In the Middle of All This

by Fred G. Leebron

  “There’s a mother’s right to know,” his mother was saying. “And then the kids grow up. And who knows what the right is anymore.” She sighed. “You’ll find out.”

  “If I’m lucky,” he managed to say.

  “Don’t be so morbid.”

  They sat there quietly, and finally he turned her wrist to look at her watch.

  “You in a hurry?”

  “I promised I’d be back for dinner,” was all he said.

  “Are you all right?” she said as she stroked the back fringe of what was left of his hair.

  “No,” he said. “No, I’m not.”

  “So what do you want?” Sarah eyed him warily as they sat on the bed in her room, the door shut. He’d awkwardly come in and held a finger to his lips as he closed the room off from Max.

  “Aunt Elizabeth.” He swallowed any emotion. “Aunt Elizabeth sent you something.” From his pocket he pulled out the velour pouch and placed it in front of her.

  “What is it?” Sarah said.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t open it.”

  “You didn’t?” She looked at him with disbelief.

  “Nope.”

  “So you want me to open it and then call her, right?”

  “You can’t call her,” he said. “You know I don’t know where she is.”

  “So I’ll write her a letter or something?”

  “Something,” he said.

  She looked closely at the velour pouch and then looked back at the book she’d been reading. “Maybe I should wait until my birthday,” she said.

  “You can open it now,” he said.

  She tugged on the satin string and then grabbed hold of the bottom of the sack and overturned it. A pearl necklace and two gold earrings each with a dangling diamond dropped onto the bed.

  “Wow!” she said.

  “That’s Aunt Elizabeth’s pearl necklace,” he heard himself say quite distantly. “And those earrings are what we all gave her when she turned forty.”

  “She’s giving them back?” Sarah said. “I thought she liked them. And didn’t Uncle Richard give her that necklace? What is she—dead?” She started to cry.

  “Oh, honey.” He reached for her and held her. “I can’t say. I guess I think she is …” He shut his eyes and tried to see. “I guess I think she could be gone. Or maybe she’s just sick of all this stuff. Or maybe she’s … getting ready to go.”

  “Getting ready to die? People don’t get ready to die.” Sarah sniffled and wriggled from his grip. “We were supposed to go see her this summer. She wanted us to. I didn’t want to. Won’t I ever see her again?” She was weeping now. She picked up the necklace and ground it back into his hand. “I don’t want this,” she said. “Get out of my room. Get out now.” She pushed the earrings and the sack from her bed. He again reached for her but she shied away.

  “Sarah—”

  “You knew what was in there,” she cried.

  “I didn’t,” he said, stopping to pick up everything from the floor. But of course he had guessed.

  In the hall Lauren stood holding Max.

  “I’m such an idiot,” Martin said.

  “I don’t know.” She joggled Max, who cooed and clung to her as if he were a baby again. “The whole thing is so impossible.” She sighed and glanced at Max and looked back at him, her eyes still rimmed red. “I mean, whatever she’s done is incredibly selfish,” she said. “But it’s also … it’s also admirable somehow.”

  “I know,” he said.

  Then there was a knock from behind Sarah’s door.

  “It’s your door,” he said through it. “You can open it.”

  She poked her head out. Her eyes were watery, but her face was nearly composed. She held out her hand. “I changed my mind,” she said. “I want everything. I want all of it, please.”

  He put his closed hand in her open one and opened it.

  “What is it?” Max demanded.

  “Girl stuff,” Martin said.

  Sarah quickly closed the door shut.

  “What do I get?” Max said, tugging at Lauren’s shirt.

  Martin still had the deflated velour pouch and he held it up. “This?” he said.

  “Oh.” Max snatched it and wriggled his tiny hand inside. He pulled out something. “I found it,” he said.

  “I thought it was empty,” Martin said to Lauren.

  Max held out his hand.

  “Oh shit,” Martin said.

  It was her wedding ring.

  That night the college was spending fifty thousand dollars for a fireworks display for returning alumni. The students were long gone, and the fields were filled with people in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, who for one reason or another felt proud enough of their association with the place to shell out $250 each for the privilege of attending the weekend. The air was barely cool, it was early June, and Martin and Lauren sat holding hands on a spread underneath the darkening sky while the kids raced around intersecting with other hopped-up kids, shrieking and tickling while they waited.

  “When’s it going to start! When’s it going to start!” Max demanded.

  “Soon,” Lauren promised. “Soon.”

  The twenty-fifth reunion class had a keg in a roped-off area, enveloped by thickening guys in bermuda shorts and button-down shirts and penny loafers, women with frosted hair and pastel blouses and plaid skirts. Martin used to think that the people who returned for such reunions were either preening their nouveau riche selves or—even worse—exhibiting the pathetic fact that college was the high point of their lives, but now he could see the comfort of it. A tourist train coming into the fake train station tooted its horn. There was a high whistle, and then the sky filled with bright pink streaks followed by a tremendous boom.

  “Ow!” Max screamed. “Mommy! Mommy!” He ran to them and fell between their laps covering his ears.

  He’d been waiting all day for this, and it only frightened him. On the lawn Sarah jumped up and down.

  “Come on,” she shouted at the sky. “Come on! More!”

  Max kicked against the ground. “I want to go home,” he moaned. “I want to go home.”

  Martin got up. “I’ll take him.”

  “Let me,” Lauren said. “You must be exhausted.”

  “What do I care about fireworks?” he said.

  He picked up the whimpering boy and rested him against his shoulder. The sky boomed, and the boy curled tightly against him.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. We’re going home.”

  He carried him out through all the families staring up at the sky, with one hand pressed to the boy’s ear to muffle the next explosion. They passed close to the keg, and he felt how dry his mouth was in the slow onset of summer. They reached the street, and his sandals slapped against the empty sidewalk as explosion after explosion sounded behind him and the boy whimpered and sobbed.

  “Almost there,” Martin lied.

  “I want to go home,” Max sobbed. “Please, Daddy.”

  “We’re going. We’re going.”

  At the stoplight, more than halfway there, he turned for just a peek. Yellow fissures sliced the sky, shot through with bursts of blue and orange, and when the color dissolved as it fell he could hear the popping and whistling of more light to come. It was all artifice, he knew. He wanted to feel nothing.

  Or he didn’t know what he wanted to feel. When Lauren had come home that time from the office, and he’d managed to tell her what Elizabeth had told him, and they’d looked at each other and felt their life ripping away and changing at the same time, they stood in the front hall, the children retreated to the living room, and they held on to each other, while he buried his face in her shoulder and she soothed him, while she let him cry himself out. He cried, he felt, from the base of his skull, from his chest, from his lower back, from wherever the depths of where he could reach inside himself were, from wherever the grief was exploding inside him. When he was able to look again, the children came out caut
iously to ask what was wrong with Daddy, and Lauren had to wipe her eyes for the moment and say, Nothing. He’d thought that was an end, the way he’d been able to let the grief tear into him. Maybe what he wanted was all that emotion to come back to him, so he could have it again and let it go. He knew he dreaded it, and he knew it might not be there, even if he sought it. Had he been going after it all this time, or had he been just avoiding it? Was it her intention to relieve him or deny him of emotion? Maybe he just wanted to feel it the way she intended it.

  Now he saw their escape as some extreme extension of the simple fact that she had always refused to return, to come back to them. What a dreadful and complicated and bold thing she’d done, how, by depriving him and them of being with her, she had somehow probably saved something of herself. And it wasn’t only that they could have been perceived as dogs on some shore waiting to devour her as soon as she drifted in on the raft of her illness—although certainly that was part of it. It seemed to him that in choosing to be among strangers and only with Richard, she had probably relieved herself of some of the essential humiliation that seemed to await them all on this passage, among the culture of the living. And, in some truer sense, she had never given in to her illness. And he could turn it around and around and see the two of them again—in the back of the white Cadillac he himself had driven, in the picture at his wedding to Lauren—and see how encased they had at some time been, encapsulated in their couple-ness. And that certainly was an answer. He could look at his children and know it to be true. He wanted to live. He could look at Lauren and know that there was so much more between them, unexplored, unknown, that he needed to reach, that he wanted to reach. He wanted her. He wanted the children.

  “What is it, Daddy?” Max asked, his face tight against Martin’s shoulder.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Is it beautiful?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, as they began to cross the street. But he kept glancing back at the sky. “Maybe you should look and see?”

  She was gone, oh god she was gone. These had been years that death was everywhere, that he woke every morning and could not escape it, that he kept feeling he was missing everybody, that he had to keep living, that death descended, that it hadn’t yet arrived. These were years that death was everywhere. He had never wanted them to end.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many, many thanks to Amanda Urban and Jen Charat for their wonderful guidance and complete support and encouragement. I’m also grateful to Steve Rinehart, J. D. Dolan, Peter Ho Davies, Andrew Levy, André Bernard, and the incomparable Don Lee for their diligence, wisdom, and generosity. Thanks as well to Lynne Raughley, Barry Wolfman, Janet Rollings, Elizabeth Lambert, Christopher Fee, and Ian Clarke for their help and to lerance.

  For support during the writing of this book, thanks to the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and Gettysburg College.

  I am most grateful to Kathryn Rhett, for her editorial expertise, patience, and kindness.

  The Dzanc Books rEprint Series

  The Dzanc Books rEprint Series is dedicated to publishing great works of contemporary literature that are deserving and clearly will benefit from having their work appear in electronic form. Our efforts include works that have recently gone out of print, books in print that have yet to be converted to e-form, as well as titles where the author holds the eBook rights and is looking for a publishing partner for the electronic version of their book.

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  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2002 Fred G. Leebron

  Cover design by Awarding Book Covers

  978-1-4804-8332-3

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