by C. D. Reiss
Leave it to them. As if we had a choice.
“All right,” I said clearly now that the secret of Jonathan’s parentage had slunk back in my throat.
“Yes,” Mom concurred. “We’ll leave it to you.”
They stood, and I let them go back behind the swinging doors without uttering a thing I didn’t have to. They were checking. Strat’s heart didn’t matter.
7
Jonathan was being wheeled around between diagnostic units. We were put in an abhorrently expensive private waiting room so we didn’t have to feel any middle-class discomforts. Sheila came with a crossword book and files for the few clients she kept. Fiona came with an entourage she left at the door. Leanne was en route, and Deirdre was in the chapel. Dad came but was still in exile from Mom over a decade after she’d found out he was sleeping with a not-quite-legal friend of his daughter’s. Forgiveness was in short supply. It was 1999 all over again.
There was nothing I could do but wait and manage business from the phone.
That night, Sequoia was as quiet as hospitals ever get, and the beeping machines only had the bang and clatter of brooms and mopping whuh whuh splash to compete with. Walking down the hall, heels clopping on the linoleum, I heard it.
Someone’s earbuds weren’t in all the way, or the nurses had a little radio.
Maybe I was going insane, but I heard it as sure as I was breathing. I heard it and stopped walking.
I knew plenty about falling in love with musicians, but I didn’t know shit about music except the difference between major and minor. And I knew what I heard—two notes plucked in sequence from an alternate tuning Strat had tried to explain to me one day in 1982. It was the most distinctive thing I’d ever heard in the Palihood or Sequoia Hospital.
I followed it to an open door. Under the light of a single lamp, a man in his twenties with a short fade and soulful brown eyes sat by an older woman’s bed, noodling with the strings as she slept. Nothing exceptional or original. At least nothing that sounded like anything the boys had made in Palihood. How had I heard Bullets and Blood?
The young man noticed my intrusion.
“Sorry,” I said, backing away. “Wrong room.”
Stiff-kneed and lock-jawed, I went to Jonathan’s room. I hadn’t heard what I thought I’d heard. Obviously.
The curtain was drawn. I slid my hand between the edge of the fabric and the wall, pushing it aside. Monica was on a chair, bent over the bed, her head resting on his thigh. His hand lay in her hair, and even with white tubes coming out of the veins, it rested there in security and strength.
They were unable to give Jonathan the bypass until tomorrow. He’d been too weak to move and too unstable to cut. Yet he’d laid his hand on his love’s head to comfort her.
I’d made him. He was a man who loved and who was loved. A man who spoke and created meaning. Who heard and was heard. A fully realized human.
Quietly, I stepped into the room. His beard was growing in redder than the brownish ginger of his hair. Strat’s had been more strawberry. Indy’s had been browner. I’d liked to fantasize that Jonathan was really Drew’s and one day we’d live together in some nuclear family fever dream. But he wasn’t Drew’s. The straight nose was Strat. The green eyes as rare as precious Chinese jade. The body like a tensed spring and the shape of the hands cupped over a lover’s head or the curve of a guitar were one hundred percent Stratford Gilliam.
And let’s not forget the heart defect that killed the father could kill the son.
I stood over him, thinking he’d look less like Strat if I got closer, but his cheeks were rock-star hollow and the artery in this throat pulsed in a rhythm.
“You look just like your father.” The words assumed Jonathan was asleep and escaped.
“But he’s an asshole,” he replied, eyes opening into slits.
I had to reroute my train of thought around a hairpin turn. Monica was deeply asleep, lips smushed on his thigh.
“There’s that,” I said. “Good-looking guy though.”
“You come to offer me a modeling contract?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Must be nice.”
I sat on the edge of the spare chair. “I’m sorry.”
“About?”
About too many things to list. “Have you ever played music? Ever tried?”
“Piano, like all of us.”
Right. We’d all had to take two years of piano. Sheila and Deirdre had played without any delicacy or touch. Carrie still enjoyed playing the last time I saw her. The rest of us had dropped it the minute our obligations were met.
“Why did you stop?” I asked.
“No talent.”
“I don’t believe that.” I must have been tired to tell such a dangerous truth with such conviction. Backpedaling beat explaining. “You’re good at everything.”
“Not good enough.” He looked at Monica. “Not like her. I could hit the keys, but when she plays… it’s music.”
Not everyone could tell the difference. I couldn’t always. Not without Indy and Strat explaining what was good, what sucked and why. Even then, the appreciation wasn’t instinctual. Jonathan may have suppressed his father’s talent, but not his taste.
“I’m glad she’s here.”
“Me too.”
“I wanted to see you before the surgery.”
“Shush. We don’t speak of it.” He jerked his chin at Monica as if to say he didn’t want to talk about it in front of her.
“I’ll be waiting. All of us.”
“Even Carrie?”
Of course he dug deep for the sister least likely to show.
“You’re such a pain in the ass.”
“When I’m better, I’m going to find her and make her feel so guilty.”
“Spoken like a true Catholic.”
He smiled. “Learned from the best.”
I stood and laid my hand on his cheek. He closed his eyes.
“I really like you, brother.”
Eyes still shut, he patted my hand before I took it away. His eyes didn’t open. The machines beeped calmly and room stayed quiet enough to let me hear the hiss of the vents. He was asleep.
I kissed his forehead, remembering the first time I’d done that. The smell of him had been thick, sweet babyness. Now he was a man, and despite everything, I truly liked who he’d become.
* * *
Jonathan had been prepped and wheeled into surgery. Most of the family waited in the hotel across the street. Dad had a separate hotel room but made a second home in the hospital cafeteria.
I couldn’t be cooped up in a room any more than I could eat bad bagels and exchange barbs with Dad, so I ran the hospital halls like a rat in a maze, working my phone like a weapon of mass efficiency.
“I want to know where Theresa is,” I said into the phone with a stride that suggested a destination but guaranteed none. My goody-two-shoes sister had gone missing with her boyfriend, a notorious mob boss. “And if you can’t find her, I want to know where the mafia don is.”
“He’s not mafia,” Will said. “He’s camorra.”
“Same shit, different food.” I kept walking at the same pace, weaving through people, turning corners into new wings, new waiting areas, avoiding doorways that required an ID card or a medical degree.
“I have a lead who says there’s a war starting.”
“Is he hiding her?”
Same shit. Different day. The chaos of the Drazens always had the same shape. Only the colors changed.
“Don’t know yet. How’s Jonathan?”
I stopped when I saw him.
A man by the double doors, far away, flicking in and out of sight as people passed.
Brown hair. Scruff at the jaw. Evenly-sized top and bottom lips. Eyes as blue as jewels.
“Indy?” I said, frozen in place.
He turned to look at me as if answering my call.
“What?” Will asked.
I walked toward the man. Big ste
ps. Not quite running. Never taking my eyes off him. He wore jeans and a black sweater that was stretched at the neck. Hands in pockets. The slouch of the confidently unassuming.
“Margie?” Will’s voice came through the phone.
Indy.
Drew.
Crossing an intersection of hallways, I got knocked off balance by a woman in scrubs. Her clipboard jammed right into my ribs.
“I’m so sorry!” she said.
“It’s fine.”
“Margie?” Will got far away.
When I looked down the hall, the man in the black sweater was gone.
It was just me in a sea of moving people.
* * *
Whenever I went home for the holidays, Jonathan and Drew talked as if they were drawn to each other. I’d always assumed it was because in a house full of women and my father, they were the only two sane men. Drew wasn’t much of an athlete, but they threw the ball around. Later, Drew helped Jonathan learn his signals, catching pitches.
He was fourteen when I saw them on the back lawn with their gloves to the side. He was picking at the grass and muttering while Drew listened with a beer centering him. I kept glancing over from the table as Fiona gossiped endlessly about people I didn’t care about and Theresa tsked. Carrie was with a husband she hated, and Leanne was changing out of an outfit my mother found inappropriate.
Drew put his hand on Jon’s shoulder and spoke as my brother looked at his hands.
“What were you talking about?” I asked later that night, when Drew and I were alone.
“Girl problems.”
“He’s too young for girl problems.” I was on the bed in my underpants, waiting.
“Tell that to his body,” Drew said, peeling off his shirt. “And his mind, which… I can’t even tell you what’s going on inside it.”
“What?”
Fly. Zipper. His pants dropped to his feet. “Not your business.”
I pressed the magazine closed. “I have a right to know.”
He crawled onto the bed and kissed my nose. “I swore I wouldn’t tell his mother.”
“Fuck that, Andrew McCaffrey. Is he all right?”
“He’s scared.”
“Of what?”
“Himself.” He kissed my neck and shoulder. “Of his thoughts. His desires. He’s fine. He’s a good kid.”
“Honey?” I said as his mouth worked its way across my breasts.
“Mm-hm?”
“If he needs a guy to talk to—like a normal guy, not my father—can you be there for him?”
“I already am.”
* * *
“Where’s Monica?” I asked Deirdre, who was in her usual waiting room chair with a magazine in her lap. I was still disconcerted about what I hadn’t seen and how hard a part of me had tried to see someone else.
“I haven’t seen her.”
“All morning?”
I didn’t wait for an answer. I called Jonathan’s girlfriend.
“Where are you?” I asked, not knowing what I wanted out of her.
“Santa Monica and Cañon.”
“I’m sorry.” I must have heard her wrong. That was far away, and not between where she lived and the hospital. “Did you guys discuss you not coming or something?”
“What’s going on?”
“He’s in surgery, and I thought you might want to be here when he got out. Unless something changed with you two.”
“No!” A bell dinged from her side and the receiver rubbed up against something as Monica muttered, “Excuse me,” to a person on her side.
“What was that?” I asked before I realized the answer. “Are you on the bus?”
“Lot parking is fifteen dollars, and it’s permit parking on the street over there at this hour. I don’t need to blow gas money when the bus is fine.”
Relieved to have a purpose, I got Jonathan’s driver to pick her up. Problem solved, but the problems also dried up and I needed them.
The fancy waiting room felt like a prison, and I couldn’t shake the sense that my past was standing behind me, breathing by my ear but afraid to speak.
I took a car home. A few hours in my own house would settle my nerves. Without thinking too hard about it, I found myself tapping on my phone in the back seat, typing his name. There was nothing I hadn’t seen before. Two unlikely recipients of the same name. Not him. Not his sons. Nothing.
The apparition at the end of the hall couldn’t have been Indiana Andrew McCaffrey. Obviously. He’d be fifty-two now, and the guy in the stretched sweater wasn’t a day over twenty-two.
Sixteen years since I’d seen him.
Sixteen years between the time we met and the time he left.
My brain must have been reacting to the symmetry of it and making connections where there were none. It was nonsense and worthy of being ignored.
I took a deep breath, catching a hint of cologne I’d known very well a long time ago.
“For the love of fuck.” I gritted my teeth as if biting back insanity.
The scent was the pliable scratch of tweed and the sharp caress of old leather. A little sawdust, and at holidays with my family, too much beer and scotch. It was Drew.
Looking up from my phone, I scanned the car. No air fresheners. New leather. Windows open a crack as we zipped across the 10 freeway at forty miles per hour.
My brain was firing off a memory because of some lateral neural activity. Or maybe it was plain spite.
“Danny?” I said, leaning toward the front seat.
The driver looked at me in the rearview. “Yes, Ms. Drazen?”
“Change of plans. Take me downtown to Spring Street.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Without complaint, he got off on the next exit. I leaned back and texted Will to warn him I was coming to his office.
I’d made a decision I might regret, but I didn’t have a choice.
8
I got out of the elevator and headed down the hall, blowing by the tall, handsome guy in a suit. He spun around and walked down the hall beside me.
“You went right past me,” Will said.
“I’m a little preoccupied at the moment, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t. But I wanted to grab you before you came in.”
“I’m grabbed.”
“The agent I was telling you about?”
“The one you’re dating?”
“She casually asked me who I worked with.” We started back down the hall. “Cooper and Gareth think she’s with me to get close to you.”
Like me, Will came from a big family. It was almost a mirror image of mine. He had five brothers, four of whom were younger than him, and the youngest child, Lyric, was the only sister. All his youngers worked for him, which meant at some point, they’d worked for me.
“What do you think?”
“I think I like her enough to stay close. But not enough to sell you out.”
“You taking one for the team is feminism at its best,” I said. “But your brothers should give you some credit. She might be going out with you because she likes you.”
He stopped in front of a door marked Santon Information Assets, a name that didn’t appear in the lobby directory. He’d only been in this new space for a year. I saw it when he was renovating. At first blush, it was a small, two-room suite, but behind locked doors, he owned a few thousand square feet filled with files and computer servers. He believed discretion was impossible without modesty.
“I need to know how you feel about it,” he said before opening the door.
“I don’t have feelings about it. It’s cut and dry. If she wants a date, she can call me. If she wants to ask questions, she can get a subpoena.”
“You have a way with words.”
He opened the door. Gareth and Cooper looked up from their desks. Gareth was in his thirties, clean-shaven most of the time, and wore suits unless he was on the tennis court. The thick black frames of his glasses were often used to hide his expression.<
br />
Cooper was a few years younger and dressed like a hipster on a rooftop photo shoot. His worn-out jeans and half-tucked shirt presented him as someone who wasn’t serious. He slouched and shrugged and ran his fingers through his dark, shoulder-length hair as if he didn’t care about a damn thing. That was the biggest lie he told. He was a details man. Everything mattered.
They stood as if a four-star general had entered the building.
“Ms. Drazen,” Gareth said at the same time Cooper chimed, “Margie!”
“Please sit,” I said, putting my bag on a free chair. “You’re making me tired.”
They sat back down, and Will leaned on a desk with his arms crossed.
“How’s Jonathan?” Gareth asked.
“Prepping for surgery. Thanks for asking.” I sat down, crossing my legs as if I was staying a while. Six eyes looked at me expectantly. “Pass me that notepad, would you?”
I flicked my finger at a spiral-bound book at Gareth’s elbow. He gave it to me and added a pen before I had to ask.
“I need you to find someone for me.” I clicked the pen and wrote a down a name. “I knew them in the nineties. This was their address. The name of their band, their record company, their law firm.” I was talking faster than I could write. “Birthday. Law school. Place of birth. Parents’ names and I think this was their address.”
Taking a peek up as I wrote, I saw them exchange glances. Will twisted his pinkie ring.
“Problem, gentlemen?”
After a pause, Will answered. “You’re not saying ‘he.’”
“What?” I remembered a restaurant on Delancey that Drew used to frequent and wrote it down.
“You’re saying ‘their address’ instead of ‘his address,’” Gareth added.
I actually hadn’t thought about it and had had no intention of doing so. I put the pen down and handed Gareth the notebook. “Maybe I’m testing you.”
The three of them hovered over it.
“Bullets and fucking Blood?” Cooper exclaimed. “Are you serious?”