“You do not belong here,” Aunt Patti said. “Not tonight, and you know it.”
Julian stopped twirling Daisy around. Both children stared at the grown-ups.
“Get the hell out,” Jay said. His mouth barely moved when he spoke.
“You can’t talk to me like that,” Ari said. “This is my mother’s house.”
“I don’t give a crap whose house it is,” Jay said. “Just turn around. For your own sake. For the kids’.”
“Oh, you’re thinking about my kids, aren’t you? Both of you. You’ve certainly proven that.”
“You went skiing,” Aunt Patti said. “What happened?”
“Snow happened. Ice. Wasn’t about to risk my family’s life. Because I actually do care what happens to my family. I’ve proven that, allowing my good name to be dragged through the mud.”
“Ari,” Mimi said. “We are leaving right now.”
“No, we aren’t,” he said.
The man in the red velvet suit got up from the couch and stood there.
“What are you going to do, Tinker Bell?” Ari challenged him. “Throw me out?”
“No,” said the man. “I just don’t want to be near anything so ugly.”
“Then don’t look in a mirror,” Ari sneered.
Aunt Patti put an arm around the man in red and spoke with her voice shaking. “You may be my son, but you are not welcome in my house. Not like this. Not tonight.”
“I may be your son?”
“Ari,” said Nicole, as gently as she could. “You need to go.”
He looked at her with bleary eyes. “Why aren’t you dead yet?”
Jay hit him so hard, so fast that no one saw it coming. One minute Ari was on the sofa, the next minute he was on the floor, staring up. Jay stood over him, looking like he might kick him.
“Jay,” Nicole yelled. “Stop it! Stop!”
Daisy was sobbing. Julian and Aunt Patti were crying. The man in the red velvet suit was dabbing at his eyes, saying, “Oh, this is so awful. So awful!” Baby Rianna was wailing.
Mimi said in a calm voice, “Ari, get up and go to the car.” To Aunt Patti she said, “Mom, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. Absolutely no idea.”
Patti said, “I know you didn’t, and I’m not your mother.”
Mimi and Nicole helped Ari to his feet. He looked dazed. He was holding the side of his head but he wasn’t bleeding. He looked as white as he had the long-ago day the strange mongrel had attacked Nicole. “Are you all right?” Nicole asked.
“Like you care,” he said.
He pushed both women away and staggered to the door. He had never removed his coat or his boots.
“I don’t even know you anymore,” Mimi said to Ari in a husky voice. She was still hanging on to the wailing Rianna with one arm.
“I’m your husband,” Ari said. “I am the father of your children and the guy who busts his ass for all of you.” Then he walked out, slamming the door.
That seemed to waken something in Mimi. “Julian,” she said. “Julian, honey, put your coat back on and get in the car.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not coming.”
“You have to,” she said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Let him spend the night with me,” Aunt Patti said. “You can pick him up tomorrow morning.”
Mimi looked to Nicole, who nodded just barely. Mimi looked at her son, Julian, still body-blocking Daisy, weeping behind him. She glanced around the room, hoisted Rianna a little higher in both arms, and shrugged. “All right,” she said.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” Aunt Patti said. “Just don’t let Ari drive. Keep waking him every few hours, make him tell you his name and address. Make sure he doesn’t have a concussion.”
Jay was rubbing his hand as if he had hurt it. He kept his head down.
“I will,” Mimi said. Her boots were still dripping on the rug. “Well—good night.”
Nearly everyone in the room out called a weak good-night. Julian’s voice came last. “Night, Mom,” he said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said. She looked at Nicole, but neither of them said another word.
“Well,” said Aunt Patti, after the door had closed behind her. “I certainly do know how to throw a party.”
Out in the car Ari was weeping. He sat on the passenger side of the front seat, his seat belt already fastened. He was shivering, with cold or from shock. When Mimi had opened the back door and settled Rianna into her infant seat and got her buckled and ready, he said thickly, “Have to go back inside and apologize.” He opened the car door but then closed it again.
“No, you don’t,” Mimi said.
“Yes.”
“I think you’ve done enough damage for one night.”
“She thinks I hate her,” Ari said. “She thinks I’m a monster. I’m killing my own baby cousin. Did you see her? I can’t go on like this.”
“Oh, Ari,” Mimi said. She sounded exhausted.
“Where’s Julian?” he asked.
“He’s spending the night here with your mother.”
Tears crept down the sides of Ari’s face. “I want my son,” he wailed drunkenly.
“Well, you’ll have him tomorrow.” Her voice was kinder than she intended.
“I have to do the right thing,” Ari said. “Mimi, you have to help me. This is too hard. It’s killing everything.”
“We’ll do it together,” Mimi told him. She put her hand on his coat sleeve. “It’s not too late.”
He turned in the seat to face her. “Do you believe that? Really?” His face was streaked with tears.
“I’m sure of it, Ari.”
“I will, I swear to God,” he said. “What difference does it make? Did you see her? Did you see Nikki? Jesus.—I can’t stand myself. I’m so sick and tired of it.”
She stroked the hair back from his forehead. “I know,” she said. “It’s exhausting, behaving badly. It really takes it out of you.”
“My head hurts,” he said. “That Jay bastard really packs a wallop.”
“We’ll call your lawyer tomorrow,” Mimi said. “We’ll put an end to all this.” She could not even bear to say Katrina Turock’s name aloud. She kept stroking his head. “We’ll give her the cord blood, we’ll act like a family again.”
“Please don’t leave me,” Ari said. “I’m going to do the right thing. I will. I promise.”
But the next morning Ari woke sober, with the right side of his head throbbing and burning as if someone had shot fire through it, and his heart dead set against the whole family. Mimi had betrayed him. And his mother. All of them were against him. He remembered the night before only in patches, like scenes from a violent movie. He felt a dull fury. His mouth was dry as sand. Last night he had been humiliated in front of a room full of strangers, and his own mother—his own flesh and blood had turned against him. She had kidnapped his son. He talked about a lawsuit against Jay. He was going to get X-rays taken, he said. He thought his jaw was broken. Then he decided he had punctured an eardrum, because he wasn’t hearing clearly. He was going to take care of that son of a bitch once and for all. Katrina Turock would be thrilled, he said. Furthermore, he was going straight to the press with the whole story.
“You do any of that,” Mimi told him, “and I’m leaving you. Today. With both kids.” There was no softness in her face, no room for negotiation.
Ari felt himself alone at the edge of some abyss. He did not know how to step forward or back. Instead he just looked at his wife, his mouth opening and closing without words, his arms dangling at his sides like a hanged man’s.
Mimi turned and left him standing there. The door closed with a quiet click, but it charged the room like the striking of a match.
WINTER 2012
The Price of Love
Daisy and Julian continued to see each other, secretly. It was not so secret, since both mothers knew about it. The children were too young to manage on their own. Every Thursday afternoon
Julian came to Daisy’s house in Huntington after school. He dutifully spent a half hour playing chess with a neighboring kid his own age named Max, and then he would knock at Nicole’s door.
Daisy would always be there, anxiously waiting. She hustled Nicole home on Thursdays, insisting that they drive the quarter mile instead of walking as they did nearly every other day. Wednesday nights were her happiest night of the week. Thursday nights were the hardest, because it meant another full week before Daisy saw Julian again. “How many days before I see him?” she’d ask. “How many hours?”
Julian was unfailingly polite to Nicole. He called her “Aunt Nicole,” and acted as if nothing was wrong between the families. Nikki, in turn, kept Julian’s favorite treats in the house—mini Oreos, pretzel chips, and black currant juice she bought at a local Russian grocery.
It was the next best thing to coddling her best friend; Julian and Mimi shared a lot of the same taste in snack foods. And it seemed the least she could do to repay Julian for his loyalty to Daisy, the endless games of playing house and Barbie and hide-and-seek that he endured for her daughter’s sake.
In between visits, he would call, between three and five o’clock, when Ari was still at work. Nicole imagined Mimi kept up a charade even more elaborately at her end, focusing on the fact that Julian played chess once a week, never revealing where he went to do it. Ari was eagle-eyed. Nicole could not imagine how they managed to fool him, but he must have believed his son was on his way to becoming a chess prodigy. Thursdays Jay coached the junior varsity basketball at his school, and Nikki, feeling guilty, kept the secret from him as well. So it was all elaborately orchestrated without words or explanations, and only the women and children knew what was going on.
Mimi no longer called the house or Nikki’s cell phone to leave messages. She didn’t send out e-cards or e-mail Jewish jokes. What was there to say? The chasm between them took on a life of its own and kept on growing. Nicole saw Mimi’s familiar silver Saab parked at the corner, blue smoke puffing from the back of the car while she waited for Julian to emerge from Nicole’s house. Mimi sat in that car for at least an hour, most Thursdays, with the engine running. Listening to one of her comedy tapes, Nicole was sure, or to National Public Radio. Once or twice when Nicole had peeked out the window—she had even used her birding binoculars one time—she saw Mimi asleep in the car, wrapped in a coat, a knitted cap, two scarves, and a pair of gloves. That loved, plain face, so familiar and so distant, broke her heart. Time after time she thought of running out and tapping on the window, inviting her best friend inside. But something held her back each time. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t to punish her. It was more like the widening of a canyon. She no longer knew how to call across the distance, which grew every day that passed in silence. She tried to make other friends, but she felt too separate from the healthy young mothers, and couldn’t quite bear to bind herself to the others in the infusion room.
One afternoon when Julian wandered down for a second glass of black currant juice he stopped at the kitchen table and turned his round dark eyes—so much like his mother’s—directly on Nicole’s. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I miss you—that we all miss you. And I am completely on your side.”
“Oh, Julian,” she said, reaching out to brush the hair out of his eyes. “You’re too young to have to take sides.”
“Sometimes I wish I could just stay and live here with you in this house. It’s a whole lot more peaceful than mine.” He said it softly and matter-of-factly.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Nicole said. “Though you know you’re welcome here any time, all the time. You have an open invitation.” She wanted to ask more about what was going on at his home, but felt it impossible. Those dark brown eyes were trying to tell her—something—but Julian’s lips were clamped firmly shut, as if intent on making sure the mouth did not reveal what the eyes did. She ruffled his thick, wavy hair. “Love you, guy,” she said, and left the room. She sat on her bed and looked through her old picture albums. There were more pictures of Mimi than there were of herself. Mimi skinny right after a bout of mono in college. Mimi pregnant with Julian. Mimi clowning around onstage in front of a bunch of people somewhere. Mimi and Nicole, arm in arm on the beach, in matching polka-dot swimsuits. Mimi and Nicole in large floppy sun hats down in Florida. Nicole reached out one finger and touched her friend’s head. The photo was slick and flat, nothing more than a sliver of plastic. Then Daisy knocked on her bedroom door to ask whether she and Julian could have hot chocolate, and Nicole jumped as if she’d been caught doing something shameful. She wedged the photo albums back into the bottom of her bookshelf, spines out, and went downstairs.
Nicole could hear the steady murmuring of her daughter’s voice, high-pitched and quick, and the answering, comforting rumble of Julian’s. His voice at age eleven was already deepening, he was shooting up in height, his face had lost all remnants of its baby look. He’d gotten new steel-rimmed glasses, which only added to the adult owlishness of his handsome face.
“I wish Julian lived with us,” Daisy said. “I wish he was my brother.” She’d been saying things like that since she was three or four: I wish Julian was my twin, I wish he lived across the street. But Nicole now felt the full poignancy of her daughter’s desire. If Julian had in fact been her brother, none of this would be happening. Families had their hierarchies of loyalty. Ari would never have considered turning down his brother Al for cord blood or anything else, as badly as they’d gotten along. It was strange, the way families worked. It was stranger still that they functioned at all.
She often thought that if the parents of her students had seen how easily she lost patience at home, they’d have thought twice before they’d entrusted their own children with her. Ms. Greene, as her students had called her, was considered calm, even-tempered. She had been a popular and much-requested teacher, she knew. She had a reputation for never raising her voice to a student. Thank heaven for doors that shut and walls that kept your private life from public view.
What she felt these days was just plain lonely. Empty. She’d never had an easy time making friends, and now it was worse. She had most in common with the other patients in the oncologist’s waiting room; she’d shared detailed, touchingly intimate stories with the others who went through chemo. One of her favorite patients was a woman in her eighties whose goal was to see one last Super Bowl. Another was a trucker who had lost his right leg to cancer. They compared numbers and spoke in a language no one else could understand. T-cells and PETs; Kidrolase versus Leukeran; 6-MP or 6TG. When she met up with her fellow chemo patients on the second round, then the third, the fourth, it was like meeting up with old army buddies—and like old army buddies, they joked about old war wounds, the side effects that no one ever warned you about: aching teeth, loss of memory, arthritic pains, vertigo, and insomnia; a lingering metallic taste that spoiled your appetite for the things you’d loved best: coffee, chocolate. If you complained to the healthy people around you about these things, you’d never stop complaining, and they’d still have no idea what you were talking about.
But she was done with chemo now. That was one decision she could make without lawyers or a judge. That had been her New Year’s resolution. She’d been through six cycles. She wasn’t responding to any of it anyway, and they’d tried every new drug in the book. If she lost this case, if she was refused the cord blood and never could get well enough for a bone marrow transfusion, she would die in peace rather than keep subjecting herself to one procedure after another. She’d seen women in the infusion room lose parts of limbs, holding up bandaged stumps, death taking them one small bite at a time. She would not go through that. She could not put her family through that.
Jay said he understood, though she wasn’t sure he did. She was ready to walk away from all of it, including the fight over the cord blood. She was only going through the motions now for Jay’s sake. By the time the court case was over it would likely be too late. She might not even make
it to learn the outcome—she knew that now. When she looked in the mirror, her eyes had a hollow-socketed haunted look, as if someone else had moved in with her, behind her eyeballs. Death had already staked its claim. It was too early to be apparent to the others, but Nicole saw it—or imagined she did, the therapist reminded her.
“You have no reason to be this pessimistic,” he said. He was a nice man. He collected seashells; they were all over his office shelves, small ones, large conches, mostly delicate little spirals. Nicole supposed she should have requested a female therapist, but she feared that might make her miss Mimi even more. It would seem pathetic—paying some woman to be her friend.
“Why do you assume you are dying?” he asked her. “Is it possible that you secretly want to die?”
“No,” she said. “I secretly want to live.” This was why therapists kept boxes of tissues in their offices, discreetly scattered all over the room, like vases of flowers. She blew her nose into a tissue from the box on the little table to her right. “I assume I’m dying because I can see it in my own face. I’m just astonished that everyone else doesn’t see it, too.”
Maybe they did and just couldn’t admit it. Daisy didn’t want to snuggle as much anymore—though this might have been a function of her growing up. Nicole didn’t think so. Daisy still climbed into her father’s lap at night to watch TV; it was her father she requested to put her to bed, while it had always been Mommy this and Mommy that. So much so that it was almost a family joke. And Jay treated Nicole as something breakable. Even his touch on the rare nights they made love was lighter, less certain, as if he sensed she was merely renting her body now, not fully occupying it.
But there were still good days. Sunny days, even in the depths of winter. Snow days curiously airy and empty and free of school when she and Jay and Daisy all stayed home, huddled around the fireplace in their little purple house, light bouncing blindingly off the snow. She loved her house, she loved her people crowded around her. On such a day she could almost forget that she was dying. One of her favorite poets had written, “There are good days, and there are fair days.” Any day she didn’t have to drag herself to the courthouse in Mineola she counted as a pretty fair day. Even the infusion room was better than that. She could not bear the hours spent with her cousin Ari sitting like a statue. He never looked at her. She hated that Turock woman. Even Peter no longer provided good company; she suspected his interest in her and in the case was flagging. For a man who had never lost a major case, he was closing in on his first defeat, and it made him cranky and impatient. The judge himself regarded her, or so she imagined, with some strange combination of pity and horror. It seemed to her that he avoided eye contact as much as he could, and she had watched enough televised court cases to know this was a bad sign.
The Laws of Gravity Page 15