Family and Other Accidents (9 page)

The deck chairs have been cleared from the floor, and in their place three dozen couples make slow circles in time to melodies from a band comprised of three middle-aged men in tuxes and a woman singer in gold sequins. Christmas lights shaped like stars and moons dangle from the railings and flaming torches, while the real moon looms overhead, full and pocked like greasy skin.

A tuxedo-clad waiter comes by with a tray of champagne flutes. Mona takes two and hands one to Jack. He looks at it hesitantly before clinking his glass against hers.

“Cheers,” Jack says. “To the most beautiful woman on the ship.”

She looks down at the full-skirted black dress from Saks, tries to remember the last time he told her she was attractive. The first time was at the coffee shop on their first date, when she spilled hot chocolate in his lap. She said she was a klutz, and he said she was a beautiful klutz. The next day at work she tried typing “Mona Reed” as her byline.

Murmuring a fat thank-you that gets caught in her throat, tears burn her eyes, and she's not sure why. “You look nice, too.” It isn't a lie. But then, she always thought so, from that first day at the courthouse when she noticed his dark eyes arched like crescent moons when he smiled and that the bones of his face were almost fragile, too pretty for someone like her. Suddenly she can't look at him anymore.

“I guess if we're here, we should dance?” he says uncertainly.

Even as she nods, she realizes something is horribly wrong, so wrong Jack is trying everything he can to fix it. They make their way onto the floor with cautious steps. His palms go to her hips, and she encircles his neck with bare arms, her skin shuddering with the faint echo of the electricity she used to get when he touched her. She tries to let him lead, but he's not very good, and they're really just rocking, her own feet following haplessly behind his. Jack feels and smells so familiar as she rests her head against his suit jacket, it makes her want to cry, but then there's a tap on her shoulder, and Mona sniffles back a sob.

“You kids look great,” says Helen Stein, in a pink chiffon dress, smiling as though she'll never stop. “I don't know what you were afraid of.”

“Yeah, we're okay, when we try,” Jack says, and Mona realizes she and Jack haven't told the Steins or anyone else about their engagement; that she hasn't called her parents or her sisters.

“Would you like to see what we learned in the ballroom classes?” Helen asks; Mona nods absently.

With a grace that seems impossible for their sagging bodies, Helen and George swirl and step in perfect time with the music. Like something from an old movie with Ginger Rogers, Helen's skirt billows out as she follows George's steps. And then Mona can't look at them, because she and Jack are nothing like them. Burying her head in the silk fabric of Jack's jacket, Mona cries, no longer caring if her eyeliner smudges or if Helen and George see.

“What's wrong?” Jack's hands caress her hair.

“I don't know,” she murmurs into his chest. “I want something.”

“Whatever you want, I'll get it for you. Just, just don't cry, okay?”

“I'm sad.” She gasps for air, salt from tears and the ocean biting her eyes and nose.

“Mona.” There's all the tragedy of Shakespeare or Bosnia in the way he says her name. “Don't cry, please.”

“Jack, I want to be happy,” she says, and feels more than sees his face crumble as he pulls her body tight against his.

They've stopped dancing, but their hips still sway to the song. Jack makes cooing sounds into her hair. When she looks up, his brow is creased and his eyes, eyes that aren't crinkled into confident half-moons, are full of something closer to understanding than pain. His dark hair has fallen into his face, and he looks very, very young, years younger than she is—so young it makes her stomach shudder to know she's hurting him. Jack's fingertips press hard against her skull, and he grips her so tightly she can feel all the contractions of his torso muscles. The wood deck is slippery and her black heels so high, she isn't sure she could stand on her own if he let her go now. So she clings to his lapels, which smell faintly of shrimp scampi, even though she knows that she should let go, that if this were a book or a movie, she would let go. But it's not, so she doesn't. The boat continues to rock, and they continue to shuffle, out of time, with the music.

the next
generation of
dead kennedys

Jumping out of an airplane is the best way for Jack to get over Mona, according to his brother.

“When you're up there, you can just let everything go,” Connor says, right hand easy on the Sentra's steering wheel, left arm, disproportionately tan, resting on the open window. “Everything's quiet and loud at the same time. Skydiving will clear your head right up.”

“I don't know.” Jack leans back into the worn vinyl passenger seat. His flight from Cleveland got into Logan ninety minutes ago, and, since finding Connor at passenger pickup, the two have been stuck in rush-hour traffic en route to a vegetarian restaurant in Cambridge, where they were supposed to have met Connor's girlfriend a half hour ago. “I'm not so great with moving recreation. I don't get along so well with boats and roller coasters.”

“Naw, it's free-fall, totally different experience.” Connor inches the car up and turns down a less crowded side street, cutting off a minivan with the license plate “It's Bev” and receiving the long blast of a horn. “Those giant cars should be illegal.”

Not since trying to teach Connor to drive six years earlier can Jack remember being in a car his brother was driving. Nostalgia, like a too-sweet cake, leaves a film on the back of his throat, even though teaching Connor to drive had truly been one of the most miserable experiences in his life—one of the few times they ever
really
fought, one of the few times he may have come close to death—nothing to get choked up about. But then everything has made Jack choked up and nostalgic since Mona moved to Chicago three weeks ago.

Boston rolls past, gray and soggy, just how Jack envisioned it would look. It's his first time there, having shunned the city fifteen years earlier when he got the skinny letter from Harvard—something he credits with ending his delusions of doing anything remotely noble (politics, public defense, ACLU) and starting his descent into the smarmy lucrative world of corporate litigation. Now his brother is at Harvard for graduate school in government—his brother who got a C in high school geometry and scored two hundred points lower than Jack did on the SAT.

“Anyway, I'm too old to skydive,” Jack says. “They'll check my driver's license, see I'm over thirty, and won't let me. I'll have to find some sixteen-year-old kid to buy my jump for me.”

Connor laughs. To Jack, he always seemed skinny and young. Connor still looks skinny—thin legs lost in corduroy pants, torso broad and flat in layers of long- and short-sleeved T-shirts—but he looks his age. At twenty-three, he's no younger than the BU and Emerson students shuffling through puddles with backpacks and raincoats.

“You'll love it,” Connor says, scanning the narrow street for a spot. “I've got a pilot friend who flies for one of the schools. He'll probably let you jump with me, so you won't have to hold on to a total stranger.”

Lurching the car backward into a space, Connor kills the engine and checks his watch as they speed-walk down the streets. “Laine is gonna be pissed,” he says.

The words are still hanging in the air when a tall blonde, presumably Connor's girlfriend, steps out from under a green awning with lettering designed to look like vegetables.

“You're fucking forty-five minutes late,” she says, rolling bored gray eyes at Connor, who mumbles an apology and something about traffic, rain, and the Big Dig. Then, easy as sleep, the blonde smiles at Jack, extends her hand for him to shake, and introduces herself as Laine Rosen.

“Laine” is probably really “Elaine.” Jack is willing to bet she shortened it to create mystery, make her seem more unusual and important than she is. But she's the kind of girl who can get away with it. The kind of rope-thin Harvard girl who can get away with lots of things, like messy pigtails, not wearing a bra, raunchy language.

She just seems like such a type to Jack. Like girls he knew at Penn, and even some lawyerettes at his firm. She's the kind of girl who makes him tired, tired for Connor and tired at the prospect of dating again. And, like words to a catchy pop song or a prayer drilled through repetition at Sunday school, Jack finds Mona's name on his lips, and bites his tongue to keep from saying it out loud.

         

Nothing on the World's Harvest menu looked particularly appealing when the three of them made small talk in the tapering rain while they waited for a table, nor does it look particularly appealing twenty minutes later in an uncomfortable wooden booth—Jack on one side, Laine and Connor, thighs touching, on the other. About half the dishes are foods Jack has never heard of, the other half involve tofu, which he knows about but doesn't want to eat.

“Don't worry,” Connor says, setting down his menu and nodding at Jack. “Tomorrow Lainey's gonna visit her ma, and I'll take you to Union Oyster House for chowder, the real Beantown experience.”

“No, this is great.” Jack smiles. Of course Laine is a vegetarian, they all are. “Should we get wine?”

He doesn't even like wine. When he and Mona ordered a bottle at restaurants, he'd sniff the cork, taste the sample, and then leave his own glass half full so the waiters wouldn't ask to refill it. Jack raises the question to be polite more than anything, because wine gives you something to do.

“Wine sounds good,” Connor says, and both men turn to Laine.

“I probably shouldn't.” She blinks and briefly looks at Connor under lowered eyelids. The exchange takes a hair-fracture of a second, but it's enough for Jack to realize three things: first, that Laine is pregnant; second, that Connor knows Laine is pregnant; finally, that Connor and Laine have discussed said pregnancy and were waiting for a good time to tell him, and the present is not the time.

“Oh, God,” Jack says before he even realizes he's saying it. Once it has been said, there's no taking it back. Laine and Connor look at him, then back at each other, their faces dotty as if they're in a Seurat painting. “I'll be right back.”

Because he can't think of anywhere else to go, he wanders through the tables to the bathroom—another adventure in uncomfortable wood. And because he can't think of anything else to do, he reaches into his pants pocket for his cell phone and calls Chicago information for the listing of Mona's new job.

“
Sun-Times
, Mona Lockridge,” she says in her professional voice. Not the way she normally speaks, it sounds more like someone who might ask what you're wearing rather than interview you about local weather trends.

“Mo,” Jack says. In the six years they dated, he rarely called her randomly. She would call him several times a day, at the office or on his cell, often with some mini-crisis or question. He'd learned to balance the phone between his chin and shoulder, listening to her while still checking things online, still editing memos. But he has no idea how to start a random conversation. “It's me,” he says. “Connor's pregnant.”

“Jack?” Her phone voice is gone; she's Mona again. “Where are you? Are you drunk?”

“No,” he says. It seems Chicago has made her a better journalist already, concerned about the who, what, where, why, and how. “I'm in Boston. This girl he's living with is pregnant.”

“Oh, what's he going to do?”

“I don't know; we haven't really talked about it.”

“Jack.” She says his name in a way that makes him feel silly, as if he'd missed the obvious choice. But something in her voice softens, and she relaxes into the conversation.

“I'm actually hiding in the bathroom of a vegetarian restaurant.”

“What are
you
doing in a vegetarian restaurant?” Mona laughs, and he almost forgets Connor and lanky Laine, has to restrain himself from asking her to hop a plane and meet him. “Don't tell me Connor is a vegan now?”

“God, I hope not.”

The men's room door swings open, and Connor comes in, shrugs. “Dude,” he says, “what's going on?”

“Go talk to him.” In his ear, Mona's voice attached to Mona's body (a body he's no longer allowed to touch) in a low-rise building on the Chicago River: “Call me later.”

To Connor, Jack holds up his pointer, indicating he needs a minute, mouths the word “Mona.”

Nodding, Connor turns away, stares at the urinals.

“Okay?” Mona asks on the phone. “Do you have the number for my apartment?”

“Yeah, I think,” Jack says. “I'll call you tonight. I love         .         .         .         fuck, it's habit.” He holds out his hands as if he can wave the word away, as if Mona were standing there to him to see.

“I know.” Mona, somewhere not in the bathroom. “Don't worry about it. Just call me tonight and let me know how it goes.”

The click of the phone, and she's gone.

“You okay?” Connor asks.

“Were you going to tell me that girl is pregnant?” Even as he asks the question, Jack hopes he's wrong, that maybe he just misread things, that maybe Laine is embarrassed that she's allergic to grapes.

Instead Connor grins, thin cheeks reddening.

“Oh, yeah.” He buries his hands into pockets of baggy pants. “We would have told you earlier, but the day I called was when you told me about the Mona-leaving thing. It just didn't seem cool then. You're still the first person I'm telling. So, Laine and I are gonna have a baby.”

“Conn.” Jack rubs his eyebrows, realizes he's rubbing his eyebrows, stops. “Have you thought about this at all?”

“Not in the men's room,” Connor says evenly. “You can yell at me all you want later, but can we not do it here?”

“It's just—” Jack starts but gets distracted by a yellow stain on the ceiling. “We can talk about it later.”

         

Dinner feels as though it takes place underwater. A pink-haired twenty-something takes their order; Jack gets eggplant lasagna because it seems safest. Both Connor and Laine order some kind of spiced tofu and black bean burrito, but Connor slathers his in Tabasco sauce—at least Laine hasn't changed everything about him. No one gets any wine or mentions the baby. Laine talks about business school, working for a not-for-profit the summer after undergrad, and asks uninspired questions about corporate law in Ohio. Jack answers with nebulous authority.

“I'm going to take Jack skydiving,” Connor says at a pained break in the conversation. “Laine loved it when I got her up there. Totally freeing, wasn't it?”

“Yeah.” Laine nods, eager to have a new subject. “And I practically had to be dragged on the plane. I was like, ‘If we don't die, we're breaking up.' But then I just adored it, really adored it. Such a fucking rush.”

The food arrives, hot and gooey with melted soy cheese, and Jack stabs the purple eggplant without any real intention of eating it. He hasn't felt like eating much of anything since Mona left, and he certainly doesn't want to start with this.

“We'll see,” he says.

         

After dinner the three shuffle around the damp grass and muddy pavement of Cambridge. Everything is as Jack thought it would be with all the bronze plaques and the engraved stone. It's been a decade and a half since high school Latin, but he translates the school's motto,
Veritas
, on sight.

“Truth,” he says to no one in particular.

They walk down JFK Street, passing the redbrick John F. Kennedy School of Government complex where Connor reports daily.

“I remember being a kid and getting totally freaked out by that Kennedy poster you used to have over your desk,” Connor says, so sincere Jack feels the post-Mona-nostalgia phenomenon well in his throat. “That used to be your thing, right? You were going to be president?”

Jack stares at the brown-green water of the Charles and thinks about the Cuyahoga, his river.

“Something like that,” he says, feeling old and stodgy in business-casual khakis and a button-down. Everyone looks about nineteen—girls with pierced navels peeking out of baby tees, guys with too-big jeans. It's not as though he's the oldest person tromping through the rain-softened ground, but he's definitely in the latter half. And he wonders where that line of youth resides and how he stumbled across to the other side, a place where the stars of sitcoms and romantic comedies are now a few years his junior instead of his senior.

“What happened?” Laine asks, and Jack can't tell if she's being polite or if she's genuinely interested.

“Sometime in law school, I guess I decided I wanted a Porsche instead.” Jack smiles now because he does plan to yell at Connor later.

“Sounds reasonable.” Laine's gray eyes flash something.

“I could still go for the whole Jack Kennedy image,” Jack says.

“Would that make me Bobby?” Connor asks.

“Hey, I don't want to be Ethel,” Laine says, swollen lips in a pout. “She looks like a horse. I want to be Jackie.”