God-Shaped Hole

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  As quietly as possible, I called Jacob’s name. He turned and looked up at me with the face of a needy child and the eyes of an ancient shaman.

  I fell down to my knees and cradled him in my arms. He didn’t say anything. He just rested his head on my shoulder and cried. I’d never seen a grown man cry like that before, so unself-consciously, so unashamedly. I didn’t know if he was crying for what he’d lost, or for what he’d never had, but there was a beauty in his tears that moved me more than I could ever explain with words—a beauty in the honesty of his sadness, in the grace of it’s purity. It was holy water raining down from the clouds in his eyes, falling to the sand then being carried back to the source from which it came—his blessed sea.

  My fingertips were wet with his mourning, and I had a perverse yearning to genuflect and make the sign of the cross on my forehead.

  We stayed like that for a long time, long enough to watch the sun go down and the moon fade in. Finally, when the weight of the day had been absorbed, we headed home. As we walked, Jacob gripped my hand so tightly that my knuckles cracked, but I didn’t tell him he was practically breaking my fingers because for God’s sake, the guy had to hold on to something.

  Jacob called Rhonda Doorley that night. He wanted to attend the memorial service, he wanted to say good-bye to his father, and she was the only person he knew who could tell him where and when he’d be able to do that. He still had the piece of paper I’d given him in San Francisco, the one I wrote Thomas Doorley’s name and number on. He dug it out of his address book and dialed slowly. The jawbone on the right side of his face pulsated while he waited for an answer.

  Someone on the other end picked up and Jacob asked for Rhonda. When she got to the phone, he spoke apprehensively.

  “Mrs. Doorley?” he said. “Uh, you don’t really know me but…well…I knew your husband…”

  Jacob uttered a winded paragraph of condolences, after which he asked Rhonda about the funeral arrangements. He wrote down whatever information she gave him. It was the name of a church, Our Lady of Mount-something, in Mill Valley. The services were to be held the following afternoon. I think Rhonda thanked Jacob for calling—he told her she was welcome. Then she must have asked him his name. I was hoping he’d fall back on Barry Williams if the question arose, but he made the mistake of telling her the truth.

  He blinked three times in quick succession and squinted. “I understand where you’re coming from, I do,” Jacob said. “But—”

  Those were his exact words, only he didn’t look like he understood. Finally, with defeat, he said, “Right. Good-bye, Mrs. Doorley.”

  He didn’t put the phone down until he was sure Rhonda had hung up, after which he slammed it so hard the earpiece snapped off. Then he kicked the wall with his boot.

  “Jacob, what did she say?”

  He turned away from me. “She doesn’t want me there. She said she knows who I am and she thinks it’s better, after all they’ve been through the past few days, if I don’t show up and make it worse. That’s what she said. That I’d make it worse. My father’s dead and I’m not even allowed to go to his fucking funeral.”

  The minute Jacob learned his father’s life had become what, in relation to him it had been all along, an apparition, is when I saw desire begin to fade from his eyes. Jacob searched harder than ever for meaning in his being. His body had been orphaned long before, but this time, Thomas Doorley had taken his soul. Because a soul never truly loses hope until hope has turned to ashes, or has been buried six feet underground.

  I know that better than anybody.

  Jacob became a bastard of confusion. He saw himself as a once fertilized union of bodily fluid that should have been sucked from the womb instead of made to endure the existential question of why.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Jacob lay in bed that night, fully clothed. I don’t think he slept at all. He just tossed and turned above the sheets, spreading stow-away grains of sand that drained from his pockets and dusted the bed. When he finally rose after the sun came up, without a shower or a change of clothes, and in a sleep-deprived haze, he said he was going to work.

  “Why don’t you call in sick?” I said. “You need some rest. We can spend the day together.”

  “Thanks, but I’m fine.”

  Before he walked out the door, he caressed my face and said, “I don’t know where I’d be right now if it wasn’t for you, Trixie.”

  I drove over to the Weekly office at lunchtime, to see how Jacob was holding up. Mike told me he hadn’t been there all day. He’d missed the staff meeting and had yet to call in.

  Night came and went, and I didn’t hear a word from Jacob. I was pretty sure I knew where he’d gone, still, by the middle of the next afternoon, I started to panic. I considered going to San Francisco after him, but at that point the funeral had been over for twenty-four hours. I couldn’t very well wander aimlessly around the city assuming I’d run into him.

  Late that night, he called collect.

  “Trixie? I’m sorry, Trixie. I’m sorry if I woke you up.” He’d been drinking, I could tell by the way he slurred his words and said my name over and over.

  “Jacob, are you okay?”

  “Can you come and pick me up?”

  “Where are you?”

  “The airport.”

  “The airport? Where’s your car?”

  “It’s here,” he said. “It’s here, but I don’t think I can drive it. I love you, Trixie.”

  Part of me was on the verge of exploding at his lack of consideration, for taking off and disappearing without a word. I wanted to scream at him. My other half told me to bite the bullet, to go rescue him and shut up. At least he was safe. And it’s not like fathers drop dead every day; the cutting of a little slack might be acceptable.

  I called Pete and asked him to come with me, to drive Jacob’s car home. Jacob was sitting on the curb outside the United terminal when we pulled up. He could barely stand, and he looked so trashed I couldn’t believe they even let him on the plane. He fawned all over me, still muttering, “I’m sorry, Trixie, I’m sorry,” as Pete eased him into the back seat. We drove around the parking garage for forty-five minutes looking for his car. By the time we found it, Jacob was completely passed out.

  Pete carried Jacob up to the apartment for me. “He’ll be all right,” he said. “He’s a tough kid. Don’t worry, okay?”

  After Pete left, I went straight to bed. Jacob’s head was at the wrong end of the mattress, his feet were on his pillow, and he was curled up in a fetal position. He smelled the way kids do when they’ve been playing outside all day. Like dirt. I lifted his arm and it just fell when I let it go. I lifted it once more, wrapped it around me, and held on to it for the rest of the night.

  Jacob was in the shower when I woke up the next morning. He spent a good fifteen minutes there, coughing and sniffling like holy hell. When he came back to the bedroom to get dressed, I pretended I was still sleeping. I’m not sure why I did that, but it didn’t work anyway.

  “I saw you blink,” Jacob said.

  He’d combed all of his wet hair back off his face. It made his forehead look really high and rectangular. His skin was the color of a raw oyster.

  “What did you do, drink gasoline for two days straight?” I said.

  He sat down next to me and ran his index finger up and down my shoulder.

  “I was in San Francisco,” he said.

  “I figured as much.”

  “It rained the whole time.” He pointed to his nose, to explain his pneumonia-like symptoms.

  I didn’t say a word, I just let him talk.

  “I never went into the church or anything. I just stood outside. I watched them take the casket in and I watched them carry it out…Nobody saw me…I had to go…Are you going to say anything, Trixie? Are you mad at me?”

  I took a deep breath. “I�
�m trying not to be. I understand why you needed to go. I don’t blame you for that, but you should have told me. You should have let me come with you. You can’t just vanish like that and expect me not to be worried. Would it have killed you to call and tell me where you were going?”

  “I know,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking straight. I had every intention of going to work, I really did, but on my way there I saw the exit for the airport and something told me to take it. For closure.”

  I stood up. “Get your ass back in bed. I’m going to make you some tea, or chicken soup, or something.”

  “Hey…” He held on to my arm. “Don’t worry, it’s all over now, okay?” he said. “It’s over.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  It’s never over. How can something be over that is the essence of what it means to go on in perpetuity—the vicious familial line that runs on an invisible string, linking us to our past and to our future, to what we embrace and to what we try to deny? Take the proverbial scissors and snip at it if you dare, but you’re snipping into thin air because the thread lies inside. To sever it would mean the end of breath and the end of life, which, to some, is just another beginning. Thus the cycle continues.

  So it wasn’t over.

  It never is and never will be.

  Jacob remained sullen for days following his return from San Francisco, and I felt him retreating from me, but only incidentally. What he was really backing away from was life; I was simply a part of that. He hadn’t mentioned his book in weeks. He hadn’t even returned any of Adrenaline’s calls.

  “It’s just more bad news, I can tell by her decibel level,” he said.

  Adrenaline’s sell-by date had come and gone, and there had been no strong leads. Maybe Jacob didn’t think he was ever going to sell the book, and even if he did, I surmised there was a part of him that didn’t care anymore, a part of him that had built an illusion around what would have happened upon the publication of Hallelujah. His father would have undoubtedly read it. His father would have been proud of him. His father would have called him up and said, I’m sorry, please be my son because you’re everything I always wanted to be but never could become.

  Surely Jacob hadn’t spent the last decade of his life writing solely for the acceptance of Thomas Doorley. Deep down I know he knew that, but he’d buried his passion under his grief, and someone or something had to either dig it out, wait for it to spring back up, or watch it turn to dust.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The last straw came about a month later, in the form of a phone call from an attorney representing Rhonda Doorley, a local guy named Sanford Wilcox, who arranged a meeting with Jacob. He suggested that Jacob bring legal representation.

  “What’s this regarding?” Jacob said.

  Mr. Wilcox told Jacob he preferred to discuss the matter in person. Jacob put on a suit and tie for the meeting. I’d never seen Jacob dressed like that. It made him look like a rock star moonlighting as an insurance salesman. He declined to bring a lawyer along. He took me instead.

  The law offices of Samuelson, Wilcox, Bergman & Klein were on the seventeenth floor of a gleaming Century City high-rise. All the walls were glass, the carpet was the color of bamboo, and the furniture was made of that slippery kind of leather your ass can’t get a grip on when you sit down.

  The receptionist offered us beverages as soon as we arrived, then she escorted us to Mr. Wilcox’s office.

  Sanford Wilcox stood up from behind his massive desk when we walked in. He was a thick man, with the shoulders of a linebacker. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Grace. I’m glad you brought an attorney.”

  “I’m not his attorney, I’m his girlfriend,” I said. “Beatrice Jordan.”

  His handshake was respectably firm, so I didn’t hate him right off the bat like I usually did when I met a lawyer.

  “Any relation to Curtis Jordan?” he said.

  For Christ’s sake, I thought, can we never escape?

  “He’s my father,” I said, albeit reluctantly. I was going to lie, but I changed my mind because Jacob looked at me with eyes that said, Trixie, it’s neither the time nor the place to make up something stupid.

  “Curtis and I go way back. He’s a good guy. And a great attorney,” he said. “I’ll have to tell him I ran into you.”

  “You do that.” I feigned a smile.

  Mr. Wilcox gave Jacob a small pile of papers which, he explained, was Thomas Doorley’s will. Except instead of saying Thomas Doorley, he kept saying “your father” in a way that made me think he didn’t know anything at all about Jacob’s relationship with the man.

  Jacob shifted nervously in his chair and paged through the documents, perplexed. “Mr. Wilcox, what does this have to do with me? Why am I here?”

  “Call me Sanford,” he said.

  “Sanford,” Jacob said, “what’s this all about?”

  “Let me get right to the point. You’re being sued by my client, your stepmother.”

  “My stepmother? Do you mean Rhonda?”

  Sanford nodded.

  “She’s suing me for what?”

  Sanford asked Jacob to turn to the third page of the file. He read paragraph C to us. It stated something to the effect that, in the unlikely event of the death of Mr. Thomas Charles Doorley, Jacob would inherit the Lovell Avenue property, located in Mill Valley, California, zip code 94941.

  “He left me his house?” Jacob said.

  Sanford explained that Thomas Doorley had only two valuable assets in his estate. One was a bank account containing close to two hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars. The other was his house. He’d left the money and all other incidental possessions to his wife and son, Eric. He’d left the house to Jacob.

  Thomas Doorley had apparently been even more of a screwball than I originally gave him credit for.

  “Your father paid sixty-five thousand dollars for that house when he bought it back in the seventies,” Sanford said. “I don’t think he had any idea of it’s current value, but today, it’s estimated to be worth close to five hundred thousand.”

  Jacob didn’t know what to say.

  “Mrs. Doorley is suing you for the house. She lives in it, she wants to keep it, and she believes she has a right to it. But she’s willing to offer you a settlement. One hundred-thousand dollars cash, and you sign the house over to her.”

  “One hundred grand?” I said. “What a rip off.”

  Jacob shook his head, and I tried to interpret his expression. All I could decipher was shock. A moment later he read something in the will that stopped him in his tracks and drained every drop of blood from his face.

  “Mr. Wilcox,” Jacob said, “when did Thomas Doorley make this will?”

  “Back in the late eighties. The most recent date, the one you see there on that page, is the date the will was amended. He executed the original years ago, and in it he’d left everything to Rhonda and Eric. He changed it just last year to include you.”

  I saw what Jacob saw. The date the change was made. The first week of December. Thomas Doorley changed his will the first week of December—the week after he’d met Jacob.

  “I guess you can see why you need counsel, Mr. Grace.”

  Jacob continued to page through the documents. When he looked up, calmly, but regrettably, he said, “I don’t need counsel. Tell Rhonda she can keep her house.”

  “Mr. Grace, surely you want to think about it before you make a decision—”

  “I have thought about it. Let me know when you get all the paperwork ready and I’ll sign it.”

  “So you’re accepting my client’s offer?”

  Jacob ripped a small corner of paper from one of his documents. He scribbled something on it and handed it to Sanford Wilcox.

  “Joanna Grace, that’s my mother,” he said. “That’s her address and phone number. I want the check made out to her.”
/>   The first thought that popped into my head was this: we could leave Los Angeles tomorrow if Jacob kept that money. I knew, however, that a discussion on the subject would be futile. If Jacob wouldn’t let me buy us a house in Memphis, there was no way in hell he’d let his father’s guilt buy us one either. Besides, Joanna deserved the money as much as anyone.

  Jacob closed his file and stood up. “I guess you’ll be in touch,” he said to Sanford.

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  I found it fascinating that Thomas Doorley never took the time to send his first-born son a Christmas card like I’d asked him to, but he’d taken the time to leave him the house his family inhabited. I couldn’t even begin to unravel the meaning behind those actions.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Driftwood. Jacob just floated around like driftwood. Everything was copacetic but nothing really mattered. If I was simply confused by Thomas Doorley’s posthumous revelations, Jacob was positively spellbound, and he sought no constructive outlet for the chaos he felt. He barely acknowledged my presence when I came home. He’d taken to drinking midmorning, sleeping it off in the afternoon, sometimes disappearing in the middle of the night and not coming back until late the next day. On more than one occasion, he’d snuck out of bed at one or two a.m., unable to sleep, and quietly left the apartment. Jacob explained his absences by telling me he’d been driving around all night—an excuse I found highly suspicious until I checked the odometer on his car. One night he drove to Vegas and back. I asked him if he’d gambled and he said no, he just stopped to ride the roller coaster at the state line.

  “The thought of the city up ahead, the lights and all those people, it made me feel rotten. I just turned the car around and came home.”

  Another time he took off to Joshua Tree National Park, where he allegedly slept on the desert floor with nothing but his jacket, Dante’s Inferno, and a bottle of cheap red wine to keep him warm. The afternoon following that excursion, he stopped in to see me at the studio, looking like a sewer rat, to tell me that another publisher had turned down his book. His hair smelled like vomit, and he kept babbling on about not wanting to end up alone.