Everything Changes (17 page)

Mom and Pete come to pick us up from the precinct in her Honda Civic, and I don’t know if it’s coincidence or the ghost of an old habit, but Norm gets into the front seat, while Matt and I join Pete in the back. And there we are, the family King, on a typical outing, except that the ice packs aren’t for a picnic of luncheon meats and potato salad, but for my throbbing, swollen fist and the purple lump on the side of Matt’s head. A few hours earlier I watched transfixed as a paramedic excavated a fragment of tooth that was buried in the flesh between two of my bloody knuckles, before closing the wound with three stitches and a Band-Aid. Matt’s having a hell of a time keeping on the Elton John wig while icing a contusion the size of a golf ball under it, but the good news is, all charges have been dropped.

Norm, in typical fashion, jocularly introduced himself to our arresting officer, Jim Sheehan, from the backseat of the squad car as if they were sharing a cab, and in doing so learned that he used to carpool with the officer’s father years ago when he still lived in Riverdale. It turned out that Mr. Sheehan senior had passed away in the last year, and Norm’s fond memories of the man seemed to move his son. After hearing Norm’s version of the events in question, Sheehan left us in an interrogation room and went to have a word with Satch, who was being treated at a nearby emergency room. Two hours later, Sheehan returned, having successfully brokered a compromise wherein Satch would agree not to press charges if we would agree to keep the Mustang and be done with him. I got the feeling, from the way Officer Sheehan explained it, that he’d leaned a bit on Satch in pressing our case. “Not for nothing,” he said to Norm as we left the station, “but he was a real son of a bitch to sell your son that car. He deserves more of a beating than he got.”

So there we sit, a fractured family temporarily fused in the confines of Lela’s Honda with no idea how to be mended, what shape it is we’re supposed to take, or whether we even want to try. An awkward silence envelops us, so Lela turns on the radio and Pete sings along to Dave Matthews with reckless abandon. I direct my mother back to Johnson Avenue, where I parked Jed’s car. We all stand around for a moment, unsure of who will go with whom and who belongs to whom. Finally, Norm suggests we all go out to dinner, but that’s more than I can bear right now; my innards are still trembling as my mind replays my earlier violence in a continuous, unedited loop. I say I have to get back to the city, and Matt’s got a gig, so Norm decides he’ll follow Lela and Pete home in the Mustang and have dinner with them. First, though, he thanks Matt and me for “having my back” in the altercation with Satch. “What a team!” he declares, swelling with macho pride. “The Fighting Kings!”

That’s us. The Fighting Kings. What we lack in brawn we make up for in bizarre diversion, the strategically placed erection here, the surprise bald head there, and while your focus is shattered by the freak show that we are, we’ll use the opportunity to bash your head in. Norm revels in our superficial wounds, somehow forgetting the fact that we were fighting for Pete and not for him and that we altogether failed in our mission to get our brother’s money back. As always, Norm is judging success solely on the level of drama generated, rather than the actual result. I guess I really shouldn’t expect anything more from someone for whom the traveling has always been famously better than the arrival.

Matt and I stand on the curb, licking our wounds as we watch our parents drive away, a view that would have been inconceivable as recently as this morning, even. Norm showed up only a few days ago with plans for instant rapprochement that bordered on delusional, and yet here he is, effortlessly enmeshed in the family dynamic as if he’s never left. Can it really be that simple? I wonder. Can you just blow past the hurts and defenses of people, the transgressions of your past, and just steamroll your way into a new situation, one that works better for you? There’s something appealing in the idea, something that makes me stop and consider my own pathetic situation. Maybe a little delusional bullheadedness is what’s called for here. Yesterday I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of it, but today feels different. Today I’m a guy who fights in the streets, who rides cuffed in police cars, who has to have teeth removed from his knuckles by paramedics.

For now, though, I can’t stop shaking.

“Listen,” I say to Matt, who has pulled off the Elton John wig and is gingerly rubbing his bruised temple. “Why don’t you take the car back to the city? There’s something I need to do.”

“Here?” Matt says incredulously.

“I want to look in on Tamara and Sophie.”

He takes the car keys from me and presses a button. Lights flash and locks click as the Lexus snaps to attention. “How’s she doing?” he says.

“Who?”

“Who are we talking about?”

“She’s doing fine,” I say.

He gives me a funny look imbued with understanding. “And how are you doing?”

“I’ll live,” I say, shaking my sore fist.

“That’s not what I meant.”

I meet his gaze, allowing with my eyes what I can’t seem to say out loud. “I know,” I say.

“When’s Hope due back?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“Oh.” His eyes are open and sympathetic, inviting me to bare my soul, and it would be so good to say something out loud, to make everything a little more real, a little more possible, but it’s just not happening.

“Can I get a lift?” I say instead.

He holds my look for a moment and then shrugs. “Sure thing.”

Matt drives the Lexus much too fast for my taste, accelerating on the straightaways, taking the corners at high speed. “Some day, huh?” I say, to fill the vacuum of my unspoken confession as we pull up to Tamara’s house. He looks curiously up the walk as I step out of the car, then nods, offering me a rare full-blown little-brother smile as he throws the car into drive. “It’s not over yet,” he says before tearing away from the curb and disappearing into the gathering twilight.

“I have the same dream at least once a week,” Tamara says. “I walk into the bathroom in the middle of the night and realize that I forgot to take Sophie out of the bath. When I turn on the light, there she is, lying faceup under the water. She’s been there for hours, and I yank her out and try to wake her up, but the whole time I’m shaking her and giving her mouth-to-mouth, she’s cold and much too heavy, like she’s waterlogged, and I already know she’s dead, and that it’s my fault.”

We’re sitting on the blue tiled floor of the bathroom while Sophie splashes around in the tub. Tamara has my wrecked hand on her lap and is holding a Ziploc sandwich bag of ice on it. Next to us, Sophie splashes happily in the bathtub, her light hair so much darker plastered to her wet scalp, her chubby cheeks glistening as she sings to herself. “Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the Pooh, willy nilly silly ole bear.”

“And the thing of it is,” Tamara continues, “no matter how many times I have the dream, I’m always shocked and horrified, and this little part of me, the part that’s conscious of the dream, wonders how the hell I could have let it happen again, when I already know the dream.” She looks at me with a self-deprecating smile even as her eyes grow misty at the thought. “Even in my dreams I’m a bad mother.”

“Those dreams represent your fear of being a bad mother,” I say. “And bad mothers aren’t afraid of being bad mothers. So you see, it actually proves that you’re a good mother.”

Tamara smiles warmly at me. “Where would I be without you, Zack?”

“I honestly don’t know,” I say, but I’m thinking, Happily married to a living husband? Because without me, maybe Rael never would have gone to Atlantic City, or maybe if I’d said no he would have prevailed upon Jed, who would have driven the Lexus, or a million other ever-so-slightly divergent scenarios that would have had nothing in common other than they didn’t end in a fatal car wreck. Tamara seems to read my thoughts, and looks away sadly for a moment to leave me with them.

There’s nothing cleaner than a two-year-old in the bathtub. Sophie sits up on her knees, pulling herself up to peer over the edge of the tub at my hand and, in doing so, sends a mild spray of water cascading onto the floor, getting Tamara’s shorts wet. “Zap have a boo-boo?” she says.

“Yes,” Tamara says. “Zap has a big boo-boo.”

“I kiss it.”

I hate the thought of my ragged hand, now deformed with purple swelling and caked with dried blood around the stitches, coming into contact with Sophie’s perfect pink, embryonic mouth, but Tamara’s grin urges me on, so I extend my hand, angling it to keep the most ravaged sections away from her. Sophie takes my hand in both of her little wet ones, and peers intently at the damage. “Oh,” she says with admiration. “Zap have big boo-boo.” I’m sitting on the wet floor, knee to knee with Tamara, and when Sophie leans over and starts purposefully kissing my hand, it’s all I can do to keep from bursting into tears. There’s a wholeness here, a perfection, in Tamara’s face and posture, in Sophie’s dimpled flesh and innocent eyes. Their entire universe is contained in this little bathroom, and I want more than anything to join it, to be a part of the uncomplicated solitude of their life here. I can love Tamara and raise Sophie with her, move in with them and leave my old, middling life behind. At this moment, it seems so eminently possible, so within my grasp, and I feel like if I could just stay here indefinitely and never leave, everything else would sort itself out.

“Zack?”

Tamara is looking concernedly at me, and I realize that my face might be revealing more than I thought. I attempt a smile that I know comes out looking like an attempted smile, and retrieve my hand from Sophie. I lean back against the wall, and into Tamara, who wraps her arm around me. “I’m having a rough day,” I say.

“Mommy kiss it,” Sophie says.

Tamara smiles as she lifts my hand to her mouth. “There,” she whispers, pressing her lips against my knuckles. “All better.”

Sophie stands in the crib in the corner of her blue room, directing me in all the proper protocols for putting her to bed. When Tamara was pregnant, she didn’t want to know if it was a boy or a girl. She was very superstitious about exposing the baby to the evil eye of fate. She adamantly refused to shop for supplies or to outfit the nursery until the baby had been safely delivered, feeling that any premature acknowledgment was opening the door to certain doom. But Rael couldn’t be contained. The sonogram seemed to indicate a boy, and so Rael, in typical fashion, had the bedroom carpeted in a deep blue, with matching shades and baseball-themed crib bumpers. When Sophie was born, Tamara shrugged and said it served him right, hoping that his errant decorating would be appeasement enough to the evil eye. Consequently, Sophie’s bedroom is missing the softer, pink hues of a little girl’s room, which Tamara has ameliorated with pastel crib linens and quilted balloons on the walls.

“Sippy cup,” Sophie demands, sticking her hand out. I hand her the cup, and she takes a pro forma drink before placing it carefully against the bumper of her crib. “My peppy,” she says, and I hand her the pacifier, which she pops into her mouth before dropping easily onto her pillow. “Pooh banket.” I pull the Winnie-the-Pooh quilt over her and tuck her into it. She rolls onto her side, her tiny, plump arm stretched out in a proprietary fashion across her pillow. “Zap rub my back?” she says. I rub concentric circles on the back of her terry pajamas and she closes her eyes. Sophie’s face in repose is a study in circles; her round cheek, her closed eye, her puckered mouth. Effortless, rounded perfection, unmarred by a single worry or impure thought. Looking down at her, I can feel the violence in my belly start to abate, and I’m overwhelmed by a rush of love that causes me to brush her cheek softly with my fingers. “I love you, kiddo,” I say softly. Her breathing has changed already, slowing down as she drifts into warm, liquid sleep. I get down on my knees to listen to her breathe, and I can feel my own breath catch in my throat as the surprised tears well up in my eyes, the overflow running down my cheeks and landing in little dark spots on the blue carpet. “What am I going to do?” I whisper to her in the dim silence of the bedroom. I watch her sleep through the vertical slats of the crib, like a prisoner staring through a tiny cell window for his only glimpse of the sun. She’s the only perfect thing in my life, and she’s not even mine.

Tamara calls over a neighbor’s kid to babysit so she can drive me home. I sit in the passenger seat, watching the animated shadows from passing highway lights play across the delicate features of her face.

“What?” she says, self-consciously running her fingers through her hair.

“What?”

“What are you looking at?”

If I could tell her the truth, I would say I’m looking for flaws. Because that’s what you do when you’re in love with someone you don’t want to be in love with. You look for imperfections in their skin, oddities in their features. You picture how they will age, where time will tarnish them. You try to catch them at harsh angles, discern some measure of awkwardness where their limbs connect to their trunks. You search for these deficiencies with an air of desperation, ready to lay claim to whatever you find, to inflate it grotesquely in your mind, and in doing so set yourself free.

I would say that I’m paralyzed, that I see things I can’t reach for, have itches I can’t scratch. And then there are the parts of me that I can’t feel anymore at all. That my days are filled with a quiet dread that has as much to do with her, or at least the potential of her, as it does with that foreign mass trespassing in my bladder. That I’m so in love with her that I can’t breathe, and that it’s become the only color in my universe, a deep blood-red, rendering everything and everyone else in black-and-white, and that I don’t want to live in black-and-white, but I’m terrified that it’s where I’ll end up anyway.

I would tell her that I love her from the core of my being, that she answers yearnings in me I never knew I had.

I would insist that none of this can be trusted. Because she’s a mess and I’m a mess and she’s alone and shaken and I might be sick, and after all she’s been through, how could I do that to her, and there are so many ways for this to be a disaster, for it to be all wrong and make no sense. That it may be nothing more than a colossal accident of convenience and transference, a subtle transposition of fears and wants, the random synthesis of a savior complex and desperate grief, wrapped up in loneliness and tied with a thick red bow of unmitigated lust.

And I would tell her that even though it can’t be trusted, I do anyway.

I want to tell her. Because she already knows. If she had any doubts, that insane kiss yesterday should have put them to bed. So if she knows, why the hell can’t I say it? Probably, I think, because raw acknowledgment would compel us to address it, and doing so would hurl us headlong back into our separate realities. I can’t be hers, and even if I could, she’s not ready to be mine, and what if she was and I went ahead and got married anyway, or I could be hers and she wasn’t up for it. Somehow, discussing it would turn it into a promise, broken before it was even made, and after a disappointment like that we could never go back to the sweet, untouchable love that now courses through our collective veins.

So I say nothing. And she takes her hand off the gearshift and places it on my arm, just like that, and we ride the rest of the way in a complex but uncomplicated silence, the atmosphere in her Volvo thick with forbidden thoughts. She double-parks in front of the brownstone and we sit together for a moment, looking out our respective windows at the night.

“I’m scared,” I tell her.

“It’s going to be okay,” she says.

“Not just about the biopsy.”

“What, then?”

I look straight into her lily pad eyes. “Everything.”

She looks right back at me and smiles. “Everything will be okay too.”

“How do you know?”

“It has no choice,” she says.

“Sometimes it feels like I can’t even breathe,” I say.

“I get that too.”

“What do you do?”

“I call you,” she says. “You’re my oxygen.”

When I get out of the car, she climbs out too, to give me one of our borderline illegal hugs in the xenon glow of the Volvo’s low beams. The cold has developed an edge, winter taking an early first bite out of autumn, and I shiver involuntarily in Tamara’s embrace. “You’re mine,” I say.

She looks up at me, confused. “What?”

“Oxygen.”

“Oh.”

She kisses my cheek. We stand there, foreheads pressed together, looking at each other with weary smiles. Her lips float tantalizing inches away from mine, but I know it would be a mistake. After a moment, she kisses my jaw and climbs back into her car, and I wonder if she was waiting for me to kiss her. “Call me tomorrow,” she says. I tell her I will and step back and watch her drive off. When I turn around to walk up the brownstone stairs, I’m startled to find Jed, standing bare chested in the living room window, staring down at me in dark, angry judgment.

“Was that Tamara?” he asks me when I come through the door. He’s back on the couch, watching CSI, looking vexed.

“She gave me a ride,” I say.

“That was nice of her.”

“What’s with you?” I say.

“Nothing.”

“She just gave me a lift home.”

He raises his hand to silence me, his eyes resolutely glued to the screen. “Not my business, man,” he says.