Someone Else's Love Story (29 page)

When Shandi gets in on the other side, her arm brushes his, it’s so close and small. If she has proposed a date, then he is now on it. She’s still talking, very quickly, as she starts the car and drives, filling the car with chatter about the lamb burgers, the way none of the plates match, how there is a shady patio with a bocce ball court.

She says, “Today’s so pretty, can we sit outside?”

This is a direct question. “Sure.”

“Good,” Shandi says. She starts patting at herself with her right hand, her hair, her face, manually setting herself in order as she drives. Her arm moves against his, and he needs to get his own car fixed. This car is too small, too close. The prime numbers keep winding upward in his head, and this is helping. She’s gone into a maze of narrow, residential streets. There is very little traffic.

She says, “Let’s drink a lot of wine. So much we have to taxi home, okay? We’ll play bocce and eat gelato until we’re sick. We can talk about anything that’s nice. Or sit and watch the birds steal crumbs. Can we do that?”

She is turning into a parking lot. He is at 4,007 and Stevie is alive. Truthfully, everything that she is saying sounds pleasant. He can do this. Let the maid team finish. Eat a lot of protein. Let all that is complicated fall away. She is suggesting they compartmentalize, and William is superlative at this.

“Good,” he says.

She grins. “Let’s eat so much bread, William. They homemake it. We’ll eat lunch out, like we’re just people.”

“We are just people,” William says.

Shandi eases into a small parking space that faces the side of the patio she’s been talking about. The restaurant itself is a narrow brick building with a long, low window. He can see the bocce ball court. No one is playing.

She’s right; this time of day, it’s very empty. Only four people are sitting on the patio, divided into pairs. A young couple drinks beer and chats. The girl’s pretty legs are propped up across his lap. The closer couple is older, the man well into his forties and the woman a good ten or twelve years younger, about William’s age. They sit side by side on a wicker love seat with a low coffee table in front of them. They are oblivious to the patio and all the little things with feathers, mostly house wrens and finches, around them. The man touches the woman’s face. He leans in and kisses her, his hand snaking deep into her hair. The trees by the patio are strung with paper lanterns and feeders, and birds are everywhere. This place was made for legs across laps and public kissing.

This is what a date looks like. He watches through the glass. His body is rigid and still. His body does not open his door and walk toward it. It also does not lean away.

Shandi hasn’t opened her door, either. The VW’s engine is still running. She stares at the older couple, kissing. Perhaps, seeing these things, she has become uncertain, too. That would be excellent.

But then she says, “Hey, guess what? That’s my dad,” She points to the older man, who has now placed his hand on the woman’s side, high, so his thumb grazes the underside of her breast. “That’s my dad right there.”

William’s eyebrows rise. He flicks one finger at the woman. “You said she wouldn’t come here?”

They can leave, of course. Her father hasn’t seen her yet. He is not likely to see anyone. His eyes are closed, and William is uncomfortable with the amount of public tongue he is putting in his wife’s mouth.

“My stepmother?” Shandi says, and snorts. “She would never. That woman? She’s not Bethany. Not even a little bit.”

As if he feels their eyes, the man who is Shandi’s father breaks the kiss and turns to look right at them. He does a double take, so overblown it’s comical. He leaps to his feet and the woman is shunted to the side. She looks at them, too, and Shandi makes a strangling noise. Her father’s leg bangs the table, and their drinks topple. His unhinged jaw wags back and forth.

Shandi is already throwing the car into reverse and backing out as he leaps the table and runs toward them. The woman scrambles to her feet. Shandi peels away, her lips compressed, and zigzags off down the street. The car screeches around a corner and Natty snuffles, shifting in his booster seat. William crams his arm through the tiny space in between the seats to steady him. The car completes the turn, and he can no longer see the couple or the restaurant. He faces front.

“Get in your lane,” William says, and Shandi jerks the wheel right and centers the car. She is still going too fast. She hits a speed bump, jouncing them all. Natty makes a protesting, sleepy noise, and that slows her.

“That woman he’s with? She looks just like my mother. For one second I thought it actually was Mimmy. But no, she’s much younger, and she isn’t quite as pretty,” Shandi says, almost to herself. “God, I wish I hadn’t seen that. Now what?”

William isn’t sure. All he knows is that it is important to keep moving.

Shandi’s father doesn’t understand. Wives aren’t like children. They are not built for the mechanics of addition. Wives must be traded, one for one. Shandi’s father, whether he is aware of it or not, is replacing his wife in a slow, tearing stretch, when it should be surgical. Cut. Start clean.

It was an ugly thing to witness. Betrayal is always ugly, even on a shaded patio full of little birds.

William, careening away from a probable date with a girl twelve years
his
junior, feels sick in the pit of himself. Not because the situations are exactly parallel. His wife is not at home, after all, happy and oblivious, planning Catholic Youth Alive’s mission trip to Haiti.

But that doesn’t make whatever he is doing here with Shandi right. And there is Natty to think of, too.

He can’t let Shandi pull him in, or let himself be pushed away from her by Paula. He must choose what he wants and then act. He must turn, with the force of his own will behind the movement, one way or the other.

“Keep driving,” William says, though the car feels too small to hold enough air for them. There is not enough for all of them to breathe.

“Where are we going?” Shandi asks, but William doesn’t know yet.

Chapter 11

P
aula, of all people, was babysitting Natty. Who else did I have? Walcott was out. He’d asked for space, and I owed him anything he asked for, forever. Mimmy or Dad would have expected me to say where I was going, and I’d have to lie. The truth would horrify and frighten them. Bethany wouldn’t have cared what I was up to, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to drop by to see if she’d share Nanny Jean for the day. Not with the knowledge banging around in my head that Bethany was far better at sharing than I had ever suspected.

Natty liked Paula, and I trusted that she wouldn’t feed him bleach or bake him, but I still hadn’t asked her. If I was on fire, I doubted she’d so much as pee on me to put it out. William said she’d do it, though, and called her up. He was right. Turned out, her sexual politics were stronger than both our rivalry and her personal aversion to me.

William and I were sitting in his SUV, screened behind the smoked-glass windows. We were in the backseat, and that had a lot of subtext for a girl my age. Especially since it was still mostly dark out. And he was William. But being parked directly across the street from Clayton Lilli’s apartment complex sucked any possible romance out of it. I was a thousand kinds of jittery sick in my whole body.

But as time passed, and nothing happened, an air of unreality began to settle on the whole mission. William did nothing better than anyone I’d ever seen. His gaze was on the door, but it was blank. He was deep inside his head, and his foot twitched, faintly, like a dreaming dog’s. It was as if he had a thousand toys packed up inside himself, and he didn’t let my silent presence stop him from going down in there to get at them. It was weird, but kinda sexy. To be fair, though, I thought the way William turned oxygen into carbon dioxide was sexy.

I watched the door of the building and the dashboard clock. It ticked over to 6:01. We’d been sitting close to an hour already. It was Saturday. We could be sitting here past noon, if he slept in. Well, fine. I wasn’t about to go knock on his door and ask if he’d like to buy some effing Girl Scout cookies. I wanted to see Clayton Lilli, but the idea of him seeing me made me feel like my skin was crawling off my body.

The smell of the melted foam cushioning, even under its swaddle of towels and tape, had an Eau de Pit-of-Hell that wasn’t helping. More random violence, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was connected. William’s car bomb had been made by my kind of arsonist: fumbling, ineffective, yet doing damage that left a lingering stench. After all, I was the girl who’d cosmically called Stevie and (maybe) Clayton Lilli the world’s shittiest criminals.

I said, “I keep thinking this lurching, lumpy Golem will come oozing out.”

William’s head jerked, like I’d called him out of sleep. “What?”

“He’s just a guy, right?”

William nodded. “You saw the pictures. He’s just a guy.”

But that could not be true. Would “just a guy” feed a girl drugs, incapacitate her, walk her off alone . . .  “Something’s wrong with him. What’s wrong with him?” It was rhetorical, or maybe a question I was asking the universe, but William answered.

“Nothing serious. He’ll probably go bald, and if he smokes, he’ll have a hard time quitting. He has a higher risk of heart disease than most.” He paused, because I had turned away from the door and I was boggling at him, shocked, but at the same time glad for a distraction.

“You can’t know all that.”

“Of course I can. I have his genetic material,” William said.

“You learned all that with some . . .” I couldn’t say the word.  “. . . cells?”

“It’s all in there,” William said. “We’re made out of our cells.”

I didn’t realize what all I was handing him, when I’d scraped the inside of my cheek. “Do you know stuff like that, about me?”

“No.” He said it like I’d asked if he’d ever watched me shower through a peephole. “I did only what was needed with your sample, but”—he gestured at the front door—“I wasn’t interested in this guy’s right to privacy.”

“And Natty?” I said.

He turned his palms up in what might have been a slight apology. “I did some quick and dirty sequencing. I checked for increased risks to common kinds of cancer, for example. I didn’t see anything to worry about, or I would have told you. He’s a good kid.”

He didn’t say it the way people do to mean a child is mannerly or charming. He was saying Natty had been well constructed.

His knuckles began tapping at his knee in a rhythm, as if a song were playing somewhere, and only he could hear it. A minute of that, with me still watching the door, and the tapping starting working my last nerve. It was stretched thin as it was.

“What’s bugging you?” I said.

He looked past me, like he was watching the door now, but he said, “I also checked your son for some specific duplications and deletions that I saw in Clayton Lilli.” My eyebrows rose, and William added quickly, “Natty doesn’t have them.”

“But this guy, he has, what, these things?”

“Duplications and deletions, yes,” William said. He swallowed. I had the sense that he was telling me something significant or personal.

“Help me out here, William. I don’t speak science.”

William was rocking now, too, very faintly, but I could see it. His hand tapped harder. Whatever invisible song was playing, he didn’t like it. “With these kinds of anomalies, I expect that Lilli would present with limited empathy. He probably has a hard time reading social cues.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You’re saying that’s why he did this? Like, girls get so much easier to talk to if you drug the living shit out of ’em?”

“I’m not excusing him,” William said, his voice level, but his hand tapped faster.

“You kind of are,” I said, my voice heating.

William shook his head, vehement. “It doesn’t excuse him,” he said, but I was still talking.

“What about Stevie? Did Stevie’s genes make him bust into the Circle K with a gun and start kicking old people? What about my dad? If we’d gone up on the patio and stolen his beer bottle, could you root around in his DNA and find out why he’s screwing a girl who looks like a younger version of my mother?” I flapped my hand at the door to Clayton Lilli’s building. “Poor him, he’s got these duplications, and he couldn’t help it.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” William said, cold, tapping and tapping, so uncomfortable now inside his body, as if the backseat, already too small for him, had shrunk.

“You said it’s all in there,” I said. “You said we are made—”

“I know what I said!” His voice was harsh and loud, but then he caught himself, and when he spoke again his words came out very fast, but not angry. “I know what I said. And it’s true. Our genes define our capacity. They set the range, and we have to act within it. But it
is
a range, which means it can’t be simple. We are limited, all of us, and imperfect. We are broken in specific, quantifiable ways, but I do believe—I do believe in—” He stopped abruptly, looking down at his hand, like he had just noticed it, knocking against his knee now like it was trying to gain entry. He took in a very deep breath, through his nose. He willfully stopped his hand from moving. Meanwhile, my brain was trying to finish his sentence in a way that I could live with, a way that would let the Golem be Natty’s biological father without dooming Natty to be awful. Had William meant to say
environment
?
Destiny
?
Free will
?