Wrapped in the womb of my body-heated bed sheets, I was enclosed in the newfound solitude of my bedroom. A slate blue sky emitted a steady flow of water; I listened to it tap a hypnotic rhythm against the windowsill and a peaceful paralysis settled over my nervous system. My eyes attended to the challenging task of noting all of the imperfections in the white paint of the ceiling, its swirls and small mounds. I heard the earth grow muddy and everywhere sought evidence contrary to perfection and harmony.

When my name was called for breakfast, I ignored it.

The cherry wood dresser my father had built in my grandfather's shop was now occupied solely by my clothes, and supported my rejection from the Sheekey Summer Writing Institute. Kevin's clothes had gone with him back to the Kennedy School of Government, back to Boston where he had decided to move permanently and start his second year of school. His first year marks had made him a distinguished scholar, and he was working for a high-level politician in Boston while he continued to take classes.

My mother's voice called again from the kitchen. My younger sister squeaked a reply that bounded down the stairs rapidly enough to stop another call from my mother. I continued to focus on the topography of the ceiling. The digital clock read half-past eight.

I was sure that the phone would soon ring; it would be my older sister. She would be calling from her new apartment in New York. Her old one had been in Brooklyn; the new one was in Manhattan. She was involved with the advertising initiative to introduce the newly redesigned money to the American public. George, Tom, Alex, and Andy all had larger heads now. The symbols and phrases from the ancient world: Egypt, Greece, and Rome all remained intact. Stacy was particularly excited about a new dollar coin. A commercial was in the works to feature the speaking head of George Washington traveling all around New York City to show you every place he could prove useful.

I resurrected myself from bed because I didn't want to talk to her. My parents adored her.

She spent her private time dating a record producer, attending major label release parties. She met the legends and the one-hit wonders. She met guys younger than me who were sitting on a fortune and she drank with older guys who had lost more than Micronesia could claim as its gross national product. She also met the stars, and so did my little sister Michelle. My little sister's room was decorated with private photos from the parties Stacy had initially allowed her to attend. Christina, Madonna, Britney, Ginger, Rachel, Alanis, Jo, Patti, and others informed my sister's sense of herself every morning as she dressed and each night as she slept. In-person, Michelle was silent, soaking up the awe-inspiring presence of the modern purveyors of successful, sexy teen femininity. Stacy took good care of her, got her autographs, and always made her feel welcome at the parties. It was important to teenagers that they feel important; my older sister understood that now.

As I passed Michelle's room, I looked in. She was naked before her full-length tri-mirror. Behind her stood another mirror, which allowed her to judge her entire physical being in one moment. The scale was by her feet.

"How do I look this morning?"

"Like a naked teenage girl who smells funny," I said. "Why don't you get dressed?"

"I was thinking of getting a tattoo."

I didn't speak, just tilted my head to the side a little and began to form a sneer.

"Should I get it on my ankle, on my ass, or on my back? If I get it on my back, it is less likely to stretch out in the future. What do you think?"

I was going to answer, but she cut me off.

"I was also thinking of getting my belly button pierced."

"One thing at a time."

"I'm serious," she said. "What should I do?"

"You do know the universe is expanding?"

"Martin, don't be stupid," she said and sighed.

"You do know that scientists think you, and whatever you are going to stick through your belly button, are made out of ash-like fallout from the collision of some supernovas?"

"Martin, you are being a jerk."

"You do know there are multiple big bangs?"

"Asshole," she said.

"And you haven't even been banged once."

"Not true you shit!"

"Get dressed," I said and shut the door.

The phone rang.

The door opened.

"That's Stacy," she said. "She'll give me good advice."

"Just trying to give you an alternative reality to the one you subscribe to."

She shut the door and got on the phone. My mom was already on downstairs.

I stepped into the bathroom and started a shower. Serenity descended upon me as I mused on the flakes of water pelting my flesh. I imagined the unseen microscopic action of water molecules cleansing the cells made up of atoms constantly on the move, a grade school image. My whole being was rooted in cosmic ash scattered billions of years before; all matter now made up of strings, including the atoms being cleansed.

Downstairs my father was chewing on a bagel, drinking coffee, and entering his address book data onto a palm-pilot. The item’s box sat on the table. He seemed completely at peace, unaware that his thirteen-year-old was considering a tattoo, that his older daughter was advising on the benefits of ankle versus ass, or that his youngest son had just sat down across from him and had asked him to pass the juice.

"Dad," I said.

No answer. I rapped my knuckles twice on the table.

"Dad, can you please pass the juice?"

He looked up slightly bewildered due to his poor hearing.

"What's that?"

"The juice dad, the juice; can you please pass the juice?"

He did so, sliding the ninety-six ounce plastic container at a deliberately slow pace. I snatched up the container out of instinct, being the third child and the least successful had encouraged me to develop other talents.

I thanked him, poured the juice, spread Philadelphia cream cheese on a plain bagel and tried to eat. I was then blasted by his morning tirade:

"If that girl thought so highly of you or even gave a crap about you she would have done right by you, trusted you and would be down here. ‘Me, me, me.’ As long as one is thinking ‘me, me, me,’ there can be no ‘us.’"

The conversation was over. Fortunately, he never required a reply. He went back to entering data on his Palm Pilot and sipping his coffee.

"Martin," my mother said as she entered the kitchen after hanging up the phone in the den. "It is good to see you up. I didn't think we would be seeing you today. It's been what, three days since you left your room?"

"Susan, can I have some more coffee?" my father asked in an attempt to divert my mother’s attention.

I wanted to shoot back some great witticism about it being hard to leave the house without a car, connected to the fact that I had smashed mine up against a guardrail less than a week ago. It was true: this was the first time I had left my room; actually it was the first time I had left my room since the accident, after the letter had arrived. After that the summer program I had applied to had rejected me. There was no place else to go. My plans to get a place of my own had fallen through and I had quit my short-lived stint as a copywriter in advertising, a job I had gotten for what had turned out to be the wrong reason. Kevin, with whom I had a fairly stable relationship, had no room or time for me in Boston and Stacy had been too cool to talk to me from the time she was fourteen. I had spent a good part of the previous summer in Boston, staying with Kevin, spending most of my time with Antonia; but that had been when Antonia and I had almost been something or just before we became something, when she was telling me she was ready to move on from her situation. Antonia was the reason I could not leave my room. The reason why the bagel I gnawed on would be thrown away soon with barely two bites out of it and me not hungry at all for anything.

I was grateful for my father's request to my mother. It distracted her from talking to me, from trying to sort out whatever was wrong with me, from trying to talk about issues. Undefined issues did not strike me as an appealing topic; I didn't want to define anything. I didn't want to think or interact with anyone, especially not my mother who would just discuss everything with the neighborhood at the next group coffee. I wanted to concentrate on persuading myself I was the product of accidental matter caught up in a series of connected, but inexplicable events that made no sense in the general scheme of the universe and that, with the passage of time, would be forgotten. Along the way I would torment my little sister, a way of getting back at the offending sex in my life, all meanings intended. I thought this as Michelle descended the stairs in a Japanese kimono that Stacy had given to her last year.

"Will we be getting dressed today, young lady?" my mother asked.

"Mom," Michelle said as though screwing up her courage, "I want to get a tattoo, but I can’t decide where."

Before my mother could answer–and this put my mother in a tough spot because not only did Stacy have a dolphin on her ankle which she got in the mid-80's, but my mother had a peace-symbol butterfly on her left shoulder blade (and briefly in that moment my imagination conjured up the image of my father staring at it soar back and forth and flex and flutter as my mother exerted herself on all fours as they conceived Stacy–remember on your back with your legs in the air to conceive a boy)–my father broke in: "How about your forehead?"

"That's stupid, dad."

"You can get one on your butt or ankle or thigh or wherever when you are eighteen and foolish like your sister, but if you want to get tattooed now I suggest getting one put on your forehead."

"But mom has one," and my mother was red-faced now standing by the kitchen sink.

"That is different," my father said. "I was in Vietnam and your mother was protesting the war."

And fucking how many peaceniks, dad? And dropping how much acid in between her education classes? And did you ever fuck the Vietnamese whores dad? Ever poke a donut dolly? The pristine image of a gray t-shirt clad Antonia seductively stretching in her father’s kitchen, hands reaching towards the ceiling, pert breasts at attention, belly button exposed, tormented me. The remembered sequence of a breezy spring day when I encountered her by the tennis courts of our university, the wind whipping through her hair, a wild-eyed smile adorning her face as she cut class and laughed in my face to display how impressed she was with herself replaced the first image. A quiet sunny afternoon in time when I observed her painting outdoors, dressed in a slate blue windbreaker (she dripped a little paint on the sleeve that day) all served to punctuate the clips in my brain. But not quite, as, of course, there was the last time I had seen her, through the screened window of her father's house. Her head was bowed as if in silent contemplation; I had thought she was thinking of calling her mother, but what did I know. She could have been thinking that that was the last time she was going to see me. That she was returning to the life she had accidentally wandered into five states away and that something had happened, either within her or around her, that I would never know about. Days passed me by like the raindrops that fell on the concrete outside, empty and purposeless.

"Mom," she whined.

"Listen to your father," she said. "It was a different time; I was protesting the war."

Did she really think he would come back? What could she have thought to have been separated from him all that time, watching blood-filled news report after blood-filled news report; the voice and image of Walter Cronkite reporting after Tet, informing citizens that the war was not going well, breaking his ethics and swaying the course of public sentiment in a very real way. And what is it that keeps us apart Antonia?

"Stacy has one," she whined and pulled back the lower half of her kimono, revealing her right leg. "My leg is so bland; it would be so cool if–"

"Young lady, go up to your room and get dressed immediately," my mother slammed her open hand down on the counter and Michelle bolted upstairs like a frightened cartoon rabbit.

"What's the big deal?" I said.

"At thirteen?" My mother shot back. "And she has to ask about such foolishness on your father's birthday."

And who had wished him a happy birthday? And then I realized in the blindness of my own foolishness, in my self-preoccupation with what was no longer present, I had forgotten to get him a present or even recognize the day.

I went back upstairs to get my wallet. My sister came into my room dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.

"Where are you going?"

"Out," I said.

I trotted downstairs and asked, "Can I borrow the car?"

My father nodded and I took the keys off the wall hook.

The day was bright despite the rain, and my memories chiseled at my vital organs in a persistent manner audibly enhanced by the tapping of the rain and the rubbing of the wipers across the windshield. A palpable feeling of physical hurt tore at the interior of my chest; it felt like someone had taken the edge of a dull knife and carved out a section of my heart and soul. Rainwater flaked off the glass while I sat in traffic and watched red, green and yellow.

How many days was it? I couldn't even remember, not long at all though. How many months had we talked about her coming home? I’d had a good job, had found a place for us, and had circulated her resume. Everything seemed like it was finally settling into place, after more than ten years, and all of it seemed to be directed by her. The day she met my parents was the proudest day of my life: I was the center of their attention and had brought them good news. What I had thought was promising news, what I thought would set me apart from the talented ones: my two dysfunctional sisters and my genius brother. Not the talented one, I pictured myself the quiet one, the hardworking one in the family who was devoted to a wife who, in my eyes, was more perfect than words could describe. I was aware of our flaws and knew that we faced challenges. But we had been friends for over ten years; she filled me with strength and confidence, and we worked well together. I couldn’t envision a test we couldn’t pass as long as we were together. But, of course, we weren’t together and that was perhaps the greatest test of all, the recognition that we had to take that first leap of faith to get to where we had talked so much about where we wanted to be.

I purchased a $50 dollar mall-wide gift certificate for my father and then headed to the sporting goods store to purchase a box of golf balls, tees, a golf cap and a golf glove to help get him ready for the season. At the gift-wrapping station I made a donation for their services and filled out a birthday card.

The mall was filled with children and they were not exactly their own best advertisement. But they were enough to remind me of the last evening walk along River Road that I had taken with Antonia. After the walk, sitting in the car drinking miniature bottles of champagne, she admired the almost flawless one-carat diamond ring I had given her, a perfect round cut with no visible inclusions.

"No one has ever…" she said wide-eyed and took a swig of her champagne.

I kissed her and looked into her eyes. Reflecting on it I was probably looking for reassurance, I should have known better.

"Can you believe that one day," she became pensive and stared out the window. The light from the street lamp created an ethereal aura about her face and there was an almost spiritual wetness in her eyes that baptized my soul as my ears consumed her words. "Can you believe that one day you are going to come home from work and I'm going to be standing in the kitchen and I'm going to tell you that I've just come from the doctor's and that I'm pregnant with your child."

The statement was enough to create a tapestry of detail in my mind that I cannot shake nor fully express, even to this day. I envision a simple white kitchen. She is in a casual outfit, a tight fitting white shirt and jeans; her hair is tied back behind her head away from her face. The sunlight illuminates the radiance of her face mirroring the radiance in her heart, seeds of promise planted in her womb. The face wears not a smile, but an expression of serious joy, hope, concern, and knowledge. She walks up to me and I stroke her face with my hand and the expressible part of my imagination ends there.

In the car I marveled at how close we seemed to be, the connection she constantly talked about, the deepening dependence she claimed was growing between us, the words were the only things I had to act on. And I thought about the children that would not be born now, the apartment that would not be occupied, the job I had lost and the job she would never even interview for. The fact that she was remaining where she was after all we had said and done was still inconceivable to me, why did she choose to remain the maidservant and laundress in a situation she’d claimed was suffocating her? Was all of life just about the comfort of a routine and the safety of objects? Did she doubt me? Did she doubt herself? Had all of the broken promises of her previous relationships broken her and her faith in herself? I thought about the emptiness ahead of me, the time left of life, the rejection from the writing institute, and wondered about my own abilities to continue in the wake of her absence. My writing had been something she admired, not my talent so much as my doggedness to stick to it and keep at it until it developed into something. But I doubted my abilities. Perhaps her admiration was nothing more than a collection of empty words that came from the same place that promised our children. All I wanted to do was write the one story that would bring her back. And that was what I was thinking of when I turned left on green and was hit by a brown Toyota Celica.

I watched the whole thing in what seemed like slow motion, the force of the collision pressed me against the constraints of the seatbelt. The belt held me intact and in moments I was perched on top of the island at the center of the intersection. The police were on the scene immediately, which I found to be amazing but could not question. The driver of the Celica was a huge olive skinned man who leapt out of his car like a pre-bout professional wrestler and started cursing at me. I didn't move.

I was not relieved. I wanted something: a debilitating spinal cord injury that would leave me paralyzed, a fractured skull that would leave me brain damaged, a crushed ribcage that collapsed into my vital organs and pierced my heart killing me through internal injuries would have been perfect, even a broken collarbone would have been something. But there was nothing. Nothing. Except that the passenger door was within eight inches of me and I was filled with the knowledge that I had destroyed my father's car on his birthday.

Rain continued to pelt the car.

A police officer opened the door and I got out of the car. I walked out a few paces and officer Vanatelli–I read it off of his badge–looked me over. "I don't believe it," he said. He was in awe of my apparent health. We talked for a moment so that he could assess my physical and mental stability. The other driver had calmed down and the business of exchanging insurance information occurred in an orderly fashion.

Vanatelli was shocked for a second time when I got the car to start. Most of the damage had been to the passenger side door and midsection of the car, away from the vital organs that allowed the car to do its main job of providing transportation. I drove it home at a slow pace. Other drivers must have been looking at me, but I was unaware. I was too preoccupied with how I was going to explain the accident. His birthday. Of all days to do something like this, I cursed myself.

"You definitely are the dimmest light of the bunch, Mart," I said to myself. "Of all the fucking days: failed engagement, lost your job, rejected from the writing institute, still unpublished, and good at nothing but racking up failures and debt. You can't even get properly injured or killed in an auto accident."

At a red light, I took the opportunity to demonstrate the height of absurdity to my fellow drivers: I smashed my forehead on the steering wheel continuously until the light turned green.

At home I parked in front of the house rather than in the driveway; the passenger side faced away from the house. I walked into the house and went to the den. Casablanca was playing on the television. My mother was on the couch, Southern Accents magazine open before her. My father was sleeping on the floor and Michelle, still tattooless, had laid her head on his chest while she watched Ilsa and Rick travel through Paris in June of 1940. Paris was the first place Antonia and I were going to go. I thought of the poem, written Dr. Seuss-style, that listed all the places we were to travel, all the things we were to do, and how much I loved her.

My mother instantly sensed something was wrong.

"What happened?"

She followed me outside and I walked her around the car and showed her the twisted lump of steel that had been the passenger side door. Michelle came around and looked at it moments later.

"Holy shit, Martin, what the fuck did you do," she said absent-mindedly.

"Michelle," my mother chastised.

"Sorry," she said. "It's just so, just so…God, what happened."

I explained about the green light, as opposed to having a green arrow, and the left hand turn and how I just wasn't paying attention, just like the guardrail.

My father came out of the house and I started to shake. My knees started to buckle and I was sure I was going to collapse right in the street while muttering lame apologies. He walked at a deliberate pace around the car and looked at the damage.

I expected him to curse, to spit, or to yell, but he did none of those things. I expected him to hit me, but he did not. I expected him to bow his head solemnly and talk about when the automobile was whole and fully functional, but he did not do this. Instead, he walked up to me, put his strong hands on my shoulders and then embraced me tightly, rocking me back and forth until I ceased to shake.

In that embrace I realized my worth to him, despite all the shortcomings and failures I could locate in myself. Who knows a child’s strengths and weaknesses better than an attentive father? It is the attentive father who takes on the role of provider and nurturer, the one who is the first to consider the outside world after the birth. The one who first judges his children against that world; the mother is too, and necessarily so, focused on the interior world, the basic needs of the child. Fathers know their children their whole lives as outside observers and have the opportunity to develop a special empathy.

When my father grips me in his broad palms, his strength reaches right into my bones. It is a different comfort, a quiet, apprehensive comfort I experience. And I think of Antonia’s children.