Good news! Mixed news! Then yesterday Dr. Steiner stopped by just as I was attempting to work up a nice fart. He was a little disgusted with me for waiting so long to get the surgery—evidently I was playing with hotter fire than I knew—but he too was relieved that we got out of this one okay, nothing but a few new scars and a burgeoning opiate addiction. He wanted me to come in for some scans next week. I told him I was busy, I was working. He raised a paternal eyebrow at me. I told him I’d make time.
So I decided to try to get some work done with my laptop on this dumb hospital tray, having pushed aside the food I had no interest in (although the nurse did remind me that if I didn’t eat, it was unlikely I would fart) and already taken my required ambulation up and down the hall, holding on to the IV pole like a goddamn senior citizen. Back in bed, I sketched out a proposal for our new direct mail for Ace; I couldn’t believe that this was all I had to work on these days, and I couldn’t help it, I was worried about my inability to give it my all. I was also a little bit worried about the company. Or about my role in the company. When Chuck and I started Neulander-Davis, we were a fifty-fifty partnership. I was a founding partner! But I hadn’t talked to Chuck in ten days. And when I did, he seemed awfully busy and a little bit impatient. I picked up my phone and called, told him I was back in New York, didn’t mention that I was in the hospital. “Karen!” he said. “Glad you’re back!” But then he started talking fast: he was going to be in meetings for the rest of the day, he didn’t tell me with whom, and I hung up feeling even farther away than I did when I was across the country.
I pressed the morphine button, dialed the phone one more time. And he picked up! “Ace, it’s me, Karen,” I said. “I’m back in town. Let’s schedule a meeting.” I would be out of there soon, in plenty of time for a meeting.
“Great,” he said. “Karen, great. You’re gonna want to talk to Amani about scheduling.” I knew, of course, you always talk to the assistant, but I was feeling so totally impotent in the hospital bed, I felt like I needed some direct chitchat.
“How was France?”
“A second honeymoon! Incredible, really. Utah Beach, Omaha Beach. Chilling. You gotta get there.”
Maybe I’d get there.
“How’s Bev?” he asked.
I clicked a few buttons. “Looks like she’s raised fifteen thousand dollars. Working with a campaign manager named Jorge Grubar.”
“Never heard of him.”
“It’s her nephew.”
“Heh,” Ace chuckled, dryly. “So what are you going to need from me?”
“A little face time. Just to plot out some coordinates. You around next week? Can I come over?”
“You planning on any neat tricks? Inhospitable ties in the Dominican Republic?”
“Ace, get out of here,” I said. I looked down at myself. There was nothing I could do even if I wanted to. “The only trick you need is to keep up the good work in City Hall.”
I clicked over to Facebook, to Bev’s page. She’d posted some updates, including a few from her campaign. She did a fund-raiser at someone’s house, fifty bucks a plate for a Spanish-looking dinner, and I’d felt sorry for her—fifty bucks?—but the food looked good. There was a nice shot of a huge foil container of flan.
“We’re gonna kill her, Karen?”
I was as weak as a freshly hatched chick. “We’ll kill her,” I said, and hung up.
I wondered if Bev was going to want to do a debate or some kind of forum, and if Ace would agree. I found Jorge Grubar online, emailed him that I’d like to schedule something if they were interested. Then I scrolled over to her platform: lower city taxes, school choice, fewer business regulations. Bev, what was this, Texas? She was also “fervently pro-life,” had a yellow cross on her homepage in memorial to the “babies we’ve lost to abortion.” Usually this sort of thinking made me hate a candidate on principle, but I don’t know, I was still kind of sweet on Bev.
Three kids, five grandkids. She was only fifteen years older than me.
I wanted to tell you that I was so sorry for collapsing on the floor like that (I told you this a million times in the past two days, and you always said that it was all right, but I couldn’t stop telling you). I missed you so much.
Also you were now a little bit in love with Yuki, and I suspected she was a little bit in love with you too. That first night after the ambulance came, Kyle’s mom wasn’t able to get there till midnight, so evidently Yuki and the boyfriend ate the Carmine’s with you and stayed up playing Wii until Ann came. And the past two nights Yuki had been visiting you at Kyle’s after she got home from work.
And this morning she sent me flowers.
All of which leads me to something I’ve been meaning to say to you in this book: it’s important to know your neighbors. One of the things that bothers me about the way Americans act—even in Manhattan, this crowded little island—it’s that we act like we don’t have any responsibility toward one another. Everybody’s so atomized these days—each person on her own little device, each of us tuning out that which doesn’t interest us. We might not even know the names of the people who live right downstairs from us! And that lack of connection leads us to feel lonely. It’s not human to not know your neighbors.
So my advice to you is, whenever you move somewhere or someone moves in close to you, go meet that person. Go say hi. I’m not saying you have to bake a cake or anything (although nobody’s ever turned down a nice batch of cookies or, if that’s too much, maybe a bottle of wine). But just say hi to the people who live near you, check their mail when they’re away, walk their dogs when they’re sick. It’s a good thing to do, to be neighborly, and I think it’s one of the values that’s most gotten away from us during my lifetime.
You told me that Yuki’s boyfriend’s name was Tom. They’d been together for almost a year. Evidently he was in our building all the time, but somehow I’d never even noticed him.
Incidentally, I think one of the reasons Ace was such a good city councilman was that, deep down, he was just an incredibly good neighbor. He liked them all, the 9/11 widows, those kids with the asthma at the hospital clinics. He liked the PTA members at PS 304 and 19, he liked his bus drivers and dry cleaner—he genuinely wanted them to be happy. He got into service in order to serve them, is what I’m saying. And because it was so clear that his interests in his constituency were heartfelt—it wasn’t like he was in this for the money—his constituents liked him. They reelected him. They couldn’t have given a shit about his dalliances with twentysomethings. That was just their old friend Ace, that’s what they thought. And it wasn’t nice to stick your nose too deep into your friend’s business.
And there you were! Your beautiful face! It was three o’clock already and I really had to get out of there. I wondered what it was like outside. Weather.com said eighty-three degrees, low humidity, but that sounded a little too perfect for Manhattan at the end of July. Bring on the ninety-degree 90-percent-humidity hideout in the movie theater all day miseries! Bring on the summer! Bring on my son!
“Hi, Mom,” you said, coming up shyly for the hug you knew I couldn’t wait to plant on you. You were trailed by Yuki, which was a surprise, but I was happy to see her. Just like I couldn’t stop apologizing to you, I couldn’t stop thanking Yuki. I’m sure she found it wearisome.
“Where’s Ann?”
“Her husband had to go to the cardiologist.” Shit—Kyle’s dad was an overweight diabetic.
“Oh dear.”
“I hope you don’t mind, but she asked me if I’d take over. I was working from home today so I said sure.”
“How could I mind?” How could I have minded beautiful Yuki in her perpetual yoga pants and tight shirt and neon sneakers? What did she even do that she never had to change out of that outfit?
“Yuki, are you a yoga instructor?”
“What? No,” she said. “I’m an architect. Anyway, Ann didn’t want to bother you, so I said I’d keep him for the afternoon and then his fat
her’s going to get him at six, when he’s done with work. He said he’d bring him home to New Jersey.”
“Who?”
“Jake’s dad,” she said, smiling, but a slightly worried look cast across her face as she met my eyes. “Jake said he was the person to call, so I figured—”
“Jake said—you said to call your dad, Jakey?”
You shrugged, gazed toward the empty bed in the other half of the room. I had a roommate yesterday, but she was gone now, healthy or dead.
“You said to call your dad?” I repeated.
You nodded. “Yes,” you said. “I wanted to see him.”
I was immobile. I was in a hospital bed scanning Facebook and calling it work. I was ruminating about Bev fucking Hernandez. I’d had scar tissue sucked out of the space in my belly where I used to have organs. I was as impotent as the Jell-O quivering on the bedside stand. I was nothing anymore, nothing nothing.
“I didn’t know who else to call.”
“Jake, we have the emergency list,” I said in a low tone.
“I wanted to call him.”
“But our list—”
“Karen, I’m sorry—” Yuki couldn’t help but hear. “I thought it would be fine—”
“No, of course. It’s his father,” I said weakly. I could not yell at you for this; I could not yell at Yuki. I could not even yell at your father. What had gone wrong here, exactly? I was sick, the nanny was in Puerto Rico, so the boy went to his father. Didn’t that make sense? Wasn’t that the right thing?
But not this father not now and not ever. God, I prayed, give me the strength to get healthy please right now and take you home.
“He said he’d just pick him up at the hospital,” said Yuki.
“But we have”—I could hear how lame my voice sounded—“we have an emergency list. It’s in the kitchen. I have . . . If you find me my cell phone, we can call some of the people on the list.” Kyle’s parents. Julisa’s sister. Even Dr. Susan if there was a true crisis. “We can call Julisa’s sister. I’m sure she’ll get you. Julisa told me—”
“No!” You let out a wail so fierce that Yuki took a step back. You could tell now that she wanted out of there, wanted to walk back her steps in our neighborly direction. “No I’m going to my dad’s house, he’s coming to pick me up!” You finished this up with that horrible grunting sound you made when you were really enraged.
“No, Jake,” I started. “We have an emergency list.”
“No!”
“Come on, kiddo, don’t yell at your mom like that,” Yuki said. She put a firm hand on your shoulder. How quickly you two connected: how quickly you let people into your life. I had prepared you for nothing.
“I want my dad.”
“Okay,” Yuki said, hand on your shoulder, looking at me, apologetic.
You were crying now, you were pathetic, your face tilted toward the floor. I tried to take your hand, but I couldn’t reach that far. The bandaging around my middle. “Jakey, please,” I said. You just stood there, the tears dropping like slow rain on the floor tiles. I wanted to grab you and pull you to me and kiss you and tickle your collarbone, anything to make you happy again—I wanted to buy you ice cream and new games for your Wii.
“It was a bad divorce?” Yuki asked, quietly, her hand still on Jake’s shoulder.
“We were never married,” I said, and Yuki nodded as though she understood.
You shivered; you were still crying.
“Well, Jake’s dad said he’d be happy to keep him for as long as you needed. If you needed time to recover. He sounded happy to help.” Yuki was rubbing your shoulder gently. “He sounded nice.”
“He’s nice enough.”
You stopped crying at this, looked up at me pleadingly. “He is, Mom. He’s nice. He’s really happy to help,” you said. “It’s not a problem for him.”
“Jacob.”
“It’s not,” you repeated.
My cell phone was on my bedside tray and the bedside tray was wheeled away when it became clear I wasn’t going to be able to down my Jell-O. Without my phone, I could not call Kyle’s mom or Dr. Susan, I couldn’t call Allison. I was trapped there and would be for as long as I couldn’t eat my Jell-O, couldn’t kick my digestive process into gear, couldn’t retrieve you from your father, who I could now see was going to treat my illness with a predatory zeal. Just steal you away while I couldn’t stop him. Just swoop down in: hey, what a nice guy! A nice guy like a fucking vulture.
(A beautiful six-year-old boy gift-wrapped and presented on his doorstep. A good hand at tennis. The same shade of hazel eyes.)
“Well, thanks for your help, Yuki,” I said, to give her permission to leave.
“I’m sorry, I just didn’t realize—”
“No, no, please don’t apologize. It was great of you to step in. I really appreciate how much you’ve done for us” (although the gift certificate to Per Se I was planning to send had just been downgraded to Hunan Balcony). Yuki ruffled your hair and tiptoed out in her yoga pants and you slunk into the chair in the corner.
“I’m going to get a roommate soon,” I said after a minute or so, during which the clock ticked loudly.
“Okay.”
“So you won’t be allowed to scream like that. We’re in a hospital. People are trying to get healthy here. Screaming is like the opposite of healthy.”
“Sorry,” you said, petulant—the sort of sorry you delivered when you didn’t mean it. “Can I play with your phone?”
“Really?” I said. “I haven’t seen you in twenty-four hours and all you want to do is play with my phone?”
“Sorry,” you said again, and then you just stared at me glumly. I wondered what you would do at your father’s house. If I remembered correctly, there was a huge deck off the third floor of his complex, with a big pool, a few diving boards, a slide. It looked out over the Hudson and New York City beyond. I’d be in a hospital room. You wouldn’t think to wave.
“Jake, how did you have his number?”
“He gave it to me in Seattle. He said in case I needed it.” That vulture.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
You shrugged. “Are you mad?”
“I don’t like you keeping secrets from me.”
“I didn’t really think about it,” you said. “It wasn’t like a secret secret. I wasn’t trying to lie to you.”
“Do you even feel comfortable going over there? You’ve never been there before.” Historically, you didn’t like new places, nor the houses of people you didn’t know. Once when you were four, you chose to wet your pants rather than go inside Kyle’s grandmother’s apartment to pee.
“He said there were a lot of games at his house, like board games. He has chess,” you said. You’d been angling to learn how to play chess. “And a bedroom I can have to myself. It’s not like I’m going to have to sleep on a couch.”
“You’re planning on spending the night?”
“Well, I can’t stay in the apartment by myself, right? And Kyle’s mom needs to be with his dad. He has to go to the cardiologist.”
Kyle’s fucking dad.
“Will Dave’s wife be there? Is she traveling?”
You shrugged. How should you know if the wife would be there? Did you even know he had a wife? “Please can I play with your phone?” you said.
“Why don’t you climb onto the bed,” I said. “We can watch TV.”
“There’s nothing on the TV here,” you said.
But after a minute of stare-down you climbed into the bed next to me, and we watched some nitwit Nick at Nite show and I typed. I wrote down as best I could what I said to you, and what you screamed at me, while we waited for your father to arrive. This would be my gift to you, Jacob. The truth about who we both were.
AT FIVE FORTY-FIVE, just as I was starting to feel a pleasant accumulating sensation somewhere in my middle, your father arrived. He strode in quickly, as though he’d taken a cue from a medical show and might need to save somebo
dy’s life. He was wearing rolled-up sleeves, Dockers, glasses. A hospital visitor’s badge. I twisted the platinum ring around my thumb.
“Dad!” you said, and burst out of the bed, hitting me a little in my side. I absolutely had to fart now—of course I did—and of course now was when I had to squelch it.
“Hey, Jake,” he said, and hugged you briskly, then moved to my side with a look of concern. Jesus, I couldn’t even imagine what I looked like. It hadn’t occurred to me to try to look any better, not that I could have. I was in my hospital gown, the morphine running into one arm, the catheter running out beneath me. This was so humiliating, Jacob. When I met your father, I was a nice size 8, curvy. I’d always wanted to lose ten pounds, but now I’d lost too many and I was wasted. I was ripe before. Ripe or whatever the word is for young and healthy and fertile and dumb.
“Karen, are you okay? What happened?”
“Small bowel obstruction,” I said. “I’ll get out of here tomorrow, I think. It’s a complication from an earlier surgery.” He sat at my bedside, took my hand in his. Oh Jesus, his big strong hand. I didn’t look at him. I looked at the needle taped into the top of my own hand, I looked at the blue veins tracing my own white arm, a pattern that could decorate a mosque. Swirling lines, indigo against alabaster.
“I wish I’d known,” he said. “I could have done something sooner. I could have taken Jacob home.” He wanted to take you home.
“There’s no need for you to take Jacob,” I said, “it’s really not necessary,” but then I caught your eye and you gave me that look that said you were going to start shrieking, so I didn’t continue. I wouldn’t have you shrieking in front of your father at the end of visiting hours.
“Look, I know it’s not—I mean, we’ve only just reconnected, but we’ve got a lot of room, Jake will be fine. Is he in camp or anything? Do you need me to take him to camp tomorrow?”
“He’s not in camp,” I said, suddenly feeling neglectful. I should have enrolled you in camp for August, but I wanted you with me. “In fact, if you just want to take him to a diner or something, I can probably arrange for one of my neighbors to take him in tonight.”
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