He Gets That from Me

by Jacqueline Friedland

  Nancy asks Roy to say the blessing over the challah bread, a simple one familiar to most Jewish children, even Wyatt. But not Kai, I realize with a start.

  Not only have I deprived that boy of his true family, I’ve also denied him his religious heritage. From what I remember, Chip comes from a vaguely Protestant family that only bothers with church on big holidays, if at all. I know Donovan’s family is Catholic, but I have no idea how serious they are about it. I wonder if my Jewish child has been going to church with Donovan? Whether he’s been baptized? Circumcised? I’m supposed to be so progressive, beyond caring who practices what religion, but all those years of my parents making offhand comments about the dwindling number of Jews in the world apparently impacted my subconscious. Their remarks about the importance of passing on traditions to pay homage to Jews who sacrificed for their faith, our faith, are now echoing in my head, and I feel as if I’ve squandered something irreplaceable.

  But I still just don’t think bringing Kai into our home would be the right move. Ten years is long enough for a person to form a basic identity, long enough for a blood relative to become a stranger.

  Nick rips a doughy chunk of bread from the challah and breaks it into smaller pieces, which he arranges on a dish to pass around. We all take our seats as he sprinkles the pieces of bread with salt from his parents’ sterling shaker. He catches my eye and squints like he’s suspicious. I think he’s trying to tell me that he knows my mind has started running wild again, that I should rein it in instead of torturing myself over what kind of parents wouldn’t want their own child back. This acknowledgment is enough to stop me from spiraling any farther; instead, I focus on how much I wish I could feel this telepathic connection to Nick more often.

  A faint buzzing sound catches my attention, and I know exactly where it’s coming from. Wyatt has his gaze in his lap and is surreptitiously attempting to type something on his phone. Without warning him, I reach over Roy on my right and grab the phone out of Wyatt’s hand before he can stop me.

  “Mom!” He has the gall to sound outraged.

  “You know the rules.” My shoulders lift, a gesture meant to show him that it’s no challenge for me to be firm, to be the enforcer, as though everything is cut and dried.

  “Fine, I’m sorry,” he backpedals, re-strategizing. “I’ll keep it in my pocket, but can I just . . . can I have it back?”

  “No.” I’m resolute, even though I hate making him upset. Strict adherence to our stated family rules should only benefit him right now, while so many other things feel uncertain. All my training—as a teacher and as a parent—tells me that when parts of a child’s life feel out of control, rules and expectations are helpful, stabilizing, even when the child claims otherwise. “You can have it back in the morning. End of discussion.”

  Wyatt looks over at Nick, but when Nick shakes his head to indicate he won’t be any help, Wyatt blows out a loud breath and slumps down in his chair.

  “Let me get the soup,” Nancy says, and I rise to help her as Wyatt’s phone continues to buzz, burning a hole in my pocket.

  “I’m just going to stash the phone upstairs,” I tell her. “Be right back.”

  I remove the phone from my jeans as I head up the narrow back staircase, and it vibrates in my hand. Reflexively, I glance down to read the words on the screen.

  It’s from Summer, the girl who’s been Wyatt’s closest friend since we moved to Sedona three years ago. While she’s not exactly the girl next door, it’s close enough. She lives three houses away from us, and I’m pretty sure that Wyatt has been in love with her since the moment she rode her lavender bicycle past our driveway on moving day.

  The message, which is clear and bright on the home screen, reads, But he’s only 23, and it’s not like he’s my teacher.

  We don’t allow Wyatt to lock his phone with a passcode, so all I have to do is swipe, and I’ll be able to read this chain of texts in their entirety. I push past my doubt, worrying about what kind of trouble thirteen-year-old Summer might be getting herself into, and I swipe to the right. I start reading the texts in reverse order, and a picture begins to present itself, but maybe I am misunderstanding. I swipe up until I get to the first text from today, hoping things will look different if I move in chronological order.

  Summer: I think I should tell him how I feel. There’s only a couple weeks till school.

  Wyatt: You can’t. It’s gross and you’ll get him fired.

  Summer: From school?

  Wyatt: From the club.

  Wyatt: **Actually both.

  As I’m reading, sweat begins to form on my brow, and memories of my own school-day mistakes threaten to waft to the surface. I’m not certain who Summer is talking about, but I’m betting it’s Ross Tepper, the middle school tennis coach, who spends his summers teaching adult clinics at Mesa Creek Country Club. That would be the very same club where Summer has been volunteering as a lifeguard in training for the past few weeks. Coach Tepper is astonishingly handsome in a way that has all the sixth- and seventh-grade girls continuously tittering and swooning, and many of the mothers too. I can imagine why he might have taken a special interest in Summer, with her wavy blond hair and long, coltish legs.

  Memories of Trent Whitestone assault me. He wasn’t a full-time employee of my high school, just someone they brought in to do private instruction with the more talented music students. How I looked forward to last period on Wednesdays for months during my junior year and the beginning of senior year, when I would walk into the music room and find twenty-four-year-old Trent waiting for me in his flannel shirts and ripped jeans, his dark blond hair long and wild like he was Curt Cobain or Eddy Vedder. I used to primp in the bathroom each week before sixth period—fresh gel in my hair, Revlon Colorstay gloss on my lips. I can still see the rust-colored impression my painted lips left on my saxophone reed, bleeding into the wood grain like a scarlet A.

  I don’t want to get all up in my son’s personal life, but I can’t sit idly by and do nothing while Summer puts herself into a similar position with the tennis coach—not when I can trace the entire unraveling of my early adulthood back to what happened with Trent. I’m tempted to text back, pretending that I’m Wyatt, telling her all the reasons why pursuing a twenty-three-year-old man could ruin her life. I want to warn her about the ways in which adult men are different from pubescent boys, how they expect more than kisses, more than promises. I can still remember the exhilaration I felt when Trent finally kissed me one afternoon in October of my senior year, the way his stubble rubbed at the sensitive skin on my chin.

  He asked me to stay after school that day to work on a solo we had been practicing. After we ran through the bridge a few times, he said he wanted to show me something backstage. He took me into one of the changing rooms and locked the door. I can still smell the moth balls, the pungent odor of the preserved costumes protruding from trunks filling the small space.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out how to get you alone,” he said, wearing that flirty grin I had memorized. “You’ve been torturing me. You know that, right?” He said it as though I had control over anything at all in that situation. His green eyes roved over me as he advanced toward me and added, “No one else is like you.”

  Of course, I can see the manipulation in his words now, the utter cliché, but back then it was bliss to think that, at last, someone had seen me, the real me. His tongue pushed into my mouth and I accepted it like a gift. But when his hand went to my waistband, I pushed it away, and he got angry. He told me I’d been leading him on since the year before, that I was a tease, and that if I wanted to play in the big leagues, I had to operate by grownup rules. I didn’t want to disappoint him, this creative, musical man I had been crushing on since the year before—so, in a move I can still hardly bear to think about, I stepped back toward him, ready to do what he was asking. His lips crashed back down onto mine, and my fear mingled with relief that I had been forgiven, that he was touching me again. But then his grip b
ecame rough, too strong, and my fright won out. I pushed away from him and he looked at me in surprise, like he couldn’t imagine I didn’t want the exact same things he did.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  The displeasure returned to his face and his eyes grew cold as he told me, “This was a mistake.” That was the last thing he said to me before turning away. He opened the door and strode into the corridor without another word.

  The following Monday, I found a note in my locker from the school office telling me that I would no longer be meeting with Trent for lessons, that I was being placed back into regular band. Being removed from the honors music program was a massive blow to the strength of my transcript, but I was afraid to go to the office and complain, so I let it go. I told my parents that I was no longer that interested in music, that I wanted to focus on something else in college, like fashion. I had never expressed more than a passing interest in anything related to fashion, they said. Then maybe graphic design, I said.

  They argued with me, which I perceived as their need for me to continue propping up their parental egos through my own musical successes. I had been performing in NYSMMA and other prodigy-appropriate concerts since the minute I was old enough, each achievement another feather in my mother’s cap. It was all part of her own quest for excellence, not mine. I just liked filling the air around me with music, and Trent Whitestone had robbed me of that.

  To the soundtrack of my parents’ snide comments about wasted talents, I shoved my sax into the back of my closet where it couldn’t taunt me, couldn’t remind me of the pressure of Trent’s hands or my own guilty conscience.

  It wasn’t until June, a couple of days after I graduated, that I saw him again. He was in Central Park with Marisa Cafferty, a girl the year below me in school. They were sitting on a thick Mexican-style blanket in Sheep’s Meadow, and they didn’t notice me, just a few feet away, as I passed by. Trent had a guitar on his lap, and Marisa was holding some sort of steel drum. They weren’t doing anything outwardly untoward, but something about seeing them together made me realize, finally, that Trent had been in the wrong. I went home and told my mother everything, ready to take a stand for myself, for young women everywhere.

  Except my mother didn’t take my side. She blamed me. If I had been paying more attention when I approached her that day, I might have realized that she was already irritable before I started speaking to her. I should have noticed that she was still in her clothes from the day before, that all the books from our built-in bookshelves were surrounding her on the floor. I should have known better than to interrupt her when she was in the middle of one of her projects, which meant that she would also be more likely to erupt into one of her rages. She told me she had watched me with Trent, and that I had cozied up to him like a puppy dog.

  “Someone with a body like yours, that sexy hair that you flaunt,” she yelled. “What did you expect would happen?”

  As I look down now at Wyatt’s phone, I wonder again what exactly I did expect. I shove the phone into the tote I carried on the plane, zipping it into the inside pocket. Summer’s mother has become a friend over the years, and I’m now in the tricky position of trying to help Summer without destroying my son’s relationship with his friend. The fact that Trent wasn’t strong enough to resist a young girl fawning all over him doesn’t mean that the tennis coach will act the same way. Even so, I wouldn’t feel comfortable without getting an adult involved.

  As if we don’t have enough drama going on already. I’m fairly certain that Wyatt is going to want to throttle me when I speak to him after dinner, but I can’t sit idly by while another girl falls into the same kind of abyss that swallowed me.

  Chapter 20

  DONOVAN

  AUGUST 2018

  Chip reaches for another piece of jicama from the crudité I’ve just finished arranging, and I swat his hand away. “The point is for the platter to look nice when they get here,” I say as I lift the porcelain dish and move it to the other side of the counter. Chip rolls not just his eyes but his whole head at me, like I’m just the most grating individual he’s ever had the misfortune of encountering, and then marches pointedly out of the kitchen.

  “Feeling any better, bud?” I hear him ask.

  I glance through the kitchen cut-out. Poor Kai is sitting on the sofa, a brown paper lunch bag hanging from his hand. Maggie and Nick are supposed to be here in ten minutes, and Kai has been growing increasingly nervous. Although he hasn’t articulated it precisely, I believe he’s worried that he’ll be a disappointment to them in some way. After we decided to tell him about his birth parents, we gave him the option of not meeting them at all, but he said that no, he wanted to take this step and see them in person. Even so, nothing I’ve said has calmed his nerves this morning. Sometimes just knowing he has the paper bag nearby seems to help prevent his anxiety from getting the better of him. I always thought the propensity to panic was something he had inherited from me. At least I can let go of my guilt about that.

  Kai nods back at Chip, a look of certain doom in his round eyes.

  Teddy is moping in his room, angry that we’re even allowing Maggie and Nick to come. He says they have no right, that they gave Kai away and they shouldn’t show up now, making like they’re family. I have to admit, I’d like to throw my hat in the ring with Teddy on this one, but Chip has been adamant that letting the Wingates meet Kai is the right thing to do, and that it might provide Kai with some important closure as well.

  As I look at Kai now, his fingers running over the edge of that brown paper, the bag at the ready in case he should start hyperventilating, I regret giving in to Chip’s self-righteousness. But instead of launching into Chip and adding to the long list of disagreements we’ve had since finding out that we accidentally took home someone else’s child, I walk toward Teddy’s bedroom.

  At first, it looks like the bedroom is empty. Then I hear sounds of paper rustling. I step in to investigate, and I find him sitting on the cross-stitch rug on the far side of his bed, his back against the bedframe as he studies a photo album in his lap.

  “Want some company?” I ask as I walk closer.

  “You should show them these,” he says, holding up the album. It’s a baby book, filled with lists of the boys’ various milestones, photos from their first haircuts, their first day at pre-school, their kindergarten graduation. I’m not sure when Teddy took this book down from the living room shelf, but I’m guessing he’s had it stashed away since the day we told the boys they aren’t genetically related.

  “Why?” I ask, trying to let him lead the conversation without imposing any assumptions of my own.

  Instead of answering, he looks up at me with those astonishingly blue eyes of his and asks me a question of his own: “What if Kai likes them better? What if he wants a different brother instead?”

  I wish I didn’t have the very same fears as Teddy—that Kai might somehow be seduced by his birth parents, that he might prefer them to Chip and me, that he might ask to live with his biological sibling, to experiment with a different kind of life. Teddy needs me to be the parent right now, though, so I push away my own emotional reflexes and force my voice to sound calm.

  “Well first of all,” I start, lowering myself onto the floor next to him and crossing my legs the same way as his, “there is nobody in the world who Kai loves more than you. You’re still peas in a pod, still twiblings.”

  Teddy looks back to the book in his lap.

  “Hey.” I try to get him to look at me as I think of something else. “Think of it like movies. You know how you love Happy Gilmore so much?”

  He nods.

  “Then you watched The Waterboy and loved that movie too?”

  He just looks at me, waiting.

  “Does loving The Waterboy make you love Happy Gilmore any less?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Our hearts are big,” I say, and I realize I’m giving this talk to myself as much as I’m saying the words for Teddy’s
benefit. “We don’t have to make room each time we find something new to love. It’s not like letting in the new pushes out something old. I hope that Kai feels really good about his birth parents when he meets them, and you should hope so, too. And by the way, I think he’s pretty nervous about meeting them. I bet it’d mean a lot if you came out and sat next to him for a bit.”

  Teddy thinks for a moment and then closes the scrapbook. When I read the words on the cover, “Happiest with our dads,” I remember that this was a baby gift from Nick, shortly after the boys were born. Teddy doesn’t know that, and the irony isn’t lost on me that with so many albums to choose from, this is the one he filched.

  Before I have time to add anything else to the conversation, I hear the loud warbling of the apartment phone and then Chip telling the doorman to go ahead and send up the visitors from the lobby.

  “Come on.” I stand and reach out a hand to Teddy, who holds tight to the baby book but grabs on to me with his free hand.

  When Kai sees us walking toward him in the family room, his shoulders relax slightly, and he shoves the paper bag he was holding in between two of the sofa cushions—hiding it from Teddy, or our guests, or both.

  “Here, let me.” I yank the bag from where it’s wedged in the couch. “Boys, come help,” I call over my shoulder as I hurry back to the kitchen. They follow me in, and I hand Teddy the vegetable platter with the instruction, “Two hands.”

  As he heads dutifully back to the living room, I bend to eye level with Kai.

  “We’ve got this, yeah?” I ask as his big eyes search mine. I’ve told him so many times already about how Maggie and Nick are kind-hearted, fun-loving people, how he should be proud that he shares genes with such smart, hard-working folks. I still haven’t figured out what Kai is afraid of—whether it’s a fear of disappointing his birth parents or impressing them so much that they want to take him from us. I wait for him to nod, but he only shrugs.