The Nest Part 14

Leo had never been an early riser, but since he'd been living at Stephanie's the early morning hours had returned to his day, the hours he used to spend fighting consciousness, not wanting to feel the radiating burn of Victoria's fury from the other side of the bed, not ready for the muddled, self-recriminatory walk to the bathroom for water to soothe his parched, funky mouth, or the inglorious rattle of Advil tumbling into his trembling palm. Those days, there wasn't a single morning he didn't wake and swear the day ahead would be different. And not a single day where he didn't break his promise to himself, usually by midafternoon, gradually denuded by a day of boredom, by the specter of the evening in the company of his bitter, hostile wife.

But these days, he woke as the morning light slowly s.h.i.+fted the sky from black to the watery blue of winter. He'd quietly leave the bed and head to the bathroom, keeping his step light along the warped hardwood floors and stairs that creaked beneath the tiniest bit of pressure. He'd retrieve the New York Times from the front stoop and head into the kitchen to boil water for coffee. Stephanie had the same French press she'd owned when they met, when everyone else he knew thought coffee came brewed from the local deli or a street vendor. Once he'd poured the boiling water over the grounds, he'd sit at the kitchen table and slowly page through the paper, waiting to hear a thump in the pipes, hot water making its way up from the bas.e.m.e.nt, signaling Stephanie was up and had turned on the shower. Around the time he was done with the world and national news, he'd hear the shower turn off with a healthy screech. He'd plunge the center filter on the French press and pour himself a cup.

And it was at that exact moment on the day after meeting with Nathan, sitting in Stephanie's kitchen, watching a fat slice of sun creep across the marble countertop and magnify every discoloration and imperfection, mulling the day ahead, that he started to feel the familiar darkness gathering inside, the glint of fear around its edges. It reminded him of that children's book Melody had loved as a little girl, the one he'd read to her over and over when his parents demanded he babysit, about a French girl with a straw hat and the towering woman-he'd never understood who she was, a teacher? A nun? A nurse?-who had a second sense for trouble. "Something is not right," she would say, abruptly waking in the middle of the night. No s.h.i.+t, Leo thought.

Leo hadn't really trusted this new world order-the pretty house in Brooklyn, the comely redhead moving around upstairs, his triumphant return at Nathan's side. He'd regarded the whole picture warily, like it was an opalescent sh.e.l.l found on the beach that was concealing something unsavory inside-the stink of seaweed, a putrefying mollusk, or, worse, something still alive, its pincers stirred and groping for a tender bit of flesh.

Decisions needed to be made. Deadlines were approaching. He was thinking about who he could send his proposal to; he knew it was worth something. If he wanted to stay, he was going to have to figure out what to do about the money he owed The Nest. If he wanted to stay.

Many days, he'd considered paying off his siblings because it could be nice, the grand gesture, the rescuing hero. But this is what he kept coming back to: What if he needed that money someday? What if he needed an escape hatch? He'd always had one. Thinking about not having one almost made him dizzy. He kept trying decisions on like jackets: stay, go, pay everyone off. In the past, he'd always been able to thrive in this place, the familiar sweet spot of avoidance, keeping a million plates spinning until they all gradually fell and he quickly moved along to something s.h.i.+nier, but this felt different.

Stephanie. He could hear her coming down the stairs now, ready for work, boots pounding the steps hard and fast, too fast; he always braced a little, expected to hear her slip and fall and tumble, but she never did. He'd downplayed the meeting with Nathan, said they'd spent "too much time catching up" and were going to meet again. He would present a milder version of what had happened once he had someone else interested. "Slow down," he said as Stephanie rounded the corner into the kitchen. "You're going to kill yourself on those stairs."

She grinned at him and grabbed a banana from a bowl on the counter. "Already moving too fast for you, Leo?" She peeled the banana, poured milk in her coffee.

He smiled, too, but what he thought, reflexively, was, Here we go.

"Hey," she said. "Were you supposed to read something for Bea? She called me yesterday."

c.r.a.p. Bea. Her pages. "c.r.a.p," Leo said. "I forgot. I'll take a look."

"If recent experience is any indicator, it won't be a long read. Call me at the office if they're decent."

"I guess I'll talk to you tonight," he said, brightly.

"Funny." She leaned over and kissed him. She tasted like banana and coffee, and he pulled her close. He slipped his hands inside her jacket, holding her tight, trying to right whatever was listing inside. He smoothed back her hair and kissed her, deeply, opening himself to her, and the darkness moving through him lightened. She seemed distracted, stiff, so he ran his hand over her silk blouse until he felt her nipple harden and then moved his tongue the way she liked, lightly across her lip first and then harder, more probing, until he felt her relax against him.

"No fair," she said, softly, pulling away. "I have to go to work." Stephanie knew she had to stop procrastinating and tell Leo what was going on. Tonight, she figured, was as good as any night. "Maybe I'll leave early today."

"Sounds good," he said.

She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. "Bea," she said, grabbing her bag. "Don't forget."

AFTER STEPHANIE LEFT, he made another pot of coffee. For the first time in weeks, he didn't have any desire to open his computer. Go to his "office." Do work. The thought of sitting and looking out the small back window to the dreary quilt of adjacent brown yards was depressing. His phone vibrated on the counter. He picked it up to see the incoming call. There it was, again. Matilda Rodriguez. He dimly remembered insisting on getting her number the night of the accident and texting her repeatedly when she was still back in the kitchen getting her things before they headed for the car. She wasn't supposed to call. He was going to have to talk to George. It wasn't only Matilda he was avoiding; Jack was sending daily e-mails about a dinner party for Melody's birthday, and Melody had left a handful of messages asking to have lunch. "Just the two of us. It's urgent."

Something here is not right.

He went upstairs and found Bea's leather bag on the bookshelf where he'd left it, back when he believed he had more important things in play. Maybe the story would be good. Maybe he'd have something useful to say about it. He tried to settle his troubled brain and concentrate on the first few paragraphs. It was about some guy named Marcus. (Leo was surprised to feel a flicker of disappointment that it wasn't an Archie story.) Some guy named Marcus. A wedding. A caterer. A car. Leo's pulse started to race. He flipped through more quickly as words floated off the pages, headlights, severed limb, emergency room, suture. "Tomelo, Mami," he read. "Take it." Christ. He turned back to the first page again. The story was about his accident. The story was about him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

The night Stephanie was planning to tell Leo she was pregnant-but didn't-she came home to find him wearing the same clothes as when she'd left that morning, including the T-s.h.i.+rt he'd slept in. He was apoplectic about Bea's story. He must have started reading right after she left and then spent the rest of the day working himself into his Leo lather. It took her a good five minutes to calm him down enough to understand what was happening, that the story was about his accident and about someone who had been hurt during the accident in ways that Leo was not calm enough-or willing-to explain.

"Did you kill someone?" she finally asked. In the seconds before he answered she was sure that he had, sure that the wild terror she saw in his eyes was because he had to tell her that he'd gotten behind the wheel, inebriated and high, and committed involuntary manslaughter but had somehow gotten off the hook. But he hadn't. A severe injury was all he would say, something that was bad but had also been taken care of and if Bea published this story, he insisted, the truth would be out and everyone who had it in for him would not hold back-all this came out in one invective, evasive stream; it was a lot for Stephanie to take in.

Leo stood in front of her, shaking the pages. "This is bulls.h.i.+t!" he said. "It's an Archie story!"

"It is?" Stephanie was surprised. An Archie story. Interesting. "Is it any good?"

"Are you kidding me? That's not the point!" He threw the pages on the table and a couple of the sheets slowly drifted to the floor. He stepped on one, tearing the paper under his heel. "She's pretending it's not an Archie story-she gave the character a different name-but it is. It's about last summer and there is no way on earth she is going to f.u.c.king publish that story."

"Have you talked to her?"

"No, not yet. I'm not sure I ever want to talk to Bea again."

"Let's take a deep breath and slow down," Stephanie said. She pulled out a chair and motioned to him. He sat and furiously rubbed his head with his hands and gave a sharp groan. His unwashed hair stuck out at odd angles, the day's beard darkened the lower half of his face, and his eyes were bloodshot and a little crazed.

"Maybe she just needs to know how upsetting this is to you. Maybe there's a way to fix the story. She's writing fiction, for G.o.d's sake. It's one story-"

"It's not even finished."

"Okay, so it's just a draft. Even better. Let's take one thing at a time." She managed to calm Leo a bit and eventually coax him upstairs to shower and change while she ordered takeout. She rea.s.sured him that when he came back downstairs, they'd figure out how to talk to Bea who might be many things but was not cruel or unkind.

Stephanie remembered her earlier phone conversation with Bea and wished she'd known then what she knew now. She could have set the stage for discouraging her, warned her that Leo was not happy. s.h.i.+t. Her announcement would have to wait for another day. This was not the night to talk to Leo about fatherhood, not when he was already feeling paranoid and trapped, blindsided.

Stephanie started leafing through her take-out menus, annoyed. This was the part she hated, the part of a relations.h.i.+p that always nudged her to bail, the part where someone else's misery or expectations or neediness crept into her carefully prescribed world. It was such a burden, other people's lives. She did love Leo. She'd loved him in a host of different ways at different times in their lives, and she did want whatever their current thing was to continue. Probably. But she always came back to this: She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot. Or even better, how to sink in and absorb its particular comforts.

On the one hand, she knew that Leo was never going to really change. On the other hand, she knew that Leo had spoiled something for her. She wasn't going to enter into the type of willful ignorance that life with Leo might require, but she wasn't going to settle for less than the charge, the excitement she felt when Leo was around. She was open to love, but she was best at managing her own happiness; it was other people's happiness that sunk her.

She realized (abstractly, she knew) that parenthood was nothing more than being responsible for someone else's happiness all the time, day after day, probably for the rest of her life, but it had to be a little different. It couldn't be the same as feeling responsible for another adult who came to the party full of existing hopes and behaviors and intentions. She and her lovers had always managed to break what they built between them. She never figured out how to nurture the affection so it grew; it always ended up diminished. She knew parents and children could break each other's hearts, but it had to be harder, didn't it?

Stephanie bent to pick up a torn page from the floor and placed it on the table with the rest, which were in disarray. She gathered the pages and put them in order. She sat and started reading from the beginning.

LEO DID FEEL BETTER AFTER A SHOWER. He'd made the water as hot as he could bear, and standing in Stephanie's bathroom as he wiped steam off the mirror, he could see how pink and healthy his skin was. He had lost weight in rehab, and all the running he'd been doing showed. He hadn't let himself go, that was for sure. As he toweled off, he realized that Stephanie was probably downstairs reading. Good. That was easier than explaining to her-in his own words-the details of the accident and its aftermath. Stephanie would know how to handle this; she was an expert at telling people their work needed to be euthanized-she delivered that news all the time-and she was going to have to help him bury Bea's story.

Without even trying, Leo could come up with a list of people, starting with Nathan Chowdhury, who would be only too thrilled to write a scathing expose about his accident, the hand job, the poor caterer from the Bronx hobbling around on one foot. (They would conveniently ignore or somehow downplay that he'd made her a millionaire.) He could see the accompanying pictures, the old drawing of him as King Roach. G.o.d. He hadn't gotten this far-endured rehab, stayed clean for f.u.c.k's sake, protected and carefully camouflaged his savings-just to attract the wrong kind of heat now. Or to end up the laughingstock of New York City, to have people pointing and whispering every time he walked into a room, to be the most e-mailed article on Gawker. He couldn't have this looming over his head as he tried to set up meetings. Stephanie needed to help him put the whole thing to rest quickly.

When he walked into the kitchen, Stephanie was slowly leafing through the pages, repeatedly returning to one toward the middle (he knew which one). She was pale. She looked up at him and, ah, yes, he remembered that look. He fought back irritation.

"You see what I'm saying. It's an Archie story," he said. She sat perfectly still. He watched her, nervously. "Just because she doesn't call the guy Archie-"

"This all happened?" she asked, as Leo walked over to the sink and got a gla.s.s of water. "She lost her foot?"

"Yes."

"Where is she now?" Stephanie said, still not looking at Leo but at the pages spread on the table in front of her.

"I don't know."

"You haven't heard from her?"

"No," Leo said. "Well, kind of."

"Kind of?"

"She's called a few times, but I haven't responded. George's taking care of it. There was a settlement-a very generous one-and part of the agreement was no contact once the papers were signed."

"I see," Stephanie said. "I guess you better get George on the amputee right away."

"I wasn't privy to the terms of the agreement, Stephanie. I was in rehab. But I have to follow the rules and so does she. It's in everyone's best interest, including hers. If she's caught violating the terms-"

"You guys get the other foot?" Stephanie said. She carefully stacked the papers in the middle of the table, smoothing a page that was wrinkled. Leo thought her hand was trembling a little. He sat down next to her.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I wanted to tell you. I really did. But I have a hard time even thinking about it."

"Aren't you a little bit curious?"

"Curious?"

"To see how she's doing. Why she's calling you? G.o.d, Leo, she lost a foot."

"I know she's being taken care of. I know she had the absolute best care. I'm not allowed to be curious and contact her."

Stephanie had one hand on her abdomen like she'd just been gut-punched. "But you wouldn't call her even if you were allowed to, right?" she said. "Out of sight, out of mind? Write a check and move on?"

"I'm not sure how I could help her. And, yes, I do want to move on. That's what I've been trying to do here!"

"The money? Is this why-"

"Yes. Francie funded the settlement from the trust," said Leo. "There's not a lot left, not as much as everyone was counting on, and that's why they're circling around here like f.u.c.king vultures. Everyone wants me to magically come up with what they think they're owed. You can see my predicament."

"Your predicament?"

"How am I supposed to make that kind of sum appear out of thin air? Those three aren't thinking clearly."

"But you're thinking clearly?"

"Comparatively? Very much so."

"I see." Stephanie stood and took a winegla.s.s down from the cabinet, opened a corked bottle on the counter, and poured herself an enormous gla.s.s. She thought about the pregnancy app on her phone. The first day she opened it, she'd paged through all nine months and had been amused to see week sixteen, the one that said, This week your baby is a plum! A Plumb. She dumped the wine down the sink.

"What's her name?" Stephanie asked Leo.

"What difference does that make?" Leo sounded irritated.

"Do you even know her name, Leo?" Stephanie watched him carefully. His cheeks were pink from the shower, his hair slicked back. His eyes were guarded, flinty-ugly within his otherwise lovely face.

"Matilda." He bit the word hard, as if there were something illegal about lingering too long on each syllable. His unwillingness to hold her name in his mouth made Stephanie mad.

"What was that?" she said.

Leo straightened and spoke more clearly. "Her name is Matilda Rodriguez."

"And she was nineteen? She was a teenager?"

"Yeah, well." Leo pictured Matilda's fingers and remembered how she'd nervously licked her palm before taking him in her hand. He shook his head, trying to block the image, which had already caused a regrettable hardening in his pants. "She was old enough," he said.

That was the thing he would take back, the words that evoked the tiny but perceptible flinch from Stephanie. She walked over to the table and picked up Bea's story.

"What are you doing with those?" Leo said.

"What are you going to do with them?" Stephanie gripped the pages in her hands.

"You see why it can't be published. Forget about me," Leo said. The heat radiating from Stephanie alarmed him. "What if Matilda reads it?"

"Matilda's a big reader of literary fiction?" Stephanie said. "You were able to figure that out during your brief car ride?"

"Okay, forget about Matilda," Leo said. "I'm trying to re-create a life here. Rebuild some kind of business. Bea publishes a new Archie story? Come on. That's news. She publishes this story-it's even bigger news and everyone finds out what happened and that's it. I'm f.u.c.ked. Who's going to work with me?"

Stephanie felt dizzy and nauseated. She had to eat. She was afraid she was going to vomit.

"You know I'm right," Leo said, pacing the kitchen now. "You know if this story is published, people are going to know it's really about me. She can call the guy Archie or Marcus or Barack Obama, it's about ME."

"Even if it is about you, Leo," Stephanie said, shoving a cracker in her mouth, trying to steady the room, soothe her gullet, quell her anger, and ignore her fear. "Even if it is about you, and even if Bea gets the thing published, and even if someone reads it and connects it to you-" Stephanie took a long sip of water. Exhaled. "Even if all those things happen, who is going to care?"

It was that last sentence she would call back if she could. That was the one where she saw the s.h.i.+ft, the slightest narrowing of his gaze, the moment when she had-inadvertently and slightly, but clearly in Leo's eyes, concisely in his mind-positioned herself on the wrong side of a dividing line.

That was the thing she would take back.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

Early morning on the Brooklyn waterfront. The sheer number of people out on a brilliantly sunny but bitingly cold February day surprised Leo. The chill of the wooden bench beneath his legs seeped through his wool trousers and heavy coat. The blue sky felt like a harbinger of spring, but the water was still a dire wintry gray. The leather satchel containing Bea's story was on his lap. It had only been days since he read it but it felt like weeks. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind, suppress his rising anxiety, but instead he found himself picturing Matilda's right foot in what would be its waning minutes. Before they got into the car and when she was slipping on her silver shoe, he'd noticed how her toenails were painted bright pink, how the pink glowed against her golden skin, how the elegant arch of her foot sat against the shoe and how, when she stood and looked at him and tugged at her s.h.i.+rt, she was perfectly steady on her two intact feet. Quite possibly the worst thing for him about Bea's new story was this, how it conjured Matilda and everything about Matilda from where he'd buried her deep, deep in a tiny box in some remote corner of his brain.

He reached in his coat pocket for the pack of American Spirit cigarettes he'd bought on a whim but hadn't opened yet, not wanting to further irritate Stephanie by smelling like tobacco. He opened the pack, withdrew a cigarette, and, leaving Bea's leather satchel on the bench, walked over to the railing on the water. He felt sheepish about smoking, which also irritated him. And then he was irritated to feel irritation. Irritation was pretty much his primary sentiment lately, when it wasn't anxiety.

Things were not good inside the little jewel of a brownstone that was Stephanie's. From the street, the rooms behind the new but historically accurate windows glowed with an amber-infused warmth, inviting and cheerful. From the outside, the house looked like the perfect place to take shelter from any variety of storms, but inside? Inside, he and Stephanie were barely maintaining a civil politeness. The softness that had taken root between them since the night of the snowstorm and slowly blossomed into something expansive and occasionally exuberant had collapsed-not a slow leak either, but a sudden deflation, like a sad, sunken souffle.

They'd fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was rea.s.suring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It's why addicts stayed addicts. Why he'd walked away from buying cocaine before the family lunch at the Oyster Bar but now had a neat gla.s.sine envelope in his pocket. Why he was fingering an unlit cigarette in his hand and wondering what to do about Stephanie as he had countless times before.

Leo could see his future with her and he didn't like it: He would be one of those people who started to parcel time into "years clean." He'd build a callus of superiority around his own self-denial and would become, because of the accident and its aftermath, someone with a bifurcated past, all the accomplishments he valued would be relegated to "before," and his narrative would build around the "after"-the accident, rehab, divorce, how he straightened up, straightened out, rebuilt from the beginning. If he stayed, he'd have to divide up his money. He'd have to get a job, like every other chump. Since his meeting with Nathan he'd e-mailed or called countless old contacts and all his inquiries added up to a big fat nothing. A few polite brush-offs at best; some never bothered to respond. He didn't know if Nathan had been p.i.s.sed enough to actually blackball him around town or if he had just gravely miscalculated his own relevance. He didn't want to figure it out.