Читать книгу The Fragile World - Paula Treick DeBoard - Страница 15

curtis

Time passed, more slowly than I could have imagined, faster than I would have dreamed. Every time I walked through the living room I saw the little box on top of our fireplace mantel. Kathleen had mentioned buying an urn, and we’d each promised to look online, but hadn’t. Add Daniel’s cremains to the list of things we didn’t discuss.

It was a relief to go back to work, to slide back into my regular school schedule—the bells ringing, students shuffling in and hurrying out, meetings before and after school, the emails and paperwork, the endless, reassuring cycle of lessons to be planned and papers to be graded.

I began leaving for school earlier and earlier, while Kathleen and Olivia were still asleep. I was the second car in the lot, behind the janitor. Somehow it was easier to think there, when my classroom was quiet and there was work to be done. At home, I couldn’t escape the way things had changed. Olivia had panic attacks that could be brought on, seemingly, by nothing—the paperboy passing on his bike, the coffee grinder running in the kitchen. Kathleen, determined not to mope at home, was attempting to fill our lives with fun things. She actually used this word, as if Olivia and I were two-year-olds who had to be coaxed into a trip to the grocery store. “Come on, it will be fun!” She made big, elaborate meals, found movies for us to watch together, proposed a family night that fell flat when Olivia realized all of our board games required four players.

At night when we lay in bed, staring at opposite sides of the room, she would dive into the pep talks that I’d begun to dread.

“Please, try, Curtis.”

And: “You need to do this for me. You need to make an effort.”

Her concern soon changed to disappointment, and eventually, to disgust.

“I can’t believe you won’t do this for me.”

“I’m not there yet,” I admitted.

We slept in the same bed, but it might as well have been split in two—her side, mine, like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in their twin beds, a nightstand between them. The truth was that I wanted to reach for her, that night and the next and the next, but I couldn’t make myself cross the invisible barrier between us. The days and nights became a meaningless blur, as if some anesthesiologist had forgotten to let up on the ether, and, beneath its fog, we lay deadened and numb. We slept less than three feet apart, curled on our separate sides. I could hear her quiet breaths, the occasional sniffle, a stifled sob held back even in sleep. In my mind, I reached out a hand, touching her shoulder, her waist, the ridge of spine, the skin I knew better than my own. But in actuality, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bridge the gulf. I didn’t want to open up to her, or have her open up to me. Wouldn’t the doubling of misery have been more than we could bear, collectively?

In my saner moments I realized we were running some kind of course, and Kathleen was way ahead, flying through those stages of grief. I heard her on the phone with her friends, referring to what had happened to Daniel as “the accident,” as if it were a completely random thing, a hard fact of life that she had accepted.

But I couldn’t accept it. A lightning strike on a clear day—that was a random thing. In my mind there was a deliberateness to Daniel’s death, a reckless calculation in the act of getting behind the wheel, in taking a corner too fast, clipping a sign, driving away and crawling into bed as if nothing had happened. It didn’t feel random. It felt purposeful. It felt premeditated.

Still, I couldn’t tell her: You’re wrong. I couldn’t say: This was no accident. I just couldn’t bring her down there with me, to the place where I nurtured a long-buried, simmering anger. If Kathleen could find comfort in randomness, in silly clichés offered by shallow people and greeting cards, then so be it. I would take comfort in what was real. I would take comfort in my anger.

Eventually, the tox screen for Robert Saenz came back positive for amphetamines—an upper, speed. I’d learned this from the Oberlin P.D., after daily phone calls made from my classroom before school. He’d been denied bail; charges were being amended. What does this mean? I persisted. What kind of punishment would he get? Jail time? Prison? Could I do anything—write letters, testify?

Eventually, Sergeant Springer passed me off to the D.A.’s office, to an A.D.A. named Derick Jones, who gave me information so sparingly, it might have been drops from a leaky faucet. He had probably been schooled—don’t make any promises. He talked about “precedent” and the possibility of a plea bargain, a reduced sentence. Robert Saenz might get anywhere from ten to fifteen years; it might be reduced to seven if he pled down.

Seven years? Seven fucking years? It was a joke. It was a nightmare.

And then that February, as I was leaving Arden Fair Mall where I’d been picking out a new pair of work shoes, I saw him. I recognized him immediately as he cut in front of me, hands shoved into his pockets. I noted the same curly hair, the flabby jowls, and walked faster, looking for the dead, blank expression in his eyes. I was just going to see. I was just going to get a closer look. With each step, I felt a pressure building up in my ears, my head like the volcano Olivia and I had worked on for her sixth-grade science project.

I was even with him when he turned his head, startled at my proximity—and up close, he looked nothing at all like Robert Saenz, who was, of course, locked up awaiting trial. “Sorry,” I mumbled, head down, hurrying past the man.

I sat for a while in the Explorer, my hands shaking on the steering wheel. What was I thinking? Of course it wasn’t him. And what would I have done if it was? I was armed only with my key ring and my rage. Would I have gone after him with my fists, throwing the not insignificant weight of my body on him, kicking him, getting my hands around his neck? I felt sick with the possibilities.

I’d promised to be home by eight, but I was too worked up to face Kathleen and Olivia. Instead, I found a restaurant near the mall, and I made my way straight for the bar. After the first few overpriced drinks, I didn’t even think about them. The display on my cell phone lit up with Kathleen’s number four times, but I didn’t pick up. I rolled the highball glass between my hands, wondering how far I would have gone and how much I would have to drink to forget what I might have done. Was that why my father drank, to forget his daily faults? To dull the pain from the things he had done?

At ten-thirty, the bartender cut me off. I wasn’t used to the hard stuff. Kathleen and I never had more than a bottle of wine in the cabinet above our refrigerator; a single glass at dinner had always been my limit. Now I staggered coming off the bar stool. “Want me to call you a cab?” the bartender asked, not meeting my eye. He was just a kid—or not a kid, but not all that much older than Daniel would have been.

Kathleen picked me up. She was tight-lipped on the way home, her body tense with anger. When she did speak, it was in fuming bursts. “This is what you do? This is your answer to our problems? Do you think drinking worked out well for your father?”

I couldn’t answer; it was taking all my concentration not to vomit. A light rain was falling, and I focused on the slight swishing of the tires on the damp streets.

“Just tell me,” Kathleen said when she pulled into our driveway. “Is this the way it’s going to be?”

“I don’t know how it’s going to be,” I said, not looking at her. It was the most honest I’d been with her in a long time.

I spent most of that night in the bathroom, sleeping on the bath mat, a towel under my head so I could be close to the toilet. In the morning I called for a substitute. Kathleen moved around the house, ignoring me, making coffee, talking cheerfully to Olivia, hurrying her out to the car without saying goodbye.

I stayed in bed for most of the day, long after the effects of the alcohol had worn off. I wouldn’t tell Kathleen what I’d really been thinking, I couldn’t. I’d gone too far on my own. I didn’t want to scare her with the vision of the monster I’d become for those few minutes. Worse, if it had been Saenz in that parking lot, I knew that I would have killed him, one way or another—and I couldn’t find a way to feel bad about that.