People Who Knew Me (25 page)

“I wanted to talk to you,” I say. “Grab me a beer.”

I take a seat at one of the tables. Al and I never sit at a table. We usually sit at the bar. He knows something is up.

“Are you quitting on me?” he asks, sitting across from me and sliding my beer across the table.

“No,” I say.

“You can take time off. I told you that.” He's gruff, prematurely defensive about whatever I have to say.

“It's not that,” I say. “I'm doing okay on the work front.”

He lets out a big exhale, seemingly from the bottom of his large gut, where it's been sitting for years.

“Do you remember when I was in that accident on the 405 and we had that talk?”

Al is in his late fifties. He claims to be an old man with a terrible memory, but I know he remembers.

He nods, slowly and deliberately.

“Do you remember what you said about Claire, about watching her?”

He nods again.

“It's just that, well, the chemo wasn't working. I'm on something new now, but it's not exactly a sure thing.”

He narrows his eyes, like he's trying to focus his vision.

“It's actually really far from a sure thing,” I say. “Like, I could die. Possibly.”

He takes a long swig of beer and stiffens his posture.

“If you're asking if I'll still watch Claire, I will,” he says.

I want more specifics, though. Where will he watch her? At his shitty apartment in the Valley? How will he make sure that she doesn't become a drug addict or a homeless person?

“You will?”

“Course,” he says.

He must see the doubt on my face, because he exhales another long-trapped breath and tells me a story I don't expect:

“I had a daughter once, you know,” he says. I don't know, so I just sit and listen.

“Back in Tennessee. Had a girlfriend, Genie. I was doin' lots of drugs. Hard stuff. Genie got pregnant, had the baby. Little girl named Sophie. Genie kept sayin' she was gonna leave and take Sophie with her if I didn't get my act together. I didn't think she would, but, you know.”

“Jesus, Al.”

“No idea where they went. I tried looking for a while. Used my last pennies to hire a private investigator. No luck. Maybe Genie changed her name.”

Like me. Just like me.

“Genie's a strange name, ain't it?” he says.

He looks up at the ceiling.

“I don't know what to say.” I really don't.

“You don't gotta say anything,” he says. “You know, I came out to California after I gave up lookin' for Genie. I met JT at this biker bar, started talking about how I wanted to open up my own bar. JT loaned me the money, on pure faith. I paid him back and all. Years later, he mentions the lady renting his cottage needs a job. See how it all lines up?”

Al is one of those everything-happens-for-a-reason people. Who knew?

“Life is funny,” I say, though “funny” isn't the right word.

“Anyway, Claire is like a daughter to me,” he says. “That's what I'm sayin'.”

He sniffles, pulls a paper napkin from the dispenser to wipe his nose.

“Thank you,” I say. I reach across the table, place my hand over his. He glances away, at the bar.

“I'm not dying tomorrow,” I say. “That much I know.”

“You sure as hell better not,” he says, turning back to me. Whatever tears he was about to cry are gone.

I don't hang around because I can tell Al wants to get back behind the bar, his barricade of sorts. There is sheer relief on his face when the after-work crowd starts to roll in. I should get home to Claire anyway. We need to make up, resume our road trip discussions.

*   *   *

When I pull into the driveway, I hear music. Loud music. And then I hear laughter, the laughter of multiple teenagers. Is Claire having a party?

“Claire,” I shout when I open the front door. The music is blaring. It smells like pizza. There's loose cash on the little table next to the door, change from the pizza guy, probably.

“Claire!”

The teenage laughter stops abruptly, as does the music. They are outside, in the backyard. When I approach, one of them says, “Holy crap.”

It's Claire and a trio of friends. I recognize Heather and Riley, the girls, gangly and awkward and pretty at the same time. And there's a boy. The infamous Tyler. I've seen him walking into school with Claire. How did they even get here? Were their parents stupid enough to drop them off on the pretense of a study session? There are two empty pizza boxes, lids flung open. Three paper plates flutter around on the ground. And there, in Claire's thirteen-year-old hand, is a bottle of wine.

“What the hell are you doing?” I ask.

I've never taken this tone before. I've never had to. Claire knew I was coming home. She wanted to be caught. She looks smug, pleased with herself. Judging by the terror in the other kids' wide eyes, they did not expect to see me. They have been rendered speechless.

“Sorry, Mom, just having some fun,” Claire says flippantly. Heather, Riley, and Tyler look at her with something like awe.

I grab the bottle from Claire's hand and register that about three-quarters of it is left. It's not that she wanted to get drunk; she wanted to misbehave.
She's just acting out
.

“Guys,” I say, giving each of the other kids a hard stare. “Out.”

They practically stumble over each other on the way inside.

“Call your parents before I have to,” I shout after them.

Claire and I stand five feet apart, facing each other, like in a Wild West showdown.

“Claire,” I say, “this is ridiculous of you.”

“Oh,
I'm
the ridiculous one?” she says.

“You are, in fact.”

We sound like two petty teenagers. She is allowed, considering she is a petty teenager. I need to get ahold of myself.

“
You
are freaking ridiculous,” she says.

I hate that word—“freaking.” It makes me cringe that my daughter is on the verge of swear words, possibly past the verge when she's not around me.

“And dying on me is pretty freaking ridiculous,” she says.

So that's what this is about.

“Fair enough,” I say.

She rolls her eyes.

“Whatever,” she says, and stomps inside.

I follow her, leaving the pizza boxes and paper plates outside. I'll get them later. Through the window by the front door, I see the other kids waiting on the driveway. They look petrified. I could get them all grounded for this. I won't, but they don't know that.

“Claire, come on, we have to talk about this,” I say.

She stops in her tracks, turns around, arms crossed against her chest. She looks so small to me, so young, not at all like someone who could face life without her mother.

“Is talking going to change anything?” she says.

I'm quiet.

“That's what I thought.”

She turns around again and marches to her room. She doesn't slam the door, which I take as a passive invitation to follow her.

She's lying flat on her bed, staring at the ceiling. She still has those adhesive-backed, glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to her ceiling. I'd put them there when she was nine or ten, when it was cool.

I sit on the edge of her bed and put my hand on her thigh.

“We don't know for sure if I'm dying,” I say quietly.

She scoffs.

“And if I am, I'm sorry.”

She can't scoff at my apology. She just stares at the ceiling.

“You have to know that I will endure decades of chemo if it means I can stay with you,” I say. “I would do anything to stay with you.”

I feel the tears coming, that just-ate-something-sour feeling in my throat.

“I talked to Al. He loves you, honey. You won't be alone if I'm gone. He will watch over you,” I say, in hopes that this vague plan gives her equally vague comfort.

She snorts.

“Al would be an awful mother,” she says. She's amused at the thought.

My lip quivers on its way to a smile.

“God-awful,” I say.

“Can you imagine him buying tampons?” she says.

I can imagine this, actually. I can see his big, burly body walking down the aisle of a drugstore, shameless and committed to meeting his pseudo-daughter's every need. Claire hasn't even had her first period yet. I got my first around my fourteenth birthday—“late bloomer,” my mother said. Claire will probably get hers soon. At least I will be around for that milestone.

“If I have to leave you, let's hope it's after you learn to drive, so you can buy your own tampons,” I say.

She takes a deep breath.

“When do you meet with the doctor again?”

“Next week,” I say.

She finally looks at me with those big blue eyes of hers. Her father's eyes.

“Just be honest with me, okay? From now on?”

I nod and lie next to her, wrapping one arm around her body.

Honest. It might be the most difficult request she's ever made.

 

TWENTY-ONE

Exactly a week after that restraint-filled night I spent with Gabe, I gave him every part of me, without hesitation.

“You're getting me too wound up,” he said, as we lay together, bodies primed.

“I'd worry if I didn't.”

“I've wanted this too long to control myself.”

“Please don't control yourself,” I said. Because, really, despite the mysteriously popular idea that a woman wants a man who can last for hours and tame his desires indefinitely, the ultimate compliment is a man who can't.

And that's how it started. I assumed it wouldn't last. But then it did. For a year. I, Emily Morris, was having an affair. It sounded so absurd—an affair.

Gabe started coming to my place because I didn't want to leave Bruce alone. That first time I spent the night at Gabe's, I came home to a puddle of pee in the kitchen and a guilty-but-mad look in Bruce's brown eyes. His food bowl was empty and a pillow on the couch was torn open, its white, fluffy insides strewn across the apartment. I told Bruce I'd never do it again. I promised. He smelled me more than usual, as if inspecting for the scent of another man, prepared to take his findings back to Drew. Man's best friend and all. But I think he was as resentful of Drew as I was. This would be our secret.

For the first couple months, the sleepovers were once or twice a week. We'd go somewhere for dinner after work, then end up at my apartment. He planned ahead, brought suits in dry-cleaning bags for the next day. It felt wrong, and thrilling in its wrongness. We arrived at the World Trade Center together, in his BMW, but made sure to leave five minutes between our entrances into the Berringer office. We did the same when we left at night, sending conspiring emails that read,
Okay, you go first. See you in a few
. Still, people at work had to see us together sometimes. Nobody ever said anything, of course. It's amazing what people will just shrug off.

Three months in, Gabe was spending every night at my apartment—except for Saturdays, when Drew came home. We didn't talk about Drew, didn't utter his name. We just agreed that weekends would be our time apart from each other. On all the other days, we played house—cooked meals, watched TV, walked Bruce in the park. If people recognized me out with a man they knew wasn't my husband, I didn't care. Maybe I wanted to get caught. Maybe I wanted a nosy neighbor to say something to Drew. I fantasized about the confrontation. Drew would yell and I would run out of the apartment dramatically and call Gabe, telling him he had to come get me. I would be the quintessential damsel in distress. Gabe would rescue me, take me back to his place in the Village, and we would stay there together until the end of time.

But that confrontation never happened. I began to think that even if a nosy neighbor did tell Drew, he wouldn't believe it. Even if he walked in on Gabe and me, he would pretend he didn't see anything. He had illusions to keep intact, for his own sanity.

Drew and I, we acted normal. Or what had become our normal. We talked on the phone during the week. I told him about work. He told me about his mom. She had gotten progressively worse. She couldn't walk without someone practically carrying her. She wore diapers day and night; she got one urinary tract infection after another from sitting too long in her own urine. Drew had taken her to the hospital twice for pressure sores on her back, the result of reclining in the same position on the couch for hours a day. When I saw her—on those weekend visits—I was convinced she knew I was cheating on her son, that her lack of smile upon seeing me was something personal. Then I realized it was just that her face had gone completely slack, the muscles not strong enough to hold any kind of emotion. She didn't have a smile for anyone, not even Drew. Her eyes were vacant, sinking farther and farther into her skull. Drew told me she'd asked for Dr. Kevorkian and he wasn't sure if she was joking or not.

We didn't have sex, and we didn't talk about why. I was sure Drew wanted to believe it was temporary, that all this would resolve itself in time. Just as he saw no point in me complaining about our circumstances with his mom, he probably saw no point in him complaining about our lack of intimacy.
These are just the cards we were dealt
. We weren't angry with each other. We were pleasant. I was in a better mood with Gabe in my life. Drew didn't question the improvement. He just seemed relieved we weren't fighting.

Gabe and I didn't talk about a future. He tiptoed around the issue on a few occasions, usually while lying in bed. He wanted me to leave Drew. That much was clear. He didn't outright ask, though, not at first. I placated him, told him I just wanted to be in the moment, enjoy each other without too many questions or expectations. “What are you waiting for?” he asked. I didn't know for sure. “When it's right to leave him, I'll know” was all I said. I thanked him for being so patient. He just said, “You give me no choice in the matter.”