One Small Thing (22 page)

“Would you have done anything differently? Really? Didn’t you have to get out of there? Wasn’t that life toxic for you?”

“But I could have helped her.”

“Sometimes, Dan, the only person you can help is yourself.” As he stared at Bret, Dan heard Avery saying, “I’m not Mother Teresa.” Maybe Bret was right. No one really was always good, not even Mother Teresa. Nobody did everything possible. But for his boy? Randi? No matter what Bret said, Dan knew he could have done something. One small thing.

“We’re almost out of time. But I want to know if you’ve talked to your parents.”

Dan scooted forward in his seat, resting his elbows on his knees. “Not yet. Jared’s come over. But we decided to wait until Daniel is more settled to bring anyone else in.”

“Who’s we? You and Avery?”

“No. Jared and I. We decided. Avery didn’t have anything to—she didn’t have an opinion.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “Daniel’s already met Isabel and Avery and our good friends next door. I think he’s kind of overwhelmed.” Even though this was the truth, Dan felt the words as slick on his tongue as a lie. He was scared to call Marian and Bill. If Jared told him to wait, he would wait. As long as he could.

That night, before Avery came home from work and long after dinner, Dan sat in a chair next to Daniel’s bed, holding
Julie of the Wolves
—the book Luis had recommended—in his hands, reading aloud. Daniel looked up at him, his face blank, taking in the story of young Miyax who runs away from home and ends up lost in the Alaskan wilderness. They’d finally gotten to the part where Miyax was accepted into a pack of wolves, and even though he knew Luis would never have recommended irony along with words, Dan couldn’t help but think that Daniel was in exactly the same situation, only in this house, there was an alpha female who barred her teeth at anything that came too close, even the alpha male.

As he read, adding character to Miyax’s thoughts with high and low intonation, Dan tried to remember if his parents had read to him past the picture book stage. Sure, he could still envision
Where the Wild Things Are
and
Green Eggs and Ham
. But later? Nothing. He and Jared read comic books with flashlights in their dark bedroom, trying to stay as quiet as possible so that Bill wouldn’t push open the door and yell something about lights out. And it wasn’t until college that he’d picked up a book, a novel, and then it was only because he had to read
Catch-22
or
A Hundred Years of Solitude
for a required English class. Maybe it wasn’t too late for Daniel to like words, to use them to forget what had been real.

“Dan?” Daniel was all eyes peeking from under the blanket. “Dad?”

Dan put his thumb on the page and looked up, his mouth open, his eyes smarting.
Dad. Dad.
He cleared his throat and said softly, “Yeah?”

“Am I here for like good? I mean, will I have to move again? Will I have to go back to the Adam’s?”

Leaning back against the chair, Dan closed the book on his thumb. Miyax’s somber face stared at him from the cover. “No. This is where you live now, Daniel. Midori and Vince Bausch and making sure all the papers are in order. Everything’s just about set.”

“But she doesn’t like me.”

“Who? Midori? Of course she does.”

Daniel shook his head on the pillow, the reading light picking up the red in his hair. Randi’s red. The red that snaked through her brown curls. “No, not, like, her. I mean your wife. She’s hecka mad.”

Dan’s mouth puffed full of denials and cover-ups, but then he pressed the false sounds out and nodded. “She is. She’s really mad.”

“Why? I didn’t do anything to her.” Daniel sat up and leaned against the headboard. “I don’t even know her.”

“It’s not about you, Daniel. It’s me. I didn’t tell her some things I should have.”

“Like what?”

Dan put the book down on the nightstand and rubbed his face with both hands. What would have happened if his parents had told him the truth when he’d asked questions? His parents had fought behind their bedroom door, his mother running out of the room and down the hall, her eyes red. For the rest of day after a fight, Bill sat in his favorite living room chair watching a ball game or car races or the golf channel. If his mother had said, “I wanted to take you two boys to visit my parents for two weeks and your father said ‘no,’” would Dan have been damaged beyond repair? Why did parents want to hold life away from their children? All it did was make it more frightening when things did happen, childhood slamming against adolescence, truths falling like dead bodies to the ground.

“I never told her the story about your mom. That we were a couple. How we met. All of that.”

“How did you meet my mom?” Daniel asked, crossing his arms across his thin chest.

Dan smiled. “I met her during Freshman Orientation. The very first day of high school. She was sitting in the middle of the quad with some friends. And I said to my friend Tim, ‘Look at her.’”

“Was she pretty?”

Dan looked over at the picture of the blonde actress Daniel had immediately put on his mirror. “It was 1984, so styles were different. She had this big—“ Dan put his hands on top of his imaginary hairstyle and patted it “hair. Big hair. But it was dark and curly, and she was thin. Not skinny. Thin.”

“Kids call me skinny. The other boys at the Adam’s called me ‘Bone Boy.’”

“Listen,” Dan said, rubbing his stomach. “You’ll be glad you pulled from that side of the family later on. Trust me.”

“What do you mean? Who else is there?”

“My parents. Your . . . grandparents.”

“Did they like my mom?”

Again, the easy lie bloomed in his mouth. How much easier it would be to say, “Oh, they adored her. My mother and she went shopping together. Your mom learned all my mom’s recipes. My mother’s one best wish was that Randi and I had kids. Wait until they meet you! It’s Grandma’s dream come true.” But it would take what? Another day? A week? before Daniel would see the lie for what it was. There would be no spontaneous, joyous reunion with Bill and Marian. Nothing like the picture postcard Dan’s lie would create.

“They didn’t like us together. They didn’t like us as a couple. We did some things that made them mad. I guess you could say they are still mad at me because of them.”

“What did you do that made them mad?” Daniel asked.

Looking around the room he, Val, Isabel, and Luis had put together, Dan sighed. The truth, a language he learned in college. “Do you know how your mom died?”

“Midori told me it was her blood. A disease in her blood that was bad for her insides.”

“Do you know how someone gets that disease?” Dan asked, hoping Daniel would nod, and the conversation could move quickly toward its end. But he didn’t, shrugging, his shoulders up to his ears.

“Well, you can get it—its called Hepatitis C—from blood.”

“Oh, sort of like AIDS?” Daniel said. “We learned about that in school. A lady came in to talk with us about it.”

“Oh? Well, yeah. Just like AIDS.”

“So, from another person. She got it from another person?”

“Maybe. Or from taking drugs with a needle.”

Daniel thought, his eyes looking toward the nightstand and the book. He blinked and then looked up at Dan. “Okay.”

“You know about that?”

Daniel adjusted his legs under the covers and picked at an imaginary scab on his arm.

“You know what I’m talking about then?”

“So why haven’t your parents come to meet me?”

Dan sighed, exhausted. He’d forgotten how children talked, asking what was true and close to the bone, words like the sharpest knife filleting away the bullshit. He hadn’t been around Loren’s kids enough recently, Avery turning down dinner offers because children in general made her crave the baby that wouldn’t grow inside her. When had he himself changed from a kid like Daniel to the young man who stole from his parents? When had the truth disappeared into a fog of lies that swirled so tight around him and Randi, Dan saw only shadows?

“Well, I haven’t told them yet. I thought—we thought. . . Your uncle Jared and I thought,” Dan said, thinking of Bret Parish and how he made Dan clarify everything, “that you’d met enough people this week. You will meet them. I promise.”

“If they didn’t like my mom, I don’t like them.”

Dan nodded. Just as well. Fine. But unrealistic. Somehow, he’d have to make that meeting work.

“Did you ever meet your other grandfather? I know your mom’s mom died.”

“At little. He’d come over sometimes. But then Mom said that he’d ‘hightailed it away from hell’.”

Dan hid a laugh. “Oh.”

“That’s what she said, anyway.” Daniel looked down. “Hell isn’t a bad word here, is it?”

Picking up the book again, he smiled. “No, it’s not. More?”

Daniel shrugged but looked up expectantly, and Dan continued reading. Outside, the light shifted from light gray to black, houses lighting up, darkness settling on the neighborhood. As he turned the page, he swallowed, realizing that for the first time, this house held a family, parents and a child, like all the other houses.

That night around eleven, Dan startled awake, staring at the ceiling, his ears taking in the round, dark sounds of the house. There! Kitchen counter. Keys. Avery. She was just getting home, putting her things on the kitchen counter, filling a glass with water once, twice. She was thirsty. Did that mean she’d been drinking? She’d called at seven to say she had a dinner meeting with Brody, Lanny, and someone from that accounting firm in St. Louis, but before when she was working, she didn’t drink at those meetings. “Alcohol doesn’t help in business,” she’d said. “It only gives everyone a headache.”

And later, when they first started trying for a baby, she’d stopped drinking altogether. During the weeks following each IUI, she wouldn’t drink coffee, tea, hot chocolate—she refused to pump her own gas, sit in the hot tub, eat canned tuna (mercury levels) or camembert or brie cheese (listeria) or fresh broccoli (toxoplasmosis). If any can in the pantry was dented, she tossed it into the trash (botulism). Once she sent a large bowl of sizzling rice soup back at The China Garden because she was sure the mushrooms were canned not fresh, and she hadn’t been able to inspect the can personally.

She drank only bottled water, ate vegetables (except broccoli) high in folic acid (protects against neural tube defects), and took the yoga class at the club. She went to bed before ten, aiming for nine good hours of sleep. Instead of using Roundup on the weeds that crept up slim and green in the cracks in the patio, she pulled them with her fingers. She wouldn’t even help Dan with the pool, fearing the chlorine and chemicals. Dan laughed at her, calling her “Bubble Girl” and threatening to put plastic around the house, but she hadn’t laughed back.

“Everything I do makes a difference. You should be on the same regime,” she’d said. Fearing a week-long caffeine withdrawal headache, months without the sulfites in pepperoni and pastrami, and weekends with a Corona or two with Luis, Dan had shut up and let her go along winnowing out anything that might hurt her chances for conception and/or the possible pinpoint-sized child growing inside her.

But in the weeks she’d been working, that old, careful Avery had been replaced by business Avery, who wore high heels despite the possible damage to Achilles tendons, stayed up late, worked ten or twelve hour days, and drank Cosmopolitans or martinis after work with colleagues. All her desire for a baby, for a family, had evaporated, and in a way, Dan felt she had become another kind of Bubble Girl. Her inner life was seal-wrapped and hidden, her oxygen coming from another planet he couldn’t fly to.

Avery opened the door quietly and slipped in. For a minute, Dan let her think he was still asleep, and he watched her dark figure move toward the closet and then the dresser. He heard two quiet ticks of her earrings on wood, the slow unzip of her skirt, the shush-shush of her nylons sliding down her legs. How long had it been since he’d really touched her? They’d had sex once since Midori’s first phone call, and it was the type Avery used to love. In the middle of the night, Dan had found himself inside her, both of them moving, making noises, kissing each other as if nothing had changed. This used to happen all the time, a dream arousing him, making him reach out for Avery, who had probably been too tired for sex when they first went to bed. He’d probably felt the same way—early in their marriage, both of them had worked long hours, and after dinner, all they wanted were clean, smooth sheets and a dark room. But at 1 or 2 or 3 am, both of them were ready, even if they didn’t remember their lovemaking until sometime during work the next day.

“You sex machine,” Avery would say, calling him from her desk. “You wild man.”

Dan would flush, feel himself harden, remember her body under his. “Me? What about you?” And for a second, she was all long tan body, her arms around his neck, her breasts in his hands.

But Dan didn’t know if Avery had remembered this time. The next morning, she was shut down, quiet, apprehensive, knowing their life was changing and she could do nothing to stop it. They hadn’t had sex since. At least that he could remember.