by Dan Chaon
“I understand what you’re saying,” he says, even as his hands tighten hard against each other. “But would it be possible for me to talk to him for one minute? Just to say ‘happy birthday.’ That’s all.” And he can feel his throat constricting. “I’m his father, Judy. I want to be a good father. I know you don’t believe that, but if you’d just . . . give me a chance . . .”
“You want to be a good father,” Judy repeats, and echoed by her, the words sound limp and pathetic. Troy stares out the kitchen window, where the tree swing is still hanging, encrusted, petrified with a layer of old snow and ice. What can he say?
“You’re not a very reflective person, are you, Troy?” Judy says, very calmly and clearly, that neutral, therapist’s tone that makes Troy flinch. “I don’t know what your definition of being a good father is, but to my mind, you are the exact opposite of a good father. I would like you to think about the facts, Troy, the facts from my perspective. You sold drugs out of your home, while you had a child. You supplied drugs to my daughter, the mother of your child, who you knew was an addict. You opened your house to the very lowest scum of the earth, so they could purchase drugs, and these people wandered freely in and out of your house while your own vulnerable child was sleeping, or playing nearby, or maybe even watching while you and your cronies got high. Those are not the actions of a good father, Troy. I think you’ve gotten so used to charming people and maybe you’ve been lying to yourself for so long that you don’t even know right from wrong anymore.
“But I do. I have a very firm grasp of right and wrong, young man, and this is something you need to hear. Do you know the most loving thing you could do for your son right now? Leave him alone.” And then she repeats this forcefully, as if it is the answer to an important question. “Leave him alone,” she says. “Give your son a real gift, Troy. Show him real love. Don’t make him miss you and yearn for you, because you know you will only ruin his life.”
——
By the time he arrives in Lisa Fix’s office, at one in the afternoon, Troy has calmed down somewhat. He even smiles at her, and she smiles back, adjusting the collar of her large yellow turtleneck as she types some things into her computer. It’s a cold day. The parole office sits among a row of interconnected brick storefronts, directly across from the courthouse. A weathered cowboy is walking down the sidewalk and Troy watches him pass, trudging with his hat pulled down over his face against the blast of snow sparks.
“So,” Troy says, when Lisa finally turns to look at him. “Six months to go.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she says, and she glances down into his journal, toying distractedly with her pen, clicking the retractable point of it slowly in and out. “You’re doing fine, Troy, but let’s do this a week at a time, okay?”
“It’s my son’s sixth birthday today,” Troy says. “His grandmother won’t even let me wish him happy birthday over the phone. Why don’t you humor me? Give me something to look forward to.”
She purses her lips, giving her pen another rueful click. “What do you want from me, Troy? I’m not here to predict the future. And I’m not here to humor you either.”
“I just want to confirm the schedule of things,” Troy says. He sighs, leaning his arm on her desk, his fingers brushing the little magnetic tube in which paper clips are imprisoned. “I just want to know—I mean, assuming that there are no glitches or fuckups on my part, or . . . whatever— She has to give Loomis back, doesn’t she? That whole consent form that I signed for the probate court: Judy’s guardianship of Loomis. It’s temporary, right? Once I’m done with my parole, custody of Loomis reverts back to me, right?”
“Yes,” Lisa says. “Technically, the custody would revert to you.” Troy watches as she reclines back in her wheeled swivel chair, her eyes shifting, glancing out the window.
“Technically?” Troy says. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well,” Lisa says. She looks at him for a long moment. Her round, freckled face grows solemn. “Listen,” she says, finally. “I don’t know whether I should tell you this or not. But you should probably talk to your lawyer.”
And the look in her eyes sends the kind of thrum through him that he had felt, earlier that day, when Judy had said: Leave him alone.
“What do you mean?” Troy says.
“I mean that you should talk to your lawyer,” Lisa says. “I’m not trying to get you riled up, Troy. But I think you should know. Your mother-in-law, Mrs. Keene, submitted a petition to the probate court to terminate your wife’s parental rights. I just saw it yesterday. It’s a pretty basic petition—nobody’s been able to contact your wife for over six months, so it should be fairly easy to prove abandonment. I don’t think Mrs. Keene will have a problem making her case.”
Troy folds his hands together. Another person walks by the big window beyond Lisa Fix’s desk, an elderly woman in a long wool coat and a pointed stocking cap. His hands are beginning to shake a little.
“And . . . ?” he said.
“And nothing,” Lisa Fix says. “It’s just— I think she has a good lawyer. I don’t want to upset you, but if you think about it, once the mother’s rights are terminated . . .”
“Then I would be the next hurdle, right?”
“I think it’s a possibility,” Lisa says. “But listen. I’m not telling you this to get you all worked up. Even if Mrs. Keene did petition against you, I don’t think she could win. The law tends to favor biological parents. I’m telling you this because I think you need to be aware of it. What you need to do is keep your nose clean. Take your drug education class, do your community service, don’t get into trouble. But if I were you, I would be prepared for the possibility that Mrs. Keene is going to challenge your custody.”
Troy is quiet. He hunches his shoulders, staring down at the tile floor beneath his feet, his hands clasped tightly together. “Okay,” he says at last. “Thank you.”
——
As he drives back home he is aware again of that sense of entrapment he’d felt when the police had shown up at his door, all those months ago—that long, dreamlike pause where you imagine that there is still some way to escape. Wait, he thought. His hands were trembling as he clutched the steering wheel.
Do you know the most loving thing you could do for your son right now?
He could send his car swerving into a tree, he thinks. He could drive to Judy’s house and strangle her. He could just keep on driving—cut off the parole anklet at the next intersection, head out to California, or Hawaii, or overseas—like Carla, disappearing into the vastness of the world.
You’re not a very reflective person, are you, Troy?
No, he thinks as he turns down Deadwood Avenue. His windshield wipers tick insistently against the steady dots of melting snow that alight on the glass, asserting themselves briefly before being wiped clean.
Okay, he thinks. It is two-thirty in the afternoon, and he shudders as an old Guns and Roses song starts playing on the radio: a song that he and Carla had once liked, back before Loomis was born, and he almost starts to choke up.
——
Even before he turns into the driveway, he can see Jonah sitting there, perched on the hood of his old Festiva, right across the street from the house, waiting patiently. As he toggles the gear shift into park, he watches Jonah clamber off his car and stride up the driveway, and his muscles tighten. The old partying life he’d had with Carla falls away; the last chords of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” cut off as he kills the engine.
“Hey,” Jonah calls uncertainly. “Troy!” And Troy keeps on walking. He holds out his hand, like a traffic cop: Stop. Keep your distance. But Jonah shadows him as he walks toward the back door.
“Troy?” Jonah calls after him. “Troy?” And maybe he is so used to being ignored that he’s oblivious, and Troy has too much ingrained midwestern politeness to simply keep walking. He turns to look over his shoulder, glowering, and Jonah widens his eyes.
“Hey,” Jonah says. �
��I was, uh. I was just . . . stopping by? Like we talked about?”
Troy stands still for a moment, blinking. He remembers now that they’d made some kind of arrangement—“An appointment,” Jonah had said. “Just to sit down and talk”—but it had completely slipped his mind. He thinks of excuses, pushes his hand through his hair. Though he has come to accept that the papers Jonah had given him are the truth, it’s still a little hard to believe that this person is his brother. It’s hard to know what to do with him. Where to put him on the list of things that need to be worried about.
“You know, Jonah,” he says, “this is really bad timing.”
And Jonah gives him a stricken look.
“Oh,” Jonah says. “What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” Troy says. But this sounds melodramatic. “Nothing.”
Their eyes meet. What is he supposed to do with the look on Jonah’s face, which reminds him of nothing so much as the abused kids he’d known in grade school—that expression they’d get if you’d pay attention to them, a bleak hopefulness opening briefly and then shutting. What is he supposed to do with the fact that for a brief flash he can see the sort of younger brother Jonah would have been? He can feel a kind of shadow life pull across him like a cloud scudding across the sun, and he can picture Jonah: a grubby and wiry-tough little kid, beloved of no one but fiercely loyal nevertheless, and he feels oddly guilty, aware of all the ways he would have broken that imaginary younger brother’s heart.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he says quietly. It’s already more complicated than he wants it to be, even as he turns to go into the house to make his phone call to the monitoring device people. He sighs as Jonah hesitantly follows after him, but he doesn’t say anything more. He just picks up the phone and dials.
——
Despite everything, Jonah has been on his mind—or at least the idea of Jonah. His brother? His biological half brother? A stranger he shares some genes with? It has occurred to him that, besides Loomis, Jonah is the only other person he’s met in his life who is biologically related to him, and he’s not really sure what to think about it.
At first, he’d simply been angry. Discovering that Jonah had spent those first six weeks spying on him had bothered him more than he cared to admit. He was already feeling vulnerable, aware of his own body being constantly monitored, and thinking of those weeks that Jonah had worked alongside him at the Stumble Inn actually made his skin crawl—the uneasy, dreamlike awareness that someone he barely knew was hovering at the periphery of his life, gathering information, pretending to be someone he wasn’t. It was scary.
But he also found himself regretting how mean he’d been. He recalled the way Jonah had flinched like someone who was used to being hit, nodding in agreement when Troy had said, I don’t want you in my workplace. I don’t even know whether I want anything to do with you. Afterward, thinking about it, it had seemed cruel. It had connected in his mind with the way Judy had treated him, and Lisa Fix and his lawyers. When Jonah had called him a few days later, he’d held the phone in his hands for a long time without speaking, listening to Jonah’s hoarse explanations.
“It was a stupid thing to do,” Jonah kept saying. “I know I was a coward about it. I know that now, but I just . . . chickened out, every time I wanted to tell you.”
“Yeah,” Troy had said. “Well, maybe that was the right instinct.”
“I don’t know,” Jonah had said, and there was a sandpaper edge of emotion in his voice that made Troy’s heart tighten. “I know this sounds stupid,” Jonah said, “but it was like you were the last person in the world I had any connection to. And I didn’t want to come all the way just to have you slam the door in my face. I wanted . . . I don’t know. To get to know you a little. I know we’re not really brothers, but . . . I got caught up with the idea of it. The idea of connection. I’m sorry that I wasn’t, braver, about it.”
And Troy wasn’t sure what to say. What do you do with a statement like that? The idea of a connection.
“Well,” Troy had said. It came to him that everything Jonah had loved was gone: his parents, wife, his unborn baby, the future he’d imagined for himself. “Well,” Troy said, “we should talk about it.”
He thinks of this all again as he recites his information to the parole service. Jonah is my brother, he thinks, gazing over to where Jonah is still standing in the doorway, in his cheap, puffy ski coat and blue stocking cap, his arms crossed over his chest. My brother. Biological half brother. And there is a kind of uncomfortable wonder to this fact.
“You’re clear,” the monitoring device guy says, and Troy slowly depresses the receiver. Jonah’s eyes skim over the surface of Troy’s face, even as he wavers in the doorway, keeping a respectful distance, his head cocked like a sad dog.
“It’s okay,” Troy says. “You might as well come on in.”
——
Growing up as an only child, Troy used to have fantasies about having a brother. A little brother was what he always imagined—and in fact, back in the days when he was baby-sitting, he had come up with a game that Ray loved, in which they’d pretended to be siblings. Tim and Tom were their pretend names, and they made believe that Ray was only two years younger than Troy, instead of almost eight. It was a way to control Ray, he supposed, to keep him from wanting to play irritating kids’ games or watch babyish movies that Troy disliked, but it also spoke to his own secret wish to have a cohort, a trusted follower in his adventures, someone to tease and argue with and hang out with.
He can’t quite picture Jonah in that mode, exactly. Jonah would have been too much trouble, he imagines—and he has another guilty flash of that strange, fierce, large-eyed little brother he would have hurt and disappointed. Ray wasn’t a good model, he thought. Ray had been too easy, too pliant, and in fact, he had probably done Ray a disservice, especially during Ray’s teenaged years, when Ray was living with him and Carla. He’d let Ray do whatever he wanted, as if he was in his twenties, and had even encouraged him to drink beer and get high and drive without a license and basically join with impunity in the general hell-raising that he and Carla were engaged in. Ray could have used a real parent.
Still, he found himself wondering what Jonah would have been like if they’d been raised together. Would he have grown up so skittish and evasive, so spacey and unsocialized? Troy doesn’t think so. He’s not just a guy who had a tragedy with a car accident, Troy thinks. Whatever’s wrong with him has been building up for years and years, and Troy can’t help but feel that Jonah would have been better off if he’d been around to look out for him.
And maybe he himself would be different as well. Jonah wouldn’t have been as malleable as Ray. It wouldn’t have been a replay of the old Tim and Tom game—Jonah was much smarter, much more deeply involved with his own imagination, and maybe if they’d known each other earlier, Troy would have grown up to be, as Judy said, a more reflective person.
Of course, if they’d grown up together, they wouldn’t be the same people at all. If and if and if— The little marks and scars they would have made on each other would have molded them in ways that were impossible to calculate. It’s a little like that math puzzle Jonah had told him about: an infinitely long line surrounds a finite area. Fathomless.
——
“Do you want some coffee?” he says to Jonah, who has settled at the kitchen table.
“Well . . .” Jonah says.
“I’m going to have some myself, okay? So it’s not a big decision. You want it or you don’t want it. Whichever you choose is fine.”
“Okay,” Jonah says, and he holds his coat in his arms, fiddling with it. “I guess I don’t want coffee, actually.” His eyes widen and unwiden. “Is this a bad time?” he says. “I can come back later—”
“It’s always a bad time,” Troy says, and shrugs. How much does he want to say? “Listen,” he says, and glances sharply at the phone. “I’m sorry I didn’t turn out to be . . . what you were hoping for.” He makes a laughing
sound. “You drew some pretty unlucky cards when you came looking for me, didn’t you?”
Jonah seems taken aback. “No!” he says, as if Troy has implied some bad intention. “Not at all.” He purses his lips. “Is there anything I could do to help?” he says.
“You could kill me,” Troy says. Then he shakes his head, disliking his own blithe sarcasm, his own self-pity, which he knows Jonah won’t find funny. “Never mind,” he says. “Nothing you can do, man. This is the hole I dug for myself, and I’ll have to deal with it.”
“Well,” Jonah says, “even if it’s something little. Like . . . going to the store for you . . . or whatever. There’s probably something I could do.”
“Not really,” Troy says, and then they are both silent, listening as the coffee machine begins to gurgle and bubble.
“So how’s things at work?” Troy says, and shifts his weight. “Ha! You know, someone mentioned the Gold Coin the other day and Vivian got all edgy about it. She’s still pissed at you for jumping ship.”
“Well,” Jonah says. “I wish I was still at the Stumble Inn with you guys. I’m not very good at making friends with people.”
“Mm,” Troy says, and there is a twinge of guilt. “You’re not missing anything,” he says, and pours himself a cup of coffee from the still-filling pot, not caring that it spills a little. He sits down at the table, rests his forehead against the ham of his palm. He thinks again of his conversation with Lisa Fix. “Shit,” he says, under his breath, and Jonah gazes at him cautiously.
“It’s about Loomis, I guess,” Jonah says, and Troy looks down. Is this the conversation he wants to be having?
“Sort of,” Troy says. “Not really. It’s not important.”
“It’s Loomis’s birthday today, isn’t it?”
And Troy looks up at him sharply. “How did you know that?”
Jonah shrugs. “You told me. Remember? We talked about all of this stuff. I just have a good memory for dates.”
