by Scott Lasser
Mrs. Boyle heads off to the kitchen to call, close enough to keep the boy in her sight through the open door. Cat hears a few words, but she can’t make them out. Not with the boy staring at her, not with her inability to take her eyes off him. He seems to know this. He performs for her, walking this way and that, lifting his arms, giggling, then looking back at her and giggling more. Not a care in the world, Cat thinks. Not one.
Mr. Boyle arrives after fifteen minutes or so, during which time Cat sat on the couch and stared at the boy, who continued to walk back and forth, like a little soldier on sentry duty. Mrs. Boyle waited nearby, said nothing, a thin woman who gave off the impression that perhaps she forgot to eat. Cat finds her unnerving and is relieved when Mr. Boyle appears, a tall man, with close-cropped hair, no jacket but a shirt and tie. A shirt and tie, but nothing like Kyle wore, or her father. Short sleeves, for one thing, and a collar a size too big. Mr. Boyle walks over and Cat stands and shakes his hand. Then he takes a seat on the coach, rests his forearms on his thighs, exhales with some effort, as if it’s already been a very long day, and says, “Tell me, exactly, what do you want?”
I want, Cat thinks, to take your grandson back to Michigan to live with me. “Do you know who the boy’s father is?” she asks. It suddenly feels very hot.
“You think it was your brother.”
Mrs. Boyle has retreated to the door by the kitchen, where she stands quietly, not really in the room at all.
“I do,” Cat says. “I’m fairly certain.”
“Why?”
“Because he thought so.”
“Because he thought so,” Boyle repeats.
“You didn’t know my brother.”
“He had all the answers.”
“Men don’t own up to paternity when they’re not the father,” Cat says. She is, she realizes, sweating. She feels a droplet run down her ribs.
“You’d think a guy like that, one who would own up to fatherhood, my daughter might want to introduce him to her parents,” says Boyle. He has thinning hair, rust-colored like the upper leaves of the oak outside. From her work she knows his lot. A good man, she imagines, but with weak finances, meager options, one who has to pay up for credit. Not unlike herself.
“I can’t explain why your daughter did what she did,” Cat says. “But I can guess. You’re a woman of a certain age, you want a child, then you get pregnant, probably by accident, and you think, I don’t know if this will happen again. I don’t know if this will ever happen again, but I have this chance to have a child right now, and so maybe the father’s not perfect, maybe you don’t want the father around at all, but you have this life inside you, and once you have that you’re not going to give it up. It’s going to define you, and you don’t think that one day you’ll go to work and won’t come home.”
“What do you want, Mrs. Miller?”
No missus, she thinks. She never changed her name, never wanted to. She remembers thinking, I’m a Miller, always will be. Of course, it should have told her something, right then, about Michael.
“I want to know that my brother is your grandson’s father. There’s DNA. We can know.”
Boyle considers this.
“It will give your grandson a father,” she says. “Even if that father is dead, the boy will want to know who his father was. He’ll just want to know.”
Again, Boyle says nothing.
“Are you planning on raising him yourselves?” Cat asks.
“For now. We don’t yet have it all worked out. Siobhan has a sister.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s in the military. Navy. Abroad, right now.”
Cat looks at Mrs. Boyle, who’s looking away. She sees that Mrs. Boyle knows why she came, and Cat understands that she’s been right all along: she needs to adopt the boy. She suspects even the Boyles know it.
“I have an eight-year-old son,” she says.
“Your brother, was he Kyle?” Boyle asks.
She feels a jolt at the mention of his name.
“Why, yes, he was. Did you meet him?”
“Siobhan mentioned him once. We knew he existed. My wife and I will need to talk,” he says.
He stands, and Cat follows, relieved to be able to move. She says, “I’ll be honest, I don’t know how DNA tests are done. I’ll find out and then I’ll let you know what to do.”
Boyle nods. He’s not pushing her out of the house, but she feels he’d like to. She takes a step toward the foyer, but stops. “May I?” she asks, nodding at the little boy. “May I hold him?”
Silence. Even the boy stops playing in his pen.
“Let’s wait on that, honey,” says Mrs. Boyle.
“We’ll talk,” Boyle adds.
“What do you call him?” Cat asks.
“Ian. His name is Ian.”
“Ian,” Cat says. She walks out into the bright afternoon thinking it over and over: Ian, Ian, Ian.
XVII
Maybe we’re starting over each day, Sam thinks. Even now. He has decided to keep his place, though he will move, no question about that. He doesn’t want to have to pack up all his stuff, and, besides, it’s a little easier to relax on a boat when you know there’s a life raft. He thinks of the navy, of the rolling green water near the Philippines and the sky off San Diego, of the mountains rising out of New Zealand, and then, his mood darkening, of the control room of a submarine he trained on in the early spring of ’42. He hated submarines—no life rafts—but a sonar instructor had noticed his ear and so for a couple of weeks he feared he might spend the war underwater. One day they were training in the waters off the coast of California, only a couple of hundred feet below the surface. The sonar picked something up, something a few miles east of them. The sonar man didn’t think it was a ship. Neither did Sam, who’d trained on the machine about two weeks. He could tell from the return ping, which was too soft and fuzzy. The captain, though, insisted it was an enemy sub. A discussion ensued. The chain of command was clear, so they torpedoed the blip, but found no evidence of a sub. It was a whale, coming to the surface for a bit of air.
It is, Sam thinks, no small thing to kill an animal, any animal, but that whale was something else altogether; causing its death was a special kind of hubris, a basic injustice against nature, and the nature of things. He thinks back to the captain, who was probably only thirty-two or -three, as unsure in life as any man, charged with responsibility that was beyond him. Sam wonders if he survived the war. In any case, he’d likely be dead now. Then he was blond and skinny with blotchy skin and a face that did not display a seriousness of purpose. Still, he tried. Hood was his name. Back on shore Sam went to the Officers’ Club for a drink, a new pleasure of rank and adulthood. There, for the first time, he met Higginbotham, a large man (he’d played football at the academy), imposing at the bar, with his special mix of posture and bulk. There was one seat, and it happened to be next to Higginbotham. Sam took it.
“Where you from, son?” Higginbotham asked, his soft drawl exotic, almost foreign. In college Sam knew guys from Ohio and Wisconsin, one from Pennsylvania. The navy was a whole different story.
Sam told him.
“Dee-troit,” said the officer. “Your daddy make cars?”
“No, sir.”
“Tanks?”
“No.”
“I thought everyone in Detroit makes cars.”
“Or tanks,” Sam said.
Higginbotham chuckled and Sam thought it would end there, but Higginbotham really did want to know what Sam’s father did for a living, and so Sam told him: he bought and sold junk. Sam explained that his father was an immigrant, and that things were not easy for him, that he’d come here poor and he still spoke with an accent. Sam did not mention that the accent was Yiddish. No sense bringing that up.
“He sent you to college, though, didn’t he?” Higginbotham asked.
“He did.”
Higginbotham put a hand on Sam’s shoulder and motioned to the bartender with his other. T
hen he looked down at Sam’s beer, which was barely touched. “You ever had a martini, son?”
“No, sir.”
“We’re going to toast your daddy, then. Since he made sure you got educated. And, since he obviously never taught you, I’m going to teach you how to drink.”
“Learn from the master,” said a voice down the bar. Higginbotham raised his empty glass in a mock salute, then turned back to Sam.
“Now tell me, which tub are you on?”
Sam told him.
“Hood?” Higginbotham asked. Yes, Sam nodded. “No no no,” said Higginbotham. “That won’t do.”
Sam’s transfer came through the following afternoon. Even then he recognized it as a blessing, a gift from God.
• • •
Sam wakes from a short nap, twenty minutes in his reading chair, he guesses. How can he explain to Phyllis the joy he feels just waking up? With death so close, it’s like the war. If he woke at sea and it wasn’t a general quarters alarm—sometimes it was—then he felt he’d been granted a new life. He wanted to survive. He did what was required of him; often he did more. He understood that luck was the main component of the formula that resulted in life or death, but he wanted to move the odds. Higginbotham wanted this, too.
One day late in the war, though of course he had no idea it was so, Sam found Higginbotham in the officers’ mess, drinking from a flask. “This is the last whiskey,” Higginbotham said. “After this we’ll need to hit a decent port to restock.” He paused, then asked Sam, “You got any?”
“No, sir.” It had never occurred to Sam to buy alcohol unless he was going to consume it on the spot.
“What do you have?” Higginbotham asked.
“Chocolate,” said Sam.
“Well, let’s have it.”
Sam’s parents had sent the box, Saunders Chocolates, individual pieces set nicely into pleated pieces of paper. Except that it had taken three months for the box to find him in the Pacific, during which time the chocolate and fillings and paper had melted into a single block. Sam set the box on the table, gave it a hit with the heel of his hand, and then took off the cover. “Help yourself,” he told his commanding officer.
Higginbotham took a piece, paper and all. So did Sam. “I’ve always liked the taste of chocolate with scotch,” Higginbotham said, while he sniffed the empty flask.
“Not gin?” Sam said.
“God, no, not with chocolate. Besides, I don’t bring gin on board.”
“Why not?”
“First, because I like it too much. And second, I can’t get it cold enough to make a decent martini.”
Sam thought about this, the quest for the right drink, the importance it took on inside the larger mission. Earlier that day they had been chasing a sub, which had likely gotten away. It would come back, or another would. Zeros would appear. It wouldn’t end. Probably not for years. A good drink, though, that was a possibility you could believe in.
As if reading Sam’s mind, Higginbotham spoke. “I think I could do this forever, if it were not for one thing.”
“Do what forever, sir?”
“Stay at sea. At war.”
“And what is the one thing?”
“Women. We go too long without them. Not that there aren’t advantages to that, but it’s not natural.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ll see. When the shooting stops, all sorts of other things start to get important. The cut of a suit, who’s going to make what presentation. Money. Christ, always money. Out here, who cares? You have scotch, or chocolate, and you’re a king.”
“Except we have no women, and people are shooting at us,” Sam said.
“They’re supposed to shoot at us. It’s why we’re here. Someday you’ll see, this isn’t so bad. Everyone wants to go home, I guarantee you. But they may not like it when they get there. Home is not an easy thing for a man. Especially if you’ve been out here.”
“You prefer the ocean.”
“I even prefer the navy. They’re going to kick me out, but not till this war is over. Right now, they need the bodies.” Sam had heard stories, rumors of some transgression that stymied Higginbotham’s career. It involved a woman. There had to be truth to it. An academy graduate, in the greatest war of all time—he should have been someplace better.
“You think we will win?” Sam asked. A dangerous question, as it implied another outcome was possible, which in turn implied doubt.
“Of course. Always have. Why should this time be any different? Look at the Japs. They’ve started to send their boys on suicide missions. That’s always a sign of the end. They can’t win, so they glorify dying. The outcome is not the question. The question is: what comes after the outcome? That I don’t know. You, though, should stay in the navy.”
“Why me?” Sam asked.
“Because you’ll always have something to do. You may escape boredom. And you’ll go far.”
“And what about women?” Sam asked.
“Find a good one, the right one for you. Not an easy thing, so you’ll have to spend some time at it. That’s time well spent. Even if you decide she’s the wrong woman, it’s time well spent.”
“Are you married, sir?”
“I was, but that’s a complicated story.” Higginbotham raised his empty flask for a toast—to what he didn’t say.
XVIII
She sits at the gate at LaGuardia, the space confined and gray, almost deserted. Two rows away, in a phalanx of connected chairs, a man is trying to type on a laptop he has balanced on his knees. Three seats down there’s a priest reading a Daily News. Otherwise, there don’t seem to be many takers for Detroit, or anywhere else. Even a year after the attacks, people aren’t flying, and the airlines are desperate. She’d gotten a hardship deal on her ticket when she pleaded to an airline manager that she needed to get to New York to make funeral arrangements for her brother. The family, she said, had finally decided that the body would not show up. “He died on September eleventh,” she murmured. That’s all you have to say now, and people show respect.
Her phone comes alight, a 212 number. The cop. Ludvenko. She left him a message to tell him that she’d found Siobhan, and that she needed the sample of her brother’s DNA that the police department had. He seemed to like her; he always called back.
“I’m sorry,” he says now. “I mean, I’m glad you got answers, that you found her, but I’m sorry she’s deceased.”
Deceased, Cat thinks. Ended.
“Anyway,” Ludvenko says, “There’s a lab near the boy, in White Plains. They can do the DNA test. We don’t do it, not if it’s not really police business. But you give me the go-ahead, I’ll get your brother’s sample up there. They’ll have some paperwork for you.”
“You have my go-ahead,” she says. She writes down the lab’s name, its phone number, another 914.
“Have you seen the kid?” the cop asks.
“Yes, I have.”
“So, whaddya think? Is it your brother’s?”
“I don’t know.”
“Aw, c’mon. You don’t know by looking at him?”
“I think he is,” Cat allows.
“We get these stories all the time now. The kids whose fathers died before they were born. Lotta women pregnant on nine-eleven, I guess. My wife, even. I got two little ones now. But I’m still here. If some-thing’d happened to me that day, then, I mean, I can’t imagine.”
The priest closes his paper; she turns toward him, drawn by the sound. He catches her eye, offers the paper.
“Sure,” she says. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” he says. She envies him. He seems so relaxed, so sure. It must be the faith, knowing, if not the answers, then that you’re close to them. Her mother was Catholic, not that Cat received any religious instruction. Her mother’s funeral was Catholic, organized by her grandparents. She remembers sitting with Kyle and watching it all, the foreignness of it, the service long and boring and somehow wonderful. People had been doing
this for almost two thousand years, she thought. Here was a time-tested way to deal with death. If you believed, then maybe it was easier. Like the hijackers. They believed and went willingly to their deaths. Amazing.
She calls Tommy. She decides this is okay: she’s the one with the news. It’s a little after seven-thirty, and she finds him at home. “Big plans tonight?” she asks.
“Yeah, Tuesday’s always a big night for me. You?”
“I’m flying back.”
“That was fast.”
“I found him,” she says. “Kyle’s boy. I found him.”
“Wow. Tell me about it.”
“He’s with the mother’s parents. I asked them to do a DNA test. That’s about the extent of it.”
“Give me the name of the lab.” He tells her to name him as her doctor when she signs the privacy forms. “That way, I can call up there and push them on the results. I mean, my office can. And they can release the results to me. It’ll save you a lot of hassle.”
“Great,” she says, grateful to have help, not to have to do everything for herself.
“You need a ride from the airport?” he asks.
“I got my car there.”
“Connor with his dad tonight?”
“No doubt eating Cheetos for dinner and falling asleep on the couch.”
“Sounds like a good night. Jon’s with his mom.”
“You never talk about her.”
“Well, if you can’t say something nice …”
He was always clever. She remembers this. Clever. Also nice, but not nice. She always felt, as she feels now, a little off balance with him, and she likes the feeling.
“Cat?”
“Yeah?”
“Come to my house tonight.”
She wants to, very much. Not that she would have admitted it so blatantly, even to herself, until right now.
“When you were a kid,” she asks, “did your parents take you to church?”
“Oh God,” he says. “Is that a no?”
Somehow, in the plane, she feels closer to Kyle. His meeting was at the top of the building; he must have fallen out of the sky. Did he know it was the end? What would he have regretted? That he never knew his son? Or perhaps he couldn’t understand that yet. Even when she was pregnant, Cat couldn’t guess at the love she would feel for Connor. Yes, she loved him, but not like she loved him when he was born and she could hold him in her arms and feel his weight, the heft of him and the responsibility that was now hers. She knew then that her life would never be the same, that she had to protect this child at all costs, from everything and everyone. She felt this even with regard to Michael, and now she wonders about Siobhan. Did she really understand Kyle? Did she worry he wasn’t a good enough man? Or did she just want the little boy all to herself? Perhaps she thought she was the only person who could love Ian enough. Cat had felt that about Connor. She asks herself, Do I really want that responsibility with this little boy? With Ian? Do I really have a choice?