Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

But this stuff, garish and flashing, was way too real, somehow. It was more blatant, more perverted than anything from Nick’s fevered adolescence. And here it was, a couple of mouse clicks away. It wasn’t half-buried under dead leaves in the woods, didn’t require conservation efforts or concealment in an empty Pennzoil box in a garage. On some level it was almost sickening. And what if Julia had wandered in here and seen it?

He picked up Lucas’s desk phone and called his son’s cell.

Lucas answered after five rings, fumbling with the phone a long time. “Yeah?” In the background was loud music, raucous voices.

“Luke, where the hell are you?”

A pause. “What’s up?”

“What’s up? It’s suppertime.”

“I ate already.”

“We have dinner together, remember?” This “dinner together” thing had become one of Nick’s recent obsessions, particularly since Laura was gone. He sometimes felt that if he didn’t insist on it, the remains of his family could all fly away by centrifugal force.

Another pause. “Where are you, Luke?”

“All right,” Lucas said and hung up.

An hour later, Lucas still wasn’t home. Julia was hungry, so the two of them sat down to dinner at the small round table that had been temporarily placed in one corner of the kitchen, away from most of the construction. Marta had set the table for the three of them before going out for the evening. In the warm oven was a roast chicken, tented with foil. Nick brought the chicken and rice and broccoli to the table, remembering to put trivets under the chicken pan so he didn’t scorch the table. He expected a fight over the broccoli, and he got it. Julia would accept only rice and a chicken drumstick, and Nick was too wiped out to argue.

“I like Mommy’s better,” Julia said. “This is too dry.”

“It’s been in the oven for a couple of hours.”

“Mommy made the best fried chicken.”

“She sure did, baby,” Nick said. “Eat.”

“Where’s Luke?”

“He’s on his way back.” Taking his damned time of it too, Nick thought.

Julia stared at the chicken leg on her plate as if it were a giant cockroach. Finally, she said, “I don’t like it here.”

Nick thought for a moment, unsure how to respond. “Like it where?”

“Here,” she said unhelpfully.

“This house?”

“We don’t have any neighbors.”

“We do, but...”

“We don’t know any of them. It’s not a neighborhood. It’s just... houses and trees.”

“People do keep to themselves here,” he conceded. “But your mommy wanted us to move here because she thought it would be safer than our last house.”

“Well, it’s not. Barney...” She stopped, her eyes welling up with tears, resting her chin in her hands.

“But we will be now, with this new security system in.”

“Nothing like that ever happened in our old house,” she pointed out.

The front door opened, setting off a high alert tone, and a few seconds later Lucas trundled noisily into the kitchen, threw his backpack down on the floor. He seemed to get taller and broader by the day. He wore a dark blue Old Navy sweatshirt, baggy cargo pants with the waistband of his boxer shorts showing, and some white scarflike thing under his backwards baseball cap.

“What’s that on your head?” Nick asked anyway.

“Do-rag, why?”

“That like a hip-hop thing?”

Lucas shook his head, rolled his eyes. “I’m not hungry,” he said. “I’m going upstairs.”

“Sit with us anyway, Luke,” Julia pleaded. “Come on.”

“I’ve got a lot of homework,” Lucas said as he left the kitchen without turning back.

Nick followed his son upstairs. “We have to have a talk,” he said.

Lucas groaned. “What now?” When he reached the open door to his room, he said, “You been in here?”

“Sit down, Luke.”

Lucas noticed the computer monitor facing the door, and he leaped toward it, spun it away. “I don’t want you going in my room.”

“Sit down.”

Lucas sat on the edge of his bed, hunched over with his elbows propped on his knees, his chin resting on his hands, a gesture that Julia had recently started imitating. He stared malevolently.

“You’re not allowed to go to porn sites,” Nick said.

Lucas blinked. His angry blue eyes were crystal clear, innocent and pure. He was trying to grow something under his chin, Nick noticed. For a moment Lucas seemed to be debating whether to own up to the evidence so prominently on display. Then he said: “There’s nothing there I don’t know about, Nick. I’m sixteen.”

“Cut out the ‘Nick’ stuff.”

“Okay, Dad, ” he said with a surly twist. “Hey, at least I’m not going to snuff or torture sites. You should see the shit that’s out there.”

“You do that again and your Internet access gets cut off, understand?”

“You can’t do that. I need e-mail for school. It’s required.”

“Then I’ll leave you with just AOL with whatever those controls are.”

“You can’t do that! I got to do research on the Internet.”

“I’ll bet. Where were you this afternoon?”

“Friend’s.”

“Sounded like a bar or something.”

Lucas stared as if he weren’t going to dignify this with a response.

“What happened to Ziggy?”

“Ziggy’s an asshole.”

“He’s your best friend.”

“Look, you don’t know him, all right?”

“Then who are these new kids you’re hanging out with?”

“Just friends.”

“What are their names?”

“Why do you care?”

Nick bit his lip, thought for a moment. “I want you to go back to Underberg.” Lucas had seen a counselor for four months after Laura’s death, until he quit, complaining that Underberg was “full of shit.”

“I’m not going back there. No way.”

“You’ve got to talk to someone. You won’t talk to me.”

“About what?”

“For God’s sake, Lucas, you’ve just been through one of the most traumatic things a kid can go through. Of course you’re having a hard time. You think it’s any easier on your sister, or on me?”

“Forget it,” Lucas said, raising his voice sharply. “Don’t even go there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Lucas shot him a pitying look. “I got homework,” he said, getting up from the bed and walking over to his desk.

Nick poured himself a Scotch on the rocks, sat in the family room and watched TV for a while, but nothing held his interest. He started feeling a mild, pleasant buzz. Around midnight he went up to his room. Both Julia’s and Lucas’s lights were off. The newly installed alarm touch pad in his bedroom glowed green, announced READY in black letters. Ready for what? he thought. The installer had called him and given him the ten-minute lowdown that afternoon. If a door was open somewhere, it would say something like FAULT — LIVING ROOM DOOR. If someone moved downstairs it would say, FAULT — MOTION SENSOR, FAMILY ROOM or whatever.

He brushed his teeth, stripped down to his shorts, and climbed into the king-size bed. Next to Laura’s side of the bed was the same stack of books that had been there since the night of the accident. Marta dusted them off but knew enough not to put them away. The effect was as if she were away on a business trip and might come back in, keys jingling, at any moment. One of the books, Nick always noticed with a pang, was an old course catalog from St. Thomas More College that had a listing for her art history class. She used to look at it sometimes at night, regretful.

The sheets were cool and smooth. He rolled over something lumpy: one of Julia’s Beanie Babies. He smiled, tossed it out of the way. Lately she’d taken to leaving a different Beanie Baby in his bed each night, a little game of hers. He guessed it was her way of sleeping with Daddy, by proxy, since she hadn’t been allowed to sleep in the parental bed for some time.