A Necessary End (24 page)

“No problem.” I force a smile. I'm out of sync with this buoyant crew. I'm the recovering alcoholic at Mardi Gras.

Leah cocks her head at me, questioning and cajoling at once. Don't judge him, she's saying. But I know what I know. I can't forget it, just because she wants to play house with the little cretin.

“We made pasta puttanesca,” she tells me. “With tuna.”

“I can smell.” I bark a laugh. They're all watching me quizzically now, wondering if I'm going to blow up their party. Maybe Leah should show me her tits again, and I'll give her some beads.

I hate this guy. Not Trevor. Me.

My anger seems to have calcified into an omnipresent bitterness.
That's not who Adrienne married. But then, she's not who I married either.

I take a deep breath. It's just dinner. One step at a time, isn't that what the alcoholics say?

“I like spice,” I say. I'm referencing the puttanesca, but it's just a few beats too late. Everyone's confused.

Adrienne pipes up. “I'm going to put Michael down in his crib. You want to help me, Gabe?”

I never help. Leah knows that. Does Trevor? How much has Leah told him about the inner workings of my house?

My ears are hot as I follow Adrienne to the nursery, where she very carefully places Michael in his crib. He hasn't been swaddled or put in one of those wearable blankets that make him look like a Roman cardinal. Maybe this is discombobulating her, too, more than she's been willing to admit.

It's mostly dark in the nursery, and she turns to me, moving in close. She takes my face in her hands. Her hands, I notice, smell like baby powder. Her uncontrolled hair has a certain Medusa quality. “I know all of this has been hard on you. Just hold it together a little while longer, and then we're home free.”

“In my gut,” I tell her, “I just don't think it's going to work that way.”

She smiles. Her gaze is unwavering and sure. “Who do you trust: your gut, or me?”

She kisses me hard on the lips, no tongue. It feels like the equivalent of Cher slapping Nicolas Cage, telling him to snap out of it.

But it gets me back to the dining room, and bourbon gets me the rest of the way. Somebody—Leah? Adrienne?—has left me a glass with what must be five fingers in it. I down the hand like it's a shot.

A mellow sort of torpor settles over me as I watch the three of them. Trevor's talking about his cross-country drive, about a run-in with some trucker, and he's doing these crazy gesticulations. He's like the next-generation, Rhode Island version of Pauly Shore. That's not
exactly a compliment, but Leah and Adrienne are both cracking up. I have a feeling people tend to like Trevor. He's polite and deferential toward Adrienne and me, and he's just weird enough but not offensively so, and yeah, all right, he's kind of funny.

But he's definitely not what I pictured based on what Leah told me. Breaking into houses so they could have sex? Calling Leah a whore and a cunt? How could Leah be head over heels for the Weasel 2.0?

There has to be more to him than quirk. The fact that I can't picture Trevor saying or doing the nasty things Leah reported, that just confirms that he really is bad news. He's sitting here at my dining room table putting on an act, and he's all the more dangerous because the act is so convincing. Trevor is full of shit, and Leah's forgotten that, and Adrienne doesn't care. So it comes down to me. I'm going to have to save Leah.

I get melodramatic when I've had a hand of bourbon.

Through my alcohol haze, I see how happy Adrienne is. Carefree, for once. Trevor doesn't want a baby, and he doesn't want to live in California, but he does want Leah. Adrienne thinks all our problems are about to be solved.

Adrienne's beautiful when she's carefree. She used to look this way a lot. Before the IVF, before our first adoption profile, before Patty, before she got consumed by what Patty had done to us, before before before . . . It's been years of cares, now that I think of it. Adrienne's had it rough for a long time, wanting something so much and having it perpetually out of reach, like the baby's sitting there on a shelf that's just a little too high.

If I could just trust her now, instead of my gut, then I could believe that by playing along, I'll get my real wife back, my real marriage. Everyone at this table is overjoyed; why not just play along?

“. . . I sent this picture back to my little bro,” Trevor is saying. He's holding out his phone to all of us, and we crowd in to take a peek. It's Trevor standing on top of the giant shoe of a gargantuan
Paul Bunyan. “What can I say? He loves Babe the Blue Ox.” Trevor's full of wistful affection. Then he turns to me. “Have you got brothers or sisters, Gabe?”

For a second, I think: He knows, Leah must have told him. He's actually trying to take me down, the first night, right here in my own house.

His face is friendly as he waits for my answer. He's already mentioned his memory is for shit. He can barely remember anyone's name, let alone fun (and not-so-fun) facts from their lives. But that could be a cover story, a method of plausible deniability for all the pain he causes.

“No brothers or sisters,” I say. “It's just me.”

Leah's watching me sympathetically. “Here,” she says, walking to the counter to retrieve the bottle of Jim Beam, “have another.”

F
irst thing this morning, Trevor was up off the couch, with the bedding folded neatly and tucked behind it. He and Leah ate a quick breakfast and were out the door. Neither of them paid Michael a bit of attention. I thought, This is working out
perfectly
.

Soon, Michael started fussing, and next he was full-on wailing. He refused milk. I realized how warm his little hands were and then how warm his head was. I got the rectal thermometer and laid him over my knee. Amid the sound of his screaming, I managed to insert the thermometer with shaking hands. I've never had to take his temperature before. Even though he spits up all the time, he's never been sick.

Now he is. One hundred degrees, even.

Trevor just got here, and Michael is sick for the first time. Coincidence?

I'm still shaking as I go to call the pediatrician. My worst fear is that I've never deserved this beautiful boy. The ultimate punishment for my crimes, I suddenly realize, is not that I never have a baby at all, but that I have him for a brief time and then lose him. On some cellular level, I've been expecting this.

I need to calm down. Michael won't suffer for my crimes; he won't pay with his life. That's not how this will work. It can't.

The receptionist is an idiot. I repeat my name. “You met me,” I say. “I came in with Leah for the well-baby checkup.” Only he's not a well baby anymore, is he?

“What I'm saying is, you're not the mother. We have no medical authorization on file for you. Did Leah sign one?”

“I'm sure she did.” I'm not sure at all. But I assume my most authoritative tone. “Michael has a fever of one hundred. I need to bring him in.”

“Unless there's an authorization on file granting you—”

“If your office misplaced the authorization, that's not my problem. My problem is, my baby has a temperature of one hundred.” I jog him up and down in my arms. He's still screaming. Tears are in my own eyes; I can't stand to hear him cry. “He's suffering. He needs medical attention.”

“I understand. Please hold.” After several minutes of Michael's unrelenting cries, she's back. “Dr. Abrams says that one hundred point four degrees is considered true fever in a baby. If he has other symptoms like irritability or poor feeding or listlessness—”

“Listen to him. Doesn't he sound irritable to you? I want to talk to Dr. Abrams.”

“Dr. Abrams can't talk to you. We can only give you general information unless we have a release from the mother. Please have the mother—have Leah—call us.”

“I'm the mother! I take care of him all the time. Leah had him, sure, but I'm his mother. The adoption is in the works.”

She's quiet a long minute. “Ma'am,” she says, “as far as our records are concerned, Leah is his mother. So she'll need to call us back and we can go from there.”

“What if I bring him in? Would you actually refuse treatment to a sick baby just because—”

“Ma'am”—her voice is steely—“I've just told you what needs to
happen. Now, I understand it's upsetting when a little baby is sick, but we've got legal regulations to follow.”

I disconnect the call. I'm about to throw the phone, but instead, I call Leah and hear the tinkling ringtone emanating from her room. She left her phone behind. What nineteen-year-old leaves her phone behind? It must be because she's with the only person she cares about talking to. All she cares about is Trevor. Yes, that's what I was banking on, but now it's blowing up in my face. I don't have Trevor's number.

Pull it together. Think. Do I drive Michael to the ER? I don't want to subject him to that if I don't have to. Just imagining the kind of germs running rampant in a hospital terrifies me even more. Do I show up in the pediatrician's office and demand treatment? Do I call my lawyer and have him insist they provide treatment? If he'd done his job properly, he would have prepared for this contingency. He would have gotten me medical rights. Damn that arrogant asshole.

Think. None of this is helping Michael. Oh, God, why won't he stop crying? “Shh, shh, shh,” I croon into the top of his head. It's warm but not hot. He's not burning up. One hundred point four is the magic number, and he's not there yet.

Leah has Trevor's number, and her phone is here, in the house.

I go into her room, which is something I never do. I do my best to pretend this room doesn't even exist, as if it's a landmass that has temporarily split off from the rest of the house. I ignore the unmade air mattress bed and the way her makeup and clothes are strewn across the top of the office furniture, same as I've been ignoring the mural that's been encroaching on the nursery. One of the good things about Trevor's being here is that he's halted the progress.

“Shh, shh, shh,” I tell Michael, and he actually seems to be listening. The cries are beginning to abate, thankfully. It might only be wishful thinking, but his head seems slightly cooler. I'll take his temperature again soon.

I dial Leah again. It's the quickest way to locate her cell in the mess.

There it is, sandwiched between makeup brushes and a bottle of leave-in conditioner. I swipe it and take it back to the nursery. I rock Michael as I search through the contacts for Trevor. I notice there's no “Mom” or “Dad.” Weirdly, there's one that says “The Home.” Is that my home or her parents' house?

Michael lets out a renewed sob, and I feel it all through me, as visceral as if it were my own. I'm furious with Leah for her irresponsibility. How dare she fail to sign a medical authorization, how dare she fail to sign Michael over to me, period, and then be unreachable?

She's not unreachable. She's with Trevor.

I call him, and immediately, there he is, in all his loopy charm. “Yo, Trevor here. What am I doing? You wish you knew!” Then he cackles, and the beep sounds.

“Trevor, it's Adrienne. I need to reach Leah
now
. Michael's sick. Have her call me.”

Then I call again. And again. And again. The phone's still off, or worse, maybe it's lost somewhere or dead. Most likely, it's just off, because he's with the only person he feels like talking to. Young fucking love. I could kill the both of them.

My rocking takes on a frenetic quality, and Michael's cries intensify. The two might be related, so I force myself to slow. Yes, I'm pissed at Leah, but Michael's my priority. He needs to be comforted.

I walk at a slow bounce toward the front of the house. It occurs to me that Leah and Trevor could be outside, having sex in Trevor's car (since he promised they wouldn't do it in the house, and I'm pretty sure they were out there last night after dinner). I wouldn't have any problem knocking on their steamed-up windows. But when I look outside, the car's gone.

Maybe they're gone for good. If they take off without signing any papers—medical authorization, adoption, anything—what happens to Michael?

I walk him around the living room, slow as I can muster. I call Trevor again, with the same result. I leave another message, more
obviously angry this time. Michael's crying has hit another peak and then fallen off, to my great relief. Is it too soon to take his temperature again?

I wish I had someone to ask. My own mother. A friend. A doctor. As soon as I have the legal ability, I'm switching pediatricians. If I'm lucky, it'll be as soon as this weekend, when Trevor and Leah take their reunion show back to Rhode Island.

What makes me crazy is that I can't kick her out. This doesn't violate Hal's contract. She's so selfish—not signing that authorization, not caring what happens to her child. She's no mother; she's the antimother. This just confirms it.

Returning to the nursery, settling back into the glider, I can feel his body relax more fully against mine. I think he's getting better, but what if he's not? What if he's so sick that he doesn't have the energy to cry? Books aside, what do I really know?

All I can do is wait: for Leah to call back, for some time to pass before I take his temperature again. If I bundle him up and put him in the car and then get him into his stroller and march into the pediatrician's office, it could do him more harm than good. I wouldn't want someone doing that to me when I'm sick. He needs to rest; right this second, he's starting to.

I should call Gabe. These kinds of moments are what husbands are for. But not him, not lately. He was knee-deep in bourbon again last night.

I saw Gabe in Leah's contacts. I have the sudden idea to text him, to pretend to be Leah. He might tell Leah what's really going on with him, since he sure as hell isn't telling me. Or maybe I'd learn what's really going on between the two of them. He was just seeing how the mural was coming along the other night?
Seriously?

I need to pull it together. He's just having trouble adjusting to the situation, which—everyone seems to agree—is not a normal one: a new adopted baby, a birth mom who won't go home, a birth dad showing up out of nowhere. Anyone would be freaked, right?

Michael looks up at me with his wide brown eyes, his lashes skewering tears. “Are you okay, Mama?” he's asking. “Will it all be okay?”

“Oh, baby,” I tell him, “it's going to be fine. You and me, we'll always be fine.”

The pediatrician's office said it's not the temperature, it's whether he's irritable, whether he's eating. So I take him into the kitchen with me and remove a bottle from the refrigerator. He begins to drink it lustily. “Thank you,” I breathe, touching his sweet and cooling head with my lips.

Leah's phone rings from the counter. I see that it's Trevor. Even though it's felt like an eternity, I know that Leah hasn't actually been out of touch for very long. “Hello,” I say flatly.

“Adrienne? Is he okay?” There's no mistaking the concern in Leah's voice.

“I don't know for sure.” I let it hang out there, torturously.

“What's wrong with him? Did you call the doctor?” I hear her ratcheting up. “Get off me,” she says, muffled, to Trevor.

Now, this I don't need. Her getting upset with Trevor, her seeming invested in Michael.

“He's better,” I say.

“Wait, which is it? You don't know if he's okay, or he's better?”

“I think his fever is coming down, and he's drinking milk again. For a while, he wouldn't drink, and he was crying a lot.” I stare down at him, wishing he was suckling my breast instead of the bottle, wishing I could provide him that added measure of comfort. “The doctor won't talk to me, Leah. You didn't sign an authorization.”

“I thought I did.” There's something in her delivery that I just don't believe.

“The office Nazi said they couldn't help me, that they couldn't help Michael, because there was no authorization on file. You need to fix that.”

“Sorry.” But she doesn't sound sorry; she sounds peeved. At me, at the doctor's office?

“You should come home now. Stop at the pediatrician on the way and sign the paper. Because I might still need to take him in today. He feels cooler, but I need to take his temperature to be sure.”

“I'm coming home so we can go together.”

Michael finishes the bottle in record time and lets out a familiar cry. His hunger cry. There is no sweeter sound: He wants more.

I get another bottle for him as I calibrate my reply. It's a delicate moment. “You know,” I say, “if you go to the pediatrician's office and sign the paper, you don't even need to come home. You and Trevor can just get back to whatever you were doing.”

“No,” she says, “that's okay. We're coming home.”

As I sit on the couch with Michael drowsing on his second bottle, I find myself contemplating Leah's phone. I've never seriously considered snooping on her before. But it's almost like this whole episode with Michael was engineered to lead me here. I don't want to move and jostle Michael, he needs his rest, and all I have to entertain me is her phone.

I have a right to know what I'm dealing with. She's living in my house; her possibly reprobate (ex-?)boyfriend is sleeping on this very couch.

Gabe wouldn't like it.

But for all I know, there are text exchanges with him, too.

I just need to ever so slightly violate her privacy. I won't even read back very far, just a week or two. That would be enough to let me know what kind of person she truly is.

I don't know how far away Leah and Trevor are, so if I want to do this, I'd better start.

I want to do this. It's not just for me, it's for Michael, too. And for Gabe. I'm protecting my family.

I begin to scroll through, trying to get an overview. Who am I kidding, I'm looking for a conversation with Gabe. But there aren't any, they're all with Trevor. Nothing with “The Home.”

Back to the top, the most recent.

Good boy. “A” must mean me. Of course, he's not supposed to bone her on my couch either.

That's the end of that exchange. Go back farther.

They go on like that for a while. I knew there was phone sex; I didn't know there was text sex. Seems inconvenient, all the typing. I guess I'm getting old.

Next.

Wait, are Leah's tits . . . ?

But more important, is she talking about my being fake?

No wonder Trevor couldn't remember Gabe's name, if Leah's just calling him “G.”