Family and Other Accidents (16 page)

“Please.” She pushed plump lips into a pout. “I just want to be around meat.”

He took her to Smith & Wollensky, where the waitress's annoyance became apparent when the two of them got iced tea instead of alcohol and Laine ordered a baked potato and creamed spinach. His filet au poivre came out tender and bloody. Since dating Laine, he'd only had steak once, when his brother came to visit, and he'd forgotten the sheer joy of meat. With the first taste, he actually sighed. Gray eyes lean and hungry, Laine watched him chew.

“Just take some.” He held a piece on the end of his fork. “The cow's already dead, and he'd understand it's your hormones.”

“Put it in your mouth,” Laine said, breathing heavy, pink flush on pale cheeks. “Don't chew too much, then kiss me.”

They were next to each other in a little romantic booth, and she slipped her tongue between his lips, licked juice and pepper off his teeth, sucked the meat. Sliding her hand under the table, she reached for his cock poking through his corduroy pants. The annoyed waitress walked by pretending not to notice.

“Men's room,” Laine whispered, hand still on his crotch. “I'll meet you there in a minute.”

They'd fucked in public bathrooms before, but her changing body made them clumsy. He could hardly lift her, and her swollen stomach created an odd distance between them. Stumbling, he knocked her head against the stall. Laine laughed; Connor cried. That was the moment.

“Baby, it's okay, I'm fine.” Laine ran fingers through his hair, looked at him nervously. “It didn't even hurt.”

He shook his head, put his palm on her belly, tried to think of a way to say what seemed unsayable.

“I'm just so grateful we're doing this.” He knew she hated syrupy displays of emotion, but he needed to plow through it. “I feel, I don't know, blessed.”

After he calmed down, Laine made a joke about how he was going to lose it in the delivery room (he didn't), but for a good fifteen minutes she just held his head while he sobbed in the restroom.

“Thank you,” he said, again and again, into breasts she didn't normally have.

         

Turning off the ignition at Rosen Motors, Laine closes her eyes, waits for the rain to let up a little. When someone knocks on her window, she expects her father or one of the sales guys with an umbrella, but it's Connor, dripping wet, black hair molded into peaks on his forehead.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, but he twists up his palms indicating he can't hear her. Surprisingly, she isn't angry, but terrified. Terrified because Connor looks the same as always. There's the same faint scar on the left side of his forehead, the same right turn of his nose. Somehow she'd expected him to morph into something else since making it out of their bathroom, to have become someone entirely different. She rolls the window down a crack. “Where's Jorie?”

Connor lowers his head to the slit of space, and windblown water sprays Laine's face.

“She's inside with your dad,” he says. “I've been looking for you for hours. Please talk to me.”

Through the glass window of the showroom and the hard rain, Laine can see her father, Jorie in the crook of his arm. He's waiting to come rescue her if she needs to be rescued.

“I don't feel like talking,” she says.

“Lainey, please open the door.”

She shakes her head.

“I have the keys.” He pulls a chain from his jeans' pocket, sticks it in the lock.

Like a cornered spider, she backs into the passenger seat. Just as Connor opens the door, she jumps out the other side and runs into the lot of new Volkswagens and Audis. On his stomach and elbows, Connor crawls into the car, over the seats and console, and out of the passenger-side door. Even though she doesn't want to, Laine laughs. But she starts running as he climbs out of the car. She runs; he chases. Around a Passat, though a row of Eurovans. She stops at the rear end of a Jetta, Connor at the front. He moves toward her, and she runs to a blue Beetle and rests her palms on the rounded hood.

“Wait, please,” Connor yells, words garbled from the rain, but sincere as always.

She ducks behind a TT. He follows, and she starts running again. Crying and laughing from car to car. Within seconds her hair is wet and heavy around her face. Frigid air stabs her lungs as she splashes in puddles and muddy water seeps through her leather pumps and nylons. Coat and suit jacket in the car, Laine feels the thin fabric of her camisole mold around her nipples. And she runs like she hasn't run since high school track, since she ran away from her parents' crumbling marriage, ran out of her baby fat, ran out of Providence. Connor chases her down a row of convertibles. There's a mesh fence blocking her in, nowhere left for her to go. She turns, and he grabs her wrist.

“Lainey, talk to me please,” he says between heaving gasps for air. “Just give me a chance to make it up to you. Don't do this to our family.”

“You did this,” she says, looking at the cars, her arm, everywhere but his eyes, because she's sure her mother has said that exact line before. “This, us—it was working for me, and I don't want to hear all the things that are wrong that made you do this. I don't want to know that you always loved her more.”

“Of course not. Maybe we can go away next weekend, just the two of us—to Nassau or some other warm place.”

She concentrates hard on the asphalt lot.

“Or maybe we could take Jorie to Disney World,” he says. “It wouldn't be crowded this time of year, just get away with our family.”

“Connor.” He's still holding her wrist, but it's a gentle pressure she could shake off. “It's not like we can ride Space Mountain and you can unfuck that girl.”

“I know, I just don't want this to be the end, and we need to start somewhere.”

His voice catches, and she can't not look at him anymore. He rubs his wet eyes with raw hands.

“Your teeth are chattering,” he says. “Let's go inside and talk.”

She realizes her teeth
are
chattering and she's freezing. It can't be more than thirty-five degrees out, and the rain is chunked with ice. Connor is shaking, too, his breath coming out as white clouds.

“I don't—” She stops because she isn't sure where she wants the sentence to take them.

Leaning in, he starts to put his arms around her, then stops and holds her shoulders, a foot of rain and air and her parents' failed marriage between them.

“God, you're so beautiful,” he says, blue lips trembling from the cold and because he loves her. Even if he could stick his cock in someone else, she's still the best plan he has.

His eyelids droop, and she knows he's going to kiss her.

She could stop him. If she leaves him she could find someone else, or she doesn't need to find anyone at all. She has two degrees from Harvard and cheekbones to cut glass. She doesn't have to stick around and become bitter for the reasons her mother stuck around, the reasons that have kept women stuck and bitter throughout history. And she knows this game too well. If she kisses him, he'll be sorry for a while, be crazy good to her for a while, but it will happen again and again. Everything she has done her entire life has been in preparation for this moment, to not kiss him back. But she's freezing and he's freezing. When his lips touch hers, she opens her mouth and lets him loop his arms around her. Wrapping her long arms around him, they hold each other until they stop trembling.

         

Beth Martin initially felt good in Connor's arms that first afternoon after the coffee shop. It was as if some astrological wrong had been righted—he'd finally had sex with Beth Martin. Almost immediately that karmic soundness was replaced with a terrific pain that seemed to stem from the base of his spine and radiate to his toes and scalp.

“I can't believe we did this.” Beth rolled over to face him, her enormous eyes wet. “I talked to your wife on the phone last week, and you have that beautiful little girl. This isn't like us.”

She was so sweet, so cute; it seemed impossible that he ever hated her or thought of her as anything other than warm and wonderful. He wanted to take her guilt away, so he kissed her forehead, her nose, her throat.

“It's just         .         .         .         I thought about you every day for four years,” she said. “I don't know that I ever stopped loving you.”

Something in his chest snapped then, and he made love to her again, almost because it hurt. They kept at it for six weeks, even though it made them both miserable. Beth developed a nervous blink; Connor couldn't sleep, jumped at all shadows and chewed the tops off his pens. Somehow it made him love Laine more—martyr Laine who compromised all her beliefs to work at a giant evil finance firm so he could work for Massachusetts Reads and they could still eat; beautiful Laine, on her knees scrubbing floors, forever fucked up from her parents' divorce.

He knew things had reached a critical low point when he called his brother in Chicago for advice. As an orphaned teenager, Connor had been disgusted by the revolving door of Jack's bedroom and the steady stream of girls sipping coffee in the kitchen in the mornings. But six weeks into his affair, nails gnawed to the quick, Connor found himself dialing his brother's office.

“Have you cheated on Mona since you got married?” Connor asked.

“What?”

“Have you been unfaithful?”

“Are you asking for me or for you?” Jack sighed. “Look, kid, if you're calling for me to condone fucking around on your wife, it's not like I can give you some green light. Do what you have to do. But you like your kid, you like Laine. You made choices.”

That was what he told Beth, later that afternoon while they sat in his Nissan Sentra in a Twin Donut parking lot, words muted by buckets of rain.

“We made choices,” he said, and watched her try to hold things together.

“Of course, you're right,” she said, but she was talking to her Nikes.

A week went by, and Connor started thinking everything might not have to come avalanching down, that maybe Laine would never have to find out. Then Beth Martin came up to him in the grocery store, and Connor was pretty sure the stabbing pain in his chest was a heart attack. His father had been fifty-five when he'd had his first, but Connor was convinced he was going to die at twenty-five, on the linoleum floor of Star Market, while his wife examined prepackaged California rolls and his daughter sat in the shopping cart eating an organic oatmeal cookie.

“Conn? I thought that was you.” Beth touched his arm. “And you must be Laine? We spoke on the phone that time.”

It took a lot not to throw up or fall down, but somehow Connor negotiated an introduction between the two women. Laine apologized for missing coffee and talked to Beth about children's hospitals because Laine knew about everything, even hospitals. Connor leaned on the handle of the cart and shook his head no when Jorie offered part of her cookie.

“We should all get together and have dinner sometime, right, Conn?” His vision was actually blurring. Lower body loose as gravy, he couldn't even tell who was talking—Laine? Beth? Jorie? Probably not Jorie.

Mercifully the conversation ended. Telling Laine they needed olive oil, he cornered Beth in an aisle of imported Italian foods.

“You don't live anywhere near here.” Connor grabbed Beth's arm. “You're not freaking Glenn Close. You can't stalk me.”

“You know I'm not like that.”

He did know, which made it so much harder.

“Then why are you doing this?” he asked. “Why are you here?”

Between rows of marinated artichoke hearts and balsamic vinegar, she handed him a folded piece of paper with his name on it, exactly like she used to do in college.

“I know it's stupid, but I wrote a note,” she said. “Can you just read it? I didn't want to screw things up for you. I just, I wanted to see what our life could have looked like.”

She blinked, and he knew she would cry. Promising to read her letter, he slipped it in his coat pocket and went back to his wife.

“I didn't think Beth would be like that,” Laine said as he drove back to the apartment. “I thought she would be different. She's so bird-on-the-shoulder, you know. Like Cinderella or Snow White, the kind of girl that attracts cartoon woodland creatures. She just seemed so nice.”

“She's not that nice,” Connor mumbled, unsure he could actually have that conversation, with his heart still sprinting.

“From what you said the other night, I just thought she'd be this prissy little thing with a gold cross around her neck.”

Laine folded long legs under her chin, resting her feet on the dashboard. She was five eleven but looked small and sad, and he felt the same way he did when he saw her scrubbing the floor. So he said the thing that could make everything the most right.

“Let's have another baby.”

“Where'd that come from?” Laine laughed self-consciously. “We can hardly manage Jor.”

“Aww, you know we're doing great,” Connor said. “We aren't dead, so we're doing tremendous compared to my parents. Let's have another kid while we're still young. Come on, a friend for Jor.” He leaned over the seat and let Jorie wrap her small hand around his index finger. “Hey, cheesefry, would you like a little brother or a little sister?”

“A sister,” Jorie clapped her hands together. “Like Emily's sister.”

“There you go, she wants a sister like Emily's sister.” Connor's shoulders loosened. “But this time, can the kid look a little like me? I'm not asking for much, maybe dark hair, just so I know I have genes.”

“I could try.” Laine's gray eyes narrowed. “Are you serious about this?”

He
was
serious, maybe more serious than he'd ever been about anything in his entire life. If he could get her to agree to have another child, things would be okay, he knew it.