born. She's like what we have now instead of a parent, kinda."

  "But she doesn't live with you?"

  "No, she leaves every day at six, so not that much like a parent." Davis unlocked the doors. Daisy got in the backseat and told me to take shotgun. As I walked around the front of the car, I noticed Lyle standing next to his golf cart. He was talking to a man raking up the first fallen leaves of autumn, but staring at Davis and me.

  "Just gonna drop these two off," Davis told him.

  "Be safe, boss," Lyle answered.

  Once the car doors were closed, he said, "Everyone is always watching me. It's exhausting."

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  Davis opened his mouth as if to speak, seemed to think better of it, and then, a moment later, continued. "Like, you know how in middle school or whatever you feel like everyone is looking at you all the time and secretly talking about you? It's like that middle-school feeling, only people really are looking at me and whispering about me."

  "Maybe they think you know where your dad is," Daisy said.

  "Well, I don't. And I don't want to." He said it firmly, unshakably.

  "Why not?" Daisy asked.

  I was watching Davis as he spoke, and I saw something in his face flicker without quite going out. "At this point, the best thing my dad can do for Noah and me is stay gone. It's not like he ever took care of us anyway."

  --

  Although only the river separated us, it was a ten-minute, winding drive back to my house because there's only one bridge in my neighborhood. We were quiet except for my occasional directions. When we at last pulled into my driveway, I asked for his phone and typed my number into it. Daisy got out without saying good-bye, and I was about to do the same, but when I gave him his phone back, Davis took my right hand and turned it over, palm up. "I remember this," he said, and I followed his eyes down to the Band-Aid covering my fingertip. I pulled my hand away and closed my fingers into a fist.

  "Does it hurt?" he asked.

  For some reason, I wanted to tell him the truth. "Whether it hurts is kind of irrelevant."

  "That's a pretty good life motto," he said.

  I smiled. "Yeah, I don't know. Okay, I should go."

  Right before I closed the door, he said, "It's good to see you, Aza."

  "Yeah," I said. "You too."

  FIVE

  AS DAISY AND I DROVE toward her apartment in Harold's warm em
brace, she wouldn't shut up about the crush she was certain I had. "Holmesy, you're aglow. You're luminous. You're beaming."

  "I'm not."

  "You are."

  "I honestly can't even tell if he's cute."

  "He's in that vast boy middle," she said. "Like, good-looking enough that I'm willing to be won over. The whole problem with boys is that ninety-nine percent of them are, like, okay. If you could dress and hygiene them properly, and make them stand up straight and listen to you and not be dumbasses, they'd be totally acceptable."

  "I'm really not looking to date anyone." I know people often say that when secretly looking for a romantic partner, but I meant it. I definitely felt attracted to some people, and I liked the idea of being with someone, but the actual mechanics of it didn't much suit my talents. Like, parts of typical romantic relationships that made me anxious included 1. Kissing; 2. Having to say the right things to avoid hurt feelings; 3. Saying more wrong things while trying to apologize; 4. Being at a movie theater together and feeling obligated to hold hands even after your hands become sweaty and the sweat starts mixing together; and 5. The part where they say, "What are you thinking about?" And they want you to be, like, "I'm thinking about you, darling," but you're actually thinking about how cows literally could not survive if it weren't for the bacteria in their guts, and how that sort of means that cows do not exist as independent life-forms, but that's not really something you can say out loud, so you're ultimately forced to choose between lying and seeming weird.

  "Well, I want to date someone," Daisy said. "I'd make a go at Little Orphan Billionaire myself, except he wouldn't stop looking at you. Hey, speaking of which, here's a fascinating piece of trivia: Guess who gets Pickett's billions if he dies?"

  "Um, Davis and Noah?"

  "No," Daisy said. "Guess again."

  "The zoologist?"

  "No."

  "Just tell me."

  "Guess."

  "Fine. You."

  "Alas, no, which is so unjust. I'm such a billionaire without the billions, Holmesy. I have the soul of a private jet owner, and the life of a public transportation rider. It's a real tragedy. But no, not me. Not Davis. Not the zoologist. The tuatara."

  "Wait, what?"

  "The tua-fucking-tara, Holmesy. Malik told me it was a matter of public record and it totally is. Listen." She held up her phone. "Indianapolis Star article from last year. 'Russell Pickett, the billionaire chairman and founder of Pickett Engineering, shocked the black-tie audience at last night's Indianapolis Prize by announcing that his entire estate would be left to his pet tuatara. Calling the creatures, which can live to more than one hundred and fifty years of age, "magical animals," Pickett said that he had created a foundation to study his tuatara and provide the best possible care for it. "Through investigating Tua's secrets," he said, referring to his pet by name, "humans will learn the key to longevity and better understand the evolution of life on earth." When asked by a Star reporter to confirm he planned to leave his entire estate to a trust benefitting a single animal, Pickett confirmed, "My wealth will benefit Tua and only Tua--until her death. After that, it will go to a trust to benefit all tuatara everywhere." A representative of Pickett Engineering said that Pickett's private affairs had no bearing on the direction of the company.' Nothing says fuck you to your kids quite like leaving your fortune to a lizard."