In the Middle of All This

by Fred G. Leebron

  The beeping was stunning him, just stunning him as it pelted him with the gleeful fact that he’d even managed to set the alarm. He was getting up, moving expertly to turn off the noise, no hangover in sight. What luck! He didn’t deserve such luck. But there was something. Shit. Now he was wide-awake, out of bed, in his underwear, moving to the door. He’d forgotten to order a car.

  Downstairs in the cold morning light he paged through the business cards and found the one, hustled to the phone in the kitchen, dialed.

  “Morning,” a voice said.

  “Is it possible,” he started, his voice cracking into dry little pieces of hungover hoarseness, even though he still had no headache. “Is it possible to still order a car for Heathrow?”

  “Yes,” the voice said languidly, “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “In forty minutes?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “In Dunkers Green?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Wonderful,” he said, his voice now rising, then shutting itself down as he remembered the sleeping people upstairs. Quietly he gave the address.

  Now he even, unbelievably, had time for a shower. He hurried up to his room, found a clean set of clothes, and poured himself into the bathroom. He let the shower beat him for a while with its thudding heat. They had much better pressure here. Then he got dressed and brushed his teeth, tried not to whistle as he packed his bag, took it downstairs and set it by the door. He checked outside. The car was already waiting. He still had five minutes. He took the stairs two at a time and tapped lightly on their door.

  No answer.

  He tapped again and opened it soundlessly. The bed was empty. Still made. He looked around quickly. They hadn’t ever come home. Shit. He remembered hearing ringing last night. He raced downstairs. No message on the machine.

  Outside, the car still waited.

  He scrawled I’ll call from the airport. What happened? At the front door he tried to remember how to set the alarm, punched in numbers, heard the damn thing beep earnestly, shut it down, and shut himself from the house, the key inside. He felt a pang at that. In a minute he was opening the back door of the little compact and squeezing in.

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “What?” the driver said, turning to look at him, an older guy with an indifferent face.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “Is it Heathrow, then?”

  He settled back in the seat, the hangover flooding him with nausea, regret, and ache. “Yes,” he said.

  They chugged down the lane. These services always took the most roundabout and clogged route. He shut his eyes and willed himself to sleep. Where the hell were they? Maybe having a special night at a hotel? Richard was too cheap for that. Not even a message. Maybe they just got stuck somewhere. They would have taken a taxi home. That had to be cheaper than a hotel. He rattled the pence in his pocket, making sure he had change for the call. At least he had gifts for everyone. Pockets of air flung themselves around inside his empty stomach. The restaurant at the airport was so crappy. Where the hell were those guys?

  The car seemed to be strolling through the bleakest neighborhoods, two-story houses jammed up against one another along barren streets clotted with parked cars, the occasional convenience store just opening its shutters to show off its stacks of tins and boxes. Standstill places. It would be so nice to get home, where there were grass and trees and a fireplace, the kids would nuzzle him and he’d even pet the cats. Do you even know where you are? someone said.

  “What?” he said.

  “What?” the driver said, without turning back.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Finally they were on the only bit of highway that the damn service was willing to take. Could he sleep? Forget it.

  At Heathrow he overtipped, pushing for some karma. He found a pay phone and called. The answering machine. What to do, what to do. He just had a bad feeling.

  It was only four in the morning back home. If he called Lauren now, she’d probably reach across the ocean and throttle him.

  He had an hour before he absolutely had to check in. He called them every ten minutes, watching his pence run out. He was probably just being paranoid, or suffocating. Or hangover stupid. Lauren would know. He gave up and dialed.

  It rang all four times and the machine picked up, and then he heard her voice through his own taped voice You’ve reached the home of Martin, Lauren, … “Hello? Hello?” she was saying. “What is it? What is it?” as if she had to say everything twice to hear that it was herself who was actually talking.

  “It’s me,” he said. “From Heathrow.”

  “What?”

  “You told me to call. Remember?”

  “I didn’t mean it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You know, not this early. You never call this early. You call around seven. Before takeoff. Around then. Don’t you?”

  “They never came back.”

  “Who?”

  “Elizabeth and Richard.”

  “Oh.” She swallowed loudly and took a breath into the phone. For some reason he imagined her breath smelled quite bad, and he winced. “So?” she said.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird?”

  “They probably just wanted to have some privacy,” she said.

  “She didn’t even call,” he said.

  “Yes she did. You told me she did.”

  “She didn’t call again,” he said.

  “She has to call more than once?” She yawned even more loudly than she swallowed.

  “Christ,” he said.

  “So.” She was trying to wake up. “Is your flight on time?”

  “Yes, I have to check in.”

  “Well, then go check in.”

  “You’re not getting this at all.” He heard the anger in his voice and stopped himself.

  “Getting what? Maybe you’re not explaining it at all. Maybe you’re just making something out of nothing. Maybe you had too much to drink last night, and you have no idea what’s going on.”

  “Shut up!” he roared.

  “I’m hanging up,” she said.

  “Lauren,” he said. “Lauren, please. I need your help here.”

  “Well, then don’t tell me to shut up. You hate being told to shut up. People tell you to shut up and you just freak out.”

  “I’m glad you’re awake,” he said.

  “Listen,” she said. “They’re two adults. They can do whatever they want to do.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know. It’s just…”

  “What? Come on, honey. I want to try to get back to sleep. I have to teach, you know.”

  “The way he came back from out of nowhere. And now they’re both gone. I don’t think I should leave until I at least talk to her again.”

  “That is so illogical,” she said “They could have decided to go on one of those retreats. Or to get away somewhere. She’ll call when she wants to call.”

  “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “You don’t feel right. Its can’t feel.”

  “HONEY!”

  “Okay—oh shit. I think I hear Max.”

  Oh Christ, he’d somehow gone and woken Max. “I’m sorry. So look, can I stay?”

  “Can you stay? You can do whatever you want. That’s what this whole thing has been about, trying to figure out just what it is you want to do about… about all this.” She stopped, and he could hear Max saying something in the background. “You want to say hi to Daddy?”

  “Look—”

  “He doesn’t want to say hi. But he said you are a beautiful skier. What do you suppose that means?”

  “So I’m gonna wait and see,” he said.

  “Honey, please. Haven’t you been saying how sick you are of giving yourself up over this? I mean, you want to do the right thing, but you don’t know what the right thing is. Nobody does. Nobody ever does. Just get on the plane. That’s the right thing for now. And later there will be
another right thing.”

  “I’m going to wait,” he said resolutely.

  “Martin. Oh, he’s gotta go pee. Yes, honey, here we go. Martin, just call me, all right? I’m not the one right now you need to talk to. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “But of course you can stay. Do whatever you want about this. I just think you’re being … like your mother,” she said. And hung up.

  Oh, that was cruel. But her tone had no edge to it.

  He found a rest room and urinated and stood at the sink. He took off his glasses and splashed water on his face. Now he felt kind of alert.

  At the counter he gave up his ticket and passport.

  Has anyone you know …?

  To your knowledge …

  He got his aisle seat, but in the last row. He’d be sniffing the lavatory fumes the whole damn flight. Through customs he felt the nausea again welling in his throat. He wandered over to the specialty scotch shop. They were pouring free shots of something that should have looked tasty, but his stomach recoiled. Free shots of a single malt, and he couldn’t even do it. Every time he left Heathrow he felt ill, empty, just sick and unstable. As if he were doing someone harm and he didn’t quite know who it was. Elizabeth? Himself? He always wanted to take himself out of any equation that involved her. Leaving was selfish. He got to leave. She couldn’t. Not even Richard really could. Or maybe he could.

  He tried the phone again, heard the machine, hung up, went and sat in one of those racks of chairs stuck in the middle of the floor.

  His plane was called. He still had thirty actual minutes. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right to go like this. It wasn’t right that anybody had to be the sick one. It wasn’t right that Lauren would be stuck on the other side with the kids and all the teaching. It wasn’t right that he felt like the damn pivot, that he had any feelings at all.

  In his plastic seat in the long yellow tube he tried to imagine what they were like now, where they were, but he couldn’t see them. There wasn’t some mental trick to it, he couldn’t project it, it wasn’t there. The only thing there was the rattle of the tracks, the glum, everyday, indifferent faces of people who made this haul six or seven days a week, in from Heathrow, out to Heathrow, chugging here and there. Mind the gap. He couldn’t get into the gap.

  He reached Dunkers Green by two. Past lunchtime. He’d forgotten to eat anything yet. Was there stuff in the fridge? At their house he rang the bell, knowing it would do no good. Then he went around to the alley with the seven-foot-tall wooden gate and climbed over it and then tested the side door into the laundry room—locked—and then went into the backyard, roughly the size of the living room and kitchen, and examined the French double doors and tried to remember how they might be locked. It was a complicated system of dead bolts into the floor and frame, but the floor dead bolt was worn away and often when he had tried to lock it it didn’t hold. The top bolt was more difficult. He didn’t want to break the entire door.

  Then it began to rain.

  Why hadn’t he kept the key? After all, he’d had an intuition, an inkling, a kind of frisson. He knew. As the rain filled the natural hush of the space where the block’s backyards met, he dug around in the stony fringe of the patio, found the meatiest rock, pulled down his jacket sleeve around his hand, held the rock through it, and, as he crushed it into the pane beside the door handle, he still heard himself thinking, Do I really have to do this? Do I?

  The glass was far thicker than he’d thought—after all, it was the only glass separating inside from outside—and the pane gave with all the brittleness of a brick wall. He’d made only an uncomplicated map of cracks. His hand hurt, but didn’t seem to be bleeding. He felt dizzy. Beside him his briefcase was beginning to shine and wither with rain. He reached back again with the rock, and with all his force drove his hand toward the cracked glass. It shattered into different shards—some, he could feel, embedding themselves through his coat sleeve into his knuckles—and gave way to an eight-inch square opening into the kitchen.

  Through the rush of water and pain he thought he heard someone calling to him.

  “Yes, you, you bloody fucking idiot!” a man shouted from an upstairs window in the next house. “What the hell do you think you’re doing!”

  “She’s my sister,” he screamed back through the rain.

  “Bloody hell! Stay where you are!” His head left the window, and Martin stayed in the rain, afraid to look at how quickly his blood was soaking through his jacket, impaling himself on a mixture of disbelief and pain. He was a bloody fucking idiot. An impulse to run shivered through him. But where? Why? He kicked his sopping briefcase tight against the wall and kept it there with his nylon travel bag. Everything was soaked. Still, he wouldn’t look at his hand. He glanced out past the end of the backyard, the rain a curtain between him and the rest of Dunkers Green.

  “Their brother?” A large, oafish man stood in the door of the kitchen, staring him down. “Is that what you said you were?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You have any identification?” He blocked the doorway and laughed. “Only kidding. Of course I’ve seen you around. You might as well come in. That’s what you’re after, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Martin threw his bags in heavily and ducked in, and the lout shut the doors.

  “I had a key.” He held it out to show Martin.

  “Of course,” Martin said.

  “Don’t they do this sort of thing in America?”

  “They do. They do.” He felt something dripping and looked down at the floor. Drops of blood mingled in with slivers of glass.

  “You must feel pretty stupid.” He started toward the front of the house. “You coming?”

  Martin staggered, a bit light-headed, after him. “Where to?” he mumbled.

  “The hospital,” he said, opening the front door for him. “After you.”

  He’d never been that good about blood or pain, and in the car he alternated between a swoon and a desire to puke. He felt his face going whiter and whiter. They were in one of those cars that looked like half a car, their knees practically jammed up into their chins, rain seeping through the supposedly shut tops of the windows.

  “Is she at the hospital?” he said.

  “Who?”

  “My sister.”

  “Not to my knowledge. Is she sick, is she? I thought she was looking a little sick.”

  “Yes, she’s sick.”

  “Not every day, of course. Just some days. Most days. What’s she got?”

  “Cancer.”

  “Oh.”

  They drove for a while in silence, Martin’s mind seeming to fog and clear at once.

  “I guess I actually thought it might be that. My mother had it. It’s awful stuff.” Martin felt him turn and look at him. He couldn’t look back. “I suppose we all have it. That’s what they say anyway. At the end of the day, we all have it.”

  Martin nodded.

  “You over visiting? That’s nice.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So where are they, then?”

  “I have no idea,” Martin said with finality, hoping that would shut him up.

  “Think they needed a break?” He smacked Martin on the knee. “Cancer is hell, you know. The tests, the treatments, the smells, the needles, the scans. Of course it’s all a terrible cliché, except when it happens to you.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Oh?” He paused as if thinking that Martin might contract some cancer right there in the car. “Right!” He pulled over instantly, and Martin pushed and pulled at the door and stuck himself out in the rain and staggered to the sidewalk and frantically looked for something, anything, and there—right there—was an open bin, and into it he poured out what felt like his heart and brains.

  A hand tenderly touched the back of his wet neck.

  “There, there,” the man said. “There, there.”

  It was hard for him to believe how long his life se
emed to be going on.

  Then he was back in the tight car, head thrown back as far as it could, holding his hand up as much as he could, the guy quietly urging him, “That’s it, elevate. That’s it, elevate,” and the cars and the patterns he could see seemed to be crisscrossing through his head as if they were building him a whole new set of responses.

  “Almost there,” the guy said. “Do you think anything is broken?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  At the hospital they sat him in a padded chair and set his arm on some kind of arm desk or platform and snipped away the sleeve around the hand and soaked the wound and gently tweezered out the glass and soaked the wound some more. Or maybe it was more than one wound. He wouldn’t look. At one point they gave him a shot of something, and at another point they stitched and sewed here and there, bits and bits of cuts, and the back of his hand when they were finally done looked like he’d spilled jam all over it and had mopped up only half. They wrapped it after telling him not to get it wet for a few days. The stitching would dissolve of its own accord. He could go home.

  He paid with a credit card while the guy whom he absolutely did recall as the man who had rescued him from the rain stood alongside and double-checked the bill, whistling admiringly at the end, which was still not too bad and something Martin hoped his insurance back home would cover. Or maybe even the credit card company would cover it. He had no idea and he was too tired to think about the money, and besides, he really didn’t want to.

  The fat guy—he was fat—let him sit all stony eyed on the long ride back to the house. He let him in with a but-lerian flourish and pushed him gently toward the stairs.

  “Now, you get some rest,” he said.

  Martin nodded on his way up the steps. He still didn’t know the guy’s name, and he didn’t want to. He laid himself on the bed. It was evening, sometime between six and midnight. He still hadn’t eaten.

  Within the darkness, he landed on a moment not long ago, when he was visiting, and Richard had made plans for them to go out to a long, elaborate dinner with a few Epiphany friends. But Martin could see Elizabeth wasn’t up to it, and he told her they didn’t have to do this and he would stay with her. And she shook her head, and her yellowed face showed an appallingly unbearable determination as she said, “Oh, I’m going to go because I want to be with him and he’s going, and I hope it won’t be too long.”