Stay Up With Me (21 page)

You ask the father where Eden wants to go to college.

“She's only a sophomore,” he says, “but she has her sights on Tufts. She's got the marks to get in—or maybe she'll go to Holy Cross like her big brother.”

The fact that she has a big brother seems like a good sign. You picture him talking to her on the phone the morning after a miserable date, the way your brother used to do for you. And now he'll hear all about the girl in town who ran into his sister.

“But she drove me to the hospital,” Eden might tell him.

If he's at all like your brother he'd answer, “I still don't like her.”

 

There is a room
somewhere where the girl is lying with IVs connected to her, and her body is fighting heroically, or struggling, and this is your doing. You want to find her now and tell her that you're sorry. You imagine the scene like one in a TV drama, with you as a flawed but sympathetic character, pretty in an unmemorable way.

You go to the lunchroom and buy a packet of Lorna Doones from a vending machine. You eat one under the droning of the fluorescent lights and throw the rest away.

 

At close to four
you volunteer to take Lemon for a walk outside. The streets are silent until a snowplow makes a wake of slush on its path across town. Has it gotten warmer? You think of heading home. But what would you do? It's too early to call anyone, and there'd be too many questions. As the dog bounds ahead, you imagine the heady privacy of these walks with Lemon and what the girl thought about in the hours she was out of her parents' house. You did this in high school studying for parts, lost yourself in a stranger's life and not only in rehearsals, for whole weekends. There was a magic to it. Method acting, your teacher called it, but it wasn't acting. It was another way of being, a better path. You can guess where the girl would go, to the park behind the middle school, or the yards near the abandoned glove factory, or to the cemetery, where you would go with your friends to get high. You used to believe this place would kill you if you never left. Then you fled for college in Boston. You came back to take care of your mother when she was sick, and with her dead now you will leave again soon. If people ask about your father, you say he's dead too, because you don't know where he is.

You walk a mile or so in the white with the dog bounding ahead and the moonlight glinting off the snow, then halt abruptly when a car heads at you from the opposite direction. A block away the car turns, and when it's gone from sight you think:
I need to get back there.
The wind loosens a clump of ice from a nearby tree branch and it hits the ground like a box of dropped dishes.

You jog and then run the mile back, into the hospital and over to the nurses' station. Lemon tugs at his leash.

You ask, “Is there any news . . . about Eden?”

You hear the pleasing sound of a child laughing, and then realize it's the television.

“Oh dear
,
” says the nurse, who began her shift when you left on your walk. Her accent is from the islands, someplace like Barbados. She says compassionately, “Nobody went to
find
you?” because she believes you are the older sister.

“Beautiful
girl,
” the nurse says, and clucks her tongue. “Was it a hit-and-run?”

“Yes,” you say.

“Well, I pray to God they get him.”

In the waiting room Eden's parents are conferring with one of the doctors. Your brain shuts off, and there's a tingling in your arms and hands.

Years from now, on vacation with your husband and six-year-old son in Hawaii, you will make friends with a psychologist and find yourself more comfortable with her than you are with anyone in your everyday life. The psychologist will be traveling from Canada with her own family and staying in a bungalow a few hundred yards down the beach. Things will have turned out well for you on many fronts. You will be having drinks with her at dinner one sultry night and you'll slip and say that there are things no one will ever know about you. The psychologist, on her third mai tai, will joke and say, “You mean the sweet little child you killed once.” It will be a terrible coincidence—a macabre line put out for no reason other than that she hadn't felt like doing her job on vacation. She will read your face and then switch the subject. She will slip you her card the next day and say she works by phone if need be. You will want to tell your husband that night, but then you'll wonder how he would feel about the fact that you kept it from him this long. You will ask him to drive for the rest of the vacation. You will fall asleep in your son's bed twice that week, with the boy in your arms. You will try to forgive yourself. Home from Hawaii you will pull an old man back from the curb, though in truth no car was speeding toward him, only a slow-moving cab a few hundred yards away.

Bless your soul, he will say.

 

The doctor in the
emergency room
catches your eye now, and purses his lips, the way you've seen in hospital shows, and once in a dream about your mother.

“Go and be with your parents,” the nurse says.

It's as though she's asked you to leap from a plane in flight.

“Go on in there, dear,” the nurse says.

They gaze up at you with unreasonable kindness. You plummet toward them, into the purity of their grief.

The Women

A
week after my mother died,
my father and I went to a series of holiday parties. We lived in a sixteenth-floor apartment just off Central Park West, and in our building alone there were four different gatherings at which you could see my father surrounded by an infield of swooning women. He had become, in the wake of my mother's death, desirable real estate, a handsome fifty-eight-year-old with money. He was testing the waters, and you could see it bringing him back to life.

One of the women he met took him to her personal trainer; another took him clothes shopping to stores like Kenneth Cole and Hugo Boss “to raise his spirits.” He returned home weirdly pleased with himself, as though he'd regained fluency in a language he hadn't studied since high school. I'd borrow a new leather jacket of my father's when I went out for the night and I'd find business cards in the pockets, or a napkin with a phone number. Before long the women were dropping by our house, and I'd see them late at night drinking coffee in my mother's kitchen, moving in or out of the bathroom or my parents' bedroom, where they'd often stay over.

There'd be a scarf or a purse left out on a chair. I'd hear a woman whispering as she snuck out, for my sake, early, before seven. My room was next to the front entryway, and I was having trouble sleeping in those days.

For the first few weeks of February, my father dated a chatty frizzy-haired woman named Leanne who worked at the mayor's office scheduling press conferences and talking to reporters. They ordered in Chinese food, and they'd leave the half-empty containers lying out on the counter. They watched movies in his room, and then at some point his door would close. I pretended a few times that it was my mother in there, that she'd slipped in without my knowing, but usually I put my earbuds in to keep from hearing anything.

One night toward the end of that month, he brought home a woman from Los Angeles named Chloe who owned a string of boutiques and wore sparkly eyeliner, low-waisted jeans, and a belly button ring, in winter. She flirted with me when he left the room, quizzing me about my personal life and once touching my knee. She gave me her business card, which listed the address of her New York store. “Come by sometime,” she said, with a predatory softness in her eyes. When my father walked back in, there was music I knew he hated booming from the study.

“This okay?” he asked.

“Oh, Steve,” Chloe said, “we can do better than that.” She went and turned the tuner to some kind of lame diva dance music. She started grooving on her way back.

She was about forty, I'd say, but she tossed her hair and gyrated like an extra on a music video.

My father glanced at me and raised his eyebrows. I wrote
ABSURD
on a piece of notepaper and flashed it quickly so she wouldn't see.

“Both of you come here and
dance,
” she said from the dining room.

She looked misplaced vamping next to the long oak dining table and under my grandmother's crystal chandelier. My father moved his shoulders tentatively to the beat. Chloe yelled, “Show your father how to dance, Andy.”

“He does just fine for himself,” I told her.

I went and hid in my room. When I ventured out an hour later, his door was closed, and I saw her satin jacket and a shiny red purse draped over the reading chair in the living room.

Later that same week, I watched my father pick up the widow of one of his business partners during the intermission of
Into the Woods
. They were sharing notes about the New York City Ballet, and she said she had no one to go with, did he know anyone with extra tickets? She came back with us for drinks after the show, and my father put on an old Billie Holiday record my mother had loved.

The widow's name was Patricia Hobson. She was an interior decorator and good-looking in a preppy, older-woman way, with attentive eyes, a long thin nose, and a long wiry neck. I kept staring at the cords on her neck as she spoke.

“New York is a fabulous place to be a boy just out of college,” she said.

“How so?”

“Well, the ratio is entirely in your favor. There are so many gorgeous, stylish women in the city. I see them absolutely everywhere, and they're all single. My lord, Andrew, they'll eat you up. What's your type?”

I shrugged.

“He likes tall ones,” my father said, because my last girlfriend had been my height.

“Well, my daughter is five five, but she can wear heels.”

“I'm pretty sure I'd be a disappointment,” I told her, and she glanced over at my dad and smiled kindly. “I doubt that very much,” she said.

She started to size up our apartment then, commenting on the arrangement of the chairs and sofas and the artwork on our walls. “This apartment has so much potential,” she said. “Give me a few hours some Saturday afternoon, and I'll show you what we can do.”

“Let me show you something,” my father said. He poured her a scotch, and they stepped out on the terrace to look out at the lights across Central Park.

“Oh, boy,” she said, which is what everyone said when they saw our view.

“This is my favorite spot in the world. If you look through the binoculars, you can see people jogging around the reservoir.”

“I run around that reservoir four days a week,” Mrs. Hobson said.

“Let us know next time so we can watch for you,” my father said. I thought he was joking until I saw his face.

“I will,” she said. “We can wave to each other.”

I slipped out later to get drunk with my high school friend Jonas, but the whole time I was picturing my father and Mrs. Hobson ransacking our underachieving apartment, taking our keepsakes down to the storage lockers in the basement of our building. There were legitimate grounds for my fear: in the last week two framed photographs and four drawers of clothes had vanished. I think my father wanted to disperse my mother's ghost discreetly and respectfully. But every couple of days something else was missing, most recently a picture of my mother and godmother as teenagers, resting on a hammock like lazy goddesses. In its place now was a blank spot on the wall.

It's got to stop,
I thought.

Jonas tilted his head, puzzled. I guess I'd said it aloud.

“He's not cheating on her,” he said.

“Because she's dead, you mean. I suppose that's technically right.” We chugged our beers, then Jonas went to the bar to refill our empty pitcher.

“I have a friend who wants to meet you,” he said when he returned. “Actually, she's a little obsessed about it.”

“What did you tell her?”

“This and that. You just come up in conversation, and then it's all she wants to talk about.”

“She must have an exciting life.”

“She does, actually. She's really smart.”

“Good-looking?”

Jonas paused, as though I'd asked a trick question.

“Sort of. She kind of hides it. She doesn't do much for me, but maybe she would if I didn't know her so well.”

“You told her about my mother dying?”

He nodded. “When I told her, she cried.”

“That's just too fucking weird,” I said. I reached for my father's jacket, which was on the floor next to me, and rested it on my lap.

“It wasn't.” He put his cigarette out and lit another. “Anyhow, get comfortable, brother. You're not getting anywhere near that apartment for another couple hours, you got me?”

When we finally made it back, we saw her coat on a hanger in the vestibule. Jonas ran his hand across Mrs. Hobson's scarf and then bent over to smell it.

“Your dad is outstanding,” he said.

I took a tin of sour candies from her coat pocket, just to do it, really, not because I wanted anything of hers.

 

Both my father and
I
were in therapy then. He went two mornings a week to an animated man named Bergman who had a book-lined office on the Upper East Side, and on Wednesday nights I saw a woman named Dr. Helendoerf down in the Village. Bergman and my father started meeting shortly after my mother was diagnosed—at my mother's urging. When my father left therapy, he seemed uplifted, which was far from the case with me. He and his therapist talked about my mother, probably, but they also talked about art and politics, even sports. Bergman was constantly finding his way into our breakfast or dinnertime conversations. “Bergman thinks the Mets should trade Piazza,” he'd say. Or “Bergman gave me a list of Polish films for us to rent.” They were friends. I once saw them walking down our street together, which seemed like a violation of the patient-therapist relationship. I asked Dr. Helendoerf about it. I asked her if she would ever take a walk with a patient.