She squirms and murmurs his name, eyes still closed.
“I’m here,” he says, positioning a pillow under her head.
“You didn’t come to the appointment today.” Thick with sleep, the sentence is really one long word. “Picture’s in the kitchen.” Then she’s out again, in some deep pregnant-woman slumber.
It wasn’t as though Jack grew up thinking he would never have children, they always seemed something certain but distant, like root canals and taxes. His own father hadn’t been a parent until he was thirty-nine, and Jack had only been twenty-seven when he met Mona. Back then he’d thought she was cute and simple, that they’d date a few weeks, maybe a month. It took him years to realize he cared for her, had taken her leaving Cleveland for him to realize he wanted to be with her. He’d probably promised her children to win her back. He’d promised her everything else—the move to Chicago, the lavish wedding at the Drake Hotel. But after a few months, everything defaulted back to normal, and things like kids seemed distant again.
Held to the refrigerator with a Cubs magnet is a black-and-white printout from the sonogram. Looking at swirls of their blended genes, Jack isn’t sure what he’s supposed to feel.
Everything is pulled tighter and tighter, like fabric stretched too thin, but somehow things don’t tear. As the days blur into weeks, weeks into months, Jack carries Tums in his pockets and keeps bottled antacid liquids in his desk drawer and glove compartment. And things continue to stretch.
Mona stops throwing up and everything about her rounds. Her curls tighten to Victorian ringlets, her breasts and stomach inflated beach balls, her cheeks soft and full. Surprisingly Jack thinks she looks good. It doesn’t change the astral quality of her touch, doesn’t make him forgive her, doesn’t stop him from screwing Kathy on his office floor, but he does recognize the empirical beauty of his pregnant wife.
Even though he’s going to lose the department store case, he works late because he has always worked late, calls Mona from his office because that’s routine, too.
“I’m going to pick something up for dinner and stop home for a while,” he says. “Is there anything you want? Something you feel like?”
“No, just get the usual wherever you go,” Mona says. “Anything’s fine.”
Having watched enough movies, he knows pregnant women have cravings and he finds odd things in the kitchen—glass jars of pimento olives and maraschino cherries, twigs of beef jerky and licorice ropes—but since the missed sonogram appointment, she has asked him for nothing.
In a big, old house in Boston’s suburbs, Connor also stops throwing up. Having finished a course of chemo treatments, the doctors have started him on radiation, which makes his skin itch. At night he calls Jack’s office.
“Tell me anything to keep me from scratching,” Connor says. “Tell me about Mo and the baby. Are you still thinking ‘R’?”
Tucking the phone between his ear and shoulder, Jack glances at the stacks of documents on his desk. The department store chain is owned by Donald Ryan, and that seems fitting.
“We like ‘Ryan’ this week,” Jack says.
“Ryan Reed? Sounds like a character on Days of Our Lives. I guess it could work if he grows up to be a Wall Street guy.”
“Yeah, it’s a name that doesn’t mess around.”
“Did you finish the nursery?”
“Not yet. Mo bought everything from some catalog, and it came in four thousand pieces. Her sister is coming over to help us put it together.”
Parts of the story are true. The other day Jack noticed boxes in the extra bedroom and heard Mona tell her sister she’d ordered furniture. But she didn’t ask Jack to help.
“How is Melanie?” Connor asks. “I haven’t seen her since your wedding.”
Chugging another unmeasured dose of Mylanta, Jack weaves together more half-truths until he hears sleep creep into his brother’s voice across the line.
As night morphs into morning and the janitor’s vacuum buzzes down the hall, Jack strokes Kathy’s dewy buttocks when they finish fucking.
The trial starts in a month, and the two of them dress and drive to Cook County Courthouse to drop off a motion they don’t trust to the messenger service.
“I always wanted to live in one of these houses,” Kathy says as they pass the huge brick houses in the suburbs. Jack realizes he has no idea where she’s from—he’d assumed somewhere in the East. In fact, he realizes he knows very little about her at all other than that she never asks more from him than what he gives. Remembering Laine’s story about the love affair in Boston, he decides to test her.
“See those.” Jack points at two of the larger houses. “The wife of the one there had a long affair with the man of the other house. For convenience they dug tunnels linking them underground.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Jack says carefully. “It was the kind of arrangement where the spouses knew.”
“Didn’t they hit water from the lake?” Kathy asks. “A lot of these places don’t have basements for that reason.”
“It’s just something I heard.”
They stop to shower at Kathy’s apartment, where everything is orderly and sterile like the rooms in furniture stores with cardboard display appliances. He wonders about the artifacts of her life—photos, papers, open envelopes of mail she hasn’t dealt with, sections of the Tribune she is saving to read—but all that is hidden. Her CDs are alphabetized on freestanding metal racks, and he thumbs through them for any hint of who she really is. He notices she has one by the Talking Heads.
“Is that song on here?” He flips over the case and looks at the play list on the back. “That one about the days going by and the water flowing?”
“I don’t really know.” She comes out of the bathroom with a towel fashioned into a turban around her head, her body bare and damp. “I think it originally belonged to someone else.”
She doesn’t specify if that someone is an ex-lover, a current lover, an old roommate, or some sibling she hadn’t mentioned. He doesn’t ask.
Putting the CD in the changer, they skip forward until they find it. “Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down. Letting the days go by, water flowing underground.” And things stretch farther and tighter than Jack ever thought they could.
It’s a call Jack almost forgot he was expecting, but it comes on a Saturday evening, while he’s in the kitchen reheating leftover sesame beef, the smell of Kathy still under his fingernails.
“It’s in the fluid around his lungs and heart.” The voice on the other end is his sister-in-law’s, toneless and beaten. “They’re going to give him six cycles of MOPP and targeted radiation. They want to get started by the end of the week.”
Seventeen years ago Jack had halfheartedly been studying for a Literature and the Law exam that didn’t really matter because he’d already accepted a job with the biggest firm in D.C., when Connor called to tell him their mother had dropped dead of an aneurysm. It had been such a large idea that Jack hadn’t been able to react. Finally he simply asked Connor where he was, because that information seemed something for which there was a logical course of action—find orphaned fifteen-year-old brother.
He asks the same thing of Laine now, even though he saw the number on the caller ID and knows she’s at home.
“I’m in the kitchen; he’s outside with the girls,” Laine says. “He wanted to wait until after Mona had the baby to tell you, but I thought you should know.”
“Fuck.” Jack hurls the food into the garbage. “What do you need me to do?”
“What can you do?” Laine asks. “We were supposed to go to Orlando next weekend—this stupid Women in Finance conference, where Merrill Lynch parades me around cuz I don’t look like a troll. I have to give a speech, but we figured we’d take the girls to Disney. He says we should go without him or he can go with us and wait a week to start treatment. But I want to hit this thing with a fucking truck now.”
“Should I come there?” Jack
asks. “I could stay with him, and you could go with the kids.”
“I don’t know; Mona’s really pregnant.”
“She’s not due for another month,” Jack says, absently surprised he knows.
“Maybe.”
When he gets off the phone, nothing has been solved. He’s dazed, more so even than when Connor initially told him he was sick. Then there had been so much research, doctors, treatment centers, disease history. At this point Jack could write a dissertation on Hodgkin’s disease, knows its spreading follows a pattern, each stage lopping off chunks of the survival rate. Like all things in Jack’s life, however, it’s not up to him.
On the cream couch, Mona, open Harper’s in her lap, drifts between awake and asleep.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, instantly alert. “Who was on the phone?”
“Laine.” He shakes his head, looks at the ground. “He’s sick again.”
Mona’s up, fast as her rounded body allows. Jack should offer his arm, but everything in him is heavy and planted on the Oriental rug.
“Jack, I’m so sorry,” Mona says, and he believes her. There’s an honesty in her cool arms around his neck, her head against his shoulder. “It’s not fair. I’m so sorry.”
And then he’s kissing her like he hasn’t kissed her in a year. Faces pressed close, he feels her tears on his cheeks, salt water bitter on his tongue. He can’t even remember the last time they made love, but he lays her on the sofa and rips at her gauzy maternity shirt as if his life depended on it. In some ways it might. Every taste and touch about her is different and the same, like they’re underwater. She’s still crying, though it’s probably not about his brother anymore. When they finish, he kneels on the floor, rests his head on her alien breasts, and she strokes his brow with swollen fingers.
“I think I have to go to Boston,” he says, checking to see if that glimmer of selfishness is in her eyes, hopes it’s not, because if it’s gone, maybe things between them can be fixed.
“Do whatever they need.”
“So I should probably try to get some work done.”
In his hair, her fingers stop moving, and he feels her holding her breath.
“Mo?”
“Melanie’s college roommate heads IT at Kirkland,” she finally says. “I know about Blond Ponytail, Jack.”
He doesn’t say he’s sorry, because he isn’t sure he is. Inching up so they’re at eye level, he touches her enormous belly, wanting their unborn child to kick or shift, to give some sign. It does nothing.
“You need to make some decisions.” Mona’s voice is gentle, but she says it with more authority than anything she has ever said in all the years he has known her. “Your nine months are almost up.”
And he knows his red-haired wife means she isn’t going to be okay with tunnels.
Strangely, for the first time in months, Connor looks good. He has gained weight, softening the angles in his face, and his hair has started to grow back, the shorter length neater than the foppish mess he had before. He fastens his daughters into the seats of the limo Laine’s company sent, while Laine speaks to Jack on the front porch.
“This whole thing is ridiculous,” she says, nervous and jumpy, hair haphazardly tied back. “I shouldn’t go. You know what cocksuckers those doctors are. They tell us everything’s manageable, they’ve got drugs to make everything a-okay, then Conn’s ralphing for hours.”
“Lainey, it’s three days.” Connor comes up behind her, musses her hair. “Jack and I can watch the Indians game and pick up girls; it’s much easier to pick up girls when you’re not around.”
Her lips turn up in something not quite a smile. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“Please. If I get really sick, the girls shouldn’t see.”
She nods, leans in, whispers something in his ear, and Jack looks away, because Connor is so certain of his wife and children. Reaching for the antacid tablets that leave white powder in his pockets, Jack realizes if he could switch bodies with his brother, he would without question.
“Why do they make this so difficult?” Connor asks on the drive to the hospital two hours later. He’s trying to cram new batteries into a portable CD player, but they’re upside down. “It’s not like I want to put the space shuttle into orbit.”
One hand easy on the steering wheel, Jack reaches across the gear console, turns the batteries around and slides them in.
“You nervous?” He hands Connor the Walkman.
“COPP wasn’t so much fun.” Connor sighs, shoves the radio into the backpack with a Harvard sweatshirt and crayon drawings his daughters made; if he could switch bodies with his brother, Jack wonders what he would bring. “I can’t imagine I’m going to dig MOPP any more. Let’s talk about something else. I told you not to come, at least tell me you and Mo have everything ready?”
“We’re getting there.” Jack assesses things he knows about Mona’s pregnancy. “She had this painter do the walls in different colors—one blue, one red—it sounds stupid but it looks great.”
“Yeah, it will be nice for Ryan, too, all that color stimulation.” Connor relaxes in the leather seat, asking questions about kicking and weight.
Jack makes up answers and it gets them into the parking lot and up the elevator to the comfy chairs in Oncology. While Connor is poked and measured by the nurses, Jack gets coffee from the machine in the hall—the familiar burned taste, the familiar burn in his chest. Kathy gave him cross-exam questions he could read, but instead he looks at the sign by the elevator listing Maternity on the second floor.
“Excuse me,” says a doctor he and Laine haven’t exasperated yet. “Can you hit down?”
Jack does, and the doors pop apart. The doctor steps in and cocks his head at Jack.
“Are you coming?” he asks, hand holding the elevator open.
“No,” Jack says, backing away. “Just looking.”
Connor meets him in the hall. “I’m all full of nuke juice,” he says cheerfully.
He looks okay, but on the drive back to Natick, the antinausea meds kick in, and he rolls in and out of sleep. Waking up, he pulls on his sweatshirt and fiddles with the vent until Jack shuts off the air conditioner even though it’s eighty-five degrees outside. Connor’s head droops again, and his breathing changes. Jack yawns himself and thinks about what would happen if he fell asleep at the wheel, if Connor’s Jetta drifted off the side of the road into the median. Is there a way for his brother to escape unscathed? Some way to wreck only the driver’s side?
“We’re here already?” Connor asks when they safely pull into the driveway ten minutes later.
They turn on the game on the flat-screen TV in the den. Connor starts trembling, and Jack brings him an afghan from the hall closet.
“How much time are you taking off after Ryan is born?” Connor balls into the blanket, Mouse at his feet. “If you can swing it, you should try to go part-time for a while.”
“Maybe,” Jack says, though the department store trial should be in full throttle right around the time Mona has the baby. “At least at first.”
The Indians give up three runs in the second inning; Connor is out before the bottom of the third. Lowering the volume, Jack tries reading over Kathy’s questions, but they’re perfect.
Then he isn’t reading. His neck is cramped from falling asleep at an odd angle, the papers are on his head, and somewhere in the house Mouse is barking and Connor is calling him. Both feet asleep, Jack hobbles to the powder room. Still wrapped in the afghan, Connor is on the toilet trying to shit, puke into a waste can, and shoo the dog from vomit on the floor. It might be the most horrible thing Jack has ever seen—more horrible than news footage of the ski-lift disaster or plane crashes or car wrecks or elevator accidents.
“Can you put him outside?” Connor wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, points to the dog. “He tries to eat it when people throw up.”
Taking Mouse by the collar, Jack leads the dog through the sliding door to the yard, wi
th its enormous trees and sturdy wooden jungle gym. Though he’d absently been aware of the warming temperatures and the changing of his suit fabrics from wool to linen/silk blends, Jack realizes for the first time that everything is green. They have made it through winter; his nine months really are up.
Back on the bathroom’s floor, Connor is balled, groveling to an imaginary king, the afghan a cape over his shoulders, jogging pants and boxers at his ankles. Trying to avoid the vomit, Jack squats beside him.
“Come on, kid.” He puts a hand on Connor’s blanketed back. “Floor’s not where you want to sleep. Let me get you upstairs.”
Sitting up, Connor leans against the side of the toilet but doesn’t make any move to leave the bathroom.
“You want to know the funny thing?” he asks, voice splintered and cracked as kindling.
And Jack nods even though he doesn’t want to know, because it’s not going to be funny, it’s going to be terrible. What can really be funny when you’re crumpled on the floor, stomach heaving, teeth chattering, eyes watery and red. What’s funny when you’re thirty-two years old, and MOPP has been leaked into your veins to weed-whack hair that just grew in.
“Sure, what’s the funny thing?”
“Pretty much my whole life I figured our parents screwed us genetically,” Connor says. “I thought I’d live to be fifty, fifty-five tops. So I try to do everything the way they didn’t—have my kids young enough so I can make it through their graduations, maybe see them squeeze out a pup or two of their own, you know?”
“Conn, stop—”
“I have no memories of Dad, Jack, and I was ten when he died. Keelie won’t even be six until November.”
Family and Other Accidents Page 18