EIGHTEEN
What was it like?
Like a void.
A void is a hole, an absence of, a vast and utter emptiness. There’s no refuge in the void. There are no footholds or handgrips or guardrails. You’re in free fall with no bottom in sight.
What was it like?
Like a rupture in the natural order of things. One of those things being when you give birth to a child, they get to grow up.
What was it like?
Like developing an inoperable tumor on your heart. So it grows and grows and grows and every single morning you can feel it pressing there.
Until you don’t.
Did you miss me a lot?
And the answer was yes, of course he did. He missed the girl who took rides on his back, the one he could reliably amaze by pulling a penny out of her ear, or by transforming a yellow Splenda package—presto, whammo—into a blue Equal one at the Fairview Diner, she never asking to peek into the bottom of his fist where the Equal packet had lain scrunched and hidden.
He missed that girl, had been missing her even before she’d disappeared from their lives.
This twelve-years-older version of that girl—he didn’t know her, so how could he possibly miss her?
How much did you miss me, Dad?
Very much.
He’d taken a Method acting class at the community college he’d been forced to attend due to the atrocious grade point average he’d garnered senior year—thank the steady source of LSD he’d had access to, courtesy of his second-best friend, Curtis. The Method’s singular principle was as follows: Don’t act, believe. You are who the script says you are. And so is everyone else. All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players. Thanks, William. Here was proof positive.
Yes, I missed you. Of course I missed you. Very much.
Saying this to the eighteen-year-old nymphette auditioning for the revolving platform at FlashDancers on Forty-Fifth Street. Not that he was a regular customer—but clients being clients, he’d had occasion to pop in loaded down with a suitable amount of one-dollar bills.
Was she sitting like that on purpose?
This is Jennifer Morrow Kristal. Morrow for Laurie’s father, who’d been saddled with an impossibly waspish first name even though he was half-Lutheran and wouldn’t be caught dead in J.Crew. Jennifer for his own grandfather Joseph, taking the first letter being a kind of homage.
This is Jennifer Morrow Kristal, who when she asks if I missed her will be told Yes, very much.
She’s a stranger now. But after a while, she won’t be.
This is Jennifer Morrow Kristal. Jenny for short. Jenny Penny for fun.
The detective at the station had said, You need to be prepared.
And he’d thought, We are, having prepared himself the entire length of the clogged Long Island Expressway.
Embrace her.
Embrace her.
Embrace her.
Not meaning it literally, though literally was exactly how it played out, but, okay, not at first. Laurie had been the one to meet her halfway across the room—such neediness on the girl’s face, but maybe that’s what she was seeing on their faces, too; weren’t they in need as well?
He staring at them clinging to each other like that as if he’d stumbled across an embarrassing intimacy, like the time he’d opened the bathroom door at a loft party in his twenties and seen his best friend’s girlfriend with her legs wrapped around a total stranger.
They say—whoever they are—that the loss of a child will either bring you together or tear you apart. In their particular case, it had done both—bringing them together so they could tear each other apart. But that was mostly at first, when the wounds were still raw, gaping, and actively bleeding. Way before they’d developed the kind of scabs that masquerade as healing, even though each of them couldn’t resist picking at them now and then.
She was a stranger, but soon she wouldn’t be.
When she’d walked into the kitchen that first morning, he was about to ask her if she belonged to Ben. Until he remembered. This is Jennifer Morrow Kristal.
And they’d sat around the breakfast table and did what families do around breakfast tables, which is pretend things are fine. Which wasn’t very different from sitting around a table with Ben. Pretending he was still the eight-year-old boy begging to kick around the soccer ball in the backyard or wash the car with him or traipse off to the computer games store, instead of the postadolescent stoner who’d broken away from his upstairs hibernation just long enough to down half a bagel before retreating back to his cave.
Ben. The crux where what you’d hoped meets what you’ve borne.
Ben.
Hope it stays warm a little longer, he’d said to Ben’s sister, playing the part of local meteorologist, because it was too early in the morning to play the part of Dad.
Or too late.
When Ben stumbled into the kitchen, blinking like someone who’d been trapped in a mine accident—remember those Chilean workers who’d subsisted on breath mints?—Jake thought Ben might want to take the stroll down memory lane with him, the kind of father-son talk Ben could actually relate to. My old drugs of choice versus his. Hadn’t the therapist suggested finding areas of commonality?
My sister’s where . . . she’s home? My sister . . . ?
Thinking that Ben needed to get with the program. The Method acting one. Sympathizing that it must be hard to get your head around something like that when you had a head, were in a head, whatever the expression du jour was—even though Ben denied having been anywhere near a joint. Who, me? You going to believe me or your eyes?
When Jake told him Mom and Jenny were at the mall that morning, Jake could see Ben’s face registering shock all over again. Maybe he’d thought he’d dreamed it.
Once upon a time, Jake had dreamed it too. Right after it happened, when he’d wake up and for just a moment, for that brief shift change when full consciousness relieved dull awareness, be ready to go and wake the kids for school.
Tell them to brush their teeth. To get dressed. And to please not fight this morning.
Kids plural.
That moment as fleeting as the brown mouse he’d once glimpsed scurrying underneath their fridge, when—and here’s the kicker—he was really talking about the elephant in the room.
He let the smallest edge creep into his voice when Ben asked him where Mom was.
Mom took Jenny to the mall.
After which Ben trooped back to his cave.
Ben.
Oh, Ben . . .