Family and Other Accidents (20 page)

“No,” Mona and Jack say in unison, utterly unconvincing.

“Did you like spending time with your aunt and uncle?” Connor asks the girls.

“They broke the car,” Jorie says.

“Broke car,” Keelie says.

Mona feels a stab of betrayal. Even after “Thunder Road,” after the haiku, her nieces still hate her.

“I knocked off your side mirror.” Jack shakes his head, his hands deep in khaki pants pockets. “I'll take it in for you.”

“Don't worry about it.” Connor smiles, eyes crinkling into Jack eyes. “I hate that car.”

Easing out from under Laine, Connor starts to get up, but winces because he's stiff from sleeping or because what makes him blue and pale hurts.

“Go back to sleep, kid.” Jack looks as though he might cry.

“Naw, my girls need food and stuff,” Connor says. “Mouse needs to go out.”

“We can handle it,” Jack says with absolutely no conviction. “We've got it under control.”

Connor looks to Mona.

“We've got it under control.” She borrows Keelie's technique, as if repeating it will make it true.

it's really called
nothing

At 36,000 feet, Jack's wife tells him she's keeping the baby. He knew she would from the moment in her doctor's office last week when he found out she'd secretly gone off birth control, the moment he realized he'd been wrong about her for fourteen years.

“Really, I'm at the last safe age to have a first child.” As Mona talks, she stares out the oval window. All Jack sees is her curly red hair, always the first thing anyone notices about her. “More than anything, I want this, us, to work.”

She is crying, but there's a metal edge in her voice. Because she constantly apologized for things not her fault, didn't get pedicures, and voted Democrat, Jack hadn't understood that edge was selfishness. But in the doctor's office, everything had snapped into focus so clearly, he couldn't fathom how he ever missed it.

“But if you don't want to be a part of it,” she says. “I have to respect that.”

Something between a chuckle and a snort comes out of Jack's nose. It's not the right response considering he may get divorced, not right considering they're on their way back to Chicago from Boston, where Jack's kid brother has a wife, two daughters, and freshly diagnosed stage III Hodgkin's disease.

“I'm sorry, Jack.” Mona turns to him with mascara streaks on the apples of her cheeks, her nose red.

Laughing again, he takes her pale, cold hand, gives it a squeeze, and meets her confused amber eyes. Only five weeks pregnant, she looks like she always looks, but he barely recognizes her. It reminds him of a line in that Talking Heads song that was big when he was in law school—
And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife.

“I'll understand either way,” she says, but Jack suspects she's counting on him to stand by her, cemented with a glue of inertia, joint finances, and the fact that he walked around a world thick as Jell-O when they briefly broke up eight years ago.

The plane jerks, and everyone gasps and shuffles and grips the armrests as if they can keep course through sheer will. As the “Fasten Seat Belt” light dings, the pilot's smooth-jazz voice comes over the intercom, assuring “everything's fine, just a few bumps.”

Jack has always thought the pilot would tell you things were peachy keen even as all four engines died and the tail fell away like bird poop—keep the passengers docile with pretzel sticks and soda as the plane goes down. And he's always envisioned a plane crash as an awful way to go, with those horrible last minutes of g-forces fighting against you, lungs exploding, nose squirting blood. But today a plane crash doesn't seem half bad. Better certainly than having your body turn against itself, than having doctors pump in poison so you puke and shiver and fight with your pretty wife about whether or not you can stomach steamed rice. In fact, Jack wonders if he'd mind if the plane belly flopped into a dramatic descent right now. Maybe not if it meant he wouldn't have to watch his brother's body break or deal with the giant mess of trial for his big firm's biggest client waiting for him in a high-rise office on Lake Michigan. Perhaps plummeting to the ground would be easier, too, than having to make decisions about his selfish wife's plan to screw up their selfish lives.

But the plane doesn't crash. The pilot takes them higher, and when he finds smooth air, everyone sighs in unison.

It makes Jack chuckle-snort again.

“Say something.” Mona's brow scrunches, and she appears truly terrified. “Please.”

“Well.” He looks beyond her head to the window, where beads of rain ride the thick glass panel. “I guess I have nine months to decide anything, right?”

         

No decisions have been made eleven weeks later when Connor, his immune system Swiss cheese from chemo, is taken by ambulance to Massachusetts General with pneumonia and a fever of 103. His sister-in-law calls, and Jack, upset but not surprised, flies in to watch Connor sleep and sleep, thin sheets and thin gown blurring as though everything were a part of him. While Connor dozes, Jack and Laine speak a language of blood counts and lung function, frustrating the actual doctors by demanding to know about every bleep and drip from Connor's monitors and tubes, by bringing up clinical trials and experimental procedures they've read about online or heard about from nondoctor acquaintances.

“Can we
not
discuss the color of my snot anymore?” Connor asks when he rolls awake. Coughing a slimy cough, he tries to hide that it hurts. “I feel a billion times better. Where are the kids?”

“With my dad.” Laine runs long fingers across Connor's smooth forehead. All his black hair is gone, as are his eyebrows; strangely, his lashes stuck it out—long and full. “He took them to the new
Jungle Book
movie.”

“I wanted to see that with them.”

“You'll have to watch it over and over again when it comes out on DVD.” Laine's voice is gentle.

“Sure, in the summer.”

Connor takes Laine's hand, and Jack turns away because it's teeth-gnashingly unfair that his brother is the one who got sick. Connor's the one who taught with AmeriCorps and works for the Massachusetts reading program, the one who occasionally remembers to recycle and doesn't wear sneakers made by Indonesian children. It's unfair because though he's a decade younger, Connor cares about his family more than Jack has ever cared about anything, and there's no guarantee that he gets another summer to watch sappy Disney cartoons. Jack would gladly hand over his stock portfolio and car keys to anyone who could make his brother better or even happy. And suddenly he realizes that even though Mona's pregnancy is something he has been trying not to deal with, it has the potential to raise Connor's spirits.

“Actually, I have some news.” Jack licks his lips, and his heart hurries as it does whenever he lies. “Mo's pregnant.”

“What?” Connor props himself on his elbows, jostling the IVs jammed in his purpling forearm. “This is huge. Why didn't you say something earlier?”

Shrugging, Jack tries to smile and not think of his wife, whom he has scarcely spoken to since their flight back to Chicago.

“Congratulations,” Laine says.

“You're going to be the greatest dad.” Connor is excited, his eyes bright and almost lucid for the first time since Jack arrived. “I tell everyone you're the only parent I ever had.”

Heat floods Jack's cheeks and he nods, even though all he actually did for his brother after their mother died was sign a few checks, fill out a few forms. Connor left Cleveland less than three years later.

“We'll see,” Jack says.

“Naw, you'll be awesome.” Connor smiles, coughs, smiles again. “How pregnant?”

Wanting to keep his brother glowing and distracted, Jack makes up answers to Connor's questions—a combination of quick math, sitcom plots, and
Chicago
magazine articles. The baby is due in the summer, they think they'll turn their condo's second bedroom into a nursery, Mona wants to be heavily drugged during labor, “R” names are their favorites.

“Has she been sick much?” Connor asks.

“Constantly.” This Jack does know because he has been helping Mona in the bathroom, while she throws up and they don't talk. “She hasn't spent a whole day at the paper in forever.”

“That's rough.” Connor wrestles sleep, eyelids closing and springing open like crazed garage doors. He looks at Laine. “You never got sick.” Blinking, he shakes his head. “Can you tell them I don't need this much pain stuff, all it's doing is knocking me out.”

Laine leaves to find a doctor she knows is already frustrated by her.

Connor looks at Jack. “I appreciate you helping out with Lainey and the kids, but you should be with Mo if she's not feeling well.” He closes his eyes, and Jack thinks he's asleep. “All those hormones and stuff; it's really hard, makes girls crazy.”

“I'll go home soon.”

“At least call her.” Connor waves Jack out with the back of his hand. “I'm sure she'd want to know you told us. It's a big deal.”

“Sure,” Jack says.

But in the hall he automatically starts toward the vending machines and searches his pockets for change. He absently slips coins in the coffee machine without thinking; it's probably his ninth cup of the day. Smoldering and bitter, it rouses the heartburn he has had on and off, mostly on, for weeks. He shouldn't ignore it, his father's ticker hadn't outlasted his fifties, but Jack can't decide if he cares enough to pay a doctor to tell him to change his diet and start working out. Like a plane crash, it's not a bad way to go, quick and easy, flicking off a light switch.

Then guilt socks him in the gut as he thinks of the question-mark curve of his brother's bald head. Jack reaches into his pocket for his phone. Mona left a message, but as he starts to call her back, one of Connor's doctors waves her hand in the universal “stop” motion.

“You can't use that in here.” She's a short brunette in blue scrubs who only cares about Connor because it's her job. “There's a pay phone down the hall or you can go outside.”

Having used all his change on coffee, Jack takes the elevator to the ground floor, whizzing past Maternity on the second, and follows exit signs to a parking lot. At half past five everything is shaded by the depressing sunset of a cold, gray place in winter, and he trembles in the January air as he looks at all the cars with old snow caked on their roofs, crusted salt on the tires.

A second message on his phone is from the beautiful first-year associate working with him on the department-store case that may go to trial. In her message, Kathy says she's drafting a memo about similar cases found on the legal databases, a nervous excitement in her voice. Since starting the project, Jack has been trying to gauge if Kathy has a crush on him or if she's simply grateful he put her in charge of more than her first-year status warrants. He starts to dial Mona, but calls his office instead, punches in the digits of Kathy's extension.

“Hey, partner,” she says. “Everything okay?”

Though he's never brought his personal life to the office, there's something knowing in Kathy's voice that makes him want to tell her everything.

“I'm in Boston,” he says instead. “Family emergency.”

“Can I do anything to help?”

Because she went to Penn for undergrad and law and he went to Penn for undergrad and law, he'd been assigned her partner-liaison when she was a summer associate two years ago. When she'd graduated and joined the firm in the fall, a plethora of partners had asked for her help, primarily because she has great tits, creamy pink skin, and legs that look sexy in conservative suits. Jack, on the other hand, likes her because everything she does is unnecessarily excellent, the way his work was when he was just starting out. Giving her the fax number at Laine and Connor's house, he tells her to finish the memo if she finds time, knowing she will.

“I'll have it to you by the end of the day,” she says, and Jack pictures her behind the faux-cherry desk in her office, her blond hair brushed back, boxy black glasses on her nose like a prop—
I'm not a hot twenty-five-year-old, but a serious attorney.
For the first time in a long time, he feels himself smiling.

“No rush, Kath,” he says.

He forgets he was supposed to call Mona until he's back in Connor's room, where his brother sleeps again. Laine lies next to him, curled on her side, eyes closed. Both of them have gotten so thin since Connor got sick, as if they're evaporating into clouds of Connor's wet breath.

A wall-mounted TV is tuned to CNN, where a pretty newscaster shivers in a light blue jacket and matching earmuffs. The volume muted, a logo at the bottom of the screen shouts, “Twenty Dead in Vail Chair-Lift Accident.” The screen switches to defeated people in parkas and hats looking over yellow tape at smashed lift chairs and twisted cable. One woman raises the back of her hand to wipe her eyes. So easy, then it's done.

His phone rings in his pocket, and Jack reaches to turn it off, but not before Laine and Connor squirm awake and the brunette in scrubs materializes in the doorway.

“You can't use that in—”

“I know.” As he pushes the power button, he sees the call is from Mona. “I forgot to turn it off.”

“There's a pay phone down the hall.”

“It's not important.”

“What time is it?” Connor asks, and they all look at the institutional metal wall clock. “Lainey, you need to pick up the girls.”

“They're with Dad.” Disoriented, Laine hops off the bed like a teenager caught snogging her boyfriend, not a Harvard MBA. “I want to stay.”

“You need to let him rest,” says Scrubs.

“I've rested enough for fifteen years.” Connor coughs up more sludge. “But you should get the girls out of your father's hair. Are you okay to drive?”