Someone Else's Love Story (30 page)

“You do believe in what?” I asked, when not asking had become unbearable.

When William’s body was completely still, he turned to me and restarted the sentence. “I do believe in the possibility of goodness.”

It was such an unexpected answer. He was saying Natty was a possible goodness, a probable one, even, a true and living current one, no matter where he’d gotten half his genes. I touched William’s hand with my fingers, lightly.

“Me, too,” I said. “I want to believe in that, too.”

I’d spent years pretending Natty into a gift, a free and lovely thing, miraculous and uncaused. The closer I came to laying eyes on Natty’s biological father, the more I hoped that Clayton Lilli was at least capable of goodness, whether he had chosen it or not. That we all were.

I turned back to the door. Talking about his genes made him so real. He had cells. This wasn’t like watching for fanged mermaids to pop out of a storm drain. This was a human man with a propensity for heart disease and whatever chromosome thing caused male pattern baldness. I’d pretended him into being impossible. He could not exist, but William had brought me here to see him, and my faith in William was crazy absolute. Maybe that was how faith worked?

I wouldn’t know, with my upbringing.

Both Mimmy and Dad would agree that Moses had faith in God when he commanded the Red Sea to part. But when he actually saw the water rolling itself up into huge wet walls, all those surprised fish staring out at him, had he gone ahead and crapped his pants anyway?

“Genes don’t make it excusable,” William said. “Not for this guy. Not Stevie. Not your dad.”

He sounded so hard-line. Maybe he was Catholic, after all.

“Not to defend my dad, but he
is
married to Bethany,” I said. I still had Moses on my mind. “Marrying Bethany is the modern version of forty years in the wilderness. It gets cold in the desert at night, William. Even Moses got to look into the Promised Land.”

“I don’t recall your father looking,” William said, his voice so dry I had to smile in spite of the circumstances. “What happens when she finds out?”

“Oh, she knows.” I’d never bought Bethany as Lady Condo-Bountiful, so excited by Natty’s IQ test results that she wanted better for him than my rural, very Baptist preschool. My dad had been meeting Mimmy Junior at the condo, and Bethany moved me into town for one reason: to cock-block my own father. It made me want to take a bath in bleach and then punch her in the face with my clean hand.

I never took my eyes off the door, even as we had a nice little chat about my dad’s adultery, like any normal folks might while watching for a possible fictional monster on a superfun Saturday morning. I wanted to unsee the moment when my dad took his tongue out of that woman’s mouth, and she turned to look at us, face on. For a single dizzy second, I’d been looking at my mother.

The next second, I’d realized Miss Patio was younger, blonder, and not as crazy-beautiful—few were. But she’d been beautiful enough, with Mimmy-style cheekbones, Mimmy’s mouth. I wondered if my father saw it. Not that I could ask. He’d left fifty messages on my cell phone, but I wasn’t ready to talk to him at all, much less ask if he was aware his go-to girl was his ex-wife’s baby clone.

The door opened. My spine seized up for a second, but it was only a couple of old guys, dressed for jogging. The faint gray light was warming to gold against the building’s brick front, touching all the little balconies. I reminded myself that Clayton Lilli might not even be the guy. We were just checking. We were just here to see.

“It’s a really nice building, and not even half a block from the park. I guess karma favors the douche-y.” I was trying to keep it light, but I could hear the strain in my voice.

A woman emerged next, still in last night’s club clothes, with mascara streaks under her eyes. She took her shame walk fast, in spite of her high-heeled satin shoes, and disappeared around the corner.

William kept his face pointed at the building, but after the woman passed and I didn’t say anything else, his eyes began to drift off sideways. He disappeared down inside his head again.

I watched the door, glad I’d looked at the pictures of Clayton Lilli so I would know him when he finally came out. I’d lingered over the shot of the team, Lilli in his tattletale blue and gold jersey, maybe the last image taken of him before my path crossed his. It had been easier to look at this earlier version, when I could try to think of him as innocent.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said.

William’s shoulders shuddered as he landed back inside his body. “What?”

“When he comes out. If he does. What do I do?”

“Damn if I know,” William said. “I’m not good at this part.”

He said it as if this mission
had
parts, like there was a manual somewhere with all the steps for stalking one’s—what to even call him? I didn’t have a good way to think of Clayton Lilli. Natty’s father? He did not deserve the title. My drugger? My assaulter-person? Even if I could find a noun, I couldn’t stand to use that pronoun in the same way I’d say “my spoon,” or “my pair of shoes.” I didn’t want the ownership.

A young couple walked out the front door with a small dog on a leash. The girl was in front. She was a plain girl, college-aged, wearing white sneakers and a fifties-diner waitress dress, her hair scraped into a ponytail. I thought,
Someone got the breakfast shift,
and then she moved down the stairs, and I could see the man half of the couple. It was him.

I looked from the door to William. William nodded in confirmation. My breath stopped, and I turned back. It was him. The earth stopped, too, stopped spinning, but I kept on without it, whirling up and out of orbit, careening toward the sun.

It was truly him, dressed in baggy cargo shorts with his flossy hair hanging in his eyes. He popped into existence at 6:22 on a Saturday morning. The pictures had been useless. I saw how he held the leash. I saw how his head tilted to listen to the mousy girl. I saw the angle of his throat as he drank water from a sports bottle. Before he had existed in my world ten seconds, I knew he was the Golem.

I knew, because I saw my son.

When Natty was born, I had stared endlessly down into his brand-new potato face, so pretty, mostly unsquashed thanks to the C-section. I had immediately recognized my own rounded cheeks and chin. He had Mimmy’s small, flat ears lying close against his head, and the long, elegant feet my dad had given all his own boys, too. The other pieces were simply Natty.

But this man? He had preowned Natty’s stompy walk, leading from the boxy shoulders, as he followed his girlfriend to a sporty little Fiat parked on the street. He shared the long-waisted shape of my son’s body. His brown hair had Natty’s cowlick standing up in back. How dare he? How dare he be real and own these pieces of my son?

“Shandi?” William said.

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t process, even though I’d known the great god Thor would find him. I was reeling, mute and gobsmacked, staring at this skinny boy-man who cocked his head to a Natty-style angle as he leaned to peck his plain brown paper bag of a girlfriend good-bye.

Clayton Lilli stepped back from the curb with his dog. It was one of those silky, fox-faced objects with the plumy tails. He was completely unaware that I had penetrated his veil of pharmaceuticals and found him. He watched the girl drive off, and then he turned and headed toward the park. I saw that he had dog bags in his pocket.

My body got out of William’s Explorer and started after him. I think I left the car door hanging open. My body went, itching and burning the whole length of myself, unstoppable. Lilli was already crossing into the park when I realized William had caught up with me. My hand reached for his and caught it and held it so tight I could feel his bones grinding together. He exhaled out his nose, long and smooth, and let me keep it.

We followed Clayton Lilli across the street. It was still so early, hardly anyone was out on the green. He paused by a trash can to let the dog do his business, and we paused, too, behind him at the park’s edge. I stood frozen as he cleaned up after the dog, wondering if he would come right toward me now, going home. But instead, he let his dog off the leash. It wasn’t legal, but what was a leash law to a guy like him? He set his water bottle on the grass, then pulled a small collapsible Frisbee out of his pocket. The dog went nuts with joy. I sank down to sit on the damp lawn, pulling William with me. We watched Clayton Lilli indulge in an early-morning romp with his stupid, glossy dog.

To Clayton, we were no different from the older couple come to see the sunrise on a blanket, or the tired-looking mother with the hyperactive toddler, or the pair of teenage girls who had probably been up all night. The two girls walked aimlessly, orbiting each other in a little circle, each deep in conversation with her own smartphone.

Clayton Lilli didn’t know that among this knot of humans, on this wide expanse of green, I was the one who wanted to kill him. It was a startling, distant thing to feel.
Here I am on the grass of earth. Here is William, and here is a golden dog. There is Clayton Lilli, drinking water from his sports bottle with all his blood tucked away inside him. Here I am, wanting to let every drop of it come out.

I leaned in closer to William, my body pressing toward him like in the Circle K but this time, thank God, there was no Natty between us. I tried to figure out how to look at Clayton Lilli without running at him across the green and stabbing his eyes out with my keys, and without my heart breaking into tiny shattered bits because now that we were closer, I could see so many, so many expressions that belonged to my beautiful son crossing his perfect shit of a face.

“I want that water bottle,” William said, and then, to my raised eyebrows, said, “Saliva.”

I shook my head, no. “You don’t need it. It’s him.”

“I like to be certain,” William said.

“I’m certain,” I said with such finality he nodded. My eyes burned and itched as they rested on Clayton Lilli. I looked to the dog, to rest them. “He doesn’t deserve a dog that cute.”

“No,” William agreed. “He deserves an awful dog that poops in his clothes.”

I nodded. “A magic flaming dog that rolls on his lap until he catches fire and burns up into a puddle.”

“That dog already got my car.”

William was helping. Being funny, that was good. Being twice as big as Clayton. That was even better.

Clayton Lilli was close to six feet, but he was even skinnier than Walcott, if such a thing was humanly possible. His legs in the floppy shorts looked like lengths of string with knots in them for knees. If he so much as looked my way, William could pick up a rock and smash his head in. I’d seen William smash a head in before, so I could imagine exactly what that would look like. I liked imagining what that would look like.

What I really wanted was to pull that dog aside, because it loved him such an ungodly amount. I wanted to tell it what an asshole it had drawn in dog lotto. I wanted to lay my case out, and have the dog nod sagely, then turn on him and bite him.

It was the way it brought the Frisbee back that broke me. It was laughing up into his face with that silly pouf of tail going like mad. It was the way he knelt and spoke to it, in his sugared voice, saying, “Who is good? Who is a good dog? Who?”

I popped up off the grass, heading right for him. I sensed more than saw William rising, moving with me.

I walked right up to Clayton Lilli, and when he saw me coming, he straightened up and turned, smiling, eyebrows raised politely, like he expected me to ask if he had the time or a spare breath mint.

“Hi!” I said. I sounded so chipper. So bright.

“Hi?” he said.

“Remember me?” I said.

His straight-line, Natty eyebrows came together, and as he searched my face, I saw that he didn’t. He didn’t remember me.

My fist came shooting out forward toward him, hard as it could, and it landed in the middle of his stupid face. Right on the nose. I felt it give in a fleshy, bouncing way, and then pain bloomed in my hand. Clayton Lilli staggered back a step, his hands going up to his face. His little dog started barking its fool head off. Crazy mad barking, right at me.

“What the—” he said, and took a step toward me.

I felt a wild kind of terror rise in me, but then I felt William step in closer, rising up behind me.

“I wouldn’t,” William said, and his voice was deep and cool. Clayton Lilli’s gaze went from me to him. Watching Clayton Lilli become afraid of William made all my fear be gone.

The other people in the park were staring now. The mother picked up her toddler. He watched us, too, with one finger in his mouth. The older couple stood up, shoes dirtying their blanket. The teenage girls were closest. They stared at us, impassive, like they were looking at a TV. One of them started to lift her phone to film us.

William met her eyes and said, “No.”

She lowered it.

William said to me, “I hope you’re certain.” His jaw was tense. He didn’t like this.

“I’m certain,” I said.

He nodded. “Don’t make the fist around your thumb. You could break it.”

I took my thumb out and it was better. A better fist, I could tell already.