Laura van den Berg: The Isle of Youth: Stories

“Read what?” I’d asked.

“A novel,” my father had said.

I was eleven. The story made me feel strange. It seemed to come out of nowhere. We were eating lunch at Bojangles’. The Kingsmen were playing on the radio. I knew what a prostitute was, but I didn’t yet understand how unusual it was to not do what one normally does with a prostitute, to read her a novel instead. I didn’t understand that my father wanted me to see him as being above temptation and superior to Bill Keller, who I had never met. I didn’t know the right questions to ask. What kind of novel? What did she smell like? Did she fall asleep on your arm? What was her name? Now I thought I would like to find that prostitute and get her side of the story.

“So?” Julia said, her voice drowsy from the heat.

“I realized the other day that it couldn’t possibly be true. I don’t think I ever saw Dad read anything, let alone novels, for starters.”

“What was true?” Julia said.

Our father was a grifter. He spent our childhood selling fake insurance policies. When he vanished, he left behind a mountain of debt; the house we’d grown up in went to the bank. Our mother moved us to Athens, Georgia, where she was from. She threw away all the photos we had of our father and encouraged us to tell people he was dead. All we were left with was the stories. The prostitute in Chicago. The time he escaped the Vietcong by jumping off a cliff. The time he ran with the bulls in Barcelona and saved his best friend from being gored in the ass. Things only children would believe. All story and no truth.

I liked to tell myself that, unlike our father, we were on the right side of the law, me and Julia, with our firm and its solid-sounding name, but that hadn’t always been the case. Two years ago, Julia was arrested for breaking into houses. She’d been at it for a long time, picking places where the owners were away. When she finally got caught, in a mansion on Fisher Island, she did six months in Broward Correctional. The idea for the private detective business was hatched during visitation. We talked about how exciting it would be, how lucrative. My husband, a tax consultant for H&R Block, had always thought Julia was a professional housesitter; he was furious that I had lied to him, that I’d once gone down to Coral Gables to swim in the Olympic-size pool of an estate my sister was robbing, and even more furious that I insisted on visiting her twice a week in jail. Can’t you just write to her? he’d say. Do you have to actually go there? Our mother talked about Julia like she was away on a long trip. So it was just my sister and me, like always.

In Georgia, we had gotten bored with college and dropped out, drifting back to South Florida like homing pigeons. I met my husband while working at a watch store in Pinecrest. He brought a Swiss Army in for repair. He’d had it for a decade; he said he liked to hold on to things. We married a year later, in the Miami courthouse. I loved him, but I didn’t always understand how to be honest. Over time, we became less sure we were something the other wanted to hold on to. And then there was Julia’s arrest and visitation. I saw how small she looked in her gray jumpsuit, how she wanted to ask if our mother was coming but knew better. As I listened to her talk about the PI business — her voice quick and grasping — I realized my thirties were on the horizon and I’d never had a job I found interesting. And that I liked the idea of busting people for doing things they shouldn’t be. Since Julia had a record, I’d been the one to apply for our firearm and PI licenses. I told my husband Julia and I were starting a catering company. When he discovered a Winslow & Co. business card in my purse, he bypassed fury and went straight to sadness.

“Do you think Bill Keller was a real person?” my sister asked.

“I don’t know.” I pulled at the collar of my T-shirt; the fabric was stuck to my skin. “The hotel is a real place, though. The Iron Horse. I looked it up once.”

“Any sign of Defonte?” I could tell she was ready to change the subject.

I raised the binoculars and scanned the entrance. The perimeter of the building was brightly lit and still. “Nothing,” I said. We were prepared to keep waiting. There were two more beers, a thermos of water, and a bag of Cheetos in the cooler, plus a packet of NoDoz in the back pocket of my shorts.

“Maybe Mrs. Defonte is out of town,” Julia said.

“Maybe.” I happened to know that was unlikely, since she’d had rehearsal the night before and had it again tomorrow.

We waited through the night, and when the sun rose behind us, it brought a heat that was painful. We put on big sunglasses and baseball caps and draped towels over our shoulders. I’d taken too many NoDoz and my hands were shaky, my mouth dry. All the water was gone. We had not taken our eyes off the building since he went inside, not for one single moment.

Julia searched around with the binoculars. I rested my elbows on the edge of the roof. It was unusual for a target to change the pattern so rapidly, to go from one-hour stretches to all-nighters. Maybe Mrs. Defonte really was out of town. Or maybe he had decided to up and leave her.

“Keep looking,” she said, passing me the binoculars. “I’ll go get us coffee.”

“Water,” I said. “I feel like I’m being roasted.”

A lot of PI-ing was about waiting. Knowing how to wait, being prepared to wait, not giving up on waiting even when it felt like God was one of those assholey kids who hold a magnifying glass over ants until they explode, only He’s using the sun. What we didn’t know was that sometimes all the waiting in the world won’t give you what you need.

* * *

After twenty-four hours, we decided something had to be done. It felt like we had been on the roof for years. We’d been trading off for bathroom breaks. Julia had made two runs to the convenience store down the street for water, Nutri-Grain bars, and coffee (while she was at it, she had checked to make sure Mr. Defonte’s car was still parked in the same spot; it was). Still, we couldn’t stay up there forever. My stomach gurgled. The back of my neck and my legs were sunburned. My eyes itched. Birds had shit on our camera bag and on Julia’s wrist. Mr. Defonte had to come out of there eventually, we figured. It was a Wednesday. He had a wife, a job. But the blazing afternoon stretched on and on until finally it was night again.

“We should call Mrs. Defonte,” Julia said. “See if she’s heard from him.” She tossed me the cell phone and said she was going out for more coffee. She liked to do the talking until we had to tell clients something they might not want to hear.

I kneeled on the roof, facing the building Mr. Defonte had vanished into. I’d never had a conversation with Mrs. Defonte alone.

“Do you have any news?” she asked when I called. I closed my eyes for a moment and imagined what her words would sound like if she were singing them.

“Sort of,” I said. “Have you heard from your husband lately?”

She said that she hadn’t. He was on a business trip in Memphis.

“That can’t be true. We photographed him going into an apartment building on Royal Palm yesterday afternoon.”

“And?”

“We haven’t seen him since,” I said. “We’ve been watching the building. He hasn’t come out yet.”

She was silent. I guessed she was considering what her husband had been doing in that building for so long and who he’d been doing it with. I pictured her sitting stiffly on the elegant sofa with the cream-colored cushions and the curved wood legs, a hand resting on her knee.

Mrs. Defonte said she would call me back and did so a few minutes after we hung up. She reported that she had tried her husband’s cell, twice, but there was no answer. When my husband left, I had wanted to call him very badly, but had gotten drunk instead; at the time I told myself I was washing the urge out of me. I wondered if another postcard had turned up at Julia’s apartment in Opa-locka.