But, okay, mostly I’ve been here on Earth for nearly thirty years, and I don’t think there is even one person who ever really knew me, which is a private disgrace. Cheryl didn’t know me properly as an adult, but at least she assumed there was a soul inside my body that merited being known.
Okay then, my nephews, it’s lunchtime and this little autobiography is nearly over except…except there’s just this one other not-so-little thing remaining to be said, but I’m going to have to mull exactly how I tell you about it. I’m going to go pick up Joyce and head to the beach, and maybe by then my burning brain will have cooled down and I can finally say what I’ve been avoiding all along.
I’m at the beach, on the same log as before, and I may as well hop right to it.
Just over a year ago, when your mother phoned me to tell me Kent was dead, I drove to her house down in Horseshoe Bay. To get there I had to pass the scene of the accident; highway traffic was closed down to a single lane, and there were shards of glass, strips of chrome, fragments of black plastic fenders and pools of oil on the road. A tow truck was just then hauling the remains of Kent’s Taurus onto a flatbed. It was crumpled like picnic trash, and its beige vinyl seats were thick with broken glass. It was a hot afternoon.
I stopped and spoke with a cop at the scene who knew me, and he gave me technical details of the crash-quick and painless. This information still gives me comfort. I suppose that if I hadn’t seen the wreck, Kent’s death would have been far harder to deal with. But when you see that big chunk of chewed-up scrap metal, the truth is the truth, and the shock passes more quickly.
There was also the pressing need to go down to Barb’s-your mother’s-house right away. My cell phone’s battery had died and there’d been no way to contact my own mother or anybody else. As well, the traffic line-ups for the ferries to Vancouver Island and up the coast were huge and clogging the roads, and I took the wrong exit and ended up being detoured for a few frustrating miles, my temples booming like kettle drums.
When I got to your house, your mother was at the front door talking with the cops. Her eyes were red and wet, and I could tell the police didn’t feel good having to leave her like this. When they saw me, they hit the road.
I held Barb tight, and then asked her who in the family she’d called.
She gave me a look that I wasn’t expecting-not exactly guilty, and somehow conspiratorial. “Nobody. Did you?”
“No. My battery died.”
“Jesus, thank God.”
“Barb, what are you talking about-you didn’t call anyone?”
“No. Just you.”
I was confused. I headed for the phone inside. “I’m going to call my mother.”
Barb lunged at me and wrested the cordless from my hand. She slammed it down. This was strange, but then people react to grief in so many ways. “We’re not phoning anybody. Not yet.”
“Barb, we have to call people. Kent’s mother. Your mother, for God’s sake. It’s crazy. We can’t not phone them. Think about it.”
“Jason, there’s something you have to help me with first.”
“Of course. What can I do?”
“Jason, I need to have a baby, and I have to get pregnant right now.”
“You have to what?”
“You heard me.”
“Have a baby.”
“Don’t be so stupid. Yes.”
“Barb, make some sense, okay?”
“Sit down.” She motioned to the living room. “Sit on the couch.” She grabbed a bottle of Glenfiddich, my Christmas present to Kent, from the sideboard. She poured two glasses and offered me one. “Drink it.”
We drank. “I need to have a kid, Jason, and I need to start right now.”
“Are you asking me what I think you’re asking?”
“Don’t be so clueless. Yes, I am. Kent and I have been trying for years, but he shoots blanks mostly. I’m at the peak of my cycle right now, and I have a one-day window to conceive.”
“Barb, I don’t think-”
“Shut up. Just shut up, okay? Genetically, you and Kent are pretty much the same thing. A child by you will look just like a child by Kent. In nine months I want a kid. And I want this kid to look like Kent, and there’s only one way that is going to happen.”
“Barb, look, I know you’re screwed up by-”
“Dammit, shut up, Jason. This is my one chance. It’s not like I can do this again in twenty-eight days. I’m not having a baby ten months after Kent’s dead. Do some math. Kent was all I had, and unless I do this, there’s no way I’ll be connected to him. As long as I live. I can’t go through life knowing that I at least had this one chance to get it right even if it means humiliating myself in front of you right now. Like this.”
There was a kind of logic to what Barb was saying. The request didn’t feel cheap or sleazy. It felt like-and this sounds so bad-the one way to honor my brother. Barb saw this in my eyes. “You’ll do it. I can tell. You will.”
And this is where I surprised myself. Without fully understanding the impulse, I said, “Okay. I will. But only if we’re married.”
“What?”
“You heard me. We have to be married.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. I’m not.”
Barb looked at me as if I were a mugger about to swipe her purse. And then her face relaxed. She closed her eyes, made a counting-to-ten face, then opened her eyes and looked at me. “We can’t get married right now. City hall is closed.”
“We’ll go to Las Vegas. We can get married in a chapel on the Strip.”
Barb stared at me. “Did you take every cocktail waitress on this side of the harbor to Las Vegas, too?”
I’m stubborn. “Those are my terms. Take them or leave them. We get married first.”
“You’re nuts.”
“No, I’m not nuts. I simply know what I want.”
She looked at me. “But I’m already married.”
“No you’re not. You’re a widow.”
Barb looked at me for a good half minute. “Okay. Fair enough. Let’s drive to the airport.”
“Are you-”
“Jason, shut up. Let’s drive to the airport now. We’ll catch a nonstop or hub through Los Angeles, and that’ll be it.”
Within five minutes we were back on the highway, passing the final crash cleanup occurring on the other side of the median. Barb was in tears and asked me not to slow down. I thought this was cold, but she said, “Jason, I will have to drive past there at least four times a day the rest of my life. There’s plenty of time for me to look then.”
I said, “We don’t have any luggage.”
“We don’t need it. We’re going to Las Vegas to get married while the mood seizes us. Ha ha ha.”
“You think they’ll believe that at immigration?”
Barb yelled at me, but I took it. “Jesus, Jason, here you are, dragging me halfway across a continent to get married maybe two hours after your brother is killed, and you’re asking me whether or not I should have a carry-on bag? So that some customs guy believes that we’re going to get married?”
“But we are going to get married.”
Barb screamed out the window and lit another of many cigarettes. “This is about Cheryl. Isn’t it? Tell me-isn’t it?”
“Leave Cheryl out of this.”
“No. We can’t have anyone discussing little Miss Joan of Arc.” She threw her cigarette out the window. “Sorry.”
“You’re right. It does have to do with Cheryl.”
“How?”
I didn’t say anything.
“How?”
I kept silent.
Barb is a smart woman. She said, “Now I don’t know if you’re doing me a favor, or if I’m doing you one.”
“You’re probably right.”
“You’re as nuts as your father. You think you’re not, but you are.”
“What if I am?”
“The harder people try to be the opposite of their
parents, the quicker they become them. It’s a fact. Now just drive.”
“What are we going to tell people when we get back?”
“We’re going to tell people I freaked out. We’re going to tell them that I went crazy and drove out toward the daffodil farm, and you saw me and followed me, and that I deliberately got lost, and that you had to hunt me down somewhere in all that scuzzy wilderness out there. That’s what we’re going to tell them.”
“But your car is in the garage.”
“I’ll think of something. Just drive us to the airport.”
The airport journey was different from the taxi ride Cheryl and I took in 1988. Back then all the bridges we had to cross seemed exciting, almost like roller coasters. Crossing them with Barb, they were just these things you didn’t want to be stuck on during an earthquake.
And of course Kent was dead, too. I tried to speak about him, but Barb would have none of it. “As far as I’m concerned, for the next twelve hours you are Kent. Just drive.”
We dumped the truck in the long-term parking lot and headed to the terminal. Customs preclearance was a snap. Barb was bawling as she showed them the engagement ring Kent had given her, and they waved us through with Parisian-style shrugs and smiles. The ticket clerk had passed along the message to the flight crew that we were going to get married; inside the plane it was broadcast, and we were upgraded to business class while everybody whistled and cheered, making Barb cry all the harder. The drinks, meanwhile, kept coming and coming, and Barb kept drinking and drinking, and on the ground she was one big wobble; escorting her from one gate to the next at LAX was like trying to propel a shopping cart full of balloons on a windy day, and on the second flight she simply cried for most of the trip. We landed just after midnight.
In the decade since my first trip there, Las Vegas had been rebuilt from the ground up. Pockets of authentic sleaze peeked out here and there, but the city’s aura was different, more professional. I could look at all the new casinos and imagine people sinning away like mad, but I could also envision management meetings and cubicles and photocopiers tucked away in the bowels of the recently spruced up casinos.
I asked the driver to take us to the stretch of chapels between Fremont Street and Caesars Palace, a piece of the Strip that had remained unmolested by progress. The chapel where Cheryl and I had been married was still there. I paid the cabbie while Barb got out. We didn’t say anything as we went into the chapel, and I was disappointed that the old guy who’d performed the first ceremony was no longer there.
A couple from Oklahoma was in front of us. We witnessed for them, and they witnessed for us, through a secular version of a wedding ceremony that did good service to the term “quickie.” Within fifteen minutes we were wed, and another cab drove us to Caesars Palace, which had also been renovated in the intervening decade.
We checked in as husband and wife, and we were walking through the lobby to the elevator bank when we heard someone calling our names. I had the same sick feeling I had when I was twelve and got caught pilfering raspberries from the neighbors’ patch. We turned around. It was Rick, this guy I’d gone to high school with. He’d aged faster than most, and was much larger than I’d remembered. His head was shiny.
“Rick. Hey, hi.”
“Hi, Jason. Hi, Barb. Jason, I thought you were Kent for a second there. Did all you guys come down together? I can’t believe how cheap everything here is during the off-season.”
I didn’t know how to reply, but Barb said, “I like blackjack, but the guys are more into craps.”
Rick said, “I’m a blackjack guy, too. Craps is for the real hotshots. I like to stretch my losses out over a few days so I can savor the experience. When did you guys get here?”
“Just today.”
“You’re staying at Caesars?”
I said we were.
“I’m at this motel off the Strip. Twenty-nine bucks a night, with free coffee and croissants in the morning. Talk about a deal. You guys want to come play with me?”
I was going to motion to the elevators, but Barb said, “Sure.” My eyes must have sprung out of my sockets. “Jason, go upstairs with the others. I’ll meet you in a few minutes. I think my luck is changing.”
Rick said, “Now, this woman has the Vegas spirit. Come on, Barb. I’ll show you my lucky table.”
Barb said, “I’ll be up shortly. Go, Jason.”
This was one very screwed-up situation, but the thought of a quiet room was seductive, and I went upstairs. I showered for twenty minutes, and tried to figure out every thing that had happened during the day, particularly how we might explain to people how it was that Rick Kozarek saw us in Caesars Palace the night Kent died.
I got out, shivered in the all-powerful air-conditioning and got into bed, awaiting Barb and wondering how Mom was going to take Kent’s death. Would she just give up on life altogether?
An hour passed. I put cable news on as wallpaper and dozed off. When Barb came in the door and woke me up, her face was neutral.
“It’s about time. It’s two-thirty, Barb.”
“I’m having a shower.”
“You went to play blackjack? Are you out of your mind?”
She said nothing, but emerged from the shower and got into bed with me, and the truth is that from the tension and grief and stress and you-name-it, the sex was a repeat of my marriage to Cheryl. Around six o’clock Barb phoned the concierge for tickets on an 8:10 nonstop to Vancouver. We were silent most of the way home.
It was only in the truck, nearing the house, that I asked, “Barb, by the way, you never did say what made you decide to go play blackjack with Rick Kozarek. That was really random.”
“Blackjack? I didn’t play blackjack. I killed him.”
I nearly put the truck in the ditch as I stopped. “You what?”
“There was no other option. He saw the two of us together. He’d have blabbed. So I went back to his motel room with him and cracked him on the back of his head with a forty-ouncer of discount vodka. Done.”
“You murdered him?”
“Don’t be sanctimonious with me, rebel boy. You wanted to get married in Las Vegas, and you got it. And part of the deal of getting married in Las Vegas is that you might very well bump into the Rick Kozareks of this world. Now, are you going to drive me the final block home, or am I going to walk?”
I didn’t know what to say, because I was thinking, Oh, God, this is how my father felt back in 1988.
So Barb got out of the truck and walked home. The heel of her left shoe was about to come off, and a mist of dandelion fluff had attached itself to her panty hose. I got out and walked alongside her. “Barb, what if you’re caught?”
She stopped. “Caught? Jason, get real. One of the bonuses of staying in a twenty-nine-dollar-a-night motel room is the convenient lack of surveillance or security. And if I’m caught, I’m caught, but I won’t be.”
We rounded the corner and there were all Kent’s friends’ cars, as well as my mother’s. Barb and I looked like wrecks-we were wrecks-and my distress couldn’t have been more visible.
As Barb predicted, she was never caught, and everyone fully bought her story about going crazy-which is, in its way, true. Kent’s funeral was four days later, and that was that.
A month later, my mother phoned to say that Barb was pregnant with twins. And maybe another month later I bumped into Stacy Kozarek, Rick’s sister, in the Lonsdale Public Market, where she was buying clams. She told me that Rick had been found murdered in his motel room, and the Las Vegas police thought it was somehow gang-related.
And there you go.
I’m looking out the pickup truck’s window at Ambleside Beach and the ocean and the freighters-at the mothers tending to their children covered in sand and sugar and spit, at the blue sky and the mallard ducks and the Canada geese. And Joyce is smiling at me. Dogs indeed smile, and Joyce has every reason to smile. It’s a beautiful world and she’s part of it-and yet…
…and yet we
humans are not a part of it.
Look at us. We’re all born lost, aren’t we? We’re all born separated from God-over and over life makes sure to inform us of this-and yet we’re all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must. My heart is so cold. And I feel so lost. I shed my block of hate but what if nothing emerges to fill in the hole it left? The universe is so large, and the world is so glorious, but here I am on a sunny August morning with chilled black ink pumping through my veins, and I feel like the unholiest thing on earth.
This letter is now going into the safety deposit box. Happy birthday, my sons. You’re men now, and this is the way the world works.
Part Three
2002: Heather
Saturday afternoon 4:00
I met Jason in a line-up at Toys R Us. He was in front of me buying a pile of toys, looking slightly sad, slightly damaged and slightly naughty. I had some toy plastic groceries for my sister’s kid, who never really cares what I give her, and I just wanted to escape the store. But instead there’s this sad guy in front of me-no wedding ring, straight looking, and no apparent tattoos-and so maybe I didn’t want to leave too quickly after all.
The cashier was changing the paper tape-why does that always happen in my line? Standing on the counter was a plastic giraffe model someone had abandoned. Some wise-acre had strapped it into a little sheepskin coat with a fleece lining; it probably came from the box of one of Barbie’s gay boyfriends.
I said, “I think our giraffe here is a bit sexually conflicted.”
Jason said, “It’s that fleece-lined bomber jacket-always a dead giveaway.”