Someone Else's Love Story (21 page)

William was only supposed to compare Natty’s DNA to the other samples, establishing parenthood. But he kept testing. The human genome has been fully mapped, but not fully interpreted. Otherwise, William could have looked at the fingerprints and seen all that Natty was and is and will be. Natty has a superior intellect, but has paid no genetic penalty that William can find. His intelligence is like William’s athleticism. A gift. William’s speed and his excellent hand-eye coordination are atypical for a person with his genome.

Curious, he took the genetic material he had left from Shandi’s Person X, amplified it, and checked for strings of code linked to the autism spectrum. William has these abnormalities stacked in every cell of himself, deletions and duplications on chromosome 16.

Shandi does not. Natty does not.

Natty’s father does.

Interesting.

Early in his marriage, the idea of children made him physically aware of the absences and wrongfully duplicated base pairs that he carried. To procreate would be to risk a specific kind of failure. But Bridget, deeply Catholic, felt guilt over birth control.

It fell to him to be meticulously careful. It was William, always, who stopped, who opened the bedside drawer, who rolled on one of the condoms he kept stocked there. He did not believe in sin as such, but he posited for Bridget that he performed the bulk of theirs. Bridget didn’t argue it, but she took it to confession every week.

A couple of years into the marriage, she stopped him as he reached for the drawer, boosting herself up on an elbow to kiss his shoulder, his neck. “Will, I think you’ve made your point.”

He hovered over her, braced on his arms.

“I’m not making a point,” he said. “I’m having a basic understanding of human biology.”

She kissed his neck again, ran her hands down the length of him. “I’m having one, too, and I want babies.”

He was taken aback by the plural. “How many?”

“Oh fifty, at least,” she said, her breath in the hollow of his throat. “But we can start with one.”

Poised over her, body surging toward her cell by cell, he heard his voice saying a true thing. It sounded harsh and loud, almost angry. “It could come out like me.”

Bridget dropped onto her back and grinned up at him in her best way of grinning, the way where her eyes crinkled up until they were almost gone. She pulled him to her, saying in his ear, “I want
your
babies, stupid man. Specifically.”

After, they lay face-to-face with their legs in a tangle, his genetic material already making its way to the only exact, specific egg that could ever have been Twyla.

He brushed her hair back from her eyes and said, very solemn, “Bridget. God was right. It’s better with no condom.”

She laughed, looking up, pretending to scan the ceiling for impending lightning. “Dial the blasphemy down a notch, if you please. You know anything over seven gets me antsy.” It was a sentence she said frequently, but never when she actually thought he’d been irreverent. A private joke for William and Bridget. God wasn’t in on it.

Twyla had not been a genius. Her developmental progress fell within the norms delineated in the book that Bridget kept on her bedside table. Twyla achieved milestones on schedule, rolling over, sitting up, and babbling in the proper order, at the proper time.

In a room of a thousand human babies, an impartial panel of judges would not have chosen Twyla as superior. But to William, her genome was so beautiful. He could find himself in her, literally, and all that was not his belonged to Bridget. The genome told him Twyla was nothing that did not come from one of them, and yet, in a way so unquantifiable it had smacked of magic, she had been more than the sum of their parts. She had been her own empirical self. Twyla
had
been best, and William could have found her in that room of a thousand babies with his eyes closed.

He is approaching his regular turn into Morningside, but he doesn’t take it. Shandi will be there, helping Natty refill the bird feeders while something bubbles on the stove. He doesn’t want her as a witness when Bialys calls to tell him Stevie’s fate. She was present when he introduced air and light to the previously closed environment of Stevie’s skull cavity, and she has a vested interest in Stevie being dead. She’ll feel relieved. Perhaps even pleased, and he’s not sure what his face will do.

This road takes him into Decatur, and once he’s there, he finds himself following a familiar path. It’s not a good idea. He knows this, even as he comes to a stop in front of the painted brick cottage where Bridget’s parents moved after their youngest started college.

There are lights on inside, and multiple cars are parked in the driveway. Bridget’s parents’ old Volvo is blocked in by her brother Michael’s van and a couple of Toyotas that he doesn’t recognize. The dented Honda Civic on the street belongs to her youngest sister, Maggie. Pieces of the Sullivan clan are gathering for dinner.

William is excellent at compartmentalization, but coming to this place is a mistake. It isn’t good for him. He hadn’t so much as thought the syllables of her name for months, until the Circle K. Now her memories rise thicker every day. He will not think of her. He thinks, instead, of Baxter. Baxter is inside, no doubt milling around the crowded kitchen, hoping someone will get clumsy and drop a slice of cheese or some chicken. He feels a tightening in his chest. He should put his foot down on the gas. Speed away. Go home.

He is not welcome. This is not acceptable behavior. But he pulls to the curb, letting the car idle. His breathing has accelerated, as if he sprinted all the way here. As if he is still sprinting.

William wants to get out of the car, go up the walk, and bang his fist against their silly purple door. When Bridget’s father opens the door, William can say, “I want my damn dog.”

William can’t imagine what would happen next. Nothing pleasant. The Sullivans are mostly redheaded, and they all have quick tempers. He is not thinking of his wife, of what she called “the flash-fire angries.” He will not. He thinks instead of her youngest sister, Maggie, who combines that same temper with poor impulse control. One day last year, she drove over to his house, rang the doorbell, and then hit him. She slapped her open hand hard up against the side of his head, making an angry face so like Bridget’s angry face that he simply nodded in response. She looked instantly sorry, with Bridget’s own instant-sorry face, and he stopped being willing to look at her at that point. When he finally opened his eyes again, his porch was empty.

He can’t picture anything specific past demanding Baxter. Whatever happens, it won’t be clean or kind or simple. He did not behave well after the accident.

His lips twist up then, because he is sitting in his car across the street from their house, like a stalker. He’s still not behaving well.

But he leaves the car in park, trying to get air all the way down into his constricted lungs. Bialys’s call is not the only reason he doesn’t want to go home to Shandi.

Yesterday, dozing in his old familiar place on the rug, smelling fresh flowers and roasting meat, he heard a woman humming and the sound of small, bare feet slapping earnestly against the hardwoods. He fell into a strange peace. He forgot when he was. It was a nine-second sink into before.

He jerked awake in a belly-dropping swoop of vertigo.

The child running up and down the hall was only Natty, but Natty was no threat to Twyla’s place. That’s not how families are structured. In families, he realized, children are added to, not superseded. The addition of a child is not a betrayal of previous or current children.

Wives are structured differently.

His body is rocking itself forward and back from his hands, squeezing the wheel at ten and two. He can’t have Shandi in his kitchen. He can’t go home, risk taking pleasure in her approximation. He has come instead deliberately to this house, though he knows he shouldn’t—

The headset at his ear chirps, and his whole body jumps and shudders out of rhythm. His hands are strangling the steering wheel, and he loosens them. He must not sit churning outside this house, thinking about procreation and the replaceable nature of wives.

Caller ID tells him it is Bialys.

William puts the car in drive, pulls away from the curb, pointing toward Morningside. He taps the earpiece and says, “Hello?” He has a practiced phone voice, pleasant and well modulated, but it fails him. It shakes and lacks volume.

“Dr. Ashe? That you?” It is Bialys. William focuses, thinks only of the detective. Bialys is a large, crumpled individual, soon to retire. The last time they met, Bialys had food on his tie.

“Yes,” William says.

“Steven Parch is being taken off the ventilator. His uncle made the call this morning. I’m sorry. I only heard it now.”

Now Bialys has his whole attention with no effort. A silence stretches out between them, very long, but Bialys doesn’t seem to mind it. The uncle is Stevie’s closest living relative, so Stevie breathes or stops breathing at his sole discretion. Stevie is not brain-dead, but he is in a “vegetative state.” When Bialys first said this phrase, William thought, immediately,
The carrot feels nothing
. The longer it continues, the less likely it becomes that it will resolve itself favorably.

“He said he had a child,” William insists. He remembers it perfectly, Stevie saying,
I’m a daddy myself. I ain’t gonna shoot no little kids
 . . .

“Not that we can find. Even if, Parch’s kid would be a minor, and Parch wasn’t married to the mother,” Bialys says, as kindly as he can in his gruff, barking voice.

“When will it happen?” William asks.

“Not long. A day or two? It would be immediate, but the uncle’s doing ten in Alabama. Prison complicates the paperwork. It doesn’t help he’s in another state.”

William is turning into Morningside now. On one side of the car, the well-watered lawns of his neighbors are deep green. On his other side is Holy Shit Park. Asters bloom in the beds, and behind them, tall copper sneezeweed daisies are surrounded by butterflies. They flutter and pause, preening on the blooms. A hummingbird feeder hangs on a wrought-iron post, bright red and yellow, and north of here, a machine is breathing for Stevie. The machine is keeping him alive.

A day from now, or maybe two, William will have killed a man.

Into this second long silence, Detective Bialys says. “You understand, William, you’re not in any legal trouble.”

“I know,” William says. He is on his street now. Paula’s BMW is in front of his house. Shandi’s yellow beetle isn’t. So there’s that. He pulls into the drive and stops. “This is the only possible outcome?”

“Just have to dot some
i
’s.” There is another long pause, and then Bialys says, fast and low, “This is lucky. You have time to get right in your head. That’s not how this works, most times. He had a gun, okay? A bunch of citizens lined up. It wasn’t going anywhere good. You did the right thing.” This is the most words William has ever heard him say in a row.

“I understand.” William says. “Please call me. After.”

“I will,” Bialys promises. They hang up.

Perhaps there is no child.

But then why say it? It’s an odd lie for a nineteen-year-old armed robber to tell. William has never been good at nuance, but when Stevie told Natty he was a daddy, it didn’t sound like comfort. He didn’t say to Natty,
I promise I won’t shoot you.
He was boasting:
I made something. I am a father.

With the engine off, William’s car is quickly turning into an oven. He should go inside, but instead he hits the button, and the driver’s-side window scrolls down. The July air outside is not much of an improvement.

So somewhere in the world, a child will grow up with no father instead of a drug-addled, criminal one. Six of one, as his own father used to say to indicate equivalence. But after Monday, there will not be a possible outcome where Stevie opens his eyes and stands up and says,
I’m better now. You didn’t hit me all that hard.

He wants this, though it is not rational. He doesn’t care what happens to Stevie then. Stevie can go straight from the hospital to jail. In jail, William could forget him very quickly. Dead, he is an absence in the world that William has created.

Perhaps Stevie was lying, and there is no child. Perhaps when he dies, no one will care. Paula says that’s pathetically sad, but it seems preferable to William. A dead person, wholly unconnected from other humans, is only so much meat.

Paula is standing in his open front door now, waving him in.

He gets out, and as he comes up the walk she says, “I managed to run Shandi off, for tonight, anyway. You’re welcome. Did Bialys call you back?”

“They’re taking him off the ventilator.” He spreads his hands wide. There isn’t any more to say about that.

“I figured they would,” she says. “We could get truly, deeply drunk?” William shakes his head. “We could comfort-eat a vat of Mr. Feung’s?”

“It’s about half MSG,” William says, going inside, walking with her toward the kitchen. “Might as well eat cat food.”

“I like it,” she says.