by Lisa Tucker
“But you know I can’t be a father. How can I, when I can barely take care of myself?” A little drunken sigh of self-pity. “I’ll just screw the kid up the way my dad screwed me up.”
Ben was still talking about his father, but Matthew wasn’t listening. He’d heard all of this before, dozens of times.
“What about Amelia?” he finally said. He was trying not to yell, but he was getting really angry. “Are you telling me that you don’t love Amelia?”
“I should never have started going out with her. She was too much for me from our first date.”
“You certainly didn’t think so at the time.” Matthew could feel a headache coming on. The bar was too noisy, already packed with people celebrating. He rubbed his temples. “Tell me why Amelia was ‘too much’ for you on the first date. Enlighten me about this, because I can’t imagine why you continued to see her if you felt that way.”
“Okay.” Ben leaned forward as if he were about to share his deepest secret. “You know how I am, Matt. I like to think.”
He broke off in drunken laughter, which even Matthew couldn’t entirely resist. Talk about an understatement; Ben’s idea of down-time was daydreaming about chemical databases.
“When I’m with Amelia, it’s hard to think because she always wants to talk. She thinks we should talk about everything. She’s so intense, it makes me nervous. Even in bed, she’s so passionate she intimidates me, though she does give the best blow jo—”
“Christ, have some respect.” Matthew was instantly pissed off again. “You’re talking about the mother of your child, and our oldest friend.”
“And I will always care about her.” Oh no; he was gulping, meaning it was time for the serious drunken tears. “Even on the day you marry her.” He grabbed Matthew’s hand. “You’ve always been like my big brother. I want to know my big brother is taking care of my wife and child.”
Matthew smirked. “I believe she’s my wife in your insane scenario.”
“Right,” Ben said, sitting up straighter. “While I’m working on trypanosomiasis, you’ll be here with Amelia and your son or daughter. That’s the way I’m going to think of the child. It’s yours now.” He waited for a moment, then unaccountably laughed. “If you want, I’ll even sign papers saying I give up my rights like I did with tegaba—”
“Have you lost your mind?” Matthew jerked his hand away. “I know you’re drunk, but can you honestly think it’s funny to compare your kid to some fucking molecule?”
Had he really just called his beloved Galvenar some fucking mole cule ? Yes, strangely enough, he had. But he didn’t have time to think about what this meant before Ben dropped another bombshell.
“I know it’s not the same,” Ben said, sniffing, clearly insulted.
“I was just trying to lighten the situation. This is very hard for me. All I meant is that I’m giving it to you forever, not just while I’m in Africa.”
“Africa? You’re leaving, too?”
“Richard and I both think someone needs to be there. I’m going on Sunday. I won’t be gone long, probably less than a year. It’s an incredible opportunity to—”
Matthew ignored Ben babbling on about the point of this trip. Finally, when he couldn’t think of anything to talk Ben out of this, he snapped, “You’re being a complete shit. You should have had a vasectomy years ago, when you first mentioned it.”
Ben smiled. “Bro, you know me so well.”
And that was the end of that. Matthew pulled Ben to his feet and lugged him out of the bar. When they were on the street, heading back to the hotel, Ben told Matthew that he loved him. As usual. So, what the hell, Matthew said, “Same, asshole,” but he couldn’t resist throwing in that if Ben wasn’t so brilliant, he’d be fucking useless. “I know, buddy,” Ben said. He was still smiling. “I know.”
Matthew was driving in circles around the city, cursing the traffic and thinking about the million things he’d had to do for Benjamin over the last twenty-two years. Helping him move into not one but three apartments. Taking over his checking account and hiring someone to pay all his bills and handle his insurance and even remind him to renew his driver’s license. Flying to Boston or London or wherever Ben was to help him with a woman problem or a money problem or just a typical Ben moment of freaking out about life in the real world. And, of course, the big thing, when they were both twenty-seven. Thirteen years ago.
Ben had just moved to Boston when, out of nowhere, his loser dad showed up. Ben hadn’t even seen his father since Ben was in middle school, but somehow the deadbeat tracked him down. He told Ben some vague shit about a gambling problem and being afraid of what would happen if he didn’t get hold of a hundred grand by the end of the summer. Matthew was living with Amelia then, working at AD, but at the bottom, before his first promotion. He had less than two thousand dollars in the bank. He told Ben to let his dad rot, but of course Ben wouldn’t consider that. He loved his father and, probably more important, he’d never felt like his dad loved him.
For months, Matthew spent every waking hour trying to solve this impossible problem. It was Ben’s idea to try to sell what he always called “the accident”—a molecule he’d discovered during his PhD program, purely by chance, while he was working on something he considered much more important. In the past, Ben had insisted the accident was worthless chem-trash, but now he wanted Matthew to convince somebody it wasn’t. Couldn’t Matthew get AD to invest in it, on the off chance it could become a new drug?
No, of course not. It didn’t work that way, though Matthew did go to a friend in R&D and beg him to take a look at it. The friend was encouraging about the molecule’s potential, but he said what Matthew already knew: the company couldn’t buy anything without making sure it was eligible to be patented, and that process took a very long time. Matthew also approached several biotech start-ups, and when that didn’t work, he went to Wall Street to pitch the molecule to venture capitalists. He was so over his head (still a little green , as his boss had called him), and by the middle of August Ben was panicking. Ben’s dad was spending his days in Ben’s apartment, peeking out of the blinds, refusing to answer the phone or even turn on the television. Matthew suspected Ben’s father was making the whole thing up, but Ben insisted his dad was in real danger of being hurt or even killed. They had to get the hundred grand, somehow.
Finally, Matthew decided to get it the old-fashioned way: by opening fourteen credit card accounts and maxing out their cash advances. But he didn’t want Ben to feel bad about him taking on more debt—since Ben’s father, no surprise, had disappeared as soon as he’d gotten his hands on the cash—so he told Ben that surely AD would buy the accident molecule eventually. He had Ben sign papers, turning over all rights to the formula to Matthew. In the meantime, Matthew’s friend in R&D and the friend’s supervisor had been running tests on Ben’s accident and, amazingly, the molecule continued to look promising. After a lot of legal wrangling, AD did end up buying it, for $250,000. Matthew’s good deed had been rewarded. He not only paid off the credit cards, but also his student loans, since Ben didn’t want any of the profits.
Ben also didn’t want his name associated with the molecule in any way because he’d violated a legal agreement to share any discoveries he made with the university. It was the only unethical thing he’d ever done (except for all the other things he didn’t think of as unethical because they didn’t matter to him). Over the years, he became obsessed with what would happen to his reputation if it ever came out. Matthew told him countless times that he was being silly, but after the molecule became a blockbuster, it struck him that he just might be able to use Ben’s fear to protect his billion-dollar baby. He hooked up Ben and Amelia, knowing that if Amelia threatened to release anything bad about Galvenar, Matthew could play off Ben’s paranoia that everything about Galvenar was in danger of being exposed. And Ben would shut her up; that was the idea. Simple but effective, or so he thought.
As warped as it sounded to him now,
at the time he really didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. Ben and Amelia were both so irritatingly moralistic and self-righteous; why wouldn’t they be ecstatic to find each other? It was almost a good deed to play matchmaker for them because they had so much in common. When he met up with them in the Caymans to make sure their relationship was still on track—and to reassure Ben that Galvenar was doing fine in the postmarket, no reason to worry despite the jackass TV journalist’s scare tactics—they seemed quite happy together. Where was the harm?
But somehow he’d let himself forget about one very important difference between them: Amelia’s fierce desire to be a mother and Ben’s equally fierce desire to avoid being a father. So once again he was back in reflection hell, but this time with a new twist. He had to go back to his apartment and face Amelia with no hope of giving her back Ben. She’d moved to Philadelphia to be with the guy, and now the screwup wouldn’t even be in the country when she delivered their baby. Matthew wasn’t sure he could forgive Ben for this outrageous selfishness, but at the moment he had to focus on Amelia. He felt so damned sorry for her, pregnant and alone.
He came home to find that she’d put the kids to bed and was resting on his couch. She had the lights dimmed, but he could see her schoolgirl long hair hanging halfway to the floor.
Naturally, he told her that Ben absolutely loved her, no question whatsoever about that. But, sadly, he was too irresponsible to be a father. Then he started sharing a few details with her, including the fact that Matthew had paid the security deposit on their new house. Matthew had had one of his minions (not Cassie; this was beneath her) turn on all their utilities. Everything was in Ben’s name, yes, but Ben hadn’t done any of it—though he’d promised to handle the move when he talked Amelia into coming back from New York.
At first she was stunned, but as he warmed up and moved to the litany of strange things Ben had done in the past, she relaxed. Eventually, he got her laughing with the story of the time Ben left one of his notebooks on a plane to London and then insisted on flying to the city where the plane was headed next, Madrid, rather than waiting for the airline to return it to him. Unfortunately, by the time he got to Madrid, two hours after the other plane had landed, the notebook was already on route back to London. He had no money and it was the middle of the night. He had to wait in the airport, on the floor, and since he didn’t have the damned notebook, he took notes on his arms. Airport security thought the notes were suspicious and made him wash his arms before he could go back to London. He insisted on being given paper first, so he could transcribe them, but when he mentioned the word anthrax to someone—god knows why; Ben said he was just trying to be friendly and let them know he understood why they were being careful—airport security took him into custody, where he stayed for hours, being questioned, until Matthew rescued him. Matthew was in Berlin at the time and he flew to Madrid, with a Spanish translator, to explain Ben’s ways to the security police. And to give Ben some fresh paper, of course. And to buy him a meal, because he hadn’t eaten since the notebook was lost and he was so dizzy he couldn’t stand up.
“You really don’t want this guy taking care of your baby,” Matthew said. Amelia was sitting at one end of the couch. He was sitting next to her: friend close, nothing more. “His genes are valuable, though. If he wins the Nobel, women all over the world will want to buy what you got for free.”
He said this in the same jocular tone as the rest, but Amelia fell silent and he realized that he shouldn’t have mentioned anything about genetics. He reminded her that the ultrasound had been normal, and when she didn’t respond, he told her that the media push for all women to have tests for Down syndrome had to have been funded by some med-device company. “They just want to scare the shit out of mothers and make them pay for more expensive tests. Hell, you know how it works. You can’t take any of this too seriously.”
She looked at him. “Do you really think my baby will be all right?”
“No, I think the baby will be very strange, but that can’t be helped, given his parents.” She laughed. Good. “Seriously, I think your baby will be just fine. I can already imagine her throwing a baseball and hitting me in the head.”
At which point, before he could comprehend what was happening, she leaned over and kissed him. A real kiss, too, not a friend-to-friend peck on the cheek.
He pulled back. “Um, I’m not sure w—”
She interrupted to kiss him again. Uh-oh. “Amelia, I’m the enemy?” He forced a laugh. “The speech, remember?”
“I’ve decided that was unimportant,” she said, into his neck.
“Good is meaningless in the modern world. I was wrong.”
All she was doing was breathing on his neck, but Ben was right—it seemed intensely passionate, though hardly intimidating. Of course then his mind flashed to the other thing Ben had mentioned, which turned him on, remembering that unusual skill of Amelia’s, but then turned him off, thinking about her performing it on his best friend.
She’d moved to kissing his ear, and he said, “Wait.” He was losing it already. This was just not right on a million levels. He moved to the other end of the couch. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do this.”
Can’t do this? Had his balls been cut off? Yes, actually, in Aspen. And he had absolutely no intention of repeating that disaster, no matter how horny he was. No matter how much he wanted to just—
“First of all,” he said, “good is not meaningless, and you know that, or you will if you get past Ben’s recent bad behavior. Second, I think you’re afraid of being alone right now, and I don’t blame you. You’ve had a lot of bad luck recently. But third, you don’t want to do something you’ll regret in the morning to get your mind off your problems. Believe me, I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work.”
“You’re probably right,” she said, but he heard her voice catch. Was she going to cry again? Yes, unfortunately, she was. Her reason, when he finally got it out of her, was laughable, but he didn’t dare laugh. She claimed she was obviously too old for him now. Old and not pretty enough. Not sexy like that woman Rachel.
“That is not true.” What choice did he have but to confess? “You have always been beautiful to me.” He raised his eyebrows in what he hoped was a playful gesture, certainly not embarrassed. “Just my bad luck.”
“Then why did you sleep with her?” She looked at him; her big green eyes were glistening with tears. “I don’t mean Rachel; I mean…”
Oh shit, not Palm Beach again. The truth was he didn’t even know anymore why he’d slept with that woman, but he still considered it one of the stupidest decisions he’d ever made, and he admitted as much. “And I’ve made a lot of stupid decisions in my life, so that should tell you something.”
“Me, too,” she said. He was expecting her to say any number of things: blackmailing him, getting together with Ben, even the choice of her career. But instead she said, in a voice as earnest as if she were confessing a real crime, “I should have gone to lunch with you at Astor-Denning.”
Then he did laugh, because it just seemed so damned funny. The whole situation. Amelia smiled, too, and said, “God, we’ve made a real mess of this, haven’t we?”
Before he could answer a resounding yes, Danny appeared, rubbing his eyes, but he was clearly relieved when he saw that Amelia was still there. He went to her to whisper his request that he be allowed to watch something because he couldn’t sleep. Specifically, he wanted to watch the movie that Matthew had rented for them.
What the hell; Danny never asked for anything, and it was New Year’s Eve. But Matthew didn’t like the idea of the depressed kid watching the movie alone, so he asked Amelia if she wanted to watch it, too. She said yes so enthusiastically that he knew she still didn’t want to leave them. Or was it him she didn’t want to leave? Or was it just that she didn’t want to go home? Christ, this was so beyond his ability to parse out the meaning that he didn’t even know where to start. What if she was still here when the movie ended? What if sh
e wanted to sleep here tonight? What if she stayed around tomorrow and the next day, to help him with the kids? Where would all this lead? Was it even remotely possible that Ben’s bizarre scenario could end up being his life?
For now, at least, it was simple enough. The three of them were going to watch Star Wars . And it was obviously the right decision because Danny finally smiled when Matthew said to him, “Luke, how about using the Force and putting in the DVD?”
Having Amelia there was surprisingly nice. At least he knew her, and that fact in itself was comforting. He even knew her middle name: Elizabeth. He knew her favorite color: aqua. He knew her birthday and her favorite foods and that she had a bizarre attraction to the number four. Whenever they did the I’m-thinking-of-a-number game, he could freak her out with his psychic abilities simply by guessing four. She had a terrible memory for numbers; maybe that’s why she stuck with four, the number of people in her own family growing up; she’d probably had to say it all the time at school, answering the teacher’s question. He remembered this, too. “How many people are in your family, Matthew?” He hated that question because his dad would be out of the house on a bender for weeks at a time and he wanted to be honest with the teacher, but what was the honest answer, two or three? He used to stand there and blush like it mattered. Two or three? Who the hell cared? The truth was always a matter of perspective, or, to put it more bluntly, what most people called “truth” was usually bullshit.
Still, it was true, for the moment at least, that he was happy. Danny was sitting on the floor, a few feet from the TV, as always. Matthew was on the couch with Amelia’s feet in his lap, watching a movie the two of them had seen many times, years ago, in a galaxy far, far away. When midnight came, they heard the city come alive with fireworks and yells and the blasts of a thousand car horns. Naturally, Isabelle heard all this noise, too, and she came stumbling out in full pout mode, clearly mad that she hadn’t been invited to this little party. When Matthew collected her in his arms, she was still warm and floppy and half asleep, but she said “No!” repeatedly when he tried to take her to bed. So he gave up and settled her on the couch with them. He had no idea if she knew what was going on, but she was giggling as if she couldn’t wait to see what would happen next, as if this was so special she wouldn’t miss it for the world.
