Finally Kim took his hand and held it against her breasts, his fingers squeezed tight in a way that suggested he shouldn’t caress her. But not unfriendly either.
Danny? she asked—her voice, after all the quiet, startled him. What’s going to happen to us?
He closed his eyes—here it came. He said, I don’t know.
I don’t want kids.
Me neither. But I promised.
She was quiet for a while, and he couldn’t help himself.
I don’t want to lose you, Kimmy.
After a long pause, she said, Me neither.
Danny almost broke in half with relief.
But I will, she added, shifting. Everything’s different now. I love you, but that’s because of a way things were that . . .
I know. But it’s not my fault.
Kim said, Do you want me to be his—his mother? I mean—
I don’t know, Danny said. If you asked me yesterday, I would have said that things—that I was a little worried—
Yeah, she said quickly.
—But that I wanted us to work it out. And if that’s true, then—
Then maybe we’d end up here sooner or later anyway? With a kid?
Maybe. I don’t know. But it was possible, yesterday.
She turned to him, cheeks wet. Is it all right if I don’t know yet?
Sure, he told her. I love you. Do you know that? I really love you.
What else could he say?
She turned and kissed him. Many times, she wouldn’t say I love you back—but when she kissed him, like this, he understood that’s what she meant. He returned the kiss, pressing himself into her big soft body.
His mouth opened wider; so did hers. For a few minutes they twined together, sinking into the couch cushions. Kim was always a voracious, wet kisser; it drove him nuts. No different now. Danny started to tingle. He rocked his hips a little, found his hands wanting to feel her, to slide down to her rear end. That little thrill of chaos again: Why not, why the fuck not? Who was around to care?
Kim plucked at his hand. Danny, she said, and sat up.
He groaned. He felt sixteen again, drunk on two beers, caught groping in the dark after a school dance.
Can’t you just hold on to me? she said. For a little while?
Sure, he said. Kim lay quietly next to him while he looked up at the ceiling, while his blood slowly flowed back to where it was supposed to.
After several minutes the rise and fall of her shoulder slowed down; he felt her blow longer breaths across his cheek. Jesus. Asleep. That was any better than making love? She wanted to get away as much as he did, no matter how righteous she got about it.
She didn’t want much of him. Certainly no part of the present.
He shifted and sat up, then lifted Kim’s legs off his thighs. She murmured. Bathroom, he said.
When he’d stood he saw Tom’s letter crumpled down between the cushions. He pulled it out and smoothed it against the arm of the couch. Hey, Tom, you died and I tried to get laid in your house.
You’re a pal.
Danny’s house now. His couch. His minivan in the driveway.
His son.
Could he get out of it? What if he went to the attorney with Walt and said, I don’t want any part of this? What if he told Kim he would?
Danny walked through the kitchen and into the back bathroom. He peed and washed his hands. His face in the mirror was puffy, his eyes bloodshot, his nose raw.
On the way back he paused in front of Colin’s door. He listened for the boy’s breathing. What had Tom and Brynn done to the poor little guy? Here Danny was, trying to figure a way to weasel out of a trap—thinking about papers and attorneys and getting lucky—when, the whole time, Colin was in more trouble than he could even understand.
He pushed open the door.
The stars on Colin’s ceiling shone that pale glow-in-the-dark green. Danny walked a few steps inside. He couldn’t make himself go to Colin yet, so instead he looked around at the shelves, the plastic tubs against the walls—everything put away neatly. It was a good room, a good place for a kid to be: happy, full of toys. Like Danny’s own had been. He and Tom had spent days in his room, as kids—between the two of them they’d had a ton of Star Wars junk. Had he ever been happier than in those days? When his parents had vanished into the background, and it was just him and Tom, making shit up?
Danny stood over Colin, asleep on his back with his mouth hanging open.
The boy didn’t look much like his father. In the face he was narrower, his nose longer—he’d look more like Brynn, the older he got. From the both of them he had height; the doctor thought he’d top six feet as an adult. Danny tried to see him that way: thin, with Brynn’s thick auburn hair cut short, parted on the side. What color were his eyes? Danny couldn’t remember. Not brown, not like Brynn’s, not—
Not black, not filled up with blood.
They’d made Danny look at Polaroids. On the way to the morgue he’d been trying to imagine seeing the bodies themselves, but the attendant told him they used pictures these days. He waited for a long time in a small windowless room. The policeman who’d called Danny asked him if he wanted coffee, and when the coffee came it was pretty good. A social worker sat with him for a while, and told him about people he could talk to, gave him pamphlets and a business card. In case he felt like it tomorrow, or anytime. It’s important that you gather up people who’ll help you. Do this as a team. The morgue attendant—a woman who seemed barely out of her teens, from a too-bouncy ponytail all the way down to a scattering of acne on her cheeks—told him that he should take his time. Tom and Brynn’s faces hadn’t been hurt too badly, she said, but in death—in car accidents—people looked different. In this case the force of the crash had caused his friends’ eyes to hemorrhage. They would be darker than he remembered. He ought to prepare himself.
She was right. The people in the pictures did not look like Tom and Brynn. No. No, they did. Their faces were like gray latex masks of Tom and Brynn, lying slack and hollow without heads inside to keep them shaped. The one on the right had Tom’s hair and beard. The other looked like Brynn, except her features were tilted, everything pulled down and to the right. He remembered seeing their bare collarbones, and thinking that outside the edges of the photos they were naked, and that seemed wrong to him, terribly wrong.
They had different expressions. Tom looked like he was telling a joke. His mouth was open and his lip was a little curled, showing his teeth. His black eyes were slitted, his head tilted back a bit. Brynn was sadder. She looked more dead; her skin more blue. Blood dotted her shoulder and her jaw, hinting at something awful down below. Her hair was frizzed around her head; she’d had it up in a bun when she left work at five. Her eyes were rolled up—white at the bottoms, black at the tops—her mouth open a little wider. Like, of the two of them, she was the one who had been facing forward, who had seen what was coming for them. Like she wanted to tell Tom, to warn him, but Tom wasn’t listening.
He told the attendant, I’ve seen enough.
They’d been out to dinner. Probably running a little late. They always seemed to be hurrying home, so they could stand where Danny stood now; looking down on their sleeping child. So they could effortlessly do what Danny couldn’t seem to find the courage to do: bend down and kiss Colin’s forehead, pull his covers up, risk waking him. Love him.
Did he love Colin?
He loved Tom. He had come to love Brynn. But their son? Shouldn’t he feel more than he did? If he was any type of good person at all, shouldn’t his heart open up to this poor kid? Yesterday he would have said, yeah, he loved Colin. Of course. He’s my godson.
But today?
What if the Devil popped into the room and offered a deal? You can have Tom and Brynn back. It’s a simple thing. Give me the boy and I’ll bring them back. Would he do it? What was Colin, anyway? He was three, barely formed. Everyone loved children so goddamned much—but what about the parents? What about them? Jus
t because they had a kid, their lives were all of a sudden worth less? All their work, all their love and effort, was gone, and nothing was left but a kid who couldn’t even begin to understand the loss—was that an even trade?
He thought about Tom’s parents, or Walt, trying to take Colin. If one of them was here right now, offering to take on the burden, would Danny fight? Could he? His first urge would be to go hysterical with relief. To grab Kim’s hand and run.
He thought about the way Colin would latch onto his hand—sometimes to take him places, to show him toys. But sometimes he’d just reach out and hold it, like that was the most natural thing in the world to do.
Who’d been happier to see him, lately? Colin, or Kim?
Danny sat heavily on the floor next to Colin’s bed. He was the worst person alive. He did love the boy. He did. Maybe not like his parents did—but that wasn’t Colin’s fault. None of it was Colin’s fault. Danny wished he could apologize to someone who would understand.
He tried to imagine it. Saying: I love you, Colin.
Lately he’d been teaching Colin about the guitar. His fingers were too small to do much, but Danny brought his Martin over and taught Colin how to hold it, showed him that different strings made different sounds. Danny held down chords and Colin strummed raggedly with a pick, after each success looking up at Danny in wonder. Colin got excited these days when he saw the guitar case. Sometimes Danny would strum and Colin would warble the ABC song—which, at his age, was mostly just nonsense, but still.
Sometimes Danny would put Colin on his shoulders and chug around the backyard like an engine, pumping his arms, and Colin would pull on his ponytail whenever he needed to sound the whistle. He’d shriek up there, almost convulsing with happiness.
But Danny was only thinking of good times. Of playing.
Colin still peed on the floor every once in a while. He had to be bathed. And the playing itself—that took hours and hours; you couldn’t just turn on the TV and let the poor kid’s mind rot. And then there was the small matter of his personality and his education, all the good feelings and thoughts and karma that Tom and Brynn put into his head simply by being around. The confidence.
And, of course, any minute now Colin would wake up and ask where his mother was. And after a night of fucking around, Danny still didn’t have an answer to that one, did he?
But really, how hard a question was it? There was only one answer. Danny would say, Mommy and Daddy are asleep, but they can’t wake up. Other people would say, Mommy and Daddy are in heaven, and he would tell Colin that it all meant the same thing. Mommy and Daddy had to go away. It would be awful. Colin would cry; they’d all cry. Nothing could prevent that.
What he needed to be thinking about instead were the questions looming farther down the road, when Colin was older, when whether Danny lied or told the truth mattered a hell of a lot more.
Danny saw himself years from now, sitting at a table in a small, dark kitchen. Colin sat across from him—a teenager maybe, or even a young man. Colin was tall, handsome—he had scruffy red hair, Brynn’s narrow face. Tom’s glasses, maybe. He wore a black T-shirt.
Danny couldn’t say where they were—not in this house, anyway, but a place much poorer, dingier. Like an apartment. A place like Kim’s, only Kim was nowhere around. How could she be? That was too much to hope for, too much to ask of her, of anybody.
The apartment looked like the sort of place where people might have a lot of arguments. And why not? He and Colin had both lost too much to be happy all the time.
But they weren’t arguing, not now. They held cans of beer, and Colin was smoking—Sorry, Brynnie, he picked it up someplace. Worse things could happen.
What were they like? Colin asked him. He had Tom’s voice: rich, believable.
Danny heard himself say, They loved each other. They loved you. They even loved me.
They were good people?
He saw himself reaching across the table, putting his hand on top of Colin’s. The boy’s face turned inward. Getting sad. Worried.
They were the best people I ever knew, Danny told him. And you got half of each of them.
He might have been dozing. Kim’s hand on his shoulder made him jerk. He looked at the bed, where Colin lay, still sleeping. Kim settled down onto the rug beside him.
She whispered, What are you doing?
I didn’t want him to wake up alone. As Danny said this, he realized it was true.
She nestled closer to him.
I woke up alone, she said.
She had to know what that sounded like.
Kim—
No, it’s okay. She said this next to his ear. It was . . . a joke. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.
Me neither, he said. You probably can’t win with me for a while.
He couldn’t see her eyes in the shadows, exactly, but he knew she was looking at him. She whispered, Can I sit here with you?
Danny squeezed her shoulder.
Yeah, he said. Sure.
She moved closer. He thought again, panicked, of all the things they had to do. One of them ought to go over to the coffee shop and put up a sign, right away. The morning shift was just about due to arrive.
But Kim lowered down and rested her cheek on Danny’s leg, and pulled his forearm to her chest. She kissed his hand and tucked his curled fingers under her chin. He rubbed her fingers. He touched her ring.
He watched Colin, who lay still, quiet—unaware that the world was about to end, the moment he opened his eyes. Danny reached out and put his other hand on Colin’s pillow, next to his hair, and listened to the room, quiet except for their breathing.
The shop could wait. All of it could, just a few more minutes. If that was all the time they had left, the three of them, then Danny couldn’t bear to spend it any other way.
A Single Awe
And [I] understood, in the endless instant before she answered, how Pharaoh’s army, seeing the ground break open, seeing the first fringed horses fall into the gap, made their vows, that each heart changes, faced with a single awe and in that moment a promise is written out.
—Brenda Hillman,
“Mighty Forms”
WHILE DANA MACARTHUR’S HUSBAND BRYAN WAS BUSY unwrapping gifts with his tellers, she slipped away—finally—from the Sentinel Savings holiday party to smoke her only cigarette of the night.
Smoking was allowed inside the banquet hall—the upper reaches of the ceiling had been foggy for hours—but Dana was trying to keep her backsliding hidden. She’d quit last New Year’s, more or less, as a promise to Bryan. Honey, he’d say, I just don’t want anything to happen to you. And how could she disagree? But she missed her cigarettes, missed the private time they’d always given her. All night she’d watched the bankers get drunker and drunker, watched Bryan fuss happily over them, and felt, more and more, as though she was standing alone in the room. Why not go the distance?
She almost escaped the banquet hall unnoticed. But at the doorway to the lobby, turning the corner too fast, she nearly walked into the chest of a man she knew: Jimmy, a new teller at Bryan’s bank, just out of college, tall and trim and smelling faintly of beer.
Excuse me, Jimmy said. He bowed a little, swept his hand forward in mock gallantry. Milady.
Dana sidestepped him with only a murmur of acknowledgment. She had met Jimmy just once before tonight, while stopping by the bank for a lunch date with Bryan a few weeks earlier. She’d noticed Jimmy right away—you couldn’t help but notice him. He was handsome in a catalog-model way: sandy-blond, with a symmetrical face and slim hips, and a half smile she bet he’d practiced. He’d winked at her, when they first shook hands across the counter. She decided then not to pay him much mind. Most bankers, she’d found, were a lot less slick than they hoped.
But earlier tonight, while Bryan and the other branch managers handed out bonus checks, Dana had caught Jimmy staring at her from the other side of the room, his arm slung across the shoulders of a short, pretty blonde.
He’d grinned at Dana, rocked on his feet; the woman stared wide-eyed at the party over the rim of her plastic cup. The quickness of his smile disturbed her; Dana had looked away. Bryan had reintroduced them not long after. (You remember Jimmy? Of course. His handshake, firm and dry. The woman’s name was April. His wife or girlfriend, Dana couldn’t remember.)
In a small, shadowed nook just outside the entrance to the hall, Dana lit up, feeling small and furtive. Snow swirled past her, sparse and gritty. The parking lot shone with a glittering veneer of ice—another eggnog and she might have trouble negotiating it in her heels. There’d be some bruised asses later, when the party let out. Dana watched headlights crawl east on Henderson. The roads would be getting bad, too.
She thought about Jimmy’s wink, his smile. She tried to make herself angry, but the feeling wouldn’t take. Dana was twenty-seven—hardly old—but in the past couple of years, it was true, people like Jimmy and April had come to seem younger and younger—more like the high schoolers in Dana’s algebra classes than the kind of people she and Bryan were. Which was like no one, except in the way they acted. Everyone in the banquet hall was either too young, drinking too much, or middle-aged, trying to seem young by drinking too much. Jimmy might be nothing more than a boy in a grown-up’s body, but at least he didn’t pretend to be someone he wasn’t.
And anyway: whatever else in him might be flawed, Dana could certainly appreciate his grown-up body.
As she thought this the pneumatic door to her left wheezed, and Jimmy himself appeared, leaning his torso outside, craning his neck left and right. Dana froze—her nook was just out of his line of sight. But Jimmy walked outside anyway, shrugging on an overcoat. He turned a half circle, and then spotted her. He grinned, feigning surprise.
Dana, hey, he said. He pointed at her hand. You looked like someone sneaking. I’m dying. Can I bum one?
She should have told him she was finished—which was the truth. But instead she said, Who says I’m sneaking? and extended her pack.
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