Tilt (15 page)

Pregnant.
Why hadn't he realized it before? Because he'd been in a dream, a stupid, thoughtless state of addlement. But now he was waking up.

Janine Igwash was pregnant. By him.

Why?

He'd sworn he would never be here. He was not going to become . . . 

His fucking father.

“You're hurting my hand!” Feldon said.

He was holding Feldon's hand. Feldon had the flowers. Stan had the fishing rod.

“Sorry,” he said.

It didn't even sound like his voice.

In Family and Sexuality class, Mrs. Hardon had said sperm needed only the slightest invitation to cause irreparable parenthood. Even if you'd already . . . shot across the bow. There was still sperm in the nozzle.

Lurking.

He was nothing but the agent of his own nozzle.

“We're not going to see Janine right now,” Stan said.

Instead, the flowers were for Kelly-Ann.

It was a touching scene. The house surrounded by cop cars, lights blazing, Kelly-Ann scrambling off the front porch — Stan thought she was going to trip and break her neck — then hugging Feldon so hard he yelled in alarm.

Stan's eyes welled up. He didn't know what was happening. He didn't get weepy about anything, usually. But the sight of the little boy squirming, of Kelly-Ann nearly killing him with her own relief . . . 

Stan, too, was going to be a parent. It just kept hitting him, one load of bricks after another. He'd have to leave school. He'd have to get a job, in a brick factory, probably. He'd be moving bricks from one place to another. Probably by hand. He didn't know anything else.

He'd have to learn that, even.

He'd have to support Janine and the little baby. And his mother would be alone with Lily. His mother and Lily would unravel each other. And Stan would come home to Janine — to some filthy little apartment they couldn't afford — after a long day of moving bricks, his arms stretched from the weight of it all.

Janine would look at him with that face mothers get, that end-of-the-world face.

He'd come back to his crying kid and his unraveling wife — her parents would probably make him marry her — and they'd be together in a squishy, filthy, stinking, dark peeling-paint apartment . . . 

Desolate in the driveway, Stan gazed at Kelly-Ann Wilmer clutching Feldon and weeping. Everyone was weeping.

Stan wept for himself. His blood was turning to chalk.

He might as well call himself Ron.

They were all a huge public spectacle — cops, neighbors, Lily home from school, his mother. Lily was wandering around in circles talking to invisible people at her toes.

“He was just down at the river,” Stan said to nobody at all. No one was listening to him anyway.

—

Dinner was something from a box that went in the microwave and then came out hot and mushy. The colored parts were vegetables, Stan guessed. The whitish-yellowish parts were pasta. Gary poured wine for everyone — even Stan — except the children, who got berry juice.

The wine sat murkily on Stan's tongue, like some token of the adult world that was hard to appreciate. Gary went on about — vintage, mustiness? — while Stan considered brick dust filling his lungs.

“To life!” Gary said, and everyone clinked. Stan's mother was looking at Gary like . . . 

“I have a word to say about life,” Gary said.

 . . . like he was a Greek god or something.

“Some days,” Gary said, “you lose your job.” He looked over at Stan's mother. So that was it. How were they supposed to live? But Gary was looking at her like she was the greatest thing since . . . “Some days you get accepted into a special school —” Gary glanced now at Lily chopping her mushy noodles into smaller and smaller bits — “or you lose your kid, then you find your kid.”

Kelly-Ann had Feldon on her lap, clutched like he was a parachute she hadn't strapped on.

“It all could happen on the same day. What's important, what really stays with you . . .”

Is what your nozzle caused you to do, Stan thought.

“ . . . is all of us together. I don't care what anyone says, we are . . .”

Just agents of our nozzles, Stan thought. Our nozzles and our appetites.

“ . . . a family,” Gary said. Some kind of eye-based tractor beam vibrated between him and Stan's mother.

“I know this has been a tumultuous day . . .”

They were getting married, Stan thought.

“ . . . but I would like to make an announcement. Isabelle and I have decided —”

“I got my girlfriend pregnant!” Stan blurted. That stopped the words in Gary's throat.

“What?”

“Janine is pregnant,” Stan said. “She's my girlfriend. It's my fault.”

Stan's mother crashed her cutlery on her plate. Everyone else was silent. Even Lily looked up.

“Oh, Stan,” his mother said in a little voice.

Freight trains collided in his ears.

Why had he said it? Why had he said it out loud?

Gary still had his mouth open, but nothing was coming out now.

Welcome to the family, big fella, Stan thought. Welcome to the nut house.

“When . . . when is she due?” Stan's mother said. “Have you talked to her parents? Has she considered . . .?”

“It's all really new!” Stan sprang to his feet because he had to, his whole body uncoiled. “I don't want to talk about it.”

Up the stairs. To hell with the squeaks. A huge storm seemed to be blowing all around him. He launched into his room where it had all happened, where his life had come peeling apart in a matter of minutes.

Why?

Because he was Ron's fuck-up son.

There was the bed, sheets and blankets still wrapped in knots. That's where the disaster had unfolded. It was like he'd been on drugs or something. He'd gone completely out of his mind.

There was the balled-up T-shirt-and-gym-sock combination on the floor. Why hadn't he just stopped there? Obviously he was unfit for . . . 

But Janine had wanted to go on. She'd never tried boys. She didn't know what she was doing.

But it was his fault. He knew himself.

He thought he knew.

He buried his face into the wreck of his bed. Everything was cold now. Cold and dark. It was difficult even to remember the steam heat of it.

“Stanley.” His mother's voice.

“I closed the door for a reason!” Stan barked.

Everyone else in the family was allowed to come apart. Everyone else could slam the door and be left alone. But not him.

Why didn't he have a lock on his door?

“Don't come in!”

But she came in anyway, bearing food. Cold microwave mush. She sat on the edge of his bed — the very scene of the disaster — and put the ridiculous plate on the floor right beside his smelly wad of disgrace.

He could hear her sniffing distastefully.

“You really need to do your sheets,” she said.

He didn't have to talk.

“I'm sorry for this afternoon,” Stan's mother said. What was the phrase? Eggshells. Eggshells in her voice. “You know, as a parent, sometimes you get completely blindsided by something. You just . . .  barge in with the current crisis in your head, and you have no idea. I'm sorry.”

If he kept his head in his pillow she would go away eventually.

“Janine seems like a nice girl.”

If he stayed still as a corpse . . . if he
became
a corpse. If he willed all the life to drain from his . . . 

“I mean, it was a horrible way to meet someone. I wish you had brought her to dinner first or something. I have asked you many times if you're seeing someone. I know we're a bit chaotic as a family, but —”

“I wasn't seeing her!” Stan said. “We just got together. It's all really new!”

That shut her up. Stan waited, but he couldn't continue to be a corpse. He shifted to look at her. Shades of gray in the darkness.

Something in the bed was still slimy from . . . 

“How new is it?” she asked finally and pressed a little closer. Her hand was going to touch the slimy part . . . 

Stan sat up completely in a protective posture.

“Just today. We just started everything today. When you walked in . . .”

“Oh,” she said. “Just today?” It was as if she was sitting in the den with the three remotes, indiscriminately pushing buttons.

“You walked in on us!”
Probably everyone was lined up on the stairs listening.

“How do you know that she's pregnant?” his mother asked.

“I just know! I'm Ron's son, all right? I've got this —”

“Did she tell you that she's pregnant?”

“She didn't have to! I didn't use any protection, I didn't think . . .”

Slime, slime still on the bed. It was disgusting. Stan couldn't ignore it anymore. He wiped his hand against something unusual . . . 

“What's that?” his mother asked.

It
was
slimy. But it was also slippery and sort of like a —

“It's a condom,” she said. “It's . . . it's . . .”

Slippery in his fingers.

“Huge!”
she said.

Stan dropped the thing. It looked big enough to . . . 

“I thought you said you didn't use protection?” His mother didn't seem to know where to put her eyes.

“It's a girl's . . .”

“A what?”

“A girl's condom,” he said. He'd seen pictures of them. In health.

“Janine wore this?”

God. How could he not . . . 

The thing lay there like a squishy plastic bag.

“Anyway, if you just made love this afternoon, there's no way she could know that she's pregnant. No way. And if she wore this . . .”

She was brilliant, Stan thought, and it all slid from him — the brick factory, the lung dust, the shitty apartment, the hard weld of his jaw —

Everything flooded.

“Oh, Stanley.”

Flooded into his mother's arms. He felt himself shaking against her chest, weeping like a baby. She held him and stroked his hair.

“Oh, my baby,” she said in a whisper. “You're only sixteen. It's all right. You don't have to know everything.”

How could he miss-see so many things? How could he go through the whole sweaty passion of it and not even know?

“I think you should bring her to dinner. When everything has settled.”

“Are you and Gary going to . . .” He could barely talk. He was just weeping and breathing.

“We'll talk about it. I have to find work now.”

Weeping and breathing. She smelled good, his mother. In the face of his unbearable stupidity . . . he didn't want to let go.

“It's all right. I think it's good,” he whispered. Footsteps on the creaking stairs melting away. All of them. The drama was over for now.

Stan held her and held her until the world calmed down.

A jump shot starts in the soles of the feet and travels, like a wave, up through the ankles, shins, knees, thighs . . . through the hips and up the spine and out the arm and fingertips. It happens before thought travels through the brain. The ball spins nightward . . . 

 . . . toward the hoop in the back alley, where the beautiful girl slithers up and over the fence and emerges from the darkness before the ball clangs against the rim.

“I got your package,” Janine said.

She was wearing the plaid shirt and jeans he'd returned. He could see the shirt under the opening of her leather jacket. She had the coolest clothes. She filled them out a lot better than he had.

Stan grabbed the rebound and dribbled twice, spun the ball in off the backboard, dribbled to the foul-line crack, sank a jumper, sped in before the ball could even touch the ground . . . 

“You wanted to see me,” she said.

She had her hands on her hips. Even in the dull light she shone like the most brilliant beauty ever to set foot on an improvised back-alley basketball and martial arts court.

It wasn't quite raining and it wasn't quite snowing. The air seemed full of the turning of the season.

“One bare breast above the blanket,” he said. “One soft sigh on the shadowed wall. And dreamy early-morning breathing, eyelids drawn, face so fair, real as real though you're not there.”

She didn't move.

“I am real, and I am here,” she said finally.

“It's not finished yet,” he said.

“Is it a poem? Is it for me?”

“I need to kiss you again.”

“What for? Research?”

She would not smile at her own joke. He got the flowers then from the shadows. That seniors' residence garden had a good selection. It was almost winter anyway. He brought them to her.

“I don't really like flowers,” she said.

“I thought all girls liked flowers.”

He could see her breath. That's how cold it was getting. Not that he felt any of it. She sniffed the flowers even though she didn't like them.

“My mom does, though. She'll carry them with her all over the house.”

Their noses were almost touching. He had to crane his neck upwards.

“I'm a troublemaker,” she said.

They stood in the cold, dull light for the longest time, just heating up the whole world.

“You
are
a troublemaker,” he said finally. He wasn't going to make the first move. They stood nose to nose attracting one another. Her lips parted a little bit. He could smell her . . . was that lipstick?

Something fell in the tiny space between their nose tips. A snowflake?

Hours could go by like this. Eternities. Just breathing the same air.

“Your mother must hate me,” she said.

“My mother has asked you to dinner,” he replied. “I have to warn you, the family is infested with liars and fools. But you have to come.”

She could . . . she could just stand there breathing and keeping her lips half a thought away. He leaned in slightly but got no closer.

“I'm not my father,” he said then.

She didn't ask what he meant. They didn't need to talk really. Slowly Stan began to get the sense that two people standing like this, so close together, with so much between them . . . 

Maybe better not to say it. To just let the world fall to bits around them in the most delicious ways.