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Charlotte and Claire were Jerome’s daughters. He wasn’t allowed to see them until he had his six-month chip. Right now he was at three months. He’d relapsed twice before that.
“What have you been doing today?” I asked. “Anything different than usual?”
“Nah. Just when I was walking home from the store I went the long way around the park and saw all the kids playing. And I just miss them so much. I miss being a dad. It’s…I was actually good at it, you know?”
“Then that’s what you need to focus on. They’re who you’re doing this for. To see them again. To be their father.”
I could hear Jerome crying and trying to hide it. I closed my eyes.
“Want some company?” I asked.
“Yeah, please. Can you?”
“Be there in an hour.”
I pressed my hand to my stomach, but there was nothing written there to hold onto.
* * *
—
Jerome answered the door looking rough. Eyelids puffy from crying, white T-shirt yellowed under the arms.
“Hey,” he said sheepishly as he held the door open for me. “Thanks. Thanks, Huey.”
“Sure.”
The rental-white paint of his studio apartment was dingy with age, and the walls were bare except for school pictures of his daughters that he’d taped over yellow water stains next to the futon.
“Want to talk?” I asked.
He sighed with his whole body.
“Honestly? I just want to play video games and not think. I just didn’t want to be alone.”
I don’t like being alone, Felix had said as he shook and cried in my arms outside Quizzo. Suddenly every cell in my body yearned for him.
“I understand,” I told Jerome. “It’s worse when you don’t feel seen. Like you could do anything, hmm?”
“Yeah. Thanks, man. I’m sorry to call you away from whatever you were doing.”
“?’S what I’m here for.”
He sank into a cross-legged seat on a cushion on the floor and I perched on the futon.
“You wanna play?”
“Nah, I’ll just watch you.”
Hours later, I left Jerome’s apartment feeling like I had a cannonball in my stomach. It was after seven, and I’d spent all afternoon watching Jerome play his video game and talking a little. He’d insisted on feeding me despite my protests, so the cardboard-tasting frozen pizza that I’d choked down only added to the cannonball.
As I walked toward home, I breathed deeply, trying to get the sourness of his apartment out of my nose, but the air just smelled like car exhaust and sauerkraut and piss.
I turned around and headed to the subway instead.
* * *
—
I’d only been to Felix’s apartment once, when we stopped in so he could get some clothes. Someone leaving the building held the door for me and I made my way to the fifth floor. My tread on the polished cement steps echoed eerily and the bare bulbs in the stairwell flickered. I cleared my throat and it sounded like a shotgun.
There was a welcome mat outside Felix’s apartment that said Please Wipe Your Paws, which the previous tenants had left when they moved out.
Felix opened the door wearing pajamas, his hair in a high ponytail. He smiled, clearly surprised to see me, and joy hit me so physically I almost staggered backward.
“Hi!” Then he looked at me and his nose did that adorable wrinkle thing. “Come in.” He took my hand and tugged me inside. Then he took a good look at me and said, “What’s wrong?”
He pushed me onto the dingy brown couch and put his hands on my shoulders. I buried my face in his chest and wrapped my arms around him.
“Baby,” he said, “what’s wrong?”
I pressed my ear close enough to hear his heartbeat and breathed in the sweet, clean smell of his skin.
“Wanted to see you. Hope it’s okay I showed up without calling.”
“Yeah, of course. Do you want some food? It’s just mac and cheese with black beans mixed in, but it’s not bad.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said, less out of hunger and more to give myself a chance to gather my thoughts.
Felix and Sofia’s apartment was in a boxy postwar building with cheaply plastered walls and floors that were parquet in the living room and linoleum tile in the kitchen. They’d decorated it in cheery bright colors that came from a hodgepodge of hand-me-downs, thrifted finds, and things that were left behind when students moved out of the dorms on the campus where Sofia worked.
The brown couch was ugly but comfortable and had throw pillows with sequin suns on them. There was a floor lamp draped in gauzy scarves, a jumble of small plants shoved in the south-facing window, and the screen that separated Felix’s bedroom space from the living room proper was painted with blackboard paint and had messages, doodles, and one picture of a vomiting unicorn scrawled on it in different colors of chalk.
Felix handed me a mound of food in a chipped orange bowl and settled next to me on the couch.
