Kill Me (10 page)

EIGHTEEN

I’d flown back over the Divide for the second day’s worth of therapy sessions, unwrapped my Prius at the airport, and driven northwest down the turnpike to Dr. Alan Gregory’s Walnut Street office in Boulder.

He didn’t know my real name, or anything about the plane or the airport, or that I’d bought a Prius so that I could drive anonymously to and from his office, or about the friend’s flat I was borrowing so I wouldn’t have to register at a hotel but could still get some rest between our two sessions. He didn’t know much.

But I’d already decided that I was going to talk with him about Adam.

“There’re probably a million things I should tell you before I tell you about Adam, but … there really isn’t time for me to warm up to it.”

“Then tell me about Adam,” my therapist said.

The moment he said it —
Then tell me about Adam
— I had to swallow some fury at him. What could he know about Adam, about the feelings that go along with that word for me?

“And the rest?” I said, trying not to spit the words at him.

“What ‘rest’? The million things?”

Was he taunting me? Was that possible?

“Yeah, the rest. The million things. I should just forget about all of it? Facts are crap?” I said, letting my annoyance out of its cage, and throwing his mantra from my last visit back into his face.

Why was I so snippy?

Adam did that to me.

Not Adam, exactly. Adam made me smile. What was happening with Adam. That’s what did it to me.

“Tell me about Adam,” Dr. Gregory said again.

What the hell else was he going to say?

“Shit,” I said in protest. “Don’t minimize this. How difficult this is. Don’t misunderstand this.”

“I’ll try not to,” he said, cushioning his voice with something gentle, some offhand kind of touch.

I was grateful that he didn’t bite back at me, didn’t reply to my annoyance in kind. I told myself to cool it. He’d replied to me warmly, as an invitation, encouraging me to set aside my reservations, my excuses, my rationalizations.

He had no way to know that I’d never been able to just talk about Adam with anyone but Thea. Some of my friends knew that Adam was out there. But I picked people to tell who I knew wouldn’t ask me how I felt about it all. I’m a coward about some things.

But this guy across from me was going to ask. I could bank on it.

I helped create Adam when I was twenty-three years old, though I didn’t meet him until I was thirty-eight.

In the intervening decade and a half, I had no idea that I had a son. I wasn’t the kind of guy who stayed up late wondering about the ultimate destination of the billions of sperm I’d launched since the fateful day I’d enthusiastically volunteered to slaughter my virginity with a willing young saint-ess on the altar of adolescent hyper-arousal. I hadn’t given a moment’s consideration to the possibility that one of my energetic little swimmers might actually have met a wandering egg and found a warm uterine wall in which to nestle.

Does that kind of guy exist? The kind who stayed up nights wondering about those things?

I’ve never met him.

Never saw him in a mirror, that’s for sure.

The story of actually meeting Adam sounds trite whenever I rehearse its telling in my head. Beyond trite even, all the way to clichéd. It was 2002. The strange kid on my doorstep. His own plaintive version of “I’m here to see my dad.”

I could go off on an unkind riff about Adam’s mother — I admit I’m still tempted; God, I hate that about me — or I could come up with a cavalcade of excuses about the muggy autumn night that Adam was conceived. Back in, I think, 1987 his mother and I met at a pre-Halloween party in an ostentatious faux manor house in Buckhead, outside Atlanta, but there is little point in either gilding those memories in shit, or in tarnishing Adam’s mother’s motives or character.

She wasn’t a remarkable girl, and truth be told, it wasn’t a remarkable night. It was at a time when AIDS was still a disease other people got, and when people like me believed that recreational sex could do nothing worse than make you the kind of sick that a vial of penicillin could cure. A carefree time. Adam’s mother and I had a connection that lasted just a few short minutes longer than it took for her to raise her skirt to her waist and for me to drop my pants to my knees in a laundry room off a butler’s pantry half a dozen steps from the crowded kitchen. Our coupling was illicit and it was exciting more because of its illicitness than because of any particular eroticism, and it was quick.

Satisfying?

I was twenty-three; I was never satisfied.

Same was pretty much true for me at fifteen and at thirty-three, I’m sorry to say, though by the time I was approaching my fourth decade the emblem on the scoreboard was as likely to be a dollar sign as a flashing neon profile of a shapely babe.

Adam’s mother was one of two that month. Or five. Or more. Some months were better than others. Scoreboard or no scoreboard, I didn’t keep score, but I kept score, if you know what I mean.

When I think of that night now, something, some memory residue, suggests that she wanted to kiss me when we were done screwing. Not during. After. I doubt if I let her. That wouldn’t have been me.

By the time she wanted to kiss me I would have been done with her.

Believe me when I say that every last one of those sorry facts about my few minutes with Adam’s mother say a whole lot more about who I was back then than they do about who she was back then.

I was twenty-three years old in all the wrong ways. I was twenty-three years old in none of the right ways.

Adam’s mother may have been a wonderful young woman who got lost in a transient moment of hope and something that she had convinced herself resembled romance or, at least, passion. I didn’t hang around long enough to give her a chance to teach me a single thing about herself, or her dreams, or the bumps and bruises she’d endured that had warped her judgment about love and life until it was so screwed up that she picked the likes of me out of that crowded room of badly costumed, drunken boys. No, I learned none of those things because I was red-eyed on the red-eye out of Hartsfield before she’d even begged a ride home from the party that night, maybe even before she’d had the first of a half-of-a-lifetime of second thoughts about the charming, horny guy with the magnetic smile in the laundry room in the damn mini-mansion in Buckhead.

A promise: I wasn’t a wonderful young man who got lost in a transient moment of hope or romance or passion. I was a selfish, callous kid looking to get laid before I got out of Dodge. And that night I got what I wanted.

I also got Adam.

Life plays its tricks.

“You have a son,” my therapist said at that point, interrupting my story. He said it without surprise, and with some tenderness that I could appreciate deep in my gut. Maybe he had a son of his own.

I could find that out. Wouldn’t be difficult. Finding things out has always been one of my specialties. One of my business mantras was “Always negotiate from a position of power.”

“I have a son,” I said to Gregory, without much more contemplation. “But it’s not that … simple.”

He processed my response for a moment, or two. “Perhaps I should get out of the way,” he said. “You were doing fine without my help.”

He was right. I was. For me, about Adam, I’d been doing remarkably well on my own.

He stayed silent; he stopped working with his strong hand and touched me with his offhand in a way that let me know he was there.

I married Thea late, in my mid-thirties. I was a mover by then, on the verge of selling the medical tech brainstorm that would turn me into a certified shaker. Thea was almost five years younger than I and I’d had to invest an inordinate amount of energy into convincing her of the sincerity of my affection. Her skepticism was a good thing for both of us. Our eventual marriage felt like a wondrous change in the direction of my life. Within a couple of years my financial ship came in, and we traded our first house, a cute but battered bungalow in Denver’s Congress Park, for a big quasi-colonial thing on an expansive piece of land in the distant southern suburbs.

I liked to think that more had changed during that period than my marital status and my net worth. I liked to think that I had changed, too, and wanted to believe that I could quote evidence to support the contention that I was much less of a jerk at thirty-five than I had been at twenty-three. Still, I admit that there were days when I wondered what kind of a recommendation that was for becoming a husband.

My evidence that I had changed? I was more content. And I gave myself credit for being more mature. How was I sure of the last one? The “more mature” part? It was simple: I didn’t think that my contentedness had anything to do with my wealth.

If that wasn’t a sign of my maturity, I didn’t know what would be.

But had I been ready for a wife when Thea and I said “I do”?

In retrospect, allowing for that generous assessment of my maturational progress, I could argue that I had been getting close to that line in the sand that was marked “ready.” I could also argue that Thea had done me a great favor by making me wait before she’d made her leap of faith.

What about a family? Was I ready for one of those back then?

Again, I was getting close. Career or not, money or not, I’d done some growing up.

Dogs? Certainly, I could handle dogs.

Children? Almost. Maybe.

Problem was, unknown to me, by then my son Adam was already twelve years old.

Thea had delivered us a daughter, Berkeley, eighteen months into our marriage.

By the day that Adam showed up at the front door of our new house about a hundred-meter dash from the High Line Canal, Berkeley had developed into a high-spirited, high-speed toddler. She had Thea’s eyes, Thea’s long fingers, and Thea’s full lower lip.

The idea for our daughter’s name, too, had been my wife’s. She maintained that the inspiration had been George Berkeley, the eighteenth-century British empiricist, but I had suspected all along that the true inspiration had been Thea’s undying affection for her undergraduate alma mater across the bay from San Francisco in northern California.

She’d denied it, clinging tenaciously to the notion that our daughter’s nominal heritage was philosophical in origin and had nothing to do with her mother’s inexplicably persistent ardor for the Golden Bears. I, of course, nicknamed our daughter “Cal” and Thea pretended that it drove her crazy.

It didn’t.

But Cal — we also called her “Berk” — had my speed. Thea called it my “recklessness” and seemed to rue the presence of the trait in her firstborn. But I took comfort in it, knowing that in a few years Berkeley would be the kid who’d strap on a board, or two, depending on the fashion of the day and whether she embraced that fashion or rejected it, and who’d follow her father into the almost imperceptible gaps between the trees in the hills in the dead of winter. After a couple of more decades she’d be the one who’d gladly inherit my old 911 when I could no longer find the strength to depress the German girl’s heavy clutch.

I openly treasured Berkeley’s natural velocity.

When the doorbell sounded late that afternoon, I had to race to beat my toddler daughter to the door.

The kid standing on the front porch had none of my speed. He was a gangly and unbalanced boy, taller and thinner than me, who moved with the unvarnished verve of a sloth.

I thought he was there to sell me something I didn’t want to buy, or to try to talk me into giving money to some group I’d never heard of. I also thought that before he got to the end of the block, if he had any sense at all, he would have rightly convinced himself that he had no business being a solicitor or salesman, let alone the door-to-door variety, for anything. Ever.

As I conjured up an imaginative way to send him away from my stoop, the boy stared me up and down as though he were trying to decide whether the clothes I was wearing might fit him okay. But he didn’t speak, not at first.

My impatience got the better of me before my imagination kicked in. That particular cognitive progression — impatience before imagination — was not an uncommon affliction for me.

As a general rule, I tried to keep an eye on it. History said that I did my best work when I succeeded.

I said, “Yeah, can I help you?” To be honest, relatively little of my attention was focused on the adolescent standing at the door with his hands stuffed in his pockets; most of my attention was being used to try to keep my little girl from escaping the jail bars I was forming with my legs.

The boy’s first words to me?

“Is that my sister?”

Whoa.

What was my reaction to that intro?

I made the mitotic association immediately — the most important connection being the general idea that the kid at the door was implying some biological relativity between us — but not too surprisingly, I didn’t make the correct mitotic association. I’m not proud of it, but my initial suspicion was something along the lines that Thea must have gotten pregnant when she was younger — much younger — and had given a kid up for adoption and that she’d never told me about it. I actually felt some pride at how nonjudgmental I was feeling about it all.