Two of a Kind

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  “Unbelievable,” she said. But then it was time for the next patient. After that, Andy hurried off to the hospital to meet the patient who’d gone into labor. By the time he remembered to call Cunningham back, it was after six. The guy was probably gone for the day. But to his surprise, Cunningham picked up the phone on the second ring. “I had to expel Oliver today, Dr. Stern,” he said. And then he proceeded to explain what had happened to bring about this definitive act.

  “And there’s no way you would reconsider?” Andy said. “Maybe we’re not going about this in the right way—” A siren blared, as if underscoring his sense of alarm.

  “I’ve tried every way I could think of,” said Cunningham.

  “But he’s a good student. Or can be, when he puts his mind to it.” The siren was gone, replaced by the loud exhalations of a bus huffing down Second Avenue.

  “He shows flashes of real brilliance,” Cunningham agreed. “His English teacher shared his last paper with me; it was on Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. She said it was publishable.”

  “Really?” Andy’s heart couldn’t help but leap when he heard that.

  “Yes, really. But then he fails to show up for three out of the next five classes and flunks a silly little pop quiz. He needs help, Dr. Stern. More help than we can give him, I’m afraid.”

  “But you’ve said yourself that he’s got the makings of an exceptional student—”

  “Which is why I am only expelling him, and not bringing in the police.”

  “The police!” Whatever fragile place his heart had attained only moments ago was lost as it went thudding down, down, down. “Why the police?”

  “He was in possession of quite a lot of marijuana; it’s possible that he was intending to sell it.” Andy was silent as he absorbed this new information. Was Oliver selling drugs? That would be the final irony; he gave the boy all the money he asked for, never questioned where it went. Why would Ollie want to do that, unless he had some serious self-destructive urge? Or wanted to zetz his father, as his mother might have said?

  Andy said good-bye and put the phone away. He had to find Oliver. But he thought he’d better calm down first, so he walked over to Second Avenue, where he ducked into a bar and ordered a Scotch. When it arrived, he called Christina. Maybe she would know what to do. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was worried that something like this might happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, only that I suspected that he was smoking—”

  “You suspected and you didn’t tell me? Why the hell not?” There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “Are you there?” he asked.

  “I don’t like being sworn at,” she said finally.

  You think that’s swearing? he wanted to say. Give me a fucking break. But instead he said, “I’m sorry. I’m just upset, that’s all.” He paused. “How long had you suspected?”

  “For a while. And then Jordan confirmed it.”

  “Jordan? How does Jordan know anything about this?” He had been about to say, How the hell does Jordan . . . , but he censored himself. Barely.

  “She ran into him one day over the summer and he pulled out a joint in Central Park.”

  “And you’ve known that since the summer and kept it from me all this time?” Andy said.

  “No. She only mentioned it recently. I wanted to tell you. But I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do. I was building something with Oliver; I didn’t want to lose his trust.”

  “So you let him get expelled from school instead.” Betrayal washed over him like a tide.

  “Andy, I’m incredibly sorry. I was wrong. I should have told you right away.”

  He sipped his Scotch, not sure how to respond. They were still new as a couple; he didn’t want to ruin things between them, but he was hurt. Angry too. “You shouldn’t have kept it from me,” he said finally.

  “I know. I shouldn’t have.”

  “Maybe if I’d known, I could have done something. Now it’s too late.”

  “They really won’t take him back?” she asked.

  “Take him back? I’m lucky they aren’t calling the police.” He finished the Scotch and decided against a second glass.

  “What if I talk to him?”

  “You? Why?”

  “Because he likes me,” Christina said.

  Andy did not dispute this. “Well, I’m not sure. . . .”

  “Can it hurt?”

  “I guess not.” He suddenly did not want to be having this conversation. He wanted to say good-bye, and get the hell out of there, which was exactly what he did.

  Oliver was sitting on the sofa in the dark when he came in; Andy didn’t see him and when he realized he was there, he jumped slightly. Jesus, but he was nervous. He sat down in the chair facing his son. “I talked to Cunningham,” he said.

  “So you know,” Oliver said. In the dark, his blond curls seemed to glow.

  “I know.”

  “What are you going to do about it? Ground me? Lock me in my room?”

  “Ollie—”

  “Stop calling me that!” His voice was suddenly sharp. “I hate that name.”

  “All right,” Andy said, surprised. “I’ll stop. And you want to know what I’m going to do? Well, I don’t have a clue. Clearly that therapist you saw over the summer didn’t help.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Do you want to see another therapist?” Andy asked.

  “What for?”

  That seemed to kill the conversation for several minutes. Andy was quiet while he regrouped. “I have to ask you something important,” he finally said. His eyes had adjusted to the dark and he could see Oliver looking at him. “Cunningham seems to think you were planning to sell what he found on you today.”

  “Dad! Do you think I’m an asshole? Using, possession—that’s one thing. Selling is, like, a whole other thing.”

  For some reason, Andy believed him and there, in the quiet room, he exhaled a powerful sigh of relief. But there was still the using part of the equation. He had no reason to believe Oliver was going to stop, unless he stopped him. How? “I’m not going to be so free with money anymore.” There had to be some accountability here, goddamn it.

  “Whatever,” Oliver said.

  “And you’ll have to do something. You can’t just lie around here all day. What do you want to do?”

  “Grandma asked me the same question.”

  “Grandma? When did you talk to Grandma?” Christ, now he’d have to deal with his mother.

  “Today. I went to see her. She made me lunch.”

  Even in the dark, Andy could see Oliver’s smile. “Well, what did she say about your predicament? That is, assuming you let her know about it.”

  “I already told you what she said. She asked me if I wanted to go back to school. Because if I did, I’d have to take one path, and if I didn’t, I’d be taking another.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her I didn’t know.”

  “Is there anything you do know? Anything you do want to do?”

  “I’m not sure. . . . I was thinking maybe I could just, like, hang out with Christina.”

  “Christina?” Of all the possible answers Oliver could have given him, Andy would never have expected this one.

  “Yeah, help her and stuff. Maybe she’d need me to paint something, lug something, clean something. I want to go to those—what do you call them?—like, sales she goes to.”

  “Estate sales?” Now the kid wanted to start rummaging through all the crap people didn’t want or left behind when they died?

  “Yeah. Estate sales.”

  “Well, I could talk to her. . . .” Hadn’t Christina said Oliver liked her? Well, she was right about that.

  “Grandma was asking me about her. Like, a
hundred questions: what do I think of her, is she nice? What’s that all about? You’d think she was, like, your girlfriend or something.”

  Andy sat very still. Here was a small moment of truth, delivered right into his lap. “Actually, she is my girlfriend,” he said. Even though they had just had their first fight.

  “No shit?” Oliver said, and when Andy nodded, no shit, Oliver raised his palm to his father’s and slapped it in an exuberant high five.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Christina hurried up the steps of the Haverstick house. She was so excited; Derrick had called Phoebe to tell her that, yes, the Sargent was authentic and that given it was a late—and therefore highly unusual—portrait, it would be worth even more than he had initially estimated. Christina felt hurt that Derrick had not called her first—she supposed he was still angry, humiliated, or both—but she wasn’t going to dwell on it. The important thing was the painting was real.

  “Have you had it insured?” asked Christina when Phoebe had ushered her inside.

  “Yes, but we’ll need to change the policy now that we know it’s worth more.”

  “That makes sense. Why don’t you and Ian go ahead and start putting that in motion?”

  “Derrick said he’d like to do a light cleaning,” said Phoebe. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “I do. You don’t know what’s on the surface; what if it’s something potentially corrosive?”

  “All right, then.” She seemed to be thinking something over. “How long do you think that will take?”

  “I’m guessing a couple of weeks at most.”

  “Good. I need time to work things out with Ian,” she said.

  “Because you think he’s going to want to sell it?” Christina phrased this as neutrally as she could.

  “I know he is,” Phoebe said. “Especially now.” She stood up. “You had some fabric samples to show me, right?”

  Christina pulled them from her bag, relieved not to have to discuss Ian anymore. But she fretted about him all into the city, where she was going to meet Oliver. What was the source of his hostility? She couldn’t attribute it entirely to the painting; the feeling had been there almost from the start.

  Once she reached the showroom on West Twenty-eighth Street, she was able to push Ian out of her mind. She wriggled her way between the bolts of fabric that were everywhere, stacked horizontally in rows on industrial metal shelving, or standing packed together like saplings. But after half an hour of searching, she still did not see what she had come in search of: a crinkly, douppioni silk in a shade somewhere between pale ale and champagne. A sudden thud startled her. “Oliver?” she called. “Are you okay?”

  “Uh, I think so,” he called back.

  “What happened?” she said when she made her way over to the other end of the store. “Are you hurt?”

  He shook his head. “I made kind of a mess, though. . . .” He gestured to the bolts of fabric he’d knocked off a high shelf and which now created a barricade in the narrow aisle.

  It was a week before Thanksgiving, and Oliver’s third week of working for her. Christina had felt so horribly guilty over his expulsion from school that when he had asked if he could hang out with her, she immediately said yes. But although he undoubtedly meant well, he’d been more of a hindrance than anything. He cleaned a season’s worth of debris from her garden but had also inadvertently dug up several recently planted peonies; he’d thought they were weeds. He had also broken inventory in her showroom, blown a fuse, dripped paint on her dining room rug—and now this.

  “Hey, is everything all right up here?” Drawn by the noise, one of the store’s clerks had come bounding up the stairs.

  “Yeah, I just pulled a little too hard and they all came tumbling down.”

  The clerk frowned. “I hope nothing got dirty,” he said.

  “I’ll pay for anything that’s damaged,” Christina quickly offered. Just like she’d paid for Oliver’s other mishaps. And she hadn’t told Andy either; the poor kid was in enough trouble as it was.

  “I’m sorry,” Oliver muttered. Together, they picked up the fallen bolts.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I think we should go now.”

  “But you didn’t find your silk.”

  “Another time,” she said.

  Outside, Christina steered Oliver toward a favorite diner on Tenth Avenue. The area had gentrified rapidly, and now the avenue was dotted with expensive little bistros, bars, and cafés. Still, this place—Nell’s—had held on and they were able to find a seat right by the window. Whatever there was of sunlight on this intermittently gray day formed a diamond on the tabletop; Christina reached for a menu and handed it to Oliver. She already knew what she was having—the spinach pie with a Greek salad—because that was what she had every time she came here.

  “Do you know what you’d like?” she asked when the waitress appeared at their table.

  “A tuna melt,” he said, snapping the menu shut.

  “Fries with that?” asked the waitress.

  “Sure,” he said, and then, leaning over to Christina, “But don’t tell my dad. He’d lecture me for, like, an hour about the fat, the carbs, the bajillion chemicals in the ketchup.”

  Christina did not say anything. Andy was a bit of a proselytizer when it came to eating. When their meal came, she had to admit the fries did look delicious—crispy and golden—and she accepted Oliver’s offer first of one, and then another.

  “Our secret,” she said. “We won’t tell your dad.”

  “Deal.” He took a fry from the plate. “What do you like about him anyway?”

  Christina had to think. The first thing that sprang to mind—the erotic connection she had with Andy—was not something she was going to share with Oliver. “He has a good voice?” she said lightly.

  Oliver snorted. “Come on. You can do better.”

  “He’s smart, he’s caring, he has so much integrity about his work—”

  “He thinks he’s God, you mean.”

  “You may be right about that.” Christina smiled. “And we have a lot in common. We both lost our spouses, and we were both lonely—”

  “My dad lonely? Not!” Oliver shook the ketchup bottle vigorously.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s been dating from practically the second we buried her,” he said bitterly. “It’s like he couldn’t wait.”

  “He loved your mother very much.”

  “I know. But when she died, he wanted to, like, put it behind him. Immediately.”

  “Whereas you wanted to stay in that place for a while longer.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I did. I still do, I guess.”

  He took a bite of his sandwich. “I’ll bet you didn’t have, like, a dozen guys buzzing around the minute your husband died.”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t.”

  “He was relieved when it finally happened. He never said it, but I could tell.” His bright blue eyes probed her expression. “I was too. I mean, she was in so much pain.”

  “I understand,” she said. “It must have been horrible.”

  “It was.” He ate another fry before speaking again. “How did your husband die anyway?”

  “In a fire,” she said. “It happened quickly. Or at least that’s what the fire marshal told me and I so badly wanted to believe him.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “It’s all right,” she told him. “You wanted to know.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “A wall of flame engulfed him. I had to identify him by the buckle of his belt; the belt was mostly gone, but the buckle hadn’t melted completely. It was fused to the little bit of leather that was left.” She looked down at her salad. “I still have it.”

  “You do?”

 
; She nodded, picturing the charred rectangle covered by the charred buckle; both resided in the blue Tiffany box that had once housed the silver bracelet she always wore.

  “Was he, like, the only person who got killed?”

  “The only one. He went back in to save a girl; it was an insane thing to do. But the fire department hadn’t gotten there yet. And I know he couldn’t have lived with himself if anything had happened to her while she was on his watch.”

  “And did he? Save her?” Oliver said.

  “Yes,” said Christina. “She came to see me when she got out of the hospital. Her parents came too. Their relief was so enormous it was like some force field, almost a glow that emanated from them. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Wow,” Oliver said. “Your husband—he was a hero.”

  “He was.” Christina looked at him. His struggle to understand what had happened—to Will, to his mother—was so visible on his open, undefended face. She wanted to take him in her arms, but she didn’t know him well enough for that. Maybe she never would. Yet here she was telling him things she had not shared with his father. Death, it turned out, was even more intimate than sex.

  The waitress returned to clear the table and asked whether they wanted dessert. Christina ordered a black coffee, but Oliver opted for rice pudding piled high with whipped cream. “I wish you were having Thanksgiving with us,” he said.

  “Me too.” Given Jordan’s open hostility, Christina and Andy thought it best not to celebrate together. He and Oliver were going to Andy’s mother’s; Christina was planning to spend the morning helping prepare and serve a meal at her church, and for the afternoon she had invited Mimi Farnsworth over with her sons. But now she realized that maybe there was a way that Oliver and Andy could spend at least part of the day with her. “What time do you go to your grandmother’s?”