Ten Thousand Saints (42 page)

All he had in his pocket were a few copied keys and his wallet, heavy with Ravi’s cash. He had waited outside the bank in Miami while Ravi had withdrawn the money from the teller. He had not spent a dollar, and he had told no one but Rooster about it. Watching the ferry sail away, untethered and bright, Johnny couldn’t help thinking that it could buy him and Rooster two tickets out of New York, out of his marriage. Maybe it could buy Rooster some time, a dose or two of meds.

Johnny felt the spirits of the city howling for his attention—not the dead but the waiting to die and the waiting to be born. Yama, the god of the dead, was the one who decided which souls would be sent to the heavenly realm and which would be cast into new bodies on earth. Johnny had appealed to him to bring Teddy back, but he wondered now if reincarnation really was a curse, if his brother would be better off in the afterlife, floating as free as the ferry on the water. He wondered if the baby would be better off with someone else’s past lives instead.

Across the water was the graveyard skyline of Staten Island. Were they still over there, his father and his uncle, living in the same cell, sharing a bunk bed, like brothers were supposed to? Eating breakfast together, playing poker, saying good night? If Johnny saw them on the street, he wasn’t sure he could tell them apart, but he wasn’t sure it mattered. They were one and the same. Max and Marshall. His father’s betrayal was his uncle’s. His uncle had abandoned him as his father had, left him out in the cold. Johnny would never do that to Teddy’s baby. He would never do that.

But maybe there was a way to leave a baby without leaving it in the cold. He imagined, for the first time, Eliza handing the baby to someone else, someone who could care for it. As Harriet must have cared for Jude, rocking and bathing and feeding him as though he were her own.

W
ho was that?” Jude asked his mother.

“Who?”

“That voice. Some guy’s voice.”

“I didn’t hear it.”

Di’s cordless phone was known to play tricks on the ear, to abduct the voices of other callers, but he was sure he’d heard a man say something to his mother, and then his mother, putting her hand over the receiver, say something to him. It was late, close to eleven. Past his mother’s bedtime.

“You’re in one piece? You’re not calling from the ER?”

“I’m at Eliza’s. We’re staying here.”

Harriet paused. “Is her mother there with you?”

“No. That’s why I’m calling. Now
we
can’t find
her
.”

Jude was lying on Di’s waterbed. From the living room, he could hear the moaning saxophone of the Playboy Channel.

He’d been sitting out there yesterday, watching TV, when Eliza had walked in the door. Although he’d been waiting for her for some time, he had not expected her home so soon, and he had not expected her to return alone. “I want my mother,” she’d said. She had not been wearing shoes.

“She wants her mom to come home,” Jude explained.

Harriet said, “Well, I think that’s wise.”

“But Di’s not answering her car phone. We need to find her. Is she still in Chicago?”

Jude could hear the muffled voice again, then his mother’s sigh.

“I knew that was a bad idea, throwing her off. And a lot of good it did—now you want her to know where you are. Do you have a pen?”

The front door of the apartment slammed shut. Jude hung his head into the hallway long enough to see Johnny storm into Neena’s room. Then that door slammed, too.

“Uh-oh,” Jude said.

“What’s going on, Jude?”

“I think Johnny and Eliza got in a fight. I think he just came back for his stuff. He didn’t sleep here last night. I don’t know.”

“You’re too young for this,” said Harriet. “You’re all too young.”

“Mom, how easy is it to get a divorce?”

For months the sharp little word had been residing quietly in his head. Yesterday it had loosened, like a kernel of food from his retainer, and now it was out of his mouth, free.

“Oh, don’t tell me.”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll make up.”

“She needs her mother,” said Harriet. “This is ridiculous. We should be arrested.
I
should—”

“Hey, baby.”

The words were as clear as if they had been spoken at Jude’s side.

“What?” he said.

“What?” said Harriet.

“Everything but my toothbrush. Did I leave it there?”

“Hold on,” Jude whispered to his mother, although it was clear that the voice hadn’t heard them, and she hadn’t heard it. It was not the same voice he had heard before. It was Johnny’s. It was one side of a conversation, transmitted from Neena’s phone line.

“I’ll be home soon,” said Johnny.

“Come home, Jude,” said his mother. “For Christ’s sake, just come home.”

Twenty

H
ey, baby.

After Jude hung up the phone, he lay down on the bed again. Down the hall, a door opened. The TV cut off. “Will you guys help me carry this shit?”

He had never heard Johnny call anyone that. Not his wife. Not as a joke.
Baby
was not
dude
or
man
or
fag
. He’d said it with an adult affection, a degree of intimacy that made a fist of Jude’s balls.

He said the words aloud. “Hey, baby.”

And he felt Teddy’s hot breath on his face. Teddy blowing a gust of pot smoke into his mouth.

On the phone, no voice had answered Johnny. The empty space rang in Jude’s ears. Then the front door, again opening, then closing, silenced it.

Sitting up, he looked at the number he’d scribbled on the back of a flyer. Di’s hotel room in Chicago. How had his mother managed to get that?

Jude put the paper in his pocket and walked down the hall. Everyone was gone. He knocked on Eliza’s door. He didn’t expect her to open it, but she did.

“I thought you were Johnny.”

Jude’s balls loosened. On the TV behind her,
Santa Barbara
was on pause. Julia was embracing Mason, but over his shoulder, her face had an unsettled look. Eliza had taught Jude all the characters’ names.

“He just left. I think everyone went to the protest.”

Leaving the door open, she turned, walked to the unmade bed, and lurched backward onto it. She laid her wrists over her eyes. The lower half of her body hung over the edge, her knees dropping gently apart, her nightgown draping a shadow between her thighs. His body went rigid. He closed the door behind him.

He deserved her, and Johnny didn’t. This had been his belief all along, but he had lived with his discontentment uneasily; he’d felt unentitled to it. Now his desire flamed up in him, fully formed, righteous; he held a ticket; he had the burden of proof . . .

“You know how your phone does that weird thing with the voices?”

Eliza lifted one of her wrists from her eyes.

“I just heard Johnny talking to someone. He was on Neena’s line. He called the person ‘baby.’ ”

Slowly, she sat up. His heart was pounding with anticipation, but the look of dread on her face brought it under control.

“Who was he talking to?”

He sat down beside her. He tried to remember what he’d heard. Johnny was moving back out. He was probably staying with Rooster. He was always staying with Rooster. Unless he was lying about that, too. There could be someone else. But Jude didn’t think there was.

When his father had told him that he was adopted, the revelation was both terrible and gratifying—a piece of news that restored order to his universe, an answer to a question he hadn’t thought to ask.
Of course
. He knew with that certainty that the person Johnny had been talking to was Rooster.

But he would give the truth back if he could. At sixteen, he still wished he could shake his father’s words out of his ear.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t hear her.”

Who was he protecting, Eliza or Johnny? She was looking at her bare feet, which dangled off the bed, not touching the carpet. Sometime when Jude hadn’t been looking, her henna tattoos had faded and then disappeared. He looked at his own feet, in a pair of white tube socks with a hole in the right toe.

“You wanted me to tell you, right?”

She looked at him sharply. Then she leaned across the space between them and kissed him on the mouth.

At first, they remained perfectly still, their lips joined in patient purpose, like the ends of two cigarettes, one igniting the other. She tasted like Yoo-hoo. It took him some time—ten seconds, a minute?—to realize that his eyes were open, intent on the fact of each of her eyelashes. Closing them, he sank into a deep dark. His mouth was open, too. Mouth-to-mouth. How long had she wanted to do this? Their tongues were unmoving, the breath through their noses shallow and rough. For the first time, the hard-on in his lap seemed appropriate. He was unembarrassed of it, grateful for it. His friend was gay, and Jude—here was the evidence—was not. Of this he was ecstatically sure. Casually, as though he happened to feel like it at the moment, he slipped his tongue over the ridge of her bottom teeth and into the cocoa sweet galaxy of her mouth. Her tongue curled over his, a sprouting vine, a wave. He felt electrified. He felt as though something amazing and rare were happening to him, like becoming famous. His tongue grazed the gap between her two front teeth. It found a favorite molar, it toured her scalloped gums. Was it vegan to kiss her like this, to want to eat her mouth? Was it straight edge to want to be inside her?

Without unfastening their mouths, they eased back onto the bed. They did this with the care and determination of two people setting a heavy tray on a table. They lay on their sides, each of their heads on her pillow. The spongy interior of her cheek, the canal under her tongue. Thank God he’d removed his retainers this morning! His erection was lodged between her hip and her belly and the bed. He was dangerously close to bursting. Touching her was a bad idea, it was asking for trouble, but here was his left hand, his burned, ruined hand, now rising from the ashes, now slinking without his permission from her wrist up the length of her forearm, pausing at her elbow, circling the reed of her bare bicep, as though testing her, determining if she were fat enough to eat, and then, satisfied (their kiss still unbroken), making a sly dash for second base, fitting itself under the soft globe of her breast.

He didn’t explode. She didn’t say no. Once there, his hand knew what to do, making a slow meal of it, taking its time. It was surprisingly full, unlike anything his hand had felt before, and she did not seem to be wearing a bra. No, she certainly was not wearing a bra. Nothing separated his hand and her breast but the thin cotton of a white nightgown. He could feel the ridge of her nipple, goose-bumped, warm, and now wet. Her nipple was wet. Was that something that happened to girls? Was that good? For a moment he was relieved, that she had burst before he had, that the glow radiating inside him had held its ground, while hers, irrepressible, had spilled forth. It wasn’t until she withdrew from their kiss that he realized this was not a normal fluid of carnal excitement. It was something new, a substance neither of them had encountered for many, many years, and it was filling his palm. Breast milk.

He whisked away his hand. Rolling away from her, he wiped it on the thigh of his jeans. “Sorry!” both of them gasped.

Eliza struggled to sit up, clutching her leaky breast. “Oh, God,” she said just as Jude said, “What the hell?” Spreading outward from her right nipple was a yolky yellow stain.

“This has never happened before!” She looked at Jude. Her expression passed from worry to amazement to humiliation, then back to worry again. Then her jaw dropped comically, and her face attempted a bitter, grown-up wit. “Oh my God, I guess they
work
!”

“They definitely work,” Jude said. He was still wiping his hand on his jeans. Eliza closed her mouth, straightening it into a firm line.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said, but he sat up, too. His erection had faded. She folded her arms over her chest, closing her eyes. He wanted to put his hand on her shoulder, but he was afraid to touch her again.

“I guess you won’t be doing that again,” she said.

He dropped his eyes to the bed. The sheets and blankets were pink—rose pink and a meaty pink, like the inside of a mouth. A newborn baby. This had been the bed the three of them had been sitting on when she’d told them she was pregnant. This was the nightgown she’d been wearing.

When he looked up, her eyes, still closed, were leaking now.

“Eliza,” he said, but he didn’t move. He was frozen by the feeling that they were not alone. Teddy was there in the room with them. So was Johnny. Most of all, the baby was there with them, under her nightgown, not to be forgotten, even for an hour. This was what happened when you lay down beside a girl.