“Dad was better about it. You were in bed for a long time—almost four weeks if I remember right—but Dad was a good nurse the second time around.”
“Yes, your father was a good nurse, and yes, I was in bed for a while. I was in a lot of physical pain after the emergency hysterectomy.”
“Come again?”
“Hysterectomy,” Mom says. “The doctors removed my uterus right after I miscarried the twins. You and Jeanine just assumed I was recovering from the miscarriage, and your father and I didn’t go out of our way to correct you. When we were trying to decide when and how to break the news to all of you, Laura called me. We had our talk, and I offered to help her.”
“Help her?” I say.
“As Laura said, it was decided she would carry the baby to term, with me helping to pick up her medical and living expenses.”
“Help her?”
“The twenty-year reunion at Notre Dame was a convenient excuse. Dad went up to South Bend, while I picked up the baby in Pennsylvania. We handled everything through a private adoption agency. It was all very discreet.”
This is the type of revelation reserved for Shakespearian tragedies or bad Mexican soap operas. This is the implausible twist in our hero’s story. This is the zinger Maury Povich keeps in his pocket just so everybody can watch two tattooed bald dudes with multiple piercings throw haymakers at one another. Only I can’t punch my mother.
“No, Mom.” I bury my hands in my face. “No, no, no.”
Jack isn’t my brother.
Jack is my fucking son.
Laura pulls her chair close to mine. She puts her arm around me. “Please, Hank. You have to believe this was the best decision for all of us.”
“But you were as big as a house,” I say to my mother. “You looked…”
“Pregnant?” Mom says.
“Well, yeah.”
“Chalk it up to some conscious overeating and a prosthetic stomach.”
I raise my head from my hands, teary-eyed and red-faced. “And Dad, he was in on this the whole time?”
“Not the whole time. Your father had to be convinced. He and I had a bit of a falling out after my second miscarriage.”
“But I thought you two seemed to deal with the second one better than the first.”
“We were very good liars, Hank. When my milk came in after the second miscarriage, I started pumping it without telling your father. I couldn’t let go of my baby.”
“And that’s how you could still breastfeed, Jack?”
“Yes.”
“Mom, that is sick.”
“That was your father’s initial reaction when he caught me in the nursery at three a.m. two weeks after my miscarriage singing nursery rhymes to myself with suction cups hanging off my lactating breasts.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
“Hank, wet nurses provide their breast milk to total strangers. Jack is our flesh and blood.”
“You mean my flesh and blood.”
“No, I mean ours,” Mom says. “Once I convinced your father we were sustaining Jack’s life as a memorial to the twins, he was all in. Like me, like Laura, he felt we were doing the right thing. He felt as long as Jack was happy and healthy under our roof, there was plenty of time to set the record straight once you had a job and a life of your own.”
“Dad was all in?”
“Yes, all in.”
“So in the end, Dad wasn’t a reluctant accomplice at all?”
“Hardly,” Mom says, hesitation in her voice. “The prosthetic stomach was…well, it was his idea. He gave me his own empathy belly from our childbirth classes.”
“Isn’t that an ironic fist up the ass?” I look up at the ceiling, my right hand pointing to the sky as if I’m trying to start a fight with my father, if not the Almighty Himself. “Here I’ve been heartbroken for the last goddamn year about Jack living his life without you, Pops, and it turns out his dad is still fucking alive!”
I glance at Laura. “And Ian, he knows about all of this?”
“He knows my high school sweetheart got me pregnant. He knows I put the baby up for adoption and that I never told the father about the baby.”
“But he doesn’t know the part about the baby being adopted by his grandmother who faked a pregnancy with her husband’s empathy belly and is now posing as the baby’s mother, or the part about the baby’s brother being his unsuspecting father?”
“He will.”
“When?”
“Someday, Hank. And as Ian’s fiancée, it’s my responsibility to tell him.”
I raise my hand, mocking her. “Can someone buzz the nurse for an extra bedpan, because I’m about to fucking throw up. I assume you haven’t told Ian about our romp in the sheets this spring, either.”
Mom looks at Laura, curious.
“You didn’t tell him, did you?” I say.
“Hank, I…” Laura trails off, flustered.
In truth, my allusion is half-hearted, if that. Our assignation now seems a hundred years away, displaced from this moment, innocent when juxtaposed with the actions of the two women in this world who’ve simultaneously loved and hurt me the most.
“Son, I realize this is a lot to take in.”
“You think, Mom?” I jump out of my chair, pulling on my hair. “I’m still your son, right? I’m not like a test tube clone of Dad you’ve raised in an incubator in the hopes I will one day be either the conductor of the New York Philharmonic or the CEO of Oldsmobile?”
“You’re my firstborn, Hank. With John gone, you’re my life now.”
“Cue the tiny motherfucking violins.”
“What’s done is done,” Laura says, “and all we can say is we’re sorry.”
“That doesn’t fix this,” I say.
“Then what else do you want from us?”
“I want nothing from you, absolutely fucking nothing. My mother is my mother. She’s the only parent I got left, so I don’t have any real choice but to forgive her. But you, Laura, can stay out of my way for the next sixty or seventy years.”
“You oblivious fucking asshole!” Laura runs across the room. She grabs a handful of my shirt and shoves me into a wall with her right forearm. Our faces are inches apart. “You think this was easy for me to do? Remember the last night we were together, when you found that picture of me, you, and Jack?”
“Vaguely.”
“Fuck off, Hank. You think I’d really carry a framed picture of you and your brother around just to remind myself about a vacation?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Newsflash, Hank. You’re not that fucking fun.”
“I’m no Ian, obviously.”
“Please, don’t do this.” Laura’s grip on my shirt loosens. She drops to her knees, sobbing. “I’m Jack’s mother, and he can never know. You see him almost every day. You were there when he said his first words, when he took his first steps. In his four years on this earth I have read my son one bedtime story and rocked him to sleep one time.”
My world is in rewind. Like an old reel-to-reel tape player I’m thrown back through the course of time to events once innocent, now portentous. Laura’s weight gain. The almost too-perfect timing of Mom’s pregnancy. The picture on the nightstand.
Disney World.
“That last night of our vacation?” I ask, kneeling down beside Laura.
“Yes, that last night in Disney,” Laura says. “Do you know how many times I’ve replayed that night in my head? How many times I’ve cried myself to sleep because I can’t imagine life without this one particular boy and because picturing him in the arms of another mother breaks my heart…over and over again.”
The tears are now streaming down my face, but I don’t even try to wipe them off. I frame Laura’s face with my hands. I kiss her on the forehead, just as I did the day of Dad
’s funeral. “I’m sorry,” I say.
Laura recognizes the moment. She remembers. “I love him, too, Hank.”
I run my hands through her hair. “You were always Jack’s favorite.”
Chapter forty-nine
“The other goal, Jack! Kick it in the other goal!”
Jack Fitzpatrick is a scoring machine in the Empire Ridge Ages four to five Youth Soccer League. The problem is he’s indiscriminate in his goals, sending the soccer ball sailing into the nearest net for either team. He’s resolute and consistent, and at some point everyone except me gave up trying to temper his enthusiasm. Today, like most Saturday mornings, Jack leads his team in scoring…and he leads his opponent’s team in scoring. Unlike most Saturdays, we actually win.
Coach Larry shakes my hand. “Another great game by Jack Attack.”
I laugh. “If you say so, coach.”
“The kid can score at will, Hank.”
“Problem is he usually does.”
Jack runs up to me, squeezes my leg. “Mommy still sick and at the doctor?”
“Yeah,” I say, “Mommy’s still sick and at the doctor.”
“Hank, I yisten to coach Yarry and scored all duh goals.”
“Yes, Jack, you did score all of the goals.”
“I yike scoring all duh goals.”
Jack has been pronouncing all his L consonants as Y consonants. It’s an adorable speech pattern. According to Jack’s grossly overqualified preschool teacher, a former freelance editor who has a Master’s in speech-language pathology, this is a common substitution. It’s called liquid simplification, whatever the fuck that means. Apparently it’s very common, and most kids self-correct by around age six. If they’re still doing it by that point, that’s when speech therapy may be necessary. I have a feeling it won’t be Jack’s first trip to a therapist in his life.
I take a knee in front of him. “You want to play a game, Jack?”
“Is it hard?”
“No.”
“Is it fun?”
“Maybe.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell you unless you play it.”
“Okay.”
“It’s just a word game.”
“A wood game?”
“No, word game.”
“Yeah, wood. Das what I said.”
“Okay, fine. I’ll give you a word, and you try to repeat what I say exactly. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Mommy.”
“Mommy.”
“Daddy.”
“Daddy.”
“Hank.”
“Hank.”
“Jack.”
“Jack.”
“Love.”
“Yuv.”
“Coach Larry.”
“Coach Yarry.”
“Luh-luh-luh-luh-Larry.”
“Luh-luh-luh-luh-Yarry.”
“You’re a goofball.” I tickle Jack until he giggles. I hoist him in the air and pull him into my chest. A vintage Hank Fitzpatrick hug. I give him a big wet kiss on the cheek, which he immediately wipes off.
“Oh, come on, squirt. You too old to get a kiss from your…big bro?”
“I yuv my big bro.”
“Then don’t wipe this one off.” I reapply an even wetter kiss on the side of his face. I can see the crazed look in his eyes.
“You yicked me, Hank.” Jack wipes the kiss off, again. “Das yucky.”
“Okay, I give up. Let’s go, All-Star.” I hold Jack in my left arm while hitting the keyless entry to Mom’s Oldsmobile Bravada with my right hand.
“What’s All-Star, Hank? Do I yike All-Star?”
I strap him into his car seat and ruffle his brown mop with my hand. “Yes, little buddy. You do yike All-Star.”
“I yuv my big bro,” he says to me.
The words are like tonic and poison all at once. Jack is just too young to understand. His memories of a father are of our father, John Henry Fitzpatrick, his namesake. I don’t have it in me to take that away from Jack just yet.
Or do I?
Laura returned to Ian and Pennsylvania, vowing to start her life anew. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t shake the image of Laura reading Jack a bedtime story and rocking him to sleep that last night at Disney. His coffee-brown eyes staring back at this strange crying woman. He reaches up and touches her cleft chin with his hand. She kisses his tiny little fingers, smells his baby powder smell, and tastes on his skin the sweet-salty mixture of baby lotion and her own tears.
Yeah, with all due respect to dear Mom and Dad, fuck them. Laura and I aren’t perfect, and I doubt we find our way back to Jack together. But we will find our way.
Chapter fifty
Hatch and I camped last night along the Sycamore River, getting blitzed despite ourselves. Claire passed out early, so she’s the first one up along with her boyfriend, Derek Candela, a former Prepster and teammate of Bobbie the hockey player. That’s Empire Ridge for you. We don’t like to wander too far from our usual fishing holes. We decide to hit the Waffle House south of the livery.
“This World Famous Pecan Waffle isn’t sitting too well in my stomach, fellas.” Claire backs away from the table. “Can you excuse a girl while she goes and splashes some water on her face?”
I help her with her chair. “Sure thing, darlin.”
Twenty-two years old, in her red spaghetti-strap tank top and jean shorts, Claire sticks out in a diner of old truckers and farmhands. Even hungover, she owns the room.
Claire and Derek have been a semi-casual couple for about a year now. I like Derek, even though he’s known for getting drunk and playing “dick games.” For example, I might be standing around a pool or a bar, meanwhile Derek will pull his penis out of his shorts. “Hey, Hank!” he’ll shout. Then I’ll turn, unable to prevent myself from looking straight at his penis, to which Derek says, “Stop looking at my dick, you fag.”
Derek leans over the table. “I got a secret, Hank.”
“Oh yeah?” I wipe some syrup off my face, then flag the waitress. “More coffee, please.”
Derek shakes his head. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“Telling me what?”
“I know somebody who likes you.” Derek smirks. He’s one of those hairy missing-link types, with a thick black mop for a head and dark tufts sticking out of the neckline of his shirt. He bears more than a passing resemblance to Elvis, whom he worships. There’s a flea market about halfway between the livery and Waffle House. Claire and I had to talk Derek out of a hundred dollar bejeweled velvet painting of the King. “A Velvis with real rhinestones,” he said. “How can I pass that up?”
“Spit it out, Derek.”
“She’s a buddy of yours, a buddy of mine, and a very close acquaintance of Claire’s.”
“No way.”
“Then you know?”
“Well, I saw Beth earlier in the summer at a softball game. I even invited her to one of these canoe trips, but she’s kinda been blowing me off ever since, so I figured—”
“Bingo,” Derek interrupts.
“Seriously?” I say.
“Seriously. She’s wanted to ask you out since the beginning of the summer. Everyone in Empire Ridge knows she likes you. She’s never stopped liking you.”
“Even if I concede there’s still something there between us, what about The Tool?”
Derek places his hand on my shoulder. “Hank, my brother from another mother, do I really have to convince you of your chances against a guy nicknamed ‘The Tool?’”
“I guess she did leave a message at my mom’s house last week.”
“I know she did.”
“Something about getting together to see a movie.”
“You return her call?”
�
�Didn’t get the message until a few days after the fact. My mom and I aren’t on the same page right now.”
“But did you return Beth’s call?”
“No. I didn’t even recognize her voice on the answering machine at first. I thought she was just trying to get a group of us together.”
“Well done, dumbass.”
“Fuck off. I still say you’re shitting me.”
“I’m not shitting you, and don’t tell Claire I told you.”
A little over eight miles long, the Sycamore River is a small offshoot of the White River. Sycamores stand as living and dead sentries along the river’s edge, breaking off and drifting downstream, hence the river’s obvious name. For years, drunken Empire Ridge kids have plied these not-so-treacherous waters in vessels of battered aluminum and fiberglass.
Today is one of those days.
“Hank!” Derek stands up in his canoe, which he shares with Claire. “Pass the fucking Jägermeister over here, you pussy!”
Hatch and I share the other canoe. I haven’t started drinking yet. I can still feel the Waffle House World Famous Pecan Waffle sitting in my stomach, but it’s starting to settle. I’ve brought a twelve-pack of Natty Light, but I need to catch up.
“Wait your fucking turn!” I shout, unscrewing the cap off the Jäger. I take a long, aggressive pull.
Derek raises his fist in the air. “Now that’s what I’m fucking talking about.”
I pass the Jäger over to Derek and Claire. I sit in the front of the canoe, dipping my paddle in the water every third or fourth stroke so as to maintain the illusion I’m contributing to our forward motion.
Hatch is doing most of the work. “I can’t believe you’re drinking the hard stuff already.”
The licorice taste settles at the back of my throat. My cheeks puff out as I puke inside my mouth. It’s just a small puke, one of those you swallow back down and try to pass off as a cough.
“You aren’t going to believe a lot of things, today.” My voice is gravelly with stomach acid.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hatch says.
“Derek told me Beth wants me.”
“Beth Burke?”
“No, Beth Ehlers.”
“Who’s that?”
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