Recovery

by Michael Baron

  Ryan offered the barest trace of a smile, and she headed down to make his tea. A few minutes later, she was back up with that, along with a couple of graham crackers in case he got hungry, even though he’d already told her that he wasn’t.

  “Thanks,” he said after taking a sip. “That’s good.”

  “Try to get some more rest. Let me know if you need anything else.”

  Ryan took another sip and looked up at her. They had a moment of wordless eye contact, during which he seemed more vulnerable than he’d appeared to her in weeks, and then Corrina turned to leave.

  Chapter Six

  About an hour later, Corrina heard Ryan making his way slowly down the stairs. His steps were usually so deliberate and quick; this told her more about his condition than the thermometer had earlier.

  “Is everything okay?” she said from her office where she was working on her desktop computer. It had occurred to her that Gardner’s machine was newer and much more powerful and that his office was also more spacious, but she wasn’t ready to claim either just yet.

  Ryan didn’t answer right away, but as Corrina got up from her desk, he moved into the doorway. His face was as flushed as it was before and his posture was slumped.

  “I still feel like crap, but I figured I’d crash on the couch in the den so I can watch some TV.”

  “Makes sense. Do you need anything?”

  Ryan took a deep breath before answering, as though stringing words together was requiring energy that was in short supply. “I’d love some more of that tea, if you don’t mind.”

  “You got it.”

  Ryan made his way slowly to the den while Corrina headed to the kitchen. When she put the kettle on, she called out to him.

  “More graham crackers?”

  “Nah. One bite was more than enough.”

  Corrina grinned. Ryan sounded the way he did when he was a kid and Corrina was just getting to know him. Open. She’d taken to him right away back then. Everything was easier – for all of them – before she and Gardner got engaged.

  When the tea was ready, Corrina brought it into the den. Ryan was surfing through Netflix trying to find something to watch. She put the tea on the side table next to him and then sat down at the other end of the couch.

  Ryan took his eyes from the television and looked at her curiously, clearly unsure about why she was sitting down. She smiled at him.

  “Don’t you have to go to work?”

  “I called the bureau and told them that I couldn’t make it today because you were sick. They were very sympathetic. I can get away with anything right now. George said he hoped you felt better soon.”

  This seemed to confuse Ryan, but he recovered quickly. “So you’re basically using me to get a day off of work,” he said, the slightest bit of tartness back in his voice.

  “You saw right through that, huh?”

  Ryan tilted his head, but he didn’t respond. After a few seconds, he turned back toward the television.

  “I’m not finding anything,” he said, gesturing with the TV remote. “Do you want to take over?”

  “Persevere. You’ll come up with something.”

  Eventually, Ryan switched over to HBO GO and decided that he wanted to watch an episode of Girls. Corrina had seen most of them already and knew that the material was very sophisticated. She wasn’t concerned that Ryan couldn’t handle it, only that she wasn’t sure how comfortable she was going to be watching it with him.

  If he was doing this with the intention of making her squeamish, he didn’t indicate it, and two sex scenes in Corrina lost any sense of discomfort she’d had. The show was inspired and funny, and by all indications, it was extremely accurate, though Ryan actually had a better chance of knowing that than she did – not that he had any idea what post-college urban living was about. They found themselves laughing together on several occasions, and they even talked about a few of the scenes (though, thankfully, none related to sex or drugs).

  As soon as the first episode was over, Ryan clicked on the second and then the third immediately after that. The axiom that laughter is the best medicine seemed to have some validity, because Ryan’s complexion wasn’t as ruddy anymore and his posture was becoming straighter with each show.

  He was about to turn on a fourth episode when he shifted his body slightly in Corrina’s direction. “Dad would have had a huge problem with me watching this, you know.”

  Corrina imagined Gardner’s face if he’d found his son watching Girls. He would have realized that Ryan was too old to prohibit from doing so, but he would still have made Ryan feel terrible about the decision.

  “I know he would have.”

  And you would have backed him up.

  Ryan didn’t actually say this, but suddenly Corrina had the sense that he was thinking it. It had been a pattern between them, something Corrina had never successfully navigated around, though she’d been aware of it for some time. Corrina always stood behind Gardner’s decisions regarding his son, even when she’d already hinted at a different opinion to Ryan. Many of the tensest times between Ryan and her came at these junctures.

  “If I wasn’t sick – and it wasn’t my birthday – would you be trying to talk me out of watching this show now?”

  Corrina didn’t have to think about her answer. “You’re a big boy, Ryan. I don’t think your morals have been twisted beyond salvation over the last couple of hours.”

  Corrina could tell that Ryan hadn’t expected that answer. She continued.

  “Besides, it’s freaking brilliant.”

  He laughed. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it is. Put on the next episode.”

  After that show was over, Corrina realized she was hungry. She asked Ryan if he wanted anything, and he said he would be interested in having a little something to eat. She went into the kitchen to see what might be available. There was rarely anyone home at lunchtime, especially now that Corrina was back at work, so they weren’t going to have much. The choices would be even slimmer given Ryan’s malaise.

  Just then, Corrina remembered that she had chicken soup in the freezer. She’d made a big pot of it on one of the first chilly days of October – back when Gardner was still alive – and she’d frozen half. It would be a perfect lunch for a day like today.

  A short while later, she returned to the den with their bowls. When she put them on the coffee table, Ryan chuckled.

  “Is this one of those magic mom tricks where you whip up a batch of soup in fifteen minutes?”

  Corrina wasn’t sure she had any “magic mom tricks,” but it both surprised her and warmed her that Ryan thought she might. “It was a magic microwave trick, actually. The soup was in the freezer.”

  “You shoulda taken credit for it.”

  “Let’s pretend that I did.”

  Ryan picked up the television remote and she fully expected him to click to another episode of Girls. Instead, he turned the TV off. He reached for his bowl and turned to face her on the couch.

  “We should take your temperature again after we eat,” she said, “but you’re looking better.”

  “I still don’t feel fantastic, but I definitely don’t feel as crappy as I felt this morning.”

  “It’s really too bad this is happening today. Have you ever been sick on your birthday before?”

  Ryan thought about this for a second and then said, “Does throwing up from eating too much candy count?”

  Corrina laughed. “Did that really happen?”

  Ryan took a spoonful of broth before answering. “You make great chicken soup, by the way. I probably should have mentioned that one of the last hundred times or so you’ve served it. Yeah, it really happened. I think I was eight or nine. Dad and I went to a huge amusement center near my old house and he let me have whatever I wanted. I think I had five churros, a banana
split, and a couple of cotton candies. It was the second cotton candy that got me. I yakked a rainbow, which was kind of cool, actually.”

  “A perfect mealtime image, thanks,” Corrina said, smiling so Ryan knew that she was kidding.

  “Yeah, sorry about that. Believe me, whatever you’re imagining, the real thing was way weirder.”

  Ryan seemed to get lost in the memory for a moment and then he continued.

  “Dad got a little nervous when I threw up, since he didn’t usually deal with that sort of thing. He suggested that we go home and I swore to him I was okay, even though my legs were a little rubbery. A half-hour later, I was totally fine and we stayed out until ten.”

  Corrina and Gardner had been married for a few years by this point, if Ryan were talking about his eighth or ninth birthday. Gardner had never mentioned an occasion where Ryan had thrown up, though it would have been late by the time he came back from Boston.

  “He did love making your birthday epic.”

  “That’s for sure. Right from the time I was a little kid. It was like having an extra birthday party. There’d be something in school, then something with my friends, then something with my family, and then the blowout with Dad. It was like a birthday marathon.”

  Corrina noticed how Ryan’s attitude changed while he was talking about this. In recent years, he’d carried himself in a consciously teenage manner, but while he was talking now, he seemed boyish and bubbly, in spite of being sick.

  “I remember the first time your father told me about one of these events,” she said. “I couldn’t believe how much the two of you packed into a day.”

  Ryan’s expression clouded a bit. “That was probably right after he and Mom split up for good. Dad really went all out that year – not that he was trying to buy my affections or anything.”

  Corrina and Gardner had started dating in September, a few months after Gardner and Janice’s divorce had become official. Corrina wouldn’t meet Ryan until early the next year, but Gardner debriefed her on the birthday celebration in exhaustive detail.

  “We did some cool stuff on my third birthday,” Ryan said, “but that second year he just went crazy. He rented a fancy sports car for us to drive around in, and we did all kinds of stuff during the day and then went to a Celtics game that night. It was pretty insane, but I loved it. At the time, I thought that maybe this would be the kind of thing we would do more often now that it was just the two of us when we were together. Didn’t turn out that way, though.”

  Corrina wondered if Ryan blamed her in some way for things not turning out that way, but she knew in her heart that it wouldn’t have been any different if Gardner had stayed single. Gardner was only ever able to engage in parenting in spurts. When Janice moved Ryan two hours away to Concord, MA, Gardner only got a weekend a month and three weeks in the summer, and even then Gardner’s endurance seemed to wane after the initial five or six hours. The first Saturday afternoon Corrina spent playing board games with Ryan while Gardner worked on a brief, she chalked it up to a heavy caseload. By the third time this sort of thing happened, she realized that Gardner had given all he could by lunchtime.

  “That was the most memorable one,” Ryan said, jogging Corrina from her thoughts. “That and the one after Mom died.”

  It hadn’t registered to Corrina until just that moment that both of Ryan’s parents had died in the early fall. In Janice’s case, it was right before her son’s twelfth birthday. Corrina didn’t need to be reminded about what that birthday had been like. In an effort to obliterate his son’s grief – at least for the day – Gardner had gone way over the top, even by his standards. Between the flight simulator, the paintball battle, and the ice hockey rink Gardner had rented for just the two of them, it was obvious that Gardner was trying to do anything he could to distract his son. He never stood a chance. While they were playing paintball, Ryan got hit in an unpadded spot and collapsed in a heap. When Gardner got to him, the kid was sobbing uncontrollably and couldn’t be consoled. They never even got to the hockey rink, coming home and having pizza instead before Ryan went to bed early. Until today, it was the only other time that Corrina had spent any part of Ryan’s birthday with him.

  Corrina reached out to pat her stepson on the arm. “That was a tough one, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tougher than this one?”

  Ryan looked away, and then down at his soup. “That was really tough.”

  Corrina wished she could have seen Ryan and Janice together in a natural setting. Gardner often went by himself to pick up Ryan, and the few times that Corrina had met Janice, the setting was anything but natural. What she knew without seeing them together was that Ryan always adored his mother. It was obvious in the ease with which he talked about her when she was still alive and in the way he honored her memory after she was gone. Corrina thought now that she might have benefitted greatly from seeing the ways in which mother and son related to each other. It might have been both instructive and revealing, and it might have even helped Gardner as well.

  For a minute or more, neither of them spoke. Corrina took another sip of soup, but it was obvious that this wasn’t one of those situations where people quieted down for a short while to eat.

  “I realize it was a cheat,” Ryan said at last.

  Corrina turned toward him. “You’ve definitely been cheated, Ryan.”

  Ryan put his soup bowl on the coffee table and then faced her more directly. “I’m not talking about being cheated. I don’t know if I have been or not. I guess we’ll figure that out eventually, huh? I’m talking about the birthday blowouts with Dad. I know the whole thing was a cheat.”

  Corrina wasn’t sure she was following him, so she chose not to respond, hoping he would continue.

  “I’d love to know what he was thinking,” he said. “Do you have any idea?”

  “He loved those days, Ryan. He’d talk about them for weeks ahead of time, and he always came back from one looking like he’d had ten cups of coffee.”

  “But what was he thinking? What was the point of it? Did he really think that one full-on-dad day a year made up for three hundred and sixty four days when he mailed it in?”

  Corrina and Ryan had never explored this territory before. It wasn’t as though Ryan had never complained to her about Gardner, and it wasn’t as though he’d never tried to get her to side with him in a conflict, but they’d never talked about her husband’s unwillingness to roll up his sleeves and really father his son.

  “Your dad loved gestures,” she said.

  Corrina was no stranger to this. She’d spent most of her marriage to Gardner waiting for the everyday rhythm that never came. He would disappear into his work for long stretches – inaccessible even when he was sitting across from her at the dinner table – and then pop up with tickets to Aruba or reservations for a tasting menu at an outrageously expensive Manhattan restaurant. At some point, Corrina had come to accept this as the norm. She was even thinking about suggesting a vacation to Gardner on what turned out to be their last night together.

  “Did he think they worked?” Ryan said.

  “They did. To some degree.”

  Ryan leaned toward her. “Come on, Corrina. It’s just you and me.”

  Corrina sat back in the sofa, realizing immediately that it made it seem as though she were backing away from her stepson. “Different people love differently.”

  Ryan’s face expressed increased skepticism. “Is that what he was doing?”

  “What do you think it was?”

  Ryan’s expression had been growing more intense as this conversation continued. Now, though, he seemed to deflate a bit. He took a lengthy pause before answering.

  “I think he thought if he did a few big things, he didn’t have to do anything else. I mean, my birthday was always the biggest, but let’s not forget the ridiculous Christmas presents you and I
always got, and the crazy amounts of stuff he would buy us whenever he won a case.”

  Corrina’s eye fell on the Montelupo Museo vase Gardner had gotten her just the past July. “I think you’re looking at it more cynically than you should, Ry. I don’t think there was as much of an agenda to it as you’re suggesting.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t. I just think that’s who he was. Except in his practice, your dad wasn’t really capable of offering himself in more than small doses.”

  This statement seemed to jostle Ryan’s brain. Corrina could imagine him recalibrating as she watched him.

  “Why was that enough for you, Corrina? I know it wasn’t nearly enough for my mother. I never actually spoke to her about it directly, but it came up several times with friends when she thought I wasn’t listening.”

  “It was enough for me because the small doses were amazing. You saw it yourself – when your dad was there, he was so there that he vaporized his absences.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  “And you’re saying that you were on board with this? That you were okay with him making guest appearances? That it all sort of averaged out?”

  How far into this was Corrina willing to go with Ryan? She’d had versions of this conversation with her sisters, but she never imagined having it with the teenager sitting across from her, even under circumstances far different from this one.

  She spoke measuredly. “I’m not saying that when I was a little girl I dreamed of a man who would sweep me off my feet once every couple of months.”

  This seemed to connect with Ryan in some way. “I’ve wondered about that a lot, you know.”

  Corrina tilted her head. “You have?”

  Ryan shifted slightly more in her direction. “Yeah, I have. It didn’t make sense to me that you were okay with this. It didn’t seem to fit who you were. But you always looked okay with it.”

  Corrina offered the slightest shrug. “It wouldn’t have been very good if I’d let you see that I wanted more than that.”