We Love Anderson Cooper Page 11

  “Caleb has asthma. I put an inhaler in his backpack and left one with the school nurse, but I still have nightmares where he dies because he can’t breathe.” She tucked her legs under her and closed her eyes. A blue vein shone in her right eyelid.

  “I told Tara it was her turn to support us.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  “Not well.” The house was warm and smelled of mildew. Outside, a dead bush pressed against a window. Neal wanted to dig it up, plant something green. A laptop lay disassembled on the coffee table. Neal admired Felicia’s ability to reconstruct something working from the mess. “Where’s Caleb’s father?”

  “He disappeared a few weeks after I had the baby. I didn’t know him well. I liked having Caleb to myself. Until I got sick. Then I moved in with my mother. This was her house before she died.”

  She had raised the boy alone, and he was fine. It gave Neal something to think about, strengthened an argument he was already making to himself.

  * * *

  On his way to pick up Avery from school to take her to a psychologist, Neal realized the money was still in the glove box. He’d considered bringing it into the house but was afraid Tara would discover it. He pulled over, stuffed it into the bank envelope, and tucked the envelope behind the driver’s side visor.

  As soon as Avery got into the car, she snapped open the glove box and rummaged inside. Next she searched the center console. “Where is it?” she said.

  He was starting to hate her. He still loved her, but he also hated her. “None of your business.”

  As he pulled into a busy intersection, Avery lowered the visor and found it.

  “Leave that alone,” he said.

  “I need a hundred.” She took down the envelope.

  “You can’t have it.”

  “It’s for a friend. You don’t know her.”

  “I’m not kidding.” When he tried to seize it, she held her hand against the passenger window out of his reach. The car swerved, but he righted it. “What does your mystery friend need it for?”

  “She’s on the soccer team but can’t afford the fees.”

  He felt sorry for the girl, but she wasn’t his problem. Or maybe Avery was making her up. “I’m not giving your friend money. She should ask her parents.”

  “They don’t have it. She’s on scholarship.”

  “We don’t have it, either. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I deliver pizzas.”

  “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I don’t give a fuck.”

  Neal leaned over and grabbed her arm. All he was to her was a goddamn ATM. That’s all he was to any of them. Tara wanted him to pay for a house straight out of Better Homes and Gardens. His daughters expected new cars, top-of-the-line imports, once they got their licenses. He couldn’t imagine putting them through the private colleges they would choose, though he knew he was being a hypocrite, having attended an Ivy League school himself. But then, look where that had gotten him.

  The sound of the impact—mashing of metal and glass, explosion of airbags—wiped out everything else. The interior flashed white. The car spun, lifted off two wheels, and bounced down again.

  Neal was shoved back in his seat, eyes closed. When he opened them, the BMW faced oncoming traffic. Avery’s head angled to one side, bathed in blood. Her forehead pressed against the mangled door, and her eyes were half closed, unblinking. The side airbag hadn’t deployed. Neal smelled burning metal and rubber. He wanted to reach out to Avery but was afraid.

  The bank envelope was at her feet, intact. Neal lifted it and crammed it into his pocket. Even amid the chaos, he realized he might need it.

  Later, after an ER doctor examined and released him, after an officer cited him for reckless driving and he called a criminal lawyer, Neal stood trembling next to his daughter’s hospital bed, horrified at what he had done. He had nearly killed her. She had broken her shoulder and three ribs. Her hair was a patchwork, shaved in half a dozen places where the doctors stitched her scalp. A jagged cut furrowed her right cheek. He held himself accountable for each and every injury. When a nurse came in to adjust the IV, Neal stared at Avery’s blanket, ashamed. Taking in his daughter’s injuries, he couldn’t help but feel his family would be better off without him.

  Tara sat on a chair on the opposite side of the bed, clutching Avery’s hand. Asleep under a heavy dose of painkillers, Avery didn’t know how she looked. When she found out, she would blame him for destroying her life, for every glance she would get that was curious rather than admiring. He blamed himself. When he’d reached for her arm, the light turned red, but he didn’t see it and continued into the intersection. An SUV rammed the passenger side of the BMW. If the driver of the SUV hadn’t slammed on his brakes, Avery would be dead.

  Allie stood behind her mother, staring at Avery. “Is she going to be all right?”

  “Yes,” Tara said. “It’ll take some time. She’ll need your help.”

  “What about her face?”

  “We’ll do plastic surgery. You’ll hardly notice.”

  “Mom?”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m glad it wasn’t me.”

  “That’s okay, baby.”

  Tara’s phone buzzed and after checking to see who it was, she left the room and was gone for twenty minutes.

  Allie fell asleep in a chair. When Tara returned, she motioned Neal into the hall. Since the morning, she’d aged. New lines appeared beneath her eyes. She’d run her fingers through her hair so often it looked slept on. “While you were in X-ray, I talked to Avery’s psychologist. He said we should be prepared for her learning disabilities to worsen. She’s going to need a lot of extra support.”

  A responsible father would make sure Avery got what she needed. Especially after causing the accident. Neal had once been that man but wasn’t any longer. “BMW will pay for it. The side airbag never opened.” He’d already decided a lawyer would jump at the case.

  “What happened, anyway?” she asked.

  Bright light bounced off the walls and the linoleum floor. It seemed an appropriate place for an interrogation. “We were arguing and I didn’t see the red light.”

  “Arguing about what?”

  Neal hesitated, but Avery was bound to tell Tara. She might as well hear it from him. “Cash she found in the car. She wanted to keep it.”

  Tara had rushed to the hospital from work and still wore her tailored gray suit and narrow pumps. She leaned against the wall, uncomfortable in the shoes or the conversation, or both. “How much was it?” she asked.

  “A lot.”

  She wrapped her arms around her chest. “You’re planning to leave us.”

  “You’re the one having an affair.”

  “We just talk.”

  There was pain in her voice, but Neal couldn’t help noticing her use of the present tense. “You never meet in person?”

  Carrying a stack of clean sheets, a nurse’s aide glided by.

  “What if we do?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  * * *

  Neal spent the next day in the hospital with Avery, who had been given Tramadol and slept most of the time. When she was awake, she refused to speak to him unless she wanted something. In the hospital gift shop, he bought the copies of Elle and Vogue she asked for.

  “I’ll never look this good. Not anymore,” she said, when he handed them over, her speech a beat slower than usual. A few minutes later, she closed her eyes, and the magazines slipped to the floor.

  “My life is over,” she said when she woke up. “I hope you’re happy.” There was nothing he could say that wouldn’t make her angrier. She told him to get her a Diet Coke and a salad. “Not from the cafeteria. From the deli on Lakeville.”

  He doubted she’d have the appetite for it but was glad for the break. He walked to the store. Before he went in, he called Felicia. “If the airbag had deployed, she wouldn’t have been injured,” he said.

  “Bad things happen. She’ll be a
ll right.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes. You want to come by?”

  “Not now.”

  He returned with Avery’s lunch. About to enter the room, he heard her sobbing. If he went in, she’d stop, so he sank to his heels and waited.

  “It’s about time,” she said, when he brought in the food, her voice quiet. “You took forever.” Neal gathered crumpled tissues from the bed, dropped them into the trash. The food sat on the bedside tray, untouched.

  Tara arrived after work, and Neal left, driving her Buick, stopping at home to pack a suitcase before heading to the pizza shop. Tara would find someone to replace him, perhaps already had.

  A time would come when he would regret leaving while Avery was still in the hospital, when he would ache for his girls, whom he still loved, and when he would question abandoning Tara despite what she had done. But for now, Neal felt only relief.

  Mama Jane kneaded dough without looking at it, pressing it and folding it over itself. The dough looked pure and smelled ripe with yeast. Neal briefly wished he were a pizza chef instead of a delivery guy, but then realized he’d be stuck in the tiny overheated store.

  Neal delivered to a regular who asked how he was and to several new customers, all of it uncomplicated and pleasant. He didn’t even mind the Buick. It would turn into a beater, cracks in the windshield he couldn’t afford to fix, stains in the carpet, and half a dozen mysterious dents. Used pieces of gum would continue to roll around the floor, pelting Neal’s shoes and reminding him of the family he’d once had, until the last one disappeared in a seat’s floor track, and they were gone.

  Couch

  It was a strange couch for a therapist’s office. It was so tall, a grown man sitting on it felt like a child, his feet dangling inches from the floor. The cushion was so soft, it swallowed large women, prolonging their stay. Though covered in raw silk, the seams were frayed and revealed crumbling foam. Penelope would not have chosen such a couch, but she had inherited it from her grandmother just as she was starting her practice twenty years before on a shoestring budget. Over the years, though the couch deteriorated and her practice grew, she couldn’t bring herself to replace it. Without quite realizing it, Penelope had come to believe the couch was responsible for her success. So she ignored the cracks in the legs, the way the frame creaked, telling herself it had many more good seasons.

  At two o’clock, Penelope stuck her head into the waiting room and greeted Estelle Markowitz. The elderly woman had lost her husband, a man she hadn’t cared for and whom she had spent forty years berating. Rocking on the couch, Estelle wept because she missed her husband and because she had wasted her life with someone who picked his teeth until he had none left to pick. Then he switched to adjusting his dentures, a habit Estelle found even more repulsive. She told all this to Penelope, who clucked and nodded and said, “What a terrible shame” and “I’m so sorry.” Thinking about her own failed marriage, Penelope let out a deep sigh that startled her client.

  Penelope sat across from Estelle in a swivel chair that allowed her to reach for the tissues on her desk and roll to the couch all in one continuous motion. Although Penelope never would have admitted it, and was hardly aware of it herself, she enjoyed rolling around the office, even if it was to deliver tissues to a client who was crying. She was a short, heavy woman, and rolling made her feel light. She allowed the client a single tissue, never surrendering the box, so she might have an excuse to swivel and roll several times during the session.

  The couch caught a number of Estelle Markowitz’s tears, just as earlier in the day it had absorbed Jack Green’s, and the day before, Roger Barber’s. Over two decades, so many tears had landed on the couch, the cushion was shot through with salt. In the summer, patients experienced a mysterious burning sensation on the backs of their exposed legs, but at one hundred and eighty dollars an hour, it didn’t seem worth mentioning.

  When her fifty minutes were up, Estelle shoved the soggy tissues into her purse and wrote out a check.

  “Same time next week?” Penelope asked.

  “Yes,” Estelle answered, because she still felt like crying. Estelle Markowitz had been riding the bus from her Upper West Side apartment to Penelope’s office every Tuesday afternoon for two years, but it was as if her husband had died yesterday. She had a difficult time climbing off the couch. She felt for a moment—although she knew it was ridiculous—that the couch was restraining her. When she finally freed herself, she heard a loud groan as the worn-out frame contracted.

  “Everything all right?” Penelope asked.

  Estelle wondered briefly whether Penelope was addressing the couch. “I had a bit of trouble getting my footing.”

  “You’re not dizzy, are you? Perhaps you’d like to sit in the waiting room until it passes.” The chairs in the waiting room were from an office supply store and to Penelope’s knowledge had never given her clients any trouble.

  At three o’clock, Penelope met with Tara, whose boyfriend, Axel, had infected her with herpes before dumping her for her best friend. Tara touched her tongue ring to her lip and related all the nasty things Axel said about her. Only half were true, she assured Penelope. Picking at the bandages on her wrists, Tara said she couldn’t live without Axel.

  “Tell me about your childhood,” Penelope said, thinking about her own past and the heartbreak she experienced each time her father chose her delicate sister to ride in the truck with him as he delivered cartons of Pepsi to soda shops on Long Island. Penelope dabbed her eyes. Then she rolled to Tara and offered her a tissue, but the young woman preferred to wipe her leaking nose on the sleeve of her black spandex shirt, which was no fun for Penelope. Large tears splattered the couch, and the girl tried to wipe those with her sleeve, too. It was Tara’s third session, and Penelope had the feeling she’d be coming for a while.

  After Tara left, Penelope opened the door to her office closet and stared at the gym bag she’d packed ten weeks before. She hadn’t scheduled a four o’clock so she could beat the after-work rush at the health club. She’d never experienced the rush, but she could imagine it: svelte twentysomethings in leotards pedaling to earsplitting hip-hop. Designer breasts to match their designer running shoes. Penelope hadn’t been to the club at all since she signed up at the end of a tour given by a half-naked body builder, who complimented her eyes and touched her lightly on the back while handing her a pen. She grabbed her coat and shut the closet door before the bag could escape, leaping into her hand and dragging her off to the place.

  On the front of the door, a dog leash hung from a metal hook. Its leather was worn and cracked, chewed in one spot from the time she had tied Jung outside a coffee shop and lingered over the crossword. As Penelope massaged the rough strap between her fingers, she pictured the dog’s charcoal muzzle and brown eyes.

  She went to Murphy’s, where the bartender poured a double Scotch without her having to ask. He was young and handsome, with red hair and blue eyes, and he made Penelope feel old. She didn’t know why she kept coming back. It was a place she had come with her ex-husband, one of the few things Dion surrendered in a bitter divorce. She often imagined Dion’s face reflected in beer steins waitresses carried to off-duty cops who huddled in antique oak booths.

  Before the divorce, Penelope would rush home after work to take their German shepherds out. Freud and Jung would drag her through Central Park, peeing on every leaf and branch, sniffing the Great Dane in a studded collar and the bichon frise who needed a haircut, sniffing their owners, too. Penelope wrenched a creased picture of the dogs from her wallet and laid it on the bar.

  Penelope still had a key to the apartment she and Dion had shared. She would stop by in the middle of the day sometimes, check his e-mail, and rifle his drawers. From cloudy Tupperware, she would feed Freud leftovers, spooning just enough onto his plate that Dion wouldn’t notice anything missing but might finish dinner a bit hungry. The judge’s final order had given Freud to Dion and Jung to Penelope, but only a
month later, Jung had been diagnosed with cancer. He had lived another six months. Penelope knew she should get another dog—the ASPCA was crowded and her heart was empty—but even five years after the divorce, she couldn’t imagine replacing either dog.

  Halfway through a session the next morning, the couch collapsed. The silk ripped down the middle, the cushion crumpled, and the frame snapped in two, each half pressing onto a trembling Brian Walston who, as it happened, was describing a dream in which the walls were caving in. Penelope didn’t know what to say. None of her standard responses seemed appropriate—not “Of course you feel that way,” or “It’s okay to feel sad,” or even “That must have hurt you,” though that was by far the closest. When she regained her composure, she rose from her chair and helped Brian up. She fed him a muscle relaxant from the stash in her purse, rescheduled his session, and set off to find a new couch.

  She tried Macy’s first. If she had been looking for a leather couch, she could have had her pick in orange or topaz or gray. She had to restrain her impulse to pinch the floor manager’s fleshy arm when he persisted in steering her from one modern couch to another, since—hadn’t she told him?—she wanted something traditional. But when he showed her fabric couches in neutral tones, she hated them. The showroom’s fluorescent lighting tired her eyes. No matter where she looked, the view was the same: row after row of empty living rooms, cardboard books and television sets masquerading as the real thing, and a salesman whose comb-over told her everything she needed to know—he lived alone and ate TV dinners.

  The problem, Penelope admitted to herself over a double latte and a plate of Italian cookies, was that she wasn’t keen on a new couch at all. She wanted her grandmother’s couch. But it was beyond repair.

  She spent the afternoon hunting through SoHo boutiques filled with furniture from the 1960s and ’70s. She sat on a black leather couch, its cushion no thicker than a slice of pizza, its chrome frame reflecting the dark lines that stretched across her brow. She ran her hand over a wavy plastic couch but couldn’t picture it in her office. Tears would pool on the surface.