When it was over, I left her in the bathroom and shut the door behind me as she searched the vanity for mouthwash. I could hear girls cachinnating as I ascended the stairs to the kitchen. Carina and a couple of friends—all in shirts with “bebe” bedazzled across the chest—had joined the paisanos in clanking rounds of limoncello.
“Eyy ohh!” called the group.
“Victor! Hey baby! Where were you? Is Michaela down there?” Carina asked as she pulled me in for a hug. Michaela rose from the depths of the basement, squinting and covering her eyes against the kitchen’s florescent lighting. “There she is! Hey girl! Jeez, Michaela, you look like shit. Ha! What the fuck were you two doing down there?”
“Vito and Michaela got bored waiting, so they started the party without you,” said Joey.
“Jesus.” She tugged Michaela’s skirt down as far as it would go. “I thought you had a girlfriend, Vic. What about Jessie?”
“They broke up,” said Carmine.
“Hey, ‘Silves,’ that’s a Portuguese name, right?” asked André as he poured out a row of vodka shots.
I threw open the door to the bathroom and puked, barely making it to the toilet.
“Oh, Victor, honey,” said my mother, dropping to a knee and rubbing my back.
“But… but… he’s home from the hospital?”
“Yes, he is, but that’s not because he’s gotten better, Victor. It’s because he’s… well… It’s so he can be with his family in his home… until the end.”
Mr. Geiger had been in the hospital for a couple of weeks, and I had believed his return to West Road was a sign of total recovery.
“Vito, pal, I think you and Tony should go hang out with the boys,” said my father, standing in the doorway. “They need your support right now. When Tony gets home, why don’t you two go over together? He should be back any minute.”
I heard my brother’s RAV4 cruise up the driveway, serenading West Road in the screeching chorus of the homegrown Jersey basement band Thursday. I waited in my room, meticulously rearranging my bookshelf and trophies and other sports memorabilia like I was a child again, procrastinating doing my long division worksheets.
“Hey,” my brother said as he opened the door, his frame artificially broadened due to his royal blue and white varsity jacket. “Mamadelle (translation: stepmother; literal: little mother) and Dad told you about Mr. G, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I think we should go hang out with Karl and George.”
“But Mr. G is home. Why wouldn’t he stay in the hospital if he wasn’t still sick?”
“They didn’t explain that already?”
“No, they did. I just thought maybe you’d tell me something different.”
About halfway up the little hill that separated the Geigers’ house from our own, I began to sob—big, wet, breath-eating sobs. Tony put his arm around my shoulder and began to basically carry me up the hill. Mrs. G greeted us at the door with a hug. I rushed mine and headed straight for the basement.
“I love you guys,” she said.
“I love you too!” I yelled, sprinting down the creaking stairs.
George was sunken into the couch, legs rested on the ottoman, channel surfing the premiums. Karl, shirtless, sat at the computer and didn’t turn around. I was the only one crying.
I figured this could be a good sign. Perhaps my parents had been too dramatic. My mother was always getting worked up while she watched Fox News from the kitchen sink—my father had to remind her that, yet again, the sky was not falling.
“What do you idiots want?”
“Good to see you too.” Tony opened the fridge. “No Stewart’s?”
Neither of them answered.
“Pepsi it is then.”
He handed me a soda and joined us on the couch. George flipped to HBO, where the opening credits of The Sopranos showed Tony making his way out of the City and into Essex County.
“I think they filmed one of the upcoming episodes in the reservation,” said George.
“Yeah, yeah, you were sayin’ that,” said my brother.
“Bet they whacked someone.”
“Probably.”
Is Mr. Geiger going to die, like, soon? Why won’t anyone say anything about it? We’re allowed to talk about our feelings. That’s what they always tell us.
I wanted to go and give Karl a hug, wrap my arms around him and pull him in tight. I didn’t care if he wouldn’t turn around from the computer.
I couldn’t help but consider if my dad had been upstairs, dying. How are they not crying? Why am I the only one crying? Sure, I had always been the emotional one—“My sweet Victor, you’re cut from a different cloth,” my mother would say—but I thought that had ended by the time I turned fourteen. I stopped apologizing to the trees in the backyard when my brother would hack at the roots with a pickaxe so we wouldn’t hurt our knees and elbows. I stopped crying when all the pretty horses got lanced or shot full of arrows in the movies—“Leave the horses out of it!” I got a blowjob from Michaela Silves, drunk, and didn’t even offer her a glass of water or a rose. But that vulnerability of childhood (I considered myself “in my youth” at fourteen) came bubbling back to the surface, and it wasn’t even my father up there!
Karl! Karl! Turn around, Karl!
Fathers are supposed to be invincible. Cancer: taking the planet’s superheroes one father at a time. I hated cancer. I hated that I was born on June 29 because my zodiac sign was cancer. I personified the disease as a gelatinous, expanding sludge,
