Among the Dead and Dreaming

by Samuel Ligon

  “Not very well,” I told her.

  “Me, neither,” she said.

  “For one crazy second, I thought you were her on the phone,” I said.

  “I know,” Beth said. “I do that, too.”

  “Like she’s lingering,” I said, and Beth said, “Exactly.”

  “Did you know she was pregnant?” I said

  “Yes,” Beth said. “But I didn’t know if you knew yet.”

  “Of course I knew,” I said. “But then, lately, these last couple days or hours, I’ve been confused about it, like questioning it. Like maybe it isn’t even true.”

  A silence hung between us.

  “Like maybe it’s just a dream,” I said.

  “A dream?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was with her when she took the test,” Beth said. “It wasn’t a dream.”

  “What was it?”

  “She was pregnant.”

  “What else?” I said

  “What else what?”

  “What else did she say about it?

  “Just—. How happy she knew you’d both be.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Anyone would have been.”

  “It’s so awful,” Beth said.

  “I have to go,” I said, and I hung up the phone, knowing what I already knew. Knowing it even more.

  It rang again a few minutes later, and I was certain it was Nikki. Okay, I thought, she has a right to know everything. But it was Liz, who I hadn’t talked to in months. She’d left a million messages, and now she was calling twice in one day. I picked up and she told me she’d learned about the accident through my sister, and how sorry she was. I knew Liz would do whatever she could to help. Probably. I also knew she wanted something I wasn’t going to give her.

  Before she could bring up Kara Tomlinson, I told her about Cynthia’s baby, everything spilling out of me.

  “Slow down,” she kept saying. “Take a breath.”

  “It wasn’t mine,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “But still.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was practically unemployed. We’d shared so much love and focus and commitment—so much work and love and work all mixed together—that my disengagement from my current job would be incomprehensible to her.

  She told me she’d do whatever she could.

  One hand washes the other, I thought.

  She told me she loved me.

  I told her I loved her too, then hung up before she could bring up Kara and whatever they wanted me to do. I was done with all that.

  She called again and I ignored her. She called several more times, before giving up. If Liz had been somebody else, we would have gotten married and had kids and taken them to Cubs games. I would have left the lying life of politics and done something different, though what that might have been was unclear since I didn’t possess any skills, except lying. Maybe there was a good kind of lying you could do, some kind of charity lying, a job in the God industry. I didn’t know who Liz would be if she were somebody else. Certainly not Cynthia. And I didn’t know what role I could play in the God industry. Liz had thought it was the business with Kara Tomlinson that made me quit Lambert, and it was a little, but watching my mother die over those long months had made me hungry for something I couldn’t name. I was too afraid to think I was wasting my entire life, so I ran to New York and Cynthia without much reflection. If Cynthia had been somebody else, we would have had kids and taken them to Mets games and hosted charity barbeques. Maybe we would have found something worth fighting to save.

  “Our baby,” Cynthia would have said.

  “Oh, please,” I said. “Your baby. Kyle’s baby.”

  “Anybody’s baby.”

  “Exactly.”

  Kara

  Our first meeting was at the Original Pancake House in Wilmette, the place packed with families and hungover frat boys and Mark all shy and misty. When he asked what I planned to do, I looked at my melon bowl and cottage cheese and brought out one tear and then another, like in that Nirvana song when Kurt Cobain says, “The greatest day that I ever had, was when I learned to cry on command,” and I didn’t say anything, Mark like, “It’s going to be okay,” handing me a bandana from his pocket, as if I’m going to touch my face with that thing. I’d known before, but now I really knew how scared David was, just because of this Mark dude, obviously some power guy, waiting for me to stop crying—not that I would ever have hurt David. But they must have been crazy to read me as some teenage sex victim. As if I were Jerry Springer material. As if any of it!

  With David and me, I was just so flattered at first. We’d drink champagne at the Drake, the lake huge out his window across Lake Shore Drive, and I’d feel so glamorous and sophisticated and not at all out of place—not once I got over the fact that this guy with so much to lose was investing his entire future in me, especially after he moved to DC. When I told him on the phone I was pregnant, I wasn’t looking for anything—I was already completely in love with him, and just wanted him to know about the baby. But he freaked out, that dude Mark calling not ten minutes later to set up a breakfast meeting after my Saturday dance class. And all I could think was, Do you really think I’m this cheap and trashy? And, okay, if I’m nothing more than a lay to you, you’re nothing more than a lay to me, too. So what?

  We sat at the Original Pancake House, then drove to the lake and walked, Mark outlining options, the payoff. Of course he’d pay for the procedure, but he’d also provide something extra for my time, something for college, say 10,000? The whole thing was like a soap opera, and I was like, “I just want to think about this a little more.”

  The threats came a week later, sort of indirect and irrelevant. As if I didn’t know my father was cheating on my mother. But then David and I started talking again—really talking—and we fell deeper in love, which was why I didn’t understand Mark’s tone when we met again the next week at the Skokie Lagoons.

  “You can do whatever you want,” he said. “But there’s a hard way and an easy way, that’s all I’m saying.”

  I knew how unhappy David was in his marriage. We were talking on the phone every night, growing closer and closer. And it was like Mark hadn’t gotten the memo.

  “How does Jenny feel about all this?” I asked him.

  “Is that how you want to play it?” he said. “Ruin the man’s life?”

  We were walking toward the water, Mark giving off his thug vibe, the role he’d been cultivating since threatening to smear my dad in the newspapers. I wondered if he had a briefcase full of money in the trunk of his car. Or a gun.

  “Doesn’t he deserve to be happy?” I said.

  “We’re talking about what you deserve,” Mark said.

  That’s when I knew someone else was pulling the strings, Mark probably. Because David was always available when I called now and we’d talk into the night, just about everything, and maybe it was the hormones or whatever, but I was starting to understand how unhappy he really was, how stressed he was in his work, how he wanted another life, and me, stupid, actually sort of believed him.

  “What do I deserve?” I asked Mark, and that’s when I got scared. It wasn’t quite the way he looked at me—this squinty appraisal—more just the words themselves bringing up a mental image of my body crumpled in a dumpster somewhere.

  “I’m not convinced it’s what he wants,” I said. “He wants another life,” I said.

  “You want to ruin his career?” Mark said. “And all the good he’s trying to do?”

  Two men in lawn chairs sat fishing by the launch ramp. A band of retarded adults wandered around a picnic blanket on the lawn. Kayaks and canoes skimmed across the water. “I know he’s not happy,” I said. “He talks about another life.”

  Mark dialed his phone and said, “She needs to know exactly what you want. St
op torturing her.” He handed it to me.

  “Are you busy?” I said, and David said, “Not at all. What’s up?”

  I waved Mark away and walked toward the water. I’d been so sure that day at the Original Pancake House, but all my talks with David had made me realize that nothing has to be inevitable. “So you want me to do this?” I said, and he said, “I want you to do what’s best for you,” and I said, “Is this what you want me to do?”

  “If it’s right for you, yes.”

  “What if it’s not right for me?”

  I was just trying to push him back to how we were on the phone at night or how we’d been in our suite at the Drake. His silence told me everything, and I felt so stupid then, as if I’d ever want a baby in the first place.

  “I’ll support whatever you decide,” he said, but I knew he’d become a puppet, saying the same phrases over and over when you pulled the string on his back. That’s what really scared me. How he wasn’t even human anymore.

  I turned and Mark was beside me. I handed him the phone.

  If David had told me to drop everything and come to DC, get an abortion or don’t get an abortion, I would have done it. That’s what I regret, I guess, or what’s so hard to get over—just how much I opened myself to him. And once I understood he didn’t want me, I felt so stupid for ever having considered keeping it. If he’d just been honest with me, I never would have sunk into any feeling of possibility, not that I didn’t shake the whole thing off immediately.

  After Mark made the final offer—fifty thousand—he mentioned my brother Danny selling coke at Amherst, how far he’d fall, and I knew then that Mark could figure out anything, could track down dirt on anyone and destroy them. I was just so tired of the whole stupid game and never would have said a word about it to anyone, whether they paid me or not, but I took the money and spent every goddamn dime of it and never felt another thing about any of it except disgust. Then I wanted just a little more, ten thousand maybe, or twenty, but Mark’s phone was disconnected and some bitch in David’s office passed me off to some other bitch who said she’d track him down. He’d be in touch, she said. But he didn’t get in touch.

  I imagined him out in the world somewhere, killing people and paying people, and then I remembered how cow-eyed he was that day at the Original Pancake House and I didn’t know which version of him was true. It’s not that I regret my decision—far from it. But once the money was gone, I was like, Okay, what do I really have here?

  David

  You think you’ll never stop looking over your shoulder, knowing it might be revealed at any moment, hobbling you for the rest of your political life, if not destroying you. But time passes and you realize that what’s buried might stay buried. I punished myself for months, struggled to understand how love blooms. Good luck can go to your head, I know that much. You start to believe the press. We never should have beaten Thompson in ’98—the odds were too long—but we did. You start to believe in your own mythology, your own invincibility. And then you realize the hubris, fear finally infecting you once it becomes all too apparent what damage that kind of scandal can do. All that’s left then is the hope that you can bury it deep enough that it never sees light again.

  Her skin was flawless, her face radiant. She had the most beautiful body I’d ever seen, a dancer’s body. We’d spend hours at the Drake during my recounts, Clinton’s impeachment hearing on TV in the background. This is what I mean by hubris. She was only sixteen, a junior in high school, though I would have guessed she was twenty. Liz knew nothing about it. I would sneak away. Mark didn’t know. It was just the two of us—becoming one. That might sound trite or clichéd, but it’s just a limitation of the language, because there is no language for what our bodies knew, our souls. My recount was certified after Clinton’s impeachment, two days before Kara’s birthday. That’s when I learned she was sixteen when things had started. I love my wife, my children. I thought a lot about Clinton’s risk-taking behavior, identified with it completely. I knew what a fool I was.

  You’ve never seen skin this warm and smooth, this electric to your touch. I was only 34, twice her age, yes, but just barely. I never doubted her when she said she was pregnant, never thought she was playing me. It broke my heart to turn my back on her emotionally, though in many ways I was more available to her those last few weeks than at any other time in our relationship. But she was as good as dead to me. There’s no other way to say it. That was the horrible part. That and Mark’s silent judgement, as if I were a monster. I would have kept that baby, raised that baby, sacrificed everything for that baby if that’s what Kara had wanted, something Mark and Liz never understood. They could only consider the punishment I deserved, the punishment Kara deserved. I respect Mark’s intelligence, his integrity, but I also believe he’s sacrificed some part of himself to his ambition. He was devastated that I couldn’t live up to what he’d made of me, what he wanted me to be. He was like a child, breaking what he’d once loved. I told him I was sorry. I offered to go public. Neither of them would hear it. This is what I mean by ambition. This is what I mean when I say that once someone wants a piece of you, wants to believe in you and live through you, that they die inside. Liz got over it. Mark didn’t. It was his inability to forgive that destroyed him. And too much investment in me.

  I’ve wept for the baby countless times, for the pain I put Kara through. I supported her as best I could, tried to help with the weight of her pain. I’ve carried it for several years. I carry it every day. But if you’re going to move forward in life, you finally have to forgive yourself. You have to give yourself permission to be human. You have to learn that in order to give love, you must open your heart to the possibility of receiving love. I long for her still, for who she was and who we were together. In some ways, what we had never ends, even though I’ll never see her again. It wouldn’t be fair to her or to me or to my family. If that’s hypocrisy, I’ll cop to it. But I believe our love was first and foremost a celebration of life, a kind of prayer. At the end of the day, I’ll have what exists between us in my heart forever. So will she. Mark couldn’t understand the power of that kind of love. Liz couldn’t. Their selfish ambition and ass-covering finally for them transcended everything, as if they’d closed their hearts permanently to the possibility of giving and receiving love.

  20

  Mark

  The phone rang, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone, until I heard Nikki on the machine, the sound of her voice like a shot of adrenalin, but calming too.

  I picked up and she wondered how I was doing.

  I told her I didn’t know how I was doing, and wondered how she was doing.

  She didn’t know how she was doing either.

  We met at a bar in Rockville Center, where she walked in wearing a summer dress, completely put back together since I’d seen her at the funeral home. We ordered drinks and she told me about her job selling ads for the Long Island Weekly and I told her about my propaganda work for Dunning and Wright, convincing voters to support deregulated electricity or Indian gambling or whatever concept we’d been hired to sell—that PCBs were safer left in riverbeds, for instance, or that universal health care would actually hurt everyone. Before my current job, I told her, I’d worked for a congressman, and before that an alderman, but I was done with all that now. We talked for a long time, leaning into each other, and she finally said, “Are you okay?”

  I thought about Cynthia’s baby and Cynthia lingering. “Not really,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got time,” she said.

  “It involves you,” I said, and she said, “Now you have to tell me.”

  The waiter came by to see if we wanted more drinks.

  Nikki and I looked at each other. I kept breathing the air around us, trying to take her in. I asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else for a drink, and she did, but then we decided she should follow me to Garden City
instead. I wasn’t sure what we were doing. I wasn’t sure what I’d tell her. I pulled into a liquor store, Nikki following, and we bought a bottle of tequila. There was an hour of light left, but it was cooling. We’d sit out back with the tequila and I’d tell her about Cynthia and Kyle’s baby—if it was their baby—and Kyle’s voice on the machine. But that all seemed so long ago and fading. Boring, really. Meaningless. What mattered now was just—

  Nikki

  I told Alina Mark called me, all broken up, and that we were going to meet to talk about Cynthia and Kyle, to share our grief.

  “So I can go to Ashley’s?” she said.

  “But not for a sleepover,” I said. “It’s a school night.”

  “Not for me,” Alina said. “Ashely wants me to go to school with her tomorrow, anyway. And her mother said—”

  “We’ll see,” I said, thinking I’d have to pick her up late if everything went right. I didn’t know how Ashley’s mother would feel about that, but when I called, she said it would be fine if Alina spent the night; or if I wanted to pick her up late, that would be fine, too. She understood. She wanted to help.

  After I showered, Alina sat waiting in the living room with a backpack I knew she’d filled for a sleepover. I drove her to Ashley’s and told her I’d pick her up later.

  “How much later?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “This is like a date, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Right,” she said, and she slammed the car door.

  I went home and made phone calls while I dressed. I’d managed to gather around ten thousand dollars from friends and another five from my boss at the paper. He didn’t know Kyle, didn’t know I’d never need a loan for funeral expenses. Maybe fifteen thousand would be enough for Burke—at least to start. But that was a ridiculous thought. I’d never be through with him. Still, maybe I could convince him to leave us alone, pay him for his loss, somehow make him understand that I hadn’t meant to hurt his brother. I thought again about calling the cops. Or maybe I’d take the fifteen grand and hit the road. But I’d never get far enough. I had to push it all out of my mind for the moment, had to keep pushing it out of my mind with Mark, which was easier than I thought it would be, the two of us talking, exchanging information about our lives, Cynthia and Kyle disappearing as he tells me about his career in politics and his current hideous job. This guy is even more connected than I thought he was. But he surprises me with his disgust for the life he’s led, like he’s been hurt by it more than those kind of people usually are. I lose track of time, Friday and what I want far away for minutes at a stretch, time almost stopping or creating seconds to breathe in.