The woman, the one woman, the only person in the world who was a near witness to Nick’s crash was sure she saw a black Chevy pass by mere seconds before she came upon the accident, a car in a hurry, scuttling quickly away from the scene, swerving wildly into oncoming traffic, forcing the other vehicle off the road. A black Chevrolet.
And I find that I can’t get this sinking feeling out of my mind, a vision of my mother snatching the car keys from a forgotten coat pocket while no one was watching—napping perhaps, or consumed with a show on the TV—and deciding to dust off the old car and take it for a spin.
Nick didn’t kill himself after all.
He was killed by my mother.
NICK
BEFORE
The day that Clara and Felix are released from the hospital, I drive them home and tell Clara I have a few errands to run, and she says to me, “Okay.” Unlike Maisie, who came home from the hospital vociferous and emphatic, making her needs immediately and desperately known with a cry that could go on for hours, Felix is quiet.
“Can you get milk, too?” Clara asks before I leave, rooting around inside the refrigerator to see that we’re in short supply.
“Sure thing.” I kiss her on the lips and then go.
From my cell phone, sitting in the driveway before I pull out onto the street, I place a call to Kat. It isn’t that I’m trying to shirk responsibility. That’s not what I’m doing; that’s not it at all. If it turns out I am Gus’s father as she says I am, then I will welcome Gus into my life. I’ve been thinking about it, sprawled there sleepless beside Clara’s hospital bed, imagining this newcomer Gus sharing our lives. Split custody arrangements and visitation. Every other weekend and school vacations. It’s a strange prospect, envisioning myself playing catch with a boy I don’t even know. I’ve only seen a photo of the boy. I have no idea how tall he is, what he sounds like, smells like, whether or not he can even catch a ball. But if he’s mine, then I’ll do it because this is what decent men do. They take care of their own. They clean up their own messes. I’m not trying to neglect my responsibilities. It’s just the opposite. I’m trying to claim them, to make what’s mine, mine.
But first I have to be sure.
We meet at a DNA diagnostics center, and for the first time in my life, I meet this boy Kat calls Gus. He’s a spindly boy, tall and thin as am I, but his features—the eyes, the hair—are Kat to a T. It’s easy to see they belong together, but the question is: Do I? We greet each other in the waiting room, and Kat introduces me to Gus as her friend. I wonder if he’s heard of me before, if she’s ever mentioned the name Nick. Not around Steve, that’s for sure. But maybe around Gus. Maybe she relayed to Gus memories of her own childhood, how she and her friend Nick did this or did that. There’s wariness to his eyes, a laziness and indifference in the way he reaches a hand out to greet mine.
Kat rises from a chair in the waiting room and says to me, “I hear congratulations are in order.” I never told her I had a new son, but still she knows.
I avert my eyes, staring at Gus instead, on his chair thumbing through a magazine. “Thanks,” I mumble.
I wonder if Gus knows anything about this appointment. Why else would someone meet a stranger at a facility to have the inside of their cheek swabbed? But then again, Gus is twelve, and I’m guessing the notion of sex is just beginning to dawn on him, though thoughts of paternity are still far away. I try to talk to him. “What grade are you in?” I ask, and, “What’s your favorite food?” but his answers are all one-word answers, and any two-way conversation is missing, though whether it’s due to immaturity or timidity or disinterest, I don’t know.
“Sixth,” he tells me, and “Bacon,” and I feel my heart beat hard, knowing that bacon is my favorite food, too. Are these things hereditary? I don’t know. I try another one to be sure, as if my own evaluation might negate the paternity test we’re about to undergo, as if I can tell after a five-minute conversation whether or not this kid is mine.
“Favorite color?”
“Black.”
“Favorite sport?”
He shrugs, though it’s clear to me that he’s thumbing through a sports magazine, staring at a glossy image of LeBron James. “I don’t play any sports,” he says and, as if to prove the point, he tosses the magazine aside and reaches deep into the pocket of his shorts to produce a couple of green army guys, the very same kind I played with when I was a boy.
I nod knowingly, feeling somewhere deep inside like we could forgo this paternity test right here and right now. Steve is big, brawny, an athlete to boot. I’m not. I tried out for the middle school basketball team eons ago and didn’t make it. All but one kid did: me. It was a degrading feeling, being singled out as a loser. I never played sports again, not competitive sports anyway, though I did sometimes just for fun, always with Connor. Racquetball at the gym, running the occasional 5K. I find myself thinking about Connor then, as I sit and wait for Gus and me to be called, wishing I could call him up and tell him about Felix, about all of this, and together we’d both commiserate and celebrate, and he’d laugh about the irony of it in usual Connor candor, how suddenly I had two sons with two women and he had none, sons or women. And we’d chuckle while throwing back a beer.
But that won’t happen.
“I used to have those when I was your age,” I tell Gus, “except that mine were brown. I’d line them up across my bedroom floor and play war games. You have the tanks, too?” I ask, like the whole collection of miniature World War II tanks that used to occupy my bedroom floor. My mother, coming in to make my bed or fold the laundry, would step on them and get mad.
Gus shakes his head no; he doesn’t have the tanks. He motions to his army men. “I’ve never seen ones that were brown,” he says, and then the nurse calls our names.
Gus goes first, and then me.
When I come out of the exam room, Kat and Gus are gone. In his chair, where he sat only moments ago, remains a single green army man. I pick it up and slide it into the pocket of my jeans. Whether he left it on purpose, or if it was unintentional, I don’t know. Maybe it was an accident, or maybe it was a gift.
The results, I’m told, will be posted online in just a couple of days.
In a couple of days I’ll know if Gus is my son.