CHAPTER FIFTEEN #2
“Fucking nutcase,” he said under his breath.
Carver woke with a jolt several hours after he lay down in bed, totally disoriented. He felt all the symptoms of an unexpected nap: putrid dry mouth, hot and leaden limbs, deep confusion as if he’d woken up in another universe.
The photo of his biological parents had slipped out of his hand and was next to him on the bed.
He got up and tucked it carefully into an internal compartment of his suitcase.
Then he brushed his teeth again, splashed cool water on his face and went downstairs.
From the hallway he could hear his father snoring.
He found his mother in the den, sitting on the couch surrounded by tissues and tearfully watching Barefoot In The Park.
Nora looked up when he came in, paused the movie and dabbed her eyes with the tissue in her hand. “Sorry,” she gasped.
“Sorry for what, crying? Don’t be, I think I was crying in my sleep.”
She shook her head in dismay. Robert Redford’s frozen face, mid-aggravated expression, loomed over them from the TV.
Carver checked his phone and saw it was thirty minutes after midnight. “Any idea where my wife is?”
“Josie told me that when the wedding ended, she left with some of Letty’s friends to party at a second location.”
“Got it.” He nodded. “I guess I had that coming. Where are Chip and Conway?”
“At the actual, official afterparty… the one the brides are throwing.”
“Where?”
“Karaoke bar.”
“When did Bitterfeld get a karaoke bar?”
“We didn’t. They took a party bus to Yonkers.”
Carver scrolled through his notifications and saw nothing from Lillian. Instead he saw he’d missed several calls from Scott a few hours ago, then gotten a text from him, then missed several more calls about forty minutes later. “Why was Scott calling me over and over?”
Nora blew her nose. “He came here looking for you.”
“What? When?”
“A few hours ago, when you were asleep. I gave him his things and sent him to Josie’s.”
“Mom, come on.”
“‘Come on’ what? I don’t care how old you are, Carver, you’re not going to have adulterous relations with men under my roof and then make me continue to host them as if nothing happened.”
“After what you told me tonight, you can’t cut me some slack?”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“The fuck,” Carver exhaled in exasperation, leaning against the doorway. “Well, what did he say?”
“He was concerned about you,” Nora said dully. “He was being pushy and irritating. He saw the holes you made in the wall, which of course he was alarmed by.”
“What did you say?”
“I said it was none of his business and to shoo.”
Carver walked away down the hall. His mother waited a moment, then followed him.
“Are you going over there?” she said as he grabbed his sneakers from the closet and slid them on.
“Yes,” Carver snapped, yanking the laces tight. His right hand still ached a little. “Why?”
“I just want to know where you’re going. Are you going to tell him about tonight?”
“Probably, Mom, yes.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“I don’t think you have the right to say that.”
“Of course I don’t, but I’m saying it anyway,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like to have children. It’s so humbling and frightening. All we can do is beg you.”
“I think you’ve forgotten how humbling and frightening it is to have parents.”
Nora let out a tear-soaked laugh.
Carver finished lacing his shoes and stood. “You can go finish your movie,” he said, then moved toward his mother and did something he’d never done: he gave her a quick kiss on the head. “I’ll be back… I don’t know when. But I’ll have my phone on me.”
“Okay,” she said.
With that, he went out the door into the night.
It was cooler out now — only about 50 degrees — but Carver had a hoodie on over his t-shirt and running shorts, and made his way down the street to Aunt Josie’s at a brisk heart-pumping pace.
He wanted to see Scott so badly. He felt as if they were two kids in a movie like Stand By Me or The Goonies, and he was the one who’d stumbled across a grown-up conspiracy.
Scott, get a load of this! You’ll never believe it!
There was no one out this late, no cars on the road even.
Carver walked in the middle of the road, following its curve, passing under the yellow beams of streetlights which reflected off the glossy leaves of the trees overhead and created a hazy halo around the street.
Once the year reached mid-May, the tree canopy over the neighborhood closed and wouldn’t reopen again until early November.
All of these lovely Georgian and colonial homes were now wrapped in foliage that dappled the sunlight and freshened the air.
The streets smelled like blooming flowers.
For the first time he was appreciating what a physically nice place this had been to grow up in.
All of his problems with it were social and emotional — the invisible structures of life.
But the visible, touchable structures were faultless.
He’d never once wanted for clean water or a strong roof, for some peace and quiet or a beautiful view. He was lucky that way.
Carver knew he should be worried about Lillian, but he couldn’t manage it.
He really never worried about her physical safety; she could handle herself, she was the type of person you’d rely on to get you out of a North Korean prison.
He couldn’t bring himself to be worried about their marriage, either.
The anxiety just wasn’t there anymore. He woke up from his nap to find it gone, like a tooth that fell out overnight.
Curiosity kept his tongue working into the hole it left, but that was all.
He did care for her, he even loved her in some strange way, but he didn’t think he could stay married to her any more than he could stay married to a dead person.
He was lost in thought when he arrived at Josie and Hank’s house and almost passed it by accident, but stopped and doubled back when he recognized their mailbox, which had a cover printed with red geraniums and a pride flag affixed to its side.
He hurried up their front walk and paused a few steps from the door, then backed up.
There was their tidy three-bedroom Georgian with the blue shutters, two-car garage and short driveway, which held Scott’s dead black van.
The house was dark, and Carver didn’t want to wake up anyone but Scott.
He called his phone twice with no answer, muttered, “Shit,” then started scrounging around the front lawn and its landscaping for small rocks.
He was pretty sure the upstairs left front window belonged to the guest room, and began to toss pebbles at the glass.
After about a minute of this, the curtains swished, and Carver stopped. He stood there on the front lawn waiting, opening his sweaty palm and allowing the remaining pebbles to fall from it.
To his horror, the person who opened the front door was his aunt Josie in a bathrobe. The motion-sensing lights over the front step switched on over her head, and she squinted at him.
“Shit,” Carver said, striding over to her. “My bad, my bad. I could have sworn that was the guest room.”
“It’s okay,” Josie said, looking amused.
“Did I wake you?”
“No, no, Hank and I are just in bed watching House Hunters.”
Carver found it was a relief to see her.
She looked a lot like his mother, but there was a knowing twinkle in her eye which he’d always found both comforting and confronting.
He’d been visiting her less and less in the last decade, making up reasons in his head not to, convincing himself that she now thought he was a stuck-up asshole and didn’t want to see him anyway.
Seeing the tender look Josie was giving him even after he’d dragged her out of bed at midnight, he felt like a moron.
“Did you see that comet earlier?” she said, filling the silence. “Pretty auspicious, right? Hank and I had rain and a rainbow at our wedding, but I think a comet beats that out.”
“Definitely,” Carver agreed, hearing how distracted he sounded.
“Guest room,” she repeated. “So, you’re looking for Scott?”
“Guilty.”
Josie pointed behind him, and he looked over his shoulder at the van in the driveway. “He’s sleeping in there.”
“In the van?”
“Yeah. I told him to come inside, but he insisted.” Carver turned back to Josie, who threw her hands up and shrugged.
“I think your mom spooked him and now he’s punishing himself,” she whispered.
“He was polite about it, but I could tell she got after him. She can be a tough customer. Well, who am I telling.”
“Right,” Carver said. He took a breath and studied her, then said, “My parents and I had a weird… bad night.”
“It sounded like it,” Josie said.
“Not with the Scott stuff, actually. That was kind of table stakes.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”
“Yeah.” Carver hesitated, nursing a hunch. “Do you — you wouldn’t happen to maybe, uh, know something about me?”
Josie looked confused at first, but this look melted into cold hard recognition, which she was too slow in covering up with blankness. “Like what?” she said, before gnawing her lower lip.
She had basically given herself away there. He felt comfortable proceeding.
“Whose son I am,” he said.
Josie brought her hands to her face the same way Nora had earlier. “Oh,” she said into them, her eyes huge and round.
“Okay.” Carver exhaled, only then realizing how much his heartbeat had just sped up. “Okay. Did everyone know about me? Everyone but me?”
“Oh, no, honey,” she said, and came closer, taking him by the shoulders.
“No, no. It’s only because she’s my sister.
I never told a soul. Not Letty, not Priscilla, not Hank.
God, I can’t believe this. I told her to tell you so many times, over and over.
I thought about telling you myself, but I knew she’d never speak to me again. ” Her face crumpled. “Oh, Carver.”
Carver wept then, with the same mixture of grief and relief that had been coming to him in waves for the last few hours. Josie hugged him, bringing his head to her shoulder, and he wrapped his arms around her.
“Sorry,” he choked out after a moment, pulling back.
“Don’t apologize.” She dug in her bathrobe pocket and handed him a travel pack of Kleenex, which he made use of. “You’re in luck, I’m just getting over a sinus infection. No, don’t apologize, okay? I’d be a mess if I were you.”
“I’ve been a mess.”
“Oh, sweetheart. God, I don’t even know what to say.
” She wiped her own eyes. “I want you to know, it was very hard on them — not your existence, but the secret. Nora would come over and sob to me for hours because she could see how alienated you felt, but at a certain point she thought you were too old for them to tell you — that you’d feel even more alienated and lose all trust in them.
But the situation only got worse, but never quite bad enough.
” She hesitated. “This is going to sound terrible, but I think they felt that as long as you were physically safe, it was better not to. They thought you just hated them. You were tough enough that I don’t think they realized the extent of what you were going through. ”
Carver tried to read between the lines of this. “You’re saying if I’d started hurting myself, or doing heroin, they would have told me?”
“Something like that, yes. That’s my theory, anyway, based on what Nora said.”
Carver cleared his throat and wiped his eyes again. “What did you tell her, when you guys talked?”
“I told her to just do it, to tear off the Band-Aid. I told her the truth would set you all free and you’d figure out what to do as a family. You — God. I can’t even tell you how many times I told her that. I can’t believe they finally told you.”
“Yeah, and they didn’t, even. Chip did.”
Josie reeled, open-mouthed. “Chip knows?”
“He figured it out, he said. When Aaron was born, based on what he found out about blood types.”
“That is wild. Wow. You know, I always thought Chip would make a better cop than a lawyer.”
Carver laughed. “Listen, I kind of have a lot going on this weekend — I know you do too —”
“Oh, right, you came here for Scott,” Josie said, grabbing his forearm. “I completely forgot, sorry about that.”
“No, it’s fine, I just wanted to say, like… when things settle down some, I’d like —” He cleared his throat again. “Maybe I could come out and see you guys, take you out to dinner, and you and I could, like, talk?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Josie said. “Name the day. Do you want to shit-talk your mom? Because you get a free pass from me for that.”
“Not shit-talk, just… uh… talk.”
“Absolutely.”
“I actually had a pretty good talk with each of them,” Carver said, “but they’re kind of, uh…”
“Emotionally incompetent?”
“Yeah… something like that.”
“You know, our mother was very tough on us,” Josie said, almost apologetically. “I couldn’t ever really handle it, but your mom was always — she used to get between us and just take it. And it — you know. Like I said, your mom is tough too.”
Carver nodded, absorbing this.
“We can talk anytime. Anytime. Just text me.”
“Okay. I will.”
“And, um, before I leave you to Scott —” Josie glanced over his shoulder at the van. “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, and I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but he’s a good kid.”
“We’re all thirty-six, Aunt Josie,” Carver stage-whispered back.
“You’re kids to me still. Don’t make me feel old.
” She was smiling. “He’s a good kid, and he means well.
I know he tries to make himself seem like this self-contained rolling stone, but he needs people.
He’s just afraid to admit it, I think, ‘cause he’s always had to rely so much on strangers, you know?
It gets you off on the wrong foot with people if they get the idea that you need them more than they need you. ”
“Yeah. I hear what you’re saying.”
“Okay.” Josie patted him on the arm. “Good night. See if you can’t get him to come inside, you both know where the spare key is. I’m gonna go to bed now.”
“Night. And thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
Carver watched her go and waited to hear the front door’s deadbolt click shut before he made his way over to the van.