“I think Gretchen’s going to stay,” Miguel mumbles low when Nick makes his way over to the grill. He flips the last of the burgers onto a plate, then ambles a little toward the apple orchard near the woods, cigarettes extracted, so Nick follows, the thwacks of the softball popping as they walk, no one keeping score anymore. “This whole last year she talked to Ron on the phone every night. He wants to marry her. He’s good with Gray.”
“Isn’t her ex some sort of psychopath?” Nick asks. “Would he go along with her taking the kid out of state?”
“Well.” Miguel shrugs. “The thing you need to understand is that Chad and I have been paying that asshat off for the past three years. Gretchen thinks Troy must’ve gotten Kumbaya therapy or something, because he was on the warpath about custody, and then he suddenly backed off. Suddenly he started agreeing to whatever Gretchen said about Gray—pretty soon, he was virtually gone. All the Merrys think we were crazy to flip Termite Mansion like that, to sell so fast after we’d put so much work into it, but the profit from that house—and about twenty other properties of Chad’s, plus my bonus from my last year of work—pretty much all that went into the Bribing Troy Fund.”
“Holy shit,” Nick says. “That’s beyond generous, man, to do that for Gretchen.”
Miguel clears his throat. “Not really. She was at a breaking point. She was just coming to terms about Gray’s Asperger’s, and he wasn’t doing so hot, with the custody battle and all. I don’t know whether Troy’s chances of getting Gray were realistically ever very high, but he seemed to be in it . . . for him it was a vicious blood sport. He didn’t care if he won, he just wanted to torment Gretchen. I mean, desperate people do desperate things. If Gretchen lost Gray, or even feared she might, she could have started looking for some kind of shared custody of Imogen. Or more. We paid that piece of shit to back off so we didn’t end up in court over our own daughter. Simple.”
“But Gretchen’s so involved with Imogen now,” Nick says, perplexed. “She and Gray live out here all summer with you guys. Practically every time we see you in Chicago, they’re around.”
“Exactly,” Miguel concurs. “Gretchen is a super-involved aunt. Gray and Imogen are almost like siblings. Chad and I are very welcoming. And the terms are dictated by . . . magnanimity, not the courts.” Miguel leans against a tree, and Nick thinks of how, the first few times they met, Miguel always looked on the verge of crawling out of his own skin with discomfort—how now there is something fluid and relaxed about him that’s new, even with his bulkier form. “It’s easy to love someone who gave you an egg to have your daughter,” he says, blowing smoke like some noir Humphrey Bogart in a borderline-Hawaiian shirt. “It’s impossible to love someone who’s tried to take your daughter away. Like I said, simple.”
Nick takes a long swig of his IPA. He likes Miguel—has always liked him, but more so now, as the closest person to Lina, the most palpable, breathing reminder of her. He doesn’t want to think of her beloved brother as some Machiavellian weirdo. Miguel has a degree in actuarial mathematics; he used to be an options trader. Maybe people look like equations to him. Probabilities. Variables. Playing the odds.
“But you don’t tell Gretchen what you did?”
“It wouldn’t do for her to feel . . . manipulated.”
“What if Troy tells her?”
“Then we only kept quiet because we didn’t want to damage her pride. We were only trying to help her and Gray. Which, of course, happens to be true.”
Nick looks back over the tall grass, where Ron is helping awkward, brilliant little Gray hold the bat properly. How will a kid like that survive on Beaver Island, if his mother moves him here? Nick knows from his own Universe of Jay that the city offers “different” kids a certain anonymity, a certain weirdo-among-many-weirdos ease that small-town life—like the life he had as a boy—doesn’t. There are no Northwestern University computer classes for gifted eight-year-olds on Beaver Island. Jay says Gray already creates his own computer games. Nick knows he goes to some swanky private school, sees various “specialists.” He feels like taking Gretchen aside and saying, Hey, can’t the carpenter move to Chicago? You’re the one with the child—don’t sabotage your son for some guy. But who is he to talk? Maybe the simplicity of life here would be the best thing for Gray anyway—for any kid.
What does Nick know about anything?
Miguel and Chad have never apologized. They never made their amends. They never said, What we asked was too much to ask of another person, we miscalculated. And because of that you lost your wife. They never said, We felt so blinded by the desire to have what other people are permitted to have that we didn’t really consider anyone else. They have never said, We wouldn’t do for you what Emily did for us, so we don’t know why we felt entitled to it. But what does it matter that they have never said these things? He and Emily were consenting adults. Both mistakes and flagrant acts of generosity were made all around, and now a little girl is alive and adored. History is written by the victors.
Miguel drops his cigarette into a coffee tin at the base of a tree. Nick scans the orchard; almost all the trees closest to the house have them! He imagines Miguel, over the past four summers, saving every coffee container, walking it out to a new tree, creating some kind of performance-art statement about his own life in cigarette butts, stabbed out alone under blue-domed skies and relentlessly starry nights. The tins strike Nick as heartbreaking—tragic even—though Miguel seems, for him at least, to be a happy man.
“Your hair,” Miguel says to Nick, heading back to the rest of the group. “You’re looking awfully . . . adult.”
Nick runs his fingers through his newly shorn hair. He did it on a whim, but since, he’s found himself less conspicuous in the world, almost like he is able to wander through walls without being spotted: an invisible man. He’d never realized how glaringly visible he was, until some of the visibility was gone: the haircut, maybe age, too. He says to Miguel, “Mr. DeMille, I was ready to end my fucking close-up,” and Miguel snorts indelicately and says, “Amen.” They walk in silence for a moment, back to the picnic table, where people have started eating. Nick’s veggie burger is waiting, because who the hell else would want it?
“I’m making sure we save a couple for Miles,” Gretchen says when he sits down next to her.
“Great,” Nick says, though surely Miles doesn’t care. He is out somewhere on the island, meeting people, making his own shimmery memories, filling his own future with ghosts. His close-up is just beginning.
And: “You and Jay are everything to me,” Nick swore to his oldest son in the hospital’s Au Bon Pain the day after Imogen’s birth—two and a half days before Emily’s death. Emily and Imogen were both upstairs, struggling for their lives, and Miles hadn’t wanted to leave Emily’s bedside, but Nick, under the pretext of making him eat something, needed to get the words out, to hear himself say them. “I’m here and no matter what happens, you’ll always have me. This family is my country.”
Parenting is largely acting; he’d always believed that. But when he said these words to Miles, nothing about them was feigned. He meant them with a singular ferocity. Lina meant nothing to him in that moment; she was a thing that could be thrown to the lions and disavowed. How could it be? He loved her as he had never loved anyone. They had clicked like some complex machinery that could only fit together in one possible configuration out of millions, and they, their bodies and brains, were it: that one shimmery moment of synchronicity. Had he been planning, before Emily’s initial seizure, to leave once she gave birth, to move out and abandon his sons’ home? In his memory, this was his intention—it was what he and Lina had started, haltingly, to plan. Would he have done it? The world is overrun with people who have made both choices: to go, to stay. If Emily had recovered, as the doctors said she was going to, would Nick be here with her now on Beaver Island? Would he be with Lina, wherever she fled? Would he be on his own, forging a new life someplace like New York? Did he lie to Miles bald
ly, before he had even ascertained what he might be capable of—before his options were stripped from him by Emily’s stroke, by kidney failure, by the cessation of her heart?
He honestly doesn’t know.
There was no way for Lina to ever learn about the conversation he had with his son. Still, even up to the night Emily came home from the hospital, he’d intended to admit it to her—to admit his own confusion, to apologize, to beg her to give him time to work it out. But then there was Emily in an ambulance; then the overlapping sounds of sirens and Jay’s sobbing and Miles’s stony silence, all an interactive screensaver in Nick’s brain now, stuck. Lina would have heard from Miguel what had transpired, would understand that he needed to retreat with his sons and would call her the moment he could. But he waited too long, and she was gone. It was almost as if she knew what he’d said to Miles, and believed him.
Now, Miles will be off to university in just over a month. Jay is still at home for eight more years, leaving Nick only fifty once he’s gone. We give our lives for them, Nick thinks, but if we’ve done it well, they don’t return the favor. In the end, it’s never any different than it was for Emily or Gretchen, handing Imogen over to Chad and Miguel, who believe that makes her theirs. But our children are never ours. We belong to them, but they belong to themselves. They belong to people not yet born.
A bustling day at the beach on Beaver Island, unless it’s “Homecoming Week,” might mean eight families on the sand. There’s a 1970s-styled playground, further from the water but still on the sand, full of unsafe metal and spinning and too-high equipment Jay and Gray both love, and this year Imogen is running around, too, fearless and squealing, though Nick expects her to go flying backward off something any second now and Chad and Miguel can rack up their first ER visit. Or maybe it wouldn’t be their first. He has the illusion of familiarity with them but little idea what their day-to-day lives entail. Once, Miles vomited twelve times in under an hour, when he was smaller than Imogen. Nick and Emily finally gave up entirely and stopped even attempting to change the sheets, sat naked and covered in puke until at last Miles’s body ceased its wracking spasms. Jay, when sick, is able to go four days without eating or drinking: the pediatrician always demands that they give him Pedialyte or Gatorade or popsicles at least, and at first Emily and Nick would become frantic, pinching his skin for signs of dehydration and taking him to the ER asking if he needed to be on an IV, but eventually they accepted the fact that, for Jay, this was normal, his body’s autopilot survival mode. Children are primal, Darwinian beasts. There is only so much you can do. Chad constantly looks behind them to the playground, checking on the kids, but Nick can’t claim it’s his impulse to check much.
Gretchen wears a one-piece, sporty suit. She’s taller than Nick and looks like she could take him in a fight. She is eating fried cheesecake on a stick—what passes for a Beaver Island delicacy—from a joint called Daddy Frank’s. Miguel’s not taking off his T-shirt, Nick notices, though he’s got his own cheesecake stick, too, unrepentant. Nick has his shirt off—he’s thinner than he was in university, what Lina would call “junkie thin”—but his skin is nearly translucent, and Chad’s not much better. Ah, fortysomethings on a beach. Fuck.
Why are they here? They all live in Chicago—he doesn’t need to travel seven hours by car and another two by ferry just to spend time with Imogen, whom Jay regards as his baby sister but whom Miles, with little give over the years, clearly resents for . . . existing? Killing his mother? Still, Miles doesn’t all-out refuse to see her, drawn as he must be—as they all three are—to this one thing Emily left behind. The doctors who treated Emily the night she delivered have told Nick how she kept ordering them to “save the baby”—though Nick was so preoccupied with Lina he hadn’t even noticed, Emily must have come to love the child inside her as she did her own sons—enough to offer up her life. And so, Nick and Jay and even Miles forge on with this makeshift family: they go to Guerra and Merry birthday parties; they exchange Christmas gifts. They placate themselves that Emily would have wanted Imogen happy and healthy, even at the expense of what those who wanted her have lost. If Emily loved this baby, it is the least Nick can offer, retroactively, to love her, too.
That doesn’t explain why he comes here, though, to this island of ghosts. Here on Beaver Island, his brain fills in the blanks of every empty space: there, propped against the side of the house, would be Dead Isabel’s pink bicycle that Lina used to borrow; there would be Isabel’s wellies near the door, the ones Lina said looked “sexy” on her somehow; there is the canopy of trees arched above the gravel road, reminding Lina of the South of France, where she had never been. Is Chicago not enough of a ghost town for him? The moment the wounds start to scab over, he has to open them with fresh salt? He comes here for Lina, plain and simple, not his wife, not Imogen.
“We’ll all fly to New York together and stay at the same hotel!” Chad is enthusing. He’s pulled out his iPhone to make some note of it. “When does the play open, Nick?”
“It’s November,” Nick tells them. Does Chad mean Gretchen and Ron, too? Ron’s at work now, but has this surrogate family become such a given that even Gretchen and her new man would drag themselves off their idyllic little island, truck it to New York to see Nick’s first play at an off-Broadway theater? Why would they care? He doesn’t tell them that, once Miles is away, he is considering moving with Jay to New York in earnest. It’s been nineteen years since he moved to a new city. In New York, who would he be?
How exotic Emily was to him once, when he first arrived in Chicago. A skinny, lost-looking, vaguely Goth girl in a bar who drank too many amaretto stone sours and told him about her jailbird father, whom she hadn’t seen since she was three; who told him on their second date about her recent abortion and then challenged, “Aren’t you going to run?” He loved the bones of her—used to cup her shoulder blades in his hands and call them her “wings,” kissing the space between while she fell asleep in his arms. These people here all think of her as some selfless earth mother, “Saint Emily,” and maybe they have good reason, but he should be ashamed for his own willingness to simplify—to reduce—her that way. “Do you want me to run?” he’d asked that long-ago Her, and she said, “There’s something about you—I’m afraid if you don’t leave right now, I’m never going to want you to,” and Nick, twenty-four years old and having lived in five cities and two dozen apartments since fleeing home at seventeen, said, “Great, because I’m tired of leaving,” and believed with everything he then knew that he meant it.
Is Emily less worthy of poetry than Lina? Was his wife, his winged creature, his jailbird’s daughter, the mother of his children and bearer of Imogen, too, any less a Phoenix, less deserving of his passion, of his vigilance? He mindlessly slathers sunscreen on Jay, watches him move with such extra effort through the sand, staring after his son: Emily, what will become of him—will he ever be all right without me? There were meant to be two of us, Em, to make sure he was never alone. Impossible, of course—children are supposed to outlive their parents. Jay will have Miles. Jay will have himself.
“My ring.” He’s said it aloud, so the others turn to look at him. He feels his face reddening. “It must have slipped off when I was putting the lotion on Jay—it’s gone.”
A polite murmur of feigned interest from the others; a halfhearted sifting into the sand of their proximities.
“My wedding ring,” he finally clarifies, unsure even why it’s so hard to admit. Instantly, their energy shifts to high alert—from Gretchen, a gasp.
“Don’t worry,” Chad cries, jumping to his feet so that sand only shifts further around him; Nick wants to knock him over and keep everyone still. “We’ll find it!”
Gretchen digs in the sand like a gold miner. Nick stands by, paralyzed, as she chases the others off the blanket, turning shoes upside down. Gretchen, on the romantic mission of a woman on the verge of engagement, doesn’t ask why he is still wearing his wedding ring after three years—no one do
es, though Nick realizes now he feared their response, that they would find him . . . hysterical? a fraud? He feels himself lowering to the sand, too, helping Gretchen, but he can’t find anything. How can such a small, simple thing have tunneled to the middle of the earth on its own steam? Why isn’t it here?
Emily didn’t want an engagement ring when she was pregnant with Miles; they needed to save money for a baby. Later, after Jay’s birth, when they were in that precarious stage—both afraid the other would take them for “disappointed” in their son, so neither could articulate their fears, their grief—he found himself suddenly dropping thousands they didn’t really have on the first expensive piece of jewelry he’d ever bought in his life: Jay’s birthstone. And later still, Emily twisting the ring around and around her finger as they drove in their old car, headed somewhere Nick can no longer recall, she turned to him and said, “Thank you for my ring. I thought he might be too much for you. I thought it might be more than you had signed up for.” Nick said, “What are you talking about? He’s my son!” and Emily replied simply, “Men are fragile.” And there could have been so many responses to that—so many retorts about war and sports and every other stupid goddamn thing, but instead Nick merely pulled the car all the way over to a curb to kiss her, and said, “Not me, I promise.”
The things we say to one another. The way the most beautiful moments of our lives become lies.
He is on his feet. “I’m going to find a metal detector.”
Squatting, kneeling, they all look up at him as though he has snapped.
“This is the United States,” he says. “Every city, town, and island in this country’s bound to have one.”
“I doubt that,” Gretchen says skeptically. “You probably can’t just go find a metal detector.”
Every Kind of Wanting Page 34
