Page 131
Boston
It’s 2 am and Jack has had a setback.
Nothing dangerous, the doctors were very clear about that, nothing dangerous, just the body reminding everyone who’s in charge. We were there for six hours. Yesterday I took portraits of his family and of Birdie’s garden. Jack was laughing and joking like it was all normal. It’s not but they’ll have pictures to pretend it is.
We’re back at the townhouse now and neither of us can sleep, but there’s nothing left to say so we’re just existing in the same room at 2 am which is its own kind of intimacy.
I’m on the floor with my back against the bed. He’s on the bed. We’re not touching.
“I wasted so much time.” He says.
I wait.
He continues. “Fighting with him. Performing for him. Trying to make him see something he wasn’t going to see.” He’s staring at the ceiling. “And the whole time he was just, he wanted to hand me things. In a boat. That’s all he ever actually wanted. To hand me things and have me take them.”
I don’t say anything. He doesn’t need me to fix it, just listen.
“I don’t know how to be his son,” he says. “Without it being a negotiation. I’ve been negotiating with that man since I was eight years old and now he’s home from the hospital and I sit next to him and I still can’t just sit next to him.” He pauses. “Does that make sense? I can’t take the things he wants to hand me.”
“Yes.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Tell me something.”
“My mother,” I say to the wall across from me, “has been managing me my whole life. What to wear, what to study, who to be with, what to want. And I thought I was rebelling against it. Running from it.” I pause. “I wasn’t. I would do or wear things that were contrary. But eventually what I thought was rebellion was me screwing myself up. Picking just enough of the right thing so there was nothing to argue about. Chad was the right thing. The job was the right thing. Staten Island was—” I stop.
“No. It wasn’t…”
“It was just a quieter kind of compliance. Your path taught me that. I haven’t picked up my camera in days. Last thing I took a picture of was that random stick over your mantel.”
He reaches down and takes my hand off the floor and holds it.
We’re quiet for a long time.
He says my name. Just my name, quietly, in the dark. And I know what’s coming because I’ve been feeling it build for two weeks, in kitchens, cabs and hospital waiting rooms, in every small look and every hand found in the dark. I turn my face up toward him. He looks at me. His thumb moves across my cheek.
“I think I—”
My phone lights up the room.
MOM: Just checking in. Sleep well darling.
I look at it automatically. The reflex of a lifetime. I type back something. Something fine, something reassuring, something that takes twelve seconds and costs me everything. But I tear up because I’m tired of performing too.
By the time I put the phone down he’s looking at the ceiling again. His hand is still holding mine, but something has reoriented in the quality of our silence.
“You should sleep,” I say.
“Yeah.”
I slide into bed next to him and he turns off the lamp while we lie in the dark clutching each other, almost, not quite, everything. The thing that didn’t get said sits between us, words neither of us can take back or finish saying.
Chapter 69
Stick That Breaks The Camel’s Back
KAT
Boston
