We're in Trouble (13 page)

Did he love Colin?

He loved Tom. He had come to love Brynn. But their son? Shouldn't he feel more than he did? If he was any type of good person at all, shouldn't his heart open up to this poor kid? Yesterday he would have said, yeah, he loved Colin. Of course. He's my godson.

But today?

What if the Devil popped into the room and offered a deal? You can have Tom and Brynn back. It's a simple thing. Give me the boy and I'll bring them back. Would he do it? What was Colin, anyway? He was three, barely formed. Everyone loved children so goddamned much—but what about the parents? What about them? Just because they had a kid, their lives were all of a sudden worth less? All their work, all their love and effort, was gone, and nothing was left but a kid who couldn't even begin to understand the loss—was that an even trade?

He thought about Tom's parents, or Walt, trying to take Colin. If one of them was here right now, offering to take on the burden, would Danny fight? Could he? His first urge would be to go hysterical with relief. To grab Kim's hand and run.

He thought about the way Colin would latch onto his hand—sometimes to take him places, to show him toys. But sometimes he'd just reach out and hold it, like that was the most natural thing in the world to do.

Who'd been happier to see him, lately? Colin, or Kim?

Danny sat heavily on the floor next to Colin's bed. He was the worst person alive. He
did
love the boy. He did. Maybe not like his parents did—but that wasn't Colin's fault. None of it was Colin's fault. Danny wished he could apologize to someone who would understand.

He tried to imagine it. Saying:
I love you, Colin.

Lately he'd been teaching Colin about the guitar. His fingers were too small to do much, but Danny brought his Martin over and taught Colin how to hold it, showed him that different strings made different sounds. Danny held down chords and Colin strummed raggedly with a pick, after each success looking up at Danny in wonder. Colin got excited these days when he saw the guitar case. Sometimes Danny would strum and Colin would warble the ABC song—which, at his age, was mostly just nonsense, but still.

Sometimes Danny would put Colin on his shoulders and chug around the backyard like an engine, pumping his arms, and Colin would pull on his ponytail whenever he needed to sound the whistle. He'd shriek up there, almost convulsing with happiness.

But Danny was only thinking of good times. Of playing.

Colin still peed on the floor every once in a while. He had to be bathed. And the playing itself—that took hours and hours; you couldn't just turn on the TV and let the poor kid's mind rot. And then there was the small matter of his personality and his education, all the good feelings and thoughts and
karma that Tom and Brynn put into his head simply by being around. The confidence.

And, of course, any minute now Colin would wake up and ask where his mother was. And after a night of fucking around, Danny still didn't have an answer to that one, did he?

But really, how hard a question was it? There was only one answer. Danny would say,
Mommy and Daddy are asleep, but they can't wake up.
Other people would say,
Mommy and Daddy are in heaven
, and he would tell Colin that it all meant the same thing.
Mommy and Daddy had to go away.
It would be awful. Colin would cry; they'd all cry. Nothing could prevent that.

What he needed to be thinking about instead were the questions looming farther down the road, when Colin was older, when whether Danny lied or told the truth mattered a hell of a lot more.

Danny saw himself years from now, sitting at a table in a small, dark kitchen. Colin sat across from him—a teenager maybe, or even a young man. Colin was tall, handsome—he had scruffy red hair, Brynn's narrow face. Tom's glasses, maybe. He wore a black T-shirt.

Danny couldn't say where they were—not in this house, anyway, but a place much poorer, dingier. Like an apartment. A place like Kim's, only Kim was nowhere around. How could she be? That was too much to hope for, too much to ask of her, of anybody.

The apartment looked like the sort of place where people might have a lot of arguments. And why not? He and Colin had both lost too much to be happy all the time.

But they weren't arguing, not now. They held cans of beer, and Colin was smoking—Sorry, Brynnie, he picked it up someplace. Worse things could happen.

What were they like?
Colin asked him. He had Tom's voice: rich, believable.

Danny heard himself say,
They loved each other. They loved you. They even loved me.

They were good people?

He saw himself reaching across the table, putting his hand on top of Colin's. The boy's face turned inward. Getting sad. Worried.

They were the best people I ever knew
, Danny told him.
And you got half of each of them.

He might have been dozing. Kim's hand on his shoulder made him jerk. He looked at the bed, where Colin lay, still sleeping. Kim settled down onto the rug beside him.

She whispered, What are you doing?

I didn't want him to wake up alone. As Danny said this, he realized it was true.

She nestled closer to him.

I woke up alone, she said.

She had to know what that sounded like.

Kim—

No, it's okay. She said this next to his ear. It was . . . a joke. I'm sorry. I don't know what to do.

Me neither, he said. You probably can't win with me for a while.

He couldn't see her eyes in the shadows, exactly, but he knew she was looking at him. She whispered, Can I sit here with you?

Danny squeezed her shoulder.

Yeah, he said. Sure.

She moved closer. He thought again, panicked, of all the things they had to do. One of them ought to go over to the
coffee shop and put up a sign, right away. The morning shift was just about due to arrive.

But Kim lowered down and rested her cheek on Danny's leg, and pulled his forearm to her chest. She kissed his hand and tucked his curled fingers under her chin. He rubbed her fingers. He touched her ring.

He watched Colin, who lay still, quiet—unaware that the world was about to end, the moment he opened his eyes. Danny reached out and put his other hand on Colin's pillow, next to his hair, and listened to the room, quiet except for their breathing.

The shop could wait. All of it could, just a few more minutes. If that was all the time they had left, the three of them, then Danny couldn't bear to spend it any other way.

And [I] understood, in the endless instant before she answered, how Pharaoh's army, seeing the ground break open, seeing the first fringed horses fall into the gap, made their vows, that each heart changes, faced with a single awe and in that moment a promise is written out.

—Brenda Hillman,

“Mighty Forms”

W
HILE
D
ANA
M
ACARTHUR'S HUSBAND
B
RYAN WAS BUSY
unwrapping gifts with his tellers, she slipped away—finally—from the Sentinel Savings holiday party to smoke her only cigarette of the night.

Smoking was allowed inside the banquet hall—the upper reaches of the ceiling had been foggy for hours—but Dana was trying to keep her backsliding hidden. She'd quit last New Year's, more or less, as a promise to Bryan.
Honey
, he'd say,
I just don't want anything to happen to you.
And how could she disagree? But she missed her cigarettes, missed the private time they'd always given her. All night she'd watched the bankers
get drunker and drunker, watched Bryan fuss happily over them, and felt, more and more, as though she was standing alone in the room. Why not go the distance?

She almost escaped the banquet hall unnoticed. But at the doorway to the lobby, turning the corner too fast, she nearly walked into the chest of a man she knew: Jimmy, a new teller at Bryan's bank, just out of college, tall and trim and smelling faintly of beer.

Excuse
me
, Jimmy said. He bowed a little, swept his hand forward in mock gallantry. Milady.

Dana sidestepped him with only a murmur of acknowledgment. She had met Jimmy just once before tonight, while stopping by the bank for a lunch date with Bryan a few weeks earlier. She'd noticed Jimmy right away—you couldn't help but notice him. He was handsome in a catalog-model way: sandy-blond, with a symmetrical face and slim hips, and a half smile she bet he'd practiced. He'd winked at her, when they first shook hands across the counter. She decided then not to pay him much mind. Most bankers, she'd found, were a lot less slick than they hoped.

But earlier tonight, while Bryan and the other branch managers handed out bonus checks, Dana had caught Jimmy staring at her from the other side of the room, his arm slung across the shoulders of a short, pretty blonde. He'd grinned at Dana, rocked on his feet; the woman stared wide-eyed at the party over the rim of her plastic cup. The quickness of his smile disturbed her; Dana had looked away. Bryan had reintroduced them not long after. (
You remember Jimmy? Of course.
His handshake, firm and dry. The woman's name was April. His wife or girlfriend, Dana couldn't remember.)

In a small, shadowed nook just outside the entrance to the
hall, Dana lit up, feeling small and furtive. Snow swirled past her, sparse and gritty. The parking lot shone with a glittering veneer of ice—another eggnog and she might have trouble negotiating it in her heels. There'd be some bruised asses later, when the party let out. Dana watched headlights crawl east on Henderson. The roads would be getting bad, too.

She thought about Jimmy's wink, his smile. She tried to make herself angry, but the feeling wouldn't take. Dana was twenty-seven—hardly old—but in the past couple of years, it was true, people like Jimmy and April had come to seem younger and younger—more like the high schoolers in Dana's algebra classes than the kind of people she and Bryan were. Which was like no one, except in the way they acted. Everyone in the banquet hall was either too young, drinking too much, or middle-aged, trying to seem young by drinking too much. Jimmy might be nothing more than a boy in a grown-up's body, but at least he didn't pretend to be someone he wasn't.

And anyway: whatever else in him might be flawed, Dana could certainly appreciate his grown-up body.

As she thought this the pneumatic door to her left wheezed, and Jimmy himself appeared, leaning his torso outside, craning his neck left and right. Dana froze—her nook was just out of his line of sight. But Jimmy walked outside anyway, shrugging on an overcoat. He turned a half circle, and then spotted her. He grinned, feigning surprise.

Dana, hey, he said. He pointed at her hand. You looked like someone sneaking. I'm dying. Can I bum one?

She should have told him she was finished—which was the truth. But instead she said, Who says I'm sneaking? and extended her pack.

Jimmy laughed and took a cigarette. Well, he said, Bryan's been telling us all how you quit. He's real proud of you.

Dana wasn't surprised to hear it, but the news didn't make her any happier.

Our secret, all right? she said.

Jimmy put the cigarette between his lips and patted his coat pockets. Hey, I'm not legal either. April'd have a damn kitten.

Dana held out her lighter, but Jimmy said, Got one. He probably had his own cigarettes, too. He lit up, took a drag, and sighed. Then he leaned companionably back against the brick.

You know, he said, I'm glad to see you here tonight.

He glanced at her sideways and blew out a plume of smoke, half smiling. What a piece of work.

Is that so? she asked.

He laughed. Yeah, it is. And not just because that's a killer dress.

Dana could scarcely believe she'd heard him. Jimmy had gone right for her vanity, newly bruised. She had found the dress a few days earlier, shopping on a whim—she'd discovered, with a little thrill, how good she looked in it. The dress was black, with long sheer sleeves, and an ankle-length skirt slit up to mid-thigh. Probably not appropriate for a Christmas party, but its lines and color favored her, showed her off. She'd been dieting, had flattened her stomach a little; in the dress all that work seemed worth it. To teach she only wore sensible clothes; maybe once or twice a year did she have a chance to look this good.

So why was she surprised that someone had noticed?

And . . . hadn't she wanted other men to notice? In the
days since she owned it, if she was being honest, she had imagined strangers seeing her in it. Admiring her. Even removing it from her. The good-looking man buying ties in the next department—she'd seen him in the mirror, caught in the act of looking away, as she held the dress up against her body. Or even—she had indeed thought this—a man like Jimmy. Maybe even Jimmy himself. A man who winked at the boss's wife when she visited the bank in her jeans and running shoes. What would a man like that think of her in a dress like this?

Now she knew. She kept her eyes out on the parking lot.

Thank you, she said, keeping her voice neutral. Where's your girlfriend?

Jimmy grinned as though Dana had done something wonderful.

Inside, he said. Ladies' room. There was a line—I saw my window and took it.

Dana crushed out the butt of her cigarette. Instead of a Christmas party she should be standing outside of some fifth-year senior's house, listening to the blare of speakers propped in a window, trying to keep track of her center of gravity. Jimmy could ask,
What's your major?
She could tell him to fuck off. Or she could lean on his arm.

Your husband's quite a guy, Jimmy said to her.

Thank you, Dana said—inanely, as though she'd made Bryan the way he was.

He's crazy about you. Dana, Dana—that's all he talks about.