Chapter Twenty-Two - WEST
I surface from the water and my memory of that first day with the Conrads and see Tori and Ethan still on the rock.
“Dad!” Ethan laughs. “I already got one!” He holds up a fish. I can’t make out what it is from here and I’m not all that familiar with the tropical fish anyway, so I don’t even try. I just wave from the water and continue to swim.
The ocean feels like coming home every time. And maybe that life wasn’t so bad. I mean, being that kid, on that Nantucket beach, diving every day to feed myself… it made me into the man I am now.
But no adult wants that for a kid, theirs or not. And I don’t want that for Ethan. I want to give him all the things the Conrads gave me without all the bad things that came with it.
“Hey, kid,” I say, dragging myself up on to the rock. “Good job.” I ruffle his wet hair and then look at Tori. She’s smiling. She loves him. So much. And even though she’s pregnant with our first biological child, there’s no way Ethan will ever come in second. And I know that’s impossible to say, since when you have two, they can’t both always be first. But she will make it happen. And Ethan will grow up loved, and valued, and respected for who he is and not what we might want to turn him into.
Which then makes me feel guilty. Because I wish—very much—that he’d stop all this stuff he’s doing and just settle down.
But what if that never happens? What if this is just who he is? What if he never stops sneaking out at night? Or feeling like he has to provide for people? Or—
“What are you thinking about, Weston Conrad?”
I sigh and pull her into me. She’s warm and dry, and I’m cold and wet. But she lets me do it anyway. “Just… stuff. Ya know?”
“Stuff like me?” Ethan says. Offhandedly. Not even bothering to look over his shoulder at us. He’s always like that. Just kinda… honest and open. Not many people have those two qualities as their default setting, so it’s a little disarming when you encounter it.
I’m fully disarmed at the moment, but I figure the only way to handle honesty is with honesty. So I say, “There’s gonna be a whole party of people here tonight. Are you planning on feeding all of them?”
He laughs. Says, “Yup. As soon as you show me how to get these lobsters. They’re prickly, look!” He holds out his hand and shows me his palm, which has little spots of blood from where he’s been trying to catch lobster and got stuck with their spines. “But I got him.” And he points to the cooler of seawater with one lobster already inside it.
“Well, I’ll show you how to do it the right way, how’s that?”
“Yes!” he says, doing a fist-pump. “I’m gonna be as good as you one day.”
“Better,” I say, looking at Tori.
She says, “You know, I think I’ll leave you two here to fish for a while. I see a white sandy beach calling my name.”
She gives me a kiss, tucks her sunglasses into her shorts, and then dives off the rock and starts swimming for the beach.
That’s my cue to get to the bottom of what’s going on with Ethan, so I clear my throat and say, “So…” And that’s as far as I get.
“So Mom wants you to talk to me about sneaking out at night and doing stuff kids shouldn’t do, right?”
“Uh… yeah.”
“Well, Dad, look.” He redirects his attention from his fishing over to me, lifts up his mirrored aviator sunglasses—where the fuck did he get those?—and says, “I’m just being me. And I know it’s not normal. They’ve all told me that over the years.” And then he lowers the glasses again, hiding his eyes.
I laugh. Because he’s eight. How many years can people have been telling him this?
“But I can’t help who I am.”
“Who are you?” I ask.
“Ethan,” he says. “Ethan Conrad.”
“Before that, Ethan. Who were you before that?”
“Ethan Wright.”
I know his real last name. But that’s not what I meant. So I sigh, frustrated and unsure how to have this conversation.
He looks back to his fishing. “Ethan Wright was a lonely kid.”
“Why?” I ask, relieved that he gets me. He knows what I’m after and he’s taking the initiative. Even though he shouldn’t have to because he’s… eight.
“He had a brother,” Ethan says.
“He did? I mean, you did?” This third-person thing is freaking me out a little.
“Yeah.” Ethan looks at me, but all I see is myself. Both in who he is and in the mirrors covering his eyes. “He was twelve.”
“Was twelve? So he’s…”
“Dead now,” Ethan says. “But I saw it coming.”
“You did?” I ask, my heart breaking and beating fast at the same time.
“Yeah,” Ethan says. “He had cancer.”
“Jesus. Where are your parents? Tori—I mean Mom—said she never met them.”
“I don’t really remember them,” Ethan says. He sits down on the rock and I walk over and sit next to him. “They weren’t around when Chet died.”
“So you were alone? In foster care?”
“Yeah, that was before Mom’s place took me in.”
“And then what happened? After Chet died?”
He’s silent for a long time, but I don’t rush him. And then after minutes of this silence, he says, “Where were your parents? When you were my age?”
“Well, my mom was… not well and then she…” I’m about to lie and say she got sick and died, but that’s not a lie you tell a kid who’s been through that already. “She killed herself. And then I was with my dad, and he was murdered by some bad people.”
“Who?” Ethan says, looking up at me.
And here it is. The truth fucking staring me in the face. I can either admit it and get it over with now, or lie and let that lie fester for decades until he figures it out on his own.
I can’t live with that lie. I can’t live with any more lies. I’ve told too many of them already. So I say, “The Conrads. The Conrads killed him.”
Ethan squints his eyes at me. “The people who adopted you?”
I nod.
“Jesus Christ, West. That’s horrible.”
And I can’t help myself. I laugh pretty loud. He’s like a thirty-year-old man in this little kid body. It’s such a trip. “Yeah,” I say. “They did a lot of bad stuff. Lotta bad stuff.”
“And that’s why Mom hates them?” he asks.
“Yup. And why she wants me to get rid of my last name and take the one I was born with.”
“What?” Ethan says. “That would be like… me deciding to stop being Ethan Conrad and going backwards to become Ethan Wright again.”
“Yeah, exactly how I feel about it.”
“What’s your real last name?”
“Conrad,” I say, smiling. “What’s yours?”
“Conrad,” he says, smiling back. “Forever and ever and ever.”
I ruffle his hair and say, “Yeah. But you know your mom…” I sigh. “She’s real worried about you.”
“I know,” Ethan says. Just like that. I know. Like this is nothing in his world. “But she shouldn’t worry too much.”
“Why’s that?” I ask.
“Because I’m OK now. I don’t go out to steal food or medicine for Chet anymore. I just go out because… I like it. And I don’t go very far. Not too far. Not like I used to before Mom found me. I just go short places. To see people I know and make sure they’re OK.”
Wow. I loved him before this conversation, but I love him even more now. I don’t exactly know what kind of medicine he’s talking about for his brother. But I’m gonna assume it was over-the-counter kinda stuff. Because if this kid was breaking into pharmacies for cancer drugs I might not know what to do with that.
So I say, “Ya know, there’s this new invention called the smartphone.”
He laughs.
“And the really cool thing about it is that you call people and ask them how they’re doing. You don’t even have to go over to their house to look into the windows or anything.”
“Dad,” he says.
“And not only that,” I say, “but you can send little written messages called texts, if you don’t feel like calling. People like texts. You can put little smiley faces in them and everything. Those are called emojis.”
“Dad.” He laughs again.
“My point is, Ethan, you can’t go out at night. It’s not safe. And it’s driving your mother nuts with worry.”
He sighs.
And I get all the things out of that sigh. He does it because… well, he likes to do it. And I get that. I used to catch lobsters and fish because I liked it too. But it was dangerous, and even though it was fun, and I learned a lot, and I became self-sufficient… “That’s not how kids live, Ethan. Kids don’t do those things because they need time to grow up. Kids need to have fun, but they need to have safe fun. Ya get me?”
He thinks about this for a long time, and I let him. We just sit there. And then, finally, he says, “I get you.”
“So you’ll stay home at night? And we’ll get you a phone and put everyone’s number in it? And you can call each one of them, every single night if you’d like, and ask them if they need anything.”
He looks up at me and says, “What if they do need something?”
I shrug. “We’ll get in the car and take care of it. Together.”
“Promise?” he asks.
I nod. “Promise.”
After another long silence he says, “OK. I’ll do it your way.”
“I love you, Ethan.”
“I know,” he says back.
“Hey,” I say, deciding we’ve come to some kind of conclusion. “You wanna go catch some lobsters the real way?”
“Do we need gloves?” he asks. “Because I couldn't find any on the island last night.”
“No,” I say, feeling happier about everything. “Getting poked with spines is most of the fun.”
“Battle scars,” Ethan says.
“Battle scars,” I say back.
Later, after we’ve caught our quota for the day and Ethan has moved on to fishing, I join Tori on the beach. She’s got quite the setup down here. Giant umbrella, beach towel big enough to host a family of six, sunscreen, cooler with drinks and snacks… pretty much everything a family needs for a day at the beach.
“My hands sting like fuck,” I say.
Tori lowers her sunglasses and smiles. “Best feeling in the world, right?”
“Best,” I agree, sinking down beside her and stretching out my legs.
We sit there like that for a little bit, just watching Ethan’s lean form silhouetted against the afternoon sun as he casts, and reels, and casts again. “He’s OK,” I say.
“I know,” Tori says.
And I love this about her. That we have these conversations that are half words, half mind-reading.
“I love him so much,” Tori says, her hand on her belly. Like she’s subconsciously wondering if she will love the new baby more. Or less, for that matter.
But I know that’s not really what’s on her mind, so I don’t even go there. “He loves you back,” I say.
“I know that too.”
“He wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t happy, Tori.”
“What do you mean?” There’s a little crack in her façade.
“I mean…” What do I mean? I think about it for a second because I feel like this is crucial. That the words need to be just right and there’s no room for mistakes. “I mean… Ethan is like us.”
“Explain,” Tori says.
“We choose our path, we don’t let it just happen to us. It’s a force of will, and compromise, and maybe even a little bit of fate. But not really fate, because fate implies we don’t control it, and we do. He’s like us, Tori. We’re together, not just because we’re in love and it’s a love that lasts forever through lifetimes, but because we want to be together. He’s with us because… well, you didn’t choose him and I didn’t choose him. He’s the one who chose us.”
“You didn’t choose your parents,” she says.
But I’m ready for it. Ethan has clarified things for me in a way I would’ve never seen without him. “No, I didn’t. They chose me. And it’s not the same. Thank God, it’s not the same. Because even though what they did was disgusting, unethical, and caused a lot of people a lot of pain… I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t choose them, but I can’t change the mark they left on me any more than you can change the mark your father left on you. Or Ethan can change the mark his childhood will leave on him. All we can do is admit our mistakes, try harder, do better, and live on. I’m a Conrad. I don’t want to go backwards and be the kid I was before they took me in. And Ethan is a Conrad. So are you. We’re not them, Tori. And this name has nothing to do with who we are. It’s just a name, that’s all. And we’re gonna keep it. We’re gonna do good things with our name.”
“So Victoria Conrad,” she says, trying out her new name.
“That’s Mrs. Victoria Conrad to you.”
She smiles and scoots closer to me, her hand on my stomach as mine wanders to hers. I think about the baby and wonder why I’m so calm about it.
One year ago I was Mr. Corporate. Power player. Master of my world.
I’m still him, just better. And fatherhood suits me, I decide. It’s the best.
“Hey,” I say. “You know what’s so cool about having a kid?”
“The pregnancy sex?” she says, winking at me.
I have to stop and think about that for a minute. Jesus. “Yeah, that, for sure.”
Tori laughs. “What’s so cool about it?”
“You get to fix all the shit your parents fucked up.”
Tori hugs me, wrapping her leg around mine in a possessive way that makes my heart swell. “You know what?”
“What?”
“It’s funny how the worst day of your life can end up being the best day of your life. If we hadn’t both been under those trees in front of the admin building that night at Brown, we’d never have met.”
“Not true,” I say. “Because I had my eye on you for weeks. You just scared the fuck out of me so I never approached you.”
“Liar!” She laughs.
“Truth,” I say. I look down at my soon-to-be wife and then kiss her. “But seeing you in your moment of weakness made me brave. And I guess that’s a good lesson to learn. That it’s our moments of weakness that define us. It’s the challenges that mold us into who we become. The struggle makes the victory that much sweeter.”
Tori sighs, looking out at Ethan as he reels in yet another fish. “He’s gonna be just fine,” she says.
“Better than fine.”
“Just like us,” she says.
“Just like us.”