“Dad,” Piper says from behind me, then brushes past me into his arms. He emits a sob that sounds so guttural, I literally step back into the hallway.
We return to the garden, me unable to look at him.
“I couldn’t not include him, Tate,” Piper whispers. “He’s our dad. He was her husband. He was here a lot these past few months.”
I nod, pressing my lips tightly together so nothing slips out I’ll regret. Piper was always more forgiving of him than I was. She doesn’t remember when our mom was first diagnosed when I was twelve, and Dad coped by blacking out on the couch and getting fired from his job. She doesn’t remember walking around the strip mall, going from store to store, asking if someone could give me a job, finally being granted a kind reprieve by Ralph at the pharmacy, who let me work as a bag girl. She doesn’t remember him forgetting to pick me up from choir practice three times in a week, and how humiliated I was to slink back into school to ask Ms.Byrdwell if I could use a phone to try to call him ... or someone.
He was sober again by the time I was fourteen, when my mother was in remission, then not when I was fifteen, and it stayed that way mostly until I graduated. I lived on campus at college, but was home enough to see the pattern of ruin he left, and my mom finally saw it too. She kicked him out, but she wasn’t much better at sticking to her word than he was, and so their home became a revolving door for forgiveness. It wasn’t any surprise that Piper learned the same lesson:Come back to me, and I’ll absolve you.
Dot, my mom’s oldest friend, asks for us to hold hands, to bow our heads in prayer that Mom is no longer in pain, that she isn’t part of this physical world, that she is somewhere else, somewhere better. I don’t know if I believe this; I don’t know what I believe, really. But I dutifully drop my chin to my chest, and the sun is so very, very hot again, and I think of Ben and wish he were here but am also so relieved that he isn’t. That he isn’t seeing this mess of a life I’ve left behind; that he can’t see my weeping, which is now coming in waves, that he can’t see my father, who is clutching Piper’s elbow.
I think of the last time I saw my mother. Jesus, it was Christmas. When we watchedIt’s a Wonderful Life. She asked me if I was happy, as if I even knew what that meant.
I said: “I’m happy. But I’ll be happier when I’m employed, you know, working as an actor.”
She replied: “Don’t define yourself by that, sweetheart, don’t live a life marked by intangible achievements.”
“That’s not intangible; that’s real.”
She smiled at something I didn’t understand.
“You’re always saying, ‘If you can dream it, you can be it,’” I said.
“Well, that’s true.” She nodded. My mom had always been a writer—well, she’d always been a nurse. But she’d also been a poet,just for herself,she said,just because I can.“I want you to be anything you dream of. But mostly I want you to be happy. Those things aren’t always the same, you know.”
“But what if they are?” I asked.
“That’s why you’re young; that’s why you have the time to figure it all out,” she said, before rising to go make herself some tea.
I feel dizzy under the sun’s rays and worry I might pass out. Dot asks us all to step forward, to scoop my mother’s ashes and to send them out into the air, over the garden, over our home, back into the ground where they’ll bloom again in the form of flowers and snap peas and, if we’re lucky, perfect strawberries in later summer. I squeeze Piper’s hand tighter, unsure if I can do this, really let her go. But then I remind myself that I can do anything, be anyone.That is what I dream.I slip outside my grief, morph myself into someone else—someone who isn’t here burying her mother—and I release Piper’s grip and go.
7
BEN
APRIL 2013
I’m dreaming again, as I do so often now, have for the past year since everything turned bleak.
This time I know I am dreaming and yet I can’t pull myself out of it. This time, as it has been recently, it’s Leo. Always Leo, though it used to be my dad. Now it’s a distorted version of something out of real life: that night on April Fool’s Day when he ran away in seventh grade, when I was a senior in high school. He was pissed at my dad for something—in real life, it was that my dad threatened to pull him from the football team because his grades were so mediocre (for my dad, Cs and Bs), but in the dream, it’s because my father drowned in the Atlantic Ocean off East Hampton Beach, and Leo was there, watching, unable to save him.
So Leo ran, and unlike how it really happened—where we thought it was a prank until one a.m. rolled around and my mom started crying and my dad started cursing, and I finally found him at his friend Nate’s apartment, smoking cigarettes and skimming bourbon—in the dream I’m unable to trace him. I run down the emptied, littered streets of Manhattan, at night, at day, at dawn, at sunset, and Leo is simply gone. I shout down alleys; I scream around corners; and it starts raining, then hailing, and I am stuck in the middle of Times Square, unable to find any trace of my brother at all.
I startle awake, blinking too quickly, discombobulated in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room.
A hand is laid across my chest, and a voice says: “I’m here,” and my brain loops for a moment until I realize it’s Amanda, not Tatum, and that we have spent the night at a room at the Standard after I’d e-mailed her, claiming we needed to end things, but agreeing to drinks all the same. One drink led to two drinks and then to a full bottle, and soon enough we were checking into a room, peeling our clothes off, doing the things to each other that I swore I would no longer do. My guilt was too heavy; the fear of being caught was consuming me—a tabloid had a small headline about Tatum’s “unhappy marriage” and my “wandering eye” last week. Tatum never paid that stuff any mind, barring the scathing rumors after the Oscars, which I couldn’t even begin to contemplate because of Leo. In another universe, another time, maybe it would have cut more deeply, but it was all I could do tobreatheback then, much less contemplate what her behavior represented. It represented something, I knew, though. That much wasn’t lost on me, even in my haze of grief and confusion. And maybe, yes, it served as a subconscious excuse for what I did next, with Amanda, with my self-destruction. I don’t know.
But the headline about me, my affair, that one permeated. I’d been in the checkout line buying cereal at Gelson’s and nearly had a panic attack worrying whether I’d closed out of my e-mail on my laptop, and if Tatum, who was sleeping in, would rise and see my glaring infidelity in my e-mails to Amanda over her breakfast of a hard-boiled egg and cappuccino.
I hadn’t even meant for it to get this far, to go on for so long, but now we were eleven months, almost a year, deep. When I called her after the hospital, after Joey’s broken arm, I’d only meant, theoretically, to meet for a catch-up coffee. But coffee led to drinks and drinks sometimes led to dinner. Dinner led to e-mails and texts and late-night phone calls when Joey was asleep. Tatum was working nights: she’d started (theoretically) getting choosier about the projects that wreaked havoc on our life. ButAmerica, a gritty drama about the LA riots and the ensuing fallout (the script was spectacular—Spencer, my agent, tried to get my name in for a polish, but this was before Tatum signed on, and it went to Landon Marks, Hollywood’s new It boy, who got all the good polishes right now), kept us on opposite schedules. She’d come home in time to sit with Joey at breakfast, then collapse for the day before rising to sit with him again for an early dinner before her driver arrived for another day (and night) when we merely passed each other by. Coffee and dinners (and then much more) with Amanda really weren’t all that hard to pull off, really weren’t particularly sneaky, because Tatum wasn’t logistically present for me to have to even sneak around.
“I’m here,” Amanda says again, rustling the Standard bedding.
I inhale, and my undershirt, sticky with sweat, rises against her palm.
At home, when I burst from my nightmares, the bed is most often empty. In fact, just last night Tatum had taken Joey to Legoland as part of a thank-you to theAmericacast and crew: it had been a long, grueling shoot; she wanted to show her appreciation. I didn’t want to go anyway, but she didn’t offer. It was exclusively for the staff, the teamsters, the actors, who deserved some R and R with their kids, she’d said.
So instead I e-mailed Amanda to ostensibly break up—and then because she was there and loyal and sexy as fuck and made me feelvalued, we ended up in six-hundred-thread-count sheets in a room at the Standard. I don’t love her. She isn’t my wife. But when our legs are intertwined at the bottom of the bed, and her hand is across my chest, and I am notaloneas I so often am now, and Amandaneedsme in ways that Tatum used to but no longer does, I tell myself that I just might. Maybe I love her? Maybe I could?
