8. “Caleb Knows” #2
We drove out the gate at 10:09 p.m.
The Merritt at that hour was empty in the way it was always empty after ten on a Sunday. Just my headlights and the occasional pair of taillights and the long curve of trees along both sides of the road and the smell of leaf rot coming through the vent.
I drove for ten minutes without saying anything.
Caleb did not turn the radio on. Caleb did not check his phone. Caleb sat in the seat with his head against the window and his eyes on the dark.
At the exit for Greenwich he said, “Can we put on Dylan.”
“Which one.”
“The one Mom hates.”
“Blood on the Tracks.”
“Yeah.”
It was the first album I had ever made him listen to.
He had been seven years old and we had been driving up to a cousin’s house in Maine and he had been bored and Helena had been napping in the back seat with the headphones on.
I had put the album in. Caleb had asked, by the second song, who the man was.
I had told him. Caleb had asked, by the fourth song, why all the songs were sad.
I had said: because the man was sad when he wrote them.
Caleb had said: are you sad too.
I had not known what to say.
I had driven the rest of the way to Maine with my mouth shut.
Now I put the album on.
The opening track came in. The harmonica. The strange close acoustic guitar that sounded like it was being recorded in someone’s kitchen.
Caleb closed his eyes.
He did not cry again.
He let the music do the crying for him.
I drove south on the Hutch, then onto the Cross-Bronx, then over the Triborough into Manhattan. The city was bright in the way it was bright on Sunday nights, full of taxis going home and bars closing and the ambient orange glow that always sat over the East River.
I took the FDR down to 96th.
I took 96th over to Park.
I pulled up in front of Helena’s building at 11:38 p.m.
The doorman recognized the car. He did not recognize me, because I had not picked Caleb up from this building in three months. He stepped forward and opened the passenger door.
Caleb got out.
He turned back.
“Dad.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t disappear again.”
“I won’t.”
“You disappear when things get hard. You always have. You disappeared after Mom. You disappeared after you and I had that fight when I was fourteen. Don’t do it now. You finally have something good. Don’t disappear from the good thing.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
He nodded.
He walked to the door.
The doorman opened it for him.
He went inside.
I sat in the car for a full minute before I pulled away from the curb.
I drove the long way back to my building.
Up Park. East on 57th. The detour was four minutes longer than it needed to be, and I took every second of it.
I did not want to go upstairs to my apartment.
I did not want to be alone in the kitchen with the lights off, looking at the books on the shelves and the bottles on the bar cart and the general hush that my apartment had carried for the last decade.
I parked in the garage.
I rode the elevator up.
I walked into the apartment and turned on one lamp in the living room.
I sat in the leather chair facing the window.
The city was still moving. Headlights on the FDR. The slow blink of a plane coming in to LaGuardia. The very particular orange light that the city reflected back off the underside of low cloud.
I should have called Eden.
I did not call her.
I sat in the chair instead and I let the silence in the apartment do the thing it always did, which was to remind me that for ten years I had been a man whose phone did not ring after midnight and whose son did not text and whose closest friend was a senator who lived in Connecticut.
I had built a quiet life.
I had built it deliberately.
I had built it because I had not believed I deserved a louder one.
I sat there for an hour.
At 1:47 a.m. I finally walked into the bedroom and lay down on top of the duvet without taking my shoes off.
I did not sleep.
I watched the ceiling for two more hours.
I thought about the cut on Caleb’s lip. I had asked him about it on the Hutch, somewhere south of Greenwich.
He had told me, without lifting his head from the window, that he had taken an elbow at soccer practice on Thursday.
Stupid. Not a fight. Just a stray elbow from a teammate who had not been looking.
He had iced it once and forgotten about it.
I thought about Eden, alone in my room at the compound, in one of my shirts, with her phone on silent and her face still wet from the boathouse.
I thought about Helena at 11:38 p.m. in her apartment four blocks north of mine, holding my son for the first time tonight, and not knowing yet that I had spent the evening in a boathouse falling apart.
I thought about Eve.
I thought about Eve and the way she had handed me Gilead in 2017 and said: I think you’ll find it useful for the next twenty years.
I stayed on the duvet, dressed, for the rest of the night.
At 5:47 a.m. my phone rang.
I had been waiting for it.
I had been waiting for it without admitting that I was waiting.
The screen said: Chip.
I picked up.
“Atlas.”
“Chip.”
“Coffee. Now. Compound. Be in the library by seven thirty.”
He hung up.
I lay there on the duvet for one more breath.
Then I sat up. I took my shoes off. I changed my shirt.
I put my watch back on. I picked up the keys to the car I had driven Caleb home in and the keys to the car I had not driven all weekend, and I made the small choice between the two of them at the door, and I took the second.
I drove out of the garage at 6:04.
The Hutch was empty in the early dark.
I drove with the radio off and Bob Dylan still ringing in the back of my skull.