You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

“I wouldn’t mind a turn.”

  “When I was a girl,” Mrs. Smith said, “when I was a teenager, my mother used to run a Bible study group on Wednesday afternoons, and all these old women, it was mostly old women, though I don’t suppose they were any older than me, came by the house and sat on my chairs and my sofa. Because I wasn’t permitted to disturb, my mother kicked me out. Being the youngest, most of the time they sort of gave up with me, I got the run of the house. But not on Wednesday afternoons. And all these old women talked about their grandkids. I got five grandkids, I got seven grandkids, I got three grandkids and another one coming. They were big on the numbers, it used to make me laugh. They talked about grandkids the way my brothers talked about home runs. But now I know. It’s hard work. You got to make them normal, not too much, you got to make them so they can love somebody, and you got to do it again and again and again. If I had five grandkids I’d count ’em, too.”

  Eventually Tony picked up Michael and carried him in, and Clarence came after them, leaving the hose spilling into the grass. “Turn off that water!” Mrs. Smith called out and he went back and turned it off. He got his shoes wet in the spreading water, and Mrs. Smith said, “Take off those wet shoes,” when he came in.

  “You sure I can’t get you a glass of lemonade?” she said to Tony. “You can put a little extra sugar in it.”

  “We’re all right, we better get going. His mother is waiting for us.”

  “Thank you,” I said. She held the door open behind us. Clarence stood beside her in wet socks. There were sock prints and Michael’s wet shoe prints all over the floor. The boys looked at each other but didn’t say anything; there were grown-ups around and they didn’t want to talk.

  “Anytime,” Mrs. Smith said. “You can drop him off anytime.”

  When we got down to street level, Tony took Michael’s hand and the kid kind of dragged himself along the sidewalk until Tony picked him up. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  “Put me down,” Michael said. “I want to walk.”

  “Well, hold on to my hand.”

  “I don’t want to hold your hand.”

  “Just tell me what happened and I’ll let you go.”

  But Michael scrambled loose and ran ahead. Then he turned around to look at us and ran ahead again.

  “I am unbelievably angry with you right now.”

  “What did I do?” I said.

  “I told you to keep Michael away from that boy. I told you something would happen.”

  “I did keep him away, I don’t know what you mean.”

  We walked on, it was only about a hundred yards to my house, and at one point Tony kind of laughed, and I said, what, and he said, “I bet that’s one angry bee.”

  When we reached his car he opened the door and told Michael to get in. But Michael wouldn’t. “Get in the car!” Tony shouted suddenly.

  “You can’t leave me like this,” I said. “What am I supposed to do with him?”

  “There’s no way I take my kid in that house, with him like that. You got to be kidding me.”

  “So leave him in the car.”

  “There’s no way I leave him in the car.”

  “Just lock the door. If something happens, he can honk the horn.”

  “No way.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said and sat down on the porch.

  “Is Walter around?”

  But Walter and Susie were out; we tried the bell.

  “Just sit here and wait for the police. It will take me half an hour to drop off Michael and come back.”

  “I’m hungry,” Michael said.

  “Just get in the car.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “It will take more than half an hour this time of day. Five o’clock traffic.”

  But Tony drove off anyway and eventually I changed my mind and went inside. “Nolan, Nolan,” I called out, from the stairs. There wasn’t any answer. We had left the front door open, at least it was open when I reached the landing, and I walked in. Nolan lay on his side, with his legs swiveled over, so that both of his shoes and both of his shoulders touched the floor, but his hips stuck out. Lying like that he looked a little fat, like a strong middle-aged black man who had put on weight. The bandage from his face had stuck to his shirt. He was never very dark-skinned, and his skin had a washed-out whitish look, like when you put too much milk into a cup of tea. There was a crust of drying spit around his mouth.

  “Nolan,” I said again, then sat down on my knees and felt his neck for a pulse. Some gestures are tender just because the motion itself needs gentleness. I had trouble at first, there’s a lot of loose skin and tissue, and the cords in his throat were stretched by the angle of his head. But he was breathing, his lips moved, and then I found his pulse, which was steady enough and felt like a small gulp of blood, one after another. The human machine was operating fine and the rest of him couldn’t get in the way of whatever I felt for him. I sat like that I don’t know how long, until I heard the sirens coming nearer.

  31

  The cops came, the ambulance came, doctors did their business and loaded Nolan up on a stretcher—he’s a big guy, you could feel how heavy he is, the way they carried him down the stairs. One of the cops rode along in the ambulance, they set the sirens off, the squad car followed, and another car drove me to the station to make a statement. I called Beatrice from the road, and about twenty minutes later, Tony showed up with Mel Hauser.

  I’d been to this station before, on Beaubien Street, a big square grand old building, like a town hall. It’s where they took my fingerprints for the education board. This time they emptied out my pockets and checked my wallet and removed my shoes. They took my fingerprints again and lined me up against a blank wall and photographed me looking different ways—mug shots.

  Tony got the same treatment, but he liked these guys or at least pretended to. These were working-class Detroit city cops. One of them had a buzz cut and glasses, his face was reddish, his hair, too, and his chin ran down his neck in tough folds. A fat strong medium-size guy named Lisicki. Mel knew him—it was a good idea bringing him along. They gave me my shit back and pointed to a row of plastic chairs. It was like waiting in a hospital waiting room.

  Then Beatrice came in with a lawyer, Dan Korobkin, a skinny Jewish guy with quick expressions and a reasonable amount of hair. Robert James wanted somebody around to talk me through the legal process. It turned out this lawyer knew my brother a little, Brad was two years ahead of him at Chicago. At least, this is what Korobkin told me. He sat next to me, on one side, Beatrice on the other.

  “Is there anybody you want me to call?” she said. “I can let them know.”

  Korobkin said, “What happens now is a lot of procedural stuff, a lot of paperwork. They’ll take a statement. You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to answer, and if you feel like talking something over with me first, we can find a space. After that my main priority is to get you home.”

  At one point he went to the bathroom, and Beatrice leaned over and said, “So what the fuck happened.” Along with the makeup, which she hadn’t taken off, she had a strong scent of perfume on her, which was mixed in with her own smell—also strong on a hot day. God knows I must have stunk, too.

  “Nolan saw Michael wandering around, you know, Tony’s kid, and got him into his car somehow, because he thought he was Robert’s. This was at Robert’s house. Tony and I had gone out to lunch and left Michael behind. And then when we came back he was gone. So we got in the car and started looking for him. Anyway, Nolan ended up at my place, because he knows I’m a friend of Robert’s, and I guess he wanted to make some kind of communication—some kind of threat. He’s pissed off about the Meacher thing. I tried to explain that Michael was Tony’s kid, he had nothing to do with Robert, but by that point everybody was shouting. I got them inside, into my place, but they kept screaming at each other. I tried to call the police but Nolan took the phone away, physically, by force, and then Tony
and Nolan started going at it. I didn’t see the whole thing, I had to step out. But when I came back they were rolling around on the floor. Nolan’s already a little beat up, and Tony caught him in the— He had this bandage on his face that came away, and that must have hurt, because he just kind of lay there and Tony started kicking him, and I had to pull him away. Because by that stage Nolan was out cold. He lives with his mom just down the road and I figured he might have left the kid there, so we went to look, and the kid was there, and we took him away. Then Tony drove him home and I kind of sat with Nolan until the ambulance arrived. That’s the best I can piece it together. The whole thing’s a big fucking mess. Where were you? You look all dressed up.”

  “Downtown. I had a meeting. Some guy called Krause from Goldman Sachs.”

  “I think we got lucky, it could have been much worse. I think it’s going to be okay.”

  “For who?” she said.

  Tony kept talking, he seemed in a good mood. “The motherfucker took my kid,” he said to Lisicki.

  “I don’t want to hear it. Mel, tell him to shut up.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Look, I didn’t do anything, he was beating the shit out of me. But what I’m saying is, he had it coming. The son of a bitch definitely had it coming. Don’t expect me to feel bad about it.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you feel. Keep it to yourself.”

  “Does anyone know how Nolan is doing?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Does anyone know how Nolan is doing?” I said again, as loud as I could, but I don’t think it came out clear. I was all talked out.

  Lisicki said, “Nobody knows.”

  I felt like I was coming down with a cold. My bones ached, and there was a flat pain, like a low noise you can’t get out of your head, running from my butt to my knees. A loose wire of nerves that kept shorting. Beatrice put her arm around me, to warm me up, she said. I must have been shivering—on a hot June day that was still waiting for rain. I had the sense for the first time in years, since I was a kid maybe, that my face was something physical. That the bones of my face were a wall and my mouth was a door and I didn’t have to come out if I didn’t want to. Nobody could force me.

  But then they called me in to make a statement, and I remembered my brother’s old joke about my stories. How I said, this and then this and then this.

  AS SOON AS I GOT home I called Gloria, but the cabins they were staying in didn’t have phones—and her cell had no reception. It went straight to voicemail. So when she came back Friday night I had to tell her about the whole business. The story had been kind of accumulating in me over the past few days, and I knew it would come out rehearsed, I knew I would sound formal and underemotional and overconsiderate, and that’s how I sounded. But I had to tell her anyway. The other problem was she came back brimming with her own hard-to-follow stories, about people I didn’t know and which didn’t seem very important, relatively speaking. But I waited for her to tell them anyway, patiently. She sensed my patience, too, and that pissed her off even before I started.

  So right from the beginning we fought about the whole damn thing.

  “I don’t understand what happened,” she said. “Nolan passed out?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you left him there, for how long?”

  “About ten minutes, fifteen minutes.”

  “You’ve got to realize how upsetting this is for me,” she said.

  “What do you mean, for you?”

  “This is personal for me. You understand that. Nolan’s my friend.”

  “He’s a friend of mine, too—”

  “Apparently not. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “You mean your dad.”

  “Don’t say it. I mean you, I mean you . . .” She was crying and kind of hitting me, which I recognized as a good sign, because if she could take it out on me, she could probably let it out, too. But all of this sounds more calculating than I felt. I was very upset. I tried to tell her this, I wanted to make it clear, but it came out as more of a statement of fact than I would have liked, not an outburst of feeling, and she had limited sympathy.

  I said to her, “It seems to me that your first port of—concern should be me, should be what happened to me and what I’m going through . . .”

  “What are you going through, Marny?”

  “This, for one thing.”

  “You need to toughen up then. If you think this is bad.”

  She had cried herself out, but underneath the softness was more hardness. I got a sense of that, too. You live with somebody, in a state of real intimacy, you sleep in her bed (we were at Gloria’s place; she was unpacking), you watch TV together, you leave the bathroom door open, and then you realize she can step out of this intimacy if she wants, she can make decisions about it. At least since I was at her place she couldn’t go home. And she couldn’t bring herself to kick me out either, that was a bridge too far. So I knew that at some point that night we would lie down in bed together, in close proximity, with the light off, which gave a reasonable chance for our actual real affection for each other to come out, like some kind of hedgehog in the dark. Which is what happened.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” she said. “I’m not really mad at you. I’m just worried about Nolan, I’ve known him for a long time, and it’s confusing for me that you’re in the middle of this. I feel like I have to take sides, and somehow I’m on the wrong side. Just lying here like this with you.”

  “So let’s not have sides,” I said.

  32

  Nolan turned out to be okay—medically, I mean. He regained consciousness in the ambulance; the diagnosis was severe concussion. I didn’t think Tony kicked him that hard, but who knows. Nolan used to play football, free safety, he had a history of concussions, and this is one of those repetitive things, where the more you get it, the more vulnerable you are. It’s a complex field; the damage isn’t always structural. At least, the doctors disagree about that—a lot of what goes on is at the micro level. Synapses. Neuropsychiatry. You become predisposed. I started reading up on all this stuff; there were stories in the newspaper, too.

  I tried to remember exactly what had happened. Nolan was kind of getting up, he was halfway up when Tony kicked him. His head snapped back when he hit the ground. This was an image that replayed itself in my mind. Apart from anything else because people kept asking me about it. Korobkin, Lisicki. Beatrice and Robert James. When you describe something often enough you remember what you describe and not what you saw.

  They kept him overnight at the hospital, under police guard. His medical problems weren’t the issue. Undressing him, the nurses found a gun. It wasn’t loaded, but it wasn’t licensed either, and Korobkin said it could add a minimum of two years to his sentence. If he was convicted, that is. In which case there would be a lot of technical code to work through, a complicated points system. It was like scoring ice skating, except instead of medals they gave you months and years. The worst-case scenario was life in prison with the possibility of parole, but there were mitigating circumstances. Michael didn’t get hurt and the whole thing played out very quickly. Little details, like leaving the kid at his mother’s house, were likely to sit well with a judge. But the gun didn’t help, and Nolan also had a criminal record. One count of disturbing the peace, and a misdemeanor drug charge he picked up in college. That didn’t help either. Korobkin figured he could be looking at ten years.

  When the doctors released him, the cops took over, and a judge set bail—$100,000. Nolan didn’t have access to that kind of money. They couldn’t even raise 10 percent for the bondsman.

  I wanted to visit him in jail, but Korobkin advised against. I saw a lot of this guy over the next ten months, because what happened next happened in different stages, it took time, there were court appearances, things to sign, meetings with lawyers. It became an aspect of my life but not my whole life, though it affected the rest of my life, too.

  Korobkin lik
ed to talk baseball to me. He had Tigers season tickets, and every time I saw him, we spent maybe half the conversation on baseball. For a while it looked like the Tigers had a chance of making the playoffs, Cabrera was having a great year, knocking it all over the park. And Verlander put up his usual strong numbers. He got called up for the All-Star Game at the last minute. “What you need in this league,” Korobkin said, “is a slugger and an ace, and we have both.” But then guys got hurt and the White Sox put clear water between them, before the Twins pulled away. I had to listen to his complaining, too.

  He offered to take me to a ball game, but I said no.

  “You can talk about the game,” I said, “but don’t make me watch it.”

  “You know who you should have heard call a ball game? I’ll tell you who.” Korobkin was a big Ernie Harwell fan, the old Tigers broadcaster, who’d died in May. “He was one of those play-by-play announcers they should study in high school English classes. When a guy struck out looking, Ernie used to say, he stood there like a house by the side of the road.”

  The case was slowly taking shape but all of this takes an unbelievable length of time. The first thing you realize is, you want this thing resolved so you can move on with your life, but you have to live your life anyway because this thing is about to become a part of it. Kidnapping is a felony offense, even if the whole business doesn’t last but a couple of hours, even if no one gets hurt, and the political context looked bad for Nolan. I mean, what he said to me, “I’m just making him sweat a little,” which went towards motive. Korobkin asked me repeatedly about this line, and what Nolan said afterwards, about applying pressure. I had motives, too, operating at cross-purposes to each other, and from the beginning I decided to drown out the noise by concentrating as much as possible on telling the truth. But for reasons that slowly became clear this was unsatisfactory.

  I kept trying to understand what had happened, and the law was one way of understanding it. But I felt like you feel when you’re a kid and your parents tell stories about you at the dinner table. That’s not the way it was, you want to say. Even if it’s all true. Just because Nolan picked up some kid in his car, who was maybe wandering in the road or in Robert’s garden (this fact was still under dispute), and brought him to his mother’s house, where we picked him up a few hours later, Nolan was looking at ten years in jail. Maybe a quarter of the life he had left. There seemed to be something disproportionate—I don’t just mean about the sentencing guidelines, though that, too. I mean about the way some stupid impulse, some spur of the moment thing, can become a permanent feature or scar in somebody’s life. I guess I don’t like the way facts become facts. I remembered the feeling of that hot afternoon, it was muggy, too, Tony and I were both a little drunk, and I had a hangover coming on, but what I mean is I felt like I was operating the whole time at some slight remove from reality, I didn’t have great access. We were all just floundering around, trying to get a grip on something, and now, one month, two months, three months later, that floundering turned out to be the reality, and that other thing, the thing we needed to come to terms with, might as well not have existed.