Fortunate Son: A Novel (18 page)

AS THOMAS WALKED
up the incline toward Wilshire, there was a strong Santa Ana wind blowing. He felt this as an invisible force pushing against him, trying to keep him from reaching his brother. He smiled, knowing that he was fighting against his own ill fortune in the attempt to reach Eric. He felt like a hero pushing that heavy cart with two dead wheels up the rough asphalt street.

The police stopped him on San Vicente.

“It’s against the law to push that cart in the street, Bruno,” the officer said. He was a large white man with a name tag that read
PITTMAN.

“I was staying off the sidewalk, officer,” Thomas replied. “Because I thought that maybe I’d get in someone’s way with this big thing.”

“He’s right about that, Pitt,” a Hispanic man, Rodriguez, said with a joking smile.

“What are you doing here, Bruno?” Pittman asked Thomas.

“I’m going to see my brother, Eric.”

“He a bum too?”

“Street person,” the other cop corrected with a smirk on his lips.

“He’s a doctor’s son,” Thomas replied. “We got the same mother. I called him, and he said he’d help me out.”

Officer Pittman stared at Thomas for what seemed like a long time. It was as if the policeman was trying to make up his mind about what his next action should be. He sniffed the air, and Thomas realized that he must have smelled. He knew that sometimes street people smelled bad to straights when they didn’t know it. He wondered if Eric would turn up his nose and walk away.

“It’s three o’clock,” Rodriguez said, pointing to his wristwatch. “It’ll take two hours to process this dude.”

Still Pittman speculated on Thomas. Under that pale-skinned crew cut, the policeman scowled as if there was something important about this roust.

“Come on, man,” Rodriguez said. “He ain’t messin’ with nobody.”

“You got a knife in there, Bruno?”

“No, officer.”

“What about pills? You got pills or pot?”

Thomas thought about the phrase
a pot to piss in,
but he didn’t try to bring it to voice. He shook his head, wondering why this man was so interested in him.

“I got books,” Thomas offered as if he were a salesman and Pittman a potential customer.

Something about this answer brought a sour twist to Pittman’s lips. For a moment Thomas thought the man might spit on him.

“Get the fuck outta here,” the peace officer said.

A minute later, cops nearly forgotten, Thomas was once again pressing against the invisible force of the wind.

An hour afterward he reached the Tennyson, the building in which the man who bore his brother’s initials lived. He stopped out front, looking up at the huge edifice of glass and steel. It didn’t look like a home. It didn’t remind Thomas of his childhood friend and brother. Now that he was there, he didn’t know what to do. There was a doorman in the lobby. He wouldn’t let Thomas just walk in. And a doorman announcing his name would be even worse than a phone call.

So Thomas sat down on the curb looking up at the tower. He decided that he could wait awhile, and maybe, if he was lucky, Eric would come out of that rotating door and into his brother’s arms.

PATROLMEN PITTMAN AND
Rodriguez had just stopped at their favorite coffee spot. Rodriguez ordered a dark-roast coffee and Pittman a grande Frappucino made with skim milk, caramel syrup, and chocolate chips. It was their 4:45 lunch hour, and so they sat down and turned their radios to “emergency calls only.”

CHRISTIE WAS AT
home by then. She had told Eric that she would marry him, and they were already making plans for the wedding. The long separation from her father would be over. Minas Nolan and Ahn would certainly come. Eric had wondered if he could somehow find Thomas and share with him his new life of personal denial. Tommy would understand how much Eric was giving up. Tommy understood everything subtle and emotional.

Distraught Drew had gone to his father’s house, completely lost in his grief. He’d never known such pain before. Those three days with Christie were what he’d yearned for all these years. She was his for those hours, but the moment he took his eyes off her she was lost to him again. His heart clenched into a fist, and everything he’d ever learned or loved sank into the cold ocean of his chest.

THOMAS’S THOUGHTS DRIFTED
as he sat there. At first he had been nervous about seeing Eric, but now he was visited by a feeling of quiet elation. These moments that he spent waiting were exquisite in their own way—perfect weather, with birds arcing through the sky and people walking and talking up and down the boulevard. It was one of those beautiful instants that get past you if you don’t look. But Thomas was looking. He had nowhere to go and everything to hope for.

While Thomas was having these thoughts, a purple Chrysler drove up and a tall young man climbed out. There was a dark cast to his face and a pained grimace in his expression.

Eric, Christie, and Mona had just gotten into the elevator on the twenty-fifth floor, going down to the street for a walk to the pizza restaurant that Mona loved.

Pittman and Rodriguez were finishing their coffees and ham sandwiches and thinking about going back on the prowl.

Drew stood not six feet from Thomas. After first glances, neither paid heed to the other.

The policemen were in the street, not a block from the Tennyson.

Eric and Christie and Mona entered the lobby. When Thomas saw Eric he stood up and smiled. He would wait patiently for his brother to come out.

Mona dashed for the revolving door, obviously ecstatic about their adventure. Christie came in the next partition, watching after the child and glowing. Eric came last. Just when he was sealed within the glass quarter section, Drew grabbed Thomas’s cart and shoved it into the aperture that Christie had just left.

“Hey, man!” Thomas grabbed Drew by the shoulder, but with a sweep of his arm the tall young man knocked Thomas to the ground.

He took out his father’s Luger, and Christie screamed.

This wasn’t how Drew had it planned. He didn’t want to confront Christie on the street. He wanted to follow Eric to a quiet place and kill him. Kill him and maybe later he could console Christie, take her away to rest. He would be the shoulder she could cry on. But seeing her he was overcome by unexpected hatred. All those things she said that excited him so much in bed now had other meanings. She had cheated on him, made him into a fool. Made love to Eric while telling him a hundred lies.

“Drew!” Christie shouted, and he hated her even more.

The pistol rose of its own accord. Drew didn’t hear the shot, only saw the young mother convulse. He fired three more times, and Christie was down.

Eric shouted and strained against the thick glass.

The child ran for her mother as Drew leveled the gun at her.

Thomas leaped through the air shouting, “Lily!” and he pulled Mona down, wrapping his skinny body around her.

The policemen were running by then.

Drew realized what he had done, but he couldn’t stop his arm and hand from aiming and firing.

Thomas felt each bullet enter his back. He counted them—one, two, three. And then he heard firecrackers and yelling. The child was the loudest, shouting for her mother. Then came Eric with that booming voice Thomas remembered from childhood. And then the darkness he’d known since the death of his mother began to brighten. It got lighter and lighter until all there was was light—no details or shadows, just pure light and then nothing at all.

15

T
HOMAS AWOKE
in a hospital room breathing in mild alcohol vapors and other medicinal scents. He tried to remember what had happened, why he was there, but it didn’t come immediately. His back hurt. That brought on the memory of being shot.

Who shot me? The police? No, that was a long time ago and in the front not the back.

There was a spider tentatively making its way up the eggshell-colored nylon curtain next to the window. Thomas smiled, feeling akin to the gangly arachnid trying to survive in a place where cleanliness meant her demise.

“Are you awake?” a woman’s voice asked.

Thomas looked up and saw that it was Ahn. For some reason this didn’t surprise him.

“Hi,” Thomas said.

“How are you?” she asked.

She put her knitting down and sat forward in the chair, touching the edge of the mattress with her fingertips.

“I’m okay, Ahn,” Thomas said.

The ageless Vietnamese woman frowned and tilted her head. She looked closely at the weathered, battered, and scarred face. Then she drew back in frightened surprise.

“Tommy?”

“Yeah.” The solitary word floated on the music of a lifelong apology.

“What’s happened to you?” Fear and guilt clouded her usually impassive face.

“Life, I guess.”

Thomas could see this life imagined in her eyes—the knife wounds and roofless nights, broken bones and empty pockets. Ahn suffered for him.

“I am so sorry,” she said.

“Don’t cry, Ahn. It’s not so bad. I’m alive.”

The little woman got to her feet and touched his callused hands, hands that were so big compared to his body that they seemed swollen.

“What happened?” Thomas asked.

“You were shot,” she said. “You saved Mona, but that boy shot you in the back trying to kill her.”

“That was the little girl?”

“Yes. The police came and killed him before he could finish killing you.”

It was as if she were talking about some story in a book or on Madeline’s TV, something far away from Thomas.

“And there was a woman?” he half-asked.

“Mona’s mother, Christie,” Ahn said solemnly. “She died on the way to the hospital.”

“I’m sorry,” Thomas said. “He took my cart and shoved it into the door. I tried to stop him.”

“You saved Mona, Tommy. Oh, Tommy, look at you.”

“Where’s Eric?”

“He’s getting ready for the funeral. It’s tomorrow. Dr. Nolan went with him. They asked me to come here and see about you. But, but they didn’t know who you were. They said your name was Bruno.”

“Why did you tell me not to call?” Thomas asked. The question had been in his heart for years. Just asking made him feel better.

Ahn couldn’t answer right away. Her eyes filled up, and she slumped into her chair.

Thomas’s back hurt and his breathing was shallow. He wanted to get up and comfort his old nurse but didn’t have the strength.

“It’s okay, Ahn. I’m here now.”

“But you are so hurt. Your hands and face. Your chest. How can all this happen to a child?”

Thomas found that he could still shrug if he didn’t pull his shoulders too high.

“I thought,” Ahn said. “I thought that if you came back home something bad would happen to you, like your mother. Maybe you get sick. I don’t know.”

“Because of Eric?”

Ahn nodded.

“Eric can’t hurt me, Ahn. He’s my brother. He always saved me.”

There was sunlight shining in through the window. Thomas realized that it didn’t hurt his eyes. He smiled then and so did Ahn.

“I forgot you,” she confessed.

“I never forgot you.”

THOMAS SLIPPED INTO
a coma that evening. Dr. Nolan and Eric came to the hospital when Ahn told them who he was. They stood over his frail body.

“He looks so peaceful,” Eric said. “Just like he was taking a nap.”

“There’s less than a ten percent chance that he’ll revive,” said Dr. Bettye Freeling, the physician in charge of the ward.

“He might surprise you,” Minas Nolan told her. “He’s got something in him that won’t let go. He might be the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

“Do you know his family?” Freeling asked. She was a younger doctor, handsome. “I see that he’s uninsured.”

“I’ll pay for him, Doctor,” Minas said. “I owe him at least that.”

MICHAEL AND RAELA
came to Christie’s funeral. Michael wore a medium-brown suit because that’s all he owned. Raela wore an elegant black dress, flat black shoes, and a tasteful ebony tam, and carried a small black purse. When she touched Eric’s forearm in sympathy, there was a loud and painful crackle of static electricity.

By then everyone knew about the tryst between Drew and Christie. Drew had told his father about the affair in their brief conversation before he stole the Luger. And the doorman of the Tennyson saw them coming in late at night and watched them groping each other through the video eye in the elevator.

Almost everyone felt sorry for Eric. He was a poor cuckold, an innocent bystander. He grieved for his dead girlfriend and held their tearful daughter in his arms. Only Ahn wondered how Eric’s fateful aura had caused the hapless college dropout to murder Christie. She watched him closely. When she saw the teenage girl stand near him, she knew. It was time for him to lose his lover, Ahn thought, and so the stars conspired to kill her. The Vietnamese woman shivered under her thin silk shawl.

Christie’s parents hugged Eric and kissed their sweet granddaughter. Half of Christie’s class from Hensley showed up to express their sorrow.

Drew would be buried three days later. Only his parents and Eric came to that ceremony. Drew’s father shook Eric’s hand, thanking him for coming and apologizing for his son.

“He just never grew into a man,” Mr. Peters said. “I hope that you can one day forgive him.”

Eric didn’t answer, but he felt no enmity toward Drew. He believed that it was his own inability to love Christie that had driven the lovers together, and then his attempt to make himself love her was what destroyed them both.

Eric moved back into his father’s house so that Ahn could help with Mona. He went to the hospital every day and sat next to his comatose brother.

Thomas was surrounded by an oxygen tent that was meant to help his punctured lung heal. The doctors didn’t have much hope for him, but Eric came each morning and sat for hours in silence at his brother’s side.

ONE MORNING, AFTER
Eric’s father went to work and Ahn and Mona had gone to the stone animal park, the doorbell rang. Eric was getting ready to go to the hospital. He was on leave from his classes and had no intention of going back to school.

He opened the door to find Raela standing there. She seemed taller and more beautiful than before. It was as if she had been a child when last he saw her, Eric thought, and now she was a woman. He wondered if she had grown or if he had diminished since losing Christie.

“Hi,” she said.

Eric felt his heart skip and hated himself for an instant.

“I can’t know you, Raela,” he said.

“It’s too late for that now,” she replied, her bearing both solemn and serene.

She walked into the house, and he closed the door behind her.

She went into the living room as if she had always lived there. She sat and so did he.

“We killed them,” he said.

“We aren’t gods,” she retorted.

“I didn’t love her, but I asked her to marry me.”

“You had a child together. What else could you do?”

“I could have been a man and done what was right.”

“What’s right?” she asked him. “What can anybody do?”

“My brother did what was right,” Eric said with conviction.

“Maybe. But he’s special. You aren’t him.”

“I don’t love you, Raela.”

“I know that. I don’t care about love. I just know that we have to be together. We have to be. You know it.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“I do.”

“What about Michael? What will happen with him?”

“He’s my brother and he loves me,” the raven-haired beauty answered. “Show me upstairs.”

Eric and Raela became lovers that afternoon. He wasn’t worried about getting into trouble. He wasn’t concerned that she was too young. Staying away from her had killed Drew and Christie. Maybe even Thomas would die because of his refusal to be with her.

Raela had felt alone for her entire life. Her stepmother was more like a servant than a relative. Her brother loved her, but he couldn’t comprehend what was in her heart. And Kronin was just a big bear who wanted her to pay attention to him. No one had ever gotten close to understanding her until she met Eric.

He too was alone and unable to love. His heart was as disconnected as hers. They could at least understand each other. Maybe there could be more.

In the weeks that followed, Eric found himself laughing often and intrigued by the way the woman-child thought. She beat him at swimming, though he was her master at tennis. She could sprint past him in any short race, but he could run for miles and she couldn’t or wouldn’t—he was never sure which.

After her last class in the afternoon, she would meet him in Thomas’s hospital room, and they’d sit together holding hands and waiting.

MEANWHILE, THOMAS TRAVELED
among the dead. In the depths of his coma he convened with Tremont, the drug dealer, and Bruno, his best friend. The lost puppy, Skully, scampered about at his heels while Alicia (whom he had never known in life) made them all tea and biscuits served on her tomb in the alley valley that he always thought of as his one true home. They all spoke different languages and used signs to make themselves understood. Sometimes other guests would come. RayRay shambled in one day and asked—with wordless, elaborate apologies—Thomas to forgive him. Pedro climbed down from the fire escape and handed Thomas his gun. By this he meant that he would never kill himself again.

One day Thomas said good-bye to Tremont and Bruno. Then he and Alicia started out on a walk to the far end of the alley valley. It seemed to Thomas that he had never gone to the absolute end. The valley stretched for miles and became very wide. Trees grew tall and full above them. There were strawberry fields and orange groves along the way. Skully brought them beautiful stones and fish and tools when they needed them.

Alicia and he made love in the evenings. It was the way it had been with Monique, only instead of Lily they had Skully the dog, and because they were the same age they could have sex. The sun was bright, but Thomas didn’t mind it. The valley seemed endless, but neither one of them cared.

One day Thomas woke up to find that Alicia was gone. He knew that she was off taking care of her own unfinished business, something about the people that killed her and dumped her in Thomas’s valley. He didn’t worry about her; they would be together again.

The next day Skully didn’t come when Thomas whistled. But that didn’t bother him either. Traveling alone down the wide valley that started behind his father’s home, Thomas knew that he was getting somewhere.

One day—after many, many days of walking—Thomas heard a strange bird cry. It was a high, burplike noise. The call intrigued him, and so he began to climb up out of the valley because that was where the birdsong came from. Climbing up the slope, he began breathing hard. He fell to his knees and struggled through the brush. The bird’s odd song got louder and louder. And the louder it got, the more he wanted to see the animal that made that sound.

Maybe it wasn’t a bird, he thought. Maybe it’s a frog or a wolf or a man. Maybe it’s some new kind of talking tree.

As he climbed the foliage became thinner and the sun shone brighter. It got brighter and brighter, louder and louder, until Thomas was at the crest.

He opened his eyes and saw the beeping machine against the far wall of his hospital room. Next to his bed was a chair in which sat a black-haired girl.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“I am?”

“You’ve been in a coma . . . for six months.”

“What’s a coma?”

“Deep sleep. So deep that no one can wake you up.”

“I don’t feel tired now.”

“I should get the doctor.” The girl leaned forward, preparing to stand.

“No. Don’t go away.”

She smiled, and Thomas felt a tingle of happiness.

“Where have you been?” she asked him.

“In my coma?”

“No. Before. Eric said that you went away to live with your father and grandmother but ended up on the street.”

Thomas felt good in his bed. He sat up, and an electric whistle began to sound. He thought about his life in terms of the girl’s question, leaving the house he was raised in and then ending up on the street.

“Is Eric going to come see me?”

“Yes,” she said. “He’d be here now, but he had to take Mona to the doctor for a rash on her forehead.”

“Are you Eric’s girlfriend?”

Raela nodded solemnly.

“Oh my God!” the nurse coming into his room exclaimed. “You’re awake.”

Doctors and nurses bustled around him soon after that. They hurried the girl away and rolled Thomas into a room where they examined him from head to toe. The chief doctor probed his body with her fingers and kept asking how it felt. They looked into his eyes and ears and talked to one another, expressing surprise.

Finally the woman explained that he had experienced severe trauma to his system. He’d been in a coma for nearly six months, and it would be a while before he would be able to walk or take care of himself.

“Where’s my cart?” he asked when the doctor had finished.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“My shopping cart. That’s where I got all my stuff.”

“I don’t know. Maybe the police took it after the shooting. That was a wonderful thing you did.”

After a while they wheeled him back into his room. He had hoped the girl would still be there, but she wasn’t.

“Would you like me to turn the TV on, hon?” a plump redheaded nurse asked while pulling the blankets up to his chest.

“No thanks. I don’t like TV too much.”

“I wish my kids felt like that,” she said. “All they do is watch that thing. Between the one-eyed monster and video games, they don’t have the sense to come in outta the rain.”