The Martini Shot Read online

  Van handed him to Eleni.

  “He’s a keeper,” said Van, rocking back on his heels, his face flushed.

  “Y’all better get home,” said Monroe. “The snow is coming down hard.”

  They looked out the office window. Indeed, the flurries that had been swirling all morning had turned to heavy flakes.

  “He’s going to be cold,” said Eleni.

  “I bought a little something for him,” said Monroe, producing a Hecht’s bag holding a new outfit. “Congratulations, you two.”

  Van bear-hugged Monroe before leaving with his wife and son.

  They drove through the snow in Van’s Silverado, Leonidas secured in a car seat between them, the truck weighted down by sandbags in the bed. Van and Eleni giggled all the way home. Irene and Dimitrius, being watched by a neighbor, were waiting for them at the door.

  “Say hello to Leonidas,” said Van, snow in his hair and beard, carrying the infant football-style into the house. “Your new brother.”

  Leonidas was an early walker and it seemed that he would be athletic. He laughed huskily and charmed everyone he met, and he did not cry when the doctors stuck him with needles. Van would never admit it, but Leonidas was his favorite. Van nicknamed him Cool Breeze because it felt that way to him whenever Leonidas toddled into a room.

  Dimitrius did not seem to notice or mind that his father was overly focused on Leonidas. Irene and Dimitrius by now had become a unit. They played in their bedrooms, separately or together, and did not spend a great amount of time paying attention to their parents or their new baby brother. As for Leonidas, his eyes followed Van and Eleni as they moved about the room. When he could not see them, he smiled at the sound of their voices. Even Shilo was smitten, and he growled when anyone outside the immediate family approached Leonidas.

  Despite the pressure of the new addition, Van and Eleni were getting along fine. They made love a couple of times a week, ate in restaurants without debating if they should, and went out on the occasional movie date. Because they wanted little in the way of material possessions, they felt they lacked nothing. In fact, Van was still doing quite well despite his seeming lack of interest in making money. They had the family they wanted. They hadn’t planned any of this and they felt lucky.

  Then, when Leonidas was a year old, they got a call from Donna Monroe. Another baby was available. That night, Van and Eleni discussed it over a bottle of red. They didn’t need another child. Was this a bridge too far? Why tempt the gods?

  “Why’d she call us?” said Van.

  “I think she likes you.”

  “Or her partner got a look at my financials.” Van shook his head. “This house is already too small.”

  “We can move.”

  “I like it here.”

  “You’re a builder. We’ll make the house bigger.”

  “I dunno,” said Van.

  “There’s a reason Donna called us. Someone whispered in her ear and told her to.” She reached for his hand. “Aren’t you curious?”

  The next day they went to the law office. Van remarked that the furnishings were more lavishly appointed than the last time they had visited, but Donna Monroe ignored him as they walked down the hall to an office that Van now called “the closing area.” Monroe was seven months pregnant and she lowered herself carefully into a chair as they found seats. Her belly swelled beneath her maternity outfit. She pushed a photograph across the table, and Van and Eleni bent forward to have a look.

  “You don’t have anything against white babies, do you?” said Monroe.

  “We’re color-blind,” said Van.

  “Why us?” said Eleni. “There’s gotta be a line out the door for a white infant like this one.”

  “Actually, not at the moment,” said Monroe. “The couple who had identified him claimed that he came available too quickly. They weren’t ready. I guess they needed to get the nursery set picked out and delivered first. Or have the artist paint the mural in his room before he could sleep there. What they want is a doll, not a child. No lie.”

  “But there must be other couples.”

  “None on our list who are uncommitted to other kids. None currently who have completed their home studies. Course, I could put him in foster care for a month or so. But I don’t like to do that.”

  “I should say not,” said Eleni, looking at the photo, falling in love.

  “Aw, Jesus Christ,” said Van.

  “He is handsome,” said Monroe.

  “Van,” said Eleni.

  They named him Spero and brought him home the next day. Upon entering their house, Eleni took a photograph. When it was developed, it showed Spero still in the car seat, Irene and Dimitrius off to the side, Leonidas with his arm around his new baby brother, Van down on one knee, broadly smiling, and Shilo sniffing at the new arrival in the foreground. Behind them, through the double glass doors of the family room, there was a thick wall of clouds, and though it was midday, a light appeared to wink in the gray sky. Van said it was the camera flash reflected in the glass. Eleni claimed it was a star. She would not tell him what she truly believed: that the light was a kind of eye. That there was something out there, watching them and watching over them, this family of six.

  Van blew out the back of the house and raised the roof, and their Sears bungalow replica became something taller, deeper, and architecturally unidentifiable. The days became compressed by activity. Time went quickly and there was laughter in their home and raised voices and sometimes tears, but it was good and they were thankful for all they had. As the years passed, the children grew taller and Van grew heavier. Eleni’s face became pleasantly lined and she noticed the beginnings of turkey neck beneath her chin. Shilo passed and was replaced by a large tan mixed breed they named Cheyenne.

  Aside from the usual fights, vandalism, and mild behavior problems at school, all of the children’s lives had been free of serious trouble when they were young. Dimitrius was a skateboarder and video gamer. Leo, as he was known outside his home, played multiple community sports, as did Spero. Irene was into dance, gymnastics, and horseback riding. In Van’s and Eleni’s eyes, the boys did not seem to have a problem with their adopted status. But they may have been blinded by love. The truth was, they simply felt that these were their children, not their adopted children, and so it was easy for them to deny that in the minds of their sons there could be more complicated feelings swirling in the mix.

  In high school, Irene, black haired like her father and lush of figure like her mom, found the influence of her peers stronger than that of her parents, and she began to use pot, alcohol, and speed. She had sex with boys rather indiscriminately. She also kept up her grades and scored high on her SATs. Her crowd was punk in look only, interested in drugs, not music, and did not have the positive, community-activist bent for which the D.C. punk scene was known.

  Dimitrius still idolized Irene and trailed in her wake, and because he was black, an outsider in a group of self-proclaimed outsiders, he felt he had to prove himself and did so by being a harder user than his peers. Like any addict, he lied constantly. He stole money and jewelry from his mother, and his grades dropped to failure across the board. His parents set him up with a shrink, but Dimitrius bailed on the appointments until finally, unreasonable and illogical, he announced his intention to drop out of high school and leave home. Van and Eleni pleaded with him to obtain his diploma. They told him that they were there for him. They told him they loved him and had faith in him, and he replied that he didn’t care.

  Irene, just as eager to get away from home, was no help. She was accepted to the University of Washington in Seattle and took off after her high school graduation. Dimitrius got his GED and soon followed Irene, promising his parents that he would enroll in Seattle’s community college. They reluctantly agreed, put him on a plane, and staked him in an apartment out there; soon after he was gone they began to lose touch with him, and eventually there was no communication at all. Van flew to Seattle, looking for his
son, but the apartment they had rented for Dimitrius was vacant, and the landlord had been given no forwarding address. Irene, now in her sophomore year, claimed to have no knowledge of her brother’s whereabouts, but Van suspected that she was covering for Dimitrius. He drove and walked around Seattle for several days and nights, looking for Dimitrius among the city’s numerous homeless kids, many of whom were drug abusers. He hired a local private detective to continue the search and then, angry and anguished, he flew back to D.C.

  In their home the night of his return, Van and Eleni discussed the situation. Eleni was not happy with the turn of events, but she was less emotional than Van and told him they needed to concentrate on the children who still lived with them. She noted truthfully that the house was more settled since Irene and Dimitrius had left, and probably a better atmosphere for Leonidas and Spero, and Van had to agree.

  “But it shouldn’t have happened like this,” said Van.

  “Irene’s always gone her own way,” said Eleni. “Her independence is going to serve her well as an adult.”

  “I’m not worried about Irene. It’s Dimitrius. He’s lost.”

  “We’ll find him.”

  A week later, the detective, Paul Garner, phoned Van.

  “I located your son,” said Garner. “He’s staying in a warehouse with a bunch of kids near the university. Living hand to mouth, but he’s under a roof.”

  “Living how?”

  “You want it unvarnished?”

  “Of course.”

  “The drug of choice out here for a certain kind of kid is meth. I went to that area near U of W first because that’s where a lot of the users are concentrated. Showed around the photograph you gave me, and when I put some cash on top of it I got the information I needed.”

  “How do you know he’s using?”

  “Because I live here. He had the complexion and the look. His teeth are brown. He had the rank smell they get from all that perspiration.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what did he say?”

  “He said that he was fine. He doesn’t want detox and he doesn’t want to come home. Most of ’em think the same way: They’re fine. I told him that his father had hired me to find him.”

  “And?”

  “Mr. Lucas—”

  “Tell me.”

  Garner cleared his throat. “He said he didn’t have a father.”

  “God,” said Van uselessly.

  “Sorry. I really am. Y’know, after I divorced his mother, my son cut off contact with me, too. If it’s any consolation…”

  Van felt as if he had been punched in the face. He heard little of the rest of Garner’s story, but he got the address of the warehouse before bringing the conversation to a close. He then phoned Irene, who promised to look in on her kid brother and see to it that he had food and, if needed, a place to stay. Van had the nagging feeling from Irene’s cool tone that she was relatively unconcerned about Dimitrius’s degeneration, or at best felt that Van’s worries were overblown.

  “He’ll be all right, Dad. You’ve got to let him come through this himself.”

  In bed that night, Van and Eleni held each other and talked quietly, though Leonidas and Spero were long asleep in their room. Eleni had cried a little earlier in the evening, but in ways of logic she was stronger than Van, and also an optimist. She felt it was on her to reassure her husband that the family would be whole again someday.

  “Dimitrius will come home,” said Eleni.

  “When?” said Van.

  “Soon.”

  Dimitrius did not come home. During the next several years they spoke to him a few times over the phone, only when he needed cash. After a lecture, and against his better judgment, Van would wire the money. And then nothing, no further contact until the next similar call. They no longer knew where Dimitrius was. As for Irene, she entered law school and stopped coming home, even for holidays. They rarely spoke to her, either. That left them with their two younger sons. Van vowed to get it right with them.

  Leonidas’s and Spero’s high school years went smoothly. After witnessing the stress their older siblings had inflicted on their parents, they had no desire to rebel in any significant way. Irene’s and Dimitrius’s absence actually allowed them to flourish.

  Neither of them was academically gifted, but both were strong and athletic. They were liked and respected by their classmates for the most part, and were rarely kidded about being salt-and-pepper brothers. For their peers it was not much of an issue. That kind of baggage was carried, mostly, by the generations that came before them.

  Leonidas was a handsome man-child, fast on his feet, tall, dark skinned, broad shouldered, and soft-spoken, with an electrifying smile. He had a social conscience like his mother. Spero had black hair, pale skin, and hazel eyes, and at a glance could easily be mistaken for the biological product of Van and Eleni. He was quiet, and a bit brooding and intense, which served him well with girls. Leonidas played wide receiver and point guard for their Montgomery County high school. Spero, quick and wiry, wrestled varsity at one nineteen as a freshman and one forty in his senior year, when he was honorable mention All-Met, winning Mount Madness in his weight class and placing at the seriously loaded Beast of the East tournament in Delaware. There were partial scholarship offers, but Spero had other plans.

  Leonidas entered the University of Maryland after his graduation from high school with the intention of becoming a teacher and coach. When Spero graduated, a year after Leonidas, he enrolled at Montgomery College, attended two semesters, then stated his intention to enlist in the Marine Corps. Because there was a new war in Iraq, this did not please his parents. Van, whose father was a WWII veteran, was not a pacifist, and in fact believed that there were necessary wars, but he was strongly against this one and argued passionately with his son about the wisdom of entering the service. Eleni tried quiet persuasion, but neither she nor her husband could change Spero’s mind. Van blamed Spero’s wrestling coach, a thick-browed ex-marine with a Cro-Magnon build who had a combination father/Rasputin-type relationship with his athletes, for influencing his son’s decision.

  “He jacked up Spero with that bullshit for four years,” said Van.

  Eleni, who rarely spoke ill of anyone, agreed.

  While Leonidas neared completion of his degree and prepared to apply for teaching positions, Spero, now a marine with the Second Battalion, First Regiment and having served in Iraq for a year, was moving toward the Anbar province, where he would be participating in an offensive on insurgent forces in a place called Fallujah. In his letters and e-mails, Spero did not tell his parents of the fierce nature of the battle or the casualties incurred on both sides.

  That year, only Leonidas would be around for the Lucas family Christmas. Irene could not make it as usual, and Dimitrius was in the wind. It was a troubling time on many fronts. Van’s business was beginning to falter due in part to the economy but mainly because of the acute alcoholism of his partner, now on his third marriage. The Lucas money was safe, as Van had always been conservative with his investments, but he faced the prospect of an unwelcome career adjustment in his middle age. More disturbing, he considered his track record as a parent to be spotty at best. He still wondered on what had gone wrong with Dimitrius, remained puzzled by Irene’s cold nature, and worried considerably about Spero’s safety. He began to complain of headaches and memory loss. He sometimes vomited without the usual warning sign of nausea. In sleep, his dreams were filled with snakes.

  Over the holidays, Van said to Eleni, “Funny, this time of year I usually gain weight. I got on the scale today and I’ve lost ten pounds. But I’ve been eatin like an animal.”

  “It’s stress,” said Eleni.

  A week later, having experienced periods of low-level fever, he went to the family physician, Dr. Nassarian, for some blood work. Nassarian called the next day and told Van that he had seen something he didn’t like, that it was probably nothing to
be too concerned about but that he should have it checked. Nassarian was sending him to a specialist to do another workup and some tests.

  “What kind of specialist?” said Van.

  “An oncologist up in Wheaton,” said the doctor, and Van’s heart naturally dropped.

  There was more blood taken, and an MRI, which led to a follow-up visit with the oncologist, Dr. Veronica Sorenson, in her office overlooking the Westfield Shopping Center, which Van still called Wheaton Plaza. He had played there as a boy, flirted with girls, acted tough around greasers, taunted security guards, and been nailed in the old Monkey Wards for shoplifting, back when the center was an open-air mall.

  “You have an intracranial tumor, Mr. Lucas,” said Dr. Sorenson.

  “A brain tumor.”

  “Yes.”

  “Cancer,” he said, almost stuttering on the word.

  She tented her hands before her and looked directly into his eyes. She was an attractive brunette in her late thirties with a direct, professional manner that was not cold in the least. Dr. Sorenson had photographs of her children set up on her desk. He idly wondered if she believed in God.

  “Let me show you,” she said.

  Dr. Sorenson turned off the lights in the office and allowed him to examine his scans displayed on her light board.

  “It’s called a GBM,” she said, pointing to the image of the growth. “There. It appears in the form of a lesion.”

  “What’s a GBM?”

  “Glioblastoma multiforme. We’ll need to do a stereotactic biopsy to confirm, of course.”

  “You wouldn’t be telling me this today if you didn’t know.”

  “Unfortunately, I’m almost completely certain that this is what we’re looking at.”

  “Certain of what, Doctor? What’s my prognosis?”

  “I wish I could be more positive. This is a most aggressive cancer. The survival rate is very low.”

  He looked down at his hand and saw that he was twisting his wedding band around on his ring finger. “How long would a guy with this thing…how long? Ballpark.”