Jonathan Tropper Read online

  “Zack!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wake up, man.”

  I rolled over and sat up, the torn steel of the roof slicing painfully into both of my knees, and I had to fight the powerful urge to flee the claustrophobic confines of the ruined car. I crawled over to Rael, whose face, I now saw, was bloodied and swollen, and his chest, fuck, his chest was a mess, and I had to just look away, because if I looked at his broken body any more, I would just collapse into a weeping mess.

  “Jesus, Rael,” I said.

  “I know,” he said, his voice frighteningly calm, almost detached. “It’s okay. I can’t feel anything.”

  At some point I managed to reach around to where I thought his waist should be, my trembling fingers seeking out his cell phone. His sweater was soaked with blood and the heat was emanating from him in waves. It took the ambulance forever to show up, and in that time Rael drifted in and out of consciousness, and I did my best to support his suspended head by sitting cross-legged under him, placing my shoulder under his head like a table. I think I prayed a little.

  “Tell Tamara I’m sorry,” Rael said.

  “Tell her yourself.”

  “Come on, Zack,” he said. “Don’t waste my time. Just tell her I love her, and I’m sorry. Will you do that for me?”

  “You want me to call her right now?”

  “No. I don’t want her to hear me like this.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell her.” I was pretty sure he couldn’t see the tears that had started to run down my face. He coughed up some more blood, which landed with a heavy thud, like it was something more solid than just blood.

  “Zack.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can feel myself dying. I can actually feel it.”

  “Just hang in there,” I said. “They’re on the way.”

  He shook his head. “I’m already gone.”

  “Fuck you! Just stay with me.”

  “Believe me,” he said, his voice starting to get weaker. “I’d love to.”

  “We’ll be hanging out in your house in a few weeks and you’re going to feel really stupid about this.”

  “Tell Sophie about me,” he whispered. “When she’s older, I mean. Tell her what I was like, okay? Tell her she made me happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Just please, try to stay with me.”

  “I didn’t see this coming,” he said, more to himself than me. “I never would have guessed this.”

  “Please, Rael. For fuck’s sake, just hang on.” I was weeping audibly now. In the distance, I could hear the sirens. “You hear that?” I said to him. “They’re here. Just stay awake!”

  The sirens stopped and I pictured the paramedics grabbing their fat orange cases and heading urgently up the embankment to find us.

  “Zacky.”

  “Raely.”

  He closed his eyes for the last time and smiled. “We should have gone to fucking Vegas.”

  Chapter 8

  Usually, whenever I leave Tamara’s house, I need Hope in the worst possible way. I run to her like a junkie to crystal meth, needing to believe that my reality is every bit as good as the insane fantasies I entertain in Tamara’s universe. Even before I’ve started the car, I’ve got one hand on my cell phone, ready to flip it open and say her name, to hear the reassuring steadiness of her voice on the other end, so firmly grounded in reality that it leaves no room for doubt, and to be whole again. “Hope,” I say at the voice prompt. I get her voice mail and leave her a message, not mentioning where I am, but telling her that I miss her and that she should call me. It’s six thirty, and I know she’s working late tonight.

  This is what happens. You’re in your car, driving slowly along the service road of the Henry Hudson Parkway as dusk turns into night and the headlights of passing cars are laying claim to the highway. (Ever since the accident, you will always choose service roads over highways.) You’re thinking about one woman while trying to reach another, and despite this apparent abundance of women, you feel lonely and desolate as hell, and, almost unconsciously, you drive to the house of a third, and the third woman is your mother. It has to be unconscious, because conscious, you’d know right away that it’s a big mistake. Somewhere, there’s a therapist sitting alone in his office, staring wistfully at his door, wishing for a patient like you.

  My mother and Peter live about a half mile away from Tamara, in the house I grew up in, the house from which Norm was ceremoniously ejected after the Anna incident. Said ceremony actually happened a few days after Norm was gone, when my mother brought the soiled linens from the crime scene down to the driveway and, using a can of lighter fluid, set them ablaze underneath our basketball hoop. The burn marks on the concrete became our foul line and out-of-bounds indicators.

  Peter’s on the front lawn raking leaves. When he sees me, his eyes light up and he waves with just enough abandon to reveal his condition. “Hey, Zack,” he yells. “What’s new and exciting?”

  “Hey, Pete,” I say, climbing out of the car. “How’s it hanging?”

  “A little to the left,” he says with a giggle. “Sweet ride.”

  “You know it.”

  He drops the rake and runs down the small slope of lawn to greet me, his arms dangling behind him in the awkward body language of the mentally impaired. His kiss is wet on my cheek, and his stubble leaves a mild burn as it scrapes my skin. He’s twenty-nine years old, short and stocky, bright in his own way, and as eager to please as a puppy. But no matter how happy Pete seems, no matter how well he lives in the aftermath of the chromosomal car wreck that took place during his creation, there’s still an undeniable element of tragedy to his life. Every day, for him, is like trying to play the piano wearing oven mitts. “I missed you,” he says, and I feel a stab of guilt and make a mental note to call him more and spend the random Sunday with him doing brotherly things. Loving the mentally challenged means never feeling completely guilt free.

  “I missed you too,” I tell him, throwing my arm around his shoulder as we walk back up the lawn. “That’s why I came to see you.”

  “How’s Hope?” he says.

  “She’s great. She said to say hi.”

  “Tell her I said hello.”

  “I will.”

  For just a moment, as I feel the cold, crisp air against my face, the wind against my brown suede jacket, the brittle multihued leaves being crushed under my rubber soles, I feel a surge of optimism, a sense of the wide range of possibilities. Autumn can do that to me.

  My mother is in the kitchen, scrubbing dishes in the sink. She has a perfectly good dishwasher, but to use it would be less of a dramatic sacrifice on behalf of Peter, so it’s not an option. Caring for Peter has never been enough for her. Over the years she’s developed a finely honed martyr complex, and she isn’t satisfied that her work is being done if some form of self-flagellation isn’t stirred into the mix. I was too young at the time to know whether this trend developed before or after my father’s final transgression, if it was an effect or a cause of their marital woes, but it’s certainly the reason she’s remained alone. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, or some misdirected Zen acceptance of her lot in life; I don’t know. I’m the last one qualified to figure out someone else’s psychoses. Suffice it to say that Lela King, generally speaking, is no barrel of laughs. My brother Matt wrote a song about her called “Saint Mom.”

  From the back, with her trim figure, jeans, and bleached blond hair, she looks like a much younger person. But then she turns to face me, wearing her customary expression of weary martyrdom, and in an instant I take in the creases below her eyes, the slack jaw, and the now ingrained purse of her lips, and I want to hug her and say something that will make her smile even as I struggle to repress the urge to flee this dreary brown kitchen, still decorated in the avocado wallpaper of my childhood, and never come back. My mother can do that to me.

  “Zack,” she says.

  “Hey, Ma.”

  Sh
e turns off the sink and holds her rubber-gloved hands theatrically away from me as I lean to kiss her cheek.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was just in the neighborhood,” I say.

  She gives me a stern look. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t give me nothing. What is it?”

  Just so we’re clear, my mother is not this bastion of maternal intuition, instantly gleaning, like a mother hen, that something’s wrong in the universe of her eldest and, on the surface anyway, least screwed-up son. Her middle son was rendered brain damaged by a freak genetic mutation and her husband fucked his secretary on her side of the bed, and she lives every day with the unshakable, theistic conviction that God isn’t through dicking with her. Some people say hello. Lela King says “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything’s fine, Mom. I’m just passing by.”

  “Is it Hope?”

  “Is what Hope?”

  “You’re not getting cold feet, are you? Because that’s perfectly normal.”

  “Ma.”

  “I’m just saying.” She shrugs and frowns. The Eskimos have a hundred words for snow; my mother has a thousand ways to shrug and frown. She could give seminars.

  My impending wedding looms totemic in her mind. As far as I know, she doesn’t have much of a social calendar, and the wedding has unaccountably stirred a long-dormant vanity in her. I know she’s been clipping pages from fashion magazines on gowns, hair, and makeup, has been preparing a virtual folio of options for herself. She claims she doesn’t want to embarrass me, but we both know that’s a crock. Since my engagement, she’s had her teeth professionally whitened, started wearing contact lenses again, and has been experimenting with different shades of blond hair coloring. I don’t want to discuss my mother in sexual terms, but the fact is she’s still a good-looking woman, slim and well proportioned, with soft skin and pale blue eyes, and your average sixty-year-old man wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers. My mother wants to look beautiful at the wedding; she wants to dance and laugh and charm people as she once did, a lifetime ago. And the idea that those desires are still alive somewhere in her should thrill me, but instead it just makes me feel guilty and sad, because it’s like she’s allowing herself only the briefest visit to the life she might have been leading if she hadn’t shut herself down so many years ago.

  “You want something to eat?” she asks me.

  “No, thanks,” I say. I’m already eyeing the door, looking for my opportunity.

  “We had spaghetti and meatballs,” Pete informs me, plopping down into a kitchen chair.

  “I’ve eaten already.”

  “You were at Tamara’s?” she asks me.

  “Yeah.”

  She is unable to conceal her disapproval. She finds it dangerously inappropriate for me to be spending time with Rael’s widow, but thankfully, she’s unwilling to navigate the terrain of his death with me, so she has no choice but to leave it alone.

  “Tamara’s a hottie,” Pete says enthusiastically.

  “Don’t be fresh, Peter,” she says.

  “She is,” he argues. “You could bounce a quarter off her ass.”

  “That’s enough!” my mother snaps at him.

  “Come on, Mom,” I say. “He’s just repeating something he heard. He doesn’t even know what it means.” But I do, and it takes me a moment or two to banish the image of Tamara’s naked backside from my mind.

  “It means she’s tight,” Pete says, and we both laugh while our mother sighs exasperatedly.

  “Listen,” I say. “I have to go.”

  “You just got here,” Pete complains.

  “Your brother’s very busy.” She says it to Peter, but it’s aimed at me, right between the eyes.

  “Matt’s playing at Kenny’s Castaways tonight,” I say. “You want to come?” My invitation doesn’t start out sincere, but suddenly it is, and I want badly for both of them to come, for Saint Mom to put on a dress and some makeup and for her and Peter to squeeze into Jed’s tiny Lexus with me and come into the city, for us to be like a TV family. I’ll put the top down, and Mom will laugh as her hair whips around her head, and Pete will close his eyes and plant his face in the wind, and we’ll sing along to an oldies station, and with the speed of the car and the open air, I’ll be able to love them without suffocating. But even as I think it, I know it will never happen. The last spontaneous thing my mother did was to set fire to her husband’s bedspread almost twenty years ago, and Pete is scared of crowds and tends to act up.

  “Tell Matt I said hi,” Pete says.

  “Will do,” I say.

  “I’ll pack up some meatballs for Matt,” my mother says. “He’s really much too skinny.”

  As I kiss her good-bye, she pulls me close, gently grabbing a fistful of my hair. “You’re not yourself,” she says softly, looking me in the eye.

  “Neither are you.”

  She nods, and offers up a wry, apologetic smile. “I’ve got my list of lame excuses,” she says. “What’s yours?”

  I shake my head. “I’m fine, Ma, really,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

  She kisses my cheek and then lets go of me. “I have to,” she says. “It’s the only thing you’ll let me do for you.”

  Pete steps out with me onto the darkness of the porch, and asks if he can drive the Lexus. I sit in the passenger seat as he pilots us slowly around the block, his hands at ten and two, signaling each left turn far in advance, his face a mask of rapturous concentration in the ambient glow of the dashboard. I’m filled with an unexpected wave of tenderness for him, and I resolve, as I do so often, to build a life for myself that will enable me to take care of Pete, to afford him all of the simple pleasures that, in his uncomplicated mind, make up the sum total of happiness. The advantage to Pete’s kind of happiness, as opposed to the average man’s, is that it’s more easily quantifiable and therefore, in my mind, more easily attainable.

  “Satch sometimes lets me drive his car.”

  “Satch Bowhan?”

  “Yep.”

  “What are you doing hanging out with that asshole?”

  Satch Bowhan, a year older than me, had been a holy terror when we were growing up, always getting suspended from high school for fighting or drugs, until he stopped going altogether. He always was strangely fascinated with Pete, and seemed to take a perverse pleasure in manipulating him in public, convincing him to drink from the toilet at the arcade or to pull down his pants and dance around the pizza store. Pete, always so eager to please, interpreted the attention as inclusion and was always more than happy to accommodate Satch, who called him his little buddy. I was in more than my share of fights defending Pete from the cruelty of our peers, but it was rumored that Satch carried a switchblade and had used it before, so whenever our confrontations started to verge on violence, I always backed down. When I was in college, I heard that he’d been arrested a few times and joined the Marines to avoid a jail sentence.

  “Satch is a good guy.”

  “Pete,” I say, turning to face him. “Satch is a lowlife. You should steer clear of him.”

  “He’s my friend. He gives me a discount at the hardware store. And he lets me drive his car sometimes. That’s all.”

  “He was always so mean to us when we were kids.”

  “Well,” Pete says, “he’s different now.”

  “Just promise me you won’t let him take advantage of you.”

  Pete turns to me. “I may be retarded,” he says. “But I’m not stupid.”

  “Eyes on the road,” I say, pointing to the windshield. “I know you’re not stupid, Pete. But I’m your older brother. It’s my job to worry about you.”

  Without being told, Pete knows to park in front of the neighbor’s house, to avoid discovery by our mother. “I know, Zack,” he says. “I love you.”

  “I love you too, Pete,” I say. He’s the only man I’ve ever been able to say that to. “You can drive me anytime.�
��

  “On the highway?”

  “Don’t push it.”

  “Ha!” He laughs and bangs the steering wheel with his hand. I’m about to open the car door when he says, “You still sad about Rael?”

  I lean back in my seat, looking at him inquisitively. “Yeah,” I say. “Sometimes.”

  “Me too,” he says. “He was always real nice to me, you know. He didn’t act like I was retarded or anything.”

  “He loved you a lot.”

  “Tamara would make me cookies.”

  “She still will,” I said. “She just doesn’t feel like making cookies yet, you know?”

  “I know,” Pete says, staring down at his lap. “I used to wish that you and me would live with Rael and Tamara forever. The four of us, you know?”

  I can feel a lump forming in my throat. “That would have been nice,” I say, although his words hurt me in ways I can’t begin to understand.

  He looks up at me. “Tomorrow’s inventory after work,” he says brightly. “I make an extra thirty dollars.”

  “That’s great.” I’ve always envied Pete’s ability to snap out of a funk at a moment’s notice. He works in the stockroom at Bless My Soles, a children’s shoe store on Johnson Avenue. “You’ve been working there awhile already, huh?”

  “Four years,” he says proudly. “Mr. Breece says I’m irreplaceable.”

  “That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”

  “Ha!”

  “I’ll see you soon, okay, Pete?”

  “On Saturday.”

  “Saturday?”

  “Your engagement party, stupid.”

  “Oh. Right.” For a moment there, I’d forgotten.

  I watch Pete as he ambles awkwardly back up the lawn, my stomach churning with the pure, pained love reserved only for him, pulling away only when I feel the tears threatening.

  I’m in the Sunoco station throwing the Tupperware of meatballs into the garbage when my cell phone rings. I can see on the caller ID that it’s Craig Hodges, no doubt calling to find out if I’ve made any progress on the Nike debacle since this morning. He’ll hound me until this thing gets resolved to his satisfaction. I have no further information for him, so I let the call go to my voice mail. If he thought about it, Craig would realize that I couldn’t possibly have any news for him yet, since China is just waking up now, but Craig has no mind for the details. Like the rest of us, he just desperately wants to be told that come what may, everything’s going to be all right.