John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“He’s mine-I was asleep,” Danny told them. He crossed the pavement into the median strip, but the woman-middle-aged, glasses, a pearl necklace (Danny would remember nothing more definitive about her)-seemed reluctant to give the baby up.

“Your baby was in the street, pal-I almost ran over him,” the van driver told Danny. “The fucking diaper, its whiteness, just caught my eye.”

“It doesn’t appear that you were looking for this baby, or that you even knew he was missing,” the woman said to Danny.

“Daddy,” Joe said, holding out his arms.

“Does this child have a mother?” the woman wanted to know.

“She’s asleep-we were both asleep,” Danny told her. He took little Joe from the woman’s tentatively outstretched arms. “Thank you,” Danny said to the van driver.

“You’re still wasted, man,” the driver told him. “Is your wife wasted, too?”

“Thank you,” Danny told him again.

“You should be reported,” the woman said to him.

“Yes, I should be,” Danny told her, “but please don’t.”

Now cars were honking their horns, and Joe started to cry again. “I couldn’t see the sky from the house,” the boy was sobbing.

“You couldn’t see the sky?” his dad asked. They crossed the pavement to the sidewalk, and went into the house to the continuous honking of horns.

“I couldn’t see if Lady Sky was coming down,” Joe said.

“You were looking for Lady Sky?” his father asked.

“I couldn’t see her. Maybe she was looking for me,” the boy said.

The divided avenue was wide; from the middle of the road, or from the median strip, Danny realized that his two-year-old had been able to see the sky. The boy had been hoping that Lady Sky would descend again-that was all there was to it.

“Mommy’s home,” Joe told his dad, as they came into the apartment, which the two-year-old called the um partment; from the moment he’d begun to talk, an apartment was an um partment.

“Yes, I know Mommy’s home,” Danny said. He could see that Katie had fallen back to sleep. On the kitchen table, the writer also noticed that the rum bottle was empty. Had he finished it before going to bed, or had Katie downed what was left in the bottle when she’d come home? (It was probably me , Danny thought; he knew that Katie didn’t like rum.)

He took Joe into the boy’s room and changed his diaper. He had trouble looking at his son’s eyes-imagining them open and staring, unseeing, as the two-year-old in his bright-white diaper lay dead in the road.

“AND THEN YOU stopped drinking, right?” young Joe asked his father. For the duration of the long story, they’d kept their backs to the house they had lived in with Katie.

“The last of that rum was the end of it,” Danny said to the eight-year-old.

“But Mom didn’t stop drinking, did she?” Joe asked his dad.

“Your mom couldn’t stop, sweetie-she probably still hasn’t stopped,” Danny told him.

“And I am grounded, right?” young Joe asked.

“No, you’re not grounded-you can go anywhere you want, on foot or on the bus. It’s your bicycle that’s grounded,” Danny said to the boy. “Maybe we’ll give your bike to Max. I’ll bet he could use it for a backup, or for spare parts.”

Joe looked up at the brilliant blue of the fall sky. No descending angel was going to get him out of this predicament. “You never thought Lady Sky was an angel, did you?” the boy asked his dad.

“I believed her when she said she was an angel sometimes,” Danny said.

The writer would drive all over Iowa City looking for the blue Mustang, but he wouldn’t find it. The police would never spot the rogue car, either. But, back on Iowa Avenue, all Danny did was put his arm around the eight-year-old’s shoulders. “Think of it this way,” he said to his son. “That blue Mustang is still looking for you. Six years ago, when you stood in this street-with nothing but a diaper on-maybe the blue Mustang was stuck in traffic. It might have been several cars behind the white van; that blue Mustang might have been trying to get you even then.”

“It’s not really looking for me, is it?” Joe asked.

“You better believe it is,” his dad told him. “The blue Mustang wants you-that’s why you’ve got to be careful.”

“Okay,” the eight-year-old told his father.

“Do you know any two-year-olds?” Danny asked his son.

“No,” the boy answered, “not that I can think of.”

“Well, it would be good for you to meet one,” his dad said, “just so you can see what you looked like in the road.”

That was when the cook drove down Iowa Avenue, in the incoming lane, and pulled over to the curb, where the father and son were standing. “Get in, you two,” Tony Angel told them. “I’ll drop Joe at school, then I’ll take you home,” the cook said.

“Joe hasn’t had any breakfast,” Danny told his dad.

“I made him a big lunch-he can eat half of it on the way to school, Daniel. Get in,” he repeated. “We have a … situation.”

“What’s wrong, Pop?” the writer asked.

“It seems that Youn is still married,” the cook replied, as Danny and Joe got into the car. “It seems that Youn has a two-year-old daughter, and that her husband and daughter have come to visit her-just to see how all the writing is going.”

“They’re at the house?” Danny asked.

“It’s good that they came after Youn was up. She was already in her room-writing,” the cook said.

Danny could imagine how she’d left their bedroom-meticulously, without a trace of herself remaining, just that pearl-gray nightie tucked under her pillow, or maybe it was the beige one. “Youn has a two-year-old?” Danny asked his dad. “I want Joe to see the daughter.”

“Are you crazy?” the cook said to his son. “Joe should go to school.”

“Youn is married?” Joe asked. “She has a kid?”

“It appears so,” Danny said; he was thinking about the novel Youn was writing-how it was so exquisitely written but not everything added up. The usually limpid prose notwithstanding, something had always been unclear about the book.

“I think you should go to school, sweetie,” Danny said. “You can meet a two-year-old another time.”

“But you want me to meet one, right?” Joe asked.

“What’s this about?” the cook inquired; he was driving to Joe’s school, not waiting for contradictory directions.

“It’s a long story,” Danny told him. “What’s the husband like? Is he a gangster?”

“He’s a surgeon in Korea, he told me,” Tony Angel replied. “He’s attending a surgical conference in Chicago, but he brought his daughter along, and they thought they’d surprise Mommy-and let Youn look after the two-year-old for a couple of days, while Kyung is in meetings. Some surprise, huh?” the cook asked.

“His name is Kyung?” Danny said. In the book Youn was writing, the gangster husband was named Jinwoo; Danny guessed that wasn’t the only element of her story she’d made up, and all along he’d thought her novel was too autobiographical!

“Her husband seems like a nice guy,” Tony Angel said.

“So I’m going to meet Youn’s two-year-old daughter?” Joe asked, as he was getting out of the car.

“Eat something,” the cook told his grandson. “I already called the school and told them you were coming late.”

“It sounds like you may meet the little girl, yes,” Danny told the boy. “But what are you on the lookout for?” he asked Joe, as the boy opened his lunch box and peered inside.

“The blue Mustang,” Joe answered, without hesitation.