Friday
The leather soles of Lex’s boots clap up the concrete stairs of the High Street station. Out on the street it’s quiet except for a light thrum of traffic ramping off the bridge into Brooklyn Heights.
He’s glad it worked out that he can help with Ethan’s morning school run, that reprieve landing when Katya Spielman got in touch to report that her son had finally checked in with a text saying he was out with friends—not where, or with whom, but it was enough to allow her to stop worrying. It’s more than Lex got from Adam, or offered Adam; they’re heading now into a second day of silence.
He wonders (again) if Adam ever went home last night and tries to understand (again) when things began to sour. He fleetingly recalls that first night they spent together without Adam running home to William like Cinderella back to her keeper. They lay in bed as daylight crept into the room, peaceful in each other’s arms, and Adam confessed how good it was to be with someone who wasn’t an alcoholic, how much he admired Lex’s strength, how surprised he was to discover that he could be this attracted to someone who wasn’t a total mess. Lex didn’t doubt his sincerity, or his relief, having himself grown up with a raging drunk for the first eight years of his life, and knowing from hard experience that love binds without judgment.
The bright morning sun hurts Lex’s eyes after two nights and a day without sleep. He pauses to fish in his backpack for his sunglasses, finds them nested at the bottom, and slips them on. He makes his way up Cranberry Street and turns onto Willow.
David rents the parlor floor of a brownstone, and as Lex comes up the block he sees Ethan perched in one of the front windows, watching for him as he always does. His nephew smiles and waves and disappears. Moments later, father and son emerge at the front door, dressed for their respective days of business and school: David with his short brown hair neatly parted and combed and his dark blue suit and stuffed briefcase, Ethan in crisp jeans, spanking-new sneakers, and green T-shirt emblazoned with a soccer ball dead center over the boy’s heart.
David turns to lock the door. “Thanks for this, Lex. I really appreciate it. My timing this morning is ridiculously tight.”
“No problem.”
As Ethan trots down the stoop his broad smile reveals a surprise: tracks of braces now cover the jigsaw of his teeth. Lex tousles the thick head of red hair the kid inherited from his mother, who still lives in what was the family apartment on the Upper East Side, near the hospital where she’s an ER doctor. Ethan used to take a bus back and forth to his Brooklyn Heights private school, but after the divorce, David moved closer to ease the commute. (And, Lex is sure, to be closer to Elsa Myers, who lives nearby.) Now Ethan spends weekdays with his father and weekends with his mother in Manhattan.
They walk together until they reach the Clark Street subway, where David peels off toward the express train.
“Good luck,” Lex calls after his brother.
David waves, and is gone.
“Hey buddy, how about some breakfast?” The Clark Street Diner, their favorite, is just across the street.
Ethan answers, “I had some cereal at home.”
“Doesn’t school start at eight? It’s only ten past seven. You can have a second breakfast, or watch me eat.”
“I have earth science club at seven fifteen. My mom signed me up.” He rolls his eyes.
“That’s pretty cool, Ethan.”
“Not really.”
“Come on, let’s get you there on time.” Lex breaks into a jog. Laughing, Ethan catches up and stays close, dodging dog walkers and baby strollers all the way to Joralemon Street.
The brick Gothic school building looms over the otherwise residential block. Watching his nephew run up the stairs and disappear into the vaulted entrance, Lex feels grateful for David and Ethan, the only family he has left—a feeling that yanks the scab off a memory he tries not to revisit but sometimes can’t avoid.
Himself, eight years old, alone and frightened, entering the jaw of Sheremetyevo Airport while his drunk-in-the-morning father stands there and watches him go.
What did his father think, what did he feel, putting his child on a plane to America to live with his first wife and son, Yelena and David, whom at that point Lex had never met? The memory lands whole with a reminder of forfeiture so painful it encompasses every sense.
The river of Russian language, its sounds and symbols, that was so familiar he never thought about it until it was gone.
The sour taste in his mouth from morning tea but no breakfast.
The chill of overcooled industrial air.
And the stench of his father that lingered as the distance between them grew.
They say that vodka is odorless but Lex knows what it smells like. It smells like the far edge of alcohol and the near edge of abandonment. Like two sharp sensations you know are there because you intuit them but you can never quite describe their most salient qualities. You just know that one stinks and the other hurts and together they represent disaster.
It was the last time he would ever see his father before cirrhosis killed him a year later.
The last time he saw his mother was two months earlier, and the smell she left him with was lilac. Sometimes she couldn’t get out of bed, she was so tired, but that day, their last together, she was not only up but wearing a dress, purple with wavy yellow stripes. Her long brown hair fell neatly down her back. Her perfume was strong; she had just put it on. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, doing homework. She didn’t say anything but when she kissed him there were tears in her eyes and one of her cheeks was violently red—he didn’t have to ask if his father had hit her again. He would never forget the hard click of the door closing behind her and the soul-sucking quiet that followed. A few years later he was told that she, too, had died, but the way the news was presented, without detail, left him with a fantasy that it wasn’t true and a hope that one day he would find her. Searching for clues about what happened to their family and where Nina might have gone, he would study the single photo his father sent him off with: a boy rooted happily into his young mother’s lap, her hands clasped around his slender waist, the father standing behind them wearing the creased, humorless mask that was his face. But there were no clues in that frozen image. Eventually Lex grew up, filed away his father’s death certificate, stored the photo in the cloud, and consulted it only at his weakest moments.
Standing outside Ethan’s school, he abhors this feeling and pushes it away—this toxic memory of abandonment, this certainty that he was born for it, that he’s destined to be deserted again and again, that the cycle will never stop and the dread of it will destroy him and anyone he loves.
He could go home now, but he isn’t ready to face the quiet.
He could go to the diner and have something before getting on the train, but he doesn’t want to eat alone.
Then he thinks of the perfect solution. He takes out his phone and opens a new message to Elsa, his friend and once colleague (before David ever met her).
I’m in the neighborhood. Breakfast?