Mitch looked at him, his face so much like Tim’s that was gone. He was skinnier than Tim, though, so if anything, he most recalled Tim’s worst face, the chemo face, the one Mitch would rather forget. The more he watched him, and he was watching everyone more closely these days, the more he understood that it was also a face in hiding. Eyes, nose, mouth, jaw: every feature in retreat. It was nothing like the voice Mitch knew from the phone, the voice that was so magically present. It seemed a waste to even have a face if this was how he was going to use it.
After gratuitous ice cream sundaes that left everyone clutching their guts, they drove back to the house to change into sweats and lay around on couches and floors until one by one they fell asleep. Except, of course, for Mitch. He was on the couch, his usual station, watching a nature show: two naked survivalists in the Amazon with nothing but a machete and a map. He had his vape, his own precious survival tool, and he had finally freed himself from his goggles for the day. Night was when his pain was the harshest, but it was also when he got to feel the most real.
He texted Hardy, out in Arizona. Guess whos here?
Who, the phone burbled forth.
My old man, he fired back.
DAZONK! A recent Hardy coinage. It meant “huge,” or sometimes “check it out,” or sometimes just “I’m here.” Srsly man no shit on accident?
No cheesedick on purpose. I invited him
There was a pause and a pulsing ellipsis while Hardy thought about what to type. Mitch watched the female survivalist pull a scorpion off her partner’s neck.
Proud of you man hows he been, Hardy said.
He’s been an asshole
Lol fuck him
Yeah fuck him and his zen peace bullshit
Lol!
Death is part of life fuck you
He went on like that for a bit, brightening his mood with his thumbs. He scrolled back through their years-long conversation. There was Vicki cradling a platter of turkey. Still married, those two, married to marriage, if you asked Mitch. There was a beer Hardy was drinking. There was Hardy’s gut. DAZONK! There was weird comfort in that gut, the white blurry mass of it that Hardy had been asserting on the world for fifty years. It had stretch marks like a historical record of jiggles. It had hair patterns no woman should ever have to see. It had a never-ending navel to nowhere, home to all manner of wax and lint. It was a goddamn thing of beauty, the fat lineman’s stomach, and he hugged his own in solidarity.
After a while he was aware of another presence in the room and when he looked up Joe was standing by the screen. In the dark, with his ponytail, he managed to look simultaneously menacing and lost.
“Am I interrupting?” he asked.
“Hey,” Mitch said. “No.” He clicked the phone off and gestured at the many empty cushions on the couch. Joe chose one a reasonable distance away. They sat there until Mitch held out the vape, in sheepish atonement for his texts. “Want a hit?”
“Sure.” Joe reached over and took his fix.
They stared at the screen, which was showing close-ups of the survivalists’ bleeding mosquito bites.
“What’s happening here?” Joe asked.
“They have three days to get to their rendezvous point.”
“Think they’ll make it?”
“I know they do. I’ve seen this one before. I’ve basically seen them all.”
“That doesn’t get boring?”
Mitch surprised himself by speaking emphatically. “I see something new every time. It’s even better with the animal shows.” He clicked over to Animal Planet, and they sat watching as a lion licked the berry red meat off an antelope, her tongue like a length of hunger-fixing tape. He’d never seen it that way before, though he’d seen this segment half a dozen times. Nor had he seen the giraffes turn one by one like dancers in a music video, a connected body wave of realizations that the lion huntress was near. Things didn’t get old with repetition. They got more interesting. Especially when he was stoned.
“So,” Mitch said, passing the vape back. “You don’t drink, but you smoke.”
Joe exhaled. “I know it’s a contradiction for a lot of people. But I’ve been getting to know my body and my mind for a long time. One thing I’ve learned is that alcohol’s a problem for me, grass isn’t. Just the way I’m built.”
“Were you built for long hair, too?”
Joe chuckled. “Were you?”
When Mitch glanced over, Joe’s eyes were already there to meet his. “Nice to see your face,” he said.
Mitch grunted a kind of thanks.
“It’s a good face,” Joe said.
“You’re biased.”
“Probably so. But it’s also a treat for me. Even on TV all those years, you were mostly wearing your helmet. Thank God for that, don’t get me wrong.”
Joe had never made much of it, but at a certain point—when? Dr. Evans would want to know—Mitch had become aware that his dad was watching. It hadn’t affected his play; in those days, he rarely thought about anything but the game in front of him. But from time to time, he thought about it afterwards, what his dad had seen, what his dad might think, and with nothing left to lose, he thought about it now: Joe driving to the nearest sports bar, Joe in a booth with the right TV in view, Joe ordering his food and soft drink, having given up booze for good.
Such devotion, from such a distance.
“You could’ve visited,” Mitch said. He couldn’t help it.
But Joe wasn’t a guy you could rile. He’d done something to himself in the time since he’d gone west that had made him unwilling to argue. “I know,” he said, without bitterness. “You’re absolutely right about that.”
Alyssa, Journey, and Cindy arrived the next morning. Mitch hugged his daughter as though nothing had changed. But while she kicked off her boots at the door he hung back and watched her, trying to decide if she looked more masculine. She was still slim, and wearing her dark hair long. She still had that face he wanted to please. But there was something possibly new in her posture: a swagger, a certain dominion over her space.
Journey’s hair, meanwhile, was looking girlier than ever, a regular goldilocks. He introduced Mitch to his newest accessories—a smart watch he called a Star Wars tool, a stegosaurus he called Mike—before running off with them to the great room. “When do I get to meet Joan?” Mitch asked, once Journey was out of earshot.
Alyssa frowned, somehow hearing all of his half-heartedness and none of his good intentions. “She has her own family, you know.”
He bobbed his head eagerly. “Sure, sure, of course.” He should’ve known better than to blitz her with support. “I just mean, you know, she’s welcome. Tell her that.”
“As welcome as Mom?”
“Your mother is always welcome.”
This, she liked. She laughed. “Sorry she had to be the one to tell you the Age of Men is over.” She arched her eyebrows, not unwomanishly, waiting for him to hear the quote. The Return of the King! His favorite movie of all time.
“Don’t say that,” he said. “That’s an Orc talking. That’s Gothmog.”
She shrugged. “Sometimes I really sympathize with the Orcs. After all, I am no man.”
“Now, Eowyn I can understand,” he said, trying to sound scholarly enough for his daughter. “That makes a little more sense. Kill the Witch-King. Not me.” Maybe they could all watch the movie again tonight, see new beauty in the death of an Orc.
“I’ll think about it,” she said. “Now where’s my grandpa?”
They went into the kitchen where Cindy and Joe were already locked in conversation. He was happy to see that Cindy was actually taller than Joe, even in flats—everything good in him had always come from her, and it felt important that this not change—but he was less pleased with their easy rapport. Cindy’s cheeks were flushed and she was smiling like a kid. Joe was giving her the full attention of his eyes, which Mitch couldn’t help but register now as brown, the same as his. What about Tammy, Mitch found himse
lf wondering? Joe was married, for Christ’s sake.
“All right, you two, break it up,” he said. “Journey! Get in here!” Everyone stood in suspension while they waited for the boy to show himself.
When he did, Mitch made the introductions.
“Great name,” Joe said to Journey, apparently sincere.
“It’s the trip, not the band,” Alyssa said.
“I got that.”
“Though the band’s pretty awesome, too,” Mitch told Journey.
And then they were out of ideas. Mitch adjusted his goggles. Cindy touched her hair. They all looked at Journey, who thankfully wasn’t shy.
“I’m talking to myself in the future!” he said, holding out his watch.
“Oh good!” Joe said. “What’s he like? What does he say?”
“He’s on a cold planet,” Journey answered. “He has hands. He says hi.”
The rest of the day, Mitch found himself sticking close to his mom. He didn’t want her to feel superseded just because Joe was in town. She was the real parent, the one who did the work, who brought them all into civilization. Journey seemed to have the same idea. He hung around at her feet while she prepped potatoes and Mitch sat at the kitchen island with a seltzer.
“Tell your future self I’d like to visit him on his cold planet,” Cindy told Journey. “Do you think I’m wearing the right clothes?”
Journey evaluated her attire, a red apron over a white cableknit sweater that made her chest and shoulders look even more assertive than usual. “You need a hood,” he said. “And a Star Wars tool.”
Cindy threw a red dishtowel over her head and selected a balloon whisk from a caddy by the sink. “How’s that?”
Journey giggled. “It’s good.”
“Not on this planet,” Mitch said.
Cindy didn’t care; she kept right on working. She was so present that it was hard to imagine a planet before her. But of course, like every person, she’d been born one day, in her case a day sixty-nine years in the past, and before that there were billions and billions of days on this planet in which she hadn’t existed at all.
He looked at Journey. A second ago he was laughing and being adorable, and now he was leaning over his legs in a posture that suddenly struck Mitch as unbearably sad.
“What’s wrong, Journey?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Journey said to the floor.
“I don’t want you to be sad,” Mitch told him. Tyler had been sad in high school. It was why he acted so out of control. But why was Journey sad? Was it because his mother was dating a woman?
“Don’t listen to Grandpa,” Cindy said, an unnecessary caution, because Journey wasn’t listening to anyone. He was looking at his wrist and talking nonsense to his future self. “You get to feel however you want.”
“Childhood is supposed to be a happy time,” Mitch said. “If he’s not happy, something’s wrong.”
Cindy laughed, fluttering her dishtowel. “Stop reminding me how little you know about kids.” He started to speak but she kept going. “Oh, you were so unhappy. Anytime you didn’t get your way, which, I’ll remind you, was most of the time.”
“I wasn’t unhappy though.” He remembered running, green grass, catching football after football.
“Why do you think kids cry? All they want is independence, and they can’t have it. But that’s childhood. It’s normal. You have to learn how to be happy just like you have to learn to ride a bike.”
She’d always had a dry, cynical streak, never really fitting in with other moms, but now he wondered how she’d survived in Virginia at all. “I would say you shouldn’t be allowed near children,” he said, “but then who would raise the kids?”
“Not Joe,” she said, taking advantage of his sudden appearance in the kitchen.
“Not me what?”
“We were just riding you for being a dead-beat.”
“Oh, is that all?” He pivoted to Mitch. “I think your ex-wife’s here.”
Mitch smelled Caryn before he saw her. After all these years she was still using her same almond-scented hair product. It was the same for him, with his ponytail. They both just were who they were.
“Grandma!” Journey cried, diving for her leg, apparently cured.
“Nice to smell you, Madame Marzipan,” Mitch called from the safety of his island.
She was the one who’d taught him the word, but she wrinkled her nose like she had no idea what he was talking about. It was that haughtiness he’d fallen for at first. She was sexy, and she was entitled, a combination as irresistible at eighteen as it was at forty-eight. If only she hadn’t lost her confidence in New England, he might still be with her.
“You have a beautiful house,” she replied. She was technically middle-aged and it was technically winter, but the slowing of both seasons made her girlish outfit look reasonable. Her jacket was cropped at the ribs; her jeans were basically tights. “And this”—she looked at Joe with such possession—“this must be your dad.”
Within an hour Caryn was organizing Joe, Julie, and the girls for an abbreviated yoga practice in the basement. “It’s good to do before a big meal,” she said. “We’ll open up space in our bodies.”
“No thanks,” Mitch told her, jiggling his gut. “Mine has enough space as it is. You’ll never get Tyler either.”
Even so, he came down for a few minutes to watch as they all stood on their left legs, with their right legs stretched out behind them, like dead ends. Caryn and Alyssa’s backs were flat as dinner tables. Joe’s old hips kept twisting against themselves; both of his knees were bent. Journey sprawled at Maddie’s foot and observed her biting her lip. As a balance trick, it must have worked; she wasn’t wobbling at all.
“Make your body a line,” Caryn said over Justin Bieber, who was singing about his body, too. “A line that extends in both directions forever, shooting out through your heel and your head, reaching to infinity! Feel rooted to the earth in that standing leg, feel the strength in that heel, fire up that belly—reach for China, reach for the far side of the world. Pull your belly in!” she shouted at Joe.
Mitch laughed. They all did, which made the lines wiggle and warp. Leave it to Caryn to use global conquest as a metaphor for personal health. No wonder they loved her in DC.
In the bathroom, with the door locked, Mitch attempted the maneuver himself. He bit his lip. He envisioned space inside. For some reason, it came to him as yellow. Through the walls, he heard them chant their final om, Caryn’s clanging voice guiding the rest. She was a little off-key, more suited to karaoke than meditation, but that only made him admire her more.
Tim’s girls, who were finally starting to look like a family without him, joined them for dinner. Afterwards, they all gathered around Mitch’s Wal-Mart tree to open one gift each. Mitch’s was from Joe.
“The Book,” he said, holding it up.
“It’s by Alan Watts,”Joe said. “I sent you one of his YouTubes once. He’s a philosopher, and he’s written all kinds of things about anxiety and death. In this one he basically says our pain as human beings is all a result of this great hoax we’ve been believing for centuries.”
Mitch tried not to look at The Book like it was dusted with anthrax. “Well, thanks, Joe. But you know, I’m not really into conspiracy theories.”
“It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s more of a conceptual framework. Instead of thinking of human beings as precious, separate egos born into the world, why not think of us—as we scientifically are—as part of the world, born out of it?”
Joe might’ve been sober, but his face was drunk with words. He had clearly given this speech many times. Perhaps he had even given the book to other unsuspecting egos. “It sounds interesting,” Mitch said, even though it didn’t.
“Think of it as a book of secrets!” Joe went on. “Stuff you’ve been waiting to hear all your life. I think you’ll really appreciate it after all you’ve done—especially now that you’re in therapy.”
Mitch’s
anger flared in Joe’s direction. “Physical therapy,” he said to his kids, who were too preoccupied with Alyssa’s magnetic tablet—a gift from Julie, for streaming shows or recipes on the refrigerator—to hear what anyone else was saying. “Anyway, it’s been a long time since I’ve read a book. This will be good.” He could hear the creak of reluctance in his voice. He needed to pep himself up. “You know what book they should write, though? My life story. Make that the book of secrets people give each other at Christmas. Anybody know any writers?”
Caryn looked up. “I have a yoga student at the Washington Post,” she said. “And another one who writes children’s books.”
“Ask her,” Mitch said. “Ask her if she’ll do it.” It would be the sum of all his triumphs, his journey from nowhere to the absolute top of the NFL. It was an extraordinary story, the kind you’d want to use to inspire kids. A man who’d done everything this world would permit, a basically happy person.
“Wait until you read this book, though,” Joe said, jabbing the cover with his finger. Maybe he’d spent too much time alone out west, where there were even fewer people than in Virginia, because he clearly wasn’t getting it. He wasn’t hearing what Mitch really meant. “After you’ve read it,” Joe said, “you’re going to think of your story in a totally different way. You’re going to think, what is my story? And you’re going to realize it’s no different from anyone else’s. None of us exist without everything that surrounds us. Everything that was and is and will be.”
He knew you couldn’t argue with a person like Joe, but there was something soft about him, like a bruise on a fruit, that Mitch couldn’t help wanting to poke. “It’s a little different,” he said. He was aware of Caryn listening. In her tight clothes, it wasn’t immediately apparent whose side she was on. “I’m me,” he declared. “I’m not anybody else.”
“But that’s just the ego talking,”Joe persisted. “That’s because you’ve convinced yourself you’re a real person inside your bag of skin.”
“Dad’s ego is always talking.” So Tyler had been listening, too.
Mitch, who had spent his whole life becoming a real person, did not appreciate Joe’s cheap conclusion. Nor did he appreciate Tyler’s dig. He absolutely did live inside his skin. He felt its skinness every day, paining him, restraining him. The pain was what made him real. It was his daily proof of life, his proof of history, a regular ache that told him he had done things in the world, that his memories were not just laughs his brain was having at his expense.
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