Family and Other Accidents (23 page)

Jack makes up answers and it gets them into the parking lot and up the elevator to the comfy chairs in Oncology. While Connor is poked and measured by the nurses, Jack gets coffee from the machine in the hall—the familiar burned taste, the familiar burn in his chest. Kathy gave him cross-exam questions he could read, but instead he looks at the sign by the elevator listing Maternity on the second floor.

“Excuse me,” says a doctor he and Laine haven't exasperated yet. “Can you hit down?”

Jack does, and the doors pop apart. The doctor steps in and cocks his head at Jack.

“Are you coming?” he asks, hand holding the elevator open.

“No,” Jack says, backing away. “Just looking.”

Connor meets him in the hall. “I'm all full of nuke juice,” he says cheerfully.

He looks okay, but on the drive back to Natick, the antinausea meds kick in, and he rolls in and out of sleep. Waking up, he pulls on his sweatshirt and fiddles with the vent until Jack shuts off the air conditioner even though it's eighty-five degrees outside. Connor's head droops again, and his breathing changes. Jack yawns himself and thinks about what would happen if he fell asleep at the wheel, if Connor's Jetta drifted off the side of the road into the median. Is there a way for his brother to escape unscathed? Some way to wreck only the driver's side?

“We're here already?” Connor asks when they safely pull into the driveway ten minutes later.

They turn on the game on the flat-screen TV in the den. Connor starts trembling, and Jack brings him an afghan from the hall closet.

“How much time are you taking off after Ryan is born?” Connor balls into the blanket, Mouse at his feet. “If you can swing it, you should try to go part-time for a while.”

“Maybe,” Jack says, though the department store trial should be in full throttle right around the time Mona has the baby. “At least at first.”

The Indians give up three runs in the second inning; Connor is out before the bottom of the third. Lowering the volume, Jack tries reading over Kathy's questions, but they're perfect.

Then he isn't reading. His neck is cramped from falling asleep at an odd angle, the papers are on his head, and somewhere in the house Mouse is barking and Connor is calling him. Both feet asleep, Jack hobbles to the powder room. Still wrapped in the afghan, Connor is on the toilet trying to shit, puke into a waste can, and shoo the dog from vomit on the floor. It might be the most horrible thing Jack has ever seen—more horrible than news footage of the ski-lift disaster or plane crashes or car wrecks or elevator accidents.

“Can you put him outside?” Connor wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, points to the dog. “He tries to eat it when people throw up.”

Taking Mouse by the collar, Jack leads the dog through the sliding door to the yard, with its enormous trees and sturdy wooden jungle gym. Though he'd absently been aware of the warming temperatures and the changing of his suit fabrics from wool to linen/silk blends, Jack realizes for the first time that everything is green. They
have
made it through winter; his nine months really are up.

Back on the bathroom's floor, Connor is balled, groveling to an imaginary king, the afghan a cape over his shoulders, jogging pants and boxers at his ankles. Trying to avoid the vomit, Jack squats beside him.

“Come on, kid.” He puts a hand on Connor's blanketed back. “Floor's not where you want to sleep. Let me get you upstairs.”

Sitting up, Connor leans against the side of the toilet but doesn't make any move to leave the bathroom.

“You want to know the funny thing?” he asks, voice splintered and cracked as kindling.

And Jack nods even though he doesn't want to know, because it's not going to be funny, it's going to be terrible. What can
really
be funny when you're crumpled on the floor, stomach heaving, teeth chattering, eyes watery and red. What's funny when you're thirty-two years old, and MOPP has been leaked into your veins to weed-whack hair that just grew in.

“Sure, what's the funny thing?”

“Pretty much my whole life I figured our parents screwed us genetically,” Connor says. “I thought I'd live to be fifty, fifty-five tops. So I try to do everything the way
they
didn't—have my kids young enough so I can make it through their graduations, maybe see them squeeze out a pup or two of their own, you know?”

“Conn, stop—”

“I have no memories of Dad, Jack, and I was ten when he died. Keelie won't even be six until November.”

“Don't do this,” Jack says. “You're going to be okay.”

“Look at me. Do you
honestly
believe that?” Connor means the question rhetorically, sarcastically, but Jack answers with more sincerity than he has ever had about anything.

“Yeah, I do.” For months Jack has expected Connor to die, but suddenly he doesn't think so. Other than obligatory weddings and bar mitzvahs, Jack can count on one hand the times he has been to religious places. He doesn't believe in God or fire waiting for him below (though fucking around on a pregnant wife would probably be a good way to get there). He doesn't believe he can win the department store case, or that he'll be able to fix the unfixable things with Mona; always, he believes, the plane will crash. But for some reason—karma, the cycle of the tides, something—Jack knows his brother isn't going to call it quits before thirty-three. “I really do believe that.”

         

Of course the baby is born when Jack is somewhere over Indiana. It's only fitting of his unsettled life—half in Boston, half in Chicago; half with Mona, half with Kathy—that his son comes into the world while Jack is in the air, an unnatural place where he has never been comfortable, where his guts bunch with uncertainty. Years later he will still regret having missed Ryan's birth, even when living with Mona seems some distant dream and he knows her only as the woman who takes care of his son on the days he doesn't.

But before he becomes a father, Jack helps Connor to the master bedroom, spot-cleans the bathroom, and lets the dog in. Upstairs, he strips to boxers and an undershirt and gets in bed beside his brother. Neither one of them mentions that there are three other beds and a pullout couch where Jack could sleep; neither mentions it's two in the afternoon.

“I'm tired,” Jack offers as the only explanation.

Almost his entire adult life, Jack has been tired. Since starting at Jones Day in Cleveland, he felt a need to be first in the office and to stay after the cleaning crew finished at night. It was about proving he was more than the old managing partner's son. Through the flu, back strains, bad breakups, and most weekends, Jack worked. He grew to like the grudging respect, awed head-shakes from associates who billed half his hours, and the flurry of summers wanting to work with him because he was the guy to know. Sleep was recreational, something you did on vacations. But his poisoned brother needs sleep, his pregnant wife needs sleep, and it's the best idea Jack can come up with now, too.

So they sleep.

The first time the phone punctures the vacuum of the bedroom, Jack knows it's Laine and the girls in Florida. Even if Connor weren't asking questions about the Dumbo ride and the Enchanted Castle, he would know. It's the way Connor relaxes when he speaks to them. They must put Laine on because Connor shifts, gets quieter, asks about the conference.

“I'm fine,” he says. “My stomach was screwed up earlier, now I'm just zonked out.” Connor hands Jack the phone. “Tell my wife I'm groovy sweet, she doesn't believe me.”

“Honestly, Jack, do you need us to come home?” Laine asks across the line. “We can be on the first flight out of here.”

“Naw, he's going to be okay,” Jack says. “Thank you, though, for loving my brother.”

After hanging up, Jack lets the dog out again. It's early evening, but everything is dimmed by a gathering storm. At a lunch counter on the corner in the suburb's throwback square, he orders two grilled cheese sandwiches and steaming strained chicken broth. Optimistically he adds french fries, because his brother has loved them since he was a kid. The red-haired man behind the counter waves Jack's money away.

“You're Connor's brother, yeah?” He says “Connor” with a strange hard “K,” ending it with a long “A.” “You just take this home and make sure he gets better.”

“He will,” Jack says.

“Good. Try to stay dry; it's going to be wicked out there.”

The first crack of thunder makes Jack jump on his way to the car, and by the time he pulls into the driveway, fat drops dot the pavement. He brings everything upstairs, where they eat in bed, feeding fries to the dog.

“You're gonna make the best dad.” Connor licks salt from his fingers, looks exactly how he did as a child of six and seven, when their mother left ten-dollar bills magneted to the refrigerator and notes
saying Jack should pick up something for dinner. “Really, you'll be amazing.”

“We'll see,” he says.

Jack doesn't read through the rest of Kathy's questions, knowing they're good, certainly better than any he could write at the moment, probably better than any he could write at any moment. He calls and tells her she can do the cross exam for those witnesses.

“Really?” she asks. “I don't have any courtroom experience other than moot court.”

“You'll be great, Kath,” he says. “You know you're great.”

“We're still going to lose though?”

“Yes, but we can lose with finesse.”

“I kind of miss having you around, partner,” she says, and he knows she will say it again soon, that she's getting tired of the tunnel.

After he hangs up, Jack gets back into bed with his brother. Outside the storm is in full force, branches banging the windows, wind rattling the house, but Jack falls asleep instantly.

Eleven hours later, at six the next morning, the phone rings again. Disoriented, Jack thinks something must be wrong with Connor in Boston, but he realizes his brother is beside him.

“It's Melanie.” Connor hands Jack the receiver. “Mo's in labor. You've got to go home.”

Then Jack is awake, talking to Mona's sister, who speaks to him in a different medical language, one he didn't bother to learn—one of centimeters dilated and minutes between contractions. His wife is on the phone, voice hurried.

“Can you come back, Jack?” she asks. “I'd really like for you to come home.”

What she's saying is that she can forgive him. And there's a chunk of him that wants her to forgive him, but he's not sure. He looks at his brother.

“You have to go,” Connor says. “I'm fine.”

Jack nods, tells Mona he'll try to get the first plane out, and Melanie gets back on the line with instructions. When he hears the click of the receiver, Jack means to reach over his brother, put the phone back in its cradle, find his clothes, and make arrangements to get to Chicago. But he doesn't do that. There's a horrible pain in his chest. Bunching over, he claws through his undershirt to massage it.

“I can't,” Jack says to his knees. “I can't go home to her. I don't love her and I don't want this baby.”

“You're freaking out.” Connor sits up. “Everybody freaks out. But I've heard the way you talk about Ryan, you're going to be great.”

“The kid's not called Ryan.” Jack can hardly breathe, and he notices the hand not in his shirt is shaking. He balls it in a fist to make it stop. “Everything I told you—about the furniture, about Mo and the baby's room—I made it up. We never even called it Ryan, it's really called nothing.”

“Jack, it's going to be okay.”

“I'm serious. I haven't talked to Mo in months; I haven't made it to a single one of her doctor's appointments, and I'm sleeping with a twenty-five-year-old in my office. Do you still think I'm going to be winning awards for father of the year?”

Connor reaches for Jack's clenched fist and puts his own hand on top of it. They don't have the kind of relationship where they touch often, and his brother's warm flesh on his makes Jack look at him.

“Listen to me, I don't know what's between you and Mo and this girl,” he says. “But none of that has anything to do with you being a good father.”

“Do you
honestly
believe that?”

“I do,” Connor says. “I really do believe that.”

When Jack rewrites his history in a way that's congruent with his love for his brother and his love for his son, he will make this moment into the epiphany. Say he realized he'd always been a parent to his brother and that was one of the great joys of his life. Say while looking at Connor he imagined Ryan, not as a baby, oozy and needy, but as a young man of seventeen, smart and slender, looking at college brochures but deciding on Penn. Say the pain in his heart subsided, and he knew things
would
be okay. But that's not the way things happen. What happens is this:

Jack gets out of bed, finds his clothes, and haphazardly packs his suitcase. Fighting against the storm, he drives his brother's car in the general direction of the airport, wind throwing sheets of rain against the windshield, tires skidding on pooled water. Eventually he goes in, exchanges his ticket, and even grips the armrests in an attempt to keep the plane from crashing when the air traffic controller finally gives permission for the pilot to take off in the storm. But for hours Jack rides the circular drive of passenger pickup, wiper blades smacking at the water, praying for just a little more time.

defending the
alamo

Months before the dog starts dying, Laine feels the already-wide distance between her and her husband getting wider, but neither of them mentions it. When they notice Mouse is having trouble climbing upstairs, Laine takes the dog to the vet by herself. The vet thinks it's a simple infection, tells a joke about a Zen Buddhist and a hot dog vendor, and gives her pills she has to trick the dog into taking by covering them in peanut butter. The medication doesn't help, so Connor takes the dog back to the vet, who says he thinks Mouse has arthritis. But the new tablets don't fix the golden retriever either. Then Laine notices Mouse isn't eating, not even the scraps Jorie and Keelie pass him under the table, and Mouse isn't peeing when she walks him through their neighborhood of big old houses. They go back to the vet together. This time he doesn't tell Laine and Connor clean jokes or ask about their daughters. He draws his lips into a thin white line, pokes and prods Mouse, and then sends them to the animal hospital downtown for exhaustive tests.

“Just make my dog better.” Connor throws their MasterCard on the reception desk when a veterinary assistant starts giving them a list of potential tests and prices. “I don't care how much it costs.”

Connor looks to Laine, as if he remembered she makes ninety percent of their income, that he has only worked sporadically for various not-for-profits since he got sick. But she nods, she'd go into debt to make Mouse better, too.

Serious people in white coats shave patches of the dog's paw, run plastic tubing through the pink skin under his fur, and attach catheters to every orifice. All the while Laine and Connor stroke the dog's soft head, call him a “good boy,” a “brave boy.” The only time the dog cries is when Laine leaves to pick up their daughters from her father's house in Cumberland. By the time she and the girls get back, the vet has determined Mouse's kidneys are failing; there's nothing they can do. Putting a gentle hand on Laine's forearm, the vet says they should probably just put the dog to sleep. Mouse is in pain and it's only going to get worse.

The bones in Connor's jaw shift, and Laine can tell he might cry, feels the sting of tears in her own sinuses.

“But look how happy he is.” Connor points to Mouse on the examining table, tail wagging as Jorie and Keelie pet him in the careful way Laine said they could. “Do we have to do it so soon?”

Laine hasn't eaten an animal in twenty years, since she was sixteen, because she can't tolerate cruelty to living things, but the dog does look happy, slapping his pink tongue against Keelie's nine-year-old hands, nuzzling Jorie's face.

“Can we have a few days to say good-bye?” Laine asks the vet.

So they take Mouse and a stash of pain suppositories back to Natick, where they set old blankets and pillows on the first floor by the door so Mouse can rest. For two days Laine and Connor take turns shoving the syringes of medication up the dog's ass—truly one of the most disgusting things Laine has ever done. Keelie reads the dog pages from a chapter book she's massacring, and Connor stands outside with him in the gray wet air, praying that the dog will pee, which in his mind would signal an impossible recovery. At night Connor sleeps next to the dog on the floor in the living room, and Laine misses their warmth in the bed.

Jorie gets on the Internet and finds a veterinary clinic in New York that does kidney transplants on dogs for an obscene amount of money. Connor calls, and the clinic says Mouse isn't a good match because the disease is so far along, but if they want to bring him out to the city, they'll take a look.

“We've got to try, Lainey.” Connor's black eyes are wide and hopeful, and he looks decades younger than thirty-six. “We owe it to Mouse.”

“Conn—” she starts, but remembers how when Connor was sick and always freezing, Mouse followed him from room to room, sitting on his feet. “I'll call tomorrow and see how it works.”

But later that night the dog starts crying, even after they insert the painkillers. When he tries to stand, he stumbles and falls onto his hind legs, nails clanking on the hardwood floor. Keelie starts crying, and Jorie runs upstairs so Laine won't see her crying. She's only twelve, but Jorie is already at the stage where she hates her mother and everything she does, hates that they look almost exactly alike, pale and blond and willowy.

Laine looks at Mouse, then at Connor.

“Baby.” She shakes her head, realizes this is the first time she's called him “baby” in a long time. “This isn't fair to Mouse, it's time to put him down.”

Probably because he knows she's right, Connor doesn't say anything, just stares at his sneakers. So Laine takes the cordless from its holster on the kitchen wall and calls the vet at home, makes an appointment for the next afternoon, then leaves voice mail messages for her team at work, canceling tomorrow's meetings. When she gets off the phone she goes upstairs, where Keelie, her sweet daughter, is already getting ready for bed.

“Can I go down and say good night to Mouse?” she asks.

Laine nods, bends down to kiss the crown of Keelie's head, with its thick blue-black hair—Connor's hair. She wonders if she should say something about Mouse now or explain it to the girls later, forgiveness versus permission.

The handle to Jorie's door won't turn, and Laine knocks lightly. “You know the rule about locked doors,” Laine says.

“Go away.” Jorie's voice is scratchy and worn with tears. “You're going to put Mouse to sleep.”

“I won't come in, just unlock the door.” She hears Jorie's light feet on the carpet and the mechanical twisting of the lock. “Don't forget to brush your teeth and lay out your clothes before going to bed. Did you get any work done on your Alamo project?”

“Daddy said he'd help me tomorrow,” Jorie screams. “Just leave me alone.”

Downstairs on the pile of blankets, Connor lies next to the dog, strokes its golden head, and looks into its brown eyes in a way he hasn't looked into Laine's eyes in months, maybe years.

She bends at the knees to touch his shoulder. “Conn, the vet can get us in tomorrow at one, so I thought I'd go to work early and come back.”

“Fine,” he says without looking up at her.

“Are you going to sleep down here again? It can't be good for your back.”

“There's nothing wrong with my back, and for all this dog did for me, I think I owe it to him to spend one more night with him.”

“Sure. Do you want an air mattress or one of the sleeping bags?” Even in her own ears she sounds pathetic and meek. “I could bring some stuff down and sleep with you?”

“That's okay.” He's still not looking at her, but his voice is softer. “You've got to go to work in the morning, why don't you try to get some sleep.”

She does go upstairs, strips down to her underwear, but doesn't get into bed. Instead she goes back down, tiptoeing past Connor and Mouse, both snoring lightly. In the kitchen there are dishes in the washer that Connor forgot to run, so she takes them out, scrubs and dries them by hand. Noticing crusted food on the shelf liner in the cabinet, she takes everything down, wipes the cabinets with nonpoisonous cleaner, and rewashes all the dishes just to be on the safe side. She's already awake, so she sweeps and mops the kitchen floor, and cleans the big bay window in the breakfast nook.

When Connor first got sick—and that was how they always referred to it, not as cancer or Hodgkin's disease, just “sick”—their house had been clean like this. During those early weeks, when she tried to convince him to eat macrobiotically, to drink prepackaged shots of ginkgo biloba from the natural foods store. But then they'd settled into it and simply stopped using the lower rooms of the house.

Their bed, an enormous California king with a rounded metal sleigh frame, had become a strange island. She worked from home, propped on pillows, laptop on her crossed legs. Next to her, Connor slept or glanced at books their friends gave him, mostly he slept; if the antinausea drugs couldn't stop his guts from swirling, they could certainly knock him out. For lunch they had whatever he wanted, whatever he could keep down: sugary prepackaged snack cakes, drive-thru french fries, canned pasta with an astronomical fat content. They ate at one, so they could watch
Days of Our Lives
, becoming intensely invested in the lives of Bo and Hope, John Black and Marlena, characters who could die and be buried but come back to Salem a few months later. On nights when they didn't send the kids to Laine's father's house (Connor was adamant the girls not see him when things were very bad), they'd let the girls get into bed with them. The Japanese place on the corner had a miso soup Connor liked, and they brought the cartons of noodles and vegetables into the bed and fed pieces to Mouse. They read aloud from books about other fantastical islands—
The Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Isle of Doctor Moreau, Treasure Island
. They kept the heat cranked to eighty, and it was quiet—muted by the blanket of snow, extra afghans, and the hushed voices people use when someone is very sick.
If something happens, move to Chicago, so the kids can know my brother. If something happens, put the life insurance into trust for the girls. If something happens, cremation, no graveyard stuff, for years I've felt guilty for not going to my parents' sites, none of that for the girls.
But the something didn't happen. They found that they hadn't made any arrangements for that possibility.

         

On the drive home from the vet's office after putting the dog down, Connor refuses to look at Laine. Instead he stares out the passenger-side window, lower lip thrust out the way Jorie does sometimes.

“I loved the dog, too,” Laine says. “But we had to do it.”

“I know,” he says.

She suggests they go somewhere for lunch, maybe even a place where they can sit down.

“Whatever,” Connor says, but across from her in a booth at John Harvard's Pub, he says he isn't hungry and orders only coffee.

The waitress sets Laine's glass of iced tea and Connor's mug on the table, and they both reach for the container of sweetener packets, fingers knocking together over the white porcelain.

“Go ahead.” She smiles, but he shakes his head.

“Mouse's dead,” he says. “I don't think I can drink coffee ever again.”

And she wants to shake him, to say it was purely selfish they had kept the dog alive as long as they had, to say it isn't fair for Connor to take it out on her and it's pointless to deny himself something he loves because their dog had bum kidneys. But Laine doesn't say any of this, because when Connor got sick she promised herself, and a God she hadn't thought much about before, that if her husband got better she would never yell at him again, never admit she was smarter than him.

“Do you really think Mouse would want you to not drink coffee anymore?” she asks, amazed at her own ridiculousness—between the two of them, they have three Harvard diplomas. “I think he would want you to be happy and go on without him.”

“I don't care,” Connor says, then stares aggressively at the black-and-white photo of Jack and Bobby Kennedy on the wall above her head.

She pushes spinach lasagna around her plate, plunks down her debit card, and refuses a box when the waitress asks. On the drive home it starts raining, but neither one of them comments on it. In fact, they don't say anything until she pulls the Jetta into the garage and he gets out and revs the Harley he got three years ago. Wheeling it from the garage, he cracks the pipes, loud enough that the busybody soccer mom in the house across the street appears at her window to scowl.

Laine always hated motorcycles, knew all the statistics about crashes, but she understood that it was a way for Connor to take control of the things in his life that tried to kill him. So she hadn't told him not to get it, had even ridden behind him, arms locked around his leather jacket, pretending it was fun. But that was before the long spells of silence between them got longer.

“You promised you'd help Jor with her report,” Laine yells over the roar of the bike. “When are you coming back?”

“I'll be home before the girls get here,” he says with no further explanation.

Then he's off, in a flurry of twisted images reflected in the Fat Boy's chrome. Splotches of rain dot his shirt, and his dark hair flaps in the wind, the helmet she
did
insist on still hanging on its nail in the garage.

They'd promised to never again be careless.

Perhaps the worst moment of Laine's life, the one that still crams white-hot coals into her stomach when she recalls it, was when Connor passed out at the bat mitzvah party of her regional director's daughter. Neither Laine nor Connor had wanted to go to the dinner; earlier that morning they'd suffered through a service in a language they didn't understand. Plus, Connor had been complaining he felt “flu-y.” But Laine had been up for vice president and her director's input would be crucial, so she had Connor zip her into a crimson cocktail dress and she pinned the waist of his tuxedo, which had somehow become two sizes too large. Once at the Colonnade ballroom, they found themselves having a surprisingly good time. There was dancing, and Connor and Laine loved dancing, and because they were young and pretty, people loved to watch them dance. After an hour Connor put a heavy hand on her bare shoulder.