W
hen we sat down to eat, Angie looked across the table at me with the same controlled fury she’d been wearing since she got a good look at my face, heard about my trip to the health center, and ascertained that I was, in fact, not going to die tonight.
“So,” she said, “let’s start at the beginning.” She speared a few pieces of lettuce. “Beatrice McCready finds you at JFK Station.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And she tells you her smutty sister-in-law misplaced her daughter again.”
“Helene’s smutty?” I said. “I hadn’t noticed.”
My wife smiled. Not the nice smile. The other one.
“Daddy?”
I looked over at our daughter, Gabriella. “Yeah, honey?”
“What’s smutty?”
“It’s like kooky,” I said, “only it rhymes with slutty.”
“What’s slutty?”
“It’s like ooky,” I said, “except it doesn’t rhyme with kooky. Why aren’t you eating your carrots?”
“You look funny.”
“I wear big bandages on my face every Thursday.”
“No suh.” Gabriella’s eyes grew wide and solemn. She had her mother’s big brown eyes. She also had her olive skin and wide mouth and dark hair. From me she’d gotten curls, a thin nose, and a love of silliness and wordplay.
“Why aren’t you eating your carrots?” I asked again.
“I don’t like carrots.”
“You did last week.”
“No suh.”
“Uh-huh.”
Angie put her fork down. “Don’t start this, the both of you. Do not.”
“No suh.”
“Uh-huh.”
“No suh.”
“Uh-huh. I got pictures.”
“No suh.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll get my camera.”
Angie reached for her wineglass. “Please?” She fixed me with eyes as huge as our daughter’s. “For me?”
I looked back at Gabriella. “Eat your carrots.”
“Okay.” Gabby dug a fork into one and plopped it in her mouth, chewed. Her face lit up around the chewing.
I raised my eyebrows at her.
“It’s good,” she said.
“Right?”
She speared another one and munched away.
Angie said, “I’ve been watching it for four years and I still don’t know how you do that.”
“Ancient Chinese secret.” Very slowly, I chewed a tiny chunk of chicken breast. “By the way, not sure what you’ve heard, but it’s kinda hard eating when you can’t use the left side of your mouth.”
“You know what’s funny?” Angie asked in a voice that suggested something wasn’t.
“I do not,” I assured her.
“Most private investigators don’t get kidnapped and assaulted.”
“The practice is rumored to be trending upward, however.”
She frowned and I could feel both of us trapped inside ourselves, not sure what to do with today’s violence. There was a time we would have been experts at it. She would have tossed me an ice pack on her way to the gym, expected me to be raring to get back to work by the time she got back. Those days were long gone, though, and today’s return to easy bloodshed drove us into our protective shells. Her shell is made of quiet fury and wary disconnection. Mine is made of humor and sarcasm. Together we resemble a comedian failing an anger-management class.
“It looks awful,” she said with a tenderness that surprised me.
“It only feels four or five times as bad as it looks. Really. I’m fine.”
“That’s the Percocet.”
“And the beer.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to mix the two.”
“I refuse to bow to conventional wisdom. I’m a decider. And I’ve decided I want to feel no pain.”
“How’s that working out?”
I toasted her with my beer. “Mission accomplished.”
“Daddy?”
“Yeah, sweetie?”
“I like trees.”
“I like trees, too, honey.”
“They’re tall.”
“They sure are.”
“Do you like
all
trees?”
“Every one.”
“Even short ones?”
“Sure, honey.”
“But why?” My daughter held her hands out, palms-up, a sign that she found this line of questioning of global importance and—lucky us—quite possibly endless.
Angie shot me a look that said: Welcome to my day.
• • •
For the last three years, I’d spent the days at work, or, as opportunities dwindled, trying to hustle up work. Three nights a week, I watched Gabby while Angie took classes. Christmas break was approaching, however, and Angie would take finals next week. After the New Year, she’d begin an internship with Blue Sky Learning Center, a nonprofit specializing in educating teens with Down syndrome. When that was finished, in May, she’d receive her master’s in applied sociology. But until then, we were a one-income family. More than one friend had suggested we move to the suburbs—homes were cheaper, schools were safer, property taxes and car insurance premiums were lower.
Angie and I grew up together in the city, though. We took to picket fences and split-level ranches like we took to shag carpeting and Ultimate Fighting. Which is to say, not so much. I once owned a nice car, but I’d sold it to start a college fund for Gabby, and now my beater Jeep sat in front of my house, without moving, for weeks at a time. I prefer subways—you pop down the hole on one side of the city, pop back up on the other side, and you never have to hit your horn, not once. I don’t like mowing lawns or trimming hedges or raking the mowed lawns or the hedge trimmings. I don’t like going to malls or eating in chain restaurants. In fact, the appeal of the suburban ideal—both in a general and a particular sense—escapes me.
I like the sound of jackhammers, the bleat of sirens in the night, twenty-four-hour diners, graffiti, coffee served in cardboard cups, steam exhaled through manhole covers, cobblestone, tabloid newspapers, the Citgo sign, someone yelling “Tax-
i
” on a cold night, corner boys, sidewalk art, Irish pubs, and guys named Sal.
Not much of which I can find in the suburbs, at least not to the degree I’ve grown accustomed to. And Angie is, if anything, worse.
So we decided to raise our child in the city. We bought a small house on a decent street. It has a tiny yard and it’s a short walk to a playground (short walk to a pretty hairy housing project, too, but that’s another matter). We know most of our neighbors and Gabriella can already name five subway stops on the Red Line, in order, a feat which fills her old man with bottomless pride.
“She asleep?” Angie looked up from her textbook as I came into the living room. She’d changed into sweats and one of my T-shirts, a white one from The Hold Steady’s
Stay Positive
tour. It swam on her, and I worried she wasn’t eating enough.
“Our gabby Gabby took a breath during a discourse on trees—”
“Arghh.” Angie threw her head back against the couch cushion. “What’s with the trees?”
“—and promptly drifted off to sleep.” I dropped onto the couch beside her, took her hand in mine, gave it a kiss.
“Besides getting beat up,” she said, “did anything else happen today?”
“You mean with Duhamel-Standiford.”
“With them, yes.”
I took a deep breath. “I didn’t get a permanent job, no.”
“Shit!” She shouted it so loudly that I had to hold up a hand and she glanced in the direction of Gabby’s room and cringed.
“They said I shouldn’t have called Brandon Trescott names. They suggested I am uncouth and in need of an adjustment in my manners before I partake of their benefits program.”
“Shit,” she said, softer this time and with more despair than shock. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
We sat there for a bit. There was nothing much to say. We were getting numb to it, the fear, the weight of worry.
“I’ll leave school.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yeah, I will. I can go back in—”
“You’re this close,” I said. “Finals next week, one internship, and then you’re bringing home the bacon by summer, at which point—”
“
If
I can even find a job.”
“—at which point, I can
afford
to freelance. You’re not packing it in this close to the finish line. You’re top of your class. You’ll find a job no problem.” I gave her a smile of confidence I didn’t feel. “We’ll make it work.”
She leaned back a bit to study my face again.
“Okay,” I said to change the subject, “lay into me.”
“About what?” All mock-innocence.
“We made a pact when we married that we were done with this shit.”
“We did.”
“No more violence, no more—”
“Patrick.” She took my hands in hers. “Just tell me what happened.”
I did.
When I finished, Angie said, “So the upshot is that in addition to not getting the job with Duhamel-Standiford, the world’s worst mother lost her child again, you didn’t agree to help, but someone mugged you, threatened you, and beat the shit out of you anyway. You’re out a hospital co-pay and a really nice laptop.”
“I know, right? I loved that thing. Weighed less than your wineglass. A smiley face popped on-screen and said, ‘Hello,’ every time I opened it up, too.”
“You’re pissed.”
“Yeah, I’m pissed.”
“But you’re not going to go into crusade mode just because you lost a laptop, am I right?”
“Did I mention the smiley face?”
“You can get yourself another computer with another smiley face.”
“With what money?”
There was no answer for that.
We sat quietly for a bit, her legs on my lap. I’d left Gabby’s bedroom door slightly ajar, and in the silence we could hear her breathing, the exhalations carrying a tiny whistle at their backs. The sound of her breathing reminded me, as it so often did, of how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable we were because of how much we loved her. The fear—that something could happen to her at any moment, something I’d be helpless to stop—had become so omnipresent in my life that I sometimes pictured it growing, like a third arm, out of the center of my chest.
“Do you remember much of the day you got shot?” Angie asked, throwing another fun topic into the ring.
I tipped my hand back and forth. “Bits and pieces. I remember the noise.”
“No kidding, uh?” She smiled, her eyes going back to it. “It was loud down there—all those guns, the cement walls. Man.”
“Yeah.” I let loose a soft sigh.
“Your blood,” she said, “it just splattered the walls. You were out when the EMTs got there and I just remember looking at it. That was your blood—that was
you
—and it wasn’t in your body, where it belonged. It was all over the floor and all over the walls. You weren’t the white of a ghost, you were light blue, like your eyes. You were lying there but you were gone, you know? It was like you were already halfway to Heaven with your foot on the gas.”
I closed my eyes and raised my hand. I hated hearing about that day and she knew it.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I just want us both to remember why we got out of the rough-stuff business. It wasn’t just because you got shot. It was because we were junkies to it. We loved it. We still love it.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I was not put on this earth just to read
Goodnight, Moon
three times a day and have fifteen-minute discussions about sippy cups.”
“I know,” I said.
And I did. No one was less built to be a stay-at-home mom than Angie. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good at it—she was—it was that she had no desire to define herself by the role. But then she went back to school and the money got tight and it made the most sense to save on day care for a few months, so she could go to school nights and watch Gabby days. And just like that—gradually and then suddenly, as the man said—we found ourselves here.
“I’m going crazy at this.” Her eyes indicated the coloring books and toys on our living-room floor.
“I gather.”
“Bat-shit fucking crazy.”
“That would be the approved medical terminology, sure. You’re great at it.”
She rolled her eyes in my direction. “You’re sweet. But, baby? I might be doing a great job faking it, but I am faking it.”
“Isn’t every parent?”
She cocked her head at me with a grimace.
“No,” I said. “Really. Who in their right mind wants to have fourteen conversations about trees? Ever? Never mind in one twenty-four-hour period. That little girl, I adore her, but she’s an anarchist. She wakes us up whenever she feels like it, she thinks high-energy at seven in the morning is a positive, sometimes she screams for no reason, she decides on a second-to-second basis which foods she’ll eat and which she’ll fight you over, she puts her hands and face into truly disgusting places, and she’s attached to our hips for at least another fourteen years, if we’re lucky enough for a college we can’t afford to take her off our hands.”