CHAPTER NINETEEN #3
“What about Josie and Hank?” Scott interrupted.
“I guess that’s a thought,” Carver said.
Somehow, though, this didn’t feel like the right answer either.
Carver knew what he wanted — to leave with Scott and just go be with him wherever — but he was embarrassed to even raise the point.
This was the same guy who told him he was Lillian’s pet dog, and the idea hurt his pride.
He couldn’t rid himself of the image of a dog, leash unclipped, darting over to heel at Scott’s side and follow him home.
He couldn’t fix his life by becoming the runaway he’d failed to be at eighteen.
He would have to figure out some other thing to do.
“I’ll discuss it with them tomorrow,” he said, just to have something to say.
“Okay,” Scott said. “Look, if you really want to be alone, have some time to think, then you should be alone. I’ll stop — I keep trying to tell you what to do, sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” Carver said, laughing and getting to his feet. “I’d love to be told what to do.”
Scott got up, too. “But I can’t tell you what the right thing is. You know that, not me.”
“Sure, allegedly. Do neither of us have a car here, by the way?”
“Uh…” Scott chuckled. “If you don’t, I don’t. We could walk.”
“Two miles in the dark? I’ll call an Uber.” Carver opened the app on his phone, then glanced up. “Can I say something about the van situation?”
Scott drew his lower lip into his mouth. “Sure,” he said, in a ‘watch it’ tone.
“If you’re tight on cash, it doesn’t make sense to put two grand of work into a car that old.”
“Carv —”
“It’s just gonna break down again. It’s a Chevy. I think you should buy something newer with fewer miles on it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You’re about to spend like ten months of car payments on this one repair.”
“It just has sentimental value,” Scott said, sliding his hands into his pockets. “I know it’s irrational. I’ll take what you said into consideration.”
“Alright, if you know it’s irrational, then what are we doing?”
“You know who you sound like right now?”
“Who?”
“Doug,” Scott said pointedly.
Carver laughed and glanced back down at his phone. “Leave me alone, I’m trying to call the Uber.”
When Carver got back to the house, Doug let him in and told him his mother was waiting to talk to him in the study.
It was just the three of them now. Conway was back in White Plains — she’d left before Carver went out to dinner with Lillian, saying goodbye to their parents inside the house first and then insisting on a private goodbye out in the driveway with her brother before getting in her hand-me-down Acura and zooming away.
With only Doug and Nora in it, the house felt too big and too quiet. His parents never seemed to mind this or even notice it. Once Doug gave Carver his mother’s message, he placidly went back down the hall to the den and resumed watching what was, from the sound of it, a Civil War documentary.
Nora was sitting behind the desk in the study.
She had a few lamps on, but was primarily lit by the large computer monitor in front of her.
The bluish-white light from it made the dark circles under her eyes and the puffiness in her face obvious, and the collar of her white button-down was wrinkled.
She looked even worse for wear than Carver did.
As he approached her, she gestured for him to sit down in the armchair facing the desk, and he did.
“I did some digging,” she said, “in our files and then online, and I have some information for you. I have a phone number and email address for Isaac’s youngest brother Josh, and an email address for his sister Lena.
She apparently still lives on Long Island, where they all grew up, but Josh lives in the city.
I couldn’t find any contact information for their sister Sylvia, she’s a big business hotshot and seems to keep herself locked down.
I found several of your cousins on social media, too, but I figured you should start with his siblings. ”
Carver was floored and took a moment to react. “Just like that?”
Nora knit her brow at him as if irritated. “I said I’d do this, didn’t I?”
“What? No, you didn’t.”
“Oh,” she said, then smoothed her hair back from her forehead. She looked much older than he was used to, as if she could be in her early seventies, which made him nervous. “I meant to say that.”
“Did you get any sleep last night, Mom?”
Nora met his eyes. “No,” she said with a wry laugh. “Of course not. Here.”
She handed him a print-out. On it was the contact information for a Josh Levin and a Lena Levin-Kim.
Carver stared at this array of numbers and letters, marveling at what they made together.
He could call his uncle right now. It was so unbelievable that he developed the sudden irrational fear that none of this had been real, his parents had made everything up, there was no Isaac — he would call this number and get an out-of-order tone, or the man on the other end of the phone would say, “Who?”
“Why are you giving me this?” he said, shaking the paper and looking up at her.
“Do you not want it?” Nora said. “You don’t have to call them, obviously. I assumed you wanted to.”
“No, just… last night you were kind of snapping at me when I expressed any interest in his family.”
“I wasn’t snapping at you, I was just cautioning you to not get carried away by a fantasy,” Nora said.
“That’s not how I remember it.”
“Well, it was an emotional evening, Carver, I’m not surprised we came away with different accounts.
Regardless, I’ve spent all day being verbally abused by your siblings about what a heartless and controlling monster I am, so, here.
” She shrugged and leaned back in the desk chair, steepling her hands in her lap.
“There’s your way in. Do whatever you like, tell them whatever you like. ”
“No one thinks you’re a monster —”
Nora gave him a grim smile. “You weren’t there for my conversation with Preston.”
“He said you’re a monster?”
“In so many words. I don’t want to rehash it with you. Just take this, do what you want with it, I understand I owe it to you.”
“Mom — look, I don’t want this because you feel like you need to prove something to us —”
Nora heaved a sigh and closed her eyes, making the dark circles underneath them more visible. “Carver, I have a headache.”
“Just listen to me,” he said sharply, and she opened her eyes in surprise. “Do you realize what you did today? Do you realize how you fucked this up?”
“Excuse me? Don’t swear at me.”
“You are in charge of this family, Mom! You are the leader of this family, and you completely failed in that role today!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nora said. “Your father is the head of this family, or he and I are equals, pick one. I am not the head of this family.”
“Yes, you are! You always have been! You have always set the agenda for us, and today when we needed you to take accountability, you vanished and sent in your number two!”
“Don’t talk about your father with such disrespect,” she spat. “Good God. My number two, are you insane?”
“Are you?” Carver exclaimed, exasperated. “What reality do you live in, because it’s not the same one I’m in!”
“What do you want from me?” Nora said, spreading her hands.
“There are things I owe to you, yes. You were lied to. I understand how angry you are. But what do you want me to do for Chip? Do you understand the resentment he’s thrown at us over the last fifteen years?
And why? Because he can’t pass the bar? Do you understand how humiliating that is for us? And he blames us?”
“He shouldn’t blame you, but you never should have pushed him to go to law school.”
“We didn’t push him, we encouraged him! The interest was his!”
“He has a mental block, do you get that? I think he could pass it, but he goes in there and chokes, because he knows it means the world to you both but nothing to him other than pressure!”
“These are excuses,” Nora said, tapping the desk. “Do you think your father and I weren’t under pressure? Your father was under immense pressure. He was the first person in his family to go to college!”
“That’s less pressure! No one expected him to do what he did!”
“Which means he had no support. No social capital. No financial backing. You three…” Nora shook her head, scoffing.
“You have no idea how lucky you are. None. It’s actually appalling.
My mother almost slapped me in the face when I told her I was going to law school.
They only paid for me to go to college so I could meet a man and get married.
They had the money, but they made me pay for my law degree myself.
Your father and I were drowning in loans as first-year associates.
He only took that position with the project finance group because it paid so well, because of all the petrodollar recycling going on then.
We were very lucky that he has that incredible skill for picking up languages. ”
Carver absorbed this. “So I exist because of petrodollar recycling,” he said.
To his surprise, his mother laughed at this. “In a way! In a way. No, you exist because of my weakness, unfortunately.”
Carver froze, shocked.
“And I’m sorry about that,” Nora continued, spinning gently in the desk chair. “I really am. It’s not a good reason to exist, I do know that.”
“I… it’s fine, Mom.”
She gave him another one of those grim smiles. “Something terrible about all this mess is knowing how much Isaac would hate it. He abhorred a mess.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t blame you,” Carver said. He realized he’d been digging his fingernails into the arm of the chair, and stopped. “He was equally responsible for this situation. He shouldn’t have slept with another man’s wife.”