Everybody's Son Read online

  They wouldn’t let him ride with Anton in the back of the ambulance, so he rode in the front, next to the driver. Delores followed in their car. Every few minutes David would slide open the panel that allowed him a small window into the body of the ambulance, and he would talk to the silent boy, telling him that he was with him, reassuring him that he would be fine. He fought the urge to ask the young kid driving the ambulance to step on it, knowing that he was doing the best he could.

  The news at the hospital was somber but not grim. Anton had a concussion as a result of the blow to his head. An MRI ruled out a brain bleed or a cracked skull. He would most likely be okay, the doctor said, but they’d keep him in the observation unit of the ER until the next day.

  “I’m spending the night with him,” David told Delores.

  “You better ask,” she whispered. “It’s not like Anton has a private room. You don’t want to get in their way.”

  He gritted his teeth. “I’m not asking them anything. I’m staying, even if I have to stand all night.”

  In the end, they gave him a chair next to Anton’s bed. He lowered his lanky frame into it, caring about nothing but the fact that he would be there when Anton woke up. Already the boy had a shiner around his right eye.

  He had just dozed off when he heard Anton yell in his sleep. David eyed the clock. Three A.M. He gazed at the boy, willing himself back to sleep, but Anton had his eyes open, staring wildly around him. “Hey, hey, buddy,” David said, squeezing the boy’s hand. “I’m here, okay? I’m right beside you.”

  For one awful moment, Anton looked as if he failed to recognize the man next to him. Then he said, “Is Mom here?”

  “No, baby. She’s home. But she’ll come if you need her.”

  “No. That’s okay. Do I have cancer?”

  “No. What?”

  “This is a hospital, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “So I have cancer?”

  “Anton. No. You have a concussion.”

  “Is that like cancer?”

  David stared at his son. “No. You hit your head. You ran into another player during the soccer match today. Remember?”

  Anton scrunched up his face, trying. “I don’t. I can’t remember.” There was a film of sweat on his upper lip. “My head hurts,” he said.

  David pressed the nurse’s button. “Okay. Just try and relax, okay, buddy? You just have a little bump on your head. Everything’s fine. We’re gonna give you something for the headache, okay?”

  They were both quiet as they waited in the dark for the nurse to show. “Dad,” Anton said, and David felt the word in his chest like a lit match. “I’m scared.”

  The tenderness in David’s chest felt liquid, like milk, like honey, like something melting. He got up and carefully put his arm around the sleeping boy. “Don’t be,” he said gruffly. “There’s no reason to be. Your daddy’s here with you.”

  He felt Anton relax in his arms. He looked up, willing the nurse to come so he could ask her for pain meds, but also taking in this moment, this dark, this silence, this warm body relaxing into his strong arms. I could kill for this boy, he thought, I could wage wars, burn down villages, protect him with my dying breath. After James, he had never expected to feel this fierce a love again, this love that hissed and roiled and rattled in his chest.

  The nurse gave Anton a children’s Tylenol. After she left, David asked, “Do you know you have a black eye?”

  Anton smiled, as David knew he would. “I do? Cool.”

  “Yeah, you look like a pirate.”

  “Oh boy. Can I see?”

  “Tomorrow. When I can get you a mirror, okay?”

  “What time are we going home?”

  “I don’t know, bud. Let’s see what the doctor says.” And then, compulsively, as if flicking his tongue over a sore tooth, “You don’t remember anything about the game today?”

  Anton blinked. “No.”

  “Okay.” He ran his hand lightly over Anton’s hair. “You try and sleep, buddy.”

  “Where are you gonna sleep?”

  “Me? Right here. Beside you.”

  “But there’s no bed.”

  “That’s okay. Go on. Get some rest.”

  Anton closed his eyes and David sat in his chair, sleepy but alert, awaiting the dawn that he knew was surely around the corner.

  BOOK TWO

  September 2001

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was a movie. An epic disaster movie, like those 1970s chestnuts such as The Towering Inferno that his dad and mom sometimes watched on the old VCR. Plumes of smoke, burning buildings, the terrified people on the street running toward the camera, their eyes wide open with fear, covering their mouths from inhaling the smoke that already bore the hoofprint of death and the smell of flesh burning to a crisp. Even worse than the black plumes of smoke that rose like the wrath of God was the apocalyptic white snow-ash that fell on everything, portending a new world order. The white ash took every American metaphor—“pure as the driven snow,”—and turned it on its head, made it something sinister and ugly. A new world had arrived, delivered to their doorstep by CNN.

  They were gathered around the television set at Eliot House at nine in the morning. Just a few years ago, they were still children, gathering around the campfire at night, trading ghost stories. But now they were grown, and what they were watching was the ghost story to end all ghost stories, written by a tall man in a cave, a man who was an engineer by profession, for crying out loud, but whose audacity, depravity, and creative imagination put professional screenwriters to shame.

  None of them had ever seen a building tear open like fabric, with a giant hole in its center. None of them had ever seen a plane slice into a building. None of them had ever traced the slow drift of bodies falling from the tallest buildings in New York or experienced the sickness that they felt at the sight. Many of them had visited those iconic buildings on family trips to the city; not in a million years could they have imagined that the towers, which had felt so sturdy and strong under their feet, could collapse like a child’s set of LEGOs.

  It didn’t occur to any of them to run off to class, because they understood in their bones that attending lectures and seminars was meaningless in a world gone mad. A day earlier they had been glowing because Professor Skip Gates had grinned at a smart observation they had made or worrying about the paper on Shakespearean sonnets that they’d written for Professor Helen Vendler. Now they took in the scene before them and saw the future go up in smoke. What did it matter if they went to law school or not? Who cared whether Derek slept with Carrie or Joan? How did it matter whether Karen was gay or just confused? As the towers collapsed, their individual lives, full of ambition and promise, collapsed, too. Individual destiny, they realized, mattered as much or as little as the rubble they were witnessing. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Look where their trust funds, their titans of industry fathers, their Bryn Mawr mothers, their patrician grandparents, their fine sensibilities, their honed intelligence, their legacy admissions, had brought them—to helplessly watching their country’s demise.

  Now the first rumblings of outrage, the first stirrings of patriotic feeling, began. The TV anchors were already calling it terrorism, an unprecedented act of horror. Nobody knew how many were dead, but estimates were as high as ten thousand. When President Bush appeared on TV at nine-thirty, they cheered, even those who held the stolen election against him. A few minutes later they groaned as a third plane plowed into the Pentagon.

  “This isn’t terrorism,” Bobby Falk kept saying. “This is war, man. I’m telling you, it’s war.”

  Ahmed, an international student from Pakistan, spoke louder than anyone. “I hope they hunt down and kill the evil bastards who did this.” They wanted to assure their friend, the only Muslim student present, but found their hearts weren’t in it. They wouldn’t rush to judgment, they wouldn’t succumb to jingoism, they were Harvard men and women, liberal, fair-minded, they understoo
d their country had its own sins, they knew about Pinochet and Chile and the 1953 CIA coup in Iran and Iran-Contra and all that, but enough was enough. This was their country, and it had been attacked. Someone would have to pay. By fuck, someone would have to pay.

  It was just then, when the initial shock was leaving their systems and adrenaline was rushing in, that they heard a female voice from the back of the room.

  “This is it,” the voice said. “The chickens coming home to roost.”

  They all spun around, furious, Anton among them.

  And he locked eyes with the blackest, funkiest, most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Later, after he’d managed to get her the hell out of Eliot House and they’d walked across eerily deserted Harvard Yard and gone to Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee, after they’d sat there for two hours arguing about American foreign policy, after she had said things so outrageous and downright unpatriotic that, offended, he had gotten up to leave, after she had made a rueful face and apologized for her bluntness and then, after he had sat back down half-appeased, asked him why, as a black man, he was so eager to defend the white military-industrial complex and he had laughed, shaking his head at her, after he had told her about his adoptive parents, one of whom was now the governor of a neighboring state, after he had noticed that her eyes had not sharpened with interest the way almost everybody else’s did when they found out that he was the son of Governor David Coleman, after she’d told him that her doctor father was from Cameroon and her mother from Georgia, after he’d flirted briefly with the idea of telling her that his birth mom’s folks had been from Georgia and then dismissed it, after he’d instead told her that the combo explained why she was the most beautiful woman at Harvard, after she’d arched an eyebrow and said, “At Harvard? That’s not saying much,” after they’d both laughed and she’d looked at Anton and mumbled, “You’re pretty cute yourself,” after he’d blushed and changed the topic and asked what she intended to do with a degree in political science and she’d told him, after she’d asked why he was wasting money on a degree in English and he’d admitted that his real ambition was to get in to law school and somehow combine the two, and asked, “Are you always this rude?” and she had nodded, after his stomach had rumbled and he had declared that he was hungry, after they’d gone to Hong Kong and gotten two take-out orders of lo mein and sat on a bench on Mass. Avenue under a blue sky that bore no trace of the fact that the world had ended earlier that day, after he’d given her one of his shrimp and stolen a piece of pork from her order, after they’d eaten sitting on the bench feeling young and happy and sad and desperate, the cotton of his shirt occasionally grazing her bare arm, after they had finished and he had thrown away their take-out containers and then extended his hand to help her up and she’d placed her hand in his and he never gave it back, after they’d walked hand in hand through a strangely quiet Harvard Square and the Yard, they went back to Eliot House and into his room and got into his bed, and stayed there the rest of the day and night.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  What kind of an engagement ring did one give a girl who hated the sight of gold and who saw in every diamond the blood of the wretched who had entered the bowels of the earth to mine it? And how did you propose to a girl when your anniversary fell on September 11 and common decency demanded that this was not a day of celebration or for planning your future?

  Anton had been grappling with both these issues for several weeks, ever since he had been seized with the idea of the proposal, even though common sense told him that it was much too soon. He even made a list of the arguments against such a step:

  1.He was pretty young and didn’t want to get married until they’d both graduated from college.

  2.After a year of dating her, he hadn’t yet introduced Carine to his parents.

  3.He hadn’t met her parents, either.

  4.He wasn’t sure that she would accept.

  On the pro side:

  1. He loved her.

  2. She was the coolest woman he had ever known.

  3. Also, the hottest.

  And so he had hunted in antique stores and used-jewelry shops until he had found an engraved silver band. He thought it was elegant and hoped that she would, too. What her politics were about silver, he hadn’t a clue. He waited for a week to pass after the 9/11 anniversary. It felt wrong to be happy on that day, as if he were out of step with the mourning that engulfed the whole country. After a year, the trauma was still present—he still looked up nervously at the sky if a plane was flying at a low altitude—but the fact was, he was happy. He had been a happy fool from that first day with Carine, even though her political views and her outspokenness drove him crazy. At the beginning of their relationship, he was constantly trying to shush her in restaurants, on the street, where her loudly stated opinions were often met with hostile stares, even in progressive Cambridge. He often found himself looking around the room, smiling an appeasing smile, his skin tingling, his antennae up, prepared to get into a fight if need be to defend his opinionated girlfriend, but hoping to convey by his posture and body language his indulgent humoring of her, and that he was asking those around them for the same indulgence.

  Until the day at the restaurant when she had fixed him a hard stare and said, “Whattsa matter, boy? I thought your name was Anton. Not Tom.”

  He had flushed, pushed away his half-drunk Coke, gotten up wordlessly from the table, thrown down a twenty-dollar bill, picked up his jacket, and left. All the way home, his eyes stinging with tears, he had called her names. Bloody bitch. Bloody crazy bitch. Who the hell does she think she is?

  It had been a short-lived quarrel. She had knocked on his door two hours later, and when he opened the door, her eyes were red and her face small and pinched. She had apologized and he had accepted. But the impact of her words lingered like the reverberation of a bell. The next semester, he signed up for a literature class with Skip Gates and heard the term “the white gaze” for the first time. He had spent his boyhood and teenage years, he realized, mindful of that white gaze. What would it feel like, he wondered, to be free and direct the way Carine was? To not have to conduct yourself in a certain way at all times? To not have to constantly smile to prove that you were unthreatening, to continually demonstrate that you were intelligent, articulate, and not an affirmative action charity case? Carine seemed to have no such hang-ups. She often wore her hair in dreadlocks and had an eclectic wardrobe, so she could go from African queen to college student in no time at all. She laughed uproariously when something was funny and did not when someone made a sexist or homophobic joke. No, nobody would ever accuse Carine of being a Tom.

  He began to grow out his hair. It wasn’t an Afro, exactly, but it was longer than the close-cropped cut that he had worn ever since he had moved in with the Colemans. Carine went home to Georgia for a few days and returned with three collarless cotton shirts, all brightly colored, that her father had purchased in Kenya. Anton had balked at first—“I’m a T-shirt-and-jeans kinda guy,” he’d protested—but now they were his favorite shirts. With his longer hair and new wardrobe, the transformation was startling. Just last week at a coffee shop in Watertown, the waitress had asked him, “Where are you from?” When he smiled and said, “America,” she’d said, “Oh,” and hurried away.

  He was wearing his blue Kenyan shirt as he rushed to meet Carine on Friday. She was waiting for him outside the Au Bon Pain at the Square, as planned. It was an overcast day, and she wore an oversize army jacket over her black T-shirt and jeans. He fingered the ring in his pants pocket as he approached her. She hadn’t spotted him yet, and he relished the few seconds of observing her. Even in repose, Carine’s face was alert, and he felt giddy with pleasure at the sight of her. He had dated some in high school and during his first year at Harvard, sweet white girls from good families, but he had not been madly in love with any of them. He had been enchanted by them, had liked them well enough, but the partings had always b
een friendly and bloodless. What he felt with Carine wasn’t so much love as a homecoming, and he honestly didn’t think it was racial—though she was the first black girl he had ever dated—so much as chemical, protons and electrons coming together. I guess that’s why they call it chemistry, he thought, but now she had spotted him, and he took the last few steps toward her and kissed her briefly on the lips.

  “Your nose is cold,” he said, touching it with his finger.

  “Yeah. And whose damn idea was it to meet here on this bleak day?”

  “Actually, it was yours.”

  “Oh. Well. In which case, what a great idea.”

  They smiled at each other. “Where do you want to go to dinner?” he said. He had a vague idea that he would give her the ring at the restaurant without making too big a deal about it. He had the feeling Carine wasn’t the kind of girl who’d want a proposal on bended knee.

  She scrunched up her nose. “You know what, baby? Do you mind if we just go back to your place and make some pasta or something? I feel like maybe I’m coming down with a cold.”

  “Oh, no.” He nodded. “Pasta sounds perfect. You ready to go?”

  He put his arm around her to protect her from the wind. She leaned in to him as they walked down Mass. Avenue toward his apartment. He took in the big gray clouds, the vivid green of the trees, and felt a trickle of happiness, pure and thick as honey, in his chest. This was the world, he thought, and he had a place in it. With this mad, crazy, impetuous woman by his side, he felt mighty, powerful, clear about his future. He realized now that he had never felt young until he met Carine. But he felt it now, and as they walked, he saw their future roll out before them like a plush red carpet.