The Blessings (6 page)

“Hey!” somebody shouts. “Hey, you!”

Stephen turns around and sees the old man, halfway across the lot. He's at least seventy, maybe older, and wearing plaid pants and a windbreaker. It's Stephen the man is yelling at, Stephen he can see. “That's my car!”

“Guys,” Stephen says. “He's coming.”

“Hurry!”
Mark snaps. “Jesus, Timmy, what the fuck?”

The old guy is trying to hurry toward them but can move only so quickly. He has a limp—maybe he was in the war. “Get away from that car, boys!”

“Steve, how close is he?” Mark says.

“Close,” says Stephen, glancing again over his shoulder. Timmy is hunched over the lock, whispering, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” The old man yells, “Step away from there!” Then Mark straightens up and looks pointedly at Stephen. His ugly face is hard as a rock. He says, “You got this, Steve?”

This, after all, is what Stephen is there for—
if necessary, the muscle
. He just hadn't considered what would happen if it actually came to this.

“He's old,” Stephen says.

“And?”

The guy is so close, Stephen can see the bulge of the cigarette pack in his jacket pocket, banging against his ribs as he walks. His hair is silver, combed backward in neat metallic lines. He looks like somebody who might go to St. Bonaventure's. Stephen would bet money this guy knows somebody in his family. His family knows everybody.

“Get away from my car!” the old man is shouting, fumbling in his pocket for his keys. “I'll call the cops!”

Stephen takes a breath and steps forward. It's then that he sees the hat. Sitting in the back window of the Impala, facing outward, not tossed there but propped deliberately.
Local 691.
His grandfather had kept a hat in the back window of his Buick, a black-and-yellow cap that said
World War II Veteran
, and something about the proud way this hat is displayed makes Stephen want to bolt from the parking lot and run home. But then the old guy shoves past him, knocking hard into his shoulder, barking, “Get away from there!” just as Stephen hears the door slam and Timmy crowing, “I'm in! Guys, I'm in!”

Mark sprints around to the passenger side. The motor guns, tires rip backward, and Timmy yells out the window, “Steve! Let's go!”

But Stephen is frozen. The old guy is reaching for the door, yanking at the locked handle. “Steve! What the fuck, man?” Mark is annoyed, Timmy laughing like a maniac. The old guy is trying to poke his key in the lock as his car rolls back out of his reach, a few inches each time, like a game of chicken. Stephen's face fills with heat. He's angry at his friends for being such assholes, angry at the old guy for being unable to stop them. His hands are trembling and the next thing he knows he's swinging, fist connecting with the loose skin of the old man's cheek. The guy's head flies to one side and he staggers a few steps backward but stays standing. He hits Stephen back, knocking him square in the nose. He's surprisingly strong. A vet for sure. Timmy is now laughing hysterically. Mark is incredulous, saying, “Really, Steve?” But now Stephen is in it and can't stop. He's punching and getting punched, feeling the blows land haphazardly on the old man's face and chest. Vaguely he senses cars stopping but he's just throwing his fist, sometimes getting nothing but air, arm sailing weightless through the empty space, other times feeling his knuckles connect with bone. He hears the guy grunting, breathing hard, and then a menacing growl—
You're done, Steve
. Stephen hits the guy in the stomach and hears a low moan. The guy stumbles onto his knees, bracing himself with his old spotty hands, and a wallet falls from his pocket, flopping on the pavement like a dead brown fish. Stephen grabs it. “Steve!” Mark yells. “
Jesus!
Get
in
!” There is a note of something—true panic—in his voice that Stephen has never heard before. Stephen stands up, but slowly. He feels huge, untouchable, capable of anything. He doesn't want to look at the old guy, but he does: curled on the ground, knees pulled to his chest, a thin line of blood trickling from his nose. He shoves the wallet in his pocket and gets in the backseat and is carried away.

Stephen is dumped in front of his house on Tyson fifteen bucks richer. The Impala's stereo system was a piece of junk—not even a stereo, just a tape deck with a bunch of old-man cassettes. Tony Bennett, Fats Domino. Why Tim ever thought this guy would have a high-end stereo was anybody's guess. Even the wallet had just thirty-five bucks inside. They each got ten, with Stephen getting the extra five for doing the stealing.

He slumps on the curb in front of his porch. It's nearly dark. His mom's car is still gone. Stephen assesses the damage. His left knee hurts, knuckles are sore. He feels a black eye forming, but nothing's broken. He sits and he waits, listening for the sound of cop cars, but the street is quiet, or as quiet as it ever is. A gang of kids is playing stickball near the corner, extra charged up from the nearness of summer vacation. In neighbors' houses, TVs blare from open windows. Cheap electric fans crank and spin. It feels like summer, sounds like summer, the lazy chirp of crickets, the smells of dinners clinging to the humid night air.

When the streetlamps snap on and the kids are called in, Stephen decides that the police aren't coming. It doesn't surprise him. In fact, it makes sense: Because if his uncle is dying, really dying, nothing truly bad can happen to Stephen. The chance of two things happening in one family, in one week—the odds are impossible. As long as his uncle is dying, Stephen is safe.

Still, there's a knot of fear inside him. The same feeling he had looking at the trees in Uncle John's backyard. It's not a fear of getting caught, but the feeling that he's waiting for something else, something bigger, worse than the police. Usually when Stephen gets in trouble, he asks for it. He invites it. But this other thing, this unknown darkness, is abstract, formless, and approaching with a certainty Stephen can't shake.

When he hears the dribble of a basketball, Stephen quickly pushes himself to his feet. He can't deal with his brother right now, asking what happened to his face. Not because he's jealous that Joey is so
extraordinary
—the shrink had that completely backward. It's that his brother is so totally fucking normal. He has normal friends, thinks normal thoughts. Stephen walks in the opposite direction, limping a little on the knee. He crosses Longshore, heading toward Rising Sun, goes into the Wawa, and spends the old guy's ten on a hoagie, a bag of chips, and a Coke. Then he sits on the curb and eats. At least it tastes better than pizza. In the car today, his mother said that Uncle John could barely eat anymore—the chemo caused sores in his mouth, so he could handle only soft things. When he's hungry, he watches cooking shows. Stephen pauses, the food stuck in his throat. He thinks what an asshole he is, fucking around with his life while his uncle is trying just to stay alive, then pushes the thought back down and stands up, shoving the rest of his sandwich in the trash.

His mother's car is parked outside by the time Stephen gets home. As he opens the front door, he braces himself, but everything seems normal. Joey is playing
Mortal Kombat
, the sounds of fake video fighting spilling under his bedroom door. His father is exactly where Stephen left him, watching TV and drinking a beer. “Mark called,” he says without taking his eyes off the screen. Stephen goes to his room and shuts the door, shoves his sneakers off, and kicks them across the floor. He stretches out gingerly on the bed and props his head on the pillows. Through the wall behind his head, he can hear his mother on the phone. If she's home, she's always on the phone. He can't make out all the words, but he knows the sound: the muffled rise and fall of it, the nervous pauses, the sad one-note answers, as she talks about Uncle John.
Mm-hm. I know. It will.

Stephen's right eye is throbbing. He places a hand over it, as if the darkness might keep the swelling down. He thinks of the old joke:
Does your face hurt? Because it's killing me!
A corny joke, the kind uncles tell at parties. It occurs to him that if Uncle John dies tonight, he'll have a black eye at his funeral—the thought makes him sick. He can't even imagine what his mother would say.
Now, Stephen? Now?
He presses both hands over his eyes. In the darkness, he pictures that red Impala. Not the car itself—now dumped in the back of the Clover parking lot—but the back window, the hat. He wonders what became of the World War II cap his grandfather always kept in his Buick. Last winter when Pop died, they all went over in the middle of the night and filed into the bedroom to say good-bye. Stephen had lost it that night in front of everyone. It wasn't the rigor mortis, which he had expected from biology class, but the other stuff, the little stuff. The stubble on his cheeks, the dab of toothpaste on his chin, signs that an hour ago he had still been alive.

At least he died in his sleep, Stephen thinks. At least he was old. He lifts his hands from his eyes and stares at the ceiling. His upper lip is sweating. From the other side of the wall, he hears a click as the receiver is returned to its cradle. Then the eternal grind of numbers as his mother dials the next person. Slow, heavy, as if just placing the call is an effort.
It's Margie
, she says.
Two days to two weeks.

Stephen's heart is throbbing in his chest. He tries to empty his mind, focus on the bubbling of his fish tank to distract himself from the sound of his mother's voice. It's the tank his parents gave him for his ninth birthday, along with a bag of blue gravel and two goldfish he named Nuts and Bolts. Stephen was really into the tank back then. He saved up his allowance to buy a bunch of other junk for it. A little ceramic bridge, plastic plants, a dorky sign that said
NO FISHING ALLOWED
. He stuck a kitchen place mat behind the glass, an ocean scene with a lighthouse and waves. He was thinking he might become a deep-sea diver. That summer, when his family was all down the shore together, he'd told Uncle John about his plan. Uncle John always took his ideas seriously, unlike his dad, who chuckled—
Aren't you afraid of swimming?
But Uncle John asked Stephen a bunch of questions, the two of them leaning against the deck railing like they were businessmen discussing some proposition, or he was interviewing Stephen for a very important job.
Do you have a backup plan?
Uncle John said, and Stephen thought about it before answering:
Astronaut
.

When they got back from the shore, Nuts and Bolts were dead. The dissolving food pellets hadn't dissolved fast enough and the bodies floated on the surface of the water, already partway decomposed. The clumps of uneaten food looked gray and wet, like brain matter.
They're dead
, his father told him, and Stephen said nothing, watching his father scoop them out with the measuring cup his mother used for baking cakes. A minute later he heard the flush of the toilet, pictured his dead fish flying through the pipes inside his bedroom wall. The next day he trashed the
NO FISHING
sign, the place mat, the bridge. For years the tank sat empty, a few gray pebbles of gravel in the bottom. A year ago, when he got a job at Pet World, the new fish he picked out were silver, sharp-finned, with teeth and whiskers; they looked like miniature sharks. He didn't give them names. He rigged black lights to the tank so when the fish swam through, they glowed.
Freaky
, said Molly Healy the first time she came over, lying beside him, partway naked, the covers pulled to her chin in the semidark.

Stephen's blood pounds thickly in his ears. He pulls the five from his pocket and stares at it, the one from the old man's wallet. The bill is wrinkled and damp, torn at one corner. He opens the tank lid and drops it in. He watches it float like a lily pad, soaking up water, then start to sink.
Isn't that kind of really weird?
The five drowns slowly before settling on the bottom, the fish swimming obliviously around it. Stephen thinks of the old man, curled on the parking lot, and wonders what happened after they left. Could the man have died? Could Stephen have killed him?
You're done, Steve
—had the man actually said that? He must have been hearing things. Or maybe the old man was a messenger, the thing that had been haunting Uncle John's backyard, rustling in the trees.

From the other side of the wall, his mother's voice rises suddenly and Stephen feels a twinge of panic—then it drops back down to the lower register, murmuring. He grabs the pillow from behind his head, angling himself so he's leaning directly against the tank, picturing the fish's teeth just inches from his ear. He hopes the motor will drown out the sound of her voice, but the tank only amplifies it, like a glass pressed to a wall, sharpening every word.
I know
, his mother says. Stephen closes his eyes and for a minute just rests there, listening.
He is. It could come at any time.

K
ate had been prepared for the scene in the waiting room, for she's grown accustomed to the fact that babies have taken over the world. The streets are teeming with them. Coffee shops, hair salons, a recent lunch meeting at Le Bec-Fin. Every ad in every catalog, every commercial on TV. In the waiting room at Dr. Steiner's office, Kate was privy to every version: the pregnant mothers with their bubbled stomachs and trendy maternity dresses, the collage of newborn photos and thank-you notes on the wall, the parenting magazines in the rack, and the success stories playing happily on the floor. But she hadn't been prepared for the back door.

“It's just another exit,” Dr. Steiner told her. She waited a tactful pause, gauging whether or not Kate needed further explanation. “For patients who would rather avoid the waiting room.”

It took a minute to sink in. Dr. Steiner was tall, with a neat bob, naturally gray. The room was clean and cold. A poster of a waterfall hung above the exam table, rows of Anne Geddes babies in flowerpots, a basket of kittens. Then it clicked: This exit was for the women who couldn't get pregnant, so they could avoid walking back out through all the new-baby joy. Kate was stunned that such a thing existed. Horrified that she'd been offered it. Did they extend the invitation to all the fertility-challenged women, or did you have to be a particularly unhinged case?

“Oh!” she said breezily, chummily, as if she and Dr. Steiner were on the same side of a shared joke. “I get it. Because walking through the waiting room is too traumatic? Because of all the happiness?”

She was trying to be funny—really, what could a person do in this situation but be funny?

“A baby-free zone!” Kate laughed, too loudly, wondering why she'd told Patrick it was okay to skip today's appointment. Surely Dr. Steiner wouldn't have said it with him there. “Good to know! Although, let's be honest—aren't I kind of living in a baby-free zone already?”

Dr. Steiner gave her a neutral smile. “Some women find it more comfortable.”

“Oh, I'm fine! Sorry if I seemed—it's just the hormones, I promise. I'm fine, certainly fine enough to walk through a waiting room. The back door—I mean, to take it almost seems like admitting defeat, don't you think?” Kate looked at the wall, at the babies in flowerpots, most of them screaming. Then she looked down at the paper gown draped across her bare knees. “My husband's brother died in May,” she said.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” said Dr. Steiner, a woman used to hearing sad things.

“He's been very sad,” Kate said. “Just so—
sad
.”

She looked up, expectant, only to find that Dr. Steiner's smile had recalibrated slightly: still kind, but firm. “I know this is difficult, Kate,” the doctor said. “But I would caution you against thinking it's anyone's fault.” Then she touched Kate's knee and left the room, leaving her to put on her clothes.

Hormones, yes. Thank God for hormones. Kate is taking a hefty dose of Clomid and relies on it on a daily basis to excuse her bad behavior. Lately she is a steaming cauldron of ugly emotions. Jealousy, naturally, of all the new mothers. Of all the bad mothers who don't deserve to raise children. Of all the teenagers who got pregnant accidentally. Of her friends from Bryn Mawr, who are all simultaneously having babies. They all got married over the same two-year span—Kate included—but now she is veering distressingly off course. She attends their showers, visits their newborns, listens to them discuss things like baby sunscreen and organic peaches with the seriousness of an international peace summit. Are these the same girls she used to get stoned with in college? They're all so
earnest
. “No sunscreen before six months,” they say with an air that is satisfied—more than satisfied, almost desperately pleased with themselves, because if they don't assure themselves that knowledge like this is vitally important, what then? She recognizes it as an unappealing new strain in herself, this bitterness. Still, she's jealous of them, all of them. She's even jealous of Lauren—poor Lauren, a widow at twenty-seven—for her adorable little girl and boy.

Kate clutches the wheel, squinting into the sunlight, bright even through her new, too-expensive shades. She hasn't told Patrick what she spent on them (not that he's even noticed them) and feels a twinge of guilt, but she reasons that she deserved to treat herself. She's the one earning money, after all. She inches the car forward, behind a belching city bus, and wrenches the sun visor down. Only two blocks from their apartment and the traffic is ungodly, crawling along for no apparent reason. Life would be so much easier in general if only there were reasons. But the doctors have concluded nothing's wrong—nothing
technically
wrong, Dr. Steiner always says, as if to imply some other realm of abstractions. Karmic retribution, maybe. Sin and punishment—she married a Catholic, after all! Kate's theory, which she has been forming in secret, is that Patrick's grief is making it impossible for them to conceive. Since May, he's been so sad—immovably sad. Kate remembers what the hippie gynecologist at Bryn Mawr used to tell the girls:
Never underestimate the emotional disorders of the crotch!
She and her friends had quoted the line, mirthfully, for years.

Kate hadn't told anyone her sadness theory, in part because there are so few people she could tell. Not Patrick, certainly. Not Patrick's family, who are all grieving themselves. Her new work friends she doesn't know well enough yet. It was hard—oddly hard, really—to find someone to talk to about certain things at a certain age. In retrospect, it may be the thing she took most for granted in college, when she couldn't walk to the bathroom without tripping over another girl's bared soul. Finally, yesterday, she'd run her theory by her old college roommate Liz.

“I just think it could be that his, you know, sadness is a factor,” Kate said.

“Mm,” Liz replied. They were eating lunch at an Italian place near Rittenhouse Square, Liz's four-month-old in a sling on her lap. Liz was eating quickly while the baby slept. Ever since her friends started having babies, lunches went like this. Kate had part of them, half of them at most.

“Keep talking,” Liz said, stabbing at her Caprese salad. “I'm listening.”

“It's just, I mean, there's nothing else wrong. Medically.”

“But, sweetie, sometimes there just
isn't
,” Liz said. “Sometimes that's just true.”

“Well, right. I know that,” Kate said irritably. “Still, though. I'm thinking this could be affecting his virility. You know, keeping him from knocking me up.” Talking to her college friends, Kate sometimes felt herself becoming more coarse, glib, reverting to a younger, truer version of herself.

“It might help if you could stop worrying about it,” Liz offered. “Have a glass of wine at night. Don't focus on it so much.”

Easy for her to say, Kate thought. She ripped a piece of bread in half and mashed it in the little dish of olive oil. “All I meant is,” she said, “in the absence of anything else, this might help explain it. The sadness, I mean. You know—an emotional disorder of the crotch,” she joked, and Liz's head snapped up. Maybe you weren't supposed to say
crotch
around babies, even sleeping babies.

But Liz recovered herself and laughed. “Could be.” She smiled and shook her head. “I'd forgotten all about that.”

The luxury! If only Kate had a life where advice doled out by gynecologists at the campus health center ten years ago no longer felt so relevant. It was just one more way her life had deviated from her friends'. They used to talk bluntly about sex with boyfriends, but it was different, she supposed, with husbands. Maybe it would sound too critical; maybe they just had nothing to talk about anymore. Kate used to regale them with tales of her exploits—when she and Patrick were first dating, the stories were legendary, and she wore them like a flag—and now she longed to tell her old friend how sex with Patrick had become so regimented, so humorless and goal-driven. How sex, for him, seemed less like pleasure and more like just not-sadness.

Then the baby started squirming. Liz immediately put her fork down and peered inside the sling.

“I just think,” Kate said, “if I could cheer him up, it could happen.”

“And how do you propose to do that?” Liz said, digging in her diaper bag.

Kate was stung. She wasn't being serious—at least not
how do you propose
serious. Liz had once been a cynic, too, but motherhood seemed to have sapped her cynicism. A mother and a cynic—maybe you can't be both.

“I guess if I knew that, I wouldn't be telling you, would I?” Kate said with more bite than she'd intended. “I mean, I know there's nothing I can really do about it. Because there's nothing I can do about any of it. Because it's all a giant mystery. Somehow, I managed to marry the one Irish Catholic in all of Philadelphia who can't reproduce!”

Liz procured a pacifier from the bag and poked it in the baby's mouth, then looked at Kate. She wasn't laughing. Maybe it wasn't funny? Kate had thought it was funny, at least a little bit funny.

“I'm worried about you,” Liz said, and Kate felt suddenly like bursting into tears. Instead she said, “Join the club.”

“I'm serious, Katie. You're different.”

“How?”

“You're becoming…I don't know. Hard.”

Well, don't I have a right?
Kate felt like shouting. She didn't have a baby to melt into, to allow her to drift away from adult conversations and go all motherly and soft. Not to mention she had a full-time job doing mindless market research to support her med student husband, not that these former Bryn Mawr feminists ever asked.

Instead Kate said, “I'm sorry,” and meant it. “It's hormones,” she added.

Liz had looked at her then with the same worried expression, Kate realizes now, squeezing her car into a parking spot, that Dr. Steiner had that morning. And this, she understands, was the moment that had tipped her over the edge: from brave, fertility-challenged would-be mother to desperate, blaming wife. This was the reason she'd been offered the back exit—not to protect her from the happy moms-to-be, but to keep the happy moms from being exposed to her. She locks the car and runs up the stairs to their sweltering fourth-floor walk-up, where she dials Patrick's pager from the phone in the kitchen, then waits, forehead pressed to the warm refrigerator door. “Babe?” she says when the phone rings. “Can you come home? Please?”

Kate was Catholic, but not really.
Raised Catholic
, she always said. Catholic enough to go to Mass on Easter and Christmas (which was mostly about babies dressed in cute outfits—more babies!) and Catholic enough to get married in a church (though she insisted on generous editing privileges over Bible readings—deleting any mention of God, man's image, young stags). When she and Patrick first started dating, she'd teased him that meeting a good Catholic was like hitting the sexual jackpot—all those repressed urges, the unindulged desires to break rules. And in the beginning, it was true. They couldn't keep their hands off each other, and Patrick was game for whatever thing Kate proposed. Sex in the ocean, in a coat closet, an elevator. Once, in the tacky pastel bathroom at his sister's rental down the shore. At his family parties, Kate liked to squeeze Patrick's leg under the table, thinking of things that would shock his reserved family. Patrick and Kate were the exception to the rule—younger, looser, more liberal than the others. Lately, though, Patrick had been delivering lines right out of the Catholic playbook.
Things happen for a reason
, he might say, waiting for toast to pop.
What doesn't kill you…

“Kate?” Patrick calls, slamming the front door.

“In here!”

She listens to him moving through the apartment, all fifty feet of it—the tiny living room, the kitchen alcove with the washer but no dryer—as she kneels at the foot of their bed. It must be a hundred degrees in the bedroom, and she's sweating in just her bra and underwear, slightly racy pink ones she dug out of the back of a drawer. Listening to his footsteps get closer, she pushes her shoulders back and rakes her fingers through her hair. She feels oddly nervous, trying to look seductive, trying to remember how.

“What's wrong?” Patrick says then, appearing in the doorway. He looks mussed, slightly winded, in his sneakers, jeans, and white coat.

“This”—she smiles—“is a booty call.”

“What?” He laughs, looks confused. But at least he laughs.

“A booty call—remember? Like in college?”

“I don't think I ever had one of those,” he says, scratching his cheek, running a palm over his red hair. His freckles look even brighter from the sun. “I thought something happened at the doctor's.”

“Well, it did. Kind of.”

“Is everything okay?” He looks around the room, as if he might find the answer. “Are you ovulating?”

There is something so absolutely awful, unsexy, and—
Bryn Mawr, forgive me!
—emasculating about the word
ovulating
slipping so easily off her husband's tongue.

“Nope,” she says, flashing a smile. “This is just sex. Just fucking. No ulterior motive.” Which isn't true, of course. Because she's thinking it will be good for them. A little spontaneity, a shake-up of the routine.

When she sees the hesitation on his face, she reaches for his hand—if he rejects her right now, she thinks, she may never recover—and pulls him toward her as he says, “Aren't you supposed to be at work?”

“I called out.”

“You did?”

“I already took the morning,” she says, kissing his neck.

“It's just, I have rounds at one—”