Someone Else's Love Story

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “Get in your lane,” William says, and Shandi jerks the wheel right and centers the car. She is still going too fast. She hits a speed bump, jouncing them all. Natty makes a protesting, sleepy noise, and that slows her.

  “That woman he’s with? She looks just like my mother. For one second I thought it actually was Mimmy. But no, she’s much younger, and she isn’t quite as pretty,” Shandi says, almost to herself. “God, I wish I hadn’t seen that. Now what?”

  William isn’t sure. All he knows is that it is important to keep moving.

  Shandi’s father doesn’t understand. Wives aren’t like children. They are not built for the mechanics of addition. Wives must be traded, one for one. Shandi’s father, whether he is aware of it or not, is replacing his wife in a slow, tearing stretch, when it should be surgical. Cut. Start clean.

  It was an ugly thing to witness. Betrayal is always ugly, even on a shaded patio full of little birds.

  William, careening away from a probable date with a girl twelve years his junior, feels sick in the pit of himself. Not because the situations are exactly parallel. His wife is not at home, after all, happy and oblivious, planning Catholic Youth Alive’s mission trip to Haiti.

  But that doesn’t make whatever he is doing here with Shandi right. And there is Natty to think of, too.

  He can’t let Shandi pull him in, or let himself be pushed away from her by Paula. He must choose what he wants and then act. He must turn, with the force of his own will behind the movement, one way or the other.

  “Keep driving,” William says, though the car feels too small to hold enough air for them. There is not enough for all of them to breathe.

  “Where are we going?” Shandi asks, but William doesn’t know yet.

  Chapter 11

  Paula, of all ­people, was babysitting Natty. Who else did I have? Walcott was out. He’d asked for space, and I owed him anything he asked for, forever. Mimmy or Dad would have expected me to say where I was going, and I’d have to lie. The truth would horrify and frighten them. Bethany wouldn’t have cared what I was up to, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to drop by to see if she’d share Nanny Jean for the day. Not with the knowledge banging around in my head that Bethany was far better at sharing than I had ever suspected.

  Natty liked Paula, and I trusted that she wouldn’t feed him bleach or bake him, but I still hadn’t asked her. If I was on fire, I doubted she’d so much as pee on me to put it out. William said she’d do it, though, and called her up. He was right. Turned out, her sexual politics were stronger than both our rivalry and her personal aversion to me.

  William and I were sitting in his SUV, screened behind the smoked-­glass windows. We were in the backseat, and that had a lot of subtext for a girl my age. Especially since it was still mostly dark out. And he was William. But being parked directly across the street from Clayton Lilli’s apartment complex sucked any possible romance out of it. I was a thousand kinds of jittery sick in my whole body.

  But as time passed, and nothing happened, an air of unreality began to settle on the whole mission. William did nothing better than anyone I’d ever seen. His gaze was on the door, but it was blank. He was deep inside his head, and his foot twitched, faintly, like a dreaming dog’s. It was as if he had a thousand toys packed up inside himself, and he didn’t let my silent presence stop him from going down in there to get at them. It was weird, but kinda sexy. To be fair, though, I thought the way William turned oxygen into carbon dioxide was sexy.

  I watched the door of the building and the dashboard clock. It ticked over to 6:01. We’d been sitting close to an hour already. It was Saturday. We could be sitting here past noon, if he slept in. Well, fine. I wasn’t about to go knock on his door and ask if he’d like to buy some effing Girl Scout cookies. I wanted to see Clayton Lilli, but the idea of him seeing me made me feel like my skin was crawling off my body.

  The smell of the melted foam cushioning, even under its swaddle of towels and tape, had an Eau de Pit-­of-­Hell that wasn’t helping. More random violence, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was connected. William’s car bomb had been made by my kind of arsonist: fumbling, ineffective, yet doing damage that left a lingering stench. After all, I was the girl who’d cosmically called Stevie and (maybe) Clayton Lilli the world’s shittiest criminals.

  I said, “I keep thinking this lurching, lumpy Golem will come oozing out.”

  William’s head jerked, like I’d called him out of sleep. “What?”

  “He’s just a guy, right?”

  William nodded. “You saw the pictures. He’s just a guy.”

  But that could not be true. Would “just a guy” feed a girl drugs, incapacitate her, walk her off alone . . . “Something’s wrong with him. What’s wrong with him?” It was rhetorical, or maybe a question I was asking the universe, but William answered.

  “Nothing serious. He’ll probably go bald, and if he smokes, he’ll have a hard time quitting. He has a higher risk of heart disease than most.” He paused, because I had turned away from the door and I was boggling at him, shocked, but at the same time glad for a distraction.

  “You can’t know all that.”

  “Of course I can. I have his genetic material,” William said.

  “You learned all that with some . . .” I couldn’t say the word. “. . . cells?”

  “It’s all in there,” William said. “We’re made out of our cells.”

  I didn’t realize what all I was handing him, when I’d scraped the inside of my cheek. “Do you know stuff like that, about me?”

  “No.” He said it like I’d asked if he’d ever watched me shower through a peephole. “I did only what was needed with your sample, but”—he gestured at the front door—“I wasn’t interested in this guy’s right to privacy.”

  “And Natty?” I said.

  He turned his palms up in what might have been a slight apology. “I did some quick and dirty sequencing. I checked for increased risks to common kinds of cancer, for example. I didn’t see anything to worry about, or I would have told you. He’s a good kid.”

  He didn’t say it the way ­people do to mean a child is mannerly or charming. He was saying Natty had been well constructed.

  His knuckles began tapping at his knee in a rhythm, as if a song were playing somewhere, and only he could hear it. A minute of that, with me still watching the door, and the tapping starting working my last nerve. It was stretched thin as it was.

  “What’s bugging you?” I said.

  He looked past me, like he was watching the door now, but he said, “I also checked your son for some specific duplications and deletions that I saw in Clayton Lilli.” My eyebrows rose, and William added quickly, “Natty doesn’t have them.”

  “But this guy, he has, what, these things?”

  “Duplications and deletions, yes,” William said. He swallowed. I had the sense that he was telling me something significant or personal.

  “Help me out here, William. I don’t speak science.”

  William was rocking now, too, very faintly, but I could see it. His hand tapped harder. Whatever invisible song was playing, he didn’t like it. “With these kinds of anomalies, I expect that Lilli would present with limited empathy. He probably has a hard time reading social cues.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You’re saying that’s why he did this? Like, girls get so much easier to talk to if you drug the living shit out of ’em?”

  “I’m not excusing him,” William said, his voice level, but his hand tapped faster.

  “You kind of are,” I said, my voice heating.

  William shook his head, vehement. “It doesn’t excuse him,” he said, but I was still talking.

  “What about Stevie? Did Stevie’s genes make him bust into the Circle K with a gun and start kicking old ­people? What about my dad? If we’d gone up on the patio and stolen his beer bottle,
could you root around in his DNA and find out why he’s screwing a girl who looks like a younger version of my mother?” I flapped my hand at the door to Clayton Lilli’s building. “Poor him, he’s got these duplications, and he couldn’t help it.”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” William said, cold, tapping and tapping, so uncomfortable now inside his body, as if the backseat, already too small for him, had shrunk.

  “You said it’s all in there,” I said. “You said we are made—­”

  “I know what I said!” His voice was harsh and loud, but then he caught himself, and when he spoke again his words came out very fast, but not angry. “I know what I said. And it’s true. Our genes define our capacity. They set the range, and we have to act within it. But it is a range, which means it can’t be simple. We are limited, all of us, and imperfect. We are broken in specific, quantifiable ways, but I do believe—­I do believe in—­” He stopped abruptly, looking down at his hand, like he had just noticed it, knocking against his knee now like it was trying to gain entry. He took in a very deep breath, through his nose. He willfully stopped his hand from moving. Meanwhile, my brain was trying to finish his sentence in a way that I could live with, a way that would let the Golem be Natty’s biological father without dooming Natty to be awful. Had William meant to say environment? Destiny? Free will?

  “You do believe in what?” I asked, when not asking had become unbearable.

  When William’s body was completely still, he turned to me and restarted the sentence. “I do believe in the possibility of goodness.”

  It was such an unexpected answer. He was saying Natty was a possible goodness, a probable one, even, a true and living current one, no matter where he’d gotten half his genes. I touched William’s hand with my fingers, lightly.

  “Me, too,” I said. “I want to believe in that, too.”

  I’d spent years pretending Natty into a gift, a free and lovely thing, miraculous and uncaused. The closer I came to laying eyes on Natty’s biological father, the more I hoped that Clayton Lilli was at least capable of goodness, whether he had chosen it or not. That we all were.

  I turned back to the door. Talking about his genes made him so real. He had cells. This wasn’t like watching for fanged mermaids to pop out of a storm drain. This was a human man with a propensity for heart disease and whatever chromosome thing caused male pattern baldness. I’d pretended him into being impossible. He could not exist, but William had brought me here to see him, and my faith in William was crazy absolute. Maybe that was how faith worked?

  I wouldn’t know, with my upbringing.

  Both Mimmy and Dad would agree that Moses had faith in God when he commanded the Red Sea to part. But when he actually saw the water rolling itself up into huge wet walls, all those surprised fish staring out at him, had he gone ahead and crapped his pants anyway?

  “Genes don’t make it excusable,” William said. “Not for this guy. Not Stevie. Not your dad.”

  He sounded so hard-­line. Maybe he was Catholic, after all.

  “Not to defend my dad, but he is married to Bethany,” I said. I still had Moses on my mind. “Marrying Bethany is the modern version of forty years in the wilderness. It gets cold in the desert at night, William. Even Moses got to look into the Promised Land.”

  “I don’t recall your father looking,” William said, his voice so dry I had to smile in spite of the circumstances. “What happens when she finds out?”

  “Oh, she knows.” I’d never bought Bethany as Lady Condo-­Bountiful, so excited by Natty’s IQ test results that she wanted better for him than my rural, very Baptist preschool. My dad had been meeting Mimmy Junior at the condo, and Bethany moved me into town for one reason: to cock-­block my own father. It made me want to take a bath in bleach and then punch her in the face with my clean hand.

  I never took my eyes off the door, even as we had a nice little chat about my dad’s adultery, like any normal folks might while watching for a possible fictional monster on a superfun Saturday morning. I wanted to unsee the moment when my dad took his tongue out of that woman’s mouth, and she turned to look at us, face on. For a single dizzy second, I’d been looking at my mother.

  The next second, I’d realized Miss Patio was younger, blonder, and not as crazy-­beautiful—­few were. But she’d been beautiful enough, with Mimmy-­style cheekbones, Mimmy’s mouth. I wondered if my father saw it. Not that I could ask. He’d left fifty messages on my cell phone, but I wasn’t ready to talk to him at all, much less ask if he was aware his go-­to girl was his ex-­wife’s baby clone.

  The door opened. My spine seized up for a second, but it was only a ­couple of old guys, dressed for jogging. The faint gray light was warming to gold against the building’s brick front, touching all the little balconies. I reminded myself that Clayton Lilli might not even be the guy. We were just checking. We were just here to see.

  “It’s a really nice building, and not even half a block from the park. I guess karma favors the douche-­y.” I was trying to keep it light, but I could hear the strain in my voice.

  A woman emerged next, still in last night’s club clothes, with mascara streaks under her eyes. She took her shame walk fast, in spite of her high-­heeled satin shoes, and disappeared around the corner.

  William kept his face pointed at the building, but after the woman passed and I didn’t say anything else, his eyes began to drift off sideways. He disappeared down inside his head again.

  I watched the door, glad I’d looked at the pictures of Clayton Lilli so I would know him when he finally came out. I’d lingered over the shot of the team, Lilli in his tattletale blue and gold jersey, maybe the last image taken of him before my path crossed his. It had been easier to look at this earlier version, when I could try to think of him as innocent.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  William’s shoulders shuddered as he landed back inside his body. “What?”

  “When he comes out. If he does. What do I do?”

  “Damn if I know,” William said. “I’m not good at this part.”

  He said it as if this mission had parts, like there was a manual somewhere with all the steps for stalking one’s—­what to even call him? I didn’t have a good way to think of Clayton Lilli. Natty’s father? He did not deserve the title. My drugger? My assaulter-­person? Even if I could find a noun, I couldn’t stand to use that pronoun in the same way I’d say “my spoon,” or “my pair of shoes.” I didn’t want the ownership.

  A young ­couple walked out the front door with a small dog on a leash. The girl was in front. She was a plain girl, college-­aged, wearing white sneakers and a fifties-­diner waitress dress, her hair scraped into a ponytail. I thought, Someone got the breakfast shift, and then she moved down the stairs, and I could see the man half of the ­couple. It was him.

  I looked from the door to William. William nodded in confirmation. My breath stopped, and I turned back. It was him. The earth stopped, too, stopped spinning, but I kept on without it, whirling up and out of orbit, careening toward the sun.

  It was truly him, dressed in baggy cargo shorts with his flossy hair hanging in his eyes. He popped into existence at 6:22 on a Saturday morning. The pictures had been useless. I saw how he held the leash. I saw how his head tilted to listen to the mousy girl. I saw the angle of his throat as he drank water from a sports bottle. Before he had existed in my world ten seconds, I knew he was the Golem.

  I knew, because I saw my son.

  When Natty was born, I had stared endlessly down into his brand-­new potato face, so pretty, mostly unsquashed thanks to the C-­section. I had immediately recognized my own rounded cheeks and chin. He had Mimmy’s small, flat ears lying close against his head, and the long, elegant feet my dad had given all his own boys, too. The other pieces were simply Natty.

  But this man? He had preowned Natty’s stompy walk, leading from the bo
xy shoulders, as he followed his girlfriend to a sporty little Fiat parked on the street. He shared the long-­waisted shape of my son’s body. His brown hair had Natty’s cowlick standing up in back. How dare he? How dare he be real and own these pieces of my son?

  “Shandi?” William said.

  I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t process, even though I’d known the great god Thor would find him. I was reeling, mute and gobsmacked, staring at this skinny boy-­man who cocked his head to a Natty-­style angle as he leaned to peck his plain brown paper bag of a girlfriend good-­bye.

  Clayton Lilli stepped back from the curb with his dog. It was one of those silky, fox-­faced objects with the plumy tails. He was completely unaware that I had penetrated his veil of pharmaceuticals and found him. He watched the girl drive off, and then he turned and headed toward the park. I saw that he had dog bags in his pocket.

  My body got out of William’s Explorer and started after him. I think I left the car door hanging open. My body went, itching and burning the whole length of myself, unstoppable. Lilli was already crossing into the park when I realized William had caught up with me. My hand reached for his and caught it and held it so tight I could feel his bones grinding together. He exhaled out his nose, long and smooth, and let me keep it.

  We followed Clayton Lilli across the street. It was still so early, hardly anyone was out on the green. He paused by a trash can to let the dog do his business, and we paused, too, behind him at the park’s edge. I stood frozen as he cleaned up after the dog, wondering if he would come right toward me now, going home. But instead, he let his dog off the leash. It wasn’t legal, but what was a leash law to a guy like him? He set his water bottle on the grass, then pulled a small collapsible Frisbee out of his pocket. The dog went nuts with joy. I sank down to sit on the damp lawn, pulling William with me. We watched Clayton Lilli indulge in an early-­morning romp with his stupid, glossy dog.