When the police find her, living on the street, she tells them she ran away in fear for her own life after seeing a man shoot her father in the chest. That she was afraid to go back to the house, because maybe someone would kill her, too. Or maybe she says none of this. Maybe she only later tells Aunt Pilar this tale about Mami, when she visits Miami for the first time six years later, en route to Chicago to live with us, perhaps hoping for a better option, somewhere else to go besides to Mami and me, but somehow despite seeing Aunt Pilar and forming a relationship with her that would span years and letters, she decided to head to Chicago anyway . . .
The thirteen-year-old Isabel wouldn’t have owned gloves, would she? What did she hold the gun with, such that her prints were concealed? Never mind: she managed to hide the evidence.
If you’ll hear me out, though . . . just one more moment about Variable B:
My biological mother never suffered a psychotic episode. Nor, for all Miguel’s charming babbling about being “crazy,” has anyone else in my family. Except Papi.
So you tell me: What are the chances that anonymous john did, too? What are the chances that none of Javier Guerra’s offspring inherited his “black fits,” but that it skipped a generation, landing instead on me?
I am the motive, Nick. I am the one piece of evidence Isabel couldn’t hide.
EMILY
Every morning, Emily wakes up and thinks to herself, This is what life is like on TV, and now it is my life, too. Not the retro network TV she grew up on—shows that earnestly attempted to reflect the gritty reality of blue-collar single parenthood like One Day at a Time and Alice—but like the cable shows Miles has grown up on, where teenagers are all played by twenty-seven-year-olds wearing Prada, or like a soap opera, or Friends. Shows where everyone lives like money is a nonissue even though hardly any characters appear to work. Emily is on medical leave, and for the first time since she was seventeen and started putting in hours at a dry cleaning business after school every day to help her mother, she does not have to wake up and go to work. At 6:00 a.m., her body jolts with a start even without her alarm clock, but instead of being disruptive the feeling is glorious: she stretches like a Disney princess in her high-thread-count guest bed, rolls over (albeit uncomfortably) onto her other side, and falls promptly back asleep.
At 10:00 a.m., Chad arrives with her cup of decaffeinated coffee, which comes from such a high-quality bean that Emily cannot even taste the difference. He has the coffee on a wicker tray along with some sort of pastry, because his assistant arrives with coffee and pastries every morning, not even from a chain like Starbucks but from some quirky Bucktown European café, and Chad has the timer on his phone set so he can bring Emily her treats at 10:00 a.m. sharp.
Until she came to stay with Chad, being an invalid was merely inconvenient, frustrating, lonely. She lay in her and Nick’s unmade marital bed, watching chaos explode around her. The house smelled like a locker room. Nick and the boys did nothing but watch TV and “funny” videos on YouTube that contained an inappropriate amount of swearing for Jay, and that involved entirely unfunny things like one teenage girl kicking another teenage girl in the head while her friends shouted at her to stop. Nick, Miles, and Jay would roar, and yell “Stop!” at each other in the intonation of the videoed teenage girl; they would watch the clip eight times in a row, convulsively laughing on the living room sofa, just out of Emily’s range of vision. They ate frozen pizza every night, offering her one slice. Her head hurt, and she thought she would claw her eyes out with boredom, and despite doctor’s orders she kept getting out of bed to try to straighten up, or to make herself something decent to eat before she murdered Nick in his sleep, or to help Jay with something while Nick was elsewhere, always allegedly on some domestic errand that would have taken one-third the time to fulfill than the duration he was actually out of the house.
Emily was supposed to be on bed rest, but obviously when a rich doctor imagines bed rest, the bed is clean and made; the food automatically appears; the children continue to practice basic human hygiene; there is a flat-screen television in the bedroom on which all the high-end cable channels play. Emily spent her hours staring at the cracking Moroccan-blue paint on her bedroom walls and recalling all too acutely studying “The Yellow Wallpaper” in college and how histrionic the story had seemed at the time, how almost tacky in its heavy-handed points . . . now, like to her (also tacky, but in a different way) mother, she related to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She spent her hours staring at the oversized armoire Nick once thrilled her by making for them, but which in reality is too large for the room and has a rack too high for Emily to reach without standing on a stray dining room chair that clutters the bedroom further, and is not safe for her now, in her “condition.”
During her bed-rest days at home, she kept playing over and over again in her mind what the doctor had told her: how nobody would blame her if she induced labor now to end this nightmare, to reclaim her body, to put herself out of danger. She thought over and over again, I clearly tried. The phrase too much came to her on repeat like the YouTube videos. It was only Chad’s daily visit that kept her from calling her OB-GYN and saying, Clearly this isn’t working. But every single day like clockwork, Chad arrived with flowers or chocolate or stacks of magazines or an artful throw blanket from Anthropologie or unbelievably delicious-smelling Chinese takeout in giant paper bags with the sauce leaking through, which Nick proceeded to not allow Emily to eat because she was supposed to be avoiding salt. Nick actually said, to Chad, who at least tried, who at least brought her gifts to make her smile, “That’s, like, the whole basic tenet of preeclampsia, mate, the high blood pressure,” and shamed Chad, who stammered, “Oh God, I know that, I knew that, I wasn’t thinking about the soy sauce, I forgot, I’m so stupid,” and Emily wanted to shove a chopstick into Nick’s smug eye while he and the boys chowed down on her dinner.
That turned out to be the night Nick unwittingly saved her, though. He said to Chad, “Yeah, it’s bad enough she keeps jumping up trying to do shit. I can’t keep her in the bed. She’s incorrigible—she won’t listen!” And Chad, the second he and Emily were alone in the bedroom—Chad perched on the edge of the bed like a mother: not Emily’s mother, but some mother, some Florence Nightingale kind of mother who would make pancakes when you were home sick—leaned into her ear and whispered, “Do you think he’d be offended if you just came to stay with us for the rest of the pregnancy? Then we could take care of you.”
Offended? Emily had no illusions that Nick would be anything but indifferent at best, possibly thrilled.
Some pang in her rose, thinking of Jay. She had never, she realized with some shock, spent more than one night away from Jay, in all of his seven years, and even a one-night absence had occurred only twice, both times for overnight conferences Emily had been obligated to attend for work. She had, a few times when Miles was young, gone on girlfriend getaways for a weekend or to visit her same-age cousins in Rochester on her own, but nothing like that had happened since Jay. Seven years. She had for seven years barely left her home except to go to work, like she was under house arrest. And just like that the pang snuffed out, leaving in its wake a hunger, an inevitability.
Jay asked, as Chad was helping her out the door, “Will you call me every night, Mommy?” and Emily kissed his pale cheek and promised, “Of course, little man!” But the first night she forgot, and the second night when she called, Miles talked to her cursorily, and then said Jay wouldn’t stop playing on his DS and kept saying “Later” when called to the phone, and could Emily call back?
Emily did not call back.
At Chad’s house—Miguel calls it “Termite Mansion,” though everything infested has been gutted and replaced with shiny, new-smelling materials—just being in her guest bedroom is like being on an episode of Friends. Mugs of coffee appear, and though Chad runs a large business, his office is just in the basement, so it seems like both he and Emily lead lives of leisure, job-free. People “drop by�
� all the time at odd hours of the day, mostly women her own age, though a few gay men, just to hang out with Chad for an hour or so. They bring him pita sandwiches, and Chad parades them all to Emily’s room, where she has been watching General Hospital for the first time since 1986, and they all sit around talking about the baby excitedly, eating nice things, dressed in fresh, fashionable clothing. Emily herself wears revolving pairs of maternity pajamas Chad and Miguel purchased—at home, she just wore sweats to bed. The only thing missing is a delivery of fresh flowers to her room daily, but of course even though Chad and Miguel are gay, they are still men, so one can only expect so much.
In the evenings, she and Chad and Miguel all recline on her California King bed in a happy row, binge watching shows on HBO that she and Nick could never afford. Chad and Miguel act as though Emily having never before seen an episode of The Sopranos is a cultural travesty they must immediately rectify under penalty of a steep fine. Had she watched The Sopranos at home, Emily would have been sick with envy at Carmella’s cushy life, but here, under the auspices of Chad and Miguel, she feels a detached amusement that Carmella, despite all her money, still has certain “Guido” tastes, just like Emily’s mother did. Emily’s mother wore gold chains with charms that dipped into her conspicuous décolletage: a gold horn, a gold cross. In the California King, watching Chad and Miguel carelessly order dinner delivery every single night as though the food arrives for free, Emily can hardly believe her mother was real—her gold horn, her selfishly guarded orange juice that she never let Emily or her friends drink because it was “expensive.” On Mondays, the boys’ cleaning lady (“Hi, Barb!” Emily calls out, delighted to already know her name, to already be somehow an insider) works around Emily in cheerful silence. The few times Emily and Nick considered spending up for a cleaning woman, Nick always concluded that he “couldn’t take” someone poking around his things and cleaning his house while he sat there. “It’d be too embarrassing,” he insisted. “I’d feel like some bourgeois ass, picking up my feet so she can dust! I’d have to evacuate the house, and what if I don’t have anywhere to go? It’s not worth it—we’re capable of cleaning our own house.” But of course Jay doesn’t even have chores, and Miles always just claims Emily is “too type A” whenever she asks him to do anything more complex than dishes, and Nick takes Miles’s part, maintaining amidst the utter disarray that the house is “fine.”
Here is her secret: she is supposed to be sick, but other than symptoms that are not uncommon at this stage of pregnancy anyway, she feels perfectly fine. Her head hurts some; she is swollen . . . but she’s also getting used to it. It seemed strange and disconcerting in the beginning, but by the third trimester most women—especially at age forty—don’t feel so fabulous. Pregnancy is tough. This bed rest business—this everyone-would-forgive-you-if-you-induce-delivery-and-kill-the-baby business . . . it all feels excessive, honestly: out of proportion to the situation. Not that she is complaining—but it feels like something extolled by the sort of OB-GYN Chad and Miguel would choose. Bed rest! At Northwestern (“Prentice Women’s Hospital,” they call the wing where she will give birth—they’ve just done some multimillion-dollar renovation and the food is allegedly gourmet), these doctors are probably acclimated to litigious rich ladies who sue for malpractice if their blood pressure spikes ten points above normal. Emily’s grandmother had high blood pressure her entire life and worked every single day as the secretary at a roofing company until she was seventy-five. Imagine calling your boss and saying you have to lie in bed being fed European pastries and watching The Sopranos because your blood pressure is high! This is the United States of America, land of the obese! Half the country must have high blood pressure, and they are all still at their jobs. But now, in this strange new world, Emily is here, in her silk maternity pajamas, not among the suckers anymore.
Just when it seems impossible that things can get any better, Miguel announces that he is taking a trip to Miami with his wretched whore of a sister. He’s only barely returned from his other sister’s funeral—Miguel always had a dramatic family—and now he and Lina are off to Miami, to see some relatives or something, and Chad, who has to jump through a fair number of hoops to keep moody Miguel happy, is undividedly Emily’s. He even arranges for their usual pedicurist to come to the house and do their nails right there in Emily’s bedroom! At night, he falls asleep watching The Sopranos (“This is such a great episode!” he always enthuses, just before passing out), and sometimes sleeps there in his clothes, over the duvet, happily through the night, as though even in his slumber he is standing sentry watching over Emily. He would be the perfect husband, she thinks. He is the perfect man. Not so much because he doesn’t want sex—that’s not it precisely—but because the things he offers are infinitely more important than the things he doesn’t. Emily chose unwisely. She chose with her pussy; she chose with her thrashing desire to not be her mother. Only here in middle age can Emily see that there are thousands of different ways to not be her mother, and she chose the most obvious, the whole Superwoman lie, the perfect mother, the ambitious career woman, the driving of herself into the ground to prove some point to an audience that has long since left the theater. She didn’t understand, in her twenties, what options were even on the table. If she had it to do again, it seems unlikely she and Nick would even end up on a date, much less married. He must feel the same way, or maybe men don’t think about such things. Maybe most men don’t think about anything, and that’s what makes Chad so rare.
The thought to be glad that Lina is out of town while Emily is otherwise occupied at Chad’s and Nick has more than his usual excessive freedom occurs, but only occasionally, like breaking through fog, unbidden and unwelcome. Emily has trained herself not to think about Lina anymore, like the pathetic woman she used to be did. The Emily she is becoming would not lose a husband to a tacky stripper . . . or rather, if she did, it would not even be humiliating so much as it would be a pathetic cliché over which everyone would shake their heads in mystification, and castigate Nick. She, Emily, who had Chad and Miguel’s baby—she, Saint Emily in her silk pajamas with her perfectly groomed feet—is clearly in the right in all matters now. Nick would have to take the boys 50 percent of the time, and during that time Emily would be free—free to go to Chad and Miguel’s vacation homes and to be their guest at the opening of every hot new restaurant. She would still have to work, of course—she isn’t delusional!—but she would come home to an empty apartment many days, and could clean until her heart’s content, her own mess. It sounds like a form of heaven.
Who cares, then, if that stupid, déclassé tramp from the hood is in Miami or not? Emily is the goddamn assistant principal of a school. Emily has babies for one-percenters out of the goodness of her heart and barely accepts payment. Emily is “sick,” but heroically forges on to protect the pregnancy, despite the “hardship” of extended bed rest. Emily has nothing to fear from a girl like that.
On the ninth day of her stay, Chad arrives in her room with his usual flair. He pulls back the curtains like a ladies’ maid, letting in the paltry daylight and singsonging, “Rise and shine, sleepy head.” He puts the wicker tray with her brioche and oversized coffee mug (he apparently cannot bear to serve her coffee in its original paper container, so it arrives daily in a different artisan mug, perhaps freshly reheated, always steaming just a bit too much) toward the foot of her bed, where she can’t disturb it while struggling to sit up. He sits down next to the tray waiting patiently, a big smile on his face.
“Tonight,” he says, “Miguel’s coming back.”
“Oh,” Emily says, disappointed. “That’s fabulous—yay!”
“Yeah,” he agrees, though he doesn’t seem to think it is any more fabulous than she does. “I guess things didn’t go well there.”
“You mean with the relatives?” Emily says. “Did they fight? Or do you mean things didn’t go well with Lina? I know she’s . . . kind of eccentric.”
“Oh, no.” Chad waves hi
s hand absently, too close to Emily’s coffee. “No, Miguel thinks Lina walks on water, he’s mad about Lina. I mean just other things. Various things. A plethora of Guerra things, that went, apparently . . . wrong.”
“Oh,” Emily says.
“He’s such a private person,” Chad says. “You must remember that, from high school. He’s just such a freakishly private person, Miguel. He would find it unbearable for anyone to know if he so much as had a hangnail. Everything is always top secret, like the CIA is wiretapping our home and we have to speak in code. That’s the only reason why. I love having you here, it’s just that things apparently didn’t go so well.”
For someone indicting another person for speaking in code, Chad’s words would seem to be unintelligible. But they are not, of course. Emily understands instantly: she is being kicked out.
“There isn’t any hurry, of course!” Chad says, and now he looks down at his excessively gesticulating hands and picks up Emily’s mug and hands it to her, then sits down on his knuckles. “His flight isn’t due back until five or something.”
“Am I . . . ?” Emily realizes there is no way to ask the question, because if the question had an affirmative answer, she would already have been informed. Still, she hears her voice saying anyway, “Am I supposed to come back? After you two have a chance to talk? Tomorrow or the next day?”
“I just don’t know, is the thing,” Chad says. “Sometimes when things have gone wrong, you have to batten down the hatches. Miguel has to, I mean. I’m not really that sort of guy.”
Every Kind of Wanting Page 27
