Cadence raised herself up on two pillows, and Richard slid closer to her, wrapped his leg on top of hers, and held on. She said, “You’re going to be just fine, and when you aren’t, you’re going to learn that it’s okay to ask for help. Plenty of people will help if you just ask.”
“I need help,” Richard said. He liked the sound of it in his mouth, so he said it again.
“You can teach Gabriel all sorts of things. Man things. The difference between thirty-weight and forty-weight motor oil. Never to order a steak well done. How to shave around the cleft of his chin. When a team should hit and run. How to slide into second base. When to use a fairway wood. How to check the air pressure in the tires of his first car. How to place a bet. When to double down at blackjack. How to put that little dimple in his tie. He can be a mini-you. In summer, you can take him camping and teach him how to tell the difference between a harmless snake and a poisonous one.”
“Who’s going to teach me that shit? What is the difference?”
“It has something to do with where the eyes are on the head. I’ve never really understood.”
Richard physically felt the challenge of the next few years. It emerged as a tightness in his musculature, and he absentmindedly grabbed at his neck while he talked. “I’d just like to know how everything is going to turn out in the end.”
“Sit up,” Cadence said, and she took over rubbing Richard’s shoulders. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“Children might as well be invaders from another planet.”
“You and Ellen never wanted children?”
He could tell she expected him to say yes based on the proportionate increase in the pressure she was applying to his knotted trapezius. How he hated to talk about his ex-wife in front of Cadence, if only because Cadence had always been greedy for details. She wanted to know what they’d fought about, how they’d made up, where they used to live, whether or not Richard considered himself a good husband or had managed to stay faithful, even whether or not Ellen had been a good fuck and a good wife and if she’d liked to suck his cock on long drives or show up at his office with no panties on beneath her summer dress. Cadence could retell every detail of every relationship she’d ever been in with cold precision. To Richard, telling Cadence about the life that he and Ellen had lived had seemed like one last betrayal of his ex.
“We’d go for a walk around the neighborhood, maybe to Dupont Circle, and stop for coffee. We’d sit at the corner tables at this café over by the Scientology building and watch the young families go by. I’d look and think I was seeing my future. But then some couple would roll up with their new baby, the kid in a stroller that cost more than my rent. Ellen always looked at those kids and sneered and said, ‘I’d never want that. It’s like having a parasite take purchase in your body,’ and she’d end it with this little theatrical shiver. It was hard to even suggest sex after that.”
“But you wanted a kid, yes? You saw the allure.”
“I’d see a father lift a kid high over his head, and I’d think only about that kid’s face, half laughter and half terror. And I’d think about how I had no memories of anything like that from my own childhood. None. I can’t recall anything I did with my father.”
“Never tossed a baseball? No family vacations?”
“Do you know what my family did for vacation? We’d rent a house at Rehoboth Beach, and he’d pack the backseat of the car with exciting reading material like the conference report on the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Act of ninenteen-seventy-whatever. While I swam by myself, my mother slept off the drinks from the night before and my father waded out into the ocean up to his knees and read stuff for work. Some kids could tell you who played right field for the Orioles. I could tell you the names of all the minority counsels for the House Judiciary Committee.”
“That’s not really a marketable job skill for a ten-year-old,” Cadence said.
“I was never ten. Anything normal kids did, I missed. I grew up in the city, and all my friends and their parents disappeared to the suburbs, poster children for white flight. I missed out on all of it, lightning bugs in a jar and setting ants on fire with a magnifying glass, soft-serve ice cream, dogs named Clyde, candy cigarettes, going to the beach on the spur of a moment with a $1.49 Styrofoam cooler. I missed it all.”
Cadence’s face brightened with a wide smile, the kind that came with a specific memory. “We did that. Before my mom died. Styrofoam cooler and two bags of ice and about twenty different sandwiches, potato chips. We’d go to Wildwood for the day, and at sunset, we’d all ride the roller coaster. One of those old rickety wooden ones that tilted side to side in the wind.” Somewhere during her story, she stopped rubbing his shoulders. Richard fell back into the bed, and she snuggled up beside him.
He said, “If we went to an amusement park, it would just be me and my dad, and he’d find a pay phone somewhere and an excuse to call the office about something, and I’d end up riding the roller coaster next to a stranger.”
“You got to go, at least. That has to be worth something,” Cadence said. “There has to be one pleasant memory in there.”
“Oh, sure. Skee-Ball. Afternoons at the beach when it rained. Lew would hand over a roll of dimes. That’s how long ago this was—each game cost a dime. I’d play hours of Skee-Ball, and Dad would sit under the awning on the boardwalk and smoke a Hav-a-Tampa. At the end of the week, I’d have a million tickets, and Dad would find some downtrodden-looking kid at the arcade and make me give them to him.” Richard was aware that he sounded greedy, petulant, so he smiled his way through the last half of it.
“It doesn’t exactly sound traumatic. How good were the prizes, anyway?”
“Like a pot of gold. Squirt guns. Itching powder. Baseball cards. Invisible-ink pens. Those snap-pop things that blew up when you threw them on the ground. Toy handcuffs. The Chinese finger torture. Plastic sharks and plastic army men. A yardstick made entirely out of bubble gum.”
The only light in the room, the pale blue wash of the television, flickered to black at the end of a commercial. When the news resumed, Richard looked up long enough to recognize the footage of the crash, its broadcast loop starting again. He shook his head, turned away from the TV. “I don’t even know what kids do these days.”
“They do what kids have always done. Tell me, counselor. What kind of father will you be?” she asked.
Richard was proud for having anticipated the question, the way a good lawyer should. What Cadence really wanted to know was, Can you be reliable? Can you get out of bed at four in the morning to fetch Gabriel a glass of water in a spill-proof plastic cup imprinted with scenes of superheroes and cartoonish reptiles? Can you take his temperature? Can you provide three meals a day, complete with fresh fruit and vegetables? Can you make time for father-son picnics, after-school conferences, emergency room visits, movies on Saturday afternoon, carpools to and from everything? Can you remember the orange slices for soccer practice and the cookies for the Christmas party and the dozen miniature cards and tiny candy hearts for the girls in his class on Valentine’s Day?
Richard wanted to give the kid a normal childhood, and he wanted Gabriel to know he would always stick up for him in a spat with his fifth-grade teacher. He wanted Gabriel to have what he hadn’t, tennis lessons and sleepaway camp and lake swimming. He could coach Gabriel’s Little League team. That all sounded normal. Normal meant skinned knees and minor accidents that resulted in stitches, bee stings and chigger bites, seventh-grade make-out parties and car dates and getting so drunk you get sick the first weekend away at college. That was what Cadence had done, only she often claimed not to remember it. Her childhood was a secret buried out in the backyard, and she hated to dig it up, portioned it out in rations. He knew she was making an effort here for his sake.
Richard wanted to tell her that he loved her, past and present tense, that she belonged where she was. Her left hand fell in the center of his chest and absently played with his chest hair, and though he ha
d always been vaguely ashamed at the amount of fur there, she pulled it through her fingers and stroked it against the grain and smoothed it back down enough for him to know that it was not a nervous tic but a gesture of affection. What more could he ask than that, he thought, the eye or the hand that saw his imperfections and decided for whatever reasons—expediency or closeness, passion or the simple fear of being alone—to love him anyway.
She tapped him twice on the chest, a sign that she actually expected an answer to her question.
“What kind of father do I want to be? One that tries. Hard.”
Cadence lingered in the bathroom, dawdling in front of the mirror. She wanted to tend to her upkeep, to floss her teeth and use the makeup mirror to direct a surgical strike on blackheads, her eyebrows. She wondered how long she could stay in the bathroom, how long she could avoid opening the door to Richard’s sadness. Too much of her adult life had taught her what sadness looked like: it looked like her father’s prescription bottles filling the top shelf of a medicine cabinet, his weekly pill trays whose plastic compartments overflowed with a cornucopia of meds—drugs for hypertension and high cholesterol, diuretics, blood thinners, Proscar, B-complex pills, and vitamin-E capsules, gelatinous and golden—that smelled to Cadence of hospital beds and urine.
She’d been waiting for the thunderclap, some grand announcement that she was on the right path instead of just committing herself to one option or another. Work meant a hotel and a minibar and a series of allegedly guiltless assignations with someone whose loneliness was as tangible as hers. Her judgment, which she had once thought unassailable, had led her in what she saw now as a big fucking circle, and now she stood in her own bathroom washing off the semen of a man she’d never thought she’d sleep with again.
He was a fixture, as prominent as a piece of furniture. He belonged.
And it was time to say something, time to admit it. She returned to the bedroom, and there he was, riveted to the screen again, because he wanted answers too. He had a natural inclination. He looked at the television and then at her and then back at the television, and if for no other reason than that she was afraid she might be in love, Cadence said, “I need you to do something for me.” He raised an eyebrow in response, and she snapped the overhead light on. “We are not watching that again. Absolutely not,” she said, and Richard knew her well enough to wait for the alternative she undoubtedly was about to propose.
She started rummaging in her bedroom closet; when she moved in, she had removed the closet door and replaced it with a beaded curtain, which at the time had seemed charming, a little personal stamp on an otherwise generic condo. Now, in the late night, it looked childish, and the clacking plastic beads were nothing but an irritant. She turned the closet light out and told Richard, “Turn around.”
“I’m in bed. Where am I turning around to?”
She laughed. “Cover your eyes, then. Okay, now you can look.”
She knew him well enough to realize that he half-expected lingerie, some erotic costume, but instead Cadence emerged clad in black ski pants, a down parka in a brilliant silver nylon, her head topped with a knit hat that peaked in a giant felt pom-pom of a bright tomato red.
“Very nice,” Richard said. “I had a hat like that as a kid. Mine had a Washington Redskins patch on the forehead. What exactly are we doing?”
“Get your coat,” Cadence said. “We’re going to remind you how to be a kid.”
55
IN A hotel located between terminals at the DFW airport, six-year-old Gabriel and his temporary guardian, Maura Valle, tried to make the best of it. She’d lied to the boy at least three times; they were going to meet his mother’s plane, she would be late, she would be home tomorrow. She couldn’t imagine lifting the psychic weight that it would take to tell him the truth. The evening felt driven entirely by her guilt. She let him order dinner from room service; she’d worry about who was paying tomorrow, and if it came out of her pocket, it would be the price she had to pay for her lack of courage and her well-intentioned lies.
While Maura made phone calls to various executives at Panorama Airlines, establishing that there was indeed a responsible party (the boy’s uncle) and that he would be arriving in the morning, Gabriel flipped through the channels, at least twice skipping beyond footage of his mother’s crash. Maura took the remote, brought up some animated film from the pay-per-view movies; Gabriel collapsed into one of the two queen-size beds and pronounced his judgment: “That’s kid stuff.”
She picked up the phone and dialed the number that had been forwarded to her by one of the angel teams, the home number for the boy’s uncle. Three hours’ worth of phone calls in fifteen-minute intervals, and she’d gotten the same recording each time: “You have reached the voice mailbox for Richard MacMurray. If you are calling about an on-camera appearance, please leave a number that is available after hours, and I will return the call as soon as possible.”
She hadn’t left a message. She would call, and keep calling, until he answered. Some things should be said only from one human being to another.
She knew too that feeling was hypocritical. She couldn’t find a way to say it to the boy. Maybe it would be easier to explain in the morning, the both of them well rested. Easier still would be to wait until the boy’s uncle arrived, but that seemed callous. She knew she’d already made mistakes here, enough that she felt frozen, unable to act.
Maura managed to suggest that he brush his teeth, then put on the pajamas that she’d salvaged from the mess in Mike’s guest room.
“It’s time to get ready for bed,” she gently reminded him. Gabriel had a certain deferential quality, hadn’t once questioned her authority or why someone who was effectively a stranger had shuffled him off to a nice hotel. She’d blown off his questions at Mike’s house, and he’d been mostly silent during the forty-minute drive to the airport. After she’d decided to stop lying to the boy, all she’d volunteered was that his uncle was coming to visit. She was still working out how to broach the subject. She’d read reams of stuff, the best practical advice on grief, on talking about death with children, and now the entirety of it ran together in her head, a well-meaning muddle. She’d seen other court-appointed guardians struggle with this stuff in the past; that was to be expected. The heartbreaking part usually came later, some remark that showed how the child did not understand the permanence of what had happened. An orphan girl she’d chaperoned for a week kept repeating that her father had gone to sleep and would be up soon; Maura kept thinking how so many of us approached any conversation about death solely with euphemisms, trying to sneak up on the subject. The doctors were the worst. Ever since she’d worked in child protective services, she’d never known a doctor to use the words dead, death, dying. They would walk out of the operating theater still draped in their sterile smock, saying, “We tried heroic measures.” But to have a hero, you had to have a victory.
She did not know for certain how long she’d been in that reverie, only that Gabriel had returned from the bathroom and was standing in front of the television, his toothbrush in his hand, and had changed the channel to FBN and its continuous live coverage. A plane en route to Dallas from Salt Lake City, which earlier this afternoon crashed on approach. There were only so many ways you could say the basic facts. It looked to Maura as if each of the repeated details drew the child a step closer to the screen. The part that Maura would always remember, even more than the sight of the boy running across the terminal to his uncle the following morning, was his hand, in this moment; it dropped from his mouth to his waist, then slowly to its full extension, down, and the toothbrush tumbled out of his grip onto the hotel room’s carpeted floor.
56
IT IS a kind of delicious cheating to flip ahead, to know how everything turns out; to read the last page is to learn exactly how inevitable the events are in a particular story. But the idea of an ending as inevitable is less than modern. It is quaint and disquieting in all the most pejorative ways. Said another
way, the neat ending is directly contrary to the massive disorder of life.
Bob Denovo, Heavy Metal Bob, walked out of the Salt Lake City airport on New Year’s Day and never returned, not even for his final paycheck. Without bothering to gather the few items in his almost-barren apartment, he withdrew what little he had from the bank and drove through the high desert into Wyoming and kept heading north. He entered Manitoba on the afternoon of January 3. Today he works illegally as a short-order cook at a Greek diner in Winnipeg, where the owners pay him in cash under the table.
Funeral services for Captain Grady Williston, fifty-five, of Westlake, Texas, were held on January 7; federal investigators would keep his remains embargoed for forensic investigation for several months’ time, which meant that the centerpiece of his viewing was an empty casket. At the Elder Brothers Mortuary—whose promotional materials include a quarter-page Yellow Pages advertisement with the disclaimer not to be confused with the original Elder Brothers Mortuary—the funeral director provided the casket as a prop for the material benefit of the widow and the dead pilot’s friends and colleagues. Two other captains made repeated trips out of the viewing, to the lobby, to discreetly take telephone calls placing them in charge of the flights scheduled for Captain Williston for the next fourteen days.
Mike Renfro ordered his office closed for the foreseeable future, and then, because he was first and foremost an insurance man, realized that the progression of loss that created the need for insurance would not stop just to make accommodations for his grief, so he rescinded the order. Closing the office was like trying to fight the very notion of what it meant to be human.
He arrived home after his overnight drive to Dallas, expecting to find Gabriel and Sarah; instead, a cleaning lady he did not know was on her hands and knees in the kitchen, and Gabriel was on his way to the airport to be reunited with his uncle. He woke Sarah with an early-morning call, wherein she provided the name of a child advocate and a number for someone at the family court. Mike thought of getting back into the car and driving to the airport, but what would he do once he got there? His duty was to Mary Beth, and by extension that meant some obligations to her son. But Gabriel wasn’t his son, a point that even a six-year-old could make with a surgeon’s precision. Mike could see no way to impose himself into Gabriel’s life that didn’t require lawyers and hearings and social workers, hours of paperwork, sworn depositions. Perhaps his duties had ended with the crash; he had spent his adult life selling people the idea of security, and that was the word that came to mind when he understood what it was that he could do for the boy. He could provide security. Instead of a harried trip to the airport, he decided he could take action. He busied himself with the details of creating a tuition fund for Gabriel, filling out the paperwork, making sure he had the liquidity to start it with a large cash contribution.
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