Beginner's Luck

by Kate Clayborn

  “I’ll talk to him,” she says, looking up at Alex, who scans her face in concern.

  “You don’t have to,” he says.

  “I know. But it’ll be faster this way. I’ll take care of it.” Faster this way. Faster, I know she means, to get me out of this hospital, out of her face, out of her life. I feel sick.

  Alex nods, then turns to glare at me before heading back down the hall. But he sits a few seats closer than he was before. He’s keeping an eye on us.

  When Kit looks at me, she’s wiped any expression of recognition from her face. I could be anyone. I could be another hospital employee, someone she just wants to deal with and get rid of. “Kit,” I say, but even though I’ve thought of nothing but her since I left home, I haven’t thought at all about what exactly I’d say in this moment, when I’d see her, white-faced under these fluorescent lights, looking slight and weary and so, so finished with me. “How is your father?”

  She crosses her arms over her chest, but it’s less defiant than it is an effort to stay warm, or to self-contain, somehow. She’s holding the pieces of herself together. “He’s not awake yet. We’ll know more when he is.”

  “Has the—is the doctor good? Answering all your questions? Because sometimes it helps if you—”

  She cuts me off. “The doctor is fine. She’s very helpful.”

  “That’s good,” I say dumbly.

  “Ben. I don’t know how you heard about this, but—”

  “Zoe told me.” Kit clenches her teeth together, and I know Zoe must’ve broken confidence, must’ve done exactly what Kit had told her not to do. But somehow that gives me a strange sort of hope, that Zoe would do that, that she’d believe in me enough to tell me where Kit was. “Don’t be upset with her.”

  “I’m not,” she snaps, then takes a deep breath. “But listen, this is a family matter. And I know you’ve come a long way, but—I’d really prefer that you leave.”

  I search her face for something, anything, to tell me she’s lying, to me or to herself.

  “Kit, you have to know—”

  “No,” she says, an echo of her brother. “I don’t.”

  She’s right—she doesn’t have to listen to me, to my explanation about Jasper, about how I’d told him stuff about Singh before I was involved with her, before I knew where this was going. Here, in this place, I doubt she cares, or at least I doubt she can let herself care, not until her father is out of the woods.

  “Just let me be here with you. I’m so worried—”

  “You know what, Ben? I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry that you’re worried. I know that’s hard. But this isn’t about you. This is something that’s going on with me, and I get to pick who I want to have around. I get to choose. And it’s not you. It’s really, really not.”

  “I’ll do anything,” I say. “I’ll wait outside, if you want, or I’ll—what if I check into a hotel? And you can call, if you want to—” It’s me who breaks off here, something cruel twisting in my chest. This is familiar—I have done this before. I have begged this way before, a long time ago, and it was the worst day of my life, worse than the day I got arrested. Half of me doesn’t care—half of me wants to keep going with this until I’ve lost any shred of dignity I have left. But the other half of me? Something ices over, a soft frost, and I feel my spine straighten.

  Kit looks at me, hard, a flash of something in those dark eyes. But then she lowers them, shakes her head slowly from side to side. “I’m not going to want to. I don’t think—I’m not going to want to see you again, okay? What happened with Beaumont, and Dr. Singh, that’s really terrible, and I’m going to have to sort through that later, when things are…” She doesn’t finish this thought, and I know why. There’s a sort of superstition that steals over you when you’re in the hospital with someone you love. You’re always looking for wood to knock on, always wanting to say don’t jinx it to any doctor or nurse who promises recovery. Her chin trembles for a split second, and I reach for her, instinctively, but she turns her body just so. Just so that I can’t get near her. “But I don’t have to sort through much to know that I can’t trust you,” she says. “And right now—all I’ve got energy for is the people I can trust.”

  I can feel it, right then, my throat closing up—not for me. It’s for her, for the way she looks so small, and so in pain. I swallow, once, twice, to force the feeling down, and it’s ugly, the feeling that replaces it. That soft frost, it’s hardening into something else, something I don’t want Kit to see. I’m rooted to the spot, though. Looking at her, I can’t bear the thought of walking away and leaving her here.

  But I don’t have to.

  Because Kit walks away from me.

  * * * *

  Someone other than me, someone with a bit more optimism, or someone who didn’t actually see that look in Kit’s eyes when she saw me, may have stuck around, waited it out. But not me.

  I don’t get a hotel room. I don’t stay overlong at the airport.

  I go back home.

  It feels like it’s been the longest day, like it should already be tomorrow, but Jasper’s call had come in early this morning, and in the end, I’m off my last flight before midnight. I don’t drive home right away, though. I drive to the salvage yard. At this time of night, it’s as dark and menacing as all the kids used to think it was. I let myself in, disable the alarm, and head straight back to the office, where I’ve been working on the Baltic chandelier. It’s maybe half assembled now, the largest pieces in place so that it can hang straight from the hook I’ve put it on. Every day I’ve been here, I’ve worked a bit on assembling more of it.

  What I want to do, what my instinct is: to pick up the baseball bat my dad keeps under his desk—from before he had an alarm for this place—and smash this chandelier to hell. To watch all the pieces shatter, hear the sound they would make, feel the crunch of them under my boots.

  What I do instead is take it off its hook, less gingerly than I should, and carry it upstairs to the east wing, the graveyard, where I first found it. I don’t bother rehanging it. I set it on the floor, its layers collapsing into themselves, the prisms tinkling against each other, against the ground. I go back to the office, pick up the tray of spare pieces I have gathered on the workbench, and carry this upstairs too. Again, I resist an urge—to scatter these all over, to make it next to impossible to find all the pieces again in this mess. Instead, I set the tray beside the broken-bodied chandelier. Maybe River will come up here sometime, find it, and start in on it instead of me.

  I stand in that room for a long time. And I don’t do anything but live out all my aggression in my head. In here, there’s tons of stuff to destroy, to smash up, to grind into dust. My body is still, but coiled—I can imagine the release I’d feel in picking up those window frames, breaking them over the top of the dresser in the corner. I can hear the wood split, can feel splinters that would go into my hands and arms from the impact. I could tip that dresser right over, and it would make the most satisfying thud on this floor. It would shake everything in here. It would feel really, really good.

  But I don’t do that anymore. I haven’t been that person in years and years.

  Still, I can’t shake the sense that what I did with Kit was pretty close to what I’m imagining—I smashed up the room of her, of us. I went in reckless that first time I’d met her, and I’d been reckless about my involvement with her—I waited too long to get myself off her case. I didn’t tell Jasper enough when I finally did. I fell too fast, too hard, told her I loved her too soon. I barreled into that hospital, didn’t have the right things to say. I acted like the brash, feckless kid I’d grown up being, that I’d worked hard to leave behind.

  After a while, I go back down the steps, reset the alarm, lock up. I’m so tired that I hardly remember the drive back to my dad’s, but I’m dreading getting into bed, closing my eyes and seeing Kit there. So it�
��s a minor relief that my dad’s waited up—I may not feel ready for talking, but at least it gives me an excuse to put off the tossing and turning I’m sure to do all night.

  He’s in the recliner. He’s got the TV tray of clock pieces pulled up again, but this time, he’s using both hands—the left one’s shaky, pale, a little smaller than the other one, but other than this, Dad looks almost like his old self, as if I’ve never been here at all.

  Fitting.

  “Up late,” I say.

  “That’s my line, kid.”

  I sit on the couch across from him, scrape a hand down my face. “I fucked up, Dad.”

  “Let’s hear it,” he says, keeping his eyes on his clock pieces, his hands busy.

  I give him an abbreviated version—what I’d told Jasper about Kit and Dr. Singh when I’d still been working on her case, what Jasper had done with the information without telling me first, what Kit thinks now about me and her, about why I’ve been with her. “Now her dad’s sick, and today I—I flew all the way there, tried to be with her. I tried to tell her it wasn’t me who did this, with Beaumont, but…”

  “She’s probably not in the mood to hear that,” he says, matter-of-fact. “Probably she’s too worried about her dad to hear anything you’ve got to say.”

  “I know,” I say, dropping my head back.

  “Maybe you ought to have stayed. Got a room nearby, in case she needs you.”

  In spite of myself, I lift my head up to cut him a sharp look, but only because he’s floated the idea I was too chickenshit to do myself. “I’m not going to fucking stalk her, Dad. She said she didn’t want me around.”

  “Tough thing, that.”

  Holy shit, I am not in the mood for this. I am not in the mood for my dad’s weird, monkish approach to advice, where he says hardly anything at all and I’m supposed to sort out the answers in the silence. “I don’t think I’m right for her, anyway,” I say. “She’s pretty settled in here, with her life, and I’m headed home in a few days. Long distance wouldn’t have worked. It was a temporary thing. We don’t—we don’t really fit.”

  He snorts, half laugh, half scorn. “Don’t be an idiot, Ben. I was married to someone I didn’t fit with, and what you’ve got with Kit, it’s not that. Maybe you’re not going to be able to work it out with her, but don’t say some damn fool thing about you not fitting with her. You know you did.”

  I do know I did. But right now, I want to go on lying to myself about it. I want to pretend I’m going to get on a plane on Sunday night, fly back to my life in Houston, sleep in my king-size bed with its two pillows and extra-hard mattress and not think about Kit at all. I want to pretend that it’ll be easy, at some point, to just check-in, make sure she’s okay, and then go on with my life as if I’d never fallen in love with her.

  As if I’d never thought at all about living a whole different life, for her.

  “So you’re going to leave, then,” he says. I look over at him, at where he’s still got his eyes down on the clock. Despite the words, he’s not said this with any judgment, and that’s how he’s always been. He’d been the same when I’d announced I’d go to Texas, when I’d told him I’d be staying there once I’d taken the job with Beaumont. I always wondered whether he thought I should have stayed, taken over the yard, been closer to him. But he’s done fine without me. He’s had a whole life without me, with Sharon and his work. He loves me, but he doesn’t need me here.

  “We ought to turn in,” I say. I rise to go over to Dad’s chair, still shadowing him a little as he pushes himself up, even though now he uses all the stability training he’s got from the trainer.

  When he puts his good arm around my shoulders as we walk, I know he’s trying to take care of me now.

  Chapter 19

  Kit

  For the next three days, my life is stale coffee, shitty hospital food, and long, loaded silences with Alex and Candace, punctuated with the occasional interruption of a doctor or nurse. Alex and I have checked into the hotel nearest the hospital, separate rooms, and Alex didn’t even bother arguing with me about paying. At night, one of the three of us stays in Dad’s room, the others scattering to our respective corners. I sleep better upright, in the chair next to my father’s bed, than I do for the two nights I’m in the hotel room—there, it’s too quiet. I’m too alone. After the first day, the immediate danger to Dad had passed, and that left room for everything else—for thoughts of my job, of Dr. Singh. For thoughts of Ben.

  If I’m lucky, Ben will never know what it cost me to send him away. To not collapse into him, inhale his familiar scent, press my whole self against his warmth and cry until I couldn’t anymore. But the truth was, while I was terrified about my dad, I’d still been in a sort of numb, unprocessed shock about it. The real thing that had been keeping me on the verge of tears was what had happened with my job, with what Ben had done.

  Candace is what I pictured, back when Dad first told me he was moving in with someone, except maybe her hair is even more enormous, teased up in the front in such a way that I want to take photographs and study it for scientific purposes. But over the last two days we’ve spent together in my dad’s cramped hospital room, I’ve learned a few things about Candace.

  They’re not the normal things—where she works or whether she’s got kids of her own, or how long she and my dad have been together. The mood in the room has been too tense, too somber to strike up those kinds of conversations. But they’re important things, I think. Candace takes notes when the doctors and nurses come in, because, she tells me and Alex, it’s easy to forget when there’s so much information coming at us. When she leaves for an hour to take a shower, she comes back with an afghan that she’d made for Dad as a gift. It’s his favorite, she says, and even though it is completely hideous, she is obviously correct, because my father, who hardly opens his eyes, still manages to clutch that afghan between his hands like a child. She also brings in a small radio, tunes it to a station that plays “golden oldies,” and lets it play softly from the table next to Dad’s bed. And she watches him—not with the furrowed, tense, vaguely angry attentiveness that Alex seems to radiate—but with a patient, focused concern, her hands often clasped in her lap.

  It’s these things that make me think I should make an effort to know her in a more complete way. I haven’t even spoken to Dad about her, other than that first phone conversation we’d had weeks ago, but I have the sense from watching her these last couple of days that she’s not temporary. By Saturday afternoon, the worst has passed—the doctor tells us that Dad’s stroke was minor, and during the few hours a day he was awake, he’d been passing benchmark tests, though he’s got lingering aphasia—language difficulties—that may or may not clear up. We’ve heard long, frightening lectures about my dad’s risk if he keeps smoking. A counselor has come by and spoken to us about managing his withdrawals. But it’s all less pressured than those first few hours, and so while Alex is out picking up lunch, I decide to try for conversation with Candace that’s not about my father’s immediate care needs.

  “So. You met my dad at church.”

  Candace looks up from the Sudoku puzzle she’s been doing. She’s got a book of these and has done them periodically throughout our time here, and up to now, I’ve preferred that to her trying to make conversation. “Is that what he told you?”

  Oh, fucking great. I should have known better. The craps table is my dad’s church. I don’t say anything in response.

  “Well, I suppose we did meet at church. Our meetings are in the basement at St. Christopher’s.”

  “Your—what meetings?”

  “Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. You didn’t know?”

  “I know my dad’s an alcoholic. Among other things. But I didn’t know he went to meetings.”

  “We met there, well, I suppose about eight months ago now…”

  “Eight months?”


  “Aha,” Candace says. “Well. Your father attends meetings. And he’s sober, or at least he has been for the last five months—he had a few stumbles early on. But I don’t know that he’s necessarily accepted many things about the work. Such as making amends to the people he’s hurt.”

  “Right.”

  “And I know he’s hurt you, Ekaterina.” The way she says my name—it’s too harsh, starting with an eee sound.

  I look at my father in the hospital bed, sunken cheeks and gray stubble, sleeping heavily. I don’t want to talk about this when he’s there, in this state. It feels disloyal. But I guess I’ve opened a can of worms with Candace, because she’s got no such compunctions. “He talks about you kids a lot. About mistakes he’s made with you both.”

  He doesn’t talk about it with me, I think, but I don’t say this. Instead, I opt for a re-direct. “Why did he move in with you?”

  “I asked him to,” she says placidly. “The place where he’s been working is closer to my place—”

  I hold up a hand. “I’m sorry. He’s been working?” At this point, it feels as though she’s angling for me to be disloyal, to get angry, dropping these revelatory bombs about my father’s life that I know nothing about. My father has had jobs before, off and on, but not since Alex and I left the house for good. Given that Alex and I both have been sending him checks, it would’ve been nice to know that Dad himself could have supplemented.

  “Yeah, at a dry cleaner in town. Four days a week, and before this happened he was going to start learning how to run some of the pressing machines.”

  “Well, that’s—that’s just great, I guess.” I shift in my chair, reach for the remote that’s on the windowsill. Mostly we’ve kept the TV off in here, but right now I don’t care what awful thing is playing. I only want the distraction.

  “He’s been saving the money you and your brother send him, for the last six months or so.”