CHAPTER FOURTEEN #2
Nora looked up at him, bleary-eyed. “So?” she said. “What are you thinking right now?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Carver said, and left the room.
He found his father in the study upstairs, sitting behind the massive cherrywood desk with a glass of scotch in his hand, staring into the middle distance.
The only light turned on was a banker’s lamp on the desk.
Doug looked up as Carver walked in and dragged a tufted leather accent chair in front of the desk, then sat down in it.
“Hey, Dad,” he said casually.
“Hello,” Doug said, then cleared his throat. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, I just wanted to talk to you for a bit.”
“Okay,” Doug said, sounding wary. He pointed at Carver’s hand. “Is that still cold enough for you?”
Carver lifted the ice pack and examined his knuckles, which were still pink and puffy but less so. “I should give it a break for a while, actually.”
“Alright. There are more ice packs in the freezer, just make sure you put that one back.”
“Yeah.”
“The dog keeps coming in here and bothering me,” Doug muttered, more to himself than Carver. “I should probably go take him for a late walk.”
“Sure. I’ll come with you?”
“No, no, just say whatever you came in here to say, please.”
“Nothing, Dad. I just wanted to check on you.”
“Check on me,” Doug repeated. His eyes were bloodshot, and his tie was loose and askew. He looked like a dazed businessman who’d survived a plane crash and was wandering around the wreckage looking for his briefcase. “I see. I’m alright.”
“You want me to leave you alone?”
“No, no,” Doug said quickly. “Did you take an ibuprofen? You should.”
“I probably shouldn’t, I think I drank too much.”
“Oh, right.”
“But I’m not in any pain.”
“The upside of drinking too much,” Doug said. “You’ll feel it tomorrow.”
Carver looked at the crystal lowball glass in his father’s hand. It was unusual for him to drink alone.
“I think I heard your mother apologize, maybe, while you two were screaming at each other,” Doug said. “But I wanted to apologize as well.”
“What for?”
“Well, all of it.”
Carver sat back in the plush, uncomfortable chair — it was more for decor than sitting — and laughed. “Oh, sure.”
“It just got away from us,” Doug said, still staring into space. “I know that probably sounds ridiculous to you, but it did. We were so sure we could proceed normally, like nothing happened.”
“But something did happen.”
“Right. But it’s something — it’s not so uncommon.
It used to be even more common. A couple from my parents’ generation wouldn’t have had any issue taking a secret like this to the grave.
” He laughed. “I mean, how many men came home from World War Two and raised someone else’s child? Probably a few thousand, right?”
“And everyone involved just repressed everything?”
“Yes,” Doug said. “And that’s kind of what I’m saying. Your mother and I overestimated our ability to repress this, and contain it, and stop it from reaching you.”
Carver felt momentarily sorry for both of them. It was easier to feel sorry for his mother when he wasn’t talking to her. “You were expecting a lot of yourselves.”
“We were weak,” Doug said, sounding cold. “We were selfish and weak. I want you to know, we’ve discussed this ad nauseum. We’re not unaware that you were the innocent party.”
“Good to hear.”
Doug sipped his scotch. “I expected to be a better man. I thought, well, it isn’t his fault. And if, say, my brother left behind an orphaned child, I’d be more than happy to take it in.”
“But it’s a different scenario. Mom had betrayed you.”
“But you hadn’t,” Doug said. “But it felt like you had. I never knew what to do with you. I convinced myself that if you reminded me of him, I could be reasonable about it. And maybe I thought that in exchange for accepting that, I’d be rewarded with a blank slate.
Then you started to remind me of him, and it almost felt like you’d gone back on a deal we made. ”
“Seriously?”
Doug nodded, then let out another laugh. “It did. It really did. I remember when you came home from school and told us you’d been running races in gym class and you were the fastest at almost every distance. You were so thrilled, too. I felt like you’d slapped me, I had to leave the room.”
“But you knew you weren’t being fair.”
“Of course. I was ashamed of myself.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t just tell me when I was a teenager,” Carver pressed. “I remember asking you point blank if I was adopted or something.”
“It was never the right time.”
“Any time would have been!”
“You were so angry and distant.”
“I wasn’t angry. I was hurt.”
“No, you were very angry. You blamed us when you tore your rotator cuff.”
“Because you begged me to play football. Because, apparently, I was hurting you by running track instead.”
Doug closed his eyes. “I know. I know, Carver. But this is the kind of thing I — look, I encouraged you to play football, I didn’t make you get sacked.”
“I know, I got happy feet, I know.”
“I mean that more as in, you could have said no to me. I almost hoped you would. It kind of makes me sick, the way you hate us yet still try to please us. Like you’re defying us by pleasing us.”
Carver could only laugh at the brazen unfairness of this. “So it’s on me for trying to please you. Okay. I wish you guys would stop saying I hate you, by the way, because I don’t. You’re my parents, I love you, and apparently you did something kind of monstrous to me.”
“Please don’t say monstrous,” Doug said, looking down at the green leather desk pad, which Carver had gotten his parents for Christmas a few years ago. He rolled a pen across it, then said, “Monstrously ill-advised.”
“I wasn’t so angry that you couldn’t talk to me.”
“Maybe so, but we were afraid to anyway,” Doug said.
“And we were working, and raising three children, taking care of the house and having a social life, and our parents were getting old and having problems. The days just flew by, and it just kept getting further and further away from us. Like a dinghy we couldn’t pull back in. Just watching you float out to sea.”
“Yeah. Well.”
Doug was quiet for a while.
“If it helps,” Carver said, “I forgive you a little more than I do Mom.”
“That doesn’t help,” his father said quietly.
“Really?”
“Yes. This isn’t about whose fault it is.”
“No?” Carver said, with raised eyebrows.
Doug met his gaze with his pink and rheumy eyes. “Don’t say ‘no’ like I’m stupid.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“You think I’m being too charitable to her. Well, you know a lot about us now, you might as well know this — I had my own affair before she had hers.”
Carver instantly and deeply regretted whatever dicky facial expression of his had led his father to divulge this. “Jesus, okay.”
“In Japan.”
“Okay, Dad! That’s fine!”
“If I’d had a Japanese love child —”
“Sure. Yes. My bad.”
Doug drank more of his scotch. He’d already been tipsy at the wedding, and the bottle of Glenlivet on the desk had clearly just been opened but was missing a few glasses worth of its scotch.
He must be more inebriated right now than he’d been in a decade.
“Your mother felt abandoned, and neglected. And she had good reason to.”
“But you didn’t drive her into this guy’s arms. I thought everyone was taking responsibility for stuff tonight.”
“You won’t take responsibility for how hostile you were as a teenager,” Doug tossed back at him. “You were an emotional terrorist, the temperature dropped five degrees when you walked in the room. It was like living with an ex-girlfriend.”
Carver self-protectively breezed right past that comment. “I’m just saying this situation is more her doing than anyone else’s.”
“So you see me as weak, now that you know. You think I didn’t have my house in order.”
“I think you’re taking this in an unnecessary direction.”
“I know,” Doug said helplessly.
“I’m sorry I shit-talked Mom. We all love Mom, okay? She’s so good at minigolf.”
Doug let out a sigh and finished his drink. “God damn it all,” he said. “You’re right, we should have told you sooner, because now I have to wear this when I’m already a pathetic old man. Just another retired asshole who plays golf and putters around in the garden waiting to die.”
“Dad…”
“I was going to be a judge someday, but it’s so much more political than I realized.
I never had the right connections. I think it’s because I had to go to a state school for my bachelor’s.
I got into much better schools, but I only got the one full ride offer for football.
I wonder sometimes if I should have just gambled on the loans, but I had no way of knowing.
These are the kind of indignities I worked so hard to spare the three of you from. ”
“Dad,” Carver repeated, thinking for the first time in his life that his father really needed to see a therapist.
“He was my friend, too,” Doug said, with a sudden and surprising anger. “The… man.”
“I know,” Carver said. “You guys said.”
Doug rubbed his forehead. “It would have been so much easier if you had been an adopted child,” he said. “If I didn’t have to pretend you came from me.”
“And if I didn’t remind you of him?”
Doug said nothing and continued to rub his forehead. Carver leaned back in the uncomfortable chair, glancing out the window. The blinds were drawn but open. Through them he could see the ghostly white leaves of one of the flowering dogwoods that grew along the back of the house.
“It’s complicated,” Doug finally said.
“Okay.”
“I didn’t completely hate him for what he did. I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”
This was a surprise. Carver leaned forward.
“I just knew I couldn’t ever see him again,” Doug said. He paused for a moment, and it looked like he was grinding his teeth. “So I didn’t. Your mother tried to get me to see him on his deathbed, and I didn’t go. And I’m glad I didn’t.”
“You don’t regret it?”
“No. I had nothing to say to him and I didn’t want to hear anything he had to say.”
“Right.”