Fitz

22



Fitz flips up the hood of his sweatshirt. It is a kind of private signal with his mom, half joke and half not, his own personal do-not-disturb sign. It’s what he does when he doesn’t feel like talking, when he needs a little Fitz time. It’s how he retracts into his shell when he feels vulnerable. He’s read somewhere that some rock star, Dylan probably, somebody legendary, communicates this way with his people—when the hood is up, it means I don’t wanna talk. It means leave me alone. Fitz loves the wordless efficiency of the gesture—no need to explain, which is exactly the point—and he sometimes likes the sensation of being insulated from the world. It’s a way for him to step back. It’s not as if all his clothing is hooded—though a surprisingly large percentage of his wardrobe does indeed consist of hoodies—and it’s not all that often, really, that he feels the need. But sometimes he does. Especially in the car, he’s glad to have a no-chat option with his mom, who may smile a little when he flips up but always respects his preference. It works for him, with his mom at least.

His father obviously doesn’t know the code, doesn’t speak the language. Right now he seems to be in his own world, too. He might as well be hooded. He’s off in his own place, wherever that it is.

Fitz unzips the front pocket of his backpack and takes out a CD. It’s got a handful of songs they recorded the week before, just Fitz and Caleb and a drum machine, a few covers and one original. It isn’t a demo or anything, just something to show for all their time in Caleb’s basement. Fitz isn’t sure why he packed it this morning. He wasn’t really planning on playing it. But right now it feels like the right thing to do. They’re in the middle of something, going from one thing to the next, scenery whizzing by them—it’s the perfect time for, what do they call it? A musical interlude.

The first song on it is them doing a number by Jimmy Reed, one of Caleb’s heroes. He wasn’t blind, but he did have epilepsy and was an alcoholic, too, of course. A couple of weeks before, Caleb gave Fitz a CD of his songs. Told Fitz he should try to write something like it, but there was no way. If you copied out the lyrics to one of his songs, they didn’t look like much.

Ain’t that lovin’ you, baby?



Ain’t that lovin’ you, baby?



Ain’t that lovin’ you, baby?



But you don’t even know my name.



They didn’t always even seem to make a lot of sense. It was like the song might have been made out of phrases written on scraps of paper and pulled out of a hat or something. But somehow still, the songs got under Fitz’s skin.

Probably it was Jimmy’s vocals, the knowing, lazy way he sang, that made Fitz feel something that wasn’t on the page. It was all about wanting, wanting something you didn’t have, wanting it with every ounce of your being. It was like Jimmy knew all about having a hole at the center of yourself. The songs had some kind of New Orleans beat—it was happy music, it made you want to move your feet—but underneath it all, there was something else, something desperate and incurable.

Fitz slips in the disc and hits play. The song they cover is “I Wanna Be Loved.” Strumming his guitar’s bottom strings with a thumb pick, Caleb sounds a little like Jimmy. He has recently acquired a harmonica rack, which he is awfully proud of, and manages to play some decent harp fills. Fitz is playing a boogie-woogie shuffle on the bass. Caleb’s singing is passable. He sounds a little less weary than Jimmy, he sounds more urgent, he’s got a little punk edge, but it works all right.

I wanna be loved but by only you



Because I know, I know your love is true.



Fitz turns it up a little, adjusts the balance. They sound pretty good on his father’s fancy sound system, just not enough bass, which Fitz corrects. He wishes Caleb could hear for himself.

His father cocks his head to show that he’s listening. Fitz wants him to like it. To be impressed even. Wowed. And he hates himself for caring. Why should it even matter what this guy thinks of him? What does he know about music? Fitz shouldn’t give a damn one way or another. He shouldn’t crave his approval. But he does.

“That’s you, right?” his father says. “Your band?”

“Yeah,” Fitz says.

His father listens some more. “I like your sound,” he says. “You have a nice groove going. I don’t think many kids your age understand the blues. But you guys got it, you really got it.”

He is saying all the right things. But Fitz doesn’t trust it. He doesn’t trust him. Everything he says could mean just what it says. Or it could mean something else entirely. “I like your sound” could mean “I like your sound.” Or it could mean “Maybe you ought to consider taking some lessons.” It could mean “All right, I listened, you satisfied?” Or it could even mean “Please don’t shoot me.”

Fitz could try to figure it out. He could try to turn himself into a human lie detector. Study his father’s breathing and gestures, try to tune in to his micro-expressions, practice the same kind of close reading Mr. Massey makes them perform on poems—weigh every syllable, measure connotation, tone, implication, understatement. But it’s exhausting. Plus he’s not very good at it. He’s had so little practice. When Caleb says something like “Dude, there’s something wrong with your hair, it looks frightened,” there’s not much doubt about what he’s getting at. When his mom looks at his report card, even the less-than-stellar marks in French, and tells him, “I’m proud of you,” it never occurs to Fitz that she might mean something other than just that.

Fitz hears himself stumble just a second on the song’s last turnaround and peeks at his dad to gauge his reaction. He feels a warm flush of shame. He leans forward and hits the stop button.





23



They’re on Summit Avenue now. It’s St. Paul’s postcard street: lined with trees, a grassy median down the middle, wide sidewalks, and on both sides churches and mansions, mansions and churches. It’s like they’re inside a coffee table book. Fitz thinks these streets, these cities, must have some kind of hold on his father. They must exert some gravitational pull on him. He went to law school here, but then he moved to St. Louis. That’s where the checks came from. He must have had a nice place to live, he must have had friends there, some places there where he played tennis and bought fancy coffee and shopped for produce. But he came back. Fitz doesn’t quite buy the good-job line. And now, just driving around, this is where he directs the car.

Somewhere on this street is where F. Scott Fitzgerald lived when he was a kid. His namesake. His mom’s favorite.

Fitz wonders what she’s doing now. She’s had her lunch already and has been outside on the playground with the little kids, pushing them on the swings. No idea that he’s rolling around town with his father. Probably she’s working with Wesley, a new boy with such a terrible history she’s only hinted at it.

All the kids at her school have issues, problems, every one of them a bundle of deficits and special needs. That’s what the school is all about. But her favorite kids, her special projects, the ones she talks about at dinner, are always the most damaged and beaten up, the toughest cases, the ones who’ve lost the most. Kids like Wesley.

Even though they’ve never met, Fitz feels like he knows Wesley. His mom talks about him all the time. He’s like a character in a book they’re reading together, day by day, chapter by chapter. “Wesley Makes Friends with Snickers the Hamster.” “Wesley and the 500-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle.”

But he’s real, Fitz knows that, with real problems. Wesley is just a little younger than Fitz, thirteen maybe, but has been in foster care since his father sold him for drug money, his mom told Fitz that much. Now he rarely speaks, never makes eye contact, and sometimes, for no apparent reason, flies off into a rage.

His mom said she thought Wesley liked Star Wars, so Fitz gave her some of his old action figures—Chewbacca, Luke, Boba Fett, a couple of droids—to bring in for him. She said he liked them. So he imagines his mom playing Star Wars with this boy, Wesley, the same way she played with him when he was little, moving them across a tabletop, making up a story together.

“You grow up here?” Fitz asks. “In St. Paul?”

“Here?” his father says. “No.”

“Where?”

“Chicago,” he says, but then corrects himself. “A suburb.” Fitz can imagine it. A rich kid. There was a big green lawn, tennis lessons. It makes perfect sense.

“Your dad was a lawyer, too, right?”

His father looks surprised. “How’d you know?”

“Lucky guess.” It isn’t rocket science. The guy hated law school. So why would you even go in the first place? “Your parents,” Fitz says. “My grandparents?”

His father’s face changes. It gets stony. “What about them?”

“Where are they?”

“My dad passed away. My mom lives in Florida.”

“Brothers and sisters?”

“One sister. A neurologist. In Boston. Married to another neurologist.”

“And how about you? You ever married?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Sure,” Fitz says. He looks out the window. Everything’s complicated. How do you sell a kid? That’s gotta be complicated, too. Why did he think this guy would give him a straight answer? He’s a lawyer. He’s all about complication.

They’re stopped at a red light.

“We thought about it,” his father says. “Your mom and me.”

Fitz tries to imagine the two of them getting married, coming down the steps of one of these Summit Avenue churches, people throwing rice, or birdseed, or whatever it is that people throw. Curtis in a tuxedo, Fitz can totally see that, rocking a black tie and cummerbund. Tails probably. He’d cut a dashing figure. His mom in a wedding dress, all frilled and lacy, not so much. Not at all, really.

“But you didn’t,” Fitz says.

“No,” his father says. “But I wanted to.”

“Just because,” Fitz says.

“Not just because. Because I thought she was the one. Even before you, I thought that.”

So what happened? Fitz wonders. This is what he needs to know. This is why he bought a gun. If he has to wave it in his face some more to get him to answer, so be it.

What happened? He’s in the delivery room. He’s giving her books. He’s thinking she’s the one. And then he’s gone. Out of the picture. Mailing it in from Missouri. Something happened.





24



“I have to ask you a favor,” his father says.

The possibility that he might be able to do something for his father, to give him something—that interests Fitz. It makes him feel important. “Really,” he says. Whatever it is, he’s inclined to say yes. He can show his father that he’s not only funny and a decent bass player but that he’s generous, too.

His father explains that he needs to go into his office and sign something—a motion. If it’s not filed with the clerk by five o’clock, he’s in trouble. Fitz feels a kind of embarrassed sinking. He’s been hoping for something personal, some kind of intimacy. Tell me, something along those lines. Forgive me. Some special favor only he can confer. Instead, his father is asking for what—work release?

“How much trouble?” Fitz wants to know.

“Big trouble,” his father says. “A boatload. If I miss this deadline, we go to trial unprepared. I could get sued. Slapped with malpractice.”

“Could you get fired?” Fitz asks.

“Maybe.”

It’s an appealing thought. Imagining his father being brought down. Fitz feels a certain pleasure in contemplating that. Some big boss man chewing him out. Telling him to clear out, clean out his desk.

But really, Fitz wonders, how could that be? It doesn’t sound right. So much riding on one guy’s signature. Who’s that important?

They’re coming into downtown St. Paul now, the capitol dome behind them, passing the science museum he used to visit with his mom, aiming straight for his father’s building. Fitz realizes that they’ve been headed to his office all along, even before he asked. It bothers Fitz that even today, his father can’t put away his work. That he has to share him. “They can’t get along without you? For one lousy day?”

“It’ll only take five minutes,” his father says. “I give it a quick read-through and sign my name.”

“What if you were sick?” Fitz asks. “I mean, really sick?”

“I’d come in, sign, and go back to bed.”

“What if you were in the hospital? What if you were hooked up to an IV? What if you were on life support? What if you slipped into a coma? What then? You’re telling me one of your lawyer buddies couldn’t sign?”

“Five minutes.”

“What about me?” Fitz asks. “You crack a window and leave me in the car like a dog?”

“No,” his father tells him. “No, no, no. Of course not. You come along with me. I can show you around. After that, I’m all yours.”

“Sure,” Fitz says. “Five minutes.” His father’s face brightens. He looks as happy as he has all day. Fitz really has done him a favor. It’s just not the one he wanted.





25



The firm of Plunkett and Daugherty takes up the entire twelfth floor of its building. They enter through two heavy, carved wooden doors, church doors. In the reception area, there are plants, muted abstract oil paintings on the wall, leather chairs, architectural magazines fanned out on a coffee table.

Here, Fitz feels dirty and disreputable, unkempt and unwashed. With his backpack slung over his shoulder, he feels homeless, a guy toting his belongings with him wherever he goes. In the car, back in the parking ramp, his father straightened his tie and fixed his hair in the rearview mirror. He put on his suit jacket, and now, fully wardrobed in his lawyer getup, he seems completely at ease.

The receptionist is a young woman in a black blouse wearing a headset, her hair pulled back austerely in a bunnish configuration. “Hello, Mr. Powell,” she says. She pushes a button in front of her. “Plunkett and Daugherty,” she says. “How may I direct your call?”

Fitz’s father gives her a little wave and motions to the left, this way. Fitz follows him down a long hallway, past offices, some with their doors open. He catches a glimpse of a silver-haired man in a bow tie and suspenders talking on the phone—he looks like the popcorn guy. They pass a kitchenette smelling of garlic, a little like his mom’s homemade red sauce.

His father pauses then and opens a door on the left. This is his office, his natural habitat, his lawyer lair. It’s more modest than Fitz imagined. He’s been picturing his father seated in some kind of padded, spinning leather throne, his desk ornate and expansive, the kind of place where sinister moguls in movies devise their evil plans. In fact, the office is neat—tasteful and understated.

There are framed diplomas on the wall and a painting of a sailboat. On the desk, there’s a computer monitor, a calendar, a leather cup full of pens. There’s a tall bookcase full of legal volumes, a credenza with a neat stack of file folders on it. No souvenirs, no knickknacks. No photographs. Nothing that implicates him in the life of another human being.

Fitz’s father stands at his desk and pushes a couple of buttons on his phone. He picks up a pen and makes a note on his calendar. His face takes on that half-abstracted, mildly impatient look people get when they listen to a recorded message.

His mom’s space at her school—it’s not quite an office, a kind of cubby really, just a desk and bulletin board in the back of a classroom—is full of personal stuff, most of it Fitz-related: primitive animal drawings he made back in elementary school; a full set of his school photos, before and after braces, his hair changing gradually, growing out from a buzz cut to its current style, Sgt. Pepper–era Beatles; a flyer for a coffeehouse gig that Fitz and Caleb were going to play except the place closed down first. It’s almost embarrassing. Like a museum exhibit: Fitz Through the Ages. But really, if it all disappeared somehow, if he ever came in and discovered that she’d remodeled and upgraded, replaced his ragged art with some framed sailboats, it would be upsetting, more than upsetting, it would be wrong.

Fitz wonders if his father’s apartment looks like this on the inside. Generically neat and professional, like something from one of those magazines in the lobby. Not like the mess that’s always fermenting at his house. The dining room table full of Fitz’s schoolbooks—Homework Central, his mom calls it—alongside her latest school project—construction paper and stencils, glue and glitter. The kitchen counter piled high with secondhand books from the latest library sale. The fridge entirely covered with magneted stuff, a crazy paper tree in full bloom: report cards, school notices, a snapshot of Uncle Dunc with a monster muskie he landed years ago, pictures from newspapers and magazines Fitz and his mom have cut out and posted over the years for no apparent reason—B.B. King, Kaiser Wilhelm, Toni Morrison.

A woman comes into the room. “There you are,” she says. She’s aiming for his father but pauses when she notices Fitz, who is just sort of standing there, lurking.

“My name is Sheila,” she says. She says this toward Fitz, in his general direction. He recognizes her name. It’s the woman that Chip at the diner wanted his father to greet. She’s older than Fitz expects an assistant to be, not old-old but older than his father. She looks like a fifth-grade teacher, a nice one.

Fitz expects his father to come in at this point, but there’s an awkward pause. For a moment, Fitz thinks his father is going to deny any knowledge of him, act like Fitz just followed him into the office, a stray. But then he speaks up. “And this,” he says, pausing just a beat, “is Fitz.”

In his father’s mouth, his name sounds good. He hasn’t always loved his name—he downright hates being Fitzgerald on all the official class rosters—but even corrected, reduced to a single memorable syllable, it sometimes seems too odd. He is always the only one. But now, when his father says it, it has a certain dignity. Right now, it makes him glad, even proud, to be Fitz.

“Pleased to meet you,” she says. She smiles. She looks genuinely pleased. If she is repulsed or frightened by his grubby self, she doesn’t show it.

She turns to his father then. “This has all the changes,” she says, and hands a sheaf of papers to him.

His father stands there reading, turning the long legal sheets, making little sounds of approval, Sheila watching him read. There are little arrowed transparent thingies sticking out between the pages, marking the spots, Fitz supposes, where he’s supposed to sign.

Fitz walks over to the window. It’s an amazing view. He can see people on the sidewalks below. From this distance, they look like miniatures, like toys—cute little people going about their little lives. He remembers a story Caleb told him once about a friend of his who worked as a salad boy at a downtown hotel and used to go up on the roof late at night and throw vegetables at pedestrians—two, three blocks away, some guy would get nailed with a cherry tomato and have no idea where it came from. Now, standing here and looking down at the world, Fitz can maybe understand the urge. If he had an open window and some veggies at hand, no telling what he might do.

Two blocks away he can see the top of a metro bus making a wide turn. It’s one of the new green buses, just like the one he boarded this morning. It’s hard for Fitz to believe that it was only hours ago. It seems like that was another year, another lifetime. In a space between two other buildings, he can see the Mississippi again. It’s the third or fourth time he’s seen it today. Every time, it looks different. It changes color, like a mood ring. Now the sky is getting overcast, and the water looks gray.

Across the river is his house, his neighborhood, his life. Somewhere over there, his mom is working. Caleb is at school, in sixth-period study hall now, a little annoyed with Fitz probably for his no-show.

He can almost imagine himself there, too. Across the river. Going about his business. Some other version of himself, not his gun-toting, outlaw self—his everyday self, his law-abiding, rule-respecting, good-kid, low-maintenance self. Yesterday, that kid was sitting at a desk, doing his homework, following directions. And tomorrow? Is he going to step back into that life as if nothing happened? It doesn’t seem possible.

“Okay,” his father says. “Our work here is done.”

Sheila’s got the papers back in hand now, she’s clutching them. “Nice to meet you,” she says to Fitz. “Enjoy your day.”





26



Back in the elevator with his father and a couple of other well-dressed business types—a man and a woman, each with leather bags, facing the same direction, watching the numbers above the door—Fitz feels different. Despite his jeans and sweatshirt, he feels professional, important even. He must be breathing in some secondhand confidence. His father looks pretty pleased. He’s not literally whistling, but he may as well be: he has that kind of self-satisfied air. Fitz can hardly blame him. It’s good to be him. A guy with his name on the door and a personal assistant. A guy who can sign his name and make something happen. It occurs to Fitz that this place is his father’s stage, it’s where he performs. He must feel like himself here, only bigger maybe.

They step out of the elevator into the lobby. “So what was that about?” Fitz asks. “Back in the office. The thing you signed.”

“You really wanna know?”

“Yeah,” Fitz says. “I wanna know.”

“A motion,” his father says. “That’s what I had to sign. A motion to compel interrogatories.”

“What does that do?”

“It’s part of the discovery process,” his father says. “Before we go to trial, there are some things we need to know.”

That phrase, discovery process—it registers with Fitz. He likes the sound of it. “Questions you want answered.”

“Exactly.”

“So this stuff that your guy—”

His father corrects him. “Our client.”

“Stuff your client needs to know. Stuff you need to know because, like you said, you have to tell his story.”

“That’s right.”

“And the other guys, what do you call them?” They push through the revolving doors, his father in the lead, so Fitz has to wait to hear his response.

“Plaintiffs.”

“Plaintiffs. They gotta tell you, right? They gotta answer your questions. You’re compelling them.”

“The judge will—we hope—but sure, that’s how it works.”

“Under oath?”

“Yep. Sworn statements.”

“Because your client needs to know the truth. Has a right to know, isn’t that so?”

They’re on the sidewalk now, headed for the ramp. Maybe his father is surprised by Fitz’s sudden interest in the workings of the justice system, by his passion for his case. But that’s not it. That’s not where he’s going with this.

Fitz wants his own discovery process. He has some questions he wants answered. When they’re back in the car, his father’s jacket hung up, Fitz’s backpack positioned on his lap, seat belts buckled, that’s when Fitz says what’s on his mind.

“You’re all mine now, right?” he says. “That’s what you said. If I did what you wanted. If I did you that big favor. Which I did.”

“Okay,” his father says. He says it slowly, the drawn-out anticipation of something crazy.

“I just want you to answer some more questions,” Fitz says. “That’s all. I wanna do the interrogatory thing. With you.”

Fitz has enough questions to fill up one of those long legal sheets. He could go and on.

“Questions,” his father says. “Like?”

“Like, what happened? With you and Mom? With you and me.”

Out of nowhere, Fitz feels himself choke up. He doesn’t think his father notices, but it’s those words, simple as that, you and me. The two of them stuck together like that. He turns away, looks out the window. He can’t cave now. He didn’t come all this way to go soft and blubber.

He can find his edge. He touches his backpack on his lap, feels the hard outline of the gun. He can compel. He remembers when he got in the car that morning, all snarly and full of attitude, his father thinking he was getting jacked.

“Come on,” Fitz says. “One day you’re thinking there’s no one like her, and next thing, you’re mailing it in from St. Louis. What’s up with that? Something happened. Tell me what happened. That’s all I’m asking.”

His father’s hand is on the shift but he hasn’t put the car in gear.

“I wanna hear it,” Fitz says. “The whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

“All right,” his father says. “You wanna hear about that? Fine. I can tell you that story.”