Every Little Thing (40 page)

“It's the wrong order, isn't it? It's not like I've be sitting around deciding to adopt the boy! It's not an overnight. Like. You're sitting there so calm, like you're doing me a favour I didn't ask for. And I can't imagine a bigger. Fucking.
Thing
. We're not talking about getting a dog or buying a car or something here, Dad.”

“Were you not…looking into adoption? You seemed serious about it—”

“
Thinking
about it and setting off
court-ordered
courses of action—it's night and day.”

“So we'll back off then?”

“That's not what I said.”His father said nothing; he nodded his head like he understood. “Slow down, that's all I'm saying. I need to catch up, mentally. Slow down with the lawyer and everything.”

“All we're doing right now, with our lawyer, is to determine paternity for Zack. Not his guardianship. One thing at a time. One decision at a time.”

Cohen let out a long sigh, like he was blowing out fire in his father's words. “This is...”He shook his head.

“I know, Cohen. It's why your mother's handling it. Right or wrong, she had good intentions here. This is a
very
tricky and complicated situation, and she spent months on it.”

“What about if he's
not
mine? Will it matter to Adoption Services that I know the kid? That we've bonded. Gotten…close?

It's an exceptional circumstance, like you said. The kid's waiting on a goddamn
heart
.”

His father looked at him, curious. “I—I don't think that can happen, Cohen. If the boy's not yours. For now, let's stick with matters at hand. I need to know—”

Three loud blares, like transport truck horns, signalled the end of visitation hour, but Cohen felt like he'd just rounded that corner to greet his father. When the alarm rang, it frightened him for the first time. Cohen had grabbed the sides of his chair and ducked down like a raid was about to happen.

“I've got to know,Cohen. I—I need to relay to your mother, so that she'll know how to proceed. If we can arrange for it, do you want a paternity test done?”

All the other visitors had left. An officer approached, motioning his father to leave. “
Sir, now!
”The officer threw a hitchhiker's thumb at the exit. “Time's long over.”

NINE DAYS LATER, he was escorted to a small room in the medical wing of the prison. There was a nurse telling him to roll up his sleeve. She was wearing a purple top and a black pencil skirt instead of a hospital or prison uniform. A subtle hint of perfume, like wet grass and honey. Her shiny black hair swooping like a C around each ear; the soft wind her hair made when she'd move her head. He'd spent more than four months barred away from female grace, and that made this woman a cathedral.

She was asking him to make a fist as she wrapped a rubber string around his bicep. But no one could ever find his veins, and most nurses punctured his arm a few times, apologetically, in search of blood. But not this woman. She was having a hard time finding a vein, but she didn't feel the need for small talk and apologies. She hadn't even answered his,
How are you?
She had every reason to be curt, judgemental, to the point, and assume he was another prick trying to dodge child support or the kind of guy who has kids he doesn't know about.

Cohen had learned to spot fake courage in men in jail, so he knew hers was feigned. And he was sorry she'd had to take blood from a prisoner on account of him. He looked her in the eye, “I knew a man who had framed photos of his daughter'sDNA in his house,” he told her. “You can get cameras that work at that level of magnification. It struck me as an odd thing to frame, as artwork, but they'd framed it on their fifth wedding anniversary. It was a testament to how they loved each other enough to swirl themselves into one person. That whole new batch of DNA on their wall, it existed solely because they met and fell in love.”

“Almost done,” she said, not quite understanding his rambling.

“Those two twisted-ladders of DNA in his photo, they housed the personal histories of that kid's parents. And their parents and their parents, way back through time. And you think,
My God if our DNA could talk, you know?
About our ancestors, who clubbed sabre-tooths and mastodons for supper, then left themselves behind, somewhere, in that kid's DNA.”

She raised an eyebrow,
Never thought about that before
, but she didn't say anything to him. She hit a vein, and they watched his blood fill another vial.

He tried again to break the silence, “This end of it is amazing too. How you can match a child's DNA to its parents', like holding up two sides of a torn piece of paper.”

“It's really not that simple.”

“No, nothing is, is it?”

“Sir, I—” and she never finished her sentence.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you know that a child's mitochondrial DNA comes exclusively from their mother? So, technically, a child really
is
a little bit more of their mother than their father. It's not just nine months of pregnancy—and
that
bond—that a mother can hold over the father. It's the mitochondrial DNA too, which means every cell in a child's body has an exclusive bit of its mother in it. Fittingly, the mitochondria is basically the life force of a cell.”

Surprised now, grinning a little, even, “I have to confess I graduated twelve years ago, and I can't even remember what mitochondria do, in a cell. All I remember is that there is the kidney-bean-shaped thing, in a diagram of a human cell.”

“It's the cell's power plant, really.”

She pulled the vial from the needle, capped it, and motioned for him to apply pressure to the tissue she'd placed over the needle hole in his arm. A little circle of red ballooned into the fabric of the tissue.

Rooting through her work kit, she said, “Can I ask you how you know all of this stuff?”

“Would it be cliché of me to say I don't belong in here?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “We all make mistakes, I guess. Open up and say Aw. We take cheek cells too. For comparison.”

He opened his mouth, said,
Aww
, but then closed it to add, “Sometimes people make mistakes for us.” She hadn't seen the second sentence coming, and he almost bit the swab as she brought it to his mouth. “Sorry,” he said, and she smiled,
That's fine.

He opened his mouth again and she took a swab. She bagged the Q-tip-looking thing and handed him a pamphlet as she was leaving. Paragraphs and paragraphs about how to deal with the outcome of a paternity test, no matter what the result. There were counselling options, and frequently asked questions, as if anyone had ever been in Cohen's exact situation.

HE WOKE UP hungry and read the shade of orange falling through his window as 6:30 at best. His door wouldn't slide open for breakfast until 7:00, and by then the sunlight would be piss yellow. Like it always was when those doors slid open.

Waiting out the hunger had been the most uncomfortable part of his sentence. Or the most desperate ache he couldn't distract himself from in there. He paced his room that morning: six feet one way, then six feet the next. He went to his window, stared. There were two crows on the ground, excited about something they'd found, but he couldn't see what with them hopping around. And the glass in the window was so thick that the sunlight burned his eyes in a warm, refreshing way.

He laid back in bed. Held his stomach. Pushed a fist into the hunger pang like he could numb it. Waking up that morning, he thought about what kind of man, in a situation like his,would not adopt his own child. He thought about the camping trips he and his father had taken, alone, before Ryan had been born. Though scant, they'd made him a biologist, and he knew it. The impression they'd left. The way those nights were the only nights from his childhood his memory had kept intact as a whole. The wet smell of a rain-soaked tent. The distinct sound of a tent zipper. The texture of smores in his mouth; how a third or fourth marshmallow could make his teeth hurt, and how, ever since, a toothache had made him think of his father. On those nights he'd step out of the tent at 3 a.m. to pee, a life-affirming fear of black bears and coyotes had punched into his genetic makeup and re-wired his personality.

One morning there'd been bees buzzing around their campsite.
They're only here to pollinate flowers
, his father had promised him.
They've got no interest in stinging you if you leave them beeee.
And he pinched Cohen, but that pinch, that fact, that every animal on earth serves a concrete ecological role, amazed him. The way it amazed Zack. And what Zack deserved was a man making the world more accessible or amazing for him too.

He pictured Band-Aids in his medicine cabinet with cartoony images on them.

He pictured packing a lunchbox—sandwiches in little baggies with the crusts cut off—and wondered if Zack was that kind of picky-eater. It was one of too many things Cohen didn't know about Zack. What he liked to eat. What he liked to drink. Real orange juice or the cheap, tooth-zapping, concentrated stuff. Questions like those were the reasons he resented the notion of getting a
second chance
with his son because a
second chance
implied that starting from scratch was possible. It implied that Zack could be one day old again. Instead,Cohen would be parachuting down into a life in progress. He'd be learning a hundred things about a seven year old—all at once—that he should have gathered slowly, one clue at a time, over a period of seven years.
Loves chocolate milk, hates grapes. Likes bicycles or can't ride one and needs to be taught.

The light in his room was going yellow now, and he tried to picture how bad off Zack was. There were some mornings the hunger in his stomach would crawl up into his chest and burn.

The doors opened, and Cohen weaved his way to the cafeteria. He was getting his ladleful of eggs, but the person spooning them onto his tray dropped the ladle as everyone jumped from a sudden guttural scream, somewhere in the cafeteria. The man dropped the ladle, and the ladle knocked over Cohen's tray, and the man said, “I'm sorry,” as they both looked at Cohen's tray on the ground. “But you'll have to get back in line.” And there were forty people in line now.

The howling had been from Curt, the big black man Cohen had been checked into prison with. It was the first time Cohen had seen him in there, and Truck had his head pressed into a table—one side of Curt's face pancaked hard against the surface and the other side covered by Truck's big hand; the folds of his big jowly cheek had smeared across his face so that his mouth and an eye had disappeared. Truck was twisting Curt's arm up behind his back, as far as it would go, and the guards were taking their time. Curt howled every time Truck bent that arm, and he howled in a way that begged sympathy from everyone in the room. And on that day, unlike any other time Truck had put a hand on a man, Curt had somehow managed get that sympathy put to action. He swept Truck's foot out from under him, and Truck went down hard. Five or six men got to stomping Truck, finally, and the lockdown alarm went off before Cohen could get his food. It was an hour before they let everyone back into the kitchen, and that meant going right from eating to the visitation room to see his father.

He'd learned to read people's facial expressions before rounding the corner to greet them. Bad news and anger held themselves in the jaw. A rigid jaw, or a closed mouth, was a bad sign. A smile was an obviously good sign, or it meant no news. Crossed arms meant the person was still wording things in their head, concentrating.

He rounded the corner, and his father had a posture he'd never seen before. He was already shaking his head like he didn't want to have to say whatever he was thinking. “Even if a heart does come now...” his father stopped shaking his head and stared at his knees. He looked like he hadn't slept or even showered in days, and he'd kept his hat on for the first time. The bags under his eyes were the colour of angry rain. With every visitation hour, it was clear his father was growing more and more attached to Zack. And it was more in his tone than his haggard appearance that day.

“Even if a heart
does
come. The doctors are saying we need to be prepared for...causality. Death. It's septic shock.”He swirled his hands together to connote,
everything
. “Multiple organ failure. The tube, running from one of his bedside machines, into his abdomen—it rendered his body open to infection. There's a big abscess there.
E. Coli, Staph
. And his immune system's shot.”

Cohen fell back in his chair. Breathed in and in and in.

“...One minute he's sweating, next minute he's shivering. Throwing up. It's everything at once. And we're back to watching his urine bag again. Waiting for yellow.”

HE KNEW, FROM the return address on the envelope, that he was holding the paternity test results. He kept the envelope, folded in half, in his pant pocket, sometimes running a finger along its edges through the fabric of his pants.

The envelope was un-sealed—the prison scanned all incoming mail—so all he had to do was peer down into it because it wasn't a full piece of paper folded three times to hide its message: the results were printed on something the size of a cue card, one third the size of a piece of paper. He sat on the edge of his bed the day it came. He squinted his eyes, to blur the words, and he looked down into the envelope. There were two or three lines at the most. In isolation, he'd seen the word
negative
, out of context, like it could have been in reference to his blood type, or it could have meant a hundred things, so he shut the envelope.

He'd been romanticizing the idea of stepping on toy dinosaurs and dinkies scattered all around his house. He'd been picturing it now, him and Zack. A tent pitched in the living room, a flashlight pointing up,
once upon a time
stories.