by Edan Lepucki
“After that performance?” I said, nodding to the car.
If you take Kits advice you can use it for ur big solo show
“So now you think I should listen to her?”
I cant meet him alone
How long had he been meaning to ask me this favor? It could have been the real reason he’d sent me the angry texts this morning, and why he’d brought Kit to tear me down, and why he’d left me at his mercy, without a car of his own.
Please S
56.
I don’t remember when we had moved to the living room, but that’s where we were now, the morning light seeping between the blinds and pleating the floor. I was naked from the waist down and straddling Marco on the cracked leather couch, my face in his curls. Some things don’t change. He was whispering something I couldn’t hear into my ear, circling my wrists with his fingers. He’d lost his combative edge, and so had I. It had taken some work, but I’d found sweet Marco, here he was.
“I think I might want you after all,” I whispered.
“I’m okay with that,” he said. He kept on whispering, so quiet and rushed I couldn’t make out the words.
This was probably just pillow talk, in-the-moment lies. But then again, he had continued to let me into his house, and he had asked me earlier if we were good—as if we were a unit, two against the world. He wanted me to keep coming back.
Marco was the father of my child. At least right now he wanted me for who I was, defects and all.
57.
“What were you whispering in my ear?” I asked as we put our clothes back on. We always dressed right after.
“You really want to know? Now?”
“Was it that dirty?”
He tossed me my jeans. “Not at all, actually.”
“Really?”
“I…I’m liking this.” He pointed at himself and then at me. This, meaning us.
His smile shocked me, it was so sincere. “You want to, I don’t know, have dinner sometime?”
“With your superior cooking skills? What would be the point?”
“I’m serious,” he said. He stood at the other end of the couch fully clothed except for his bare feet. He still did that thing where he stood with his toes spread apart, as if to better grasp the earth beneath him. “I want to. Do you?”
“Is it because I have money?” I asked finally.
“Is what because you have money?”
“You’re underwater with the house, right?” I said.
He didn’t look away. This was new: a Marco who didn’t evade, didn’t feint and dodge. “Karl’s the one with the money, isn’t he?” he asked.
“I just inherited my mother’s estate.”
He looked so surprised I thought he might slip into taking offense. “I never thought you’d rescue me,” he said. “Is that what you think? I never thought about you at all.”
“So you’ve already implied.”
“Until recently I mean. You got under my skin, Lady. And now what? Now here we are.”
He was kissing me when the doorbell rang.
“Who the fuck is that?” Marco said.
“Lucy?”
“This early? No way.” He was already leaving the living room. “Stay here. It’s probably some Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’ll be right back.”
I lay down on the couch. My hangover had returned, a headache beating like a metronome at the front of my skull. I closed my eyes. When Marco came back, I would either get up and leave, like I always did, or I’d stay. If I stayed, our illicit meetings would become sanctioned, nothing to be ashamed of. No Karl. How could I not know what I wanted?
I strained to hear what was going on at the front door. I couldn’t understand what Marco was saying, but from the tone of his voice, confused rather than officious, I knew he couldn’t be talking to a solicitor, religious or otherwise. I sat up. Now I heard another voice, a young woman’s.
I recognized it—she sounded like S. I suddenly felt drunk instead of hungover. Like I had last night, holding S up in the water.
The woman who sounded like S spoke again. Was it really S? Was that possible? She had figured out my secret and I didn’t even have to tell her myself. She knew I’d end up here.
The Sitter is now The Soothsayer, I thought.
Without thinking, I left the room and headed toward the voice.
“But you’re definitely Marco Green?” she was saying.
“I am indeed,” Marco said. “Why?”
“S?” I tried.
Marco turned toward me, and in doing so, moved from the partially opened door. There was S—my ears hadn’t fooled me. Except this S didn’t look like herself, she wasn’t wearing a bra and her hair was a tangled mess around her face. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t place it. I felt a charge of something, a current of static electricity, and then it disappeared.
“S?” I said again.
When she saw me, she startled as if I were a poltergeist coming toward her.
I’d been wrong: S hadn’t foreseen this—me—at all.
Next to her stood Seth. He was wearing the blue basketball shorts I’d bought for him over two years ago. The ones with the unraveling waistband. He never let me throw anything away.
“Seth,” I said now. I was announcing people like a butler, stating the obvious. I couldn’t manage anything more.
He’d seen me before S had, and now he was breathing heavily. It was the sound he made when he was angry, when he wanted to yell, but couldn’t. What agony, I thought.
“Seth,” I said again. I made my hands into a bowl, even though I knew he wouldn’t remember. Sorry Love.
He backed away and S steadied him so he wouldn’t fall off the steps.
“Seth,” Marco said. He was just standing there, staring at his son. I could tell he was shaken. Seth looked exactly like him—nearly twenty years ago. Marco had been sucked back in time.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“We’re—” S glanced at Seth as if to confirm that she should adhere to the script they’d previously agreed upon. “We’re looking for Seth’s father. Mark Green.”
“That’s me,” Marco said, stepping onto the porch. “But I’m Marco, not Mark.”
Seth began signing furiously. I caught a few words. Name. Mom. Liar. Fuck you.
“Hey, hey,” S said in a soothing voice. “Let’s get the whole story.”
“Yes, let’s,” I said. “How did you end up here? Why are you together?”
Seth signed something else. I think it was Helping me.
“Goddammit with the ASL, Seth, use your phone,” I said.
“From your Twitter,” S said, the words modulated so that everyone might keep calm and obey her. It was the voice she used to get Devin to put on his shoes. “Muffin Buffin.”
Seth signed something else, deliberately fast, and I deliberately caught none of it.
Marco was watching Seth with a furrowed brow. “Are you deaf?” he asked.
He turned to me. “Is he deaf?”
Marco began to twiddle his fingers in a sorry approximation of ASL. Seth had hung with enough hearing-impaired kids to be offended, but when I turned to him, he wasn’t sneering. He was staring. This was his dad, and he couldn’t look away.
“Stop,” S said to Marco. “He isn’t deaf.”
“It’s called selective mutism,” I said. “He doesn’t speak,” I continued. “He never has.”
Seth had turned to me. Now it was hard to tell exactly what he was angry about, but his breathing was getting heavier, and I thought he might pick up one of Marco’s large planters and throw it across the front yard in a rage. I remembered the old tantrums, the way his inability to express something as simple as I don’t want apple juice made him fling himself across a restaurant floor, or bite my arm, the body tearing itself apart as if to dislodge the language inside of it.
“He autistic?” Marco said. He was speaking like Seth was, in fact, deaf.
“No,” I
said. “And he isn’t an eccentric genius either.”
S raised an eyebrow—I must have used a similar line on her. She was reading something else on my face, something between me and Marco. Smart girl.
“Have you guys been in touch for a long time?” S asked.
“Only a few weeks,” Marco said. He was looking at Seth, still trying to take in the fact of him. “She came to tell me about Seth. How he wanted to meet.”
“Seth is right in front of you,” I said. “He can’t speak, but he can hear you perfectly.”
I turned to Seth, who was practically vibrating. When I reached out to try to calm him, he flung himself away. S stepped in and gave me a look that suggested I stop, for my own good.
“Why didn’t you tell him?” she asked.
“I was going to tell you, Sethy,” I said. “I swear. Marco wanted me to wait.”
“Now, hold on,” Marco said, “there’s a good reason for that. I do want to know you, man. I just have some business to attend to first.”
“That’s not what I meant,” S said.
She looked at Seth, as if trying to understand what he might want to say, what he might be feeling. And she was getting it; she was reading something on his face, in his body: all that was illegible to me.
“You didn’t tell him,” S repeated, and this time she nodded at Marco.
For a moment Seth’s body calmed.
“Tell him what?” I began, but now I understood. I had told Marco about Seth, about what Seth wanted—a father, to know his father—but I’d withheld the other thing, the central thing, the problem everyone was forced to orbit around.
I hadn’t told him what was wrong with my son, our son.
“I didn’t know how,” I said weakly.
Seth let out a little whimper. He placed a middle finger at each temple and waited. It was a special sign that he’d made up at fifteen, one I’d banned because it was cruel, the equivalent of a kid saying, I hate you.
Then he carefully spelled out K-A-R-L. Karl. The father who knew everything about Seth and loved him.
“What’s he saying?” Marco said, like the buffoon he was. I ignored him.
“What is there to tell Karl?” I asked, and everyone looked away, as if sorry for me and my caravan of secrets.
Seth pulled out his phone. I didn’t know if he was going to text his stepfather right then, or maybe type something for us to read. God, I longed for the latter. There it was: the old, deep-seated pain of wanting to communicate with Seth. What’s wrong? Just tell me why you’re crying! How can I make it better? Every mother begs like this in the first days of a child’s life, but I hadn’t ever been able to stop. This was my relentless plea.
Once Seth had typed something, he put his phone in his pocket. I would never know.
A moment later, his keys were in his fist and he had directed them across the street. My car blinked on.
“Don’t you dare leave,” I said, but he was already at the sidewalk, already headed across the street.
“Lady’s right,” Marco called. “Come inside, let’s talk. I mean, not talk, but—”
“Just shut up,” I said.
Seth signed Thank you to S, and she nodded. Again, that sharp, fleeting current of understanding.
“Please,” I called out, but he wasn’t going to turn around, and we all knew it.
58.
Seth was driving away when I started asking the questions I already knew the answers to: “How do you know about my Twitter? Why are you dressed like that?”
“The photo you sent,” she said. “The one of you and Marco. You emailed it to me.”
Marco had already gone inside, saying he needed to piss, and he’d left the door open. As if all three of us were going to hang out.
“What did you do with the photo?” I asked. “Why did you want it?”
“It was for an art thing. But is that really what matters right now?” S asked. “I mean, what’s Seth going to do now? Are you and Marco…?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“I didn’t tell Seth anything you told me. I swear.”
“So you’re good at keeping secrets, so what? I assume you kept all of Seth’s too.”
“He and I are friends.”
“Good for you. I haven’t had a friend in almost nineteen years. Did you know that? Not a real one. Not since Seth was born—or probably earlier. When I got with Marco, none of my girlfriends liked him. I guess you could say Karl and I were friends, but you can’t count your husband, can you?” I was surprised by my tears. “I guess you can’t count your kid’s nanny either. That’s even more lame.”
“The Sitter, you mean,” she said. “I don’t even care about that. What I do care about is the fact that Marco is a jackass. You can’t be serious, Lady. That guy? Seth is better off not knowing him.”
“How easy for you to say,” I said. “You’ve got a dad who loves you.”
“So does Seth.”
“I was talking about myself.” I wiped my tears. “God, I am such a fuck-up.”
“At least you haven’t killed a bunny.”
“What?”
“You didn’t see him? In the pool.”
“It’s my fault,” I said. “I told you not to swim with Milkshake.”
“Good thing, or he’d be the dead one.” She shook her head so she wouldn’t cry, like a dog shaking off water. “I’ll drive you home,” she said. “Tell me where your purse is. I’ll go inside and get it.”
“It’s your day off,” I said.
“Consider it pro bono work,” she said, and this time I did laugh, for a second. I told her where my purse was.
A few minutes later she emerged with it in her arms.
“Marco says bye and sorry.”
Bye and Sorry. There was no sign for that.
59.
My father called as we were getting into the car. I didn’t answer. I had bigger problems than his questions about my health, my “self-care” as he called it, and I didn’t give a shit about his and Maria’s garden right now, or a salad recipe with tarragon I just had to try. Not now, Steven Shapiro, not now.
Marco lived in one of those neighborhoods where all human activity occurred inside, as if a curfew had just been announced, or a smog warning. Every car was parked, no one had a dog to walk, and I hardly checked my side mirrors as I pulled from the curb. We were on the freeway within a minute, and every time I merged into another lane, Lady, like my echo, checked the traffic too, as if she were the one driving.
“I won’t kill us,” I said. “I’m hungover, not drunk.”
My buzz from Bills had been sucked away like water in a tide pool. Nothing is more sobering than being found out. Although, so far, it was Lady, not me, who was in trouble. Marco was an idiot, and Lady was worse for sleeping with him instead of introducing him to Seth. Lady had chosen Marco over everyone else.
“Is it strange to say that I wish you’d told me about Marco?” I asked.
I glanced in the rearview to make sure the guy behind me wasn’t still on my ass, and on instinct, Lady peered over her own shoulder. My camera was in the backseat, along with the packages from the lab.
“You were taking pictures,” she said.
“I’m an artist,” I said.
“Let me guess,” she said. “Seth was your subject.”
“Wrong,” I said. “But you could say you were.”
“I guess I asked for it, sending you the photo.”
“You had no idea it was going to me, your employee. Not that it matters. The whole thing is dead anyway. It sucks. It’s derivative.”
“You sound just like Cunt Daniels,” she said. “I guess that means you must be talented.”
“Cunt Daniels thinks I’m a hack.”
“Oh who fucking cares about her right now,” Lady said. “I don’t want to hear anything about her. I cannot handle it. Please just get me home.”
The heat in the car was dry and soupy at once. I rolled down my
window and the wind was so forceful and loud my eyes watered. I closed it.
“Sorry about the AC,” I said.
Lady was staring straight ahead. If she was hot, she didn’t show it.
“What’s really going on between you and Seth?” she asked, and turned to me.
I kept my gaze on the road.
“Be honest,” she said. “You owe me that.”
Here it was, the moment I’d been dreading, the inevitable walk to the gallows. I just didn’t think it would come when she and I were alone in my Camry, going 75 on the 170, the heat like a weight we had to wear, like a heavy X-ray apron. Any second now she might reach over and grab the wheel, kill us both, take out a few other drivers too.
I hadn’t answered yet, and I realized she was nervous, her hand cranking her window open and closed. Noises—engines, a helicopter, the wind—flew into the space between us, then were shut out, then returned.
She went on: “In the past, I wouldn’t have asked. I wouldn’t have even known to ask! But he’s an adult. I get it. And you two are fairly close in age.” I could tell she was counting the years between us.
She leaned over and put a hand on my leg. “Why wouldn’t you fall in love with him?” She sat back, removed her hand. “He’s so unusual and funny. He’s smart.”
“But not a genius, remember?”
“So I’m right. You love him.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.” This was the truth, and I was happy to announce it.
“You aren’t together?” she asked.
Of course the questions wouldn’t stop. This wasn’t just anyone we were talking about, it was Seth: her baby, her boy. He was like a wild animal, rarely seen and barely understood. Lady thought I’d caught him.
“No.” That was true—we’d never been together.
“So nothing happened between you two?”
Here was the real question, and here it, my lie, would be.
“Never,” I said. “Lady, I would never do that to you.”
I’d lied, I was a liar, but I’d also saved this, I’d saved us.
60.
Lady had turned on the radio, and aside from an occasional remark about NPR or the traffic, we were quiet, and it wasn’t until we were finally on familiar ground, driving through Studio City on Laurel Canyon, that our silence felt right and companionable. I rolled my window all the way down and let the warm breeze flutter across me. I couldn’t believe she’d let it rest.