Fortune Smiles: Stories

by Adam Johnson

  “You must watch her,” Dr. Gaby says, handing him the cooler. “I’ve always believed Cherelle’s capable of goodness, though honestly, I haven’t seen much sign of it.”

  When they head outside, they can see Cherelle is crossing the lawn. In a waddle, like she is pregnant with it, Relle carries her heavy-ass sewing machine toward the van.

  “What are you doing?” Nonc calls to her. “We’re going to be right back.”

  Grunting, Relle says, “I don’t go anywhere without my sewing machine.”

  Dr. Gaby looks up at Nonc. It’s the look the old ladies at the church gave him.

  “What?” he asks.

  She keeps looking at him. “Nothing,” she says.

  Nonc goes to the van to get Geronimo’s yellow boom box and the rest of his stuff, which is still in the same bag Marnie used. It feels like there should be a bunch of things Nonc has to do to prepare for the trip, but really, there isn’t. He comes back and sets the gear on the porch. Geronimo is sitting on the ramp with his feet hanging off the side, holding up the binoculars. He’s only looking through one lens, so Nonc can look through the other.

  “Big bird,” Geronimo says to him.

  Nonc lowers himself to the boy. “Nonc’s got to go,” he tells him. “But he’ll be right back. Nonc always comes back, remember that.” Then he takes his DIAD and hands it to Geronimo. “This thing has a GPS chip in it. No matter where you go or what happens to you, I can find you with this thing. If anything goes wrong, I’ll talk to my friends at UPS, and this is how I’ll track you down.” Nonc kisses the boy on the forehead. “You remember that Nonc’s your real father,” he says. “And that he’ll be right back.”

  Before he can say goodbye to Dr. Gaby, she wheels inside.

  When Nonc climbs in the van, Relle is already sitting shotgun. She unhooks the bouncy chair that hangs between the seats, then pulls out lots of material she’s downloaded from the Internet. One printout is called “The L.A. Apartment Hunter’s Bible.”

  “What?” she says when he looks at it. “You can’t sleep in a van in L.A.”

  Things are going okay, Nonc thinks as he fires up the rig. This part went easier than he’d figured. Nonc was afraid that saying goodbye to Geronimo would flatten him, that the boy would fall apart, and then he would fall apart and everything would start off wrong. But things are working out. “We got to make some time,” he says as they pull out of the drive. Nonc gives a last wave out the window—the dream team observes him without judgment, without response; his boy looks back at him with one eye. Through those binoculars, Nonc thinks, he must be magnified, he must be the boy’s entire field of view.

  They turn onto Lake Street, and the plan is in motion. For once, instead of things happening to Nonc, Nonc is making things happen, and that is a new feeling, a good one. The plan is going to take his best, he knows that. It’s going to take everything he’s got.

  Relle starts changing the presets on the van’s radio. “Some people say New York is the fashion capital,” she tells him. “But really, it’s L.A.”

  Nonc is thinking about the one time he went with Relle to her father’s property. He kept visualizing where all the dogs were buried. He could imagine a bubble of greyhounds below his feet wherever he walked. But he’s got to change that kind of thinking. They have those A-frame lodges that come in a kit, you set them up anywhere you want. He’s got to be visualizing that kind of thing.

  “You know who would make a good chef,” he says. “Donny Trousseau’s brother. That guy can cook anything.”

  “Yeah, that guy’s great,” Relle says. She opens the cooler and takes out two sodas. Then she grabs the sandwiches. “I have eaten a thousand of these,” she says, and throws them onto the road.

  Nonc watches them tumble in the rearview mirror. He suddenly remembers that he was going to make a vocabulary sheet for Dr. Gaby. “Aw, shit,” he says. “I was going to write down instructions for the boy.”

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “Dr. Gaby’s a pro.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right,” she says. They hit the on-ramp for the I-210 bridge. “And you got to relax a bit, okay? Ease up on yourself. Your dad’s not going to mess with you—he’s almost dead. And it doesn’t matter if we’re a day late coming back or even a week. What’s Dr. Gaby going to do, roll the boy up in a carpet and put him on the curb? No, she loves him. So if something comes up, everything will be okay. If I got to make a pit stop in Denver, everything will be okay.”

  “You got to make a pit stop in Denver?”

  She takes his hand. “See, you’re not relaxing.”

  Climbing the Lake Charles Bridge, Nonc can see the muscles and elbows of the petrochemical plants, their vent stacks blowing off maroon-blue flame. Below are the driven edges of a brown tide, and everywhere is the open abdomen of Louisiana. At the top of the bridge, there is no sign of what happened here, not a sippy cup in the breakdown lane, not a little shoe. Nonc looks out on the city. It looks like one of those end-times Bible paintings where everything is large and impressive, but when you look close, in all the corners, some major shit is befalling people. Nonc shifts into fourth, and even doing that feels like a development, like it’s the first step in a plot so big you can’t imagine. The smallest thing now feels like a development, a turn signal. You kiss your son on the crown of his head, and no doubt, no denying, that’s a serious development. You turn the ignition and drop the van in gear, and you know this is no ordinary event. You crest the Lake Charles Bridge, headed west with the wind in your eyes, and even flipping down your sunglasses feels charged with forever.

  Interesting fact: Toucan cereal bedspread to my plunge and deliver.

  It’s okay if you can’t make sense of that. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t grasp it, either. The most vital things we hide even from ourselves.

  The topic of dead wives actually came up not too long ago. My husband and I talked about it while walking home from a literary reading. It was San Francisco, which means winter rains, and we’d just attended a reading from a local writer’s short-story collection. The local writer was twentysomething and sexy. Her arms were taut, her black hair shimmered. And just so you’re clear, I’m going to discuss the breasts of every woman who crosses my path. Neither hidden nor flaunted behind white satin, her breasts were utterly, excruciatingly normal, and I hated her for that. The story she read was about a man who decides to date again after losing his wife. It’s always an aneurysm, a car accident or the long battle with cancer. Cancer is the worst way for a fictional wife to die. Anyway, the man in the story waits an appropriate amount of time after his wife’s loss—sixteen months!—before deciding to date again. After so much grief, he is exuberant and endearing in his pursuit of a woman. The first chick he talks to is totally game. The man, after all this waiting, is positively frisky, and the sex is, like, wow. The fortysomething widower nails the twentysomething gal on the upturned hull of his fiberglass kayak. And there’s even a moral, subtle and implied: when love blossoms, it’s all the richer when a man has discovered, firsthand, the painful fragility of life. Well, secondhand.

  Applause, Q&A, more applause.

  Like I said, it was raining. We had just left the Booksmith on Haight Street. The sidewalk was littered with wet panhandlers. Bastards that we were, we never gave.

  “What’d you think of the story?” my husband asked.

  I could tell he liked it. He likes all stories.

  I said, “I sympathized with the dead wife.”

  To which my husband, the biggest lunkhead ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, said: “But…she wasn’t even a character.”

  This was a year after my diagnosis, surgery, chemo and the various interventions, injections, indignities and treatments. When I got sick, our youngest child turned herself into a horse: silent and untamable, our Horse-child now only whinnies and neighs. Before that, though, she went through a phase we called Interesting Facts. “Interesting fact,” she w
ould announce, and then share a wonder with us: A killer whale has never killed a person in the wild. Insects are high in protein. Hummingbirds have feelings and are often sad.

  So here are some of my interesting facts. Lupron, aside from ceasing ovulation, is used to chemically castrate sexual predators. Vinblastine interrupts cell division. It is a poisonous alkaloid made from the purple blossoms of the periwinkle plant. Tamoxifen makes your hips creak. My eyebrows fell out a year after finishing chemo. And long after your tits are taken, their phantoms remain. They get cold, they ache when you exercise, they feel wet after you shower, and you can towel like a crazy woman, but still they drip.

  Before my husband won a Pulitzer, we had a kind of deal. I would adore him, even though he packed on a few pounds. And he would adore me, even though I had a double mastectomy. Who else would want us? Who else, indeed. Now his readings are packed with young Dorothy Parkers who crowd around my man. The worst part is that the novel he wrote is set in North Korea, so he gets invited to all these functions filled with Korean socialites and Korean donors and Korean activists and Korean writers and various pillars of the Korean community.

  Did I leave out the words beautiful and female?

  You’re so sensitive to the Korean experience, the beautiful female Korean socialite says to my husband.

  Oh, he’s good about it. He always says, And this is my lovely wife.

  Ignoring me, the beautiful female Korean socialite adds, You must visit our book club.

  If I could simply press a button every time one of them said that.

  But I’m just tired. These are the places my mind goes when I’m tired. We’re four blocks from home, where our children are just old enough not to need a sitter. On these nights our eleven-year-old son draws comics of Mongolian invasions and the Civil Rights Movement—his history teacher allows him to write his reports graphically. (San Francisco!) Our daughter, at nine, is a master baker. Hair pulled into a ponytail, she is flour-dusted and kneading away. The Horse-child, who is only seven, does dressage. She is the horse who needs no rider.

  But talk of my children is for another story. I can barely gaze upon them now. Their little outlines, cut like black cameos, are too much to consider.

  My husband and I walk in the rain. We don’t hold hands. I still feel the itch of vinblastine in my nail beds, one of the places, it turns out, that the body stores toxins. Have you ever had the urge to peel back your fingernails and scratch underneath, to just wrench until the nails snap back so you can go scratch, scratch, scratch?

  I flex my fingers, rub my nails against the studs on my leather belt.

  I knew better, but still I asked him: “How long would you wait?”

  “Wait for what?”

  “Until after I was gone. How many months before you went and got some of that twentysomething kayak sex?”

  I shouldn’t say shit like this, I know. He doesn’t know a teaspoon of the crazy in my head.

  He thought a moment. “Legally,” he said, “I’d probably need to have a death certificate. Otherwise it would be like bigamy or something. So I’d have to wait for the autopsy and a burial and the slow wheels of bureaucracy to issue the paperwork. I bet we’re talking twelve to sixteen weeks.”

  “Getting a death certificate,” I say. “That has got to be a hassle. But wait—you know a guy at city hall. Keith Whatshisname.”

  “Yeah, Keith,” he says. “I bet Keith could get me proof of death in no time. The dude owes me. A guy like Keith could walk that death certificate around by hand, getting everyone to sign off in, I don’t know, seven to fourteen days.”

  “That’s your answer, seven to fourteen days?”

  “Give or take, of course. There are variables. Things that would be out of Keith’s control. If he moved too fast or pushed too hard—a guy could get in trouble. He could even get fired.”

  “Poor Keith. Now I feel for him, at the mercy of the universe and all. And all he wanted to do was help a grieving buddy get laid.”

  My husband eyes me with concern.

  We turn in to Frank’s Liquors to buy some condoms, even though our house is overflowing with them. It’s his subtle way of saying, For the love of God, give up some sex.

  My husband hates all condoms, but there’s a brand he hates less than others. I cannot take birth-control pills because my cancer was estrogen-receptive. My husband does not believe what the doctors say: that even though Tamoxifen mimics menopause, you can still get pregnant. My husband is forty-six. I am forty-five. He does not think that, in my forties, after cancer, chemotherapy and chemically induced menopause, I can get pregnant again, but sisters, I know my womb. It’s proven.

  “You think there’d be an autopsy?” I ask as he scans the display case. “I can’t stand the thought of being cut up like that.”

  He looks at me. “We’re just joking, right? Processing your anxiety with humor and whimsical talk therapy?”

  “Of course.”

  He nods. “Sure, I suppose. You’re young and healthy. They’d want to open you up and determine what struck you down.”

  A small, citrusy ha escapes. I know better than to let these out.

  He says, “Plus, if I’m dating again in seven to fourteen days—”

  “Give or take.”

  “Yes, give or take. Then people would want to rule out foul play.”

  “You deserve a clean slate,” I say. “No one would want the death taint of a first wife to foul a new relationship. That’s not fair to the new girl.”

  “I don’t think this game is therapeutic anymore,” he says, and selects his condoms.

  Interesting fact: Tamoxifen carries a dreaded class-D birth-defect risk.

  Interesting fact: My husband refuses to get a vasectomy.

  He makes his purchase from an old woman. Her saggy old-lady breasts flop around under her dress. The cash register drawer rolls out to bump them.

  My friends say that one day I’ll feel lucky. That I will have been spared this saggy fate. After my bilateral, I chose not to reconstruct. So I have nothing, just two diagonal zipper lines where my boobs should be.

  We turn south and head down Cole Street.

  The condoms are wishful thinking. We both know I will go to sleep when we get home.

  Interesting fact: I sleep twelve to thirteen hours a night.

  Interesting fact: Taxotere turns your urine pink.

  Interesting fact: Cytoxan is a blister agent related to mustard gas. When filtered from the blood, it scars the bladder, which is why I wake, hour after hour, night in and night out, to pee.

  Can you see why it would be hard for me to tell wake from sleep, how the two could feel reversed? Do you hear me trying to tell you that I have trouble telling the difference?

  “What about your Native American obligations?” I ask my husband. “Wouldn’t you have to wait a bunch of moons or something?”

  He is silent, and I cringe to think of what I just said.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “You’re just tired,” he says.

  The rain is more mistlike now. I hated the woman who read tonight. I hated the people who attended. I hated the failed wannabe writers in the crowd. I loathe all failed wannabe writers, especially me.

  I ask, “Have you thought of never?”

  “Never what?”

  “That there’s never another woman.”

  “Why are you talking like this?” he asks. “You haven’t talked like this in a long time.”

  “You could just go without,” I say. “You know, just soldier on.”

  “I really feel bad for what’s going through your head,” he said.

  Interesting fact: Charles Manson used to live in our neighborhood at 636 Cole Street.

  Manson’s house looms ahead. I always stop and give it my attention. It’s beige now, but long ago, when Manson used this place to recruit his murderous young girls, it was painted blue. I used this house as a location in my las
t novel, a book no one would publish. Where did all those years of writing go? Where does that book even reside? I gaze at the Manson house. I feel alive right now, though looking through the gauze of curtains into darkened inner rooms, I can’t be sure. In researching my novel, I came across crime-scene photos of Sharon Tate, the most famous Manson stabbing victim. Her breasts are heavy and round, milk-laden since she is pregnant, with nipples that are wide and dark.

  I look up at my husband. He is big and tall, built like a football player. Not the svelte receivers they put on booster calendars. But the clunky linebackers whose bellies hang below their jerseys.

  “I need to know,” I said. “Just tell me how long you’d wait?”

  He puts his hand on my shoulder and holds my gaze. It is impossible to look away.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he says. “I won’t let you leave without us. We do everything together, so if someone has to go, we go together. Our 777 will lose cabin pressure. Better yet, we’ll be in the minivan when it happens. We’re headed to Pacifica, hugging the turns on Devil’s Slide, and then we go through the guardrail, all of us, you, me, the kids, the dog, even. There’s no time for fear. There’s no dwelling. We careen. We barrel down. We rocket toward the jagged shore.” He squeezed my shoulder hard, almost too hard. “That’s how it happens, understand? When it comes, it’s all of us. We go together.”

  Something inside me melts. This kind of talk, it’s what I live on.

  —

  My husband and kids came with me to the hospital for the first chemo dose. Was that a year ago? Three? What is time to you—a plucking harp string, the fucking do-re-mi of tuning forks? There are twelve IV bays, and our little one doesn’t like any of the interesting facts on the chemo ward. This is the day she stops speaking and turns into Horse-child, galloping around the nursing station, expressing her desires with taps of her hooves. Our son recognized a boy from his middle school. I recognized him, too, from the talent show assembly. The boy had performed an old-timey joke routine, complete with some soft-shoe. Those days were gone. Here he was with his mother, a hagged-out and battered woman beneath her own IV tree. She must have been deep into her treatments, but even I could tell she wasn’t going to make it. I didn’t talk to her. Who would greet a dead woman, who would make small talk with death itself? I didn’t let my eyes drift to her, even as our identical bags of Taxotere dripped angry into our veins.