A Necessary End (25 page)

Good question, Trevor.

Go, Trevor!

What does he know?

My luck runs out: I can hear a car pulling up outside and two loud voices. Leah is clearly angry, and Trevor is expressing seven varieties of “What the fuck?”

I try to scroll quickly to see if I can latch on to any more information. Are Gabe and I “them”? From context, it would seem so, but the conversation appears increasingly disjointed. It's clear that Trevor gets references I don't, and that they've talked about this before. But whatever plans she has, Trevor is here to interrupt them. Isn't he?

I close everything up on Leah's phone and toss it to the other end of the couch. I hold Michael closer.

T
he vibe's definitely off when I get home, and allowing for the peculiarity of the cast of characters in my house, that's really saying something. The TV's on, showing some Lifetime telemovie (stalker lovers, isn't it always?), and I can't imagine which of the three of them would have picked that. None of them are watching it, exactly. They seem like they're all just trying not to look at each other. The kid is lying on his blanket in the center of the room, like a turtle stretching his neck, and Adrienne is idly patting his back. No one's talking.

They all look up at me, Trevor the most expectantly, like he thinks a fellow man might save him. He's got that everyone-likes-me grin, but it's bordered by desperation. I get the feeling Leah's not his biggest fan right now. So it's blowing up already, their little romance. I knew she was too smart to fall for him again.

Adrienne's the hardest to read. She even seems disconnected from the kid. “Hey,” I say to the room, but really, I'm talking to her.

Her eyes barely move in my direction. She's inscrutable, and I get this shiver. Anything's possible when she looks like that. “Can I talk to you in the bedroom?” I say. “Work stuff.” I look at Leah. “You can watch the—Michael?”

Adrienne shoots daggers at me, but she stands up. “Just for a minute,” she says, like a warning. To me, or to Leah and Trevor, I don't know.

We go to our bedroom and I start to push the door closed. “Keep it ajar,” she tells me.

“What?”

“The door. Don't shut it all the way. I want to be able to hear if anything, you know, happens.”

“What did happen today? It's like a crypt out there.”

She shakes her head, like she can't even begin to explain. “He's okay now.”

“Was he not okay earlier?”

“He spiked a fever for a little while. He seems better now.” She glances at the door uncertainly. She's on call, ready for any sign of change. I'm pretty sure he'll be sleeping in our room tonight, or she'll be in his.

“You took him to the doctor?”

She shakes her head again. “Long story.”

I sit on the bed and extend my hands to her. Sit beside me, please. Tell me a long story. Sing me to sleep. I need you, too, Adrienne.

I can't say any of that. What I can say is, “But he's definitely okay now?”

“Should be. I've been checking his temperature every hour. It's normal.”

“Good.” Her face is impassive. “Listen, I've been thinking about what you said, about us getting back on track. How Trevor might help with that.”

She waves her hands to tell me shush, they could hear me.

I lower my voice further. “I've got an idea of what could help me.”

“Yeah?” She suddenly looks exhausted. Defeated, maybe, and I've never seen her defeated before. Not through the IVF, not even after the debacle with Patty.

“Yeah.” I smile at her. “You okay, Wren? Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Bad day,” she says. “Tomorrow will be better.”

I can hear her fighting to be herself. I'm ready to fight for us, Wren. “I've got a great idea. Let's rename him.”

She blinks like she's seeing me for the first time and doesn't particularly like the view.

“I know, it's unusual,” I continue, “but we're nothing if not unusual, right? It's not like it's never done. I was reading online. A lot more people change their kids' names than you think. They get the baby home and they're like, ‘Hey, that's not a Eugene! That's a Colin!' It's not even hard to do it, legally, I mean. We don't even need Hal.”

Distaste crosses her face. “We definitely don't need Hal. Hal is pretty much useless.”

“Not entirely. We've got a contract.”

She snorts.

I definitely didn't imagine Hal featuring so prominently in this conversation.

“When Leah and I were in the delivery room, we were talking about Michael. My brother Michael,” I say, trying again. “We were there awhile, Wren. And I don't know why, he was on my mind. I guess because it was this big moment, I'm about to become a father, and he never will. He never did. You know?” I think she's softening a little, I think she's hearing me. “So I'm sitting there and I get this flash. I have this thought: I'm about to get a redo, I can make it up to Michael. Crazy, right?”

“Because you don't need to make it up to him.”

That's not what I meant, but okay. “So I get this crazy idea that somehow, if I give Michael a namesake with a better outcome, it'll all be better. Things will have realigned in some cosmic way. I tell you, Wren, it's like I was smoking pot, really strong pot, like I was practically hallucinating.

“And Leah, she must have been breathing the fumes, too, because she's like, Yeah, that's it. Yeah, I'll name him Michael, and you'll give him a great life, and peace will reign on earth forever and ever, amen.
It's like we were in some revival tent or something, and we both just needed to
believe
. Do you know what I mean?”

The gears are turning in her head. This could go either way. Finally, she says, “Go on.”

“That's pretty much the end of the story. We made the decision and we put on
Blade Runner
and you know the rest.”

“You didn't think I should be part of the decision? Part of naming our son?”

“It was spontaneous, that's what I'm telling you. I wouldn't have guessed I'd be in the delivery room thinking about Michael, and about my role in what happened to him—”

“How many times can we go over this, Gabe? You aren't responsible for what happened to your brother. You are not—you were not—your brother's keeper. When are you going to get that?”

“There's a lot that you don't get either,” I say. “That's why I'm trying to explain.”

“So you feel like it was a mistake to name the baby Michael, it was some shared lapse of consciousness between you and Leah, is that it?”

“It's bigger than that. You say you want me to bond with our baby, but I can't if he's got that name. I just can't. There can only be one Michael for me. I must have been high to think it could have been otherwise.”

To her, it's just an excuse. I see it in her face. That tears me up more than anything.

Then she tries to paper over that expression, over what's true, with a look of faux-sympathy and the pretense of understanding. “I see you don't like calling him Michael. You never really do call him that. But to me, he's already Michael. I just can't think of him any other way. I don't see your brother in him at all, and over time, you won't either. But in the meantime, let's come up with a good nickname.” She gives me a smile. “Something other than ‘the kid.'”

I can't smile back. She's trying to work me over, to create the
illusion of appeasement while yielding no ground. She's not willing to hear me, or she hears but she just doesn't get it; she refuses to get it. Has she completely forgotten the way Michael died, the circumstances leading up to it, our shared responsibility in it? How can she be so comfortable calling our baby Michael, divorcing it from our past as a couple? Her powers of compartmentalization are stultifying. They'd be the envy of any sociopath.

“‘Mickey,'” she's musing. “But would we always want to add ‘Mouse' to it? I don't really like ‘Mickey,' but I could live with it, if it would help you. ‘Mick,' maybe. ‘Micah' is a cute one. How do you feel about ‘Micah'?”

“Let me think about it,” I say.

“Or ‘Cale.' But would people think we're talking about kale then, like our baby's a leafy green?” She wants me to laugh, but I'm feeling the opposite. This was supposed to bring us together, but we're even farther apart. “I won't put him in the monogrammed outfits anymore, okay?” She thinks this is a major concession.

“Thanks for listening,” I tell her, and she smiles, not registering the sarcasm.

I realize as I open the bedroom door that I didn't need the kid to have a new name as much as I needed my wife to understand why I can't say “Michael.” She, alone, can understand. Micah, Mickey, Mick, Cale, Kale . . . They're all just ways to not think about my brother and what I did to him. I can't feel like a father after failing so completely as a brother. But there's no point in telling Adrienne that. She's let me know quite distinctly that she doesn't intend to hear it.

Adrienne goes back to the living room. I hear her urging Trevor and Leah to take a walk or a drive or see a movie (code for “get the hell out”) and once the front door slams, I retreat to the garage to play pool (code for “getting drunk alone”). I've got Jim Beam stashed in there but, I quickly realize, no glass. There's no way I'm going to the kitchen, though, when Adrienne is directly in the flight pattern. Swigging from the bottle like an old wino riding the rails is better than facing her right now.

I don't like what I've become. Not the drinking, even, but the slinking. The not-facing.

Tonight, though, I went right at her, and what did it get me? A son named after a leafy green. That's her final offer.

I could go back out there and fight her on it. It would, undoubtedly, get ugly. I might have to say something like, “It's him or me. Change the name, or I'm walking.” She'd give in. Probably.

But that conversation—it's sucked the life out of me. I thought if I approached her right, she'd have to hear me.

So maybe it was my approach. I got it wrong, somehow.

In my heart, I don't think that's it.

This is not my beautiful house. Or my beautiful wife. Or my son. Above all, that is not my son.

I take a long pull from the bottle, and then another. Time passes with me sitting on the granite steps of the garage, lost in reveries I can't begin to recount, more feeling than event, sinking down and down and down . . .

“Oof,” I say, jumping up and rubbing my back. I didn't even think about the door opening outward when I sat on the steps; it seemed that improbable for anyone to come looking for me.

“Sorry, dude!”

Trevor. Of all people.

Who's still saying “dude”? It occurs to me that it could be some kind of retro affectation, something Trevor rescued from the archives.

“I thought we could rack 'em,” he says. “Play some pool. You'd probably kick my ass, though. Leah says you're out here, like, a lot.”

The bottle is still in my hand, uncapped, evidentiary. I stow it to the side of the steps, hoping he won't see but pretty sure he does. “I'm okay,” I mumble, “at pool.”

Now I'm on defense, when I should be on offense, asking where he gets off coming into my man cave. How he even has the balls to show up at my house trying to woo Leah back after what he did.
He should be off in a cave himself, too ashamed to face daylight. He wasn't man enough to be a father.

I'm one to talk.

Trevor is staring at the pool table, the balls neatly aligned inside the triangle, untouched.

“I just finished a game,” I say. “I was about to start another.”

“I've always had awesome timing. It's, like, my gift.”

“They say timing is everything.” My tone is sour, but he doesn't pick up on it. Or if he does, he's not letting on. I have this suspicion that Trevor gets a lot of intel with this “Dude, where's my car” routine. People think he's benign when really, he's a tumor that's metastasized to my house.

He removes the triangle and selects his cue. “Mind if I break?” he asks, suddenly formal.

“Sure.” I move to pick up my cue. I'm unsteady on my feet, but I try to camouflage it by leaning slightly against the table. The balls splintering apart nearly makes my brain rattle. Oh, let me guess. Trevor's a born pool player. It's one of his other gifts.

He's stripes, and I watch him circumnavigate the table with grace and confidence. He reels off numbers, one after the other, as balls dance into pockets. I'm subjected to his effortless choreography, when all I wanted was a little peace and quiet.

On top of that, he wants to talk. “Leah,” he says, “is not having a good night.” As if her name is kryptonite, he proceeds to miss his next shot.

“Yeah?” I say. I'm trying not to sound too friendly. It's not bros before hos around here. I shove off from the table and prepare for my first shot. He hasn't made it easy for me. I squint and concentrate.

“I love her, you know?”

My bank shot is wild, embarrassingly so, given Trevor's virtuoso performance. But he's not even looking. He's leaning on his cue stick, staring off as he muses about his great love for Leah.

“. . . She's worth coming all the way out here for, no question.
I mean, we're killer together. You can tell that, too, right? Adrienne sees it. She wants us to work out. She's into love, you know?”

I stifle a belch. If he thinks I'm going to stand here and validate his relationship with Leah, he must be drunker than I am.

“But Leah's different now. It's like, she's a mother, except that she isn't.” He pushes his greasy hair back with my pool cue. I feel like snatching it out of his grimy little hands. “I dunno, it's confusing.” He looks directly at me. “She likes you, though.”

I don't know what to make of it, the “though.”

“Like you're the father she never had, or some shit like that. Maybe you can talk to her?”

“About what?”

“About not being so pissed off at me.”

Either I'm not following him, or he's unfollowable. He can't finish a complete thought. The whole generation has attention deficit disorder. He was raised by Wii.

When did I get to be so old? When did I become the father Leah never had?

“If Leah's pissed at you, she probably has her reasons,” I say. Like, for example, you calling her names and abandoning her for months.