He tried again. I guess I’m talking about fate, or doom? If that’s the right word? Set in stone. Fixed outcomes.
Well Mr. Massey, if I didn’t think people could change, and change their lives, their outcomes, I wouldn’t be in this business, would I?
He’d tried to find those guys on the Internet once. One was still in Tucson, it looked like he ran a janitorial service. One might have been in California, but there were a lot of different matches for the name. One he couldn’t find. He tried to look up the girl but she was off the grid too, hadn’t left any tracks. Maybe she got married and changed her name. He liked to think she’d managed to make that kind of a life for herself.
There was no need to dredge any of that up, for himself or for anyone else. The records were sealed. He hadn’t cared about it at the time, too sunk in catastrophe to appreciate the difference between an adult and a juvenile, but he did so now, and for that at least he was grateful.
He stopped following Phoebe and her friends on their nights out. It was as if the appointment with the counselor had done some good in spite of his distaste for it. The weather took a halting step toward spring, or at least toward the end of winter. Phoebe was still wary of him, waiting for him to turn back into Asshole Dad, but he guessed he had that coming. There was something closer to peace in the house, at least as much as you could expect with the four of them always scrambling off in four different directions, work and work and school and school. Weren’t families meant to do things together once in a while? All this time he’d measured them against the wreckage he’d grown up with, and thought himself lucky.
“We should go on a vacation this summer,” he told Lila. “Before the kids get too old for it.”
She was at the computer, going through a coupon website. “They’re already too old.”
“I’m not talking about Disneyland. More like a resort, a beach or a lake, maybe.”
Lila turned around to look at him. “You can get away from work?” He could never get away from work.
“Sure. For a week, maybe. Where do you want to go?”
“Me? I’ll go anywhere I can sit in the sun and get a margarita. You better talk to the kids before you get too carried away.”
“Or you could talk to them.”
“Dave.”
“All right. Talk to offspring. On the to-do list.”
“And Dave? It’s so nice of you to try to do this. Even if we never end up going anywhere, it’s nice that you want to.”
Kevin said yes, without much prodding. He’d been spending time reading lately, the kind of paperbacks with pictures of vaguely Nordic, vaguely prehistoric warriors on their covers. He kept a thumb in the pages to mark his place while Massey made his pitch. “Could we go someplace where they have boats?” he asked, when Massey was done laying out the possibilities.
“Boats, what, rowboats? Cabin cruisers? Speedboats?”
“I don’t know, maybe a sailboat.”
Kevin didn’t seem to want to elaborate. Massey studied him, unable to connect anything he saw with the request. Kevin wore his usual all-purpose T-shirt and athletic shorts. His legs were getting longer, and, Massey noted, hairier. “Sure, buddy. There’s lots of places for that. We could head up the coast of Michigan, or out East. Find a place for sailing lessons, if that’s the kind of thing you want.”
“Cool.” He was waiting to get back to his reading, and so Massey left him. Did his son have some kind of buccaneer fantasy, picked up from one of his lurid books? Or was it some unsuspected jockish impulse? He couldn’t think of a way to ask.
Phoebe’s door was closed. Massey knocked, announced himself, and a moment later Phoebe said, “Come in.” The words dredged up out of a reservoir of vast reluctance.
Massey opened the door halfway. “Got a sec?”
“I have an environmental studies test tomorrow.” Her notes were spread out on the desk around her. Her phone was there too. Did they never turn them off, stop talking and texting and tweeting?
He decided not to say anything about the phone. “This won’t take long. I wanted to see how you’d feel about all of us taking a vacation this summer.”
“It would activate my gag reflex.”
“Someplace on the water. Ocean or lake, either one. Everybody else is up for it.”
“Then everybody else can go. I’ll stay at Maura’s.” Phoebe’s chair had a swivel seat and she used her foot to push it from one end of its arc to the other. She was wearing black, stretchy tights and a T-shirt with its hem tied up in a knot, clothes that suggested yoga or dance classes, though he was pretty sure she didn’t do either of these.
“I don’t think so. Either we all go or nobody goes.”
“Then I guess we stay home,” Phoebe said, almost happily, maybe because he’d made that one so easy.
“Why don’t you think about whether there’s any body of water you might enjoy hanging out at for a week, anyplace you’d look forward to, anyplace that might impress your friends if you said you were going there.”
“Tahiti.”
The conversation had dead-ended in pretty much the way he had expected, but Massey wasn’t quite ready to give up. “Think about it,” he repeated. “Let the idea grow in you.” He looked around Phoebe’s room, which had gone from pink to militantly not-pink a few years ago. Now it was decorated in moody shades of black and gray, with some throw pillows in sunset colors: magenta, orange stripe, copper graphic. “Your room goes good with your hair,” he said.
“What?” Phoebe wary, ready to take offense.
“Just, the colors. I guess that’s why you picked them. It’s like the room doesn’t make that much sense until you’re in it.”
“Thanks, I guess.” She was almost smiling, and Massey guessed he’d lucked into saying something endearingly stupid, as dads were meant to do. What did he know about fathers? His own hadn’t been around that much, which was a good thing, given the way things went down when he was.
“You know how pretty you are, don’t you? I guess I don’t have to keep telling you.”
His daughter locked the fingers of her hands together and stretched both arms over her head, stretching out the lovely curve of her back. “I guess you can tell me once in a while.”
Just as, once in a while, he could tell her to be careful, careful, more than that, vigilant, wary, sober, mindful—
“Dad? I really do have to study.”
—
You could luck out. Dodge the bullet meant for you. Who would have thought, given the crapped-out family he’d grown up in, that he’d end up with a woman like Lila and a couple of decent kids? All of them muddling along as best they could, the occasional rough patch, sure.
That was life. His, theirs. Not perfect, because no family ever was, but not the sad, distant, failed, hurt and hurtful people who’d raised him, or made their halfhearted efforts at doing so. Luck could save you even when you didn’t deserve it.
And the rest of it? Sometimes it was a dream but not a dream. A memory but not entirely a memory. There were gaps. No memory of pleasure. At least not the part you’d expect. He’d been too drunk. He’d stopped after a while and let somebody else take their turn. The real enjoyment had been the invention of different, novel ways in which the girl could be positioned, posed, what different substances might be applied to her, what methods and items could be used for purposes of insertion, while the girl, who might have consented (although not in the legal sense) to some if not all of what had happened, at least at the beginning, mumbled and drowsed and moved her hands as if trying to swat away insects. How naked she was! So much unexpected, secret skin! He had never seen a real naked girl before, only pictures. None of them had. She was like something washed up on a beach or dropped out of the sky, an object of curiosity as much as cruelty. So that leaving her where and as they did at the edge of a parking lot, fouled, bruised, ex
posed, her hair matted with semen, indicated they had simply exhausted their curiosity and lost interest. They were tired, they were ready to go home and sleep, and that was what they had done.
It was a dream but not a dream. Massey woke up from it fast. Here was the real and present world, the darkened room, the coolness of the sheets, Lila asleep beside him, this life he could reach out and take hold of, his heart calming itself, his gratitude for all the things he did not deserve.
And then the telephone rang.
—
The doctor was very careful with his words and he was speaking slowly. He said, “I want to prepare you for what you’re going to see. The side of her head and face which impacted the windshield are heavily bandaged. We have already sutured a portion of her scalp back into place. She’s intubated, the machine is breathing for her. She is not conscious at this time. She is not in pain. There are orthopedic injuries, one shoulder and some cervical vertebrae. We don’t know if we can save her eye. There’s a lot we don’t know yet. Please be certain that we are doing everything we can for her.”
Massey and Lila held each other. Lila was not crying but her breath was short and rasping. Massey had turned to stone. The doctor said, “Do you have any questions now? I know you’ll have them later.”
“My son,” Massey said. “He’s out there with one of our neighbors. What do we tell him?”
“Nothing you’ll have to take back later. Are you ready? Would you follow me please?”
The doctor led them through a set of double doors and along a hallway that turned and turned again. The boy who had been driving was dead. They didn’t know him, or how Phoebe had ended up in his car when she was supposed to be somewhere else and with someone else. Was he drunk? High? Or just reckless? These were no longer important questions. The doctor slid open a glass door and stepped aside.
Lila screamed from a place deep inside of her and her legs went out. Massey caught her around the chest and took most of her weight so that she only sagged, not fell. An orderly came and stooped over her. “Let’s get her . . .” the doctor said. And, to Massey, “I’ll be right back.”
The glass door slid closed again. The small room was dark except for a light over the bed and the banks of green and yellow lights belonging to machines, the one pushing air in and out, the others taped to her wrist, delivering medication, he guessed, and monitoring vitals.
He made himself look at the worst of it: everything that was swollen, bruised, displaced. Then he sat down on her good side, where a portion of Phoebe was still recognizable, still beautiful, and smoothed the hair away from her forehead. If she slept for a hundred years, he would stay here, keeping watch, waiting, as he was meant to be.
I thank the court for the opportunity to speak. I am grateful for the punishment handed out to these boys. But punishment is not always justice. They are going to pay their debt to society and then put it all behind them. You would hope they think about what they did to my daughter every day of their lives, but I know they won’t. They’re too low-down. Just look at them. Snotty little losers. I guess each of them has a mother who loved him. Maybe still does, though it’s probably a lot harder for her now.
Well I’m a mother. And my beautiful child cries herself to sleep each night. She is precious to me. These boys have no feeling for that kind of thing. They are ignorant of every kind of feeling except sorry for their own stupid selves. So maybe they should go on in life and in time have their own daughters. And know that kind of sweetness and grow the heart for it. And then have that child taken from them and broken.
That is what I think would serve justice.
Again, I thank the court.
YOUR SECRET’S SAFE WITH ME
He was her first husband, but she was not his first wife. Of course Edie knew this, everyone knew this, since her husband was a public figure, a prominent, even famous man, at home in the wider world. He was exactly twice Edie’s age, fifty-six to her twenty-eight. It was only to be expected that given his years and his stature, he had a history, had endured paroxysms of romance, tragedy, betrayal. Edie had a little old history herself, but it was pretty much like everybody else’s.
Anyway, the first wife had died, all those years ago. Died! Struck down by a galloping cancer, leaving him with two small children. When Edie said how dreadful, sad, lonesome, it must have been, he turned his face away, the memory unmanning him. “It was a terrible time,” he said. “I wasn’t the parent I should have been.”
“You were overwhelmed. Anyone would have been.”
“I was not at my best. I have some regrets.”
“Well,” Edie said, when it was clear he was not going to say more, “You got through it. Your children got through it and they turned out fine. That’s the important thing.” She had not yet met his children, the two boys, who were by now grown-ups, a few years older than herself. She assumed they were fine, because he had not said otherwise.
He gave her a sideways look from beneath the hooded crescents of his eyelids. “You always believe the best of me. I love that about you.”
“Thank you,” Edie said, although there was a whiff of something insulting about his words, as if she was being praised for a charming stupidity.
“I have my share of rough edges. Rotten history. Sometimes I think I haven’t been fair to you, gobbling you up so fast.”
Edie murmured that he mustn’t be silly.
“I was lost in the wilderness for such a long, long while. I had become a caricature of myself, an intellect on legs. Such a glittering surface! So much abominable cleverness! But when I groped around for my heart, there was only this hard, stunted kernel. I lashed out. I hurt people. I caused damage.”
“I can’t imagine,” Edie said, meaning, she could not imagine he’d done anything all that terrible. He was fond of talking in grand terms.
“There are still some resentments circulating out there. Bad blood. Just so you’re aware.”
He waited until she nodded: Okay. “But everything’s different now, thank God. Thank God for you.” He buried his mouth in her soft and ticklish places, and Edie mewed and giggled.
Edie imagined he might have had a difficult relationship or two, or three, in his past, women who had tried to fill the awful void that made all his fame so hollow, only to fall victim to his bitterness and confusion. She understood how such things might have played out, though she wished he’d given her a few more specifics. They had only been married for a very few weeks, if you counted the actual civil ceremony and not the extended, honeymoon-like trip to Barbados that had gone before it, and they had not known each other all that long no matter how you counted.
Edie knew a fair amount about the second wife, the one who had preceded her. The Afro-Swedish beauty, even more famous in her own realm than her husband was in his. She of the long Masai limbs and cinnamon skin and unearthly clouds of pale hair. Edie thought she understood this chapter also. The woman was dazzling; he was bedazzled. They were both celebrities, it was a celebrity thing. It was not a marriage that anyone expected to last very long, and it had not. Her husband was not considered an attractive man. People had made certain jokes.
Edie remembered, before she actually met him, seeing him from time to time on television, catching glimpses of him as she clicked through the news channels and serious panel discussions. (She was so shallow. Her own viewing tastes ran to reality shows about wealthy people behaving badly, and crime dramas with wisecracking detectives.) And she had not paid him much mind. Honestly? Because he was not attractive. Yes, shallow, she had wallowed in shallowness, if that was possible. He had a funny name too, Milo. Milo Baranoff. Milo’s forehead was bald and shiny. Two wings of dark hair crept down over his ears like horns. His nose bent slightly to one side. He commanded interest and attention because of his widely read pronouncements, the force of his personality, the droll and entertaining gloss he brought to important issues.
And once Edie did come to know him, she saw how this could be so, how a person’s magnetism, how their soul, could shine through, transcend the fleshly wrapper. She understood then how a particular fault—the pallid wart protruding through one of Milo Baranoff’s eyebrows—might become something you could stare down, acknowledge, accept, dismiss, once you were well and truly in love, as she was.
They had met at one of his lectures, part of a Great Thinkers series sponsored by the midwestern university where Edie had matriculated, graduated, and then hung on grimly as an instructor in English composition. She had meant to make her big move by now. Her life embarrassed her. It was a February night. The darkness outside was sleety. The lecture hall was in an elderly building; the room swooned with radiator heat. Perhaps because of the bad weather, only a smallish audience had assembled, feeling self-conscious about their lack of numbers. Edie’s roommate, another instructor, had talked her into going because the roommate wanted to seduce the professor in charge of the Great Thinkers series.
Edie squirmed inside her too-hot sweater. Her head felt clogged and she was pretty sure she was coming down with something. She wondered if she was even capable of a Great Thought. It seemed unlikely. All her thoughts were tiny and ignominious, a swarm of outdated coupons and missing socks.
The professor, the one her roommate had the thing for, took the podium and wrestled the squealing microphone into submission. He said it was a particular privilege to introduce tonight’s speaker, who was known far and wide for his elegantly formulated commentaries on matters cultural and political, for his many well-received essays and books. He rolled out the list of Milo Baranoff’s publications, accomplishments, awards. “He is a man who brings formidable gifts of intelligence, observation, and humor to bear on the issues and dilemmas of our troubled times. Please join me in welcoming him.”
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