Grand & Humble (10 page)

But his mom was absolutely wrong when it came to Harlan. As a result, she had to be stopped once and for all. And Harlan had come prepared, with just the right weapon. This time he
did
have a strategy.

Harlan kept laughing, but he wasn’t feeling happy so much as serene. So
this
is what wisdom felt like! He’d never experienced anything quite like it before.

“Don’t you laugh at me!” his mom said. “And don’t you
dare
laugh while—”

“Listen,” he said, stopping her in mid-sentence; he didn’t think he’d ever stopped her in mid-sentence before. “Things
are
going to be different around here from now on.”

“I refuse to listen—”

“Do you know why?”

He’d stopped her again. She didn’t answer his question. She looked confused; by throwing the adoption in Harlan’s face, she thought she’d won. Now she didn’t know how to respond. Her big guns hadn’t been so big after all.

Harlan reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag full of white pills.

“Do you know what these are?” he said.

She still didn’t speak. Could it be that she was finally at a loss for words? His mom, the woman who wrote the speeches that got his dad elected to the U.S. Senate and who, even now, edited the words churned out by his staff of highly paid speechwriters?

“They’re drugs, Mom. Ecstasy, to be exact.” He wasn’t lying. Jerry Blain was good for something after all.

“What are you—”

“Nothing at all. I’m certainly not taking them, if
that’s what you’re thinking. But here’s the deal. Unless you back off, I’ll be caught with them.”

“You would do that to your—”

“I’d do much more than that,” he said, still speaking calmly, evenly. “And think about it. The Senator’s son? Caught with Ecstasy? Does Mr. Family Values really want to have to explain that to his fans at the Christian Coalition? Remember how much embarrassment the Bush girls caused their parents?”

Harlan’s mom glared at him. What little color there had been in her unrouged cheeks was gone now. It was blackmail, plain and simple: that’s what he was doing to her. Just because his mom didn’t want him ending up an addict like his biological father, that didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of the political ramifications too. He hated that he had to resort to such a thing—to lower himself to her level. But he
had
to do it. It was the only way. Sometimes you had to fight fire with fire. Sometimes the path to peace
was
war.

He had her now, and she knew it. He could see it in the set of her jaw. It was over, and he’d won. She was vanquished. This time, he had all the leverage. This time, he was the one who would be getting his whole way.

Even so, there was no reason to rub it in, to take what little dignity she had left; there was no need to
do to her what she would have done to him. Without another word, he turned to go.

“You’d really destroy your own future just to get back at us?” his mom said from behind him. “You hate me that much?”

He stopped just long enough to answer the question. “I don’t hate you at all,” he said. “But you forced me to choose between myself and you. And I chose myself.”

Manny sat across from his dad at the kitchen table.

“Your parents were killed in a car accident when you were three years old,” his dad said.

“I know,” Manny said. “You told me this already.”

His dad shook his head. “I didn’t tell you the whole truth. I said you were home with a baby-sitter, but you weren’t. You were with them in the car.”

“A truck,” Manny said without thinking. “We were hit by a truck.”

His dad stared at him. “That’s right. Do you remember the accident?”

Did
Manny remember the accident? Or was he just remembering his last nightmare, where he’d come up from out of the cave-in and been creamed by the front of a truck?

“My nightmares!” Manny said suddenly. “The
accident is what my nightmares are all about!” The truck. The asteroid. The tidal wave. He thought about his other nightmares too—they all involved something huge slamming into him.

Then there was the smell of gasoline. That was part of all his recent nightmares as well. Was that another buried memory from the accident? Did the truck crash into their car, rupturing the gas tank, and had Manny, even as a three-year-old, somehow registered the smell?

“Glasses!” This time, Manny shouted.

His dad was confused. “What about them?”

“Did my biological father wear glasses?”

Manny’s dad hesitated. “Yeah. I guess he did.”

So, in the aftermath of the accident, Manny had somehow seen his dad’s broken spectacles, and remembered. He must have seen the whole accident, but suppressed it. Manny still had no conscious memory of the event itself, not even fleeting images. But the memories were in his head somewhere, pushed deep into the Mariana Trench of his subconscious, and now images from those memories were bubbling upward, resurfacing in the form of nightmares.

So was that it? Had Manny solved the Mystery of the Recurring Nightmares? Would they finally go away for good?

His dad didn’t say anything, just looked down at the table.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Manny asked.

“You had no memory,” his dad said. “Not just of the accident. Of your parents. The doctor said not to push things. That your memory might return someday. Or that because of your young age, you might never remember. He did tell me that you might have nightmares, but you never did. Not until just these past few months.”

“No,” Manny said. “I mean, why didn’t you tell me all this yesterday? You said that when my parents were killed, I was home with a baby-sitter.”

“Downtown,” his dad said. “At the intersection of Grand and Humble. That’s where the accident was. It was a miracle you weren’t killed too. A damn miracle.”

That’s interesting, Manny wanted to say. But it isn’t the answer to the question I asked.

“Dad?” Manny said.

Suddenly his dad stood up and turned away, toward the stove. A second later, the teakettle on that stove began to whistle, almost as if his dad had somehow known it was going to happen.

His dad reached for the kettle and started pouring the boiling water into a teapot.

“Dad,” Manny said, more forcefully.

“Damn!” his dad said. He’d burned his hand from a splash of hot water.

“Dad! Answer me!”

His dad put the kettle back on the stove and swung toward the sink. He turned the cold water on full blast and plunged his hand under it. He was still facing away from Manny, so it took a second for Manny to realize that his dad was crying.

“Dad?”

He didn’t answer. Manny wasn’t sure if his dad could hear him over the splashing of the water, so he stood up and walked to the sink. His dad’s body was shaking, like he was in the middle of an earthquake, but one centered on him alone.

“Dad?” he repeated.

His dad turned and buried his face in Manny’s chest. “Manny, I’m sorry! I’m really, really sorry!”

He let his dad hold him, cry on his shoulder. But tears or no tears, his dad had promised him answers, and Manny was determined to get them.

He gripped his dad by the shoulders and pushed him away; for the first time that Manny could remember, his dad looked old, broken. He could see the angry red welt on his dad’s hand from where he’d spilled the hot water. It looked a little like a heart—or maybe the Batman logo.

“Dad?” Manny said. “Why are you sorry? For not telling me the truth? It’s okay, all right?”

His dad shook his head and started to turn away, but stopped himself. “It’s not that. I’m sorry for that too. But I’m more sorry for the accident. You almost died!”

“But that wasn’t your fault. It’s not like you were driving the truck that hit us.” Manny froze. “Wait. Dad, you
weren’t
driving that truck, were you?” Could it be? Distraught truck driver adopts the orphaned child of the parents he killed?

His dad dried his hand on a nearby towel. “No, that’s the one thing I didn’t do.”

“Then what? Why are you sorry about the accident? You weren’t to blame. You didn’t even know me then. You hadn’t adopted me yet.”

His dad didn’t answer. Manny was certain his dad was about to start crying again, so he reached out a hand and directed him back to the table. “Sit down, Dad. Tell me what happened.”

His dad sat. Manny turned off the faucet. After the sound of splashing water, the silence was deafening.

“I did know you,” his dad said softly, before Manny had even had a chance to sit.

“What?” Manny said.

“I knew you,” his dad said. “Before the accident. Of course I did. I was your father.”

Wordlessly, Manny took the seat opposite his dad.

“You’re my son, Manny. My
biological
son. Those parents who were killed in the car accident at Grand and Humble? They adopted you from me. When you were nine months old. After they were killed, I adopted you back.”

Manny listened, struggling to understand. It was like trying to make sense of a foreign language when he’d only studied it from books in a classroom—the words were coming too fast, too garbled. His dad was both his adoptive
and
his biological father? But that didn’t make any sense.

“You had a mother, of course,” his dad said. “My girlfriend—we weren’t married. She did die, but not of skin cancer, and not when I told you. She left when you were two months old, and I never saw her again. She died a few years later, in a drug overdose. She was a drug addict.” His dad wasn’t on the verge of crying now. He was now completely without emotion. It was like Manny was talking to a robot.

“I decided to raise you myself,” his dad went on. “A single father, that part was true. But I wasn’t a very good father. And when you were nine months old, I lost custody.”

“What?” Manny said. He had to choke out the word.

“There was an accident, and you almost died. It was my fault. I should have been watching you more closely.” So Manny had almost died twice—once in the car with his adoptive parents and once even earlier, when he’d had some kind of accident with his dad?

“The state took you away from me,” his dad was saying. “They gave you to different parents. It almost killed me. I was depressed, so I went out and did a lot of really stupid things. And I destroyed everything that had anything to do with you, every toy, every picture. I couldn’t bear to be reminded.”

“All except for the jack-in-the-box,” Manny whispered.

His dad nodded. “A gift from my sister. You loved it so much—it was your favorite toy—I couldn’t bear to throw it away.

“About two years later,” his dad said, “your new parents were killed in that car accident. A complete fluke. But I saw my opportunity. I petitioned the court. It took a while, but I convinced them I could raise you right this time. And finally they awarded me custody again. At this point, I had no legal rights to you, so I had to adopt my own son.”

Manny had questions, lots of them. But he couldn’t
get them out. He still didn’t speak the language.

“For a year or so,” his dad said, “we stayed in the town where we’d lived before I lost you. And it was too much. Everyone was watching me, assuming I’d screw up again. I didn’t want you growing up with a loser for a dad. And so we left. We moved here, to the big city, where you’d lived with your adoptive parents. No one knew us here. That was the real reason we left, not what I told you yesterday, about the prejudice from my being a single father. It was because of me, because I was ashamed of what I’d done. But I finally did turn my life around.” He looked down at the burn on his hand. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t gotten you back in my life.”

There was silence when his dad stopped talking, but Manny imagined he could still hear the rushing of water in the sink.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me all this?” Manny said at last.

His dad shifted in his chair, back and forth, like he was struggling to get up but couldn’t, like he was tied there with ropes. “I’d planned to,” he said. “But after a while, I stopped thinking about it. It was a part of my life I wanted to forget. I was a different person then. I didn’t want you to know that old person. I told myself there wasn’t any reason for you to
know. Then you started having those nightmares. A few weeks ago, that day at breakfast, I finally realized what they meant. You were starting to remember.” Suddenly Manny’s dad began to sob. It was like someone had flipped a switch and turned the emotion back on. “I’m sorry!” his dad said. “I’m so sorry!”

Manny reached out a hand. “Dad, it’s okay.
I’m
okay. It’s over now.”

“No!” His dad looked up with haunted eyes. “Don’t forgive me! I did something unforgivable—the one thing a parent
can’t
do! I put the life of my child at risk. Twice! First when I got drunk and left you alone in that bathtub and you almost drowned, then again when you were riding in the car with your adoptive parents. You wouldn’t have been there if it hadn’t been for me. I don’t want to be forgiven for that! I
can’t
be.”

A bathtub? Manny thought to himself. That was the accident his dad had caused when Manny was a baby—his dad had gotten drunk and left him unattended in a bathtub? Was that why his dad was so afraid of his ever going swimming, why he’d never let Manny take swimming lessons? Even after all these years, was he still afraid that Manny was going to drown?

His dad had been living in his own private hell for
years, Manny thought. Not because of the things he had done. Because of how much he loved Manny. A truly bad parent would have made the same mistakes, but then wouldn’t have thought twice about them afterward—probably would have somehow even blamed them on the kid. Not so his dad. His dad was in agony.

“Dad?” Manny said.

“I mean it!” his dad said. “I don’t want your forgiveness!”

“Who says I’m forgiving you?” said Manny with mock indignation. “You did a really stupid thing when I was nine months old, and there’s no taking that back.” Manny gave his dad the fisheye. “And, for the record, I’m not forgiving you for lying about all this either!” His dad looked up, unsure. “But as far as I can remember,” Manny went on, “those are the only two bad things you’ve done in the seventeen years you’ve been my father. And when everything is said and done, you still come out ahead. I wouldn’t want anyone else for a father.”

His dad started to speak again, but stopped himself this time. A smile tickled his lips.

“What?” Manny said.

“Do you know why I first started calling you by your nickname?”

“Manny’? No.”

“Because I used to call you ‘my little man.’ I told myself that you were like a little man, strong and stoic and unfeeling. I think I wanted it to be true because of all you’d gone through. But it wasn’t true. You were always so sensitive. You were like an emotional Geiger counter, able to pick up the tiniest flicker of emotion in any room. It was stupid of me to think you wouldn’t figure all this out sooner or later.

“But the thing is,” his dad went on, “it ended up being a good nickname for you anyway. You’re a good man, Manny. The best man I know. You’re someone I’m proud to call my son. So I don’t care that no one ever calls you by your real name. You were named after my father, by the way. But I suppose that’s one more thing I wanted to forget.”

“Tell me about my adoptive parents,” Manny said.

“It was my sister and her husband,” his dad said. “She and I never got along. When you almost died in that bathtub, they petitioned the court, probably more out of spite than anything. It was…complicated. The husband was in politics—a real up-and-comer, or so they said. Everyone said he was destined for big things. Who knows? Maybe, if they’d lived, you’d be the son of the president right now.”

Manny rolled his eyes. “No, thanks.” He didn’t
want to dwell on the past, at least not right now. But there was one thing he wanted to know. “What were their names? Your sister and her husband.”

“Your adoptive parents?” he said. “Victoria and Lawrence Chesterton. So if that accident at Grand and Humble had never happened and your adoptive parents had lived, right now your name would be Harlan Chesterton.”