by Alan Rossi
Stefanie looked at him as she was putting the sliced potatoes and carrots into a Tupperware bowl. She put on the lid and then put the bowl in the refrigerator. After a moment she asked if maybe he thought he was doing more than thinking about just Jack’s welfare here? Maybe he was being actually selfish. She went to the front door and put on her raincoat and told him that if he really wanted to continue this conversation, they could, but he knew the answer was pretty simple. I don’t know that the answer is simple at all, he said. She said that he knew what Nicholas wanted, she herself knew what April wanted, they were the godparents. Even if this wasn’t public record, Nicholas and April had asked both of them, at the same time, at Jack’s first birthday actually, if they would be the guardians. Simple. She put on a pair of rubber boots she kept outside, near the door. Nathaniel was hobbled over, getting his boots on as well. The bottoms of both pairs were covered in mud. Nathaniel looked at their bootprints of dried mud, that moved off the porch, down the steps, and then into the yard, which wasn’t a yard, but was just the mountain. The traces of their coming and going. And we accepted, Stefanie said.
She stepped off the porch with Nathaniel following, Stefanie walking fast, her arms crossed across her chest against the wind, which was moving the clouds above relatively quickly across the sky. Her body’s quick movements, quick pace, conveyed her slight irritation toward him. Nathaniel caught up to her and pulled on her coat a little and she glanced at him, relaxed her arms. They walked side by side to the garden, a mile away on the property. Stefanie held her phone in her left hand, and on it, a feed from Jack’s room monitor. She showed it to Nathaniel and made a he’s-so-cute face – it was both audio and visual, but was extremely pixelated and blurry because it was connected to such a weak cell signal, but they could still see the boy in his bed, in black and white – the image seeming almost like a negative of a photograph – sleeping on his side in his bed, with what they both knew was a blue blanket bunched up near his chin and face, his left hand cupping his left ear, a thing the boy did when he slept or in moments of what they deemed ‘worry.’ The cat slept on a chair in the corner. Stefanie put the phone in her pocket – the phone would vibrate if he moved – and said that Nathaniel didn’t need to bring his self-doubt to this. Please don’t do that, she said. He brought it to everything else. He brought it to his life with her, he brought it to his job, he brought it to his existence as a person, and every time he did, it made her feel like shit, because it meant in some way that he wasn’t content with her.
Their boots made squishing noises on the dirt, now mud, path. It was still cold in the mountains, spring defrosting rather than warming, and yet small wildflowers, the size of bees, grew along the trail. They were in a pocket of sunlight that broke through the trees and was highlighted by mist rising from the ground, then they were in the shadow of a quick-moving cloud. Nathaniel told her that he didn’t want her to feel that way. He didn’t mean to bring any doubt into this, he just wanted to know if Stefanie really wanted to do this. No, that’s not it, she said. You understand that this is going to be a fight of some kind, and you want to run from it. You don’t want to engage in it because you think that you’re above it in some way. You’re just like your brother in that respect. For a moment, neither of them said anything. Nathaniel felt the force of the absence of the dead brother, of April, too. As though his name conjured both his presence and his absence at once, and the confusion between those two things. Here and gone, Nathaniel thought without willing himself to think it, like the thought wasn’t his. Where did a thing come from and where did it go? All this in his mind in the space of a moment felt like the reality of the moon reflected in water: the moon is there, in the water, and also not, and in the same way, these thoughts existed in his body and also not, and you were here for a short time in the world and then you were gone, and this coming and going seemed to contain some hidden message, like the coming and going itself was attempting to say something, as though everything was trying to tell itself something, though he didn’t know what. He thought of Jack and felt a pressure rise through his chest and into his head and stopped himself from crying by biting his cheek hard. Stefanie said she was sorry – she shouldn’t have said that about his brother. Her hand briefly touched his and in the touch, he felt a small release. Nathaniel shook his head and quietly said it was okay, it was fair, she was being accurate. He did think Nicholas ran away to some degree – that was the meaning of his moving out here. His brother couldn’t deal with certain things. They were the same in that regard, they didn’t like to fight. Even when younger, they didn’t fight as kids. Or rarely did. Not like other brothers he knew. After a moment he said that he missed Nicholas. Stefanie moved her body close to his and in the way bodies communicate their own actuality, he accepted wordlessly, and they held each other standing under the trees on the trail.
Nathaniel said okay, okay, and they continued walking and after a moment he thought that Stefanie was right, that he didn’t want to fight with this Tammy woman. So much of his existence was fighting. His career took getting good reviews and getting noticed and creating new things not solely because he wanted to be creating dishes, but because that’s what the industry demanded, and there was a certain kind of ‘new’ that was acceptable, there was a certain kind of creation that was immediately obvious as creative, and in this way, he’d realized over time, he was in a kind of box – there were things he had to do, this wasn’t purely creative – and it made the thing he did less in some way, corrupted in some way, and Stefanie was right, he was a little like his brother, he was tired of fighting so much for what he wanted. Had he not proved himself? Did he even need to? He’d worked under one of the best chefs in the city, he’d helped open two new restaurants, he’d been featured in the local magazine as a chef to ‘watch out’ for, and yet he couldn’t get help starting the kind of restaurant he wanted to start. It was like he was going backward. He was a private chef. He knew he was selfish. He was selfish and idealistic about his job, which was a thing he didn’t think he should have to fight for, the fighting ruined some part of it, and he knew that she knew this made him, often, like now, feel shitty. Like maybe he wasn’t actually good at what he did – maybe he was just lucky even to work for the Camerons. And because of all this, he thought, maybe the clear answer here was to just let Tammy have Jack because he already had to go back home in a few days and deal with the fallout from a mediocre review of his spring menu at the country club, a review which had called the menu theoretically interesting, but almost too interested in the small things, in pure tastes, so that everything was a little bland. As though Nathaniel had any real choice in that menu. He had to go back home and deal with that on top of the ever-pervasive stigma about vegetarian food in the first place, as though good vegetarian food can’t be rustic and elegant, can’t be simple and complex, can’t taste great and be affordable, that it’s either plates of mush or salads. Nathaniel said, I don’t know, maybe this is wrong, maybe we can’t do it. How are we supposed to raise Jack and live our lives? Stefanie stopped walking and asked him what were they supposed to be talking about here? Fuck, he said. I know. See, that’s evidence itself though. All I do is think about myself. I’ve been having these terrible moments where I imagine what the town is thinking about all this. She told him to stop. She didn’t want to hear about the existential crisis of his career or whatever right now, she didn’t want to hear his food philosophy again. She knew his food philosophy. She was on board with it. She didn’t need to hear it again. He said that she was right, he was done, sorry, he just had to get that out.
They came to a part of the trail that crossed a stream – Nicholas had built a wooden bridge some years before, complete with a handrail. He’d built it, Nathaniel remembered, when he had moved himself and April to the property, before he had cleared part of the woods for the garden and greenhouse. Nathaniel had helped him construct the bridge, which basically meant that he held boards in place while Nicholas hammered and constructe
d. They walked across, the bridge now bowed, moving gently above the rushing stream. Nathaniel thought of the things Nicholas could do well, things which came easily to him while he himself could barely do one thing well, he could barely be a good husband to Stefanie, be a decent chef, be a somewhat involved son, and also do other things he cared about like working in some hiking and tennis from time to time, he could barely even approach the idea, he was so busy, about how to actually be a decent person, so how was he going to be a parent? In an effort to stop thinking this, he said that what it came down to was that he was very anxious now that this Tammy person had said her piece. Stefanie agreed.
The garden emerged, through trees and fog, set in a large clearing. It had recently been planted, small green sprouts coming up in places, the neat rows of dirt still noticeable. In the back of the garden, some larger plants, winter vegetables. Nathaniel watched Stefanie walk around the garden to where potatoes and carrots grew. She began to dig up carrots and turnips from the ground. She seemed so capable of doing, of completing tasks, he didn’t know how, though at the same time he thought that there was no reason to be out here getting vegetables. She’d peeled and cut up potatoes and carrots already. What did they need more for? As the carrots and turnips came up from the wet dirt, Nathaniel collected them where they lay. She told him that his problem, which had always been his problem, was that he had lost his original intention in all of this, he had allowed himself to be influenced by others and by himself. She said that that was the difference between their two families: his family was a family of people who overthought everything, though his parents had improved now that they were nearing retirement, as he himself had described, and Nicholas had apparently entered some way of life that was unfathomable to them both, but Stefanie had parents who taught her to just do things. When you have a father in Mexico and mother in Dallas, you learn to just do what you have to do. She said that wasn’t he happiest when he was just making food, making a dish, creating, wasn’t that the thing? Why add all this extra onto it? She didn’t like the phrase ‘man up’ because they were living in a culture that was still stupidly patriarchal, and obviously ‘grow some balls’ was insensitive, so maybe she’d use the thing the pilot says in Raiders of the Lost Ark, ‘show some backbone.’ Seriously, she said. Show some backbone. Nathaniel was gathering the vegetables and he said, Okay, okay, yeah, I got it, you’re right, and Stefanie was saying that she knew she was right. She knew she was right because she was the kind of the kid who got left at home when her mother used to go to the bar. She was seven and had to make dinner for herself. She was eight and had to set her alarm, make her lunch, and walk to school by herself. She took care of her father when she was twelve and thirteen and he refused a hospital. She didn’t want to do it. But she also didn’t get to think about it. She just did what she had to do. Nathaniel was picking up the vegetables behind her, now saying, I think that’s enough, that’s plenty of carrots. Didn’t you already cut a bunch of carrots up? Stefanie pushed the spade into the dirt and looked at Nathaniel. I’ll say when there are enough carrots, she said in a mock-dad voice. He stood up and nodded his head and said she was right, he got it, and said, I’m done, I’m over it. We can do this. She quickly kissed him on the cheek and said, That’s better.
They walked back to the cabin and when they arrived, Jack was just waking, and when he was fully up from the nap, Nathaniel watched him walk from his bed toward him and immediately grab his pantleg. He sort of combed Jack’s black hair into place, Jack’s wide blue eyes briefly looking up at him and then back down. Want to read a book? Nathaniel said. Jack put his thumb in his mouth and nodded. They went down the hall and into the small family room. Nathaniel picked Jack up so he could choose a book from what was a sturdy, probably oak bookshelf that Nicholas had constructed. Jack pulled a book about a bear in a toy store, whose overalls are missing a button. The bear, convinced that a new button will help him find a home, has an adventure at night in a department store. Nathaniel had read the book to Jack what seemed to be countless times since they arrived – and when reading it the first time, unfamiliar with the book, he felt so moved he almost wasn’t able to complete it without his voice wavering and had to take several breaths and then cough in order to compose himself. Now Jack held the book while Nathaniel held him and when Nathaniel sat him on the sofa, then sat next to him, Jack immediately stood up on the sofa, and sat on Nathaniel’s lap, holding, with his left hand, the sleeve of Nathaniel’s shirt. Jack handed him the book, and Nathaniel said, Okay, you turn the pages, and Jack opened the book, and they began, and Nathaniel tried to be fully there for Jack, but he was thinking about how Jack might be thinking of how Nicholas read the book, or how April read it, how they probably read it with different inflections, how they emphasized parts that Nathaniel maybe didn’t know to emphasize, and along with this, since he’d now read the book several times, he knew to distance himself from the sentimental story he was a reading, a story about a bear wanting a family, feeling outcast, left out, alone, a story which would be trite and amusingly, maybe even warmly, clichéd at any other time, but that was now, Nathaniel couldn’t help but feel, exactly what Jack was feeling, a book chosen because it mirrored Jack’s own feelings, and was probably Jack’s way of indicating, over and over and over, in a child’s way, his longing to be with his family, to have a family, and if Nathaniel allowed himself to think about it too much, to consider this barely coded message and to really be there with Jack and therefore with the book, he would start crying. So he read it distantly, thinking of the Tammy woman, of how to figure out that situation, while Jack turned the pages. When he finished, and Jack closed the book – he always closed it – he turned it over and looked at Nathaniel and said, Again. Nathaniel said, Yeah, one more time, then we need to eat lunch, and when he said it, Jack sat up higher in his lap and hugged him around the neck briefly, then opened the book again.
After reading, Nathaniel fed Jack lunch and played with him on the kitchen floor and in the afternoon they went on a walk. The day passed quickly, quicker than Nathaniel was used to. Jack was quiet and sullen, but Nathaniel so sensed a wish in his small body for physical expression. Nathaniel played a wooden block game with him, he kicked the soccer ball with him in the muddy yard, they read another couple of books, thankfully not the bear book. Nathaniel watched Jack, his play withdrawn, and Nathaniel thought his play seemed to be more of an attempt at play than actual play, which if he allowed himself to think about, just like when he thought about the story the boy wanted read to him over and over, made it impossible for Nathaniel to engage, so he tried to stop thinking about it.
That evening, Nathaniel made pan-roasted chicken, with the vegetables on hand and a mushroom cream sauce. For Jack, homemade mac and cheese. They ate quietly in the kitchen, Jack watching them and looking away in the same way Nathaniel felt he was observing Jack. Nathaniel watched Jack, and watched Stefanie, thinking about how he could never be Nicholas, how Stefanie couldn’t be April – they would always and only be substitutes. He thought of April, how when he first met her, he didn’t know how to talk with her, she was so quiet. It unnerved him. She watched. Yet when she finally spoke, he found her easy, kind, and also full of her own anxieties that he hadn’t seen. She wasn’t this observant, perfect person, and this understanding – Nathaniel remembered now while eating dinner, watching Jack brush his long hair out of his face while spooning mac and cheese to his mouth – endeared her to him, and thinking of it now, it made him feel like maybe he and Stefanie could do this, that their flaws weren’t an inescapable problem. There was a piece of macaroni on Jack’s face and Nathaniel reached across the table with his napkin and wiped it off, as though symbolically proving to himself that he was capable, that he could do this. He ate a piece of chicken and thought of April, knew from Nicholas that people found her odd, and he did, too, at first, and though he wasn’t sure he liked her, he did feel an odd admiration of her, that she was okay being considered odd and wasn’t going to change hers
elf to fit some more prescribed idea of normal. She didn’t do any social media, didn’t even look at the internet, had influenced Nicholas not to look at the internet, almost never drank, though she claimed she didn’t dislike drinking, and was impressed when Nathaniel told her he was a vegetarian chef, but was also distant when he revealed he himself ate meat, as though she was judging him, but he’d learned, over maybe a half a year or so, that she wasn’t, she was only observing. Nicholas had told Nathaniel that the townspeople thought April was odd, he told Nathaniel he could just see it. Nathaniel imagined that probably no one disliked her, no one thought she was a bad person or that there was anything malicious in her, they just thought she was strange, maybe they mistakenly thought she was a little dim, all that quietness: Nicholas had explained that her fellow teachers at McComb Montessori had learned that, along with the weirdness surrounding technology, she had a shaman she met with occasionally, and that while this was not terribly strange for their town (many people in the town had gone to one of the two Peruvian shamans for a cleansing), what was odd was that April invited the shaman to her and Nicholas’s cabin on the mountain. The shaman had stayed for several days. This was all sometime in her sixth month of pregnancy, and while the shaman himself didn’t reveal any of what had gone on during those days, April did, Nicholas had told Nathaniel. She had told her friends, or supposed friends at the school, that the shaman took the whole family on a cleansing journey. Nathaniel remembered how Nicholas explained that the other teachers asked April what she meant by whole family, since it was just her and Nicholas at that point, and she’d replied that she meant Jack, too, of course. Nicholas just knew that the other teachers at McComb Montessori glanced at one another, out of comedic suspicion, because apparently this woman believed that her unborn child had also entered the dream dimension with her and Nicholas, and sure, the whole shaman thing was acceptable for adults, many of the townspeople would’ve thought, but it was of course just a psychological trick, a way of meditating maybe, all that drumming meant to bring one into a trance-like state which could thereby allow a person to see into their own idiosyncrasies and flaws and be accepting of those things, possibly learn from them, or, alternately, if there were drugs involved, the drugs opening a person to some unseen aspect of themselves, but to think that an unborn child also experienced this journey was a little superstitious. Nicholas had said he could just see that to the Montessori teachers this all was a little superstitious, and also sort of dumb, and therefore, he’d said, that’s how they saw April.