Chapter 25
Patrick
If I ever needed a working definition of I don’t know what I’m doing, this would be it.
I am obsessed with Elena Brown. I was probably obsessed before that weekend, in the careful, managed, expertly denied way I’d been obsessed with her for months, the version where you convince yourself that what you’re feeling is just proximity and inconvenient timing and you will sort it out eventually like a sensible adult.
That version is no longer available. Last weekend removed all its infrastructure and left me with nothing to stand on except the simple, unmanageable fact of her.
I smile too much. I catch myself doing it at my desk, in the elevator, in the car on the way to the office. I look, Alister told me on Tuesday, like a man who just remembered that being alive was the point.
He’s not wrong. That’s the part that undoes me a little, every time I think about it. He’s not wrong.
My mother, meanwhile, has called four times since Sunday.
Each call has a different entry point and the same destination.
The first was ostensibly about Erick’s school calendar.
The second was about a dinner she wants to organize.
The third was direct: I think you’re moving very fast. The fourth was this morning, and she said, after a pause that contained everything she wasn’t saying: I just want to make sure you’re thinking clearly.
I know what she means by that. I’ve known my mother for thirty-seven years and I understand the architecture of her concern, the way she wraps worry in standards, the way love, for her, has always expressed itself through management.
She is not a cruel woman. She is a woman who lost her husband and her daughter-in-law within fourteen months of each other and watches me the way you watch something you nearly lost. With too much attention.
I also know what she’s actually worried about.
She thinks Elena is after the money. She says it in pauses and in the careful selection of observations she delivers like gifts: She’s your secretary, Patrick.
And the acting, that’s not really a career, is it?
Do you even know anything about her family?
She is building a case file. She is constructing the version of Elena that makes sense to her, the version where a twenty-seven-year-old secretary with no family, no money, and a hobby she calls a dream attaches herself to a widower with a brownstone and a four-year-old and calls it love.
She’s wrong. I know she’s wrong. But I also know that telling her she’s wrong will only confirm what she already believes, which is that I am not thinking clearly, that Elena has done something to my judgment, and that it is her job to hold the line until I come to my senses.
I think about what I told Elena in the kitchen, about my parents’ marriage.
The cordial precision of it. The particular quality of silence over dinner that was not comfortable but was managed, always managed, everything flowing through the proper channels of two people who had organized a life together and called it happiness.
They were not unhappy. I don’t think they were unhappy.
But I also never heard my father say something that made my mother’s face do the thing Elena’s face does when she’s genuinely surprised by something funny, the way it breaks open before she can stop it.
I have one photograph of Sarah laughing.
One. Six years together, a marriage, a child, and I kept that photograph precisely because it was rare enough to document.
She was not unhappy either. We were not unhappy.
We were two people who were good at being in the same life and did not always remember to be in it together.
I don’t want to manage another life. I want to be in one.
Elena doesn’t ask about the weekend. I don’t ask about hers.
There’s a lane and we’re both staying in it while we figure out what this is, and I respect it even as I spend most of my waking hours wanting to blow past every line we’ve drawn.
I wonder, sometimes during the week, if the audition result has come through.
The Okonkwo thing, the Masha role she wanted badly enough that I could hear it in her breathing when she talked about it.
She hasn’t mentioned it. I don’t know if that means she’s still waiting or if she knows and isn’t ready to say.
Either way it sits in the back of my mind, the question of what that answer would mean for her, whether a yes pulls her toward something that takes her further from this, from me, and whether thinking that makes me the kind of man I don’t want to be.
It’s Saturday and Maria has the weekend off. It’s just us in the house, which is at its specific best on April mornings when the light comes in from the east. Erick wakes up at seven with his hair a catastrophe of blond curls and an already fully formed agenda.
This morning the agenda is: Patrick is a Giganotosaurus and Erick is a Velociraptor and the house is the Late Cretaceous period.
The Giganotosaurus, I am informed, was actually larger than a T-Rex. Erick explains this to me with the gravity of someone correcting a significant misconception. “Most people don’t know,” he says seriously, “but you are bigger.”
“Thank you.”
“Well maybe not, but you are big.”
I chase him through the living room. He screams and runs and doubles back and dives behind the armchair, which is apparently a neutral zone because “velociraptors need a safe space, Dad.” I stand outside the safe space being a large predator in a patient way while he reorganizes his defenses.
“Dad,” he says, peering around the side of the chair.
“Yes.”
“Why do dinosaurs not exist anymore?”
“Asteroid. Sixty-six million years ago.”
“But why did the asteroid come?”
“It’s space. Things move around.”
“But why?”
“Gravity.”
“But why is there gravity?”
I crouch down to his level. He is looking at me with the expression of genuine intellectual inquiry he gets when he has found a thread and intends to follow it to its end regardless of where that takes us.
“I don’t know,” I say.
He considers this. “That’s okay,” he says generously. “Some things nobody knows.”
“That’s right.”
“Elena probably knows.”
“I doubt Elena knows why there’s gravity.”
“She knows a lot of things though.”
“She does.”
“Dad?” He emerges from the fort. “Is Elena your girlfriend?”
I look at him. He looks back at me with the clear brown eyes of a child who has asked a very precise question and expects a precise answer.
“She’s someone I care about,” I say.
“Like how you care about Alister?”
“Different from how I care about Alister.”
“Like how you cared about Mama?”
A beat. The kind that you can’t plan for and can’t quite survive the same way twice.
He asks these questions without weight, not because they don’t matter but because he is four and his interior life doesn’t have room yet for the weight we load onto certain words.
He asks about his mother the way he asks about dinosaurs: with curiosity, with the full expectation that there are answers.
“Different from that too,” I say. “But important.”
He nods, solemnly. Then: “She’s very nice. And she knows about Rex.”
“She does.”
“I think,” he says, with the considered air of someone delivering a verdict, “that she should come to the zoo.”
I don’t even know what to say to that. Should she come?
Would she? I want her there, but the truth is I don’t know if I’m ready, I don’t know if she’s ready, and I don’t know if I should let her that far into our lives yet.
I spend the afternoon trying to make up my mind while I play several dinosaur roles with Erick, take him to lunch, lose hours at the park, and carry my phone around like it’s an explosive device.
At 9:43 p.m., after Erick is asleep and the apartment is finally quiet, I decide I can be a grown-up about it, that it doesn’t have to mean anything. I open her thread, type one line, delete it, type another, delete that too.
Then I send: I miss your breasts. I can’t stop thinking about what you did to me on Thursday.
She replies in less than a minute: Bold opening. Continue.
I laugh into the dark like an idiot.
Erick has a formal request. Central Park Zoo. He says his animal knowledge is being wasted.
Compelling. What time?
I stare at the screen, thumb hovering, second-guessing all of it. Inviting her. Letting Erick get attached. Wanting this anyway.
Ten. We’ll be at the south entrance.
I put the phone down and look at Erick’s closed bedroom door. I hope I’m doing the right thing. I hope letting him want this, letting him reach for someone new, isn’t the kind of mistake you can’t undo.
She’s already there when we arrive, hands in the pockets of a black jacket over a white t-shirt, jeans, her dark hair down around her shoulders.
The April morning still has cold in it, the city not quite convinced by spring but trying.
She’s watching the entrance, she doesn’t see us yet and I have approximately four seconds to look at her before she knows I’m looking.
I use all four.
Erick sees her before I can say anything, drops my hand and runs.
“Elena,” he announces at full volume and full speed, arriving at her knees like a small truck. “You’re here. Where are we going first?”
She crouches down to him immediately and looks at him at his level with complete attention. “I don’t know I’ve never been here.”
His eyes go enormous. “You’ve never been here?”
“No, you are going to be my guide.”
He looks at me over his shoulder with an expression that says: you see?
This is exactly what I was talking about.
Then he takes her hand. Not mine. Hers. Without asking, the unconscious claiming move of a four-year-old who has decided this person belongs in his orbit, and begins walking toward the entrance explaining the difference between carnivores and omnivores.
I watch him do it and something in my chest tightens.
Not the good kind. The afraid kind. I did this.
I invited her and told myself it was harmless and now my son is holding her hand like she’s been here all along.
He is four and he doesn’t know what this is…
fuck, even I don’t know what this is, this thing between us has no name and no shape and no guarantee.
And I shouldn’t be putting my son through this.
At the penguin exhibit Erick presses his face against the glass and watches them waddle in their serious, purposeful way and then turns to Elena with the expression of a man who has been holding something in.
“Elena,” he says. “Do penguins have legs?”
“They do. Short ones.”
He watches them again. Very carefully. “But they walk like that,” he says, doing an impression that is devastatingly accurate. He waddles. “Their butts are so close to the ground. Don’t the rocks scratch them when they walk?”
Elena tries to hold it together. She fails.
Erick watches her laugh and his entire body lights up and I can see the four-year-old calculation: I made her do that. I can make her do that again. He has found his audience and he is never letting go.
We keep walking. Elena on one side of Erick, me on the other, a careful geometry that looks casual and isn’t.
She and I don’t touch. We don’t brush shoulders.
We don’t do any of the things two people do when they’re together and want the world to know it.
We walk with a four-year-old between us and we both know why, because it would make it real and real is the thing we’re both circling without landing.
Erick holds her hand. Through the whole reptile house, through the bird sanctuary, through the entire mammal loop.
He holds her hand and explains things to her and she asks questions and he answers them and they have a dynamic that has nothing to do with me and has been building since the first Rex chapter they drew together.
Watching it in person does something to me that’s far from simple, I like it but it also scares me.
Because every minute he holds that hand, every question she answers, every time she crouches to his level and treats his four-year-old logic like it matters, he is attaching.
He is building her into his architecture.
And I don’t know what this is. I don’t know if she’s staying.
I don’t know if I have the right to let my son fall in love with someone I haven’t figured out how to keep.
She catches me watching at some point and our eyes meet over Erick’s head. There is something in her expression that I recognize because I’m wearing it too: the look of two people standing on ground they know is dangerous and choosing to stay anyway.
We don’t talk about it. We stay in our corners. We let Erick be the bridge and we stand on opposite sides of him and we pretend this is just a Sunday at the zoo.