Family and Other Accidents (29 page)

“I think that must be it.” Kathy points to a low-rise building with a police crest on its side.

Mona hasn't been at a police station since her early days picking up arrest reports as a general assignment reporter, but the place feels old hat, not too far a cry from the worn and weathered precincts she's seen on TV.

Boy Cop, arm draped around the watercooler in the corner, talks to another blue-uniformed officer. “How's your wrist?” he asks when they come in, and Mona holds up the cloth cast. “I told you, you should have gone to the hospital.”

“You were right,” she says, half-expecting him to ask where her husband is. He doesn't, instead hands Mona stacks of paperwork to fill out.

Kathy thumbs through the Most Wanted flyers dangling from a ring on the wall, and Mona notices her engagement ring. Not identical to the one she and Jack picked out in St. Thomas more than sixteen years ago, it
is
similar, the same princess cut and a platinum band. Maybe it's just classic, but Mona can't help looking at it and thinking how unoriginal.

“If you need to go to work, I think I can handle this from here,” Mona says to Kathy. “You don't have to stick around.”

“No, I should stay, just to make sure that the car works and everything.” Kathy smiles. “Maybe we should drop it by a mechanic? I don't want to leave you with something broken down and useless.”

It occurs to Mona then that the ball of something dark and sticky in her gut isn't guilt but sympathy. With her injured hand, she reaches for Kathy's shoulder.

Hours later, as Mona skims another horrible story by the horrible intern, she'll still be thinking about the exchange. But now Kathy turns her head, looks at Mona, eyes wide and searching for something. Her pinked lips open and close, and she waits for whatever wisdom Mona can offer.

“By the way,” Mona says, “congratulations.”

more fluid than
you think

It seems impossible to Jack that his brother could be forty. But Connor's kid, the younger one with the dark hair, Jack thinks, calls him at the office on a Tuesday morning and invites him to a surprise party.

“I would love for you and Aunt Kathy to come,” the girl says, calling Kathy her aunt even though she technically is still only Jack's fiancée. “And I don't have to tell you how much it would mean to my father.”

Phone balanced between his ear and his chin, Jack opens the calendar on his computer screen and looks at all the meetings scheduled in the days immediately before and after the Saturday afternoon in two months.

“Do I have to tell you right now?” he asks. “Let me get back to you after I check with Kath.”

But Jack doesn't ask Kathy about it when he goes down a floor to her office to eat Thai takeout in the cartons or when they're in bed that night. He doesn't bring it up in the morning over coffee and the
Tribune
. Not the next morning or the one after that. It's not simply his hectic schedule making it a problem, nor is it just the idea of his kid brother getting old—he and Kathy celebrated Jack's own fiftieth birthday at Eli's last month. There
is
something unsettling about the idea of him and Kathy going to his brother's, but he can't quite define it. So the party doesn't come up again until he drops his son off at Mona's on Sunday.

In the foyer, seven-year-old Ryan acknowledges his mother with a nod, mentions Kathy took him to the new
Superman
movie, and scampers to his room to resume his love affair with a handheld game system. Jack follows Mona to the kitchen, where he sits at the table that used to be his.

“You look really nice today,” he says as she makes coffee.

She thanks him and asks about his week. It has become their ritual. Thirteen months ago, when he'd slept with her for the first time since the divorce, Jack figured it was going to be a one-time kind of thing. It had evolved into a Sunday-afternoon-when-he-dropped-Ryan-off kind of thing. They'd start with coffee and a prospect and end in the bedroom, the study, or the floor of the bathroom, depending on where Ryan was in the house. But today when he reaches for her hand, she draws it back against her breast.

“Not now, Jack,” she says, and he notices one of the reasons she looks so good is that she's wearing a low-cut shirt and high-heeled sandals. “It's not such a great time for that right now.”

He doesn't need to ask, but he does anyway. “Do you have a date or something?”

“Yes, actually.” When she blushes, she looks like she did when he met her more than twenty years ago, and something, maybe jealousy, maybe relief, pinches at his chest. It's uncharted territory, and he's not sure of the correct response.

“Well, there you go. It's more fluid than you think,” he says, inexplicably adding a wink. Mona looks at him and cocks her head. “If you'd have told me, I could have kept Ryan a little longer, so you could have some privacy.”

“No, no, it was kind of a last-minute plan.” She waves for emphasis. “It's some guy from work         .         .         .         we dated a while ago, we figured we'd try again. It's no big formal event. I got a sitter.”

“Sure,” he says. Realizing he's drumming his fingers on the glass table, he stops. “I understand.”

“Yeah, one of those type of deals.”

“Hey,” Jack begins unsure of what he's going to say until he says it. “Do you want to go to Connor's fortieth birthday party with me?”

“Yes,” she says without blinking or asking when it is, or where she'll be staying, or if Kathy will be there. “I would love to.”

         

When Connor picks Jorie up from the mall so she can practice driving, he doesn't tell her he spent the afternoon in Mass General's oncology ward or that his hip aches from where technicians extracted a marrow sample. He doesn't mention he's woozy because they took enough blood to feed a family of vampires. He certainly says nothing about how he didn't believe his oncologist when she'd told him again, everything looked great, no sign of any relapse.

This leaves very little to talk about as they weave in and out of Boston's lesser-trafficked streets. Her skills are nervous and wobbly, which isn't making him feel better physically or better about her chances of passing the driver's test when she tries again next week. Still, he tries to be encouraging, until, mercifully, she jerks the Beetle to a stop in a visitor-parking space in front of the condominium tower where her mother and stepfather live.

“Maybe brake a little sooner next time,” Connor says. Twenty-some years ago his brother had screamed and yelled and turned tomato red trying to explain the finer points of the manual transmission; Connor had felt sick then, too. “You're getting much better, though.”

“That's a gross overstatement,” Jorie says. “I still suck.”

“Well, you're sucking less and less.”

Popping the trunk, she gets her backpack and meets him at the driver's side. Hands on her bony shoulders, he kisses her forehead, tells her he'll pick her and her sister up the next afternoon, suggests she try to get along with her mother.

“You should come in for a minute, Mom wants to talk to you about a few things.” Oddly nervous, Jorie balances on one combat-booted foot, flipping a piece of coal hair between her thumb and forefinger.

Two days ago she'd been a blonde—a tall, beautiful blonde, with the translucent skin and gray eyes of her mother. Yesterday morning Connor found her at the kitchen table eating scrambled eggs and drinking coffee, her waist-length hair looking like an oil spill. A week shy of forty, Connor's own hair is still as dark as ever, but it's nothing compared to what his daughter did. She looks like something in a children's coloring book, where none of her shades are true to life. The black hair makes her eyes almost purple, her face unbleached cotton.

“I don't feel so hot, cheesefry,” he says. “Tell your mom I'll call her tonight.”

Jorie's eyes narrow, the same way her mother's narrow, into a concern that's oppressive.

“What's wrong?” she asks. “When's your next appointment?”

“Next month.” He feels his eye twitch; he's never been able to lie convincingly to people he cares about. “I'm really just tired, that's all. Tell your mom I'll call her later.”

“But Keelie's probably home, and you know she'll throw a complete fit if you were here and didn't say hi.”

Connor sighs. There are many reasons he doesn't want to go into his ex-wife's condo. If he had to pick the top three, he'd start with Jorie's hair. Then there's Laine's new husband, though Steve is likable enough, his “Gosh, I'm lucky you let this girl go” attitude makes Connor uncomfortable. The real reason, however, is that he feels ill, and it shows—his belt is in the last notch and his pants still drip from his hips, his skin is the color of boiled chicken. Even if his doctors can't find anything wrong with him, Laine won't miss it. Laine never misses anything.

“I can barely keep my eyes open—” he starts.

“You have to go in because Keelie planned this stupid surprise party,” Jorie says, words jumbled and rushed. “And Uncle Jack flew in from Chicago and Grandpa Rosen and all the stupid friends you guys used to have. They're crammed upstairs, waiting to jump up and throw confetti and crap.”

“Oh.” He smiles and flicks the key fob, locking the car. “I guess I have to go in then, don't I?”

“I tried to tell Keelie you wouldn't want anything and it would be weird to have it in the dweeb's house, but you know she can be a total cunt.”

“Jor—”

“I know, I know,” she sighs. “We're family, blood, water. Yada, yada, yada.”

Connor considers lecturing Jorie, but then he notices that she's wearing a dress, moss-colored and gauzy, but a dress nonetheless, for his party. Something about that is so sweet, it makes his chest ache. So he rolls his eyes and wraps his hand around her index finger. The doorman nods them through to the elevator, and they shoot up a dizzying thirty floors. He blinks and leans against the railing.

Jorie eyes him nervously. “Are you sure you're okay?”

“I'm fine now,” he says. “Once your mom sees your hair, I can't promise anything.”

The doors part, depositing them at the penthouse, where all the people from his former life yell “Surprise,” and do actually throw blue and gold confetti, the shiny foil dots splintering light in all directions.

The first person he sees is his ex-wife; Laine is always the first person anyone sees when she's in the room. “Happy birthday.” She leans in to kiss his cheek, smells the way she's always smelled, simply clean. He's known her seventeen years, her own fortieth birthday slipping by five months earlier, and he's still struck by her.

Steve Humboldt, standing next to Laine with his dopey aww-shucks expression, gives Connor a banker's handshake. Connor straightens up and tries to make his grip as firm.

Connor's older brother is there with his ex-wife, not his fiancée, and the way Jack's arm snakes around Mona's waist seems to indicate the title “ex-wife” may be subject to change. Connor wonders why Jack has told him nothing about it. In fact, can't recall his last conversation with his brother at all.

There's Laine's father, who still calls Connor “son,” even after all the things Connor did to hurt his daughter. And the rest of the room is filled with the friends he and Laine used to have. People they'd go skiing with, other couples from graduate school who stayed in the area after Harvard, people with whom you discuss politics and weather and other things of no consequence. Near the end of his marriage, he'd had an affair with one of their neighbors, and that woman is there now, next to her husband, smiling and throwing metallic dots, as if nothing ever happened.

“Do you like it, Daddy?” his thirteen-year-old daughter asks. She has Connor's dark hair and eyes and C-cup boobs neither he nor Laine can account for.

“It's wonderful,” he says, even though the catered appetizers—feta and spinach puff pastries, skewers of chicken, scalloped potatoes, chocolate fondue—aren't things he likes. A bunch of her friends roam the plush rooms, pretty girls in pretty dresses, young men in suits they wear to dances, and he sees that his birthday was her excuse to throw a party, because she's not Jewish so she didn't get a bat mitzvah at the Four Seasons. But Connor doesn't mind. He wants Keelie to be happy, and if this party—paid for by his ex-wife, who has oodles of money, or by his brother, who has even more money—makes her happy, then he's happy.

But he feels alone.

At the doctor's office earlier that day, when everyone kept insisting everything looked okay, he'd started to feel woozy. His oncologist had offered him Compazine, a drug he'd never been able to take. On a desk in front of her she'd had his medical records, records she'd authored for nine years saying just that. He'd looked at her blankly and felt profoundly isolated.

He feels the same way now, in this room of people who think they love him.

         

It's Jorie's goal to slink past the party and back to her bedroom. On Monday she was voted Girl You Most Want to Fuck in an unofficial poll by the boys of Natick High School. She actually did have sex with her boyfriend after school on Wednesday, and then skipped school on Thursday and Friday because she hadn't wanted to see Brandon afterward. These aren't things she feels like discussing.

For a minute, every one
is
too busy kissing her father and wishing him a happy birthday to notice Jorie or her hair. But then she smells Brandon, overpriced aftershave and Prell shampoo.

“Where have you been, babe? I've been trying your phone for days.” He reaches for her arm. “Your hair looks awesome, like Cleopatra or something.”

The comment has a domino effect. Jorie's mother, sister, grandfather, and all the friends turn to stare.

“Ohmygod,” Keelie gasps, covering succulent lips with manicured nails. “What did you do?”

“It's different.” Her mother's face reflects a true horror, but she tries to smile. She reaches a hand out to caresses Jorie's forehead, but Jorie brushes her away. “Is it permanent?”

“Yeah, it is,” Jorie lies. “I was just really sick of being a blonde.”

Her mother blinks and walks away, and Jorie turns to Brandon. “What are you doing here?” she asks.

Brandon had been assigned her chemistry lab partner in September. He'd broken a lot of test tubes and started a small fire with the Bunsen burner. “You make me nervous,” he'd said. Because he was two years older, on the soccer team and student council, Jorie had thought he was making fun. When she realized he was serious, it hadn't made her like him; it made her feel sorry for him, which was why she'd finally gone out with him. But when they'd had sex Wednesday, his face had twisted like the melting clocks in a Dali painting and he'd told her he loved her. She'd hated him then, hated his toothpaste-commercial smile and the way that he told her about the Girl You Want to Fuck poll with a mix of offense and pride.