Sing You Home

“What any brother would have done,” Reid says. “I wrote him a check.”

Angela Moretti asks for a recess. Mostly because I think she’s afraid that Zoe is about to come at me with her claws bared.

It wasn’t like I was trying to lie to her, or hide the fact that Reid gave us the money for that last fresh cycle we did at the clinic. But we were buried in debt; I couldn’t put another ten thousand on a credit card or find any other way to leverage the cost. I also couldn’t stand the thought of telling her we’d run out of money. What kind of loser would that have made me?

I just wanted to make her happy. I didn’t want her thinking about what we’d owe if and when we ever had that baby.

It’s not like Reid ever asked me for the money back, either. I think we both knew it wasn’t a loan, more like a donation. What he said to me, as he scrawled his name across the bottom of the check, was I know if the situation were reversed, Max, you’d do anything you could to help me.

When Zoe comes back to the courtroom, she doesn’t make eye contact with me. She stares straight ahead at a spot to the right of the judge, while her lawyer gets up to cross-examine Reid. “So you’re buying a baby,” Angela Moretti begins.

“No. That money was a gift.”

“But you did give your brother ten thousand dollars, which was used to create those embryos whose custody you’re now seeking, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you have a right to these embryos because you bought them, don’t you?” Angela presses.

“I have a moral responsibility to make sure they’re raised properly,” he says.

“That’s not what I asked. You believe you have a right to these embryos because you bought them, isn’t that correct, Mr. Baxter?”

In all the time we have been talking about Reid and Liddy having these babies, Reid has never brought up that check he wrote me. He’s never said anything to make me feel like I owe him now because of what he did for me then.

Reid looks down, carefully working through his words before he speaks them. “If it weren’t for me,” he says finally, “these children wouldn’t even exist.”

When the judge decides he’s had enough for one day, I jump up before Wade can stop me and I run out of the courtroom. I have to shove past a group of Westboro folks, who call out that they are on my side.

When did this become a war?

As soon as I burst out of the courthouse, a mob of reporters surges forward. When I hear Wade’s voice at my back, my knees nearly buckle with relief. “My client has no comment,” he says, and he puts his hand on my shoulder and steers me through the walkway toward the parking lot. “Don’t you ever do that again to me,” he hisses in my ear. “You go nowhere until I tell you you can go. I am not going to let you fuck this up, Max.”

I stop walking and stretch to my full six feet. I jab a finger in his fancy-ass tailored shirt. “You,” I say, “work for me.”

But this isn’t one hundred percent true, either. Because Reid paid for Wade, too.

This makes me want to smash my fist into something, anything. Wade’s face is tempting, but instead, I flatten my hand against his chest and give him a shove, enough to make him stumble. I head to my truck and I don’t look back.

I think I know where I’m going even before I get there. There is a spot in Newport near Ruggles Avenue where there are some rocks, and on days when the surf is firing, it’s got the most incredible break I’ve ever seen.

It’s also a place where you might get totally pounded.

My shortboard is in the back of my truck. I strip down to my underwear and get into the wet suit that I always keep in the backseat, just in case. Then I work my way down through the rocks and into the water, careful to keep from getting axed on the inside.

There aren’t any groms bobbing in the water-it’s just me, and the most beautiful curls I’ve ever seen.

I don’t know why the problems I have on land look different in the ocean. Maybe it’s the way I’m so much smaller than what’s around me. Maybe it’s knowing that, even if I get trashed, I can paddle out and do it all over again.

If you haven’t surfed, you can’t understand the pull of the sport. No matter what Pastor Clive does or says, it’s the closest I’ve ever felt to God. It’s the strangest combination of absolute serenity and mad exhilaration. There you are, in the lineup waiting until you see a wave take off. You pump your arms, paddling like crazy, until like magic the foam becomes a wing underneath you and the wave takes over. And you’re flying. You’re flying, and then, just when you think your heart is going to burst outside your skin, it’s over.

A swell rises underneath my board, and I turn to see a tube forming behind me. I pull myself upright and sneak into the shoulder end, riding the barrel as the wave shuts down around me, and then I am falling, tumbling, underwater, not sure which way is up.

I break the surface, my lungs on fire, my hair matted down, and my ears throbbing from the cold. This, I understand. This, I am good at.

Very intentionally, I stay out after sunset. I wrap myself in a blanket and sit on the edge of the rocks and watch the moon take a few turns riding the waves. My head is pounding and my shoulder aches from a nasty fall and I’ve swallowed about a gallon of salt water. I cannot even begin to describe how thirsty I am, how much I’d kill for a beer. But I also know, if I get into my truck, I’ll head right to a bar and have that beer, so instead I wait until it’s past last call at most places, and then allow myself to drive back home.

All the lights are off at Reid’s house, which makes sense, since it’s nearly three in the morning by the time I pull into the driveway. I turn the key in the lock and leave my shoes on the porch so that I won’t disturb anyone while I’m creeping inside.

I sneak into the kitchen to get a glass of water, and see her sitting at the kitchen table like a ghost. Liddy’s white cotton nightgown swirls around her ankles like sea foam as she stands up to face me. “Thank God,” she says. “Where have you been?”

“I went surfing. I needed to clear my head.”

“I tried to call you. I was worried.”

I saw her messages on my cell. I deleted them, without listening. I had to, although I can’t explain why.

“I haven’t been drinking, if that’s what you’re getting at,” I say.

“I wasn’t. I was just… I wanted to call the hospital, but Reid said you were a big boy and could take care of yourself.”

I see the phone book, open on the table, and feel a pang of remorse. “I didn’t mean to keep you up. You have a big day tomorrow.”

“Can’t sleep anyway. Reid took some Ambien, and he’s snoring to beat the band.”

Liddy sits down on the floor, her back aligned against the wall. When she pats the spot beside her, I sit, too. For a minute we are quiet, listening to the house settle around us. “Remember The Time Machine?”

“Sure.” It was a movie we saw a few years back, a particularly cheesy one, that was about a time traveler who gets lost in space and stuck 800,000 years in the future.

“Would you want to see the future, even if you knew you couldn’t change it?” she asks.

I consider this. “I don’t know. I think it might hurt too much.”

When she leans her head against my shoulder, I swear I stop breathing. “I used to read these mystery books when I was a little girl, where you could choose a different path at the end of every chapter. And depending on what you picked, the outcome changed.”

I can smell her soap-mango and mint-and the shampoo she uses, which sometimes I steal out of her bathroom and use myself.

“I used to skip to the back of the book and read all the endings and pick the one I liked the best… and then I’d try to figure it out backward.” She laughs a little. “It never worked. I could never make things happen the way I wanted.”

The first time Liddy saw snow, the time I was with her to witness it, she held out her hand to catch a snowflake on her palm. Look at the pattern, she said, and she held it out to me so I could see. By then, though, it was already gone.