Ten Thousand Saints (45 page)

His father pressed his hand lightly to Jude’s spine, where the hospital gown opened to his bare back. Then, the glass doors sliding open before them, he followed his son to the entrance.

T
hey stayed at the apartment on St. Mark’s, Davis in the loft, Jude and Les sharing the futon. Davis made breakfast for dinner—grits and Kentucky scramble and buttermilk biscuits. Jude had toast. He called his mother. He’d be coming home soon. Late into the night, Les told stories of his travels, cannabis by cannabis—Mauwie Wauwie, Swiss Miss, Holland’s Hope.

Uptown, Eliza and her mother watched
Santa Barbara
. Eliza napped on the divan. For dinner Neena made them saag paneer and fresh chapati bread, Eliza’s favorite, and they ate on the balcony, watching the joggers in Riverside Park, their sweatbands glowing like distant planets in the settling dark. The boys were gone. On the dining room table, under a ring of spare keys, Kram and Delph had left a note—
Thank you for your hospitality
—and eight dollar bills to cover the bottle of wine they’d made use of, a 1981 port. The only things left were Jude’s.

The following morning, Di paid a visit to her lawyer, a colleague of her late husband’s, to discuss a lawsuit against the City of New York and an annulment, on the grounds of nonconsummation, of her daughter’s marriage to John McNicholas. Neena went to the grocery to restock the kitchen. Eliza stayed home. She painted her toenails. She called Nadia and talked to Nadia’s father. Nadia was at her mom’s place in the Catskills. She had a new horse: Rome. Did Eliza want the number?

No, thank you, she didn’t.

She was playing one-handed scales on the piano, a Yoo-hoo in her other hand, when there was a knock at the door. Jude stood on the other side of it, wearing one of Les’s Hawaiian shirts. His eye socket had faded from a deep purple to a jaundiced brown. His lip was cut, too.

“I still have my key, but I didn’t want to bust in. I just want to pick up my stuff.”

She held the door open, and he stepped inside. Hitching up his shorts—those were Les’s, too—he looked around the apartment as though he hadn’t been there before.

“What were you playing? It sounded pretty good.”

“Nothing. Just scales.”

Jude looked across the room for a place to sit, then shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned his shoulder against the wall.

“Anyone home?”

Eliza shook her head.

“How you feeling? I like your head wrap thing.”

“Thank you. Neena gave it to me.” She reached up and touched the top of her head, stroking the silk scarf. “They gave me a list of things I could take for pain, but I don’t want to take anything.” She put her hands in her lap. “What about you?”

Jude shrugged dismissively. “You got it worse than I did. I wish it was my head that got split open.”

Eliza took a sip of her Yoo-hoo. Then she slipped off her scarf. “You can make it up to me.” She found the end of the bandage and unwound it, undressing her head, and released the ribbon of white gauze. Across her left temple, nine stitches held together a naked patch of scalp. “Do you have your clippers?”

He shaved her head in the living room, Eliza sitting on the piano bench, Neena’s purple scarf now wrapped around her shoulders. He circled her body, the clippers humming, her dark hair feathering to the floor. She didn’t open her eyes until the sound stopped. In her mother’s bathroom, her back turned to the sink, she angled Di’s hand mirror in front of her face.

“Now you’re really punk rock.”

“We’re twins,” Eliza said, putting down the mirror on the sink. She swept the scarf from her shoulders and dropped it over his head.

“Do I look punk rock?”

Eliza said, “You look like Little Red Riding Hood.”

“I wanted to ask you something,” he said, taking off the scarf. Scattered across the marble vanity were the various toiletries he’d left behind. Noxzema, shaving cream. Like the skeletons of some spiny-backed mollusc, his retainers.

“You’re not going to ask me to marry you, are you?”

“Do you want me to?” Jude asked. The scarf around his shoulders looked like the shawl Johnny had worn on their wedding day, the shawl she had tied to her own.

“Not anymore,” she said. “Sometimes I wished we were the ones who were married, though.”

“You did?”

“It’s stupid.”

Jude tried to hide his smile by playing with his lip. “Well, sometimes I wished the same thing.”

She was rubbing her shaved head, and now she took another look at it in the mirror. “What were you going to ask, then?” she asked his reflection.

“If you’re sure,” he said, rubbing his own head reflexively. “About the baby.”

“I’m sure,” she said. Her other hand was on her belly, and, reflexively, she began to rub it, too. He copied her. They rubbed their bellies and their heads.

“Is it pat your belly, rub your head?” he asked.

“No, it’s rub your belly, pat your head.”

They attempted this for a minute, watching each other in the mirror. He kept messing up and patting his belly. “It’s not that hard!” Eliza said, laughing. He gave up and reached for the handful of charms hanging from her neck. He fingered the subway token. Teddy used to hold it up to his glasses and peer through the hole at Jude.

“What’s in this locket, anyway?”

Gently, she took it back from him. “It’s a secret.”

Empty-handed now, he dropped his hands to her belly. She closed her eyes. He held his hand over her T-shirt and he rubbed. It was a Green Mountain Boys T-shirt, extra large. Clockwise, he polished her belly. He leaned in to kiss her and closed his own eyes, and no one but the mirror was there to witness their image, their profiles locked at belly and mouth.

They remained in this position until, at the distant door of the apartment, there was another knock.

“Maybe Neena forgot her key,” she said.

It was Johnny. Linen jacket, tie. The bridge of his nose was bruised, and beneath his left eye was a jagged cord of skin, not yet a scar. Beside him, smaller than Johnny, also in jacket and tie, was an Indian man with a briefcase.

“Oh my God,” Johnny said to Eliza. “Did they do that at the hospital?”

“Jude did it.”

“She had hair before,” Johnny said to the man. To Eliza, he said, “The doorman let me up. But I thought I should knock.”

“Thoughtful,” said Eliza. Over her shoulder, Johnny caught Jude’s eye, then abruptly dropped it. He was not here to return any punches, Jude saw. He had some more formal method of retaliation in mind.

“He might as well hear this, too. Can I come in?”

The visitors did not sit down. Jude stood by the piano, arms crossed, the foliage of Eliza’s hair scattered at his feet.

“Who’s this?” Eliza asked, nodding to the man with the briefcase. Whoever he was, Jude was grateful for his presence, for the excuse not to get into another confrontation with Johnny. He wore a precise mustache, a pair of metal-framed glasses, and too much of an expensive cologne. Where had Jude seen him before? The temple? He recognized some feature, the narrow span of his shoulders, the controlled way he moved his body, as though he hoped he would appear not to be moving at all.

“This is Ravi Milan,” said Johnny. “He’s a lawyer. He’s Teddy’s dad.”

Eliza and Jude didn’t move from where they stood. Ravi did not extend his hand but nodded politely at each of them. “I have great respect for the life you’re carrying,” he said to Eliza.

“That’s his friend Jude,” said Johnny.

“That’s not his dad,” Jude said. “Teddy’s dad’s dead.” But the eyes, the small, fragile hands . . .

“I’m sure you have many questions,” said Ravi. “I’m happy to answer them—”

“But we have business first,” Johnny finished.

Ravi stepped over to the piano bench, set down his briefcase, and opened it. Out of it he produced a handful of printed pages, bound with a black plastic clip, which he handed to Eliza. Over her shoulder, Jude squinted to read the letters:
PETITION FOR ADOPTION
.

“What is this?” she asked Johnny. “You put on a tie and you think you can adopt my kid?”

“That’s not what it says,” said Johnny.

“Did he tell you we didn’t sleep together?” Eliza asked Ravi. “That we’re husband and wife, but he’s been sleeping with someone else? Should you tell the judge that? Did he tell you he doesn’t have a job, an apartment, a fucking
phone
—”

“Miss, if you’ll read the form—”

“This is what you’ve wanted the whole time. Why didn’t you just say so from the beginning!”

Ravi, looking over her shoulder while remaining as far from her as possible, pointed to the typewritten entries on the bottom of the first page:

PETITIONER(S)
: Ravi and Arpita Milan.

RELATIONSHIP TO ADOPTEE
: Grandfather, stepgrandmother.

Ravi said, “My wife and I would like to adopt your child.”

Neither Jude nor Eliza heard much after that. Intermediary parties, open adoptions, hearings, consents. Eliza was screaming, a blue vein pulsing under her stitches. Amidst her protests, Neena arrived from the grocery and spilled a plastic bag of canned spinach across the floor. Ravi bent to help pick up the cans. First uncertainly, then like old friends, he and Neena chattered on in a language that no one else understood.

Twenty-Two

J
ude took the 1 train to the 7 to the 6, piecing together Manhattan. At home, Les was on the futon, snipping dried leaves into the bucket between his knees. He packed some fresh bud into the bowl of his newest bong, Raquelle. “You look like you could use some of this,” he said.

Jude imagined the smoke rising up to fill his lungs. The sweet taste of ashes.

“No, thanks,” he said. He went to the bathroom. He took off his father’s clothes. He turned on the cold water in the shower and stepped inside. The man with the briefcase was still there in his head, Teddy’s ghost come back to haunt him.

A
t eight o’clock the next morning, the phone in Ravi’s hotel room rang. He rinsed the shaving cream from his face, patted it dry, and, in his bathrobe, crossed the room to the TV to turn down the morning news. On the fourth ring, he picked up the phone. It was the young man he’d met the day before, the friend of his son’s. Had Ravi had breakfast yet?

They met downstairs at the café in front of the Union Square Inn, at one of the two tables on the sidewalk. Ravi ordered a poppy seed muffin and coffee. The boy ordered a bagel and juice. Flies darted around them in the heat, over their plastic silverware, the emptied pats of butter and jam. Ravi told him what he knew—about Bonnie, his search for Teddy (he was getting used to calling him that), the letter from Johnny. From his briefcase, he withdrew the manila envelope containing the newspaper clipping, the case reports, the photo of the four of them at the beach. The boy looked them over.

“You do believe me?” Ravi asked.

Under the table, the boy rolled his skateboard back and forth.

“So she wanted him for herself,” he said.

Ravi swallowed a hard lump of his breakfast. He did not take pleasure in revealing the truth about Bonnie, but this boy, like Johnny, had to know. “She took him to spite me. It was a rash decision, a heated one, but one that she was stubborn enough to live with. Teddy was a”—Ravi fluttered his hands, searching for a word—“I’m sorry to put it this way, but he was. . . .”

“A pawn?”

Ravi winced. “An instrument. An asset. She knew he was valuable to me.” He emptied a packet of Sweet’n Low into his coffee, even though it was already too sweet. “I’ve seen it with my clients again and again. More than money, more than homes and cars and boats, parents use children to settle their scores. Of course, we had very little money, and we weren’t married. Our child was all that was of use to her.”

Jude thought of his parents, conspiring to keep Eliza and Johnny and himself away from Di, the elaborate and inconsequential game of checkers the adults were playing. “But that doesn’t mean she didn’t love Teddy,” he insisted. “All that time she’d been hiding him, and then she just left him behind?”

Ravi told him about Teddy’s wish to find his father, about Johnny’s call to his mother on Christmas, his attempt to help his brother. “If they had found me,” he explained, “I could still have pressed charges. I could have sent her to prison for the abduction of a child. So she abandoned Teddy to save herself.”

That word—
abandoned
—it was a spiky little briar patch. Jude tried not to think of his own birth mother, but he was caught. It was better, wasn’t it, to be abandoned as a baby, before you could be blamed, or blame yourself? “But why didn’t she take him with her?” Jude asked.

Ravi smacked his lips lightly, as though he were trying to rid his mouth of a bitter taste. “I imagine that, as her hate for me lost its edge, she ceased to care so fiercely.”