C HAPTER T WENTY-FIVE

It is almost as if Jacob-Perez Sullivan, four days past his eighteenth birthday, has gone into the Witness Protection Program. His beard is gone, and his hair is cut even shorter than mine. We owe this miracle to his beloved grandfather, Danny Sullivan, who’d given Jake some valuable advice while the two of them constructed that cobblestone path together a few weeks earlier.

“When you hit the road, Jake, you ought to clean up your appearance,” my father advised. “Shave and a haircut, man. Last thing you want to do these days is resemble a terrorist. Good-lookin’ kid like you, they’ll be cavity-searchin’ you at every port just for the fun of it.”

Nothing Doris or I could have told him would have resulted in the cleanup. The change in Jake’s appearance is so dramatic that I can’t stop staring at him as the three of us make our way through JFK Airport.

It’s our second family outing in less than a week, after years of never doing anything together. Our first outing wasn’t your typical divorced-family-getting-together-for-old-times’-sake gathering.

The three of us had gotten together to kill the cat.

It was long overdue. Poor old Jasper was blind, and probably deaf. He couldn’t eat, he moaned in his sleep, and you could see his skeleton through his coat. He was twenty years old. It had been a hell of a life.

The veterinarian’s office was in the basement of a brownstone on West Eighty-eighth Street. I carried Jasper in an old pet carrier box, while Jake walked arm in arm with Doris. It was a beautiful sunny day, a great day to die or a terrible day to die, depending on your point of view. Is it better to die on a rainy day, since the day is a washout anyway? Or is it better to die on a sunny day, to go out on a cheerful note?

Jake and Doris were actually in tears as we entered the place, a small, dingy room rank with smells of alcohol and animal fur. The vet was a small, gnomeish man with round eyeglasses, a full head of white hair, and an appropriately mournful face.

He embraced Doris. She’d left a lot of money here over the years, and this would be her final payment. Maybe that’s why the vet looked mournful. He clasped his hands together, like a priest about to address his congregation. “Are we ready?”

Doris nodded. She lifted the lid of the carrier case to stroke Jasper’s head one last time. “Good-bye, old friend.”

I turned to Jake to see if he wanted a final farewell. He shook his head, wiped his eyes.

“I said goodbye to him back at the house, Dad.”

I followed the vet into a closet-sized room with two chairs and an examining table. I set the carrying case on the floor and lifted that all but weightless creature onto my lap. He meowed nervously. He may have been blind and deaf, but he could sense where he was, and he didn’t like it. Unpleasant things had been done to him here.

The vet was busy preparing a syringe. He didn’t seem quite so mournful now, with Doris out of sight.

“Who are you to Doris?” he asked.

“Ex-husband.”

He couldn’t help chuckling. “Well. This is an odd thing for you to be doing.”

“We do things together once in a while for the sake of the child, you know? Birthdays. Graduations. Executions.”

His eyes narrowed. “You’re a funny guy, eh?”

“Depends on who you ask, Doc.”

Jasper was squirming on my lap. I stroked his head. He licked my hand. Oh boy.

The vet was ready. “Now listen. Just hold him the way you’re holding him. I promise you he won’t feel a thing.”

“Just make sure you get him and not me, Doc.”

He chuckled, held up the syringe. A drop of poison hung from the tip of the needle. “This wouldn’t be enough to kill a man of your size. Might make you sick for a day or two, but that’s all.”

“Take careful aim anyway.”

The vet gave Jasper’s head a perfunctory stroke, a wordless eulogy. Then he pulled up a fold of the fur on Jasper’s back, stuck the needle in there, and pumped in the poison.

Jasper perked up in my lap, cocking his head as if he’d heard someone calling him from another room, or maybe another world.

“Just hold him,” the vet said. “Stroke him. He’ll be asleep in less than a minute.”

Jasper shut his eyes and rested his head on top of his paws. A surge of current seemed to run through his body, and then he was still, absolutely still.

“Okeydoke,” the vet said, turning to write something in a notebook. “Set him on the examining table. I’ll do the rest.”

“Let me take his collar off first.”

I removed the collar, a strip of worn yellow leather that held a metal tag with Jasper’s name and address. What a pathetic thing for a cat who never left the apartment, except to visit the vet’s! I laid Jasper’s bare body on the examining table. It was all over.

“What happens to him now?”

“He’ll be cremated. Would you like to have the ashes?”

Here we go, I said to myself. There’s always a fucking angle.

“How much?”

“A hundred dollars.”

I was no longer a New York Star reporter, but this was the kind of thing that made me want to reach for my notebook and go to town. “What do I get for my C-note?”

The vet seemed offended by my slang. “Well, you get Jasper’s remains in a small urn, plus a certificate saying these are his remains.”

“I see. That way, we know it’s authentic.”

The vet stares at me before answering. “That’s right.”

“What’s the urn made out of?”

The vet adjusted his glasses. “Believe it’s some sort of metal.”

“You don’t know what kind of metal it is?”

“Why is that so important?”

“Because you should know what the hell it is you’re selling to people before you bang ’em for a hundred bucks. And while we’re on the subject, let me ask you this—are all of your animals burned separately, or is it one big bonfire?”

“I beg your pardon!”

“I don’t want to shell out a hundred bucks to wind up with the remains of some stranger’s dead Doberman pinscher mixed in with Jasper’s ashes.”

“Sir. Let’s remember something here. This isn’t even your cat.”

“That’s right, it’s my ex-wife’s cat. But she’s in a very vulnerable state right now, and if you go to her with this ridiculous offer she’ll jump at it, and I don’t want that to happen. So let’s just forget the ashes deal, pal. Don’t even offer it to Doris.”

He shrugged. “As you wish.”

“Oh man, what I wish is that I could catch the rascals who probably chuck these dead animals in the river and then scrape out the bottom of their barbecue grills to fill up urns and sell ashes to grieving pet lovers! That’s what I wish, as long as we’re talking about wishes!”

By this time I was practically yelling. The vet looked as if he was ready to dial 911. I held up an appeasing hand. “I’m going, man, I’m going.”

He didn’t follow me back to the waiting room. Doris and Jake were sitting there, reading magazines. They looked up at me as if hoping I had a miracle to report—that the vet had injected Jasper not with poison but with a miracle elixir that had turned him back into the bold, beautiful kitten he once was.

I wanted to believe that, too. There was nothing to say. All I could do was burst into tears.

They took me to a nearby ice cream parlor, where I ordered the biggest hot fudge sundae on the menu. I ate every bit of it, hogging it down with all the grace of a junkie sucking on a crack pipe. People stared at me, but I didn’t care. They didn’t know what it was like to have a cat die on your lap.

On the way out, I remembered something. “Shit, Doris, I left the carrying case at the vet’s. Want me to go and get it?”

“What for?” Doris replied, and maybe that was the saddest thing that happened all day, the idea of knowing without a doubt that you will never have another pet. Maybe it’s not quite the same as knowing you’ll never have another child.

But without either of those things, what is left?

Anyway, this trip to the airport is promising to be every bit as emotionally turbulent as the cat murder. But so far, it’s going all right—remarkably well, in fact.

It’s a ridiculous thing to say about an eighteen-year-old, but he actually looks ten years younger, which would make him eight years old, but that’s not how I mean it. This isn’t about his hair. It’s about the light that’s back in his eyes for the first time in so long.

I was wrong about the light in the eyes. It can come back, if you believe in miracles, and you don’t have to believe in God to believe in miracles. You just have to believe in each other. Maybe it’s the same thing. Maybe it’s a better thing.

“Have you got everything?” Doris asks.

“Absolutely everything,” Jake patiently replies.

We’ve been over the checklist countless times. His tightly packed canvas bag contains his clothes and his books. The carryon bag contains his first-ever passport, his ticket to Paris, the reservation for his hotel on the Left Bank, insurance papers to cover medical emergencies anywhere in Europe, a blank notebook, five pens, the book he happens to be reading at the moment (Leonard Gardner’s Fat City—one of my choices, I’m proud to say), a twenty-four pack of Trojan lubricated condoms, five hundred U.S. dollars, and a bank card that will enable him to get money from cash points wherever he goes. Jake will stay at the hotel until he finds himself an apartment.

He’s letting me carry his guitar, which he’s learning to play with astonishing skill. Those cello lessons paid off after all, lubricating Jake’s transition from one stringed instrument to another.

Doris has deposited thirty thousand dollars into Jake’s checking account, but the trust fund is still quite healthy. The remaining amount, after the withdrawal, stands at $157,543 on departure day.

Moneywise, I’m doing all right myself. After I was fired from the New York Star the union lawyers went to bat for me and wangled eighteen months’ worth of severance pay, plus medical coverage. Management tried to un-fire me, claiming Derek Slaughterchild lacked the authority to do what he’d done, but it didn’t hold up in arbitration. I had been fired, all right. There were witnesses who hated Derek as much as I did, and they were delighted to testify to what they’d seen and heard. I’m sure it was no coincidence that a few weeks after the ruling, Derek was fired, and I’m told he wept like a baby while he packed up.

So here I am, on a year-and-a-half-long sabbatical at full pay. Not only that, but I have no more tuition or child support payments. If I wanted to I could get on the plane and go with Jake.

But I wouldn’t do that to him. This is his time. I know it, he knows it, and so, at last, does Doris.

Jake is straining under the weight of his bag, but as usual he won’t let me help as we make our way toward Air France.

“Look at this,” he says, reaching into his pocket. “Danny gave it to me.”

He pulls out a rectangular box. It’s about the size of a deck of cards, encased in brown leather.

“Open it, Dad.”

Inside the box is an old compass, with a black enamel face and raised white letters indicating north, south, east, and west. Its needle quivers as we continue walking, ever sensitive to direction.

“How cool is that? It’s from when Danny was in the navy.”

“Extremely cool,” I agree, trying to ignore a twinge of envy over the fact that this family relic is skipping a generation to land in my son’s hands. But the twinge quickly passes. I am happy, very happy for my son. I close up the compass case and hand it back to him.

“Danny says that when in doubt, always head north.”

“I’ll trust that he knows what he’s talking about.”

When we reach Air France, Jake checks in his big bag and answers the ticket agent’s routine questions as if he’s heard them a million times before. Doris and I stand on either side of him, letting him handle the whole thing. As the agent affixes a tag to Jake’s bag she seems to notice Doris and me for the first time.

“I assume the child is traveling alone,” she says.

“I wouldn’t call him a child if I were you,” I reply.

We begin the walk to Jake’s departure gate. I’ve sworn to myself that I’m not going to cry, but it’s a vow I may wind up breaking. Doris seems to be holding up all right, but it’s hard to tell. She’s the one who’s lived with our kid all these years, so she’s the one whose day-to-day life is going to change drastically. I realize I know nothing about her personal life, outside of how it relates to our son. I wonder if she has a boyfriend. Maybe now she’ll remarry. She’s about to get her first true taste of what it is to be alone.

As for me, I’m okay by myself for now. For the first time in my life I’m alone without being lonely.

Suddenly I’m in the grip of a powerful memory that hasn’t paid a visit in a long time. It’s something that happened one autumn day when Jake was about two years old, and the three of us went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jake wasn’t crazy about the idea of a museum visit, but we appeased him with a promise to take him to a nearby playground afterwards.

Doris kept us both there longer than we wanted, staring at painting after painting as if she meant to memorize every brushstroke. It was late afternoon, almost early evening when we finally came out and brought Jake to the playground, which was now empty except for us. The kid was cranky, and so was I. Doris and I began arguing, and when we came up for air we suddenly we realized that our son was nowhere in sight.

You don’t even know where to begin in a situation like this. Doris ran frantically around the playground, screaming his name, while I raced outside the gates and began running down Fifth Avenue, looking wildly about for my son and his kidnapper. Then it hit me that the kidnapper might have taken Jake the other way, so I reversed direction and ran a few blocks uptown, stopped, sensed the hopelessness of my mission, and hurried back to the playground, praying I’d see Jake nestled in the arms of his mother.

But she was standing there alone, still screaming his name to the sky. She turned to me, tears streaming down her face.

I looked at my watch. Twelve minutes. Jake had been missing for twelve minutes. By now he could be halfway to Brooklyn, or Jersey City, or any place else where a bridge or tunnel could accommodate a speeding car. Oh, they are good, those kidnappers! They wait for their moment, and they pounce. All they need is two selfish parents who’d rather argue with each other than watch their child, and Doris and I were those parents!

Doris collapsed into my arms. I told her we had to call a cop, right now, and as I was saying it a round metal lid on the ground of the playground went up, and Jake popped out like a happy gopher. This particular playground, it turned out, had a series of underground tunnels for the kiddies to crawl through. Jake found this out twelve minutes before we did, twelve minutes that aged each of his parents twelve years.

We ran to him and hugged him and wept uncontrollably, and now, for the first time since that day, we do the same thing as we reach the departure gate, me on his left, Doris on his right, the two of us hugging him before he disappears into this new tunnel that’s going to take him away for a lot longer than twelve minutes.

He’s got his arms around us. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay.” Jake’s eyes are wet but he’s under control. He’s had a lot longer to think about what he’s doing than we have.

At last, we pull away from him. Doris can’t even speak. I wipe my eyes, blow my nose. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to say to my son, but suddenly I’m saying it.

“Always remember the bacon.”

He seems puzzled. “Bacon?”

“Yeah. The smell of bacon on Saturday mornings, whenever I made us breakfast. You’re going to have some lonely times, and when you do, you’ll feel better if you remember the way the bacon smelled.”

“That’s good advice, Dad.”

He hugs me, then hugs Doris. “I love you both very much,” he says. I hand him the guitar, and then he turns and heads off.

He hands his passport to an apathetic-looking security person, who glances at it and waves him through. Jake doesn’t even look back as he turns the corner, and I have to admire him for this. He’s already said good-bye. He doesn’t want to milk it, the way so many people do at airports.

Jacob Perez-Sullivan is on his way to the City of Lights, a place his parents have never been.

Doris Perez stands there with her arms folded, staring at where Jake has last been seen, like a fisherman’s wife checking the horizon for the sight of a sail. I have a feeling she’ll stay there all day if I don’t do what I do next, which is to take her by the elbow.

“Doris. Come on. Let’s go.”

“Maybe we should stay until the plane takes off.”

“If you want.”

It happens about an hour later. We watch from behind as Jake’s plane races down the runway and lifts into the sky without a bump.

“Look at that, Doris. He’s finally getting what he always wanted.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s flying. How ’bout that? Our son is finally flying.”

We watch until the plane disappears into the clouds; then we begin the walk toward the exit at JFK, which has to be the world’s ugliest airport—shitty carpets and ratty shops run by angry people, people who clearly would rather be elsewhere. I guess it would be depressing to work at the airport, watching people go off to places all over the world while you stand stuck behind a cash register, selling magazines and breath mints and airsickness tablets.

Doris is still weeping, but it’s an aftermath cry. She’s more or less under control.

“He’ll be all right,” I say. “He’s a healer, you know?”

“A healer?”

“Yeah. If he can do anything to help a situation, he does it. Have you ever noticed? It’s in his nature. On that crazy weekend that you were away, he did all he could to help anybody we came across.”

“Don’t remind me of that weekend.”

“Be proud of him, Doris. He’s a good kid. He’ll be a good man.”

“Well,” she says, wiping her eyes, “what are your plans, now that you’re out of work?”

“I’m out of work, but I’m still getting paid.”

“How nice.”

“I’m thinking of going back to high school and getting that diploma.”

“You asshole,” Doris says, but her heart isn’t in it, because her mind is on Jake.

“Doris. He’ll be fine.”

“So you say.”

“If he doesn’t like it, he can always turn around and come back.”

“He may never come back.”

“Of course he will. We’re his family—especially you, Doris. You’ve always been right there, in his face. Now that you’re out of his face, he’ll finally have a chance to miss you, and believe me, he will. Jake always liked Thanksgiving. I’m betting he’ll be back for a Thanksgiving visit. Christ knows he can afford it.”

“Oh God,” Doris sighs as she suddenly hurries ahead of me. But her idea of hurrying is just a brisk walk for me, and it’s easy to keep up with her.

“Have a little faith in him, Doris.”

“Shut up. Just please, for once, shut up.”

“Everything happens for a reason. Jake told me that.”

“I’ll bet he did.” She shakes her head. “That weekend, that weekend,” she moans. “Why did I have to go away on that weekend? Why?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“I know you can’t.”

“But I can tell you that what happened would have happened anyway, eventually. This isn’t about one crazy father-son weekend, Doris. This is about a unique young man who won’t walk the path just because everybody else is walking it. You should be proud of him.”

“You really think so?”

“Yeah, I think so, Doris. I learned a lot on that weekend, but the best thing I learned is that Jacob Perez-Sullivan is a good person. He’s got a good core. You put it there, Doris, and maybe I did, too. So I think maybe we didn’t mess up so badly, after all.”

Doris startles me by falling into my arms for the first time, perhaps, since that terrifying day in the playground when we thought our son was gone for good. I once saw a photo of one of the Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor shaking hands with one of the Americans who dropped the big one on Hiroshima. Two old warriors, fifty years later, showing there were no hard feelings. That’s Doris and me, hugging at the airport.

“I am proud of him,” she says.

“So am I.”

The hug evaporates, and we continue our walk toward the exit. The three of us had taken a car service to the airport, but now we’ll have to get in line for a cab.

But I’m not quite ready to leave. I feel a little bit dizzy, and the very idea of getting into a stinking New York City yellow cab makes me feel nauseated.

I tell Doris I’m not feeling right, that she should go ahead without me. She actually seems relieved. We’ve had a decent time today, and spending any more time together could only wreck it.

Doris goes off to the cab line. I get myself a Coke, find myself a seat, and sip it slowly to settle my stomach, happy to watch people and planes come and go. I don’t have any appointments. Nobody expects anything of me. My ex-wife is heading home, and my son is in the sky, and I have absolutely no place to be.

And then it hits me how wrong I am. There’s someplace I want to be, all right, and I get up and begin the journey my bones knew I’d be making before my brain did.