Watching an overindulged child rattle off the names of the state capitals isn’t something Jack would have thought he’d ever enjoy, but he and Mona stand around in his ex-sister-in-law’s new place encouraging Ryan and actually clapping. And even though it isn’t, it somehow feels familiar.
The whole discussion with Kathy had ended up being much easier than he’d envisioned. She has a court date the Monday after the party. True, Jack hadn’t mentioned the event until after he’d checked her docket, but when he finally did, he hadn’t even lied about Mona. He’d simply told Kathy that his ex-wife would be there too and waited for her to say something.
“Of course,” Kathy had said. “She and Conn have always been close.”
It had been a Sunday night and Kathy was wearing glasses on the end of her nose, her pale hair held back with a scrunchie. He’d felt more for her then than he ever had, so much that his heart actually seemed to swell and press against his ribs. “I’ll miss you,” he said, knowing it was true, but also knowing that he was taking Mona to Boston.
And he did. At seven this morning he kissed Kathy good-bye and picked Mona and Ryan up from the condo, where they’d never really lived together as a family. It was raining and Mona was wearing a fitted yellow slicker. Even though she and Ryan were under the building’s awning, she held a bright blue umbrella and she twirled it a tiny bit when he pulled the car around. It was something about that action, a simple flick of her wrist, that made him certain this was the right thing, maybe not for Mona or Kathy or even Ryan, but taking Mona to see his brother in Boston was the right thing for him.
When their plane shot into the air, he reached for the armrest but grabbed Mona’s hand by mistake. She smiled and squeezed his fingers, bumped her knee against his, and he’d felt it again.
Ryan didn’t seem to notice anything until they checked into a junior suite at the Harbor Hotel and started unpacking.
“Wait.” Ryan looked up from his video game. “Are you and Dad staying in the same room?”
“Is that okay?” Mona asked Ryan, but she was looking at Jack.
For the first time it occurred to Jack that his son could report back to Kathy, but the idea wasn’t frightening. He would have to talk to Kathy when he got back anyway. “What, you’re so old you need your own room now?” he asked lightly.
“I’m not sleeping with you, Dad, you snore.” Ryan shrugged and went back to his game.
Even when they showed up at Laine’s apartment this afternoon to get ready, no one had said anything about Kathy. Instead, Laine took her twice-over ex-sister-in-law into her arms. “It’s been too long,” she said.
And in this room full of his brother’s people in his brother’s city he’s stopped saying “ex” when he introduces Mona. She’s not correcting everyone either. And now their son is doing parlor tricks, impressing people by his ability to list trivial things like state capitals and the names of world leaders—the fruits of the overpriced private school he attends.
Mona taps Jack’s hip with hers and smiles. “Wonder who he gets it from?” she says, and Jack remembers the Cuyahoga County Geography Bee when he was nine. His father had brought stacks of xeroxed documents to go over; his mother had kept ducking out to check her calls at the pay phone. Both of them had been older and icier than the other parents, and yet they’d still been there. And Jack wonders if maybe that’s what’s really important, just showing up.
“We should get a picture of this,” Mona says. “Did you bring a camera?”
“We left it at home,” Jack says, realizing that he means the hotel room. But he doesn’t correct himself, because the junior suite at the Harbor is the only home the three of them have ever lived in together.
Connor’s interest in his grad-school tennis partner’s diatribe about the benefits of hatha yoga wouldn’t fill a thimble, but he sinks back in the cream-cheese leather sofa, sips a Corona, and pretends to care. He’s glad when Keelie rests her butt on the edge of the couch and touches his forearm.
“I got you a present, Daddy,” she says when the grad-school tennis player gets up for more mini crab cakes.
“You didn’t have to—”
“Daddy.” Keelie smiles, more sophisticated than thirteen. “It’s your birthday, of course I did. It’s in my room.”
She takes his hand and leads him down the hall to her girlie room, where everything is shabby chic linens and baby’s breath. It’s almost identical to the one she has in his apartment, only this one is twice as large. He sits on her bed and fiddles with the lace of the long canopy, while she brings out a large wrapped rectangle, obviously a framed poster or painting.
Expecting something thoughtless and haphazard, he is floored when he rips off the curled ribbons and red foil paper, revealing the framed black-and-white poster of John F. Kennedy, the exact print that hung over his desk in high school.
“Where—” He shakes his head at his daughter. She’s already achingly beautiful, and will only become more beautiful.
“I remembered it in our basement.” Keelie’s grin is wide, her satiny cheeks dimpled. “And Mom was always saying it was the only thing you took with you from your house in Cleveland. So I went to the Kennedy Library, and they had the same one.”
Then he’s on his feet holding her small, soft body. “It’s the most amazing thing anyone has ever given me.”
“Really? It wasn’t that big a deal, I just took the T to the Kennedy Libr—”
“No, Ke, I mean it,” he says, and feels as though an anvil has been lifted from his back, because he knows that she will be okay. No matter what happens, Keelie will be fine, because she has the skills to negotiate the world and depth below the sparkly eye shadow and pinked lips.
“I love you so much,” he says, and then she is only thirteen—shy, and short, saying she loves him, too. Then she just stands there.
“You better get back to your friends.” He tilts his head in the direction of the door, and she retreats to the safe and superficial.
When she’s gone, he holds the poster at arm’s length and stares into the flat black eyes of the late president. Then he goes to find his brother.
In the room her mother keeps for her but Jorie rarely uses, she and Brandon sit on the bed someone else made and pass the bottle of vodka between them. He tells her about what she’s missed at school, about a party they’re invited to next Saturday. His hand is on her knee, and she lets it stay there, lets him slide the hand along her thigh, considers the possibility that she’s wrong to hate him. She feels herself floating above his touch, until he runs fingers under her top and tweaks her nipple. She pushes him away.
“Get off me, I don’t want to.”
“Okay.” Brandon strokes her hair. “Whatever you want.”
“Why are you even here?” Jorie asks, and because she wants him to leave, adds, “Shouldn’t you be off banging a cheerleader?”
“What are you talking about? I love you.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you think you love me?”
“I don’t know.” Brandon shrugs. “Because you’re beautiful and smart, and you know things.”
She remembers his face hanging over hers during sex, twisted and stupid, the way he panted and moved with more urgency when he got close to orgasm.
“Can you just go?” she says, and looks at her black boots. “I really just want you to leave.”
When she looks up he’s gone, and she distracts herself with the mail her mother stacked on her desk. Letters and pamphlets from colleges that’d apparently gotten wind of her astronomical PSAT scores, far away schools like Cornell, Columbia, Penn, Chicago, Rice, Stanford, and Miami (though they might have been more interested in the results of the Girl You Want to Fuck poll). But then she thinks of her father alone in the city without her. Earlier in the parking lot he’d looked faded, and she’d seen defeat in his eyes she recognized from her childhood, when she was only allowed into his hospital room for a few minutes at
a time. She remembers he took her finger in his hand, their secret gesture since she was a baby. Taking another sip of vodka, she reminds herself to be more vigilant in making him see doctors, eat vegetables, and go to the gym. One more sip, and she goes back to the party to check on him.
Even though the party is for grown-ups, it’s morphed into the kind of event she goes to with Brandon and his friends. Her mother and the dweeb dance in the living room, people laugh and bump into the heavy stone coffee table, everyone lubricated by wine and spirits.
“Where’s Brandon?” Keelie asks when Jorie stumbles back into the living room without him. Jorie has a fleeting imagine of Brandon wandering around the Back Bay streets, wondering what he did wrong, but she pushes it out of her mind. “I sent him to boink a cheerleader,” she says, words muffled by a wad of gum to mask the vodka. “What difference does it make to you?”
Keelie shrugs.
“Did you dye your hair to look more like me?” Keelie asks.
And for the first time Jorie realizes her sister does have black hair. It’s not as though Jorie forgot, it’s simply that Jorie never thinks about Keelie—days go by at her father’s house where Jorie doesn’t remember she has a sister.
But that’s not why. On Thursday Jorie had been studying at Café Paridisio, avoiding Brandon and the boys at Natick Senior High who wanted to fuck her, when a familiar-looking blond man asked if she was Laine Rosen’s daughter. Jorie nodded, and the man told her to say hi from Mike Murphy. It was a solid hour before Jorie realized that the man was the same one in the decaying prom photos in her mother’s old room at her grandmother’s house. And Jorie had thought about her mother at her age, having sex, making As, and shuffling between the houses of her mother and father. Until one day, poof, a broken condom or a failed diaphragm, whatever it was, then a wedding in January and Jorie’s birthday the next month. It had made Jorie’s stomach bunch into her spine, and she stopped by CVS for the Clairol on the T ride home.
“Did you dye your hair to look like me?” Keelie asks again.
“You mean fat?” Jorie says.
Keelie’s dark eyes darken. “You’re just saying that.”
“If that’s what you want to believe.” Jorie turns away from her sister, starts looking through the old CDs alphabetized on built-in wall shelving.
“So I heard you were voted Girl You Most Want to Fuck,” Keelie says. “That’s the kind of thing that makes Mom and Dad really proud.”
“Well at least people want to fuck me,” Jorie says without turning around. “You know, because I’m not fat.”
Taking down Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run album, she checks the playlist on the case. A few seconds later she hears Keelie walk away.
To be fair, Jorie has almost forgotten “Thunder Road” was her parents’ song, almost blotted out memories of driving around strapped in her child seat in the back of the Jetta while her parents sang in the front. She does, however, experience a momentary happiness when the harmonica’s whine starts, and her mother stiffens in the dweeb’s arms. But then her mother breaks away from Steve, gray eyes circling the room for the source of the music. Jorie is surprised that she can’t look at her and bows her head. Her mother excuses herself, scurrying down the hall so no one will see her fall apart. From across the room, Steve squints at Jorie. She shrugs and goes back to her room.
Holding the poster at arm’s length, Jack feels himself becoming misty-eyed and philosophical.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Connor asks.
“Didn’t Dad get this for me originally?” Jack asks. “On like the one family vacation the four of us ever took. New York or something?”
“Not New York, D.C. I was five.” Connor says, and Jack is surprised, both because his brother is right and because Connor rarely talks about their father. “Dad had to work and Mom thought it would be nice if we all went. But then she had a headache, so he had to take us around, and you kept sneaking off to call Anna Fram.”
“That’s right. It was like a hundred degrees, and Dad almost punched the paddleboat guy at the Lincoln Memorial.”
For the second time in as many hours, Jack finds himself thinking of his father and mother. About how when he had been an orphan at twenty-five, his brother fifteen, people always assumed their parents must have died together in some sort of accident, car wreck, plane crash, fire. How else could you be careless enough to lose both parents so early? But now he’s at the age where most people he knows have lost one if not both of their parents, where no one makes those assumptions anymore. And he wants to say something, feels that uneasiness he did on the phone with his niece last month.
“It all comes back around.” Jack shakes his head, because that’s not quite right. “Everything is just so fucking fluid, you know?”
“Is that why Mona’s here?” Connor raises his eyebrows. “Are you guys back together again?”
“Yeah.” Jack nods. “I think so.”
“What about Kathy? I thought you were engaged.”
“We were; we are. I don’t know.” Jack sighs. “But Mo and I have Ryan, a fucking barrel of history. That stuff’s important.”
Connor just looks at him.
“It’s something you should probably think about with Laine.” Jack’s not entirely sure but adds, “That guy with her is a total putz.”
“Steve’s a good man.”
“Maybe.” Jack shoos Connor’s words away. “But she’s still crazy about you—”
“Jack, she’s happy or almost happy, a lot happier than before.”
“She still loves you,” Jack says, and Connor shakes his head, says that’s not always enough. But Jack wants to say more, in truth more for himself than for his brother. “All I’m saying is that these things are more fluid than you might think.”
“Is ‘fluid’ like some new word you just learned?” Connor asks, and Jack tries to remember where he did pick it up, why it’s suddenly become his mantra.
“Eh, I think some guy used it in a New Yorker cartoon,” he says. “I’ve been trying it out.”
Jack is in the middle of a sentence, something about Ryan and an L train and the Lincoln Park Zoo, when it hits Connor, something akin to being thrown an object too heavy to catch. He’s not just tired anymore but exhausted, the bedroom and the skyline through the window, a series of spinning floating colors, bleeding out of their lines.
“. . . And the judge is standing next to me, right there at the lion cage,” Jack is saying, but Connor holds up his hand to cut him off.
Jack’s eyes slim, and he sets his diet soda on the nightstand. All the humor is gone from his voice, he asks, “You okay, kid?”
In the months when Connor had been sickest, Jack had flown back and forth from Chicago to Boston to yell at doctors and demand answers when Connor was too weak, Laine too frazzled. And Jack would be there again if Connor asked. Be there to get Connor into the office of every specialist in the Western world, to throw money around, to threaten lawsuits. But things are different now. Jack has his own son, his estranged wife, and a fiancée back in Chicago. And Connor is no longer a kid.
“I’m just really tired,” Connor says. “I’m going to go to the bathroom, splash some water on my face.”
Jack nods, says he should find Mona.
Someone is in the bathroom in the hall, so Connor goes to the one in the master suite. It’s unlocked and dark, but when he pushes open the door and flips the light switch, Laine is sitting on the edge of the tub, long legs out in front of her, head droopy. She’s not an emotional woman, but he can see she’s upset, a crumpled piece of toilet paper in her hand. Immediately on her feet, she sniffles back whatever it is she is sniffling and smoothes the seams of her long black skirt.
“I’m sorry.” Connor starts to back away, unsure what’s appropriate anymore. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Laine waves the hand with the crumpled tissue.
“What’s wrong?”
Laine shrugs with open palms. “Listen.”
/>
And he does. Springsteen’s raspy voice floating through the condo, so faint it’s almost imagined. Seventeen years ago, driving around with Laine in the rusting Nissan Sentra. Both of them young and pretty, Laine’s stomach growing with Jorie. Even then he wasn’t sure he loved her, knew only that he should because she was smart and capable and he was lucky to have her.
“Jorie put the song on.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and she looks down again. “I don’t know why she does these things to you.”
“Well, whatcha gonna do?” she asks. “Are you okay? You look a little piqued.”
Telling her would be so simple, would make things better. If he told her any of it, she would take charge, make him better through her platinum will alone.
“Conn?” Eyebrows pitched in tents of worry, she looks so much like Jorie, or at least how Jorie used to look before her run-in with Clairol. It would be easy to tell Laine, but he won’t. He’s not her responsibility anymore. It’s not her job to help him die, because he doesn’t want the burden of loving her if he lives.
“I’m groovy sweet like a peppermint stick,” he says, and she smiles, perhaps the saddest smile he’s ever seen.
“I miss you saying that.” She’s saying she still loves him. And it makes everything in his body throb that he’s still hurting her, after all these years of hurting her, after she’s married to the kind of guy she should have married in the first place. She puts her hand on his shoulder, steps closer than Steve Humboldt would probably like. “Do you ever miss me?”
He knows she’s really asking if he still loves her.
“Lainey, I don’t—” he stops. He doesn’t what? Doesn’t love her? Isn’t it some kind of love that makes him not want to hurt her so badly that he can’t finish the sentence? “Of course I miss you.”
Neither one of them says anything, and they’re once again aware of Springsteen, so faint it’s almost gone. Her fingers are still on his shoulder, and she’s close enough that he can smell the chocolate on her breath from the fondue. Taking her hand off his shoulder, he holds it, slides his other arm around the back of her waist and starts swaying to the music.
Family and Other Accidents Page 25