Beginner's Luck

by Kate Clayborn

  I have to look at my dad again, to remind myself that it’s colossally shitty to get angry with a man in a hospital bed. It only half works. “Well, Candace, that’s really great for him. Maybe he can use it on his hospital bills.” Even as I say this, I know it’s ridiculous. I’ll be paying every one of those hospital bills, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  “He wanted to give it back to you on the one-year anniversary of his sobriety.” Maybe this should make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Maybe I should be celebrating the fact that my dad was in a place to think of this kind of gesture. But it makes me so mad to hear this, to hear that he’s been going along, getting better at his life, making some grand gesture plan for me and Alex when all we’d really want was a bit more kindness from him. Maybe it’s progress, but it’s still selfish. It’s still 100 percent the dad I know, him choosing whatever feels good in the moment. It feels to me like a bet he made with himself, rather than a real commitment to change.

  “Do you know he has a gambling problem?” I ask, and it sounds so harsh, so snappish. As if I’m trying to assert myself in front of her, to get back at her for all this knowledge she has about my dad with something of my own, even if it’s something terrible.

  “I do know that. He hasn’t gambled since the night he took his last drink.”

  “You ought to make sure about that. He can be really sneaky about it. And he never lasts long.”

  Candace gives up a little cough—she’s got that smoker’s raspiness too. “You’re a good person to be here, Ekaterina,” she says, surprising me. “My own kids, I put them through a lot, and I don’t think they’ll ever forgive me. I’m not here to defend your father to you. That’s work he has to do himself, and I know he’s not doing a good job at it. But I think he was trying.”

  I don’t know what to say to this. This is—it’s all such a mess, this thing with my dad. It’s chaotic and conflicting and terrifying. I hate that he’s sick, and I hate that I’m so scared about that, about the thought of him dying. But I’m angry with him too—about the last eight months of him getting his shit together and yet still being mostly difficult and recalcitrant with me and Alex, about all the years before that when he wasn’t even trying to get his shit together. I’m angry that I don’t trust a single thing Candace is telling me, that I don’t trust her or my father, and mostly that this distrust might say as much about me as it does about them.

  “Hey,” says Alex, coming in with bags of food from the bagel shop down the street, and thank God for that, because however strained it is between me and him right now, it’s not worse than the situation I’ve worked up with Candace.

  “Why don’t you two take your food outside and eat?” she asks. “It’s so nice out there today, and we’ve all been so cooped up. You two go first, and I’ll go once you get back.”

  “You sure?” Alex says, right as I’m saying, “Oh, no, that’s okay.” We look across the room at each other, and I roll my eyes and push myself up off the chair.

  “You’ll call us if the doctor comes in?” I ask.

  “Of course,” she says. Alex crosses the room to give her one of the sandwiches he’s brought, then pauses to take a look at Dad. He straightens the bedclothes around my dad’s sleeping form—quick, efficient, again that vague frustration with everything. It’s this that gives me an unwelcome flash of Ben. A few times, Ben had told me how hard it was, sometimes, to be his dad’s caretaker, how stubborn and willful his dad could be, especially during the long recovery process. But in front of Henry, Ben was patient and gentle, never condescending. You watched him and thought, he doesn’t want to be anywhere else but here.

  It’s not fair to judge Alex by these standards. Beneath my brother’s gruff attentions there’s a kindness, or at least an awareness of my dad’s humanity. Sometimes I forget that Alex had years with Dad before I came along, that his relationship to him is different than mine, and I’ll bet this whole experience is hard for him in a different way. It’s been tentative with Alex and me, these last few days, and I’m suddenly seized with an urgent feeling that I have to fix this, whatever this is between us, because we’re family, and my father’s sick, and ridiculously, maddeningly, without Ben, I feel more alone than I have in years.

  * * * *

  We find a mostly quiet spot on a wood bench that’s set under a huge horse chestnut, its leaves fat and summer-green. The air is muggy, the sun too bright, but it all feels good. I hadn’t realized how tired I’d gotten of the dry hospital air, the fluorescent lights. We both sit crooked to the side, so we can lay our food out on the expanse of bench between us, and it reminds me of our many living-room picnics, messy and haphazard, but somehow comforting.

  “Thanks for this,” I say, once we’ve both taken a few bites, and once I feel desperate to break the silence.

  He shrugs his acknowledgment, wipes his cheap paper napkin across his mouth. “How’s the house coming along?” he asks, and I know this is his peace offering, this attempt at conversation.

  “It’s all right. I had some unexpected repairs to do upstairs,” I say, swallowing back a fresh wave of pain when I think about the plaster, about the day Ben first kissed me. “But it’s all set now. Should be starting on the kitchen pretty soon.” Even as I say this, there’s unwelcome, stomach-turning thoughts about whether I’ll even be in the house, whether I’ll have to pick up and move to help Dr. Singh.

  “That’s great.”

  It’s my turn, but this is harder than I thought. I’m out here to try and make things better, but I’m still mad about last month. I’d been so excited to show Alex every single thing about my house, to get his input, to have him be excited for me. Now I don’t want to talk about the house at all, and especially not with him. Whether that’s me protecting something that matters or me punishing him is too complex a problem for me to sort out on such little sleep.

  We dither our way through various other dead-end topics—what we think of Dad’s doctor, our shared impressions of Candace, even, God help us, the weather. We’ve both balled up the trash from our meals and I’m packing it all back into the bag for disposal when Alex stills my hand and says, “Tool Kit.”

  I have to look down, give my eyes a minute to fight back the wetness that springs up there. “Yeah?”

  “I need to tell you I’m sorry about last month. For everything I said, and for leaving the way I did.”

  One of those tears snakes its way out anyway, and I swipe at it, frustrated. There’s no one else like Alex in my life, who can make me cry this way—I want so bad to be tough in front of him, to make him proud of me, to stand up to him when the moment warrants it. But with Alex, I’ve always been the weak link, the kid, the one he has to take care of, and I have a trigger-tear response to him. I want to tell him that he should be sorry, that what he’d said had really hurt, and that while I may have messed up, offering that money, all I’d really wanted was a chance to tell him how important he is to me. But I know if I try to say all that, my voice will be weak and tear-soaked, so I settle for a simple, “Thanks.”

  He takes the bag of trash from me, stands to take it over to the can along the sidewalk. I guess we’re done here, so I gather my purse, but Alex comes back, sits beside me, slinging an arm along the back of the bench. He looks out toward the parking lot, and he’s quiet for so long I think he’s not going to say anything, that he maybe wants to enjoy the quiet for a while—or he’s giving me a minute to collect myself. “You know I take a lot of risks in my job,” he says. “That job I was doing, in South Africa, it was for a series on prison overcrowding. About the violence there, the TB outbreaks they’ve had.”

  There’s a hard knot forming in my stomach while he talks. I know the kind of work Alex does, but he rarely tells me himself about it. I usually find out later, when I see pictures he’s got a credit on, and by then I know he’s safe, out of danger.

  “Are you okay?” I manage
.

  “I’m okay. But when I was there, I thought—I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty tough guy, doing these jobs. That’s what I’ve gone after, since I left home. Nothing familiar.”

  “I know,” I say quickly, not wanting to hear a retread of this, not wanting to have him try to explain what he meant in a nicer way. “I heard you. And I understand why you’d want that, after everything.”

  “I don’t think you do. I think it’s actually you who’s done the harder thing, the braver thing. Chaos is what I was used to. And chaos is what I’ve stuck with, just a more intense version of it. And this way, I can watch it happen from behind my camera, but I don’t have to try and clean it up for anyone. What you’ve done, Kit—you’re the bravest person I know. The way you put yourself out there with people, the way you’ve made a home there. You’ve done exactly the thing neither one of us had any training to do.”

  “But you made…”

  “I didn’t,” he says, cutting me off. “I know what I said last month, but I didn’t really make homes for you. I kept us afloat. And I’m not saying that wasn’t good, especially for a kid, but I didn’t do what you’ve done, ever. So I’m sorry. And I’m so fucking proud of you.” This part, he punctuates it, thumping the edge of his fist against his thigh.

  Well, shit. He’s going to have to wait a good long while longer for me to talk again, because my one rogue tear has turned into a flood, and I have to sit forward, rest my elbows on my knees so I can cradle my face in my hands. Alex moves his arm from the back of the bench, rests a warm hand on my shoulder and squeezes. In that small gesture, I feel everything Alex has ever done and wanted for me. I feel all the unconditional comfort and support, the selflessness it took for him to wait for me, to wait until I grew up enough for him to go out and live his life. Alex has always been everything our dad couldn’t be.

  But maybe I haven’t been. Maybe, despite what I’d said to Alex when we’d fought, I had expected something. I had been thinking of myself and what would feel good to me. I wanted to give that money to my brother on my terms. I’d wanted to make his decisions for him.

  “I’m sorry too,” I tell him, when I’ve caught my breath again. “I’m so sorry about the money.”

  “Kit,” he says, before I can go on. “I told you, you can’t feel bad about the money.”

  “No, I’m sorry for trying to force the money on you. The truth is, Alex, I’m always going to keep some of that money for you.” I shoot him a quelling look when it seems he might protest. “Because you’re my brother, and nothing would make me happier than being able to help you out sometime, if you wanted me to. But if you never want me to, that’s okay too. It’s okay so long as you’re happy. So long as you’re living a life you feel good about.”

  “I am,” he says. “For now, I am.”

  “I’m glad.” And I am glad. I miss him, but I’m glad. And maybe for the first time, I realize that it’s possible to feel both at the same time.

  “We’re okay, Tool Kit?” he asks, using the hand at my shoulder to shake me, gentle and coaxing.

  I lean in to it, reaching up to pat his hand. “We’re okay.”

  It feels good, this conversation—like having something lost returned to you, unexpectedly. But I still feel as if something huge is missing, some big sucking hole that’s actually inside me. Despite how Alex sees me, I don’t feel very brave right now. I still feel like I’d walk all the way home just to get away from this hospital and this situation with Dad and with Candace. I wish I was in my own house, or on the microscope. I wish more than anything I hadn’t sent Ben away—that he hadn’t given me a reason to.

  “Is it that guy?” Alex asks, because this is how well he still knows me. He knows I’m not all right. “Because it’s not a problem with you, that you don’t want that job. It was a shitty thing he did.” Alex knows the bare minimum about what happened with Ben—at some point, on that first morning, before Ben himself had shown up, Alex had asked, in one of our bland attempts at conversation while we waited for Dad to wake up, what had happened to the recruiter Zoe had mentioned. “I started dating him,” I’d said, “And he went around my back and tried to have me traded to his company.” Almost immediately, I’d felt a wave of guilt, and tried to take it back. “Well, I mean, I think that’s what happened,” I’d added, but the damage was done. I’d ensured that full freeze-out Ben got from Alex when he showed up.

  I close my eyes against the thought of Ben’s face, the way he’d looked at me. I’ll do anything, he’d said. “You know, this thing with Dad and Candace,” I say, changing the subject, or at least I think I’m changing the subject.

  “Yeah.” He says this on a resigned sigh, and from that sound I know he shares every single one of my doubts.

  “She knows he’s a bad bet. She knows he’s got a drinking problem, a gambling problem. She knows he’s not even all that great at recovery.”

  “It’s early, though. He might get better at it.” It’s surprising, this generosity, maybe another sign of how we relate differently to our father. Maybe Alex had held out hope for longer with Dad, while pretty early on I’d learned to keep all my hope focused on my brother, the guy who actually got things done for our family, the guy who never messed up.

  “I mean, I don’t get it,” I say. “She’s got a drinking problem too. Why would she go in for someone who could screw up her own sobriety?”

  “Different kind of bravery, I guess,” says Alex.

  “Or stupidity.”

  “Or that.”

  “Ben made me think about moving to Texas,” I blurt. “For a second, I thought, hey, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, if we were together.” It isn’t remotely the same, what Candace is risking for my dad, and what I thought fleetingly about risking for Ben. But damn if that conversation with her didn’t make me think of how weak I was with Ben, about how the first time he got me into bed I’d thought, this is home. I knew better than that—I knew that despite what people say, no one person can be your home. Home was complicated, layered. Home was people you loved but also places you knew well and liked to go to, things you had around you that made you feel safe and comforted. Home was too much for one person to be to anyone. Look at what it had done to Alex, for all those years he had to be a home for me.

  Alex starts to say something, but I don’t even let him get a word out before I rush on. “That’s stupidity. Everything I’ve worked for? My friends, my work. Everything I built on my own there? Stupid.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Kit. It’s not always stupid to want to be with someone, not that I’d know much about that. But this guy—not this guy, not if you can’t trust him.”

  “If I don’t take the job, I might be screwing over my friend. My mentor.”

  “If he’s your friend, he’ll understand that you don’t want to take it. You don’t owe him anything.” He pauses, seems to consider what he’s said. “You don’t owe him as much as what you’re considering, I mean.”

  “He gave me a shot. He’s given me this job that I’ve loved. He’s welcomed me into his family.”

  “Kit,” Alex says, moving his arm to wrap around my shoulders. “You must not have heard me before. You did all that—you made yourself the kind of person someone would want to take a shot on. You made yourself the kind of person someone wants in their family. That’s not going to change because you don’t take a job.”

  I don’t know whether Alex is oversimplifying it, but right now, I don’t really care. I want to believe that things can go back to the way they were before this thing with Beaumont blew up in my face. Before, I trusted my life, the choices I’d made in it. I felt so settled for once—I’d finally had control over what was in front of me. I felt safe. And I hated that Ben had made me wonder about those choices, about that control, even for a second.

  The truth is, I don’t know what Ben really had to do with Beaumont’s of
fer. I don’t know whether I can trust him. I trust Alex because he’s the only family member I have that had any hand in raising me. I trust Zoe and Greer because I’ve known them for years, because they always show up for brunch and break-ups and random bitching sessions. I trust Dr. Singh because he’s always on my side, because he’s let me do what I love under circumstances I can handle. I just—I don’t know about Ben, not for sure. I don’t know what he’d say if I gave him a chance to explain about Beaumont and the offer to Dr. Singh.

  But maybe, the problem is that with Ben, I can’t trust myself. I can’t trust myself to see the big picture, to see what’s best for me. When Ben is in front of me, I think about him—he becomes the person I’d let myself be shuffled around for, the person who I’d risk home for. And I can’t do that, even if the thought of never seeing him again makes me feel as though someone’s stuck needles right through my ribs, puncturing my lungs, making it impossible to breathe. That feeling, it’ll go away after a while. It has to.

  “We’d better go in,” I say, and I’m off the bench, headed back to that hospital room before Alex can stop me.

  Chapter 20

  Ben

  When I first moved to Texas, I didn’t miss anything at all about home. I’d worked so hard to leave. I’d had my mind set so completely on a different future that I think I had actively worked, in my last year there, to de-color the world around me, to see everything as flat, dull, dead-ended. I’d gone to Austin and immersed myself in it. I declared Texas barbecue the best, I rooted for the Longhorns, and I drank Texas whiskey. When I moved east to Houston after college, I ignored the claustrophobic feeling I got from all the highways and high-rises and plunged into the city’s corporate life. I thought of home not with disdain, but with a sort of detached nostalgia. I thought of it as my dad’s home, but not my own.

  But now, I miss everything. I miss the way the air there is heavier, wetter somehow, even on a dry day. I miss the sound of the drawl in people’s voices, different from the quicker, rougher twang I hear in the native voices here. I strangely miss the musty, damp smell of the salvage yard, the dusty feel I’d have in my clothes at the end of the day. I miss the fried rockfish at Betty’s. I miss my dad and River, so much that I’ve called Dad every day since I’ve been back. I say it’s because I’m checking on him, seeing how he’s feeling now that’s he’s supposedly back to full strength, but we both know I’m only trying to stay connected.