Kill Me (11 page)

It was such an Oprah moment.

My pride changed to mild shock and embarrassing comfort with the quick conclusion I reached next:
Better Thea than me.

But even the comfort evaporated after only a few seconds as the mirage that was providing me the transient oasis from personal responsibility vanished like vapor, as mirages tend to. Those few seconds were all it took for me to spot the color of the kid’s eyes — “halogen blue,” Thea called it — and the distinctive way his nostrils dilated with each breath he took.

I saw those same iridescent blue irises and that identical nasal flare every morning in the mirror.

“Go find your mom, babe,” I said gently to Berkeley. “I think she’s in the kitchen.”

I knew she was in the kitchen, her soft feet clad in the Angelo Luzio pointes that she wore year-round to pad around the house.

I liked to think my wife went through life as though it were a pas de deux. She was, in all good ways, light on her feet.

I was her klutzy partner.

“Who is it?” Thea called from the back of the house. “Dinner will be on in a minute.”

“I’ve got it. Take Berk, okay? I think I’m going to be a few minutes. Go ahead and start without me,” I yelled back toward Thea before I stepped outside and closed the door behind me.

I was blinking at the boy, my mouth open in a pretty good approximation of a befuddled stupor. I realized that I’d stuffed my hands into my pockets and was mirroring his adolescent posture to a T. Finally, I managed to state the obvious: “You know a lot more about what’s happening right this minute than I do, don’t you?”

“Probably,” he said. He bit his lower lip before he added, “I know who my mother is, for instance. You probably don’t know that, do you?”

The words hit me like a punch in the gut. I fought an urge to double over, I exhaled once, and then I exhaled again.

This kid had some fight in him.

Paternal pride?

“Can we go for a walk?” I asked.

“Why not?” he said. “Why not?”

NINETEEN

Papaya King had grown even more crowded while we were eating. The queue snaked out of sight out onto the sidewalk. Cool as a tropical breeze, I asked Lizzie, “What does Adam have to do with any of this?”

Her warm hands were once again wrapped around one of mine — the uncasted one — on top of the grimy counter. Lost in my Adam reverie, I hadn’t even been aware she was still holding on to me.

I thought,
She has two off hands
. And I wondered if maybe that was one too many.

She said, “I tend to use the word ‘objective’ a lot. Maybe too much. But decisions like the one a man, or a woman, needs to make to enlist our professional services require an objective appraisal about living and, more to the point, about dying. About the value one assigns to life and to death. After our evaluation of your circumstances — all your circumstances — we’re no longer convinced that you are in a position to be objective about those things.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s a mouthful.”

“We have to evaluate the appropriateness of the fit. We consider it our responsibility.”

“And you have doubts because of something to do with Adam?”

“Yes, because of what’s happened, what’s happening, with Adam. And you.”

“And you think you know those things about me and my son?” I asked. But I was thinking,
How could they? How could they know? Whom would they have asked? Thea? Never.

Bella? Maybe. Maybe Bella. Damn.

But so what? Thea doesn’t know. Bella doesn’t know.

Not really.

For the first time, I allowed myself to ask what should have been an obvious question, an earlier question:
Who the hell are these people? The Death Angels. Who are they?

Lizzie squeezed my hand and nodded her reply to the question I had actually asked aloud.

I said, “Have you considered the possibility that what’s going on with him … with him and me, that it makes me all the more objective? About life. Maybe about death. Certainly my death.”

“Convince me,” she said.

She sounded like a referee daring a basketball player to argue a foul. I didn’t believe she wanted to be convinced; I believed she wanted me to feel that she’d given me a fair chance. But nothing in her body language told me she was prepared to change her call.

A large Hispanic woman suddenly filled the space between us and shadowed us like a cloud passing before the sun. She had a lot of food in her hands. Three dogs — she had no hesitation about kraut at lunchtime, none — two orders of curly fries, and a huge tropical beverage of some kind filled her cardboard tray to overflowing. “You two done? This ain’t no Sta’bucks. People eat here, they leave. They let other people eat,” she said.

“Want to walk?” I said to Lizzie.

She glanced up at the woman who was so eager to poach our spot. “We’ll be gone in a minute. Or two.”

“Hon, your two minutes ‘sup a while ago. My feet are burnin’. My legs ache. I’m so hungry my stomach’s playin’ drums. And I need to get back to my goddamn job in fi’ minutes.”

“We’re all done,” I said, lifting Lizzie’s hand. With my casted hand I gathered our trash together. I noticed that Lizzie was watching me carefully as I crumbled up the detritus of our meal and that she was watching me carefully as I dumped it into a nearby trash can. I led her outside onto the sidewalk and explained, “That woman looks like she’s had a rough morning.”

“I don’t like to be pushed around,” she said.

I noted a little gesture she made with her left hand as she spoke, a little sweeping arc that instructed the driver of the Town Car to follow us on our impromptu stroll up Third.

Is he just a driver,
I wondered,
or a bodyguard, too?

“I’ll remember that about you,” I said.

I would.

Did she glare at me? Hard to say.

TWENTY

The shower at my friend’s flat in between the sessions with Dr. Gregory helped a lot. The nap not so much.

“Thea was terrific,” I said. “With Adam.”

“Yes,” my therapist said. “What year was that? That he showed up?”

“A few years ago. 2002.”

“Go on,” he said.

It was like hiking up a steep hill with some guy a half a step behind you who kept poking his finger into your ribs.

Looking out the windows of his office, I was transfixed by so many leaves falling from the trees in one concentrated flurry. Autumn.

Without even an emotional hiccup at the confounding circumstances, Thea welcomed Adam into our home that first night as though he’d always been her favorite nephew. When she sensed that I didn’t know what to do next, she steered me gently to my son’s side. When my tongue couldn’t find my lips and my lips couldn’t form a word, she hugged me and whispered to me to “try honesty.”

As Berkeley’s bedtime approached, Thea plopped our daughter onto her half-brother’s lap and handed him a well-worn copy of
The Snowy Day
. I thought that Adam read to my daughter as though he’d done it before, and I found myself wondering whether he had other siblings. Other than my daughter.

What I wondered, Thea voiced. “So do you have any other brothers and sisters, Adam? Besides Berk?”

“Not really,” he replied.

Thea waited a moment for him to go on before she sighed at the cryptic nature of his response. It was something she did with me when she found my natural parsimony irritating. I could tell she wanted more from Adam, but she found a patient place. “Keep reading,” she said. “You read beautifully.”

He told us precious little that night about his life, his terse replies to our questions a clear indication that he wasn’t eager to be quizzed. Instinctively, both Thea and I gave him room. He’d made the first move by coming to our door.

We figured that we’d make the second by making him welcome.

I kissed Berk good night and she gave her half-brother a big hug before she crawled under her covers into bed. Thea stayed behind with her to deal with her inevitable curiosity about Adam.

As he and I settled downstairs at the kitchen table, Adam said, “You’re way too trusting.”

“Yeah? I’ve been accused of a lot of things in my life. That’s never been one of them.”

“I could be a con, a sociopath. I could be anybody. Somebody who’s done his homework about you. A serial killer, even. What proof do you have I am who I say I am?”

The melodrama of it all amused me. I could have told him about the halogen sparkle of his irises and the distinctive way his nostrils flared, but I didn’t. I could have told him that I already felt a connection to him as solid as the one that anchored the roots of the big old oak to the soil in the backyard, but I didn’t.

I simply shrugged. I was enjoying the novelty of being accused of being too trusting by my very own son.

“You like old movies?” he asked.

“Some. I’m no Roger Ebert.”

“Citizen Kane?”

“Heard of that one.”

“Remember the sled?”

I recognized the reference. I was relieved. “Rosebud,” I said.

“My mom said if I ever met you, I should say a single word.”

“Rosebud?” Was this some kind of odd memory quiz? “I took your mother to a movie?”

He laughed. It was, to be generous, an ironic laugh.

He said, “The word is ‘Buckhead.’ You didn’t take my mother to a movie.” He looked away from me for a long moment and when he finally turned his attention back toward me, his voice was much more somber. “You took her to a laundry room.”

TWENTY-ONE

I didn’t know then whether or not Adam had any idea what to expect when he arrived at our house, but by the end of that evening his heart, if it was open to us at all, must have registered the reality that Thea at least had made it clear to him that he’d found a family, if indeed he wanted another one.

Did he want another one?

I wasn’t convinced. Part of me — the part of the iceberg below the surface, the cynical part, the skeptical part, the biggest part — was convinced that he’d come to the Rocky Mountain West on some quest that was nothing more than a psychologically twisted version of tourism, eager to see, finally, his personal family-tree version of Pike’s Peak or Mesa Verde or the Royal Gorge, or whatever real-life natural attraction I represented in his curious mind. I was guessing that his visit would last just long enough to take a few snapshots — digital or figurative — and then he’d head back to wherever it was that he lived.

A more cynical part of my brain considered the possibility that he was preparing to lay claim to some of my wealth.

But mostly I believed that Adam would eventually leave the way he’d come, surreptitiously and without fanfare, and I would end up being nothing more than a four-by-six glossy on the bulletin board in his brain, or on the refrigerator door in his kitchen. The medical technology big shot. The distant father in the Rocky Mountain West. The Rosebud/Buckhead guy. I saw my smiling mug hanging at a cockeyed angle just below an uninspired shot of the Sears Tower or the big arch in St. Louis.

A magnet shaped like a pineapple would be obscuring most of my head.

“Did I say Thea was terrific?” I said to my therapist.

“You did.”

“Well, Thea was terrific. She could have made that day hell. She could have pinned me to a figurative rack and stretched me in all kinds of uncomfortable directions. But she didn’t. She was a dream.”

Once it became clear that he was staying the night, and that staying the night had been his plan all along, we settled Adam into the guest room on the first floor. Adam maintained that his mother knew where he was, and since I was quite aware, and he was quite aware, that I didn’t know his last name, let alone his mother’s first name, he also knew that I was in no position to question his contention that he had parental permission for this sleepover. I thought I’d try to act just the slightest bit fatherly, and I handed him the remote control and helped him find the channel that would allow him to watch the late edition of
SportsCenter
on ESPN.

He asked me if we got the History Channel.

I was being tested.

I said we did, but that I didn’t know the channel number.

The smirk on his face was my grade. I hadn’t passed.

“I’ll find it,” he said. The undertone of his words said
“lame attempt, Dad”
but I got the distinct impression that he appreciated the fact that I’d given it a try. Maybe I’d get a B+ for effort.

“I’m sure you will. Good night, Adam. This day has been … something else.”

I reached for the knob to pull the door closed behind me.

He said, “Bella.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t know if you care, really. But my mother’s name is Roberta. Everyone who likes her calls her Bella. I guess you qualify, or you did once.” He paused. “At least for a few minutes you qualified. That night in Buckhead? She probably told you that her name was Bella. She’s friendly, outgoing. People like her. She would have told you that her name was Bella before …”

He didn’t want to have to finish the sentence.

And I didn’t want to finish it for him.

I put some dedicated effort into ignoring the knife he’d just slipped into the narrow space between my ribs. “Thank you,” I said. “I didn’t remember her name. I’m sorry.”

“She knows yours,” he said, his eyes on the TV screen. “Knew exactly where you lived, where I could find you. Showed me an article about you in
BusinessWeek
. Taped an appearance you did on one of those stupid business channels on cable.”

I nodded. I had a desirable combination of live TV talents — I could think on my feet and could make interviewers look smart — so I did a lot of cable interviews. I had no way of knowing which one Adam had seen, but the
BusinessWeek
piece was a one-and-only. It wasn’t a bad piece; they’d accurately portrayed the meteoric nature of my early success, and fairly concluded with the fact that the promise I’d displayed in the first act of my entrepreneurial life was still awaiting an encore.

In wunderkind terms I was a one-hit wonder. I considered the possibility that my son was reminding me of that while I comforted myself with the fact that at least it had been a hell of a solo hit.

Adam wasn’t done with whatever he wanted to say. His eagerness betrayed him. From the quick way he tied the words together, I could tell he’d been waiting quite a while to ask me the next questions, had maybe even rehearsed them. “Did you know back then? That night at the party? What her name was?”

Bella? Roberta?

Rang no bells. Not even the faintest little
ding-dong
.

Admitting the truth wasn’t as difficult as I might have imagined. I shook my head to indicate that I hadn’t known the girl’s name that night, but Thea’s earlier counsel about trying honesty continued to resonate, and I knew that although my headshake may have been truthful, it hadn’t been either sufficient, or honest.

“No, Adam. I don’t think I knew her name that night. I wish I could say I did.”

“Yeah.”

His “yeah” was dismissive. Nothing more than a polite version of “get the hell out of here.”

I said, “I’m not proud of who I was back then, Adam. It was … It’s hard to explain … Growing up is, I mean.”

“Yeah?”

“What happened when I was younger. It’s —”

He exhaled loudly through his nose to interrupt me. “I’m what happened when you were younger. I’m what happened.”

Ouch.
“I never knew. That’s not an excuse. It’s not right that I didn’t know. But it’s who I was. I never gave a moment’s thought back then to anything about …”

I lost momentum as I struggled to figure out how to relate to a fourteen-year-old boy some context about being twenty-three, about being the center of the universe, or about the night I’d had anonymous sex with his mother in Georgia.

Bored with my nakedly self-serving act, waiting for me to crawl away with my tail between my legs, he started flicking through channels on the remote control. Whatever channel I was on as I fumbled for a way to finish my sentence and to rationalize away my behavior was the very first casualty of Adam’s attention.

Not too surprisingly, he’d had all of his dad that he could tolerate that night.

I watched Thea undress. First her pale pink pointes, then her satin pants. Finally she twisted the long-sleeve cotton top over her head in that one patented corkscrew motion I never tired of seeing. She curled next to me in our bed around midnight. Her flesh felt hot and lush with just a hint of sweat sticking her skin to mine. The draperies hung open, as they did most nights, and in the distance the purple-black outline of the craggy-topped Rockies made a shadowy silhouette against the midnight blue of the western sky. She kissed my shoulder once and then again, and right at the moment when I was steeling myself for the reality that she was about to press me for details about that fateful tryst with Adam’s mother — had Adam said something to her about the laundry room? I hoped not,
Jesus
— she said, “So why do you think Adam came today, babe?”

Adam hadn’t told either of us much — he was parsing out the details of his personal history as though they came from a ration that needed to last a long, long time — but since he’d reminded me about the washing machine in Buckhead I had managed to narrow down my recall enough to be pretty sure when the encounter had occurred. In my early twenties I’d only been to Georgia once — a trip that lasted a couple of days, total. I’d been visiting an old college friend who was in graduate school at Emory back in ‘87. With some effort, prompted by the clues Adam had provided, I had also recalled a few foggy details about the pre-Halloween party at the Buckhead McMansion, and I’d pieced together some even foggier reminiscences about the young woman with whom I’d coupled — and whom I’d apparently impregnated — in the laundry room off the butler’s pantry during the height of the premature celebration of All Hallow’s Eve.

Bella had been tall and skinny. Back then she had short, blond hair and bright eyes. The washing machine had been a top loader. She and I had joked about getting it agitating without even starting it up.

Okay, I’d joked about getting it agitating without even starting it up.

Thea was surprised but not shocked by any of the day’s developments; she knew who I’d been when I was a twenty-three-year-old kid. It wasn’t a secret between us what kind of life I’d lived before we met. During our courtship, while I’d been busy trying to convince her of the sincerity of my affections, she’d made it clear that she’d pushed away plenty of guys like me during her single days. Guys who never, ever put a girl and a responsibility in the same sentence. And she’d told me about it in such a way that I was confident that despite her caution she had been ambushed by a few guys like me. The scars from those encounters were faint — Thea had made sure they healed well — but they were there. No doubt.

Despite that, all she was seeking from me at that moment together in our marital bed were my thoughts about why my apparent undiscovered progeny had arrived that day — that day — at our door in Colorado. The question perplexed me, too, once I got past how grateful I was that Thea was able to postpone the more prurient aspects of her curiosity. I was also insightful enough to know that I wasn’t ready to provide complicated answers to any inquiries that had to do with the teenage boy who was watching the History Channel in the guest room downstairs.

I said, “To see who his father is, I guess. That has to be a strong pull for a kid his age.”

“You think it’s that simple?” she said. Obviously she didn’t think it was that simple. Not even close to that simple. She threaded her long fingers through the sparse hair between the nipples on my chest. There was no seduction in her touch, just connection. Her voice was as understanding as could be, but I knew she was prodding me to dig a little deeper.

Okay, a lot deeper.

I said, “His mother’s told him all about the … time he was conceived. The details, I mean. Where we … you know. A kid his age? Don’t you think that’s odd for a parent to … I find that …”

“Inconceivable?” Thea said with a tiny laugh.

Although the humor was spot on, the joke was on me, and the word hurt a little bit as she said it. Recognizing that I’d just started a conversation I didn’t want to finish, I said, “Adam’s watching some history something on TV.” I knew at some level that I was trying to race through the channels with Thea as my son had done with me earlier.

She found the fact that my son was watching history ironic, of course. “Well, then,” she said.

“He’ll tell me why he’s here when he’s ready,” I said, trying to persuade her of my thoughtfulness, my tone swollen with pretense that I was drawing on a wealth of knowledge about the motivations of teenage boys. The reality was that I remembered only one particular adolescent motivation with any clarity. And that was the one that had endured far beyond my adolescence and had gotten me into trouble with Bella.

“Or when he senses that you are,” Thea replied.

Many honest words were spoken in our house that day, but perhaps none any more truthful than those.

Thea’s last thought that astonishing night? They were a mother’s words, nurturing words, all-inclusive words. Mostly, though, they were hopeful, surprising words. She said, “We have a son.”

Her breathing revealed that, within heartbeats, she was asleep.

Me? I wasn’t.

My new therapist’s reaction to my narrative? In a tone that had no inflection whatsoever, he said, “You had a daughter. Before that you had a son.”

I thought it was his way of letting me know that he knew there was much more to this story.

He was right, of course.

But he didn’t know the half of it.