Everything Changes (23 page)

“Zack!” Jed says, pulling me to my feet. “You okay?”

“I didn’t think you were coming,” I mutter, trying to catch my breath.

“I’ll bet you’re glad I did, though,” he says with a grin, straightening out my shirt and jacket. “Who is that guy?”

“Hope’s father.”

Jed stares as Hope and Vivian kneel on the floor beside Jack. “You’re shitting me.”

Four of the larger men in the crowd, corporate underlings of Jack’s, start closing in on us in a small circle, not quite sure what’s called for, but ready to go to battle if their CEO demands it, and at first we appear to be outnumbered, but then Matt pushes through the crowd, brandishing the guitar like a battering ram, the Elton John wig wildly askew on his head. “Everyone just back off!” he commands, planting himself in a defensive position in front of me, guitar poised on his shoulder like a baseball bat. “You okay, Zack?”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“What the hell is wrong with you!” comes Norm’s ragged, booming voice as he bursts out of the onlookers, charging at Jack with his fists raised. The men converge on Norm, grabbing his arms and hustling him roughly away from Jack as he writhes madly in their grasp, his face knotted with rage. “Don’t you touch my son, you fucking animal. I’ll bury you—you hear me? I’ll bury you!”

Hope and Vivian help a dazed Jack to his feet and usher him gingerly toward the kitchen. “He was kissing that girl,” he mutters dazedly to no one in particular. “Right in my study.” Just before they disappear, Hope turns to look at me, and her eyes are like lasers, cutting through flesh and bone to pierce me at my core, her expression of bewildered devastation branding itself into my brain as it burns through my eyes. I stagger slightly, and start to fall as the room spins, but then I feel myself righted as a soft hand slips into mine, squeezing my fingers. “Okay, then,” says Lela, her voice loud and authoritative. “Matt?”

“What, Mom?”

“It’s time to go.”

And so, with Matt leading the way, and Norm and Pete bringing up the rear, and a swath of angry destruction in our wake, the Fighting Kings make good their exit.

Something happens to me in the elevator, some final synthesis of the drinks, the Viagra, and the trauma of the last few minutes, and I leave my body to hover above us as we descend, taking in everyone else’s shifting postures as their combined adrenaline dissipates in the air like smoke: Norm leaning against the back wall, red faced and disheveled, still catching his breath; Matt rubbing his neck thoughtfully; Jed tucking his shirt in—it came undone when he hurled Jack across the room—Pete humming nervously as he studies my own blank expression, worried about me; and Lela still firmly clutching my hand protectively. Her expression, an amalgam of concern and grim determination, would certainly move me to tears if I were in there to cry them.

We step out into the chilly night, and arrangements are made, logistics confirmed, but I’m still floating, so it all happens beneath me. The sky is clear, but the glow of Manhattan makes it hard to see any stars, and I want to float higher until I can see them, but I seem limited to this lower level of flight, just a few feet above my own bowed head. Jed gives me a pat on the back and tells me he’ll talk to me tomorrow, and I feel a rush of gratitude and want to hug him, but by the time I think of it, he’s gone, and then I’m in the backseat of Lela’s Honda with Pete and Matt, Norm riding shotgun as she pilots her way toward the Harlem River Drive. We head north toward home, exactly how we might have done a lifetime ago, before we had any concept of how far we would all drift. I lean my head against the window, the vibrations from the glass rattling my teeth, and this sensation proves to be the lone thread that pulls me back into my body, where a bone-deep exhaustion mercifully takes the bite out of what little awareness is there to begin with.

Lela takes charge when we get home, making tea for everyone as we sit, shell-shocked, in the living room, an ice pack pressed firmly to my temple, which is swollen from Jack’s assault. Norm and Matt engage in the inevitable play-by-play, reconstructing the events from their separate perspectives, until, finally, Norm asks me, “What the hell happened back there?”

And so I tell them, and they nod, not terribly surprised, and somehow, talking about it makes it seem more pedestrian, less calamitous, so I find myself describing the scene in detail, my own editorialized version of my encounter with Jack. It’s understood that we will not tackle the hairier issue of why, exactly, I was kissing Tamara to begin with, but keep the focus squarely on the violence, breaking it down, establishing an exact chronol-ogy, like athletes reliving a recent victory on the field. Pete sits next to me, his head on my shoulder, tired and confused, but not willing to miss out on this rare family time. And there is an undeniable warmth permeating the room as the five of us sit sipping at our teas, a tangible intimacy in which we’re all reveling, and it occurs to me that it’s something we’ve all been missing for some time now. We’ll all sleep in the beds of our youth tonight, except for Norm, who refuses an offer to bunk with me, choosing instead to sleep on the sofa bed in the basement, and I intuit from the way he avoids looking at the stairs leading up that he’s unwilling to get that close to the epicenter of his former life, the scene of the crime that led to our dissolution.

When we finally get up from the couches to go to sleep, Matt forgets himself, wearily pulling off the Elton John wig, and upon seeing his bald head, Lela’s eyes fill with tears, and her hand goes to her mouth to stifle a sob. “Shit, Mom, I’m sorry,” Matt says. “I forgot.”

“It’s okay,” she says, wiping away her tears with the back of her wrist. “I don’t even know why it makes me so sad.”

“I can put it back on.”

“No,” she says, walking over to him and gingerly tracing the lines of his skull with her fingers. “You were my baby,” she says, and then turns to look at Pete and me. “You’re all my babies. And sometimes I just miss it so much, taking care of you.”

“You take care of me,” Pete says, alarmed by her tears.

She smiles at him. “I know, pumpkin. And you take care of me. God sent you so that I’d never feel worthless.”

Being the oldest, I had my own room, while Matt and Peter shared. I don’t remember it ever being a sore point. The linens on my bed are the same ones I slept in when I lived here, and it’s as if Lela wanted to keep everything exactly as it was, so that it would all feel right to me in the unlikely event I ever came back. Climbing into bed, I take in the familiar scents of the house, the cone-shaped shadow on the ceiling cast by the streetlight outside, absently running the back of my hand along the textured wallpaper, which is how I used to lull myself to sleep as a kid. I nod off briefly, and then wake up with a start to find Lela sitting on the edge of the bed, the light from the hallway illuminating her in her nightgown as she gently rubs my legs through the blanket. “Mom,” I say.

“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” I roll onto my back to look at her.

“I just like having you here,” she says. “I can’t remember the last time everyone was home, sleeping in their beds. The house feels alive again.”

I nod, yawning as I stretch my arms. The evening’s earlier debacle cannot penetrate the protective walls of my childhood bedroom, and I feel myself at a calming distance from the fiasco of my real life. “It’s good to be here,” I say.

She smiles tenderly at me, and I notice that the wrinkles around her eyes are starting to deepen, and beneath her jawline hang discreet pockets of looser flesh, the crumbling chin of an elderly woman. I feel a raw panic in my throat, a visceral sense of the inevitable mutability of everything, the wasted time and the losses to come, and I want to be a little boy again, safe in her uncomplicated embrace, with no notion of the future. “It’s going to be okay, Zack—you know that, right?”

“I’ve got my doubts.”

She nods. “Well, whatever it is that happened tonight—and God knows I don’t know what it was—you have to believe it happened for a reason.”

“The reason,” I say, “is that I’m an idiot.”

She laughs softly and leans forward to kiss my forehead. “You get some sleep, and we’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

I grab her arm. “Thanks, Mom,” I say. “For getting me out of there, and for bringing me here.”

“You’re welcome,” she says softly. “That’s your bed, Zack, and as far as I’m concerned, it always will be. And we are your family and you will always have us”—she grins—“no matter what kind of idiot you are.”

She kisses me again, letting her lips linger on my cheek for an extra beat. “Get some sleep, baby.”

But after she leaves, I roll around, unable to get comfortable. The clock radio on my dresser tells me it’s past two in the morning, and even though my eyes are burning with acid fatigue, my heart pounds out a hip-hop beat, fast and insistent in my chest, my limbs pulsing with nervous energy. The first prickly hints of my incoming hangover are flitting about like insects in the front of my skull, looking for a nice, warm spot to land and dig in for the long haul. I roll out of bed and pad down the hall in my borrowed boxers and T-shirt, tiptoeing downstairs to get a drink of water. In the living room, I sip at my glass while flipping through old photo albums, from the days before Norm left. He’d been the photographer, always determined to capture our essences for posterity. Afterward, Lela was never big on pictures, possibly due to negative associations with cameras from the time she’d snapped Norm and Anna in her bed. As I look through photos of my siblings and me, a pattern emerges: Matt’s always facing the camera full-on, smiling or being a ham, while I always seem to be corralling Pete, directing him to look at the camera, and thus, am never fully smiling myself. The effect is one disjointed picture after another, three boys out of sync, as if cut and pasted from separate photos altogether. The only pictures that seem composed at all are the ones with Norm in them, taken by Lela, his anchoring presence somehow fusing us, bringing us into focus together.

The stairs creak under my bare feet as I wander back upstairs to stand at the doorway to Matt and Pete’s room. Matt’s sleeping in his clothes, curled up in a fetal position on top of his comforter, his face less than an inch from the wall. Pete is flat on his back under the covers, snoring loudly, his mouth, even at rest, in a slight, smiling crescent. The articulated desk lamp is extended to its fullest height on the desk between them, watching over them like a sentry, the effect completed by the Elton John wig Matt’s placed over it for safekeeping. On the desk is a picture of a three-year-old me holding an infant Pete, my eyes wide as I look down at him.

“What are you doing, Zack?” Pete whispers to me from his bed.

“Nothing,” I say. “I can’t sleep.”

“You want to bunk with us?”

“Sure.”

He climbs out of bed, still half-asleep, and expertly pulls out and raises the high-riser from beneath his bed, carefully arranging it so that the two beds are perfectly lined up, and throws one of his two pillows on it. “Get in,” he says. There’s no extra blanket in his room, but he moves to the edge of his bed to share his with me. “You’re not going to marry Hope, huh?”

“It doesn’t look good,” I say.

“You going to marry Tamara?”

“I don’t think I’m getting married anytime soon, Pete.”

He lies back in his bed thoughtfully. “Women,” he says. “You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.”

“Amen to that, buddy.”

He laughs. “I like it when you sleep here.”

“I know,” I say. “I should do it more often.”

He rolls onto his side, yawning. “I love you, Zack.”

“I love you too, Pete.”

I lie awake between my sleeping brothers, and I can feel the consciousness slowly bleed out of me as the soft, rhythmic sounds of their slumber lull me into a black, dreamless sleep.

Sunday is dead on arrival. I spend most of it slipping in and out of a sweaty, strenuous sleep, suffering through lurid, dizzying dreams in which I’m invariably running too slow from something or sliding too fast toward something, unable to stop myself. In the rare moments that I do wake up, either bolting from a nightmare or just to urinate, I’m listless and hungover, my eyes throbbing, my breath hot and rancid. It’s past three in the afternoon when I finally drag myself to the shower, and only then, as lucidity claims me for the first time in almost twenty hours, do I feel the gaping hole in my belly where Hope used to be.

No one is home. I stand looking out the living room picture window, dressed in my suit pants and the T-shirt I slept in, with nowhere to go, feeling a dull resentment at my family for abandoning me like this in my hour of need, and even though I know at least some of them will be home soon, I can’t face the suffocating emptiness of the house. There are no cars in the driveway, so I throw on my suit jacket and start walking. It’s a bright, blustery day, warm enough in the sun, but the wind is laced with ice, and it blows right through my suit jacket, freezing me beneath my T-shirt. Still, I’m too lazy to go back to the house to rummage for an old coat. I fold my hands over my chest and turn my face into the sun, trying not to think about where it is that I know I’m headed.

Riverdale Avenue is alive with the buzz of late-afternoon traffic, drivers swerving around double-parked cars, waiting for parking spots, honking impatiently at crosswalks. The neighborhood is infamous for its dearth of parking, and Norm once tried to put together an investment group to build a parking tower, but by the time the project made it to the zoning board, he’d lost interest, moved on to the equally ill-fated possibility of a modern multiplex in the shopping center. Norm’s short attention span and the municipality’s elderly predisposition toward immutability had proven to be a lethal combination. The avenue is a congested hive of activity, mothers dragging children by the hand or pushing them in strollers, teenaged boys in baggy surfer pants plugged into MP3 players, young girls laughing into cell phones lit up like Christmas trees. I walk among them all like the undead, observing unseen from my timeless hell while their lives move innocently forward, crossing the street to avoid the hardware store, lest Satch catch sight of me and attempt to incite a rematch.

Ten minutes later I’m at Tamara’s front door, trying to work up the nerve to knock, when she pulls it open, looking drawn and on edge. I want to step right into her, to fold her around me and kiss her for an hour, until all the madness recedes and we can just be ourselves again, figure out the next move together. And I would do it, if it weren’t for this nagging fear that as soon as my lips got within striking distance, she might start to scream. We look at each other, each of us trying to determine where we fit into this new reality.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

“Oh my God, look at your face.” She reaches out to touch the welt on my cheek, an imprint of Jack’s diamond pinky ring, but retracts her hand before it can make contact, as if unsure whether she’s allowed to touch me anymore.

“I had it coming.”

“You’re shivering,” she says. “Do you want to come in?”

I step inside and we sit down on the couch. “Where’s Sophie?”

“She’s watching Annie in the den.”

I nod, all out of small talk. “I need to ask you something.”

She closes her eyes. “Don’t, Zack. Please.”

“You don’t even know what it is.”

“Yes, I do,” she says, her voice cracking. “I know because I know you, better than anyone. Like I know myself. And I know I can’t give you the answer you want.”

Suddenly, I’m finding it hard to breathe. “Why?” I say, and it comes out in a broken whisper.

She knots her hair behind her head nervously. “It’s not your fault, Zack. I knew where things were heading with us, just like you. I’m not innocent here. And I hate that now I’m cast in the role of the other woman. That’s not who I am. I’ve only ever been the one.”

“Listen,” I say. “You’ve never been the other woman, and I’ve never been the kind of guy who cheats. Our timing was terrible; I’ll give you that. But you were never the other woman. When I fell in love with you, Hope became the other woman. I’m not proud of that, but it’s the truth.”

She shakes her head resolutely even as the tears come. “It doesn’t matter,” she says.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “How can it not matter? Last night, that wasn’t just me. I know you were feeling it too.”

She looks up at me, her eyes wide and stricken. “You didn’t choose me,” she says softly. “You felt this way all this time, and you didn’t choose me. And if we hadn’t gotten caught the way we did, you’d still be with Hope. And I can’t be the consolation prize, Zack. I might be lonely, and I might love you, but I will not start the rest of my life as anyone’s backup plan. Not even yours.”

“Tamara . . .” I say, but after that, I’ve got nothing.

“You didn’t choose me,” she says again. “And you know what the worst part is?”

“What’s that?” I say.

“Now I lose my best friend too.”

I grab her hands. “You don’t have to,” I say, pleading with her. “Just keep me.”

She presses her forehead against mine, eyes closed. “I can’t,” she whispers.

After a moment, she gets up and runs upstairs. I walk into the den, where I find Sophie sitting on the couch, stroking a stuffed dog as she watches Annie. “Look, Zap,” she says, pointing to the screen. She seems utterly unsurprised to see me, as if I’m always here. As if I live here too. “Annie.”

I sit down next to her and pull her onto my lap. She settles right in, clutching my fingers in her little fists. “What are they singing?” I say.

“Hard-Knock Life.”

Her favorite part. She sings along phonetically in her thin, high voice while I bounce her on my knees. When I start to sing along with her, she says, “No Zap sing.”

“Why not?”

“Only Sophie.”

“No fair,” I say, making a sad face.

She laughs. “No fair,” she repeats gleefully. I can feel the laugh through her round belly, the way it spreads through her insides like running water, filling her.

“I love you, Sophie,” I say.

“No fair,” she says, and laughs again.

I leave Sophie to her video and step back into the front hall. Tamara is sitting on the steps, wiping her nose with a tissue. “You going?” she says.

“I guess so,” I say. “Can I still come by to see you guys?”

She frowns. “No. Not for a while, I think.”

“Well, can I call you?”

“Zack, please,” she says, standing up. “I’m hanging on by a thread here. Don’t make it harder.”

She steps forward and puts her arms around me, resting her head on my shoulder for a moment. It’s by far the saddest, lamest hug we’ve ever shared, a poor facsimile of a hug, at best. My fingers come up to disappear into her hair one last time. “I love you, Tamara,” I say. “Whatever that means to you, it means to you. But I know what it means to me.”

For the briefest instant, her grip on me tightens, and then she stiffens again. When she pulls back, she’s crying again. “I’m sorry,” she says. She pulls my head down to kiss the center of my forehead. Then she whispers, “Now go.”

That night, back in my apartment, I dream of the car crash again, of Rael hanging upside down as his life bleeds away, only this time I’m trapped as well, my unfeeling legs disappearing into the twisted wreckage of the engine. When I try to free myself, my legs twist off like torn licorice as I fall to the ground. The me in the dream seems to accept this horrifying development as a matter of fact, is poised and stoic, walking through the inverted car on my hands as if I’d been doing it for years. But at some point the dreaming me catches on and I wake up with a gasp, my hands falling instantly to my legs, confirming their solid presence beneath my covers, shaking perceptibly even as the dream recedes. I roll out of bed to walk around my bedroom, needing empirical evidence of nonmutilation, and wander downstairs to get a drink.

This is what happens. You piss blood one day and it somehow makes you think that maybe your life isn’t taking shape the way it’s meant to and, at thirty-two years old, if you’re going to be making any changes, you had best make them quick. So you give it a whirl, and it’s like trying to make a ninety-degree turn in a speeding boat, and the whole thing just flips over, and you’re submerged in the frigid, churning waters, bobbing roughly in your own broken wake. And no matter which way you turn your desperate gaze, there’s absolutely no land in sight, which is strange, because you didn’t think you’d gone out that far to begin with.