Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [67]
Still, Johnny had seen no reason for Jude to dive back into trouble in Vermont. “Don’t we have enough on our hands?”
He had a point. Sitting in Johnny’s apartment, Jude felt the mass of that responsibility. He was tired. But maybe Johnny was taking it into his own hands now. “Eliza told me you’re going to pretend you’re the father.”
Johnny was tugging at his bottom lip. The tattoo on the inside, below his gums, said, simply, NO. “It’s the only way, man.”
“But are you guys just friends, or . . . ?”
Blood beat in Jude’s ears. He wasn’t sure which answer he wanted to hear.
“Just friends?” Johnny said. “None of us are just friends anymore.”
Les was on the toilet four mornings later, hitting Gertrude and doing the Times crossword, when the phone bleated in the insistent, lonely way it does at sunrise, when the news is rarely good. Les allowed it to ring. Just as the sound became insufferable he heard his son’s descent from his bed, the gargle of his voice, and after several more moments, an ambivalent knock on the door.
“Dad?”
Leaning his head back and closing his eyes, Les released a billow of smoke to the ceiling. “Son.”
“We got a problem. Can you hear me?”
Les wondered if the “we” referred to Jude and himself, or to Jude and the person on the phone.
“Can it wait a sec? I’m only about one-third done here.”
“Can you just hurry up?”
“Go on and tell me. I can hear you.”
Nothing for a few seconds but the wobbling of the mirror on the back of the door.
“Eliza’s on the phone. She’s at school. You won’t get mad, right?”
Les balanced the crossword on the edge of the sink and the bong on the crossword. The prospect of helping Eliza—the prospect of helping Eliza without getting mad, as Di would—gave him satisfying pause. “I won’t get mad.”
“And you won’t tell her mom?”
“Unless she’s dying. Or she’s killed someone.”
On the doorjamb, painted over but still legible, were the pocketknife scars that recorded the stature of some other tenant’s children. Les had penciled in Eliza when she was little enough for that sort of thing—Di wouldn’t allow it at her place—but the graphite had long ago been smudged away.
“She’s bleeding.”
“What sort of bleeding?”
“You know, woman bleeding.”
Les scratched at his beard with his pencil. “Uh-huh?”
“The thing is, she’s pregnant, though.”
The pencil slipped from his grasp. As he bent to retrieve it, his forehead collided with the bong, which clattered into the sink, spilling its contents onto the newspaper.
Les put his hand to his forehead. He pressed hard, thinking.
“What should we do?” his son asked.
From the sink, Les retrieved Gertrude’s glass slide, which had snapped off at the base. It lay helplessly in Les’s palm, an amputated finger, dainty as an icicle, dumb as a dick.
“For God’s sake, kid, haven’t you heard of a rubber?”
The waiting room at the Mount Sinai Emergency Room, where Eliza had met them with her backpack and a look of being lost and not lost, as though she had a standing appointment for lunch there each week and was scanning the room for her date, was upholstered in a maroon a little too much like the color of blood. There were the usual amenities: issues of Prevention and Reader’s Digest that looked as though they’d survived a flood, the floor toy that involved sliding colored beads on shoots of wire, the Today show murmuring on the television in the corner, broadcasting from several sunnier blocks away news of the presidential race. It was early for emergencies, 8:20 according to the clock on the wall. The only other patients to make an entrance were a febrile toddler over her mother’s shoulder, and a construction worker, who on the site of the hospital addition had nailed his hand to a two-by-four.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” said Les when they were alone, feeding himself a jelly doughnut he’d had