Gregg Hurwitz - The Survivor

Wearing a borrowed sweater three sizes too big, Janie leaned into Nate, and he rested his arm across her narrow shoulders, and Cielle looked at them and for once said nothing cynical. He stole looks at his father, not quite believing that they were here under the same vaulted ceiling, and damned if the old man didn’t almost smile a time or two. Nate felt his muscles relax by degrees; maybe it was the meds starting to leave his system, or maybe he just finally had the space to let go a little. Cielle cracked a stupid joke and then giggled at it herself, leaning into her mom. Janie started laughing, too, and then Nate. He caught their reflection off the glass fireplace screen, something about the arrangement of the three of them tugging at a thread of a memory. And it struck him: the family portrait. Same pose, eight long years later. The sight of them was all different but somehow the same. They finished eating and talking, then sat for a moment in silence, basking in the afterglow, no one wanting the gathering to break up. It was magical, a momentary respite from reality.

After a while, as Cielle and Jason, with some prompting, cleared the dishes, Nate took his cell phone and started outside.

Janie caught his arm. “Where you going?”

“Find a signal. Abara. After the hospital-”

She plucked the phone from his hand and turned it off. “Not tonight,” she said gently. “Just one night.”

He could give her that.

Later, though it took some doing, Nate climbed the ladder to the open loft where Cielle was bedding down. Beyond the dormer window, black fangs of treetops bit into the star-patterned sky. He combat-crawled a few feet toward her pillow.

“Are you stupid, crawling up here with your muscles all tweaked?”

“Yes.” He leaned to kiss her on the forehead, but before he could, she hugged him around the neck, holding on.

“What’s gonna happen to us?” Her voice caught, and he felt her cheek growing hot against his.

He pulled away to answer, but she just squeezed tighter. He said, “I will let nothing happen to you.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“Yes. I can.”

“Are we ever gonna get home again?”

He thought, I am home.

He kissed her on the forehead and started to back out of the cramped space when she asked, “Why’d you and Mom split up?”

He halted, hunched beneath the low ceiling. “It took me a long time to come home from the war.”

“How long?”

He considered. “Till now.”

“So you fell out of love with her?”

“No. Never.”

“But you…?”

“Couldn’t figure out how to love her right either.”

“That’s really what men are like? This is what I have to look forward to?”

He smiled a little.

She said, “If you loved her-us-then how could you stand being away?”

“I couldn’t. I always thought tomorrow would be different.”

“And it wasn’t.”

“No. But today was.”

She smiled secretly and lowered her head to the pillow. “Dad? Will you…?”

“Of course.”

He inched forward and lay up there by her until she fell asleep.

After descending with difficulty, he searched out his father and spotted him just outside the back door, scraping leftovers into a composter. He started for him, but a neat row of framed photos hanging in the brief hall brought him up short-his own school pictures from preschool on, ending with his second-grade photo.

The year before his mother got sick.

He stared at the shrinelike display of himself. A collared shirt each time out, the neat side part, his small face not yet shadowed with loss. The abrupt end at second grade. He pictured those pen marks in Cielle’s doorway, her heights marked at various ages. Where was the line at which childhood ended? His mind drifted to Nastya in her VIP booth, an ash-heavy cigarette forked between manicured fingers.

Despite our best efforts, we fail each other, he thought, all the time.

And yet there was still so much to keep trying for.

At once his father was at his side, looking on with him at the four small frames. “You deserved to have that wall filled.”

By the time Nate could recover to reply, his father had moved on down the hall.

Nate stood for a while, leaning against the wall beside those pictures. He was about to start back when he heard the quiet plucking of guitar strings from the front of the house. He made his way through the kitchen and living room, Jason’s form drawing into view outside on the porch swing. The kid sat Indian style, large shoulders bowed, guitar across his lap. Nate drew near to the window. Jason was singing so softly that the words were barely audible, but the song slowly resolved: McCartney’s “Blackbird.” Jason’s voice was startlingly good, high-pitched and pure, almost feminine. Nate kept on toward the door, a snatch of lyrics coming clear- “take these broken wings and learn to fly” -but when he stepped onto the enclosed porch, Jason stopped playing abruptly, the guitar lying awkwardly across his thighs like a lapdog that could at any instant turn hostile.

They faced each other there in the light of the dark black night. The door clicked shut behind Nate, cold running up his sleeves and around his neck. “Why don’t you play that instead of the other crap?”

“You really know how to pay a compliment.”

“You really know how to play.”

The kid actually blushed. “Yeah, well.”

“I’m serious. Why don’t you play more like that?”

Jason shrugged, jerking his head to flick the hair out of his eyes. “Dunno. Guess I figured I wasn’t supposed to. You know. Be good at something.”

Nate sat beside him, the porch swing rocking. “Maybe it’s easier to just lump along sometimes.”

“No,” Jason said. “It’s exhausting to be a fuckup.”

Nate laughed.

Jason picked at his shoe. “All my life I was told no. Can’t go outside to play. Can’t do algebra. Can’t date a smart girl. Well, I’m sick of it.” A touch sharp-an accusation.

Nate thought for a time, then said, “You should be.”

The crickets were at it out there in the blackness.

Jason nodded a bit to himself. “You know when you hear a song on the radio that you just dig ? And it sticks in your head, right? So you download it from iTunes. At first you love it. Take it with you to the skate park. Go to the beach with it, everywhere. But then you have it, so you get sick of it. And later you hear it on the radio, it’s not as exciting. Because you own it, right?” He licked his chapped lips. “That’s how it was with other girls. But I never feel that way about Cielle.”

They swayed a little on the porch swing, the silence growing awkward. Then Jason reached over and chucked Nate on the shoulder, a touch too hard. “Glad we had this talk, Pops.”

Suppressing a grin, Nate rose. “Good night, Jason.”

Jason threw his hands out, all smart-ass smirk. “C’mon. Shouldn’t we, ya know, go throw a ball? Quick bonding game of catch?”

Nate passed through the door. Safely out of view, he couldn’t help but crack a smile.

Janie lay across him in the sweaty aftermath, her lips at his chest, the blades of her shoulders forming an erotic ridgeline in the darkness. Starlight angled through the curtainless pane, blanketing half the bed in a faint blue glow. Her mouth worked up his neck and found his mouth. She lifted her head, catching the sheet of light, her face smooth and beatific save the inadvertent half sneer of her swollen lips. He tugged at her hair, damp and heavy at the nape, and she pulled forward into the gentle pressure, tilting her head as if to stretch her neck.