Here’s what it is: he knows something he didn’t know before, that he’s going to figure out how to keep her. He doesn’t want to send her back to Tessa. In fact, he can’t.
He gets up and paces around the room. He woke up last night in the middle of the night thinking about Anneliese, and for the first time she wasn’t screaming, and he wasn’t feeling guilty toward her. She wafted away.
The streetlight is shining in the window, making a patch of light on the floor. The windows rattle like they’re rattling his bones. Why, he finds himself wondering, has he wasted so much time on guilt? Hell, he ran toward her in the fire, didn’t he? He tried to save her. He gave his utmost in that effort. What if . . . what if, like everybody kept saying to him, it really wasn’t his fault?
It wasn’t my fault, he thinks, experimentally. He sits down. I didn’t do anything wrong. I am a survivor.
He says the words again: I tried to save her.
He holds out his arms and looks at them. They look strong and capable, these hands, even with their scars and their uneven coloring. He remembers back before, before the fire, when he thought of himself as strong. He’s been contemptuous the last few years, thinking of that guy—but he was a good guy. He got stuff done.
He doesn’t have to hate himself for who he is.
He was strong for Blix when she was dying. And then he was strong for Marnie when she needed him, back when she first moved here, and through all the months of figuring out how to be a Brooklynite. He smiles, remembering how she acted like she’d come to a quaint but baffling foreign country or something, a place filled with mysterious hipsters and subways and scary radiators clanging in the darkness.
He looks down at Fritzie, who turns over in her sleep, curls herself up. He wipes his eyes. What the hell is happening to him? Love has sneaked up on him and zapped him so hard that he’s down for the count. He’s got some fairly serious demons to stare down. He needs to say good-bye to Anneliese. Send her away.
And call Marnie. The thought of that makes his head hurt. He’s been such an idiot.
Before he does that, though, there is a thing. Some unfinished business he needs to take care of, something that he’d avoided for too long. He needs to call Anneliese’s parents. Just to talk to them. To let them say whatever it is they need to say to him. They should hear from him that he loved her, that he tried to save her, that he hopes they’ve found peace.
Tomorrow.
That’s what he’ll do tomorrow. He still has their phone number in with his things that he’s kept and moved from place to place. Grace and Kerwin will probably cry, and maybe he will, too. But he owes them this.
Fritzie Peach. He looks down at her sleeping and smiles, shaking his head at that name.
“My daughter,” he says.
And then—well, after he talks to Grace and Kerwin, then he’ll figure out how to call Marnie. See if he can make things right.
If Marnie doesn’t come back, if she can’t love him anymore—well, that’s unimaginable. He’ll grovel. But if he has to, he’ll raise this girl alone. He listens to her breathing for a long, long time and then he tiptoes away and closes the door. He feels like he wants to sit outside the door with a shotgun, if need be, keeping anybody out who’s going to try to take her away from him. And meanwhile, he’ll think of what to say to Marnie.
Grace is surprised to hear his voice on the phone.
“Patrick,” she says, and he tries to gauge by the way she says his name if she’s angry that he waited so long. But then when he stammers out his apology, she says, “Oh, Patrick! No, no, no! No apology necessary. It is so good to hear your voice. We so hoped you’d call when you were ready. You’ve been through so much, my love.”
She always called people “my love.” He remembers that—and her warm brown eyes. She puts Kerwin on speaker, and they tell him they live in California now, with their other daughter. They trade off telling him things: They are grandparents now. They have a little shrine to Anneliese and they talk about her every day, they say. They’ve told their grandchildren about her. She stays alive in their house, and with her artwork and her stories.
The Anneliese who visits them is their loving daughter, he realizes.
But what surprises him even more is that they are grateful to know that he’s well, that his life has continued. He remembers hearing that they had visited him in the hospital when he was in a coma. They have said prayers for him, Kerwin tells him.
“It’s so good to hear from you, Patrick,” says Grace before they hang up. He apologizes again for not calling sooner, and she says, “We’ve often wondered where you are, if you’ve healed. It’s lovely to hear that you’re moving on with your life. I’m so relieved, my love.”
After he hangs up, he takes Bedford for a walk in the cold air and crunchy snow. Funny thing: he hadn’t told them he was moving on with his life. They just knew that that’s what people do. Because they are healthy and loving, they didn’t want to think of him suffering any longer. Funny how that thought had never occurred to him before.
“You’re different somehow,” says Ariana to him the next evening. “What’s happened to you?” She is studying him, squinting her eyes and chewing on her lip. Thinking hard about him. He meets her scrutiny with a good-natured shrug, a first for him.
“Hey, I’m just cleaning the house is all,” he says. “That’s not so out of character for me, is it? I’m a clean guy most of the time.”
He had invited her for dinner earlier, when he’d seen her out on the sidewalk. A spontaneous invitation for dinner. Something he can’t remember ever wanting to do before.
“Nooo, I don’t think that’s it,” she says. “You’ve got like something else going on. It’s like you disappeared for months into that studio, and then you emerged as a big old grouch—excuse me for saying it, but it’s true. And now you’re like normal again.”
“I’m never all that normal,” he says.
“Hey, by the way, thanks for not giving me a hard time when I let Janelle move in. She’s going through some heavy shit.”
He’s in such a good mood that he doesn’t feel the need to point out that he didn’t even know that Janelle had officially moved in. He’s just assumed the basement apartment is filled up all the time with tons of kids.
“Just a ballpark estimate, how many would you say are living down there these days?”
She laughs and shakes her head. “Basically there’s just the two of us. Janelle and me. Although occasionally somebody else might need a night away from home, you know.”
“Everybody staying safe and legal?”
She laughs again. Just then Janelle shows up at the door to the kitchen. She has dark brown hair, a blue plaid shirt and jeans leggings, and an enormous belly sticking out in front of her.
“Hi, Patrick,” she says. She has a stricken expression on her face, and she’s telegraphing something to Ariana with her eyes.
“Wow. Won’t be long now!” Patrick says, which is the line he always uses upon sightings of pregnant bellies. He has hoped that it conveys the perfect amount of observation, respect, and even perhaps a sense of optimism.
“Sorry to interrupt. Ari, can I talk to you?”
“Oh, God. Who is it this time—your father or Matt?” Ariana says. “Come on in and sit down. You can tell me about it with Patrick here. He’s not a typical guy. He knows how awful men are.”
“What?” says Patrick. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?” He looks over at Janelle. “Come on in and have a seat. I just made some tea. You look like you could use a cup of tea.”
Naturally she bursts into tears.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” he says, but Ariana says, “It’s okay, Patrick. She cries all the time, don’t you, Janelle? It’s a combination of pregnancy hormones and also the fact that her parents are being kind of shitty about things. And Matt wants her to put the baby up for adoption and for neither of them to ever see it again. And this is after he said he’d help her raise it.”
�
�Okay,” Patrick says. “Tell me the whole thing.” He feels he owes it to the universe to listen to any story a woman wants to tell him about pregnancy.
Janelle sinks down in the kitchen chair he holds out for her and sticks her legs out as far as they will go. “Well, so even though we’re not really a couple anymore, we had decided we were going to do this cool experimental thing, where we’d live together. It was going to be Matt and his girlfriend and me, and we’d all raise the baby together in Boston while the three of us took turns working and going to school—”
“But the girlfriend, Lulu, now doesn’t think this whole arrangement works for her,” supplies Ariana. “Which we are not judging her for, are we, Janelle? It would be a tough go if you only later found out she wasn’t really into it.”
Patrick doesn’t say what he’s thinking—that this whole plan sounds insane. Like off the charts insane. Not that he’s a poster boy for good relationship tips or anything.
Janelle is still weeping softly. He remembers what Marnie had told him about her—that weeping is her default setting.
He pours her a cup of tea, and she says, “I might be judging her. And then my mom said she and my dad would keep the baby while I went to school. So okay. But I just got off the phone with her and now she said that she’s not going to be my Plan B. She told me that she and my dad had a big talk, and they realized they have never gotten to do anything they wanted, and they want to travel. They don’t want to be tied down.”
“Which we are also not judging,” says Ariana.
“Nooo, but why did she then have to start yelling at me? She was saying that I can’t look to other people to clean up the mess I’ve made of my life, and it’s time I grew up and realized that I have to choose which life I’m going to have: saddling myself with a dependent that I can’t really care for, which means turning down my scholarship from BU, or finding people who will adopt my baby and getting on with my life.” It takes her forever to get this story out, because she has to keep stopping to cry. Patrick feels his own breath high in his chest. He cracks his knuckles.
“I categorically reject the two-choice view of life,” says Ariana. She gets up and goes over and gives Janelle a hug.
“Yeah, well,” says Janelle. “Tell my mom that.” Patrick hands her a fistful of paper napkins, and she blows her nose. He sips his tea and tries to think of something to say.
Janelle sits there for a few moments, contemplating the tabletop, and then she says, “Well, maybe there is another way. I met this woman on the subway the other day, and she’s a counselor, and she said maybe I should look into open adoption, which is a system where I could pick the parents I wanted for the baby, and then I could arrange with them to be part of my baby’s life. I could visit and make sure she had a good family life. It’s better . . . maybe. At least I wouldn’t feel like I was just throwing her away.”
“By the way, it’s a girl,” Ariana says to Patrick, and he nods.
“Are there . . . agencies . . . for this?” Patrick says. His voice sounds like it’s coming from far away.
“I’m going to find out. I’m a little bit exhausted by the whole idea. It’s already March, and she’s due at the end of May, and I’m in school so I don’t have a lot of time to interview people.” She puts her head down on the table, resting on her arm. “I’m just so tired of it all. Not knowing what’s going to happen.”
“Hell, I’ll take her myself,” says Ariana. “You can go to school, and Justin and I can take her out on the road with us this summer and we’d videotape people holding her. How would that be?” Ariana gets up and paces around the room, cracking her knuckles.
Patrick says, “Well, that seems like a horrible idea!” and Ariana says, “I was just kidding, Patrick! Where’s your sarcasm gene?”
“It’s gotten thrashed out of me,” he says. “It wasn’t working for me so well with the parenthood gig.”
Janelle bursts into a fresh round of tears. Maybe he shouldn’t have said the word parenthood. She buries her face and lets go with all the sobs. Patrick doesn’t know if it would seem creepy to get up and give her a hug, but he can’t seem to help himself. He stands up and moves toward her, feeling like he’s being carried along by a current that’s taking him away somewhere. It’s as though some part of him has forgotten that he’s not a hugger.
It seems everywhere he looks people are suffering and fighting, experiencing the collateral damage of being alive. Here is this teenager crying in his kitchen, knowing she doesn’t have what she needs to raise a baby. And here is Ariana, hurting from her parents’ disapproval of her plan for her life. And Fritzie—dear little rebellious, resistant Fritzie—scared of being abandoned, feeling that she has to push the boundaries every single day, to test out whether she can still be loved. That chin of hers, thrust out, and the POW haircut, the lower lip that sticks out and trembles and breaks his heart.
And Marnie. Oh God, Marnie. He thinks maybe he should send her a funny text: Hey, Marnie. I sent that artisty, angsty guy packing, and regular Patrick is back. Wonders where you are.
No, that wouldn’t work. He has to do better.
He’s been crap at being in the world. Looking at all the wrong things. Letting himself seize up with fear. Building guardrails all around himself, using his scars and his sarcasm to scare off any interlopers. Never paying attention to what mattered.
He gazes down, looks at the grain of the wood of Blix’s old table, thinks of all the dinners he’s had here, first with Blix and her friends, and then with Marnie and all the people she brought in.
Blix had said once to him: “Maybe everything that frightens you, Patrick, is really something helpless in you that needs you to love it.”
A thought hits him, like it’s the missing piece to a puzzle he didn’t even know he was working on.
He could be the dad to Janelle’s baby. He and Marnie could adopt her. Maybe.
Could that work? Is he insane? He feels that steady humming in his ears that means he’s getting some kind of feeling he’s not going to be able to block out. He checks with himself again. He wants this baby. Does he, though? He has never even entertained such a thought before in his life. He rubs his face, hard with both hands. Makes a little sound.
The two girls look up at him absently, then Ariana swivels her head back to Janelle. “We can find you a family, just the right family,” she says.
Oh God. He. Wants. This. Baby. He wants the baby and he wants Fritzie and Marnie—all of them here with him, being a family. A put-together family. He feels such a sudden pang of longing, so sharp it’s like heartburn. Maybe he should go look for an antacid and ask himself again later if this is really what he wants. Lie down until the feeling passes.
That thought makes him smile. This isn’t going to go away. A baby! He feels excited when he thinks about it instead of abject, pull-the-blanket-over-his-head fear. What would it have been like to have known Fritzie as a baby, to see that little flame of humanness in its beginnings? That spunk she has: What did it look like at four weeks of age? At age two? And how did love first show up in her eyes? What would it have felt like to have her stop crying and hold out her arms at the sight of him?
Dude, something says, you’ve been wise to be wary of babies. Think of their paraphernalia. Their screaming fits and their drooly chins. The diapers alone are scary as hell.
But another part of him answers quickly. Bring it on. He wants the whole happy catastrophe: mostly he wants Marnie back, but he also wants kids, the dog, the cat, strollers in the hallway, Legos on the stairs, the rows of little shoes, the diaper bag . . . and he can see himself and Marnie in bed with the two children curled around them, sunshine coming through the window, their faces tilted up to his.
He wants Marnie and her laughter and her funny little dances and her genius for magic, and he wants it all so much that his heart is aching. He wants Mercury in retrograde and the universe and Toaster Blix and the homeless people she loves.
“But I want to be able
to see her sometime,” Janelle is saying. “I want her to have people who will love both of us, you know?”
He looks at her, forgetting that she can’t read his thoughts. She doesn’t see the yes that’s running through him, pinging his nerve endings. She doesn’t know yet that he could love her baby and love her, too.
The silence in the room roars in his ears. It’s like the time at YMCA camp when he was at the top of the diving board, staring down at the water so impossibly far away. Everybody else had already dived, and it was his turn. He wanted so badly to turn back, to crawl down the ladder. But the longer he stood there, the clearer it was that he was going to have to dive. It was as though he was being pulled toward the water by a force that was stronger than any fear he had. But that moment before the dive—now that was the moment. When you could still turn back, but you knew you weren’t going to. That’s when the courage attached itself to you.
That’s what this is.
“Janelle,” he says quietly. He has to interrupt their conversation. Both sets of eyes turn to him, questioning. “I need to talk with Marnie, but let me just ask you something . . .” he begins.
And then he says the thing he needs to say. The thing that’s going to change his life.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
PATRICK
Later, he’ll wonder why he didn’t see the whole thing coming. He’ll go over the day in his mind, the way people always do after a tragedy or a near-tragedy. “What were the signs I missed?” they ask themselves. “Why didn’t I look a little more closely?”
But for now, the morning is just a regular morning, perhaps even a happier than normal morning. He made a huge decision last night, and he still feels the high of possibility. He makes breakfast for Fritzie and himself—toast and oatmeal. The toast does not fly out of the toaster and land on the floor, which makes him smile. Also: Fritzie gets herself completely dressed all on her own, and she comes out of her room on time with her backpack already filled up with everything she needs for the day.
She has her homework, and she’s brushed her teeth, and she has her pencils and her notebook, and her phone, and her shoes are tied. She shows him that she’s even wearing matching socks. She has a big smile on her face. When he lifts her backpack off the table, when it’s time to leave, he says, “Whoa, this is heavy.”
A Happy Catastrophe Page 31