“I NEED YOUR HELP!”
“Who is this?” I said into the phone. “Hello?”
“You know who this is,” he paused, breathing heavily into the receiver. “I … I need your help, Noa.” The tornado winds of his voice tossed me aside. More than six months absent, and back we were to our original conduit of reconciliation. “Please. Can you meet me?”
I inhaled with a deep yogi breath.
“Absolutely not,” I said and then I hung up.
But it rang. And it rang. And rang again until I answered it once more.
“I’m going to call the police,” I said answering the phone. “I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to get involved with your business. I’m trying to fix my own life here.”
“Noa, sweetheart,” he pleaded. “I’ve never asked you for anything in my life—”
“You’re joking, right?” I laughed. “Seriously, Caleb. You can’t hear yourself, can you?”
“Please, I … I need you. And I haven’t asked you for anything—”
“—you constantly asked me to see my apartment, to visit your bar, to forgive you.”
“Hear me out—”
“—and secondly, you’ve barely been in my life long enough to even make such claims. The few minutes you’ve been a part of it, all you’ve done is ask for favors. Do you even hear yourself?”
“Please!” he shouted, quietly, like a muted stage whisper. “I don’t know where else to turn.”
“Not my problem,” I said. “Good-bye.”
But I didn’t hang up. My hand clutched the phone close to my ear, waiting.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said eventually, his voice crumbling.
I listened to him. I’m not sure what took over me at that moment. Maybe it was his panting that felt reminiscent of that stray golden retriever. Maybe it was the fact that I could hear him wiping a lip of a semiclean pint glass with a rag that probably hadn’t been washed in the better part of the fortnight.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Caleb—”
“—she’s pregnant,” he finally said. “She’s pregnant, and I don’t know what to do about it. You above all people should know how it feels to have a father like me. I shouldn’t be a father. I shouldn’t … I mean … I … can’t …”
“Stop stuttering!”
“I’m … fr … fr … freaking out, Noa!”
“You’re a grown man. You’ve made this mistake before. Deal with it the way you’ve always dealt with it. Run the fuck away.”
He breathed in through his nose, and I could tell he’d been crying. Every breath was clotted with mucus and felt caught behind a fear he so rarely displayed.
“I don’t want to run away anymore,” he said. “Believe it or not, I really have changed.”
I heard him gulp something liquid. Water? Juice? Beer?
“Where are you now?” I asked.
A faint bell dinged nearby.
“I’m at Bar Dive,” he replied. “Can you meet me here?”
“It’s freezing. I’m not leaving my apartment.”
I held the cell phone in my left hand as I bit the skin hanging off the corner of my cuticle on my right thumb. It tore a little beyond its dead root and started bleeding little rivers drifted into the wrinkles on my hand like red tributaries.
“Please,” he said.
“Aren’t you preparing for tomorrow’s big new year celebration with Sarah or something?”
“Please,” he said again. “I need you.”
“Come on, Caleb.”
“Please, Noa.”
I don’t know that I recognized a crack in his voice or if it was the swivel in his tone, but I thought about it as if it were true that he had no one else but me in the world. I waited a few moments—long enough for him to wipe the sweat from his brow three times—and then I gave in.
“Fine. I’ll be right over.”
I grabbed my messenger bag, draped it over my chest like a Girl Scout sash, and covered it with my black down jacket, a red scarf, red gloves, and purple hat—all courtesy of my new income from Marlene. The whole time I was getting ready, feverishly, as if my father’s life depended on it, the sound of his phone call rang in my head like a warning. A siren circling my subconscious as if I knew exactly what was going to happen before it did. It’s funny how our minds work. Almost like that movie soundtrack with the tremulous violins prescient of our next move. Even though the soundtrack dictates otherwise, we still enter that dark room. Still, we tell our loved ones we’ll be right back. Still, we drive home alone when all the power is out in a thunderstorm.
For me, that soundtrack was playing against the telephone ring in my head when I left my apartment. It played when I dropped into the subway stop and traveled all the way to Girard Street, where I exited by the corner where I first saw the shadowman, strolled the few blocks until I arrived at the hanging tennis shoes and Bar Dive. The letters on the marquee were still canary yellow as they were the day I fled all those months earlier.
The door was locked, and the sign in the window read SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED. I knocked on the door and peeked through the slight opening in the window where the blinds were broken. My father was sitting alone in a chair, trembling, his arms wrapped around his torso like he was wearing a straitjacket. He hadn’t shaved in what appeared to be days. No hair grew over the pea-pod scar over his lip, and for a moment, he looked almost like a negative of a thin Charlie Chaplin. Scattered images of my mother’s elementary-school fetish flashed in my memory.
“Dad?” I yelled through the glass, knocking on the door. “Hello?” He looked up and rushed to let me in. “What the hell is going on?”
“Sit. Please sit.”
My eyes skimmed the bar. It was uninhabited as usual, but seemed scarily vacant. I didn’t take off my jacket or my bag beneath.
“Come with me,” he said, taking my hand, trying to pull me to his back office.
“No, no, no,” I said. “I’m not going back there.”
He pulled harder. “I need to show you something. That’s why I called you over.”
“I thought you called me because you needed to get it off your chest how horrible a father you are and that you realize that you’re about to make the same mistake again.”
He nodded, running his fingers over his stubble. Still he pressured me to walk into the back room.
“Don’t!” I demanded. “Who knows what other contraband you’ve got. I’m not about to be a drug mule now.”
A nervous laugh ejected from his mouth like a piece of gum inadvertently falling from his lips.
“You have exactly one minute to tell me why you dragged me out of my warm apartment when it’s freezing outside.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, again with those goddamn surrender hands. He walked to the bar and slipped under the wooden door instead of opening it. He grabbed a plastic pint.
“Beer? Coke?”
“Noa, please,” he pleaded again. “This helps calm me as I talk about it. Beer, coke? Diet? I have Mountain Dew. I know you like that.”
“Just water,” I said.
He served me a pint of water, walked back under the bar as if it were one great limbo construct, and sat down at a table, his back facing the door. I sat across from him. If anyone were to look in, they’d see only my face, only my hands. They’d never see any identifying feature on my co-conspirator’s face.
“I’m freaking out,” he said for what could have been the fiftieth time. He was sweating. Porous beads slipped down his temples and the ridge of his bumpy nose.
“Because of the baby?”
He nodded.
“Really?” I laughed. “Gonna play mute with me after all this time? Don’t give me another story about twelve steps or your mother’s death or me changing your life.”
He looked away from me.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Shhhhh,” he begged. “Please keep your voice down.”
“I can’t deal with this,” I said, standing to leave.
“Look, I don’t want Sarah to have this baby.”
“Yeah, I gathered that.”
“No, you don’t understand, Noa. I can’t have this baby. I really have changed, you see. I have this bar. I made amends with you. If she has this child, I have no chance at being a proper father to you.”
“I think we’re a little late for that, aren’t we?”
“I’m serious.”
He glanced toward his office and looked back to me. Putrid odors spilled from his lips unlike anything I’d smelled. He must have had eight, maybe nine beers.
“Come up with another reason. I saw you two together. I saw you walk into Planned Parenthood with a smile on your face,” I said. “You both looked happy, actually.”
Caleb scratched his scar. His pupils danced between my eyes as he struggled to focus.
“She was going to end it that day but decided against it. She knew I didn’t want it.”
“Try again.”
“It’s the truth, Noa,” he said. “I swear.”
I looked behind him to his office. The heavy wooden door was cracked near its hinges.
“What is it you want from me?” I asked.
He looked around his bar for a moment before standing up. “Stay right there, I’ll be back in a second.”
He walked to his office and returned a few moments later with a plastic baggie in his hand.
“Seriously, you really are a drug mule now?”
He sat down.
“This is RU-486. It’s the abortion pill.”
“I know what it is. What are you doing with it? Planning on drugging your girlfriend?”
His expression didn’t alter.
“It’s not really as simple as that, Noa.”
“I was joking.”
He gave me time to flush the thought from my system, before attempting a sophomoric explanation.
“It really isn’t that simple.”
“Did Marlene Dixon put you up to this? Supply you with the drugs?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t true.
He didn’t respond, and for the first time, I wished he hadn’t been so silent. I wished I hadn’t been so vocal when I met with her last. I wished for a lot of things in that moment.
“—she did, didn’t she?”
“How do you …,” he stumbled, as if a light were just beginning to radiate, a bit too late for him, but finally, it was turning on. “You know Marlene?”
“You’re actually sitting there telling me—”
“—I’m not ‘telling’ you anything.” He stood up. “Please, just come with me.”
I followed him into the back, where Sarah Dixon was lying, sprawled across the couch, peaceful as a corpse.
“Oh, my god!” I cried, tripping over my feet.
“Shhhhh.”
“Is she … is she … dead?”
I nearly fell to the ground. My heart skipped a beat. My hands shook.
“That’s why I needed you here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I gave her the pill—”
“—you actually gave her an abortion pill?” I cried. “How … how on earth? How did you get … how did you get this kind of a pill?”
He stared at me, but we never exchanged words. Not that day, not during my trial, not for any moment of my incarceration.
“Holy shit …”
“I put it in her drink, but then, after, she sort of passed out. I don’t think it has anything to do with the pill, but what … what if it does? What if she’s sick? What if she had a reaction?”
“Holy shit … holy shit …” I started pacing. “Why? Why do you keep bringing me into your business? I don’t want to have anything to do with you. Jesus Christ, stop calling me.”
“You’re the smartest person I know, Noa,” he said, holding out his hand to meet mine. “You were valedictorian of your high school.”
“Salutatorian.”
“You went to Penn.”
“For a year,” I corrected, my hands still shivering. “Less, actually.”
“You teach science. Right?”
“I sub.”
“But you still teach.”
“I sub, Caleb,” I said again. “I substitute. I’m not real. That’s what a fucking substitute is—someone who isn’t real.”
“Noa, I know how bright you are,” he insisted. His voice was weak. “You’re the only person I knew to call. I couldn’t just leave her here.”
“Of course not!” I yelled, quickly calming myself. “Take her to the fucking hospital.”
“We both know I can’t do that.”
“Do we?”
“They’ll want to know about the pill. How she got it,” he said.
I stared at him. “Then tell them.”
“I can’t,” he said, pacing. “I can’t. I didn’t know this would happen. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“She’s not actually going to turn you in,” I said. “She wouldn’t have actually turned you in, you know.”
I walked over to Sarah. Her thin limbs stuck out from the couch. Her mouth was open, her eyes closed, and her stomach was half covered with her two palms as if she was showing everyone in her dreams her unborn child. I know it’s strange, but at that point, the only thing I could think of was Liza Minnelli. I pictured her singing Cabaret, thinking of her dear friend Elsie, spread across the bed, corpselike as a queen.
My mouth opened.
“How long has she been out like this?”
“I’m not sure … Maybe twenty, thirty minutes before I called you.”
“Thirty minutes?”
I took off my gloves and threw them to the floor. Then I sat down beside her and pressed my fingers against her throat to check her pulse. There was a beat, slow but present. The temporal artery bounced off my fingertips enough for me to know she was alive.
But still, the music continued in my head.
“You know that pill isn’t supposed to be given by nonmedical professionals. Especially in such a high dose.”
“I know, I know.”
“And it’s only a part of the process. She needs to follow up with someone. Did you think you could drug her a second time? Because that’s what you’d have to do. Godamnit, why do you do these things?”
He held out his hands in prayer.
“What are we gonna do?”
“Again, we aren’t going to do anything. You are going to take her to the hospital. She’s unconscious but breathing normally, as far as I can tell. I’m not a doctor, Caleb. She needs a doctor.”
As soon as I removed my fingertips from her warm neck, I felt something move on the couch. It set off a wave of fear in my spine that I’d felt only once before. I’m not talking about the fear that overtakes you when you see a shadow moving through your dark home at night, or when that creak in the wooden planks of your floorboard definitely—almost positively, you swear—came from an intruder inside the house. No, I’m talking about the fear of discovery, the scintillating fear that you know you may be doing something wrong, but you can’t quite spell wrong or understand what wrong is.
My father and I locked eyes just as he knew he needed to take her to the hospital. His eyes spread open, wide like the Adriatic, and he started backing away from me. I looked closer at him until fingertips touched my back. Tentacles, as if from a spider, inching along up my spine vertebrae by vertebrae. And the music played in that wretched mellifluous soundtrack.
“Where am I?” I heard her say, and then I turned around back to face Sarah.