David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

“That’s easy for him to say. You could sink a boat with the awards he’s won. But I’m not talking about fame ,” Cat said. She sounded like a schoolteacher saddled with some incorrigibly dull kid. “I’m not talking about being famous. I’m talking about being — I don’t know. What am I talking about?”

“Happy?” Benji tried.

“Happy is overrated. Happy comes and goes.” She put a hand on his knee and looked at him longer than a person behind the wheel of a moving vehicle should. “Is that really what you want? In the end? To be famous?”

It was. Of course it was. He’d had a taste of it, the largest possible dose a boy could squeeze from a second-tier sitcom in the days before the Internet. The giggling requests for autographs, usually made by moonfaced, acne-prone girls, as he walked through the mall. The jean-jacketed spread in Teen Beat . Strangers doing double takes and tugging each other’s sleeves as they passed him by. That’s what you think! That’s what you think! Hell yes, he wanted to be famous.

“No. That’s not what I want. Not the only thing.”

The grassy fields gave way to more or less tended lawns, clusters of cheap, vinyl-sided split-level ranches, and cul-de-sac developments named with the puzzlingly idyllic optimism of mental health facilities. Echo Valley. Windview Fields. They passed the tennis courts, the Elks Lodge, the municipal swimming pool (closed for the season) before crossing the town line and crawling down Main Street, past the post office, hardware store, hair salon, gas mart, past the pizza parlor and the library and the steepled Presbyterian church that comprised Alluvia’s business district. Cat turned right onto School Street, then left onto Palmer, then left again into the Fishers’ drive.

And there it was. As soon as Benji saw it, his foot began pumping the imaginary brake that provides comfort to so many frazzled mothers when driving with their lead-footed teenage sons. “Whoa,” he said. “Whoa.”

The silver Mercedes he’d noticed three days earlier sat under the elm at the curb in a dappled pool of light. He’d assumed the car belonged to Roger, but Roger Fitch would no sooner spend three days in Alluvia than in Al Anbar, and someone, someone of size, someone with hair, someone decidedly not Roger, was sitting in the front seat.

“Back up,” Benji said. “Back up to that car.”

“Who is it?” Cat asked with a tinge of alarm, letting the car roll slowly down the sloped blacktop.

Benji saw a silhouette, nothing more, but he could tell from the rigid, upright shape that the person was considering whether to flee. He rolled down his window and waved. “Hey,” he called. “You. Hey.”

In the largest, most fundamentally solipsistic region of his mind, Benji assumed the car was somehow there for him. He entertained the idea that the car belonged to a fan. An enthusiast of eighties television, come to ask for his autograph or to wish him well or, more darkly, to stalk and possibly shoot him. Or did he owe somebody money? Had he fucked (or fucked over) somebody’s sister? Was he about to get his other leg broken? There were, of course, more realistic possibilities — perhaps the man (it seemed to be a man) numbered among the doctoral candidates who appeared every so often, like pilgrims at a holy site, journeying to meet the esteemed author, the subject of a dissertation on rural ennui or imploding masculinity.

The door of the Mercedes swung open and, after a minute, a boy climbed out of the car. He was less handsome than pretty, possessed of a pale, waxen beauty that, were it not for the shadow of stubble on his cheeks and a small silver barbell piercing the upper curve of his ear, belonged to a porcelain doll. He was tall and thin with big, staring blue eyes, a slender nose, and a perfect Cupid’s bow for a mouth. His dark hair, oiled to a high, almost plastic sheen, was pushed back. He wore black camouflage pants, cut off at the knee, and a lilac shirt with a deep V-neck that exposed the taut and, despite his otherwise androgynous mien, surprisingly hairy plates of his chest. He was eighteen, Benji guessed. Or twenty-five. It was hard to tell. The only thing Benji could say with certainty was that the kid had never seen Prodigy .

“I’m sorry,” the boy said.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m just sitting here.”

“You’ve been sitting there for three days.”

“Not the whole time.”

“And not because you like the block.”

The boy considered his car, flicked a rock at the tire with a shy sweep of his boot. “No,” he answered.

Benji leaned out the window and waited for what followed, waited for more, but nothing came. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

The boy stared up at the house, the pleasant picture made by the dormers and chimneys and pillared porticos, the pearl-gray paint that was almost the same color as his car. “Do the Fishers live here?”

“Pull around back,” he said to Cat, feeling mildly heroic in his promise to handle this. He swung his door open and gruntingly heaved himself out of the car, tapped the sun-warmed roof to make Cat go, then took a few wobbly steps closer to the boy. “Who’s asking?”

“Me? I’m Max. Max Davis.” He swiped the hair out of his eyes and for the first time met Benji’s gaze head-on. Had they met before? “What happened to you?”

“Long story.”

The boy blinked. “I’m looking for Claudia?”

“Claudia’s my sister.”

“You’re?”

“Her brother.” Benji felt entitled to give the kid a hard time until he stated his business.

“Is she here?”

“You’re about twenty years too late. She hasn’t lived her since, ah, you do the math.”

“1990.” Max nodded, plunging his hands into his commodious pockets to play an anxious, rattling song of keys and change. “I figured she wouldn’t be here, but this was the address they had on file. And there are about sixteen million Claudia Fishers on Google. I wasn’t even sure Fisher was still her last name.”

Twenty-two years. No sooner had Max uttered the year than Benji, with the startling suddenness of having a blindfold pulled from his eyes, could plainly see. 1990. It was the only number Benji needed to solve the equation. He didn’t need Max to tell him who “they” were or what their files contained. He didn’t need to summon the memory of the year Claudia disappeared between college and grad school, the entire year she refused to come home. The variables fell ineradicably into place in front of him. Max’s eyes, Max’s mouth. He hadn’t met the boy before, but nevertheless Benji had seen him. He knew that mouth. He had that mouth. The same as Claudia’s. The same as their father’s.

“Oh my God,” Benji whispered.

“Yeah. Oh my God.” Max swallowed. “I’m.”

“I know. I know who you are.”

He was, among other things, the reason Nick Amato had proposed, the reason Claudia’s first love had ended in a fit of flames, the reason Benji drove her to the most discreet clinic she could find and then, when she couldn’t go through with it, the reason she refused to show herself to her parents for an entire year.

“What did you say your name is?” the boy eventually asked.

“Mine?” Benji answered from far away. “Benjamin.”

“Benjamin,” the boy repeated, then, through a winsome but not yet certain smile, “Uncle Ben?”

Benji’s laugh started slowly, warming up like a motor on a cold morning. “Benji,” he said.

“Benji.” Only then did Max step forward, ignoring his uncle’s outstretched hand and pulling him into a tight and pleading hug. “Benji,” he said. “I can work with that.”