Family and Other Accidents (10 page)

“Fine with me.” Jack puts his arm around Laine and gives her a good-natured squeeze. In some parallel universe in his head, he lets his hand linger too long on her shoulder, maybe taps her ass when Connor isn't looking—shags her for the sport of it, because she goes by a stupid name, and she'll end up hurting his brother eventually anyway. In this universe he lets her go. “You can be my Jackie anytime.”

“All girls want to be Jackie,” Laine says. “It's one of the things we're taught when we're growing up—be elegant, be loyal, wear really nice clothes.”

Jack thinks Laine means girls other than her, not the smart, sexually aggressive ones getting their MBAs from Harvard. It's the girls like Mona who want to be Jackie, demure and pretty, good with children and the elderly. Or at least, that's what he thought Mona wanted.

“Naw, Lainey,” Connor says. “You're not Jackie or Ethel, you're Carolyn Bessette and I'm John-John. We're the next generation of dead Kennedys.”

“I like it.” Laine reaches for Connor's hand and braids her long fingers with his long fingers. “I like it a lot. Doomed, but doomed in new and different ways.”

Letting Connor and Laine walk ahead, Jack kicks stones at the chunky soles of their Dr. Martens.

“Still doomed,” he mumbles.

         

It's after midnight when they get to Connor and Laine's minuscule apartment—the apartment Jack sends Connor seven hundred dollars a month for.

Everything looks three-quarter scale—a narrow stove and half-size refrigerator, a sink that could hold no more than a few dishes. Though the paint is peeling in a few places and the hardwood floors are hopelessly cracked, everything is surgical-ward clean, which has to be Laine's doing.

“I made the futon for you,” Laine says, pointing toward the mattress and wooden frame against one wall of the living room, more accurately the room in the apartment that isn't the bedroom. “I slept on it all through undergrad, it's actually more comfortable than the bed.”

“That's great,” Jack says. He'd wanted to stay at a hotel, but Connor had sounded hurt when he'd suggested it. “I'm so tired, I could sleep on the floor.” And he is tired, tired from the flight, and Laine, and the post-Mona nostalgia, and the fight he still plans to have with his brother.

Then they all just stand there, Jack with his leather travel bag still on his shoulder, until Laine announces her train leaves early the next morning, and disappears into the bedroom.

Setting his bag on the floor, Jack sits heavily on the futon. Connor follows.

“Are you okay? Really?” Connor asks. “I know I was loony tunes for months after Beth and I broke up.”

“Is Laine short for Elaine?” Jack asks instead of answering.

“I don't think so.”

“You don't know?”

“Jack.
”

“You're going to have a baby with this girl, and you don't know her name.”

“Jack, don't.”

“How long have you even known her? Five, six months?”

“Her name is Laine, okay?” Connor bows his head and kneads black hair that's too long in the front. “It's not as though there's a set amount of time you need to spend with someone before you know them.”

Jack exhales, tries not to get too frustrated too quickly. “I just want to know why you think this is a good idea.”

“It's not an idea,” Connor says. “It's something that's happening. I've always wanted to have my kids when I was still young enough to play with them—”

“What's the fucking hurry? You're still in school.”

“I just don't want to be the kind of dad Dad was to me, okay?”

“Jesus, Conn, the man's been dead thirteen years—”

“That's not what I mean.” The muscles in Connor's face shift. “It's just that maybe some of that stuff is more important to me than maybe it was to him.”

“Fine,” Jack sighs, “then wait a year, see how you feel then.”

“Jack, I'm not asking for money or—”

“You can have any money you need, this isn't about money.” But on some level it is. Jack had told Connor not to think about money, to just go when Connor called from his AmeriCorps station in Arizona to say he'd gotten into the Kennedy School last summer. Four months ago, Connor had called to say he only needed half the rent because he was moving in with his girlfriend. Jack continued to send the seven hundred; the checks still got cashed.

“I don't want any more of your money.” Connor's cheeks redden, his nose twitches.

“I just don't want you to have your whole life decided because you accidentally got some girl pregnant.”

“Jack.” There's a weight, an authority, to the way Connor says his name that Jack isn't sure he has heard before. “Don't you think I was an accident?”

And Jack starts to say no, but remembers his mother pregnant at the age of forty-two, how she spent the whole nine months annoyed and angry, how his father was grumpier than usual, around even less.

“You didn't come here to fight with me about this.” Connor sighs.

“We're not fighting, we're discussing,” Jack says, but he tries to remember why he is here—in his brother's world of futons, lanky blondes, vegetarian restaurants, and bad life choices. It has something to do with Mona's leaving. She said he'd be okay, that he didn't need anyone. And he's here to prove that he does need people, people like Connor—the only living person in the entire world required to love him.

“Then can we discuss tomorrow?” Connor asks. “It's like two in the morning.”

“Whatever you want, kid.”

“I'm gonna crash.” Standing up, Connor backs toward the bedroom. “We have toothpaste and towels and stuff in the bathroom. Red Sox tomorrow at one; I'll talk to my friend about skydiving on Sunday.”

And then Connor is in the bedroom with Laine, who may be snoring, angled features softened by sleep. Or maybe she stayed up to wrap long, long legs around Connor and whisper dirty things in his ear. Jack hasn't worried about his brother's sex life since Connor was in high school, when Jack wondered if he was supposed to say something about condoms. But the way Connor fucks Laine seems important, the power dynamic of the thing. Does Connor spend hours with his tongue between her thighs or does he enter her hard, not caring if her head bumps against the wall?

In the bathroom Jack pees, studying the Warhol soup cans poster hanging over the toilet. Looking for the promised toothpaste, he opens the mirrored cabinet above the sink, but gets distracted by the contents: a clamshell of birth control Laine apparently hadn't thought much about, MAC compacts, sunscreen, a lipstick, shaving cream and razors, contact case and solution (does Connor wear contacts? are they Laine's?), an amber prescription bottle from CVS—
Connor Reed
, it says,
take once daily for seasonal allergies
.

The bottle brings the post-Mona-nostalgia phenomenon to the back of Jack's throat. Apart from the years Jack was at Penn and those Connor was in school in Boulder, Connor has lived in the same house with Jack since he was born, easily the person Jack should know the most about, but he finds himself wondering what he does know about his brother. That Connor lost both parents by age fifteen, that he once broke his shoulder, is allergic to strawberries, likes to jump out of airplanes, chose his undergraduate university based on skiing, spends three hundred and fifty bucks a month on something that isn't rent, apparently has allergies, says he likes kids, might wear contacts?

And what about Mona? For six years Jack slept with his arms and legs woven with hers, passed her salt across the table of hundreds of restaurants, got annoyed listening to details of her days, knew and grew bored with every inch of her body. But what does he really know of her? That she made the bed every morning? That she was always on time? He was sure he'd be the one to tire of her, the one who needed to find someone more challenging. Never did he think she'd really leave. Not when she nervously spilled hot chocolate on him on their first date, not when she hung her dresses in his closet. Not even when she interviewed for the job in Chicago. But last week, the engagement ring she'd been wearing for six months came back to him via FedEx. It was currently sitting in a coffee cup on his kitchen counter, an extremely expensive souvenir from a different life. Maybe that's why he wants her back, because her leaving proved he was wrong.

         

The drip of the coffeemaker wakes him, and Jack realizes that, even with the futon frame poking through the thin mattress, he must have fallen asleep. All his body parts feel stiff and bunched. He tests them out as he reaches for the balled heap of yesterday's khakis. In the kitchen, which is really just the wall of the living room where appliances purr, Laine, long and lean in low-rise jeans and a tight sweater, pours coffee, spreads tofu cream cheese on a bagel, and hums some song Jack knows but can't place.

“Hey,” he says, “can I have some of that coffee?”

She jumps, probably scared she has to deal with him without the buffer of Connor. “Did I wake you?”

He shakes his head no, but she apologizes anyway.

“Do you want a bagel or cereal or something?” she asks, reaching for a mug from the cupboard. “We might even have some meat-type things.”

Her nervousness greases his resistance to her. Jack sips the coffee she pours and straddles one of two chairs at a card table he assumes they use for meals.

“Are you from Boston originally?” he asks.

She's from Providence—her father owns a Volkswagen dealership; her mother is a teacher—but she always thought she wanted to live in Boston. Now she's not sure.

“It's weird, you know, like no one here seems really committed to staying for a long time.” She sits lightly on the other chair. “Something like one in four people in the area is a college student, and everyone just feels transitory.”

“Yeah,” Jack says. Though he isn't thinking about Boston, but Cleveland, where he lived at first by necessity, because of his parents, because of Connor, because of Mona. But somehow he's the one who got stuck there, in his parents' house, in his father's law firm. So stuck that when Mona suggested he move to Chicago with her, he'd refused to even discuss it; he told her just to go.

“I mean I still love this city.” Laine finishes her bagel, checks her watch. “I just don't really want my kids to grow up here.”

Jack wonders if this is her way of saying she's taking Connor to Rhode Island after the baby is born and they've racked up a hundred and twenty thousand dollars' worth of advanced degrees. He wonders if he's supposed to argue with her.

“I'm taking the train to my mom's,” she says. “But I think I'll be back before you leave tomorrow.”

“I'll take you to the train.” Jack gets up and sets his coffee mug in the sink.

She protests that it's just a short ride on the T, that traffic will be bad and he'll never find another parking spot in the neighborhood, but Jack offers until she accepts. Laine hands him the keys to Connor's Sentra, and he picks up her duffel bag.

“I could get that.” She gestures toward the bag.

“I know,” he says, and then neither one of them mentions it again.

In fact it is a short ride to South Station, and they talk briefly about the Red Sox tickets Connor has for the afternoon and how the day looks nicer than the last. With her long, long fingers, Laine pauses to indicate the turns. The wheel of the car feels cheap and plastic, the brakes not nearly as responsive as they should be. Jack makes a mental note to remind Connor to take the car in. At the station, Laine gathers her bag from the trunk and comes around to the driver's-side window to say thank you.

“Like I said, I'm pretty sure I'll be back before you leave.” And then she leans in through the open window to give him a clumsy hug, made clumsier by the fact that he isn't expecting it. “But just in case I don't see you again, I'm glad I got the chance to finally meet you.”

On her way through the crowd—those pierced-navel girls and big-jeaned guys—she turns and smiles a small smile, or maybe she's just squinting against the sun. With her thick sunglasses it's hard to tell, but in that moment she looks a little like Jackie Kennedy.

         

By the time Jack thumbs through the keys and opens the front door to Connor's apartment after forty-five minutes of circling the one-way streets for a spot, Connor is up and drinking coffee from a crimson mug and reading the
Herald
's sports section.

“You run off with my girl?” he asks.

“I took her to the train. Your brakes don't feel right.”

“So you ran off with my girl
and
my car?” Connor smiles, naked except for plaid boxers. “My brakes just don't feel right to you, because my car is cheap. You left your cell phone here; Mona called.”

“What'd she say?” Jack asks, heartbeat quickening at the mention of Mona's name in a way it hasn't done since he had a crush on Anna Fram in seventh grade—a way that seems absolutely ridiculous considering during the whole last year he lived with Mona, he was constantly coming up with reasons to stay late at work so he wouldn't have to talk to her.

“You were supposed to call her back last night.”

“Fuck, did she sound mad?”

“Not at me.” Connor sips coffee. “You guys sure talk a lot for people who broke up.”

“It wasn't the cleanest of breaks.”

The pink scar from a biking accident five years ago snakes around Connor's left shoulder. That also had been a messy break, and the surgeon had to insert a pin to keep things in place.

“Remember when you broke your shoulder?” Jack asks.

“Every time I go through a metal detector.” Connor taps his arm. “Why?”