The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  “What the fuck do you think I’m trying to do?” I screamed back.

  We were up most of that night, her pacing through the house, ranting half the time, sobbing and whimpering the other half. At one point, she said she wished they’d found her that day and killed her, too. “Well, they didn’t,” I said. “You came out of there alive. So goddamn deal with it.”

  I made pots of coffee, mugs of tea, trying to stay awake and alert, trying to outlast her. She finally conked out, splayed the wrong way across our bed, somewhere after three in the morning. I covered her with a quilt, then flopped into the chair by our bed and fell into a deep sleep myself. I awakened with a start to a clanging sound. She wasn’t in bed, or in any of the upstairs rooms. I ran downstairs and headed to the kitchen, where the noise was coming from. From the doorway, I took it in: my toolbox, the wrenches, the hammer wrapped up in a dishtowel. She’d tried but failed to disassemble the drain pipe. Now she was standing at the sink, slamming her hand, over and over, against the drain. Hoping against hope, I realized, that she might jam her hand down far enough and retrieve a pain pill or two that had survived the dousing.

  Her desperation gave her a broken finger, a sprained wrist, and five badly skinned knuckles, but none of those lost pills.

  * * *

  HER NARCANON MEETINGS WERE IN the basement of the Episcopal church at the corner of Sexton and Bohara. Night driving made her uneasy, especially in that area of town, so every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evening, I’d drive her over there, then drive back home. Get in the car and go pick her up an hour and a half later. “So how’d it go?” I’d ask.

  She’d shrug.

  “These meetings helping you?”

  She’d shrug again.

  Her sponsor, Gillian, was laconic-bordering-on-hostile. She usually called at dinnertime. “It’s the Ice Queen,” I’d say, my hand over the mouthpiece, and Maureen would rise from the table, take the cordless from me, and leave the room. Leave me sitting there with my meal and myself. “Maybe you could ask her to call a little later?” I suggested one night.

  “Why?”

  “Because this is our time. And because I hate to see you have to get halfway through your dinner and then come back to it after it’s gone stone cold.” Maureen said Gillian worked full time and had a family. She called when she could. These conversations were more important than whether or not she ate hot food.

  I ran into Jerry Martineau at Target. Yes, she was going to meetings, I reported. No, she hadn’t gotten back into counseling just yet, but we were working on that, too.

  That night, I sat in bed with her, leafing through the Yellow Pages.

  “What about Dr. Patel?” I said. “You liked her.”

  She reminded me that Dr. Patel was a couples counselor.

  “That’s what we went to her for. Doesn’t mean that’s all she does.”

  I called and left a message; Dr. P called back. Yes, yes, she said. Many of her patients over the years—the majority of her forensic patients, actually—suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder. So while she couldn’t claim to be an expert, she was certainly familiar with this malady and its treatments. And it would be lovely to work with Maureen again. “And so, very good, we will meet next Wednesday at four p.m. Yes, yes.”

  She had relocated her practice to a warren of duplex two-stories in the Industrial Park—medical and dental offices, for the most part. The brick walkway leading to her door was lined with waist-high Indian statuary—Hindu gods and goddesses whose serene smiles and bared breasts belied the damp chill of the gray March day. The waiting room was narrow and nondescript. We were hanging up our coats when the inner office door swung open, and Dr. Patel emerged in a sari of brilliant blues and greens. “Ah, yes, the Quirks. Come in, come in.” She seemed genuinely happy to see us, but of course, she didn’t know who we’d become.

  Her office walls were painted a sunny yellow; the furniture, soft and comforting, was kiwi green. Mo and I sat on the sofa, and I was suddenly aware of how drab and monochromatic we were: she in her baggy gray sweater and black jeans, me in gray jeans and a gray UConn sweatshirt. The table between us held a small stack of magazines, a bubbling dish fountain. A terrarium, filled with lush, moist plants, was home to a fat leopard frog, turquoise and black.

  She fed us first: slices of mango on a pale green dish, a small bowl of cashews, a larger bowl, royal blue and white, that brimmed with strawberries. “It’s robbery, the price they ask for fruit out of season,” she said. “But March is such a long and dreary month. One must treat oneself to small indulgences, yes?” I nodded. Popped a strawberry in my mouth. It was so delicious that I ate another, a third, a fourth. Maureen bit into a single cashew.

  I told Dr. P about our lives in Littleton: our home, our jobs, Mo’s attempts to reestablish a connection with her father and his family, the shootings and their aftermath. “You want to tell her about the pills?” I asked Mo. She shook her head, so I told her. I was aware, as I spoke, that Dr. Patel was both listening to me and observing Maureen.

  “Most helpful, Mr. Caelum,” she said. “Very, very useful information. And now, shall we hear from Saint Augustine?”

  I shrugged. “Why not?” I said.

  Dr. P read from a blood-red leather book. “My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry…. Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?”

  She closed the book, then reached across the table and took Maureen’s hand in hers. “Does that passage speak to you?” she asked. Mo nodded and began to cry. “And so, Mr. Caelum, good-bye.”

  Because the passage had spoken to me, too, it took me a few seconds to react. “Oh,” I said. “You want me to leave?”

  “I do. Yes, yes.” She handed me a couple of the magazines on the table: the Sun, Parabola. “So we shall see you in, oh, thirty minutes.”

  “Yeah, okay. Sure.” I stood. Began backing out of the room. I was reluctant, suddenly, to leave a place so full of color: the warm yellow walls, Dr. Patel’s peacock blue sari, the orange flesh of the mango, and those strawberries, like fat, edible jewels.

  Rather than cool my jets in the waiting room, I left. Put the key in the ignition, started the car, and drove around until I found a florist. I bought Maureen a bouquet: red carnations, blue delphinium, and a single Stargazer lily. The aroma of its fleshy bloom filled the car.

  “Where’d you go?” she asked.

  “Here.” I handed her the bouquet.

  She smiled, smelled the lily. When we got home, she put the flowers in a vase and carried them up to the bedroom. It had been Lolly and Hennie’s, and now it was ours. I lit two candles. Put one on her bureau and one in the window. “I love you,” I said.

  “I love you, too.”

  That night, for the first time in two years, we risked intimacy.

  chapter sixteen

  WHEN MORGAN SEABERRY WAS IN utero, his mother had been sick as a dog. Morgan’s older brother, Jesse, was three at the time. Studying the murky ultrasound photos of his brother-to-be, he had wondered aloud if, in the event that they didn’t like the baby after it arrived, they could give it back. “That’s not how it works, buddy,” his dad had told Jesse. “And it’s a ‘he,’ not an ‘it.’ You’re going to have a little brother.” This was Carole Seaberry’s third pregnancy. There’d been a miscarriage between Jesse and Morgan.

  Morgan was born two weeks before his due date, on Labor Day of 1987. It was a relatively easy delivery, compared to Jesse’s: two hours in the birthing room at Rockville Hospital, as opposed to fourteen. Mike Seaberry had meant to clear out and wallpaper the spare room that summer, but it had been crazy at work (Mike was in Human Resources at the University of Conne
cticut), and he just plain hadn’t gotten around to it. So he’d pasted and put up the paper—a repeating circus theme—while three-day-old Morgan sat contentedly in his infant seat on the just-carpeted floor. “That’s the image that comes to me whenever I think about him,” Mike Seaberry was quoted as saying in “A Victim’s Victims,” which appeared as a lengthy Annals of Justice article in the New Yorker the week before Maureen’s sentencing. “Good-natured right from the beginning.”

  Morgan had been an easy baby, his mother said—and a funny one. So much so that the Seaberrys bought a camcorder they couldn’t really afford because they wanted to capture for posterity their younger son’s comical antics: his impromptu dances and Pampers-padded pratfalls, his inverting of the dog’s water dish and wearing it as a hat. Rosalie Rand, the author of “A Victim’s Victims,” was shown some of these videos. She wrote of them: “Jesse leaps and flies between the camera and his little brother, trying hard to upstage him, but Morgan is clearly the star of the show.”

  “He was very creative,” Morgan’s teacher, Mrs. Leggett, recalled. “And such a sweet boy, too. Never a tattletale. And so considerate of others. When we played ‘dog and bone’ or sang ‘Farmer in the Dell,’ Morgan would always go out of his way to choose the children least likely to be picked by the others.”

  In 1996, twelve-year-old Jesse was “identified” and medicated (ADHD, Ritalin) and Morgan, a fourth-grader, won three awards. Weekly Reader magazine cited him for his poem about endangered Bengal tigers. His fire prevention poster was Vernon, Connecticut’s entry in the statewide competition that year. In May, Morgan was named Vernon’s Student of the Month. The Seaberrys videotaped the presentation of his award at the school board meeting, capturing, simultaneously, Morgan’s comical acceptance speech and, behind him in the audience, his brother Jesse’s obstinate concentration on Simon, the noisy handheld electronic game he was playing as an alternative to watching his brother’s latest triumph.

  Mike and Carole Seaberry’s abrupt separation in 1997 had been unanticipated by their children, and, until seventy-two hours earlier, by Carole. There were three Seaberry siblings now; Jesse was fifteen, Morgan was eleven, and little Alyssa was five. Mike, who later married Ellen Makris, the young associate professor of Romance languages with whom he’d begun an affair, remained in Connecticut. (He’d been promoted twice and was now UConn’s Human Services director.) Against her estranged husband’s wishes, Carole relocated with the kids to Red Bank, New Jersey, the town where her parents lived. The divorce became final the following year, at which time Carole dropped the surname Seaberry and became, again, Carole Alderman.

  It was after the move to Red Bank that Jesse Seaberry’s downward spiral gained momentum. He’d had few friends back in Vernon, but now he had none, except for the forty-seven-year-old arcade operator at Monmouth Beach who hired Jesse as a janitor and roving change-maker, and who paid him in whiskey, weed, and fistfuls of quarters. In October Carole was notified that Jesse, who’d been leaving the house at 7:15 each morning, ostensibly to catch the school bus, had missed nineteen consecutive days of school. They had contacted her, the attendance officer insisted. Three times. Had Jesse been intercepting their messages? Shaken, Carole swallowed her pride and called her ex for backup. Mike had driven to New Jersey two days later to give his son “a reality check.” Jesse had refused to come out of his room, and the one-hour standoff ended only when Mike threatened to break the lock on Jesse’s bedroom door, remove the door, and drive it, Jesse’s computer, his PlayStation, and his CD and video game collections back to Connecticut. The lock clicked, the door opened, and Jesse emerged, stinking of pot and body odor. He was shirtless, and the ripped, dirty jeans he was wearing rode four or five inches below his underwear. Across his bony chest he’d Magic Markered the words Satin Rocks. Halfway through Mike’s harangue, he had pointed at his son’s chest and asked, “What’s that about? ‘Satin rocks?’ What the hell does that mean?”

  “It’s Satan rocks!” Jesse had retorted. “You work at a college, and you can’t even read?” Mike had laughed in his son’s face and said that if Jesse was going to worship the devil, the least he could do was learn how to spell his name. Then Jesse had called his father an “a-hole,” and Mike had lost it and backhanded him, accidentally chipping his son’s front tooth with the big, clunky college ring he still wore (Rutgers, class of 1978; he’d been a senior when Carole was a sophomore). In “A Victim’s Victims” Mike identified this as a critical juncture in Jesse’s life—the point at which he should have overruled his ex-wife and taken his at-risk son back to Connecticut where, under a father’s firm hand, Jesse might have turned back from the road he had started down. Carole Alderman told Rosalie Rand that yes, it was true that Mike had made the offer to intervene with Jesse during that visit, but, in her opinion, the proposal had been made halfheartedly. And if Mike had wanted so badly to be a responsible parent, why had he abdicated and set up housekeeping elsewhere?

  Morgan, too, had had a bumpy transition to Red Bank. One of his new classmates had taken an immediate, illogical dislike to Morgan and began ridiculing him relentlessly, insisting that Morgan was a girl’s name, hence Morgan must be gay. Morgan had tried to ignore his tormenter, who lisped and flapped a limp wrist at him in the hallway for the amusement of his buddies. Then, one day in the cafeteria line, Morgan had lost his temper and whacked the bully in the face with his lunch tray, giving him a very public bloody nose. Morgan’s victim was sent to the nurse, and Morgan was sent to the office—for disciplining this time, rather than for an award. But Morgan, being Morgan, had turned things around. While waiting for Mr. Wengel, the assistant principal, he passed the time by entertaining the school secretaries with jokes and impressions of Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Nixon. When Mr. Wengel returned from his meeting, he’d asked what all the laughing was about, and the secretaries had made Morgan repeat his routines. By the time Mr. Wengel notified Morgan’s mother to report the lunchroom incident, he began the conversation with, “Ma’am, I’m calling about a problem, but first of all, let me tell you that’s quite a kid you have there.” Recalling the incident, his mother, smiling through her tears, had told Rosalie Rand that Morgan could have taught Dale Carnegie a thing or two about how to win friends and influence people.

  Out of financial necessity, Carole Alderman had surrendered her status as a stay-at-home mother and become, first, a graduate student (her parents paid for her coursework and pitched in with the kids) and, later, a paralegal for the Perth Amboy Housing Authority. She’d been on the job a scant six weeks when she fingered a lump in her breast. There were tests, a mastectomy, difficult post-op radiation treatments. The Housing Authority, considering Carole had just barely begun her career there, had been great about it. Her insurance had covered everything, and they’d held her job open during her three-month recuperation. Her coworkers had even thrown her a small welcome-back party. Amidst the cake-eating and well-wishing, Carole had given an impromptu speech, addressing cancer itself—warning the disease that, if it thought it was going to beat her, it had better think again, because she had kids to raise and worthwhile work to do. Everyone in the break room had put down their plates and applauded. And Carole’s defiance of the disease seemed to have worked, too; every half-year since, her tests had come back negative. Her kids had been terrifically supportive during her ordeal, too, she told Rosalie Rand; all three of them, Jesse included, had locked arms and accompanied her during her first postradiation Walk for Life. Mike had driven down, too, at Morgan’s secret request. It had floored her: Morgan’s doing that and Mike’s having made that effort. They were a family again, for an afternoon, at least, and for an evening. The five of them had gone to dinner at the Olive Garden, and, well, if Carole’s cancer ever did return, at least she could say she’d had that night, when they’d laughed and eaten all those different kinds of pasta and had gotten silly enough to play chew-and-show with the tiramisu, even Carole, wearing her paisley head scarf and prosthetic breast.
r />   Carole had dated a little before she’d gotten sick, but post-mastectomy she did not. She felt self-conscious about her absent breast, and on top of that she had gained weight, thanks in large part to the stress brought on by Jesse’s various dramas. And kids were a liability to a woman trying to date; she loved her children more than she could say, but what man in his right mind would want to date someone who had a Lane Bryant wardrobe, a single breast, and three children, one of whom had a drug problem? No, she had faced it: she was going to remain single, and so be it. As much as she’d like to claim otherwise, she loved Mike and only Mike, the man with whom she’d created four children, three of whom still walked the earth. She pictured that love as a perpetual flame, like the one Jackie Kennedy had designated for the grave of her slain husband. President Kennedy: another husband who had stomped on his marriage vow. No, Carole would always love Mike, she admitted to Rosalie Rand, but she remained bitter about his betrayal.

  Jesse, like his mother, harbored a powerful resentment of his father and refused to have anything to do with him, not even that Saturday night when Mike drove down from Connecticut on a moment’s notice—the night when Jesse was arrested for possession of crystal meth and needed, if not his dad, then the lawyer and the bail bondsman his dad had gotten him. Not even the night when Mike arrived, white as a ghost, and stood at Jesse’s bedside in the emergency room, sobbing and apologizing. He’d driven like a bat out of hell down I—95 after Carole had called to tell him Jesse had tried to end his life by hanging himself with his belt in that filthy apartment where he lived with the woman who owned all those cats. “You’re the invisible man. I don’t even see you standing there,” Jesse had told his father, slurring his words, and then falling into a deep, tranquilized sleep.