This Was Not the Plan Page 4

  “Something like that, Hector. Good to be home.”

  “Must be hard to be away from your son.”

  “It’s the worst.”

  Hector nods solemnly. Unable to make small talk with yet another person, I turn and stare at the elevator doors. The lobby falls silent except for the static hum of Hector’s radio. I’m so tired that it takes some effort to remain standing. I briefly consider sitting cross-legged on the floor, but mercifully the elevator doors ping open, and I step inside.

  “Good night, Hector,” I call over my shoulder.

  “Good night, Mr. Goldwyn.”

  • • •

  The apartment is dark and quiet when I enter. I tiptoe past the kitchen, which still holds the faint scent of roasted chicken. My heart aches a little when I see Caleb and Zadie asleep together on the couch. He’s wearing his favorite Dora the Explorer pajamas and the rainbow-striped socks he insists on wearing to bed every night. His fuzzy blond head rests on her thigh; her hand lies gently on his shoulder. His pink fleece blanket—his “buddy,” he calls it—has fallen to the floor. The television screen is lit but blank, the movie they watched long since over. I wonder, my heart heavy, how long he waited up for me.

  I shed my shoes in the front hall so as not to wake them. When I go over and lift Caleb off the couch, his head lolls onto my shoulder.

  “Mmmm-buh,” he mumbles, his eyes twitching as though he’s mid-dream.

  Zadie sits up and looks around, disoriented. “You’re home,” she whispers, her voice still heavy with sleep. “What time is it?”

  “Late,” I whisper back. “I’m going to bring him to bed.”

  She nods silently, her eyes flickering at half-mast.

  I carry Caleb down the hall. His room always smells the same, like fresh-baked bread and Play-Doh. An elephant-shaped humidifier whispers away in the corner. A fire engine wails past outside. My arms tense around him, but he doesn’t stir.

  I have to step over the army of stuffed animals ringing his bed. Several of Zadie’s old My Little Ponies are the first line of defense. In the shadows, I can make out Roger the Dinosaur and Mr. Meatball the Bulldog, and Sylvester the Squirrel, all propped up against the dust ruffle. Elmo and Grover stand guard at the foot while Steve the Gorilla looms near the headboard. Their beady eyes glint back at me in the darkness, open and alert, ready to chase the monsters away.

  “More, Daddy, more,” Caleb always says whenever I line up the animals for him. “Aunt Zadie puts all the animals out. You have to do it right. They protect me while I sleep.”

  Indeed, Zadie has put out all the animals. There must be thirty tonight, more than usual. This is a bad sign. The number of animals is directly proportional to the shittiness of Caleb’s day.

  Caleb’s had more than his fair share of shitty days. There’ve been days so shitty that “shitty” doesn’t begin to suffice as an adjective: Mira’s memorial service; our first Thanksgiving without her; Mother’s Day. There’ve been countless run-of-the-mill shitty days: a kid on the playground makes fun of the way he’s dressed; some well-meaning but underinformed grown-up asks him where his mommy is. There are days that start off well but devolve into unexpected shittiness: Caleb finds a photo of Mira he hadn’t seen before; he watches a television commercial in which a mom hugs a boy about his age. There are days that are just plain old shitty, for reasons neither he nor I can fully understand or articulate.

  And then, there are what I call disaster days. After Mira died, Caleb became obsessed with natural disasters. First, it was hurricanes. Hurricanes Danielle and Earl swept the eastern seaboard the summer after Mira’s plane went down. In an epic fail fathering moment, I let Caleb sit on my lap while I watched some of the CNN coverage about the storms. He didn’t sleep through the night for weeks after that. He still occasionally has a nightmare about the ocean “rising up and eating him.”

  After the hurricanes, it was volcanic eruptions. How big is Mount St. Helens? Is it active? When did it last erupt? How far, exactly, is Washington State from New York City? Caleb’s preschool teacher called me in to discuss his seemingly boundless curiosity about Pompeii. Lately we’re on to earthquakes. Last week, Caleb made me take down the framed photo over his bed for fear it would fall on him should an earthquake hit in the middle of the night. He keeps telling me we have to bolt all the furniture to the walls, too, just in case. He found a checklist, God knows where, of items we absolutely need for our earthquake kit—we have six of the twenty-three—and has put a collection box in the kitchen to “raise money” for said kit. If anyone in the Los Angeles area is interested, Caleb is willing to consult for a fee.

  It doesn’t take a genius or a psychiatrist to figure out what this disaster obsession is all about. I do, however, wonder why Caleb’s focus seems to be on disasters of the natural variety. There was nothing natural about the way Mira died, after all. Maybe he’s just working his way through some disaster handbook, with hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes appearing before plane crashes and terrorist attacks. Or maybe the idea that a human being could be responsible for widespread death and destruction is simply more than he can handle at this point. Hell, it’s more than I can handle. If Mira had been killed by lightning instead of Chip McCleary, would I be any less sad? No, but it’s possible I’d be less angry. Not to mention less guilty, because, after all, it was my fault that she was on that flight in the first place.

  • • •

  Caleb rolls onto his side when his head hits the pillow, his body curling into itself like a shrimp. As I pull away, his body convulses and he lets out an anguished cry.

  “I’ve got you, buddy, everything’s okay,” I say. I lie down next to him and stare up at the glow-in-the-dark stars affixed to the ceiling. I can smell the alcohol on my breath as I begin to drift off into sleep.

  After a while Caleb stirs, rousing me from my state of semiconsciousness. I lean over and kiss him on the back of his head. “I love you, bud,” I whisper. He doesn’t respond. I stay for a minute longer, listening to his labored breathing before I slip out of the room and close the door silently behind me.

  • • •

  “I’m sorry about dinner.”

  Zadie, who’s fluffing the pillows on the couch, doesn’t stop what she’s doing.

  “It was just one thing after another. I felt like a character in Super Mario Bros., just endlessly running through level after level of weird partner-created booby traps.”

  “Wow,” she says, nodding thoughtfully. “So, how much did you have to drink tonight, exactly?”

  “Some. Too much. But seriously, I’m sorry. I know you had plans tonight.”

  “It’s fine, Charlie. Really, it was no big deal.” She looks tired, maybe a little disappointed, but not angry. I almost wish Zadie would get angry with me sometimes. I certainly deserve it.

  “You’re not mad?”

  She sighs. “No, I’m not mad. I know how demanding your job can be.”

  “Was Buck pissed?”

  “Buck will survive.”

  “I sent you some texts. Did you get them? I was worried when I didn’t hear back.”

  “Oh, no.” She shakes her head. “Caleb dropped my phone in the toilet. Sorry, didn’t mean to worry you.” She laughs sheepishly. “Anyway, I’ve got to be honest: it was probably a good thing you were out there making money, because this afternoon set you back, at least a couple grand. Caleb spilled juice on Mrs. Goodrich in the elevator, so I offered to pay for her dry cleaning. Then he broke the lamp in the living room, somehow returned home from the park with only one shoe, and just for fun, he threw my new iPhone in the toilet. Oh, and he’s refusing to wear pants now, so I caved and bought him a pair of turquoise Jeggings. Don’t look at me like that. At least they’re pants. You should see the outfit he was trying to get me to buy him. To cap things off, Norman ate a plastic kiwi from Caleb’s play kitchen, so we spent two hours at the veterinary hospital—which, by the way, I think you’re single-handedly keeping in business.�
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  “Superb. Remind me to get you upgraded to a platinum Amex.”

  “The receipts are in the kitchen.”

  I sigh and sink into an armchair. Suddenly I feel excruciatingly tired. My head throbs from the beginnings of a hangover. I lean my head back on the cushion and wonder if I have the energy to make it down the hall to my bedroom.

  “You all right?” Zadie says, frowning down at me. “You look kinda green.”

  “Yeah. I’m fine. You should go to bed. Sorry I kept you up.”

  “No worries.” She pauses, biting her lip. “Hey, Charlie?”

  “Yup?”

  “So I was thinking, now that your big case is over, maybe you could take a little time off?”

  “What would I do with time off?”

  “Take Caleb on a vacation. Some fresh air would do you both good. Fresh air and sleep.”

  “Zadie, I’m up for partner this year. I really can’t afford to slow down.”

  “Yeah.” Another pause. “Honestly, I’m worried about you, Charlie. Ever since, you know, the hours you’re working . . . well, it just can’t be healthy. It’s been years of this. They can’t expect you to keep up at this clip.”

  “No one’s expecting me to do anything.” I’m slurring my words, I realize, but I’m too tired to care. “I like being busy. It keeps me sane.”

  Zadie nods. I can tell she’s not buying what I’m selling, but she knows better than to argue.

  “I haven’t been around enough for Caleb. I have to be better about that. But I’m doing this for him. You know I am. I want him to have all the things we didn’t have growing up. The kid lost his mom. I can’t ever make up for that. But a better life—well, that I can give him.”

  “I know,” Zadie says. She stares at some indeterminate spot on the carpet. “You’re doing a great job, Charlie. I just thought—”

  “I know. A vacation.”

  “Maybe just, like, a long weekend or something.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Okay.” She gives me a brisk nod. “I’m going to hit the hay. Get some rest. You look wrecked.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” I murmur as my eyelids begin to shut.

  “We love you, Charlie.” It’s the last thing I hear before I fall into the deepest, longest sleep I’ve had in months.

  Pizzazz

  I roll over and reach for Mira. Instead of her slim waist or soft, round breasts, my hand hits a hot body covered in thick bristle-brush hair. I open my eyes to find Norman, his head on the edge of my pillow, staring directly at me. I realize I’m scrunched up in the corner of my bed, while Norman’s seventy-pound body stretches out like a slinky across the rest of it. He appears to have recovered nicely from yesterday’s kiwi incident. He lets out a gleeful yowl when he sees that I am awake and presses his cold snout against my ribs, nudging me to get up.

  “Hey, buddy,” I croak. “Give me a sec, okay?” I look around, trying to get my bearings. I’m still wearing yesterday’s clothes. I have a vague recollection of falling asleep in the armchair in the living room; how I found my way to bed is a mystery. In fact, I don’t remember much about last night at all. I close my eyes and dig my thumbs into my temples. My head feels like it’s been crushed in a giant nutcracker. Norman doesn’t care. He barks sharply, then rolls over, spread-eagled, waiting for his tummy rub.

  • • •

  When Mira and I moved in together, she decided that we needed a dog. I wanted to spring for a purebred Labrador or golden retriever. I spent hours scouring the Web for the top breeders in the tri-state area. I filled Mira’s e-mail box with nausea-inducing photos from their websites, of puppies wriggling around in wicker baskets or frolicking joyfully in flowering meadows. Mira politely ignored my e-mails and demurred every time I suggested taking a weekend trip to visit one of the breeders. Little did I know that, for the past several months, she had been quietly volunteering at a shelter downtown. She walked the dogs around the block, groomed them, took them to the vet. One day she came home with Norman, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  Norman’s not going to win any beauty contests anytime soon, and I can’t get him to recognize his own name, much less sit or fetch. He’s also got irritable bowel syndrome, a weak stomach, a highly flawed urinary tract, and several skin disorders that cause him to shed, scab, and scale with alarming regularity. I’m on a first-name basis with all the receptionists at the animal hospital down the street. Norman’s kind of like the secondhand Subaru I drove in college. Supercheap sticker price but, in the end, more costly than a Lamborghini and a lot less attractive. Even on his best day of grooming, Norman’s hair is fixed in a perpetual Mohawk and he smells vaguely of old cabbage. But he’s what I got, and I wouldn’t trade him for anything.

  • • •

  Norman’s eyes perk up when he hears the pat-pat-pat of small feet down the hall.

  “Hi.” Caleb appears in the doorway. He slouches against the doorjamb and crosses his arms. He is unhappy with me, evidently, and he wants me to know it.

  “Hey, buddy. I’ve missed you. Can I have a hug?” I say, and open my arms.

  Caleb cocks his head to one side, considering. “Will you take me to camp today?”

  I hesitate, but only for a split second. “I would love to take you to camp today.”

  Caleb holds out a fistful of Mardi Gras beads: a peace offering. He’s wearing several strands of them around his neck, too, as well as Hello Kitty Band-Aids on every finger. Hanging from the collar of his T-shirt is a pair of cat’s-eye sunglasses. If there’s one thing you can say about Caleb, the kid knows how to accessorize.

  “What’s this?” I say, reaching for the necklaces.

  “Pizzazz,” Caleb says matter-of-factly. He hops up onto the bed, his feet dangling over the edge.

  “Hey, thanks.” I loop a few strands around my neck. “How does this look?”

  Caleb studies me with a critical eye. “Good.” He hands me another strand. “But you need more pink.”

  “Who doesn’t? So, buddy, is that what you’re wearing to camp today?” I say this as casually as possible. Zadie and I have discussed ad nauseam Caleb’s recent interest in dressing in girls’ clothing, and what, if anything, should be done about it. Zadie, ever the free spirit, is a big believer in letting kids be their own person. If Caleb wants to wear a tutu to the park, that’s cool with her, as long as he’s warm enough. I’m more hesitant about letting Caleb out the door in anything too pink, too sparkly, or, well, too girly. It’s not that I don’t want him to be his own person; I just don’t want him to be the kind of person who gets the shit kicked out of him at the playground.

  “Yah,” Caleb says breathlessly, smoothing out his multicolored skirt. I can’t help but notice the sparkly purple nail polish that’s been expertly applied (by Zadie? Did she take him to get an actual manicure in an actual salon?) to his small fingernails. “Isn’t it pretty? Aunt Zadie got it for me. We went to Old Nay-bee.”

  “It is pretty, buddy. I just think, you know, maybe it’s hard to go on the swings and stuff in a skirt.”

  Caleb cocks his head, considering this. “Fiona does it,” he finally says.

  “Okay. Fair enough. But, Caleb, do any of the other boys you know do it?”

  Caleb’s face falls, and I know instantly that I’ve made a mistake. “Dora,” he whispers, more to himself than to me.

  “What’s that?” I say, leaning in. I put my hand on his back and I can feel him stiffen against my touch.

  “He wants you to call him Dora,” Zadie announces from the doorway. “Like Dora the Explorer.” She gives me her “Don’t ask” face and holds out a mug of coffee. “Thought you could use this.” To Caleb she says, “Hey, bud! You ready to go to camp?”

  “Actually, I thought maybe I’d take him,” I say, reaching for the coffee. “In fact, I thought maybe I’d take the day off so we can hang.”

  Caleb’s face lights up like a little Mardi Gras float.

  Zadie smiles. “That
would be nice.”

  “I need to get Fiona ready. She’s always late for everything.” Caleb rolls his eyes, presumably about Fiona’s incompetence. Sighing, he heaves himself off the bed and disappears down the hall.

  “Fiona?” I ask.

  “The latest imaginary friend.”

  “What happened to Mr. Beep?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Is that seriously what he’s wearing today?”

  “Please don’t start, Charlie. It’s been a tough week.”

  “I just—”

  Zadie shakes her head as though thoroughly disappointed in me. “Charlie, I really think it’s just a phase he’s going through. I promise you, I don’t want him to get teased any more than you do, but he’s still so young. I don’t think the other kids even notice at this point. And a lot of them are obsessed with Dora the Explorer. Even the boys. Trust me, the other moms and I talk. It has nothing whatsoever to do with sexuality.”

  “Zadie,” I say, frowning, “if Caleb’s gay, that’s one hundred percent okay with me. You know that, right?”

  She hesitates for one second longer than I’d like her to. “Yeah,” she says, looking unconvinced. “Of course. I know.”

  “I’m serious about this. I want Caleb to be his own person, I really do. I just don’t want him to get hurt. Boys can be tough on one another.”

  “Listen, I get it. But Caleb marches to his own drum. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s something we should encourage.”

  “I know. I just—”

  “He’s fragile, Charlie. If you could just see how happy it makes him when I let him get something like that—”

  I’m about to respond when my BlackBerry begins to vibrate on the nightstand. I notice that I have more than one missed call. In fact, I have fourteen. That’s pretty unusual, even when I’m in the middle of a big case.

  “You should take that.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m taking today off.” I let the phone go to voicemail, but almost immediately it starts to ring again.