This Is Where I Leave You

Chapter 29

I wake up strangely energized, my stomach growling. Upstairs, the overstocked fridge offers me its bounty of sympathy food. I throw some cheese slices onto a soft bagel and then head up to the second floor. I haven’t been up here since I got back. The bedroom doors are all closed, so there’s really not much to see. I tiptoe up the attic stairs, which creak like a haunted house, and out the access window to the roof, climbing up the slate until I’m sitting at the highest point of the gable. When I was a kid I used to climb up here to look down at the block and gather my thoughts in private. Paul would climb up here with Boner to smoke weed and look at porn, and Wendy would come up to get a tan while her nails dried. I don’t know if Phillip ever figured out the roof. By the time he was old enough, we were all out of the house.

Knob’s End is on a high elevation, so you can see a lot from up here. You can see into backyards for blocks, swimming pools, swing sets, barbecues, discarded toys. You can see across the rooftops to where the early morning joggers are running on the track behind the baseball diamond in the county park over on Fenimore. You can watch the sun come up, coloring the sky white, then pink, then blue.

You can see your older sister, barefoot in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, walking hurriedly up the block from the direction of the Callens’, tying her long, mussed hair back as she goes, and wonder what she might be doing coming from there at this hour. And then, just minutes after she’s let herself in below, you can observe Linda Callen leaving your childhood home to quietly make her way down the block back to her house. It would probably help to see Linda’s expression, but her back is to you, so you can only guess at it. You can ponder these two women, who miss each other by a matter of minutes, walking exactly opposite routes as quietly as the dew now dropping in a mist on the grass and on your face, and you can hazard any number of guesses as to what business they might be tending to in the soft focus of these hushed morning hours when the day is taking its first tentative breaths. You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you’re not, coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don’t know anything about them at all.

I STEP OUT of the shower into pitch darkness. By now this has become routine. Wrapped in my towel, I walk across the basement to the circuit breaker. But this time, when I flip the switch, there is a crackle of electricity, a flash of blue light, and I am blown out of my towel and backward across the room, where I land flat on my back, poised on the precipice of unconsciousness. My body tingles with electricity, and I can feel every molecule in me, thrumming in harmony. I close my eyes and . . .

. . . I am three years old and riding my red plastic motorcycle in the park. It’s cold out, I’m wearing my navy blue ski hat, and my nose is running copiously into my scarf. The plastic wheels of the motorcycle clatter loudly against the cracked asphalt as I push off with my feet to propel myself around an Olympic-sized sandbox. I don’t know if I’m going clockwise or counterclockwise. I’m three years old; I don’t know from clocks. Suddenly, a kid appears in my path, tall and fat, two lines of snot running equilaterally down from his nose to the corners of his mouth. He holds a gray milk crate over his head like the Ten Commandments being brought down from Sinai. “The Hulk!” he screams at me. I don’t know what he means. I’m years away from Marvel comics, and even once I discover them, The Incredible Hulk will never make sense to me. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? You’re never really sure, and moral ambivalence has no place in childhood. I’m three years old, and I have never heard of The Incredible Hulk, but this kid clearly relates to him intimately. And maybe he’s pretending the milk crate is a car, or a house, or a large boulder, or an archenemy, I don’t know. Whatever it’s supposed to be, it hurts like hell when it hits my face. And then I’m off the motorcycle, lying on my side, the grit of the cold asphalt biting into my cheek. My nose and mouth are bleeding, and I’m coughing and spitting and crying, gagging on my own blood.

And then I’m borne up into the air by powerful arms, lifted high above the fat kid and my plastic motorcycle and the earth, really, my face pressed into my savior’s large shoulder, which is somehow hard and soft at the same time. I bleed into the fuzz of his peacoat as he rubs my back and says, “It’s okay, bubbie. You’re okay. Everything’s fine.” And then he stands me up on a bench and pulls out a handkerchief to softly wipe away my blood. “That little bastard really nailed you,” he says, gently picking me up again. I don’t know what a little bastard is, I don’t know who the Hulk is, I don’t remember what exactly happened, but my father is holding me safely above the fray, and I’m burrowed hard into his powerful chest, and I’m aware of the fat kid somewhere down below, but I know the little bastard can’t reach me up here.

I COME TO with my mother’s worried face hovering over me. “Judd,” she says softly. “Just stay there for a moment.” There are deep shadows under her eyes, and at this angle, the gray roots of her hair frame the upper half of her face. She looks tired and old, and I feel a surge of tenderness toward her. I’m still vibrating.

“He called me bubbie,” I say.

“What, dear?”

“When I was little. Dad used to call me bubbie.”

Mom looks at me and smiles. “I remember,” she says, rubbing my chest.

“You’re crying,” I say.

“So are you.”

And now I can feel the abundant wetness on my face, and she comes in and out of focus as I blink through fresh tears. “I miss him,” I say, and something in me breaks.

And then Mom lets out an anguished cry and drops her head to sob into my chest while I cry into the brittle tangle of her hair, and we stay like that for a good long while.

Chapter 30

This being Saturday, the laws of shiva are suspended, all outward signs of mourning put aside in honor of the Sabbath. Boner stops by to give us the news. He is dressed in a dark suit with a black shirt and looks ready to go out clubbing.

“You are still in mourning, of course,” he says. “But there will be no visitors today, no outward observance of shiva.”

“So, it’s like a day off,” I say.

“Not quite,” he says. He looks at my mother, who nods, and then looks back at us. “This morning, you’ll all come to temple to say Kaddish at morning services.”

“Kaddish?”

“The prayer for the soul of the departed.”

“Why can’t we say it here?” Paul says.

“Kaddish is said responsively. It can only be said with a minyan, a quorum of at least ten men present to respond.”

Paul looks at his childhood friend exasperatedly. Give me a break! But Boner just looks back and shrugs. I don’t make the rules.

Paul blinks first. “When do services start?”

Boner checks his watch. “In twenty-five minutes. You’d better get dressed.”

THE SUIT I wore to the funeral has been lying on the basement floor in a crumpled heap ever since, so Mom brings me up to her bedroom and picks out one of Dad’s suits for me. Dad only ever wore two kinds of suits: midnight blue and black. When I try on the black one Mom has chosen it fits perfectly, except for the slacks being an inch or so too short. I am somewhat surprised, because I’ve always seen him as taller than me. I never got close enough to know better.

Every so often, based on the tick of some internal clock, Dad would randomly decide to bring us all to temple on Saturday morning. “Get showered,” he would say. “Sport jacket and tie.” And Paul and I would grumble as we dressed. On these occasions Wendy was allowed to use Mom’s makeup, so we’d all end up waiting in the living room while she fussed with her blush and rouge and Mom dolled up little Phillip in the androgynous sailor outfits that Dad worried would make him gay.

The yarmulkes in the olivewood box at the entrance to the sanctuary were black and constructed from nylon so insubstantial that a light draft from the air-conditioning vents was enough to launch them off our curly hair like hang gliders. Mom would fasten them to our hair with bobby pins while Dad threw a prayer shawl yellowed with age over his shoulders like a scarf. Then we’d follow him into the sanctuary, pausing every few feet as he stopped to shake someone’s hand and say, “Good shabbos.” We would follow suit, shaking the large cracked hands of these men, inhaling the clean scents of their aftershave and breath mints.

Rabbi Buxbaum would come down from his seat to greet us warmly, his smile obscured by his silver handlebar mustache. “Gentlemen,” he would say with a wink, pressing hard butterscotch candies into our palms as he shook our hands, “and I use the term loosely.”

Within ten minutes Mom would have to take Phillip outside to run through the halls of the Hebrew school we’d all sporadically attended, and Dad would close his eyes and rock lightly in his seat, humming along with the cantor to the liturgical melodies he recalled from his own loosely affiliated youth. Paul would make a goal out of two spread fingers at the edge of his prayer book, and I would attempt to flick my crumpled candy wrapper in. If Dad caught us he would smack the backs of our heads and tell us to knock it off. Wendy sat upright, crossing and uncrossing her legs, studying the women’s dresses and mannerisms, scanning the rows for cute boys.

When services were over, there would be sacramental wine and light refreshments in the social hall. While my parents chatted with the other adults over creamed herring and pastries, Paul and I would sneak little plastic shot glasses of schnapps from the liquor table and try not to gag as it burned its way down our throats. Sometimes a kid would procure a tennis ball and we’d all go out to the lot behind the synagogue to play stickball in our shirtsleeves. By noon we’d be home again, suits hung up, our shirts piled on the dining room table for the dry cleaner, Mom and Dad holed up in their room for an afternoon “nap.” All this happened two, maybe three times a year. There were years when it didn’t happen at all, and then, one Saturday, apropos of nothing, Dad would once again wake us with “Sports jackets and ties, boys. Sports jackets and ties.” It seemed to happen less and less as we got older, until, by the time I was a teenager, the only time we ever went to temple was for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Once, when I was old enough to ponder these things and young enough to think there might be credible answers, I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, “Do you believe in God?”

“Not really,” he said. “No.”

“Then why do we come here?”

He sucked thoughtfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. “I’ve been wrong before,” he said.

And that pretty much summed up what theology there was to find in the Foxman home.

KADDISH IS ONLY said by the blood relatives of the deceased, so Barry, Tracy, and Alice have all opted out of the trip, and who could blame them? My siblings, Mom, and I arrive at temple an hour late, but Boner has reserved a row of pews for us. I can feel all eyes in the cavernous room on us as we make our way down the aisle, my brothers and I feeling awkward in our flimsy black yarmulkes and tattered prayer shawls borrowed from the rack in the hall, which we wear slung over our shoulders like scarves. Boner wears a long white prayer shawl with bits of silver trim around the collar that jingle like chain mail. He descends like a spirit from his high seat on the front platform to dramatically hug each one of us as we enter the pew. This seems gratuitous to me, as we all saw each other an hour earlier, like when talk show hosts warmly greet their guests even though they’ve obviously talked backstage before the show.

And Boner is definitely putting on a show. He strides the aisle like a political candidate, shaking his congregants’ hands, giving the younger guys a quick hug with a fist to the back, leaning in to kiss the women on the cheek, tousling the carefully brushed hair of the children, all the while wishing everyone a good shabbos in a loud stage whisper meant to be heard above the droning of the cantor. He is clearly aware that all eyes are on him, and he basks in the attention of his captive audience.

Boner has become the kind of rabbi whose agenda seems to be comprised solely of proving to the younger generations that Judaism is cool, that rabbis can be hip, that he, Charlie Grodner, is a happening guy. Hence the Armani suit, the abundance of product in his hair, the trendy sideburns, the diamond stud in his left ear. He’s a rock star rabbi, and whether that’s done to sell God to today’s youth or simply as the sublimation of his unfulfilled Zeppelin fantasies is anyone’s guess. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it’s hard to see divine purpose in the man who doodled anatomically correct images of anal sex in the back of his trigonometry notebook.

The temple hasn’t changed since my childhood. The high stucco ceiling, the grand, bleached wood ark up front containing a handful of Torahs, each one colorfully adorned in a cloth cover and a silver crown. The “In Memoriam” plaques that line the walls, each name accompanied by a tiny orange bulb to be lit every year on the anniversary of their death. The older men, prayer shawls slung over stooped shoulders and weathered blazers, sucking on hard candies and humming along with the cantor. The younger men, with their better suits and creased yarmulkes; the women, dressed to the nines, their prayer books balanced on their laps atop designer handbags. The stained glass windows bending the sunlight, dedications handwritten on the glass in black calligraphy. And the large, raised platform up front, where the rabbi’s lectern stands directly under the postmodern Eternal Light, a few feet in front of the ark, and where Boner now ascends to address the crowd.

“What’s up, everyone?” he says. “Good shabbos, Elmsbrook!” There is a low rumble of response.

“Oh, come on, I know you can do better than that. Good shabbos, Elmsbrook!”

The crowd responds with a “Good shabbos,” self-conscious and loud.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” Boner says. “I’d like to take a moment to welcome the Foxman family back to our temple. As many of you know, Mort Foxman, one of our founding members, passed away a few days ago. His wife, Hillary, and his children, Paul, Judd, Wendy, and Phillip, are here to say Kaddish for him and mark his passing before God and before their community. Mort was a well-respected businessman here in Elmsbrook; many of us grew up getting our sneakers and baseball gloves at Foxman’s. On a personal note, I spent a good part of my childhood in the Foxman home, playing ball with Paul and Judd—”

“Smoking weed,” I whisper.

“Jerking off.” Paul.

“Trying to touch my boobs.” Wendy.

“. . . and he leaves behind this legacy, his work ethic and his uncompromising values, for his children and grandchildren to carry on. May the Lord comfort the family among the mourners of Zion.”

“Amen,” the crowd responds.

“I’d like to call Hillary and her children up to the bimah now, to say Kaddish for their beloved husband and father, Morton Foxman.”

Mom stands up first and strides down the aisle in her stiletto heels like it’s a runway, garnering appreciative glances from the older men in the crowd, including Peter Applebaum, who shamelessly watches her ass the entire way down.

“She couldn’t find a longer skirt for temple?” Wendy mutters.

My siblings and I follow her up to the bimah, a raised table at the front of the room, where the cantor hands each of us a laminated sheet with the words of the Kaddish written in Hebrew and then transliterated in English. “Just read it slowly and pause at the dashes for the responses,” he says. “You’ll be fine.”

“Okay, everyone,” Paul says. “On three?”

“Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba,” we say.

“Amen,” says the congregation, all rising to their feet.

“B’alma di v’ra khir’utei v’yam’likh mal’khutei . . .”

We read off the ancient Hebrew words, with no idea of what they might mean, and the congregation responds with more words that they don’t understand either. We are gathered together on a Saturday morning to speak gibberish to each other, and you would think, in these godless times, that the experience would be empty, but somehow it isn’t. The five of us, huddled together shoulder to shoulder over the bimah, read the words aloud slowly, and the congregation, these old friends and acquaintances and strangers, all respond, and for reasons I can’t begin to articulate, it feels like something is actually happening. It’s got nothing to do with God or souls, just the palpable sense of goodwill and support emanating in waves from the pews around us, and I can’t help but be moved by it. When we reach the end of the page, and the last “amen” has been said, I’m sorry that it’s over. I could stay up here a while longer. And as we step down to make our way back to the pews, a quick survey of the sadness in my family’s wet eyes tells me that I’m not the only one who feels that way. I don’t feel any closer to my father than I did before, but for a moment there I was comforted, and that’s more than I expected.

AS THE CANTOR drones on, I stick my hand into the pocket of Dad’s suit and discover what feels like an old, twisted tissue but turns out, upon further inspection, to be a very fat, bona fide, home-rolled joint. I palm the joint, hold it out over Phillip’s lap, and discreetly show it to him. The only thing wider than his eyes is his smile. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he says. He stands up and heads up the aisle. A few minutes later, I follow. The bathroom smells of powdered crotch, so we push open the double fire doors and head down the darkened hallways of the Temple Israel Hebrew School. Phillip finds an unlocked classroom and we sit down in miniature chairs, still wrapped in our prayer shawls.

“Where’d you get the doobage?” Phillip says.

“It was in Dad’s suit.”

“Dad was a stoner?” Phillip says. “So much about my life makes sense now.”

“Shut up. It was probably medicinal. They prescribe it for cancer patients.”

“I prefer to think that every once in a while Dad just liked to toke up and consider the universe.”

“Think what you want, just light the fucker.”

A few moments later, we’re sprawled at our tiny attached desks, while the three-dimensional letters of the Hebrew alphabet taped above the blackboard float over us in a smoky haze.

“Can you still read Hebrew?” Phillip says.

“I doubt it,” I say. “I know the letters, though.”

“Aleph, beth, gimel, daleth . . . ,” Phillip sings.

“He, vav, zayin, heth, teth, yod,” I chime in.

We sing the rest of the Aleph-Bet together solemnly, like a funereal psalm, and when we’re done, our voices echo briefly in the room.

“I miss Dad,” Phillip says.

“I do too.”

“I feel very alone. Like when I mess up now, he won’t be there to help me.”

“I guess we’re officially adults now.”

“Fuck that,” Phillip says, taking an extra long pull on the joint. He blows out a perfect ring and then blows a jet of smoke through it. When it comes to worthless frat-boy skills, Phillip is second to none. He can light a match with his thumbnail, open a beer bottle with his teeth, flip a cigarette from the carton to his mouth with a flick of his wrist, play the William Tell overture by flicking his fingers against the soft underside of his jaw, burp the national anthem, fart on cue, and dislocate his shoulder upon request.

“Do you think maybe that’s why you’re with Tracy?” I say. “Because you want to know there’s someone looking after you?”

Phillip lazily passes me the joint. “I don’t know, but I like that theory much better than the one that postulates I’m trying to sleep with Mom.”

The door to the classroom flies open. “What the hell?” Paul says. “Oh. Christ.”

“In or out,” I say.

“I should have known.” He steps into the room, closing the door behind him.

“We learned from the master,” Phillip says.

“Give it here.” Paul takes a drag and sits down in one of the chairs. “Damn! That is some strong shit. Where’d you get it?”

“Dad,” I say, indicating the blazer. “A gift from the beyond.”

“I wouldn’t have pegged Dad for a fan of the weed.”

“People can change,” Phillip says.

“People are who they are,” Paul says, leaning back in his little chair to take another generous drag. “I really miss him,” he says.

“Me too,” I say.

“Me three.” Phillip.

A ray of sunlight comes through the window, passing through the thick cloud of ganja smoke in a way that makes you think of God and heaven, and we sit there getting baked in our skullcaps and prayer shawls, three lost brothers in mourning, the full impact of their loss only now beginning to dawn on them.

“I love you guys,” Phillip says, just as the smoke alarm goes off and the sprinklers come on.

FORTUNATELY, THE SPRINKLERS in the sanctuary are in a different zone and must be set off independently, so the worshippers do not get soaked as they evacuate the building. In the classroom, though, the water rains down on us as Phillip grabs what’s left of the joint, still lit, and swallows it whole, with the confidence of someone for whom joint swallowing is a routine practice. The sprinklers have also been activated in the hallway, and we run through the indoor storm, stopping at the fire doors that lead to the lobby area. Peering through the narrow vertical windows of the door, we can see the crowd moving through the lobby and out the glass doors to the synagogue’s front lawn.

“Just act casual,” Paul says. “Blend in.”

It seems easy enough, only because we’re too stoned to realize that three men dripping in their suits might stand out.

The air-conditioning is cold against my wet clothes. We discard our soaked prayer shawls and join the crowd moving out the doors and soon find ourselves standing in the parking lot, being warmed by the late-morning sun.

“What did you do!” my mother shouts, her heels clattering on the asphalt as she storms over to us. Wendy follows behind her, enjoying every second of it.

“Nothing,” Phillip says. “It was a false alarm.”

“Look at the three of you!”

“You guys smell like a dorm room,” Wendy says, wrinkling up her nose.

“You got high at temple?” Mom says, outraged.

“Of course not.” Paul.

“No.” Me.

“Who’s hungry?” Phillip.

In the distance, we can hear the wail of the fire trucks.

“Ah, shit,” Paul says.

Mom leans against a car, exasperated. “I blame myself.”

“That’s a relief,” I say. “Now can we get out of here?”

But just then Boner emerges from the crowd and comes striding purposefully over to us, brow furrowed, face flushed with anger. “What the hell, Paul?” he demands.

Paul shrugs. “False alarm, I guess.”

“And you three are the only ones who got wet.”

“It’s been that kind of week,” I say.

Boner steps right up into Paul’s face. “I smell weed.”

“You would know.”

The two childhood friends stare each other down for a moment and then look away. The rules have changed. Boner sighs. “You guys should get out of here before the cops show up.”

“That’s a great idea,” Wendy says. “Come on, Mom. I’ll drive.”

“Thanks, buddy,” Paul says, smacking Boner’s shoulder.

“Just go.”

“Thanks for everything,” I say, shaking his hand. “Good shabbos.”

“Yeah, thanks, Boner,” Phillip says.

Boner gives Phillip a withering look. “That was the last time you call me Boner, you hear me?”

Phillip looks at me, and I shake my head. Don’t do it.

“I’m sorry, Boner.”

Boner lunges at Phillip, but Paul catches him and turns him around, whispering in his ear, while I drag Phillip toward Mom’s Jeep. “Jesus, Phillip. Grow up, would you?”

“I gotta be me,” he says, snickering.

Wendy looks over the roof of Mom’s car and smiles cheerfully at us. “You guys are so going to hell.”

Chapter 31

I wake up in the basement with a start to find Alice lying on her back beside me, looking up at the ceiling. “He stirs,” she says.

I am momentarily disoriented. The last thing I can remember was coming downstairs to peel off my soaked suit. I haven’t smoked weed in years, and my nap felt as deep as a night’s sleep. “What time is it?”

“It’s just after one.” She turns onto her side to face me, resting her face on her hand. “You’ve been sleeping for almost two hours.”

“Where is everyone?”

“Paul went to work. Everyone else is out at the pool.”

“You’re not.”

“Neither are you.” She stretches a bit, the tops of her breasts rising and spilling out of her low-cut dress.

“What’s going on, Alice?”

“You seem to be staring at my breasts.”

“Your breasts are in my face.”

Alice props herself up on one elbow and pulls slowly at the neckline of her dress, stretching it down until her naked breasts emerge, round and whole. “You always liked my breasts.”

“What’s not to like?” I’m thinking that this is a dream, a strange, twisted, but not altogether unpleasant dream.

“I feel bad about how I reacted when I found out Jen was expecting. I should have been happy for you, and instead I just felt bad for me.”

“A simple apology would have been fine,” I say.

“There’s nothing in the world I want more than to have a baby,” she says. “You know that, right?”

“Yes.”

She moves closer, so that her breasts are now dangerously close. The room starts to spin a little bit. What was in that joint, Dad? “Um, can you put those away?”

“In a minute,” she says. “First I want you to listen to me.”

“Okay.”

Alice takes a deep breath and looks me dead in the eye. “I’ve been trying to get pregnant for almost two years. I don’t ovulate regularly. My cycle never returned to normal when I came off the pill. I take a drug to make me ovulate, and my eggs have tested fine, but Paul won’t get his sperm tested. I was thinking, maybe I would increase the odds and you’d give me some of yours.”

“You want my sperm?”

“Yours seems to have what it takes.”

“What does Paul think about that?”

“Paul will never know. It will be our secret. And you and I will never know if it was yours or Paul’s sperm that did the trick. It’s perfect, really. Any baby that resembles you will resemble Paul.”

“There are so many things wrong with that idea, I don’t even know where to start.”

Alice rolls over, almost onto me, her face hovering inches above mine. “Won’t you help me, Judd? Please? Forget Paul, forget everyone and everything else. We liked each other a lot once; we used to come to this basement and have sex right here where we’re lying now. And maybe we were what we were then so you could help Paul and me with this now.”

“If you and Paul need my sperm, you can have it. But not like this. We can go to a doctor. I mean, Jesus, Alice, look at what you’re doing here.”

She sits up on the bed, flushed and angry. “I’ve been going to doctors for two years, Judd. That’s two years of needles and hormones and specialist after specialist. Do you have any idea how exhausting that is? I’ve been peeing on sticks and crying myself to sleep for two years. All Paul has to do is come home and screw me when I’m ovulating, and half the time he can’t be bothered to do that. He actually smoked weed today.” She starts to cry. “He knew I was ovulating and he came home stoned.”

“Hey, it’ll be okay.” I could never resist a crying girl. I don’t know what that says about me, but it’s probably not something good. I reach out to touch her shoulder, and she takes my hand, cradling it against her breasts, which seem to be drawing all of the light in the dim basement. “Please, Judd,” she whispers. Then, never taking her eyes from mine, she shimmies her way down the bed, dragging the waistband of my boxers down to my knees. Her tears are warm against my thighs. “Please.”

She pulls up her dress, and I catch a glimpse of a dark thatch of pubic hair just before she grabs hold of my shamefully hard cock like a stick shift and straddles me.

“Alice. No.”

And then she slides me into her, and she is drenched in there, probably from all that estrogen she’s taking, and I haven’t had sex in a very long time and as soon as her weight settles on me and she starts to move, I explode inside of her. She squeezes me between her thighs, rocking gently on me, her hand pressed down on my chest for support. After a moment, she tucks her breasts back into her dress and then leans forward to plant a quick, soft kiss on my lips. “Thank you,” she says. “Our little secret.”

Down below, I slide out of her with a soft, guilty plop.

I FALL IN love twice on the way to meeting Jen over at the Marriott for a drink. The first time it’s a girl walking her dog. She’s wearing white shorts and a tank top that hangs just high enough to reveal a tan swatch of flat belly, and she’s got mussed blond hair and great skin, but beyond that, she just seems cool and laid-back; a dog person, but not one of those intense dog people who French-kiss their dogs and have their pictures in their wallets and buy them birthday cards. Her dog is some kind of terrier, and if I asked her, she would tell me that he’s a mutt, and how the minute she saw him at the shelter, she knew she would be taking him home. She’s laughing into her cell phone, nice white teeth, and even though I can’t hear the laugh, I know if I did, I’d like it. She looks like someone who doesn’t sweat the small stuff, who would be happy going for pizza and a movie or just taking a long walk before going home and climbing into bed. The dog will not sleep with us, because the noise of our lovemaking riles him up—she may be just this side of reserved in a crowd, but in bed her sexuality flows uninhibited. And when we’re done, lying sweaty and spent on the damp, twisted wreckage of our sheets, she entertains me with stories of her experimental lesbian phase in college, before padding naked into her studio to work on the latest book cover she’s been commissioned to design, because she’s a much sought-after graphic artist and she has deadlines to meet.

The second woman is in the car next to mine at a traffic light. She’s dark-skinned, with long black hair and eyes the color of coal, and she’s drumming on her steering wheel and singing along to whatever’s on her radio. When she sees me watching, her sheepish grin is warm and direct, and I can tell that she’s one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, fun and approachable and never a bad word to say about anyone. In fact, the only times we’ll argue is when I’m trying to convince her that someone is a real asshole and she just won’t see it. It will frustrate me, but then she’ll smile and I’ll remember why I’m with her, what a good and generous soul she has, and how she makes me a better person and how all of my friends are in love with her, and how good she is to my child, how she sings off-key in the shower, making up silly lyrics when she doesn’t know the real ones, and how, when I’m feeling down, she wraps her arms around me from behind in bed and runs her lips over my shoulders, humming lightly into my skin until I’ve decompressed.

Then the light changes and she’s gone, just like the dog-loving graphic artist before her, both of them headed back to sexy, softly lit, uncomplicated lives. And me? I’m mourning my father and having sex with my sister-in-law and falling in love with strangers on the way to see the wife who slept with my boss and is now simultaneously divorcing me and having my baby. I feel like the driver who spends that extra second fussing with his cell phone and looks up just in time to see the front of his car crash through the guardrail and drive off the cliff.

THERE ARE DARK shadows under Jen’s bloodshot eyes, and she nervously stirs her glass of ginger ale in the Clubhouse Grille, situated in a recessed portion of the hotel lobby. The only other patrons are a group of flight attendants a few tables over, laughing and drinking in their blue uniforms, their little suitcases lined up like sentries. There is a wedding this evening at the Marriott, and the lobby hums with industry as vendors scurry around in a state of controlled chaos. Party planners streak past, speaking urgently into headsets; flowers are carried through on trays; skinny kids dressed all in black tear silently across the floor in their sneakers like slacker ninjas, carrying bulky photographic equipment. Jen is nauseous and exhausted and wants to talk about our marriage.

“Yesterday was the first time you’ve asked me anything related to us,” she says.

“We don’t talk very often.”

“I know. But we’re going to be parents, Judd, and I think we’re going to have to get better at talking to each other.”

“So this baby is your free pass, is that it?”

She offers a wan grin. “I know it sucks, but yes. You’re going to have to come to some kind of terms with me so that we can work together here.”

“Maybe I don’t want to work with you.”

She puts down her glass and looks at me. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“I didn’t want this baby. I once wanted a baby with you, but that was before I knew who you really were. Our dead baby was the one I wanted. This baby . . . doesn’t feel real to me. It doesn’t feel like mine any more than you do.”

Jen studies her drink for a long time, and when she looks back up at me, her eyes are filled with tears. For an instant I flash to Alice’s tears, dripping down her face and onto my belly, but I banish the memory before it can make me too queasy. One train wreck at a time, I always say.

“I think that may be the ugliest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“You wanted me to talk about it. I’m talking.”

I don’t remember what I just said, and I have no idea if I even meant it. I just know I wanted it to hurt. In the day or so I’ve known the baby is mine, I have managed to avoid doing any concrete thinking about it. It’s still completely unreal to me, but if I said that to Jen, she would nod sympathetically and keep talking about being parents together, and I’ve got a splitting headache as it is. The fragments of my fractured life are spinning in my head like a buzz saw, and I feel moments away from coming apart in a very real and permanent way.

“Do you want to know why I started seeing Wade?” Jen says softly.

I consider it for a moment. “Not really, no.”

“When our baby died, I was grieving. I needed to mourn him. You acted like everything was fine. Well, maybe not fine, but not so far from it. No big deal, Jen, we’ll just make another one.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Not by a lot.”

“So you worked through your grief by having sex with Wade.”

One of the ninjas drops a steel pole, which rolls thunderously across the marble floor. Jen jumps. The kid curses and picks up the pole. A party planner materializes to admonish him, somewhat severely, I think.

Jen looks intently at me. “You had stopped looking at me, stopped touching me. It was like I had failed you, failed to keep our baby safe, and until we had a new baby, I had nothing to offer you. You lost sight of me.”

“That’s not true.”

“You wouldn’t hold me, or cry with me. You just looked away and talked about how it would all be fine, how we’d try again when I was ready.”

“I was trying to reassure you. I knew how much having a baby meant to you.”

“You may not have meant to make me feel that way, but it was how I felt. And I guess, as wrong as it was—and I know it was wrong—Wade was someone I hadn’t disappointed. He wanted me, and it had nothing to do with a baby. And that made him appealing.”

I consider what she’s saying, try to place myself back there, in those days after she’d delivered our strangled baby, but that time has become a dark blur, and I can’t recall very much about it. “You never said anything to me.”

“We were in such different places. I was grieving our dead child.”

“So was I.”

“You were looking at the calendar, asking the doctors when we could try again. You say you were trying to reassure me, and that’s probably true. But to me, right then, it felt like you were moving on, leaving me behind. And somewhere along the way, you stopped seeing me as your wife; you just saw me as the mother of your dead and maybe future child.” She clasps her hands together, shakes her head, and offers up a sad little smile. “It’s tragic, really, when you think about it. I needed you to see me as your wife and all you could see was the failed mother. And now I need you to see me as the mother of your child, and all you can see is the failed wife.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot.”

“I don’t get out much.”

“You should have told me.”

“I did. You didn’t hear me.”

“You should have kept telling me until I did. I would have eventually.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“We could have fixed this!” I am suddenly, violently furious. “We could have fixed it. But you gave up. You found someone else before I even knew anything was wrong. This could have been our baby.”

“It’s still our baby. You and me.”

“There is no you and me,” I say, getting up to leave. “We are strangers. And I don’t see how I can raise a child with a stranger.”

“Judd,” she says, beseeching. “We’re finally talking. Please sit down.”

I can sense the flight attendants shutting up to tune in to the little drama playing out in their midst. I take a long, last look at Jen, at her tired eyes, her desperate expression.

“I can’t do this.”

“Please don’t leave,” she says, but I’m already moving, weaving through the tables to get out of there. The last thing I hear her say is “This isn’t going to go away.” And it’s that very fact, obvious though it may be, that squeezes the air from my lungs and makes me run. Because, more than anything, what I want is for it to go away. I am not ready to be a father. I have nothing to offer: no wisdom, no expertise, no home, no job, no wife. If I wanted to adopt a child, I wouldn’t even qualify. What I’ve got is a great big bag of nothing, and no kid will respect a father like that. This was my chance to start over, to find someone who would defy the odds and love me, to figure out the rest of my life. Now any chance of a clean break is gone, and as a single father I have become, by default, even more pathetic.

I’m heading down a wide, carpeted hallway toward the parking lot when my legs give out on me. I stumble against the wall and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor. A group of tuxedoed guys in their early twenties emerge from a conference room, bustling with nervous energy. They pass around a silver flask and smack each other a lot; the groom and his groomsmen. The groom is differentiated with tails and a white tie. He’s in his early twenties, handsome in an almost pretty way, his face scrubbed, his hair gelled. The groomsmen file into another room at the behest of the photographer, who is ready to shoot the wedding party, and for a moment it’s just the groom and me in the hall. Our eyes meet and he smiles a greeting.

“You okay, bro?” he says, brimming with benevolence and goodwill.

“Yeah,” I say. “Good luck.”

“Thanks. I’m going to need it.”

“You have no idea.”

I am not real to him. This is his wedding day, and nothing is real to him. And I am in mourning, and in shock, and he is not real to me. We are ghosts, passing each other in a haunted house, and it’s hard to say who pities whom more. He straightens his tie and heads back into the conference room to record his cocky naïveté for posterity, and I get up on shaky feet and walk out to the parking lot.

I MAKE THE two-hour drive back to Kingston, to the house Jen and I used to share. I let myself in through the front door, like I do from time to time when I know she and Wade aren’t around. If I had a shrink, he would ask me why I feel the need to burglarize my former home, and I would tell him the same thing I’m telling you: I have no idea. I just know that sometimes, without any premeditation, I go there and poke around. Technically, the house is still half-mine, and if Jen truly didn’t want me there, she’d have changed the locks, or at least the alarm code.

I let myself into the front hall, taking note of the mail table that no longer has the picture of Jen and me on it. The kitchen is unchanged, except for the fridge door, which no longer has the pictures of Jen and me at Martha’s Vineyard or the old black and white of me from college that she always loved, sitting on a railing in my Bob Marley hat, smiling at her as she snapped the photo. There are no photos anywhere of her and Wade, which I’d like to read as a sign that she’s not that invested yet, but when you’ve been carrying on a yearlong illicit affair, there just aren’t a lot of photo ops.

I climb the stairs and swing open the door to our bedroom, the scene of the crime. There’s the bed, there’s the reading chair, there’s the dresser, the mirror, nothing to indicate that this was any kind of marital ground zero. I walk over to my old dresser and pull open a random drawer. Inside are a handful of Wade’s boxer shorts and undershirts and a pile of dark socks. The drawer beneath it has a selection of polo shirts and T-shirts. In the closet, there are a few pairs of jeans and two suits. From what I can tell, Wade has moved in the essentials, but not everything. He’s still keeping his own place. I pull out the trousers from his suits and then go into the medicine chest for a pair of tweezers. I grab a six-pack of his beer from the fridge and take it with me to the den, where I watch Mad Max without sound on the plasma television while gently pulling the stitches out of his pant seams, leaving just enough to hold the pants together, so that they won’t fall apart until he moves around in them a little, preferably at work, in front of a large crowd. After I put the pants back, I open the night table drawer. There’s a billfold with a few hundred-dollar bills, a prescription bottle that says naproxen but that I know from past visits contains his Viagra stash, a checkbook, some loose change, receipts, a Sports Illustrated, a cell phone charger, and the spare key to his Maserati. I pocket the Viagra and three hundred dollars.

Down in the basement there’s a carton full of our old photo albums. I pull one out and flip through it. Our trip to the Caribbean a few years ago, in the aftermath of our dead baby; a two-week consolation prize. We splurged on a private villa. There was the beach, a pool, a water slide, and a casino. We made a rule: no talking about the baby, about home, about anything of consequence. We lay on the sand for hours, baking in the sun, staring out at the blue water until we could see it with our eyes closed. We read our novels and retained nothing. The sun turned our brains to Jell-O. Jen bought some new bikinis that showed off her tan and let a fat native woman braid her hair in cornrows like Bo Derek’s. In the evenings, we would have sex before dinner, urgently and desperately, bruising our groins, kissing our lips raw.

There was another couple, Ray and Tina from Chicago, on honeymoon for their second marriage. Ray had a Chrysler dealership. Tina had big hair, a pierced navel, and store-bought fingernails. She’d been his secretary for years. You didn’t need much of an imagination to guess what had ended his first marriage. We all went on a midnight cruise, getting drunk on red rum drinks. There was a reggae band and we tried to dance but it’s hard to dance to reggae unless you’re very stoned. Ray stared at Jen’s tight ass. Tina was shorter and a little bottom heavy, but she had these sexy bee-stung lips and she grazed my arms with her fake nails when she talked. Ray and I got drunk and he confided in me that he’d give anything to have sex with someone who looked like Jen. We joked about swapping for the night. Back in our villa, Jen and I made fun—but not in a mean way—of Ray’s Tom Selleck mustache and thick gold necklace, of Tina’s nails and that she wore heels to the beach.

After they went back to Chicago, we felt the silence between us even more. We read, we swam, we lay out on the beach, watching happier people. I went parasailing one day, and Jen rode in the speedboat, taking pictures of me in the sky. A day later, Jen was bitten by something in the ocean and her knee swelled up like a balloon. By the time we flew home, we could barely look at each other. Was she already seeing him then? Or maybe not yet seeing him, but flirting with him? Already redrafting the boundaries of her life? When, exactly, did she cross that line and stop being mine? The only thing more painful than not knowing would be knowing. Having to go back to every picture in every album and stamp it real or a lie. I don’t have the stomach for it.

In the back of the album there’s a single orphaned photo out of its sleeve, and I recognize it from our honeymoon in Anguilla: Jen in a pool—looking seductively at the camera while, in the background, whitecaps dapple the blue ocean. It’s one of those accidentally perfect pictures you take, when the sun is just where it needs to be, and the focus is perfect, and you’ve caught your subject at her absolute best. I look at the photo for a long time, at Jen when she was still Jen, when we were still us. I put the album back in the box and make it as far as the second stair before turning around and pulling it back out.

Back in the car, I place the photo faceup on the passenger seat, where it stays for the drive back to Elmsbrook. I couldn’t begin to tell you why.

HOME, FOR LACK of a better word, or option. Fireflies flicker and glow in front of my windshield as dusk thickens into another humid summer night on Knob’s End. I can smell barbecue. I follow the sounds of voices around to the backyard. Everyone is gathered on the patio eating, while Barry mans the grill. Wendy is sprawled on a lounge chair with Cole asleep on her chest. Everyone else is at the table, eating burgers and minute steaks, dipping chips and washing them down with Diet Coke. Paul is pitching a wiffle ball to Ryan, who whacks every third pitch or so. Horry plays the field while Phillip stands off to the side, providing the play-by-play through cupped hands. “The pitch . . . Oh, he got a piece of that one, it’s going deep, sending Callen to the warning track. That ball is out of here! Ryan Hollis’s two thousandth career home run. The crowd goes wild. You know he’ll be getting some tonight, Bill . . .”

Mom and Linda are at the head of the table, sipping chardonnay out of plastic wineglasses and playing Rummykub. Alice sits with them, idly reading the weekend paper. I stand around the corner of the house, watching these people, these strangers, this family of mine, and I have never felt more lost and alone. My cell phone vibrates softly in my pocket, and I step back around the house to answer it.

“Hey,” Penny says. “Want to go to a movie?”

My last trip to the movies didn’t work out so well. It was a few weeks after I’d moved into the Lees’ basement, and I could feel the walls closing in. So I took myself to the movies. Back when I lived with Jen, I had some friends. In the aftermath of our separation, Allan and Mike had met me for drinks and we’d all raised our glasses in agreement that Jen was a cheating bitch and I was the good guy here. I didn’t know it at the time, but that night was actually my good-bye party. Jen would retain custody of our friends and I’d be wordlessly discarded. A few weeks later, as I circled the multiplex parking lot, I saw Allan and Mike with their wives, leaving the theater along with Jen and Wade, all walking in standard formation, talking and laughing in the cinematic afterglow, like it had always been just so. I tried to tell myself it was simply a chance encounter, but it was clear from their body language that they were all together, and probably not for the first time. It’s a sad moment when you come to understand how truly replaceable you are. Friendship in the suburbs is wife-driven, and my friends were essentially those husbands of Jen’s friends that I could most tolerate. Now that I’d been sidelined, Wade had stepped in for me like an understudy, a small note was inserted into the program, and the show went on without missing a beat.

THE WRITER IS pretty, beautiful even, but in a toned-down way; neurotic and accessible. She kisses her fiancé good-bye in their beautifully cluttered apartment and travels to a comically unpronounceable seaside village in Scotland to do a story for the travel magazine she writes for. There she falls for a local widower who trains sheepdogs. The townsfolk are kindly eccentrics, the widower is rugged and built like an Olympic swimmer, and we forgive the ingénue her dalliance, since her eyes well up so beautifully when she talks about her recently deceased sister, and also because her fiancé is a cad who flirted with his sexpot secretary in the opening scene and likes his red sports car a little too much.

Penny and I sit in the back row, holding hands. She softly runs the fingers of her free hand up and down the inside of my forearm, playing with the short hairs on my wrist. I lean my head against hers, and we’re seventeen again. We make out for a while, our tongues cool and sugary from the soda, and I never want the movie to end, not because it feels so good, although it certainly does—Penny kisses with passion and depth and just the right amount of tongue—but because when the movie ends the house lights will come back up, and real life will materialize around us like hidden creatures in the horror movie we should have gone to instead.

And even as we kiss, my hand now under the hem of her short skirt, rubbing her smooth thighs, her fingers in my hair as her tongue dances across my lower lip, I am aware of the on-screen plot resolving itself. The fiancé has shown up unannounced, there’s some kind of sheepdog festival, a chase through a crowded farmers’ market on motor scooters. The fiancé rides his scooter off an embankment and into the duck pond. Happily-ever-after is just a dramatic gesture and a heartfelt speech away. We stop making out and tune in for the last ten minutes. The girl is at the airport, alone, having broken it off with the fiancé, but too late to save her relationship with the widower. But here he comes, zipping through the airport on a stolen luggage cart. He delivers a loud speech about what he’s learned about grief and love and second chances, proclaiming his love even as the cops handcuff him. Somehow, his trusty dog is there too, along with half the village, who have all had a hand in bringing him here to stop her from leaving. She kisses him while he’s still handcuffed, and so he falls over and they kiss some more on the floor. Next to me, Penny sniffles at the happy ending. Then she leans over, takes my earlobe between her teeth, and says, “Take me home.”

PENNY LIVES IN a ground-floor apartment in a complex downtown, just a few blocks from Dad’s store. There are framed movie posters on the walls—Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Julia Roberts—and not very much in the way of furniture: a mucous-green leather couch that she must have gotten a deal on because no one would choose that color in a vacuum. There’s no matching love seat, which I find somewhat symbolic. A fat cat with yellow demon eyes is curled up on the couch, and the potpourri scattered in little bowls around the room almost manages to cover the smell of the unseen litter-box.

I’m nervous, the kind of nervous that leads to flop sweat and flaccidity. Too late I remember the Viagra I stole from Wade, now sitting worthlessly in my glove compartment. I have not had sex with a woman other than Jen in over ten years, if you don’t count my bizarre sixty seconds with Alice earlier today, and you’d better believe I’m not counting it. I’m treating it like a dream or a UFO sighting, something maybe you’ll talk about one day when you’re drunk and among friends, but nothing that has any bearing on your actual life. But when your wife spent the last year of your marriage going elsewhere for her sexual gratification, it’s only natural to have some performance anxiety.

Penny steps into the apartment, tossing keys and flipping off lights. I stand uncertainly in the doorway, my thighs trembling a little. I can feel all the crap I ate at the theater burrowing through my intestines, making me feel bloated and queasy. “Should I come in?” I say. My voice sounds hollow and scared.

She gives me a sharp, knowing smile. “If I were you, I would.”

The bedroom is a mess, clothes everywhere, towels draped over an armchair to dry. Penny undresses in the light of the desk lamp, not sultry, not like a stripper, but the same way she would if I wasn’t here, letting her clothing fall where she stands. She presents herself to me, her body lithe and smooth, breasts full and buoyant on her too-thin frame. I am self-conscious about my own soft body, with its budding love handles and lack of abdominal definition, but she doesn’t seem to mind, kissing my thighs as she pulls down my pants and then falling down onto the bed with me, licking her way up my belly to my chin and then into my mouth. “You taste good,” she murmurs. I worry that I have bad breath, that my ass will feel flabby in her hands when she grabs it, that I’m rubbing her breasts like a high school kid, that my dick won’t get hard enough, that it won’t measure up to other dicks she’s seen, that I’ll come too soon, that she won’t come at all. I should go down on her, just to make sure she gets something out of the deal, but I’m intimidated by the thought of an uncharted vagina, terrified that after a few minutes of fruitless exploration she’ll gently pull me back up by my ears and tell me it’s okay when we both know it’s not, that it felt good anyway when we both know it didn’t.

The sex is as good and bad as first times tend to be, like a play rehearsal full of missed marks, botched lines, bad lighting, and no calls for an encore. We don’t do it up against the wall, on the kitchen sink, in the shower, from behind while she’s bent over the bed. It’s just paint-by-numbers missionary sex: kiss, rub, lick, stroke, enter, rock, moan, and come, all at the proper time. I’m playing scared, letting her set the rhythm, trying my best to banish the image of Wade humping Jen that hovers in the background of my mind. Thanks in part to my earlier release with Alice, I’m able to hold out until Penny finishes, gasping and digging her teeth into my chin hard enough to leave a mark. And it occurs to me, as I surrender to my own somewhat subdued orgasm, that I’ve come twice today, and as sad and twisted as each occasion was, both involved actual, live women, one on top of me, and one beneath me, and maybe that’s a cause for some small measure of optimism, even if we’re not counting Alice. Which we’re not.

When we’re done, I roll off of Penny, feeling ridiculously accomplished and wondering how soon I can leave.

“That was nice,” Penny says drowsily, throwing a leg over mine, splaying out her fingers against my chest.

“Okay. Give it to me straight,” I say. “I can take it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why did my wife need to have sex with someone else?”

“Because she’s an evil bitch.”

“Come on. Really.”

Penny lies back on her pillow and removes her leg from mine. I grab it and put it back. I like it there. “In my limited experience, women rarely leave because the sex is bad. The sex becomes bad because something else has gone wrong.”

“Really?”

“Nah. He probably just has a world-class schlong.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

Penny laughs. “Judd Foxman. Naked in my bed. This is beyond surreal.”

“Surreal is my new reality.”

She kisses both my eyes and wraps her arms around me in a way that brings me dangerously close to tears. I should tell her about the baby. It’s on the tip of my tongue.

“Judd Foxman.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I just like to say your name.”

Penny pulls me closer and burrows her head into the hollow of my neck, lazily repeating my name a few more times as she drifts off to sleep. I open my mouth to say any number of things, but in the end I just lie there, telling myself that no one can feel this disconnected forever.

WENDY AND BARRY are standing on the front walk, having an argument. Wendy gesticulates wildly while Barry stands there absorbing it, swatting away gnats as he waits her out. I wonder, as I often do, why they stay together, what it is they offer each other that keeps them locked in this bloodless stalemate. But I suppose if I understood anything about marriage, I’d have understood my own a little bit better.

“I’m sorry, babe, it’s the eleventh hour,” Barry is saying. “I need to be there to close this deal now, or it’s all going to go up in smoke.”

“You’ve had a death in the family. Can’t they understand that?”

“Yes, but I can’t be gone for seven days. They need me there.”

“And what about your family? We need you too.”

“I’m doing this for my family.”

“Right. That old load of crap.”

They fall silent when I step out of the car.

“Where the hell have you been?” Wendy says.

“Clearing my head.”

“You didn’t tell anyone where you were going.”

“There’s actually a good reason for that.”

“What?”

“I didn’t want to.”

Barry snickers. Dumb move. Wendy turns on him with a baleful stare, and I use the distraction to slide past them and into the house.

Mom and Linda are in the living room, playing Scrabble at the coffee table and drinking tea. Paul, Alice, and Tracy are on the couch watching Jon Stewart, while Phillip sits on the floor, thumbing through a shoebox of old photos. They all look up at me. Alice smiles, but I can’t look at her, can’t be anywhere near her. The monitor in the hall is broadcasting Serena’s cries in stereo. No one seems terribly concerned.

“Where have you been?” Mom says.

“Out and about.”

“Don’t be evasive. Just say you’d rather not tell me.”

“I’d rather not tell you.”

“But now you have me curious. Did you see Jen today?”

“Yeah.”

“And . . . ?”

“And now I’m going to bed.”

Alice flashes me a meaningful look, and I try to remember if there’s a lock on the basement door.

“Look at this picture,” Phillip says.

I squat down to see the photo he’s holding. I’m around eleven, Paul twelve, and Phillip is two years old. Paul and I are throwing him to each other, playing catch with our little brother in this very living room, twentysomething years ago. Phillip loved that, would laugh hysterically, his eyes wide with excitement as we launched him airborne at each other. Pay catch, Yudd. Pay catch, Pole. We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars. Even under the best of circumstances, there’s just something so damn tragic about growing up.

“Look here,” Phillip says, pointing to the corner of the photo. “In the breakfront.”

The breakfront has two sets of glass doors, behind which Mom keeps her crystal glasses and the good china.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Look at the glass on the last door.”

I stare at the picture and then, just as I’m about to give up, I see it, a reflection in the glass, a face and arms. Dad, watching us from off camera, smiling widely as Phillip flies between us. The breakfront still stands against the living room wall, and I look into the glass doors a moment. When I look back down Phillip is smiling at me.

“I did the same thing.”

“He’s like a ghost,” I say.

“Last night I woke up and thought I saw him walking out of the study,” Phillip says. When Phillip was little, he would put on his toy tool belt and stand beside Dad as he fixed things in the house. “The compressor is shot,” he would repeat solemnly, brimming with self-importance. He was a very cute kid, and I can remember how much we all adored him, how even then, I hated the fact that he had to grow older.

The baby is still crying her little lungs out upstairs. I lean forward to tousle Phillip’s hair. “I’m going to go check on that baby.”

“They’re letting her cry,” Mom says.

“That doesn’t make it right.”

Phillip watches me as I stand back up and head for the stairs.

“Judd.”

“Yeah.”

He grins. “You smell like pussy.”

SERENA STOPS CRYING the instant I pick her up. Her head is bald like an old man’s, with just a ring of dark hair around the perimeter. She feels almost weightless against my chest in her little pink pajamas. “It’s okay,” I say softly, and make other idiotic sounds like you do when you’re holding a baby. Her tiny fingers find my chin and she latches on with a surprisingly strong grip, like my chin will save her life, like my chin is exactly what she was crying out for. I sit down on the bed, cradling her little head against my shoulder, inhaling her sweet baby scent. Someday she’ll get older, and the world will start having its way with her. She’ll throw temper tantrums, she’ll need speech therapy, she’ll grow breasts and have pimples, she’ll fight with her parents, she’ll worry about her weight, she’ll put out, she’ll have her heart broken, she’ll be happy, she’ll be lonely, she’ll be complicated, she’ll be confused, she’ll be depressed, she’ll fall in love and get married, and she’ll have a baby of her own. But right now she is pure and undiminished and beautiful. I lie back on the bed as she sleeps on my chest, listening to her tiny little snores, admiring the soft nub of her unformed nose, the sucking blister on her upturned lip. After a few minutes, when her breathing becomes almost imperceptible, I gently lay her down in the crib and head back downstairs. I crawl under my covers and drift off to sleep, still feeling the warm spot where she lay on my chest.