Unzipping, whichever twin it was stepped in front of the single wall urinal. “Okay,” he said, studying Griffin in the mirror, his urine hitting the porcelain with enough force to make Griffin envious. “Settle an argument. Jared says our family’s fucked up. I say no.”
Griffin, making a mental note that unless he was speaking of himself in the third person this was Jason, pointed to his grotesque, swollen eye.
“You shouldn’t have called us morons,” he said.
“I didn’t.” Hadn’t his mother offered that observation, in the privacy of his own brain?
“We both heard you. We were standing right there.”
“Huh,” Griffin said, reluctantly entertaining the possibility that a dead woman had, albeit briefly, taken control of his larynx.
“Also, we thought you’d pushed our father into the hedge.”
“Why would I do that, Jason?” Griffin said.
“You’ve never liked any of us,” he said, as if stating a well-known fact. “Plus you were the only one who could have done it. Standing just where he’d been with that shit-eating grin on your face. Same one you’ve got now.”
Griffin turned to examine his face in the mirror. What he saw there was a grimace, not a grin. A well-earned grimace, come to that.
“Like you were enjoying the whole thing,” Jason continued. “Jared thought the same thing.”
“Jason,” Griffin said, “you and your brother arriving at the same conclusion isn’t really a test of its validity. Seek some genetic variety would be my advice.” Griffin half expected this observation to provoke further hostility, but it didn’t.
“It’s true,” the other man chuckled. “We sort of share a brain, don’t we? Always did. No reason to call us morons, though.” Finished, he gave it a shake, zipped up and came over to the sink.
Griffin stepped aside so Jason could wash his hands. His forearms were striped with angry yew scratches, but they weren’t swollen like Laura’s. “I apologize if I called you a moron.”
“What do you mean if?”
“And I wasn’t enjoying it,” he told him, to set the record straight.
“I’m just saying it’s how you looked. Call it a misunderstanding, I guess. Anyway, nobody died, and tomorrow’s a new day,” he said, vigorously washing his hands of the old one and yanking a paper towel from the dispenser. “You think this wedding’s fucked up, you should try Iraq.”
“Yeah, sure, but New England weddings aren’t supposed to invite that kind of comparison,” Griffin said, pleased that he was again capable of making such subtle distinctions, more or less effortlessly.
“I’m only saying,” Jason shrugged, tossing his wadded-up towel into the bin. He apparently saw no need to elaborate further on what, exactly, he was only saying.
“Tell your brother all families are fucked up,” Griffin said. “It’s not an argument either of you can win.”
“That’s truly warped,” Jason said. “You know how you end up if you go through life thinking like that?”
“No, how?”
“You end up like you. One working eye, with twigs and shit in your hair.”
Griffin couldn’t help smiling, though it literally hurt to.
“I’m sorry I punched you, though,” Jason admitted thoughtfully. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I realize now it probably wasn’t just because you called me a name and pushed Pop into the hedge. The way I’m figuring it, subconsciously?” Here he pointed at his forehead, perhaps to suggest where such delicate, refined “figuring” took place. “Subconsciously, I was still pissed at you for being such a prick to my sister. You think that’s possible?”
Griffin did, consciously.
At the nurses’ station he was told his wife was in examination room 2B, where he was treated to an unexpected sight: Brian Fynch, glassy-eyed, being wheeled out of the room on a gurney On his forehead, a knot the size of an egg pushed up through his Ringo bangs. Griffin was pretty sure he hadn’t been one of those hurt when the ramp collapsed, so… what? He’d been injured at the hospital?
Inside the room, Joy, dressed for some reason in a pale blue Johnnie, was seated on the examination table, looking shell-shocked. “What happened to…” He’d been about to say Ringo, but caught himself.
His wife sighed deeply. “I warned him not to keep looking at it.” She showed him her finger, which lay at an almost anatomically impossible angle. “But I guess he couldn’t help it. He got really pale, and then…” She pointed at the wall, specifically at an indentation in the plaster that looked to be about the same size as a college dean’s forehead. Griffin had to look away lest she observe one of those vintage shit-eating grins Jason had accused him of wearing earlier. When he finally turned back, though, he saw that Joy herself was smiling. A grudging, guilty smile, but still definitely a smile. “You know the wet sound a ripe cantaloupe makes when you drop it on the kitchen floor? That’s what he sounded like.”
“Jesus,” Griffin said, feeling genuine sympathy for the man. His wife’s finger was a truly gruesome sight, enough to make a squeamish man light-headed, and he was, like his father before him, a squeamish man.
“Don’t you faint, too,” she said, slipping the hand under her Johnnie.
Back in the men’s room, after washing his face, Griffin had congratulated himself that the abstraction and confusion he’d felt after being pulled from under the hedge had mostly dissipated, but now, studying his wife, he wasn’t so sure. “I guess my question would be, why did you have to get undressed for them to set your finger?” Also, how in the world had she gotten undressed with her finger bent back like that?
“We discovered something else.” She pulled the Johnnie forward, exposing her left side and part of her breast, beneath which there was a three-inch gash. It hadn’t bled much, but it looked deep. “I’m going to need stitches.”
Okay, it had been a bizarre day, Griffin thought, with its mazes and man-eating hedges and collapsing wheelchair ramps and dead ventriloquist parents, but this had to be the strangest thing yet. Think about it. He’d spent most of his adult life with this woman. He’d forfeited the right to admire her body, though it was even now-admit it-capable of stirring lust. How perfectly, ludicrously insane not to be able to take this same woman in his arms and at least try to comfort her, comfort them both. Why shouldn’t he? What possible reason could there be? Well, he could think of a couple. For one, another woman was waiting patiently for him back at the B and B. Maybe he wasn’t in love with her, but he did feel-okay, admit this too-great fondness, which meant he should not be drawing his Johnnie-clad wife into his not entirely innocent embrace. And there was knot-headed Ringo, who would appreciate neither the comfort he meant to provide Joy with nor its accompanying erection.
“You might as well tell me what you think of him,” Joy said, as though she’d read his thought. Something in her tone suggested she had her own misgivings about the man, reservations his fainting had confirmed.
Griffin shrugged. “He seems amiable enough,” he said. “Bit of a booster, maybe.”
“That’s his job,” Joy said, and he knew immediately he’d said the exact wrong thing. “He sells the college. It helps to have an upbeat personality.”
“Nice change of pace, too,” he added, sounding more bitter than he meant to, more the “congenitally unhappy” man she’d accused him of being last summer.
“It has been, actually.”
Feeling the wind go out of his sails and his earlier wooziness return, Griffin slumped into a folding chair. “I know it’s crazy,” he said, “but I can’t shake the feeling that all this is my fault.” Meaning, he supposed, not just his behavior on the Cape last summer and their subsequent separation but also tonight’s fiasco, most of which-the rotten railing; Harve’s injuries, whatever they turned out to be; Joy’s broken finger; the grade-A jumbo egg on Ringo’s noggin; his daughter’s swollen Popeye forearms-no reasonable person could have held him responsible for. Nor did it stop there. Whatever happened from this point forward would be his fault as well. When a big string of dominoes falls, you don’t blame the ones in the middle.