“I just want—”
“I know what you want,” Ari said. “Every sentence for you begins with ‘I want.’ But the answer is no. You had the same opportunity we did; the same technology is open to everyone. It’s not my fault that you didn’t take advantage of it.”
“That’s not fair,” Nicole said. “It was so new. You were the first person we knew who stored cord blood. And it was expensive—we were living on one salary.”
“Five thousand bucks,” Ari said. His voice sounded exactly like his father’s just then, even in his own ears, barking around the corner of his auto parts and repair store on the Lower East Side. “What’s a few thousand bucks? You’re saying that you and Jay never went on a vacation all those years? I told you it was a good idea, back when you were pregnant with Daisy. You never listen to me. You never have listened.”
“If I had to do it over,” Nicole said, “of course that’s what we would choose. But we don’t have that second chance. Ari, stop for a second and listen. This is me, Nikki. My leukemia is resisting all the treatments. It’s some kind of genetic fluke. And I’ve tried every public source, every alternative.”
“It’s genetic?” She could hear the ring of fear in his voice. “So Julian and Arianna might have the same gene. What right have you got to steal from my children?” Ari was yelling now. He had gotten up from his chair and he was pacing, with the office phone in his sweaty hand. Normally he talked on the cell, through a Bluetooth headset. It felt weird to hold the phone in his hand, this appendage. “You’ve had your life. Why would you try to take away their safety net? What makes you so precious?”
“I’m—I’m not,” Nicole said. “Jesus, Ari, aren’t we all precious? I won’t let them use all of the cord blood.”
“You can’t guarantee that. What if it gets contaminated? What if some moron drops the tube or tosses it? I can’t risk my children’s future for you.”
“Ari, for God’s sake. No one is going to drop or toss anything.” Not just her voice, her whole body was shaking. She was looking out the west window in her living room. It seemed like the last bit of color or beauty left in the world lay in the branches of the Japanese maple whose brilliant quadrangles touched the glass, glittering with light, blood red and on fire. The branches scooped the air and flourished brilliant scarlet against gray-white arcs of sky in between like an ikebana flower arrangement. Fall was coming. Every tree would soon be bare, the piles of leaves swept up, carted away, burned, discarded.
“As for that goddamn letter,” Ari went on, his voice menacing. “You’d better tear it up and send me the pieces, or I swear I’ll come after you. I’ll take every measly dime you’ve got left. Do you hear me? Do you understand me now?”
“I have to go,” Nicole said. “I can’t listen anymore.” She hung up and tears burst from her eyes in a flood. Crying came as a relief, loosening the agony of holding on and listening. Surely he would change his mind. He was her cousin, she had known him forever. She felt closer to Ari in many ways than she did to her own sister. He was moody. He had a temper, granted. She was not going to give up hope. Her tears, like the leaves in the Japanese maple branches, seemed at least some form of life.
As for Ari, he felt a sick headache coming on as soon as he hung up the phone. His desk looked hazy, as if seen through fog. He punched a button and barked at his secretary, “No more calls today! No one. Nothing.”
His temple throbbed, as if someone was trying to pound a nail into the right side of his head, and his stomach burned. The usual red aura began to collect around objects in the room—the chair, cars parked out in the office parking lot. He shut off the lamp by his desk to make the room dimmer. He thought he was going to throw up. He drew the blinds. He felt older than he’d ever felt in his life. There was barely enough energy left in his hands to pull the cords on the window blinds.
“What in God’s name have I done,” he said to himself, in a voice low enough not to stir the angry hornets buzzing in his head, not to raise the demons. “What have I started?”
That night, Nicole dreamed she was back at her senior prom. The wooden floors of the gym gleamed golden brown; the basketball hoops were so festooned and heaped with paper flowers that they seemed like blossoming trees. Ari was there, too, looking as he had in high school—his hair longer, his shoulders wider. He was dressed in some sort of elaborate purplish-red velvet jacket, edged with gold trim. But he didn’t look ridiculous. He appeared regal, a king. On his head he wore a spiky gold crown. It was glowing with rubies, emeralds, topaz. He came toward her smiling in the dream and, removing the crown from his own head, held it out to her. She didn’t want to accept it. She could imagine its weight, its spikiness, settling down on her. She hung back. But he smiled even more broadly—a beaming, mischievous grin that she hadn’t seen in years—and held it out again, insisting. “It’s yours,” he said. “You have to take what belongs to you.”
She woke up, and lay in the half-gloom of early morning, mulling it over. She felt calmer and saner. It had often been this way for her—whenever things were at their worst, at their darkest, she would have a supremely happy dream. Nicole wasn’t sure why this was the case, but she supposed it was a gift. It was as if her nighttime life carried on joyfully with or without her, and the momentum of that dream happiness swept into her waking hours. After her mother died, she’d had a series of happy dreams where they were out biking, mountain climbing, picnicking in deep woods together—things they had never done in real life. She woke up laughing from one of the dreams and asked herself, Am I losing my mind?
In fact, she remembered, she and Ari had gone to his senior prom together. Not as a couple, of course, but with their own dates, together. Ari had been going around with a girl named Denise since his junior year. She was a short, tough-looking young woman with high blonde hair who chewed gum, smoked cigarettes, and cut class more often than not. Nicole was in awe of her. She’d just assumed that Ari and Denise would get married, but then something happened—a pregnancy scare, she thought—and it all fell apart abruptly after high school.
Nikki, a few years younger, had just started dating one of Ari’s closest friends that spring of his senior year, a boy named—she fumbled for the name an instant. Darrell. A tall, skinny runner from upstate, shy and quiet. He wanted to be a veterinarian. He was crazy about animals. He’d worn a red tux to the prom, she remembered now, an orangey-red color that looked like a band uniform. He had been almost handsome enough to carry it off.
Nikki was just beginning to realize that things weren’t going to work out between her and Darrell after all. Darrell was a nice guy, a truly sweet guy, but after a few mumbled sentences they had nothing to say to each other. The silence between them was paralyzing. And she didn’t know any of the other kids at the prom—they went to different schools, and besides, they were all older than she was. In those days, three years felt like a century. Ari was her safety zone that night. As often as she could, Nikki crept over to him and stood in the comfort of his familiarity, nursing her punch in its plastic fake champagne glass. He seemed to realize that she felt out of place; he made a point of including her while he stood around talking to his friends. He’d asked her to dance a few times, and as long as she was at her cousin’s side she didn’t feel so hopelessly lost and awkward. Once, though, while they were dancing, Ari leaned his chin against the top of her head.
Nicole stiffened. “Are you smelling my hair?” she demanded.
“Sure,” Ari said easily. “Why shouldn’t I?” He moved her in a circle. “It smells nice,” he added. “Like your mother’s meatloaf.”
She laughed. Her mother had indeed made meatloaf for dinner that night. Relieved, she punched him lightly on the arm.
“Denise’s perfume is giving me a headache,” he confided. “That and the smell of cigarette smoke.”
“So hold your head farther away,” she advised him.
“Naw. Are you kidding? Did you see her in that dress? I want to get closer.—But
I might end up with a migraine.”
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln,” she teased him, “how did you enjoy the play?”
How did we come so far, she wondered now, from so much closeness? All the hours they had spent together, she and Ari, all the days and nights—it must add up to months of their lives spent in each other’s company, playing cards, trying not to be sick in the back during long car rides, watching old movies, building intricate sand castles, just hanging around. Time that had seemed without end. She used to love wearing his outgrown sweaters because they smelled like him, and made her feel stronger, older, braver than she really was. And now this. They had come to this. Had some thread of their connection caught and held? she wondered. Wasn’t there something unbreakable behind it all? Perhaps only in her dreaming life. But even that was enough to keep her buoyant for an hour or two.
Every family has one living patriarch or matriarch, the final arbiter and repository of ancient family history, and Nicole’s aunt Patti was the last woman standing. It was to the formidable Patti that Nicole turned for help now. Her stage name was Patti Leeds, and she was best known to the world as Aunt Patti, a loudmouthed character she’d played seven years running on a TV sitcom.
Aunt Patti had never had a major breakthrough as an actress, no starring roles, never top billing, but she’d managed to capture the kind of small parts people remembered. She was the angry soup lady. She was the one on the cat food commercial who tangoed with the cat. She was the woman in the bakery who had bought the last cream puff and ate it while the main character watched and cried. She had been on Broadway and off-off-Broadway; she had appeared in movies, television shows, and scores of commercials.
“I’m the queen of the bit part,” she used to brag. “If the Academy Awards ever handed out an award for Best Bit instead of those awards nobody gives a crap about, I’d have a gold statue over my fireplace.”
Nicole’s mother, Leslie, had been the brains of the family; Patti, Ari’s mother, had been the wild one. Aunt Patti was brash, even vulgar. She was a short, round, dramatic-looking character with a snub nose and high cheekbones. Almost Mongolian looking. Her hair, even now, in her eighties, was jet black, and she swore it wasn’t dyed. That meant nothing, of course. She swore to a lot of things that weren’t remotely true. Born Esther Morgenstein, she had changed her stage name to Patricia Morgan. She still lived well off the residuals of Aunt Patti reruns and the occasional commercial.
She had stayed on in the house in Little Neck where she raised Ari and his brother, Al. After her husband passed away, she moved into one of the two big rooms downstairs, and treated the Cape Cod as a ranch. There was a large backyard, filled with a tangle of thorny raspberry bushes, and a church next door, which is why they’d been able to buy it cheaply back in the 1960s. Patti didn’t start her acting career till she hit her forties; Nicole still remembered watching her aunt’s early roles in tiny basements of makeshift theaters all over Manhattan, and how her mother had scoffed at them. Nicole and Ari both had painful memories of being dragged onstage to dance with the actors, or of being showered with colored confetti and, one memorable time, pelted with black feathers. Nicole still had one pasted into a photo album somewhere. She thought her aunt Esther brave, weird, and exotic, then and now.
So before she called Aunt Patti and told her what was going on, Nikki braced herself. Ari was the baby of her aunt’s family and her favorite son.
Nicole could only imagine what her aunt would say to all this, but she steeled herself with her new stubborn will.
Or maybe it wasn’t so new. Maybe she had just unearthed it, here in the last lap when she needed it most.
Nicole had been a rock-headed teenager, she knew that. She wondered uneasily if it had driven her father away, if it had led to her mother’s early death. Despite the softness of her face, the roundness of her curves, Nicole was someone who stood her ground. Once she had warded off a would-be rapist by planting her feet and refusing to get inside his car. Her resistance seemed to confuse him. He finally gave up and drove away. Her shapely calves were round but large, as if from having rooted herself firmly to the earth all these years.
As soon as the doorbell rang, Aunt Patti threw open her front door. The old lady still drove, though time had shrunken her so she could barely see over the top of the steering wheel. She was wearing a long black cape, dripping wet at the fringes, and she drew Nicole inside out of the wind and rain.
“You look awful,” Aunt Patti said, enfolding her niece in a hug. Her cape smelled heavily of musk perfume. “I just got in myself,” she added, stamping her feet to shake off water. “My neighbors cornered me. Right outside my own house, here in the downpour. I was just getting out of the car when they hobbled up to me. ‘Oh, Mrs. Leeds! Mrs. Leeds!’ they cried—and that’s not even my real name, my name is Wiesenthal, same as my husband—‘We’ve got colored people moving into the neighborhood!’
“ ‘Colored people!’ I said. ‘Heavens, what colors are they?’
“ ‘Oh, you know what we mean,’ they said. ‘African-Americans.’—As if I didn’t know exactly what they meant. I know what they say behind my own back, too, the old cranks. ‘But what are you going to do about it?’ they wailed.”
Aunt Patti struck a pose on the carpet. Her mouth dropped open in mock amazement. “ ‘Do?’ I said. ‘What am I going to do about it?’ And I looked those old women right in the eye. ‘I shall treat them exactly the way I treat all of my neighbors,’ I told them.—‘I shall ignore them!’”
Nicole laughed, and Aunt Patti dragged her over to the sofa and made her sit down.
“Little Neck,” Aunt Patti said. “Little brains, little souls. I would have moved out long ago, but I love my yard and the church bells next door. They practically conduct their funerals in my driveway. It’s very baroque. Sometimes I sneak inside and take communion. They don’t know what to think.”
She bustled around, hanging Nicole’s coat on a brass coatrack in the shape of an elephant with many trunks. She shook out her own long black cape and hung it on another brass trunk. “How about I make some tea,” she said. It was not a question. She disappeared into the kitchen, a narrow galley-style room that was hardly used. Aunt Patti had never been a cook. Aunt Patti was the only woman Nicole knew who served her guests TV dinners and lasagnas still in their frozen-food foil trays.
She reappeared ten minutes later with a tea tray trembling in her arms. All of the dishes clattered together gently, and she set them down with a look of relief. A deep red teapot, two dark red cups, and a pack of Fig Newton cookies. “I adore Fig Newtons,” she said. “These are my idea of health food.”
She poured the tea, and Nicole pretended to nibble at one of the cookies. She forced herself to eat something every morning—usually fruit with yogurt—then didn’t eat again till dinnertime, when Jay and Daisy watched her like hawks. She and her aunt sat in silence for a few minutes, drinking tea and eating the cookies. At least, Aunt Patti ate while Nicole hung on to hers. After a while Aunt Patti got up and turned on the NPR station on the radio. They were playing something with strings.
“So,” she said at last, when she had finished her tea. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“How much do you know?” Nicole asked, stalling. She had always been terrified of Aunt Patti, who seemed so much larger than life, plump and tiny as she was.
“I know Ari promised you something you need, something medical, and changed his mind.”
“That’s right,” Nicole said.
“What’s it called, again?”
“Cord blood,” Nicole said. “It’s Julian’s.”
“Cord blood.” Aunt Patti mused on it. “When I was born there was no such thing as a TV set. No computer. If you were a preemie, chances were you’d die. So Ari said yes, and then he backed out. Son of a bitch.”
She put up one short, pudgy hand. She always wore several large rings, including one enormous square aquamarine. “And do you know why?—Because he’s
a frightened little man. Takes after his father. He clings to things. He was like that even as a little boy—a packrat. He collected everything. All kinds of useless crap.” She turned the dark red teacup around and around on its little plate. “Baseball cards, shells, nails, paper clips, polished rocks. One time he decided to collect walnuts, hid them under his bed, and we ended up with white maggots all over his room. Maggots, in Little Neck.” She barked out a laugh.
“He could never let go of anything. When he outgrew his clothes, I’d try to donate them to Goodwill, but he wouldn’t let me give anything away. I might need them, he’d tell me. When? I asked. Probably it’s my fault. I’m not what you call the maternal type. So now he hangs on to everything.” She shook her head. “Like a dragon. Sits on a pile of crap and guards it. And that poor homely wife of his has to keep him company while he does. No wonder she tells jokes. I introduced those two, you know.”
This was not true. Nicole had introduced them in college, but it was one of Aunt Patti’s many myths. “Mimi is not homely,” is all Nicole said.
“Suit yourself,” Aunt Patti said. “A meeskite. Even on her wedding day. They say every bride is beautiful, but Mimi proved them wrong. She looked—what is it you say about an ugly baby? She looked alert.” She patted Nicole’s hand. “Now, now,” she said. “Don’t get upset. Everything you felt always showed in your face and it still does. Beauty isn’t everything.—But it doesn’t hurt, either. Right? I was a beauty. You were a beauty. Still are. But this.” She looked down again. Nicole had the funny feeling her aunt could read her future in the bottom of that red teacup. There had always been something witchy about Aunt Patti. “This is a mess.”
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