Out of Nowhere (5 page)

“He’s tired,” Mom said, like that was the real reason for the baby’s wariness.

“It’s okay,” Jeff said softly. He leaned back a little to give him some space. “I knew he wouldn’t remember me. It’s been too long.”

She crouched down next to Tristan and kissed his forehead. “Baby, this is your daddy. We looked at his pictures the other day, remember? Can you say hi?”

Tristan’s eyes, still cautious, fastened on Jeff again and we all stayed perfectly still and quiet. Then, my baby brother wiggled out of Mom’s grasp, turned away from his dad, and ran directly over to me. His lifted his chubby little arms, grunting to be picked up.

“Wow, he can run,” Jeff said, shaking his head in amazement. “The last time I saw him he was just learning to crawl and now…he’s growing up so fast.”

Mom squeezed his arm and he looked over at her, his eyes all wet and shiny. Damn. I’d finally worked up the nerve to tell him to keep his meaty hands off my hair and quit calling me dumb nicknames, and then he had to go and do something sweet like cry. Happened every time.

“I brought dinner,” Mom said, cheerful again. She gave Jeff’s tree-trunk arm one last squeeze and then bent down to retrieve the plastic bags she’d brought home. “Chinese! Your favorite.”

She started toward the kitchen but Jeff stepped in front of her, pressing his lips to her forehead. “Thanks, Kim,” he said, his voice cracked with emotion. Mom put the bags down and used her palm to wipe the tears off his cheeks, just like she did to Tristan when he had a nightmare or hurt himself. Watching such an intimate exchange made me uncomfortable, so I carried the baby and the Chinese food into the kitchen to give them some privacy.

“Chee,” Tristan said, raising a drool-slicked finger toward the cupboard above the fridge, where we kept our cereal. I lowered him into his high chair and brought down the Cheerios, scattering a handful on his tray. Then I set about unpacking the Chinese food containers, getting out plates and cutlery, organizing the packets of sauces, setting the table. What were they
doing
out there? The food was getting cold. I started dishing chow mien and fried rice onto my plate, past caring about politeness. There was
luggage
in living room.

“Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m starving,” Mom said as she entered the kitchen a few minutes later, Jeff right behind her. When she saw me at the kitchen table, already eating, she didn’t bat an eye. “How is it?”

“Tastes like Chinese food from the mall food court,” I replied with a shrug, and shoved in another mouthful of beef and broccoli. Mom didn’t react to that either. She was too high on love. Or maybe lust…I’d never been sure which.

Jeff, dry-eyed now, reached down to pick up Alice, who had ambled into the kitchen at the smell of food. “What do you feed this cat, Rye Bread? Steak and chili dogs?”

“Cat food,” I said evenly. My cats weren’t fat, they were just…really fluffy. Well, maybe Alice did have a little belly flab problem.

“Mow mow,” Tristan said, pointing to the cat. He pointed at everything now—ants, clouds, cars, shadows—always with an inquisitive grunt if he didn’t know the word for them.

“Mow mow,” Jeff repeated with a grin. He held on to Alice, who looked less than pleased about being manhandled, and slowly approached the high chair. Tristan kept his eyes on the cat. Maybe he figured if his friend Alice liked this guy, he might be trustworthy after all. “This mow mow needs to start going to the gym with me, huh, Tristan?”

Tristan gazed up at him, fascinated. Eating had put him in a much more congenial mood. He wiggled in his chair, excited to be in such close contact to a restrained animal. Jeff recognized an opportunity when he saw one and moved as close as he dared, maneuvering poor Alice so Tristan could get his hands on her. Using my cat for bait, I thought. The nerve. But it worked. They were laughing together now, father and son, and I knew that soon my baby brother would be just as charmed by Jeff as my mom had been two years ago.

Dinner was a relaxed, upbeat affair, at least for everyone around me. I felt what I always felt when Jeff was around—extraneous. Left out. They never consciously made me feel that way, always tried to include me in conversations and outings, but it was plain to all of us that I did not belong in this picture. Mom had started fresh…a new man, a new baby, a new little family. And on the fringes was me, the same old Riley, daughter of a ghost, a constant reminder of a past she wanted to forget.

I thought of all those bags in the living room again. “So, Jeff,” I said, mushing a grain of rice into my plate. “Where are you staying tonight?”

He chomped into his fourth egg roll and glanced at Mom, who gave him a don’t-sweat-it look. Then she turned to me, already biting her lip in anticipation of my reaction. “Here, babe. He’s staying here.” The horror must have been evident on my face because she quickly added, “Just for the weekend. So Tristan can get used to him again.”

“The weekend,” I said with a snort. “That’s what you said last time, and that weekend turned into a month.”

Hearing my tone, Mom’s face quickly went from nervous to annoyed. Jeff kept his eyes on his food and Tristan, oblivious, was trying to determine how many cheese cubes he could fit into his mouth at one time.

“His apartment was being renovated, Riley. He had nowhere else to stay.”

Jeff raised his fork. “Look, I—”

“Yeah, and next time it’ll be something else,” I said, my voice rising to meet hers. “A fire or an ant infestation or…or something.”

“Watch yourself, young lady. Jeff is Tristan’s
father
and I don’t appreciate—”

“Ladies,” Jeff bellowed. Mom clamped her lips shut and Tristan stared at him, bits of cheese tumbling from his mouth. “Ladies,” he repeated in his normal voice. “If my staying here is going to cause a problem between you two, then I’ll gladly go back to my apartment.”

“Well, you do live there,” I said.

“Riley!” my mother barked. She put a hand on Jeff’s forearm. “Of course you can stay here. It appears my daughter has completely forgotten her manners and I’m sure she’d like to apologize to you for her rudeness.” Here, she glared in my direction.

Apologize. Right. I stood up and tossed my balled-up napkin onto the table. “Just don’t get pregnant again, okay, Mom?” I said, and then I gathered up my cat and left the room.

* * *

My mother and I didn’t speak to each other for the rest of the evening. I stayed in my room while she and Jeff gave Tristan a bath and put him to bed. I thought for sure she’d come and talk to me after that, so we could work everything out and watch
Grey’s Anatomy
together like we did every Thursday. But she didn’t. Instead, she and Jeff turned in early and I ended up watching TV alone.

When
Grey’s
ended, I called Eva and told her everything. She’d been there for me a lot during the last shack-up. This time, though, she seemed less empathetic.

“What exactly do you have against Jeff?” she asked in her typical straightforward fashion. “He stuck around after your mom got pregnant. He always comes back to her. He loves and supports Tristan. So what’s up with all the hatin’?”

“I don’t hate him, I just…I don’t know. You’ve met him. He’s one of those steroid-freak goofballs with more muscles than brains. And he leaves the seat up after he pees.”

“He takes
steroids
?”

“Well, no. But you know the type.”

I turned off the TV and then strolled around the quiet house with the phone, flicking off lamps and switches as I went. In the kitchen, I refilled the cats’ food and water dishes and set the coffee maker timer. “Maybe I’m just not ready for this,” I said. “Having a man around, trying to be my new dad.”

“It’s been five years, Ry,” Eva reminded me. “Your mom deserves to be happy again. And Jeff might not be the sharpest crayon in the box, but I’m sure he knows he could never replace your dad.”

“I know.” I sighed. “God, now I feel like shit. I acted like a total brat at dinner tonight.”

“Your mom will forgive you. That’s what parents do. Probably so we’ll forgive them when
they
screw up.”

“Yeah,” I said softly. I thought back to after Tristan was first born, when Mom developed post-partum depression and stayed in bed for three weeks straight while I took care of the house, the baby,
and
her. Losing my father was the scariest thing to ever happen to me, but thinking my mother would die next ran a close second. What would I do without her? She didn’t die, of course, and she finally went to the doctor to get help. Then she spent the next year or so trying to make it up to me. Those three awful weeks were the reason why she tried to be tolerant of my various eccentricities. Not just any mom would sit there and listen with a straight face while her teenage daughter confesses that she thinks she might have early-onset osteoporosis.

She’d been indulgent with me, for sure, but she wasn’t a pushover. Jeff was staying for the weekend whether I liked it or not. So in the interest of domestic harmony, I apologized to both my mother and Jeff the next morning.

“No worries,” Jeff said, tousling my hair. Because I was trying to be the bigger person, I didn’t fix it right away or complain. “You’ll grow to love me. They all do.”

Mom hugged me. “Thanks, babe. We both appreciate it. I hate it when we fight like that.”

“You’re mature for your age, Rye Bread,” Jeff told me. He was holding Tristan, who, as I’d predicted, had grown completely enamored within an hour.

“Well,” Mom said, smoothing my hair back into place. “She’s been through a lot, you know.”

I looked away. Jeff did know. Everyone knew. Even the mail carrier was probably well aware that I was home alone with my father when he dropped dead. Mom had major guilt issues about that too, because she’d been off at her Friday night book club that night, drinking wine and discussing bestsellers with her girlfriends. She wasn’t there when Dad got home from work, complaining of a headache as he trudged down the hallway to the bathroom, his skin ashy against the dark fabric of his paramedic uniform. She didn’t hear the rattle of the pill bottle when he shook out some Advil after his shower, washing them down with a swallow of beer. She didn’t smell the lasagna, plastic-wrapped and saved just for him, as it warmed in the microwave. She wasn’t watching TV in the living room just a few feet away when the sounds came—a thump, and then a sharp crack like something heavy and solid had hit the floor. She didn’t call to him and then get up and walk into the kitchen when he failed to answer.

She wasn’t there for any of those moments. All my father had was me, a terrified eleven-year-old girl with anxiety issues. But for some reason, I didn’t panic that night. After seeing my father lying there, not moving, his eyes open and fixed, I went straight to the phone and dialed 911. When the operator came on, I told her my name, my address, and my emergency. I calmly answered all her questions, staying on the line until the ambulance arrived just like she told me to. When the paramedics rushed in, their faces frozen in shock, I realized they were co-workers of my father’s. He’d left them a little over an hour before, to come home to me. Now one of them was leading me away, back into the living room, where I stayed until my mother burst through the door a few minutes later.

Everything after that was a blur. The ambulance ride, the hospital, the ugly doctor with the nose hair telling us that they did everything they could, but it was too late. My mother’s hand, clutching mine so tightly I could feel my bones rubbing together. The autopsy that told us what happened: a bleed in the subarachnoid space, the area between the brain and the tissue that covered it, resulting from a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. The funeral. Casseroles, stacked high in the fridge. My mother and me in her bed, TV on constantly because we were both afraid of silence. Going back to school, the look of pity on my teachers’ faces and the curiosity in the kids’ eyes when they got brave enough to look my way. Learning to live without a father who was far from perfect but who’d been there, always, to take care of me.

You did everything right
, people kept telling me. The paramedics, the doctors, my mom, the grief counselor I had to go to for weeks afterward…they all praised my maturity, my cool head. But I still felt responsible, like I should have done more. Maybe if I’d called 911 sooner, when he complained about the headache, he’d still be alive. When I said this to my counselor, she replied, “A headache isn’t usually a cause for alarm in a basically healthy twenty-nine-year-old man, Riley. You couldn’t have known.” No, I thought, but maybe I could’ve saved him if only I’d recognized the symptoms.

That was when I started researching. I became fascinated with the human body, how it worked, and what could go wrong with it. I read medical texts like other girls my age read fan magazines and romance novels. Nowadays, my default channel on the TV was still The Health Network, but when
Grey’s Anatomy
came on I gladly took a break from the real stuff to watch it with Mom. She liked the romantic drama aspect; I liked the cool surgeries.

That was what I wanted to be—a surgeon. Most people assumed I’d specialize in brain surgery after what happened to my father, but any kind of surgeon would do. I just needed to know what it felt like to stand over a person, expose their problem, and know exactly how fix it before it was too late.

Chapter Five

“Medium non-fat double shot mocha latte. No whip, no sprinkles, warm, not hot,” Lucas said over his shoulder as he whizzed by me on his way to the coffee urns.

I stood in front of the espresso machine, repeating the order over and over under my breath as I steamed the milk. “Warm not hot,” I muttered to myself. “It’s coffee, it’s supposed to be hot.” But we weren’t allowed to question the customers or make faces at their weird, long-winded requests. Rudy, our boss, didn’t force us to smile robotically or pretend to be perky at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m., but he drew the line at blatant discourtesy. We were better than those chain coffee shops, he liked to remind us. More unique. People didn’t expect puppies and rainbows when they walked in here. They came for the kickass coffee, delectable cookies, reasonable prices, and speedy, no-nonsense employees. Whatever he did worked because Jitters survived not one but
two
new Starbucks openings down the street.