Juliet, Naked

Bounce.

“You are mad at me.”

“I’m just bouncing a ball.”

“I understand. I promised you I wouldn’t get sick.”

“You promised me you couldn’t die if you were well the day before.”

“Do I look dead to you?”

Bounce.

“Because I’m not. And the truth is, I didn’t feel well the day before.”

Bounce.

“Okay, Jack. Give me the ball.”

“No.”

Bounce, bounce, bounce.

“Okay, I’m coming to get it.”

Tucker made a show of pulling the sheets back from the bed.

Jackson let out a wail, threw the ball over to his father and collapsed onto the floor with his hands over his ears.

“Come on, Jack,” said Tucker. “It’s not such a big deal. I asked you to stop bouncing the ball and you wouldn’t. And now you have. I wasn’t going to give you a beating.”

“I’m not scared of that,” said Jackson. “Lizzie said that if you strain your heart, you’ll die. I don’t want you to get out of bed.”

Well, thank you, Lizzie.

“Okay,” Tucker said. “So don’t make me.”

Whatever works, he thought wearily. But it was going to be hard to pretend from now on that he was just your regular elementary-school dad.

Jesse and Cooper turned up later that afternoon, looking disheveled and bewildered and resentful. They were both wearing iPods; they were both listening to hip-hop with one ear. The other white buds, the ones they’d removed in the clearly unexpected event that their father might say something they’d want to hear, hung loose by their sides.

“Hey, boys.”

Mumbled greetings were formed in his sons’ throats and emitted with not quite enough force to reach him; they dropped somewhere on the floor at the end of his bed, left for the cleaning staff to sweep up.

“Where’s your mother?”

“Huh?” said Jesse.

“Yeah, she’s okay,” said Cooper.

“Hey, fellas. You don’t want to turn those things off for a little while?”

“Huh?” said Jesse.

“No thanks,” said Cooper. He said it politely enough, so Tucker understood that he was turning down something else entirely—the offer of a drink, maybe, or an invitation to the ballet. Tucker performed a little mime restating his desire to converse without the hearing impediments. The boys looked at each other, shrugged and stuffed the iPods into their pockets. They had acceded to his request not because he was their father, but because he was older than them, and possibly because he was in a hospital bed; they’d have done the same if he were a paraplegic stranger on a bus. In other words, they were decent enough kids, but they weren’t his kids.

“I was asking where your mother was.”

“Oh. Okay. She’s outside in the hall.” Cooper did most of the talking, but always managed to give the impression that he was channeling his twin brother somehow. Maybe it was the way they stood side by side, staring straight ahead, arms dangling from their sockets.

“She doesn’t want to come in?”

“I guess.”

“You don’t want to get her?”

“No.”

“That was my way of saying ‘Would you get her?’ ”

“Oh. Okay.”

They both walked to the door, peered right and then left, and beckoned their mother toward them.

“He wants you to, though.” And then, after a pause long enough to accommodate dissent, “I don’t know why.”

“She doesn’t really want to come in,” said Cooper.

“But she’s coming in,” said Jesse.

“Okay.”

She didn’t come in.

“So where is she?”

They had readopted their previous positions, standing stiffly side by side, staring straight ahead. Maybe when they’d turned their iPods off they’d somehow turned themselves off, too. They were in standby mode.

“Maybe the restroom?” said Cooper.

“Yeah, I think so,” said Jesse. “The restroom. And maybe there was someone in there already?”

“Oh,” said Tucker. “Sure.”

Tucker suddenly became wearied by the pointlessness of the exercise that Lizzie had planned. These kids had flown thousands of miles to stand in a hospital room and stare at a man they no longer knew very well at all; this debate about whether their mother had gone to the bathroom or not was the most animated conversation the three of them had managed so far. (Tucker would miss it when it was over, but to extend it any further would probably entail scatological detail that he wouldn’t feel comfortable with, although the boys might enjoy it.) And then, in a moment, the ambient room temperature would become further chilled by the arrival of an ex-wife—not one he was particularly afraid of, nor one that bore him a great deal of ill will, as far as he knew, but not a person he’d had any real desire to see again during the time remaining to him on the planet. And then, sometime in the next hour or two, this ex-wife would bump into another one, when Nat came back with Jackson. And these two boys would stare at a half sister they’d never seen before and mumble at her, and… Jesus. There had been a part of him that was half joking when he’d asked English Annie to get him out of here, but that part was gone now. There was nothing funny about this.

The door opened, and Carrie peered around it cautiously.

“This is us,” said Tucker cheerily. “Come on in.”

Carrie took a few steps into the room, stopped and stared at him.

“Jesus,” she said.

“Thanks,” said Tucker.

“Sorry. I just meant…”

“It’s okay,” said Tucker. “I got a lot older, plus the light in here isn’t so flattering, plus I had a heart attack. I accept all of these things with equanimity.”

“No, no,” said Carrie. “I just meant, I guess, Jesus, it’s been a while since I saw you.”

“Okay,” said Tucker. “Let’s leave it at that.”

Carrie, of course, looked good, healthy and sleek. She’d put on weight, but she’d been too skinny when he’d left her anyway, due to the misery he’d inflicted on her, so the few extra pounds indicated only psychic health.

“How’ve you been?” she said.

“Today and yesterday, not so bad. The day before, not great. The last few years, mostly not so bad.”

“I heard you and Cat split.”

“Yeah. I managed to mess up another one.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ll bet.”

“No, really. I don’t suppose we have a whole lot in common, but we all worry about you. It’s better for us if you’re in a relationship.”