David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

“I’m Max. I guess Benji told you that already.”

“He did.”

“And you’re Claudia.”

The easy relief she’d felt in the weeks after the hospital had long ago hardened into a sense of the rightness of her decision. She lived, protected, in its shell. But sometimes, not often, but sometimes a feeling of dread crept in. Where was he? What was he doing? Was he smart or skinny or perpetually scared? Was he loved? Very occasionally, she walked the city streets fearful that a child on the sidewalk would tug her coat sleeve and call her Mommy. Once, three years after the fact, she bought a birthday card with a baby giraffe on the front, but having no place to send it, fed it to the paper shredder with a stack of canceled checks.

“I’d love the chance to talk to you,” Max said.

“Yes. Yes.”

“In person? Do you think we could meet in person?”

“Mm-hmm. I was about to say.”

“Cool.” A short, satisfied laugh came at her like a siren. He asked her a few other questions, as if trying to make chat at a cocktail party with a committed mute, then said, “When do you think?”

“Soon. I have a few things here,” she said, standing and returning to her sketches. A shaking hand smoothed the paper as if to display the enormity of her task, the real and blameless unlikelihood of making time. “But soon.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow,” came Benji’s voice. She could have reached through the phone and snuffed him out like a candle, in good conscience.

“Tomorrow?” Claudia repeated, transformed, it seemed, into the most hapless of parrots.

“Cool,” he said smilingly. “Great.”

“Can I talk to Benji?” Claudia asked, applying a steady pressure to her voice to keep the murderousness from seeping into it.

“Sure.”

She heard Max calling him, heard the phone being passed into her brother’s hands, and then the sound of the line going dead.

The call touched a match to Claudia’s fuse. She didn’t know this yet, not fully. In the front office of her mind, her business was simply getting to the boy, but in the back, in the windowless dark, she sat watching a spark dance up to a powder keg, uncertain exactly what part of her life was about to go up in smoke, but too fascinated to pinch it out.

After hanging up, she collapsed on the couch on the eastern side of the apartment and watched what was left of the morning sun spool across the room in a gauzy strip. Fiery, golden, imperative, the light rolled out like a carpet that led to the bedroom, where her suitcase awaited packing. When Oliver got home from his workout, freshly showered but still sulking, she pushed him onto the bed and, tearing his clothes from him, fucked him without fully removing hers. When it was over, she rolled onto her side, facing away from him, and doubled up her pillow.

“I got a phone call,” she said.

He rested his chin on her shoulder as she spoke, listened without interruption, which was Oliver’s virtue as much as his downfall. She couldn’t help wondering if it mattered whether she chose to discuss the child who turned up out of nowhere or the review of the newest restaurant on the block. If he registered the difference.

“Max Davis?” The first words out of his mouth.

“That’s his name.”

“Max Davis, the cellist Max Davis?”

Claudia turned. “Benji said he’s a musician.”

“You know Max Davis.”

“I do not know Max Davis. Did you hear anything I just said?”

He did, he assured her. He did. He pulled her onto her back so she was looking up at him. “The Bach cello suites? The recording I gave you last Christmas? That’s Max Davis! How cool is that?”

“Cool?” Claudia asked.

“I missed seeing him the last time he was in town.”

She kicked herself off the bed and went to the closet to retrieve her bag.

“What? Are you mad?”

“Am I mad?” She posed the question calmly, like a Buddhist sending a quest for insight out into the universe, not expecting an answer.

“I’m so many things at this moment, Oliver. It’s hard to pick just one.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I tell you what I just told you and you’re — what? — jonesing for comp tickets to the philharmonic.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Thinking? No, you weren’t.”

“But this isn’t a total shock, is it? I mean, we knew this day might come. It was always a possibility, right?”

“It’s a pretty big fucking shock to me.” She flipped open the top of her weekender and said, “Grab me my gray sweater?”

“Take the big bag,” Oliver said. “I’m coming with you.”

“No. No. I’m doing this alone.”

He said her name as if she were a toddler and he, cowed, afraid of a coming tantrum.

“You stay here and listen to Bach.”

He got up and got the sweater. “Don’t be like that. Let me come. I want to be with you. And not because I want to meet.”

“No.”

She often wondered what formed the foundation of her husband’s reliable cluelessness. He loved her so, and yet could life be that mystifying? Could she? What was she to make of the fact that Oliver had forgotten four of her last ten birthdays or his habit of talking ball scores with the bartender while other men sidled up and offered to buy her a drink? More than once, Benji had assumed the role of his brother-in-law’s apologist. He praised Oliver’s lack of jealousy as a rare and covetable evolutionary step, suggested that addle-mindedness was sometimes nothing more than that, and Claudia took heart. She found it more convenient to let her troops be called back from the battlefront, to let her temper be cooled, even if she never completely lost sight of the red flags that troubled the horizon.

She passed the baton of packing to Oliver, knowing that he could run that leg of the race better than she, and retreated to the other side of the apartment with her laptop. She pulled up the Hertz website, but in that moment rental cars might have been the theory of relativity: they were nowhere on her mind.

Oliver stood over the suitcase, considering its insides like a diagnostician as he shucked a blouse from its hanger and folded it atop the others.

“I’m only staying for a day or two,” Claudia called.

He moved to the dresser for a stack of underwear. “You never know what you’ll need.”

True, she didn’t know what she’d need. But she knew, with arresting clarity, for the first time in a long time, what she wanted. How long had it been since she’d thought his name? She pulled up a new window as her fingers raced ahead of her priorities and typed Nick Amato . Google yielded over three million results, with top honors going to a self-styled tween idol filling up YouTube with covers from the Justin Bieber catalog.

As she clicked from page to page, looking for the ghost of the Nick she knew, guilt snaked around her heart like a thorny vine. Why wasn’t Max her first priority? Shouldn’t he be? At some point, didn’t the boy deserve to win out above all else? It pained her to think how disastrously she’d behaved on the phone. Stricken and speechless, she’d done little more than stretch two minutes to their most torturous length, agreeing to meet him simply to get him off the phone. It wasn’t that atonement and tenderness were beyond her, but the apology she felt she needed to make, like a form stepping darkly out of a mist, had its sights set on Nick, not Max.

Claudia scrolled through several pages of YouTube videos of prepubescent homage to a prepubescent Canadian before coming upon a link to Amato & Sons, Contractors Inc. She clicked it, and up popped a functional, utterly frill-less website for the company that Nick Amato Sr. had started years before Nick Jr. was born. Assuming the attractions of a business dedicated to house painting couldn’t possibly seduce an accomplished lawyer from a well-heeled life in the Pacific Northwest (or so rumor had it), Claudia hoped to find an e-mail address for one of Nick’s loyal but less ambitious brothers, but when she clicked “About Us,” she sat face to face with Nick himself, who’d walked out of her life with the steely promise never to enter it again. “Nicholas Amato Jr., President.” He hadn’t lost that easy, affable handsomeness that still had the power to set her heart pounding, though he’d traded in his lanky frame and shoulder-length locks for a brawny body and a salt-and-pepper burr cut. She e-mailed herself the company’s address and quickly closed the window as Oliver, having carried her zippered bag to the door, came forward for a conciliatory kiss. She shut the window on Nick and pulled up a list of links to Max’s name.