I watch Ms. Sinclair sleep from my place in the doorway, her pale hands tucked together against the side of her face. Her breathing is shallow and rhythmic as I step into her room, letting the door close quietly behind me. I sit down on the edge of her bed, staring at her translucent skin and lightly sweeping the hair off her face with my index finger. I think of my daddy then, and how fragile he was at the end of his life. I think of him crying on the day he died. And how I wiped away his tears, humming Otis Redding into his ear. He handed me his wedding ring that night, even though he barely had enough strength to tug it off his finger. He put it in my hand and told me he loved me.
I wonder if Winston Sinclair has anything to give his child before he dies.
I wonder if he’d say I love you to Adam, if he could.
I tuck Ms. Sinclair’s blanket up against her chin and leave the room as quietly as I entered it.
On my way back to the cookie-filled community room, I stop in the break room and grab my phone from my bag. I send Adam a quick text. I think he might need to hear what I have to say.
I’ll take care of her. I promise.
A few short seconds pass before I get a reply.
I know.
It makes me smile.
THE REST of the day passes in a blur. After she wakes up, Ms. Sinclair has a decent afternoon, spending most of it watching her birds from the lobby sofa. She’s pretty lucid, but the day is a busy one for me and we don’t have much time to talk. By the time the second shift arrives, Ms. Sinclair is back in her room, watching the cooking channel and sucking on a Starlight mint. I say goodbye to her on my way out, but I don’t tell her I’m going to see her son tonight. I don’t tell her anything other than goodbye and have a good night. Because there’s nothing else she needs to know.
On the bus ride to Latham Street, I carefully consider all the steps I’ll have to take tonight. I walk through every scenario, working through any possible glitches before they happen. Tonight, focus and caution will be as necessary as compassion and empathy and love. It’s different this time, because it’ll happen somewhere new. Somewhere far more public than Pine Manor. Somewhere I don’t belong.
After I find the man on Latham Street and get what I need, I take the 57B home. When I get to my apartment, I don’t take off my scrubs. I don’t even take off my shoes. I just sit down on my sofa and wait for night to come. I wait for visiting hours to end and for the bare bones of night-shift hospital workers to start replacing the second shift.
Even though I’m miles away from The Upstage when darkness comes, I see Crackerjack Townhouse on the stage. I see Jarrod standing at the mic, silent and still, filling the audience with want. I see them there, hundreds of people humming with expectation and alcohol as Bryson’s lips press into the trombone’s mouthpiece and Mark’s fingertips hover above the piano keys. I watch Jarrod’s chest fill with air, and a heartbeat later, I hear Crackerjack Townhouse strike its first note, crisp and brilliant, and I listen to it echo around the pulsating room like a buzzing bee, filled with sweetness and energy. I feel Stevie’s bass notes throbbing inside my chest, their slap and pop causing a lump to rise up into my throat.
The sound of funk infuses the air around me, vibrating through my gut and sending me its message of love as if I were there, on the stage with them. I see the audience in front of me, their hearts filled with poetic thumping, and more than anything, I wish I were there for real. I wish I were the one giving those mascara-laden lovelies the panty-dropping feels. I wish I were the one vibrating inside them.
And I wish my bed-headed swooner were there, too, watching it all.
Just after 11:00, I step out into the night and walk to the bus stop, the soles of my shoes scuffing the concrete in perfect time with the electronic hum of the streetlights and the song inside my head. The memory of Miriam Hansen’s words settles over me again. She said the next person to fill her room would bring me all the happiness I deserve. She said love would come, and it did. I only wish she would’ve warned me about how hard it would be to see it go.
The symphony of funk continues to flow through my arteries, just as it crackles through the air at The Upstage. I feel the beat jostle around inside of me as I walk into the doors of Penn Presbyterian a few minutes before midnight, each song coming and going in synchronization with the set list they’re using on the other side of the city. The volunteer at the lobby information desk nods at me, no doubt thinking I’m part of the crew of night shift employees now coming to work. I see a few of them walking through the lobby, purses and lunch bags slung over their shoulders, ID lanyards around their necks. Mine is flipped over so you can’t see the Pine Manor logo. You can only see my face smiling back at you.
As I walk toward the elevator, I pass the exact spot where I met Adam’s mother. When I step across the same mellow tan hospital floor that was once beneath her polished, pointy-toe beige pumps, the funk inside of me calms for a moment, settling to a dull roar and refining itself for a few measures. But the moment my finger meets the elevator button, it rushes back at me, full and loud and ceaseless.
It’s “Break It Out.” One more song until the end.
The elevator carries me up to the trauma ICU and closer to the raw, charred skin of Winston Sinclair. I walk down the corridor and through the double doors to find the desk in the waiting area vacant. This time, it’s just me and the magazine-filled end tables under the fluorescent lights. The sour, middle-aged woman with pudgy hands is at home, probably dreaming about some slick romance-novel hero coming to sweep her off her feet. I bend over her desk, looking for her self-worth-validating button; the one that opens the door. The paper with Perry Devine’s handwritten number is still taped next to the phone. When I see it, my stomach twists over on itself, sending more surging notes out into my blood. The bridge of “Break It Out” rushes through me, hot and quick, its contrasting key sharpening my senses and filling me with purpose. My hand shakes as I reach down and press the door release button tucked underneath the lip of the desk. I hear a hollow click and see the light on the wall switch from red to green.
Curtains are drawn across most of the glass windows as I walk silently down the corridor. I can’t see anyone inside the rooms, but I can sense their presence. I can feel their stories. The disinfectant-infused air is still, save for the occasional soft blip of a piece of medical equipment. I pass the large, central staff area where three women are busy looking back and forth between their computer screens and the various contents of manila file folders. None of them look up at me as I pass, but I know they see me. They must see me. How could they not.
I open the door—the one at the far left corner of the hallway—just as “Ecce Homo” begins. Jarrod’s voice shuttles a wave of emotion through me as the words come out of his mouth. They’re the same as always: self-serving yet self-deprecating. Cocky yet sardonic. Structured yet raw. It’s a funk song gone philosophical. And its message is more powerful than ever. The conceit of self-faith will always exist. “I am no man. I am dynamite,” will always be said, in seriousness rather than in song, inside the heads of people like Winston Sinclair. People who thrive on power and control, and who think their own importance belittles everyone else’s. Even the people they’re supposed to love.
But tonight, Mr. Sinclair cannot say those words. Or any other words, for that matter. Because he’s in the bed in front of me, medicated and powerless, his skin wrapped in gauze and a catheter funneling his manhood away right along with his piss.
The smell of greasy ointment sinks into my nostrils as Marquis’s trumpet blasts out a series of bright, staccato notes in time with Bryson’s trombone. More bass notes ripple through me. I walk across the room and sit down on the edge of Mr. Sinclair’s bed, the door drifting closed behind me. The stiff whoosh-and-hum of the respirator is gone; they must have removed it when he regained consciousness. There are only IV stands around him now, their bags half-filled with saline, antibiotics, and painkillers.
As I lift Mr. Sinclai
r’s arm and gently place it vein-side-up across my lap, I think of my daddy and what he taught me about death and all the pain that can go with it. If you’re not willing to stop it, the torture can be relentless, both inside and out. Nothing on this Earth should have to suffer before a foreseeable, inevitable death. Nothing. That’s why we’re born with empathy and understanding already inside. It’s a part of being human, and my daddy taught me not to be afraid of it.
He taught me that I always need to do the right thing. Every time. Even when it hurts.
My daddy taught me how to break a mourning dove’s neck when I was five years old. He’d take me and Charlie to the quarry where he worked, and we’d run around collecting the birds after he’d filled them with birdshot. Sometimes, they’d still be alive. They’d have a broken wing or a missing foot, and they’d look up at you with their shiny, round, black eyes. Like they were just waiting to die.
“If they’re still alive,” Daddy would say, “you’ve got to break their neck real quick. No use letting ’em suffer.”
He showed us how to put their downy heads into the crook of skin between our first two fingers and flip their bodies backward until we heard the bones snap.
“Flick ’em fast,” he’d say, “like the tongue on a snake.”
By the time I was eight years old, I’d probably taken more lives than a poacher on the African savannah. They were good, too, those doves. My momma knew how to cook them so they tasted just like chicken.
In fact, the day I was born, the doctor asked my momma about the last thing she ate before labor came on. When she told him it was a dove sandwich, she said he looked right back at her like she was some kind of wild sinner, fresh outta the bayou.
So here I am, twenty-four years after my illustrious dove-fueled birth, sitting on a mattress with another living thing in my hands, just waiting to die.
Only this time, it’s different.
Because this time, he’s already dead.
CHAPTER 36
Winston Sinclair—Room number 736
I spent most of my life trying to hide my secrets. Some of those secrets were bigger than others, but every one of them started with a lie. One simple lie that eventually morphed into either a tragedy or a gem of good fortune. There were secrets threaded throughout my life. Too many to keep track of. Most of my lies made me a lot of money, but a few of them cost me millions.
It started when I was six. My mother got me a canary. I hated that thing, but she insisted I keep it in my room. She said it was good for me to learn how to take care of something besides myself. That damn bird would scatter birdseed and feathers all over, and start chirping at the break of dawn. Every day, for months, I wanted to break the bird’s puffy, yellow neck.
Then one day, I did.
It was 5:30 in the morning on a summer’s day. I should’ve been sleeping in, but it wouldn’t shut up. So, when I couldn’t take the chatter anymore, I whipped open the cage door, grabbed the little motherfucker, and tried to twist off one of its wings. It pecked and squawked at me until I dropped it on the floor. I watched it flop around on the carpet, dragging its broken wing around in some kind of frantic dance.
I broke the other wing next, just to see what it would do.
When I put the bird back down on the carpet, both of its wings dangling off its tiny body like lopsided, feathery pendants, it didn’t dance or squawk. It just looked at me. We stared at each other until I heard my mother walking down the hallway outside my door. I quickly opened the window and threw the bird out, watching it flutter down like a falling leaf until it smacked head-first into a rhododendron branch and landed crooked-necked in the dirt below. When my mother came into the room and saw the open cage and window, I began my first secret. I told her the bird flew out the window while I was cleaning its cage. I cried. I apologized. I lied and told her I was sad. And, forever the schoolteacher, she told me it was a good lesson. When I pretended to beg her for another canary, as expected, she said pets weren’t replaceable. She said I wasn’t responsible enough yet and blamed herself for trusting me when I was still so young.
As I grew, I learned that lies could just as easily get you out of trouble as they could get you into it. When I was a teenager, my mother thought I spent a lot of time at the library, when instead, I was out making mayhem with my friends and spinning lies to cover it up. In college, I lied about my grandfather dying to get out of taking finals. I lied to girls all the time, telling them they were “the one” just so they would fuck me before I said goodbye. I even lied about graduating. I told my mother not to come for my college graduation ceremony because I had strep throat and couldn’t even go myself. She was in Philadelphia and I was in Indiana, at Notre Dame. She never knew I didn’t actually graduate because I didn’t pass enough classes to get my diploma.
But the lies that led to my life’s biggest secret were the ones I told my wife. Heather and I met when I was working at Strahan Partners. I was twenty-two, with a new job at the state’s most respectable lobbying firm, thanks to a handsomely fabricated résumé. Five days a week, I was a runner. I’d deliver documents wherever they needed to go, all over town. They gave me a company car and a promise that I could eventually work my way up if I worked hard enough. Heather was a secretary for one of the state senators. I must’ve convinced her I was something special because after three or four visits to her office, we had our first date. She quit her job soon after we got engaged, and we were married a year later.
I met Marissa at a bar when Adam was four years old. She was very different from my wife. She didn’t want to spend her life shopping and getting her nails done and having tea with some senator’s wife. Marissa just wanted to have fun. A lot of fun. She was my deliverance from reality for four solid years, and she was by far my biggest secret. By the time we met, I’d already made my first million, having worked my way up the ranks at Strahan before jumping over to Murray and Associates. I got Marissa an apartment, and I’d spend a few afternoons a week sharing her bed.
But everything changed when she got pregnant. She refused to get rid of it. She started teasing me about the baby being leverage, telling me she’d have one hell of a bargaining chip the moment our child was born. She was trying to make a joke out of it, but I knew from the start there was nothing funny about it. I knew she was serious.
Two months after Bradley was born, Marissa started asking me to leave Heather. When I told her I’d do no such thing, she threatened to tell Heather about us. She knew there was no pre-nup and Heather would get half of everything if we divorced. To keep Marissa quiet, I gave her more money. But, she started doing foolishly risky things. She’d take Bradley to the park and strike up a conversation with my mother as she sat and watched Adam on the swings. Marissa once showed me a picture of my mother holding a chubby-faced Bradley, as if she already knew he was her grandson. There was even a picture of Adam holding Bradley’s tiny hand as he sat in his stroller at the park. I had to stop it, before I lost my wife and son—and money—for good.
So, I told another lie in order to keep my secret. I told my wife I wanted to move out west and open my own firm. I told her I had connections there and moving Adam away from his grandmother, whom he loved more than anything, was no big deal. She said she trusted me, and a few days later, the moving truck showed up at our front door.
I didn’t tell Marissa we were moving until Heather and Adam were already on the other side of the country. She was angrier than I’d ever seen a person, and I was fresh out of lies. There was nothing I could do or say to make it better. She threatened to drop Bradley at an orphanage. Or over a bridge. She said if she couldn’t have me, she didn’t want him either.
I did the only thing I could think of. I hired a lawyer.
For the next few weeks, I stayed in Philadelphia, “tying up some loose ends” while my wife and son were in Seattle. The lawyer drafted the documents for Marissa to sign, and I gave her a briefcase filled with more cash than I’d ever seen in my life.
She signed away full custodial rights to her own son for two million under-the-table dollars. For her guaranteed silence, she got another quarter million and a one-way ticket to Europe.
And I was left with a baby I didn’t want.
I took him to my mother’s house and told new lies. I said he was the product of a one-night stand, and his mother was emotionally unstable. I said I had full custody of him because she was addicted to drugs. I said Heather and Adam could never find out because I couldn’t bear to lose them. I cried and apologized for my horrible mistake, just like I did the morning I killed that damn canary. I wept in my mother’s arms and begged her to take care of Bradley for me. I tugged and manipulated her heartstrings as if she were a marionette, eventually convincing her Bradley needed her more than Adam did. I promised her we would hire the finest nanny for Adam, and he would be loved just as she had loved him. We cried together, though my mother’s tears were the only real ones to fall. She was mourning Adam as if he had died because she knew she would never see him again.
I never said the words out loud, but I think she always knew I would keep him from her in order to protect my secret. She knew I wouldn’t risk losing everything I had for a baby I barely knew.
And it worked. Mother raised Bradley just as she had raised me. And Adam. He slept in my old bed and got the same damn chocolate pudding in his lunch I did. She’d send me pictures from time to time, always to my office so Heather couldn’t see them. I kept them all in a locked desk drawer. Occasionally I would look at them, always surprised at how much Bradley looked like his half-brother.
I can’t say I loved him, but Bradley was my son, and he deserved a better fate than the one my mother handed him.
I privately grieved when he died. Marissa knocked on my mother’s door one day, showing her a picture of the two of us together she’d taken before Bradley was even born. She said she was Bradley’s mother, and she just wanted to take him out for lunch to celebrate his ninth birthday. My mother invited her in, and then, after only a brief conversation, she let Bradley go with Marissa. They were supposed to go to Ruby Tuesday’s, but instead, they ended up wrapped around a phone pole.
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