A Better Man (25 page)

The thing about the twins is, he misses them terribly when they’re not around. A kind of missing he experiences not so much as longing but as a kind of low-level anxiety that eats at him like rot. He connects this dreadful sensation to his children because of the way he feels at the sight of toddlers in the park, babies in arms or even commercials for orange juice. He can mostly hold it together, except when other children are around.

And yet when they’re with him—all fat, sticky cheeks, starfish hands and pleas for “Up, up, UP!” and “PLAY with ME!”—he finds he can’t enjoy them. Her absence, the lack of her, the terrible
misunderstanding between them (which he knows is not really a misunderstanding per se, but a lie that turned into the truth, then got misrepresented as the original lie), looms over all his interactions with Isla and Foster now.

Still, he is learning. Doing the single dad weekend dance—a pathetic, unsophisticated two-step he used to pity in others. He used to see those men, sitting in family-friendly brunch places, checking their phones as the kids ate eggs smothered in ketchup. Wandering cluelessly through the park or standing silently by the sidelines of the playground as the mothers traded gossip and jokes. He feels badly for them now in the same way he feels badly for himself. A great big pity party is what he’s throwing—self-pity-palooza, with an exclusive guest list of one.

Take today, a Saturday. The twins have been here since dinnertime last night, when Velma dropped them off, but she put them to bed while Nick worked late. He’s taken the day off so they can spend some “quality time.” He would like Maya to see them together, doing wholesome family-type things—proof that he is an earnest husband and father, not the selfish, deceptive bastard she believes him to be. But there is no chance of this. Between Velma and the nursery school, Maya has arranged it so they never see each other, not even to hand off the children. And needless to say she’s ignored his increasingly desperate and stalker-ish pleas for conversation. Lately he’s eased off, the hope draining out of him.

Nick stands outside on the back deck in his bathrobe and a pair of old boots, drinking coffee and smoking his first cigarette of the morning. He sucks hard, trying to get as much nicotine in his bloodstream before the kids wake up. He hears them before
he sees them, through double-paned French doors, their weird morning singing. Playgroup songs he doesn’t know the words to. He tries to slip back in the room without them noticing, but the blast of cold fills the kitchen along with the grim whiff of smoke.

“Why are you playing outside, Daddy?” asks Isla, barefoot and ratty-haired in her flannel nightie. “Are you making a snowman? What’s that funny smell?”

Nick ignores this and heads straight to the sink to wash his hands, but the soap dispenser is empty. The household supplies have dwindled in Maya’s absence—even the stacks of frozen organic butter and the club packs of Kleenex he used to tease her for stockpiling in happier times. For some reason, he is paralyzed over what to do about this. To buy more things would be admitting she’s never coming back, so instead he makes do. Blows his nose on dirty T-shirts, breakfasts on dry toast. This morning, he washes his hands with dish soap. He does this even though his children are so innocent they don’t know what a cigarette is, let alone understand what one smells like.

Isla is tugging on his robe now and Foster is punching his butt cheeks one at a time like a prizefighter in training.

“Waffles?” Foster asks uncertainly.

Isla shrieks in support before Nick has time to put a damper on the idea. “Yay! Waffles! With booberries and maple!”

“But Daddy can’t make waffles, you know that,” Nick says, mainly to Isla because Foster’s returned to his bottom pummelling.

Isla pokes a thumb in her mouth and looks at him with imploring eyes. She pulls it out again and says, “But we never get waffles at Mommy’s, ‘cause she says the waffle thing is at
Daddy’s. It’s no fair. No waffles, and they are our most favourite food in the whole world.”

She begins to sob quietly, just as Foster starts his howling chant: “WA-FULS! WA-FULS!” Isla’s face brightens—her younger brother has hit on a winning strategy. “WA-FULS! WA-FULS! WAAAAAAA-FULS,” they shout—until Nick cuts them off with a booming surrender. “Oh, all right. FINE,” he barks, beginning to root through the pot drawers to see where the waffle iron might be.

He is amazed—not for the first time—to see evidence of Maya’s spectacular levels of household organization in places he’s barely, if ever, bothered to look before, like the pantry drawers. Inside there are three white plastic tubs lined with paper towels and labelled “Kitchen Gadgets We Never Use,” “Kitchen Gadgets We Rarely Use” and “Kitchen Gadgets We Sometimes Use.” He reaches into the last one and finds the waffle iron, a heavy cast-iron thing with a long and menacing cord. The twins cheer at the sight of it and begin pelting each other with Lego pieces.

Nick sets out the iron, then opens the fridge to look for waffle ingredients. At first he is stumped. Then he sees a carton of eggs, which looks promising. He even remembers buying it, in a rare trip to the corner store about two weeks ago. He checks the expiration date: yesterday. Totally fine. In the lazy Susan he also finds spelt flour, baking soda and baking powder. He’s not sure what the difference is between the last two but figures it can’t hurt. Emboldened, he starts pulling out ingredients at random and adding them to his batter bowl: ground almonds, quinoa flakes, cinnamon and something called kamut. He throws in some powdered formula, because there is no milk, and adds
water. Then he stirs it all together, thinking,
How bad can it be?

Foster is lost in a Lego freestyle trance, but Isla, ever the hawk-eyed critic, is observing him closely. She drags a stool over and watches as he tips the bowl of goop into the heated waffle pan and watches it sizzle and begin to smoke. He shuts the lid before anything else bad happens.

“I think you’re supposed to put oil on it first,” she says.

“Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?”

“Because I’m three and a half,” she says.

When he ejects the waffle from the pan, it is less a familiar breakfast food than a sodden cement plank with messy cross-hatching. Undeterred, he makes two more and sets the table. They all sit and take turns drizzling maple syrup from a sticky bottle scavenged from the back of the fridge. Foster, who hasn’t entirely recognized the direness of the situation, picks up his waffle and takes a large bite, which he immediately spits out onto his plate.

Nick pulls out the box of Cheerios and slams it on the table. “Sorry, kids. Daddy tried but Daddy failed, okay? No waffles.”

To his amazement, the twins don’t immediately start to howl. Instead they silently contemplate the cereal box. After what feels like a minute but can only have been a few seconds, Isla starts to cry. Not a whiny, wheedling sobbing, but a tragic, wide-open-eyes, glistening-tears-rolling-down-her-cheeks sort of weep.

“What’s wrong, kiddo?” says Nick, who is reluctant to scoop her up for fear she might push him away.

Isla sniffs and stares at the cereal box. “My heart misses Mommy’s waffles.”

At Big Papa’s Waffle House, breakfast arrives covered in clouds of whipped cream, berry goop and chocolate sprinkles. Definitely no kamut in there, Nick thinks grimly, sipping his bottomless cup of stale black coffee. When the kids beg for Sprites he says yes, even though it’s only ten in the morning and he knows it will make them wiggy. By the time they leave the restaurant and trudge to the sledding hill, the twins are fractious with sugar. They whine over snow-filled mittens and fight over who will pull the sled. Nick has to stop several times and make empty threats about “going straight home” to even get them to the park, but once there they fling themselves face first down the hill, giving him a moment of peace. He is losing himself in work messages on his phone when he feels a mitten-buffered tap on his shoulder. He turns around and sees a small dark-haired woman standing before him. She’s wearing a fur coat. He can tell it’s not fake but a real sheared mink, and she also wears a woolly orange hat that matches her lipstick.

“Oh, Nick,” she says, offering him a silky hug. “I heard about you and Maya. It is the saddest thing. Are you okay?”

Nick staggers slightly. He can’t think of anything to say. Feels like he’s been sucker-punched. This is the first time anyone has mentioned Maya’s leaving to him. He looks at this lady in her mohair mittens and her snow-dusted furs and he senses that she is familiar, but not necessarily in a good way.

She sees him squinting and says, “It’s Rachel—Rachel of Rachel and Glen.”

“Oh, right. Of course, Rachel,” he says. Rachel and Glen-the-entertainment-lawyer, their so-called couple friends. “How are you?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” she says batting the air with her mitten. “But
you … Look at you all on your own with the kids. I’m so sorry to hear about all this. It’s funny because I was saying to Glen just the other day that I always thought of you two as a sort of golden couple. You’re both so successful and good-looking, and I mean,
twins
?” She motions down the hill to where Isla and Foster are wresting a Thermos of hot chocolate from the hands of another child. “It’s just so perfect, you know?”

Rachel pauses and Nick smiles and nods. He has a flashback of being at a barbeque at this woman’s house a few years back, a pool party in the suburbs. Drinking craft beer and making small talk with a bunch of lawyers, including her husband, beside a grill the size of a rocket launcher. All the energy drains out of his body just looking at her.

“Yeah, well, it is … what it is. I guess,” he says helplessly.

She gives a sympathetic pout and squeezes his arm before turning to shout at her daughter.

“Verity! Put your hat back on or I’m counting to ten!”

When she looks back at him with the pitying look that is meant to be empathetic, Nick wants to slap himself. And then her. Instead he searches the hill for the twins and spots them snapping icicles off tree branches and licking them. He smiles remembering the taste.

“You look like you’re doing okay, considering,” says Rachel.

Nick nods. “Yeah, it’s not so bad, I guess.”

“Let me know if I can do anything to help. If you ever want me to watch the kids … I mean it.
Anything.
”

“Thanks, Rachel. It’s fine. Honestly. It’s good.”

“That’s good you two are being amicable about things then, for the kids and everything.”

Nick murmurs something about everything working out for the best and watches as Rachel’s eyebrows creep up her forehead.

“So I take it you’re fine with the situation, then? Because just between you and me, people we know at the firm were a little surprised about it. I mean, obviously she and the twins needed somewhere to stay, but it seems a bit inappropriate to move in so quickly, whatever’s actually going on between them. I mean, who knows?”

Nick shakes his head in confusion. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry?”

Rachel takes a panicky step back in her fur-trimmed mukluks. “Oh, God, I can’t believe you didn’t know. I thought—”

“You thought what?”

“I thought she would have told you. Or he would have. How could you not know? Aren’t you and Adam Gray, like, old friends? VERITY, I’m serious. Put it on now OR ELSE!”

“So you’re saying they’ve … moved in together?” Nick says quietly.

Rachel puts a mitten on his forearm. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew. Are you okay?”

Nick doesn’t answer this last question because he is too busy looking for his kids. He scans the hill and then spots them hurtling along in a sibling embrace, the flying saucer spinning out from underneath their bums as they scatter apart at the bottom of the hill, screeching with laughter. By the time they stand up, he is there, tucking one twin and then other under his arm, leaving the saucer where it lies. The children scream, thinking Daddy’s playing a funny joke, horsing around with them like the other dads on the hill. But Nick is not one of the other dads. And
he’s most definitely not horsing around. He walks back to where Rachel stands, poking a straw into a box of pear juice for her runny-nosed daughter.

He puts the twins down in front of her. They jostle in their snowsuits, a pair of tiny Michelin Men tipping over then righting themselves, giggles dissipating. Verity eyes them suspiciously and sucks her juice.

“On second thought, Rachel, you
can
help me out,” Nick says as brightly as he can manage, trying to shave the aggressive edge from his voice. “Do you mind watching Foster and Isla for an hour or two?”

Rachel is visibly shocked. Although she is generous with her offers of help, she is clearly unused to being taken up on them. She sputters something about short notice and the busy day ahead.

The twins are starting to whimper about the cold and Nick knows he needs to make a quick exit. As soon Rachel has nodded an ambivalent “Sure, but wait—” he is off at a sprint across the icy park path and back to his car. He jumps in the Audi and points it toward downtown, flooding the engine with gas and causing the sedan to fishtail at more than one intersection along the way. He parks in the basement of the building, not bothering to get a ticket for guest parking, and rides the elevator up to the enormous chrome-and-glass lobby. He’s upping his game this time. But it doesn’t occur to him to devise a strategy.

He dials Gray’s number on his cell, knowing he’ll be in the office on a Saturday (they all work weekends), and sure enough his assistant, Mandy, answers. Nick puts a scarf over his mouth and says the name of a man he knows to be one of Gray’s biggest
clients, a captain of industry who is going through a messy divorce from his second wife. “I need to see him immediately. It won’t take a second,” he says. “I’m down in the lobby, had some other meetings today.”

Mandy asks him to hold, then comes right back on. Which means Gray’s there.

“Come right up, Mr. Penfold. Twenty-third floor. I’ll call down and have security give you a pass. Mr. Gray is busy today, but he can happily fit you in for a coffee.”

Nick hangs up and feels the blood pounding in his head. What exactly is he here for? He’s not even sure. In the elevator he feels the stern tug of gravity in his stomach, and for a second the force is so strong he feels he might be pulled through the floor and down the shaft, lost forever in the bowels of the city’s second-tallest skyscraper.