by Scott Lasser
At seven she goes to Connor’s room and sits on the edge of his bed. He sleeps hot. She runs her hand lightly through his golden hair, which is matted and damp with sweat. She can feel the heat when her hand is an inch away. “Hey, my angel boy,” she says, now rubbing the worn powder blue cotton of his pajamas, “it’s time to get up.” He turns away, then back, his eyes open.
“Okay, Mommy,” he says, and he swings his bare feet out of the bed and onto the floor, stands, and looks back at her as though he’s been awake for hours. The perfect little man. “Let’s go,” he says.
“What am I?” she says. “Chopped liver?” This is her father’s line. Connor runs the three steps back to her and hugs her. Then she lets him go.
By the time she reaches the kitchen Connor is already sitting at the counter, his feet dangling off the stool, the television at the counter’s end tuned to Nickelodeon and an early-morning episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. There was a time when Cat would not have allowed this, but then her father reminded her that he’d let her watch television when she was young. “In the navy,” he said, “they taught me never to give an unnecessary order.” And so she relented. It was one of many things she has relented on. Not to use the microwave, for instance. She’d read somewhere it did no good, but this morning she cooks two pieces of bacon in it, then five frozen silver-dollar pancakes, Connor’s favorite, food he prefers over anything she can make from scratch. To get the pancakes he’d bargained away labor—he’d promised to make his bed—and Cat has to admit he does a good job of keeping up his end of the deal. Whenever Cat looks at his bedspread, arranged into a childish approximation of order, she thinks that her philosophy of parenting really can be boiled down to one concept: bribery.
She sets the food in front of her son and he turns to it, then smiles at her.
“I love you so much, Mommy,” he says.
“I love you,” she says.
“No, really,” he says. “I love you so much.”
“I love you so much,” she repeats. He smiles at her, satisfied, and takes a bite of bacon. Remember this, she tells herself. Remember when your boy looked at you and said he loved you. Remember it because otherwise you might let it slip, it was possible to forget anything, even love and dreams. She wonders where Kyle’s boy is right now, if someone is making him breakfast, and who it is.
She dresses Connor for day camp, that summer refuge for the children of single mothers and dual-income families, and then has him watch TV at the counter while she takes ten minutes to put on a little eyeliner and then some concealer to lighten the darkness that now never seems to leave the underside of her eyes. She thinks of Kyle and that time when Cat was eight or nine and she lured Kyle into a McIntosh tree in their backyard and left him there. Kyle was too scared to climb down. Cat thought this hilarious. She left him, went into the house, and turned on the TV. It was almost an hour before her mother appeared, face bright with fury, a smudge of red lipstick on her teeth.
“How could you?” she demanded. “How could you?”
Cat actually had no idea what she was talking about.
“He’s your brother!” she yelled.
Later that night Cat lay in her bed, dreading her mother’s visit, worried she wouldn’t come, or worse, that she would but that she wouldn’t care anymore. It was cruel to leave Kyle in the tree, Cat saw that now, and she didn’t understand how she could have done it. Why? she asked herself. Why did I?
But her mother came in as she always did. She asked Cat if she was ready for sleep. Cat lied, said she was. Her mother kissed her forehead, then turned out the light. Cat could still make her out in the darkness, and smell her, a combination of perfume and sweat and fatigue from a long day. She said, “Your father and I gave you Kyle, and gave you to him, so that you two would always have each other. So that your whole lives there’d be someone there for you. Him for you and you for him. Stick with him and you’ll never be alone.”
But she hadn’t stuck. If Kyle got the same speech, he hadn’t acted on it. They saw each other once or twice a year, and the years went by, and there came a point when Cat realized she didn’t really know Kyle, and that if she were going to, she’d have to make the effort. Because blood mattered. Their mother was right. Cat knew she was.
And so last year she’d flown to New York, on Kyle’s dime, yes, but the truth was that was the only way it was going to happen, what with her crappy production and all the things that Connor needed and Michael’s pathetic child support, which was often late, and the rent on her little apartment. Here she was, extolling home ownership, and she didn’t even own her own home. Kyle was a big deal now, escaped to New York for almost twenty years. He lived high above Third Avenue, in a neat two-bedroom that seemed rarely used, as if he were afraid to unpack. Kyle worked hard, apparently had a fair amount of money, and could do as he pleased when he wasn’t working, which was almost never. Cat remembers going out for drinks with Kyle the last night of his life and, after dropping the bomb about his son, Kyle said he was thinking of retiring by forty-five. Forty-five! Cat will be that next year, and she has nothing, and will have nothing, except what comes to her from Kyle, whenever the courts in New York get around to helping settle up the estate. An estate is not, however, a life, and for this to be settled she will go to California. She knows she must. See her father. Take her son. Make whatever connections are left to be made, while there is still time to make them. And she will find Kyle’s boy, because she needs to find him and because the boy needs to be found.
V
Sam drives, wondering if knowing that his arteries are clogged will make him live differently. It was foolish to go to the doctor; at Sam’s age it’s like reading the paper, nothing but bad news. A fused back and a fake hip, one bypass already—he’s had enough surgery for a lifetime.
A Conoco station presents itself, and he pulls in, a damn-the-torpedoes idea forming in his head. A great thing about gas stations nowadays is all the things you can buy at them, not that you can get a lick of service on your car. Beer and pop, pretzels and candy, milk and cereal, magazines and T-shirts, baseball caps, cigarettes. Well, maybe you could always buy cigarettes. He stops in a designated parking space—they actually expect people to come here and not buy gas—and hobbles inside. There’s a dark-skinned kid behind the counter, some strain, Sam thinks, of central Asian, one of those places where they hate us, or love us, you can never tell which.
“A pack of Marlboros,” Sam says.
The kid reaches to pull the pack from the rack above his head.
“Make it two,” Sam tells him. “And some matches.”
“Eight thirty-seven.”
“How much?” Sam asks.
The kid repeats it. Since when, Sam wonders, has a pack of cigarettes cost what a steak and a martini once did? He hands over a ten, Hamilton off center, the way they are making money now. He’s read that the government is doing this to foil counterfeiting operations in the Middle East. Everything is changing. Soon money won’t be green.
Outside he sits in his car, puts the windows down, then wrestles with the infernal cellophane till finally he is able to tear it off and tap out a cigarette, the old ritual coming back to him, its motions and rhythms instantly familiar, the movements part of an indelible memory. It is, he thinks, the little personal habits that get one through, as smoking was in the war. He believes he remembers his last cigarette. His destroyer was off Okinawa and came to the aid of a damaged ship, the Bid-well. A kamikaze had hit it and taken out the bridge. The Bidwell was still smoldering, afloat but listing, its future uncertain. The crews set up a system of ropes and pulleys, and then evacuated the injured men from the damaged ship. Men strapped in gurneys hung from ropes above the olive-colored water, the gurneys teetering as they were tugged across the gap. Sam stood at the railing with an enlisted man, Marsten, from Iowa. The injured men kept coming. Marsten asked if they were alive. Sam said they were. The dead were buried at sea. Marsten knew this, had to know it. He pulled out a
pack of cigarettes, and offered one to Sam. They stood for a minute, smoking and watching.
“It’s something, sir, isn’t it?” Marsten asked.
“It certainly is.”
Sam was hurt right after that, and when he could move again he didn’t take smoking back up, and then came the surgeon general’s warning. It did not surprise him, this warning. One did not need a lot of common sense to figure out that putting smoke in your body was not a healthy thing. Still, he missed it, missed the ritual of procuring and lighting cigarettes, missed the taste on a cold morning or late on a summer evening. He missed the taste of it mixed with the air of the open ocean. Usually he remembered the war when he smelled cigarette smoke, and maybe this is why it held him so.
He smokes his cigarette and drives to Phyllis’s house. She’s kind and quite pretty for a woman her age (seventy-four, he thinks), and tolerant of his ways, his need for time alone. He has always had this need, but he also misses her and wants to see her. They spend the night together a few times a week, though sometimes less. It has been this way for roughly four years. She is a separate world to him; they go out occasionally, but usually stay in, sitting on her tan leather couch and talking, or watching a movie she has chosen, playing it from the little discs like the ones used nowadays for music. He is thankful for the companionship, both emotional and physical. She kids him about his desire, that he has any at all, and he is thankful for the simple joy of joking, and that she accepts him. I am a lucky man, he thinks, that I should still have this when so much else is lost.
“Sam!” she exclaims when she opens the door. She’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, like the kids do, a trim woman, still mindful of her appearance and posture, with blue eyes and long gray hair she lets down only in bed. She steps to the side, her way of inviting him in.
“I smell tobacco,” she says.
“You got any coffee?” he asks, knowing she does.
In the kitchen he tells her about the doctor visit. He’s sure she’ll rebuke him, with her almost religious belief in modern medicine and a desire she seems to have to nurse him, something he secretly enjoys. She’ll want him to cut his chest open. He’s sure of it, but she surprises him.
“You’ve got this far without it,” she says. She puts her hand on his. He looks in her eyes and wishes it were fifty years ago. She must have been something then. She might have saved him from a bad marriage, from a lifetime of halting, distrustful relationships with women.
Behind her, he can see her garden. She lives in a house a couple of miles from the ocean, the sunlight now on the many plants whose names he does not know, old acquaintances nonetheless. He wonders why he never learned the names of plants. He should know everything by now.
“Sam?” she asks.
“Take me to bed,” he says.
She gives him a look. “What about your heart?”
He taps his chest. “I’m actually feeling pretty good today.”
“You can’t go dying on me. Literally.”
“What a way to go, huh?”
“Like Rockefeller,” she says. He appreciates that she remembers this now-ancient history. She stands and walks off. He follows, perhaps not as eager as he was as a younger man, but just as hopeful. Odd, he thinks, given his condition, but he doesn’t fight it. The windows in the bedroom are open, letting in the moist and fragrant air of the garden. Look at this, he thinks to himself. What a bounty.
• • •
It is the little details of dreams he remembers, and this is the same dream he’s had almost sixty years, the plane coming at him, the little toggle of the wings among the black puffs of the antiaircraft ordnance, and then he’s awake, just as it happened once. Back then he was looking at a white ceiling, with a single bulb encased in metal mesh. There was a curtain. He tried to sit up and found he couldn’t move at all. Still, he felt motion, and it took him several moments to realize he was at sea.
“What is it?” Phyllis asks.
Ah, he thinks. Here I am. “The war,” he says.
“It would be nice if you could dream about sometime else. Something nice.”
“Like you.”
“That would be a good start,” she says.
She is nestled against him, in the crook of his arm. Another man, he thinks, might take this for granted.
“You smell like cigarettes,” she says.
“I’ve decided to smoke.”
She raises herself up on an elbow, her long hair falling down, a silver waterfall. “Sam, for the love of God.”
“He doesn’t mind. At my age it’s hardly a vice.”
“You learn you need a bypass and your response is to take up smoking?”
“I like smoking. I used to do it. I’m just returning to my old ways.”
She shakes her head at him.
“In old age,” he says, “you give up things, one by one, till there’s little left to give. Smoking, it’s one thing I can reclaim.”
“It will kill you.”
“Funny,” he says.
“You act as if you have nothing to live for.”
“I don’t think that,” he says. “I was just thinking that I’m a lucky man, having you. Earlier I thought how beautiful your garden is. I like smelling the ocean, and, on clear nights, studying the stars. I have a daughter and a grandson. All things worth living for.”
She shakes her head at him but has decided, it seems, not to respond.
“My daughter is coming to visit,” he tells her.
“Well, maybe this time I’ll get to meet her.”
He knows that tone, hears the accusation in it. He’s never let her meet his children. Early on he got used to keeping the lives of his children separate from the lives of his women, and he’s never let the two come together.
“Sure,” he says. “You will. Why not?”
“Four years. We’ve been together four years, and you never let me meet your children. And now one of them is gone.”
“I guess I felt I was protecting them,” Sam says.
“From what?”
He thinks about this. He doesn’t know.
At his home he fixes himself a martini. He is here to shower and grab a change of clothing, then head back to Phyllis’s for dinner. So this is life, he thinks. Back when he worked, such a day would have seemed heaven, and it isn’t bad now. He opens the window of his living room, so that he can hear the ocean and blow smoke outside into the ocean air. A drink and a smoke. Unhealthy vices, perhaps, but he doesn’t want to deny himself. Asceticism, self-denial—these promise future rewards, which all seems a little silly. If he has a regret about his years, it’s that he didn’t enjoy them enough.
The phone rings, but he decides to let it go. Probably a solicitor. He knows he could put his number on a do-not-call list, but he doesn’t, interested in where the people are calling from, the progression from Iowa to Idaho to Ireland to India. He remembers cold mornings as a boy, when his father, who was born in the nineteenth century, would heat bricks in the wood stove in their house and then place them under the seats of the old Model T for the trip to Sam’s cousins, eighteen miles away. This trip took forty-five minutes, providing there was no snow. Now on a sunny afternoon he gets calls from strangers in Bangalore. All in a lifetime. He wishes he could tell his father.
His father never had to think about a bypass in his eighties. He died well short of that, and quickly, a heart attack. He hadn’t known it was coming, but, when it did, it happened very fast, without any waiting to die. This was outside a deli, before lunch. He dropped on the cement sidewalk, was dead by the time the policeman found him. He’d always told his son he came to America because he wanted to live in a place where the streets weren’t mud, and where a man could walk around without fear, and so maybe this was a victory.
Sam marvels at how America is his birthright, and yet fear has driven him. He remembers the first time his ship was fired on. He was on the bridge and issued the general quarters order. Sirens wailed. Men ran. Sam’s capt
ain, Higginbotham, appeared and as Sam explained the situation, the antiaircraft guns opened up. Later Sam realized how scared he had been, but what had frightened him most was what Higginbotham and the other men on the bridge would think of him. He wanted to acquit himself well, feared the loss of respect more than death. He was foolish then, cavalier, young, and unwise. He fears death now. He fears he won’t survive the operation. Perhaps his condition will kill him, but at least the timing won’t be planned. It is better, he thinks, to know how you will die than when.
VI
Another morning and no Siobhan. There are limits to the Internet. For instance, her father is absent. Plenty of Sam Millers, but none is the right one. He’s too old, perhaps, for the Internet age.
It’s Saturday, and Cat will pick up Connor, keep him for the week. Michael said a lot of the right things when they split up, but he was always an indifferent father, and being out of his son’s home has apparently put a lot of the issues of fatherhood out of mind. In many ways she feels it is better this way. She can be there for Connor, and Connor still gets to know his father and spends time with him. For Connor there is no mystery of origin, no sense of being lost.
Michael lives in Birmingham, in a little two-bedroom apartment. Cat remembers the day he moved out of the house, before they sold it because things were always tight and they needed to split the little bit of money locked up in that home. Cat took Connor into Birmingham and soon Michael called her on her cell and said he was out. He was forty then, and it took him less than an hour to pack up his life and move on.
Except, of course, he couldn’t take Connor, seven now, light-haired like his father, and full of life. Cat wonders what the boy understands and decides it can’t be much, not if Cat understands so little herself. Cat thinks the boy knows that he loves his mother and father, which is wisdom, of course, and not always so easy.