You Could Be Home by Now (9 page)

“Stephen, I—how did you even know?” His son'd had a college-vintage girlfriend from these parts, a volleyball-playing squeak toy of a girl. Zoey something. “Did Zoey tell you?”

“Zoey, Dad?”

“The volleyball girl. Does Anjali know you're still in touch?” Anjali hardly seemed the jealous type, but you know women. Ben had been with two girls before Veronica, Paula Derry his first year at Bucknell and Deborah Shale back home. It was a small campus. They ran into Paula a few times each term. Veronica was always airy and much too sweet, like the cotton candy their kids would beg for at festivals in the years to come. They graduated. They married and moved West. They visited his boyhood home very seldom. Whenever they did though, Veronica insisted on flapjacks at the Sweet Mountain Grill, where Deborah waited tables. Deb looked just as she had in high school, and then she looked like she was trying very hard to look just as she had in high school. Veronica tipped outrageously, upwards of thirty percent, and though Ben had never felt particularly well versed in the slights and symbols that made up the language of women, he knew it wasn't well meant. He never said anything though. He reckoned Deb could use the cash.

“I haven't heard from Zoey in years,” Stephen said. “It's called the Internet, Dad. You're all over everywhere. Hugh and Enrique posted it and neither of them even knew it was you.”

Ben failed to place the names Hugh and Enrique. His son lived a whole world apart. “It was just a local girl,” Ben said. “That reporter. She's on all the time down here. School bee stuff. Dog shows. So-and-so entered the state fair.”

“And you won the blue ribbon. C'mon. You know there's no such thing as local anymore.”

“I guess not.” A side effect of television: since the interview aired Ben couldn't speak without hearing his own voice. Good grief, the threadlike timbre. The leaden way he ended words. Try hard enough to beat out an accent and you wound up with a new one. “Don't hang up yet, Stephen.”

“Hang up?”

“Please.” Ben was missing something here. He'd only been televised long enough to say
bad luck all around
. No possible offense in that. “You're upset and—”

“I don't hang up on people. Christ, Dad. People don't do that.”

“You're angry.”

“I'm not. But, Dad—Tenaya Alder? Mimi Asencios?”

“What? That part didn't air.” Though he did owe the reporter an apology. Flowers too, probably.

“The
Internet
. You know what? Maybe I
am
mad.”

“I never meant—” Gall in the back of his throat and all along his molars. The rest of it must have gotten out somehow. Out and into the everywhere. “You know I'd never—”

“Christy Aves?”

“Stephen.”

“What about Tara?”

Ben's throat constricted.

“What about Tara?” Stephen's question was quieter this time. It was telling, if you thought about it. His son had always had an easy time with women. He'd reddened, but not declined, when Ben asked if they ought to buy him a box of condoms before his first term at USC. Before Anjali, he'd had two definitive types: brittle, pallid Tara clones and the plumped-up, over-processed chicken-cutlet girls who were their explicit opposites.

“Tara,” said Ben, massaging his throat. “I thought she—it's stupid.”

“This whole thing is pretty stupid.”

“I thought she might see it somehow.”

“Yeah. I figured.” It bothered him, in a way he was too keyed up to fully articulate, that Stephen guessed. It was a loss of sorts. There had been a wholesome kind of benevolence in being mysterious to his children.

Ben said, “If she was out there, I wanted her to
know
. It's not right how the whole world let her disappear.”

“Dad.”

“Because it's not. And this thing . . . the boy is fine, but the reporters keep on—”

“Dad. You should have said, come home.”

He and Veronica worried about how uncomplicated Stephen was after Tara, how absolutely forthright. They tongued at that worry like a canker sore. But that was just Stephen. Their boy. “You're right,” Ben said. Come home. The breath-catching simplicity of it. The only real thing he had ever wanted to say.

“Well. Long shot anyhow, right?” Stephen made a noise like he was swallowing a sigh. Ben heard murmuring in the background. Anjali? He thought of her eating breakfast at the IKEA table he'd help the kids assemble, lipstick blotting the rim of her juice glass. Veronica used to do that. He'd once been wild enough about her to raise those smudges to his lips.

“Is that Anjali I hear?”

“I'm calling from work.”

Of course he was. Monday in Boston. Once, he'd known where his kids were every minute.

“She's worried about you though,” Stephen said. “Anjali.”

“Tara used to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Use an intermediary.
Anjali's
worried. Instead of saying it herself.
Stephen
wants Frosted Flakes.
Mom
wants you to push me higher.” Maybe they should've packed her off to a shrink. It sure as hell didn't augur well that she was five years old and couldn't even speak to them directly.

A hiss of breath from his son. “Okay. Yeah. I'm worried, too.”

“You don't have to be.”

“You didn't seem like yourself, Dad. You're not—you're okay, right?”

“Never better. Hand on my heart.”

“Because Anjali has a cousin at Hopkins. He could find someone to take a look—”

“It's nothing to do with—the old noggin's fine. Your dad's a little foolish, that's all.”

“You meant well.”

“You can't see it, but I'm shrugging.”

“Dad.”

“And I'm sorry. If I embarrassed you.”

“I'm not embarrassed. Really. In a few days someone will train their puppy to moonwalk and no one will remember you.”

“Good. I'm glad.”

“But, Dad? I'm trying to be Switzerland with you and Mom—”

“I know that. I appreciate it. Your mother and I both do.”

“You know she's going to worry.”

“I was thinking get really pissed.”

“That too. But mostly—Dad, you really, really didn't seem—”

“I'm fine. Scout's honor.”

“Dad.”

“Stephen. I really am. I wish—”

“Yeah?”

“I don't know. That someone hurries up and trains their puppy.”

They said goodbye and Ben—because of course Stephen was right—checked his voicemail. Nothing from Ronnie. Time was, he'd have relished the fight he knew was coming. There was never any guessing what might trigger Tara. But Veronica, Veronica was easy. Milk left out to sour. Talking while she parallel parked. Frivolous workday interruptions. They somehow kept things pleasant while their son was in high school, but hardly a minute longer. Ben began to pick at her on purpose. It was air at high altitude, sharp and pure and intoxicating, to fight with Veronica. That sweet, sure feeling, knowing—because he never had with their daughter—exactly what he'd
done
to unleash all that rage. By the time he confessed in couples' counseling, all that was just background din.

Veronica hadn't e-mailed either, though Anjali had. She had a trial coming up but even so had done the crossword.
7:34. A new personal best! How about that, Dad? Saw you made the news. Stephen sent it to me. Are you okay? Forgive my overstepping, but you know I'm a worrier and I want to make sure. Trial hell continues here but both of us should have some downtime at the end of next month. Want to visit? I could probably score some Pops tickets . . .

Ben hit reply. He highlighted the word
Dad
. Hit control B. The word stood darker and more solid than any other.

Dad.

He'd had one of those
dreams
last night. Underwater this time, Anjali's hands on his body, slowed by the water and made slicker by it, too. They bucked and arched; their limbs entangled like seaweed.

His first thought on waking was
you dirty old coot
.

Only you had to hope that the subconscious was more gracious than that, that it crafted dreams as explicit missives: Here, right here, is the line you may not cross. You may never know what cost you Tara, and maybe you should count your blessings. You've had decades to get used to the question, and at this point your thick-hick psyche would buckle with the weight of knowing. So instead, know this: There's only one thing that would cost you your son, one, and that thing is an impossibility.

You have a nose-hair trimmer in your medicine cabinet, for God's sake.

Ben had stretched out in bed, happy and well rested. He'd had an erection and he'd taken his time attending to it. Approaching seventy now. Modern medicine was all very well but who knew how many more spontaneous ones he could count on. Only now, with the word
Dad
bold on the screen in front of him, was he troubled about Anjali. She hadn't been
her-
her in the dream, at least not entirely; he had the wispy sense that in sleepers' logic she had also been Sadie Birnam. Still, he ought to do some token thing to shake the sense he was turning into an overripe letch. Ben pulled up the crossword site and dawdled, taking on the twenty-plus letter clues first, watching the clock so that Anjali beat his time by over four minutes.

T
HE SHOWER DRAIN WAS THICK
with Alison's hair and the soap in the soap dish was worn to a filmy sliver. Seth dialed up the hot water. Ali could go ahead and clear out the gunk. She could replace the soap, too. The extra bars were stashed in the cupboard under the sink, along with a Costco pack of Q-tips and Ali's half-empty box of Kotex. Along with the grief books, because Ali had a theory. If the books were displayed, then people would ask, and they'd come all this way to be Seth and Alison again, not that poor couple nobody knew how to talk to. Which, fine, made sense. But she hadn't so much as asked first. Seth grabbed a washcloth and his wife's shampoo. Like Ali would say, soap was soap and count yourself lucky: One hundred and fifty years ago, Adah Chalk rendered hers from tallow and ash. The stuff in the bottle smelled faintly of green tea. He rinsed and toweled off. Steam had fogged over the mirror.

Alison was waiting outside. Running shorts and a sports bra edged with sweat, blotches all over like Rorschach tests.

“Sorry,” he said, “I didn't hear you get back.”

“No worries.”

Not too long ago, she'd have joined him in the shower. Residual fog met the salt on her skin.

Not too long ago, he'd have pulled her to him.

Her doctor had given them the all-clear six weeks after. She went along with it and made noises, but Seth could tell. She only touched him to wordlessly reposition his hands. She writhed, but only so he'd be done, already.

Add her morning pill to all that.

Better to take care of himself.

“You don't have to wait for me,” she said. “I'll catch the next bus in.”

Their first time together in the dorm room he'd kept tidy for a hopeful month and a half, she'd said,
Pay attention: This is what I like. Fingers like so. Remember my neck. My breasts will never be as fun as the skin beneath.
And now she stood there. Just stood.

“Clear your hair out of the drain, could you?” Seth had a hidden book of his own, a first year month-by-month, squirreled away in his office. It said new mothers should expect significant hair loss. It said Timothy would now be pulling himself up to standing.

Alison shrugged. “Yuck. Sorry about that.”

She should've yanked Seth's hair out by the fistful. She should've wept.

Either or both. She should've known about the shedding. She should have explained. He wasn't asking for much. He no longer hoped she'd speak the name they chose instead of early favorite Ethan, instead of Joseph her father or Raymond his, instead of Charles for Dickens or for Darwin, depending on their mood. He kissed her goodbye without zeal and rode the bus alone for the first time since their move. Her shampoo made a cloud around him. The secretary the
Crier
shared with Marketing looked at him funny, and he wondered if she could smell it, too. Hoagland Lobel was waiting in his office.

Seth's boss wore cowboy boots and a silver bolo. “Howdy,” he said. Seth had run a biographical feature on the man. Worcester born and raised, UMass undergrad, Chicago business: roughly as authentic a cowboy as George W. Bush.

“Good morning.”

“Lost your intern, I see. Young Nick not showing up?”

“Off on assignment,” Seth lied. He had no idea where Nicky Tullbeck was. He was surprised the big boss knew the kid's name.

Lobel adjusted the angle of the framed wedding photo on Seth's desk. “You been following all this, Seth? About Mona Rosko and the little one?”

“Yes, of course. It's a real shame.”

“That's tofu talk.”

“Tofu?”

“Doesn't taste like anything on its lonesome but takes on the flavor of the rest of the conversation.”

“I wouldn't have guessed you liked tofu.” Seth tried to approximate Ali's easy back-and-forth with Lobel. Given the state of the job market and the length of their resumes, Seth suspected that easy back-and-forth was what had landed them here in the first place.

“My doctor's idea.” Lobel raised a hand briefly to his heart like a child about to say the pledge. “Now tell me what you really think.”

“Like I said, it's a shame.” Shame on Mona Rosko. The old bat. She'd been entrusted with a
child
. The whole of Seth clenched at the thought. He managed to control his voice. “It's a lousy situation all around. Of course, our aim here is to stay objective.”

Hoagland Lobel hitched a thumb through each belt loop and rocked back on his heels. No Wild West buckle. The man knew his limits. “A damn shame. Mona was one of our Phase One buyers. Arizona lifer. You'd think she'd care a bit more about community.”