Everything Changes (26 page)

“Hi, Miguel,” I say. “This used to be my buddy’s phone number. He died in a car crash about two years ago. You’d think I would have erased his number by now, but there it is. I guess I was kind of hoping that maybe, if I pressed the button at just the right time, I might have gotten him, but I guess not. Anyway, I hope things are fine with you, and that the number’s working out for you. His name was Rael, by the way. Whatever. I’m sure you’ve got your own problems. I’ll let you go. ’Bye.”

I look down at the glowing screen and hit the requisite buttons to delete Rael’s number. Are you sure you want to delete Rael’s cell? the phone asks me. I click Delete again, and the number disappears. The next number that comes up is Rael’s home. Tamara picks up on the second ring. “Hey,” I say, but it’s one of those one-way connections where I can hear her, but she can’t hear me. “Hello?” she says. “Hello?” I say hello back, but she doesn’t hear me, so all I can do is listen to her say hello a few more times, sounding mildly irked, before she hangs up, which is fine, because I don’t know what I would have said to her even if she could hear me.

Matt is in the living room, covering Sesame Street songs on his electric guitar, putting some punk into them, while Henry, dressed in a Buzz Lightyear costume, sits on the floor, laughing hysterically. They stop to look me over when I enter the room, dressed in an old monk’s habit and a rubber goblin mask. Henry looks a bit nervous about the mask, so I pull it off, my hair tingling with static electricity. “It’s just me,” I say sheepishly.

“I knew it was you,” he says, but he still looks relieved.

Matt plays a distorted version of “Elmo’s World” on his guitar.

“You ready?” I say to Henry.

He stands up. “Don’t wear the mask.”

“Deal.”

Matt gives Henry a kiss on the top of his head as he gets off the couch. “Gotta go,” he says. “We’re playing the Halloween Ball at Irving Plaza tonight.”

“That’s a step up,” I say, impressed.

“There was a last-minute cancellation,” Matt says with a shrug. “Jed knew a guy.”

“Good luck.”

“Don’t need it.” He throws his guitar over his shoulder and heads for the door, stopping to point an admonishing finger at Henry. “No drugs and no underage women, you hear me?”

Henry nods seriously, in a way that makes us smile.

The streets are filled with roving gangs of pint-size trick-or-treaters and their accompanying chaperons. Henry holds my hand tightly, stopping every so often to marvel at the ghosts, monsters, ’droids, and hobbits moving past us on the street in the dim glow of the porch lights. After only two weeks, his trust in me is absolute, like a longtime burden he’s finally found a safe place to deposit. For probably the thousandth time since we picked him up from Tommyknockers, I silently vow that I will be worthy. Making this vow in the dark, in my hooded monk’s attire, seems to lend it some added weight.

“Why didn’t Pete come?” Henry asks me.

“He likes to stay home and scare the trick-or-treaters.”

“Oh.”

We brought Henry directly back to Lela’s house and turned my old room into his. We still haven’t figured out exactly how we’re going to configure everything, but in the interim, the prevailing idea is to surround Henry with family at all times. I’ve been staying there, sleeping downstairs on the sofa bed recently evacuated by Norm, and Matt comes by pretty much every day as well. A few days ago, Jed arrived in a rented van, introduced himself solemnly to Henry as Uncle Jed, and then proceeded to unload what appeared to be the entire inventory of the local Toys “R” Us while Henry looked on with unconcealed glee.

We left Henry and Pete to sift through the toys, and joined Matt, who was smoking a cigarette out in the backyard. “Hey, Matt,” Jed said. “Did you tell Zack about my vision?”

“No,” Matt said, stubbing out his cigarette. He’d announced his intention to quit in Henry’s honor, but so far it hadn’t been going well. “I figured I’d leave that to you.”

Jed nodded and turned to me. “I was shopping for some new guitars with Matt, when I had a vision.”

In the aftermath of what will forever be referred to by my family simply as Zack’s Party, Matt and Jed reached some convoluted arrangement wherein Jed would serve as manager for Worried About the WENUS, booking their gigs and lining up a solid producer for their first demo. His first move was to buy the band all new equipment.

“You’re having visions now?” I said.

“He’s definitely onto something,” Matt said.

“Or just on something.”

“It’s kind of like a musicians’ superstore,” Jed plowed on, ignoring my wisecrack. “A fully stocked, full-service musical equipment store with recording studios in the back for bands to cut demos, and a café with a stage to showcase local bands.”

I nodded, thinking about it. “Interesting.”

“The opportunities for cross-promotion are endless,” he continued excitedly. “You’ve got four or five converging revenue streams under one roof: the café, the instruments, the recording studios, and the concerts. You host events to showcase new talent, and they come in and buy gear as well. We’ll help bands make demos, and offer discounts on studio time when they buy equipment from us. And we can negotiate with the instrument vendors to underwrite the studio time in exchange for in-store advertising and advantageous brand placement. I’ve got a few VC guys I know who will be all over this. I’m putting the finishing touches on the business plan—oh, and once we have the prototype done, we can expand to other cities.”

“It’s going to be awesome,” Matt said enthusiastically as he fired up another cigarette, already banking on his freebies.

There was a time, I recalled, when Jed used to sound like that all the time, animatedly pontificating on the latest company his hedge fund had discovered, why their product would revolutionize a particular industry, what his end would be. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it until that very moment, and I wanted to hug him and welcome him back to the living. Instead I just said, “Sounds great.”

“I’ll finish the plan and raise the money,” Jed continued. “You’ll negotiate the lease and handle all the vendor contracts.”

“Oh, so I’m a part of this?”

He gave me a serious look. “You have something better to do?”

I grinned. “Count me in.”

“Good,” Jed said, shaking my hand. “Because we’re turning your room into our office.”

After an hour or so of trick-or-treating, Henry’s bag is bulging with hard candies and chocolates, as well as the toothpaste and toothbrush set self-righteously presented by one well-meaning party pooper. A group of little kids race past us, laughing as one of their fathers sprays Crazy String all over them. Henry stops where he is, watching the kids with a happy smile, enjoying their antics, and it makes me wonder how often he got to play with other kids over the last year with Norm. I make a mental note to find him some friends in the neighborhood.

Back at the house, Dracula opens the door and growls savagely at us even as he throws Milky Ways into Henry’s bag. “Hi, Pete,” Henry says.

“Hi, Henry,” he says. “Looks like you got a load of candy.”

Henry nods, holding up his bag for Pete to inspect. “I got so much,” he says enthusiastically.

“We still have one more stop to make,” I say. “We just need your car keys.”

“You can have them. But first,” Pete says, grabbing Henry and hoisting him up into the air. “I’m going to suck your blood!”

“Dracula,” I say. “Have a heart.”

“Don’t mind if I do!” Pete yells in his best Transylvanian accent, burying his masked face into Henry’s chest while Henry convulses with laughter.

“Whose house is this?” Henry asks me from the backseat.

“They give good candy here.”

“Oh,” he says, nodding.

With Henry’s permission, I am once again wearing the goblin mask underneath the monk’s hood. Tamara answers the door in jeans and a cable sweater, her hair pulled haphazardly out of her face with some randomly placed plastic clips. “Buzz Lightyear!” Tamara says, kneeling down to examine Henry’s costume. He nods, smiling shyly at her. I watch Tamara through my mask, the rubber, slick with my saliva, sticking to my face. It’s a strangely disembodied feeling, being so close to her again while she has no idea. I’m dying to reach out and touch her face, to bury my hands in the thick rings of her hair, but she would no doubt find the advances of a satanic monk alarming, so I stand quietly, impotent in my disguise.

“What’s your name?”

“Henry.”

“Here you go, Henry,” she says, tossing some Hershey’s Miniatures into his bag. She looks up at me as she does, and I’m suddenly positive she can see me, right through the mask. But if that were true, she’d be angry, wouldn’t she, at this violation? And the expression spreading across her face is anything but angry. Suddenly, impossibly, she steps forward and hugs me. I hug her back, too shocked to say anything. After a few seconds, she whispers into my rubber ear. “Please, just tell me it’s you.”

“I just figured this is how you treat all the grown-ups,” I say, my voice muffled under the mask.

“Thank God,” she says with a laugh, hugging me tighter.

“How did you know?” I say, spreading my fingers out across her back.

I can feel her trembling in my arms. “My Zack alarm was going off.”

Finally, we separate. “So, what?” she says, stepping back as I pull off the mask. “Did you actually rent a kid for this little stunt?”

“This is Henry King,” I say, brushing the sweaty hair out of my face while Henry clings to my leg. “My brother.”

Tamara looks at me, nodding slowly as she figures it out. “Wow,” she says. “I guess you’ve had an exciting few weeks, huh?”

“Never a dull moment. Where’s Sophie?”

“Sleeping. Can you stay awhile?”

“I would, but I have to get Henry home. It’s past his bedtime already.”

She hugs me again and it’s one of our originals, a no-holds-barred, full-on, cut-through-the-crap embrace, and only her arms stop me from crumpling like a rag doll. Sometimes you don’t need to talk things out. Sometimes, with the right person, things just need some time to percolate on their own, without the messy lunge and parry of discussion to hinder them. “Come back later,” Tamara says meaningfully, her eyes wide and deep, her voice borne on the currents of the unspecified promise in which we’re suddenly, inexplicably floating.

Henry and I step outside into the starry night and, pagan holiday or not, I would swear I can see heaven up there.

Henry must be put to bed with two books, which, after being read to him, have to be left on the bed within arm’s reach as he falls asleep. The closet light is left on with the door ajar, casting a long rhombus of light onto his bed, his Thomas train clutched tightly in his fist, the creased photo of his lost and found brothers folded squarely and tucked under his pillow. He is a boy of careful ritual, given to creating order and predictability in whatever small ways he can, having found the greater world around him sorely lacking in this department. Only once all of these safeguards are in place do I kiss him good night and leave the room, making sure not to leave the door halfway open.

My mother is sitting in the dark on the top stair, pairing little white socks from an ancient laundry bin. “You’re very good with him,” she says to me.

“Thanks.”

“You know, I’m too old to raise another child.”

I sit down next to her on the stairs and pick a batch of socks out of the laundry bin. “I know, Mom,” I say.

Our elbows connect softly as we work, sparking with static electricity from the carpet. “He’s a sweet boy,” she says. “And I’m here to help, but I’m too old to be his mother. He should have a normal life, maybe the first King boy in three generations to have a positive male role model.”

She puts her head on my shoulder as I line up two white socks and roll them together into a tight ball, tossing them lightly into the bin. “I know, Mom,” I say.

Tamara hugs me fiercely when I step through the door, and we stand like that in her foyer for a long while, rocking slowly back and forth while things inside me twist and rotate on their axes like lock tumblers clicking into place.

“I did choose you,” I tell her.

“I know,” she says, smiling. “I’ve missed you so much, and I just decided that if you hadn’t chosen me, you never would have made such a mess of things.”

I stare at her incredulously. “If you felt that way, why didn’t you call me?”

She shakes her head, leaning in to hug me again. “I knew that if I was right, you’d come on your own.”

“There’s so much I have to tell you,” I say, my chest quivering, my voice soft and unsteady. She pulls back to look at me, smiling as she turns up to kiss me. “Later,” she whispers, pulling me toward the stairs.

Afterward, I lie between her legs, still ensconced firmly inside her, as we hold whispered conversations that she punctuates with soft, lingering kisses on my chin and lower lip. “I have an idea,” I say.

“Tell me.”

“Let’s skip the part where we have to feel each other out, trying to determine where the boundaries are, and who’s feeling it more than the other and all that. Let’s just agree that we’re in love and take it on faith that there are no trapdoors.”

Tamara runs a lone finger down my spine, and I shiver against her, moving my hands to where her breasts merge into my chest. “That’s probably easier said than done,” she murmurs, tickling the sweat off my neck with the tip of her tongue.

“Nothing has been easy for us yet,” I point out even as I feel myself growing aroused inside of her again. “I figure we’re due.”

Tamara closes her eyes, arching her back up beneath me, chin to the ceiling, eyes at half-mast as she pulls me farther inside her. Her expression is one of pleasurable effort, and even though this is the first time we’ve been here like this, I know it’s the expression that I’ll forever associate with our lovemaking, that will appear unbidden behind my closed eyes whenever we’re apart. “So, what do you say?” I whisper, stretching out over her.

“I say we give it a shot,” she says in the last instant before her lips part to devour mine.

While Tamara sleeps, I tiptoe into Sophie’s room to kiss her in her crib. She rolls over as I do, opening her eyes to stare up at me, instantly awake. “Zap here,” she whispers, her voice hoarse with sleep.

“I missed you, Sophie,” I say.

“Zap came back.”

“That’s right. Zap came back.”

“The Annie DVD broke,” she informs me.

“Should we go to the store and buy you a new one?”

“Yes, buy you a new one,” she says, rolling sleepily onto her side. “Where I going tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper to her. “Wherever you want.”

“Where Zap going?”

I rub her back softly. “Zap’s not going anywhere,” I say.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t spend the night. Henry has been waking up crying in the early-morning hours, tearing down the stairs to find me, terrified that I’ve left him. No matter how much I reassure him during his waking hours, his subconscious remains unconvinced. I’m hoping that it’s just a matter of time, that unlike the rest of us, Henry is young enough to have escaped any lasting psychological damage from Norm’s particular brand of neglect. I think about maybe getting him some professional help, but I don’t want to be one of those people who send their kids to a different therapist for every little ailment. On the other hand, I don’t want to be the kind of person who denies his child the benefits of therapy on principle, either. I discussed it briefly with Lela, who certainly knows a thing or two about screwed-up kids, but she just said welcome to parenthood, where the only certainty is uncertainty. Maybe so, but when I see the terror swimming in Henry’s wide, red-rimmed eyes, his mouth opened in a petrified scream as I wipe the tears off his face, I’m fairly certain that I hate Norm with a passion that threatens to overwhelm.

But at other times, when Henry’s playing peacefully with his trains or sitting on my lap as I read to him, his fingers absently, possessively pulling at the hairs on my wrist, I find myself thinking wistfully about Norm, grateful for his having brought Henry to me, and I wonder whether we’ll ever hear from him again. In the short while he was here, his presence was so overpowering that it seems impossible that he’s gone, that he was ever really gone. I realize that while I thought I understood him, he was more of a stranger than I’d ever imagined. To have wormed his way back into the relatively good graces of his family, only to abscond with our forgiveness once again, seems indicative of an inherent defect of the soul that goes much deeper than pathological irresponsibility. And, oddly enough, that very realization seems to facilitate a new acceptance, a willingness to meet him on his terms. At some point I’ll have to discuss all of this with Henry, try to help him understand his father in as painless a way as possible, but that point is not now. He’s nowhere near ready, and I know I’m not, either. But I’m hoping that perhaps, without the burden of expectations, Henry can grow to feel good about Norm, maybe even get to know him a little. And, I guess, maybe I can too.

But as I crawl into bed, my limbs deliciously weary from the past few hours with Tamara, I consider another, equally likely possibility, that someday in the not-too-distant future, the phone will ring, and it will be a police officer, maybe a Florida state trooper, calling to tell me that they found Norm dead in his room in some low-rent efficiency hotel in a crummy neighborhood, that his heart gave out while he slept, and I’ll think bitterly, at that moment, that it served him right, that there was no other end for him but to die alone. But I know that somewhere in me will be the grief, already forming now, that every son has for his father, and I hope I’m smart enough by then to give voice to it and let it be heard, if not for my sake, then for Henry’s.

And here comes Henry, like clockwork, tearing down the stairs, Thomas train gripped, as always, in his right hand, his frightened wail shattering the quiet stillness of our house, waking me up from the sleep I didn’t even realize I’d slipped into. I sit up in my bed, arms open wide, and he performs a running leap, clearing the top of the bed to land squarely at my side, his arms flying around my neck even as the sobs wrack his body. And as much as I want him to get over this, I also know I’m thrilled to be the one he seeks out in his dread, the lone person who can right his world. I feel love in places I never knew existed within me. I hold him tightly, rocking back and forth as my whispered assurances gradually penetrate the somnambulant haze of his nightmare. Once he’s calmed down, he kisses my cheek and curls up beside me under the comforter, nestling his butt against my chest like a sleeping puppy as I sing to him.

Good night, sweet baby, good night

I’m right here to watch over you

And the moon, stars, and I

And this old lullaby

Will make all your sweet dreams come true

I’m still not sure what I want for myself, but I know what I want for Henry, and that will be my guide. I will love him, and I will love Tamara and Sophie, and it occurs to me, as Henry snuggles easily against me, that there are better things than plans upon which to build your life, and by some miracle, in my flailing about, I seem to have stumbled upon them. Tomorrow I’ll start looking for a place in Riverdale, close enough so that Lela can help out with the babysitting as my work schedule fills up. There will be schooling to determine, legalities of guardianship to address, and no doubt a host of complications I have yet to discover. The future is suddenly terrifyingly and magnificently uncertain, but tonight, as I lie fully awake in the dark, there is only now, the sound of Henry’s slow, even breaths filling the room, and the electrified beating of my own racing heart.