Every Moment After

by Joseph Moldover

  “Fuck you,” I growl at him. “Fuck you, you stupid little bastard. Fuuuuuck you.”

  “Cole?”

  I turn from the dog, and there’s Viola, standing in the middle of the lawn, staring at me and the dog and the car and the mailbox.

  “Are you talking to my dog?”

  I look down at the little shit baring his teeth and staring up at me. “No, I was talking to myself.”

  She walks over and looks at the mailbox, her eyes wide. Then she throws her head back and bursts into laughter, eyes still on me. “What in God’s name are you doing?” she asks.

  “I seem to be trashing your lawn,” I say. As at the pharmacy, I can’t come up with any excuse but the awful truth.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yeah . . .”

  “Is your car okay?”

  “Yeah. But I’m not sure the mailbox is going to make it.”

  “No, I don’t think it is. I’m so sorry; this is my fault, letting Winnie get out of the house like this.”

  “No, it was my fault—”

  “You just wanted your walk, didn’t you, you little beastie?” she says to the snarling bulldog.

  “I was just driving by, and I didn’t want to hit him—”

  “You were driving by?”

  “Well, I was driving here.”

  “Why?”

  Why, indeed. Well, I got her this present, and I was going to drop it in her mailbox while she was at work and then I was going to call her later and say that it was just something I randomly came across that made me think of her and maybe does she want to get coffee and talk about it? Except that I’ve crushed her mailbox and almost killed her obnoxious little dog, and she’s obviously not working today. So things are clearly not going according to plan.

  I wish I could disappear into the ground. I feel my face burning and my stomach seizing up, and for an awful moment I think that I could actually vomit.

  I don’t. “Just a minute,” I say. I take a deep breath and get into my car and back it off the lawn and over to the curb while Viola clips a leash to Winnie’s collar. The dumb animal is totally cooperative for her. I get out with the present in my hand.

  “I thought you were going to be working today,” I say.

  “I took the day off, since I knew we’d be up all night. What’s that?”

  “It’s for you.”

  “You got me a graduation present?”

  “Sort of—​it’s just something I found, and it made me think of something you said, so . . .”

  It’s just a little something that’s one of my prize possessions. Just a little something I’m staking my dreams to.

  I hand it to her.

  “Thank you!” She opens the card, scans it and smiles, and then pulls off the brown paper.

  She does it just the way I imagined she would, carefully pulling it apart at the seams rather than tearing it off like a little kid.

  “We were out of gift-wrap,” I tell her. I hate the moment when someone opens a present.

  “Oh, Cole, this is lovely,” she says. She’s holding my copy of The Collected Works of T. S. Eliot. She turns the book over in her hands and opens the front cover, studying the name on the inside. “This was your father’s!”

  “Yes . . . but it made me think of you. I mean, I thought, I thought you would like it because, you know, you like Eliot and all.”

  She closes the book and runs her hand across the cover. “It’s beautiful. I love it. Thank you.”

  My stomach relaxes a little bit, though I can still feel my face burning. I want to freeze this moment in time, standing here on Viola’s lawn, hearing her say that she loves it. It’s quite possibly the best moment of my life.

  And then Winnie bites me on the ankle.

  “Fuck!” I shout, louder than I should.

  “Winnie! Bad dog!” Viola tugs on his leash and pulls him away from me. “Cole, I’m so sorry! I don’t know what’s gotten into him; he never behaves this way!”

  “It’s okay . . . It’s fine . . .”

  “Is the skin broken?”

  He got me on the sock, right on the Achilles tendon. “No, no . . .”

  “Do you need some ice?”

  “No, I’m fine, really.” I want to kill this dog. Literally kill it.

  “I think he needs to go for a walk and get some energy out.”

  “Okay.”

  She looks at me. “Do you want to come?”

  “Oh . . . uh, I’ve got to . . . I think I’m supposed to work this afternoon.”

  “Well, all right. Can you just hold Winnie for a moment while I put the book inside? It’s so lovely.”

  “Sure.”

  I take Winnie’s leash and watch Viola retreat across the lawn and hate myself with a whole new level of intensity. How many chances like this is the summer going to give me?

  Winnie and I spend an uncomfortable thirty seconds glaring at each other until Viola comes back outside.

  I’m doing it again. I’m waiting.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “Oh, fantastic.” She takes the leash back, and we set off toward Jimmy Carter Avenue, me trying not to limp because my ankle actually does hurt. I can’t think of a thing to say.

  “You get some sleep?” I finally ask.

  “A little bit, yeah. How about you?”

  “Not really. I was writing.” There is truth in this. I sat with a pen and paper for about fifteen minutes.

  “What were you working on?”

  “Just . . . stuff,” I say.

  “You’re writing ‘stuff’?”

  “Yeah, well . . . poems. I’m working on a poem. I’m actually a little bit stuck with it.” I want to tell her that I’ve published three of my poems, but I can’t think of a way to do it that doesn’t sound like bragging. “Do you ever write?”

  She laughs. “No, not unless you count practice SAT and college admission essays.”

  “Well, it seemed to work.”

  “I suppose it did.”

  “What do you think you’re going to study at Berkeley?” I ask.

  “Major in econ, minor in Asian studies.”

  “That’s pretty specific.”

  “That’s how I tend to be.”

  “Specific?”

  “Yeah. Well, precise. Planned out.”

  “So, you’ve planned what your major and minor are going to be?”

  “Oh, Cole, I’ve planned lots of things. I could tell you where I’m going to be and what I’m going to be doing an hour from now, and a week from now, and a year from now, and probably ten years from now too. It makes life very . . . predictable.”

  I want to ask her more about those plans and how negotiable they are, but instead I nod and say, “That’s not really how I think of Berkeley, you know? I think about hippies protesting and people walking out of class and stuff like that. I don’t think of people majoring in econ.”

  “Well, I think I may wind up being the only strait-laced conservative in Berkeley. I’ll be the one-woman College Republicans. It should be interesting.”

  We’re walking along Rutherford B. Hayes Drive now. I’d have a tough time finding my way back to the car by myself; we’ve taken a couple of turns, and everything looks the same. The dog stops and starts to circle around by the side of the road, and we both stop with him. I look at the huge houses to our right, big green lawns swooping up to their front doors, chandeliers visible through arching windows. “It’s nice here. The houses are nice.”

  She shrugs. “It’s okay.” We watch as Winnie elaborately prepares to take a dump. “Where do you live?” she asks.

  “Other side of town.” I tell her the street name, but she doesn’t seem to know it. Most people don’t. It’s a small street, not many houses, by the woods. I’m sure that’s why Mom and Dad chose it. The dog apparently decides to find another spot, and we walk on.

  Rutherford B. Hayes Drive is long, straight, and empty. There isn’t a sidewalk, and since th
ere are no cars around, we walk right down the middle of the street. The heat is starting to come up out of the smooth, fresh asphalt. Off to our left, the grass slopes down to a line of trees, and I can see the sun glinting off some water.

  “What’s down there?”

  “Down where?”

  I nod toward the tree line.

  “I actually have no idea.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “It looks like a stream.”

  “Do you know, I walk Winnie down this street every day, and I’ve never really looked. There is a stream, I think. You can sort of see it in the wintertime, when there are no leaves.”

  “Let’s go see.”

  “Should we? Whose property is it?”

  “Just the town’s, probably. It’s fine.” I veer off, stepping up onto the curb and setting off across the grass. This is the sort of thing Dad always did with me when I was young. We’d be driving somewhere and he’d spot something, some clearing or rock formation, and he’d pull over and we’d explore it. It might seem weird to other people, but it’s totally natural for me. He saw things that no one else could see.

  I glance back. Viola is hesitating, standing in the street, holding Winnie’s leash. He’s sitting next to her, staring at me. “Come on!”

  Viola smiles and catches up with me, tugging Winnie behind her. He looks like he’d rather be heading home. We walk down the slope and into the trees. It’s cooler in the shade, and the ground is soft. I smell the leaves from last autumn, decomposing underneath our feet. Even here, in the middle of this development, there’s a little bit of nature, and it’s a relief to step into it.

  We pick our way around rocks, down to the stream. It’s small and slow moving, going nowhere fast. Still, it’s pretty. Water always is. It ripples over a bed of pebbles, and there’s even a tiny waterfall where the rock bed drops off by about six inches. Winnie wanders over and sniffs the water.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t know this was here,” Viola says, looking around.

  I nod, looking at the sun filtering down through the trees. “There was a spot like this behind the old school,” I say. “You could get to it from the playground. We weren’t supposed to go back there at recess, but we did. Andy, Matt, and I.”

  “Andy was Paul Gerber’s brother?”

  “Right. His twin.”

  Viola nods. She doesn’t say anything, and I can’t tell whether the silence is awkward. “Where did you go to school back then?” I ask.

  “Outside of London. A little all-girls school.”

  “Was it nice?”

  She thinks for a moment. “I liked it, yes. It was quiet. Very sheltered, very strict. It was a good place for someone like me, at that age. I like it better here, though. There’s more going on, you know? More to do.” We watch as Winnie laps at the water. “You’re an only child, aren’t you?” she asks.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “I am.”

  It’s a lot of house for three people, I think. It’s the type of thing my dad would have said to my mom. They didn’t approve of developments like this one.

  “Look at those,” Viola says. “Aren’t they lovely?”

  I look across the water and see a cluster of small blue flowers along the bank on the other side.

  “Are those forget-me-nots?”

  “They are,” I say. “Myosotis scorpioides.” I say it without thinking, and then worry that it sounds like I’m showing off. “Hold on a moment.” I step down to the water, pause, and then hop out to a flat rock in the middle of the stream, and from there to the other bank. I glance back. Viola is watching me, and Winnie is looking up at her, probably wondering who this person is that she found to walk with them. I walk along the stream to the flowers, pick one, and make my way back, managing not to fall in. I hand it to her. “Here you are.”

  She smiles. “Very nice. Thank you.”

  “Do you know the story of the forget-me-not?”

  She shakes her head as she smells the flower.

  “Well, there was a knight, and a maiden . . .”

  “All the good stories begin that way.”

  “They do. And this particular knight was in love with the maiden and took her for a walk along a river, much larger than this one. He declared his love for her, and he went down to the water to pick her a flower. But he lost his balance, and he fell in, and he was wearing his armor—”

  “He was out for a stroll in a full suit of armor?”

  “Well, he was a knight . . .”

  “I suppose. But still.”

  “These were medieval times. A dragon could have popped up out of nowhere, right? Plus, he probably looked good in it. Anyway, he fell in, and because he was in all that armor, he couldn’t swim, right? And as he drowned, he threw the flower to the maiden and called out, ‘Forget me not!’ ”

  She nods. “Or . . . what did you call them?”

  “Myosotis scorpioides. My parents were both biologists. Dad told me what all the plants and flowers are called.” I look around. “He would have liked this.”

  “Well, I’m glad to know it’s here.”

  We look for another moment, and then Winnie begins to tug on his leash, pulling back toward the road, so we make our way out of the little woods. We reach the street and continue on. “So, what are you doing this summer?” Viola asks.

  “Working at Finn’s, mostly. Not much else. I’m guessing you have yours pretty much mapped out?”

  “To the minute.”

  “Anything fun?”

  She wrinkles her nose. “Fun usually doesn’t enter into the equation. I’m working a bit. Edward Riley?”

  I shake my head.

  “The CPA downtown. Not far from Finn’s.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I think a CPA is an accountant, but I don’t want to ask.

  “Yeah. So, I’m doing that, and then I’m also going to be away for three weeks in Haiti.”

  “That sounds cool.”

  “It’ll be fine. It’s a service trip; my dad set it up. It’s for, you know—​it goes on my résumé. Does that sound awful?”

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t? Do you do things like that? You know, to look good for future employers and grad-school applications and whatnot?”

  Now it’s my turn to laugh. “I think my best shot for graduate school is going to be putting some gum on my résumé and hoping that it winds up underneath yours.”

  It seems to take her a moment to realize that I’m joking. “Really? It’s really not something you think about?”

  “No. Maybe I should.”

  “No, you shouldn’t! I mean, maybe you should; I’m not sorry I do, not really . . . but it must be nice. It must be nice to do things without worrying about how they’re going to look to the world. Like write a poem. I’ve never written a poem.”

  The clouds from earlier in the day are moving on, and the sun is coming out. Viola takes a pair of sunglasses that had been hooked over the collar of her shirt and puts them on. I left mine in the car. It’s a rarity; I’m hardly ever caught in public without them.

  “I think I know what you mean,” I say. “About worrying how you’re seen. For me, it was different. You know, I was famous—​my face was famous, at least—​from when I was really young. People look at me, even now. They look at me for an extra second, or they look at me twice, or they look away. I mean, you’re sort of making a face for yourself, right? With your résumé. With the job and the trip and stuff. It’s the face you put out to the world. You want to get yourself out there. I just think about things differently. The only thing I’ve ever cared about is trying to take my face away.”

  Viola looks at me thoughtfully but doesn’t say anything, and I immediately feel like I’ve spilled way too much. Jesus, why can’t I find a middle ground? Still, she looks like she’s considering what I said and like she’s about to say something back, but it’s in that moment that Winston finally decides to crouch down and take a c
rap on the side of the road.

  I really do hate dogs.

  Viola has a plastic bag tied around the leash, and I watch as she unties it and puts her hand inside. I realize that she’s going to scoop the shit up, and I stop her and tell her I’ll do it, taking the bag off her hand and putting it on my own. I really don’t want to, but it seems like the right thing to do, and anyway I don’t want the image of Viola picking dog shit up in her hand to be stuck in my head. I bend over, grab it, and pick it up. I can feel the warmth through the plastic and I think I might gag, but I don’t. Then I realize I’m not totally sure what to do next.

  “Turn it inside out and tie it,” Viola says.

  I do, and now I have a neatly packaged dog turd in a bag. I look around for somewhere to put it, but of course there’s nothing.

  “I’ll take it,” she says.

  “No, it’s fine,” I say. We start to walk again, Viola holding the leash and me holding the bag dangling from one hand, trying not to think about its weight.

  “You know,” she says, “I’ve never really talked to anyone about this stuff before. It’s interesting, what you’re saying. It’s sad, but it’s interesting.”

  As usual, I’m not sure what to say. A small plane flies overhead, dropping down toward the county airfield. She watches it as it passes.

  “Even our vacations are supposed to accomplish something,” she continues. “Later this summer, after Haiti, my parents want me to go with them and some friends of theirs up to Nantucket.”

  “What’s that supposed to accomplish?”

  “Oh, you know, they’re not really friends. They’re some sort of business associates. They’re somewhere in the web that connects my dad to all the other lords of the universe. I don’t want to go. I really don’t. Do you know, the son in the family, Conrad, is an ex of mine?”

  “An ex?”

  “We dated for a summer. He went to Northfield Academy. He’s a year ahead of us. He’s at Yale now.”

  “Huh.”

  “And Conrad, of course he had to be the valedictorian of his class, so I’m really not sure I can stand to be around him right now.”

  “Right, right.” My final class rank was eighty-six or eighty-seven. Maybe eighty-nine, now that I think about it. I was just happy to be in the top half.