Last Night in Twisted River (44 page)

He thought he’d better have a look at Joe before he staggered off to bed, and perhaps he should put some pajamas on the boy, but Danny felt he lacked the necessary dexterity to dress the sleeping child. Instead, he closed the windows in the boy’s bedroom and checked to be sure the rails on the child bed were secure.

Joe couldn’t have fallen out of bed with the rails in the lowered position, and the boy was that age when he could climb out of the bed if the rails were in either the raised or the lowered position. Sometimes the rails weren’t securely latched in either position; then the rails could slip, pinching the boy’s fingers. Danny checked to be sure the rails were locked fast in the raised position. Joe was sleeping soundly on his back, and Danny leaned over to kiss him. This was awkward to do when the bed rails were raised, and Danny had had enough to drink that he couldn’t manage to kiss his son without losing his balance.

He left Joe’s bedroom door open, to be sure he would hear the boy if he woke up and cried. Danny left the door to the master bedroom open, too. It was after three in the morning. Danny noted the time on the alarm clock on the night table as he got into bed. Katie wasn’t back from seeing Roger, if that’s who she was seeing.

Whenever Danny closed his eyes, the bedroom began to spin. He fell asleep with his eyes open—or he imagined that he did, because his eyes were open, and they felt very dry, when he was awakened in the morning by a man shouting.

“There’s a baby in the road!” some idiot was yelling.

Danny could smell the marijuana; he must have been half asleep, or only half awake, because he imagined that the shouting man was stoned. But the smell of the pot was beside Danny, on the nearest pillow. Katie was sleeping naked there, the covers thrown off and her hair redolent of marijuana. (It was Danny’s impression that Roger smoked dope all the time.)

“Whose baby is this?” the man was shouting. “This baby’s gotta belong to
someone
!”

Maniacal shouting would occasionally reach them from the noisy sorority house farther west on Iowa Avenue, or from the downtown area, but not during what amounted to the morning rush hour.

“Baby in the road!” the maniac kept repeating. It was cold in the bedroom, too, Danny only now realized; he’d passed out with the windows open, and whenever Katie had come home, she’d not bothered to close them.

“It’s not our fucking baby,” Katie said; her voice was slurred, or she spoke into her pillow. “Our baby’s in bed with us, fuckhead!”

“He
is?”
Danny asked, sitting up; his head was pounding. Little Joe wasn’t in the tousled bed with them.

“Well, he
was,”
Katie said; she sat up in bed, too. Her cheeks were a little roughed up, or red-looking—the way your face can get when you’re kissing someone with a scratchy beard, the writer supposed. “The kid was fussing about something, so I brought him into bed with us,” Katie was saying.

Danny had already headed down the hall. He saw that Joe’s bed was empty, with the rails in the lowered position; Katie was so short, she could never lift the boy out of his bed without first lowering the rails.

The traffic was backed up on Iowa Avenue—all the way east, to the bend on Muscatine—as if there’d been an accident in the avenue, directly in front of Danny’s ground-floor apartment. Danny ran out the front door of the duplex in his boxer shorts. Given his state of undress, the writer must have struck the driver of the dirty-white van, which was blocking the incoming traffic to town, as a likely candidate for the neglectful parent.

“Is this
your
baby?” the van driver screamed at Danny. The handlebar mustache and bushy sideburns may have frightened little Joe as much as the man’s ceaseless shouting—that and the fact that the van driver had managed to corral Joe on the grassy median strip in the middle of Iowa Avenue without actually picking the boy up, or even touching him. Joe stood uncertainly on the grass in his diaper; he’d wandered out of the house and across the sidewalk, into the lane of incoming traffic, and the dirty-white van had been the first vehicle to almost hit him.

Now a woman from the car that was stopped behind the white van ran into the median and scooped the baby into her arms. “Is
that your
daddy?” she asked Joe, pointing to Danny in his boxer shorts. Joe started to cry.

“He’s mine—I was asleep,” Danny told them. He crossed the pavement into the median strip, but the woman—middle-aged, glasses, a pearl necklace (Danny would remember nothing more definitive about her)—seemed reluctant to give the baby up.

“Your baby was in the street, pal—I almost ran over him,” the van driver told Danny. “The fucking diaper, its whiteness, just caught my eye.”

“It doesn’t appear that you were looking for this baby, or that you even knew he was missing,” the woman said to Danny.

“Daddy,” Joe said, holding out his arms.

“Does this child have a mother?” the woman wanted to know.

“She’s asleep—we were both asleep,” Danny told her. He took little Joe from the woman’s tentatively outstretched arms. “Thank you,” Danny said to the van driver.

“You’re still wasted, man,” the driver told him. “Is your wife wasted, too?”

“Thank you,” Danny told him again.

“You should be reported,” the woman said to him.

“Yes, I should be,” Danny told her, “but please don’t.”

Now cars were honking their horns, and Joe started to cry again. “I couldn’t see the sky from the house,” the boy was sobbing.

“You couldn’t see the sky?” his dad asked. They crossed the pavement to the sidewalk, and went into the house to the continuous honking of horns.

“I couldn’t see if Lady Sky was coming down,” Joe said.

“You were looking for Lady Sky?” his father asked.

“I couldn’t see her. Maybe she was looking for me,” the boy said.

The divided avenue was wide; from the middle of the road, or from the median strip, Danny realized that his two-year-old had been able to see the sky. The boy had been hoping that Lady Sky would descend again—that was all there was to it.

“Mommy’s home,” Joe told his dad, as they came into the apartment, which the two-year-old called the
um
partment; from the moment he’d begun to talk, an apartment was an
um
partment.

“Yes, I know Mommy’s home,” Danny said. He could see that Katie had fallen back to sleep. On the kitchen table, the writer also noticed that the rum bottle was empty. Had he finished it before going to bed, or had Katie downed what was left in the bottle when she’d come home? (It was probably
me
, Danny thought; he knew that Katie didn’t like rum.)

He took Joe into the boy’s room and changed his diaper. He had trouble looking at his son’s eyes—imagining them open and staring, unseeing, as the two-year-old in his bright-white diaper lay dead in the road.

“AND THEN YOU
stopped drinking, right?” young Joe asked his father. For the duration of the long story, they’d kept their backs to the house they had lived in with Katie.

“The last of that rum was the end of it,” Danny said to the eight-year-old.

“But Mom didn’t stop drinking, did she?” Joe asked his dad.

“Your mom couldn’t stop, sweetie—she probably still hasn’t stopped,” Danny told him.

“And I
am
grounded, right?” young Joe asked.

“No, you’re not grounded—you can go anywhere you want, on foot or on the bus. It’s your
bicycle
that’s grounded,” Danny said to the boy. “Maybe we’ll give your bike to Max. I’ll bet he could use it for a backup, or for spare parts.”

Joe looked up at the brilliant blue of the fall sky. No descending angel was going to get him out of this predicament. “You never thought Lady Sky was an angel, did you?” the boy asked his dad.

“I believed her when she said she was an angel
sometimes,”
Danny said.

The writer would drive all over Iowa City looking for the blue Mustang, but he wouldn’t find it. The police would never spot the rogue car, either. But, back on Iowa Avenue, all Danny did was put his arm around the eight-year-old’s shoulders. “Think of it this way,” he said to his son. “That blue Mustang is still looking for you. Six years ago, when you stood in this street—with nothing but a diaper on—maybe the blue Mustang was stuck in traffic. It might have been several cars behind the white van; that blue Mustang might have been trying to get you even then.”

“It’s not really looking for me, is it?” Joe asked.

“You better believe it is,” his dad told him. “The blue Mustang
wants
you—that’s why you’ve got to be careful.”

“Okay,” the eight-year-old told his father.

“Do you know any two-year-olds?” Danny asked his son.

“No,” the boy answered, “not that I can think of.”

“Well, it would be good for you to meet one,” his dad said, “just so you can see what you looked like in the road.”

That was when the cook drove down Iowa Avenue, in the incoming lane, and pulled over to the curb, where the father and son were standing. “Get in, you two,” Tony Angel told them. “I’ll drop Joe at school, then I’ll take you home,” the cook said.

“Joe hasn’t had any breakfast,” Danny told his dad.

“I made him a big lunch—he can eat half of it on the way to school, Daniel. Get in,” he repeated. “We have a
… situation.”

“What’s wrong, Pop?” the writer asked.

“It seems that Youn is still married,” the cook replied, as Danny and Joe got into the car. “It seems that Youn has a two-year-old daughter, and that her husband and daughter have come to visit her—just to see how all the
writing
is going.”

“They’re at the house?” Danny asked.

“It’s good that they came after Youn was up. She was already in
her
room—writing,” the cook said.

Danny could imagine how she’d left their bedroom—meticulously, without a trace of herself remaining, just that pearl-gray nightie tucked under her pillow, or maybe it was the beige one. “Youn has a two-year-old?” Danny asked his dad. “I want Joe to see the daughter.”

“Are you crazy?” the cook said to his son. “Joe should go to school.”

“Youn is married?” Joe asked. “She has a
kid?”

“It appears so,” Danny said; he was thinking about the novel Youn was writing—how it was so exquisitely written but not everything added up. The usually limpid prose notwithstanding, something had always been unclear about the book.

“I think you should go to school, sweetie,” Danny said. “You can meet a two-year-old another time.”

“But you want me to meet one, right?” Joe asked.

“What’s this about?” the cook inquired; he was driving to Joe’s school, not waiting for contradictory directions.

“It’s a long story,” Danny told him. “What’s the husband like? Is he a gangster?”

“He’s a surgeon in Korea, he told me,” Tony Angel replied. “He’s attending a surgical conference in Chicago, but he brought his daughter along, and they thought they’d surprise Mommy—and let Youn look after the two-year-old for a couple of days, while Kyung is in meetings. Some surprise, huh?” the cook asked.

“His name is
Kyung?”
Danny said. In the book Youn was writing, the gangster husband was named Jinwoo; Danny guessed that wasn’t the only element of her story she’d made up, and all along he’d thought her novel was too autobiographical!

“Her husband seems like a nice guy,” Tony Angel said.

“So I’m going to meet Youn’s two-year-old daughter?” Joe asked, as he was getting out of the car.

“Eat something,” the cook told his grandson. “I already called the school and told them you were coming late.”

“It sounds like you
may
meet the little girl, yes,” Danny told the boy. “But what are you on the lookout for?” he asked Joe, as the boy opened his lunch box and peered inside.

“The blue Mustang,” Joe answered, without hesitation.

“Smart boy,” his father said.

They were almost back at the Court Street house before the cook told his son, “Yi-Yiing and I decided that it should appear you two are a couple.”

“Why should Yi-Yiing and I be a
couple?”
Danny said.

“Because you’re the same age. While the husband from Korea is around, you should just pretend that you’re
together
. Not even a Korean surgeon is going to suspect that
I’m
sleeping with his wife,” the cook said. “I’m too old.”

“How do we
pretend?”
Danny asked his dad.

“Let Yi-Yiing do the pretending,” his father said.

In retrospect, the writer was thinking, the pretending hadn’t been the most difficult part of the impromptu deception. Yi-Yiing did a good job of acting as Danny’s girlfriend—that is, while Youn’s husband was there in the Court Street house. The surgeon from Seoul struck Danny as a sweet man, both proud of himself and embarrassed for “surprising” his writer wife. Youn, for her part, could not conceal how happy she was to see her daughter, Soo. The Korean writer’s eyes had sought Danny for some reassurance, and Danny hoped he’d provided it; he felt relieved, actually, because he’d been looking ahead to their inevitable parting with more than the usual guilt.

Yes, he would definitely be in Iowa City through this academic year—he’d already asked the Writers’ Workshop if he could stay another year after that—but Danny knew that he probably wouldn’t be staying in town long enough for Youn to finish her novel. (And when Danny went back to Vermont, he had all along been assuming that Youn would go back to Seoul.)

The surgeon, who would be in Chicago for only a few days, kissed his wife and daughter good-bye. All the introductions and good-byes had happened in the Court Street kitchen, where the cook acted as if he owned the place, and Yi-Yiing had two or three times slipped behind Danny and encircled him with her arms—drawing him to her, once kissing the back of his neck. It being a warm fall day, the writer wore only a T-shirt and jeans, and he could feel Yi-Yiing’s silky pajamas brushing against his back. These hugs conveyed a coziness between them, the writer supposed—not knowing what Youn might have made of this intimate contact, or if Yi-Yiing and the cook had informed the Korean adulteress of their plan that Danny and the Hong Kong nurse should “pretend” to be a couple.