3
Mrs. Valdez corners Patrick.
“You’re in charge here,” she tells him, an index finger firm against the placket of his shirt, her nurse’s uniform bright in the gloom of Susan’s kitchen. “You treat that baby like she’s your own baby and that poor girl like she’s your sister, you hear?”
Patrick can only nod. He’d watched with a secondhand sense of shame as Mrs. Valdez took in the empty bottle of Ballantine’s on Susan’s bedside table, the pills in the bathroom, the pervasive smell of weed.
“They’re both healthy,” Mrs. Valdez assures him. “Physically, at least. New mothers need meat. Can you cook liver?”
Patrick doesn’t even have a real stove in his apartment, and that’s on purpose.
Instead, he orders so much takeout that, after the first few days, he starts giving Hector and Iris five dollars every morning and asking them to pick up Chinese food, sandwiches, pizza—I don’t care, surprise us, keep the change—on the way home from school.
Just when he’s starting to worry he’s about to go broke, Susan remembers that she’s earned four gold records and has a bank account full of money.
“I shouldn’t be doing this to you,” Susan says.
It’s three o’clock in the morning. They’re in Susan’s bed, Eleanor asleep on the mattress between them.
Patrick should put her in the cradle Mr. Valdez brought home from work—a prop from a show that just finished its run—but if she wakes up again he’s going to need to scream into the pillow.
“You know I want you here,” Patrick says, when what he wants to say is just please don’t die .
All week long he’s been reminding himself that Susan’s been in a band for years.
Valium and whiskey aren’t the worst she’s done.
They aren’t even the worst she’s done around Patrick.
“Just be careful, okay?” And then, feeling shitty about it before the words even leave his mouth, “If you die, your parents will take Eleanor.” The Larkins aren’t bad people, but there’s a reason Susan’s here instead of their comfortable Long Island split level.
“Go to hell,” she says. “I’m not trying to die. I just don’t want to be awake and sober for this.”
“People die without trying all the time.” Patrick hears Susan’s sharp intake of breath. Obviously people die without trying, Patrick, you fool, that’s the reason they’re in this mess.
“Okay,” Susan says, a little wetly. He rolls to his side and attempts to stroke her hair, but he’s terrible at this, just truly the world’s least comforting human being. He keeps thinking she needs to wash her hair.
“You trust him,” Susan asks a few minutes later, waving a hand in the direction of the living room. Through the bedroom door, Patrick can see Nathaniel passed out on the couch, an arm flung over his eyes. “I’m not insane for letting a total stranger rock my kid to sleep?”
Patrick doesn’t know a single thing about Nathaniel except that he takes his coffee black and has something against dust.
But you learn a lot about someone when you spend practically every waking minute with them for a full week.
He’s kind to Iris and Hector, patiently listening to their tales of ninth grade drama and correcting their algebra homework.
A lot of people would judge Susan for—well, for everything about how she’s handling things, frankly—but Nathaniel doesn’t so much as look at her funny.
He seems to save any malevolence for Patrick, and even that’s just a gentle cattiness: some scathing commentary about a used tea bag he found in the military history section, some pointed words about grown men who don’t understand that babies need to be burped.
Nothing’s gone missing, no sinister strangers have come around asking for him, and Patrick would swear he isn’t using.
That much Patrick’s sure about: Nathaniel’s rarely more than a few feet away. Patrick would know if he had so much as a cigarette.
And then there’s the fact that he’s helping at all.
It’s not like anybody asked him to—it wouldn’t have occurred to Patrick to ask his bookstore clerk to sterilize baby bottles, and it wouldn’t have occurred to him to ask anybody in the world to spend their nights walking his niece back and forth in front of the window until she falls asleep.
“He’s taking good care of that baby.” Patrick doesn’t add: thank god somebody is.
Patrick’s trying his best but every time he picks her up he’s sure he’s doing something wrong, and from the way she carries on, she seems to agree.
Susan’s trying too, but she isn’t in any shape to look after a newborn on her own right now.
“It’s so sad,” Susan says.
Patrick doesn’t even need to turn his head to know that she’s crying again. The past few sentences were probably the longest non-crying conversation they’ve managed since she got here. He reaches for her hand. “Why’s it sad?”
“Because he must have had kids. Where are they now?”
Patrick could point out that men leave their families all the time, or that Nathaniel’s experience with babies might come from younger siblings or nieces and nephews. But it all boils down to the same question: where are they now?
The next morning he shows Nathaniel where he keeps the stamps and envelopes. “If you want to send any letters,” Patrick explains.
“Thank you,” Nathaniel says, straightening out the roll of stamps before putting it back in the drawer.
“Just stick your letters in the tray with the other mail and I’ll make sure the mailman picks them up,” Patrick says.
“You can use the phone if you don’t want to write,” Patrick says a few days later when no letters from Nathaniel appear in the mail tray. “Long distance, too.”
“No thank you,” Nathaniel says, a little testily.
“Sometimes you need to,” Patrick says, “even if it’s just to stop yourself from feeling guilty.”
Nathaniel looks up at him, something flinty in his expression. “Nobody’s worried about me. God knows I’m guilty, but not of that.”
* * *
In tenth grade, there was a kid who kept getting sent to the nurse’s office for burning himself in chemistry lab.
“Just wanted to see how long I could keep my hand there,” he’d say after getting sent back to class, his hand bandaged in gauze.
The next time the Bunsen burners came out, he’d do it all over again.
Reading the newspaper begins to feel like that, like an obvious danger that Patrick should have the common sense to avoid.
Instead, he walks to the newsstand when it’s still dark and the streets are almost quiet, Eleanor bundled in a blanket inside his coat, and reads the front page of the Times while standing on the sidewalk.
At least the sanitation strike is over, and Patrick can carry out this masochistic ritual in reasonably fresh air.
He doesn’t know what he expects to see. Every day the body count climbs higher, and Patrick reading about it in the early edition isn’t going to make it stop.
He can’t tell if it’s his imagination or if even the reporters seem sick of the war now.
The other night, Walter Cronkite—not exactly a long-haired leftist agitator—went on air to more or less say we aren’t going to win this war, and should negotiate a way out.
Today, on the front page, is the news that President Johnson—Patrick can’t even think his name without something livid and dangerous curdling inside him—ended draft deferments for graduate students.
Even if Michael had stayed in grad school, he could have been drafted anyway.
It doesn’t matter—Michael is dead, it’s final, Johnson can’t kill him twice—but Patrick wants to kick something.
Who even fights a war with unwilling graduate students?
It sounds like the setup to an unfunny joke.
When Patrick gets home, fingers white with cold and Eleanor furious as usual, he checks on Susan, then goes to his own apartment and makes a pot of coffee and a bottle for Eleanor.
Nathaniel comes out of the spare room, bleary-eyed and rumpled, a blanket still around his shoulders.
Patrick hands him a mug and the paper. When Nathaniel’s done with it, it’ll get shoved into the bottom of the trash can, because they’ve entered into an unspoken conspiracy to hide the newspapers from Susan.
“Cold out,” Nathaniel mumbles as he pours himself a second cup of coffee.
It isn’t quite a question. Nathaniel isn’t capable of speaking with punctuation until he’s fully awake, one and a half cups of coffee in his stomach.
Patrick’s added that to his meager stockpile of things he knows about Nathaniel.
It’s gray, windy, and colder than yesterday, but it seems unfair to inflict that information on someone who’s still mostly asleep. “It isn’t raining,” Patrick says.
Eleanor’s fussy this morning—fussier than usual, which is really saying something—so Patrick types out a few letters one handed while trying to soothe her.
At noon, Susan wanders into the shop, actually dressed and only slightly out of it.
For a minute Patrick lets himself believe this is progress, but then she catches sight of Patrick holding Eleanor and abruptly goes back upstairs.
Patrick shuts his eyes. When he opens them, there’s a fresh cup of coffee on his desk.
“Thank you,” he says, but Nathaniel’s already gone. The smell of Windex drifts down from upstairs.
Patrick keeps thinking that Michael’s going to be horrified when he learns what a state Susan is in. Every few hours, the thought pops into his head and stays there for a precious few seconds until Patrick remembers that Michael isn’t going to be anything, not ever again.
It’s like the most important fact of his existence keeps slipping his mind, like where he put the phone bill or how many copies of Billy Budd they have in stock. How can you just forget that a person’s dead? When Patrick’s parents died, he hadn’t forgotten.