I could hear Natty happily calling out Spanish words with Dora, one floor down, as Walcott and I did a final sweep of the two upstairs bedrooms, looking for anything we’d missed. I checked the closet while Walcott dug around in Natty’s bedding. He unearthed the old blue patchwork rabbit.
“Oh man, we almost left Yellow Friend.”
“That would not be an acceptable loss,” I said.
That was one good thing, seeing Yellow Friend there instead of Vader’s disembodied head. William’s plan was working. Last night, Natty had only woken twice, and I’d gotten him back to sleep in his own bed. I was willing to bet even his milder bad dreams would fade once we were home.
When we left, I felt like we should salt the earth behind us. This was a godawful place. Bethany’s decorating made it so cold and unwelcoming, and, strike two, it had likely served as my dad’s illicit love pad. Last and most, there was still a crisscross patch of duct tape in the closet, covering the Stevie-hole. I wouldn’t come back here for a pair of sandals or some underpants.
Walcott sat down on Natty’s twin bed, holding Yellow Friend. We’d already taken the pictures of Bikini Mimmy and Praying Hands Jesus and wrapped them up and loaded them inside my Beetle. All Natty’s clothes and books and most of his toys were in Walcott’s car. Bethany hadn’t bothered much with the third floor, so what was left was a plain room with generic twin beds and a boring dresser with a herd of origami animals on top of it. They were the only sign Natty had lived here at all, except a laundry basket holding the last of Natty’s toys. I began stacking the paper cranes and frogs into the basket.
I was so careful, not knowing when they’d be replaced. I hadn’t heard from William since our trip to the hospital. Stevie had looked small and so pathetic, lying in a curl on the bed with a tube up his nose. William had pointed the camera at him for a minute, maybe two, before moving the camera back to his own face. I’d watched Natty shift from terrified to actually feeling sorry for poor Stevie. He’d even wished, along with William, for Stevie to wake up. I thought that was taking empathy a bit too far, and maybe William had, too. He’d cut off the feed abruptly and come down a short time later. He’d been silent and preoccupied as he drove us back here. He’d left us without coming in for coffee.
I hadn’t been back to his house in two days, either. Paula had gotten to me with her description of William in love. I didn’t recognize it. If he did have feelings for me, they were so well hidden that even he hadn’t found them yet.
Now I was moving miles and miles away from him, and he didn’t even know. That sucked, but it didn’t change the plan. Natty out of the line of fire first, and the tattered rag of my potential love life later. Natty first, and everything else later. This was nonnegotiable.
“I think that’s all of it,” Walcott said, as I placed the last animal.
I nodded. Mimmy would be here any minute. We could load the toys and the stack of trash bags in the foyer into her big trunk. It was amazing how a tightly packed VW Beetle’s worth of personal belongings expanded when you shoved them willy-nilly into bags and baskets. I took a deep breath and sat down by Walcott on the bed, but not too close. I kept a careful foot of air between us.
I said, “You know what scares me? I don’t know what Clayton Lilli will do next. Not at all. I don’t know what kind of person he is. I can’t guess what he might be thinking, so how do I prepare? I guess I need to prep for the worst. But the worst is so bad, Walcott.” Walcott knew what I meant. What if Clayton Lilli wanted into Natty’s life? He could even sue for visitation and parental rights. “I should get Dad to put that awful Paula on retainer. Just in case.”
I might not like her, but she was so freaking terrifying. She only worked for women, she had told me, and she knew all about custody. Just thinking the word custody in connection with my son and Clayton Lilli made my spine feel like a brittle string of ice. It could never come to that. I couldn’t let it come to that. Why had I put him on trial in Piedmont Park?
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Walcott said, and I felt myself bristling up, already taking it wrong, because I knew what he was going to say. “What if he’s telling the truth? When you called me from the party, I thought you were drunk, and I know you really well. You were talking loud and slurry, but you were talking. You even made sense. I don’t know what happened, but you weren’t unconscious. Not then, anyway.”
I felt myself hunching into a little coil as he spoke. He was right, but it didn’t matter.
“There’s no way I can ever know, so I can’t let him be anywhere near Natty. Not if I have any doubt at all. I can’t.”
“No, you can’t,” Walcott agreed.
All the air on my skin felt so chilly.
“It’s dangerous, because I want it to be true,” I said. “I don’t want Natty’s dad to be a rapist.”
Just saying these things out loud, I was shivering so hard my teeth banged together.
“You can sit by me, you know,” Walcott said, his eyes on me so nice. “We really are okay.”
I curled deeper into my miserable huddle, not sure why I couldn’t quite slide over. He’d fixed most of the damage his declaration of love had done when he came back with the flowers and the poem.
That day, after William went upstairs, Walcott told me, “That whole noble retreat from the field—I’m not that guy. I can’t toss my hat and heart and pants all in the ring and then sag off like some kind of moopy loser at your first frown. Not to mention, you’re my best friend, having a crap month. What kind of a tool would disappear right now?”
Natty had patted at his cheek and said, “Don’t disappear, Walcott.”
“Never,” he said. Natty was satisfied with that simple answer. He wanted down, so Walcott kissed the top of his head and set him on his feet. “I’m sorry I bailed. I needed some time to get my head clear.”
Natty went to the coffee table and started zooming one of his cars around. I knew that he was listening, though.
I asked Walcott, “So, what next? You’re going to come sing under my window every night?”
He shook his head. He was looking down now, at his feet, but he had a familiar, rueful, Walcott kind of smile growing.
“You wish. This was it. The whole thing just happened.” He looked up at me slyly with his head still bent, and handed me the crumpled paper. “That’s right, you just got professionally courted by a poet. Boom! I’m not going to read this to you now. Not with Bruce Wayne right upstairs. I hope you’ll read it later. I wrote it for you. Me. Not Auden or that hack John Donne.”
“You did?” That made me smile back. I’d seen him use both those guys on Math Department girls, and Dickinson and Barrett Browning, too. I’d seen him whispering Shakespeare’s dirtiest couplets into CeeCee’s ear, but never his own. “You don’t write love poems.”
“Not usually,” he said. “You were my first. But I’m done, okay? The poem, the flowers. There was candy, too, but I ate it on the drive.”
“We go back to normal?” I hoped it wasn’t too insulting that I said it so damn hopeful. I wanted to be with William, but my life didn’t work well without Walcott in it.
“I guess. I’m not ready to throw fifteen years of friendship away because you’re too effed up to know that you’re in love with me. It is what it is. I promise not to gaze at you all heartlorn and be irritating like some courtly moron in Chaucer. We’ll be us, but with one small difference. You have to know, I’m going to kiss you.”
I glanced at Natty, but he did not stop vrooming his car. It went in an endless, breakless circuit of the coffee table.
“Kiss me?” I said, “Like a real kiss, on the mouth?”
“Oh, yeah. Tongue and everything. You owe me one, at least, for all that prime lovin’ I threw your way that time.”
He was right. I owed him whatever he needed, forever. Even with William right upstairs. Even with Nat
ty three feet away, creeping around the coffee table on his knees and making engine noises. I nodded and turned toward him, bracing myself.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s do this thing.”
He laughed outright and said, “Not now, you weirdo. Maybe not even soon. But before one of us is dead, I’m going to kiss you. It happens whenever I pick, and you have to promise that you’ll kiss me back. That’s the deal, if you want us to go back to normal. It may not be for years. Maybe even after whatever senior citizen you marry first drops dead. But you agree now that it’s mine, whenever I decide I want it.”
Natty’s car found another, and they banged together. He made explosion noises with his mouth.
I had no idea how much of the conversation his big brain and his baby emotions understood, but I was glad he was there as a witness. It made it a true, sweet promise in between us, instead of some weird pressure.
So one day, maybe years from now, Walcott would kiss me. Who knows, in ten years, maybe twenty, we would be super different. I might blink and yawn like a middle-aged Sleeping Beauty, waking up to know I’d loved him all along.
“It’s yours then,” I said. “I promise I’ll kiss you back.”
He grinned and said, all mock cocky, “You don’t know what you’ve agreed to. I wouldn’t say it myself, but my friends all say I kiss like I invented it.”
“Oh, you do?” I said, picking up his lighter tone, and grateful for it.
“Yeah. I’ve been told it’s practically like kissing France.”
I laughed, and after that he said good-bye to Natty and left. He wouldn’t come with us to see Stevie, but I didn’t mind. He had given me the world back, exactly how I liked it.
Now, the foot of space on the bed was the last awkward thing left between us. It was only air. I scooted over to him. He threw one arm around me and we sat, feeling the last barrier to us being us banished by the absolute not-weirdness of it. This was me and Walcott, his body and his smell familiar to me as my own. I leaned into him, and we stayed that way until the doorbell rang.
“I’m sure it’s just your mom,” he said, feeling my shoulders tighten. He got up and checked out the window. “Yeah. I see her car.”
We went downstairs to get the door, and Natty joined us on the second-floor landing. He’d heard the doorbell. He bounced down ahead of us yelling, “Mimmy! Mimmy! Mimmy!” until we let her in.
She scooped him up, dropping fifty kisses on his head, then hugged me and said hello to Walcott.
As she came in, her eyes were darting all around, taking in the small foyer with its white marble floor, the ice-white walls. I realized this was the first time Mimmy had ever set foot in Dad’s place. She’d never seen his house in Sandy Springs, either. The exchange of my child-self every other weekend had happened exclusively at public meeting places in between Lumpkin County and Atlanta. My mother and father would stand awkwardly in a Dairy Queen or a McDonald’s, passing me and my bags back and forth. Taking the three-foot walk from one to the other was like crossing a whole tundra. It felt like the loneliest walk in the world. It had been a huge relief to drive it myself when I turned sixteen and Dad gave me the Beetle.
“Mimmy,” Natty said. “Can I go with you in the big car?”
“I’d love that!” Mimmy said, at the same time I told him, “Of course you can.” Walcott was already taking Mimmy’s keys to load the last bags in her trunk. I handed him mine, too. “Can you move his car seat?”
“Sure,” he said. “Give me a hand, Mr. Bumppo?”
Natty went with him, and Mimmy took me into another big hug, asking, “Are you okay?”
“I will be,” I said.
Mimmy stepped back to search my face for truthfulness, and nodded at what she saw there. I was already better. Moving Natty actively away from here, I was able to think oh so much more clearly. I wanted to get right on the road, but Mimmy turned to the doorway to the living room, one little foot lifting, poised on the edge of the next room.
She wanted to see.
I glanced out the front door. Walcott was still moving the seat, so we had a couple minutes.
“Go on,” I said.
She took a few tentative steps forward, like a deer who wants to eat your pansies but is scared of getting caught. She stopped inside the doorway. Her face was impassive as she took in the ultramodern furniture, everything cubed off in cold shades of black and gray.
“That should have had bumpers before you moved in,” she said. She gestured at the sharp glass coffee table. “Those corners could have pierced Natty’s little skull like a harpoon.”
“Bethany,” I said, a one-word explanation.
Mimmy brushed at her own body lightly, as if the act of standing in this room had coated her in some distasteful dust. “Yes. Bethany. It’s certainly not your father’s taste. I’d do earth tones, chocolate brown and cream and cinnamon.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “It would be masculine, but so much warmer. So much more like Dad.”
She looked pleased, and she might have said more, but Walcott probably had the car seat moved by now. I was eager to get Natty gone.
“We should go,” I said.
Out the corner of my eye, I saw her smile. It was a secret smile, only for herself. She added, so quietly I barely caught it, “Bethany doesn’t really know him at all.”
As she turned to leave, the smile spread, and there was triumph in her upturned lips, flashing like a victory banner. Triumph, yes, but tinged with other things. The hollowness of it stopped me in my tracks. It was such a bitter, covert smile, too much clandestine feeling for what was a very small win. I recognized it, even as she walked away.
My mother was in love with him. All these years later, she was still so very much in love with Dad.
I followed her, dazed, and saw my half-assed plan was going forward. Walcott was strapping Natty into Mimmy’s car. There was no sign of Clayton Lilli. Our getaway would be complete and clean. Mimmy was already halfway down the steps. I paused to lock the door, still reeling.
I’d always thought Mimmy’s vigilance was a waste: the constant diet, the exercise videos, the moisturizers. The cozy warmth of her house. The gorgeous meals she cooked and served but never ate. I thought she kept her body toned and her face so lovely and her home so welcoming for no one.
I’d been wrong. It wasn’t empty. It was all for him. Whether she knew it or not.
Before I could feel sorry for her, I realized that he was equally pitiful. He’d married Bethany. My dad was charming and generous, funny and successful. Bethany hadn’t been the only single Jewish lady in Atlanta when he went looking for a bride to please his family. He could have had his pick of a hundred warmer-hearted girls who would have loved him so much better. Maybe he knew that he could never love them back? Or maybe Bethany had been an angry impulse. His way of giving his family the skin of what they asked for, wrapped around a hundred and twenty pounds of bitch.
With her, he was as lonely as my mother. Now he was screwing Mim’s facsimile, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Patio Girl had been the first faux Mimmy to pass through his bed.
How stupid. My mom and dad had lost each other, and for what? So they could fit better at their parents’ tables at Christmas and Passover? So their brothers and sisters could be comfortable? The families who had worked so hard to tear them apart had gone smugly back to their own lives after it was over. I didn’t see any of my grandparents more than once a year. I got colorful birthday cards with twenty-dollar bills in them from my aunts and uncles on my birthday.
Meanwhile, my parents spent their lives so lonely. Dad wandered, seeking home in a mistress’s Mimmy-canted face. Mimmy waited, her lamp trimmed, for a day that never came.
Meanwhile, all they’d ever wanted was alive inside the other.
As I came down the stairs, I knew it
wasn’t fixable. He’d missed me so much, seeing me only every other weekend. He wouldn’t repeat that pattern with his sons, no matter what the cost, and Mimmy wouldn’t ask him to. But God, I saw it perfectly, and it was such a mighty, overwhelming waste.
“See you back in Lumpkin,” Walcott said. He climbed in his Subaru and started backing out. Mimmy was checking the car seat straps and then she closed the back door. She got in and started her car, and I went to mine. I watched as first Walcott’s car and then Mimmy’s found a break in the stream and slipped into it. Atlanta traffic pulled them away, toward the highway.
Mimmy and Walcott were taking Natty out of here. That was nonnegotiable, but it was also done. I sat in my car, and I knew I wasn’t leaving yet.
I could not leave Atlanta until I’d seen William. I could send Mimmy and Walcott a text later, once enough time had passed to get them safely home. I’d say I’d had to run an errand, and I would be home soon. But I couldn’t leave until I’d gone to William like an adult, and simply told him what I wanted.
A whole and grown-up person didn’t play games with their own heart and their happiness. I’d let Paula and my own fear push me out. I didn’t want to end up seeking substitutions or waiting for the world to change its course and swing my way. A whole and grown-up person would go and simply tell him. I’m in love with you. A whole and grown-up person would ask him. Can you please love me back?
I started my car and slid myself into the traffic, but heading the other way. I drove myself to Morningside.
I pulled over by the little square of park near his house and sent my texts. Then I drove on. As I crested the hill in my Beetle, I saw William in his yard. I hit the brakes, surprised. He was walking down his driveway, opening the driver’s-side door to his SUV. He was carrying an ax. A real one, long and thick, like something for a fireman. It paused me. Not only the ax, but his body language. He moved like he was in a fury, with such fast, contained grace. I could see a world of tension in his shoulders as he loaded the ax into his car and climbed in after it. He backed out of the driveway and sped away.
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