She also knew she’d never tell him.
She knew Sonia would want her to get an abortion. She said as much whenever they saw a young girl pregnant out to there. “No idea,” Sonia would say. “That girl has no idea how hard it’s going to be.”
Her mind raced, and she tried to grab any possible solution that floated by. Adoption? How did someone set that up? Didn’t they have to be part of a Catholic charity or was that old-fashioned? And school! She couldn’t go back to school. Not that school, anyway. One of Nolan’s friends would see—would tell him. Nolan could never, ever know. Kate pictured herself at the small continuation high school that sat, literally, on the wrong side of the tracks, in broken-looking portables. Going there would practically guarantee she would have to get a tattoo on her neck.
Her mother was right. Kate sat on her bed, her fingers gripping the ragged teddy bear she’d outgrown so long before, and felt the world get huge on all sides of her. It was too enormous, too big. Too hard.
She had no idea what to do.
Chapter Eleven
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
10 a.m.
Kate made a pot of coffee and drank almost the whole pot sitting alone at the kitchen table, staring at the place on the doorjamb where they’d marked Robin’s height every year.
Then she started moving. She dragged plastic bag after plastic bag down from the attic and into her Saab, fitting in as many of them as she could until she could barely close the passenger door.
Kate drove to the thrift store wondering if she was the most callous person on the face of the earth. While driving down Fruitvale she lost herself in a whirlpool of regret, thinking about how he was now erased, his things being given away—his room no longer existed. She was a terrible mother. She’d already known that, of course, but this made it even worse. She remembered an e-mail Nolan had sent a few months earlier, asking if she still had the rocking horse they’d bought him when he was two. It had always been in his room, even when he was too big for it. Several times Kate had tried moving it out, but Robin had always chased after her, clutching the horse’s wool mane. Now it was in the back of the car on Robin’s side, riding where his car seat had been. Biting back tears that threatened to rise, she parked in the thrift store lot.
Nothing to do but keep moving forward. Even if it was at a stumbling pace.
Inside, she found a small, mousy woman wearing a flowered apron sorting coffee mugs. “I have some donations in the car.”
The woman shook her head. “No today.”
“Yes, I’m here today.”
“No donate today. Wednesday, Friday, Saturday only.”
Kate balled her hands into fists. “You don’t understand. I have to get rid of this stuff. Now.”
“Goodwill in San Leandro has drop-off today.”
Through clenched teeth, Kate said, “I’m not driving another half hour. I can’t. Please, won’t you take this stuff? They’re children’s clothes, and toys, and—oh, a whole bunch of books. Good books.”
The woman folded her lips, looking unimpressed. “No one to receive. I don’t make the rules.”
“But can you bend them?” Kate tried smiling. She couldn’t get back into the car with that scent. Burning the car and its contents was a more attractive idea.
“No bend. Sorry.”
“My child died.” There, she played the only card she had. Really, it was the only one left in many ways, Kate thought.
But instead of softening the woman, it seemed to anger her. “You should go. No donate.” She turned her back on Kate and went back to pushing coffee mugs around, clinking them together, lifting one up, shaking out the dust, and replacing it so hard that the handle cracked off. “Shit.” She turned fiercely back to Kate. “No donate. Tomorrow. Shit.”
In the car, Kate beat the palm of her hand against the steering wheel until it throbbed deep inside. She wouldn’t drive to San Leandro. She couldn’t go that far. Instead, she drove from the thrift store to a shopping center close by. She’d been behind it once before. She and Robin had been searching for the perfect piñata. They’d heard that Lucky carried a Spider-Man one, which was exactly what Robin wanted. After jockeying for position to enter the lot, she’d gotten turned around and had ended up behind the center. Kate had noticed then the unlocked Dumpsters. It was a leftover tic from her apartment-dwelling days: she’d made an automatic mental note of their position. When she was in college, she’d made many a midnight dump run to unlocked Dumpsters, chucking in bags of trash that wouldn’t fit in the overflowing apartment Dumpster.
When she was with Robin, excited about the closeness of a real Spidey piñata, she’d never thought she’d be back here. In fact, inside one of the bags she’d packed the day before was a collection of plastic cars that they’d also bought here to put in Spider-Man’s chest cavity. Robin had kept them lined up on his window. Kate had thought that another kid might have liked them. Some little boy might have gotten a sparkle in his eye at the thrift store and would have pulled on his father’s arm. Please, please, Daddy. I want them. Please?
One by one, she tossed the bags into the Dumpster. This, she could do this. And wasn’t this similar to what it would be like on Saturday? When she would go to the bay with the ashes. Maybe she would be able to do it, to throw the bodies of her mother and of Robin into the wind.
Like so much trash, like what she was chucking into the Dumpster. She swallowed hard, pushing the tears back with sheer willpower.
On top of the bags, she placed the rocking horse. It looked obscene in the Dumpster. A tragedy. It was begging to be photographed in black and white by a college student, displayed pretentiously under track lighting. It would be titled “Heartbreak” and people would nod knowingly as they passed it, knowing nothing at all.
The last item she tossed over it all was a practically brand-new red sleeping bag that Robin had treated like a toy when he’d received it one Christmas morning when he was five. Once she’d found him in the garden, inside the bag, only the top of his head sticking out. “What are you doing?” she’d asked. “I’m a burrito!” he’d cried rapturously. “B is for burrito!”
She’d almost forgotten that entirely.
Three blocks away from the store, waiting at a light, Kate saw a woman huddled against a shopping cart under the 880 overpass. Her hair was stringy and so thin Kate could see her scalp in places, although she probably wasn’t much older than Kate herself. She wore jean shorts, even in the cold air, and Kate could see track marks on her legs. Next to her, behind the cart, something moved, and then Kate realized someone was peeking at her. A little boy. Or perhaps it was a girl—it was impossible to tell. No more than eight, the child sent Kate a cheeky gap-toothed grin and followed it up by shooting her the bird.
Kate flipped a U-turn and screeched around each turn, hurrying back to where she’d just been. But in the three minutes it took to get there, it started pouring. “No, no, no,” she said, unwilling to use her wipers, hoping it would stop. It had to stop.
Damn it. The Dumpster had already been used. Boxes of rotting fruit and vegetables sat oozing on top of Robin’s sleeping bag. She pulled at the edge, but it wasn’t salvageable. A piece inside Kate’s heart, a tiny piece that had been miraculously still whole, broke.
“No diving!” a man’s voice shouted from behind her. “Get away from there!”
“Asshole,” yelled Kate in his direction as she sank back into her car that no longer smelled of Robin. “You should lock it, then.”
But he didn’t hear her. He didn’t even look at her, just hurried through the rain to pull up the lid, banging it into place. Kate drove away, knowing that, like the woman and child under the overpass, no one noticed her, either.
Chapter Twelve
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
6 p.m.
Dear Nolan,
There is something I have to tell you.
When Nolan opened his computer, the return address pulsed from the screen as if it were bright r
ed instead of regular black and white like the others. KateMonroe2002. He’d thought it was funny when she’d attached the year to her handle so long ago, as if they’d never enter another new year. When they’d started e-mailing about Robin, he’d been surprised she hadn’t changed the address. Or, for that matter, her last name. But she hadn’t changed, either.
It had been a long day on the road—they’d been putting in new speed limit signs on Mountain Boulevard, and people didn’t know how to drive out there. Stupid winding road. You’d think they’d get a freaking clue when they saw the flashing lights and all the guys in orange, but no. They had to speed up, daring each other to pass in the most dangerous ways possible. Shante had had to dive off the edge of the shoulder into the poison oak at one point to get out of the way of a red SUV. The driver was looking down at her phone, and Nolan didn’t even think she noticed that she’d almost killed a man. She’d go to bed tonight thinking about bills and maybe have sex with her guy, instead of counting her blessings that a man she’d never know was still alive to go home tonight and think about his bills and maybe have sex with his wife.
People didn’t get it.
Nolan did. He should be dead. Every day he knew that.
Wiping the back of his suddenly dry mouth with his hand, Nolan slowly and very deliberately shut the computer without reading the rest of the very short e-mail. It was different, he could tell. This one wasn’t a remembrance of their son. He stood from the couch and put the beer he’d opened back in the fridge. It could wait. It should wait.
In the bathroom, he removed his smelly work clothes, and instead of taking his normal shower, he filled the tub with hot water. He lowered himself into it, hissing at the pain. He’d always liked a hot bath, as scalding as he could get the water to run. The tub in this apartment was subpar, and that was putting it mildly. It was plastic sealed, with cracks at the bottom where rust from underneath bloomed. Even when he scrubbed it, it never seemed clean. As it was too shallow to even cover him fully, he’d almost given up on baths altogether, even though it had been one of his favorite daydreams when he was in prison: a claw-foot tub like he and Kate had had out on the hill under the oak trees, deep enough for two, water hot enough to make his skin feel like it was about to sizzle right off.
But now, it was enough to soak as best he could. He kept the faucet running a slow drip since the overflow valve shunted water away from him. Fred Weasley sat on the bath mat and licked at the water every once in a while, seeming surprised and pleased by the taste each time. Part pit bull, part enormous unidentifiable orange mutt, Fred Weasley resembled the kind of dog that might knock over little old ladies and take their purses just for fun. Robin had always wanted a big orange dog so he could name him after the character in Harry Potter. Once Kate had asked Robin why Fred, and not Ron Weasley, since they were all red haired. “Ron’s a terrible name for a dog,” was the only answer Robin gave. And it wasn’t an awful answer, Nolan thought.
Toward the end, they’d even talked about getting him a dog, not that Robin ever knew it. It was after he’d stepped on a bee while walking to the bathroom—a bee that must have crawled in during the heat of the day when they’d had the windows open. Robin had yelped, and when Nolan saw the crushed body of the insect, he’d called 911, almost unable to breathe himself. Robin was allergic to bees. Robin was weak. Robin would die, from a bee sting, and it would be all Nolan’s fault.
But the damnedest thing had happened: Robin hadn’t reacted at all. When the ambulance got there, they could barely tell where the stinger had gone in. They didn’t even transport him—Nolan chose instead to just keep an eye on it, knowing they could rush to the hospital if they needed to. They hadn’t—no swelling, no wheezing, not even a red spot. The doctor later explained that his immune system was so compromised he didn’t even have his normal allergies. All his warning systems were shut down, closed for business.
On the back porch while Robin slept, he and Kate had sat in the wooden swing and talked. She’d pretended to sketch the rosebush, but her pencil barely moved. She said, “If he can’t get sick from a dog, why not just get him one? I mean, besides the fact that you’re allergic, too.”
But Nolan’s allergies didn’t matter, he knew that. Something happy and bright rose in Nolan’s chest, but it took only a second to flip through how it would go: Carrying Robin in his mask through the shelter, letting him point at the one he loved best. Taking it home. The dog falling in love with Robin. Robin expending precious energy, loving his new best friend.
Then, Nolan and Kate having to care for it after its master died.
It was an unbearable thought. Nolan had disguised his answer as being in Robin’s best interest. They didn’t know, he’d said, when Robin might start feeling better. When his immune system would compose itself and recognize what it was supposed to do. When Robin might spontaneously heal. And dogs were dirty, tracking germs in from outside. They couldn’t afford that, and they wouldn’t be able to get rid of a dog, not once it was in the house. So they shouldn’t bring one in, period.
The lead of Kate’s pencil had scratched louder as she continued to draw something she didn’t care about, something that he’d find crumpled in the trash later. They hadn’t looked at each other for the rest of the night.
Fuck allergies, anyway. After he got out of prison, when Nolan had found Fred Weasley in the pound, he’d figured the worst thing that could happen would be that he would have such a bad asthma attack that he’d stop breathing. While he’d mostly gotten over his death wish, there were still times when Nolan wondered how much he would mind dying. Yet an over-the-counter daily allergy pill was all he’d needed to be able to live with Fred. He still didn’t touch the dog and then immediately rub his eyes, but if he washed his hands often and didn’t let Fred sleep on the bed, he barely had any problems. Chalk that up to one more thing he wished he’d known earlier. He should have gone along with Kate’s plan about finding Robin a dog. She’d been right, as she was about most things relating to Robin.
Even though she hadn’t been right about him.
Fred Weasley whuffed in his ear and then burped gently.
“I suppose that’s my cue.” With a wet hand, he diligently scratched Fred behind the ear for a long moment. Just before he got out, he scrubbed himself with a washcloth and Dial soap harder than he normally did.
Kate deserved that, at least. She didn’t need her e-mail read by a man who stank of sorrow and sweat. Kate, who’d never minded if every single scrap of food in the fridge turned green and fuzzy, had always been sensitive to the way he smelled. When he’d first gotten the job at the firm, she’d sniff-tested different combinations of antiperspirant and cologne. “Too sweet, and you’ll bother the women’s noses. Too assertive, you’ll piss off the higher-up men,” she’d said, coated in scents in the small bathroom of the apartment they’d lived in then. It was years before they’d been able to afford the house that was supposed to keep them safe. Hell, they hadn’t been able to afford expensive cheese.
Wrinkling his nose, he’d said, “I don’t think anyone’s going to notice. Maybe I’ll stop wearing deodorant altogether.”
She’d been so shocked. “And smell like a punk rocker? You’ll be out of there so fast your head will spin. Smell is almost as important as color.” She dabbed a different cologne of the four cheap ones she’d bought at the drugstore in the crook of her elbow and buried her nose in it. “Speaking of which, which tie are you going to wear? The blue, I think. You look amazing in blue.”
Kate had loved him. And god, he’d known it. Back then, he’d worried about everything—how to keep her happy and safe, how to earn more money faster, what the bumps were in the dark of the night—but he’d never worried that she didn’t love him. He knew she did. Felt it in his bones. His parents had never noticed him. His teachers hadn’t, either. Friends were a little better, but Kate, when she whirled through a room, throwing pillows off the couch and tossing the newspaper into the air looking for the brush
she’d already misplaced twice that hour, when she stopped momentarily in her flight to press kisses all over his face, he knew it. He had everything he’d ever needed. And so much more.
Now, in the dismal studio half the size of that old apartment he’d shared with her, Nolan was out of the bath. Clean, he leaned back into the couch, pulling a pillow up behind him. Fred groaned and stretched at his feet.
Dear Nolan,
There is something I have to tell you.
I should probably see you to say it. If that’s something you could feel comfortable with, please e-mail me back to set up a meeting.
I hope all is okay with you,
Kate
A meeting. In person. Hot damn.
The very next e-mail was from someone who wanted to know how to seal a garage properly in order to commit suicide. Jesus Christ. Who the hell did they think they were, e-mailing him? As if he knew. Like he had any fucking clue. He’d lived, goddamn it. Didn’t they get that?
God, it was stuffy in the apartment. He got up and turned on the small fan and slid open the window that looked out over the back alley. Cumbia music pumped through the screen and the rain played a steady rhythm against the accordion. He stood in front of the fan, resting his cheek against the grimy screen until his heart stopped clattering. Kate had always loved this kind of spring rain the best. It had made her joyful, silly. Giggly. He wondered if she was looking outside, too.
Nolan didn’t care what Kate wanted to talk about. She could want to discuss cutting off his balls with a rusty letter opener and he’d sit there and nod and agree before unzipping his pants.
He moved back to the couch.
“Dear Kate,” he typed.
He stopped, and erased “Dear.” Added “Dearest.” Erased that and put it, just for fun, “My darling Kate,” knowing he could never send it like that. But he looked at the words for a moment and remembered the feeling of rolling over in the middle of the night, reaching to find her in the king-sized bed. “My darling,” he’d say against her hair that smelled of their bed. “My darling.” She never woke, just wriggled back into him, letting him hold her tighter.
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