“Maybe you can be your own tether.”
“I can’t,” she said. “It’s my fault that he died. The shrink said kids who are young when their parents divorce think they’re responsible, and have delusions of omnipotence. But I could have made it different. And instead I went to this stupid party where you had to dress like a slut. Jesus, it hurts.”
“I’m sorry, Ab.”
“Oh, fuck,” Abby said, blowing her nose.
Jamie had brought his guitar, and he practiced in the mornings after Abby left for work. Then he walked over to campus, where the pretty summer school girls were in shorts. He bought used books at the bookstore and read them at lunch, sometimes at Abby’s restaurant. Then he walked home. He read the Bible sometimes—skimming past the boring parts for stories like Lot and Job—as if he were still in his class.
“I’m like a crazy homeless guy,” he told Abby one day when she got home from the café. “People are starting to look at me. I’m becoming a fixture, wandering around.”
“Hang on a sec,” she said, kicking off her shoes. “I smell like that place.” She disappeared into the bathroom, then reached back around the door to toss her jeans and her T-shirt into the hamper in the hallway. The T-shirt fell to the floor.
“I’ll get it,” he said.
She disappeared again, leaving the bathroom door open two inches, and Jamie heard the shower come on. From behind the door, over the sound of the water, she called, “I never want to see, or smell, or taste chipotle sauce again, as long as I live.”
He picked up the T-shirt and smelled it. It smelled like sweet potato fries and Abby’s peppermint soap. He dropped it in the hamper. The shower curtain rings rattled along the rod, and the sound of the water changed, hitting Abby’s body instead of the tub.
Jamie sat on the floor in the hallway, just outside the door, in case she wanted to say more. That was his job now, to listen to Abby. It was at least as important as selling guitars. Peppermint steam started to come out of the bathroom. He adjusted his jeans and thought it was time to admit to himself that he was hot for his niece. It wasn’t a noble thing to be, but it felt human. She was so pretty, and she loved him, and she was naked in the shower six feet away, behind an open door. The healthy thing to do was to accept that it was human, and not to act on it. That was all.
She came out in a towel with wet hair. “Why are you sitting on the floor?”
“I could hear you talking from here.”
“Thank you,” she said. She leaned over and kissed his temple. Her wet hair fell against his face, and the tuck of the towel over her breasts was at eye level. The important thing was not to act on it.
She sat on her heels and looked him in the eye. “Someday you’re going to have to do something besides take care of me,” she said.
“But it’s the only thing I’m good at.”
She studied him for a long second, and then she did something he hadn’t expected: she kissed him, not on the temple, but on the mouth.
“Abby,” he said, when she drew back, but then he was kissing her, too. She kneeled on the floor, and he took her face in his hands. He pushed the wet hair behind her ears and ran his hands down her arms, which were smooth and strong. Then he stopped. “Wait,” he said.
He was going to say they shouldn’t do anything more, but she waited like he said, watching him. He picked her up in the towel, with an arm under her knees and one under her back. He groaned a little, which made her laugh. Then he carried her out of the hallway into the bedroom and laid her down on the sublet bed, no excuses about how she had led him into it. He untucked the end of the towel and pulled it aside, and there was half of her, the soft breast, the smooth hip. It was right there in the Bible, as literature or not: Do not uncover the nakedness of your sister’s daughter, for she is your niece. It is a depravity . He pushed the other side of the towel away.
“Oh, Abby,” he said.
8
LEILATIRRETT WASa psychologist with a Ph.D. and problems of her own. Her daughter had become clinically depressed after an abortion, and her husband was being investigated for business fraud. She went to work every day, but she didn’t know whom she was more reluctant to see: the hard cases who seemed ready to pull her under with their own despair or the college students who cried over getting a B and the white university professors who moaned over tenure applications and real estate woes.
Once she had loved her job. She had been engrossed in the stories her patients told, and energized by the clarity with which she saw their lives. She gave them strategies and tools. She loved them in an expansive-feeling, empathetic, but dispassionate way, expecting no love back from them. She was good at what she did.
But lately, as her own family had buckled under stress, she had started to resent her patients. She still saw their problems clearly— moreclearly, now that she had lost her muddying compassion. But she also saw herself turning against them, and none of her strategies seemed to pull her out of it. Her father, a career military man, had wanted her to be a medical doctor. “That’s the way people can be helped, ” he said. She had started to think he was right.
Her impatience extended to everything in her life. She had always straightened her hair and worn it shoulder length, but one morning she cut it short with the kitchen scissors. Then she had to beg for an emergency salon appointment, so her clients wouldn’t think she had lost her mind. Her hairdresser, when she saw the mangled cut, said, “Leila, my God, ” and Leila had to fight back tears in the chair.
Abby Collins, the undergraduate who’d lost her father, called when Leila was feeling worst. She didn’t really want to see the girl, who was just grieving and needed time to pass, but Abby’s voice was insistent on the machine.
On the scheduled afternoon, it wasn’t Abby who came to her office but a young white man in his early thirties, dark-haired, nice-looking, in faded jeans. He looked at her sheepishly as she stood, confused, in the open doorway.
“Abby sent me,” he said. “I’m Jamie. She thought I needed this more than she did.”
Leila frowned at him. “She made the appointment for you?”
“She made it for herself, but then she changed her mind. I think she left you a message.”
“I haven’t had time to check them,” Leila said. She looked past him to the waiting room. “Is she here?”
“No. She thought about coming, too, but decided not to.”
It wasn’t normal procedure, and Leila had every right to send him away.
“Please just let me talk to you,” the young man said. “It’s about Abby, too.”
She didn’t have the energy to say no, so she sighed and let him in. He looked at the two chairs and the couch in her room, and he hesitated.
“You can sit on the couch,” she said.
Jamie sat on the edge of the cushions, as if he might get up any second. Leila sat down in her own chair.
“So—how do you know Abby?” she asked him, when he didn’t say anything.
There was a long pause. “She’s my niece.”
Leila tried not to assume anything. “You’re very young to be her uncle,” she said.
“Her mother, my sister Clarissa, is older,” he said. “I’m closer to Abby’s age than hers.”
Leila nodded.
“Abby says you can’t tell anyone what I say here,” the young man said.
“That’s true.”
“Can you tell the university anything I say about Abby?”
“No.”
Jamie took a breath and leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. “I took care of Abby for a while when she was a kid,” he said. “At my parents’ house when my sister was getting divorced. Then recently my sister, her mother, wanted me to come visit Abby, after—I think she told you. Her father died.”
“Yes.”
“So I came, and I was really happy to see her. I hadn’t in a few years. She’s having a hard time, but she’s this really cool young woman now, you k
now? She’s not a kid anymore. And I was sitting in the hallway the other day when she was taking a shower, thinking how I shouldn’t have a boner for my niece—or if I did I shouldn’t act on it—and then she came out and kissed me.” He stopped short.
“And what did you do?”
“Well.” He looked at his hands. “I kissed her back.”
Leila waited. People were so slow telling about sex, as if they thought you didn’t know how it went.
“It sort of went too far,” he said.
“How far?”
“As far as it could. I know we shouldn’t have.”
“How did you feel afterward?”
“Weird,” he said.
There was another long silence. Leila waited.
“Sometimes, after sex,” he said, “you’re not that excited about hanging out with the girl anymore. That’s sort of how you can tell, you know, how you feel about her. With Abby, I do want to hang out with her, but after I come, she’s my niece again. I want to hang out with her as my niece . But that’s until a little time passes and I see her pull on her jeans and then I want to fuck her again. Oh, Jesus.” He put his head in his hands. “I know we’re going to have to be at the same family things for the rest of our lives,” he said, “and that’s—I mean—it would just suck if this went bad, but it has to go bad. I mean it can’t go on.”
“You’ve had sex more than once?”
He shrugged, embarrassed, and Leila understood. Once could be an accident. More than once was deliberate, in full knowledge of what was on the other side.
“Did you use birth control?” Leila asked, thinking of her daughter and the abortion and the misery.
“She’s on the pill,” he said. “All those college girls are on the pill.”
Leila nodded.
“In my day,” Jamie said, “there were side effects or something, girls wouldn’t take it. And that wasn’t even that long ago. Abby says all the girls in the dorms have those little plastic compacts on their bureaus. Now, when they’re supposed to use condoms.”
“Did you use a condom?”
“No. But I know I don’t have anything.”
“How old is Abby again?”
“Twenty-one,” he said.
“And you?”
“Thirty-three.”
“You like the fact that she’s young.”
“Of course I do.”
“What else do you like about her?”
Jamie thought about it. “I like the way she’s like me,” he said. “I taught Abby what was funny, when she was a kid. That sounds arrogant, but I did. I taught her music—she’d still be listening to Air Supply without me. It’s like I made her, a little bit, but not for any evil purpose. And then I show up at a time when she’s lonely and single, and she’s all grown-up, wearing this waitress apron tied around her waist, and how can I not think she’s sort of wrapped up for me? And then she kissed me first, my God, I swear she did. I was going to resist all temptation.”
They stared each other down, for a long minute. It wasn’t true that Leila kept all secrets from the university. If she was particularly alarmed about a student, there were channels to go through.
“How’s Abby doing?” she asked.
Jamie looked down at his hands. “At first she was fine,” he said.
“At first she just seemed kind of sweet and charged up, you know—the early stages. But two nights ago she had a total breakdown, cried for two hours straight. We stopped doing anything then, and I said she had to see someone, and she left you the message. But by this afternoon I was feeling worse than she was, and she wanted me to take the appointment.”
“She should come see me,” Leila said. It was the first time she had wanted to see a patient in months.
“I know,” he said. “She will.”
Leila looked at the clock on the wall behind him. “We have some time,” she said. “Tell me about your family.”
The young man sat back on the couch, and stretched his arms, and looked around the room as if the answers might be there, and then he started to talk.
9
JAMIE TOLD THEshrink things he hadn’t thought about for a long time. He was glad Abby had told him Dr. Tirrett was black; he would have been thrown if she had just opened the door. He wondered, even as he was talking, if black shrinks usually had black patients, and if they got annoyed by white people’s problems. But then he got caught up in his own story. He told her about his parents, about how they’d been fighting before he was born, maybe over Yvette’s pregnancy. They’d never kept it a secret that he wasn’t planned.
His mother had gone to stay in a convent, to rest during her pregnancy. Dr. Tirrett seemed surprised at that. But his mother had wanted to make a spiritual retreat anyway, and she’d been afraid of losing the baby, and Teddy was unhappy about the burden of another child. He felt, as the shrink watched him, that this sounded like too many reasons.
His oldest sister, Margot, had been in France that year, having her junior year abroad. Margot was the perfect sister, the one who stayed Catholic and never did anything wrong. The nuns at school loved her. She was well behaved and good at school, and after that year spoke perfect French.
Clarissa was wilder, but she and their father had forged a real relationship while they fended for themselves at home: an enviable connection. Jamie had no real closeness with his father; Teddy had always seemed to suspect him of something. And Teddy was so straightforward, military, strict, and morally sure. Jamie was none of those things. He didn’t even look like his father.
He told Dr. Tirrett all this, trying to gauge her reactions as he went. She seemed smart and somehow motherly, with her short hair, but she looked unhappy. He couldn’t tell if it was his situation that was making her look that way.
“How long was your mother in the convent?” she asked.
“Until she had me. But first she went to visit my sister in France. She went into labor there.”
Dr. Tirrett seemed startled. “In France?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, surprised by her surprise.
“Was that expected?”
“No, I was early.”
“How long had your sister been in France?”
“For the whole school year,” he said. “Nine, ten months.”
The shrink just looked thoughtfully at him.
“What?” he said.
She shrugged.
“Hey, don’t check out on me here,” he said. “I’ve told you all this. So now what?”
She sighed. “Did your sister have boyfriends?”
“I don’t know,” Jamie said. “But I told you, she was the good girl in the family.”
“And your father was strict.”
“Yeah. We all went to Catholic school, but I got kicked out. He went nuts about that.”
“Nuts?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to talk about that?”
“No.”
Jamie thought about his father’s disapproval and flushed with shame.
The shrink said, “So he had angry reactions to problems with his children.”
“Sure.”
“Was your mother on your side?”
“Yeah, but he was in charge.”
“I see,” she said.
“Why did you ask about Margot’s boyfriends?”
The shrink shifted in her chair, rearranging her gray skirt. “I had a patient once,” she began. Then she said, “No, never mind.”
“What?” he said.
“I was just reading somewhere,” she said, “that half of all pregnancies in this country are unplanned. I don’t know how the statistics have changed since you were born.”
“I told you I was unplanned,” Jamie said cautiously, unsure what she was getting at. “My parents used the rhythm method.”
The shrink nodded.
“I know that seems kind of stupid now. When I was still in Catholic school, they said we would have to learn it with our wives. I know—it
’s embarrassing.”
“Do you think the nuns taught it to your sisters?”
“No,” he said. “I think they taught them to say no.”
“And did they? Say no?”
“I don’t know.” He tried to back away from the idea that had started to form.
“Where exactly did you say you were born?” she asked.
“In a French hospital,” he said. “Because my mother had gone to see my sister. Oh, God.”
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
His first thought was that if they had passed off Margot’s baby as Yvette’s, and Margot was really his mother, then Abby was only his cousin. Not his niece. That wasn’t so bad. His second thought was that the ground had opened beneath him and everything he knew was a lie.
He put his hands over his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see the shrink anymore. “Oh, man,” he said.
10
ON THE DAYJAMIEwent to see Dr. Tirrett, Abby was working the lunch shift, trying not to think about what she had done with Jamie, when a feeling of doom came over her like a dark wave. Her breath was short, and the room seemed to be spinning. She reached for a countertop, and held it tight so she wouldn’t fall. After a long minute, she let go of the counter and found one of the other waitresses watching her. Sandi was the tattooed blonde, barely five feet tall.
“You okay?” Sandi asked.
“I don’t know,” Abby said. But she wasn’t. She had wanted it, too, in the hallway and the bedroom. What kind of girl did that? It couldn’t be okay.
“Did you feel dizzy?”
“I guess,” Abby said. “My chest hurt.”
“I get that sometimes. The best thing is just to hold on to something and wait it out.”
“I think there’s something really wrong,” Abby said.
“How do you feel now?”
“Okay.”
“It’s a panic attack,” Sandi said. “If you go to a doctor they’ll just put you on drugs that make you fat. It’s better to ride it out.” She looked around the restaurant to see how crowded it was. “I’ll take your tables. Go home and feel better.”