whine about meeting my kids, and then when one of them finally materializes, you disappear.”
“I’ve just been busy. You told me to apply myself. I’ve had a lot going on!”
“Wait, what are you doing home on a weekday?”
“Who . . . home?”
“What? Say it again.”
“ALL RIGHT, FINE. I’m on my mom’s phone. I wasn’t feeling well, so I took the train home.”
“Aren’t you not supposed to do that?”
“You wrote a note, saying you were taking me on a trip.”
“That was nice of me.”
“Les,” said Eliza through a burst of static, “ . . . tell you anything, right?”
“Sure, honey.”
Then a kid’s voice, not Eliza’s, said, “ . . . not fair, it’s totally not fair.”
“Quit your whining, man,” said Les, eyeing the hot dogs across the room, surely gone cold, as the Twins performed a double play that was truly not fair, and Eliza’s voice danced inextricably with the ghost of a stranger’s, their words sometimes nearly making a sort of sense.
“JUST TELL HIM TO CALL ME,” said Eliza, and Les hung up.
The doorman was expecting them. They rose in the mirrored elevator, Jude’s stomach dropping through the floor. Inside the apartment, a vacuum cleaner was running, and they had to ring the bell several times before a small, dusky-skinned woman answered the door. She was wearing a sports bra and leggings, between which, bisecting a lumpy stomach, ran a scar the same purple as the polish on her fingers and toes. A red spot hovered just above her eyes. “Thank goodness,” she said. “She been cry and cry.” Through a living room that looked like a wing of the White House, down a hallway hung with the frowning visages of Eastern Europeans, the woman led them to Eliza’s room, opening the door without knocking. “Two boys in your room okay?” she said, but then left, closing the door behind her. A moment later the vacuum cleaner started up again.
Jude had never been in any girl’s room but his sister’s, but Eliza’s looked just as he would have expected one to. A Beastie Boys poster hung on the rose-papered wall, and a pair of ballet slippers was slung over the back of a rocking chair, in which sat a family of stuffed bears, one wearing a Yankees cap. On the dresser was a cluster of photographs: a man who was not Les with a dark-haired baby swathed in his arms; a long-locked Eliza aloft in a bat mitzvah chair. In the wicker wastebasket beside the bed were clouds of Kleenex and four or five empty Yoo-hoo bottles, and in the double bed, which was pink and ruffled and plump with pillows, Eliza lay with the covers pulled up to her chin. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.
He had known, as soon as his father had relayed the message, that it was about Teddy. There was no other reason for Eliza to summon them to her mother’s apartment. “Just come over,” she’d said, “and you’ll see.” On the silent train uptown, Jude felt a calm settle over him. Not because he looked forward to whatever revelation Eliza had in store, but because he welcomed the relief of pressure. It was as though Johnny and Jude had been engaged in a staring contest, each daring the other to speak Teddy’s name first, and even though it meant he would lose, Jude was desperate to blink.
“What happened to your hair?” Her voice was hoarse, her eyes and nose red.
Jude and Johnny both put a hand to their heads. “I cut it,” Jude said.
“Nice sling.” It wasn’t a cast, but Jude had never broken a bone before, so he had people sign it. Johnny, Les, Rooster, a nurse named LaCarol, the couple who owned the Smoke Sho. “There should be a marker in my desk drawer.” Johnny retrieved the marker and Jude sat on the edge of the bed while she found a blank space to print her name in capital letters. “Does it hurt?”
“Not really. When I change the bandages. Mostly it itches. This guy saved my life,” he said, slapping Johnny hard on the back.
“Stop, drop, and roll,” Johnny explained.
“What happened, exactly?”
Jude could sense she was stalling, but he didn’t mind stalling with her. “These women carry around these plates of candles. You’re supposed to wave your hands through the fire and over your head”—he imitated with his free hand, as though washing his hair—“but I held my hand in there too long and it got my sleeve. I was tripping