Long Bright River: A Novel (29 page)

I sensed even in that moment that the two of us were at a crossroads. The map of our lives stretched out before us, and I could see, quite clearly, the various paths I might choose to take, and the ways in which this choice might affect my sister.

In retrospect, of course, the path I chose was wrong.

Dishonorable, even.

—I’m pregnant, said Kacey.

—It’s Simon’s, said Kacey.

—It was during a bad streak for me, said Kacey. I didn’t know what I was doing. He took advantage of me.

—I’ve been trying to get clean ever since, said Kacey.

And I said, No.

That’s the first word that came out of me. I felt in my body the same lightheadedness that sometimes felled me as a child, and I wanted to stop it, and so I said, again, No.

As I said the word, I sensed that some decision had been made for me. It was difficult to turn back. If I could have, I would have put my hands over my ears.

I should have left. I should have taken more time to think.

—Mickey, said Kacey.

I turned my face away sharply.

—Mick, I’m so sorry, Kacey said. I’m sorry. I’d take it back if I could.

Today, when I consider the list of the worst things I’ve ever done and said to Kacey, at the top of it is the lie I once told her, in anger, about our mother: that she once said to me that she loved me more than Kacey. It was a child’s fantasy, the sharpest knife I could wield, a moment of real cruelty in the middle of an otherwise ordinary spat between siblings. Kacey’s reaction, the horrible wail that came out of her, made me remorseful enough to swear to myself I’d never say anything so unkind again.

And yet I did, that night.

—You’re lying, I said, calmly.

She looked briefly confused.

—I’m not, she said.

—Anyway, I said. How would you even know.

—I don’t understand, said Kacey.

—Who the father is, I said. How would you even know?

She looked, for a moment, as if she might hit me. I recognized the tightened fist, the tightened arm, from her childhood, when she regularly brawled. Instead she absorbed the shock of my words in silence, and looked away from me.

—Leave, she said.

Her roommate—a woman I had never before met—echoed the word to me, pointing at the door. It occurs to me now that her loyalty to my sister—this relative stranger, this person I did not know—was greater, that day, than mine was.

I made it so easy for Simon. I did not even require him to issue a denial to me. Instead, when he came to see me the following day, I told him that I agreed with his assessment, and that it was imperative that we find help for Kacey.

—She told me that she was pregnant, I said, and that it was yours.

He was silent.

—Can you believe that? I said.

—I told you, he said.

—Is she really pregnant? I said.

—She may be, said Simon. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

That spring and summer, I did see her, more and more. She returned to the street, with vigor. I saw her working, on my shifts.

And I saw that, sooner or later, she was beginning to show.

If she’d been clean when I found her at the house with the geraniums outside it, she was very clearly using, now. Her eyes were glazed and bloodshot. Her skin bore red marks on it. Her stomach was the only thing protruding from her body, which otherwise was gaunt. I am sad to say that this did not seem to deter her clients. Very often, I saw them stop for her. Sometimes doubling back to do so.

—I can’t watch this, I said once or twice to Simon.

I was thinking of the baby, and the baby’s welfare, and I was thinking of our own mother, and the choices that she made.

I began to research lawyers.

The first of them told me that third-party custody was not out of the question. It happened frequently in cases where one or both parents were addicted. She had personally handled several cases just this year. But even if custody is wrested from the mother, she said, the mother would have to testify that she did not know who the father was. If she named a father, then he would have to sign paperwork agreeing to give over the child, as well.

—What if, I said, the mother is delusional? What if she falsely names a father, but it isn’t true?

—Well, said the attorney—Sara Jimenez was her name—then a paternity test would be recommended by most judges.

I told this to Simon, who went silent.

In fact, that whole year, he had been suspiciously silent every time the subject of Kacey came up. He stopped seeing her, stopped trying to help her. When I brought her up he changed the subject.

But when I told him, at last, that a paternity test would be necessary to disprove Kacey’s assertion—and when his only response was further silence—then I began, finally, to acknowledge aloud what I suppose I had known all along.

By then, of course, it was too late to take back what I’d said to my sister.

Thomas Holme Fitzpatrick was born on December 3, 2012, at Einstein Medical Center. Of course, Thomas was not the first name he was given. Kacey called him Daniel, after our father. But I knew right away that that couldn’t be his name.

I was not present for his birth. But I learned, after the fact, that Kacey entered the hospital drowsy and intoxicated, clearly high. And I know that within minutes of being born, Thomas was taken from his mother and placed in the care of the nurses in the NICU so that they could monitor him for signs of withdrawal—which, within hours, he began to show.

At home in Port Richmond, I was ready to receive him, to welcome him into the better life that, for months, I had been planning. I had turned one of the bedrooms in my house—Kacey’s old room, in fact—into a soothing nursery. I decorated it in shades of pale yellow, a sunny color I hoped would presage a cheerful life for my new son. I framed favorite quotations from books I loved and hung them on the walls. I went to bookstores and bought for him the books that, as a child, I was never read. I’d read them all to him, I thought: as many times as he wanted, and then more. I’d never say no, I thought.

By that time, Simon and I had stopped speaking, but had come to an arrangement. He would give over the rights to Thomas, but he wanted to remain in the boy’s life. (Why? I asked him, and he said he always prided himself on finishing what he started.) I told him he could do so if he would fund Thomas’s education. Nothing else: just the money I needed to ensure for him a respectable education.

All of this was off the record.

In our arrangement, two threats were implicit, a careful equilibrium we orchestrated and maintained: I held over Simon the threat of my telling his superiors about the beginnings of our relationship. He held over me the threat of seeking custody of Thomas.

We were cordial with each other, but we rarely spoke. Once a month, after his birth, a check came for Thomas: his tuition for Spring Garden Day School, and nothing more.

In exchange, once a month, Simon took Thomas out on an excursion—something Thomas at first resisted and then began to look forward to more and more as he got older, something he counted on for weeks in advance and narrated the story of for weeks after.

The person who was left out of this arrangement, of course, was Kacey.

She didn’t give Thomas up voluntarily. She wanted to keep him. In her hospital room she promised, over and over again, that she’d get clean. But Thomas’s NAS score at birth was very high, and his withdrawals from the many narcotics that had been running through his mother’s body were severe. As my attorney and I expected, the baby was taken into the custody of the Philadelphia DHS, where he remained for one night while they assessed him and located the baby’s closest relatives. The next day, they telephoned Gee, and they telephoned me.

Gee told me I was crazy to get involved. You don’t know what you’re doing, she said. You don’t know how hard it is to raise a child alone.

But I had already decided.

Yes, I told the social worker; I have a place for him.

My plan was to seek full custody of the child. With my attorney, I decided against requesting a complete termination of Kacey’s parental rights. I left the door open, always, for her to get into recovery, for her to begin to see Thomas. But at my instruction, my attorney requested a
caveat: Kacey would not be allowed to see her son until she began to pass court-ordered drug tests.

She never could. Despite her protests, despite her many attempts to regain visitation rights, she failed every test that she took.

She has never, therefore, been allowed to see Thomas, and I have retained full custody over him. The court has deemed this arrangement to be in the best interest of the child—an easy decision for any respectable judge.

This is, I suppose, exactly what I offer: Respectability. Decency. Sobriety. A stable home. A career. A chance for Kacey’s son—now my son—to be educated.

I told the PPD, and Truman, I had adopted a child.

No one asked questions.

Even Truman, with whom I had already been partnered for five years, only said, Congratulations. He brought me a present: a beautiful gift bag of books and clothes, so carefully selected that it must have taken him ages to compile. I wrote him a thank-you note and mailed it to his home.

The PPD’s parental leave policy is not generous. It is unpaid, for one thing. But they do grant new parents up to six months off, which is better than nothing. With the small amount I had saved, I determined that I could afford three months and one week. After that, I would enroll Thomas in day care.

Those first months of Thomas’s life were among the most difficult of mine. I do not recommend attempting to tend to any newborn for months on end alone, without some relief—familial or paid—let alone a newborn in withdrawal from a daily narcotic regimen as active as Kacey’s. But I did so.

In the hospital, he had been given morphine.

He was sent home with a prescription for phenobarbital.

Neither spared him completely from the pain of withdrawal, and so I watched in sympathy as his small body trembled and sometimes
convulsed, and placed a hand on his chest to feel it rise and fall more rapidly than I sometimes thought possible, and listened in agony to his cries, which were at times unstoppable. He vomited so much after his feedings that every ounce he gained was a small victory. He was unable, often, to be consoled.

Still, I held him, and in the short-lived moments of peace that presented themselves like oases when I thought I could no longer go on, I fell in love with the baby, watched as his lit-orb eyes opened slowly, in wonder, to take in his small world. Cheered him through each physical accomplishment, through the vowels that poured out of him fluidly, and then through each new consonant pronounced.

Who on earth can explain, in words alone, the great gutting tenderness of holding your child in your arms? The animal feeling of it—the baby’s soft muzzle, the baby’s new skin (which throws into relief the wear your own has endured), the little hand reaching up to your face, searching for family. The quick small pats, light as moths, that land on your cheek and chest.

The strongest grief I’ve ever felt in my life arrived one afternoon as I was feeding him. I was sitting on my bed, Thomas in my arms, and as I looked down at my son—the soft tiny wisps of hair on his scalp, the balloon-animal arm, its new plumpness segmented at the wrist and elbow—a sudden storm of disbelief and sorrow burst about me, and I opened my mouth and—I am embarrassed to admit it—I wailed aloud.

Because for the first time I understood the choice my own mother had made to leave us—if not by design, then by her actions, her carelessness, the recklessness with which she sought a fix. I understood that she had held me—us—in her arms, and gazed at us as I was then gazing at Thomas. She had held us like that and had decided to leave me, to leave us, anyway.

In that moment, I made a promise to myself, one that has become the guiding principle of my life: I would protect my son from the fate that befell Kacey and me.

Thomas’s struggles continued for the better part of a year. Watching him, my anger with my sister rose and rose in my throat. How could she, I thought to myself. How could anyone.

Nights blended into days and then back again. I often forgot to eat and to use the bathroom.

Gee was the only person, aside from Simon, to whom I revealed the particulars of our arrangement. And although she was diligent at first in stopping by, soon her visits became less frequent.

The one time I ever mentioned to her how difficult it had been since Thomas’s birth, she looked at me and said, Imagine two of them.

I never complained again.

Those months made me determine one thing with certainty. I would never let Thomas’s beginning hold him back. I’d never let him use his history as a crutch. In fact, I promised myself, I wouldn’t even tell him, until he was ready to receive the information without allowing it to negatively affect his self-perception.

It is for this reason that, today, Thomas believes me to be his biological mother.

I thought that Kacey would return to the street and forget.

I thought she’d be angry with me but quickly move on: the routine of seeking and finding and seeking a fix is immersive and hypnotic, and it’s difficult to emerge from that cloud for long enough to care.

And yet, several times during my maternity leave, I peered out my upstairs window to see Kacey outside, sitting on the stoop of the house across the street, or on the curb, her legs stretched out before her, dejected. She turned her face up, squinting toward the house, her gaze darting rapidly over its facade, from window to window, seeking a glimpse of her son, I imagine. My son.

Once or twice, she even went so far as to ring the doorbell.

I never answered.

On these occasions I made sure the rooms inside the house were darkened, and I gave Thomas a bottle so he wouldn’t cry, and I stayed far away from the door as she pounded on it, as she rang the bell, over and over again, wailing for the baby.

Once, toward the end of those months, I walked outside with Thomas in a carrier I used to wear strapped to my body. I intended to walk to the corner store. As always, I had checked out the window before walking outside, ensuring that my sister was not present.

But ten yards from the front of my house, I heard the footsteps of someone quickly approaching, and I turned, shielding Thomas’s head protectively, and there was Kacey, wild-eyed, her hair a mess, an angry ghost. She had been hiding, I suppose.

—Please, Mick, she was saying. Please let me see him. I just want to see he’s okay. I’ll never ask again.

I don’t know what came over me. I should have said no.

Instead, after hesitating, I turned wordlessly in her direction, allowing her to gaze upon Thomas’s small face. He was sleeping. His cheek was pressed into my sternum. He was—is—a beautiful child.

Kacey smiled, just a little. She began crying, which made her look even wilder. She swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. A neighbor passed and looked at us both, goggle-eyed. Then she tried to catch my eye to ensure I was all right, presuming, I’m certain, that I was in the midst of being harassed by a crazed stranger. I didn’t look back at her.

Tentatively, Kacey stretched out one hand, as if to put it on Thomas’s forehead—a benediction—but I jerked away, instinctively.

—Please, she said again.

It was the last word she would speak to me for the next five years, aside from our occasional encounters on the job.

I shook my head. I walked away. She stood in place behind me, as still and as sorry as an abandoned house.