Family and Other Accidents (2 page)

Squeezing his hand, Jenny smiles, and they sing louder. Her voice is thin but pretty—one more thing to like. On the high notes, his tenor splinters. Jenny laughs, and Connor forgets that they have to have sex in one hundred and ninety-one hours, that he can't drive stick, that Jack keeps pressuring him to apply to Case Western.

“Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they've all come to look for Amer-i-ca
—
”

He stops singing when he sees the strange car in his driveway, realizing it must belong to Jack's reporter.

“Don't forget to get condoms before next weekend,” Jenny says, as if she were reminding him to call ahead and find out movie times. “It's good to have a backup method, just to be on the safe side.”

Connor gives a nod punctuated by the birth-control-announcement stomachache.

“I'll call you tomorrow,” she says. She calls every day, even when they've just seen each other and she has nothing to say. Sometimes she'll call while watching reruns of
Three's Company
or
The Brady Bunch
and narrate the episodes to him scene by scene.

“Sure.” He starts to get out of the car, but ducks back in to kiss her; she likes that kiss, too.

Her headlights cast his treelike shadow against the house as he fumbles through his pocket for the garage opener and waits for the door to rumble up. Side by side the M3 and the Sentra look like something from
Let's Make a Deal
. Through the laundry room and kitchen, Connor is at the stairs when Jack calls him from the family room.

“You didn't actually get a chance to meet Mona at the courthouse,” Jack says. He's sitting on the floor next to the girl with good hair. The two appear to be playing Scrabble—board unfolded, letter tiles peppering the carpet. It's not the thing that pops to mind when Connor thinks about sex, but Jack gets laid on a regular basis. Jack points at her. “Mona Lockridge, general assignment reporter for the award-winning
Cleveland
Plain Dealer
.” Pointing at him: “Connor Reed, Beachwood High School senior.”

“Hey.” The reporter nods. She's cute in a pale way—an unfocused-eyes kind of way; a freckles-across-the-bridge-of-her-nose kind of way—very different from girls Jack usually dates, with their sleek pageboy haircuts and fitted skirts. “I'm sorry about your car accident.”

“Thanks.” Connor glares at Jack, who didn't need to tell the reporter about the accident, who didn't need to chastise him in the Sentra for an hour, who didn't need to be a cheeseball when introducing the reporter.

“Where's Jenny?” Jack asks, absolutely oblivious.

“She has a midnight curfew,” Connor says, more accusatory than he intends.

“I can give you a curfew.” Jack shrugs. He's wearing his uniform of khakis and a blue button-down. Since starting at Jones Day, all his clothes, even non–work clothes, look exactly the same. For Christmas, Connor decided to get him stock in Brooks Brothers. “You've got leaves in your hair.”

“Yeah, it's fall.” Connor tries not to sound sullen, not in front of the reporter with her amazing hair, who knows only that he gets into car accidents, is somehow mad about not having a curfew, must roll around outside. “That happens.”

The reporter laughs, a little nervously, and the way her nose crinkles makes her beautiful, even though she probably isn't, is probably only pretty. It's funny she's a reporter because she looks like the character from the comic strip about the reporter he used to read at breakfast—Brenda Starr.

“Well, um, speaking of curfews, I should get going,” she says. “I'm sorry. I've got work at seven tomorrow.”

Pushing herself to her feet, she straightens her sweater, brushes palms across the front of her jeans. Connor knows she's leaving because she doesn't want to sleep with his brother, or she doesn't want to do it yet and doesn't trust herself to stay, and he likes her for that, likes her for wanting it to mean something.

Her hands are pale and chaffed, nails short and unpolished. They look cold, and he wants to warm them between his own hands. But it's Jack who reaches for her fingers.

“Don't go,” Jack says. “Not so soon.”

“I'm sorry.” She squeezes Jack's fingers—neither one of them particularly interested in Connor or his lack of a curfew anymore. Then Jack smiles his Jack smile, and Connor takes that as his cue to leave.

He and Jack may look alike, have the same black hair and eyes, but when Jack smiles he looks like such a yearbook-handsome, all-around good guy. Last weekend Jenny gave Connor doubles of photos her parents took before homecoming, and he noticed his own smile looked not only forced but pained—more like he was squinting from a migraine than genuinely happy.

Upstairs Connor's bedroom door is closed, and he wonders if that means Jack brought Brenda Starr upstairs or planned to and didn't want her to see the mess—sheets and comforter on the floor, college application parts scattered across the quilted mattress, clothes and shoes and school stuff blanketing every square inch of the carpet, skis and poles creating a dangerous obstacle in the middle of it all. When the maid service came last week, the uniformed girl just shook her head and said she wouldn't touch the room. There was nothing she could do. He'll have to make them clean it next Saturday so he and Jenny can have sex; the dull stomachache.

Connor's bedroom is really Jack's old room. But Jack had been staying in their parents' room since he came back from Philadelphia after their mother died. Last year Connor had switched to Jack's room because it was bigger and had a double bed. But he never got around to taking Jack's old stuff off the walls—an Indians poster with a home game schedule from eleven seasons before, framed photos of Chagrin Falls Jack's high school girlfriend gave him for Christmas a decade ago, and the huge JFK poster over the desk. At first Connor had hated the poster with its intense eyes, but he grew used to being watched by someone with more authority and experience. Now he finds Kennedy oddly reassuring. With Jack hardly ever home, Connor has started running things by Kennedy, just to get a second opinion. Generally the poster doesn't say much. Though Kennedy didn't object when Connor said he wanted to leave flat Ohio, with its strip malls and burger chains.

Downstairs, the front door opens and closes, and Connor watches through the window. Jack is holding Brenda Starr's hand, walking her to her car. Looking around to make sure nobody is watching, Jack leans in to kiss her, and their faces disappear behind her hair. Body contouring to fit the car, back arched, she has one hand on the metal frame for support, the other against Jack's chest. Still holding her hand, Jack starts to walk away but then they're kissing again, then apart, together, apart, together, like scissor blades. Connor looks away. From the wall, Kennedy suggests Connor need only watch and learn.

         

Thirty-three hours before the scheduled sex, Connor finds a box of condoms in Jack's nightstand drawer, exactly where he thought they'd be. Pocketing two square packets, he puts the box back in the drawer on top of coffeemaker instructions, a broken watchband, cellophane-wrapped restaurant mints, and a picture from Jack's college graduation that Connor must have taken because Jack and their mother have no heads: tall bodies (their mother's in some turquoise wrap dress, Jack's in a black gown) against a redbrick building somewhere in Philly.

Picking it up, Connor wonders why Jack kept the photo; they have better pictures from Jack's commencement—a good one of the three of them is in a silver frame downstairs. Yet there
is
something interesting about this shot, where the hands have become the focus. Both sets of fingers long and tapering—Jack's hold the box with his diploma, while their mother's clutch her leather handbag. She had used her hands when she'd talked, and his mother had talked a lot, always exaggerated and fast.

She'd been a member of Coldwell Banker's Five Million Dollar Club for fifteen years. Other than constantly telling Connor he needed a haircut, his mother had hardly been around to offer sitcom-mom witticisms. But a few months before she died, the two of them had been in a booth at Slyman's, quickly eating sandwiches before she had to show a house. “You know about sex and love, and all of that, right?” she'd asked from nowhere, reaching out to put her hand on his. He'd looked down at his corned beef and nodded, anticipating the horrible conversation he'd seen in movies. “Good,” she said, focusing again on her turkey sandwich. “Just try not to be careless with people, okay?” That had been the extent of his sex talk. He wonders now if she meant careless with girls like Jenny. Careless the way Jack is careless.

Lying back on the bed, Connor stares at the ceiling and thinks about the girls Jack has brought home who've shared the view. Other young Jones Day associates, an MBA student at Case, his married high school sweetheart, other childhood “friends” who live in more exciting places but come home to Cleveland for Thanksgiving and Christmas. He wonders what they thought looking at the ceiling, what they expected—if they knew they were just there for a little while. Wonders if the reporter has seen Jack's ceiling yet. Since meeting her the other night, Connor started reading Brenda Starr again—not a whole lot has changed for Brenda: she's still chasing Basil, still wandering into zany situations. He hopes Jack's reporter hasn't looked at the ceiling, hopes she really is different than the sleek-skirted girls, and that the nervous laugh and freckles across her nose are real. He wonders how Jenny
really
feels about him, why she wants to have sex with him, why she wants him to be her first.

A car chugs down the cul-de-sac, but Connor is certain it's not his brother. Some company Jack isn't allowed to name is being bought this week; and he has been getting home after midnight. Congested and cranky with some flu, Jack just grumbles up the stairs and goes to bed when he does come home. Connor has barely spoken with him since last Friday's driving debacle. Still Connor puts the photo back in the drawer and goes to his room, where he puts the rubbers in his own nightstand drawer next to mix tapes Jenny made him, his less-than-stellar SAT results, and
Penthouse
magazines he and some friends stole from the Little Professor in Beachwood Place a few years ago. From the wall over the desk, Kennedy makes a snide comment about how he never stole condoms from Joe Jr.'s room.

“I don't have a car,” Connor says.

         

Five hours before Jenny Greenspan's pills should start working, Connor draws a face with squiggly hair on the cover page of a University of Colorado application. He's having trouble concentrating because the pre-sex stomachache he's been having has been bad all day and because Jack, who's in denial about being sick, has ratcheted the heat up to ninety.

“I'm taking Mona to dinner at nine.” Across the kitchen table, Jack is wearing all kinds of clothes—another pair of generic pants, another blue button-down (business casual acceptable on weekends), a University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt, and a stocking cap Connor is sure is his. Even though it's Saturday and he just got home from his office, he's going through a mammoth box of contracts, highlighting the word “buyer” with a fat yellow marker. His job is absolutely nothing like lawyers' on TV; Connor can't believe Jack went to seven years of school to be such a minuscule cog in the workings of the Man. “Do you need a ride anywhere?”

“Jenny can pick me up,” Connor says.

It's been snowing all afternoon, but half an hour ago he gave up trying to convince Jack it was too hot in the house and so he just stripped to boxers. He shifts to unstick his sweaty thighs from the wooden chair. Jack starts coughing, keeps coughing, and continues coughing while Connor wonders if someone can die from coughing. Getting up, he has the impulse to smack Jack's back, the way their mother used to. Instead he runs the faucet, fills a glass of water.

“You should go to bed.” Connor hands Jack the drink. “You sound like you're choking on a cat.”

Jack nods, takes a sip. Connor thinks he should tell Jack about the sex—discussing that with older brothers is industry standard, even older bothers who tell you there's no time to use the bathroom. He's about to say something when Jack winces, rubs his chest, points to Connor's applications.

“Those things would look a lot better if you typed them,” he says.

Connor shrugs; Jack highlights more words, starts coughing again. Something yellow-green and unpleasant flies from his mouth and lands next to Connor's drawing on the manila paper. Connor just stares at it; he hadn't realized he was drawing Brenda Starr.

“Does the reporter want to write novels?” Connor asks, looking at the sketch with its linked circles for hair. “I feel like most journalists I know really want to write books.”

“How would I know; we've been on one date.” Jack cocks his head. “And what other journalists do you know?”

“I just think it's funny she's a reporter, because she looks like Brenda Starr.”

“The woman who sings ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart'?”

“That's Bonnie Tyler,” Connor says. “Brenda Starr is the comic strip; it's in the
Plain Dealer.
”

“You've thought about this an awful lot.” Jack smiles, eyes narrowing into something between a shared joke and ridicule. “Do
you
like her?”

“No.” Connor looks at the squiggle next to the drying snot. “I just thought she seemed nice.”

Jack nods. “Did you call the driving school?”

Connor says nothing.

“Good to see you're really on top of this.” Jack coughs again. He winces and rubs his chest again. “You might think about doing that Monday.”

But Connor doesn't want to think about Monday because that's after tomorrow, which is after tonight, which he's still thinking of as something distant and abstract—something happening to him that he has no control over, like turning into a werewolf or the Incredible Hulk. Blood vibrates in his temples; the dull stomachache. Maybe he's getting sick.