Someone Else's Love Story (14 page)

“I have to call Mimmy. I didn’t think it would be on the news. We were only in there, what, half an hour?”

“It was a long half hour, though,” Walcott said darkly.

“I can imagine,” my dad said, snuggling me closer.

I said, “Oh God, Mimmy can’t see it on TV before I’ve talked to her. She’ll lose her mind.”

Bethany came back with her arms full of bedding, passing through on her way to the basement stairs, but she paused when I said “Mimmy.”

“You didn’t call her from the car?” asked my father. I shook my head. He rubbed my back, and he couldn’t help but smile faintly. “Don’t worry. Your cell phone would be ringing right now, if she had seen this.”

I knew then that he would never hold it against me, the fact that I stood in the foyer and let Bethany yell at me, because I hadn’t called Mimmy. He had been the first to know. In fact,
Mimmy
might hold a grudge, because I had come here to him instead of having Walcott drive me two hours back to her place.

Bethany said, “You should definitely call.” She looked like she had a whole alive mouse trying to scrabble its way up her throat and out. She was trying to choke that mouse back down. Now that she had banked her temper, she knew I was a solid ten points up in the endless game of Who’s the Asshole? that we’d started playing the instant she married my father. He was the show’s host and the judge, as well as our lone target demographic. “You should go call her right now.”

But Dad didn’t let me go.

Well, I’d had a crap day. I’d been held at gunpoint, been so scared for my kid, fallen in love with a shotten-up stranger with a tragic past, and had decided to risk everything, even Natty’s peacefully fatherless childhood, to stop being a coward. Sometimes, on a day like that, you need a victory. Even a little one. Even if it is thorny and vicious and small-minded.

So. For just a few seconds more, I made The Mimmy wait, and I stayed right damn where I was, smiling beatifically at Bethany from inside the circle of my father’s arms.

Sometimes karma takes years to pay a person back, but that day, it had a fast backhand return; I snuggled in, and that’s when Natty started screaming.

N
atty was up and down all night, chased out of his sleep by a spider, by a ninja, by a silver gun with human legs and feet.

I’d moved him into my bed, so I didn’t have to leap across the room to wake him all the way out of the scary dream and pet his sweaty hair back from his face. When he was a tiny baby, he’d work himself into such deep and earnest sleeps that he would sweat hard like this. The side of his head that had been pressed against the mattress would smell a little bit like a foot. Baby Foot Head, Walcott called him back then, and remembering this, my heart lurched around and got wobblety against my ribs. I could have lost him today. I nestled him in close, crooning, “Hush, baby, hush.”

His eyes gleamed huge in the dark. Walcott appeared again in the doorway. The last three times, he’d been in boxers and his T-shirt, but I clocked that he was fully dressed now. Shoes even, though the clock by my bed said three
A.M.

“I had a bad dream,” Natty said in an aggrieved voice, like he was accusing someone of something. “That gun camed back. It chased me on its legs.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “What a terrible gun. I hate that bad gun. But now it is just you here safe with me and Walcott.”

“Want me to pet your feet some more?” Walcott said.

“Yes, please,” said Natty.

Walcott sat down on the edge of my bed, his long fingers petting and petting the bottoms of Natty’s feet. Natty was the least ticklish child on the planet.

“I think a bad thing,” Natty said.

“What bad thing?” I asked.

“I think Stevie shotted William into being dead now,” Natty said, barely a whisper, and it worried me that those effed-up baby verbs had stuck.

“It’s not true,” I said. “William is very strong, like a big, smart lion.”

“Seriously?” Walcott muttered, his hands going still. I made questioning eyebrows at him, but he wouldn’t look at me at all.

“Natty, do you want to go and visit William at the hospital? So you know he is okay?”

“Yes,” Natty said, and then, “Walcott, you didn’t pet my feet now.”

Walcott resumed.

“You want to take him some balloons?”

“Yes, please,” Natty said.

Walcott petted, and I whispered a long list of get-well gifts that we could take William Ashe: flowers and a puppy, a new car and chocolate cookies, a giraffe in a nurse cap to fluff his pillow, a water pot of singing flowers or a mermaid in a bucket, either would do for lullabies, and on and on, replacing the awful footed gun that had chased him around inside his head with prettier friends, until Natty’s eyes closed and his body became a limp bit of boy-string in the bed.

When Natty was good and out, Walcott stood silently and tipped his head at the door. I got up and followed him out into the rec room. The bedding was folded neatly on the end of the sofa. I sat down, but he stayed standing, both of us facing the big flat-screen that dominated the room. There was also a Wii, a hundred thousand Legos in buckets, and a shelf full of board games. The basement smelled like popcorn and a full herd of little boys, though it was supposedly for me.

Once I’d had a room upstairs, but every time Bethany had a baby, I got moved into a crappier bedroom. When my third half brother was born, I got stuffed down here in what used to be the basement office, with Bethany saying, “Teenagers need their space!”

“The basement den and bathroom will be your own domain, too. Teenager heaven, right, Shandi?” Dad had asked.

The truth was, I would have liked to stay near Davie and Simon and giggly, round-bellied Oscar, who was barely a year older than Natty. I liked little kids, always had, and these three had my same dark, round eyes, and exact replicas of my dad’s long-boned, elegant feet. Not to mention there was still a huge, posh guest room, with trey ceilings and a California king. It had its own bathroom with a garden tub. It sat empty by the boys’ rooms, a showpiece reserved for Bethany’s parents or her sister.

But Dad had to live with her, so I’d said yeah, that sounded cool. He felt bad about it, though. He made Bethany grant me free rein in the bedroom—my first deco job—and set a budget generous enough for me to do the walls in a faux suede finish, have the curtains custom-made, and get a wrought-iron bed from Anthropologie. But “my” downstairs den had quickly degenerated into a playroom, and now my toilet seat was always sprinkled with little-boy pee.

Walcott had never rated the guest room, either. The few times he’d stayed here, he’d slept on this couch, not really a guest. Or at least not Bethany’s guest.

“Where are you going?” I asked. It was obvious he was skipping out, though it was the darkest wee hours of the morning.

“Over to CeeCee’s,” he said. “Can I borrow your car?”

It took me a second, but then I got it. CeeCee could offer him all kinds of comfort that he wasn’t getting here.

“I’d need you to come back and take us to the hospital to see William in the morning.”

He said, “Seriously?” then rolled his eyes. “Whatever, I’ll be back by ten.”

Something was off about him. Way off. “What is it?” I asked.

He didn’t deny there was an it, just said, “Can we talk about it later? I need to go if I am going, before us yacking raises Bethany from her crypt.”

That sounded more like him. I grinned and got up to hug him, but he stepped back from me. Like, literally, took a step back and away.

“Walcott!” I said, really worried now.

He shook his head, his eyes hooded and unreadable, and then shoved his hands through his hair so it stood up in mad Beethoven tufts.

“I’ll call you,” he said, and went fast and quiet up the stairs.

It wasn’t right. He wasn’t right. Maybe he was having some kind of post-robbery meltdown, but why shut me out? It was my robbery, too. I started to go after him, to track him to the driveway and make him talk to me, but just then, Natty went off like an air-raid siren again.

I ran back to my bed and picked him up, said his name until he was all the way awake. The ninja had made another appearance. He had red eyes like a jawa and he was chasing Mimmy, chasing me. He had already ninja-starred Batman into pieces.

I back-burnered Walcott and climbed into bed to cuddle Natty. I heard my little VW start up, carrying Walcott away from us, to CeeCee’s.

Maybe he hadn’t wanted me to touch him because he was purely desperate for some sex. Earthquake syndrome. I’d read about it, how a herd of babies are always born in a little run nine months after a natural disaster. Death brushing past makes people hungry to connect to other people, to make even more people in a big push toward life, a celebration of surviving.

It made sense to me today in a way it hadn’t on the pages of a magazine at my dentist’s. Deep down in my body, I had a niggling push rising, too, a desire to go and get a cab, to go to William Ashe. I’d kept my hymen, but I’d lost more than my sandals and my panties the night that Natty happened. Was this what it felt like, to actually want sex? Did it start low in the belly, a buzzing kind of hunger?

Pushed deep into lemon-fresh bedding, pinned beneath the great god Thor
, I thought, and there was a trill in my below half, like I was sitting on a speaker and it was blaring out my favorite song at volume nine, but I couldn’t hear it. I could only feel the pulse in the base of my hips.

Had this feeling sent Walcott all the way across the city in a borrowed car full of everything I owned? Did he have this crazy rhythm beating low through all his bones, calling him to his girl? I couldn’t imagine how Walcott’s long, bony body would work, would fit itself to CeeCee’s. She was built rounded and bouncy all over, like a blond me.

I said sweet things to Natty, telling him the story of Pigling Bland, a favorite of his. He was drifting off again, but in my head the pictures I saw were nothing like Beatrix Potter’s pastel talking animals. More like me and William Ashe, with his huge, fast hands and his chest like carved wood, starring in
Caligula
. Glorious Technicolor. Dolby surround sound.

Bring it.

Chapter 6

A
t the end of his workday, William’s skull feels hot, and his eyes are grainy. His brain is waxy and tight from subverting the agenda of a being that is not truly alive. Viruses might not meet the definition of life, but William knows these faceless strings of DNA and RNA contain immense will. They invade, change their host, replicate, survive. The trick is placing them correctly so they attack faulty DNA strands with sequences loaded to fix them. Because they invade, because they change their hosts, and because their will is so absolute, they are a perfect tool to correct poorly written human genetic code.

It is interesting work, but after hours of peering at computer screens and down into the microscopy, up to his eyes in the clean, white science of it, his body is a restless animal, shuddering and tense from being still. He runs five miles in loops through his neighborhood, then hits the weight room in the basement before making dinner. He likes the simple chemistry of cooking. He follows recipes exactly, and his food always comes out looking like the picture.

But in the before, Bridget liked cooking, too. She never cracked a cookbook. She dug around in the crisper and the pantry, setting unrelated things out on the counter. Goat cheese, an aging Roma tomato, leftover grilled chicken, some fresh herbs from her garden, maybe an egg. In the end, it would all agree and be a dinner. Her food shouldn’t have been better than his, but oftentimes it was.

On nights she cooked, he would keep Twyla. It was an easy, pleasant job, even though Twyla was a very busy person. He would lie down flat on the rug in front of the fireplace, and she would pad back and forth, toting things from her play kitchen to pile around him, or she’d run in circles, making a buzz sound, or clack Duplos together like huge castanets. She would pause frequently to show him one of her fat plastic animals, or climb him, or simply sit on him, backing up and then lowering her butt in the careful way of little bipeds who are not yet certain of their center of gravity. She’d perch on his side, as at ease as when she sat on her tiny, solid play chair, taking his presence underneath her for granted.

His eyes are closed, but he does not need to see to know that she is perched on his side now. He feels her there, uncharacteristically silent. She weighs one thousand pounds.

He tries to keep so still. She is welcome to crush him, if only she will stay. He wants to reach for her, run his fingers over the familiar planes of her face, feel the sprout of hair Bridget would have gathered up onto the very top of her head, but his arms are so heavy and unwieldy. He manages to lift one toward her, anyway.

“Look who’s awake,” a woman says. Not a voice he knows. “How’re you feeling, Mr. Ashe?”

A nurse leans over him. A few beds away he can hear a woman moaning. Someone is murmuring to her. He orients; he is in a hospital recovery room, with institutional green walls and a row of beds. The light is harsh and yellow, making him squint. It feels as if his eyes have been closed for a long, long time. He remembers being wheeled into surgery, and here he is, apparently out, technically closer to being a living system than a virus is.