“But she died?” Michael’s eyes are wide.
I nod. “Yes. She died.”
“Did you never tell me because you didn’t want me to hear about another kid like me dying, and it would make me scared instead of brave?”
I nod.
He bites his lip. “Those things don’t scare me anymore. They just make me sad.”
“I know. But I’m not telling you this to make you sad. The thing is, that in the beginning, the locket inspired me to be happier. Even when I was miserable, like, no hope miserable, I’d glance at it in the mirror and remember something good. And despite myself, I’d smile. And each of those tiny smiles, even if they only lasted for a microsecond before the pain came back in? Each smile was enough of a rest for my soul that I could keep going. The memories gave me strength. And eventually the pain faded and I know how to remember the good times all by myself.”
I put the locket into his hand and close his fingers around it. “I know this is sort of a girly thing. But it’s yours now. I don’t expect you to wear it, or think you should. But keep it for a while, okay? Remember the fun times we had but more important, the things we talked about. The way you’ve learned to be polite and respectful. The way you’re so kind and empathetic to Anna and other kids.”
He sniffles. “Anna’s really cool.”
“I’m glad you like her.” I rub his shoulder. “Listen, about the locket. You don’t need to keep it forever. It’s yours now, and you get to make your own meaning for it. Maybe one day you want to scream and hurl it into the ocean, and that’s okay. Maybe you want to give it to a homeless person, and that’s fine. And maybe you’ll put it in the bottom of a box and forget about it, and in ten years, you’ll find it and be confused about what it is and where it came from, and that’s okay too.
“The point is that I’m giving it to you as a symbol. I can’t give you the ability to make something good out of something ugly, but I’m giving you the wish and the hope for it. And the reminder that it’s possible to let someone go, and still remember them in brilliant flashes, and go on with a wonderful, full and happy life.”
He looks at the locket, rubs it with one finger.
“And always remember how strong you are, Michael. You’re going to do great at school, and in Robotics next semester. You’re ready for everything you want.”
Michael cries and grabs me hard. “No. Shai, don’t go.” I hug him back, touch his hair that’s growing in all wild and curly, rub it, as if I can rub happiness and strength into him with my touch. I touch his shoulder, bony and strong, a boy on the cusp of puberty, and marvel at the miracle of life, how he’s going to make it there. I squeeze his hand once, and then I let go and stand up.
“See you around, Kid.” I give him the airplane wave, our special wave, and he does it back without hesitation, and I have to turn around and walk fast so he doesn’t see me break down.
I look in the room and Michael is sitting cross-legged on his bed, playing with a thin silver chain, letting it trickle from one hand to the other like water, like sand. When he sees me, he whips his hand down and hides the thing under his leg.
“What do you want?” His voice is mean.
I take a deep breath. “I just want to talk to you.”
“Whatever.” He stares at the wall.
“I’m sorry about Shai, Michael. I know you miss her. She was fantastic, and she was so good for you. But I think you’re ready to be on your own. It’s going to be better this way. You don’t need her anymore. Sometimes, when therapy goes on past a certain point, it becomes a barricade instead of a crutch.”
“I don’t believe you.” His voice is even, and that’s worse than his rage. “Because you don’t make good decisions. I’ll never trust you again.”
“This is the right decision.”
“I guess I can’t stop you,” he says, his voice bleak. “You’re the grownup and I’m just the dumb kid. I guess you can do whatever you want, no matter how much it breaks my heart.”
I feel the usual rage swell and start to stab me in my temple and in my chest, and I rub hard on my left temple. Without meaning to, I hear Shai’s voice in my head, a pretty crystal bell. “He’s pushing your buttons. It seems like he wants to make you mad, I know. But what he really wants is to have you be strong, to not crack under the pressure. He’s testing you, and secretly hoping that you can handle him. That you can love him. Don’t yell. Don’t insult him. Don’t threaten him. You need to be firm, kind. He needs it.”
“I love you,” I tell him.
“I hate you,” he says, flat, unexpressive. “And I probably always will. You took my good life and you wrecked it. My cancer went away, but now it’s back. It’s you. You’re the cancer. You ruin everything good.”
I leave the room. I just can’t. I can’t deal with this without shouting or sobbing, so I walk out and go to my gym in the exercise room and punch the bag until my knuckles bleed, until I’m so exhausted that I’m dizzy. I want to punch out all of my anger, but there’s so much.
So instead of punching, I turn to fucking, trying to lose myself in someone new.
Shelby is a forestry major, and she came up to me in the bar, when I was getting a whiskey after a downtown meeting, before going home to face Michael’s cold, miserable wrath. She put her hand next to mine, and her slender fingers, sparkling with cheap silver rings, danced into my bruised, shredded ones and down my body here in her apartment. She’s lithe and smiley and she takes charge, getting on top, riding us both into shouts of pleasure. I don’t care, because I’m not planning to see her again, so what the fuck. Let her do what she wants. All I want is the high.
But afterwards, when she lights incense and walks around in her soaked purple panties and no bra, chattering about her upcoming move to Brazil to study medicinal plants in the rainforest, I feel nausea, like I gorged myself on all the chocolate at the party. Sick with too much sugar, even though I knew better, and now it will take a long time to purge myself back to lean health.
I don’t want to offend her, so I dress in silence and give her a hard kiss on the mouth for goodbye, but her face falls despite my best efforts, and then her chin goes up and her eyes flash. Fuck you, too.
I get home in time to shower and change, and the evening with Michael is just as awful as predicted, made worse by my memories of how I tried to steel myself for it in a stranger’s body. I try to listen to him, try to explain about Shai without telling him things he shouldn’t hear, but he’s not interested. He closes himself in his room, and when I go to knock, there’s a sign: “Jerks stay out. That means you, Gabriel.”
Fucking Kaitlynne. I’m frantic for her body, grabbing her ass, her breasts, her slender thighs. I don’t want to kiss her mouth, so I bite at her skin instead, over and over. And then it’s over. As I lie there, depleted, letting my empty brain relax, she shifts, her arm brushing mine. When it happens a second time, I peer over. “Hey.”
She’s not smiling. She sits up, clutching the sheet to her chest. “What the hell was that?”
Her anger eludes me. It was good, hard sex. She was down for it.
“Who’s… Shai?” Her voice is hard. She tugs the sheet, but can’t get more, because I’m on top of it, so she turns away from me to put on her panties and jeans. She turns back when she’s snapping her bra, businesslike, spare motions. “You said someone else’s name. Gabriel.” She puts emphasis on mine. “I know we just met and all, but still. I have standards.” She tugs her shirt over her head, jabbing her arms through the armholes, and her eyes dart around the room, landing on her shoes and purse tumbled together by the window.
“Kaitlynne. I’m sorry. I didn’t even realize—”
She puts up a hand. “Just don’t. Don’t even bother.” Looping the purse over her shoulder, she shoves her feet into the heels and grabs her leather jacket. “I need coffee. Let yourself out, lock the door after yourself, and don’t ever fucking call me again.” She pauses at her door, then gives a smirk that has nothin
g to do with humor. “Not that you could. You don’t even know which name to look up in your phone’s whore-ectory.”
Wow. I raise my eyebrows. It’s a good line, and I hope she’s proud of it. At the same time I feel a sick guilt. Really? I called out Shai’s name? I don’t remember that at all. I just have physical snapshots of what we just did: Firm nipples in my mouth. The freckle at the base of her left ass cheek. The glorious way my brain blanked out into a sheet of pure white nothing when I came, came, came, almost covering up Shai’s face.
When I get home, Kaitlynne is gone but Shai’s here, still here. She’s more present in the room than the other woman, whose scent still lingers on my fingers. I get into the shower, letting the hot water drench me, turning my face to shout into the stream of needles. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I roar it out, ready to bring down the walls, but my words just bounce around, ineffective rubber bullets.
What am I doing? The question is one that a million people must ask a million times a day, but I need to know. Women aren’t erasers meant to scrub out another woman’s existence. Her mistakes. Her essence.
There’s a poem I read once in grad school. I’m not much of a fiction reader—I prefer books about real things: Financial investing. Trade journals. History. But poetry relaxes me, calms my mind when I’m ragged. Poems contain so much in so little space; it’s the most efficient art you can imagine, and the most potent. It’s pure alcohol, distilled into discrete stanzas. It’s undiluted adrenaline to the heart.
This particular poem tugs at my mind, so I pull the book from my shelf and find the page. It’s about a guy who can only think about his lost love even while he’s fucking all these other women. Physically he’s not loyal at all, but in his mind, the passion for her outshines anything he feels for all the others. And the emotion summarizes the way I can’t stop thinking of Shai.
The woman’s name, Cynara, means artichoke in Latin. But that’s not important. The poem makes me feel wild and angry and vicious and sad, all at once.
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I tried to forget Shai. But how do you forget someone who’s etched into your soul?
Her words linger in my mind, too, and I know what I need to do to reconnect with Michael.
“I want to do something special with you today.” My voice cracks. I touch the edge of Michael’s bed and don’t react when he turns off his tablet and swivels so he’s facing the wall, not me. It’s his new tablet; he broke the other one by—I think—throwing it.
“Special? Like go to watch Arielle try on shoes? Uh, no, thanks. I’d rather stab myself in the eyeball with a rusty fork.” He knows I haven’t been with Arielle for a long time now. He’s saying this to irritate me further, remind me of how awful I am at being a father.
“Noooo.” I draw out the word. “Not like that. Maybe we could go to the beach?” It’s a sudden idea, but I remember how happy he was that day he and Shai came back from Montrose, his cheeks healthy and red, all proud of the kite situation. “Maybe collect shells. I can show you the place where I used to play fort with my brothers.”
“There are no shells,” he informs me. “Just tiny ones, so small they’re useless, and only if the bulldozer hasn’t smashed them flat when it rolls out the sand. You used to play fort?”
I nod and sit on the edge of the bed. “On those rock stairs at the left edge. We always brought this old bedsheet with us and propped it into a tent with a long stick and rocks. It was pretty cool.” My voice breaks and I brush at my face.
He catches it before I turn away, even with his peripheral vision, and something in his expression changes. “Could we do that?” He turns his body just slightly toward me.
I nod eagerly. “Yes! Yes, we could. We’ll use a bedsheet from my room. Or we can take any one you want. And sticks, sticks. Maybe there’s some garden stakes in the courtyard.”
“Okay.” He unfreezes enough to climb off the bed. I see him slip his silver chain into his pocket, and it’s supposed to be private, I guess, so I don’t comment. I don’t know where he got that chain, but right now it doesn’t matter. All that matter is that I figure this out. I’ve lost so many people; I can’t afford to let my son slip through my fingers.
He’s happier than I’ve seen him in weeks, at least around me. He’s eager to explain, to teach me. “The hot dog stand that is there in summer?” He points, a little official in his puffy jacket. “It’s closed now, of course. Not enough patrons in the winter. Probably too cold in there, too,” he says. “The cost to heat that place would be prohibitive, if even possible.”
I nod. “Maybe you could offer him your stock of stuffed animals. The ones from my old girlfriends. The ones you hate. You could make a bonfire to provide heat.”
He pierces me with his green eyes. “Shai already made that joke, Daddy.”
I feel my heart rise. Daddy. He switched back to Gabriel exclusively after Shai stopped coming and he got so angry with me.
“I know.” I try to keep my voice light. “I liked her jokes.”
“Me too.” His gaze is solemn. Then he looks away. “They’d only last a few hours, tops. Then we’d need more fuel.”
I hesitate. “Maybe we could burn those books from Arielle. The baby books she gave you.”
He snorts out a laugh. “Those are too good for a fire. Those need to be shefecated on by Craig’s dog.”
I burst out into a laugh, too and grab him into my arms. “Can you clone one in your lab? I don’t want to give him too much license. He’s already clogging up the lawns.”
He leans into me for a split second before tugging away. “Let’s make the fort now.”
Okay, let’s. I take all of the gear from the trunk and lead the way down the grass to the rocks. It’s bitter cold but I want to make this for him. It’s been a long time, though, and I forgot how it went, and it seems futile, in this crazy wind, to get the slender sticks to hold the flapping cloth without being blown right into the white-capped waves. Then a sudden memory startles me: John’s boots. He always wore these weird long riding boots to the beach, and we’d fill the toes with rocks and use the boots to anchor the sticks.
But I don’t have boots, and the sheet is wild now, fighting me, tearing away like it wants to race, an untamed horse bucking and kicking. I look at Michael, expecting to see disappointment and condemnation in his gaze, but he touches my hand. “Daddy. It’s okay. How about we just sit down and hold it over our heads for a minute. And you can tell me how you made them with Uncle John and Uncle Kyle.”
This boy is amazing. I don’t deserve him, but I’m going to work harder to be the kind of man who does. I sit down and pull him in close to me and we hold the sheet over our heads, two figures staving off a storm. And I open my mouth and tell him a story, and I talk and talk until our fingers get numb, and then I take him back to the car. On the way home he falls asleep in the back, but there’s a smile on his face. And there are tears in my eyes again, but not from the bitter wind. In fact, something inside me is thawing, warming up, right here in the dead of winter, making my heart leak emotions I never knew I could feel again.
Like forgiveness. Can I forgive Shai? What if I care for her so much that it doesn’t matter if she has someone else’s baby? If she loves me and I love her, fuck it, can we make it work anyway? God, my genes are no good. I can’t risk passing on PPB to another child. That’s why I had the vasectomy. But the thought of a baby brother for Michael… another child to love… it’s not that awful. I think about new life in the house, and it suddenly looks nice, in my mind. It would be complicated to say the least. Strange. Difficult. But could it be possible?
I think about how I tried to lose myself in
other women’s arms. Was Shai doing the same thing, maybe? Trying to lose herself, or find herself? How can I judge her, when I’ve done the same thing? After all, I pushed her away first. Told her no. Is it so wrong that she wanted a physical connection with someone?
Fuck. Why does life have to be this complicated?
And it strikes me that maybe there isn’t even a baby. I mean, she never actually said the baby was mine, or that she was even having a baby. Did I jump to assumptions? I should have let her talk, let her explain.
I think of my ugly words and feel sick. How could I have treated her that way, said those things? I see her in my mind, the way she looked up at me, like she had something important in her eyes. Suddenly, it’s imperative that I know what that thing is.
I need to talk to Shai, to figure this out. Ask her to tell me what really happened, that day and in her past. Ask her to forgive me for my cruel words. But when I call her, she never picks up. No matter how many messages I leave, she doesn’t call back.
The next week we go back to the beach. It’s cold but today is still, and the water looks like frozen glass in places, black and immense. It’s unnerving to see it this way, but Michael is happy, racing up and down the sand, kicking up little storms with his feet, getting dangerously close to the water. Good thing I packed extra sneakers in the trunk.
When we see people approaching, I feel disappointment, especially when Michael runs up to them and starts to talk. The last thing I want right now is to be social. But I come closer and find that it’s a mom and a girl. They look familiar, somehow. Have we met? I run a fast film through my mind: His school? Swim, before the first surgery?
I hold out my hand. “Gabriel. Michael’s dad.”
The mom holds out hers and we shake, my cold fingers in her brown leather, worn at the tips. “Kelsie. Anna’s mom.” She gestures at our children, who have greeted each other with exuberant grins and are already doing something along the water line with a stick and a long string that one of them must have found lying there.
A Handful of Fire Page 20