Disclosure by Garrett Rowlan

Irritated by his son’s unexpected phone call, Karl drove by night. It was past ten.

Arriving at the dark, Pasadena bus station he saw no Eddie inside the dim lobby, but when he turned back to his car, his adopted son waved.

Eddie’s handshake—he was never a hugger—was weak, like twigs tied together. “How come you didn’t tell me you were coming?”

“It was a sudden decision,” Eddie said, easing into the passenger seat.

            “You didn’t drive or fly?”

“I can’t. This was the only way.”

Eddie seemed different. Karl supposed it was drugs, but unlike before he didn’t sense some underlying nervousness that the drugs soothed. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

Karl searched for something else to say. “How’s Mary?”

“We’re not together.”

            Karl took a few moments to absorb this. Mary was, or had been, Eddie’s girlfriend. She’d come with him to Martha’s funeral, a blonde with sallow features and large eyes. While Eddie had openly grieved she had stayed silent, hovering in a dense tranquility of drugs, or so Karl had assumed at the time.

            “What happened?”

            “You know, things happen.” As they went down Colorado, Karl probed gently, though couldn’t get a clear picture of Eddie’s life since his mother had died. He spoke vaguely on how he and Mary didn’t see eye-to-eye. He worked stocking shelves in a CVS. His voice had a syrupy, weird tranquility, that is until he said, near the Eagle Rock border, “Turn left here, please.”

           “Here?”

“I want to see my dad’s house.”

“I’m your father.”

“You know what I mean.”

We would have kept on going, Karl thought as he turned, pretending Eddie was his biological son if Eddie hadn’t brought the issue of his paternity up himself, when he was sixteen, He had insisted then that he be told. And they had done so with tears and apologies to which Eddie was surprisingly stoic, as if he already knew.

The side street was quiet, gently curved, and suburban with its lawns, trees, and clean sidewalks. Karl was curious or nostalgic himself because he hadn’t traveled this way for years, and when they passed Livingstone’s house Karl was surprised to see a single push lawnmower sitting on the slightly slanted front lawn. Livingstone liked to mow his lawn; do it the old way, as he called it.  “Gets your muscles moving,” he had said. “Technology just makes us lazier, fatter, unhealthy.” He was pushing that mower or one like it when two years ago his heart gave out. Enid had died eight months earlier.

Martha, when questioned—grilled, really, by Karl—had confessed to the affair and said what she liked about Livingston was the vigorous and physical aspect when compared to Karl’s more sedentary, cerebral approach to life. But then Karl had liked that about Livingston too.

“Someone else owns that place now,” Karl said, slowing. “I think it’s a lawyer and his wife and child.”

“Hmm,” Eddie said, his features mask-like. He had contented himself with a good, long glance and now looked forward.

“Speaking of which,” Karl said, turning the corner and heading back to Colorado Boulevard, “I got a call the other day from your sister.”

            “How’s Sally doing?”

            “She got a promotion. And Kara just started the third grade.”

            For a second, Eddie looked puzzled.

            “Your niece.”

            “Of course. And Barry?”

            “Nothing recently. I know the practice and his family are keeping him busy.”

            “That’s good.” Eddie never had much of a relation with Sally and Barry. Maybe it was the age difference; maybe it was their knowing that Eddie came from the worst part of Karl’s life: Martha's affair with Livingstone ended as her pregnancy became evident. She had refused an abortion. Barry and Sally were nine and ten years old at the time. They kept their promise to accept the child as their brother, maybe better than Karl, who didn’t feel the same as he did for his natural children. He saw Livingstone in Eddie’s features. There was always a distance.

            Yet, he reflected, Barry and Sally were now near or in middle-age with their own families, careers, and residences in distant zip codes. His old life seemed remote as well. Last month, with nothing better to do, he’d visited the university where he’d taught for thirty years. They were respectful, but it had been seven years since he left, and with all the new faces in the department, he felt like some outsider given the tour. On his way to the parking lot, he stopped at the library, revisiting the two academic books he’d written. The stamped dates inside the covers indicated that no one had borrowed them in years. A novel about the Sixties, published and forgotten, had vanished from the shelves and not been replaced.

             Ten minutes later, they pulled into the driveway. Karl got out and Eddie did the same, though he pushed the car door with all his might as if he were weak or ill.

“Are you okay?”

            “Home sweet home,” Eddie said, stepping out and a moment later stepping through the door Karl had opened.  

“You want anything to drink?” Karl asked.

“No, thank you.” Eddie walked around the front room, seeming to take it all in. “This house brings back memories,” he said.

It seemed kind of an odd thing to say, since he’d been here a year ago for Martha’s funeral. “Martha and I bought it about the time you were born.”

            “That’s when she came back to you, right?” 

            Karl took a breath. It went down like exhaust fumes. “She had already returned from her…indiscretion.”

“You make it sound like…something from a novel. Objectified.”

“I’ve tried to minimize the consequences, I mean mentally.”

“Like me, I’m the consequence.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I mean the relationship I had with Livingstone. Your mother and Enid were never that close, anyway.” Karl wanted to say something else, Something delicate, about how the affair changed his closeness with Livingstone. It was never the same.

            “I just want to know,” Eddie said, “what led Mother to stray?”

“Is that the word she used?”

“Something like that.”

A poor student, Eddie had been indifferent to, sometimes defiant of, Karl’s status as a professor and his insistence upon education. Now he listened with his hands on the back of a chair, supporting him, almost. His head sagged forward and his eyes trained on Karl.  

“I was busy, getting ahead, committees. I became involved with a graduate student. There was a bit of a scandal.”  

“Yes, I knew this. Mom told me.”

            Karl remembered Ann Rose in a flash of memory. She had blonde hair, a wide smile, and a tattoo on her shoulder, decades before that was popular. “No need for guilt,” Ann later said, when she left the program. She could have sued, Karl supposed. She probably would have, these days. But then she had expressed no rancor when Karl had looked her up a few months ago. She didn’t want to see him, either.

            “I’m not saying,” he said, “I drove Martha into the arms of … your father. Oh, I suppose I could have seen her attraction.”

“Do I look more like him or her?”

Karl was surprised by the question. It was something a 10-year-old would ask.

“Your mother, I think. Livingstone around the eyes.”

Eddie nodded. “And what happened?”

Karl had told this before, when he and Martha were middle-aged and facing him from the living-room couch. He didn’t want to tell it again. “She came back to me pregnant, refused the abortion. That was hard to deal with. I don’t think we would’ve made it if, deep down, we didn’t still love each other, strange at that sounds. Or perhaps we re-learned to love each other. Whatever the case, our marriage became a work in progress.” As he spoke, however, Karl wasn’t thinking of Martha but of the miniature tsunami on Ann’s left shoulder.

“And what about my father? He said you were great friends at one time, close friends.”

“Well, something like that, you understand why it would separate us. Obviously, we kept Livingstone in the loop and they offered to help. Well, he did. Enid never took it that well, but they stayed married. We used to be a foursome but after that wasn’t like it used to be.”

            “He told me people used to think you and he were brothers,” Eddie said. “Is that so?”

“We were close friends,” Karl said. “And lookalikes, yeah.” Eddie’s features in the room’s light had a layered look, a palimpsest. Karl saw Martha there, in the bowing of the mouth and the width of the forehead, and in the eyes he saw Livingstone. “We were like brothers, one I never had.  We haven’t ever really talked about this.”

“Well,” Eddie said. “It’s all good. You and Mom did your best, I mean considering the circumstances. I always felt loved. The rest is my own doing.”

A car skidded around a corner and sped down the street. Listening, Eddie winced.

“I have to go now.”

“What? You haven’t even sat down.”

“I told you I couldn’t stay long. The bus leaves in a half-hour.”

“You’re not staying tonight?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I just can’t.”

That was like the old Eddie—unreliable. Karl felt an old frustration. “You call me at night and you know what I think about phone calls late at night, they’re always bad news—to come and get you, and now you want me to take you back?”

“Sorry,” Eddie said. “I should have told you earlier.”

He didn’t know what compelled Eddie to call, be collected, and returned to the station within a matter of minutes. He had always been unpredictable. He was like Livingstone in that way.

And so they went outside when the car was still warm. As they drove, Karl’s irritation lessened. Eddie was Eddie; he was always a kind of misfit. He probably would have been happier raised by Livingstone, but Enid wasn’t as forgiving as Karl was.

They didn’t speak about this. They only talked about the Dodgers.

To Karl’s surprise, a brightly-lit bus was waiting when they arrived at the station. It was already half-filled with people.

“You know,” Karl said, “I thought they had closed this place, now that I think about it. They were going make it into a parking lot.”

But Eddie was already out of the door. He passed in front of the car’s headlights and turned to Karl and waved and smiled, then entered the bus. Karl wanted to wave goodbye but almost as soon as Eddie stepped inside, the bus went dark and rolled out of the station. Karl watched it go.

Returning, he veered back down the street where Livingstone and Enid had lived. Someone had moved the lawnmower to the yard’s other side.

He could almost see Livingstone with his shirt unbuttoned, pushing in the summer heat.

Sometimes, that seemed the worst thing was about Martha’s betrayal, the way it severed Karl from Livingstone.

Karl let the car idle and recalled the time he and Livingstone had left in the middle of the night to go fishing and got drunk and huddled together when the day and the rain came over the mountain. Livingstone had pulled him close for warmth.

Karl told Eddie about that moment though not all of it, and only to him, not the other children. The moment had never happened again.

He put the car in gear.

At home, he felt suddenly weary and went to bed. Lying on his back, heard the breeze and the soft stirring of the leaves outside. A car passed by outside, going too fast.  

            The phone rang on the bedstand. “Now what?” he muttered, sliding out of bed. He hated the sound of the phone ringing late at night; it often meant bad news.