CONTINUATION OF AN ILL FITTING CHAPTER
“From what the report says,” Mark told him, “he wasn’t crying out that much, and Rick, if their parents couldn’t even tell, how could you?”
“I could have. I could—” Rick looked for something he could have done. “Well, you heard what Kerch said about Jedd. What if it was lots of students saying that day after day? I could have stopped that. That could have led up to what he and that girl did.”
“Laura Wyler was weird too,” Sully said.
They all looked at him.
“She was,” Sully said. “You can’t explain everything, and you can’t make everything better. Some people are just going to do what they’re going to do.”
They continued looking at him and then Mark said, “Sullivan’s right.
“Boys, listen to me,” he told Chris and Sully. “Life is a precious gift from God and you can’t just throw it away. It’s precious.”
“Dad we know,” Chris said.
“Well, I don’t want you to forget. You’re both loved in this household,” Mark told them. He was going to stop at cared for, but maybe Sully wasn’t care for so much at his home. Maybe he needed to know he mattered. “And if either one of you has troubles or thoughts like this… You need to let me know.”
“You’re a shrink, Dad. Don’t you know the signs?”
“I’m serious, Chris,” Mark’s voice was sharp.
In Chris’s room he told Sully who was changing into his pajamas, “If he wasn’t asleep I’d call up Matt and tell him. Can you believe it? Someone we know—dead. I’ve never been around death before.”
“But your mom…”
“That was different. I mean it happened so long ago, and ... Well, in a way it wasn’t different because it was a shock, but then I knew it was coming. I had a long time to prepare for it. With this it just sort of happened. Kids, our age. Just choosing to kill themselves. Why?”
“Maybe they were just so unhappy,” Sullivan said.
“I don’t understand being that unhappy,” Chris said.
“I do.”
“Sully,” Chris got up and took Sully’s face in his hands.
“Not right now,” Sullivan said, pulling away and trying to laugh. “But before. In the past, I have... Been that sad and lonely, where it just didn’t make a difference. I never went through with it, obviously.
It’s just, people say, when folks do crazy things that they can’t understand why they did them. People can’t put themselves in other people’s shoes. I can. I understand. Maybe it’s because I’ve been sad a lot, or maybe it’s because I’m crazy—”
“You’re not crazy.”
“I think I am. At least a little. But I think it’s because I’m a writer, and I have to be in that place, on that sort of fringe. And when you’re on that fringe, near the craziness, you get why people do things like that.”
“Then why do they do it?”
“Because they think life is meaningless. They think nothing matters.”
“But it’s like Dad said,” Chris said. “It’s a gift from God. Life.”
“But it’s hard,” Sully told him. “It’s hard and it’s not fair. And you didn’t ask for it. And people always look for the meaning of it, or for God, but if you don’t feel like looking for that or you’re too tired or you can’t find enough stuff to stop you from thinking about God and meaning, maybe offing yourself in is the only way to go.”
“I never thought of killing myself. Not even when my mom died.”
“Maybe you were too busy to let yourself think about it.”
“No,” Chris said. “I was always taught life has a meaning.”
“But I think it doesn’t,” Sully said.
Chris looked at him, shocked.
Sully looked like he was deciding something. He sat on the bed with a look of great purpose, and then said, “I was taught a lot. And I don’t believe in most of it. I don’t believe that God gives your life a meaning, and I’m not sure I really believe in God.”
“Sully!”
“No, listen,” Sully waved him to silence. “I think it’s no point looking in a Bible or a church or... whatever for meaning. We’re here, and we’re alive and I think we’ve got to find a meaning for ourselves. We’ve got to make life mean something, not wait for some angel to give it to us. And I think that’s what life is about.”
When the boys had gone to bed, Rick and Mark sat on the sofa for a long while and, at last, Mark said, “I can’t believe you’re going with us.”
“Is Chris going to be all right with that?”
“Why wouldn’t he be?”
“Because I’m the dean of the school and his ex football coach.”
“He likes you.”
“And Sully?”
“I’d think Sullivan would be grateful to you. He and Chris wouldn’t even be friends if you hadn’t introduced the two of them.”
“And from what I hear his math grades are pretty good.”
“Yes,” Mark remembered. “That was the whole point of the thing.”
“Yes,” Rick said. “Chris is Sully’s tutor.”
“Sometimes,” Mark said. “Still, I wonder who isn’t teaching who? Or whom whom? I always screw that up.”
Rick shrugged. “English was never my strong suit.”
“I can’t imagine a boy and girl giving up on life, killing themselves. I can’t imagine agreeing to a suicide pact. I can’t imagine making one.”
“Well, Maybe Sully’s right,” Rick said. “Maybe out of the mouths of... teenagers, comes wisdom. Maybe its not such a foreign thought as we are trying to make it. Wanting to die, wanting to end it.”
“No,” Mark allowed after a moment. “You’re right enough about that. But... I’m trying to remember what it was like for me. When Margot died. I felt like that. But I wasn’t searching for a way to die. I was looking for anything that would make me alive, that would let me feel like I wasn’t dead, anything that could get me over... the hump. That’s a cliché, but that’s what I was looking for.
“It just seems like most of the time days work on their own accord. You wake up, day comes, turns to noon, goes back to night. You do it all over again. But when you’re in something like that, when you’re in deep loss, it’s like you exert effort just to make the sun come up, just to open your eyes. Just breathing is a struggle. And it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you live.”
When Margot died where was Chris? Try as he does to remember, Chris isn’t in any of those memories. There is no son. In fact there is no sun in the sky. everything is grey white, the color of a cloudy day that does not promise rain but will not show the lights.
Sidney is there. Joel is there. The boys aren’t though, none of their sons, the hard clack clack of shoes on the hardwood floor is there. Whenever Joel moves through the house, the sound of his work shoes on those shiny floors is in Mark’s ears, and the sound of Mark’s own shoes, and even though Sidney doesn’t wear shoes—except to the funeral—when he is walking around Mark hears that same clack clack. That clack clack clack of the sensible black shoes on the shiny hardwood floor is the only true noise. All other noises are muffled. Children laughing; that’s muffled. His heart in his ears, that’s muffled. Dirt, dirt, dirt on the coffin, that’s muffled too.
He drifts. He’s drifting. He drifts to the restaurant where he meets Vanessa. It’s the first time he’s awake. It’s the first coherent memory.
“We broke up in such a bad away,” she’s telling him.
“It doesn’t matter,” he tells he. He’s already told her all about Margot Bello Powers, the woman who gave him the best twelve years of his life. He’s already told her about watching her die.
“Sometimes I felt my life slipping into her with the IV,” Mark said, “and when she was dead, I was gone into her too, exhausted. I never told anyone that.”
She kissed him, simply, on the cheek.
“Sleep with me,” he told her.
“I’m married.”
“I don’t care.”
When she said she was married, it sounded to Mark like really she was testing if he cared or not. Mark knew the marriage couldn’t have been any good or else he never would have violated it. That’s what he told himself.
“I don’t want you all the time. I don’t want another wife. I just want this.” He’s never sure if he actually told her that as he undressed her in the hotel room, or she helped him out of his shirt, his tie, his trousers, his underwear...
What went on he doesn’t think about. It doesn’t make him feel sexy to think of that first time in the hotel room, or getting dressed and going home or when he began to call her. It made him feel sexy back then. When Margot was dying, so was romance, so was love and desire. That last day when the funeral home came she was a hundred pound corpse eaten by cancer, emaciated. Mark felt the same way. He’d felt that way, a walking corpse until that night when he was a desirable man again, when he was sexy and had needs and Vanessa had needs too and they met them in each other.
After that one affair he kept calling her up because he wanted that feeling again, he wanted to hit that moment to hear this woman calling his name, shouting out, crying even at his touch, pulling him inside her. He couldn’t stop calling her. He couldn’t stop fucking her.
“Go to your room,” Sidney said.
Mason, Addison and Tommy didn’t argue with his tone. They just went. You knew better when he used that tone. For Mark that’s the first memory of children, the looks on those boys’ faces. Joel, who had left Seth and Chris with Martha that evening, looked afraid. Mark felt defensive.
“You’re fucking a married woman?”
“Sidney,” Joel’s voice was pleading.
“Don’t Sidney me. I’m not the one who’s having someone else’s wife.”
“I’ll thank you not to take that high tone with me,” Mark said.
“I’ll thank you not to take that high tone with me,” Sidney replied. “Especially when you’re committing adultery. No, I’m sorry. If no one else tells you that’s what it is, I will. And with the woman who tore you apart when you were twenty-two. My God, Mark, you’ve lost your mind.”
“MY WIFE IS DEAD!”
From behind them the door opened. It closed. Mason’s room, the boys wanting to come out, but afraid.
The house was quiet. Joel looked so afraid, He just kept playing with his collar.
“Yes,” Sidney said. “I suppose she is. But... I don’t see that it gives you a go card to break a commandment.”
“I’ll break any commandment I want to. I’ll break all the commandments. What do I care about someone else’s wife? I don’t have mine. What do I care about God’s commandments. He took my wife. Goddamn—Goddamn him... Goddamn...”
Joel’s arms were coming around him when Mark shook them off.
“Don’t,” he snapped at them. “Either one of you. I don’t need any sympathy or condemnation from any of you—”
“Either of you—” Sidney corrected automatically and put a hand over his mouth.
Mark’s eyes flared at him.
“One day I will knock you down,” Mark promised darkly, and then turned and walked out of the house.
On the sofa, in his house, beside Rick Howard, Mark said, “We’ll do anything just to keep on living. But to make ourselves die...” he shrugged. “Who can explain desperation?”
Timidly Rick placed his hand in Mark’s.
Mark squeezed his hand, and then held it in his own.
“You know,” Sidney had mused years ago, “I never realized until now that Mark and I are the same height. The same build. I always thought of him as a little man. But when he said he would knock me down... I don’t know, maybe he could. I’d have to knock him down then,” Sidney went on, “but it might be interesting to see what happened.”
“Sidney, he was really mad.”
“Most people are when they get hit in the face with a dose of truth. And he couldn’t expect it from you, could he, Joel? Really, you Catholics are always going on about sin, but meet a real sin and you avoid it like a plague. Mark’s my friend, and I’m not about to pretend that what he’s doing is smart or good. And… and you just make it worse for me by saying nothing. It’s not even good cop, bad cop. It’s me the bitch and you the good silent friend. That’s too much to put on me.”
The whole time Sidney was straightening up the living room, putting magazines on the tables and picking them back up, refluffling the pillows, accomplishing nothing.
“Mason!” he bellowed. “It’s time for dinner.”
“He’s trying to... get past Margot,” Joel said in a low voice. “He’s occupying himself to escape the pain.”
“You know how he could occupy himself? What are you looking at?” he snapped at the kids. “Go to the kitchen and don’t even try to eavesdrop.”
Sidney sat on the couch closer to Joel. “You know what he could try? He could try raising his damn kid instead of foisting Chris off with Seth all the time.”
“It’s hard for a single father.”
“You,” Sidney said, “tell me, it’s hard for a single father. Like I don’t know that. Like my wife didn’t decide her art was more important to her and get up and run off without bothering to sign divorce papers. Like I don’t have to explain to Mason every night, your mother’s not coming back because she’s a confused, selfish bitch—”
“You don’t say that to Mason.”
“He asked and that’s what I told him.” Sidney pushed his glasses up. “I don’t have time to mince words and once a bitch has left her pups there’s no making her look good no matter what you say. And here I am learning to cook and clean and vacuum—not having sex with other people’s wives! Though in the past I have had sex with women who are currently other people’s wives, that’s another story. And what do you know about being a single father?”
The look on Joel’s face was half sick.
“Oh, I think I’m going to know very soon,” Joel said.
Sidney’s eyes flew open. His brusqueness was gone.
“What?” he said.
“Martha,” Joel told him. “Martha and I are over.”
“It was so good. You all were so good.”
“No, no,” Joel said. “Apparently not. Not good enough. She was in bed with John.”
Sidney looked confused. “No, wait a minute. Not your brother.”
“Yes!”
“Shit!” Sidney stood up again enraged. “What is it with people fucking other people’s wives!”
Mason poked his head out of the kitchen, Addison’s head followed. The white boy said, “Honestly, Sid, he couldn’t help hearing that.”
Sidney flashed a look at both boys that made them stick their heads back in the kitchen.
“Joel,” Sidney said. Then, “Joel.” He held his arms out. He went to Joel and hugged him. He let him go.
“So that’s why I’m saying,” Joel continued, “we’ve all been hurt, and sometimes we don’t do the right thing. Sometimes we do what we have to do. We reach for what’s there, and Mark needs to know that... we care about him, and understand. He’s at the bottom right now. My wife didn’t die, but... she’s put me at the bottom. I feel at the bottom right now and I just might do anything. So I understand him.”
Joel McKenna shot up out of bed, his heart hammering in his chest, sweat on his brow, rising in beads on his back.
“Joel,” Shelley was half asleep, and then she said, “Joel,” rising up, waking up worried for him.
Joel was breathing so hard in the darkness of Shelley’s room that he couldn’t speak. When he did, he said, “I need to call Seth... need to know he’s okay...”
“What?” Shelley said.
“I had a dream...” Joel crawled out of bed pulling on his briefs, and went to the phone. It kept ringing.
“He’s probably out,” Shelley said.
“Damn,” Joel wailed, suddenly afraid and angry. He hung up the phone. “Damn!” He came back to bed, sitting on the edge.
“Joel,” Shelley climbed over the bed, then climbed off until she was kneeling in front of him and held his face in her hands.
“Joel, darling, you have to tell me what’s going on?”
“I had this dream…” he was shaking his head. “This terrible dream—”
“Was it because of those kids on the news?”
“Maybe,” Joel shrugged. “I don’t know. But... in this dream there was a gun. And there was death. Blood, all of this blood. I couldn’t get it off of me. Kids were dead. I just kept crying, and crying and I was calling out for Seth and I couldn’t find him.” Joel was shaking his head and trembling. “And there was all of this blood all over me.”
He kept breathing, breathing more slowly now. He wanted to pray, he needed to. But he was afraid of God just now.
In the dark, Sully whispered, “Are you still awake?”
“No.”
When Sully said nothing, Chris said, “What, Sully?”
“What was that Dave Riley said?”
“Said about what?”
“When he was leaving he turned around and told Matt, he told all of us, ‘One day I’ll shoot all of you.’”
“Don’t say that.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Don’t say that in the dark. It scares me.”
“It scares me too. I don’t trust that. Trust him. I don’t like to be told someone’s going to shoot me.”
“It was all bullshit. Go to sleep, Sullivan.”
“But you know,” Sullivan said, “it seems like no one thinks life is valuable anymore. Not their own. Why mine, then?”
Sidney squirted the toilet cleanser into the bowl and then scrubbed the toilet while shouting, “Mason!”
Mason came to the bathroom and Sidney said, reading the label. “Did you know that toilet cleanser was poisonous and could cause death if ingested orally?”
“I’d heard that somewhere,” Mason told him.
“I wasn’t sure,” Sidney said. “But since it says it on the bottle, I’m not going to use it for the salad dressing.”
“Which is what you had planned.”
“You know it was,” Sidney said. “That lovely hint of bleach and the blue fluid all over the romaine lettuce and tomatoes. Oh, well, we’ll have to use Caesar instead.”
The doorbell rang and Mason said, “I’ll get it.”
While Sidney went on cleaning the bathroom, which was the way all his thoughts came to him and his mind got sorted out, he could hear from the front of the house that it must be Keisha. He put the toilet brush down and came out to greet his wife.
“I’m here,” she said shoving bags of presents at them both. “What time is everything? When does everyone get here?”
“Everyone’s just Addison and Tommy,” Mason said.
“No Mark. No Chris?”
“Ski trip,” Mason said.
“Oh, good, they get on my nerves. I’m sorry Sid,” Keisha said. “They’re too white for me. I feel like I should be eating cornflakes and mopping the floor in pearls and high heels like Donna Reed.”
“I don’t think you’ve ever mopped a floor,” Sidney told her. “in or out of heels.”
Keisha cocked her head to think about this, and then said, “No, I think you’re right. I tried once. But the soap was actually floor wax. That was a disaster.”