A Necessary End (21 page)

I should feel more, seeing her. But with the life she lived, of course this day would eventually come. I'm following the developing story with a strange mixture of avidity and detachment. Is it because Michael is consuming all my emotion and I can't spare any for Joy?

Summer is interviewing Brad Ellison, who is apparently too stupid to realize that he's the prime suspect. Has he never watched the show before? Sure, she's being nice now, taking it easy on him, but that's just to get him talking. Later on, she'll use clips from the interview to dismantle his story. There's nothing she loves more than using a husband's own words against him.

“So you were in Arizona, doing day labor?” Summer confirms.

“Right.” He's in his early thirties, and his hair is shellacked with gel. He's wearing an ill-fitting button-down shirt. You can tell he's used to T-shirts and jeans and baseball hats. He seems thrown to even be sitting across the table from a woman as beautiful as Summer Jackson. She must have flown him in for this, instead of just doing it by video. That means she really plans to nail him later.

“How long had you and Joy been separated?”

“Going on a year.”

“But you still love her, I imagine?” Summer uses her most syrupy, sympathetic voice.

“Yeah, I love her. She was a great girl. I mean, she's a great girl.” Uh-oh, that slip is going to cost him. “We just weren't getting along, is all. I always wanted to get back together with her someday. I thought that if money wasn't so tight . . .”

“You fought a lot over money?”

“We didn't fight a lot.” He shifts in his seat, starting to wonder if Summer is his ally after all. He couldn't have watched a few episodes on YouTube? “But when we fought, yeah, it was about money. Joy got stressed out a lot. It would put her in a bad mood.”

“Whose idea was it to separate, Brad?”

“We both thought it was a good idea. My buddy told me that I should come to Arizona, that the work didn't dry up as much in the winter, so I moved there.”

“You actually moved there in the summer, though, isn't that right?” He nods. “Did you and Joy talk often in the beginning, and then it petered out? Or did you fight and decide not to talk for a while?”

He obviously realizes she's emphasizing fighting, but there's nothing he can do about it. “We decided not to talk for a while. That's why I didn't know when she went missing.”

“Do you think it's possible that she just took off? That she started a new life?”

“Maybe. She had a lot of dreams.”

He's clearly lying.

“Or,” Summer asks, “do you think someone did this to her? Someone made her disappear?” Long pause.

Now's when he's supposed to get misty. But he can't manage to do it. “I think someone might have hurt her, yeah. That's why I'm here. I want to ask people out there to come forward with information.
I know a lot of time's passed, but if you know something, you need to tell the police. You need to help us find her.”

Summer leans in toward him. “You know that with so much time passing, the chances of her being alive—they get slimmer.”

“But you find people with your show, don't you? I mean, that's what you're doing here, right?” Oh, Brad, that kind of naïveté is going to be your downfall.

Summer affects a modest look. “I do my best, Brad.”

T
hat stuff is amazing,” I say as I walk in the room. “I can't even smell it.”

Leah pauses, holding her paintbrush high in the air, but she doesn't turn. “The consistency isn't great, but I can work with it.”

“Spoken like a true artiste.”

I'm still looking at her back, but I can see by the way she stiffens that my comment was not well received. Seems like I can't say anything to a woman today without her bristling. Of course, my behavior at the veghead restaurant was pretty extreme, even before I polished off a $150 bottle of vino. Come to think of it, the wine only improved me, but by then, Adrienne was about done. She was staring fixedly at the view—by which I mean, the kid.

I sit down on the floor near where Leah is working, carefully balancing the glass of bourbon on my knee. “It's going to be beautiful,” I tell her. “That's really a special thing you're doing for him.”

“Thanks. Can you even tell what it is yet?” She sounds slightly challenging.

I squint at the wall. There are swirls of green and lavender,
painted with great care, but no, I can't exactly see it yet. Adrienne and I already approved the sketch, which is a slight variation on the tattoo Leah plans to have someday. It's going to be an enchanted forest. I take a guess: “That's the peacock tree.”

She turns, her face as soft and open as I've ever seen it. “Really? You can see it already?” I nod, because when a woman is looking at you like that, what else can you do? It's the most alabaster of lies.

She tilts her head, paintbrush extended, as she studies the wall.

“You look pretty when you work,” I say. She makes no response. “I know the paints were expensive. I can reimburse you.”

I see her stiffen again. “If I wanted you to pay, I would have asked you for the money. This is a gift.”

“Thank you.”

“A gift for Michael.” The subtext: not for you, or for Adrienne. It stings. I mean, I knew she wasn't going to be handing out presents to Adrienne any time soon, but I thought she and I were friends. She was the one who said it first, that day we went to Lands End. She said a lot of things that day.

I take a long sip of the bourbon. Calm down, I tell myself. Only an asshole would use any of that against her.

“Well,” I say, “thank you on behalf of the kid.”

“You need to stop that.” She's dabbing a bit of darker green around the edge of one of her swirls. “His name is Michael. You suggested it, now get used to it.”

In the past, when she's admonished me, it's been flirty. Not this time.

“Or give him a nickname,” she continues. “But ‘the kid' just sounds . . . I don't know, it sounds shitty. It sounds like he's just an annoyance to you.” She spins and regards me. “Is that all he is?”

I find I can't meet her eyes. The truth is, he's a lot more than just an annoyance.

My problem could be solved right now. I tell Leah that this was all a mistake, I thought I could be a dad but I just can't, and she'll
have to look for new adoptive parents. It occurs to me, for the first time, that she's still assessing Adrienne and me for fitness as parents, and that she loves Michael. This year isn't only about Leah's getting her feet under her in a new city but about making sure that she picked the right parents for her son. Maybe she loves him more than she expected to. Maybe she's having second thoughts.

But if I confess the truth to Leah, if I tell her the whole story of my brother, and she hightails it out of here with the kid under her arm, Adrienne's going to know. I would have destroyed what she thinks is her greatest chance at happiness, her chance at family. There's no way she'd ever get past that.

“I love him,” I tell Leah, knowing I have to make it true. For Adrienne's sake, and for my own. “I'm just having a hard time showing it.”

Leah studies me an extra few seconds. “You probably shouldn't have named him after a dead guy.”

There's a lump in my throat. “Probably not.”

“I bet you can legally change it. There might even be a grace period. Like, I don't know, a ninety-day money-back guarantee, sort of. You should start thinking about different names.”

“That's a good idea. I'll talk to Adrienne about it.”

Leah smiles, happy she's solved my problem. She likes me, I know she does, and she wants this arrangement to work out. She's laying down roots here, painting this mural. This is supposed to be her baby's home.

I stand and walk up behind her. “You really are talented,” I say in a low voice. I watch her stiffen up, but it seems different this time. She's definitely not offended.

Adrienne knows I'm in here with Leah, and I like that. Let Adrienne think it's “inappropriate,” her new favorite word. Some jealousy could do her good. She's got Michael cuddled up in our bed right now, and she needs a reminder that I exist.

I'm not proud that I got drunk on our first family outing and
that Adrienne had to drive us home. But the old Adrienne would have laughed it off. She would have told me I was a very bad boy; we would have come home and she would have given me a spanking and all would have been fine with the world. But it's like she's changed the terms of the marital contract without consulting me.

She was mad that she had to drive home (she's a feminist, why's it a man's job to do all the driving anyway?), and she was stressed out because we were stuck in traffic leading up to the bridge; she couldn't see how the kid was doing because he was facing out the back window. I offered to ride in back with him, but she told me no, and then she was bitching because she couldn't tell what was happening. I told her if he had a problem, we'd know; he's not exactly subtle, with that bleat of his. She shouted, with zero irony, “SIDS is a silent killer!”

I said, “I'll get in the back with him right now,” and she said, “No, you've done enough.” I still don't know what that meant. Then she started talking to herself about how the day's ruined and worst of all, we didn't even get any pictures. As if the point of having an experience is to capture and Facebook it, that's how conventional she's become. When I called her conventional, she didn't even deny it. “It's not like I want to remember this anyway,” she said. But I know she will.

“Well,” I say to Leah, “good night.”

“Good night.” She doesn't turn but I feel like it's intentional, like she can't. I could just be overestimating my magnetism. I want to think that someone still finds me attractive in this house.

I drain my glass during the walk to the kitchen. Before I get into bed with Adrienne, I'll brush my teeth and use Listerine. Adrienne will probably still smell the booze on me, but at least she'll know I cared enough to try to conceal it. She'll know I was thinking of her.

The lights are low in our room, and Adrienne's sitting up against the headboard. She turns off the TV as I come in. The kid is across her lap, facedown, and she's rubbing his scalp gently. It's her latest obsession with him. He's just developed this dandruff-type condition
called “cradle cap.” It's probably flurrying down on our sheets right now. Adrienne says it usually clears up on its own, but despite that, she seems to love tending to it. She's been washing his scalp every day and massaging it with her fingertips. It's like it gives her life purpose. My unvoiced suspicion is that's because she doesn't actually have that much to do. I mean, he sleeps upwards of eighteen hours a day, and all she has to do is feed him Leah's milk. With all his spitting up, there is a lot of laundry, but it's not like she has to go out and beat it against a rock. I don't really understand how her days pass. Reading about SIDS, probably.

I climb in bed next to her. “Leah doesn't want us to pay her back for the paints,” I say. I think Adrienne will like that, but instead, her eyes narrow.

“Why's that?” She sounds flinty.

“It's a gift.”

“We don't need her gifts. It's a business arrangement.”

This is not the way I was hoping the conversation would go. We're supposed to be making up. I probably shouldn't have had that extra finger of bourbon.

“Michael's going to sleep in here with us tonight,” she says. “I don't really feel comfortable with him going back in the nursery.”

“It doesn't even smell. Go in and check.”

“I'd rather not.” She eyes me sideways. “I thought you were playing pool. What were you doing in the nursery?”

“I wanted to see how the mural's coming along. I think it's going to be really nice. She's working hard on it.”

“I'm glad she has a hobby. But as soon as she moves out, we're going to paint over it.” She stares at me hard. “Do not tell her that.”

“I wouldn't.” Though it doesn't seem right to me, painting over the gift his mother left for him, especially when I can see how much it means to Leah. But I'm not going to say that tonight. “Listen, I'm sorry about what happened at Fort Mason. Let's try again next weekend. I've got Saturday off. I'll be on my best behavior.”

Adrienne is watching her fingers stroke the kid's head. “He only turns one month old once.”

I move in a little closer. “I know. That's why I'm sorry.” I wish I could tell her what I just did for her, how I lied to make sure we can keep the kid that I don't actually want. I wish she could begin to understand how much I love her and the lengths to which I'd go. She did it once for me; I'm just returning the favor.

I want to tell her about my conversation with Leah and realizing that the name “Michael” was a mistake. It's keeping me distant from the kid. For one thing, it's making me want to call him “the kid.” There must be some way we can legally change the name. Even if it's a pain in the ass, so what, it would be worth it. I need to bond with my son. I need to stop cringing internally every time I think “my son.” I just can't be a father to my own brother, especially given the history. Adrienne, of all people, should understand that.

She pushes against my chest, saying with disgust, “You're drunk.” Then, icily, “Do you need to go to AA? Is there a problem we need to discuss?”

“No,” I say, leaning back against the pillow, closing my eyes, willing sleep to come quickly and mercifully. “We've got no problems.”