Hooked (22 page)

Ian started his coughlike cries. Could Will take him away from me? I stood and went to pick Ian up as Will gathered his stuff for school and left.

“I think he knows the word
poo
,” Dad said, dropping the high chair, still in the box, near the sink. I’d spent the day letting the morning’s scene with Will play out in my head a thousand times. I would talk him out of it when he got home, I kept telling myself. When Dad buzzed that evening, I panicked for a moment, thinking that Will had called an agency and that they were coming to get Ian. I’d forgotten that Dad was coming to drop off the high chair so that Ian could start eating “real food.” I’d told him that it was still a couple of months too early to start with the food, but he’d insisted on bringing it over anyway, “just in case.”

“I swear I heard him say ‘poo’ when we were in the hospital with his leg that night,” Dad said, leaning the large box against the coffee table. “Did I tell you that?”

“He’s not even three months old,” I said.

“Well, he’s advanced,” he said, ripping through the packing tape with his keys. I rolled my eyes. “Seriously,” Dad countered. “The way his eyes dart around when someone enters a room or when that Noah’s Ark thing snaps shut. He’s very alert. Unusually so.”

“Okay, well, take it easy,” I said. I was in a black fog, but I
couldn’t help smiling. “He’s got his whole life to buckle under the pressure.”

“Of course.” He smiled, leaning over Ian, who was on his back on a blanket. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get this over here. Better late than never, eh? How is he?”

“He’s good,” I said, folding up the bed in a hurry. “His leg looks much better.”

Dad looked at me, pushed my hair off my forehead. “You all right? You seem …”

“I’m okay.”

“You don’t sound okay.”

“Will’s still upset about the accident.” I stared at Ian on the floor, unable to look anywhere else.

“It was a very rough thing to go through,” he said. “But he’ll come around.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Look, you’re giving this everything you’ve got,” he said. “Not everyone is as capable as you are, at your age, you know. If he doesn’t realize that …”

I escaped to the sink to rinse out glasses and lost it. Horrible, embarrassing, convulsing crying.

“Thea?” Dad walked toward me like he was walking toward a sick animal.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Really. What’s the matter? What’s wrong? What’s he doing?”

“Nothing.” I was afraid to tell him that Will thought we should give Ian up because I was afraid he’d agree.

“Honestly, this situation …,” he muttered, his voice trailing off. He started to lean against the pillar with his hand. Instead he bounced himself off the pillar and then smacked it.
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s not your fault.” He leaned his hands up against the counter, just like Will had done that morning, and we both faced the sink.

“I’m fine, Dad,” I choked. “It’s okay.”

“This isn’t working here.” A quick, embarrassed smile crossed his face as he raised his arms to encapsulate “here.” “You look so unhappy. Not just today. How long have you been feeling like this?”

“Since Ian’s accident, maybe before.”

“Look, just come stay with me for a while, Thea, okay? Take some time apart and figure out what’s what.”

It made sense, I realized, to be the first one to go. To get out first, like Mom did, before he could take Ian away from me. So I said okay, setting the last dripping glass on the rack.

part four

We got a cab with as much stuff as we could carry, and I sat holding Ian and watching the trees thin out as we made our way west toward Dad’s place on the river. Mom called when we were stopped at a light on Tenth Avenue.

“I can’t find my black leather belt with the rivets,” she said. “Do you have it?”

“No,” I said.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“I’ll double-check when I get a chance,” I said, moving Ian’s fingers away from his mouth. “I’m with Dad, on my way to his place, actually. Will and I had a fight.”

“Oh no …,” she groaned.

“What do you mean, oh no?” I asked. “You want us to stay together now?”

“I just … Wait, how did Daddy end up in the middle of all this?” she asked.

“He brought over a high chair,” I said.

“And?”

“And I agreed.”

“Agreed to what?”

“We just decided that I should stay with him for a while,” I said. “It’s not forever, it’s just a break.”

“You could have called me, you know,” she said, sounding strangely forlorn.

“I know, it just happened.” I couldn’t tell if she really wanted me to go home to her or if she was simply miffed that Dad had “won.” “Anyway, we’re here now, let me call you later.”

“Okay, don’t forget,” she said.

My room was dark, and as I walked in, I could see the mean queen, elongated by the light from outside, sneering at me from the ceiling. I dumped my bags onto my bed, thinking of all the times I’d dragged Vanessa with me to Dad’s to avoid being alone with him. Vanessa always lightened it up. She was so good that way. “Where are we going to find you a good woman, Mr. Galehouse?” she’d say. “What’s your type?”

Dad would wince and make a pathetic attempt to play along. “I don’t know, uh, Vanessa, your guess is as good as mine.”

She set him up once, with Jana, a very blond Czech masseuse. We told Dad she was a
physical therapist
, and that she worked with people with sports injuries.

“Honestly, it made me want a drink,” he said when I asked how it went. Vanessa’s mom said Jana thought he was cute but that they didn’t click and that Jana didn’t like that Dad didn’t throw his popcorn box into the garbage when they left the movie theater.

“So what? Who cares?” I said, thinking, How cruel. My poor, hopeless, littering father.

When Dad dated Nancy, the violinist, Vanessa and I had made fun of the way her nose twitched like a nervous rabbit’s, and the fact that she was twenty years younger than Dad and not even remotely hot.

“He’s handsome and rich,” Vanessa said. “He could have anyone he wants, and look what he does. Goes for the cellist with stringy hair. King of the midlife-crisis freaks, that one.”

I put my mess of underwear in the top drawer, before Dad could see it strewn all over the bed. I stacked Ian’s Pampers in a row on top of the dresser, thinking about all the nights sophomore
year Vanessa and I did our faces in the bathroom and drank vodka out of Diet Coke cans until I was spinning by the time we went out the door, only to stand in line at some club, get in and walk around, dancing and scream-whispering and drinking more vodka Diet Coke, until we stumbled home. Dad waited up at first, but by the end of sophomore year he was always in bed, Nancy long gone.

And now Vanessa was gone too. I had a flash of her slumped in the corner, drunk and sneering, the tinkling sound of bangles on her wrist as she rolled a joint. Dad tiptoed into my room with Ian’s Pack ’n Play. Ian kicked his legs at the ceiling from a blanket on the floor, and for a second I thought Dad wouldn’t see him and would step on him.

“He’s a happy little guy, isn’t he?” he said, hunching over at him. “You done with these?” He straightened up and pointed to the empty duffels.

I nodded and he picked them up and folded them until they were a quarter of their size, then lifted them to a spot in the hallway closet. The room was a large rectangle, one you could easily fit two double beds into, and I wondered what would happen when Ian got older, whether Dad would let Ian take the third bedroom or whether we’d still be in there like siblings. Or whether Will would come to his senses and rescue us. Dad tiptoed into the kitchen and I stayed in the bedroom as long as I could, feeling how slowly the minutes went by when you were stuck in a house with someone who believed you lived your life carelessly.

I called Vanessa and immediately started sobbing.

“I took Ian to Dad’s,” I said. “I left Florence’s.”

“Oh no,” she said.

“He wants to give him up for adoption,” I said.

“He what?” she shrieked.

“Can you believe that?” I said. I put my hand on Ian’s stomach as he squirmed and gassed on the floor. “He said that ever since the accident, he hadn’t felt right, or whatever. Vanessa, he can’t make me give him up, can he?”

“Jesus,” Vanessa said. “It’s like he has postpartum depression or something. Crazy. No, he cannot make you give him up. No matter what.”

“Really?”

Dad appeared in the doorway, looking like a timid puppy. “I was going to make some penne with pesto,” he said. “That sound okay?”

I nodded at him, trying to smile.

“Really. You’re a
great
mom.” Girls laughed and doors slammed in the background.

“What’s that noise?” I asked.

“Nothing, some idiotic tea party. Have I mentioned I hate it here?”

“Vanessa, what am I going to do?” I whispered.

“I’m so mad at him.” She sighed. “I’m sorry, Thea.”

I hung up, wondering if Will had gotten home yet, whether he realized I was gone. I couldn’t imagine speaking to him, so I sent him a text. Whenever I thought about what he had said, about giving Ian up, I felt sick to my stomach. “We went to Dad’s,” I typed. “Don’t do anything. Let us go.”

Out in the kitchen Dad blasted water into a pot and the showering sound filled the apartment, drowning out my shaky sense of connection to anything.

I woke the next morning at 7:22, stunned that Ian had slept through his 3:00 and 5:30 a.m. snacks. Maybe there was an upside to being at Dad’s after all. Maybe my room had secret powers. Maybe the mean queen on the ceiling had cast a spell on Ian. I tiptoed out into the foyer. Dad’s shoes were gone from under the chair and there was a note on the table and money:
Home tonight. Pick up some sirloins?
I envisioned another night with him and felt instantly done-in. There were Christmas cards from people who worked for Dad lining the chest by the wall. Young guys, all with short crew-cut hair, all smiling with three kids. I thought of how things had been a year earlier, when Ian was just an about-to-be-aborted grain of rice and Will and I lay on his bed at Columbia, studying for the SATs. I remembered Will’s face when I was going down on him after we napped. I missed his body, missed it wrapped around mine. John and Yoko. I looked at the marble bust of a woman on a pedestal in Dad’s corner, her arms, legs and head chopped off. I felt like her.

Ian woke up, his wails streaming hollowly down the hallway. I leaned over his Pack ’n Play and picked him up, wondering if it was possible for cheeks to be any chubbier, and held him above me, making him fly. Will’s voice blew through me like a cold gust.
“I want to give him up.”

I remembered what Vanessa said and tried not to think about anything else. “Let’s go get some yarn today,” I said to Ian. I nursed him for a long time, then bundled him up, cramming him into the sack and walking the fifteen blocks to Stash. We clanged the cowbells right after it opened.

Carmen popped up from behind some shelves by the window.

“Thea!” She beamed. Her hair was down and in a jagged, punk-looking part. I wasn’t sure, but I thought she’d put streaks in. “It’s been ages. How are you?” She crossed the store and peered into the sack. “And look who you’ve brought!”

“Hi, Carmen.” I was so happy to see someone outside of my normal cesspool of a life that I could have kissed her, and did. Ian lifted his head and kicked, also finding it hugely refreshing.

“Oh my God, what a butterball,” she said, giggling. “Wow.” She made an O face and Ian was transfixed, unblinking.

“So I finished an attempt at the bikini,” I said, pulling it out of the bag and laying it on top of a white shelf. “It took me long enough, right?”

“Well, I can imagine your hands are a bit tied.” Carmen said, still ogling Ian. I remembered the last time I was there, she said she’d been trying to get pregnant.

“Now I want to do one with teal and royal-blue zigzags,” I said. “It’s funny how you get these urges, right? I’m, like, possessed now. I have no intention of wearing it, but I
have
to make it.”

“I know what you mean,” she said, nodding vigorously, studying the bikini. “It’s like once the urge takes hold … But this one’s fantastic.”

“Really?” I asked.

“It’s fantastic,” she repeated. She picked up the yellow top and draped it across her white tank top. “I love how it turned out. It looks homegrown but in this very cool way. It looks like it would sell for five hundred dollars at Barneys.”

“You think?”

“Yes! Totally,” she said, strutting around with the top. “The Brazilians? Who are always waxing themselves silly? Some rich Brazilian would snap this up in a second.”

“They like skimpy stuff more, no? To show off their waxes?”

“Yeah, but I could see them, you know, wearing it a little stretched out, maybe even bunching up a side.” She bunched up her own fuchsia underwear, under her skirt. “The thing about crochet is that it drapes so nicely. It’s got the whole drape-hug thing going for it.”

“Maybe I should try and sell it,” I said.