“Pleasure to meet you, Oliver,” said Swift, offering his hand. “Can I get you a drink?” Like Ava, he was one of those rare people who do not adjust their tone of voice in any way when speaking with a child.
“Do you have to put money in that?” Ollie asked. He had noticed the pinball machine, which Swift had been smart enough not to point out. Better to let Ollie discover things for himself here.
“For you, buddy, it’s free,” said Swift. “My son Cooper used to play that all the time. When we first got it, he was too short to reach the controls, so we got him that box there.
Ollie climbed up on the makeshift step stool. He was stroking the controls. Then he looked at me, as if I might tell him not to touch it.
“It’s fine,” I told him. “These are our friends. You can do whatever you feel like.”
After lunch, he wanted to see where the dogs’ beds were. Then Swift showed him the den, where he had taken out Cooper’s old Ninja Turtles.
“Is your kid around?” Ollie asked.
“He’s big now,” Swift told him. “The only kid around here now is me.”
Ollie looked at him hard. Sizing him up.
“You can make yourself at home, bud,” Swift told him. “The one place you’ve got to be a little careful is by the pool. Ava made this rule, there has to be a grown-up around if I’m going in the water. This would apply to you, too.”
“But he’s not a kid,” Ollie whispered to me.
“You got me there, buddy,” Swift told him. “But I misbehave a little now and then, same as kids do. The only difference is, nobody sends me to my room.”
We walked outside. They stood at the side of the pool for a moment, the two of them looking down at the water, Swift darkly tanned—he never believed in sunscreen—Oliver’s legs, under his too-big shorts, the color of milk.
“I don’t know how to swim,” Ollie said. His voice was low and husky. Back when my son still lived with me, I’d taken him to two different sessions of swimming lessons, but Ollie had always been afraid of the water.
“You don’t say?” said Swift. “Maybe it’s time we did something about that.”
He picked up my son and threw him over his shoulder. Still holding onto Ollie, he jumped in the water. I thought Ollie would cry, but he came up laughing.
In the end, the two of them spent most of the afternoon in the water. By four o’clock, Ollie was jumping off the edge backward and doing dead man’s float from one end of the pool to the other.
“You were kidding me, right?” said Swift. “When you told me that stuff about not swimming. You’re a natural. You’ll be a champ.”
“I didn’t know I could swim!” said Ollie. “I never came over to your house before.”
“Well, now you know what you need to do,” said Swift. “You have to come visit us more often.”
My son’s face took on a serious expression. As if Swift had just offered him a job, and he, after consideration, was accepting the offer.
“Do you think your kid will mind if I play some more on his pinball machine?” Ollie asked. Swift had shown him a photograph of Cooper hang gliding over the Arizona desert, and another of Cooper in the skybox at a Giants game.
“I think he’d like you to do that,” Swift said. “Maybe one of these days when you come over, he’ll be here, too, and you guys can hang out together.”
Ollie played pinball for a while and tossed the Frisbee to Rocco out in the yard. Then Ava made us smoothies and let Ollie throw every single thing he wanted into the blender. A little before dinnertime we all got in Swift’s Range Rover and drove to the park to take the dogs for a walk. Rocco stayed next to Oliver the whole time.
We went out for hamburgers. Swift ordered Ollie a root beer float. Sitting with me in the backseat, with Rocco on his lap, Ollie leaned close to me. “I wish we didn’t ever have to go home,” he whispered.
My son fell asleep in the car. This gave Ava and Swift a chance to get caught up on what was happening with Elliot, though—even with Ollie sleeping—we avoided some of the specifics.
“So you really like this guy?” Swift said.
I told him I did. “It’s not some huge deal,” I said. “But it’s always easy with him.”
“Easy,” said Ava. She sounded skeptical.
“And how does he feel about my little buddy here?” said Swift. “Because this little guy deserves to have a great guy in his life. The best.”
“Let’s not jump the gun, darling,” said Ava. “Helen’s just dating this Elliot person. It’s not like they’re getting married.”
“It’s a fair question,” said Swift. “Helen needs to think ahead.”
“Well, Elliot probably wouldn’t be a natural with kids, like you,” I told Swift. “But hardly anyone is.”
“But good in bed, right?” he said, grinning as usual.
“Hush,” said Ava, gesturing in the direction of Ollie. “Her son.”
It was past ten o’clock when Ollie and I got back to my apartment. Though he was too big to carry up the stairs, I managed—it felt so good, getting to do this again, and afterward, laying him on the air mattress I’d set up for him and unlacing his shoes. The last thing he said, drifting off, was to ask if we could go visit our friends again tomorrow. He called Swift Monkey Man.
The next morning Ollie asked again if we could go back to Monkey Man’s house, but I’d promised to have him back at his father’s by noon. We sat outside on the little balcony off my living room—looking out over the parking lot—and I gave him a haircut. I could have stood on that balcony forever, my son in the chair with a towel around his neck, me with the scissors, clipping his wispy blond hair. I didn’t want it to end, and though I might have been wrong, it seemed to me that he was happy, too. His shoulders—so tense just one day earlier—weren’t hunched up in that way they often were. He was singing “Yellow Submarine,” one of the songs he’d heard on the jukebox the day before at Folger Lane.
On the car ride back to Walnut Creek, he was already talking about what he wanted to do the next time we went over to Monkey Man’s house. Play with the dogs again. Try out the air hockey table. And go swimming some more with Monkey Man.
“Is that guy a superhero or something?” he asked me.
“You could say that,” I said.
The Monday night after I brought Ollie back to his father’s in Walnut Creek, Elliot took me out to dinner.
“I hope this won’t sound needy,” he said. “We only went three days without seeing each other. But I just missed you so much. I can’t even remember what it was like before you were in my life.” I could have felt happy that he felt this way, but instead I registered a certain irritation. As if he had nothing else going on.
“I totally respect your decision not to introduce me to Ollie yet,” he said. “I just look forward to the day when you feel sure enough about the two of us that you can do that.”
I didn’t know what to tell him. The truth was, my reluctance to introduce Ollie to Elliot was only partly about the relative newness of our relationship. The other part came from my fear that if the two of them did meet, Elliot wouldn’t know what to say to Ollie. And that Ollie would think he was a dork. It came from recognizing that Elliot would be nothing like Swift. And Ollie would wish he were.
And it wasn’t just my fear that Ollie might not think much of Elliot that had kept me from including Elliot in our time at the Havillands’. I also worried about Ava and Swift’s judgment of Elliot. I worried that Elliot might embarrass me in front of my friends. Or worse, embarrass himself.
“I’m sure you two will meet up before too long,” I said. “I just want to find the right moment.”
Hard to say what moment that would be.
36.
Usually Swift would be out in the pool house talking on the phone when I came over to Folger Lane to see Ava or to work (in secret, of course) on the birthday book. If he was around, he’d joke with me for a minute or two before disappearing. But the next tim
e I saw him, a few days after Ollie’s visit, he wanted to talk about my son.
“You’ve got a great kid there,” he told me.
“He loved hanging out with you,” I said.
“It’s totally fucked up that his father took him away.” Swift was chewing on a turkey leg as he spoke. He ate like a caveman. No fork. “He won’t admit it, but a boy that age needs his mom. As much as my ex-wife drove me crazy, I knew that when Cooper was a kid.”
“Believe me, my son’s father is nothing like you,” I told him.
“Well, you’re a great mom,” he said. “Ollie should get to spend a lot more time with you.”
It had seemed to me that the person my son wanted to spend time with that last weekend had been Swift. But that was still good news. So long as Ollie wanted to visit Swift and Ava’s house, he’d want to visit me. So long as the Havillands were around, I had a family to offer him.
“So when are you going to get that boy back over here?” Swift said. “I miss him already.”
“I was thinking about trying to get some more time with Ollie over summer vacation,” I told Swift. “But his father’s not likely to be very supportive of that, and if he doesn’t agree to it voluntarily, there’s no way I can go back to court right now to force the issue. The legal aid lawyer I talked to last year still hasn’t done one thing on my case.”
Not to mention, I said, I hardly had any time off all summer. In addition to the work I’d been doing for the Havillands, I’d taken on extra work, doing some low-paid catalog shoots down on the peninsula, which meant I’d hardly have any free time for being with Ollie. Never mind Elliot.
“Listen,” Ava said. “Oliver’s happy over here. And Estella’s always around. If you can just get your ex-husband to agree to let him spend a few weeks this summer with you, Swift and I are happy to have him come over here when you’re working.”
I couldn’t say anything. I was stunned by their generosity. I let myself imagine setting up an air mattress for him. The Legos back on the living room table. Popcorn on the couch.
“I’ll teach him to swim,” Swift said. “We’ll have that kid doing the butterfly by Labor Day.”
“I’ll talk to his father,” I said.
37.
I called Dwight to ask if I could keep Ollie with me for a few weeks that summer. With less argument than I’d anticipated he agreed to a two-week visit, by far the longest amount of time I’d gotten to spend with my son since losing custody.
“If I hear one word about you drinking, we won’t be doing this again,” he said.
I wanted to say something back, but I didn’t. All that mattered was getting time with Ollie. I’d waited a long time for this.
Over the phone the next night, Ollie told me his plans for the visit. He was going to teach Rocco a trick, he said. And he was going to work on his swimming. That day he’d gone into the pool with Monkey Man, they’d decided to have a swim race on Labor Day weekend. Now, Ollie said, he could start training.
“Maybe if I’m in a good mood I’ll give you a head start, buddy,” Swift had told him. “But I don’t think you’ll need one. You’re a lot younger than me. Do you know how old I am?”
“Twenty-five?” Ollie had guessed. He was sketchy on ages of adults, but Swift really did act like a twenty-five-year-old.
It wasn’t only Ollie who seemed excited about the summer plan. So was Swift. He had bought seats for a Giants game, and he was looking into how old a person had to be to go drive the Formula 4 go-karts he’d seen at a track off of I-280, with an eye toward a field trip for himself and Ollie. Not only that: Cooper’s old batting cage, which had sat neglected in the yard for close to ten years now, would be refurbished. Swift understood that I probably wouldn’t want Ollie riding on the back of the motorcycle. But how would I feel about it if he got a sidecar? he asked me.
“I want to bring the kid to Tahoe,” Swift told Ava and me. “Take him out on the boat. The Donzi.”
I’d heard him mention the boat before. It had been a graduation gift to Cooper. A number of the photographs lining the walls of the house featured the two of them on a highly streamlined speedboat. Laughing, as always.
“We’re not talking some old Boston Whaler,” Swift went on. “This baby’s an original 1969 Donzi cigarette boat. Colin Farrell drove a Donzi in the Miami Vice movie. Think our boy Oliver might go for a ride in that one?”
“Let’s not forget the point here, sweetheart,” Ava said, as Swift listed his many plans for things to do with my son that summer. “This is about Helen and Ollie getting to see more of each other. Not you getting a fresh chance to share all your toys with a little boy again.”
“I know, I know,” Swift said. “I’m just talking about all the stuff I’ll do when Cooper and Virginia start popping out rug rats. This will be good practice.”
Hearing Swift say this, I felt a rush of gratitude and affection. As if it weren’t enough that the Havillands had adopted me as they had, now they were including my son in that warm embrace. It might be true that I was using Swift and Ava as a way of getting Ollie to spend time with me, but if so, was that so terrible? We had to start somewhere.
“I’m not sure I feel old enough to be a grandfather,” Swift added. “Call me an uncle. A rich uncle.” He let loose his big crazy laugh. “We’re going to have a ball.”
“Just keep in mind, darling,” said Ava, “this is supposed to be Helen’s time with Oliver. Who knows, I might even like to see some of you myself this summer.”
“Which part of me were you planning to see?” he said.
38.
The person whose name did not come up in our discussions of the summer activities was Elliot, whose existence remained unknown to my son and the object of a certain quiet but unmistakable judgment to my friends. With Ollie back at my apartment—for those two weeks, anyway—I’d have to curtail my new practice of spending two or three nights a week in Los Gatos with Elliot. But having that time with Ollie was a precious, long-awaited opportunity to rebuild our relationship. I would let nothing get in the way of that.
When I told Elliot I wouldn’t be able to sleep over at his place anymore, once Ollie came to stay with me, he took the news with kindness, as usual. He was happy for me that I’d get to see more of my son. If things went well over the summer, who knew what might follow? As for the rest: We’d take things slowly. Once he and Ollie met, he knew things would work out.
“I know I’m a nerd,” he said. “But I think once we get to know each other he’ll be able to tell that I mean well. And I care about him.”
I already had the inflatable bed, but with a longer visit approaching I bought a folding screen to give my son a little privacy and stocked up on his favorite cereal and Popsicles. Rather than subject Ollie to yet another uncomfortable transfer of his possessions, I bought a giant set of Legos and set the box on the living room table, along with a fresh box of watercolor markers and (because the Havillands’ pool would be a big part of his time that summer) a new pair of swim trunks. Nights now, counting down the days to picking Ollie up, I allowed myself to imagine us together again, finally. I would never let anything bad happen again. Nothing—not even this very good man I’d grown to care about—would get in the way of my time with my son.
I picked Ollie up at the end of June, two days after school got out. He was out in the yard waiting for me when I pulled up, and for the first time I could remember since the move to Walnut Creek, he was smiling. From inside the house, I could hear my ex-husband yelling. It sounded as though Jared had been giving him a hard time.
“He just spilled a box of cereal,” Ollie said. “You know how Dad gets.”
A few moments later Dwight came out to the driveway. As Ollie climbed into the car and started fiddling with the seat belt, my ex-husband leaned down and spoke in a low voice into my ear. “Just remember what I said about the drinking. One slip and it’s over.”
He straightened up and turned his attention toward Ollie in the backse
at. “Don’t forget, son, if you have any problems, you can always give Cheri or me a call. Even if it’s the middle of the night.” Then he stepped back from the car and waved, a tight smile on his face. From the doorway, I could see Cheri standing there, with Jared on her hip. No flicker of emotion there.
The moment we got to my apartment, Ollie wanted to go over to Monkey Man’s house. Every day after that was the same. He liked Ava and he loved the dogs, but he was crazy about Swift. The first thing he said when he woke up in the morning was “When do we get to go see Monkey Man?”
I still had to work—though it never felt like work, helping Ava with the book project, and the best part was I could do this with my son nearby. Sometimes Swift went in the pool with him, but if not, Ollie would follow him around the house, stand watching his qigong lesson, or join in. If he got bored, he’d head outside with the dogs.
I worried sometimes that my son might overstay his welcome, become a nuisance to the Havillands, but Swift told me he loved having Ollie around. “This guy’s my number-one sidekick,” Swift said as the two of them headed out to the pool. “After Ava, of course.”
Ava had taken to speaking of them as “the boys”—and pretty swiftly, they developed a routine together. Sometimes the two of them went on errands in Swift’s Range Rover. Or they played air hockey. Swift was teaching Ollie how to play cards, and said he had a knack for bluffing. “You know the best way to get people to believe you when you’re lying?” Swift said. “You fill in the fake part of your story with true stuff. Then they believe everything.”
He showed him how to read the NASDAQ, and to make it more interesting, bought him three shares of Berkshire Hathaway, so he could follow what was happening to his stock. He had done the same thing with Cooper, years before. Sometimes Ollie brought his Legos out to the pool house where Swift worked and lay on the floor for an hour or two, just building, while, in the back room, Ava and I laid out photographs for the book—now well along—or talked.
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