Scott Lasser

by The Year That Follows (v5)

  Cat’s plan is to fetch Connor and drive right down Woodward to the Detroit Zoo. Why not? Connor loves the zoo. Michael’s apartment lies east of Woodward, in one of the old complexes built in the sixties, refurbished now but with a dated feeling apparent in the cheap brickwork, the crumbling cement of the sidewalks, and the window-mounted air-conditioning units moaning in the morning heat. Cat opens the screen and knocks on the inner door, its set loose, so that it clatters in the jamb.

  “Mommy!” Connor shouts. He’s opened the door, excited to see her. Cat reaches down and in that moment when Connor moves full force into her arms, she thinks she understands how things are, that her love for her child is so profound as to require a new word altogether. The word love is inadequate. She once loved Michael, crazy and stupid as that was, but it wasn’t like this. Nothing, ever, could change this. She lifts Connor and hugs him, kisses him on his head, takes in that smell, of youth, of her own flesh and blood. “How’s my boy?” she asks.

  “Good.” Connor sits on her arm, back cadet-straight, which allows him to get far enough away from her that they can look at each other.

  “You plucked your eyebrows,” the boy says.

  “I did. Do you like it?” she manages to ask. She finds his scrutiny, always detailed, unnerving.

  Connor rubs his hand over Cat’s eyebrows, touching and smoothing them, rubbing out on one, then the other. “I like them,” he says.

  Her arm is on fire with the strain of holding him, and she must put him down. It is then that Cat notices that Michael is there. He’s looking at her, probably wondering what he ever saw in her. She wonders this about him. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, with dirty-blond hair and sleepy bedroom eyes she will never forget seeing for the first time. So maybe that’s the answer: looks. And that he pursued her, relentlessly. It was flattering that such a good-looking guy would want her, and then she got pregnant, just like her mother.

  Michael wants to know what she’s planning to do, as if he ever has a plan.

  “Well,” Cat says. “I thought we’d start with the zoo.”

  “Yeah!” Connor shouts. “The zoo.”

  There’s a bag by the door, packed with Connor’s teddy bear and several books that Cat sent with Connor and that she doubts they cracked open. Probably Michael lay around with Connor and watched television, that constant drone of ESPN, with its scores and updates crawling across the bottom of the screen like stock quotes, like the updates that all the channels used now, ever since the attacks last year, when the networks decided that after such a disaster, what people needed was even more news.

  They leave the apartment. Cat hears the screen door slap and she lets out a deep breath. She puts her hands on Connor’s shoulder and thinks, ah, the weekend: two days to spend with my boy and, if I’m lucky, not worry about money.

  Connor loves monkeys. At the chimp exhibit he would, Cat thinks, climb right into the cage, unmoved by the danger, willing to ignore what the scientists say is that very tiny difference in DNA. For most of the day he’s happy and giggling, laughing in the penguin house as the birds swim by the window, waving at the sad polar bear, reaching out to the sleeping lions. Cat is aware that she is always looking for signs of sadness in her son, a habit born of guilt, worried—with good reason, it seems to her—that the failures of her life might be visited on her son.

  And what of Kyle’s little boy, somewhere in New York? Is he sad? Does he know to be? He’d be over a year old now, without a father, maybe without a mother, living with grandparents, perhaps. Cat has called the New York police looking for Siobhan. She’s sent e-mails, searched the Web, read “Portraits of Grief” every day since the Times put it out. It would seem that a woman would not be that hard to find, especially if you have her picture, but it hasn’t gone that way.

  They eat lunch at a table with an umbrella, which offers relief from the sun but little from the heat, that humid inescapable heat of a southern Michigan summer. Connor is as interested in the food packaging—the cup with its colorful animal design, the paper boat that holds the fries—as he is in the food itself. Cat won’t mind getting back to the apartment, hanging out in some air-conditioning, maybe catching an old movie on television while Connor plays with the new cars Cat has bought him, a surprise waiting at home.

  Connor notices another little boy at the table just over Cat’s right shoulder. Cat sees him watching the boy with a studied reverence, the way Connor watches chimps. Cat is often moved by Connor’s awareness of others, of the surprisingly small reservoir of self-interest he seems to have, unlike so many children his age. The new boy has a mop of brown hair, a few freckles, and hazel eyes. His father, Cat notices, is similarly colored, with high cheekbones and a fine jaw. A little thinner and he’d have the face of a clothes model, though right now he’s damp with sweat. He looks up and catches Cat’s eye.

  “Cat?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Cat Miller?”

  “My whole life,” she says, the idea of whom she’s looking at coming to her just as he tells her.

  “It’s me. Tommy. Tommy Swenson.”

  Tommy. She’d been thinking about him just this morning, her old boyfriend, the one she thinks of as getting away. She hasn’t seen him in over twenty years, but that she hasn’t recognized him, even when she was looking right at him, seems impossible. He’s changed, somehow. Her mind is turning thought over thought, memory over memory, images come to her of summer nights and the backseat of her car folded down and its hatchback tipped up, of holding him, of how she had no idea what she had. She wonders, then, if this is one of those moments, here at the zoo, that Tonya tells her to be ready for.

  She looks for a wedding band and finds none. He catches her looking, raises an eyebrow, then holds out his hand, strong and masculine fingers, straight, big half moons on the nails. There is, she thinks, something quite intimate about looking at a man’s hands.

  They talk, two divorced parents, it turns out. The boys are communicating also, in that little-boy way. They are looking at a toy, a car/rocketship that has both of them mesmerized with its mechanics and technology. The other boy, Tommy’s boy, perhaps older, points out features to Connor’s rapt attention. As Cat talks to Tommy his looks open up to her, and it is not what she remembers from long ago but what is here now, that jaw and his large arms, the brown hair maybe a little thinner now, the fine lines and exquisite wide shape of his mouth. He is, he says, a cardiologist.

  “A heart expert,” she says.

  “Hardly,” he replies.

  She talks about herself, about her child and failed marriage, about her job. “I sell money,” she tells him, “but, believe me, I could be a lot better at it.” He’s thinking of refinancing his home, what with rates so low, and so they talk about this for a while, which is a relief, because on this topic she knows what to say. She also learns of his house in Birmingham, only a few miles from Michael’s apartment, but on a street that is a world away. She is explaining, God knows why, the difference between LIBOR and one-year T-bill (Sherri taught her this) when he asks, “How’s your brother?”

  And so she must explain. He is duly horrified; she admires how perfectly he expresses sympathy, perhaps something he’s had practice at, being a doctor. Expressing sympathy is something she’s never been able to do, even when she’s felt it. He puts his hand lightly on her bare forearm, and with that simple gesture, that light touch, she feels as she did at seventeen. Twenty-seven years disappear, like that.

  “You have a brother,” she says, remembering Denny, the little boy who used to spy on them, wearing one of Tommy’s old football jerseys.

  “A U.S. attorney, in Chicago. His specialty is bank robberies, but of course now they got him working on money laundering. It’s part of the whole antiterrorist beat.”

  “How old is he now?”

  Tommy must think about this. The answer is thirty-eight. Tommy’s mother lives in Arizona. His father died five years ago, of cancer. “It wasn’t good,” he sa
ys. “So now I’m the only one left in Detroit.”

  “I’m still here,” Cat says.

  “You were going to be a lawyer,” he remembers.

  “It was an idea.”

  “Can I see you again?”

  “Of course you can,” she says, feeling a little flutter in her stomach. She looks down, at her knees sticking out from beneath her shorts, then at her sandals, noticing suddenly that the polish on her toenails is worn and chipped—How could I go out like this? she asks herself—and then looks up, so maybe he won’t notice. “But what are you asking?” She tucks her feet under the bench.

  “I was thinking more like dinner than lunch.”

  “I’d like that.” She hands him a business card from her purse. It has her cell phone on it, not that she gets many calls. She writes her home number on the back, then feels self-conscious about it. That third number seems a bit desperate.

  “I’m in the phone book,” he offers.

  The phone book. She’s been all over the Internet, and all this time all she had to do was look in the phone book. He was there, she thinks, and I never thought to look. She expected him to be far from Detroit, somewhere out in the prosperous part of the Republic. She did call his parents’ house, the old number, which she remembered by heart, adding the new suburban area code. That was when she and Michael finally split, but she’d gotten a different family altogether.

  Tommy is standing, cleaning up the trash on the table. The boys are down on the ground, running his son’s toy on the cement. If Cat were a stranger, she’d assume they were brothers.

  The good-bye is short. He holds out his hand, they shake, and she feels a little cheated. Still, watching him go, his son trailing behind, she knows what she needs to do. Raise her son. Get the man. Find the boy. Simple.

  She and Connor go to the reptile house, as steamy inside as out, but there comes a time when you’ve looked at enough animals, fought off enough heat, and are more tired than you thought. So they drive north to Cat’s little apartment, which she has finally admitted is home.

  Later, once she has put Connor to bed, she goes to the phone book, a worn copy she brought with her from the old house. And there Tommy is, living in the open, unusual for a doctor, on a street named Pilgrim, his name appearing one line below his dead father’s. She writes down the number, and the address, and then checks the Web one more time for Siobhan, but she’s still not there.

  VII

  He must tell her. Forty years is too long to keep a secret, not that it can’t be done. Normally, Sam feels no compulsion to spill out the truth, as so many do. Odd thing, human nature, with its dueling impulses to lie and disgorge. He wonders if Cat is really hurt in not knowing. There is no way for her to look for her lost father, who is truly lost, long dead, buried, if Sam remembers correctly, in a cemetery in Milford. Sam never met the man. Is it fair, really, even to call him a father? Sam raised the girl, provided for her, gave her a brother, and thus ran a long experiment in parental love. He found, as all adoptive parents must, that there is no difference in the love you feel for your children, blood or no blood. When she’s yours, then she is yours, and there’s nothing else to be done about it. Nothing else you should do.

  Still, she turned away from him. He could never be sure why. He asked Kyle once, but the boy had no insight into the situation, other than to admit he knew it existed.

  It is morning, so he walks toward the water, down the cement path dusted in sand, then struggles across the dry of the beach to the firm, wet part by the water. Another morning and not much to do, the tragedy of old age. He should travel more, he thinks, get another look at the world.

  Still restless at midmorning, he drives into town and parks by the pier. He could park on the pier, but it makes him nervous navigating the narrows of that wooden structure with his big car. He knows he’s not what he was, that he can’t afford any accidents. The world has little use for old men with bad backs and clogged arteries. They might take his license away, which would be a kind of paralysis, the kind he faced in forty-five.

  He walks onto the pier, among the other pedestrians. No one looks at him. The older you get, he thinks, the less people see you, or even want to see you. He moves past parked cars and restaurants, till he gets to the end, as close to the ocean as he can be. In truth, he has not been on the water in the last fifty-seven years, after almost three years of uninterrupted service. It’s the sharks. Late in 1944 his ship came to the aid of seamen in the water, men bobbing up and down like apples in a barrel, all of them screaming and thrashing, begging to be pulled out. They were fighting off sharks. Sam was in a rescue boat. The noise was deafening, like battle itself, with the screaming and thrashing in the water and the crew blasting pistols in desperate attempts to hold off the sharks. Sam worked beside his enlisted men, all of them as frantic as the sailors they pulled from the water, grown men who sobbed when they landed in the boat. One had his leg eaten away at the knee. As he screamed, blood pooled in the boat; soon he went into shock and bled to death before they got him back to the ship. Sam watched as men in the water were pulled under. He shot at sharks—it was the only time he personally shot at anything, the whole war—but it was no use, the sharks got what they got. After the war he could visit Japan—he even enjoyed it, enjoyed meeting the people—but he could not go in the water, or on it. This is as close as he will go, this wooden pier, in this peaceful bay, where he can look at the water, and smell it, and remember where he’s been.

  A young man comes and stands next to him, white forearms resting on the railing. His hair is short, which could mean anything, the kids nowadays wear it every way imaginable, but Sam can see that he’s wearing a small chain around his neck, and there is something pressing against his T-shirt from the inside. Dog tags. Sam knows the look of dog tags. He’s looking out at the water, this kid, and it is that look more than anything else that tells Sam he is a soldier. “Excuse me, son,” Sam says. “Are you in the army?” The kid turns and faces Sam. He doesn’t stand at attention, but it’s close. “United States Marine Corps, sir.”

  “You’ve been to war,” Sam says. “Afghanistan.” The kid rests his arms back on the railing, and soon he and Sam are again looking at the ocean, a bright glare on the scalloped water. “Yes, sir. How did you know?”

  “I’ve been to war.”

  The kid nods. “Which one?”

  “The Second World War.”

  “Were you army?”

  “Navy. Three years on this very ocean.”

  They stare at the water, and Sam assumes that’s all that will be said. To say you’ve been there—it’s all that’s needed. But then the kid speaks.

  “You must be very proud,” he says.

  “Very,” Sam says. It may be, Sam thinks, what I’m most proud of. When Truman sent him that letter, thanking him for his service, he framed it, and it’s still on his wall, the only award he’s ever displayed. He knows that everyone got one of those letters, even soldiers who never left the States, but that isn’t the point. That letter has meaning. There is no way to adequately thank someone who has been in combat. “You’re wearing your dog tags,” he says.

  “Yes, sir. A reminder of the guys who are over there. Around here it would be easy, you know, to forget there’s a war on.”

  Sam remembers getting his dog tags, two pieces of notched tin with his name and the letter H. H for Hebrew. Every government has its system of branding. He puts his hand in his pants pocket, fingers the tags. They got him through the war, and he goes nowhere without them, though he doesn’t wear them around his neck. He’d be self-conscious about that.

  “Your family in Santa Barbara?” Sam asks.

  “Carpenteria.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I like it here,” the marine says. “Where there’s money.”

  “I know there’s a war on,” Sam tells him.

  “I appreciate that,” the marine says. He’s thin, not the burly Hollywood version of a soldier but
a slender kid, the skin drawn tight across his cheeks, veins and tendons visible in his neck when he turns his head. “I go back in five days. Do you know that Afghanistan is exactly on the other side of the globe?”

  “I used to think that about the South Pacific.”

  “Did you see action?” the marine asks.

  “Yes. Broke my back, in fact. Off Okinawa.”

  The kid turns to him. “Did anyone understand, when you got home?”

  “How could they?”

  “My best friend was killed by a mine. A Russian mine. It was probably older than he was. What was the point of that?”

  “My son was killed on September eleventh. I thought what I did in the war should mean that my children would get more than forty-one years.”

  “He was killed in the attacks?”

  “Yes,” Sam says.

  “You’re the first person I’ve met who lost someone that day,” the marine says.

  Sam nods.

  “We’ll get those bastards.”

  “I hope so,” Sam says.

  Standing next to this kid, Sam feels the urge to put his arm around the boy. He remembers when he first heard the news of the 9/11 attacks, early on that Tuesday morning. He knew then, as he knows now, that there would be war. He knew it because he knew his country. For all its technological and economic prowess, for all its art and culture and great universities, for all its odes to the best qualities of the Western enlightenment, America is at heart a warrior nation, much more Sparta than Athens. There will be hell to pay, and skinny kids like this one next to him will be sent to collect.

  Sam looks down and sees a pair of dark eyes staring up at him. A seal. He reaches into his pocket and takes out his dog tags. He feels he’s being watched as he removes one of the tags from the chain, and hands it to the kid.