The Candy House(14)
“Wow,” she said as they left the house. “Is it always like that?”
5
Back in the rental car, Alfred tried to avail himself of the vaunted intelligence of his new phone, but it seemed capable of telling him only that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jack Stevenses lived in the Chicago area. His momentum stubbed against this fact.
Kristen became gloomy. “Now what?” she asked. “Our luggage is inside your brother’s house. Are we even going back?”
“Of course we’re going back,” Alfred said. “After we visit Jack Stevens.” He was scrolling among Jack Stevenses fat and scrawny, young and ancient, grinning from real estate websites and glowering from mug shots. He had a smoldering worry that Jack was a nickname for John.
After a while, Kristen leaned over to look with him, and her curiosity energized Alfred. “There!” he said suddenly, after several more minutes. They peered together at a face: rakish, big smile, blurry in a way that suggested motion, or indecision. “That’s Jack.”
Kristen winnowed away possible addresses associated with this strangely obscure and scantly photographed Jack Stevens until one emerged as most likely: a western suburb that might not have been a suburb at all, Alfred thought, when they reached it forty-five minutes later, so much as a low-slung extension of Chicago. Modest freestanding houses lined the streets, identical in every detail down to a staggered trio of rectangular windows cut into each front door. The house was in the middle of the block. A red toy lawnmower and a small pink scooter rested on its square of grass.
They stepped from the car into a smell of lawn clippings and motor oil. The quiet felt abrupt, as if children had been playing there just moments before. Alfred experienced an old, prickling anticipation. Jack Stevens. Why had he waited so long to seek him out?
“I’m nervous,” Kristen said as they approached the door. “What if he’s angry?”
“Why would he be angry?”
“Some people don’t like it when you show up at their houses unannounced.”
“Jack isn’t like that.”
“You don’t really know what Jack is like,” she pointed out. “You haven’t seen him since high school.”
The doorbell made a three-tone sound, like actual bells. They waited, and Alfred pressed again. “He isn’t home,” Kristen said with audible relief.
“He can’t be far. There’s stuff on his lawn.”
They sat on the front steps to wait. Alfred was surprised by the neighborhood’s uniformity; it wasn’t what he would have expected for Adult Jack. As if sensing his thoughts, Kristen said, “What’s so special about this guy, anyway? Other than, you know. The thing with your mom.”
“Jack was, like, legendary,” Alfred said, but the word was a poor vehicle for the legendariness he wished it to convey. “People just—loved him. He brought out the best in everyone, and sort of… completed every situation he was in.” He stopped, confounded by the difficulty of invoking Jack’s magical effect.
But Kristen nodded in recognition. “I guess every high school has a guy like that.”
She was wrong, Alfred wanted to say—no high school had a guy like Jack Stevens, only theirs and only him, but he hesitated to contradict her now that they were getting along again. She would have to see for herself.
After thirty minutes, a worn-out gray Buick pulled into the driveway, its driver hard to discern, small faces peeking from the back windows. The car passed close to Alfred and Kristen on its way to a garage behind the house. They heard an electric door judder open, then a flotsam of children’s voices and the twang of a screen door. The family had gone inside through the back.
“This is so awkward,” Kristen said. “Why didn’t he stop?”
“He was parking,” Alfred said, but he’d experienced a flicker of cold as the car drove past. He took Kristen’s hand and felt her sweating. “Would you rather wait in the car?”
“No way.”
A slightly older, slightly heavier, slightly balder, slightly more weathered variant of Jack Stevens opened the front door, eyes narrowed in the manner of a man anticipating conflict. He was holding a translucent pink-and-blue life preserver. “Help you folks?” he said tersely through a screen door, which he left shut.
“Hi, Jack. It’s Alfred.”
Jack’s face underwent an evolution of expression, as if he were deciphering a rune. “Holy fuck,” he said at last, pushing open the screen door and squinting out at them. “Hollander?”
“That’s me,” Alfred said, and reached out a hand, but Jack ignored it and clapped him in a bear hug. To enable this, Kristen took the life preserver. “Alfred Hollander?” Jack said, pulling away to look at him again. “What in Christ are you doing here?”
“This is Kristen,” Alfred said. “We’re visiting Miles, and we got curious about you.”
Jack took the life preserver back from Kristen and shook her hand. “Come on in,” he said. “Mi casa tu casa, if you don’t mind my ex coming by pretty soon to pick up my kids.”
They followed him into a dim carpeted living room. A boy and a girl sat on a couch in bathing suits, fiddling with a TV remote.
“No TV,” Jack said. “I told you.”