Family and Other Accidents (11 page)

Jack remembers the cold aluminum of the chairs where he sat and waited for Connor to come out of anesthesia. How he stayed in the hospital for close to fourteen hours, long after Connor, groggy and drugged, told Jack to go home. Surely that's a sign he needs people, that Mona is wrong.

“I don't know. Did Mona say she was at work?”

Connor nods, and Jack picks up the phone from the coffee table and starts to dial. Taking the paper, Connor shakes his head, goes into the bedroom.

First her phone voice, then her real voice.

“Hey,” Mona says. “You never called me last night. I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

“Yeah, I fell asleep.”

“I was a little worried, you don't usually call me from bathrooms in Boston,” she says, and Jack imagines her propping the phone between her neck and chin, doodling spirals on her reporter's notebooks—
everything always curly, like her hair. “It sounds as if everything is under control now.”

“Something like that.”

“That's good,” she says, and he can tell she's going to hang up unless something changes, unless there's something else they need to talk about.

“So everything's okay out there?” Jack asks. “You have enough money?”

“I'm not your little sister.” She sounds angry. “You don't have to take care of me because our parents are dead. I should go, I've got edit board in a minute.”

“Do all women want to be Jackie Kennedy?” he asks, because it's the first thing that comes to mind.

“What does that have to do with anything?” She sighs. “I've got a meeting. I'll just talk to you when I talk to you, okay?”

Jack stays on the phone until the beeping ends, and the canned voice of the operator suggests that if he would like to make a call, he should hang up and try again.

         

During a wave at Fenway, Jack's cell phone rings. Rummaging in his pocket, he checks the number on the caller ID, sees it starts 312.

“Hey, Mo.”

“So all morning I've been thinking about what you said about every woman wanting to be Jackie Kennedy,” she says, “and I think that's not right. I think it's men who want women to be like Jackie Kennedy.”

“I hadn't really thought about it that way,” Jack says, struggling to hear Mona over the crowd and the rubber-band voice of the announcer. “But that sounds about right.”

“What woman wants a philandering husband who gets his head blown off?”

“I guess not too many.”

“I mean, think about all the diseases that poor woman probably got. And it must have been so embarrassing.”

“You're definitely onto something. Maybe you could even suggest a feature on it.”

“I don't know, I'd just been thinking about it all morning, so I figured I'd call.”

A pause that goes on and on.

“Are you happier without me?” Jack finally asks. “Honestly?”

Another titanic silence.

“Maybe we shouldn't talk for a while, you know?” she says. “Certain things aren't going to change, and I'm not sure we're making things any easier, you know?”

Jack doesn't know, but he agrees and hangs up.

Something important has happened on the field, people around them stand up to clap and shout encouragement.

“Mona?” Connor asks.

“Yep.”

“It's weird to see you like this,” Connor says, and Jack sees his brother wants to pat him on the back or hug him, to make some sort of contact, but for whatever reason—the hot dog in Connor's hand, something about friendships between men, the inapproachability of being Jack—Connor doesn't. “It's like you're walking through soup.”

“Are you going to marry her? Laine, I mean.”

“We've talked about it.” Connor shrugs. “I want to.”

“She doesn't?”

“Naw, I think she does. She just wants to be sure it's her and not the baby.”

“Is it?”

“Of course,” Connor says, too easily.
Doomed in new and different ways.
“Maybe you should just move to Chicago. It's like Cleveland. It's cold and gray; it's got a lake.”

“I don't know,” Jack says, thinking about how everything felt wrong with Mona for a long time, long before she interviewed with the paper. How they almost broke up on vacation six months earlier, and they could never set a date to get married. “It might be kind of like taking spoiled milk to a new place to see if it will freshen up.”

“Spoiled milk?” Connor shakes his head. “That's a terrible metaphor.”

Jack shrugs and thinks about reaching out to touch Connor, but doesn't. They don't have that kind of relationship, and it's easier to send rent checks.

“Don't worry,” Connor says. “I talked to my friend about skydiving, and he can take us tomorrow before you leave. I'm telling you, it will fix you right up. You can just let everything go.”

         

From the backseat of the Sentra, Jack can't really hear what Laine and Connor are talking about, but he can see their fingers touch on a to-go coffee cup in the console between the bucket seats. Jack and Connor have just picked her up from the train station, and the three are headed for the airfield so Jack and Connor can jump out of an airplane before Jack has to get on one that takes him back to his house in Cleveland—the house that Mona and Connor don't live in anymore.

He dials Mona on the cell.

“I can see this not talking thing is going to work great,” she says, but he can tell she isn't angry, might be relieved. “What's up?”

“I'm going to skydive.”

Over the headrest of the driver's seat, Connor's head swivels around. With raised eyebrows, he asks if it's Mona. Jack nods.

“Are you nuts?” Mona asks. “You get sick on merry-go-rounds.”

“I've been told that it's free-fall,” Jack says. “That it's a totally different experience.”

“I can't believe your brother talked you into this. Put him on.”

Turning the phone over to his brother, Jack can only guess at what Mona is saying. All he hears are Connor's lines—“Hey, Mo, whatcha knowin'. Yeah, good. Nope. Would I lie to you? I know, I promise. Good to talk to you, too. Here's the big guy.”

And then the phone is back under his ear, carrying Mona's voice, which is attached to Mona's body in a low-rise on the Chicago River.

“Don't break your neck,” she says.

“I'm going to call you when I get on the ground.”

“I'll be here,” she says and hangs up.

They park the car and file out. Connor tells Jack to give Laine the contents of his pockets—wallet, keys, spare change, cell phone.

“Mona will probably call, because they talk every fifteen minutes even though they broke up.” Connor makes quotation marks in the air when he says “broke up.” “Just explain who you are so she doesn't mistake you for some floozy Jack picked up.”

“Right.” Laine winks a gray eye at Jack. “Not a floozy.” Running fingers on the back of Connor's neck, she leans against him, whispers in his ear, but Jack hears. “Be careful, baby, we're going to need you around here.”

Connor ropes his arms around Laine, presses her body against his, kisses her cheek, then lets her go.

Spreading out her jacket on the grassy area by the parking lot, Laine sits down, opens her backpack, and takes out a giant book. The sun makes her dirty blond hair a halo, her skin the same color as the golden dry grasses around her. For the first time since meeting her two days ago, Jack realizes just how impossibly beautiful she really is—maybe the most beautiful real woman he has ever seen. Holding one hand to shield her eyes, she uses the other to salute them as they walk toward the skydiving school where they'll get their Mylar suits and chutes.

“See you on the ground,” she says.

As Connor opens the door to the building, Jack kicks pebbles in the gravel of the parking lot.

“So I just grab onto you when we jump?” he asks, even though Connor has explained it a half-dozen times—
“Hold on, let your legs fly back.”

“Pretty much.” Connor smiles, and Jack recognizes it as his own smile. “Don't worry. I promised Mo I wouldn't let you die.”

And Jack realizes that Connor has been wrong about one thing. For Jack, skydiving is not going to be about free-fall or about letting go. It's going to be about holding on as tightly as he can, about trusting that Connor knows when to pull the cord.

in the middle
of nowhere, dying
of salmonella

After watching some of the grossest shit he's ever seen (literally shit, and blood, and other icky substances between liquid and solid), Connor leaves the delivery room and calls his brother from the hospital pay phone. Jack is hurried, emphatic, and impersonal—
A girl? Great! Laine and the kid are both fine? Great!

“I've got a conference call in a minute, kid,” Jack says. “I'll call you tonight.”

Jack doesn't call that night, but Connor tries calling him. He tries him the next night, and the night after that, but the voice mail picks up at Jack's house, at his office, even on his cell. A check comes in an envelope from Jack's law firm with a note inside. Not a card, but a note written on company letterhead. It simply reads,
Let me know if you need more.
Jack hadn't even bothered to sign it. Connor is so hurt, he doesn't want to cash it. But he and Laine both have crappy grad-student health insurance and big papers to finish before getting real jobs. Laine writes a thank-you note, and Connor leaves more messages on all Jack's voice mails.

A week rolls into a month, one month into four, and Connor's hurt and anger bunches into an unpleasant knot in his throat that surfaces in the rare moments when he and Laine aren't busy trying to keep the baby clean and alive. Then the phone finally does ring, when Connor has Jorie on the changing table, plastic-tipped diaper pins balanced between his lips.

“It's your brother.” Laine pulls back the bedsheet she hung to make a nursery in the bedroom. “It sounds important.”

“And all my phone calls weren't?” Connor says, words muffled by the pins.

Laine shrugs bony shoulders; already she's long and lean again. Her flaxen hair that curled from prenatal vitamins is back to being straight.

“He wants to sell the house and move to Chicago,” she says.

“What?” One of the pins slips, pokes the skin under his thumbnail. He shakes off the blood dots. “It's my house, too. He can't just sell it.”

Coming behind him, Laine touches Connor's bicep in a way that's both condescending and comforting—a way that reminds him she's a lot smarter than he is.

“Go talk to him.” She takes the pins and cloth, licks his nose. “I've got this one.”

So Connor goes into the apartment's other room and picks up the phone.

“You want to sell the house?” he says as way of a greeting.

“Yeah, Mona and I got back together, and she wants me to move. I called Mom's old assistant, just to get an idea, and she brought this couple by from New York. They made an amazing offer, right on the spot.”

Five hundred miles away in Ohio Jack pauses, but Connor isn't sure how to respond.

“It's a really good offer,” Jack says.

“It's our house.”

“Conn, you haven't been here to visit in like two years.” Jack sighs. “I thought you'd be excited about the money. It's more than enough for you to buy your own place.”

Connor looks around the five-hundred-square-foot space he shares with his wife and daughter. The plastic milk crates that still serve as sock drawers, bookshelves they've fashioned from concrete blocks and plywood, Kmart's finest futon.

“I guess         .         .         .         I don't know         .         .         .         I guess.”

“We have to act sort of quickly if we want to take their offer,” Jack says.

“I guess,” Connor says again. But he feels his anger shifting into something else. When Jack had come out to visit in August, Connor had thought they'd almost connected, but that had been a year ago. Now Connor has a hard time even remembering what Jack looks like. Rationally he knows Jack looks a lot like him, tall and limby, thick black eyebrows and hair, but he finds himself slipping back to the default picture he had a decade ago, when Jack, ten years older than him, loomed over Connor's adolescence like another species, one that knew how to talk to girls, drive a manual transmission, and figure out restaurant tips. “So you and Mo got back together?”

Jack explains how Mona called from Chicago and about the job offer he got from a giant Chicago firm, but Connor senses it's a tidy revision of some larger story his brother won't share.

“Studying for another bar is a bitch,” he says, “but I've got a couple of months.”

“Maybe you could come out here for a few days with your time off,” Connor says. “It would be swell if you got out to see Jorie before she's driving.”

“We'll see,” Jack says in a way that means no, then haphazardly asks how things are going. “I would have called, but I figured you'd be busy with the kid and all.”

Because he's annoyed and hurt and Jorie is crying in the space beyond the curtain, Connor tells the kind of story Jack just told. The kind where you say all the expected things when talking about a newborn—he and Laine are tired because they don't sleep much, he can't believe how long it takes them to go anywhere because of all of the baby crap they need to bring. He says nothing about how everything in his life since Jorie has felt charmed and important, about the hours he spends looking at her fingers and toes. Nothing about how her birth has made him rethink almost everything about his own childhood.

“Sounds like you have it under control,” Jack says, then tacks on the first sincere thing since picking up the phone. “I just can't believe my kid brother has a kid.”

In bed later, Connor finds himself distracted as Laine crisscrosses her legs with his. “It's weird, you and Jor will probably never get to see where I grew up,” he says quietly. They say everything quietly with Jorie asleep so close by. “You'll never see this weird poster of John Kennedy I had over my desk or these ridiculous Jane Fonda exercise videos my mother had.”

Laine stops running her fingers down his thigh, suggests he go to Cleveland and see if there's anything in the house he wants Jorie to have.

“I can handle Jor for few days,” she says.

“It's not just the house.”

“It will be good for you to see him, too, before this gets bigger and stupider,” she says. “Jack strikes me as someone who'd be uncomfortable around children. Honestly, he's probably just freaked out.”

“Jack's too self-centered to be freaked out,” Connor says, but Laine clicks her tongue.

Eighteen months ago, on their first real date (Laine had picked him up in a bar and taken him to her place two nights before), Connor and Laine ended up at his apartment where she asked about a family photograph from Jack's high school graduation. Connor explained both his parents were dead, and Laine had lowered gray eyes and said she was sorry. “It's been a really long time,” Connor told her. “I don't even think about them every day anymore.” It had been true then, but it had become less true. When Laine got pregnant, Connor had thought a lot about his parents retroactively. He would be the exact opposite of them: young, energetic, and involved—he would potty train, coach Little League, make peanut-butter sandwiches and cut off the bread crusts. But over the past few months, while he rocked Jorie to sleep or fed her bottles of Laine's breast milk, he started thinking of them more and more, not in terms of the kind of parents they'd been, but simply that they had been his parents. Of course that started him thinking of Jack, too, willing his brother to want to be a part of things.

Laine's parents had gone through the world's longest, messiest divorce, but they'd been able to pull it together for their grandchild. They'd driven up to Newport and watched Connor and Laine's last-minute nuptials on Easton Beach, eaten fried clams at Flo's afterward. Three weeks later, for Laine's entire twelve-hour delivery, her parents managed to put aside the things that made them crazy long enough to feed their daughter ice chips and go over potential names. Connor's only living relative, on the other hand, took four months to pick up the phone because children made him uncomfortable. And it didn't seem fair, because Connor had chosen Jack years ago.

         

When his mother died almost ten years earlier, Connor spent a good chunk of time feeling sorry for himself. He had nightmares where he bolted awake screaming and cold, friends who'd fallen out of his life because they didn't know what to say to him, and he was forever waiting in the freezing northern Ohio dusk for Jack or Jack's ex-girlfriend to pick him up from swim practice. But he'd felt sorry for Jack, too, stuck in a city he'd tried to leave, working a billion hours a week at a law firm where the partners called him “Reed's kid.” Connor didn't feel sorry for himself
because
of Jack until they'd been orphans for four months and Connor woke up at three in the morning with a headache so intense he couldn't see straight.

He'd heard Anna Fram (Anna Fram Levine since the previous spring) pull her car into the driveway a few hours before. It was supposed to be a big secret that she was sleeping with Jack again. On nights when her husband worked the graveyard shift at the Cleveland Clinic, Anna came over after Connor went to bed and left in the morning before he woke up. Connor had been playing along, but his mother had died of aneurysm and his own head felt like it was in a vice, so Connor went into Jack's room without much thought about the situation's etiquette.

Still, there
was
something startling and horrific about seeing Anna in his brother's bed. In all the years Anna and Jack had dated in high school, Connor had never so much as seen them kiss. But there she was, a swatch of brown hair and an olive-skinned arm across Jack's chest. If Connor hadn't been convinced his brain was going to blow up, he would have left.

“Jack.” Connor nudged his brother's shoulder, lightly at first, then more demanding. “Wake up.”

“Wha—” Jack blinked, sleepy and unfocused. In jerky motions, he propped himself on his elbow, glanced at Anna, who was wearing one of his undershirts and squirming awake beside him. His features tightened. “Jesus Christ, you can't just come—”

“My head is killing me—”

“—in here without knock—”

“I'm really sick.” Connor felt his face crumbling, eyes pooling.

“Your head?” Jack didn't look angry then, but truly terrified. Sitting up he rubbed his own forehead, pressed his lips together until the color changed from pink to white. “Like sick enough to go to the hospital?”

“I'm sorry,” Connor said, though he wasn't clear why he was apologizing.

“It's okay.” Jack reached for his discarded boxers and pants. “Lemme get dressed and I'll take you.”

Sitting up, Anna took Connor's hand as if there weren't a reason for her not to be there, as if the three of them hadn't eaten her butter-cream frosted wedding cake at the Ritz-Carlton Ballroom.

“Sweetie, it's probably just a migraine,” she said, and Connor loved her for saying everything would be all right.

“I'm going to take him to Deaconess.” Jack buttoned up a wrinkled button-down. “I'll call you?”

“I'm coming with you, and we should go to the clinic.” Anna was up and putting on jeans. She turned her back to Connor and slid her arms into a bra, pulled a sweater over her head. “We'll tell Eddie you called me. If I weren't here, you would have called me anyway.”

It was true. Jack had called Anna for everything since he moved back. She'd made all the funeral arrangements for their mother, hired the cleaning lady to go through their mother's stuff. And she was always threatening to do more—pick up groceries, have Connor over for dinner when Jack worked late. As far as Connor could tell, Jack was letting her because it was easy and familiar, and she was married, so she wasn't allowed to ask all those questions about the future that Jack had never wanted to answer when he was her boyfriend.

“Come on, Ann.” Jack shook his head. “Going there is a really bad idea.”

The pain in his head was no less than epic, and there was panic rattling around Connor's chest. Leaning on the mattress, he realized it had been their parents' bed and he wondered how the scene would have played out if his parents were alive. One thing he knew was that he wouldn't have to be worried about Jack getting into a fight at the hospital because he was sleeping with a resident's wife. It wasn't fair, and life already wasn't fair enough.

Anna Fram said Jack's name in a way that made Jack close his eyes and nod and Connor sure that he had only seconds left to live. So they got in the Sentra and Jack drove to Eddie's hospital because it was a better hospital, and it was closer, and Jack and Anna both knew Eddie Levine would take good care of Connor, even if he might murder Jack. But no one said anything until they got to the emergency room, when Anna asked the receptionist to get her husband.

“What's the emergency, Ann?” Eddie was a former college tennis player, tall and full of lean muscles. He had one of those jutting jaws, and it jutted further when he saw Jack, who had the decency to look down.