Nick Nolan

by Double Bound (Sequel To Strings)

  And he didn't care about finding a job or looking for an apartment or getting older or being lonely. He just didn't care about anything.

  He made his way up Pacific Coast Highway toward County Line, then turned right on Sea Crest and made his way halfway up the hill. After pulling underneath the ancient Chinese elm in front of the house, he cranked the wheel into the curb, set the parking brake, grabbed his bag, then lurched up the driveway of the tiny, Spanish-style house. He approached the few steps leading to the front entrance, but instead went around to the side of the house where the key was hidden--under an especially ugly black flower pot with yellow roses silk-screened onto it. Then he went back to the front and let himself in.

  If he was depressed before, just being in the old living room made him despondent.

  There were too many memories here, and few of them were good. The place even still stank faintly of cigarettes, as if the remains of his father residing in the urn on the mantel had just snuffed out another one.

  Ashes to ashes. Now, that would be a fitting slogan for Marlboro...

  As he made his way to his old bedroom, right off the dining room, he spent a few moments looking around the house to see what had changed.

  Nothing.

  So he went back into the living room and sat on the old sofa, where he saw a framed photo of the family at his sister Morgana's wedding, back in '89.

  Almost everyone was still alive then, including two of his grandparents. And most everyone was healthy--even his father, who posed, grinning, with a telling cigarette in his hand.

  Time doesn't pass here...it just gets more constipated.

  He went back into his room, took the boxes and old clothes off his bed and flopped down, face-first.

  E-mail to Jeremy.

  He got back up, unlatched his laptop case and pulled out his sickly Compaq. After it finished grinding through its lengthy start-up, he began his final communication: To: Tylerboi@ballena-beach.com

  Cc: KTYLER1@ballena-beach.com

  Re: Us

  Dear Jeremy,

  It is with the saddest and heaviest of hearts that I write this to you. Katharine is right. We don't belong together. But I want you to know that it's nothing you've done, and knowing you has been one of the great joys, if not the greatest joy, of my life. I've known love before, but nothing like how I've felt for you. You are one of the most dynamic, gifted, sweet and generous people I've ever met. But you have a path to take in this life, and it's very, very different from mine.

  I understand that this is probably very hard for you to understand, just as it's really hard for me to write this, and it's taken some really tough words from Katharine to make me understand it all. But it's for the best in the long run--

  I'm absolutely, positively certain of this. If we had tried to make this work, I'd be stealing from you everything you're meant to experience, and this would be wrong, because you have so much ground to make up, having lived through what you have.

  I crossed a line with you that I wish I hadn't, but then as the old saying goes, you can't un-ring a bell. So this is my gift to you--a new bell. One that you can ring yourself, as stupid as that sounds. I will never forget each and every minute we had together, and the joy I felt every time I saw your face, or heard your voice call my name. I will always remember you, and your amazing transformation from awkward boy to splendid man. I like to think that I had a little something to do with that. But however I helped you, please remember me only for those things.

  So go out there and find yourself a partner--maybe even consider resuming your relationship with wonderful, brave, loving Carlo. But whoever it is, please carry with you the knowledge that I will always love you with all of my heart, and I will try my best to learn to live with the regret I feel for having destroyed our beautiful, innocent, perfect relationship.

  I'm just so glad that I was there for you when you needed me to be there, as your protector, and as your friend.

  You cannot know how hard this is for me to say, but I do not want you to look for me. We need to cut this off, like surgery, so we can both heal.

  Please know that I will miss you terribly, just as I miss you now.

  Please take care of yourself.

  You will always be my one 'old buddy'.

  Love, Arthur

  He was amazed, upon finishing, that somehow his fingers knew exactly which keys to press. After he composed the message, he read it over five times, and changed only a word here or there with each pass. Then he held his breath and pressed SEND. Once that was accomplished, he opened his e-mail's TOOLS tab, then the MAIL tab, clicked on the REMOVE ACCOUNT prompt and pressed YES.

  It was finished.

  He curled himself into a ball on his old bed, and began dancing with his regrets.

  The creak of the back door swinging open, as well as the familiar clops of his mother's footfall on the kitchen linoleum, startled him out of his misery. "Artie?"

  "Yeah, Mom," he called back, rubbing his eyes and sitting up. He swung his feet to the floor and stood. Surprisingly, he felt hungry. Then he remembered he'd eaten only a bowl of oatmeal early this morning.

  He went out to greet her, hid the shock of seeing how old she looked and gave her a peck on the cheek. "Hi."

  "Are you hungry?" She set the little white pharmacy bag, along with her purse, on the counter next to the bread box.

  "A little. But I don't want you to go to any trouble."

  "You're still my son. Sit down and I'll fix you a sandwich. Is tuna salad OK?" She went over to the sink and washed her hands.

  "Sure." He sat at the old Formica breakfast table but avoided the chair that used to be his assigned seat. "How are you?"

  "Surviving," she said, unscrewing the lid from a jar of Miracle Whip. "My hip is killing me, and I haven't slept one night through in three years." She dug out a white glob with her knife and smeared it on two slices of wheat bread. "Why are you here? What happened?"

  How could he possibly tell her what had happened? "I quit my job."

  " You quit the FBI? " She glared at him with the knife poised in midair.

  "I haven't worked for them for six months, Mom. I told you."

  She furrowed her brows. "Then what've you been doing?"

  "I've been working for some rich people down on the cliff, the Tylers. I was overseeing their estate, working as their chef, and being the bodyguard for the young man of the family, Jeremy's his name--he's Jonathan's son. I don't know if you remember my friend Jonathan."

  She squared a look at him. "Oh, I remember your friend Jonathan," she replied dryly.

  He ignored the look and the intonation. "Anyway, we just got back from Brazil."

  Where I had sex with him and he got kidnapped and we were almost killed.

  "Oh, that's nice." She spread a heap of tuna salad between the two slices of bread, then squished the sandwich down and sliced it in half diagonally. "So then what happened? Why did you quit?"

  "It just wasn't working out, I guess. I needed a change. Something more challenging."

  "And so you quit--just like that?" She snapped her fingers, then slid the plate in front of him, with a frosty glass of ice water.

  "Yep. Just like that." He snapped his fingers back at her. But louder.

  She pulled out a chair and sat next to him. "People in my day never just 'quit' a job without something better lined up. I'm surprised at you."

  He shrugged. He was immune to her disapproval. "How's Morgana?"

  "She's all right, I suppose. I just see her working herself to death over those kids and her job. She never seems to get a break."

  "What about Gwen?"

  Her face brightened. "She's expecting again, didn't I tell you?"

  "No. Boy or girl?" He took a bite of his sandwich and winced; the pickle relish she always mixed with the Miracle Whip gave the fish a nasty, sweet flavor.

  Bleh.

  "They don't know yet. So how long do you think it'll be before you find another job?"
r />   "I'll start looking first thing tomorrow."

  "Why not today?" She glared at him.

  "Because I'm wiped out. But don't worry, I won't be asking to move in here," he said, knowing he'd rather give himself liposuction with a chain saw.

  "Where will you look?"

  "The paper, I guess. Do you have one?"

  She heaved herself up from the table. "Yesterday's. I'll get it."

  "Thanks." He took another bite, and washed it down with his water.

  She went over to the coffee table, rustled through a pile sitting atop it and withdrew the newspaper. "Did you get fired?" she asked, handing it over.

  "No, Mom. I said I quit."

  "You know your father went through that whole period in the late seventies when he just couldn't seem to hold a job." She sat back down.

  He nodded, remembering the string of company cars that appeared and disappeared, with the transition from LTD to Malibu to Fury to Granada signaling each episode of his father's job hopping. "What was that all about? I remember all that."

  She sighed. "He just wouldn't work. He'd get a job and say everything was going to be different; then after a couple months he'd find any excuse to stay home, or go into work late, or come home for a three-hour lunch, or...whatever. of course his sales were horrible and he'd used up his three-month draw against the commission and they'd fire him." She looked away, as if watching an invisible black-and-white television from across the room. Then she focused back on him. "You know, you'd make a good salesman," she suggested brightly.

  "You guys were fighting all the time," he told her. Then he took another bite of his sandwich. "especially after you had to go back to work."

  "That job at the junior high was a godsend, because we would've probably lost the house otherwise. But I hated it. I used to think being there was like working on a ship that hit an iceberg on its first day out, and was sinking slowly ever since."

  "I remember you saying that when I was a kid. Did you make it up?"

  "The principal--he was an alcoholic--he used to say that." She fiddled with the ancient cut-crystal salt and pepper shakers before her. "I was going to have the perfect marriage," she said wistfully, wiping the crusted salt from the top of the shaker. "I thought about leaving him and taking you three, at least back then."

  "I always wished you would've, when I was a kid."

  "That's so sad, Artie. I never wanted it to rub off on you."

  "But it was so obvious. You would argue about anything; then he'd yell and you'd cry and we'd just be sitting in the back of that headache-blue Granada getting nauseous. Fun times."

  "What's 'headache-blue'?"

  "It's that pale metallic blue; Morgana came up with that because we always got headaches in the backseat with his smoking and your fighting."

  "I think he was depressed," she told him.

  "Well, who wasn't, in this house?" He laughed. "He bullied us, Mom. All of us.

  And even though he's been dead for three years, we're still bullied by him."

  She shook her head. "You shouldn't speak of him that way. He loved you."

  "He did not, and you know it. He hated me and I hated him. We never had anything in common...except for our mutual loathing."

  "You're right there, about not having anything in common. He used to say that if he hadn't known me so well, he would've sworn you were someone else's son."

  "I wish I had been."

  "No, you don't." Her eyes met his. "You got a lot of good things from him: your strength, your intelligence and your looks. You look just like him, you know, more and more with each passing year."

  "Don't remind me." He finished his sandwich, then got up to take his plate to the sink."I'm gonna go out for a bit. I think there's an Internet café close by where I can get some coffee and check the classifieds." He washed his plate in the sink, then placed it atop the drying rack. He waited for her to say something, but she didn't, so he turned to her and saw she was staring at him and fiddling with a yellow paper napkin. "Mom?"

  "One thing I never told you," she said quickly. "Before you go."

  He stopped. "Yeah?"

  She stared at him, and Arthur wondered if she'd forgotten what she was saying.

  "What?" he asked softly. "What didn't you tell me?"

  "His father," she said, then pulled her lips in together, like an old woman without her false teeth in place. Finally her mouth opened and she breathed in. "He was terrible to them."

  "Rotten tree, sour apples."

  "Yes." She raised her eyebrows. "I suppose that's true. But you need to know something."

  He put one hand on his hip and glared at her.

  She paused, to make certain he was listening. "He made your father shoot his own dog."

  He leaned back against the counter. "Did it have rabies or something? Was its name Old Yeller?"

  "His father was sick, Artie." She stood and began clearing the table. "When he was eight or nine--it was during the Depression--your father's dog--he named it Spot, if you can believe it--caught one of the chickens and killed it. And your grandfather..."

  " No."

  "He told him his dog was his responsibility, and his dog had cost the family money, so he made him take his rifle out to the yard and--"

  "Oh, my God." The tragic incident flashed in his head. "Why didn't you ever tell me that before?"

  "Because I didn't want to upset you. And I don't want to now. It's just that he"--she looked away, her crow's-feet pinched--"he tried to be a better father than his own father was. And I think--I know--that he was."

  " How, I mean besides not making us murder our guinea pigs and lizards?"

  "When they were kids, if your father or his brothers did anything wrong, their mother would lock them up in the woodshed for the rest of the day until their father came home. Then he would beat them. Mercilessly."

  "And?"

  "Your father stopped at one point with you kids. After he knocked out Morgana's front teeth."

  "What a great guy." He laughed. "Good for him."

  "No, Artie, I'm serious. After that he never hit any of you kids again. He saw that he was becoming like him and stopped. And we agreed that I'd handle the discipline from then on."

  He shook his head. "You're forgetting the 'playing rough'--and he did hit us after that; and even if he toned it down, we always knew what he was capable of."

  "What's 'playing rough'?"

  He couldn't believe she didn't remember. "He'd grab me and throw me down and push me onto the bed, and when I'd try to run away, he'd grab me and throw me down again and tackle me and bend my arms back and not let me go, and you'd be yelling, 'Frank, you're hurting him, Frank, stop it, you're hurting him,' and I'd be crying and he'd be laughing and sometimes I couldn't breathe--I'd get an asthma attack and couldn't breathe. Remember now? "

  "Now I remember." She smiled sadly. "I'd forgotten about that until now. You must have been terrified."

  "Yep. I was." He paused for a moment. "But you know what amazes me?"

  Her eyebrows rose expectantly.

  "When I was probably four or five, when you'd fight, I was so afraid he was going to hurt you that I remember standing in front of you, waving my arms and telling him, 'Don't hit her, don't hit her.'"

  "Dear God," she whispered. " You remember that? "

  "How could I forget?"

  "You were so brave to stand up to him," she said softly. "I used to cry about that at night."

  "So did I," he told her. "I'm sorry he treated you that way. You deserved so much more."

  "So did you kids," she replied, fingering the wattle under her chin. "All this talk's exhausted me, so I need to lie down for a while," she told him, getting up. "And then if you want to, later we can go into town for dinner."

  He nodded and smiled thinly. "OK."

  "Artie?"

  He stopped and looked back at her.

  "He did love you."

  He huffed. "Did he ever tell you he did?"

 
"Not in so many words."

  "It's OK." He smiled. "Some men are just not meant to be dads. I'll see you later."

  "You need to forgive him."

  He stopped in midstep. "He's been dead for more than three years. What good would it do to forgive him now?"

  "He never forgave his father, and I can see his same anger in you." Her eyes bored holes in him. "I'm afraid you're going to make the same mistakes he made."

  He laughed. "That's never gonna happen, and you know it."

  "I'm not talking about being a bully, or hitting your nonexistent kids. I'm just hoping that...you don't let your anger stop you from finding real happiness, or even someone to love."

  His head was about to rocket off his neck. "I have found love! Jonathan, who turned straight; Danny, who was killed, and now Jeremy--"

  "You're in love with his son?" Her eyes bulged, then shrank. "Oh, Artie." She restrained herself from shaking her head disapprovingly. What could she say? "I just want you to be happy. That's everything. And I think...I know that forgiving him is part of what you need to find happiness."

  "Do you forgive him?" he asked.

  She looked down, then lifted her eyes slowly to meet his. "I do. I have. And you need to remember that no one lived with his wrath as much as I did.

  But...something changed in him when he was sick; you wouldn't come around much then, so maybe you didn't see it. He became gentle...even appreciative sometimes. It's like the cancer gave him peace; maybe because his father made him believe that's what he deserved: a miserable ending. So when it came to him, he was finally able to accept his... destiny."

  "That's absolutely sick."

  "It is what it was. But the fact is, he could never forgive what his father did to him, so he let it destroy him--he smoked and drank too much, and his anger ate him up from the inside out. And I don't want the same thing happening to you."

  "Never gonna happen," he stated convincingly.

  "Good." She smiled. "one more thing."

  "Uh-huh?"

  "He used to wait for you."

  He cocked his head sideways and stared at her. "What do you mean?"

  "When he was sick. He would ask me when you were coming to visit him. And I would lie."

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. "Don't tell me that. Please, not now."