Man of the Year

by Caroline Louise Walker

  In my head: visions of their late nights in the guesthouse, their inside jokes—their book club, for crying out loud.

  “Dad. Are you even listening to me?”

  I look at my boy, who is wild in the eyes. “Yes. You’re not going crazy.”

  He laughs. “You have no idea.”

  “Jonah.” I harness my calm. “Is there something you want to talk to me about?” This is the introduction to Parenting 101, is it not?

  He squints, sticks his neck out, throws his arms in the air. “What’s wrong with you? Yeah, obviously I need to talk to you. That’s what I’m trying to do, Dad. Hello?”

  I nod, desperate to reverse this unraveling. “Why don’t you tell me about something else—something that has nothing to do with the detectives.”

  He huffs and shudders as he shrugs his shoulders, flaunting every marker of disdain he’s mastered in his years of angst.

  “Let’s talk about what you really want to get off your chest.”

  He laughs again and fidgets, pacing the room, then taking off his socks and shoes, presumably just to stay busy.

  “Something more personal.”

  “What do you want from me?” He walks from one wall to another and back, no longer faking purpose. Just pacing. “I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

  “I think you do.” I’m the dad with open ears, an open heart, an open mind.

  Jonah kicks his dresser. His face is flushed when he screeches, “What are you asking?”

  I wait.

  “What do you want me to tell you? That I was up there when he died?”

  My heart quickens. My skin tingles and head spins, but I stay composed when I say, “Yes. I want you to tell me about that.”

  He closes the door and this room shrinks. “I watched him die, and I lied about it, and now I’m fucked. Royally. Because if this investigator finds out, he’s going to think I have something to hide. What do you think will happen then, huh?” The cool drains out of him. Hopelessness fills the cracks. “Could he try to frame me for murder?”

  What the hell were they doing on the roof? Did a lover’s quarrel end in suicide? Blind rage? I ask, “What happened up there?”

  Jonah slams his back against the door and slides down like some silly girl in a corny music video. I look away, noticing nicks in his furniture, stains on his curtains.

  “Jonah?” I keep my tone velvet-soft. “What were the two of you doing up there?”

  He takes a deep breath, lets it out over several seconds. Finally, he says, “I go up there sometimes. That key just sits there on the doorframe. No one noticed if I took it, or if I left it unlocked. Used to go up in junior high and pretend I was a sniper. In high school, I’d hang out up there sometimes just to break a rule. Stupid stuff.” He holds his face with both hands, hiding from me like a kid playing games with a baby who believes that what he can’t see can’t see him. “And Nick was curious, so I showed him. He lost his balance and fell, smashed into the balcony and went over the edge. It wasn’t my fault.”

  “Of course it wasn’t.” Of course not. Still, the picture blurs. “Why were you up there?”

  He lifts his shoulders. “Privacy.”

  The crow’s nest was their love nest, then. Mildew, hornets’ nests, splinters, lead paint, but yes, privacy, too. I’m assembling time lines in my mind, aware that young men keep secrets, aware that Jonah’s sexuality is his business, his private acts are none of mine. And yet, this is my house, he is my son, and something isn’t making sense. “Tell me what happened.”

  Jonah jerks his head, snapping the neck of invisible prey in his mouth. “I promised I wouldn’t,” he says.

  “Promised who?”

  “Nick,” he says.

  I fill in the blanks: “Because you loved him.”

  Jonah stares at the ceiling, shrugs, shakes his head. “You don’t understand.”

  “Jonah. I already know,” I bluff.

  His face falls. His eyes widen but he does not say a word.

  “I know everything,” I lie.

  Just like that, my boy is unburdened, he slumps low and asks, “You do?”

  I nod.

  He breathes a sigh that turns into a wail. “Thank you for finally being real with me.” He hugs his legs and hangs his head, saying through a muffling net of limbs, “How long have you known?”

  Play it safe. “Not long.”

  Jonah convulses, or something. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It seemed best to let the two of you handle it.”

  “But didn’t you feel like—like it was your place to get involved?” His desperation breaks my heart. His obfuscation tests my temper.

  “It wasn’t my business.” I want to comfort my son, not coddle him. So what? He’s gay. Own it, don’t be wimpy about it. “Whatever special relationship you and Nick had, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Wait,” he says, with a lightness to the word that reminds me of how he spoke as a child. Less worry, more confusion. “Wait, what are you talking about?”

  I cock my head. “What are you talking about?”

  “The thing you knew—the big secret—was that me and Nick were together?”

  I grit my teeth. I’ve said too much.

  “That’s everything?” he asks.

  My cool cracks. “Well, what then, Jonah? If that’s not it, what the hell are you crying about?” Scraps of memories. Details. The events flip and shift in a watery time line—my early consultation with Nick, Jonah leaving for his mother’s, and before all this, footsteps on the stairs—and yes, something else: my bedroom door. It opened and closed late that night. Early in the morning, rather. My son is smiling. The walls of his room shimmer and throb. “Tell me now,” I demand. My equilibrium tips. “Tell me, Jonah.”

  “I’m afraid you got it all wrong.” He is cold and steady when he says, “Please don’t be mad at her, Dad. It’s not her fault.”

  I blink. That’s all. I blink and hear, her, her, her.

  “I don’t know how this happened.”

  Her. My skull creaks. “How what happened?”

  “It wasn’t on purpose.”

  “Say it.” From behind my eyes, a sharp cold radiates to every groove in my brain, every crack in every bone. Ice and marrow. I want to light my own son on fire for relief, but first I repeat, “Say it, Jonah.” My teeth rattle.

  “It was an accident,” he allows. “It just happened. Somehow it happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “We happened,” he says.

  And just like that, my world shatters.

  “Me and Elizabeth.”

  Get out, I hear in my head. Get the fuck out of my house.

  I hear myself say, You’re lying.

  I hear, Fuck you, too.

  I can almost feel my fantasy: the sensation of my heel connecting with his face, the sound of my foot cracking his jaw—teeth knocked down his throat as I force-feed him my DNA, code passed down to him by me, life given by me. But he’ll need his jaw to tell this story, and he’s not getting off that easy, so instead I say, “I’m listening.”

  33.

  He begins in the worst way: “The first time was an accident.”

  This can’t be happening.

  “We didn’t plan it,” he reiterates. “I never even really knew her until recently. I used to hate her, actually. She’d been the thing that came between you and Mom, and I was the one who had to watch Mom fall apart every day. I didn’t live here. I was a kid. All I knew was that Elizabeth was the reason Mom was a wreck, and kids aren’t supposed to clean up messes like that. I stuck by her since you didn’t. What the hell else was I supposed to do?

  “For so long, it’s like she didn’t even exist to me. She wasn’t even a person, more like an evil force. But after I went to college and you made me come back here, I didn’t have a choice but to get to know her. I didn’t want to. You understand that, right? She wasn’t the one who’d been missing from my life
. You were. All those times you tried to get me to bond with Elizabeth, all I really wanted was to bond with you, Dad.

  “So here I am, back in this house, you trying to force me and Elizabeth into quality time, and me with a head full of stuff I’m learning and liking in school—and maybe I’m not great at it, maybe I’m embarrassed about not being great, even—but here I come to find out Elizabeth teaches this stuff. For the very first time, we had common ground. You got your wish. She was willing to help me. I remember what started it. It was Bulgakov, remember? Remember when I brought him up last Thanksgiving?”

  I shake my head.

  “Well, I did. I wanted to talk with you about it, but you’d never read it, so you told me to talk to Elizabeth instead, and I hated you, Dad, for not being willing to fake it for once. Just, like, pretend to give a shit about what your own son is all about. Try to know me.”

  “Don’t you dare blame me for your depravity.”

  “I’m not.” Jonah drops his head between his knees and says, “I’m just explaining that I didn’t know her as a kid, and she didn’t know me then, either. She never saw me that way.” He rubs his hands against his face. “She only got to know me as I am now. As a man.”

  I exhale a bitter sigh of mock amusement. “When you bonded over Lolita?”

  He lifts his head slowly, locking eyes, calm and cool. “I said Bulgakov, not Nabokov.”

  I ought to cut out my boy’s tongue.

  “We just talked at first.” He sounds sorry but not contrite, almost like he feels sorry for me. “We had a connection.”

  She laughed at his jokes and brought him ice cream. These aren’t acts of lovers. But she also went out of her way to embrace his world. She befriended and pampered his best friend. This sort of thing, I’ll concede, is symptomatic of romantic love.

  “She freaked out after the first time and made me promise to forget about it. I tried hard. We couldn’t help it, though. We really care about each other, and what we had was different from what you two have. I’m not saying it’s better. It’s just different. We tried to be sensitive about keeping things separate, too. That’s why we chose the roof, designated it just for that. But Nick’s death ruined everything. Now she won’t even look at me.”

  He gnaws a fingernail, takes a breather and continues: “The night before Nick died, Elizabeth heard him trying to sneak up there in the middle of the night. She said she couldn’t sleep because you two had a fight. You slept downstairs that night, right? Whatever. The point is, she heard someone trying to get to the roof and assumed it was me. She texted me in the middle of the night and told me what happened, said we needed to talk. She was worried we were getting too close to getting caught, but Nick was oblivious at that point. Believe me. He was too much in his head about something.”

  “About what?” I ask.

  “Doesn’t matter. But the next morning, after you shouted up about going to the gym, I texted Elizabeth and told her to meet me on the roof when she woke up, and I went up there and waited. That’s why the door was unlocked. And I guess Nick was outside already for some reason, and so he saw me appear up there, which is why he knew it was unlocked. The next thing I know, he’s up there with me, and I’m freaking out, worried that Elizabeth will come up and everything will go to shit.

  “I asked Nick about the night before, and he said yes, he’d tried going up there. He’d been upset about something and wanted to get away, and he remembered me saying that’s where I’d go to escape in high school, so he tried, but the door was locked. But he was still spazzing, still hard-up for privacy. And I thought his timing was really weird. Like, what in the world was he doing outside at that hour? For him to see me go up, I mean?

  “I told him the roof was too dangerous, and tried to convince him to turn around, but he went crazy. He begged me to either leave him alone or be a friend. I couldn’t warn Elizabeth to stay back, because I’d left my phone downstairs, but I figured if she heard Nick talking she’d turn around, so I said, ‘I’m listening.’ ”

  I’m listening, too, piecing the time line together and remembering how free I was that morning when I started my engine and drove off to the gym, away from the drama. That memory collapses, felled by a detail I thought I’d dodged. “What was worrying him?” I ask Jonah.

  “I didn’t know yet. And I was freaking, so I suggested we get Elizabeth. She’s better at crisis than we are, you know? But he was adamant we not upset her. When I insisted, he snapped. That’s when he told me Elizabeth was pregnant.” Jonah looks at me with the limp hope that I’ll correct him. “As you can imagine, this was pretty shocking for me. I’m not ready to be a dad, you know? I asked Nick to give me a minute, just a minute to think, but that was a bad move, because sitting there silently meant we weren’t making noises to warn Elizabeth, and suddenly, there she is. Things got really weird really fast.”

  Rage courses through my body and into my head, compressing into a bullet.

  “Nick was so clear, you know? Hyperalert. Hard to explain. Afterward, I kept trying to convince myself that maybe he was like that because he was fucked up or something, but I know in my soul he was stone-cold sober. We were the thing that made him run. It was us. It was our fault, Dad.”

  Jonah tells the ceiling, “Elizabeth is the one who looked guilty right away, and she said something to the effect of, ‘It’s not what you think,’ which might as well have been a confession. That’s when Nick checked out our setup and realized there was something to hide. From that point on, it was chaos. I tried to get him to relax, asked if he wanted to take a walk or a Vicodin.”

  “Why would you have Vicodin?”

  He sounds bored when he says, “You can buy anything at school, Dad. RAs sell them.”

  “Great.”

  “It’s not a big deal. We only took them if we were super stressed, or like, on special occasions or whatever. That’s not even the point, anyway, because Nick said no.” He rubs his forehead. “I don’t know how long we were up there. Might have been minutes or seconds. I can’t make myself forget it but can’t seem to remember, either. Nick started apologizing, and Elizabeth almost started to cry, but she was still blocking the stairs, so Nick ran outside to the deck. All I did was grab him. I was trying to contain things, so I ran after him and grabbed his clothes to hold him back. His shoe wasn’t tied, and it was slick up there, you know? I was trying to stop him. I grabbed his shirt but lost my grip and he went flying right into the banister. It smashed clean through. He went over. That was it.”

  Jonah bangs the heel of one hand against his head. “He just wanted some privacy, Dad. You were always hovering, riding his jock. Maybe if you’d given him some space.”

  “That’s ludicrous. I hardly knew the kid.”

  “Yeah, but you were always doing shit for him, taking him fishing or whatever. What the hell? When’s the last time you offered to take me fishing?”

  “I asked you after the funeral, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, but before. Before Nick came around, you didn’t want to do anything together. Suddenly you’re obsessed with my friend and we’re all buddy-buddy or whatever.”

  “Enough about the fishing. That has nothing to do with this.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  I picture them on the boat, swapping coded looks, and this leads me back to the thread that pulled me into this rabbit hole in the first place. These two: the boys. “Jonah, you can tell me: Where was Nick in this love triangle?” I ask.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Well?”

  “Even now. Even in this, it just has to be about someone else, doesn’t it? Nick wasn’t the third in our triangle, Dad. You were.”

  My eyelid twitches, my jaw clenches and tension surges—but this time, it’s not a homicidal urge. This time, it’s the absolute denial of linear time, the desire to reverse the present and choose another face-to-face, another outcome, a different moral to my story, because this isn’t how my story goes. I ask, “Why didn�
�t you call the cops?”

  “I wanted to, I swear, but Elizabeth made me promise not to—and she made me promise not to tell you. She went a little crazy, Dad. Something snapped. She started shaking me and asking what I saw, asking if I’d made eye contact with Nick, wanting to know if Nick’s eyes were open or closed. She was insane about making sure I didn’t see the body, and she kept forcing me back to my room, like I was some little kid. ‘Go to your room,’ she kept saying, so eventually I did. I came here and waited for her to bring everything down: the sleeping bags and pillows and stuff.”

  My stomach turns.

  “That’s when Elizabeth sent you out for prescriptions that didn’t exist. She was trying to buy time to clean it all up, and it worked, because by the time you got home, I’d zipped everything into a duffle bag to bring to Mom’s house, remember? I threw most of that stuff in a dumpster across town. I threw the rest in different dumpsters, which made me feel like a criminal, but it was an accident. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Big-time.”

  Jonah had been carrying an enormous duffle bag. Laundry, I’d figured. Looking back: so much laundry. Also, looking back, he and Elizabeth were both acting odd. I thought he’d been nervous to talk about giving me and Elizabeth space. And Elizabeth—I thought she was licking her wounds from a childish affair that had met its end. I guess it did. Different co-conspirator, different end. I guess that means, too, that when she hugged my neck, Nick was already in the bushes, and she knew it, and he wasn’t her lover. He wasn’t the one.

  Did she see him when she bent over the hosta that night? When she refused to let me hold her hair? She changed after that moment, but then, I suppose, a corpse jutting out from under the hydrangeas would be a sobering sight. When she stood on the diving board and gazed at me, was that an apology rather than seduction? When she dove, was it an invitation, or was it an effort to wash it all away? Baptism by swimming pool. And here I thought I was all she wanted.

  My own son turned on me so severely, so terminally. My own flesh and blood—but then, no. His flesh. His blood. My seed. He carries proteins encoded by my body, true, but he is not me in mind or form, and Elizabeth is impermeable. She and I are not halves of a whole. We are the color made by overlapping circles in our Venn diagram, a color that exists only through each other. I can connect to her, put myself inside her—I can enter her and still not crawl around inside her head. She is separate from me, divided by skin, thought, fantasy, history—a whole her-before-me I’ll never know. We tell stories. We learn each other through anecdotes and confessions, but as with her precious books, I visualize the scene in the theater of my mind without ever knowing if my vision matches hers. I see the truck, the sister, the school, the long-dead best friend, the ex-husband, the thesis, and what I see is little more than a police sketch of her memory—which is, itself, once removed from an objective reality, if one exists. The only things I know about her, the only things I know for sure, are the things we share: a dance, a dinner, a kiss. But even these are watered-down wishes, because is she even thinking of me when we kiss?