Hooked (21 page)

“I really can’t,” he said, taking some books out of his backpack and stacking them on the desk. “Is he okay?”

“He’s okay, he just has to lie a certain way, off his leg,” I said.

Mrs. Weston hunched down and kissed Ian’s foot. She patted my leg and gave me a “Hang in there” look. “I’m here and available if you need anything, Thea. Please take me up on it. If you need some time to yourself, to take a nap, to recharge, just call me. Promise?”

“Thank you,” I said.

She fished through her big canvas tote bag for her car keys. “Maybe you could bring him around this weekend and we could watch him for a few hours. Give you guys a break.”

“Let’s see how he’s feeling,” Will said. He stroked Ian’s head for a few seconds and picked his keys up from the table. “I’ll walk out with you.”

When they left, I ordered chicken with broccoli, an egg roll and a carton of rice and ate it all while Ian slept. He slept on and on that night, barely stirring.

I picked up the yellow yarn, still on the lower shelf of the side table, out of a panicky sense of boredom. It had been a while, but I was relieved to find that my stitches didn’t look disastrously different from the last time I’d worked on it. I got all the way up to the top of the triangle—it went faster as the triangle narrowed—and then did the series of chains that made up the tie around the neck, which went faster than I’d remembered. At around midnight, the bikini was done. I held it under Florence’s rickety, red metal reading lamp, the night dust circling around it like little fireflies, and thought, This is pretty cool. I marveled at the details Carmen had written into the pattern—how the strap that tied around the back was just a little bit thicker than the strap that tied around the neck. And how the band at the waist had started to roll over just a little since I’d finished it a few weeks earlier. I couldn’t wait to show it to her.

When I opened my eyes, Will was standing over me and staring. It was one o’clock and I’d fallen asleep with the bikini top splayed across my chest. He picked it up and the ball of yarn dropped onto the floor. He fished around on the floor in the dark, found the ball and put the top and the yarn back on the second shelf of the side table.

“You’re still working on that thing?” he asked.

“I finished it,” I said. “Not that you’d care. Where were you?”

“Studying.”

“You smell like beer,” I said, pulling the blanket up to my shoulders.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, throwing his coat on the chair.

“Nobody, apparently. It doesn’t occur to you to call? To see how he’s doing, at least?”

“I figured you were taking care of things. Like you’ve been doing so well.”

“Subtle, Will,” I said, leaning up on my elbow. “We had an accident. Deal with it.
I
am.”

“I didn’t say anything.” He sat by my legs, his sneakers flopping to the floor.

“You don’t have to.”

“Let’s go to sleep,” he said. “You’re tired.”

I lay there waiting for him to drift off, hating him for the stupid, selfish wall he’d put up, hating him for inserting me so deeply and squarely into the middle of the night, awake and alone. Ian woke up and we sat in the chair by the window. He fell asleep at my boob almost immediately and I wondered for the millionth time what to do. Whether to put him back in the Pack ’n Play or wake him up to keep nursing. I peeled the gauze off his leg, praying he wouldn’t scream. I nudged Ian and he startled awake, his jaw starting to move, barely detectable, his arm drifting around my chest, banging it a few times, then drifting up in the air behind him. I wondered if his thoughts were as floaty as his arm. I imagined his thoughts as light phantoms that had no names, just floating and settling, free of synapses or endings. His hand finally settled at my collarbone, and I tried to imagine a future moment when Will wouldn’t look at me as though he didn’t trust me with Ian, when I wouldn’t hate him for looking at me like that. If Will mistrusted me so much, why didn’t he step in? If I was really doing such a terrible job, why didn’t he just take Ian and run away? Ian breathed in sharply; I tried in the dark to decipher the
New York Times
headlines on the ottoman a few feet away, tried not to think of my own crimes, my honest mistakes.

Will’s uncle Dave, Mrs. Weston’s younger brother, died of a heart attack in Prospect Park while Ian and I were in the hospital. He was fifty-three. I put Ian in the sack and went with Will to the memorial. We walked around piles of wet leaves and vast, muddy puddles toward hundreds of people huddled on a hill near where he’d been jogging. Dave’s wife, Carol, stood by a tree in a navy-blue suit, their three kids next to her. Mrs. Weston was on her other side, her gray eyes sunken and red. She saw us and reached her hand over, where it rooted around aimlessly, touching my cuff, Will’s knuckles, Ian’s bum in the sack. Amanda cupped Ian’s cheeks. “So this is Ian.”

“This is Ian,” Will said. “And this is Thea.”

“He’s just beautiful,” she said. “I’m sorry we haven’t gotten over to see you guys.”

You guys, I thought. We were not “you guys.” “You guys” were bustling, intertwined; they picked cereal up off the floor and went out to the park, swinging their kid between them. We were not “you guys.” I looked at Will, who was shuffling his feet, his eyes fixed on the ground. I missed him in a way that felt like homesickness.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Carol,” he said, his hands digging stiffly into his pockets. “I really am.”

A guy next to us reached for her. “Hello, Carol,” he said. “Don’t know if you remember meeting a couple of years ago at Dave’s fiftieth. Bob Rosen.”

She nodded, looking up at the guy, and smiled in a way that unpacked her grief for anyone to see. “That was such a lovely night, wasn’t it?” she said.

The oldest son spoke during the memorial service at a club in Brooklyn Heights. He talked about family camping trips and how his dad loved hideous, cheap light fixtures and was stingy with paper towels and toilet paper to the point of ridiculousness. Black candle smoke drifted up to the ceiling and I wondered for the millionth time, How would I be a good mother? What would it take?

Will went to school after the service, and I went home thinking about how I’d stop snapping at Will when he took his socks off in the middle of the room or threw Ian’s dirty diapers directly into the kitchen garbage. It was a Friday night and for some reason, maybe to forget about Dave, Will came home later that night with some people from Columbia and a case of beer.

It was Mark and Maggie and Helena from his hall and Lester and Tina and Jason, all in our small room with Ian nursing and sleeping on me. Maggie and Mark had something going on, but she held on to Will like he was hers; she put her hands around his waist when she spoke to him and they swayed to Neil Young in front of me on the rug. I wasn’t supposed to mind. Lester sat next to me on the couch and passed a bong around, taking a hit between each person.

Helena swung her leg over the leather armchair and let her foot float to the music in the thin air. “How often do you have to do that?” she asked me.

“Feed him?” I asked, getting up to open a window. “All the time.” She looked away, her puffed lips and her spacey, bored eyes telling me how she believed it was her right to be there, taking up space in our apartment. I looked for her hips, tried to trace them toward the middle of her body, but they were hidden from me. Will sat down at Florence’s old upright
piano, so dark and unshiny it could have been made out of a blackboard, and played something I recognized by Eric Clapton or a band from the seventies that had a one-word name, and although it was short, it took me around the room in a spiral of aching memories of Will and the way we were together, before Ian, while people talked. It was the opposite of listening to a song over and over until it sinks in and you like it. It was inescapable, lilting love. I didn’t know he played piano. What else didn’t I know? Will’s back was to me, but I could see the side of his face, and he moved around on the bench as though he were in a conversation with someone, as though he were talking, and I thought about being the one he was talking to, how nice that would be, and although I understood all of it for what it was, I still felt as though part of me could step into a cloud of sad love for him and stay there, with Will drifting into the cloud and out, visiting me and then leaving me by myself.

When everyone left, Will threw his clothes in a heap outside the bathroom and flopped onto the bed. I pushed his hip to the side and let my hand wander down, hoping to coax him to life. Usually he took two seconds, but that night he slipped through my fingers. “Will …” I whispered, wanting it right between us. Wanting to fuse. Wanting. I rolled on top of him and kissed his forehead.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t feel good,” he said. He let his head fall toward the wall, avoiding me.

“Sick?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Just weird,” he said, looking back at me.

“What is it?” I said, rolling off him. “Tell me.”

He folded his arm behind his head and stared at the
ceiling. “You could have killed him, Thea,” he said, as though he were reciting an age-old, unavoidable fact. “He could have died.”

Now it was my turn to stare at the ceiling. I gazed up at the exposed water sprinkler, trying to untangle my defensive thoughts from the truth of what he was saying.

“Do you ever think about how crazy it is?” I finally said. “With Ian, I mean? You must. It’s so scary, how could you not. It’s like, I know we could lose him at any moment. It’s on my mind all the time. Something bad could happen at any minute of any day. But I have to believe it won’t. I have to believe we’ll keep him safe, that our love will somehow protect him.” I found Will’s hand under the blanket and held on to it. “The thing is, we can’t stop loving him just because we could lose him. I’m trying so hard to just … be brave. You can’t really be any other way.” The sprinkler in the ceiling was starting to resemble a prickly black flower. I thought about Ian’s little mouth, how it contracted even smaller when he wanted something, and the familiar aching sadness came right up to me, like a bus getting too close when it rounds a corner. “It’s sick, how much I love him,” I said. “He is so helpless and I just love him so much.” I felt the embarrassing tears popping out of my eyes, rolling down the sides of my face toward my ears.

Will burrowed his arm under me and squeezed, which was such a relief I almost lost it. He squeezed and stroked my rib cage, and relief came to me in soft, warm waves. Finally, a connection, I thought. He didn’t say anything, but I felt it: he understands what I mean and he feels the same way I do. It’s going to be okay, I thought. We are back in this together.

Ian woke up at six the next morning, and I brought him to the bed and gave him the boob till we both fell back to sleep. When the alarm went off, I heard the shower go on, then later the sound of drawers opening and later still, the sound of shoes shuffling around the apartment. Each time I woke, I remembered Will and me, holding each other the night before, and drifted off into a peaceful, happy sleep.

But a while later I opened my eyes to Will standing in front of the bed with wet hair and a stiff face.

“You shouldn’t sleep like that when he’s in bed with you,” he said. It felt like a kick in the stomach. “You could suffocate him.” I picked Ian up and stumbled over to his Pack ’n Play, where he remarkably stayed asleep after I laid him down. Will watched me with his arms folded as I crossed the room. I wondered what had happened, how it had slipped away so easily. I thought he’d been right there with me. I stopped at the kitchen trash bin and tugged the red plastic garbage tie to keep it from spilling over. I didn’t know anything anymore.

He sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said, his voice sounding thick, underwater.

“What do you mean?” I asked. I sat down next to him on the bed, the first inkling that we might not make it plowing through me, spreading fear over me like seeds. “Will, we’re
doing
it. We may not be doing it great, but we’re doing okay, which is enough for now.” I wanted to keep going, to tell him how full of messy hope I was for us, to tell him we had to keep trying because when the three of us were in bed together, Ian
kicking up at the ceiling, the two of us sandwiching him, wasn’t it amazing? Didn’t he wonder how people could ever let go, after being together like that? The three of us on an island, how could you ever say goodbye to those moments? Just let them go? How did
my parents
ever let them go? How was it possible?

“I want to give him up.” He stared straight ahead at the wall. “For adoption.”

My eyes skidded over to the Pack ’n Play. For a second I felt like Will was going to get up and take him away. “Don’t say that,” I said. “That’s cruel.”

“I’m not trying to be cruel,” he said. “I don’t know, Thea. When I came to the hospital that morning and saw him in bed with you, lying in front of you on the bed … his leg looked like it had been blown off, Thea, I’m not kidding. I can’t stop thinking about it. It hit me that morning, so hard. It isn’t right, what we’re doing. I’ve been trying to tell myself we’ll be okay, but this isn’t right. It’s not right for him.”

I knelt down on the floor in front of him and gripped his knees. We were both crying. “That’s not true and you know it,” I said. “You’re hungover and you feel like crap.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. The shades were down and the room was dark, but I could still see his eyes. “I really do believe it, Thea.”

Over in his Pack ’n Play, Ian’s foot stuck straight up in the air, his toe pointed like a dancer’s. I thought of that first night, walking to the Seagram Building with Will in the freezing cold, the fiery orange squares of office lights, how they sort of exploded inside me, little pops of bright, burning sun. I believed they were also exploding inside him. That first night, he told me he was an optimist and I believed him. I looked at that face, into those uneven eyes I didn’t know yet, and believed he’d
do anything. From the very beginning, I’d thought, This is a guy who’ll do anything.