The Invisible Circus Read online

  “Do you miss her?” Phoebe said into the silence.

  Kyle groaned up from the couch and sprayed water on the leaves of several spindly marijuana plants leaning toward an ultraviolet bulb. Delicate threads tied them to stakes. “Sometimes I feel like she’s still back there,” he said. “In that time. I miss it like hell.”

  “Me too,” Phoebe said, an ache in her chest. “Even if I wasn’t really there.”

  “Sure you were there.”

  “No. I was a kid.”

  There was a long pause. “I wasn’t there, either,” Kyle said. “Not totally.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I kept circling, circling, but I never quite hit it.”

  This admission made Phoebe uneasy. “You were there, Kyle,” she assured him. “You were definitely there.”

  He grinned, seeming heartened. He sprayed his mister into the air, granules of vapor catching the light as they fell. Phoebe heard the cannon, fired each day at five o’clock from the Presidio military base. “I better go,” she said, wobbling to her feet. One of her legs was asleep. It was 1978. Faith’s boyfriend Wolf lived in Europe now. Phoebe’s mother hadn’t heard from him in years.

  Kyle waited, hands in his pockets. “I’ll give you a call.”

  “Okay,” Phoebe said, knowing he wouldn’t.

  She walked carefully down the macadam steps to the street, gripping the rail. Sunlight glittered in the trees. There was a distant cable car prattle, silence around it.

  “Hey,” she heard overhead. Kyle was leaning out his window. “I forgot, I wanted to give you something in case you get to Munich. I’ve got a cousin over there.”

  Phoebe shielded her eyes. She’d forgotten her Europe story, and was startled now to hear it repeated as fact.

  “C’mon back,” Kyle said.

  Phoebe retraced her steps. Kyle handed her a joint wrapped in fluorescent pink rolling paper. It felt dry and light in her hand.

  “Tell him it’s the same stuff we smoked at Christmas,” he said, copying from an address book onto the back of a receipt. “Steven + Ingrid Lake,” Phoebe read, with an address. The telephone number seemed short on digits. She rolled the joint carefully inside the address and slipped it in her wallet.

  “Tell Steve to stay clear of the anthills,” Kyle said, laughing in the doorway. “He’ll understand.”

  Descending the stairs a second time, Phoebe felt a curious excitement. As far as Kyle knew, she was going to Europe—next week, tomorrow—and this thought amazed Phoebe, thrilled her with a sense that anything might happen.

  On the street she looked up. Kyle was watching her from his window again, absently touching the prism. “When are you leaving?” he said.

  “Soon,” she said, almost laughing. “Next week, maybe.” She turned to go.

  “Send me a postcard,” he called.

  Phoebe found herself smiling at the bony Victorian houses. Europe, she thought. Birds, white stone, long dark bridges. Going all the places Faith had gone—exactly, one by one. Her sister’s postcards still lay stacked in a shoebox underneath the bed. Phoebe recalled awaiting them feverishly, right from the day her sister and Wolf had first left, a summer day not unlike this one. They’d driven to the airport in Wolf’s truck, with a girl who’d already paid him for it. Phoebe had stood on the sidewalk a long time after they’d gone, wondering what would happen to them. She’d been wondering ever since.

  Her sister died on November 21, 1970, on the rocks below Corniglia, a tiny village on the west coast of northern Italy. She was seventeen; Phoebe was ten. Traces of drugs were found in Faith’s body, speed, LSD, but not enough that she would have been high at the time. If her neck hadn’t broken, they said, she might have lived.

  If Phoebe could string together the hours she’d spent circling this event, they would surely total years. She lost herself in these contemplations, her own life falling away like a husk as she sank into the rich, bottomless well of her sister’s absence. And the longer Phoebe circled, the more certain she became that a great misunderstanding was at work; that if Faith had taken her life, she’d done it without a hint of the failure or hopelessness the word “suicide” implied. When Phoebe thought of her sister’s death, it was always with a curious lilt to the heart, as if Faith had been lifted into some more spectacular realm, a place so remote she could reach it only by forfeiting her life. Like kicking away a ladder. Where was the failure in that?

  Phoebe’s mother, Gail, had flown to Italy and returned with Faith’s ashes in a box. She and Phoebe and Barry scattered them from the clifftops near the Golden Gate Bridge, a place where their family used to picnic. Phoebe remembered staring in disbelief at the silty, uneven chunks, like debris left in a fireplace. Her hands had been sweating, and as she tossed fistfuls into the wind, the finest powder stuck in the creases of her palms. No matter how hard Phoebe shook, the powder remained. Afterward she’d locked the door to her room and gazed for a long time at her open hands. The house was quiet. Phoebe stuck out her tongue and lightly ran its tip along her palm. The taste was sour, salty. Horrified, Phoebe fled to the bathroom and scoured her hands and mouth in the sink, staring into the toilet and willing herself to be sick. Lately she’d wondered if what she tasted that day was her own sweat.

  A white door at the end of a hallway. “Come on,” Faith had said, reaching for Wolf. They closed it behind them.

  Phoebe pacing outside, driving her toes deep into the soft rug. Terrified—of what? That her sister was gone. That the door would never open. That when finally it did, she would find herself alone in a bright, empty room.

  two

  When Phoebe rode with her brother in his Porsche, they played a tacit game of chicken: Barry accelerated steadily, knowing it scared Phoebe, wanting her to ask him to slow down. Phoebe would plunge straight into the jaws of death before she gave him that satisfaction. When they rode alone together, grim silence would overwhelm them as the needle edged across the speedometer, Phoebe begging God please for one red light. How long can this go on, she would think, before something happens to us? But she wasn’t giving in.

  “Honey, calm yourself,” their mother said when Barry began gunning the engine three blocks out of the driveway. “I’d like a few more birthdays after this one.”

  The day was warm and clear, rare for a San Francisco June. Barry was duly elated. He’d been planning their mother’s birthday for weeks, proposing first a long weekend in Hawaii, then a hot-air balloon ride, finally an all-day sail on a chartered yacht. “I’m your mother, not the CEO of Sony,” she’d chided him, laughing gently so Barry wouldn’t take it wrong. “Why not a picnic?”

  At twenty-three, Phoebe’s brother was a millionaire. The seed of his wealth had been their father’s five thousand dollars, engorged by careful investments while Barry was at Berkeley. After graduation he’d used the money to start a software company, and when Phoebe last asked, his employees had numbered fifty-seven. He owned a four-bedroom house in the hills outside Los Gatos, and showered Phoebe each holiday with gifts that left her weak with gratitude, a Prince tennis racket, a digital watch, a string of real pearls that radiated a faint pink glow in certain lights. Barry often dropped the names of important people he’d met at parties, always stressing how they’d sought him out, how some moment of unique communication had transpired. According to Barry, his employees were off the genius charts, his products so phenomenally great that customers were nearly fainting away at their computer terminals. Against her better judgment, Phoebe found herself believing him sometimes, adopting Barry’s view that the center of the world was not New York or Paris or Washington, D.C., but a software company near Palo Alto.

  “Where are we going?” Phoebe called from the backseat as the Porsche entered Golden Gate Park.

  “You’ll see,” Barry said. He was talking to their mother. Chips, Phoebe heard, bytes (of what? she idly wondered). She opened her window and breathed the wet, eucalyptus smell of Golden Gate Park. It had been exactly a week s
ince she’d met Kyle here, and like most stoned memories, the encounter had a sketchy, dreamlike quality. But the feeling of telling Kyle she would go to Europe, having him believe her—that Phoebe couldn’t forget.

  She reached over the back of her mother’s seat and touched her frosted hair. Exquisite though her mother looked to Phoebe, an outdatedness made her beauty seem muted in the outside world, inactive. Phoebe loved this. It unnerved her to look at old snapshots of her young, glamorous mother smiling coyly up from under hat brims. She remembered her parents together, how her father would lie with his head in her mother’s lap or playfully slap her behind. She remembered Claude, too, her mother’s single lover in a widowhood filled with meaningless dates—the dazed openness that had fallen on her mother in Claude’s presence, a tension between them filling the room like a charge. But Phoebe loved her mother best as she was now, wistful, out-of-step, her laugh tinged always with sadness, as if things were only funny in spite of themselves. Phoebe saw her mother as still in mourning and treasured the safety this made her feel, like falling asleep knowing someone else will always be awake, keeping watch.

  Barry parked beside a clearing full of fruit trees whose leaves were so new they looked wet. He unloaded the car, waving away their offers of help. Barry was dark-haired and tall, his eyes pure black, as if the pupils had sprung wide in some moment of panic and never snapped back. The trait was arresting in photographs—“That’s your brother? God, what a fox,” Phoebe’s friends had been saying for years when they saw his picture—but in life something cut the effect. He moved childishly, neck outthrust, arms loose at his sides, looking always ready to duck.

  Barry assembled their picnic, a lavish, daunting array of Brie and red pears, roast beef and bagels and stuffed grape leaves. There was Dom Pérignon in an ice chest, a tiny pot of beluga caviar. Their mother kicked away her espadrilles and sipped her champagne, flexing her white toes. The skin of her calves was so dry it shone like a glaze. “I could do with a few more days of this,” she said.

  When they’d all eaten slices of Phoebe’s carrot cake, Barry returned from the car with arms full of gifts. He piled them before their mother, a heap of gold foil and green ribbons. “Goodness,” she said.

  Phoebe’s own gift was hidden in the pocket of her corduroys, a silver necklace from Tiffany for her parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary. It would have been Tuesday. “You go first, Bear,” she said, knowing he would like that.

  Barry selected a box. Their mother opened it slowly, at pains not to tear the wrapping. She always opened gifts in this same careful way, yet afterward would crunch up the untorn wrappers and toss them away without a thought. “Makeup,” she said, peeling the gold aside.

  “They’re the latest colors,” Barry said. “It’s a whole set.”

  Rows of tinted ovals sparkled like the watercolor sets Phoebe had used as a child. “I haven’t worn much makeup in years,” their mother said.

  “Not to worry,” Barry assured her, proffering a second gift. It was long and flat. Inside lay a card.

  “‘A gift certificate,’” she read. “For a complete makeover?”

  “What it is, is,” Barry leapt in, “they figure out what goes best on your face, then they teach you how to do it.”

  “A paper bag would suffice in my case,” their mother said, putting an arm around Barry. “Honestly, honey, you really spent time on this.”

  The next box revealed another gift certificate, this time for a hair salon. Their mother rumpled Barry’s hair. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll have you know this style was the rage in ’65.”

  But Barry seemed not to hear. He loomed over their mother, handing her presents as fast as she could open them. Phoebe gazed overhead at the fresh new leaves, furious. How rude, she thought, how totally insulting. Had Barry lost his mind?

  Another gift certificate, this time for the Centurion, a clothing shop on Union Street. “This is too much,” their mother said. “You’ve gone completely overboard here!”

  “And now,” Barry said, foisting upon her a final box, “to bring it all home, present number five.”

  Their mother opened it and frowned. “Fashion coordinator,” she said. “It sounds like a machine.”

  “No, no, it’s a guy,” Barry explained. “You bring him with you to the store and he helps you choose what to buy. He knows what styles are ‘in.’”

  There was a beat of silence. Their mother looked up from the flurry of gold wrapping, and Phoebe glimpsed in Barry’s face a flash of distress, as if the weight of so many gifts had suddenly borne down upon him. “I don’t mean it badly …” he said.

  “Of course not,” their mother said, turning to Phoebe. “He’s right, isn’t he? I have become sort of a frump.”

  “You’re not a frump,” Phoebe said.

  “I hope you’ll really use this stuff,” Barry said. “I mean, not just throw it in a closet or something.” His eyes lingered on Phoebe, as though divining her urge to sabotage him.

  “It’s funny, actually,” their mother said. “I’ve been thinking for months about trying to … revitalize my appearance.”

  “Really?” Phoebe said, taken aback.

  “Honestly. But I had no idea where to start. Your timing is sort of uncanny, Barry.”

  Phoebe mulled this over uneasily. It was several moments before she remembered her own gift and pried it from her pocket.

  “More presents,” her mother said. “Such extravagant children.”

  Barry looked on in silence. Already Phoebe sensed his resentment, his fear of being upstaged. Their mother unwrapped the tissue slowly, opening the box to find the small blue Tiffany bag. “What a beautiful little bag,” she said. “I’m sure I can use this for something.” She was going slowly, balancing Phoebe’s one gift against all of Barry’s, making it last more than an instant.

  Her mother loosened the bag’s drawstring throat and found the necklace: a solid drop of silver on a slender chain. “Oh,” she said. “Oh Phoebe, this is beautiful. Help me put it on.” She lifted her hair and Phoebe fastened the clasp around her mother’s neck, so the drop of silver rested in the shallow cup between her collarbones.

  “Nice,” Barry said, shifting on the grass. “That’s pretty, Pheeb.”

  “It’s spectacular,” their mother said, kissing Phoebe’s cheek. Phoebe caught the smell from inside her blouse, tart from her lemony perfume. Their mother always smelled the same.

  Phoebe kept her eyes on her mother, waiting for her to acknowledge the true meaning of the necklace. Probably she would manage this without Barry’s ever knowing—just a glance to remind each other of the vanished years stretched taut beneath them.

  Their mother shut her eyes and tilted her face to the sun. Phoebe peered at her until she opened them. “What is it?” her mother said, straightening.

  Phoebe just stared. She heard a distant pulse of bongo drums.

  “Sweetheart, is something wrong?” Phoebe kept her eyes wide open. “Phoebe?”

  “Don’t you get it?” Phoebe cried, exasperated.

  “Get …”

  “Silver.” It astounded her, having to say it.

  Her mother touched the necklace. “Yes, I—I love silver.”

  “Think. Sil-ver,” Phoebe said, drawing out the word. “I can’t believe you don’t understand!”

  “What’s to understand?” Barry cried. “Jesus, Phoebe, she said she liked it.”

  Her mother’s hands fluttered at her neck.

  “Silver! For your twenty-fifth.”

  But even now, her mother’s face remained empty. Phoebe felt a pulse of fear deep in her stomach.

  “Oh, I see,” her mother finally cried, with relief. “Our twenty-fifth, of course. But that was last year.”

  Phoebe sat upright. “Last year? How?”

  “What was last year?” Barry said.

  “We were married in ’52.”

  “Fifty-two! I thought it was ’53.”

  “It doesn’t matter, honey. Re
ally, it makes absolutely no difference.” Her mother still seemed off-balance. “Goodness,” she said, “you frightened me.”

  “Cut. Cut!” Barry said. “Will someone please explain what this necklace has to do with you and Dad getting married?”

  “Silver,” their mother said. “That’s what you give on someone’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.”

  Barry leaned back, staring fiercely at the trees. “Got it,” he said.

  “It was a sweet thing to do,” their mother said, but without the conviction Phoebe longed for.

  Barry did not reply. Phoebe followed his gaze to a long, rainbow-striped kite twisting just above the trees. A muscle jumped near his jaw. “Don’t be mad, Bear,” she said.

  “Oh, I see. Now it’s my fault.”

  Their mother’s shoulders fell. Phoebe sensed her defeat and blamed herself, getting the year wrong. She looked at the trees, an old man tanning his face and chest with a blinding foil bib. Beneath all this lay a frame of past events, a structure upon which the present was stretched like a skin. A mistake in that frame made the world appear senseless—clouds, dogs, kids with fluorescent yo-yos—how did they fit? What did they mean? “’Fifty-two,” Phoebe said, trying to calm herself. “I can’t believe it was ’52.”

  Barry opened his mouth to reply, then exhaled. Their mother took Phoebe’s hand in her own, slim and warm, full of strong veins. Phoebe relaxed. Her mother saw the frame; she saw everything.

  It was time for their mother to go to her office. She worked often on weekends, a fact that drove Barry to paroxysms of rage at her boss, Jack Lamont. They rode in silence to her building, on Post Street. “I have the most wonderful children in the world,” their mother said, kissing them both as she left the car. Phoebe remained slumped in the backseat, leaving Barry alone in front. As he roared down Pine Street, running lights the instant before they turned green, she shut her eyes, trying to pinpoint when exactly it was that she and her brother had first turned against each other. But no matter how far back she went, it seemed already to have happened.