It was two-thirty in the afternoon when Eliza woke up. She couldn’t sleep on the train, too amped from the coke and Teddy and what had happened to Jude, but by the time she’d gotten home, the sun rising orange above the Manhattan skyline, she was tired enough to crash. Now she threw off the covers and looked down at her body. She was not hungover. She was not enrolled in school. And her mother was not home. She sat up and reached for her backpack on the floor, found the slip of paper on which Teddy had scrawled his brother’s address. East Sixth Street.
In the shower she reviewed the details of last night, trying to recall if Teddy had touched the parts she washed: her wrist, her belly button, her earlobe. He had not touched her excessively. He’d been quiet and polite. The only thing new was her surprise: she’d expected this time to be different. And perhaps worse, she had the feeling that Teddy would not tell Jude what had happened. The night would be lost, a secret between the two of them, as though they’d done something wrong. Only now did it occur to her that they might have. She had done it on a bathroom sink with some guy she didn’t know, in some state she’d never set foot in again. When she did it with guys who knew her, her reputation, her money, her address, at least she was not entirely alone. She would wash off the shame of one weekend with the next.
But she did not want to wash off what had happened last night, and it was because, she decided, she liked Teddy. She had not liked Jeffrey Dougherty or Hamish Macaulay or Bridge. She had only wanted them to like her. With Teddy, though, she didn’t stop when he produced no protection. “Not on me,” he apologized, and she locked her ankles around the fragile length of his torso, as though climbing an unsteady tree, and whispered, “It’s okay.” She’d come so far, the train and all, and Teddy was sweet. He was almost certainly a virgin, disease-free.
Was that it? Did she like Teddy? Perhaps it wasn’t him she’d wanted; she only wanted something to happen. She wanted access into the life Les had left behind, a tunnel out of New York, and now she had it—a mission. Teddy needed her help. When she was dressed, contacts in, teeth brushed, makeup done, she pocketed the address, donned her headphones, and rode the 1 train to the 7 to the 6. Traveling from the Upper West to the Lower East Side could take nearly an hour, but she enjoyed the busy anonymity of the subway. She wondered what Teddy was doing, if he was thinking about her at all, if he’d stayed the night at Jude’s, if Jude was okay. It had been a cold kind of shock to find him facedown in the snow. For a moment, she’d thought he was dead. The evening had been momentous enough already, awkward but complete, and then it had ended on such an unpleasant note. They hadn’t parted on clear terms. She’d wanted to stay with them, make sure that Jude got home all right, but they’d made her get on the train, and with Jude there she and Teddy couldn’t say much but good-bye. What would they have said, if Jude hadn’t been there? And if Teddy hadn’t been there, what would she have said to Jude?
The neighborhood east of Tompkins Square Park was unknown to Eliza. Her mother was the kind of New Yorker who lamented the gentrification of the Lower East Side but, when passing a junkie on Les’s comparatively safe St. Mark’s Place, would grab Eliza’s hand and hurry her by. Eliza burned through two cigarettes while she walked from the Astor Place station, past Les’s building, across Avenues A, B, C (A: you’re Asking for it, B: watch your Back, C: you’re Crazy) and approached D (you’re Dead), watching the addresses, walking purposefully, trying to blend. She turned off her Walkman, kept her ears open. “Wassup, baby girl?” a man called from the top of his steps. But most of Alphabet City was sleeping, bums dozing peacefully in snow-padded alleys and doorways. A spiral of smoke rose out of a metal garbage can, but its effect was more reassuring than spooky. On a clear afternoon like this one she could almost believe the windows had been shot out by stray baseballs. Up ahead, the East River glistened as bluely as Lake Champlain.
On the south side of the street, the buildings were numbered haphazardly. There was no answer at apartment A in the first building she buzzed, and there was no apartment A in the second. The next building was hollowed out—no doors, no windows. She could hear the faint throttle of music, but she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. In the basement of the second building was a narrow storefront. The awning and the shuttered door were both painted the same ochre as the building, and no sign hung above it. At the bottom of the staircase that led to it, the landing was carpeted with trash, but as Eliza moved down the steps, the music became louder, and then very clear. Hardcore. She stood outside for a moment, listening to it.
I’m as straight as the line that you sniff up your nose
I’m as hard as the booze that you swill down your throat
I’m as bad as the shit you breathe into your lungs
And I’ll fuck you up as fast as the pill on your tongue!
Before she could change her mind, she knocked insistently on the metal door. No answer. She knocked again. A few seconds later, the music stopped, and a voice called, “Who is it?”
“I’m looking for Johnny?” she said.
The person on the other side struggled with the door, kicking it several times. Then slowly it squeaked open. Eliza’s eyes alighted on a guitar, a drum set, a card table, a couch, and an orange cat sitting in what looked like a dentist’s chair before landing on the blue-eyed boy of eighteen or twenty who stood in the doorway. His head was stubbled, all but bald, muscular as an apple, but the hair he did have, on scalp and cheek, was as yellow as a toddler’s. His face was heart-shaped: broad forehead, severe cheekbones, chin like a spade. He wore a small gold loop through each earlobe, a strand of wooden beads wound three times around his neck, and although it was nearly as cold inside the apartment as it was out, only a pair of camouflage shorts. From his waistband, the dark, serpentine shapes of tattoos climbed up the downy path to his navel, across the ladder of his ribs, circling the pale sinew of his arms, feathers and scales and flames and gods, sea green and devil red.
Across his chest were the words TRUE TILL DEATH.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered, trying not to stare. “I thought you were someone’s brother.”
He tugged at one of his earrings. The nest of hair in his armpit was golden and sparkling with sweat. “What makes you think I’m not?”
Absently, she introduced herself. She must have looked like a runaway, shivering in her coat, standing on broken beer bottles in a neighborhood she didn’t belong in. Maybe that was why he was so quick to extend his hand—each tattooed from wrist to knuckle with a fat, black X—and smiling, as though any friend of his brother’s was a friend of his, say, “Johnny McNicholas.”
On the way to the pay phone at Tompkins Square Park, walking back across the four avenues, they talked about everything but the boys’ mother. Eliza was brief on that point, because it was difficult, she realized, to relay bad news to a stranger, and because she didn’t really remember what Teddy wanted her to say. She said, “I guess your mom’s missing? He wants to know if you know where she is,” but she didn’t think that was quite right.
She almost said, “He wants to move in with you,” but how could Teddy live with him there? In the glimpse she’d gotten of his apartment, it was surprisingly—even hauntingly—neat, but the couch seemed to be the only place to sleep, and the whole room was warmed by an ancient space heater. She counted three cats. He was paying next to nothing in rent, he’d said, and the place was buried enough to serve as a tattoo studio and big enough to serve as a practice space for his band. “Prewar,” he’d joked. “Private entrance.” While he’d looked for a quarter, she’d explained her tenuous link to his brother—through her mother, Les, and Jude. Acquaintances, four times removed.
They passed two clusters of pay phones with the phones missing entirely, the arterial wires flowing to nothing. Eliza offered him a cigarette, but he declined. He was straight edge—didn’t smoke, didn’t drink.
“I heard the song,” she said, exhaling. “It’s funny, you having a brother that’s, like, the opposite of you.”
“We’re more alike than we look,” he said, and Eliza worried that she’d offended him. She hadn’t wanted to get Teddy in trouble. She hadn’t told Johnny anything about last night.
“I don’t know Teddy that well, actually.”
In the phone booth at the corner of Tompkins, a man was sleeping. Johnny knocked gently on the glass to wake him and, addressing him by name, asked if he could use the phone.
“You got to call your old lady, Mr. Clean?” The man stumbled out of the booth, the smell of urine following him out into the cold.
“You know it, Jack.” One of the man’s eyes coasted luridly over Eliza, staring through her, before he wandered into the park. The tents across the park were blue and yellow and army green, made out of cardboard and bedsheets and tarps, drooping with snow, and she might have thought she was in a third world country, or on a battlefield, or at some abandoned circus, if she hadn’t known she was standing in her own hometown. The park was full of tents, and this was why it was called Tent City, and seeing it she felt a dull stab of shame and distaste. Not long ago she had heard on the news that a man had frozen to death in this park. Or maybe it was another one.
“Is that guy blind?”
Johnny looked up from the number he was dialing. “He’s just a faker. Hang around a sec, would you? Make sure I have the right number?”
She’d been hoping to, of course. She wondered if there was a gracious way to insert herself into Johnny’s conversation. She would linger at a distance, pretending not to eavesdrop, and then tell him not to hang up. She’d ask Teddy how Jude was feeling, if he’d had any word from his mom, what his plans were.
“Prudence, hey, it’s Johnny McNicholas. Teddy’s brother. Remember me?”
The snow that had fallen the week of Christmas had hardened into slick, icy mounds, stretching across the park like the tentacular roots of trees. She missed the cold purity of New England.
“Who did?” Johnny asked.
Eliza thought of the snow that had fallen over them last night, the flakes like small, wet mouths, whispering.
“Where is he?”
Johnny was standing up straight in the booth, gripping the phone cord. Eliza pulled the collar of her coat tight around her ears. She had been too young when her father died to remember her mother’s face when she got the call, but she’d imagined it. She had not known until now that she’d imagined it, but she had, a thousand times; she knew this grim dream as well as she knew her mother’s voice.
Johnny’s eyes froze, and then darted for a place to land, and then pinned her where she stood.
Prudence hadn’t gone with them to the hospital. The vehicle into which Jude’s stretcher was fed had room only for their mother. The sirens had woken her, and by the time she’d found her bathrobe and slippers and dashed down the stairs, the paramedics were already loading the boys into the twin ambulances, their bodies draped in blue blankets, and from the look of them there was no reason to believe that one was alive and one was dead. The same substances were discovered in their systems—THC, alcohol, petroleum distillate, and chlorofluorocarbons—except in Teddy’s there was also cocaine. Whether this distinction was of significance the doctors could not say. Her brother had fallen into a severe state of hypothermia, but Teddy had died of heart failure before he’d had the chance to freeze, had been dead all night behind their house, not far from the bed where Prudence had been sleeping.
She spent two nights at her friend Rachael’s. Rachael’s mother, who was a student at the New England Culinary Institute, practiced her foie gras on them both nights, and each time it tasted marvelous. Rachael’s father kept talking about his frat brother Rusty who’d OD’d in college, and they all went to church on Sunday morning and prayed that Teddy’s soul would be accepted into heaven. Afterward Rachael’s sister took them to the mall to buy black dresses to wear to the funeral, which was held at the same church the day after Jude was released from the hospital.
Beatrice McNicholas wasn’t there. She’d disappeared. Her housekeeping clients were questioned, but nobody had a clue where she’d gone, and as far as anybody knew, she didn’t know her son was dead. After two days, when it was determined that neither of Teddy’s parents could be found, that Teddy’s father couldn’t even be identified, Johnny, Teddy’s closest living relative, barely eighteen (who had borrowed Les’s camper van to make the drive from New York, after Eliza enlisted his help), signed the papers giving permission for his brother to be cremated.
The service was attended by Jude, Johnny, Harriet, Prudence, Kram and Delph and their parents, Rachael and her parents, the guidance counselor and two teachers from Ira Allen High School, and six or eight dutiful, well-dressed students, mostly girls, whose names Prudence knew but Teddy probably hadn’t. They had received permission to miss half of their second day back at school, and arrived on a school bus, the driver of which, a large black woman with pink curlers in her hair, also attended. The minister read a passage about shepherds and lambs. Delph played “Stairway to Heaven” on Jude’s guitar, but it wasn’t tuned. Jude wore a white button-down shirt, navy blue Dockers, a pair of Vans, and a clip-on tie borrowed from Delph.
Before Johnny returned to New York, he went through Teddy’s room in Queen Bea’s abandoned house, taking with him Teddy’s posters and clothes and record collection and the cardboard box of ashes. The rest of the family’s furnishings were sold in a yard sale organized by Kram’s mother, the proceeds from which she later sent to Johnny, folded in a cream-colored note she signed Joan, which he studied for some time before placing the name.
In the ICU, Jude had breathed warm air that tasted like the beach, listening to the Darth Vader rasp of his lungs. Salt water flowed in his veins, sugar and saline, thawing his limbs. His temperature when the ambulance arrived had been eighty-seven degrees. He had been shivering violently—his mother believed he was having a seizure—and if he’d been any colder, they said, his body would have shut down, and soon his heart would have stopped beating.
On the third morning in the hospital, the young doctor who had overseen Jude’s MRI, the one who wore a ballpoint pen speared through her elaborate French twist, led Harriet into her office. When she drew a folder from a stack on her cluttered desk, Harriet knew what was coming: the bill. She had signed three or four consent forms already, on clipboards balanced on her knee beside Jude’s bed, but no one had mentioned money, and she hadn’t mentioned that she didn’t have any. Before the divorce and for brief periods afterward, she had invested in family health care plans of the discount variety, but her children were rarely sick. It was cheaper to pay for Jude’s Ritalin out of pocket than to cover the monthly premiums. For the big things, like the children’s braces, she called Les.
She would, of course, have to call him again. She had called him the day it happened (strangely, he already knew the story—his girlfriend’s daughter and Teddy’s poor brother, who had somehow become associated, had just burst through the door with the news), but she’d been too panicked at that point to discuss finances with her ex-husband—or, for that matter, to talk to the daughter, whom she’d hoped could fill in the details of the previous evening. The detective assigned to Teddy’s case soon took care of that, questioning the girl and Teddy’s brother and Jude’s friends Kram and Delph. Jude, when the oxygen mask had been removed, volunteered that the huffing, both times, had been his idea, and that the marijuana had been Teddy’s mother’s (how easily it could have been her own!), but nobody seemed to know anything about how the boy had gotten his hands on cocaine in Lintonburg. In the end, Harriet wasn’t certain it mattered. Thankfully, the police officer was discreet, and kind; he did not wish to badger a boy in a hospital bed. No foul play had taken place, just an accumulation of poor choices.
“Mrs. Horn,” began the doctor, extracting the pen from her hair.
“Ms. I’m divorced. In fact, I never took my husband’s name. Always just Ms. Horn.”
“Ms. Horn—”
“I hope you have some more papers for me to sign,” Harriet said lightly, putting on her glasses.
The doctor produced an exasperated smile. “Actually, I was just reviewing your son’s records. Tell me—this might come as a shock, but—has he ever been assessed for fetal alcohol effects?”
Harriet, who had been sitting, she realized, in a rather unladylike position—knees apart, back slumped, pocketbook in her lap, wearing the same sack of a dress she wore yesterday—now sat up straight. She removed her glasses, let them bob on their chain. A trivial amount of alcohol had been found in Jude’s system, but it was the freon that had caused him to pass out. And he was okay now: scheduled to go home that afternoon. She said, “Jude’s sixteen.”
“Yes, I know. Most children are diagnosed at a younger age, but not always. And I see that he’s adopted. Was he tested for birth defects as an infant?”
“I’m—I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Is anything known about the pregnancy?”
Harriet shook her head. The doctor scribbled. She knew almost nothing about Jude’s biological parents. That was the way most New York State adoptions had worked then.
“And he’s on methylphenidate. Kids with FAE or FAS are often diagnosed with ADHD, often have trouble in school, even trouble with the law, which is why it’s so important to take precautionary measures. Now, the hyperactivity and dyslexia, combined with the adoption and the telling facial features, lead me to suspect—”
“Hold on, facial features? What—you have to spell things out. FAE?”
“Fetal alcohol effects, which includes fetal alcohol syndrome.” The doctor, who appeared to be all of twenty-one years old, went on to describe Jude’s cranial symptoms with a precision—as though she, not Harriet, had kissed the boy good night every day for sixteen years—that pierced Harriet’s very brittle sense of reality. She felt dazed, dizzy, listening to the list that reduced her son’s face to a series of tribal malformations. Short, upturned nose; flat space between nose and mouth; thin upper lip; small chin; short eye openings—
“His eye openings—are just fine. Are perfect. I—”
“Perhaps it’s a mild case,” the doctor said, not unkindly.
Harriet said nothing. She was suddenly exhausted. She had slept about ten minutes in two days.
“Think about it awhile. When Jude has had time to recuperate, bring him in.” He would just need to undergo a few tests—motor functions, language skills. The doctor recommended a birth defects specialist whose name Harriet promptly forgot. “A firm diagnosis could be helpful to you. You could consider other medications. It could help answer questions about the source of your son’s behavior.”
“The source,” said Harriet dreamily. She looked down into the gaping pocketbook on her lap. In it was the detritus of her slipshod motherhood—keys, Kleenex, aspirin, cigarettes, checks decorated with the Grateful Dead dancing bears, a Snickers wrapper, an old shopping list, and a dime bag inside an Altoids tin inside a glove, which she decided then and there to flush the next time she had the chance. She closed her eyes. She could fall asleep right here, disappear. How wonderful it would be to find the source of all this, to blame it on some other mother.
At home, she was a shadow, a voice. She flitted in and out of his dreams, in and out of his room, opening the curtains, picking up the clothes from the floor, leaving a mug of warm milk on the nightstand. Sometimes she sat at the edge of his bunk bed, humming his song but not singing the words, running a hand over his arm or ankle, still trying to return heat to his body. Most of the day and most of the night he lay curled on his side with his back to the room, his Walkman turned up, his nose pressed to the cold wall.
Delph and Kram visited every day after school, always together. One sat in the bean bag chair, one in the wooden school chair with the butt cheeks scooped out. Again and again they apologized for not showing up on New Year’s Eve—their girlfriends had dragged them to another party. If only they’d gone to Tory’s instead! Maybe things would be different.
But mostly they didn’t talk about Teddy. They talked about school, what new albums were coming out, how Kram had hidden a sensor chip in the sole of Delph’s shoe to set off the Record Room’s new security alarm. They brought things in paper bags—tapes, porn, cigarettes, candy bars, pot. They’d crack the window and smoke some together. When they climbed down the fire escape, fat Kram would pretend to get stuck in the window, trying to make Jude laugh. Then the Kramaro would roar away, fast as it could go.
She allowed him time. She didn’t want to push. She left breakfast on his desk in the morning, toast and eggs he ate at some point, leaving the crusts behind as evidence, then walked to Ash Street, where she sat in front of her table from eight in the morning to eight at night, chain-smoking, reading the same page in her library book over and over again. The bookmark was a pamphlet on FAS. On the front was a picture of a pigtailed girl on a carousel. Jude had been a happy child, exuberantly, senselessly happy, but also gloomy, and unpredictably hostile, and strange. He bit, and he kicked, and he threw. At five or six, he’d brought to her in a shoe box a collection of gifts: a button, a toy truck, some coupons she’d clipped, the husk of a beetle. When she’d responded with inadequate awe, he’d given her a black eye. His fists were still pummeling when she lifted him by the armpits, his little legs wheeling, his face sopping with sweat. Where did this person come from? she’d thought. One of her drawing students, suspecting Les, had called in the domestic violence agency from Montpelier, and she’d had to swear up and down that her abuser was in kindergarten.
A week after he came home from the hospital, she sat on his bed and said, “Jude, honey? You’re going to have to get back to school soon.” She was rubbing his calf rapidly through the blanket, as though trying to start a fire. When she saw what she was doing, she put her hands in her lap. “You don’t want to get too far behind.”
Jude said nothing. He was wearing his headphones, she realized. He was lying on his side, facing the wall, his body entwined in the sour-smelling sheet. The only times she’d heard him leave the room all week were when he crossed the hall to the bathroom, and evidently it hadn’t been to take a shower.
The next morning she came into his room before the sun rose. “Come on, babe, I started the shower.” She made the mistake of sitting on his bed, sighing loudly, and slapping him—tap, tap—on the bottom.
Into the pillow, he said, “I’m not fucking going. Ever.”
“Jude,” she warned, reaching to slip his earphones from his ears.
He spun around at her so fast she flinched. His eyes were distant and glazed, but they burned right through her. It was seven o’clock in the morning.
“You’re stoned,” she said, more to herself than to him. Of course he was. Why wouldn’t he be? What else were Delph and Kram bringing him in those paper bags?
That afternoon she listened for the jangle of the fire escape as they left his room, and then leaned into the passenger side window of Kram’s car as it was about to drive away.
“I know you think you’re helping, boys. I appreciate it, I do. But if you help him anymore, I don’t think he’s ever going to get out of bed.”
They hung their heads, nodded at the dashboard. Nobody felt compelled to look anybody else in the eye, and she was glad.
And then there was Prudence, crawling onto and across Harriet’s bed, skulking in her nightgown like that clingy old cat of theirs, depositing her sullen head on her mother’s breast. Harriet spread her open book across her lap, removed her glasses, ashed her cigarette, and kissed the part in Prudence’s hair. “What is it, babe?”
“When’s Jude going back to school?”
Every day that Jude missed school, the attendance office called with a recorded message. Two of his teachers had called. The principal, whom Harriet had had the pleasure of meeting several times before the funeral, had sent a letter, asking Harriet to come in for a conference, which she did, not bothering to take off her coat. She could feel the disapproval steaming off of him, just as it always had, dressed up in courtesies. She thanked him for his patience. Her son just needed a little more time.
“He just needs a little more time,” she told Prudence.
“How much time?”
“Pru, stop it with the baby voice. Talk to me normal.”
“How—much—time?” Prudence sassed, propping her head up on her hand.
“Your brother’s sixteen now. If he wants to drop out, there’s not much we can do about it.”
With her finger Prudence traced one of the diamonds on the faded patchwork quilt. “People are saying he dropped out, and I don’t even know if it’s true.”
Harriet ashed her cigarette again in the ashtray on the nightstand. “People will say all sorts of things.”
“Someone said Teddy killed himself. He didn’t, did he?”
“Of course not.”
“And Rachael said someone said Jude killed him, that the drugs were all his idea.”
Harriet put her cigarette to her lips, then removed it. “How can that be true,” she asked, “if Teddy killed himself? Which is it?”
Prudence sighed. “You shouldn’t smoke in bed.”
“You shouldn’t tell your mother what to do.”
It irritated Harriet and comforted her, the persistent morality of her secondborn. She, too, had been named for a Beatles song, a fanciful name given by fanciful parents (but it was a good song!) who couldn’t have known how apt it would grow to be.
She had a funny thought: if she had a spouse, it was Prudence. Prudence was the one who shared the worry about their Jude. But now Prudence had surprised her. She would have expected her daughter to be the one to intervene with Jude, to try to speak some sense into him, but Pru was as apprehensive around Jude as Harriet was, hovering at his door but never daring to knock. As far as Harriet knew, she had not laid eyes on her brother since he’d returned home.
What were they so afraid of? He was just a teenage boy.
The next evening, the first evening his friends didn’t come, Harriet brought dinner to his room—macaroni and cheese with sliced hot dogs—and took her seat on the bunk bed. He was lying on his stomach, facing her. No headphones, but his eyes were closed. “Jude, hi,” she said, as though she’d just been passing through the hall and decided to drop in. “Look, I’m not going to bug you about going back to school. I know you’ll go back when you’re ready.” His eyes remained closed. “I just want to tell you that, if you need medicine, we can get it for you. If you need to talk to someone, someone professional, you can do that, too. If you’re not taking your Ritalin, we can—”
Jude emitted a long, painstaking groan, intended to obscure her voice.
“Jude, they’ve got drugs for depression now. All kinds of things.”
A louder groan, flat, dispassionate.
“Jude, Jesus.” She tapped him on the bottom again, as if to turn him off, and oddly, it worked. “I spoke to one of your doctors when we were at the hospital.” She was looking at the pamphlet in her lap, speaking quickly. “She said your birth mother might have drank alcohol, drunk alcohol, while she was pregnant, and it could be the reason you’ve been having so many problems, and apparently it’s fairly common. She said there are drugs for this kind of thing, you just have to get tested, and apparently the drugs are just phenomenal. . . .” She trailed off. She placed the pamphlet on the bed beside her and gave it a pat. The fact that she had a history of communicating to her son through pamphlets with titles such as What Are Nocturnal Emissions? did not make her cowardice any more bearable. Still staring into her lap, she didn’t see her son’s eye, the one not pressed to the pillow, peel open, slow as a budding flower, fix itself to the side of her face, and then close.