Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

No wonder they called it a four-letter word.

37To Be Continued

Mia answered the door wearing a Columbia Law School T-shirt that drooped to midthigh. She smelled fresh from the shower, green-apple shampoo or conditioner, her mop of wavy chestnut hair brushed back and for once subdued.

“Yes,” she said. “I checked the peephole.”

Evan said, “And you answered anyway.”

“You look a little banged up.”

Given the ringing in his ears from the close-proximity gunshot, her words came in slightly muted. “Rough day at the office.”

She opened the door and offered a hug. Her body felt distinct beneath the T-shirt, every contour of her pressed against him. For a moment he lost himself in the familiarity of her. His mind cast back to the warmth of her bare stomach against his, her mouth at his ear, the arch of her spine. He felt an urge to slide his hand off the midline of her back to the dip of her waist and wrap her into him.

Instead he patted her shoulder blade once and stepped back. Behind her he could hear the TV, something cartoony and symphonic.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Mia said.

“You asked me to talk to Peter. About the stuff he’s been grappling with. Your husband—he died when Peter was three, right?”

“Good memory.”

Evan had gone upstairs only to burn his clothes from the impound lot and grab a shower. Standing under the pounding heat of the jets, he’d realized that if he felt lost in regard to Veronica, Peter must have felt the same way about his father. But was trying to process it with a nine-year-old brain.

And that no matter how busy Evan was dodging missiles and mercenaries, he owed it to the boy to try to clear a few obstacles from his path.

Not that he had any idea how to do that.

Mia beckoned him in. “He earned a bit of screen time this week,” she said somewhat defensively. “And tomorrow’s an admin day, so no school.”

Evan said, “I won’t tell anyone.”

Peter’s head popped up above the back of the sofa. “Evan Smoak!”

As Peter zipped into full view, Evan saw he was wearing pajama bottoms and another man’s dress shirt, the tail and front hems swaying down past his knees. The fabric was wrinkled, the collar out of whack, and Evan wondered if he’d been sleeping in his father’s shirts, too.

Peter tried to engage Evan in an elaborate handshake that he couldn’t keep up with. “No,” Peter said, seizing his hand and forcing it into various contortions. His fingers were grubby, sticky with some sugar residue, but Evan restrained himself from drawing away or commenting.

He blundered his way through the ritual, looking over at Mia, who grinned at his discomfort. “I’m gonna finish the dishes,” she said. “Why don’t you two watch TV.”

Peter made a fist, yanked it back beside his waist. “Yesss.” He grabbed Evan’s arm and pulled him around the couch, flopping onto the cushion.

Jerked down next to the boy, Evan grimaced against a rib bruise he’d sustained in his death match with Keller.

On the television a donkey-boy cried out, “Mama, Mama!” braying and kicking everything in sight, and then Pinocchio sprouted equine ears and tugged at them in horror.

It was one of the few children’s movies Evan was familiar with. He remembered watching it on Papa Z’s crappy console TV with its wooden frame, the reception fuzzed by static. How the lost boys of Pride House had fanned out around the screen on the worn carpet of the living room, transfixed like toddlers at story time. What had the movie of a motherless boy meant to them all? To Andre?

What had it meant to Evan?

On the floor beside the couch rested a poster board with color-printer photos pasted haphazardly on it, apparently drying. A crayoned oak tree with the pictures dangling like fruit from the limbs—Mia; Peter’s father, Roger; Mia’s brother and parents; and so on.

The stupid family report.

Evan snuck a peek at Peter, but he was focused intently on the movie. They watched a few minutes, Evan glancing over at Peter from time to time, gauging an opening. His own childhood, devoid of heart-to-heart talks, had left him ill-prepared for this.

“He’s a puppet,” Peter said. “But he wants to be a real boy.”

Evan nodded. “Why do you think that is?”

“Duh,” Peter said. “Everyone wants to be real. But I guess…”

“What?”

“I guess you could get hurt more. ’Cuz wood, you know? But once you’re real, it’s scarier.”

Evan thought about the Ten Commandments, how they wrangled the world into a rigid order. His penthouse upstairs, airtight and defended against intrusion. Clean hard surfaces, every item in place, accounted for. So comforting and so lifeless. Not a single mess or splinter, every rough edge sanded down, smooth as the limbs of a marionette.

Very much opposite to the chaos engendered in him at the thought of Veronica. This person he was bound to, human and flawed, blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh. He recalled her hands on his shoulders, the tinge of chardonnay on her breath. She’d gazed at him with maternal adoration. And recoiled from him in disgust when he told her what he’d been trained to be.

Maybe that’s what intimacy was, a discomfort like the burning he’d felt in his chest when Joey had told him she could take care of herself. A sense of dread at what could go wrong, a stifling of fear, a baring of the vulnerable self to the judgment of someone else. The jagged edge of one soul meeting another, tearing and rending, a connection and a diminishment both. All that imperfection, all that friction—it wore down the tread, expending rather than preserving.

What if that was the point?

To expend ourselves in the care of people who mattered?

Without that, what was there to preserve?

He felt a rush of grief that he’d taken this long—the better part of four decades—not even to learn this but to consider it. Once again he pictured Veronica crouched over that marble newborn in the cemetery. He was so much like that inanimate likeness rendered in stone, carved into a facsimile of a human being. What had Veronica told him in Bel Air? To survive you had to shut off parts of yourself, what you felt, what you reacted to. He’d certainly expended himself in the service of others, for Andre and those he helped, but now all those missions lay revealed to him for what they were—proxies for actual intimacy, surrogates for real connections that could pierce through his defenses and touch him at the tender core.

Joey mouthing, Thank you , as he drove away from her.

Veronica’s hazel eyes glazed with emotion and champagne.

Peter swimming in the rumpled pinstripe shirt of his dead father: Once you’re real, it’s scarier .

Evan felt that heat moving through him once again and blinked a few times to regain his focus. He noticed he was clenching his jaw and relaxed it, bringing himself back to this couch, this living room.

Pinocchio was following Jiminy Cricket now, pursuing his conscience up a craggy hillside and leaping into the black, black sea.

Peter was watching Evan. “What are you thinking about?”

Evan cleared his throat, which he was surprised to find needed clearing. “How much wiser you are than me.”

“When you were my age?”

“Maybe now, too,” Evan said.

Peter beamed.

Evan tried to find what to say next, but this wasn’t his language. His head felt murky, words just out of grasp. He picked a starting point. “Your shirt’s big.”

Peter looked down, picked at it. “It was my dad’s.”

“Do you remember him well?”

“Not really.” That raspy nine-year-old voice still upbeat, contemplative. “I remember the scruffles on his cheeks when he kissed me. And some kind of whaddayacallit he wore. Like, to smell good?”