by Mary Kubica
“Who’s this?” I ask Kat before the waitress arrives, staring at a boy with shaggy blond hair, a school photograph with the standard blue backdrop, a boy who didn’t smile when he was told to smile. In the image, his face falls flat, his lips tugging downward at the edges, his eyes sad. He has that whole teenage ennui to him already, a clear dissatisfaction with the world around him, though he’s younger than a teenager, displaying evidence of adolescence.
“That’s Gus,” she says, and her eyes rise from the photograph to meet mine. “He’s your son.”
And with that the waitress arrives, and I ask for a Death in the Afternoon—Hemingway’s hybrid of absinthe and champagne—because it feels entirely fitting for this moment in my life.
“What do you mean he’s my son?” I ask in a forced whisper, hissing the words across the table so that only Kat can hear. I look around the bar to be sure that I don’t know anyone here, that a neighbor or Jan my hygienist isn’t sitting at the booth behind me, eavesdropping on my conversation with Kat. “He can’t possibly be my son,” I say, but I’m no idiot. I know in my heart that he can be my son. Kat and I were stupid teenagers, the kind who believed nothing bad could ever happen to us. Sometimes we got caught up in the moment; we didn’t always take precautions. We didn’t play things safe.
“That night,” she tells me, as under the table her knee presses into mine, and I pull back. “That night before you left for college. My parents had gone to the ballet,” she says, and she stops then. She need not say more. I nod my head slowly. I know. I remember. They’d gone to see Coppélia, and after they left I stopped by to say my goodbyes. It was Kat’s parents’ anniversary, and so they planned to stay in the city for the night, at the Four Seasons. It wasn’t the kind of thing they ever did, but that night they were celebrating twenty-five years, and so it was something out of the ordinary, something special, and Kat and I decided to celebrate something special, too. Kat had a bottle of Goldschläger that she’d taken from her parents’ liquor cabinet, knowing it was something they didn’t drink and wouldn’t miss. Kat and I had never been alone together for so long. We took the bottle to her bedroom, doing things slowly for once, feeling like we had all the time in the world. In the morning I awoke and boarded a plane bound for Chicago; three days later Steve took over my spot in Kat’s life.
“How can you be sure he’s mine?” I ask, and I hate the words even as they come out, this shirking of responsibility. It isn’t me. But twelve years ago is a long time. If Kat had called me up twelve years ago and told me she was pregnant, things would have been different.
I don’t wait for her reply. “Why now?” I ask, feeling irate. “Why are you telling me this now?”
In the corner of the room is a TV. On the screen are sportscasters, wagering their bets on tonight’s NBA finals game. My eyes putter to it to see that the odds are not in the Warriors’ favor. The favorite for tonight is the Cleveland Cavaliers, the team with the home advantage, and at this my hands turn clammy and my heart sinks. The room starts closing in on me as I think of the hole I’ve dug myself into, financial and otherwise. All these secrets I’ve kept from Clara that I can’t now confess, after the fact. The fiscal state of the business, firing Connor, my reunions with Kat. Two of them now. Two reunions with Kat. Two times I’ve seen a former girlfriend, the mother of my child—my other child—and I’ve never mentioned them to Clara.
The waitress meanders by, and I ask for another drink, Jack and Coke this time, which I down like it’s ice water and I’ve just been on a five mile run. I’ve begun to sweat. There is a countdown on the corner of the TV screen, reminding me that it’s eighteen minutes until tip-off. Eighteen minutes until I win or lose all that matters to me in the world.
“I don’t know if I can stay with Steve,” Kat tells me, adducing the number of arguments they’ve had lately as the reason she can’t stay. He’s under a lot of pressure, she says, with a new job, and he’s taking it out on her and Gus. “His temper,” she adds on. “He’s always short of patience, with me, with Gus. He has a short fuse. And he’s never home. He’s always gone. Always working.” She reaches a hand across the table to touch mine, and I quickly disengage, pulling back and placing my hands in my lap so that she can’t reach them. “Gus needs a father figure in his life. A father. He’s twelve years old. I don’t know the first thing about raising twelve-year-old boys.”
I shake my head quickly. I can’t do this. This can’t be happening to me. “I already have a family, Kat. A wife, and a child. Two children. I love them,” I say. “I love my wife—I love Clara. You kept this from me all these years, and now you just expect me to slip into the role of father? I can’t do that,” I insist, smacking my hands on the table too loudly, so that a man at the table behind us turns to see. “Don’t you get that? Don’t you see? I have a family.”
It’s all coming at me so quickly now, my life spiraling out of control. I place my head in my hands to make it stop, but it doesn’t stop. In fact, the world keeps spinning until I feel like I could be sick.
“We were happy once, Nick,” she says. “Don’t you remember?” she asks, but instead of replying right away, I yank my wallet out of my pocket, find a twenty in it and lay it on the table.
“We were kids, Kat. We were stupid kids,” I say as I stand quickly, telling her we’ll talk about this later, that I have to go. “I’m in love with Clara now,” I stammer. “Clara is my wife.”
I hurry away, mumbling over and over again to myself as I leave, I already have a family. I already have a family.
“Nick,” she calls after me as I push past people out of the bar and into the oppressive June air. I clamber into my car, the inside nearing a hundred degrees in the evening sun.
How will I tell this to Clara? How will I explain? Not only is Kat informing me of my paternity of a twelve-year-old boy, but she’s telling me she wants me to be a father figure—an actual father—in Gus’s life. What do I do? Give her money and tell her no? I have no money to give to her.
Clara will leave me. Clara will leave me if she knows.
I can’t live without Clara. Clara, Maisie and my baby boy. These are the only things that matter. I turn on the car and start to drive. I spin out of the parking lot, needing to get away, the tires skidding as I press down hard on the accelerator, the engine moving faster than the tires can go, leaving black marks on the concrete. I pull out onto the highway and floor it home, the world coming at me quickly, trees blending together into a mass of green, buildings and houses becoming one. All I want is to be home.
Evening traffic is a mess as always, scores of cars lined up at red lights going nowhere. I watch as other drivers check incoming texts on their phones. They listen to the radio, bebop music turned all the way up, the heavy bass making their cars shake. We sit frozen in a line, and my patience starts to thin. The train has no doubt stopped on the tracks again, making it impossible to get to the west end of town, where I need to go. Where Clara is, and where Maisie is. Home. I picture them sitting side by side on the sofa, waiting for me. I’m coming, I think, and then, when the traffic finally starts to clear, I gun the engine and press down hard on the gas. I swerve in and out of cars to get to Clara and Maisie.
The radio is tuned in to some AM sports station, and they’re giving the play-by-play of the basketball game. It isn’t going so well. It’s all I can do not to scream.
I drive past the grocery store, the library, the post office, the elementary school and a public park. The highway turns residential, but I don’t slow down my pace. The streets become pockmarked but wide, lined with dozens of full-grown trees. In the distance I spy my house. I keep my eyes on the house the entire time. I hold my breath and dig down deep onto the accelerator. The speedometer surpasses forty-five miles per hour, reaches for fifty. I close in on my house. The finish line.
What I fail to see is little Teddy from across the street, scampering out from behind a tree. Two steps ahead of him bounces a red rubber playground ball, which
Teddy trails blindly into the middle of the street. It happens so fast. I don’t have time to react.
First there’s nothing, and then there’s a boy, a four-foot, forty-pound figure standing in the middle of the street with eyes terrified, his mouth formed into a silent scream. Staring at me.
If I hadn’t had two drinks at the bar my response time might have been quicker; if I weren’t under so much stress I wouldn’t have been driving so fast. But as it is, I’m slow, my movements asthenic, and it takes time to react. Time to raise my foot off the accelerator and move it to the brake. To press down hard on the brake pedal. To divert the steering wheel from its course. The car slips past Teddy by mere inches, and as it does, I hear the boy finally scream.
I come to a stop on the lawn of a neighboring home, missing their mailbox by a hair. My hands are shaking, my legs like sludge as I thrust the gearshift into Park and open the car door, tumbling out onto the street below, my feet barely making contact with the road. “Teddy,” I say, lurching around the side of the car to find the boy lying on the concrete in the fetal position, embracing the ball. For a moment I think he’s hurt, maybe even dead. I’ve hit him, and I start running to his side, saying his name over and over and over again, “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy,” and I fall to my knees to shake him awake, to bring him back to life. I’m about to employ my resuscitation skills, but then I notice that Teddy is breathing, and there is no blood. He’s okay, he’s okay, I tell myself, and I feel a smile cross my lips, a relieved, thankful smile. Thank God he’s okay.
“Get your fucking hands off my son,” says a voice, and my head rises sharply to see Theo marching into the middle of the street toward me, arms already swinging. His fist connects with the side of my head, and before I can react the world spins. I stagger, and Theo comes at me again, connecting this time with my gut so that I bowl over in excruciating pain, clutching my stomach. I’m apologizing profusely, spouting a surfeit of confessions and excuses. “I’m sorry,” I say and, “I didn’t see him,” and then I place the blame on Teddy and claim, “He came out of nowhere.”
“I saw you,” barks Theo as he lifts Teddy from the concrete. “You were driving too fucking fast, and you know it,” he says, and then he steps closer to me, and I prepare for another beating, in the mouth this time or maybe the nose, as his fist forms and he leans in close to me. By now Theo’s wife, Emily, has stepped from their house, and Teddy leaves his father’s arms to run to his mother, who collects him in a maternal embrace. My car, ten feet away, still idles, keys in the ignition, engine running. My own house is quiet; Clara hasn’t seen a thing.
“If I ever see you speeding again,” he says, face pressed so closely to mine that I can see the pores of his skin, the way he salivates in anger. His eyes are more than just angry, but irrational and deranged, the very same way I’d be if someone ever messed with my kid. Emily calls to him, “Theo, enough,” but like a belligerent dog disobeying its owner, Theo doesn’t come.
“If I ever see you speeding again on this street or anywhere ever again,” he says, stepping somehow even closer now so that his spittle flies into my eye, “so long as you shall live,” as Emily encroaches on the conversation now, tugging desperately on Theo’s arm to try to bring him inside, “I will kill you. I will fucking kill you, Solberg,” he says, and Emily’s and my eyes grow wide, fully dilated, at exactly the same time.
I have no doubt in the world that he means it.
CLARA
My father calls. It’s midafternoon.
“Daddy?” begs Maisie at the sound of the phone ringing, but I say no, it isn’t Daddy.
“Boppy,” I say, and Maisie smiles gaily.
“Your mother has been asking for you,” my father says, “again,” though we both know this isn’t true. She isn’t asking for me so much as she’s asking for Maisie, for the four-year-old version she believes is still me. We feed into her delusion sometimes, letting her believe that Maisie is me because it’s far easier than telling her the truth.
My mother is not that old, and yet it’s hard to remember sometimes when her mind has stopped working and her body is quickly following suit. No one knows for certain how much time she has left on the ever-dwindling hourglass of her life. Some doctors say five years, others say seven, though one way or another she’s simply biding time as we all are, biding time until we die.
“You’ll come see your mother?” my father asks, and I say that I will.
* * *
I open the front door to step outside with Felix in my arms and Maisie on my heels, and, as luck would have it, a black sedan sweeps down the street, a chauffeured car that stops three houses away at the home of Jake and Amy Lawrence, a childless couple in their thirties. They’re business moguls, and one or the other of them always seems to be on the road. Amy leaves their house towing a rolling suitcase in a pair of sling-back heels. Today it’s her turn to go.
But none of that matters. What matters is that Maisie sees the blackness of the car as it drives slowly past, tortoise-like and deliberate, the driver’s eyes converging with hers, and now her eyes are locked on that car as it hovers down the street waiting for Amy, Maisie’s knees trembling, her eyes filling with tears. She says nothing, and yet her body language says it all, the distress and the agitation as she turns on her heels and begins to run. She’s fast, much faster than me, as I lug Felix in my arms and attempt to pursue her throughout the home. I call to her over and over again, Felix frightened by my screaming, and so he, too, begins to scream.
I find Maisie under the bed, a spare queen-size bed in a guest room where no one goes. “Maisie,” I say to her, dropping down to my hands and knees to try to meet her eyes, “please, come out,” but she buries her face into the carpet and cries. “Boppy is expecting us,” I say. “Please, Maisie. Please. Do it for Boppy.”
What I don’t do is ask her why she’s scared; I know. I don’t tell her that everything is going to be okay, because I’m not sure that it is. I raise my voice once and demand that she come out, and when she doesn’t, I beg. I offer treats; I issue threats. And when all that fails I lie on the floor at the edge of the bed, and reach a hand out to hers and pull, and my Maisie cries out this time, not in fear but in pain. That hurt. She bawls, saying how it hurt, how Mommy hurt her, and I tell her that I’m sorry, that Mommy is so sorry.
But it doesn’t matter; Maisie is still rooted firmly under the bed.
I want to tell her that she’s wrong about the car, that there was no bad man in a black car trailing her and Nick. Nick was the bad man, I believe, but as always I’m confused. Did Nick end his life, or did someone do it for him? I have to know, feeling that the uncertainty is slowly driving me mad.
Closure is what I need. I need closure.
More than thirty minutes later my father calls again, wondering where I am. I slip from the room to retrieve my cell and answer the call. “I thought you’d be here by now,” he tells me, and this time I confess that Maisie has cloistered herself beneath the bed and won’t come out. My voice is panicked as I say it, tired, frustrated, panting, with Felix serving as background noise, quietly lamenting. She is a smart girl, my Maisie, hiding under the bed because she knows I’ve mastered removing the hinge pins from the doors.
Nick would know what to do. Nick would slide his body under the metal bed frame and join Maisie beneath the bed, or he would lift up the mattress and box spring with a single hand, and the situation would resolve with laughter before they’d make a fort out of the blankets and sheets and pillows that were now cluttered around the guest bedroom.
But not me. I can only beg.
“Oh, Clarabelle,” my father says empathetically, and it’s decided that my father and I will swap places. He will come to cajole Maisie out from under the bed while I stare into the addled eyes of a woman I once knew.
I come into my parents’ home to find my mother shored up on an armchair, Izzy beside her, painting my mother’s fingernails a cherry red. Izzy gazes at me with her heavy-lidded eyes an
d a compassionate smile. She has a big bust and fullness around the middle, but the legs that emerge from beneath a denim skirt are disproportionately slim, like the legs of a giraffe.
My mother was born Louisa Berne, the only child of Irish parents who imparted to Maisie and me our green eyes and red hair, and a face full of freckles. She married my father over thirty years ago, he a former business exec and she a happy homemaker, the type of woman who could do most anything on an hour or two of sleep and a good cup of tea. Her dementia developed slowly at first, a few forgetful moments that spiraled into something more over the coming years.
Izzy smiles at me and says, “Look how lovely our Louisa is,” while my mother watches on, staring at me with a confused and yet hopeful look in her eye because she doesn’t know me from Eve, and yet she’s waiting for a response, for me to also say that she’s lovely.
“Beautiful,” I say, though she’s not. This woman is not my mother.
My mother is self-sufficient and adept; she doesn’t need some woman to paint her fingernails or to introduce me when I step inside.
“It’s Clara, Louisa,” Izzy prompts. “Clara’s come to see you. You remember Clara,” she adds while my mother decides pointblank, exhaling heavily like Izzy and I are both a bunch of idiots, that I am not Clara.
“This is not Clara,” my mother insists, and Izzy tells her, “Well, sure it is. This is Clara.” I stand pressed to a wall and awkwardly smile, an outcast in the home. My mother has no memories of me, not the twenty-eight-year-old me at least.
There are bruises on my mother’s arms, bluish bruises on the pale skin that lines her tender forearm, and as my eyes move to them in question, Izzy explains, “She’s been clumsy lately. Not so good on her feet anymore,” which of course is an effect of the dementia. My heart sinks. This is something the neurologist has been forewarning us about for a long time now, how my mother would need more and more help performing those everyday tasks she used to do on her own with ease, how her mobility would become stunted, how in time she might be bed-bound.