Tiered Rejections

His brother, a junior and an athlete in high school, was visiting campus. Wanting to show him a good time—and, perhaps, convince him to play soccer there—he bought weed and Banker’s Club to pregame. He told Lexa, a girl he was dating, to see if friends would meet them at White Picket Fence, a baseball house off campus.

Lexa said, “That’s super cute! Big brother showing little brother the ropes.”

Later she took his brother, drunk and high, back to her triple on east campus and fucked him. They’d lost their virginity, in the same bed, to the same girl, but now she was interested only in his brother, and his brother was interested in her. He enrolled at the university to play soccer. For two years, he and his brother avoided each other.

After graduation, his brother and Lexa, who now went by Alexandra, got married. To the chagrin of their mother, he and his brother had stopped talking. He wasn’t at the wedding. He didn’t send a gift. Then there was a baby, a girl, and his brother called to ask if he would be the godfather. He let the call go to voicemail. He told his mother to tell his brother that the answer was, and would always be, no.

When his brother was killed, years later, by a drunk driver, he went in tears to the viewing. Lexa and her daughter stood in black by the body greeting people. Her daughter had Lexa’s light hair and his brother’s forgiving eyes. “I’m your uncle,” he told her. At one point, he pulled Lexa aside. Not much had changed since college.

“I’m glad you came. You know, we don’t have to be friends, but it would be nice if you were in my daughter’s life. It would mean a lot to her and to your brother.” Lexa said she saw his brother in him.

He was shaking. He squeezed her arm, hard, and said this was what she got for breaking up a family.

—❉—

She was in surgery, having a meningioma removed, when Larry texted her:

Nine minutes later, he must have realized he’d sounded like an asshole:

—❉—

Lance came back from Ucayali with clarity and a week’s growth of beard. His wife greeted him with a kiss at the front door. She was excited but uneasy, looking him over like an intruder. The children were happy to see him. They ran from their rooms, hugged him. His middle son showed him a score on a video game. His older daughter said, to celebrate his return, she and her sister were making a special dessert—homemade chocolate ice cream in a bag.

After dinner and prayers, the kids were in bed, and his wife asked about the ayahuasca. She’d never had a sip of alcohol in her life. “Did you get sick?”

“Everybody does.” But Lance had also seen his dead father in a spiral of light. His father had explained why he left him as a boy. All the resentment Lance had accumulated since he was eleven had been, literally, thrown up. His wife saw God’s image in his countenance. She asked if he’d changed his mind about church.

Mormons believed in, but didn’t trust, a God of miracles.

Lance said he needed more time to think and to process, but he’d come with her and the kids for an hour on Sunday. On the couch, he told her about another breakthrough he’d had in Ucayali. It was revealed to him, he said, not during the ceremony but the next morning, walking through the rainforest, that they needed to add another member to their family. His wife was almost forty. She thought he meant a sixth child. When Lance shook his head, her willingness turned to revulsion. Polygamy was their history and had always been a stumbling block to her testimony. One man with six, twelve, nineteen wives. But that’s when Lance bit his lip and told her about a man he’d met in Ucayali, a musician, who also lived in Utah.

—❉—

Her friends thought he was a stalker, and now so did Lorelei. The timing, she acknowledged, was terrible. They’d been regularly sleeping together when she stopped answering his calls, his texts, his messages on social media, and on the dating app. Her ghosting, if that’s what it was, brought out a vicious side of him she hadn’t known. She blocked him everywhere. He was a system administrator and used Google to create three virtual phone numbers with which to call her. But Lorelei worked with computers, too. That was something they’d talked about on the dating app.

She screened her calls. Eventually, it was easier to get a new phone number. To set all her social media to “private,” to delete the dating app. For a few weeks, she went to live with a married friend on a ranch in Elgin. Even with roommates, she didn’t feel safe in her apartment. It wasn’t like her boyfriend to have a gun—they were both Democrats—but it was Texas, and they hadn’t been together very long.

On the ranch, Lorelei got used to the smell. She needed Wi-Fi for work, but no matter where she went, the connection was weak. She updated her drivers, typed into a prompt window to reset the TCP/IP stack. Finally, she asked to borrow a car for a few hours to go to the library. Her friend let her use her husband’s Trans Am.

Dog tags hung from the mirror.

“There’s cowboys out here,” she told Lorelei. “I don’t mean dudes with cowboy hats. I mean, cowboys, like that’s their job. They chase longhorns all day. Why it’s cowboys and not cowmen, I have no idea. There’s a cowboy church.”

Lorelei learned to shoot an AR and a Glock. Her friend’s husband took her to a small dry pond on the property. “Cattle used to come here to drink,” he said, “to cool off. But only takes one calf dying of thirst before they learn. They talk to each other.” He stuck two steel targets into the cracked sludge. He showed her how to line up the sights.

“Squeeze,” he told her. “Squeeze. You feel the resistance? That’s the trigger wall.”

One day Lorelei’s roommates called: her boyfriend, or whatever he was, hadn’t given up. Every night, from eight to midnight, he’d park on the street, smoke with the windows up, wait for her to come back. Her roommates were scared, too. They were at a hotel outside Austin. They expected Lorelei to pay.

“I don’t have the money,” she said.

“Figure it out,” they told her. “We don’t deserve this. Maybe you should fuck normies for a while.”

The day Lorelei was leaving, she asked her friend if she could borrow money. “My roommates are at a hotel,” she said. “I get paid next week. I’ll pay you back.” Her friend was more than generous; she didn’t ask her husband.

She made Lorelei promise to visit again. She said marriage was lonely.

In his Trans Am, the husband drove her back to Austin. He said, “It’s been good having you, we don’t get many visitors.” At her building, he wished Lorelei well. “Call anytime,” he said. “We’re here.” He reached behind his seat. In back was what looked like a lunch box with two latches and a key lock. “In case Romeo shows up again,” he said, handing it to her through the open window.

—❉—

“Your wife knows?”

“That’s not why.”

“A crisis of conscience?”

“Is that so hard to believe?”

“It’s never been part of the job description. That’s it then?”

“For now, yes.”

“For now? Some crisis. When do you get announced?”

“Tuesday. I have interviews scheduled here. Then I leave. He and I. If donations are consistent, I’ll be back for a week in September.”

“Is your wife travelling with you?”

“For press events, but she’ll probably come home in between to see her mother and be with the dogs.”

“So why can’t I travel with you?”

“Yeah, you and my wife can bunk together on the bus.”

“I have a car, Leo. I can drive myself.”

“What are you going to do in Pennsylvania and Ohio?”

“I’m not there to sightsee.”

“You’d miss work?”

“You wouldn’t take care of me?”

“ … ”

“What?”

“I see what this is.”

“What?”

“I’ve been blackmailed before.”

“You think I’m blackmailing you?”

“I think you think I’m the kind of guy who’d go to the ends of the earth to protect his reputation.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m a Democrat, from New York. Voters assume I’m cheating on my wife. My wife assumes it. A sex scandal might even help our polling with young people.”

“Is that what you tell the other women who blackmail you?”

“…”

“I don’t want this to end. And I think, if circumstances were a little different, you wouldn’t want it to end, either.”

“It’s not ending. It’s … on pause.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“What do you want?”

“That’s not why I asked you here.”

“You’ve made your intentions clear. I’ll be on a national stage. This isn’t a pissing match for the 47th District. There’s more I stand to lose, which I know you know. The timing indicates sabotage. So, I’m asking you, how much?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“What?”

“ … ”

“How?”

“It wasn’t malicious. It must’ve been the condom. This has never happened before.”

“I’ve used condoms since I was sixteen.”

“ … ”

“You took a test?”

“I’m not stupid.”

“How far along are you? You can’t even tell.”

“My doctor said eight to nine weeks.”

“Your doctor?”

“There’s a heartbeat, I heard it, I cried.”

“When were you going to tell me this?”

“You were in Florida. I didn’t want to do it over the phone.”

“ … ”

“I thought you’d be happy. You and Melissa have been trying. You spent all that money on treatments. It’s her, and now you know it’s her. You always talk about your legacy.”

“Are you fucking crazy?”

“I want you to be a father, Leo. You’d be a good one. You told me yourself you want boys.”

“I told you voters are more trusting of someone with kids.”

“ … ”

“I take it, you’ve already decided—”

“ … ”

“You fuck a married man, and this is the thing you’re Jerry Falwell about?”

“Fuck you.”

“ … ”

“I’m coming to Pennsylvania and Ohio. The events are public. I’ll check your website.”

“Ten grand? I’ll write you a check for ten thousand dollars. I can’t tonight, I have to move some money, but tomorrow.”

“ … ”

“I have to go. My wife is expecting me.”

“ … ”

“All I’m asking is that you stay here, in New York. Let me do what I have to do in Ohio and Pennsylvania. I’ll call you every day. While I’m gone, take yourself to dinner. Get your hair and nails done. Go to a spa. Buy things for the baby. I swear, I’ll talk to my wife. I’ll tell her. Give me till November. After November, we don’t have to hide.”

“Twenty-five.”

“You bitch.”

“Baby clothes are expensive. And I have to look nice if I’m going to be Second Lady.”

“Are you really pregnant? If you’re not, I’ll fucking murder you.”

“You want to come to a doctor’s appointment? My next one is in a couple weeks. Not everyone lies for a living, Leo. And I’d prefer cash. If you’re going to put me on the payroll, you shouldn’t leave a paper trail. I’m just looking out for you, sweetheart.”

—❉—

The boy was four months old, happy and beautiful like his father. His father slept during the day and worked nights, making 115% in a coal mine. The boy also slept during the day, and Lola was having a hard time adjusting. Life, for her, had always been hard, and that’s why she was with the boy’s father. He was good for her. He was strong. But one day, while father and son slept like angels, Lola’s mind went to a dark place. To keep from making a huge mistake, she took the boy in their truck and drove.

When the boy’s father woke for lunch, the house was empty. He saw that his son and his truck (respectively) were missing. Before he cursed, he thanked God that Lola had lasted this long. He prayed, then poured himself a drink. Then another. It wasn’t, technically, too early for bourbon, but for him, it was morning.

By his third, he called Roughgarden from the mine. Roughgarden was angry. “I told you that bitch was crazy!” he said. “With good-looking girls, there’s always something.” Roughgarden had a motorcycle. He helped him look. He rode pillion. He was no queer, as he’d say, but it felt good, in the state he was in, to hold someone, even if that someone had a beer belly and a skull tattoo. They went to Lola’s friend Sue, who lived off Wabash in a single-wide she’d inherited from her brother.

“I haven’t seen her or talked to her in a week,” Sue said. She mentioned a psychic out by the freeway. Lola had gone there quite a bit, Sue said, especially during her pregnancy. They rode to the psychic, who happened to be a man. Why did he assume a con artist would be a woman? The psychic asked them, before coming in, to remove their boots.

“Lola is a Leo,” the psychic said. “Nobody forgets a Leo. Leos live forever.”

“Live forever? What happened to Lola? Did you do something?”

“I don’t think you two understand the work I do here.”

Roughgarden had to hold him back. He was drunk. They looked some more, as far south as Gillespie, before Roughgarden said, “You can keep looking, but I can’t miss a shift.”

He brought him home, where two police cruisers, local and county, were sitting in his driveway. The police told him a truck registered to his address had been found abandoned on the side of the road, outside Carlinville. They’d been calling for hours.

“My son,” he said.

“The boy is okay. Neighbors saw the truck, found the boy in the back seat, drinking his bottle. No signs of foul play. They’re taking care of him for us. We’re looking for the driver of the truck, and I hope, in your condition, that it wasn’t you.”

“My fiancée,” he said.

“Is she here?”

“I don’t know where she is. I woke up this afternoon, and she and my son and my truck were gone. Where is my truck?”

The cops said they should talk inside. He agreed. He put on some coffee. They asked about Lola. Had she been distraught? Did she take any medications for what one of them speculated might be postpartum? Was she a drinker like he was? Did he have any reason to harm Lola? “When can I see my son?” he said.

They brought him later that night to the neighbors and gave him back his boy. The boy seemed sad to go. The cops kept the truck for another week to rule it out as a crime scene. During that time, he rode to work on Roughgarden’s motorcycle. Any extra money went to Lola’s friend Sue for babysitting. The cops said they’d talked to Lola’s family, in Peoria and Memphis, and to every name in her little red address book. No one had seen her. They brought dogs to the house to smell her clothes.

“Do we have a funeral?” Sue said a year later. “What are the chances she comes back?”

“Where could she have gone?” he said. “She has no money.”

January was his birthday. Guys from the mine got together at the Glass Rose. They drank. Cops, he said, had ruled out Lola’s father, but he wasn’t sure.

“I want her alive and home as much as you do,” Roughgarden said. “But if we’re talking facts,” he put an arm around him, “you’ve got a woman over there who’s good for you. She’s good for your boy. She may not be as pretty as Lola, but she’s shaped the way a woman’s supposed to be.”

Sue was in a booth, feeding the boy french fries and ice-cream cake, drinking beer through a straw to match the boy and his apple juice. Sue was sweet like that. Because of her, the boy had been sleeping at night instead of during the day. Later, at his house, Sue gave him a present to unwrap while she put the boy to bed. Back among the torn paper, it was only the two of them. He poured drinks. She said, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry.”

He knew what she meant and offered to pay her more. She said it wasn’t the money. When he asked what it was, she said she was falling in love with him, was starting to love the boy like a mother. She didn’t want to leave, but she had to. “You’re a good man.” Too good, she said, for Lola.

“What do you know, Sue?”

She said there was a chance his son wasn’t his. Lola had told her, more than once, about other men, about walking, lonely, into town when he was at the mine, about truckers waking up for the overnight. She’d tell them she was a widow, that her husband had died in war, from cancer, by suicide. Men liked to feel that they were rescuing.

“Who were the men?”

“I asked her not to use names. But I don’t think she knew. She didn’t want to.”

“Is that why she went to the psychic?”

“He’s a friend of hers. I don’t believe that stuff. She thought if she asked you to do a test, at a hospital, you would’ve left her.”

“You’re hoping she never comes back,” he said.

“I miss her, too. She’s my friend. But I care about you and your boy. Your boy is the real victim in this. He’ll always be yours. He can be ours.”

“Have you talked to her since she disappeared?”

“A boy needs a mother,” she said. “I know you need a wife.”

That year the police gave up on Lola. Her parents had a casketless funeral in Peoria. He refused to go or bring the boy. Sue, as promised, stopped babysitting and later married an Army reservist from her church. She had two girls.

By himself, he raised the boy. He never married or did any tests. He wanted to know, but not without Lola there to defend herself. Alive or dead, she deserved the courtesy. They were a family.

—❉—

Ten years later, Lonny’s wife and daughter couldn’t say for sure whether he’d murdered his brother. The body was found in the East River by a sightseeing cruise. Between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, a Japanese boy with binoculars told his father he’d found a mermaid. The body was shot through the head, twice. Beneath the skin, veins showed blue-gray like the water.

A jury of Lonny’s peers deliberated for less than an hour. The verdict was that he’d have to leave the city, his home, and spend the rest of his life in prison, upstate. No possibility of parole. He was an hour away by car.

Lonny maintained his innocence. “I love my brother! If I could bring him back, I would!” However, the story he told his wife, on a phone, through glass, changed slightly, and she noticed. Back home, in the Bronx, she relayed details to their daughter. She wasn’t trying to turn her against her dad: she thought their daughter needed some healthy distance from Lonny. At her age, she should have had more emotional intelligence. She loved him and only him. Love, for their daughter, was zero-sum.

“She doesn’t have friends,” Lonny’s wife said during a visit. “She’s the weird kid at school. She reads and draws all day. She’s in her head too much. She won’t tell me, but I’m pretty sure someone is bullying her.”

Lonny sank against the table, bit the chain between his wrists. What good was he if he couldn’t protect his kid? “You can cry,” a guard said, “but head up!”

During his daughter’s next visit, Lonny said, “This is it, okay? I can’t see you or Mommy anymore.”

“They won’t let you?”

“It’s no good for you to see me in here, sweety. I’m doing you no good in here.”

“But don’t you want to see me?”

He said it was the only thing he looked forward to.

“Me too.”

“Maybe that should change.”

“Why? I like coming here.”

“Because you’re a teenager,” Lonny said. “There are better things to do on a Saturday night. You should be with friends, going to parties, getting in trouble.”

“I should do drugs?”

“Not drugs,” he said, “but you could socialize more.”

“I’m talking to you.”

“Do you like any boys at school?”

“Not really. Gompers is full of idiots.” She looked behind her. Her face in the one-way glass hid her mother’s on the other side. “Mom thinks if she convinces me you killed Uncle Jules, I’ll never come back here. But she doesn’t believe you’re guilty. If she did, she wouldn’t come herself.”

“You’re a bright girl,” Lonny said. “I hate that I can’t be your dad in here. I hate that nobody is anybody in here.”

His daughter was confused. Lonny decided then that there was only one way, given the circumstances, to be a good father. He got closer to the glass. He said Jules knew things he shouldn’t have, and, to steal his share of their father’s business, Jules planned to go to the police. Jules was a greedy motherfucker.

“Did Mom tell you to say this?”

If he stopped now, he would never say what he had to. “I was protecting you and Mommy. That night—”

“You’re lying.”

He described the blood. He described rolling his brother in a drop cloth. The business was contracting. The sounds his daughter made into the phone were those of the baby girl he used to feed from his hand like a bird. She stood and called for her mother. The door swung open behind her. In came his wife. On his side, a guard stepped in with keys. “The visit is over.”

His daughter wouldn’t let go of the phone. She hid her face in her mother’s arms, and her mother stroked her hair. Lonny was out of reach of his phone, being led away. He screamed for her. She didn’t look up. His was another loud prison voice, and through the glass, his wife was thanking him.

—❉—

The summer before sixth grade, Liv’s father got an aerospace job. He was moving the family to Arizona. “They have space shuttles there.”

“Is your dad an astronaut?”

“He builds rockets,” Liv said, “and missiles. They test them in the desert.”

“Do we have rockets in New Jersey?”

That summer they rode bikes to the lake. Liv had the idea to put Fleers in their tires.

“Now they sound like motorcycles!”

She caught a tadpole in a soda bottle. He skinned an elbow. They climbed trees. “This one is mine!” he said. “No girls allowed!” He carved his name in the bark.

He had a short bow, and arrows, and took Liv to an old barn behind his house. It was ten minutes through the woods. Near the barn was an old, rusted Ford, hood raised, thistle growing around the engine. “This place looks haunted,” she said.

“I never come here at night,” he said.

“We should.”

They shot arrows at the barn, watched them angle and ricochet, watched their metal tips spark in the gravel. When they stuck in the barn, chips of paint and dry rot scattered like pollen. They shot arrows into the sky and played action hero, dodging them as they fell. He asked Liv if she wanted to stay for dinner. She said yes, but asked what his mom was making. “I’m a vegetarian,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t eat animals.”

He felt stupid that he’d tried to shoot a rabbit for her.

In July, Liv was gone for a week. When she came back, her face and arms were darker, her hair lighter. There was a strip of bubblegum skin down the middle of her nose. “We helped my dad pick out a house.” She said it was too hot in Arizona, but there were more members of her church out there.

“I know we have churches in New Jersey,” he said. He asked if she’d made any Arizona friends.

“Not yet.”

August was a sad month. Liv made friendship bracelets. Hers: pink, green, and white. His: blue, green, and orange. At her house, men from her church were loading a U-Haul. He helped two teenage missionaries carry boxes. In her room were books and a deconstructed bedframe.

“What if we never see each other again?” he said.

“That’s what the bracelets are for. To remember.”

She was smiling.

He kissed her. He hadn’t planned to. He kept his hands at his side. His eyes were closed because that’s what people did on TV. Finally, Liv pulled back, looking around, wiping her lips.

“Have you ever done that?”

“No. You?”

“I’m not supposed to till I’m sixteen.”

“Should we do it again?” he said.

“The next time I see you, we’ll kiss. Even if we’re married to other people, even if we’re a hundred years old, if I see this—” she touched the bracelet on his wrist—“I’ll kiss you.”

Decades passed. They more or less forgot each other. He legally changed his name, his last name, because people made assumptions about Italians in politics. Liv married young. One summer, for vacation, she and her family, three boys and two girls, were in New York City. As a kind of religious pilgrimage, they’d rented a truck and driven upstate to a small town on the Erie Canal called Palmyra. On the way back, Liv didn’t take them to New Jersey. All these years later, she didn’t have much feeling for the place. Her love was reserved for Arizona. They went, instead, to Central Park and Times Square, to the Empire State Building. Now they were going to dinner.

He’d come straight from LaGuardia to the Lotte. It was a Midtown hotel, visits to which, over the last three months, his accountant had expensed to the taxpayer. He was on the sidewalk, in front of the hotel, texting. One of Liv’s daughters, absorbed in an app or eBook, bumped one of his guys. The girl, startled, apologized profusely. Liv turned. He knew he’d seen her before, but beyond that, he couldn’t say. She was a pale, sloe-eyed woman in knee shorts. He had hair transplants and wore contacts. Liv thought she recognized him, maybe from TV, but these days she watched whatever her kids watched.

Both kept walking. Later, in the lobby of the Lotte, he knocked the crystal of his Submariner against a wall. He swore. Nothing had happened to the watch, though he began to think, in the elevator, going up, and without knowing why, of his childhood in New Jersey. He remembered a friendship bracelet and a promise his friend had made. Where had the bracelet gone? And why did he care? Why now? The bracelet was three colors. One, he remembered, was orange. The other two? He thought of nothing else. Green? The woman with whom he was having an affair had to stop the oral sex she was giving him in her room. “I haven’t seen you in a while,” she said. “I didn’t think it would be this much work.”

“We need to take a break, you and me,” he said.

“Your wife knows?”

The next day Liv and her kids were on a plane, going home. Liv’s husband wasn’t there. From JFK he was going to Peru for a week. Her older sons in the row ahead were already planning what they would do with only Mom in the house. The whole trip seemed to Liv like an excuse to take drugs. Recreation as ritual. Her husband had denied this angrily, and she said, “Fine! But why does it have to be Peru? What if something happens—are there no places in Utah to do this?” He accused her of being a Molly, narrow-minded, brainwashed by the church, and while he was gone at work and her youngest was napping, she cried alone upstairs.

“Where’s Peru?”

“South America, Dumbo!”

“Mom! He said dumb.”

“What’ll Dad do there?”

“You know how you like to learn about other cultures?” Liv said. “Your dad’s the same. He’s very curious.”

“You’re not curious?”

“I am, but someone has to watch you guys.”

“What about Grandma and Grandpa?”

While a stewardess was serving them lunch, Liv thought of the boy she’d known in New Jersey. For no reason she could identify, the memory came—the boy, chubby, in tube socks, swaggering with his bow and arrow—as she stripped the cellophane on her ham sandwich and ate. Her vegetarianism had lasted till college. Her youngest, in the next seat, was pretending to feed a plush rabbit doll. “Look, Mom! He likes pretzels!” The boy, she remembered, had tried once to shoot a rabbit for her, and he’d been so nervous, and the arrows had missed badly. She remembered no details but only the fact of a kiss, that one had happened before her family moved away. She remembered thinking, at the time, that she was not like other girls, that God had big plans for her. She looked out her window at the sky, a Great Lake, blue, above the clouds. Liv wondered if people, like planes, could get only so far apart before they started back toward each other.