Family and Other Accidents

by Shari Goldhagen

  Laine’s parents had gone through the world’s longest, messiest divorce, but they’d been able to pull it together for their grandchild. They’d driven up to Newport and watched Connor and Laine’s last-minute nuptials on Easton Beach, eaten fried clams at Flo’s afterward. Three weeks later, for Laine’s entire twelve-hour delivery, her parents managed to put aside the things that made them crazy long enough to feed their daughter ice chips and go over potential names. Connor’s only living relative, on the other hand, took four months to pick up the phone because children made him uncomfortable. And it didn’t seem fair, because Connor had chosen Jack years ago.

  When his mother died almost ten years earlier, Connor spent a good chunk of time feeling sorry for himself. He had nightmares where he bolted awake screaming and cold, friends who’d fallen out of his life because they didn’t know what to say to him, and he was forever waiting in the freezing northern Ohio dusk for Jack or Jack’s ex-girlfriend to pick him up from swim practice. But he’d felt sorry for Jack, too, stuck in a city he’d tried to leave, working a billion hours a week at a law firm where the partners called him “Reed’s kid.” Connor didn’t feel sorry for himself because of Jack until they’d been orphans for four months and Connor woke up at three in the morning with a headache so intense he couldn’t see straight.

  He’d heard Anna Fram (Anna Fram Levine since the previous spring) pull her car into the driveway a few hours before. It was supposed to be a big secret that she was sleeping with Jack again. On nights when her husband worked the graveyard shift at the Cleveland Clinic, Anna came over after Connor went to bed and left in the morning before he woke up. Connor had been playing along, but his mother had died of aneurysm and his own head felt like it was in a vice, so Connor went into Jack’s room without much thought about the situation’s etiquette.

  Still, there was something startling and horrific about seeing Anna in his brother’s bed. In all the years Anna and Jack had dated in high school, Connor had never so much as seen them kiss. But there she was, a swatch of brown hair and an olive-skinned arm across Jack’s chest. If Connor hadn’t been convinced his brain was going to blow up, he would have left.

  “Jack.” Connor nudged his brother’s shoulder, lightly at first, then more demanding. “Wake up.”

  “Wha—” Jack blinked, sleepy and unfocused. In jerky motions, he propped himself on his elbow, glanced at Anna, who was wearing one of his undershirts and squirming awake beside him. His features tightened. “Jesus Christ, you can’t just come—”

  “My head is killing me—”

  “—in here without knock—”

  “I’m really sick.” Connor felt his face crumbling, eyes pooling.

  “Your head?” Jack didn’t look angry then, but truly terrified. Sitting up he rubbed his own forehead, pressed his lips together until the color changed from pink to white. “Like sick enough to go to the hospital?”

  “I’m sorry,” Connor said, though he wasn’t clear why he was apologizing.

  “It’s okay.” Jack reached for his discarded boxers and pants. “Lemme get dressed and I’ll take you.”

  Sitting up, Anna took Connor’s hand as if there weren’t a reason for her not to be there, as if the three of them hadn’t eaten her butter-cream frosted wedding cake at the Ritz-Carlton Ballroom.

  “Sweetie, it’s probably just a migraine,” she said, and Connor loved her for saying everything would be all right.

  “I’m going to take him to Deaconess.” Jack buttoned up a wrinkled button-down. “I’ll call you?”

  “I’m coming with you, and we should go to the clinic.” Anna was up and putting on jeans. She turned her back to Connor and slid her arms into a bra, pulled a sweater over her head. “We’ll tell Eddie you called me. If I weren’t here, you would have called me anyway.”

  It was true. Jack had called Anna for everything since he moved back. She’d made all the funeral arrangements for their mother, hired the cleaning lady to go through their mother’s stuff. And she was always threatening to do more—pick up groceries, have Connor over for dinner when Jack worked late. As far as Connor could tell, Jack was letting her because it was easy and familiar, and she was married, so she wasn’t allowed to ask all those questions about the future that Jack had never wanted to answer when he was her boyfriend.

  “Come on, Ann.” Jack shook his head. “Going there is a really bad idea.”

  The pain in his head was no less than epic, and there was panic rattling around Connor’s chest. Leaning on the mattress, he realized it had been their parents’ bed and he wondered how the scene would have played out if his parents were alive. One thing he knew was that he wouldn’t have to be worried about Jack getting into a fight at the hospital because he was sleeping with a resident’s wife. It wasn’t fair, and life already wasn’t fair enough.

  Anna Fram said Jack’s name in a way that made Jack close his eyes and nod and Connor sure that he had only seconds left to live. So they got in the Sentra and Jack drove to Eddie’s hospital because it was a better hospital, and it was closer, and Jack and Anna both knew Eddie Levine would take good care of Connor, even if he might murder Jack. But no one said anything until they got to the emergency room, when Anna asked the receptionist to get her husband.

  “What’s the emergency, Ann?” Eddie was a former college tennis player, tall and full of lean muscles. He had one of those jutting jaws, and it jutted further when he saw Jack, who had the decency to look down.

  Anna Fram went to Eddie’s side, put her arm around the back of his white coat, spoke to him in the quiet way she used to speak to Jack when the two of them were in high school watching movies or playing pool in the basement.

  “So you’ve got a headache?” Eddie smiled at Connor. “Sounds like a migraine. We’ll fix you right up.”

  “You know about our mother?” Jack’s head was up, alert and flush. “That she died—”

  “Yeah.” Eddie nodded. “So we’ll do a CAT scan, just to be on the safe side.”

  Eddie led them to an examining area behind the front desk, where Anna helped Connor onto a gurney covered with uncomfortable paper. A nurse took his temperature and what seemed like a lot of blood. Eddie asked Connor a bunch of questions about when he started to feel sick, what he’d eaten that day.

  “You’re allergic to pencillin, right?” Jack was filling out a clipboard of paperwork and studying the back of his insurance card. Still piqued, he hadn’t looked at Anna once since they left the waiting room.

  “And strawberries,” Connor said. Perhaps it was the thought of strawberries, or the blood leaving his arm through the plastic tube, more likely the way Eddie’s eyes narrowed every time he looked at Jack. “I think I’m gonna be sick,” Connor mumbled.

  The nurse stopped stabbing him long enough to hand him a plastic basin, and Connor threw up, apologized, threw up again.

  “Oh God.” Jack bit his lower lip, exhaled, looked as though he might barf, too. “Is that bad? That can’t be good—”

  Anna’s fingers twitched, and Connor knew she wanted to touch Jack, to take his arm, hold his hand. But she was standing next to Eddie, his hip against hers.

  “Jack, why don’t you go get some coffee in the lobby,” Eddie said.

  Jack shook his head, “No, he’s really sick. Look at him.”

  “You’re making things worse, Jack.” Eddie was suddenly icy, and it was a weird moment in which everyone knew everyone knew everything. “Go get coffee.”

  Jack finally looked at Anna, who looked at Eddie, who suggested that they both go to the waiting area while he took Connor to run some tests.

  With Jack and Anna gone, Connor felt his guts shuffle again, half-expecting Eddie to ask about what had really happened, about what had been happening since Jack came back after law school. But Eddie became friendly again, making jokes as he wheeled Connor’s gurney down the hall to the lab, where the giant white CAT scan hummed. It looked like the slab in a TV morgue, and when the technician rolled hi
s gurney into the cave, Connor instantly thought of his parents, of their grave sites that he hadn’t been to since their funerals.

  Eddie was searching for pulsating blobs of blood, but Connor wondered about all the other things inside his head the scan wouldn’t show. Pulsating blobs of anger and self-pity because he was probably dying and Jack was making it worse. Blobs of guilt because he would lie if Eddie asked about Anna and Jack, more guilt blobs for never telling Anna about the other women who slept over nights when Eddie Levine didn’t work late. Blobs of a secret fear that he didn’t miss his mother as much as he should and didn’t miss his father at all.

  Eddie didn’t find pulsating blobs of anything, though. He told Connor everything looked fine and rolled his gurney back to the examining area where Jack and Anna looked nervous, their heads down. “A classic migraine,” Eddie said, and the nurse gave Connor a shot, dabbed his arm with a cotton ball, and warned him that he might feel drowsy.

  “You’ll be okay, Conn.” Eddie wrote Connor a prescription and clapped him on the shoulder, something Jack would never do. “Just take it easy. These things are sometimes brought on by stress.”

  “I know you’ve had kind of a rough time lately.” Anna tried too hard to sound light. “And if Jack’s ever too busy or whatever, you know you’re welcome at our house—”

  “Thanks, but he’s okay,” Jack cut her off, then looked at his polished black shoes. Eddie and Anna looked at each other, then at Connor.

  “We’re okay,” Connor said, even though it probably wasn’t true, even though he was still mad, and self-pitying, and mildly panicked. Jack was his family, fair or not.

  Eddie’s shift at the hospital was almost over, and Anna said she would leave with him, come by later to get her car. After that, Anna didn’t invite him over for dinner anymore or pick him up from practice. Connor ordered delivery and stood out in the cold, his hair freezing to spikes while he waited for Jack. As far as Connor knew, she never slept over again.

  Now, almost a decade later, it’s Mona, a different girlfriend Jack makes crazy and won’t marry, who meets Connor at the gate of Cleveland Hopkins Airport. In a burgundy leather jacket, she’s sleeker than he remembers, lipstick a deeper brown, gold highlighting the swirls of her red hair. When she hugs him, she smells the same as she did when he was seventeen and she started dating Jack, and Connor remembers exactly how it felt to fantasize about her in the next bedroom.

  “I go away for a year and you’re married with a kid.” Mona holds him at arm’s length when the embrace ends. “Even on soap operas these things take more time.”

  “Yeah, it’s like Bizzaro World.” Connor looks over her shoulder. “So where’s the big guy?”

  Stepping away from his chest, Mona looks up at him, eyes apologetic.

  “They needed him in Chicago.” She tries to sound like it’s not a big deal. “Isn’t that crazy? He can’t even practice in Illinois yet and already they have him working weekends.”

  Connor shakes his head.

  “He promised he’ll be back late tonight,” she says. “He didn’t think he was going to have to go, and then he thought it was something he could handle over faxes, but he really needed to meet with people. I do have specific instructions to take you out for dinner.”

  Mona reaches for his forearm, and he feels a gut-balling sorrow for her. She’s apologizing for Jack not being there like all of Jack’s girlfriends have apologized for his not being there—Anna Fram’s Camry pulling in front his school forty-five minutes after swim practice, Jack just called and asked if I could get you, he’s running late. A part of him wants to warn Mona that Jack’s going to Chicago will only move their problems a few hours west. But he says nothing, nods and smiles because it’s kind.

  Again she mentions she’s supposed to take him to dinner, but Connor says they don’t have to do anything fancy. So they get carryout from Corky & Lenny’s.

  It’s been almost two years since Connor’s been back to the sprawling brick colonial, and when Mona turns onto the cul-de-sac and the house comes into view, it takes a few seconds to register that it’s even his house. The big elm in the front yard has been cut, new pear trees in its place, the shutters a different shade of cream. If the Frams’ old house weren’t next door, looking exactly like it always had, Connor isn’t sure he would be able to place it at all.

  In a way it’s more Mona’s house than his—she left only a year ago, while he hasn’t lived here in six. She is the one with the garage door opener, the one who knows where to find soupspoons and napkins. Over pastrami sandwiches and steaming bowls of matzo ball soup at the kitchen table, Mona asks to see photos. He shows her pictures of Jorie at the hospital, with the Easter Bunny at Copleand Mall, in her baby swing in the apartment.

  “Laine and Jorie are both so beautiful,” Mona sighs. “I can’t believe how much I’ve missed.”

  And Connor believes her, wonders why it’s so easy for her to care about him and the things he loves, while Jack refuses to be a part of his life in any real way.

  By the time they put the dishes in the washer, it’s after eleven, and Mona says she has to drive to Chicago the next morning, says she should go to bed and disappears upstairs. Connor wanders the levels of the house, trying to find something sentimental, but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s snooping in someone else’s home.

  Since he left for college, his brother has changed the sofas; installed a series of bigger, flatter televisions and stereos throughout—nice furniture Connor has no associations with. The heavy cherry set in the dining room is the one they always had, but the lack of memories attached to it overwhelms him. His mother never cooked; his father never made it home for dinner. Growing up, they’d used the dining room table as a place to put mail and keys and other items easily lost.

  Boxes in the basement are full of discarded, broken things from his youth—hiking boots missing laces, cracked skis, concert T-shirts of bands he no longer likes, yearbooks signed by people he’s forgotten. A more recent box offers grammatically challenged term papers from the University of Colorado and assignments he must have forgotten to return to his students when he taught with AmeriCorps. There’s a set of child’s golf clubs his father gave him for his ninth birthday, but Connor’s father had been too busy and then too dead to ever take him to the course.

  Upstairs Jack’s old bedroom is exactly how Connor left it, the black-and-white poster of John Kennedy still looming over the desk. Pensive and presidential, Kennedy looks at him now, and Connor squints at the poster, to see if there’s any judgment left in its eyes. He can’t tell.

  The alarm clock on the table (he does have distinct memories of hating its clanking and bitching on weekday mornings) glows midnight, Jorie’s final feeding time, so Connor calls Laine in Boston.

  “How’s it going?” she asks. “Bridged any gaps yet?”

  He tells her that Jack isn’t even back yet. “I just feel like this is one more thing that he needs to apologize for,” Connor says. “One more way he’s sucking.”

  “Baby,” Laine sighs. “Just promise me you won’t expect some big dramatic moment. Okay? It’s not as though everything in his world changed because you knocked me up.”

  When he hangs up the phone, he looks out the window at the Frams’ old house, feels the same rush of self-pity he did at the hospital when he was fifteen. Unsure what to do, he gets into his old bed, still wearing his jeans and sweater, and thumbs through old comic books until the images blend into dreams. Three hours later, he wakes up to Kennedy staring at him again, and for a moment remembers exactly how it felt to live in this house with his brother and the women in his brother’s life. Hearing the garage door rumble, he runs down the stairs and through the kitchen to the garage like a dog excited to meet its owner.

  “Hey, kid, what are you still doing up?” Jack asks, pulling a shoulder bag and laptop case from the passenger side of a Porsche. Jack had always talked about getting one, but Connor had assumed he was fantasizing—like when
people talked about moving to an island or starting their own business. But there it is, shiny and dark. Jack is also shiny and dark, his jawline cleaner than Connor remembered.

  “When did you get the car?”

  “You like it?” Jack smiles his Jack smile, and Connor starts to think that maybe his default mental picture is true, that his brother is some other breed from a land of TV people where everyone is sleek and manicured and self-contained. “It’s my midlife crisis mobile, I got it when Mo and I broke up. I’m keeping it now that we’re back together.”

  And then Connor remembers that he’s mad.

  “I want to take some of the furniture and my stuff back with me, so Laine and I can have some sentimental things when we get our own place,” Connor says, the idea forming as he talks through it. “I can rent a U-Haul and drive it back. I’d really like it if you came with me. Just for a day or two.”

  “Conn, I’m just walking in the door. It’s like four in the morn—”

  “You could see Jorie, and we could switch the return part of my ticket, so you fly home from Logan.”

  “I don’t know,” Jack begins, but Mona appears in the doorway, arms folded across her chest from the cold.

  “You should go,” she says, winks at Connor. “You can not study for the bar in Boston just as well as you can not study for the bar here.”

  “I might have to go back to Chicago—”

  “It’s like one day.” Connor realizes he’s bordering on whining.

  Jack looks at Mona, who nods.

  “I can drive with you,” Jack finally says. “But I have to be back Monday.”

  So the next morning they rent a van. Without any discussion about who is going to pay, Jack clicks his credit card down on the counter. Without any discussion about who’s going to drive, Jack gets behind the wheel of the truck. Mona meets them at the front door, her hair pulled back into a thick ponytail, the Mona of Connor’s youth. The three of them load the dining room set, the golf clubs, the framed poster of Kennedy, and the boxes. Jack insists that since they’re already schlepping crap to a storage space in Boston that Connor at least take one of the TVs and the couch. So they load those, too. Connor rolls down the rear door and starts to lock the chain, but Jack stops him.