by Matt Dean
Chapter 30
She found her baby brother in the waiting room, huddled in a seat near the wall, clutching his phone to his chest as if it were a tiny light-up teddy bear. She went and sat next to him.
He touched the back of his head. “Ten stitches.”
“Where is he?”
“Having a PET scan.”
“You did good,” she said. “You took care of business like a champ. Take a second to be proud of yourself, okay?”
He somehow managed to nod in agreement without quite looking like he agreed.
The automatic doors opened and—of all the extraordinary, improbable things—her other brother limped in out of the rain. He was wearing running clothes and, for some reason, a dog collar. Someone followed him in, a bearded man in camouflage pants. Both men were muddied and bloodied and soaked through, shedding a trail of brownish sludge as they walked. While the bearded man checked in at the desk, Ben ambled over to Corinne and John Carter.
“What’s up?” He said it as a greeting, not a question, as if they’d all arranged to meet here for coffee or a late lunch.
“Daddy collapsed again,” Corinne said.
Ben all but fell into a chair. Wincing, he pressed his hands against his ribs. “That’s fucking bullshit. Is he okay?”
As before, John Carter touched the back of his head. “Ten stitches.”
“Are you okay?” Corinne said. “You and your buddy look pretty rough.”
Just then, the friend hobbled over. Ben made introductions, but he gave the wrong names, and they all had to introduce themselves anyway.
“You can call me Jimmy. Only Littlefield calls me La Flamme.”
“Corinne, not Coco. Pleased to meet you.”
“John Carter, not Tater. Cripes, Ben. Stop calling me that.”
Using a little pantomime and a lot of profanity, Ben and Jimmy described the “cluster fuck” that had brought them to the ER. The gist of it seemed to be that weed and boys and the laws of physics were a poor mix. Ben had scraped up his hands and wrists. He might have cracked some ribs, but he wouldn’t hear of seeing a doctor. He’d kicked Jimmy twice in the face, once with the heel of each sneakered foot.
“I was bleeding like a mother,” Jimmy said.
“Luckily he had, like, an old T-shirt in the car,” Ben said.
“To soak up the blood,” Jimmy said.
“But he couldn’t drive,” Ben said.
“So I gave him my keys,” Jimmy said.
“But I flooded the engine,” Ben said.
“It has a carburetor,” Jimmy said.
“Car’s old as fuck,” Ben said.
“So we walked,” Jimmy said.
“It’s only five blocks,” Ben said.
“Wasn’t like I was in much pain,” Jimmy said.
“We smoked up the rest of what he had on the way,” Ben said.
“Medicinal purposes,” Jimmy said.
Their banter had the timing of a Vaudeville comedy routine. Corinne’s head began to ache. She excused herself and went outside to call Andrei. In the last twenty or thirty minutes, he’d texted her about seven times, nothing but a bunch of web pages. News articles, maybe. Some fresh disaster in the world. She held her breath and dialed his number.
“My love.” He wasn’t using his disaster voice. In fact, he sounded as if he’d been napping. “How’s your dad?”
“I haven’t seen him yet. He’s getting a PET scan.”
“Did you see my messages?”
“Sort of.”
“There are two grad schools in Pittsburgh that offer economics, and two more within an hour’s drive. There’s a list of research topics here. They sound pretty wonky to me. Hold on a second.”
Why had she expected some world-scale disaster, when she should have foreseen only this? When they’d decided to get married, he’d sent her the names of caterers and signed her up for The Knot. When they’d decided to have a baby, he’d sent her a period tracker for her phone and bought her a basal thermometer. Now they’d more or less decided to move to Pittsburgh, and so he’d begun plotting their life there. Of course he had. He managed complex systems for a living. Of course he’d treat his marriage as if it were a project to research, plan, and direct.
“This is from Carnegie Mellon.” She heard the click of his mouse, the clack of his keyboard. “Okay, here we go. Research Topics. Real Business Cycles. Expectations and Indeterminacy of Monetary Equilibrian Experimental Economies. What does that even mean? No, don’t tell me. Distribution of Income Within and Across Households. International Trade Policy. Female Labor Supply and Fertility.”
“Very wonky,” Corinne said.
“You don’t sound happy. You sound lugubrious.”
“I’m distracted, that’s all. My Dad—”
“Of course. Sure. Sorry. But it’s wonky enough? Maybe wonky enough to apply?”
“I think so. I’ll take a look tonight.”
“We do pretty well for ourselves when we talk about stuff,” he said. “At least, you know, I think so.”
“Me too,” she said—but she was thinking, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh. They’d be living in the land of snow shovels and Yankees. Andrei, Vic, and Jodie would be the only people in her entire state of residence whose names she new.
“I should go,” she said.
“Do you want me to print out some of this stuff for you?”
“You can,” she said. “I should— I should go, though.”
When she went back inside, a nurse was just calling “James La Flame-y.” The boys all clomped off together, as if medical exams were a group sport. Corinne went looking for her father. She didn’t find him, but so many of the exam room doors were shut that it hardly counted as a proper search.
By following the sound of Ben’s voice, she found her way to Jimmy’s room. A doctor in a white lab coat had just finished putting a stitch in Jimmy’s lower lip. Soon, an orderly came to take him to radiology. Corinne and John Carter sat in the two little hard chairs in the corner. Ben sat on the foot of the bed and swung his legs. A clump of mud knocked loose from one of his sneakers splattered across his brother’s shin. John Carter grunted and glowered and brushed off his leg.
“Hey, Tater,” Ben said, “how come you’re still in your PJs?”
“Fucking…don’t…call me…fucking…Tater.”
“Two out of ten,” Ben said. “Try this. ‘Don’t fucking call me Tater, you fucking fuck.’”
Corinne gave him a look.
“What?” said Ben, opening his hands. “I offer the benefit of my fucking expertise.”
“Nothing makes any sense anymore,” John Carter said in a small voice.
“It’s just simple grammar, bro,” Ben said. “Unless you put the fucks in the right place—”
John Carter flushed so deeply that his cheeks turned nearly purple. “Shut the fuck up,” he shouted. “How’s that?”
“Points off for lack of creativity, but I give it a solid seven.”
“Children, please,” Corinne said.
John Carter said, “What I meant was, nothing makes sense anymore without Mama.”
“Fuck that,” Ben said. “Nothing made sense with Mama.”
John Carter glared at Ben. “What?”
Ben bared his teeth. A cruel smile or an anxious snarl—Corinne couldn’t have said which. “She never wanted kids and a family,” he said. “That’s fuckin’ obvious. So she made everybody suffer.”
“Shut up,” John Carter said. “Shut up.”
“She gave away my dog,” Ben said. “She was the drunkest person at Coco’s wedding. The drunkest person in a room full of Irish fucking Catholics.”
“Romanian fucking Catholics,” Corinne said.
“What dog?” John Carter said.
“Bozo,” Ben said.
“Bozo? Bozo the dog?”
“No, Bozo the Commander-in-motherfucking-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet,” Ben said. “Yes, Bozo the dog, who the fuck el
se are we talking about, Tater?”
“That’s not what happened, though,” John Carter said. “Mama didn’t give Bozo away.”
Ben blinked a few times. “What?”
“You were at the Jamboree. He got hit by a car. Mama took him to the emergency vet, but they couldn’t do anything for him. She told you she took him to the pound?”
“That’s what she told him,” Corinne said. “I was there when she said it.”
“See?” Ben said. “This is exactly what I’m fucking saying. Nothing made sense with Mama. Why would she do that? Why would she say she gave him away when she didn’t?”
“To protect you, dummy,” John Carter said. “So you’d think he was still out there somewhere, happy being a dog. It’s not that hard to figure out—is it?”
Ben got down from the bed and stalked to the door and back. He made a fist and let it go. “I have to walk away for a minute. I just have to— Yeah. Walk away.”
He bolted from the room as if a part of him were on fire, swinging the door so hard that it banged against the magnetic stop and stuck there. Within a few seconds, Corinne heard another door slamming on the other side of the unit. The ward went momentarily silent, and then there were voices murmuring in other rooms, the rhythmic hiss-thud-hiss of a respirator, instruments quietly beeping.
“Should I try to smooth things over?” Corinne turned to John Carter. “Or will you?”
“Let him figure it out for himself,” John Carter said dully. He polished his phone on the leg of his pajama bottoms. “I should call Doris. We were supposed to go see the Festival of Lights. I’d better tell her we probably can’t.”
Corinne listened while he retreated down the corridor, his rubber clogs squeaking softly on the linoleum. Rather than sit around in some stranger’s room, she thought, she should try again to find Daddy. But instead, she succumbed to the peculiar inertia of the ER, that curious—or was it incurious?— tendency to stay where you were until someone came and got you and put you somewhere else. She played her brothers’ argument over in her mind, choosing the precise moments when she could have—should have—intervened and made peace.
Somewhere a woman was sobbing. Someone was pushing or pulling a cart with a squeaky wheel. Corinne got up and paced the room. Her ER inertia was giving way to entropy.
The white-coated doctor who’d stitched Jimmy’s lip glanced in and nodded to her as if in greeting. Before she could acknowledge him, he turned to the room opposite. He knocked twice on the door and went in without waiting for an answer. Corinne had the briefest glimpse of her father—he was inside the room, sitting at the end of the bed—before the doctor closed the door.
After a couple of minutes, it opened again and the doctor backed partway through it. “I wish I had good news,” he said. “But at least now we know.” Moving aside his lab coat, he glanced down at a pager hooked to his belt. “Sit tight. I’ll swing by as soon as I hear from the radiologist. Shouldn’t be long.” He hurried away.
Corinne dashed across the hall and caught the door before it could swing shut. Daddy was sitting sideways on the bed, swinging his legs. He was barefoot. When he saw her, he grinned and rushed to meet her.
“Coco,” he said, wrapping her in a bear hug and rocking her side to side. “What are you doing here?”
“John Carter texted—” She took a breath. “I came to— But I just overheard the doc—” Another breath. “He said there’s bad news. What is it? What’s going on?”
Holding her at arms’ length, still grinning, he said, “I have a disease, and it’s called—” He gave it a second’s thought. “Nope. I’ve already forgotten the name of it. It’s incredible, whatever it is.”
“Daddy, what—? Incredible? What kind of a disease is incredible?”
“It’s my thyroid. It’s enlarged or something. Hypo or hyper, whichever. I probably have to have part of it taken out and go on Synthroid.” Hugging her again, he said into her ear, “But I don’t have Parkinson’s-plus. I don’t have Parkinson’s-plus.”
What was Parkinson’s-plus? Which was it, hypo or hyper? What were the complications and side effects of a thyroidectomy? Why was he barefoot? There was so much to take in, so much to wonder about, but for the moment, she let herself dissolve into his weird infectious joy.
Someone tapped on the door. It was Ben. “Hey, Pop. How’s your nod?”
“Been better.”
“Let’s see,” Ben said.
“It’s bandaged,” Daddy said, but he turned anyway and showed the back of his head.
Ben turned, too, and ran his fingers up from his hairline to his own scar, a white lightning bolt slashing across the right side of his occipital bone. “We’ll be twins,” he said.
“Scar twins,” Daddy said. “Is that a thing?”
“That’s not a thing, Daddy,” Corinne said.
“La Flamme’s all clear,” Ben said. “They gave him Motrin. He’s pissed.”
“No doubt.”
“Can you carry us back to the house?”
“Sure,” she said. “Where’s John Carter? Do you know?”
“Talking to Doris, I think.”
“Did someone apologize?” she said. “Please tell me at least one of you apologized?”
Ben shook his head. “We brawled out back. I kicked his ass, then we hugged it out.” He ducked out of the room again.
Sighing, Corinne turned to her father. “I guess we’re just waiting for you, then.”
He kneaded the back of his neck. “I’ll see if I can find Ramanujan.”
“Ramanujan like the mathematician?”
“Exactly. Who’s La Flamme?”
“He’s Ben’s— Well— Are you familiar with the word ‘bromance’? Or ‘man-crush,’ which I think is perhaps a more traditional term?”
Daddy blanched, no doubt for exquisitely parental reasons—the ongoing degradation of the language and culture, etc. “There’s a certain self-explanatory quality to each of those. Let’s leave it there.”
While he went to find the doctor, she poked her head into the other room. “Ten-minute warning,” she said.
“Coco,” Ben said. “We’re doing this thing.” He turned to Jimmy. “Say it again how you said it before.”
“It’s like Nickel and Dimed plus On the Road.”
“But as a comic,” Ben said.
“We travel wherever we can get to,” Jimmy said, “but probably mostly red states, just on what we can earn from minimum-wage jobs, day labor, shit like that.”
“Sounds like fun,” Corinne said. “But who am I kidding? Not really.”
Ben said, “The greatest challenge right now to our economy is— Aw, fuck it. I can’t remember. I’m just in it as the control group.”
“Income inequality,” Jimmy said. “And, yeah, I’m actually the control group. Littlefield here’s a quote-unquote ‘war veteran, and I’m just your average dickhead. So we’ll get see if people really give two shits about veterans or not.”
“Uh-huh,” Corinne said with a nod. “Ten minutes. Meet you out front.”
Keys in hand, she trudged into the damp, shimmering night to fetch her car. The rain had gone, leaving a chill in the air. From somewhere on the other side of the Ashley River, she heard the squeal of a siren—whether headed toward them or away, she couldn’t tell. Closer at hand, probably on the Crosstown, a truck’s Jake brakes stuttered and growled. She paused to look up at the stars, what few there were. The violet sky had a strange kind of purity to it, as if the firmament and the spheres were tangible objects and the day’s storms had scrubbed them clean.
The sky in Pittsburgh probably looked exactly the same. A few degrees of latitude wouldn’t make much difference. The constellations wouldn’t be unrecognizable. The heavens wouldn’t be green instead of black.
But still. She couldn’t reconcile herself to the idea. Pittsburgh. It might as well be Hong Kong or Rabat. At least in Morocco there wouldn’t be any snow.
Once she started walkin
g again, she heard the wet slap of footsteps behind her—someone trotting to catch up with her. She rearranged her keys in her hand, ready for the second time in the day to use them as weapons—but this time, like the last, the approaching stranger was no stranger at all. It was her father.
“Coco,” he said. “Coco, wait.”
She turned back and went to meet him. “What are you doing? You must be freezing.”
He was shivering. He had on only his T-shirt, no jacket. He’d gotten his gardening clogs back from John Carter, but they couldn’t be much use in keeping his feet warm or dry.
“Before we get back to the house and everyone’s around and all— That guy Jimmy— I don’t know if he’s— Anyway, I wanted to say—”
“Daddy,” she said. “Slow down. Finish a sentence. What on earth?”
“I should tell you—” He paused and took a step back. “I should—”
“Here we go again.” She grasped his hands. Both her knuckles and his whitened with the force of her grip. “You don’t get to do this to me over and over. We’re standing here just like this until you say it. Whatever it is, just tell me, straight out.”
After a moment, he said, “Coco, I’m gay.”
She dropped his hands and stumbled backward a step. She didn’t know what to say. She said nothing. She didn’t know what to feel. She felt—
Well, what? Bewildered.
Yes. Bewildered.
“Oh, shit,” he said. He reached out for her. “Oh, God, shit. God. Forget it. Forget I said it. Let’s just—go back—”
All at once, he was crying—choking, gagging, sobbing, slobbering. He seemed about to crumple, to tumble in on himself. She rushed toward him and threw her arms around him, to embrace him, yes, but also to keep him from sinking to the wet pavement. She couldn’t support his weight. If he dropped, she would, too. But she couldn’t let him fall. She couldn’t let him be uncomforted. She couldn’t allow him to believe he’d repulsed her. She stumbled backward against the trunk of a palmetto tree and somehow kept both herself and her father mostly upright.
“Daddy,” she said. “Daddy, It’s okay. I’m here. I love you, Daddy.”
She didn’t know what else to do but that—to call out to him, to call him back to himself. Gradually, it seemed to work. He stood on his own. He spat and clawed at his eyes and pinched his runny nose. She dipped into her purse and handed him a wad of tissues.
“I can’t—” He wiped his face with the tissues. “I can’t lose anything more to this. My father, your mother. I’ll just be— I’ll be like a monk. I won’t— I won’t do anything. I won’t even look. I’ll just—”
She touched his arm. “Daddy, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“I went into that bookstore, and then my father— I know it was a coincidence. It was. But then your mother— I was about to tell her—”
Corinne still didn’t understand, not entirely, but it was clear enough that he’d been in a great deal of pain for a long time, probably his whole life. He’d been dividing himself in two for as long as he’d been alive, keeping a part of his soul in hiding, even—or especially—from the people who loved him best.
“I loved your mother. Genuinely, truly. That was never a lie. I loved her. And our family. She came back for me. When my father died, she came back. She came back for me. She taught me how to feel again. I loved her for that. I would not have wished—” He was breaking down again.
Corinne put a hand on his shoulder. “Of course not, Daddy.”
“But maybe— Maybe it’s some kind of penalty— Some kind of—”
She wouldn’t let him go on. Not if, as it seemed, he was about to argue that the Captain Kangaroo God of his youth had punished him in adulthood by smiting his father and wife. It verged on the insane. She was no priest, no theologian—and perhaps only nominally a Catholic—but she would argue to anyone, anywhere, that a God as cruel as that might as well be a devil.
Taking his hand, she said, “You’ve done the best by this family that you know how.”
“But what you don’t know is—”
She said it again: “You’ve done the best you know how. I will fight anyone who says different, and that includes you.”
“Fair enough,” he said, almost in a mumble.
“I think you told me this because—” She squeezed his hand. “Is it because you wanted someone to forgive you? You wanted me to…absolve you?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe so.”
“I can’t do that,” she said. “I’m not a priest. I’m barely even Catholic.”
He smiled, albeit faintly.
“And you don’t need to be forgiven,” she said. “Not for—not for being what—who you are.”
He looked at her, his eyes wet, his smile fading.
“I’m going to love you for the rest of my life, no matter what.” She joggled his hands until he met her gaze. “Do you believe me?”
“I believe you.”
“Let’s— Oh, God, then— Let’s just get everybody home, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, and he clung to her for a moment. As he let her go, he kissed the top of her head.
Corinne pointed into the shadows ahead of them. “I’m parked on the next block. Are you walking with me?”
He nodded and waited for her to lead the way down the darkened street.
Soon, she thought—the sooner, the better—she would have to sit in privacy and silence and rewrite the history of her family. The stories she’d always told herself, the roles in which she’d cast her parents and her brothers—they’d been only about three-quarters correct.
She’d always thought that, Tolstoy be damned, all unhappy families were alike. Fate or God or pheromones always paired a tyrant with an apologist. A martinet and a helpmeet, a Leo plus a Sonya, could serve as a bare minimum, but for a top-of-the-line unhappy family, the misery-luxe edition, you had to add a prodigal, a naïf, and mediator. The trick was to play your role faithfully. The alternatives were chaos or isolation. That was, at least, how she’d always thought of it.
The truth of it was more complex. Her father had a bit of the Leo in him. Her mother had occasionally done her duty as apologist and helpmeet. And it wasn’t as if Ben had never been naïve or John Carter had never been impetuous. They were all a little bit of this and a little bit of that, weren’t they?
And what about Corinne’s own little family? What about her marriage? She couldn’t quite admit to being a tyrant, but on the other hand, if she were the Sonya of her household, she’d have no qualms about following her Leo to Pittsburgh. Her trunks would already be half-packed. The coachman would already have harnessed the horses.
Maybe Daddy had loved Mama enough to hide part of himself for decades. Maybe Mama had loved Daddy enough to sacrifice her career to their marriage. Or maybe they’d both settled for comfort—comfort of a sort, anyway. Corinne didn’t think she could do the same. She didn’t love Andrei as much as he loved her, that was the truth of it, and she couldn’t go to Pittsburgh with him or bear his children or love him the way he deserved to be loved.
Her heart swelled a little, as if she’d received a piece of welcome news. At almost the same instant, she shuddered so hard that her teeth knocked together. The next hours, days, and months were not going to be easy. She was going to break his heart.
The sidewalk broadened a bit. Her father quickened his step and drew even with her. She took his hand.
“Daddy,” she said. “Daddy, do you mind if I sleep on your couch tonight?”
He stopped and looked at her. “Why? I mean, of course you can—but why? Is Andrei out of town again?”
“No,” she said. “That’s not it. That’s not it at all.”
The Fifth of June
