by Scott Lasser
He stands now and looks at the darkness of his window and knows where he is. He misses snow. This isn’t really the time for snow, though, even back in Michigan. Here it is not the time or the place. There is always a time with the place. He thinks, I will wake several more mornings in this bed, and then I will go back to the hospital. Another bypass, another roll of the dice. They crank open your chest. He doesn’t want to do it, but he doesn’t want to give in, not yet.
He sits back down on the bed to catch his breath. So it was when they taught him how to walk at the VA hospital. It had been so long since he’d been out of bed that even standing was an exhausting trial, two steps a marathon, but soon they had him out in the hallway, walking, leaning on a cane, the hallway a river of war waste, men with missing arms, legs, blind men, burned men, one with part of his jaw shot off, another with no nose. Sam walked, tried to stand tall, thinking, I am intact; someday I will walk out of here and claim my life.
And so, he thinks, what have I claimed? A family—broken, yes, but a family still—two children and now a grandson who is a Miller, not actually a blood relation but a Miller, which was really just a made-up name, chosen by his father because he thought it sounded more American than Bodenmach—he was right about that—and he wanted to be a new man in a new land, something different completely. And so now he has a great-grandson named Connor, a goyish name if there ever was one, and that it has turned out like this seems okay. Fitting. The boy is still a Miller.
Sam wonders what would have become of Kyle. Oddly, for how rarely he and Kyle talked, the boy had taken a lot of Sam’s advice—namely, to take his time with women. There was plenty of time, Sam always said. Forty was a perfectly good age to start a family. On the last visit Kyle mentioned that he was open to the idea of a family, now that he was over forty, but there was no one on the horizon. “And Cat has a child, so the pressure’s off, right? You have a grandson.”
“There would be no pressure if I didn’t,” Sam said.
“Mom would want me to be married, I think.”
“Mom would want you to be happy.” Sam decided long ago that he had no idea what Ann wanted, but he didn’t doubt that this was true.
“I’m not unhappy,” Kyle said.
Not unhappy. Sam thought about this. Kyle never had to go to war, had a good job, plenty of money, excellent health. Sam wanted nothing more for him than happiness, which should have been the outcome of the mix of all these other ingredients.
“You’re still young,” Sam told him.
XXIV
Her father moved back into the house the day she found her mother, back into her room the day after. Cat waited, wanting him to call her aside and level with her, to tell her the truth about who she was and what he’d done. Two months ago everything was fine. Then her parents split, she found out she had a different father, and her mother died. It required an explanation. And he did call her aside to the kitchen while Kyle was at cross-country practice. He’ll tell me, she thought. He’ll tell me right now.
“You’re the woman of the house now,” he told her. “Life has to go on. You graduate this year. You still planning on applying to Michigan?”
“College, Dad? I sent off the application last week.”
“Good. Great years, college, Ann Arbor. I wish I could get them back. What I want to say is, I can’t change what’s happened, but I can make the future better. I’m going to hire a woman to cook and clean. We’ll all pitch in. It won’t all fall to you.”
Cat thought, You’re telling me you’re going to hire someone to do what Mom did, that I don’t have to be a maid? What about you and me, how you came into my life?
“Did …,” he started to ask, then stopped. He looked to his right, toward the bedroom. He wanted to know about his wife’s death. “Did she say anything to you?”
Oh, yeah, she thought, Mom said a lot. But Cat answered, “No, nothing. Nothing at all.”
For Cat, one of the charms of Detroit Metro Airport’s old terminal—its only charm, really—is the display of automobiles, cars parked right in the terminal, as though it were a showroom. Ford has an Escape parked near the entrance, and Cat stops with Connor to look at the sticker, thinking, If only I made a little more, I could buy something like this—financing it, of course, but it would be mine and I could take trips in the winter, get Connor up north into ski country. It’s a nice illusion, just as the cars themselves, shiny and new and seemingly accessible, suggest a Detroit that is still dominant and strong.
She remembers when her father’s company sold out to Ford. She was two years out of college, and he had her over to dinner to show her the stock certificates. He was quite proud of them, as if they denoted his worth as an engineer or businessman. Kyle was away at school; it was just the two of them. He grilled steaks, covering them first, as was his way, in peanut oil and pepper. She stood next to him at the grill, sipping the martini he’d made her, the odd smell of it going right to her head.
“I’ll be all right now,” he told her.
“How’s that, Dad?”
“It’ll be all right. This is enough money.”
“How do you know?” It had never occurred to her that there wasn’t enough.
He smiled and flipped the meat as the flames jumped. “You can only eat one steak a day. We always think we need a little bit more. It isn’t usually the case.”
“I have nothing,” Cat said.
He turned to look at her. “What do you want?” he asked.
“I’m thinking maybe I will study law.”
“You’ve mentioned it. A profession is good. Would have made your grandfather happy.”
“It’s not about the money,” she said. “I figure, if I gotta go to work every day, I might as well love it.”
“That’s wise, but difficult. And law can be so dry you want to shoot yourself. I’ve dealt with some lawyers in my day.”
“Can you get behind me on this?”
“I’m behind,” he said. “You get into law school, I’ll pay.”
“You make it sound easy.” She would spend the next year studying on and off for the LSAT but never take the test.
“Lots of things are easy if you don’t have to worry about money.”
That was him in a nutshell, she thought. He could talk about money, business, and, God knew, the Second World War, and it was all easy. When it was hard—say, telling your daughter she’s adopted—then he couldn’t say a word. And yet once she knew, it was all she ever wanted from him, that one little unprompted admission.
She wonders if he can admit it even now, then wonders again why she’s even considering this, wonders why she still sometimes thinks he will change.
The security line is at a standstill. A year after 9/11 Cat still feels a bit of paranoia at security. It probably doesn’t help that there are seven partially veiled women in front of her speaking a language that is likely Arabic, or that the X-ray reader is an older man with glasses as thick as bulletproof glass. Eventually Cat sends Connor through the metal detector, then passes through herself. Neither sets it off, but Cat is pulled over for additional screening.
The guard asks her to spread her arms, freezing her in a crucifix stance, palms up, while the metal-detector wand is run over the outline of her body. Then they search her carry-on, and find only snacks and drinks for Connor, plus a Glamour and Us Weekly, bought impulsively at an airport newsstand.
“What did you do wrong?” Connor asks.
“Nothing.”
“Then why did they give you a time-out?”
One of the joys of motherhood, she thinks then, is to be awed by your child’s innocence. It is, of course, a mother’s duty to educate—one might say eradicate—that innocence, and perhaps this is the tragedy of parenting.
“They wanted to make sure I wasn’t carrying anything bad on the plane,” she explains.
“Like what?”
“Like a knife.”
“Why can’t you take a knife? I like knives.”
“Did anyone ever do that? Hurt people with knives, on a plane?” Connor asks.
“On September eleventh they did,” says Cat.
“What’s that?” asks her son.
Cat stops. People walk around them as though they were stones in a river. “On September eleventh, last year, men hijacked four planes. Two of them flew into the World Trade Center, where Uncle Kyle was. That’s how Uncle Kyle died. It’s why we’re going now to see Grampa. To mourn Uncle Kyle.”
“Why did they want to kill Uncle Kyle?”
Cat reaches down and picks her son up, no easy feat anymore, big as he’s gotten. “They just wanted to kill Americans,” Cat says. “And Uncle Kyle was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“But why?” asks the boy. “Why did they want to kill?”
Cat shrugs. “They just did. There are a lot of reasons, and no reasons.”
“I feel bad for Uncle Kyle.”
“Me, too,” says Cat. The weight is too much, and so she sets Connor down. He’s getting older now, and she realizes these are the conversations she is likely to get with her son—about the length of time she can hold him in her arms.
XXV
He wakes disoriented, unable to see—old age seems to require a certain amount of personal idling before the body can be put into gear—aware only of the plane, the toggling wings, remnants of the dream. Okay, he tells himself, I’m okay. It’s Kyle who’s not okay. The plane got Kyle.
“What is it?” says Phyllis. He’s in her bed; he turns his head and can almost make her out.
“Is it morning?” he asks.
She turns away to look at the clock. “If you’re a farmer,” she says.
“Ah, good.”
“What, that you’re alive? Tell me, did you ever sleep, for, say, eight hours? Like a normal person?”
“Rarely. But sleep’s overrated. Especially those long sleeps. Fifteen minutes here, twenty there, a few hours at night, and that can get you through.”
“Hmm,” she says, as she always says when she thinks what he’s just said is totally ridiculous but doesn’t want to talk about it. “Today’s the day,” she adds, changing the subject to the arrival of Cat and Connor at threethirty this afternoon, on a connection through Denver. They will stay at Sam’s place, as will Sam. This has already been decided, but the issue of Sam and Phyllis’s cohabitation hasn’t been discussed, and it’s eating at him. He doesn’t want to tell Cat.
“Why not?” Phyllis wants to know.
“It’s just one more thing to deal with. And, if I don’t tell her, it’s a secret. I like secrets. I used to have a lot of them. Now I’ve got none left.”
“If you don’t count the one whopper. Your daughter, I think, might be interested in her biological father.”
Sam allows that she might. “Can you just keep the thing about us quiet?” he says. “Do you mind?”
“I don’t know if I mind. It’s like you’re embarrassed by me.”
“Hardly. It’s just that I know how young people think. They think romance ends at whatever age they can’t quite imagine for themselves.”
“So why not disabuse your daughter of that notion?”
“Maybe because I like being smarter than her?”
“Smarter?”
“Wiser,” Sam says. “At least that.”
He wishes Kyle had had a son. There’s no logic to it, he just wishes it were so. He desires this because he wants his blood to be passed on, wants it to live on in the species the way it has for so many other men. Lesser men, even. It’s ego, he knows, but whoever decided ego was a bad thing? He remembers now a woman he got pregnant, and how afterward Goodman told him he should get a vasectomy, what was he thinking, he had two children, children who loved him, he didn’t need any more. Still, Sam couldn’t do it, couldn’t stand the idea that he’d be shooting blanks. He had high hopes for Kyle, that through him the blood and the name would live on. Not that the name meant much. His father had jettisoned the old name, and that was that, end of story. Just as he would never tell Sam about the village where he grew up, or anything of his early years, which, Sam gathered, were particularly tough. “Why do you want to talk about that?” the old man always said. And so now Sam realizes that he’s a little like his father, reluctant to tell his child where she’s come from.
After much cajoling, he is able to persuade Phyllis to drive his Lincoln to the airport, a compromise between letting him drive and her driving her filthy matchbox. Just as well, he thinks. Driving is getting to be a bother. He’s excited to see his daughter and grandson, and sitting in the passenger seat allows him to concentrate on that.
“Put your seat belt on,” she tells him.
“Are you a bad driver?” he asks.
“No, but lots of others are.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“What is with you?” she asks.
When you’re young, with so much ahead of you, they send you to get shot at; when there’s almost nothing left, they want you to wear a seat belt.
“I’m tired of playing along,” he says. “Let an old man ride without his seat belt, for Chrissake.”
“The light won’t stop blinking. On the dash.”
“Ignore it.”
“You’re getting more difficult, Sam. I thought seeing your daughter would put you in a good mood.”
“Who says I’m not in a good mood?”
In the airport they stand at the large window and watch the small jet as it taxis toward the terminal. Sam feels relief that the plane has made it. A kamikaze almost killed him, and Kyle died on 9/11—this family hasn’t done so well with planes. As he waits he stands at attention and puts his hand to his heart, trying to feel its beat.
About half the people are off the plane when he sees Cat emerge and then notices Connor walking in front of her, making his way down the stairs to the tarmac, his blond head bobbing with each step.
“There they are,” he says.
“The tall woman there?” Phyllis asks.
“That’s her.”
“The little boy is adorable.”
It’s startling to watch Connor walk toward the terminal. He looks exactly as Kyle did at that age, the fair hair, the smile, the bounce in his gait. Sam wonders if Cat sees this, how her son looks just like her brother.
When Connor enters the terminal he immediately sees Sam and takes off running till he jumps into Sam’s arms. Sam feels himself driven backward, reeling both from the welcome—he worried that Connor wouldn’t recognize him, or even remember him—and the weight of the boy. Phyllis is behind him, holding him up.
“Hi, Grampa,” Connor says.
“Hello, there. Look at how big you’ve grown.”
“I’m eight now.”
“That’s quite an age.”
“Who’s that?” the boy asks.
“That’s Phyllis. She’s a friend of mine.”
“Hi,” Connor says. He extends his hand, and Phyllis shakes it.
“You’re raising him well,” Sam tells Cat. Sam gets a close look at his daughter. She is, he knows, in her mid-forties, but to him she looks remarkably young. Still, the time has made certain things plain: Tarver’s cheekbones, for instance, his dark eyes. Like a jealous lover, Sam is always looking for these signs, for the influence of the other.
“Learned from you. Hi, Daddy.”
She hugs him. With his arms around her, he doesn’t want to let her go. Not quite yet. “Thank you,” he whispers in her ear. “Thank you for coming. It means a lot to me.”
“It means a lot to me, too. Now, are you going to introduce me to your friend?”
XXVI
So, her father has a woman
, an attractive one at that. He looks frail, more stooped than the last time she saw him, which was early in the year, when he stopped in Detroit on his way back from New York. They went to the DIA to look at the Rivera murals, that brilliant depiction of the intricate play of man and machine. “I miss this,” he said. “I miss being part of it. Detroit was something once.” Remembering that day now she is also reminded of Tommy, of how he has the same wistfulness for what Detroit has been.
She needs to tell her father about Ian. Or maybe she shouldn’t. Maybe she should keep it a secret, the way he has kept secrets. There would be an odd justice to that, but she doubts she can do it. It would burden her more than him, and she wants to let it go. Let it all go. Withholding is exhausting; it takes the energy of youth.
She decides it is perhaps better to wait till after the ceremony. She’ll tell him then. Give him a few more days to come clean, and then, one way or the other, she’ll leave the old man on a hopeful note. She’s ready to move on.
She can hear Connor talking to his grandfather in the kitchen, but she can’t make out the words. Every once in a while there’s a pause, probably when her father is answering. Funny, she thinks, how boys are drawn to men, even men they barely know. She dials Tommy and gets him on his cell. “Hello, beautiful,” he answers. “How come you’re single?” she asks. The idea just occurred to her. How could a gorgeous, forty-four-year-old doctor not have women lined up at his door? “I’m not,” he answers.
“Not what?”
“Not single.”
Panic. It hits her so quickly she runs from the suitcase she’d been unpacking and toward the bathroom, hand over her mouth.
“I have you,” she hears him say.
She sees herself in the mirror, a wreck, but relieved.
