by John Searles
Charlene crosses her arms and sits down on the second-to-last step. “Well, good luck because he isn’t here.”
Beyond the issue of Melissa, one of the main reasons Richard made such an impulsive decision to come back to Pennsylvania was so that he could lay eyes on his son again. In his time as a doctor, he had seen thousands upon thousands of people recovering in hospital beds with injuries far worse than Philip’s. But there was something different when it was his child—a child he had failed so miserably. Richard wants to see him again so he can erase that image of Philip’s bruised body and weary eyes from his mind. He hopes to rid himself of those guilty feelings too. “Where is he?”
“I have no idea where he went. Maybe he hopped on a plane to Florida because he suddenly felt that he had to see his long-lost father. Or maybe he got sick of this place and went back to New York. That’s how he left last time. He walked out the door and didn’t come back for almost five years.” Charlene’s voice cracks suddenly, and Richard realizes she is crying. He watches as she puts her elbows on her knees and her face in her palms. Since he doesn’t know what else to say or do, he leans against the banister and places his hand on her shoulder. It is the first time Richard has touched her in years, which is odd in a way, since there was once a time when he couldn’t get enough of touching her. “You ruin everything,” Charlene says, her voice barely audible as she talks into her hands. “This is all your fault.”
Richard tells himself not to take the bait, but he does anyway. “What’s all my fault?”
Charlene looks up at him, her face wet with tears. “I saw Pilia today.”
It’s been ages since he has heard that name. Still, Richard would never forget the way Charlene used to carry on about that woman. “What does Pilia have to do with anything?”
Charlene wipes her eyes with the back of her hands to no avail, because the tears keep coming. “I’ve been wishing bad things upon her for years. And she’s not the only one either. I had an entire list of people in my head. She was right up there at the top. Next to you, as a matter of fact. And when I saw her today, it turned out she had cancer. Cancer. She had to have both of her breasts removed.” Charlene stops to take a breath as Richard tries to figure out what she is getting at. “Afterward, I got in my car and thought, ‘You know what? I am going to make an effort to be nice today. I am not going to scream, and I am not going to yell.’ It was like a little promise I made to myself. But today of all days, I have to find out about you and Melissa! Today of all days, you decide to show up and make me break that promise to myself!”
“Why are you blaming me?” Richard says, his hand still on her shoulder.
“Who the hell should I blame?” she screams, brushing him away. “Tell me that. Who?”
“I don’t know, Charlene. Maybe there is nobody to blame. Maybe it’s not about blame at all.”
After that, she grows quiet. She holds her hands out before her, absently inspecting her nail-bitten fingers as Richard walks to the other end of the foyer and leans his back against the wall. Holly had warned him that it was a bad idea to come here. But she hadn’t really understood about his relationship with Melissa Moody either. The only thing she did seem to comprehend was how shaken he felt after seeing Philip in that hospital bed. Now Richard tries once more to make Charlene understand. “I swear to you, Charlene. I am telling the truth about that girl. No matter what her parents or anybody else said, I did not have an affair with her. We ran into each other at the cemetery one afternoon and we started a friendship.”
Without looking up, she says, “A friendship with a seventeen-year-old girl. That’s normal, Richard.”
“I never said it was normal. None of it was normal. But her parents were awful to her. She had no one. She needed help. She needed me.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell me then? Why did you keep it a secret?”
“Think about what you’re asking, Charlene. I could barely talk to you that summer. All you did was lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. You wouldn’t even have a conversation with me about the way Philip was handling it. Never mind how Melissa felt.”
That comment makes her reach for the banister. She pulls herself to a standing position, points a finger at him, and says, “Don’t come here and pretend that you were some do-gooder trying to help Philip and Melissa and me. Please. That’s what I have to say to that, Richard: please! Half the time you were off screwing that slut girlfriend of yours from Vegas and—”
“Do you always have to call her that? Besides, Charlene, she is not my girlfriend anymore. She is my wife.”
“Well, good for you.” Charlene throws both hands up in the air. “I’m glad you picked one over the age of eighteen this time.”
Richard resists the impulse to yell at her. He should be used to these sorts of attacks. At the very least, he should be prepared for them, seeing as he walked right into it. Still, he can’t help but be bothered by the things she is saying. In a calmer voice, he tells her, “I don’t know how to make you believe me.”
“Me neither,” Charlene says. “And I don’t want to think about it anymore. You better call that cab back. And when it comes, you can show yourself out. Do me a favor too. Next time you decide to make a surprise visit, don’t.”
With that, she steps into the bathroom beneath the stairs and reappears a moment later holding a box of tissues. She hugs it close to her breasts as she walks off down the hallway toward the kitchen. Richard stands there a long while, wondering what to do next, since he has no intention of leaving so quickly after coming all this way. Somehow, he thinks this would be easier if Philip were here. He glances up at the photo of him in his cap and gown with that forced smile on his face. Then Richard looks at the picture of both his sons in front of Pat’s, where they used to go all the time for cheese steaks. Even though he tried not to play favorites while the kids were growing up, he couldn’t deny that he got along better with Ronnie than Philip. It was just so much easier with Ronnie, who was almost always cheerful, whereas Philip was so sullen and moody all the time. But as Richard stares up at that photo on the wall, he tells himself he should have tried harder to reach out to Philip—especially in recent years. Yes, he made a point to regularly send checks to him in New York, and yes, he paid for whatever Philip charged on the emergency credit card, which was mostly books and cheap meals but he has the sense that he should have done something more.
A loud clanging sound comes from the kitchen, and Richard turns his gaze away from those photos. He walks slowly down the hall and finds Charlene standing at the sink, scrubbing a pot. The smell of brewing coffee fills the room. “What are you doing?”
“Making strudel,” she says over the sound of running water. “What the hell does it look like I am doing? I thought I told you to leave.”
“You did, Charlene. But I’ve come all this way and I’d like to see my son before I go. I would also like it if we could work this out.”
Charlene continues scrubbing. “I don’t know what there is to work out, Richard. To tell you the truth, I don’t even care anymore. It doesn’t matter to me if you and that girl were madly in love or if you just had a friendship. Either way, it won’t affect my life after today. It is never going to bring Ronnie back. And it is never going to make that baby she is carrying my grandchild.”
“Your grandchild?” In the midst of all this arguing, he had managed to lose sight of Melissa’s claim that the baby she is carrying belongs to Ronnie. In Richard’s memory, he hears her voice from one of those afternoons at the cemetery, telling him, I pray to Ronnie all the time. I pray to him and I tell him everything I am feeling. I ask him to come back to me somehow. Miracles like that happen, you know. My father talks about them all the time… “Charlene,” Richard says now, “you didn’t honestly believe her, did you?”
She finishes cleaning the pot, turns off the water, and grabs a dish towel to wipe it down. On the counter, the coffee maker releases a loud gurgling sound as it brews. Richard wonders why sh
e would put on coffee at this time of night, but he doesn’t ask. “Of course I didn’t believe her,” she says finally.
There is an unconvincing tone in her voice that makes him suspect otherwise. “Good,” he says. “Because it’s not possible.”
“This morning on the phone you told me that it was possible. So which is it?”
“I only said that after you forced me, Charlene. What I meant was that it is feasible in a hypothetical sense. But it is not the case here. Nobody froze Ronnie’s sperm. I know that for a fact.”
“So I just have to ask. Do you know a Dr. Gerald Casale from Penn?”
“Who?”
“Dr. Casale. He’s a fertility doctor who does this sort of thing. I Googled him today at the library.”
“What were you doing Googling a fertility doctor?”
“Never mind that. Just tell me, do you know him?”
Richard realizes how much she must want to believe Melissa if she made the effort to actually research specialists in the field. A big part of him feels bad for disappointing her. Still, he has no choice but to tell her the truth—he has never heard of the man before.
His words cause Charlene’s face to go slack with resignation. She looks exhausted from it all. Richard watches as she dries her hands with the dish towel, then drapes it over a cabinet handle. “Well, like I said, it’s not as though I was stupid enough to believe her anyway.” Charlene turns away from him, focusing on something in the corner of the room. When Richard looks, there is nothing but the pale yellow phone on the wall, her address book open on the counter. She lets out a sigh and says, “Listen, it’s been a long, trying day and I want to go up to bed.”
“I understand,” Richard tells her.
“How nice of you. But I’m not looking for your approval. My point is, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll stay here and wait for Philip.”
Charlene cocks her head. “Hold on a second. You weren’t planning on sleeping here, were you?”
“Obviously, I wasn’t planning much of anything. I came here without really thinking about it.”
“Well, maybe you should have,” Charlene tells him.
All Richard can think to say is, “It’s too late now.”
After that, Charlene stares away at the silent telephone again until finally she waves her hands in the air and steps past him into the hallway. Under her breath, she says, “Fine. Do whatever you want. You always do anyway. I’m too tired to fight anymore. You can sleep on the sofa in the family room. It’s already pulled out. Have a party if you want to. Just don’t turn off the coffee because I made it for Philip in case he comes home.”
“Good night,” Richard tells her.
Charlene mumbles something else but he cannot make out the words. Her footsteps pad up the stairs, and the house grows silent again. Richard is so accustomed to the lull of the waves outside the condo in Palm Beach that he’d forgotten how quiet this house can be at night. There is only the sound of the wind rustling through the trees outside. Somewhere in another room, a branch scrapes against a window. Richard pokes around the kitchen, noticing that Charlene’s address book is open to the P section, and that Philip’s cell phone number is the only one on the page. Then he looks at the sink, where the few remaining bowls are caked in green. Pea soup, he thinks, remembering those days on Spruce Street when Charlene used to make a giant pot to last the week.
He turns and stares at the nicked farmhouse table, surrounded by the stiff, ladder-back chairs he used to find so uncomfortable. Night after night after night, he and Charlene had eaten at that table when the kids were growing up. He thinks of all the conversations that took place during those dinners—about report cards and field trips to the Liberty Bell and the capitol building and the zoo and birthday parties and library events and nice teachers and mean teachers and new doctors at the hospital and retiring doctors at the hospital and who wanted a new bicycle and who needed to study harder for algebra exams and so on and so on and so on. It is not that Richard is unhappy in his present life—no, it is not that at all—but remembering those dinners makes him realize it is a different kind of happiness than what he felt back then. In those days, he carried inside him a certain kind of hopeful buoyancy—a sense that things were as they should be—a feeling that is all but foreign to him now.
Richard rubs his eyes and releases a breath. He has never been the nostalgic type, so he doesn’t know why he is giving in to those feelings. To distract himself, he opens a cabinet and takes down a glass. He locates the Brita pitcher in the fridge and pours himself some water. The airplane ride left him dehydrated, and he gulps down three glasses before his thirst is quenched. Afterward, he wanders into the family room, where the sofa bed is unfolded just as Charlene said. The sheets are rumpled. The pillows tossed every which way. There is a small, portable reading light in the center of the bed as well as a book open facedown. On the floor, there is an unzipped duffel bag. Judging from the looks of things, he figures that this must be where Philip has been sleeping, since it is probably too difficult for him to navigate the stairs in his cast. The thought makes him wonder how Philip was able to leave the house at all tonight.
Without bothering to peel back the covers, Richard sits on the bed and leans his head on the pillows. For a long while, he stares up at the ceiling the way Charlene used to do that summer. The longer he waits for Philip to arrive, the more Richard begins to think that Holly was right: it was a bad idea to come here without any sort of planning. And as the wind blows outside, and that branch scrapes against a window in another room, all those reasons he’d had—which had seemed so compelling this morning—fade from his mind. The clock on the wall is stopped at five-thirty, but his watch says that it is almost ten. Normally, Richard wouldn’t nod off this early, but he allows himself to close his eyes as he waits for Philip. It is only a matter of time before his breathing slows, his mind drifts, and he is asleep.
As he goes on sleeping, Charlene lies sideways across her bed upstairs, mentally examining the puzzle pieces of the last twenty-four hours—from Melissa Moody showing up at their door, to her discussion with Philip this morning when he first planted the slim possibility in her mind that the girl could be telling the truth, to her odd encounter with Pilia at the library, to her visit to the Moodys’ house, to coming home and finding Philip gone, to reading those e-mails in his duffel bag, and now Richard’s unexpected return. When it becomes too much to think about, Charlene gets up from bed. She goes to the bathroom and fetches her nightgown on the back of the door, then pulls off her clothes and changes into it. Before climbing into bed again, she walks to the window and parts the curtains, looking out for some sign of Philip. Charlene can’t say why exactly, but the feeling of dread she had earlier still plagues her. She tells herself that it is nothing more than the turmoil of recent events. But something has her worried. Down in the driveway, she can see the trunk of her car sticking out of the garage. The sight makes her think of her cell phone, which she’d left inside on the seat, and those messages that she couldn’t figure out how to retrieve.
At last, she gives up thinking about them and forces herself to return to bed. Since it will be nearly impossible to sleep tonight with her mind weighed down by so many worries and her ex-husband downstairs, Charlene reaches over to the nightstand for her container of sleeping pills. Instead of uncapping it and swallowing a pill, the way she normally would, she does something different tonight: Charlene simply squeezes the container in her palm for comfort before closing her eyes and trying to give herself over to sleep.
Outside, the wind continues to blow. The stars and the nearly full moon illuminate the black winter sky. Under that same moon, far away from the Chases’ house—past the rows of suburban homes and the tangle of wooded streets, along one stretch of highway, then another, then another, past hundreds of green exit signs and lonely rest stops, where waitresses are making watery coffee and janitors are scrubbing urinals and running mops ov
er bathroom floors and truckers are dropping coins into vending machines—across seven state lines to Florida and then to Palm Beach, the ocean crashes against the shore outside the window of Holly and Richard’s condominium, just as he was thinking of earlier tonight.
Inside, Holly lies in their king-size bed alone, occupying only a slim portion of the left side, since she is so used to Richard hogging the rest. Like Charlene, Holly is replaying recent events in her mind. In particular, she mulls over her conversation with Richard this morning, dissecting what he told her about his relationship with his son’s girlfriend. It was more than a friendship, but it was not an affair. I never so much as kissed the girl… For what must be the hundredth time today, Holly wonders why he kept it hidden if, as he claimed, there was nothing to hide. Her thoughts go to the many details of her own past—the men she’d slept with before meeting Richard, the various drugs she’d tried in her early twenties, even the boyfriend of her mother’s whom she’d once kissed when she was barely sixteen—none of those things had she ever divulged to Richard. Not that he wouldn’t understand, because she figures he would. She supposes that she kept those parts of her past a secret because the woman who did those things is not the woman she is anymore. In the same way, Holly wonders if the man who formed such an unlikely attachment to his son’s girlfriend was not the same man he is today.
Something about this thought causes Holly to get out of bed and go to her closet. It takes a few minutes of digging before she locates the shoe box in the very back, behind an old down comforter and a small mountain of heels she never wears anymore. She pulls off the top and sorts through the cassettes inside. When she spots the tape she is looking for, Holly stands and goes to the living room, where she puts it in the stereo. The instant she presses Play, a crackly recording of her voice fills the room. It is of her in Vegas at a medical convention, telling jokes about male gynecologists and their lack of proper “vagina-side manner.” Each time she blurts out a punch line, the audience erupts with laughter. But there is one laugh that rises above the others. It is an odd sound—heavy and reckless—the sort of laugh that sounds close to tears. It is Richard’s laugh. Holly still remembers how sad that sound had seemed to her then, because it sounded like a man in pain, which is what he was when they first met.
