The Survivor

Chapter 10

For the whole ride, Nate alternated his gaze from the road to his rearview, searching for dark Town Cars with illegally tinted windows. After parking he sat, double-checking that no one had followed him, but also, he realized, stalling. It took all the courage he could muster to head up the walk of the beloved Santa Monica house. A corner brick at the base of the porch had come loose, and he paused to shove it with his heel back into alignment. Owning a house was a war of attrition. Sap holes in the gutters, birds’ nests in the chimney, dry rot in the window frames. Tears of rust hung beneath the house numbers and he thought of the time he would have cleaned them with pride. He knocked, and a moment later the door swung open.

Pete looked out at him, doing his best to disguise his consternation. “Nate. Been a while.”

“Right. Okay if I come in?”

Pete looked unsure. “Hang on.” He leaned back. “Janie?”

A moment later there she was. She wore a flare-waisted Spanish gauze blouse, bright orange to pick up the flecks in her eyes. Not that Nate noticed. Her thin eyebrows lifted, disappearing beneath the bangs of her pixie cut. “What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you. And Cielle.”

She raised her left hand to push a wisp of hair off her forehead, and he saw with great chagrin that her ring finger sported a diamond the size of a bran muffin. “It’s been nine months, Nate. Nine months. Women make babies in that time. Not a visit. Not a phone call.”

“I know. I want to explain-”

“And it’s not like you came by to see her frequently before then.”

“That wasn’t just me. I would’ve loved nothing more than-”

At once there was a clutter of claws scraping floorboards, and then Casper was there, nosing through Pete and Janie, losing his mind at the sight of Nate. A hundred ten pounds of Rhodesian ridgeback backing up in celebration, wiggling, thick tail smacking legs and walls, turning to shove his hind end into the nearest set of knees. “Off,” Pete said. “Off. Down, Casper. Off. Casper-”

Nate said, “Sit.”

Casper sat.

Janie’s face was flushed, hiding the freckles. “Did you at least bring the divorce papers?”

“They’re at home. Signed.”

“Why didn’t you just bring them?”

“It’s been an eventful day. That’s why I want to talk to you.” He took a breath, unsure where to begin. “Did you see the news today?”

“No.”

“There was a robbery this morning. At Wilshire and Ninth.”

“I heard about it,” Janie said. “Radio.”

“I was sort of in the middle of it.”

Whatever she and Pete were expecting, it was not this. Janie’s expression softened with concern. The door creaked open, and Nate followed them in, Casper zigzagging underfoot like a patrol car slowing traffic. As they passed by the family room, Nate noted the new family portrait on the mantel-a trio, this time properly posed, with Pete replacing Nate. At the sight of the three glossy faces, he felt his last handhold at the cliff’s edge crumble.

In the kitchen Nate perched on one of the stools that, in another life, he’d found at a garage sale, then sanded and repainted. He ran a thumb across the grain of the wood. Everything like a detail from a remembered dream.

Janie said, “I’ll see if she’ll come down,” and headed upstairs.

Pete finished washing romaine leaves in the farmhouse sink, set them aside, and dried his hands on his Wharton School sweatshirt. Pete was a widower, an intrinsically decent guy, and a former neighbor whom Nate and Janie had known in passing. He had made a lot of money in commercial real estate, and when he’d moved in here a few months ago, he’d cut a check to finish off the mortgage, an act of generosity that Nate still resented. Nate might have been struggling with that bank note, but at least it had been his. Even when he and Janie had separated about three years ago, it had given him comfort to know he was keeping a roof over the head of his daughter and the woman he still wildly, ineffectually loved. Over Janie’s objections he’d sent 70 percent of each modest paycheck to her until she stopped cashing every other one to make sure he kept some money for himself. Pete’s arrival had dissolved the last sure way Nate had known to help his family. Since then he and Pete had harbored an affectionate dislike for each other. Back in the months after Pete’s wife passed, Nate remembered walking Casper by his house and seeing him inside, eating dinner alone at that big dining table, and no matter how much Nate wanted to hate him now for sleeping with his wife and raising his daughter, he just couldn’t bring himself to get there in full.

Nate sat on his former stool and fussed with the neat stack of mail before him. Brokerage statements, Vanity Fair, a Lexus service reminder-all the accoutrements of a robust, prosperous life. They had added a wine fridge beneath the microwave.

“One of the bricks on the porch is loose,” Nate announced to the silence.

Pete laid the romaine leaves side by side on a paper towel. “How am I supposed to reply, Nate? I say it’s no big deal, I’m insulting you. I say I’ll fix it, you’ll get pissed off since you think it’s still your porch.”

Nate wanted to say, It is still my porch. I rebuilt it with my own two hands. I leveled the form, poured the concrete base, used a toothpick to scrape the mortar from beneath my fingernails. Instead he said nothing. He had lost the right to have opinions here.

Pete distributed the romaine across three plates, setting fewer spears on the last. By way of explanation, he said uncomfortably, “We’re trying to help her with her weight.”

At a loss as to how to respond to that, Nate lined up the mail nervously and smacked the envelope edges straight on the marble slab. Two tickets fell out-Turandot at the Ahmanson Theatre. Nate lifted them to the yellow light. “Opera?”

“To celebrate our engagement. You saw the ring?”

“No,” Nate said, “I didn’t notice.”

Janie entered, and he looked hopefully past her, but no Cielle. His disappointed gaze returned to the tickets. She took note of his expression. “What?”

Nate’s mouth moved instinctively before he could stop it. “You hate opera,” he told her.

Janie halted by the stove. “Huh?”

Pete paused from chopping. “It was a surprise.”

“Oh,” Nate said. “Oops. But she hates opera. You hate opera.”

Janie’s smile did not quite reach her eyes. “Not really,” she told Pete.

“There is no ‘not really,’” Nate said. “This is opera. There are two camps. You either love opera. Or you hate opera. There is no Switzerland when it comes to opera.”

Janie’s head whipped over to him. He showed his palms.

Pete looked confused and a touch disappointed. “You really don’t like opera? I’m sure I can find someone to give the tickets to if you-”

“Look,” she said, resting a hand on the small of Pete’s back, “can we maybe not have this discussion right now, honey?”

Constantly with the pet names, as though they were afraid if they didn’t label each other at the end of every sentence, they might find themselves estranged.

Nate said, “Where’s my daughter?”

“She doesn’t want to see you,” Janie said.

The words like a slap. It took him a moment to recover. “Why not?”

Pete said, “She’s probably afraid you’ll disappoint her again.”

“Don’t take yourself so seriously, Pete,” Nate said. “No one else does.”

Janie was studying him, furrows texturing her forehead. It wasn’t so much his words, he realized, as his tone that had caught her attention. She seemed less angry than mystified. “What’s gotten into you, Nate?”

Pete leaned over the counter toward Nate. “Cielle is my responsibility now, too. And you can have all the smart-ass quips you want, but I’m gonna do right by her. Which-if you actually took a second to think-is probably what you want instead of some asshole stepdad who doesn’t give a shit about her.”

Nate thought about those abysmal first months after the separation. How on day four the sight of a girl riding her father’s shoulders had nailed him to the pavement outside a grocery store. How one desperate night Janie had let him in just so he could sit in the darkness of his daughter’s room and listen to the faint whistle of her breath as she slept. How Cielle, standing in the dim light of his tiny one-bedroom, had clumsily declared, “It’s too hard when I see you and then you’re gone.” Then, a few visits later: “Sometimes it’s easier when the person who leaves just leaves for good.” And how, even though it gutted him, he’d given her more space and more space until their weekly dinner became monthly, then quarterly. And how after the diagnosis he’d torn himself away from her and Janie altogether, not wanting them to have to suffer anything with him, whether out of love, guilt, or obligation. Fair or not, he wanted to weaponize all that pain and loss and aim it right through Pete’s gallant face, but instead he looked at Janie and screwed his jaw shut.

Casper lifted his square, Scooby-Doo head and compassionately took in Nate’s discomfort. He wasn’t an animal so much as a human in a dog suit.

Janie said, “You’re bleeding.”

He peered over his shoulder and saw where a crimson seam blotted the undershirt. “I’m okay.”

She wet a hand towel, carried it over, and lifted his shirt in the back. Pete and Nate made an effort to avoid eye contact.

“Nice stitch work,” she said, dabbing at the edges of the wound. He relaxed a bit under her touch. “The bank robbery,” she reminded him.

Before he could speak, Cielle appeared in the doorway.

She still carried thirty or so extra pounds, though her fullness didn’t detract from her beauty. Those dark brown irises, almost black. Long bowed lashes framing her eyes, rendering eyeliner or mascara superfluous. Raven locks twisting this way and that, now streaked with maroon. Everything about her appearance, from the goth-girl highlights to the baggy charcoal sweater with torn thumbholes in the sleeves, seemed too angry for a fifteen-year-old girl. Or perhaps right on target. He’d forgotten how long ninth months was in the life cycle of a teenager.

“What’s with the undershirt, Nate?” she asked.

“Show some respect, Cielle,” Janie said. “Call him Dad.”

“It’s from the hospital,” Nate said. “I got stabbed during a bank robbery.”

Janie took in a clump of air.

“And I shot the robbers. Well, most of them.”

Pete lowered his hands to the counter, and Janie’s hands stopped moving on Nate’s back, but Cielle didn’t miss a beat. “Were any of them named Jason Hensley?”

“… No.”

“Then I don’t care.”

“Who’s Jason Hensley?”

“My shithead boyfriend. Who thinks that buying a new guitar is more important than taking me to Magic Mountain as was promised for our three-month anniversary.”

“Cielle,” Janie said. “I love you, honey. And I know that in your fifteen-year-old brain, boy troubles are equivalent to your father’s getting stabbed in a bank robbery, but can we please focus on him right now?”

“You don’t actually believe him, do you?”

Pete said, “Whatever you want to think about your father, Cielle, he’s not a liar.”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Go ahead.”

Nate walked them through the official version, leaving out the almost suicide and the threats that Number Six had leveled at him in the vault. When he finished, Cielle’s mouth was popped open, exposing a wad of fluorescent gum.

“Aren’t you worried?” Janie asked. “That they’ll come after you? I mean, you killed five men. They have to have … I don’t know, associates.”

Nate thought about that tattooed hand curled through the gap in the Town Car’s window, pinching off the cigarette between the fingers without so much as a flinch. Just slow, steady pressure, suffocating the flame. Nate tapped his palm to his pocket, felt the comforting weight of the pill bottle against his thigh. His exit plan. “I’m not concerned about it,” he answered.

Cielle: “So you just came to…?”

“I wanted to tell you before you heard about it somewhere else,” he said. “And … um…” There was no good transition. “I’m sick. Too.”

Janie had forgotten about the towel, which was dripping pink onto the floor tiles. She looked as though she were piecing herself back together internally, and he felt a darkening remorse for bringing this here, to her and Cielle. “As in…?” was all Janie could manage.

Nate took a deep breath. Bit his lip. Here was that point before the world flew apart. The toughest death notification he’d have to serve.

He said softly, “I’m not gonna be around much longer.”

Janie shook her head. More fat drops tapping the floor tile. “What…?”

“ALS,” he said. And then, for Cielle’s sake, “Lou Gehrig’s. That’s why I cut off from you guys nine months ago. We were already … And … I didn’t want to put you through it.”

Though Janie’s face stayed still, there were tracks on her cheeks instantly, as if they’d sprung through the skin. He felt an overpowering urge to take her in his arms, but then Cielle said sharply, “That is so unfair,” and stomped away. They listened to her Doc Martens pound the stairs, and then a door slammed so hard that a magnet fell off the refrigerator.

Pete cleared his throat, then said, “I remember when Sally died, I couldn’t find any sense in getting out of bed. But after a while…” His hand circled, trying to land on a thought. “Someone said once that whenever a door closes in your face, another opens farther down the hall.”

“Which door is that?” Nate said. “To Valhalla?”

A sharp silence. Janie looked unsteady on her feet, and Pete pulled her in and rubbed her shoulders from behind. His face was heavy with sadness, and Nate felt a rush of regret.

He sucked in a breath. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m a jerk.”

“No.” Pete shook his head. “It was a dumb comment for me to make. I don’t know what to say. I’m really sorry to hear about it, Nate.”

Nate pointed upstairs. “Look, I’d better-”

Janie nodded, a quick jerk of the chin.

Upstairs, Cielle’s closed door waited, as imposing as a prison gate. The pencil lines on the door jamb marking her childhood heights were fading; a few more months and that piece of their shared past would be as lost and gone as Nate himself. He’d wasted so many chances. Countless nights he could’ve just walked down the hall to this room, pulled out a board game, read a story, picked her up, and breathed her in.

Gathering himself, he tapped the wood with a knuckle. No response. He entered cautiously, expecting to draw fire. She sat at her desk, hunched over schoolwork, facing away. He hardly recognized the room beneath the magazine collages, the posters of boy-men actors, the scattering of teenager clothes. But there, half buried by a cast-off jacket, was the stepstool that Charles had sent as a baby gift, her name carved in wooden letters. It remained where Nate had positioned it a decade ago so she could step down from her big-girl bed and come wake him if she had a bad dream. He clung to the sight of it, let it moor him.

He cleared his throat. Where to start? “Your boyfriend. Is he a nice guy?”

“Of course not. He’s an asshole who treats me like shit. I grew up with no positive male role model in the house, so that’s what I get.”

He watched her back, debated how to forge into a wave of sarcasm that thick. “Look, I get that you’re angry with me-”

“No. I’m just sullen and withdrawn in general. Ironically self-aware, too, which insulates me further. I could do drugs or cut myself or get a shoulder tattoo of some Chinese symbol for vagina power. But instead I think I’ll just stay pissed off.”

“Cielle.”

She whirled. “What?” Her face was fighting to maintain the tough veneer, but he saw right through the cracks.

“I’m sorry I’m not gonna be around.”

“I’m not sure what the big diff will be. I mean, even before you split, our seasonal dinners were hardly a mainstay.”

“You told me it was easier for you to see me less.”

“I was twelve! I was a kid. You shouldn’t have listened. You shouldn’t have believed me. You should have fought me.” Her voice was wavering now, on the verge.

“Well, honey, you were convincing.”

“You left. I had no say. I had no say.” She noted the effect her words had on him, and her scowl lightened, if only for a moment. “You know what? Never mind. Fine. It’s all my fault.” She turned back around. “Buh-bye now.”

He stared helplessly at the clothes littering the floor, a black polo shirt catching his eye. Car-wash decal on the breast pocket, Cielle’s name stitched above. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re working at a car wash? Why?”

“That’s not really your concern either.”

“Cielle,” he said. “What’s going on?”

She turned again. “Pete lost most of his money in the recession. Some real-estate thing crashed. Which means we can’t afford my stupid private school. So I got a job. But it’s still not enough.”

He sank to sit on her bed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She picked up her iPhone in its pink rubber case and poked at the screen disinterestedly. “Because you’ve been so available?”

“So you guys are…?”

“We’re fine. Or so Mom and Pete say. It’s not like we’ll be on the street or anything. There’s just no money for extras. Which would be-oh, that’s right-my education.”

“How much is Brentwood Prep?” Since she’d started last year at Pete’s urging, Nate was unacquainted with the price tag.

“Twenty.”

“Twenty thousand dollars?”

“No. Twenty thousand glass beads. They’re having a special.”

“Do you … do you like it?”

“No.” She tossed the iPhone aside. “The girls are all named Chelsea or Sloane, and if I have to hear from one more assclown that he’s sooo brilliant he has to smoke pot to slow his brain down, I’m gonna puke on his worn-out Vans.”

Nate was struggling to keep up with all this. “So you don’t want to go there anyway.”

“The thing is, I do want to go there. Annoying, sure, but hello? It’s high school. At least the teachers are smart and there’s honors classes and the students aren’t as lame as they could be. Plus, it’ll get me into a good college, too, not that I’ll be able to afford that now either. So I’d better enjoy this semester, since it’s my last hurrah before I move on to stitching wallets in some sweatshop.”

Given his own experience joining the Guard to pay for college, Nate had always sworn he’d work until Cielle’s education was squared away. Pete’s arrival had seemed to take care of all that. Until now.

She glared at him. “Oh, c’mon. This isn’t your concern. Any more than anything else has been these past nine months. Or three years, for that matter. You just … what? Moved on? Got over it?”

“No. I never got over it.”

A cynical snicker couldn’t quite hide the hopefulness. “What then?”

He studied his hands. “I always thought there would be time.”

“There’s never time. There’s only right now. And you suck at right now.”

He was running numbers in his head, but there weren’t many to run given the anemic state of his bank account. “Maybe I can help with the tuition-”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

“What can I do, then?”

Once again she showed him her back. “Die somewhere else.”

The words left a clean hole through him where his stomach used to be. He sat for a while and watched her shoulders, the back of her head. She was ostensibly reimmersed in homework.

His joints ached as he stood. “I wish I could’ve done better by you.” He heard the faintest sniffle, but nothing more. “For whatever it’s worth, I’m proud of everything you are and everything you’ll be.”

He took care to ease her door shut silently behind him. Janie and Pete were where he’d left them downstairs by the sink, the salad plates sitting unmoved. Janie asked, “You wanna stay for dinner?”

He thought of his date with a handful of pills in the quiet dark of his apartment. Those inked fingers curling through the Town Car’s window. “Nah. I have to get back.”

The look of relief in Janie’s eyes about killed him.

“I’m sorry to hear about the investments,” Nate said.

Pete tensed a bit. “We’ll figure it out. You have enough to worry about. Don’t worry about this, too.”

Janie added quickly, “She’ll be fine in public school. We were.”

“Okay.” Nate wanted so badly to raise a hand to her cheek, to feel those lips one last time, but instead he tipped his head. “I just wanted … I just wanted to say good-bye.”

Pete said, “If there’s anything we can do…”

“You know what I like about you, Pete? You’re a decent guy. And you’ve never let the fact that we don’t get along mess anything up.” Nate lifted his eyes, indicating the thunderous silence emanating through the ceiling. “Take care of her. When … you know, I can’t.”

They shook hands, and Pete pulled him into a hug. Janie said, “Honey, I’ll just see him out,” and Pete said, “Of course.”

Janie walked Nate to the porch, and they stood there. Nate crouched and fussed with the loose goddamned brick. “There’s a mortar bag in the garage with a little left over.” When he stood, he saw that she had tears in her eyes again, and he said, “Janie.”

“I want to say something comforting, but I don’t know if it’s for me or you. So I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

Afraid of what his face might show, he looked at his waiting car. “C’mon. It’s not that bad. You still get to go to the opera next week with Pete the Fun Vacuum.”

“You’re a menace.”

“I want you to know,” he said, “there was never anyone else for me, Janie.”

Her lips trembled, and then she nodded once, turned, and hurried inside. He walked to his car. He had the keys in the lock when he heard from behind, “Fuck you.”

He turned, and Cielle was standing there, her sweater sleeves pulled down over her fists, her face flushed. “I loved you so much.” She spit it, like a curse. “I lit candles when you were away at war, and then, when you left us, I lit candles that you’d come back. ‘Dear God, please bring my daddy back to me safe.’ And even when you were with us, you were busy with your stupid job taking care of everyone else except for the people you were supposed to be taking care of.”

“Cielle-”

“You can’t have my sympathy. You can’t have it. You don’t. I don’t care if you’re dying.” Despite her best efforts, tears were leaking.

He stood there, still, his heart coming apart for her. More than anything he wanted to go to her, but he knew if he took so much as a step, she’d bolt like a deer.

“You can’t die yet,” she said. “You didn’t earn it. You left us, and now you get to die before I can get even.”

When he trusted his voice, he asked, “How were you gonna get even?”

“I was gonna have a great life and get married and be successful and keep your grandkids from you. But you’re dying and trying to make me feel … make me feel…” Her face wobbled all around. “Why’d you come tell us anyway?”

“I wanted to say good-bye to you. I wanted to have a chance to set things straight.”

“Why now, Nate?” His proper name, like a projectile. “I mean, you found out months ago. And you’re not sick yet. I mean, you still have months left at least, right?”

The weight of his bones pulled at him. “It might be sooner than that, Cielle.”

She staggered a bit. Encased in her sleeves, her fists tightened. “Does Mom know that?”

He shook his head.

“Then why are you laying it on me?”

“It’s too late for me and your mother.”

She swiped at her cheeks angrily with her sleeve. “It’s too late for me and you, too.”

He watched her all the way up the walk, hoping for a final glimpse of her face, praying she’d turn around one last time.

She didn’t.