A Necessary End (17 page)

Since Michael, though, I don't enjoy Summer in the same way. I think it's because he makes me so acutely aware, all the time, that bad things can happen to good people. Now I watch her show because I have to keep a step ahead, because I want to know what people are capable of, because—as Summer says—knowledge is power. Since I don't leave the house, Summer has become my friend.

“This is Joy Ellison,” Summer says, indicating the screen behind her. I stare at the picture: a woman with chin-length dark hair, head thrown back playfully. The photo was taken by someone she loved, or was at least sleeping with. I always feel a tiny bit disturbed when Summer presents her latest missing woman, but this time, it's way
stronger. I have Michael now, and so much more to lose than ever before.

“Joy's thirty-one years old,” Summer continues, “and was last seen in Denver, Colorado, five months ago. Yes, that's right, five months ago. No one reported her missing until now.” She looks into the camera meaningfully. “Her estranged husband, Brad Ellison”—the screen shot changes to a photo of a man with scraggly facial hair and a baseball cap holding a beer can aloft—“just reported her missing.”

Oh, Brad, I think. You're in for it. You're about to get the Summer Jackson treatment.

Summer explains that Joy wasn't working and had no local friends in Denver. Brad was living in another state, doing “seasonal work” (another meaningful look from Summer). “Apparently,” she says, “he and Joy were out of touch. None of her family members had heard from her either, not for months.

“Five months, to be precise. The police are estimating that she disappeared in early December. That's when she stopped paying rent, failed to pay any utility bills, and there were no more posts to Facebook, where she'd previously been an active user. According to her landlord, people ‘skip town all the time.' So the potential crime scene has been cleaned out and rented to a new tenant.” What that means to me: no clues, no forensic evidence. Does Summer even think about what kind of life leads to the situation she's describing—no job or friends or anyone to care about you, no one to even report you missing for months? No, Summer's too busy focusing on her prime suspect, the husband.

I have this crazy thought: Could anything go so wrong in my life with Gabe that he'd try to get rid of me? I know I'd never do it to him—well, never say never, but really, I never would. Gabe knows he couldn't shake me off easily; he couldn't just walk away and leave. So would he ever think the way out is to make me disappear?

I obviously need to get out of the house, if I'm having thoughts like this.

But I don't feel crazy, that's the funny thing. I'm crazy for Michael, and terrified of losing him, and yet, I'm also somehow more clear-eyed than I've ever been.

All these years, somewhere inside me, I've felt a small flicker of fear at the remote possibility of losing Gabe. Strangely, it's absent.

Joy's face is back on the screen, with Summer promising to follow the story closely and keep us updated. I'll be watching.

R
emember to support his head,” Adrienne says, admonishing me, “always!”

You'd think I was swinging the kid around like a caveman with a club instead of trying to hold him. Trying to “bond,” as Adrienne calls it. But bonding is damn near impossible with her hovering and screeching.

Of course he starts crying. What else is he going to do when he sees Adrienne all freaked out?

It makes me want to hand him back all the same. He doesn't want to be held, I don't need to hold him. We're in agreement, Michael and me.

I can't get used to that name, and it's stenciled everywhere. I've got a burp cloth over my shoulder, and there's a blob of something on top of the “ha.” Ha is right. My life's become a cosmic joke.

“Take him back then,” I say. “You know you want to.”

“No,” she says. “I want you two to bond.”

“It doesn't seem that way,” I mutter. I thrust him into her arms and walk out of the room (I can't get used to calling it a nursery, either).

I go out to the garage to shoot pool, but when I pick up the stick, I find my hands are shaking. I sit down with my back against a leg of the table and try to calm down. Any minute now, she'll come looking for me. She'll tell me she's sorry for being so preoccupied. Obsessed. She'll tell me I'm the one she loves more than anything.

The first time she said that, I was nineteen, and she was sixteen. She was dating Michael. Months later, he was dead. Sometimes I still feel like I killed him. Adrienne says that's crazy, we're all responsible for our own actions, I wasn't the one who slashed Michael's wrists (vertically—if it had been horizontal he might still be here). She says I couldn't have known. But she's wrong. She couldn't have known; I should have.

When my mother died, he was only four. Sure, she didn't choose to leave, but how can a four-year-old get that? She's here and then she's gone and he's on his own.

I tried to look after him. He was a scrawny, pasty kid who kept to himself, wasn't any good at sports or at socializing. He was destined to get picked on. I was good at all that stuff, and I stood up for him. No one was going to bully my little brother, not while I was around.

The problem was, I couldn't always be around. And Michael didn't necessarily want my help. One time, he mumbled something about how if I didn't talk back to those kids, they'd just leave him alone, like I was making him a target.

Maybe he was right, I don't know. I just know he was a motherless kid with a father who'd checked out and a bitch for a stepmother, and who was going to look after him if I didn't?

I think he resented that things came easy to me. I didn't have to study much to get good grades or practice much to be on varsity teams. I didn't have to try hard to get girls.

Michael didn't seem to try at much, though. If life was a competition, he was going to sit it out on the sidelines. His big interest was watching people and drawing them (sometimes realistically, sometimes in caricature). That's how he first got together with Adrienne.
Once she realized he was sketching her, she came over and demanded to see it. It must have been good, because she became his first girlfriend.

I was proud of him, getting a hottie like that. But that was about all I thought of her. She was a junior in high school, and I was working my way up at the Chevy dealership. I thought I'd go to college, just as soon as I figured out what I wanted to study. I was smart enough for it. Life was nothing but possibility.

Adrienne was Michael's girl, and it didn't even occur to me that I'd mess that up for him. I was glad he finally seemed happy.

I can still see them together on the living room couch: Michael in his thermal with a band T-shirt over it and ripped jeans, and Adrienne in her tight tops and tiny skirts. They didn't make sense, on a visual level. They didn't even belong at the same lunch table. But she was so sexual, and he was learning that he could be, too. One day, I caught them fucking on that couch, and I told Michael afterward that it was cool, nothing to be embarrassed about, but why didn't he just use his own room? He said that the couch turned Adrienne on more.

So she was doing everything she could to make sure I'd notice her, and eventually, I did. Adrienne's hard to ignore.

In my defense, I never even flirted with her. Because Michael was my brother, and he was finally happy, and I was not going to ruin that.

But of course, I did ruin it.

Adrienne says I never stole her. She's not property.

But I saw Michael's reaction when she flirted with me, how hurt he was. I'd spent my life trying to protect him, and then when it counted, I let him down. It said something about me. When I had nothing to lose, I could stand up for him. Put a good-looking woman into the mix, and then it's every man for himself.

He wasn't a man, though. He was a sixteen-year-old kid, and I was his brother. Because of me, he's in the past tense.

Adrienne's not coming to the garage. She's probably still sitting in the nursery. If it's because she thinks I'm sulking and wants me to
work it out on my own, that's one thing. But I've got a feeling she's barely registered that I'm gone.

Michael, you win. You're finally the one she wants more than anything. I deserve that.

By the time I go back into the house, it's after midnight. Adrienne's asleep in our bed for the moment, though the kid will probably howl in an hour and she'll leap to her feet, eager to be of service. So now's my chance.

I knock on Leah's door. I have no idea what time she's going to bed these days. Sometimes we all eat dinner together, but it's often in silence. I feel like I don't know anyone in this house anymore.

I knock again, a little more insistently, and I hear a faint, “Come in.” When I push the door open, Leah's sitting on the air mattress, her back against the wall, with what look like two megaphones attached to her areolae, milk dripping into the attached plastic bottles. A quilt puddles around her lower body.

“Sorry, sorry,” I say, my face crimson as I spin around.

I hear her laughing. Did I imagine the “come in”? Or did she say it, not caring what I'd see? Or wanting me to see?

“It's okay,” she says. “I'm just about done anyway.” I realize the sound I've been hearing is a gentle suction—her breasts being vacuumed out—and now she's turning it off.

“This was a bad idea anyway.” What I mean is, I shouldn't be here to vent about Adrienne to Leah, of all people. But Leah, of all people, would get it.

“No, let's talk. I've missed you.” She sounds so genuine, and those are just the words I've been aching to hear. Wrong woman, mind you, but sometimes you have to take what you can get. “You can turn around now.”

She finishes tying her robe. I try not to look at her tits. They're inescapably real, after what I just witnessed. I'm hard for the first time in a long while.

She pours one bottle of milk into the other and tells me to wait
while she puts it in the refrigerator. I notice how at ease she seems, like men are in here every night at the tail end of her pumping session.

“Have a seat,” she says, patting me on the shoulder on her way out. The only place to sit is her air mattress, the blankets askew. The generalized feeling of wrongness becomes more specific. I'd be sitting on another woman's bed, with that woman in just her robe. Adrienne definitely wouldn't like that.

Adrienne didn't care that I spent the last hour by myself in the garage. She's not too concerned with my whereabouts these days.

I sit.

Leah returns and gets under the covers. Her robe has loosened to hint at cleavage. Accidental? I can't tell. But there's no way to miss that she's getting her body back in a big way.

She notices my noticing, and smiles.

I should go. She's getting the wrong idea. I'm just here to talk about my wife. But isn't that how things often start?

Not this time. I love my wife.

Isn't that what they all say?

I love my wife, but she doesn't give me enough attention. I love my wife, but does she still love me?

“I feel like a fucking cliché,” I tell Leah.

She nods, like she gets it completely. I don't see how she could, but it feels good anyway. I'll take even a pantomime of understanding right now.

“She's in love with that baby,” I say. “It's like she can't think of anything else. It's not normal.”

“It's probably not normal that I barely think about him. What's normal, anyway?”

“Not this arrangement, that's for sure. Hal knows his shit.”

She laughs, though I wasn't joking.

“Is this working out for you? Living here, I mean.”

“It's going to.” The set of her chin, that determined tone—it's so Adrienne that I actually feel like crying. I miss her that much.

“I don't know who she is anymore.” Suddenly, I'm pissed. “She says she wants me to be closer to the kid”—your son, that's actually what she said but I can't bring myself to repeat that—“and then all she does is undermine me. She's got to be the authority on all things Michael. She criticizes the way I hold him, the way I change a diaper.”

“You don't change diapers.”

“Not anymore, I don't.”

I know this is off-the-charts disloyal, and I should feel guilty for venting to Leah, but I'm too angry with Adrienne to care. I've been angry for weeks. But I can't tell her that. What would I say? “I'm pissed that you love our son so much”? “I'm pissed that he doesn't feel like our son, but like my brother reincarnated to screw me”?

“Are you okay?” Leah asks. Her hand ventures out from under the covers and inches toward me, serpentine.

I move my hand away. I'm not that pissed at Adrienne.

“I'm just trying to help. You seem like you're falling apart.” She sounds defensive. “You're the one knocking on my door.”

“You're right.” Now that I'm here, I don't know what I hoped to find. She's offering me compassion, but apparently, that's not what I was in the market for. I got to see her tits, but that wasn't it either.

I can't meet her eyes. I feel ashamed, but of what? Of needing at all, maybe.

“I'm losing her,” I say.

“No, you're not.” A sage look crosses her face. “Change more diapers. Rock him to sleep. Let her see you trying. That's all she wants.”

“Has she been talking to you about this?”

“No. But who wouldn't want that? You're supposed to, like, be a father.”

Supposed to be. The words beat on me like a hailstorm. “But what if I can't?”

She's got no answer for that.

“Let's play poker,” she says. “Spot me two hundred dollars.”

It's the best offer I've had in a while.