Hell to the hell. I throw myself back on the chair, splay my legs onto this bookend thing next to it, not giving a damn that I knock over some weird-ass statue of a chick with too many arms.
Little click of the front door and Hester comes down the hall into the living room on her little cat feet, which I only hear because I’m listening for her and every sense is amped up.
She’s sorting through some mail, she doesn’t look up as I stalk toward her.
“We need to talk.”
She jumps a little, does that hand-to-heart thing and the letters flutter to the ground.
“A-about the adoption? Have you changed your mind?”
“Let’s start somewhere else,” I suggest, in that cornering-with-a-whiplash voice I learned so well from Pop. “Say, oh, last fall. You’re gonna have to help me out here.”
Hester sits down on this footstool thing with a little jolt. She’s staring at me with the Bambi eyes. Hasn’t looked at Cal once.
“So . . . Alex Robinson. Did he happen to pay you a visit in, say, early November?”
Look baffled. Say you don’t know why I’m asking.
But she doesn’t look baffled. And she doesn’t ask why.
“Calvin is yours. I think.”
“You. Think.”
Then a rush of words like a flood I’m drowning in, yes, Alex was home for a long weekend for Veterans Day, but he’s conscientious, I thought it was his, wanted it to be his—of course—at first, but then the hair—
My stomach clasps hard and tight, like someone’s punching it with a hot fist. “Did we ever have sex at all?”
“We did make love,” she breathes. “I would never lie about that. You can ask my friend Michaela, and Jude, and Buck. I told all of them right after the party.”
“That wasn’t ‘making love.’ It was sperm meets egg. Or not. Tell. Me. The. Truth.”
She grabs a floor pillow from the corner and hugs it to her, quivering with suppressed sobs. “The truth is I hope it’s you. I thought . . . I thought all along it was Alex’s. I mean, he and I had a relationship. So I wanted it to be his. But all he said when I told him was that he was sure I’d work it all out. Work it all out! Like it was a geometry problem or something. That whatever I did was fine. Fine! Nothing was fine, Tim. They wanted to kick me out of Ellery, did you know that? Waldo brought in his lawyer and told them they couldn’t, but I had to go the rest of the year, through graduation, knowing that they all wanted me gone. Alex didn’t need to do anything like that. You didn’t need to do anything like that. All you had to do was screw me once.”
I can actually feel my hands around her neck, gripping hard, tightening harder on pulse and tendon and skin. Jesus. Flex my fingers, tighten them, jam them against my thighs. “Yeah, well, now you’ve done it twice.”
I’m backing away from her.
“Where are you going?”
“Someplace safe. I’m taking Cal.”
“You don’t have to.” She’s across the room, grabbing my arm.
“He’s coming with me. I don’t trust you.”
She raises her chin, gives a little nod. “All right. I accept that. Maybe I deserve it. But I am his mother.”
“Must be nice to know that for sure. Get away from me, Hester.”
Chapter Forty
ALICE
Tim’s lying on his back on the grass outside the garage apartment, smoke curling in the air above him, cigarette in one hand, staring at the sky.
When I sit down on the bottom step near him, he doesn’t even turn his head. The cigarette’s nearly smoked all the way down. As I watch, he pulls another one out of the pack of Marlboros, lights it from the tip, drops the first butt into a foam coffee cup, where it hisses.
“Your mom tell you what’s up?” His voice is idle, uncurious, like it doesn’t much matter either way.
“Just now. Cal’s fine. George was doing ‘Itsy-Bitsy Spider’ for him. He’s good. Where were you?”
Tim takes another drag. “Went to town. Out of diapers. And cigarettes.”
“You probably shouldn’t do that with the patch on.”
He tips the foam cup at me. In the bottom, floating in an inch or so of coffee, along with six or seven cigarette butts, is the nicotine patch.
He blows a smoke ring.
Then, abruptly, he rolls over on his stomach, crushes out the cigarette, gray eyes sharp. “There are all these things, all these little pieces of him that are just like me. I keep telling myself that. But you probably have more medical—genetic—whatever—facts than I do.”
Facts come easily to my lips, like I’m reading them off the whiteboard at school. “It’s not all that straightforward with physical characteristics. They don’t just get inherited as simply as dominant and recessive. So that cleft chin?”
He nods, his eyes still locked on mine.
“Maybe yes, maybe no. The red hair. Same story. There’s more than one gene controlling each. Who knows? The dimple. That’s rare.”
“Hester’s mom has that. So you’re saying there’s no real way to tell. What about a blood test?” He strips his shirt down to his elbow, like I can pull out a Vacutainer and do a venipuncture right here and now.
“That can only rule someone out, not in.”
He digs the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, shakes his head, then drops his fists again. The look on his face. Lost, frightened, frustrated. Despite the stubble and the circles under his eyes, it reminds me of George’s expression when I can’t explain exactly, scientifically, why an asteroid won’t hit the earth. Can’t tell him that we know for certain there isn’t one already headed straight for us.
Tim just keeps staring at me like he doesn’t understand the instructions, or doesn’t want to.
My cell sings out “Eye of the Tiger.”
I start to mute it, but Tim’s hand flashes out, yanks the phone away before my fingers close on it. “Back off,” he snarls into it.
There’s an angry rumble of sound.
“I said back the fuck off. Leave her the hell alone. . . . Yeah, I’ll make you.”
He’s practically baring his teeth at the phone and in an instant all my worry coalesces into fury. “Quit it!”
“He needs to quit it.”
I jerk the phone out of his hand. “Cut it out, Brad. You’re better than this. If you keep it up I’m filing a restraining order. Enough already.” I hang up, hit the keys to block his number, my thumbs flying, then toss the phone on the stairs.
“There. Solved. I’ve got this handled. I don’t need you—” To fix it is what I mean to say, but before I can, Tim puts both hands out, palms facing me.
“Gotcha. Not needed here either. That’s great, Alice. Thanks. It must be terrific to have it all handled. Know how to handle it all.”
“You know better than that. Quit acting as if you’re the only one who ever feels anything. We can figure this out. We’ll—”
“Except it’s not your problem to solve, Alice, is it? I don’t want to be handled. Just another item on your list of people to rescue, things to fix? I’ll pass. How am I supposed to handle this? My son may not—might not . . . shit . . . might not be my son.”
His hand trembles as he grabs the lighter again, shakes more as he tries to flick it and the sparks won’t ignite. I take it from him, flip it, hold the flame to the cigarette he’s jammed between his lips.
I’m helping him hurt himself.
Then I do more.
“Lighting up won’t help Cal, dad or no dad.”
“Whoops, thanks. Forgot how much older and wiser you are. You’re probably even ‘mature’ enough to be relieved about this. No need for sink-in time”—he makes air quotes—“right? Bye bye baby.”
“You’re the one acting like a kid here, Tim.”
He laughs. “Sure. Got it. Thanks for the light.”
Still laughing, he plunges down the driveway into the Jetta, out onto the road.
Going, going, gone.
T
IM
I’ll be just like him.
If Cal isn’t mine, if I can’t keep him, I’ll be another Mason man with no photographs of his son on the walls.
My heart is doing this racing thing—maybe tension, maybe too much nicotine because I blew through a few butts before I remembered to adios the patch. Still, I fire up another, even though I feel more like yacking.
All the rules I broke, and it hasn’t occurred to me for years to enter Pop’s sanctum when he wasn’t here, much less make myself at home. Now I throw myself into his well-padded chair, spin it around, legs kicked out. Never even did this as a kid.
Another twist of the chair and back to the desk, which has a stack of his blue-lined pads on it, a silver pencil holder full of his brown-and-copper building and loan pens. Desk calendar with Nan’s field hockey games penciled in. One note, near the end of the month: “Crawley Center for Adoption Services, 3:30 p.m. Bring health records, birth cert.”
Only noise in the room is the gentle burbling of the fish tank. No fish in the tank, however. Pop likes aquatic snails. There they are, sliding up the wall and bobbing around on the lettuce leaves he feeds them every five days or so. Don’t require a lot of upkeep, those guys. Not much attention paid. Not even to the big picture.
Twirl in the chair again, and this time my legs strafe the wedding photo—Ma with puffy sleeves, Pop with a shiny silk vest—the pen holder, and Nan’s middle school graduation picture, Hodges beret and all. They tumble off the desk, land—a perfect basket into the leather trash can, as unerring as one of Jase’s newspaper throws.
And I wasn’t even trying.
I think I hear a door slam, but then all’s quiet.
The little silver bucket is lined up; a good little accomplice, right next to the Macallan and the cut-crystal highball glass. No need to wait to fill it with ice. We want what we want when we want it, right? Into the tumbler it goes. One finger, two fingers, three. It sloshes onto my hand and the desk calendar. Wipe my hand on my shirt, but the desk calendar can fend for itself.
You still might be his father.
Don’t do anything you can’t take back.
But Cal’s not here right now, he’s safe with the Garretts. Nothing to stop my hand from reaching for the glass, from picking it up, turning it around, and frowning into it.
A Pop habit.
Don’t think there’s quite enough scotch in this glass, since I spilled some and all. It smells like disinfectant or that red stuff Ma puts on cuts.
But I’m tipping the glass and parting my lips when the office door swings open.
Chapter Forty-one
TIM
“Oh, Tim.”
Nan closes the door behind her, so gently that it barely makes a sound, not even the usual click of the latch. Then she stands against it, blinking at me in the sleepy, unfocused way she does when she first wakes up, waiting for the world to make sense.
Can’t help her with that one.
“Cheers!”
Now she’s standing next to me, fingertips pressed against her lips.
Another “Oh, Tim.”
She doesn’t even sound surprised.
The glass travels toward my mouth again. Now she’s shaking her head, that look on her face, corners of her mouth turned down, spaniel eyes. There you go again.
I respond to the words she doesn’t even need to say—they’ve been said so often in this very room that they’re probably hovering in a cloud above us. But then I catch a whiff of what surrounds her like a burnt, grassy-sweet fog.
“Don’t judge, Nano. You aren’t exactly on the moral high ground here.” I sniff in an exaggerated way.
She lifts her forearm and smells her pressed Hodges navy blue blazer. Her red eyebrows shoot up like she’s shocked, shocked, at the scent. Then it’s like she crumples, spaniel eyes even bigger, face a paler triangle. “It’s not what you—”
I laugh. Harsh in the quiet room. She flushes. “You know what? Forget explaining to you. You’re just trying to blow off what’s really going on here. What the hell is that doing in your hand?”
“Taking waaay too long to get to my mouth.”
Tip the glass again, still with it too far from my lips, so some sloshes onto my jeans. Whoops.
She reaches out and I think she’s going for the glass, but instead she rests her hand on my shoulder, awkward. “That guy you were turning out to be? I liked him. I was proud of you. In two months, you’ve been ten times the father Dad was. Ever.”
“Except I love my kid. I mean—that kid.”
Now she takes the glass out of my hand, and I let her, my fingers going slack. She sets it on the desk calendar, centers it like she’s gonna be judged on that, turns back to me.
“Probably he loves us. He just isn’t good at it.”
“It’s not rocket science, Nan. You show someone they matter to you—do whatever it takes to show that.”
She lowers the hand resting on my shoulder, slides it to my own, and pulls, so we’re both sitting on the couch, hand in hand like lost kids in a fairy tale.
“Drunk Dad will definitely hammer that home for Cal.”
And then it’s out, all of it, blurt it all out, all over her—Hester, Alex Robinson, Alice.
“What is it about those Garretts?” Nan’s short, sharp laugh sounds like it was rabbit punched out of her. “First they get Samantha. Now you.”
“What they get is how to show up. The stuff that you and me aren’t so great at.”
“You help,” Nan says, unexpectedly. “You’re good at it.”
“Yeah, right.”
She looks me in the eye. “I owe you my GPA. My good grades in English. That.” She gestures at the framed newspaper photo of her at the Fourth of July parade.
I’ve waited fucking forever for her to say this, admit it, and now it’s just some little nothing, one of those things you desperately want for Christmas that you’ve forgotten about by the time the wrapping’s in the trash.
But she’s looking at me, The Look, spaniel face, like she’s dropped something at my feet and I owe it to her to say how special it is, how much it means that she brought it to me.
I sigh. “Sure, Nan. You plagiarized from my papers, and even when I knew, I didn’t say a word. I’m a hero.”
“You helped me, Tim. You let me keep on doing it, and you didn’t tell anyone.”
“Just like you didn’t let on that I was full of more drugs than a Pfizer warehouse. Yay for us. I’ll stand right next to you at the next Fourth of July parade. Masons rule.”
I reach for the glass again and she smacks my knuckles like an old schoolteacher.
“You helped me,” she repeats.
“Nan, me ‘helping’ that way? Made you think you were crap. Helped cost you Samantha, if I’m guessing right. Help isn’t supposed to make you weaker and even more effing lost. I might as well have been old Troy, supplying you shit.”
“Don’t say that.” Her voice rises, higher pitched.
Not sure who she’s defending. Also if it matters. Close my eyes. I would reach for the scotch again, but it’s impossibly far away. My head hurts.
“You helped me.”
“Stop saying that. So fucking what, Nan. So maybe you’ll get into Columbia. Maybe. Gonna be happy there? I wouldn’t take a bet on that one.”
Tears stream down her face now, big gaspy sobs. She sounds like Cal, lost and sad and sure there’s no help in the world for that. I let go of her hand, put my arms around her, pat, pat, circle, circle. Do everything but burp her as the tears and the shuddering keep on and on and on, like she’s waiting for the one magic word or gesture that I’m so not coming up with.
“You could have asked,” I say finally. Total opposite of reassurance. “I would have, I dunno, coached you or something without you ripping off shit behind my back.”
Nan sighs. “Back then? You wouldn’t have handed me a drink of water in the Gobi Desert. You wouldn’t have shoved me out of the path of a meteor. You were g
one, Tim. Don’t you remember?”
I squeeze her hand, tug her a little closer so she’s resting her cheek on my shoulder. “Not the way you do. That was sort of the point.”
She shakes a little, but this time with the tiniest of laughs. “Guess so. Job well done.”
I pull back, look at her. Her hair all over the place, except the pieces that are plastered around with snot, her “edgy” mascara making her eyes into a creepy clown portrait that only needs a black velvet background. God, what a mess. My stupid, crazy sister. I love her so much.
“Kid . . . Nan . . . I . . . I didn’t screw myself to screw you up. I know that happened anyway. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Pull off my long-sleeved shirt, pass her one sleeve, use the other myself.
“One, two, three, blow,” Nan says, muffled by the shirt.
Ma always said that.
For a few minutes, we sniff and breathe at the same time, twins for the first time ever, probably.
“You weren’t the only one to screw me up, so you don’t get to take all the credit or the blame. I did a super job all by myself, but . . . but Tim. You and Sam were my best friends. You left me behind one way. Then she left me behind another.”
“Kiddo. You couldn’t have rescued me from anything I did. But Samantha . . . she was just down the road. A phone call away, as they say. All you had to do was say I’m sorry.”
“You don’t even know what happened,” Nan says, a trace of her old self-righteousness creeping back.
Hell with that.
“I do, though.” I lean back so we’re once again side by side. Her head on my shoulder, my hand on her hair. We could be posing for a really effed-up version of one of Ma’s twin pictures. “She called you on your bullshit and you ditched her. It’s not exactly an original story. I’ve starred in it a billion times.”
“Samantha’s not perfect . . .” Nan says, and then she yawns, like even she’s too sick of this to go on.
“Despite that sandwich board she wears that says she is?”
Watery giggle. “I hate you.”