In the morning he awakened late. He was dressed in pajamas, back in bed, with the worst headache of his life. He lay on his stomach for a while, trying to get his thoughts in order, surely trying to reckon the reality of last night. He looked over the bedside, at the carpet: There were no semen stains.
So that was it.
At least it should have been.
Everyone in the office had known he was engaged and many of them had received RSVPs. So of course everyone knew about the breakup.
His editor tried to express sympathy, which Cordo accepted with the same roboticism he’d accepted sympathy for Lourdes’ death, his parents’ deaths. Then, as his quantity and quality of work diminished progressively, his editor expressed concern, wondered whether he needed some time off.
Cordo dismissed the thought, promised he’d get back up to speed. That afternoon he called and scheduled an appointment with a psychologist for the upcoming Thursday.
Whether this appointment would have done him any good is up for speculation as he never made it. On Wednesday Amelia told him she was pregnant.
Cordo was drinking a stout on the couch and watching Frasier when Amelia came into the house after being dropped off by Tom and she asked if they could talk. She stood across the coffee table from him, arms crossed. She wasn’t ashamed or trying to avoid his gaze. She was bold, as though this were something she’d done purely to prove to him she could.
After Cordo regained the ability to speak, his voice was thick but he wasn’t drunk.
“How could you possibly know?”
“I got my first period in October,” she said. “I haven’t had it since December and I’m now a week late this month.”
Cordo was expressionless. He might have thought to ask her how she knew about periods when even he, at 38, was still a little mystified by them but then realized that was a stupid thing to wonder.
Finally he asked her who the father was. She only lowered an eye at him.
That shut him up for the rest of the night.
The next day Cordo took her to a doctor—not her pediatrician—and told her the situation. The doctor took Amelia into an examination room while Cordo remained out in the waiting room, leg jiggling.
A half-hour later the doctor brought Cordo into the room and told him she couldn’t confirm the pregnancy, as an ultrasound hadn’t detected a fetus.
“If she is pregnant, she’s less than five weeks,” the doctor said.
She additionally said she had taken a sample of Amelia’s blood to be tested. The results, which would be in in two days, would give a definitive answer.
After this the doctor asked Amelia to go out to the waiting room and asked Cordo to her office. She closed the door and they sat across the desk from each other.
“Does Amelia have any male friends, Mr. Tendler?”
He shook his head.
“Not that I know of,” he said. “She works in the lab at—”
“Yes, I’m aware of her extraordinary circumstances.”
“Yeah. So she works with some guys probably. One of them has to be the father.”
“I asked her. She adamantly denies it.”
“She’s refusing to name him, I know.”
“Why?”
“To protect him. Obviously. Whoever it is is going to prison.”
“You’re presuming the father is an adult.”
“She’s surrounded by 18 year olds and older.”
“She also spends a lot of time with her lab’s director, Tom Liking.”
Cordo held back from responding immediately.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever noticed anything…odd between your daughter and him? Or his husband?”
“…No.”
The doctor nodded.
“There’s also you.”
Cordo squeezed his fists.
“This is part of my job, Mr. Tendler. Would you submit to a paternity test?”
Cordo looked as though he wanted to jump the desk and maul her. He slapped his knee and stood and spat on her Turkish carpet underneath her desk.
“There’s your fucking sample.”
He left.
Two days later Amelia’s blood results came back: She was pregnant.
Tom was dumbfounded. He fared no better in finding out who the father was.
“Are you going to do the test?” he asked Cordo.
“Of course I’m gonna do the fucking test. I’m not gonna let them think I fucking rape my daughter. They can’t do it until she’s 13 weeks though.”
By the next week, however, Cordo received a letter from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services that the matter had been reported to them and Child Protective Services had opened an investigation. He called the doctor he’d taken Amelia to but she didn’t answer. He called her over and over until she finally picked up and then he berated and damned her and once she’d broken through his thick tapestry of hate, she vehemently assured him she had not been the one to notify CPS, had been waiting until after he’d done the paternity test, said that she was prohibited from doing so otherwise, anything done before a paternity test was strictly speculation and a violation of patient’s rights.
After he hung up, he called Tom but he didn’t answer. It was past noon, Tom ought be having lunch and would have his cell phone. He called several more times but Tom never picked up, so on the last time he left a voicemail, rapidly explained the situation, saying he needed to know from Mark if he needed a lawyer.
Later that night, as Cordo was pacing the living room, Amelia called him, asking him to pick her up.
“Where’s Tom?”
“Drunk.”
He drove to the university and parked outside the Botany building. Tom’s door had a ‘Tom Liking, Ph.D.—Assistant Professor’ plaque on it and it was locked but light was coming out around it. Cordo knocked and Amelia opened. Tom was prostrate on his couch, Hester on the floor below him. Cordo tried wakening him but quickly recognized the profundity of Tom’s inebriation.
He put an arm over his neck and walked Tom out to the car. He drove them to his house and put Tom to sleep on the couch.
In the morning Cordo asked Margaret to take Amelia to school. Tom was up with a bitch of a hangover. Cordo brought him black coffee and sat beside him on the couch.
“I got a letter from Child Protective Services,” Cordo said, sipping lightly.
“I know…”
Cordo looked at him. Tom started crying.
“Mark’s the one who notified them.”
Tom didn’t see how furious Cordo’s face became.
“He asked me if that was something I could forgive,” Tom went on.
He looked over at Cordo, still fuming. Tom shook his head.
So Tom and Mark filed for divorce. It went uncontested and everything was filed before the end of January. From there it would take 90 days for the divorce to go through.
Mark kept the house in Bellevue and Tom moved in with Cordo and Amelia until he could find somewhere else to live.
A social worker came to Cordo’s house and inspected it, looked through his computer history, photo files, physical photo albums, found nothing. Cordo watched her resentfully. After this she separately questioned Cordo, Tom, and Amelia. In his session she asked Cordo about Lourdes, her death, what impact it had had on Amelia. Then she asked about Amelia’s childhood, I understand she was an especially difficult baby. Cordo responded with nothing but the truth: He’d religiously taken her to the pediatrician and followed his advice on what to do and what not to do. Yes, he’d lost his temper many times with her but was never abusive in any sense. Then she asked about Lila.
“Yeah, we were engaged.”
“What happened?”
Cordo sighed.
“Amelia said something to her. Scared her off.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t know. Neither she nor Lila ever said.”
He glared at the social worker, extrapolating t
he conclusions she was making.
“Ms. Drapas had a daughter a little younger than Amelia.”
“Yes, Rachel.”
Silence between them. Cordo understood what she was doing, sat like a marble statue, unmovable.
“What would Ms. Drapas say if we were to call her, tell her about this investigation?”
“I don’t give a shit what she would say. But if you ever get a hold of her, you tell her what I went through with my wife—the cancer, watching her wither away with no hope of getting better so that our daughter could be born, only to then have whatever little time I had left with her cut short by her fucking eviscerating herself—hurt a hell of a lot less than what Lila did—disappearing from the face of the fucking planet!”
Tom and Cordo consulted defense lawyers, who advised them that this matter—particularly with the impending paternity testing of all the males in Tom’s lab, which would happen in the beginning of March, approximately Amelia’s 13th week—would attract a lot of attention and bringing lawyers into the situation would only attract more.
Tom and Cordo discussed it and both agreed there was no need for lawyers on their parts just yet.
“Have you talked to Amelia about…going to a clinic?” Tom asked him.
Cordo dropped his shoulders.
“She’d have to wait until after the paternity test but she can do it up to 26 weeks,” Tom said.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Cordo muttered. “No, I haven’t. I’ll do it tonight.”
He did and Amelia resolutely dismissed the idea.
Soon Tom found a house in Arlington, north of Seattle, made an offer, got it, and moved in.
In March the paternity test was conducted. The males in Tom’s lab were given the option of whether to provide saliva samples that may help in the prosecuting of a case dealing with child molestation resulting in pregnancy. All the males, including Tom and Cordo, confidently gave samples and these were tested against an amniotic fluid sample taken from Amelia’s uterus.
In a week the results came back: all negative.
The investigation broadened: the lab mates’ brothers, sisters’ boyfriends, fathers, even uncles and grandfathers and cousins and nephews.
Police and CPS investigators got Amelia’s class schedule for fall and spring and the names of everyone in each class—students, professor, and GAs. They presented themselves in these classes or contacted each student in the previous semester’s classes and inquired about getting saliva samples. Some obliged to help the investigation, others declined, citing civil rights violations and demanding warrants, which were soon plentifully obtained.
All these tests turned up negative as well. Then everything went into standstill.
Local news eventually got wind of all the DNA sample taking going on at the university and ran brief packages on it, with interviews from those who had volunteered and those who had declined until court ordered. No names were revealed and the issue soon became one of whether the police and CPS investigators had overstepped their bounds and what were civil rights regarding DNA sample taking anyhow? Interest soon waned.
Cordo wanted to withdraw Amelia from the university but she refused.
“You might be embarrassed for me to be seen like this but I’m not.”
After more arguing with an increasingly hungover Cordo, Amelia stayed in school.
Amelia’s OBGYN estimated she was due on October 16. First trimester tests showed a healthy fetus. Amelia decided she would name it Camille, certain it would be a girl.
As the summer approached, Cordo saw less and less of Tom. The divorce had gone through. When they did spend time together, they either didn’t talk or talked so superficially as to induce suicide. One of them always cried and soon they must have jointly subconsciously decided to do this separately and so they did.
One day in late April, Cordo ran out of fluoxetine and though he had a refill, he threw the bottle away and he did not call his doctor. He went a full week without the medication, perhaps expecting to go into seizures, madness, even die. But the only things he noticed were brief bouts of intense irritability—“Where the fuck are my keys? Where the fuck are my glasses? It’s ‘it’s,’ not ‘its!’” Or maybe he experienced more than that but such actions and thoughts and feelings had been untouched by fluoxetine for a while, so he no longer differentiated happy optimistic thoughts—did he ever have those anymore? Or were they as distant in his past as all his potential as a father, husband, man, writer?—and his nihilistic fatalistic thoughts. And perhaps these four categories coalesced in his serotonin-lacking alcohol-rattled life-ravaged brain as to become all the same thing or perhaps the inversions of each other and that paradoxically gave him happiness, a perverse hope.
At the start of May, he asked Tom to babysit Amelia for a weekend while Cordo attended the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association’s annual convention in Spokane, where hopefully The Times and Cordo’s features section would reap a lot of awards.
Tom agreed without question.
He’d asked Tom to do this in the past but not consistently and perhaps that’s why Tom did not remember the WNPA Awards were held in October every year in Everett.
Cordo came home early that Friday—or right on time, as the case was getting—with two bottles of whiskey in plastic grocery bags. It was five p.m. when he started.
He watched his favorite Frasier episodes—“Author, Author,” “Ham Radio,” “Are You Being Served?” and “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Moskowitz.” He drank the first bottle of whiskey while doing this, drinking with intent.
Then he staggered, second unopened bottle in hand, into the guest bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and took out all the bottles he found—antihistamines, painkillers, sleeping pills, all over-the-counter, as well as Amelia’s full bottle of fluoxetine—then he went into the master bathroom and got more OTC pills from that medicine cabinet.
He threw these on his bed and then teetered over to his dresser, where his old college stereo was. He’d preloaded it and now turned it on, put track eight on a loop: Tom Waits’ “Kentucky Avenue.”
He opened his bedside drawer and drew out a wood-framed picture of Lourdes. She’d had cancer at this point, so Cordo had had to furtively take the picture while she worked at her garden, swollen stomach below her as she troweled the soil. She’d known her bleak prognosis at this point but in the instant of the picture, she’d found some fleeting reason to smile.
He lay up against the headboard, pill bottles rattling all around him like maracas. He sat up looking at the picture for a long time, soon weeping. Then he opened the whiskey and threw away the cap. He picked up a random pill bottle and emptied it into his hand—about 30. He almost threw them into his mouth but hesitated, then did. He chewed, breaking them up, then he swallowed them with one big gulp of fire.
He got another bottle—more than the last, 50? 80?—took them all, got the fluoxetine—90, on the label—took them.
After his seventh bottle, with at least nine remaining, he was lethargic, couldn’t lift up the three-quarters empty whiskey bottle anymore. It may have been the alcohol, it may have been the pills—could he be digesting them so soon?
He let the whiskey fall off his stomach, spill out onto the bed.
So this was it.
He looked at the picture of Lourdes, which he’d propped up beside him. Darkness appeared at the rim of his vision—or had it always been there and he’d just been too blind to notice?
He kept looking at the picture, listening to the song, as the darkness grew.
Invisible waves crashing in the blackness, the feeling in the stomach as you’re dropped from the pinnacle of a drop tower, only to then brake to a halt before hitting the very bottom and start rising again, twisting, knotting, lurching, like some groundhog darting through the digestive system, never coming out completely. Pain—in the head, in the neck, electricity, stabbing, like being in an iron maiden, then the feeling before a great bout of diarrhea, passing out, outside the bod
y, levitating—
“Come on, you fucker!”
Tom held Cordo’s head tightly in one hand while his other was crammed down Cordo’s gullet, pushing down with four fingers and flicking his uvula. Cordo was gagging vilely, mouth trying to clamp shut, teeth digging into Tom’s flesh.
“Don’t you fucking fight me, you piece of shit!”
He grabbed Cordo’s forehead, pulled back, opening his mouth lest his neck break, in the process pulling open his eyes: He lay on his stomach in the floor of his bedroom and beneath his face was already a prodigious pool of whiskey and pills he’d vomited but Tom did not ease up, made him vomit again and then a third time
The fourth time was pure bile, the color of decay.
“That’s it, that’s the stuff, beautiful!” Tom gasped, breathless.
He dropped Cordo’s face in the huge puddle and then dropped himself onto the bed, catching his breath and wiping away the sweat from his face.
Cordo reeled in the foul floor, coughing and gagging, still drunk.
Tom swept both hands across the bed, flung off all the pill bottles and empty whiskey bottle, which shattered against Cordo’s dresser.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Cordo flipped over, sat up against the wall, wiping the vomit residue from his face but it was still all over his shirtfront.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he demanded of Tom.
“I cam to steal some groceries from you, Amelia is in the car outside.”
They glared at each other, vomit smell heavy in the air.
“So this is how you were planning on going, Mrs. Tendler? Why, because things are hard?”
“You should have let me go.”
“No, you don’t get off that easily, Amelia doesn’t deserve it. You think you would have bought your innocence with this? It would have only made you look guilty.”
“I am guilty!”
Most Unnatural Page 12