In Things Unseen

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  Elliott shook his head. “That isn’t possible, Laura.”

  She waited for him to go on, an unspoken dare.

  “If the boy was at school today, and no one but you has any recollection of this accident in the park. . .it couldn’t have happened. There’s just no way.”

  “Then I am insane. Or I’m dreaming and this is a nightmare.”

  “You don’t have to be insane or dreaming. You simply have to be subject to. . .to. . .”—he searched for the right phrasing—”some kind of delirium.”

  “Delirium?”

  “You may not be overworked in the technical sense, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t been under a certain amount of stress lately. You take your work very seriously, babe, and you bring a lot of it home. Maybe you’ve just broken down a little. It happens. It happens to everyone.”

  “No.” She shook her head defiantly.

  “Wait. Bear with me for a moment.” He paused for her to object. When she didn’t, he pressed on. “You’re fond of Adrian. You’re always saying he’s special in a way your other kids aren’t. He fascinates you. So naturally, if your subconscious were to single out anyone to develop a fantasy around, however bizarre—”

  “I’m not fantasizing about anyone. This isn’t a goddamn fantasy!” The word turned her stomach. Even if this was her infatuation with Adrian gone wrong—she’d already considered that possibility without Elliott’s help—that wouldn’t fall under the description of fantasy. She started to tear up again.

  Elliott said, “I don’t know what you want me to say. I want to help but I’m not going to lie to you. What you’re saying happened didn’t happen. And this isn’t a dream. That much I can tell you for certain.” He gathered his courage and delivered the final blow. “I think you need to see a doctor. Whatever this is, it’s more than we can handle alone.”

  If he were expecting another hand across the face, what she leveled against him—all the unfettered hatred she could bring to bear with her eyes—was meant to feel infinitely worse.

  “Get out,” Laura said. “Get out of here and leave me alone!”

  “Laura—”

  “I said, get out!”

  He threw his hands up to fend off the teacup she hurled at his head. He looked for some sign of remorse and she showed him nothing.

  “I’ll be right outside if you need me,” he said. “Try to get some sleep.”

  He left the room and closed the door.

  * * *

  Several hours later, a call came in on her cell, which was sitting alongside her purse on the dining room table where she usually left it. Elliott saw Howard Alberts’s name on the phone’s screen. Laura had fallen asleep and he was loath to wake her, but he was too desperate for answers to just let the phone ring.

  “How is she?” Alberts asked after the two men had exchanged awkward greetings. They had met more than once but only briefly on each occasion.

  “She’s sleeping right now. I’m hoping she sleeps straight through to morning.”

  “She told you what happened at school today?”

  “Of course.”

  “Any idea what could have caused it?”

  “Not a clue. I don’t even know what ‘it’ is. Maybe you can help me with that.”

  “Beyond an emotional breakdown of some kind? No. Is she still insisting—”

  “That this boy Adrian Edwards is dead? Yes.”

  “Jesus.”

  “She said the district psychologist who examined her at the school believes she’s just overworked.”

  “Yes. And I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any. But. . . .” Alberts’s sigh came in loud and clear over the phone. “It’s more than that. I’ve seen teachers who are overworked. I’ve been trained to know the signs when I see them. And Laura’s never given me any reason to believe she’s been working too hard. Of course, you’d be in a better position to know than me.”

  “Well, she puts in a lot of hours and gets tired like everyone else. And sometimes she even complains about it. But if she’s been overworked, I can’t say it’s been obvious to me. At least, not enough to explain something like this.”

  The two allowed a short silence to build.

  “I assume you and this psychologist talked to the boy?” Elliott asked.

  “Of course. Our first thought was that he’d done something to set Laura off. Played some kind of bizarre trick on her or something. But by all accounts, he never even spoke to her. She started screaming the minute he entered the classroom. Poor guy’s just as baffled as the rest of us.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “I think so. Some of the other children were a little freaked out, but Adrian seemed fine. Which is typical of him, as you may know.”

  “Yes. Laura says he’s not your average seven-year-old.”

  “No. Far from it, in fact.”

  “The way Laura describes him, he sounds a little strange.”

  “Strange? No. Just. . .unusually reserved for someone his age.”

  “Reserved, strange. Either way, isn’t that all the more reason to suspect him? I mean, don’t the most innocuous kids turn out to be the most dangerous sometimes?”

  “Sometimes, sure. But not in this case. I’m fairly certain of that.” Before another stretch of silence could assert itself, Alberts said, “I know this is a terrible question to ask, Elliott. It is Elliott, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know this is a terrible question, but I have to ask—does Laura have any history of mental illness that you’re aware of? Depression, schizophrenia. . . .”

  “No.” Elliott was unable to hide his offense.

  “What about prescription drugs? Does she—”

  “No. Laura abhors drugs.” Which meant she was sometimes less inclined than Elliott to smoke the occasional joint while watching a movie at home.

  “You understand—”

  “Why you had to ask, yes. But the answer to both questions is still no.”

  “I’m sorry if I offended you, but here’s the thing. I can’t let Laura back in the classroom until we know exactly what happened today. And until I have a reasonable expectation that it won’t happen again.”

  Now Elliott didn’t care how pissed off he sounded. “Excuse me?”

  “District regulations say once our psychologist has been called out, we have to get a clean bill of health from a certified physician before we can put a teacher back on the job. That’s just the way it is.”

  “Are you serious? Laura’s not a danger to anybody, least of all her students. She loves those kids!”

  “I know she does. And I’m sure she would never willingly do anything to hurt them. But her behavior today strongly suggests she may not be in complete control of herself. She needs to see a doctor, Elliott. The sooner she does that, the sooner we can welcome her back to school.”

  Elliott felt he owed it to Laura to argue with the man, to defend her right to work against his thinly veiled charges of mental instability. But he knew Alberts was right—no one could say what Laura was capable of until they had some understanding of what had happened to her today. What was still happening to her.

  “Have her call me when she’s up to it,” Alberts said. “Tonight or tomorrow, it doesn’t matter. We only want what’s best for her and the children. Please tell her I said that, will you?”

  FIVE

  MILTON WEISMAN WAS a changed man.

  For most of his sixty-eight years, he had been a bad one. A terrible husband and a neglectful father. Work had been his only love, the single thing he considered worthy of his full attention, and he was happy to let everything else go to hell. In his youth, ambition was all the fuel he needed to keep going, but at some point alcohol superseded it, transforming him into an ogre of anger and resentment. His law practice suffered, his marriage crumbled,
and his children began to hate him. He became someone his late mother, whom he had adored above all others, would have despised.

  When his wife Shauna died four years earlier, after they’d been together almost three decades, his daughters had hoped the shock would move him to get clean. Janet, his oldest, had tried guilt to reach him, laying her mother’s death directly at her father’s feet. Her sister, Lisa, had taken a different tack, sending him self-help books and emails teeming with links to online articles about alcoholism. Neither approach worked. Milton was recalcitrant in his self-destruction. Shauna’s death only served to isolate him further.

  Then he killed that little boy.

  Adrian Edwards, just seven years old. Last spring in the park. After reading the morning paper there like he always did, Milton had been exiting the parking lot when his foot slipped and tapped the Honda’s accelerator instead of the brake. He recognized his mistake immediately but panicked, and in his attempt to stand on the brakes, he drove the accelerator pedal straight to the floor. By the time the car came to a stop, it had traveled thirty yards, churning up grass and sand and earth, clipping the ladder on a playground slide and rolling right over the child who’d been climbing it.

  Most of what occurred immediately following the accident was lost to Milton, so great was his mind’s need to protect him from the memory. What he could recall were only flashes of sight and sound and fragments of sensation: the screams of Adrian’s mother and the only other woman in the park that morning; the pain in his right knee, shattered when the car finally slammed into a tree; and what seemed like thousands of questions. Witnesses, policemen, paramedics—everyone asking him what had happened, how it had happened, why it had happened. He had no answers for any of them.

  Naturally, they tested him for alcohol before the ambulance could deliver him to the hospital. On any other day back then, the results would have cost him his life: his home, his retirement, and very likely, his freedom. But on this particular March morning, he had forgone the bottle and gone to the park sober. His impulsive choice that day to test liquor’s hold on him could have been an omen, but Milton didn’t believe in omens any more than he believed in God, so he had thought little of it.

  It took him until the next day, lying in his hospital bed with machines tied to his every extremity, to fully grasp what he’d done and, comparatively speaking, how little he was likely to pay for it. He’d killed a little boy but had suffered only minor injuries. He was being reviled as a clumsy, senile old man but not as a homicidal drunk. He might be sued for damages but would almost certainly not be incarcerated. He even had the pity of some who would rather be thankful they weren’t as old and pathetic as he than condemn him for being both.

  In short, he was incredibly fortunate.

  Or such was his initial view of things. He eventually came to see what had happened to him in a different light. Milton was a retired corporate lawyer, a man for whom gray areas did not exist, so the concept of luck, good or bad, was one he had always found laughable. People made their own luck, either by commission or omission, and ascribing the turns their lives took to anything other than their own actions was idiocy.

  He thought much the same way about religion. His parents had been devout Jews, a stark contrast to those doggedly secular American Hebrews who treated Judaism like a mere tattoo, and Shauna had never missed a High Holy Day at shul in her life. Milton, on the other hand, had relieved himself from the shackles of faith many years ago, when it became obvious he could meet his professional goals just fine without wasting a minute’s time on worship. As far as he could tell, the only difference between highly successful Jews who believed in Adonai and those who didn’t was the freedom the latter had to sin at will. Milton was too busy to be bothered with such hypocrisy.

  At first, nothing about the accident caused him to reconsider his atheism. If anything, the tragedy only served to further justify it. What god would allow such a thing to happen to a child and an innocent old man? But as the days and weeks wore on, something began to turn inside him. His guilt and anger, which had painted black his every waking hour since his first glimpse of Adrian Edwards’s broken little body, gradually took on a new dimension, one that could only be described, insufficiently, as gratitude.

  The closer he came to a complete recovery from his injuries, the more he believed he’d been spared the total devastation he could have suffered—should have suffered—for a reason. Instead of being dead or crippled or withering away in prison craving a drink he could never have, Milton had emerged from the accident with only a cane and a slight limp, and no amount of objective reasoning could convince him that fate alone was responsible.

  Milton was as alive and free as he had ever felt, his alcoholism a shed skin he had somehow put behind him while still in the hospital, without deliberation or significant effort. He’d been well insured and Adrian’s parents showed little interest in seeking greater compensation for his death than they’d already received. Having had his daughters gather around him after the accident, Milton was now closer to them, Lisa in particular, than he’d been since they were little girls.

  It could have been argued Milton was better off today than he had been before killing Adrian Edwards.

  How was this possible?

  Milton didn’t know. He only knew none of it was by chance. There was a plan at work here, one beyond his abilities to comprehend, and he was going to play his part in it to the fullest. He owed whoever or whatever had saved him that much, whether “God” was its proper name or not.

  As he waited for the meaning of it all to shift into focus, he resolved to become a better person than he had ever been. A better father, a better citizen, a better man. Humility was the key. He’d never had much use for it—humility was a weakness to be exploited, not a strength to be admired—but he understood there would be no redemption for him without it. So he held the memory of what he’d done last March close to his breast. Not as a weight to be carried but as a reminder of his potential for ruin. He had developed a routine: two nights a week before bed, without fail, he turned on his computer and searched the web for stories about Adrian Edwards.

  He always found something. The story was a local sensation for weeks. There were YouTube videos of television newscasts covering the tragedy, newspaper stories, feature columns, magazine articles, message board threads, and blog posts. In all but a few, Milton was portrayed as either a hapless old fool who had no business possessing a driver’s license, or a cold-blooded child-killer who had gotten away with murder. Voices sympathetic to his position, to the guilt he was left to carry, were few and far between. When he’d been allowed to speak for himself, his words were turned against him, bent and twisted to fit the image of a delusional old drunk.

  Subjecting himself to this public flaying every Tuesday and Thursday night helped him appreciate how far he’d come. To hedge against remission, a return to the selfish, unfeeling man he used to be, it was necessary to weigh his present against his past, to keep the flame of guilt that had fueled his spiritual transformation alive and well.

  It was not always easy. Some nights, he just wasn’t up to the task. Tonight was one of those. He’d had a difficult day, littered with melancholy and capped by a stupid and unnecessary argument with Janet about his diet, and by eight o’clock, he was dead on his feet. After bathing and dressing for bed, the last thing he wanted to do was sit down in front of his laptop and revisit the darkest hours of his life.

  But he turned the goddamn computer on, anyway.

  SIX

  THE PAIN WAS CONSTANT. It changed shape and color daily, but never its depth. It always cut straight to the bone, blackening everything it touched.

  Michael had never known anything like it. He’d lost his mother when he was fourteen, and had thought then nothing could ever hurt him more. But losing an only child was an agony altogether different. It had always been his understanding that mothers suffered
such tragedies to a far greater extent than fathers, that men, never knowing the bond women formed with their children during pregnancy and childbirth, could not feel what a woman felt when death robbed her of a child. But Michael knew better now. Burying his son Adrian had destroyed him no less than it had the boy’s mother, and eight months later he was still trying to go a whole day without some thought of Adrian cutting his legs out from under him.

  Still, he considered himself far better off than Diane. She continued to cling to their son’s ghost like a lifeline. Michael might heal in time, unencumbered by any hope he could ever again be as happy as he had been before Adrian died, but Diane was doomed to suffer forever. Whereas Michael had stopped asking God for something He would never grant, Diane continued to start each day and end each night on her knees before the Lord, pleading for the impossible. And not simply because she needed her prayers to be answered; she did it because she believed they would be.

  Maybe if Michael had been able to convince her to join him in this cold new world that would never again have Adrian in it, they would still be together. Their marriage might only be a shell of what it had been, but they wouldn’t be alone. They’d have a partner with whom to share their grief, to help carry the weight of their infinite loneliness.

  But Diane would not be moved. As Michael’s faith in miracles drained slowly away, Diane’s went on and on, impervious to the enduring evidence of its impotence. In the weeks immediately following the accident, Michael was both willing and able to match his wife’s devotion, prayer for desperate prayer. He’d been raised a good Catholic and remained one. He wasn’t ashamed to confess a firm belief in a caring, loving God for whom all things were possible. But Michael had never had to put this belief to any real test. The things he had asked for—and, more often than not, received—resided squarely in the realm of reason, requiring no great stretch of credulity to accept. After the accident, however, what he sought from God—to have it all be a dream from which he could simply awake—was nothing short of an impossibility, the kind of event that only happened in the Bible. And what he came to discover, much to his horror, was that his faith did not—could not—extend that far. So his prayers became smaller and more infrequent as time wore on. Instead of miracles, he asked for a respite from his pain. When that didn’t come fast enough, he prayed only for sleep. Nothing he wanted was ever granted to his satisfaction.