She’d driven three hours not to meet the son she’d never met before — as planned, as promised — but to crack open a chapter of ancient history and fuck his father.
She’d fled from Nick as fast as a coward could without so much as a word about said son.
She’d sliced her mother and perhaps, if he was lucid enough, her father with the knife of a decades-old decision she had always intended to keep sheathed.
And worst of all, she’d let down the boy who knew her only as the woman who’d let him down.
Her selfishness astounded her. After Nick dropped her at his office, she began the drive back to the city, rocketing along as if chasing a line that, if crossed, would return her to the time before she picked up the phone to find Max on the other end. She wanted normalcy. The world didn’t need to be simple or happy, so long as it wasn’t completely upside down.
Under a long, shadowing range of perfect cumulus clouds, Claudia made it safely through Mechanicville and Clifton Park, but by the time she reached Halfmoon, her hands started to shake. The more she drove, the more distance she tried to put between her and the problem twiddling his proverbial thumbs on her parents’ front porch, the more she felt like she was wrestling another person for control of the wheel. One pair of hands fought to steer the car straight ahead, while another, with its equally implacable grip, struggled to turn it around. The warring led Claudia to drift between lanes, a deviation met with a wee but rousing horn blast from the tiny silver Smart car behind her. Shaking herself as if waking from a dream, she eased into the right lane and took the exit for the next rest stop.
She sat in the parking lot with the squeals of car-dodging, sugar-shocked children ricocheting around her. Listening to Benji’s livid voice mails or responding to Oliver’s backlog of frantic texts still proved beyond her, but she pulled her phone from her bag and put it on her lap. Of course it was only a matter of time before the thing rang, and when it did, Claudia kept her eyes shut against it. If asked, she couldn’t point to the road that bypassed her maternal—maternal? — responsibilities so completely and led instead to the shabby cemetery where she stumbled out of Nick’s Escalade with her panties in her hand. How, she wondered, did she get here?
The phone continued its trill, and Claudia opened her eyes to find her brother doing Stanley. Hey! Claud-ia! She knew that Benji would flay her for failing Max, turn the life preserver of her meeting with Nick into a sinking ship, but on the fourth ring, she broke down and answered anyway.
“Tell me you’ve been kidnapped,” Benji whispered fiercely into the silence before she had a chance to say hello. “Tell me you’re bound and gagged in some cabin in the woods and that’s why you’re not here right now.”
“Why are you whispering,” she asked with dread. “Is he there?”
“Of course he’s here. He’s where you’re supposed to be. Here!”
“Can he hear you?”
“Now you care about his feelings? Where the fuck are you?”
She told him.
“What are you doing there?”
“Heading back.”
“Wait.”
“Benji.”
“Here’s what you do, Claudia. You put the key in the ignition. You’ve got the key, don’t you? You turn the car on. Then you turn your ass around and get here. Turn around and get here now.”
But she couldn’t. She could no sooner find her way to Palmer Street — to Max and her mother and the fallout of a decision she’d made when she was barely old enough to order a drink — than she could transform her car into a plane and jet back to the city through the cloud-slung sky.
“Then I’m coming to you.”
“Don’t,” Claudia pleaded. “Please don’t.”
“Those are your choices.” His voice struck her, sharp as a hatchet and just as hard. “Stay where you are. Don’t even think of leaving. I’ll drive to the city if I have to, Claudia. I’ll break my leg again, I swear I will, I’ll kick down your door.”
She sat in the car, the rolled-up windows turning it into a sweatbox, the discomfort of which she felt she deserved. As the minutes rolled by, twenty, thirty, forty, the chime of Oliver’s incessant texts arrived, like the traffic report on New York 1, every ten minutes. Finally, feeling the next ding would be the hammer blow to the head that would end her, she dinged back with a text of telegrammatic brevity: Sorry! Case of nerves. Call later.
The echoing sound of yet another message stirred her to crack the window just enough to throw the phone out of it. It was from Benji. Inside, it read, @ McDonald’s.
She made her way into the violently lit faux-timbered lodge where people peed and bought forty-ounce drinks in a mad cycle, wearing the enormous sunglasses of a Hollywood starlet in hiding. Wending her way through a herd of elastic-waistbanded feeders on a do-or-die hunt for pumpable ketchup, Claudia positioned herself at the mouth of the dining room, glancing from one sticky table to the next until her eyes stopped on her worst nightmare. There, at the back of the room, framed beneath a forged Bob Ross depicting the saccharine splendor of fall Adirondack foliage, sat Benji and Evelyn.
She took off her sunglasses as Benji’s eyes met hers. To Claudia the two of them, sitting side by side with the grimmest of looks on their faces, resembled nothing so much as a twisted Oedipal take on American Gothic. She mouthed “Fuck you” to her brother, at which he turned to Evelyn, put a hand on her shoulder, and excused himself. Evelyn could have used the sunglasses to hide her own red and swollen eyes, which, watching Benji as he went, soon came to rest on her daughter. She pulled one, two napkins from a tabletop dispenser and used them to blow her pink-tipped nose.
“Are you kidding me right now?”
“She made me bring her,” Benji said as he approached, hands up in a posture of defending himself against a crazy lady.
“She’s almost eighty, Benji. How can she make you do anything?”
“You’re right. I should have knocked her down and driven over her.”
“No. But what resolution do you think we’re going to come to with her here? Why didn’t you bring him too?”
“You mean Max? He has a name.”
“Max,” she said miserably.
“None of this is Mom’s fault. Or Max’s. You know that, right?”
She may have been the gladiator expected to lay down her sword and die, but self-defense came as reflexively as a hand pulling back from a flame. “So where is he? Why isn’t he in your little vigilante party? You didn’t leave him with Dad.”
Benji rubbed his hands roughly over his face, as if to scour the anger that twisted his features. “Sandra’s with Dad. Max went back to his hotel,” he said with overly determined calm. “Seeing that you’re suddenly interested in his whereabouts.” He looked over his shoulder at his mother, at the impromptu interrogation chamber they’d set up in an orange plastic booth and said, “Come on.” When Claudia didn’t move, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled. “Come. On.”
She slid into the booth across from bad cop and crying cop and bowed her head. Evelyn, snuffling into her rough cardboard-colored napkins, said nothing, while Benji spoke in the fierce whisper he’d adopted for the day as his favorite tone. “Are you nuts?”
The room, loud and bright and beset with an oily smell that buried itself under Claudia’s skin, was freezing, better suited to storing burgers than serving them, and Claudia, chilly in a tissue-thin cashmere sweater that showed the tank top she wore underneath, longed to pick up one of the two steaming cups of coffee that sat on the table in front of them. They hadn’t thought to get her one. Or had thought not to get her one.