by Scott Lasser
“We should have another,” he says.
“Another what?”
“Child.”
She rolls to face him, looks him in the eye. No one has ever said anything like this to her.
“I’m forty-four.”
“Cat, I know exactly how old you are,” he says. “I mention this now because I’m suggesting we not waste time.”
She feels hot, with her eyes welling up. She touches her eye and feels the tears spill out.
“It’s our chance,” he tells her. “I know we have three children now, but I want one with you. One who’s wholly yours and mine.”
She’s almost sobbing. He’s doing this. She puts her foot on his, feels its warmth. “There’s no going back,” she tells him.
“You’re right,” he says. “We’re burning the boats.”
Jonathan and Connor race cars around the waiting room, while Cat sits with Tommy, Ian on her knee. Mrs. Boyle claimed fatigue and is supposed to be resting back at the house. Cat wonders if she’s rifling through drawers, looking for evidence of God knows what. “Again,” Ian says, meaning he wants Cat to bounce him to “This Is the Way the Ladies Ride.” She has done this at least a dozen times today alone. She’s even taught him the word again.
She bounces and watches Jonathan and her boy. No, she tells herself, they’re both my boys. I must do what my father did and take him in completely. He’s dark and taller than Connor, with a few freckles on his nose and a smile that never fails to lighten her mood. And he and Connor have taken to each other like brothers, Jonathan always leading, Connor close behind.
“Again?” Ian says.
“You should teach him something else,” Tommy says.
She hands him the child, who sneezes in transit. “You try it,” she tells him.
He starts bouncing the boy and turning him side to side to the tune of “Twist and Shout.” She remembers that Tommy always liked that song. And now Ian will, too.
After two verses, the nurse appears at the door and motions to Tommy.
“Okay, boys,” Cat says. She stands and Connor runs over and grabs her legs, locking his hands behind her knees.
“I love you so much, Mommy,” he says.
“And I love you, my Angel Boy.”
She looks up, and finds herself gazing into Ian’s eyes. Tommy has thrown him over his shoulder.
“Mommy?” the little boy asks.
She finds herself frozen. Couldn’t speak if she wanted.
“Mommy?” the little boy asks.
“Better tell him yes,” Tommy says.
Tommy’s friend Keith comes in, another youngish, good-looking doctor. Where, Cat wonders, have these men been all my life? Dr. Keith looks in all the kids’ throats, then jots down a few notes.
“I’m gonna take throat cultures to see if it’s strep, which I’m sure it is,” he explains to Cat.
“Okay,” she says.
The doctor sticks a swab down each of the kids’ throats. Ian protests, but Tommy quickly calms him. He’s good with young children, this man. It’s almost too much to ask for.
“I’ll let you know the results,” he says to Tommy.
On the drive home a thought comes to her, and so she asks Tommy. “Couldn’t you have written these prescriptions?”
“I’m just a cardiologist. It’s good to go to an expert.”
“For sore throats?”
He shrugs.
Cat works intermittently the next week; so close to Christmas there’s little activity in the mortgage world, just a re-fi or two, with no one moving. Mostly she stays home with the boys and Mrs. Boyle. With Ian. It’s as if she’s trying out for Mrs. Boyle, trying to show what a good mother she is. She feels scrutinized every time she plays with the little boy, or reads him a story, or prepares him a meal, changes a diaper. Not that Mrs. Boyle says anything, but Cat can feel her. Something makes Cat want Mrs. Boyle’s approval. Mostly she wants Mrs. Boyle to go, with the boy left behind. She wants the deal to be closed.
It is the morning of her last full day before Mrs. Boyle makes any comment at all. She is in the kitchen with Cat, who is wrestling with a newly kid-proofed drawer, when she says, “Ian will be happy here.”
Cat looks at her, this aged, thin woman.
“Siobhan would have liked you,” the woman adds.
Cat doesn’t know what to say. For almost a year she thought about Siobhan almost every day, and then hardly at all. Would Siobhan, the real mother of this child—whatever real means—have wanted anything for Ian that Cat doesn’t? Doesn’t she want him to be loved and happy, to be well clothed and looked after and protected and educated and … There was no limit, really, to what you might want for your child.
It is not quite six, and Cat stands at the bathroom mirror, her bathroom mirror the five weeks since she and Connor moved here. Mrs. Boyle is in the kitchen with Ian, and Cat has come here to collect herself and check her face. She is reminded of something her mother once told her, when Cat was fourteen or fifteen. Cat had started to wear makeup, and her mother had accepted this, unlike Tonya’s parents, who were against the whole idea—especially Tonya’s father, who no doubt saw makeup as a signal of something sexual, a loss of innocence no father wants to contemplate for his daughter. Cat’s father deferred to her mother, whose main point was that while some makeup was necessary, less was more. “My mother taught me,” her mother said, “that the most important thing for a woman is her face.”
“Why?” Cat had asked, sure of her looks then, unable to fathom that they might fade.
Now she adds eyeliner and some color to her cheeks. She is looking, she feels, a little tired. She places her hand under her jaw, squeezes the skin on both sides, then pulls it back, hoping to see something close to her former self, but really she looks silly, a woman in a wind tunnel.
Yet Tommy wants a baby. Every time she thinks of this she has to steady herself. That she would have a child who isn’t a mistake, a planned child, is beyond her experience. It’s out of character, she thinks. Still, she has found Tommy, and reason to hope.
Out in the kitchen Ian sits on the floor, playing with the plastic cars Tommy has bought him. Mrs. Boyle is at the glass breakfast table, just sitting.
“Are you okay?” Cat asks.
“I’m okay,” she says.
Cat sits across from her.
“But I have nothing left.”
“Sure you do,” says Cat.
“Soon, no husband, no children, only a grandchild a thousand miles away. You did this.”
“I did it?” Cat says.
“You found us. We were okay. But you found us. You made everything change. Now you have everything I had then—children, a husband—and I am alone.”
Cat feels almost as if this isn’t happening. Does this woman really feel this way, that I stole her life? Will she change her mind about the boy?
“You yourself just said that it’s right,” Cat says.
“For you.”
“For Ian,” Cat says.
“Yes, yes,” she says, in what seems like disgust. “Let me take him back. I want to take him back.”
“You made a deal,” Cat tells her, thinking, I knew it. I knew it.
“Let me take him back. He’s just a little boy. When he’s older, and it’s harder for me, then I’ll bring him back. He’s what I have now, and I can still care for him. Let him go.”
There is a long, long silence, with just the sounds of the TV from the other room—Connor and Jonathan are watching—and Ian running his cars on the kitchen tiles. She knows there is truth in what the woman is saying, but Cat has come too far to give in. Always she has acquiesced, but not this time. This time she will bring it all together.
“No,” Cat says. “No. He’s staying here. It’s all decided. The papers are filed. He stays.”
Mrs. Boyle’s lips are quivering. Extra lines appear on her brow. “Just for a little while longer,” she says. “Let him go.”
“We can’t do that.�
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“You can do what you want,” says Mrs. Boyle.
“Ian must stay. He must.”
“Please,” Mrs. Boyle says.
“I’m sorry.”
“You!” she shouts. “Have you no pity? You have so much, and yet you want everything!”
Connor and Jonathan come running into the kitchen. Mrs. Boyle holds her head in her hands, perhaps to hide her tears.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” Connor asks.
“Just adult stuff,” she says. She motions them out of the room. “Nothing you need to worry about.”
2003
XXXVII
The boat is a beautiful thing, an intricate structure of wires and rolled up sails and coffee-colored wood, all of it operated by two brothers with a whale-watching venture, their excuse to be out on the water. Phyllis found them, the only such operation to use a sailboat. Cat made the actual arrangements and let one of the brothers know their purpose.
“Well,” the guy said, “that’ll be a first for us, but hey, it’s fine. Glad to help.”
“And if we saw a whale,” Cat added, “that would be okay, too.”
“You bet it would,” he said.
Tommy carries the case on board, its brown faux-leather color just right for the boat. Cat has lifted it and was surprised by its size and weight; her father was not a big man. This is what is left. Tommy sets the case on the deck. Connor is there, and Jonathan, and Ian, his hand gripped firmly in hers. She places Ian between her knees, straps life jackets on the boys, and then one for herself. The older of the boat brothers—at least he looks older—runs through the safety issues, which mostly involve staying on the boat and all the ways one might not. It is a sunny and warm day, with a breeze off the water. Cat thinks this is exactly how her father would have wanted it. Last night they’d heard his name read at the temple, and Kyle’s; father and son dead in the same week of the year. And they were there, Cat and Tommy and Connor and Jonathan and Ian and Phyllis, not a Jew among them, remembering the dead according to traditions they’ve never known.
That morning there’d been a call at her father’s house, a low, deadpan voice asking for Samuel Miller.
“He’s not home,” Cat said, thinking it a phone solicitor. Her father refused to put his name on the do-not-call lists, said he was thankful every time the damn thing rang.
“Could you take a message?” asked the voice, surprising her.
“Who is this?”
“Lieutenant Richard Dandona, United States Marine Corps, ma’am. I’m trying to return something to Lieutenant Miller.”
“Lieutenant?” she asked.
The soldier was at the apartment in less than an hour, an angular, thin kid, young like the ones you saw now in airports, a stubble of what may have been blond hair across his scalp. She invited him in, had him sit in the living room, with the bigger boys watching the television and Ian with them, laughing on their cue. Tommy was out in Santa Barbara trying to find bagels because she had asked, because that’s what her father would have been doing.
“Is … ?” he tried to ask.
“My father died,” she explained. “A year ago.”
He put his head down, then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a little tin tag. He held it out to her. It had her father’s name on it.
“It’s a dog tag,” said the soldier. “Your father, he gave it to me to take to Afghanistan. He wanted me to bring it back to him. He said it got him through his war, and that it would get me through mine.”
There was, she realized, a part of the world that held only men, where maybe they did things for one another that were hard to explain. Her father always insisted he didn’t believe in God. How could he believe in a piece of metal?
“So, you’re leaving the military,” she said.
“No.”
“What next, then?”
“I’m shipping out to Iraq, October one.”
She looked at the tag. There was her father’s name, a long number, his blood type—O—and the letter H. She wondered for a moment what the H meant: some military code, no doubt. She handed the tag back to the soldier.
“You take it,” she told him. She gave him a business card. “You keep it safe. And when it’s all over, you bring it back to me.”
They are quite far out in the bay when it occurs to Cat that she’s never before been on the ocean, any ocean, not once in her forty-five years. More surprising, when she thinks about it, is that she doesn’t know if her father had, either, not in the years of Cat’s life. Of course, hardly a day went by when her father didn’t bring up the navy, and yet he never did return to the ocean.
She feels the roll and pitch of the sea as they break free of the bay and sail into open water. Cat finds herself staring at the boys, making sure they’re secure, watching them watch the water. The air is different here, wind that has blown across the ocean from far away. It’s wonderful air, salty, fresh, all at the same time. Cat understands how some men—the brothers running the boat—might devote their lives to it. But not Cat. It isn’t in her blood; she feels the basic foreignness of it.
She watches Ian watch the water, his first day on the ocean, too. He is finally at home. It’s been a long year to get him to this point. The night his grandmother left, she kissed him good-bye, hugged him, cried over him, and yet he didn’t seem to understand that she was leaving, didn’t grasp it till Cat tried to put him to bed and he couldn’t find his grandmother. He ran about the house, Cat following, till finally he stopped and wailed. “Nana!” he called. “Nana! Nana!” There was no consoling him. He refused milk, bouncing on Cat’s knee, her hugs, kisses. She made sure he had his tiger. Tommy tried to calm him, to no avail. Cat took the little boy back. He was making sporadic gurgling sounds; she worried he would choke himself, but finally he stopped crying and went limp in her arms. She saw his chest rise and realized he’d fallen asleep.
She tucked him in his bed, fearful of waking him. Later, she woke and went to check on him, but his bed was empty. She searched the room, then the house. She woke Tommy, panicked. “It’s five degrees outside,” she cried. “He could be frozen to death.”
Tommy got up, pulled on a pair of boxers, and lumbered to Ian’s room. He walked to the front door, the garage door, the back door.
“He’s in the house,” Tommy said.
“How do you know?”
“He’s eighteen months old. He can’t reach these knobs, let alone unlock the dead bolts. He’s in the house.”
She went to the drier, the washer, but they were empty. She checked the lower kitchen cupboards, opened the trash can, checked under the couch by the TV.
“Hey,” Tommy whispered. He had a flashlight. “I found him.”
He led her to Connor and Jonathan’s room, had her get down on her hands and knees between the two beds. He shone the light under Jonathan’s bed, and there was the little boy, curled up and fast asleep, hugging his toy animal.
Cat felt weak. She dropped to her knees, then rolled to her back. “Oh God,” she said. She felt as if everything was draining out of her. She started to cry, but Tommy helped her up and guided her out of the room.
“We can’t just leave him under there,” she said.
“I’ll go back and cover him up.”
“But—”
“He doesn’t want to be alone. That’s the perfect spot for him.”
The next night Tommy moved Ian’s bed into the boys’ room, wedged it against a wall after moving a dresser out, and had all the boys go to bed at the same time. In this way, they’ve all been able to get through the night.
We’re going to bring her around now,” says the younger of the brothers. “You can go aft. Get some breeze at your back.” Cat gets the boys to hold on to her, Jonathan grabbing her hand and Connor grabbing his. Tommy takes Phyllis, and they all move to the back of the boat. Cat hands Ian off to Tommy, tells the boys to hold on to the railing, and goes back to fetch the ashes. She struggles with the case, sets it down, and
opens it, then opens the thick plastic bag inside the case and grabs a handful of the coarse ashes dotted with white fragments, cups her other hand atop the full hand so that the ashes don’t immediately blow away. She looks at everyone, then uncups the hand and the ashes take flight, floating over the water, then descending onto it. She and Tommy help the boys toss the ashes, even Ian, then Phyllis, and finally Tommy partakes. Most of the ashes are still in the bag and so Cat lifts it from the case, balances the bag for a moment on the railing, then raises the bag, releasing its contents, the ashes flittering in the wind, almost shining. She lifts the bag higher and shakes, harder now, letting it all go.
XXXVIII
Do you have any secrets?” she asks. “Anything you’re keeping from me? Anything I should know? If there is, tell me now.”
They are lying in her father’s bed. Tomorrow the estate sale people will cart everything away, and there is just this one night left in California. She is nestled against Tommy, her body loose and relaxed from love-making. As far as she knows, she is not pregnant, but they’ve been steadily, enthusiastically trying for months. Never has she enjoyed sex as she enjoys it now. Never has it had this kind of meaning, even done in her father’s bed.
“I have one secret,” he admits. “How ’bout you?”
“I have one, too,” she says.
“You first.”
She argues, but he prevails. The divulging of all secrets is her idea, he says, and she must first walk the walk. So she tells him that her father, the one whose bed they are sleeping in, who raised her, whose ashes today they spread on the waters, was not really her father.
“Not really?” he asks.
No, there was a different man, long dead, unknown and unknowable to her, a man her mother had a fling with, and this is how she, Cat, came into being, a product not of love or planning but of lust and a woman’s desire to have a good time.