by Alan Rossi
From the boy’s bedroom, he heard Jack begin to make half-crying noises as he woke up. They looked at each other, unmoving for a moment, as if some game, waiting for the word that would unfreeze them. They had learned that these half-crying noises didn’t mean he would wake up fully. He would cry some, then talk a little at the mobile that Nicholas had made, which hung above the bed, the mobile fashioned out of wood, little birds that Nathaniel’s brother had carved that bobbed up and down on three separate ‘branches’ of the mobile. After talking at the mobile for a few minutes, both Nathaniel and Stefanie listening, Jack stopped and fell asleep again, and, it felt to Nathaniel, he was free to operate in the world, and in his mind, again. Again, the stream and the rain emphasized the quiet around them, and after Jack was quiet, Nathaniel decided to do it.
He told Stefanie, in a moment of clarity, that he was going to call Tammy on speakerphone and he wanted Stefanie to grab her phone and record the call, so he could share it with his father, the lawyer, to see if this woman had any actual legal rights. He tapped the woman’s last incoming call on his phone’s screen and then hit the green button. He reminded himself to speak in a low voice, not quite a whisper, so that he wouldn’t wake Jack. The mother-in-law answered her cell phone, and Nathaniel said hello, it was Nathaniel, to which he and Stefanie heard (Nathaniel’s phone was sitting on the counter. Stefanie also had her phone out and was holding it close to Nathaniel’s phone on the counter in order to record the call), I know who it is, what’s up, which made Nathaniel pause. They could hear her driving, that monotonous sound of static behind her voice – the hollow white noise of a car traveling over road, and then behind that sound, Nathaniel heard what must’ve been rain. It was raining where she was too. Nathaniel took a short breath and continued by saying that he was sorry to call back, to be bothering her here, but he maybe hadn’t heard correctly, but did she say that she was coming to pick Jack up on Friday? She told Nathaniel he had heard her one hundred percent correctly. She was on her way, and it was what, Tuesday now, so she would arrive Friday morning, and then would drive Jack back that afternoon or the next day. They could arrange for all of Jack’s things to be boxed and shipped to her whenever was convenient for them, but not too long, because she wanted Jack to feel at home with her. Stefanie’s eyes went wide and she shook her head when she heard this information, as though hearing it for the first time. Nathaniel said that he didn’t want to be rude, but he wanted to ask why Tammy thought that she would be taking the boy. Well then ask it, the mother-in-law said. What? Nathaniel said. You said you wanted to ask it, the mother-in-law said. So ask it. Okay, Nathaniel said. Why are you—. I’m just fucking with you, the mother-in-law said, and sort of snort chuckled at this and then said, in an annoyed and almost vacant voice, Who else is going to take him? You? I know neither of you wanted kids. April and I talked. Spoke words on the phone. Conveyed information to each other. Plus, I talked to April about it all when Jack was born. He’s coming with me. Nathaniel and Stefanie made confused-looking faces at each other, and Nathaniel leaned into the phone resting on the counter, and said that that was, you know, he didn’t think certain, you know, things pertained, since, actually. He stopped, composed himself, as if finally realizing the reality of what he was encountering, and said that look, all that sounded odd because he was told that in the event that both Nicholas and April should pass away, that guardianship would pass to him and Stefanie. Nathaniel heard himself saying this in his most cordial, most warm voice, a voice that, he felt, asked for understanding. The mother-in-law said that that’s not what she was told and that wasn’t what was happening anyway – she knew about both of them and there was no way Jack was going to live the rest of his life with them. I mean, do you get that: you think he’s going to live until he’s an adult with you, Nathaniel? There was a pause, as though the universe was stretched on a taut line between the past and future, the present suddenly unavoidable in its tension, and this tension was expressed, Nathaniel felt, in the way she had used his name, as though he himself was an indictment of himself. He asked if Tammy had any documentation of her guardianship, or did she only speak to April, see, because that wouldn’t constitute legal guardianship. Stefanie was nodding, her eyes still wide, her hand still holding her own cell phone and recording the call. The mother-in-law said that she didn’t have any documentation, no, but that even a will wasn’t binding, only a court could grant legal guardianship, Nathaniel, though if there was a will, she’d abide by it, and actually, she thought that there probably was one, and it most likely showed that she was to be the guardian, and she was really sorry, here, but the truth was she knew she was meant to be the guardian and knew that probably pissed off Nathaniel and Chiquita Banana over there – Stefanie stepped backward, as though the absurdity of the remark contained a physical force, and threw her arms up and let them flap at her sides in apparent disgust – but they’d just have to get over it because this is what April wanted, she knew that for a fact, Nathaniel, and it was better for Jack anyway to have an experienced parent. Just because he and his brother were Mr. Educated didn’t mean she was a moron or that he could push her aside, she had her rights, she knew them, and she was on her way to pick up the kid, and unless he could prove otherwise, she was just really sorry, but she was the guardian here.
Nathaniel had begun to say that well maybe they’d have to talk about this together when she arrived, and would she, but as he was saying it, Stefanie was shaking her head, indicating that Tammy had hung up. Nathaniel looked at her, his mouth slightly open, and Stefanie said, Chiquita Banana. Really? Because my dad is from Mexico? That doesn’t even make sense. Nathaniel nodded his head and said they needed to remain calm here, which was what he believed Nicholas might say. He continued by saying that it was very important not to do anything rash or emotional that could jeopardize Jack’s chances of being with them, which was the sole goal here, suddenly a very important goal that Nathaniel hadn’t even thought was going to be a goal or even thought was going to be a real problem he had to deal with. The problem had somehow not felt actual until being confirmed by his brother’s mother-in-law, this Tammy woman. I’m not not calm, Stefanie said. I’m just saying that woman is a racist bitch. I think that’s exactly right, Nathaniel said calmly, aware that he was acting calm. He added that he supported the notion that this Tammy woman was obviously a racist, there was definitely no questioning that, though maybe bitch was too much, he said, feeling it was a very composed thing to say, but that wasn’t the point here, he went on, the point was about Jack, they needed to figure out how Jack could stay with them, and, Nathaniel wondered, there had to be a will or something somewhere in here, so they’d just have to start going through some of the boxes they’d packed, go through the boxes again, and see if they could find it. He said he’d call his father – the lawyer, he said in a deep baritone that was supposed to be funny but elicited no response from Stefanie, probably, Nathaniel thought, because he shouldn’t be joking – who had been coming over each day for a few hours to help pack, and see if he wanted to come and help them with this new problem, this woman.
He went down the hall to his brother’s small office, really just a guest room, with a desk and a twin-sized bed, which he and Stefanie had squeezed into when they visited in the past. They’d packed up much of the room, and now Nathaniel began looking through the papers again, to see if he could find a will. Rain was still falling outside the cabin, a steady, calming sound. A mutter of thunder moved over the cabin. He’d looked through all these papers already, knew the will wasn’t there, but he shuffled through a box again, not really paying attention to what he was doing. He opened an accordion folder and looked through the papers there. Drawings that Nicholas had made of plants and trees, with short descriptions, scientific and common names. Their mother had liked these drawings, and had had several framed and hung in her office at the university where she taught, as well as in her home. Nathaniel listened to the rain falling on the trees of the early springtime moun
tain, and thought that the rain, based on the radar he’d looked at on his phone, would soon move to the town proper some ten miles southeast. There it would become more sporadic yet maybe somehow drearier.
His brother had once told him of a group in town called CALM-AA, and he’d actually met a member of the group before, who was in one of Nicholas’s grad classes, a woman named Maddie Dobenstein. CALM-AA stood for Citizens for A Less Materialistic and Apathetic America and met in the basement of the Unitarian Church, and at first Nathaniel thought it sounded like some kind of joke, but apparently it was real, they met and had conversations much like the pro-marijuana group. Nathaniel thought that even those who felt apathy and ambivalence toward all things would be moved to note that the deaths of the boy’s parents, and the situation with the rest of the family, was particularly poignant. He put some folders back in a box and thought that Maddie Dobenstein might comment on the sad affair at the next group discussion. He knew from Nicholas that the members of CALM-AA shared either their emotionally numb responses to the state of the materialistic culture they lived in and their disappointingly materialistic part-hippy part-bohemian part-bourgie lives, or noted, with hope, that they were again feeling something, could see beyond the sad materialism and rote-ness and vapidity of their American lives, and he wondered what they would think of this. He pictured all the members of the group suddenly feeling a kind of interest they had not felt in some time when Maddie, normally one of the most bored of the group, asked if everyone had heard about the boy’s parents who had died on Smoky Mills Road, which would draw nods from the circle of CALM-AA, and which would then allow her to relate that she had heard about the mother of the dead son. Had anyone heard about her? None of the members had heard, Nathaniel imagined. All of them shook their heads, though Tom, who some suspected of being not really apathetic, deluding himself about his uncaringness, would say No, he hadn’t, what about her? Listening to the steady rain, Nathaniel thought of Maddie telling how she’d heard that the mother of the dead son, the grandmother of little Jack, had taken a vow of silence. This mother would not speak again until she had fully accepted the fact that her son was dead, was what Maddie would convey, and that this process could take who knew how long, but the mother had not spoken for a week. Nathaniel saw this Maddie person explaining that she herself had seen the mother one day, ordering sandwiches from the Vegan Café, and in order to do so, this mother and grandmother had written her order on a legal pad she carried with her (which was something that Nathaniel’s father had told him his mother had done, which embarrassed Nathaniel, but which he knew he shouldn’t be embarrassed about, or maybe simply shouldn’t be concerned about his embarrassment), and what devotion, Maddie would tell the group, didn’t everyone think? What a reverence for things, what an act to make. Nathaniel could see this Maddie Dobenstein person saying something like she had to admit that she found this particularly moving, one of the most moving things that she had witnessed in a long time, one of the most real things, and she hated the way people used this word, real, that people said things like ‘it was real’ or whatever, as though there were a certain number of moments in one’s life that were real moments and that all the rest were just unreal capitalistic, consumerist bullshit moments, like somehow watching reality TV, which was clearly fake, was somehow less real than say staring at a tree. The problem, Maddie might add, was that every moment, every life, was immersed in complete and total reality, and it was just that people didn’t want to deal with that, that was too hard. They didn’t want to experience the actual reality of watching a reality TV show, which was that it was a complete waste of time, a numbing, in the same way that a drug addict doesn’t want to see the reality of their life, which is that it is a waste, in the same way we here at CALM-AA don’t want to really look at the reality of our apathy, which is that it’s pointless, and so what people do is they construct ‘real’ moments and call the rest bullshit, and Maddie really hated that. But watching this mother was such a real thing, Nathaniel could see this Maddie person saying about his mother, like his mother had chosen some real way to express her suffering. This mother’s actions felt completely and wholly real, as if everything else around it was only sketched, and that was because this woman, this mother and grandmother, was attempting, Maddie would explain, to live out every moment as though it was completely real. What this mother highlighted, Maddie would explain, was that the people around her did not want to do this. They didn’t want to take part in reality in this way. They only wanted to take part in a capitalistic process covered over in some faux-peaceful hippy philosophy, and Nathaniel, in what he understood as the sweeping final drama of this imagining, saw Maddie now saying that in particular she was going to stop going to her yoga classes because going to those classes was not about yoga, it was about who was getting something, who was being something, who was more devoted, who was better, and who was going further and pushing harder, and what bullshit, more fakery, but this mother, Maddie would say – this woman wasn’t bawling her eyes out as was popular when sons died on television, she wasn’t frantic or hysterical with grief, she wasn’t displaying her grief for anyone, she wasn’t making it about who had more grief or who suffered more or who was feeling deeply in their lives. This woman, Maddie would explain, she wasn’t doing anything for anyone else or anything else, not for other people and not to fit into some prescribed form of progressivism or liberalism. She was simply allowing herself, as far as Maddie could tell, to feel something fully. Allowing herself the time and the silence to do that. Nathaniel saw this Maddie person, now crying a little in the CALM-AA meeting, say it was like a great lightness opened in herself and she’d cried and felt things, all kinds of things, that she couldn’t remember feeling in just a long, long time, and in imagining this, Nathaniel felt himself moved, and then remembered that his brother was gone, that this thing he had made up was a fantasy, and his brother was gone. Just gone. And who knew what his mother was doing anyway? He wasn’t even sure why he was doing this imagining – it was just something he’d always done, he’d always imagined people’s responses to his food, his failures, his appearance, his family, trivial things and meaningful things, like how they saw him right now, if they believed he was being unselfish, self-sacrificing, a good brother, son, godparent, in the same way he wondered what they felt about Stefanie, about his mother and father – and he knew he should stop, but he began thinking of other members of CALM-AA, members who might feel that his mother was actually being deeply narcissistic, show-offy, and therefore selfish, but before he could continue he heard something from the kitchen and he realized he didn’t know how long he’d been in the room, staring vacantly at some papers, not really looking at them. Out the window, the rain had stopped and patches of blue began to show in the sky through the grey and white cumulus.
Nathaniel closed the box full of papers and folders that he wasn’t really concentrating on, though he hadn’t seen a will, he was pretty sure he hadn’t seen one, and walked to the kitchen to investigate the sound he’d heard, but then was overtaken with the thought that the rain had stopped and the eastern side of the mountain would be a patchwork of sun and shadow, making it appear, if one were viewing the side of the mountain from the valley, as though the trees were slowly undulating toward some new destination, moving wavelike, heaving slowly forward. He’d witnessed this once when driving up the mountain to Nicholas’s place. The small cabins that populated the mountainside appeared to be moving under the shifting shade and sun. He knew that if one were looking at the cabins on the mountainside, Nicholas and April’s place would be seen as a glint of sun off the tin roof and solar panels. The property was well-maintained, trails clearly visible overhead, the barn also tin-roofed, the garden and greenhouse well-kept, a stream running by the main cabin. All would appear exactly as it should be, and it was nothing Nathaniel himself could have constructed, and the life inside the cabin, before Nicholas and April had died, was not one he could ever recreate for Jack, he thought. From a ce
rtain point of view far away from the cabin, Nathaniel knew that none of the discussions, the analysis of the situation, the reanalysis, the hesitation about what to do, the lack of hesitation, the need for clarity amid the uncertainty, none of what was occurring on the inside of the cabin would feel a part of reality at all, and no one looking at the cabin would know anything different was occurring there, but it was, he thought.
In the kitchen, Nathaniel focused on what he should be focusing on, telling himself to pay attention, and asked Stefanie if maybe they were acting a little too impulsively here. If maybe it wasn’t a great idea for Jack to be with them. After all, Nathaniel wasn’t exactly in a good place financially. When are you ever? Stefanie said. Oh, haha, Nathaniel said in a mock-annoyed manner, to which Stefanie did an aware-of-how-stupid-the-joke-was-toothy-grin. But seriously, he told her, his job didn’t pay enough, did it? To support a child? How much did children cost, exactly? They hadn’t thought about that. He could Google it but his brother didn’t have internet on the property, and while there was a cell signal, it was weak. Not only this, he said, but he also wanted, no, he needed his own restaurant, it’s what he’d been working for for so long, and certain things were finally coming into place. They had a little money saved up, and he didn’t want to be working for a rich family his entire life. He wanted to, you know, make an impact, he said. A food impact, Stefanie said. Jamie Oliver shit, she said. I mean, sort of, he said. Whatever. The job itself as a private chef for this ridiculous family was already difficult, he thought. He drove nearly an hour on Thursday, to Greensboro, stayed at the Camerons’ Thursday night in the guest house so that he could prepare Friday’s dinner, then stayed again Friday night so that he could wake up and prepare Saturday’s dinner, and then stayed again Saturday night so that he could wake up very early on Sunday to prepare brunch for the entire Cameron family, a group of around twenty people, depending on the weekend, so that he often arrived home Sunday evening so tired he couldn’t do anything other than stare at the television, and then it was back to work on Monday prepping at the country club, a second job that he truly hated – a rote menu with rote flavors. And yet cooking, the simple act of it, not being a chef, but being a cook, was not only finally something he was good at, but also something that he felt made an actual impact on the world. People need to eat, Stefanie said. And they need to eat high-quality local foods prepared rustically. Okay, the mocking thing is hurting my feelings a little, he said. She walked over to him in the kitchen, squeezed his arm, and said, I love your food, don’t be so uptight. Nathaniel said but that was exactly the thing: he was uptight. He was a seriously uptight person. He was so uptight that his brother died a week ago and he was worrying about his job in relation to his nephew – that was the definition of uptight. He was hating himself a little bit that he was thinking about himself here and his career, which was an admittedly superficial concern, he knew that, but it was something he had worked on for so long, and he didn’t like how he was saying all this, that he might be implying that Jack was somehow going to mess that up, that’s not what he was implying. What are you implying then? Stefanie said. Because it sounds like all you’re doing is being worried about things you can’t control. I’m worried we won’t be good parents to Jack, he said. And you’re right, maybe that’s not a thing we can control, but we should think about it. We have to, he said. For Jack’s sake. Because maybe what he had failed to acknowledge, maybe what this Tammy woman had revealed, was that while he loved Jack, maybe they weren’t exactly in a position to take him, maybe Tammy was right, maybe this was an opportunity they should really look at?