“50 Cent,” Michael said, pained. “And it’s Ludacris.”
Now Noah was out of his depth. “John Wayne’s real name was Marion, but he thought it sounded too sissy.”
“Who’s John Wayne?”
“Never mind. My point is—”
Michael broke in. “So my ancestor was famous like Beyoncé famous?”
Noah had heard of her. “He still is. But it’s hard to quantify. They’d have different fans.”
“Bet Beyoncé has way more.” Michael was kneeling up on the LC4, staring at a photo from inches away. He put his finger to the glass. “That me there?”
“None of these are of you, I’m afraid.” It occurred to Noah that he hadn’t come across any pictures of Michael and Amber in Fernande’s boxes. She must have taken some. Could she have thrown them away after Victor’s death, when she thought his partner and child had slipped out of her life for good? “That was Victor, between his parents—my sister Fernande and her husband Dan.” The image of the lovely boy hurt his chest like the thump of a bat. “You’re pretty like your dad.” A lie; Noah was trying to make Michael feel part of the family. But he must have put too much stress on the wrong word, because—
“I’m not pretty.” Michael spat it.
“No, sorry”—a yelp of mirth—“I meant pretty like as in quite like, rather like. Handsome guys, both of you.” Noah was making this worse. The more often he said it, the less true it was. “That picture was taken at a little party we had to celebrate the millennium.” He remembered a tedious argument with Fernande about whether (as he insisted) the true millennium wouldn’t begin until a year later, on January 1, 2001. She’d been flippant, but Noah was a pedant, he knew; he’d like to have that quarter of an hour with his sister back now. “Victor must have been, what, nine?” Still undersized like Michael, before the tsunami of hormones.
“He had a motorbike,” the boy said.
“No, he—oh, you mean when he was grown up?”
“Took me for rides, sometimes.”
That sounded risky, typical of Victor. Had they worn helmets, at least? Noah pulled the cuff of his shirt over the heel of his hand and rubbed at the glass so his nephew’s ghostly smile shone through again. Watching a child grow up, you convinced yourself that the soft-faced toddler and the laughing boy were being folded into the young man; told yourself that nothing would be lost. But that wasn’t true. Time, the child catcher. “To be honest, we didn’t see much of Victor once he was in his teens. Christmases and so on. Joan was Jewish, but we celebrated all the holidays, in our secular way.”
“Sounds weird when you call Vic that.”
“Well, that was what he was, with us.” Noah’s gaze went back to the smooth cheek. “Originally, Victor”—a roll of the final consonant—“because our family’s French.”
Michael shook his head, mutinous.
“Send off your spit to the lab and it’ll prove that a quarter of your ancestors came from France.”
“Your name, Noah, that’s not French.”
“Ah, I’m really Noé.”
The boy frowned. “Like, no way?”
Noah nodded. “When I started kindergarten here, the other kids gave me a hard time for it.” He’d had no English when he’d reached New York, and the first year had been one long blur of confusion. “They used to point at me and shout, ‘No way, no way!’ So I kept nagging my dad till he let me switch to Noah.”
“This one time in fifth grade, someone told my girlfriend I liked someone else even though I didn’t, so she ended it.”
Noah sucked in his cheeks so he wouldn’t smile. “Kids.”
“Always talking smack, cracking dumb jokes.”
Of the yo momma variety, Noah wondered? A father in prison might possibly bring tough-guy kudos, but a mother?
“Where are yours?” Michael was scanning the wall.
“My what?”
“Kids.”
“Oh, Joan and I didn’t have any.”
“Why not?”
Clearly eleven-year-olds had no concept of which questions were rude; it was refreshing. “Never wanted any.”
Without warning, Michael lounged full-length on the LC4. It slid with him, tipping toward the horizontal; he jerked it forward, then gave up and lay back.
“This is a famous piece of furniture,” Noah told him. “You feel weightless, don’t you? Floating.”
A grunt.
“It doesn’t wobble at any angle, because of friction on the rubber tubes that cover the crossbar.” Joan’s parents had asked her and Noah to pick their own wedding present. For almost four decades she and Noah had used this lounger—separately, at different times of the day.
Michael pulled out his electronic ball again, as if Noah’s voice was just background radio. Beep, trill, beep.
“Show me how it works?”
The boy shook the ball. “‘Is it an animal?’ Yes.” Pressing the button. “‘Is it bigger than a bread box?’ What the fuck is a bread box?”
Noah was startled. Then he realized the last question was Michael’s, not the game’s. Mildly: “Mind your language.”
“Yes.” But it was the game Michael was saying yes to, not Noah. “‘Does it live in water?’ Sometimes. ‘Do you love it?’ Hell no.”
“What’s the thing you’re thinking of?”
“You have to guess. ‘Could it bite you?’” Michael read aloud. “Rarely.”
“Why rarely?” Surely a thing could either bite or not.
“I’d kick it in the teeth, that’s why.”
“Alligator?” Noah suggested.
Michael shot him such a tetchy look that Noah knew he’d guessed right.
“Mind reader,” Noah said in a spooky voice, tapping his own head.
The boy switched off the game and was on his feet all at once. “Is there anything to eat?”
Noah checked his watch: 1:27. “Ah…what would you say to a slice of pizza?”
“’Kay.”
They went down together, speechless in the elevator. “Spooky,” Michael whispered.
“What is, the clanking? That’s just the old cable.”
The boy shook his head. “So quiet. Like everybody’s dead.”
Noah assured him they weren’t. Just middle-class, he thought. Considerate, sedate, well soundproofed. “One of my upstairs neighbors practices her opera singing in the mornings. Is—was your grandma’s place noisy?”
A small shrug. “Parties, sometimes. One Saturday morning the bitch downstairs said she’d gut me for playing my music too loud.”
The boy was testing Noah with the foul language. “Could you just call her a woman?”
“Yeah, but no, because she’s a bitch.”
Before he could think of an answer they were in the lobby, and the doorman held the door of the building open for them. “Julio, this is…a young relative of mine, Michael.”
The two of them exchanged nods.
On the street, Noah lit a cigarette. Surely outdoors didn’t count as exposing Michael to secondhand smoke? Only to a bad example.
“You know that stuff’s going to kill you?”
From the mouths of babes, Joan murmured.
“I’m hitting eighty,” Noah told both his interrogators. “I’ve never had more than seven a day, and my doctor says my cardiovascular capacity is ‘far better than it should be.’ Besides, my wife and my sister did everything right and didn’t get past their early seventies, so it’s all a roll of the dice.”
Michael didn’t dispute that. “Cody used to smoke till I got him Juuling.”
“What-ing?”
“Vapes, you know? E-cigs?”
Noah nodded. “Old dog, no new tricks.” He sucked hard on his cigarette, to get it finished, as he wasn’t much enjoying it.
In the pizzeria, he found he had no appetite.
Michael held up two fingers, for two slices.
The man had his hair slicked back in what looked like a shower cap, and a net over his beard
held on by a string. He served up the pizza on a cardboard triangle.
“Coke,” Michael added.
Noah said, “Ah, I don’t think so. It’s a junky enough lunch without washing it down with sugar.”
“I want a Coke, motherfucker.”
Enough! “Watch your mouth, Michael.” Noah turned to the man and said, “A cup of water, please.”
“Dasani?” The man jerked his thumb at the refrigerator.
“All right, a bottle of Dasani water. Please.” Even if this was a rip-off, because surely you were entitled to water from pipes you’d paid for with your own taxes.
“Fine, I’ll get the soda.” Michael pulled out two dollar bills.
Noah had no idea of the extent of his authority. And was this the first battle he was going to pick, really? Did he mean to shove the boy’s money away and stage a showdown here and now? Instead he put on his best poker face.
The man sold Michael a big waxed cup of Coke, after charging Noah for the pizza and the despised water.
As the two rode back up to the ninth floor, the bottle was painfully cold in Noah’s hand. He thought he’d drink some, but his fingers couldn’t manage the seal. “You’ve got some sauce on you,” he said, pointing to his own chin. “Would you like a napkin?”
“Got one.” Deadpan, Michael held up the flimsy white rectangle, then stuffed it back in his pocket.
Noah told himself not to rise to the bait.
In the apartment, Michael stayed in the bathroom for a long time.
Medicine cabinet, Noah thought, rushing to put his ear to the door. But he couldn’t hear anything that sounded like pills rattling or hands wrestling with childproof packaging.
Maybe Michael just needed a few minutes alone? Noah knew how that felt. He leaned his ear on the door. Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée. “A door must be open or shut.” That was one of Margot’s favorite proverbs. Noah supposed the American equivalent was “You can’t have it both ways.”
In the kitchen, he had a glass of water and a few almonds and tried to start the New York Times.
A flush. The sound of water running in the sink, the bathroom door juddering open, footsteps going toward the spare room. That door shutting tight.
Noah hurried to the bathroom and spent ten pointless minutes rooting around for the tiny key to the unlocked medicine cabinet. Giving up, all he could do was remove any obvious hazards—sleeping pills, cough syrup, painkillers. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he wasn’t on a raft of prescription drugs. He frowned over a mini-bottle of hand sanitizer. Had he heard something about people stealing the stuff from emergency rooms for its alcohol content? This was getting ridiculous. He threw it all into a grocery bag and went into the kitchen to add a few dusty bottles of hard liquor (cognac, grappa, scotch).
His eye fell on a leaflet that Rosa must have left him. Being a Relative Foster Parent. At the top: “Are you fit and willing to ensure your child relative’s safety and meet his/her needs? Do you have the ability, motivation, and readiness?”
Too late now; Noah had signed on the dotted line. How did readiness differ from ability? Was it possible to be able but not quite ready, not today, not this week, though perhaps sometime in the indefinite future? “The readiness is all.” Was that Hamlet? Margot and Marc used to take Noah and Fernande to Shakespeare in Central Park on summer evenings, though Noah’s eyes had often slid away from the actors to the darkening sky, the first bats.
The next paragraph told him that he was now “entirely responsible for the temporary care of a minor who has been placed outside his/her own place of residence.” But Michael no longer had a place of residence. His grandmother was ash, and his uncle was sleeping on somebody’s couch in Queens. “During a time of disruption, you are giving a child relative a new home,” the leaflet went on, slightly more soothingly. Then exhortatory again: Noah was “obligated”—was that the same as obliged, or more stringent?—to provide “a stable, nurturing environment.” Also “guidance, discipline, and a good example.” Like something out of a Victorian novel. “Good-quality food.” Pizza and Coke. “Proper toilet articles. Keep the child’s clothes in good condition.” What did that mean—ironing? darning? “Regular attendance at school and support with homework. Recreational activities and undertakings,” whatever they were. Generally, Noah was to create “as many positive experiences as possible.”
He let out a long, ragged breath. What was he offering Michael but a further time of disruption?
“Mr.—Noah?”
Mister Noah: it had the ring of some apocalyptic street preacher. Well, better than Great-Uncle Noah. “In here. In the kitchen.” He almost tripped over the clinking bag of hazardous goods as he got up; he stashed it in the skinny cupboard with the broom.
The face in the doorway was wiped clean of pizza sauce, at least.
“You should call me Noah.”
Michael stepped in. So small without his coat. Noah had been a shrimp himself, while other boys shot up past him.
“We should go out for some air,” Noah said with false cheer. “Coat on.”
“There’s air in here.”
“Exercise, then.”
Michael didn’t have gloves but insisted it wasn’t even cold.
Within a few blocks Noah found his steps turning toward Central Park. “You must have been there on a school trip or something?”
“I don’t remember.”
Noah paid an arm and a leg for a bunch of forced daffodils from a convenience store on the way. Michael didn’t ask why, and Noah found himself too shy to explain.
He noticed how many trees there were behind absurd six-inch fences; signs saying KINDLY CURB YOUR DOG; advertisements for chamber-music concerts and chess clubs; brown-skinned workmen in safety masks, hauling away construction waste as paper-white little old ladies in fur collars stepped around them.
Michael walked along like a gunslinger, eyes taking everything in. What did this neighborhood not have, that he’d be used to, Noah wondered? People snacking and smoking outside convenience stores, maybe. Boarded-up doors, broken glass, payday loans, CA$H 4 GOLD, the odd addict shuffling.
When they passed Holy Trinity, Noah pointed it out. “My mom used to bring us to Mass there, and weekly Confession. Your grandma, she was a churchgoer, wasn’t she?”
“United Methodist,” Michael said. “Never let us skip a Sunday, not even the day I broke my collarbone. I sang in the choir.”
Noah struggled to picture this boy in flowing robes, harmonies raying from his mouth. “Our father, Marc, he wasn’t a believer. My sister Fernande stayed Catholic all her life, but I lost it early.”
“How come?”
“Ah… Once you place your trust in science, you generally find you don’t need the other stuff so much.”
Great; Michael might report him to Rosa for indoctrination.
Entering the park, Noah remembered Fernande’s skinny figure at the Bethesda Fountain, clutching her handbag as if she feared someone might steal its precious weight. How Noah’s spirits had sunk, the day he and she had scattered Victor, and stayed sunken for months. A life erased, and so squalidly. Not with a bang but a whimper.
He wondered how Amber—in prison for months already, he knew now—had taken the news. How long before she’d been told, even? And in how much detail?
Maybe the night Victor had shot up, he’d been gnawed by guilt about all she’d done for him. But hadn’t he realized that if he died, her doing his time would be for nothing?
Michael’s gaze narrowed at the sight of a passing car. “Lambo.”
“What’s that?”
“Lamborghini.”
“Was it?” Noah turned his head but it was gone. “So you like cars?”
Another small shrug. “Good ones.”
“Such as?”
“Ferrari, Maserati, Alfa Romeo.”
“Ah, the Italians. Any American favorites?”
“Tesla’s all right.”
“What about
hybrids? Dan and Fernande had a Prius.”
Michael shook his head. “So gay.”
Noah blinked. “You’re saying their car…”
“Prius sucks big-time. Everyone who’s into cars hates them.”
“I take your word for it, but don’t say gay for bad, OK?”
Michael rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t mean actual gay. Kid in my class is gay, I don’t hate her.”
Noah felt he’d lost his grip on the argument.
He trudged into the park, Michael beside him. Noah’s steps were longer, but the kid’s came faster. Noah stopped at the stand of gnarly black cherry trees and gestured with the daffodils. “This is where my mother’s ashes are, and Joan’s, and Fernande and Dan’s. You’re a Young because of Dan—you got his surname, through Victor, see? Dan taught American history at a university. They did meet you when you were tiny, and your mom.” Maybe Amber had been prickly, impossible to befriend; maybe it was Victor who’d insisted on keeping his old and new lives apart. Too many hurt feelings and absences to sort out, at this point. “They would have liked to see more of you.” He went on just to fill the silence. “A rabbi at a party, once, he told Joan that Jews shouldn’t be cremated, it was an act of disrespect and violence to the body, and you know what she told him? ‘So is rotting. And at least cremation’s faster.’”
A tiny snigger. Then, soberly, “Cody’s got Grandma in an urn.”
“Oh, your uncle? Right. What’s he planning to…”
“Dunno.”
“When we get back from France you can talk to him about it. I’d like to meet Cody, myself,” Noah added with forced enthusiasm. “You must miss him.”
The boy nodded. “And his PlayStation.”
“His what?”
“For gaming. We play Minecraft and stuff together, but he doesn’t like my first-person shooters.”
Cody sounded like a proper uncle. To get the next bit over with, Noah said, “This is where your dad’s ashes are too.” Dark clouds were massing, and the wind was making his eyes water. “It’s technically illegal, disposing of human remains here, so Fernande and I didn’t, you know—” He made a grand gesture of tossing something high into the air. “We just bent down discreetly and sprinkled them around the base of a tree.”
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