All summer he works in the garden and speaks to little Jake. Chela does not interrupt him though at times he sees her watching them in the window. As the baby turns over, then crawls, he starts to notice little mannerisms he had always associated with Jake: a turn of the head, a roll of the eyes, a clasp of the hands. He wonders how that can be; the baby never really knew Jake and there is no genetic contract between them. One day, he is in the bathroom washing his hands and he sees himself in the mirror clasping his hands in the same way. He stares into the mirror. He can see no resemblance between him and his father, but he realizes that’s where he must have learned that movement. Little Jake must have learned it, and perhaps all of his grandfather’s mannerisms from him. It comforts him as he grieves. Jake Berger left no biological legacy to the world, but he lives on in what Phil has become, in what little Jake is becoming.
That November, Carol comes out to visit. She rents an apartment close to them and stays the winter. By April, she is ready to go back to Hopkinton.
Phil gives up his graduate classes at the university. He and Mishra form a partnership and the business doubles in size in just a few months. They hire new staff and still have too much business. Gradually, they find themselves brokering whole jobs to other fabrication firms around the country.
Chela, for her part, is more and more in demand for digs in the area. She has become adept at relations between the Southwest tribes and the archeologists. All Indians have strong taboos about disturbing the dead, and most have a deep and justified distrust of archeologists. Chela has over the years earned the respect of the Navajo and Hopi, among other tribes, and is trusted by them. This has become her archeological specialty.
Phil and Chela look for a larger house, one with an adjoining apartment, and find one close to the shop. That November, when Carol comes down for the winter, they are ready for her, and she has her own place upstairs for the next five months.
Jake grows into a quiet, serious little toddler. Given to smiles rather than laughs, he talks early, and likes to help dig in Phil’s garden. Phil can keep the damage down to a minimum most of the time, but over the season there are shortfalls as Jake learns to distinguish broccoli from Brazilian pepper and tomatoes from toadflax. Each day as he watches Jake, he learns something about his own father or about Chela. The boy reflects his mother like the moon reflects the sun. Phil is grateful whenever he sees something of himself. It surprises him that he doesn’t feel upset that Jake takes so much after Chela and so little after himself. When he mentions this to Chela, she says he just doesn’t see it. Jake takes after Phil all the time.
Phil’s grief crusts over and smooths itself as time passes. He discovers himself feeling happy for no apparent reason. He finds that surprising, and the surprise itself is disconcerting. Was I unhappy all these years? He’s not sure.
Phil and Chela measure time in terms of Jake: Jake was five months old when his grandfather died, we bought the house when Jake turned one, we took such and such a trip when Jake turned two.
The week before Jake turns three, Chela is involved in some delicate negotiations between the Navajo, Hopi, and Paiute tribes over an archeological dig in the mountains near Colorado. That Friday, she races home from Shiprock on Interstate 64. It’s a pitch-black, moonless night. Her car slips on the icy bridge in Waterflow, over the Westwater Arroyo. The car tumbles down the ravine and lands upside down. Chela is killed instantly.
Act IV
Little Jake is in bed asleep when the policemen come and notify Phil. Phil immediately knows what has happened, without being told. There is a vast, cavernous silence that has opened up in the world, and everything seems distant, unreal, cold.
After they leave, he sits in the dark next to the phone. I should call Esteban, he thinks. I must pick up the phone and call Esteban. But he can’t make himself move his hands, can’t make himself stand. Carol. She’s just upstairs. Call her. But he can’t even turn his head. The only sound he can hear is the sound of Jake’s sleepy breathing from down the hall, in and out. It seems as if death has been taking slow steps toward him all his life. First, Danny. Then, Jake. Now, Chela. Little Jake breathes in a slight whistle. Phil wonders if it will stop. What would he do if Jake were to stop breathing? Would he be able to move then? Or would he stop breathing himself?
I could die right now, he thinks. I could just let go and drift away. Did she feel that way?
It seems that Jake’s breathing is the only thing holding him to the earth at all.
He can see in his mind the highway through Waterflow. He has driven that road before. He can see the patch of ice forming on the bridge, sees Chela hitting the patch and the car turning, Chela panicking and trying to regain control.
I never taught her to drive on the ice, he thinks to himself. I never saw the need.
There is a hitch in Jake’s breathing as the boy starts to wake with the dawn. Phil shakes his head and stands up, able to move at last. First, he calls Carol and tells her. Then, he washes his face in cold water. He picks up the phone and dials Esteban’s number from memory.
“Esteban,” he begins in Spanish. “There has been an accident.”
After that, he waits for Jake to wake up.
Phil is struck by the dull tedium of death. As when Chela and his mother buried his father, there are endless details to be addressed. How is Chela to be buried? Should she be cremated? Where is it to take place? What kind of coffin? What kind of urn?
Matia, looking old and sad and grand, takes over. The funeral is a large and colorful affair to which Jake feels no kinship at all. She knows which relatives to notify, how to drape the casket, what flowers to send to which church. Esteban’s sole task is to grieve with Phil. Phil’s sole task is to grieve with his son.
Little Jake does not cry immediately when he is told. He asks again when Mama will be coming home. Each time, Phil starts the story again. Mama has gone away. She won’t be coming back. She will always love you, but she can’t be here any more. Jake listens, blue eyes intent. Then, he asks again.
By the time of the funeral, Jake has stopped asking. He does everything asked of him without complaint or comment. Not much is asked. He submits to every caress, hug, and embrace as if he were somewhere else. Only his clenched grip on his father has any life to it. It is so strong that Phil has to change hands often.
Once the immediate death tasks are done, Phil must manage the lesser tasks. He settles the insurance, makes sure the deed to the house is in proper order. When the insurance check comes in, he pays off the mortgage of the house. The rest he puts in a trust account for Jake. Mishra calls him to see if he’s all right. He asks when Phil is coming back to work. Never, Phil wants to scream into the phone, but instead says he doesn’t know.
He spends all of his time with Jake and Carol. Jake had crawled into bed with Phil the night after the accident. Phil hadn’t the heart to put him back. Now, each night, Phil wakes up to find Jake nestled spoon fashion against his chest.
Finally, after a month of mourning, he goes back to the shop. Standing there surrounded by automated machines, he realizes that he never wants to be here ever again. He walks into the office and sits down across from Mishra.
“Buy me out,” he says quietly.
Mishra reaches into the drawer and pulls out a document and gives it to him. “I thought you might feel that way.”
It is something he and Jake discuss, as much as a thirty-eight-year-old man can discuss anything with a three-year-old boy. When Carol leaves in the spring, they sell the house to follow her to Hopkinton. Matia and Esteban come up to see them off.
“You’ll be back,” says Esteban, looking up at him. He touches Phil on the chest. “We are in your blood.”
Phil nods in agreement. “Someday.” It’s all he can bring himself to say. He hugs them three or four times. They can’t hug Jake enough. Finally, Jake, Carol, and Phil get in the truck, and the three of them start the long drive to Massachusetts.
This grief is harder to
bear than the death of his father. This has unnaturalness to it, bitterness, a sense of outrage. On the trip to Massachusetts, Jake sees the Grand Canyon for the first time. Watching his son marvel, Phil feels he is witnessing Little Jake for two people, himself and Chela. He must see things for her as well as for himself. When they stop for a day to play in the park next to the Mississippi, he tries to see it as Chela might have seen it, for the first time. He wonders how Gordie Howe must have felt when his wife died.
When, at last, they come to the old house in Hopkinton, it is early summer and the lawn and gardens are overgrown. It is so different from New Mexico. He wants to feel as she might have, coming from her ancient Spanish ancestors, to see this place as fresh and new.
There are gaps of time over the summer and fall. A month might pass where he remembers nothing except what happens to Jake. It is as if Phil is only alive through Jake’s eyes and fingers.
Jake’s fourth birthday marks the anniversary of Chela’s death. Phil acts purposefully unexcited about the prospect. He is determined that Jake’s birthday not be permanently marred by the death of his mother. With Carol, Phil puts together a small party composed of Jake’s new friends and their parents. The day before the party, Phil finds Jake in the living room, standing before the old and beaten piano. The orange paint is just as ghastly against Carol’s New England wallpaper as it had been in New Mexico. Jake’s right hand is resting on the keys but not pressing them down, as if he were trying to feel the weight of the music in them. Tears are falling down his cheeks.
“Jake?” calls Phil softly. “What’s the matter?”
Jake draws his hand across the keys gently without making any sound. “Mama liked to play the piano, didn’t she?”
Phil comes and sits on the floor next to him. Jake doesn’t take his hand from the keys.
“Yes,” Phil says.
Jake lets his hands fall and crawls into Phil’s lap. “I want to play, too,” he says. “Can I learn?”
Phil can barely speak. “Yes.”
When Jake starts kindergarten, Phil is at a loss for what to do with his time. As long as he can work outdoors, he works on Carol’s house. Carol is nearing eighty now. Though she is still strong, the years have taken their toll. Phil builds an enclosed wrap-around porch for her and Jake.
Over the fall, Phil and Jake have fallen into the habit of getting up early, before the bus, and walking along the lake in the park nearby. Phil guards these times jealously. It is his favorite time with Jake. This year, the winter grows cold early and snows late, so that when Christmas rolls around, the lake is flat ice in all directions. In the distance, they can see kids playing pond hockey. Phil leans down to the edge of the lake. Under the initial sandpaper, the ice is hard and smooth. Perfect hockey ice. Thoughtfully, he stands again and replaces his glove.
Jake is looking at the game in the distance. “Let’s go watch them.”
Apprehensive but agreeable, Phil follows Jake around the edge of the lake until they are close to the boys. The scene is uncomfortably close to Phil’s childhood, and he coughs nervously.
“That’s hockey?” Jake asks.
Phil nods, thinking Jake must have heard about hockey in school. Hockey hasn’t been mentioned around Phil since before Jake was born.
“Did you ever play?”
Phil looks down at Jake. The blue eyes are all that he can see of himself in the boy. The rest is Chela’s.
“Yes,” he says finally. “A long time ago.”
“Were you any good at it?”
Phil nods. “I was pretty good. I haven’t played in a long time.”
“Is it fun?”
“It’s like flying.” He thinks a moment. “It was the most fun I ever had as a boy.”
Jake thinks for a moment. “Why did you quit?”
Phil shrugs. “It’s complicated. I had to leave home. I had to grow up. All that meant I had to quit.”
Jake thinks about that for a moment. “Can you teach me?”
Phil looks down at him. The nervousness and apprehension fall away. Christ, it’s been over twenty years! I’m a forty-one-year-old man. Isn’t it time I let that go?
“Yes, I can.”
He’s rusty on skates, but, after a few days of practice, sore muscles, and several bruising falls, he starts to remember his skill. It is as if a long dormant muscle is awakened. He finds himself enjoying skating again.
Jake learns to skate easily and is soon asking to play hockey. Without quite knowing how it comes about, Phil finds himself the team coach. They are a motley collection of five- to seven-year-old children, and he’s not sure he’s up to the task. They have a good, though unspectacular, winter season. Phil continues coaching over the summer season.
Each hot summer morning, he finds himself looking forward to coaching them with an eagerness that feels brand new. Every Tuesday morning, he is on the ice, carefully teaching them how to skate, how to hold themselves, how to keep their balance when they bump into each other. The mite league doesn’t allow checking; that comes later, when they eventually graduate to the peewee league. But Phil keeps it in mind. If they stay with it, the shift won’t take them quite so off guard.
There’s a coterie of parents and watchers there every morning. Most of them he gets to know, since they’re the parents of the kids on his team. He learns to deflect their anger and advice, their yells and threats. Twice he comes close to fights, but manages to avoid them. His size and manner keeps the worst of them at bay and reassure the rest. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that his team is doing pretty well in the league.
One old man keeps coming and watching them. He was big-framed once, but has now gone to seed. His clothes are dirty with stains around the elbows and knees. Phil can always tell when he comes into the arena, because the air suddenly smells of tobacco. The man never smokes but the smell is so embedded in his clothes that it travels in the ice-pure air of the rink. He has no connection to any of the kids and Phil keeps an eye on him, just in case the old man is thinking something unsavory. More likely, he thinks, it’s just to escape the heat. Over the weeks, Phil begins to think that he might know the old man, but he can’t remember from where.
In August, near the end of the season, the old man waves to Phil as the practice session starts. Curious, Phil skates to the stands.
“What can I do for you?”
The old man coughs for a moment and delicately wipes his lips. “Thought we should talk. I’d like to see you after practice.” His voice is faint but measured.
Phil shrugs. “Sorry. I have plans. Maybe next week —”
“I don’t think so.” He smiles faintly. “My time is precious.”
“So’s mine. I’m sorry to disappoint you —”
“I thought you’d want to talk to me.”
Phil looks at him closely. There is still that sense of nagging familiarity but he can’t place the old man. “Do I know you?”
The old man nods knowingly. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d recognized me. I’m Frank Hammett.”
Phil stares at him for a long moment, then breaks away and looks back at practice. “Okay. Why now?”
Hammett coughs. “I have emphysema. Next week I might be dead.”
Phil sends Jake home with one of the other kids and promises to come and pick him up as soon as he can. He sits across from Hammett in the restaurant above the rink. Frank passes a cup of coffee toward him. “It’s still early in the day. Thought you might need this.”
“You know,” Phil starts, then stops. Starts again. “I thought for years what I might say to you if I ever met you. Now I don’t know what to say.”
Hammett grins and chuckles, then coughs. “Overcome by me in the flesh, eh?”
“Hardly.”
Hammett nods. “Not easy to know what to say to the guy that ruined your life.”
“You didn’t ruin my life.”
Hammett shakes his head. “Hey, don’t mess with history! I was there. I saw you playing back when you wer
e in the peewees. I knew in time you’d make it at least to the minors. Then, I broke the story and it forced you to leave. Don’t try to absolve me of what I did.”
“I’m not.” Phil looks at his hands for a moment. “I had a life before you broke the story. I have a life now.” He thinks of little Jake, of Chela and Esteban, of Carol and his father. “Nothing was ever ruined.”
Hammett grunts. “I see. That is some small comfort, I suppose.”
“Did you know about me all that time?”
The old man shakes his head. “No. I watched you since you were a kid. But I watched a lot of kids. About a month before I wrote the story, I got an envelope in the mail with a set of DNA chromatographs. One set for Gordie Howe. One set for you. I had a friend in the Boston Police Department verify them in the national database.” He starts to fumble in his pocket for a cigarette, stops, and lays his hands on the table. “So I ran the story.”
“Why?” Phil leans across the table. “Why did you run it? You must have known what it would do to me.”
“I thought you said it didn’t ruin your life.”
“That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.”
Hammett nods and looks out the restaurant window onto the ice. An adult team is practicing drills. “I ran it because it was big news. I ran it because I figured that I couldn’t be the only one with the information, and I didn’t want to get scooped. I ran it because if I got a good story and I could milk it right, I’d get off the damned Middlesex service and onto the Globe staff. Why the hell did you think I ran it?”
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 23
