by Jessie Haas
“Well, I can’t stay and play with you guys,” he said. “Got a date with doom!” He pulled the door shut, feeling a little guilty. They weren’t getting much attention at this rate. What had he saved them for, anyway, if he didn’t have time?
From, Johnson. Saved them from.
His timing was good. He got into the locker room at ten to one, the end of lunch period. He felt wide open, as if the wind of his running had swept through his brain and blown everything away. The edges of the lockers looked clean and sharp. He could focus intensely on the terry loops of his towel, the dark patches where water was drying off the cement floor. He avoided looking at the naked and half-dressed jocks around him. The intensity he was feeling could easily be misunderstood. He wouldn’t look a dog in the eye right now, for fear of starting something.
“Hey, Johnson! Goin’ out for ski team?”
Phillip stepped into the bare, echoing shower, turned the water full on, and shouted, “Blah!”
“Really?” said the voice. “That’s great!”
The study hall teacher found the note from the office authorizing Phillip to leave and opened her attendance book. He watched her pencil make a tiny mark in a tiny square. Back of that square was a long line of A’s—A for absent.
“You’ve missed this study hall quite a lot in the past weeks,” she said.
“Yes,” said Phillip.
“Well, you’re marked down. You’d better go, or you’ll be late.”
How long could he keep slipping through the cracks? he wondered, striding down the hall toward the office. Was this the end? He wasn’t afraid. Everyone he met in the hall looked short and wimpy. Even Mr. Peabody, behind his desk, seemed like nothing he couldn’t handle. Mr. Peabody waved him politely toward a chair, and he sat down. He felt as hungry as a wolf.
“Hello, Phil, how are you today?”
The blandness of the question made Phillip want to laugh. He felt like a bottle rocket going off.
“Okay.”
“Good, that’s good.” Mr. Peabody picked up a thin manila folder from his desktop, bounced it lightly on his fingers, put it back down. “Do you like your classes here? Are you finding them any more difficult than at your previous school?”
Phillip shook his head, letting that stand as answer to both questions.
“You’ve, ah, you’ve made friends with Kris.” Mr. Peabody paused for a response but didn’t get one. “She’s an … unusual … girl.”
“Mmm.” Phillip wasn’t forgetting that Kris’s father taught here. Anything he said about her would travel to her father like lightning.
“Well,” said Mr. Peabody, abandoning the attempt to make casual conversation. “I asked to see you because …” He opened the file and paused, apparently seeking words. Phillip straightened slightly in his chair and, as he had hoped, was able to see over the box of tissues and the picture frames on the desk. The sheet of paper Mr. Peabody was looking at had been freshly run off on the school’s tired copier. Phillip could even smell the ink. He couldn’t make out a word of the short handwritten paragraph, but about halfway down he saw the sun sign.
Stunned, he leaned back in his chair and watched Mr. Peabody’s bland face.
“Phillip,” said Mr. Peabody, and paused again with lips closed, weighing and measuring his words before he doled them out. “Phillip, do you know what the leading cause of death is for young men in your age-group?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s … suicide.” He looked at Phillip over the top of his glasses. The expression made him look at once sharp and kindly, like a television doctor. Phillip waited for what would come next, but Mr. Peabody continued to look at him.
“And?” said Phillip finally.
Mr. Peabody let out a long sigh through his nose, as if repressing irritation. He looked down at the paper again.
“Well, I … won’t conceal from you that what you’ve written for this assignment disturbed Mrs. LeFevre quite a bit. Knowing what we do about your situation at home … well, taken by and large, this is a pretty negative statement about life, isn’t it?”
She freaked! Phillip could hardly help smiling. “I don’t know,” he said when it became apparent that Mr. Peabody was waiting for an answer.
Mr. Peabody looked dubious. “Have you ever had suicidal thoughts?” he asked. “Have you ever thought that killing yourself would solve all your problems?”
“Is that a suggestion, sir?”
Mistake, he thought instantly, but he hadn’t been able to help it. He watched Mr. Peabody master his annoyance and go into the kindly, piercing-stare routine again.
Oh, what the hell! “Yes,” he said.
“Well, have you been thinking about it the last few days in particular?”
Phillip decided not to answer. Mr. Peabody flicked the Look at him.
“You realize, Phillip, that death is permanent?”
Suddenly it was getting to him. His joyous, undirected energy turned hot in his throat. I kill greyhounds twice a week, he thought, and my father is hooked to an oxygen tank. What the hell do you think?
“There’s nothing romantic about it,” Mr. Peabody went on. “People your age often romanticize things like death and … so on.” He glanced at the paper fleetingly. “But really it’s messy and ugly and leaves an awful lot of hurt behind—”
“I know all about death,” Phillip said.
“Do you? Well …” Mr. Peabody flipped to the second sheet in the folder, glanced at it briefly. “You know, in your situation it’s no wonder you’re feeling pressures. You could get free counseling after school, to help you deal with all this—”
“I have a job.” Phillip stood up. “Can I go now?”
Mr. Peabody looked at him over the glasses. “I’d rather you stayed a few minutes longer, Phillip.”
Phillip thought a couple of obscenities at the man, shoved his hands in his pockets, and waited.
“What I’d like to say to you, Phillip, is that you’re not alone. Anytime you need to talk you can come in here—interrupt me, if need be, or see Mrs. Gilman or anyone here in the front office. We’d all be happy to listen to you.” He glanced at the short page again. “You know, life is full of good things, Phillip. There’s always good to balance out the bad, if only you wait.”
Phillip squeezed his eyes shut. If he’d had a knife in his pocket, he’d have cut his own throat right here, just for the look on Mr. Peabody’s face. He supposed he’d survive long enough for that satisfaction to register on his darkening brain. Failing that, he waited, managing not to comprehend another word until he heard, “You can go now.”
The bell had not yet rung for the last class. Phillip walked straight out the nearest door.
Today it was Aunt Mil who picked him up.
He’d had no intention of getting a ride. He hardly knew where he was going, he was in such a rage. But within minutes a VW passed him and pulled over to the side of the road, and by the time he reached it she had picked up the mail from the passenger seat and put it in the back.
“Get in! Where are you going?”
“Work.”
She had a tiny stick-on digital clock on the dashboard. He saw her glance toward it and press her lips thin.
Don’t say it! he warned, internally but with considerable violence.
“You must be very early,” she said. “Are you skipping school?”
“Yes,” said Phillip crisply.
She glanced at the clock again. “In that case let’s go get a hamburger. That woman you work for is no fool. You may as well not make extra trouble for yourself.”
Extra trouble? You’re trouble enough for me, lady, he thought, keeping his face toward the window.
She took him to a diner in the mall opposite the clinic and got a booth beside the front window. Phillip looked out at the cars.
She ordered and then sat looking at him, absently navigating the ice cubes in her water glass with one finger. He could hear them clink. At last she said, “You l
ook well, Phillip.”
His head jerked around, despite all efforts at coolness, and he met her eyes.
“I mean it. You look particularly alive. Skipping school agrees with you.”
He wasn’t going to answer that, but she was right.
“Let me set your mind at ease,” she said. “I won’t interfere. I won’t even pick you up again, unless you stick your thumb out.”
He didn’t feel grateful yet, only wary. “Why not?”
Slowly and thoughtfully she dried her finger on her napkin and then started playing with the ice cubes again, never taking her eyes from him.
“Because,” she said at last, “I think you know what you’re doing.”
In spite of himself, Phillip raised his eyebrows. Knew what he was doing?
Aunt Mil responded with a brief, sardonic smile. “What most people forget,” she said, “is that school is supposed to be for learning. I don’t think you’re in a fit state to learn algebra and grammar right now.”
“No, I’ve just been told I’m about to kill myself!” said Phillip. The words came out hotly and of their own accord.
Aunt Mil’s clear, steely eyes studied him. “You surprise me,” she said, sounding completely unsurprisable. “Who told you this?”
“Peabody,” said Phillip. “Guidance.”
“Guidance,” said Aunt Mil. Her mouth curved down in the sour smile he liked. “And what inducement did this—Guidance—offer for staying alive?”
“He said death was permanent,” said Phillip solemnly.
“I should think that was precisely the attraction,” said Aunt Mil. “Well, eat your hamburger. If you’re going to kill yourself, you’ll need to keep up your strength!” Then she looked down and made a rueful face. “It isn’t right of me to laugh. Horrible job, trying to counsel five hundred people you don’t know the first thing about. He was wrong, I take it?”
“Yes,” said Phillip. He was starving, suddenly, and maybe that was why he felt so strange and light-headed. He took a big bite of hamburger—and at that moment, just when he was neutralized and helpless, Aunt Mil asked, “How is your father?”
The mouthful of hamburger seemed impossibly large. Phillip chewed and swallowed at it desperately. Aunt Mil watched him but didn’t apologize. She was not about to let him off the hook.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Like to meet him someday.” She transferred a fraction of attention to her milk shake. “I have a terminal illness, too, you know. It’s called old age.”
“Oh,” was the most Phillip could manage.
“Would he like a visitor sometime?”
“I don’t know,” Phillip had to say again, and he thought of their living room, with its wall-to-wall carpet and stuffy air, the television murmuring, the duck pillows. The idea of Aunt Mil there seemed preposterous and dangerous. But he didn’t know what to say that might discourage her or even if that was right. Maybe his father would like company. He used to be sociable—not a talker, but an enjoyer of other people, a watcher and a smiler.
“Ask him, and let me know,” said Aunt Mil.
Phillip heard it more as a command than a request, and by now he was too confused to know how to respond. He managed a nod, which seemed to satisfy her for the moment.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He went across to the clinic and must have worked competently, because no one complained. Then home, where everything was again the same as every other night. He almost didn’t mind. It was stifling, yet safe, to sit at the table with his mother and tell her that school had been “fine.” Did the school call parents when they thought a student was a suicide risk? Or had it decided his parents were driving him to it, and to tell them might only make things worse? His mother knew nothing. Her eyes strained, as usual, to see the future.
After supper he went into the living room, and seeing his father in the chair, supper cooling beside him, he remembered Aunt Mil’s command. He opened his mouth and found his breath pushing against a block deep in his throat.
Try again. “Dad?” The word felt strange in his mouth. He was embarrassed. When had he last spoken directly to his father?
“Dad?”
“Hmm?” His father almost glanced toward him, but something on the television caught his attention. He looked intently for a moment. Then his hand groped for the remote control. He punched the volume button three times. Suddenly the television was shouting.
“… late victim of the farm crisis. Like almost all his neighbors, John Watson went heavily into debt to buy more land and then to buy the big equipment necessary to farm it. Though he was a good farmer by all accounts, a combination of rising interest rates and falling land value, erratic crop prices, and finally drought brought his farm to bankruptcy. Two days before his farm was to be brought under the hammer, John Watson, forty-two years old, shot himself to death. He leaves a wife and two teenage sons.”
Phillip flinched from the theatrical note in the announcer’s voice. The father of one of his friends had committed suicide. He knew that first there was shock, spreading a chill down your back that no wood stove or heavy coat, or even someone’s arm around you, could warm up. Later it was a story told wide-eyed, in hushed voices: “I heard he …” “Did you know that …” Mostly, it was just reality—immediate, new reality. Much was changed, but there were still the chores, and what you had planned to do yesterday still needed doing. The auction had to go on, even if the man was dead. The wife had to go on, and so did the children, forever bearing this cold, new burden. Life could just get to be too much for someone, but that shouldn’t put the thrill of drama in a TV announcer’s voice.
Suddenly he noticed that his father’s mouth was stretched and his lips pulled in, desperately holding something back. His eyes glittered, and he seemed to be shaking.
His father had cried at the other farmer’s funeral, like this, almost managing to hold it back. Instinctively Phillip looked toward the doorway, but his mother was in the kitchen washing dishes.
“Dad?” He should get up off the couch.
“I was careful,” his father said. The tears spilled over. “I never got in debt. I didn’t get too big. Thought ahead, used my good sense. I still lost the farm.” The tears reached the oxygen tube, checked there, and spread along it. “All those other guys … disinherited their kids. I wasn’t going to—” He coughed, and Phillip’s mother came in.
“Carl, what are you—Carl! What’s the matter?” She rushed to put her arms around him, and Phillip waited numbly for his father’s answer. Nothing came, but the TV went on talking about the farm crisis until his mother pushed the off button.
“Carl, never mind that! It’s over. You have to save your strength now and just think about getting better. Carl—”
Phillip got up, put on his jacket, and went out. He had never dreamed it was the farm his father was thinking of, sitting in that chair from morning till night. It was life he was regretting, youth, health. But of course, it had to be more concrete than that. It must be the farrowing, the squeal of little piglets, the smell of chopped corn. Cutting wood on cold autumn days. Finding new kittens in the barn. It must be the secure past, the work, and the future. And himself. His father must have imagined he knew what his son’s future was, where it was. It wasn’t true. Phillip had known for years that he would never be a hog farmer. But that wasn’t what his father knew.
The night was cold, a mist blurring the air around the streetlights. Phillip looked up and couldn’t see the sky and suddenly was pierced with longing for real dark. The sky above the gray house would be inky black, the texture of velvet. The light wind that here swirled the orange-tinted mist there would clack the bare branches and rustle the leaves. Cold and alone, he would sit on the doorstep and let his thoughts go by.
Impossible. Soon, in the warm living room, his mother would have smothered his father’s grief and would look around for Phillip. Soon after that he must reappear.
His restless legs had taken him toward t
he playground. Now he heard small noises, and then, under the streetlights, he saw Kris.
Her back was to him, and she was throwing a ball, far out into the dim place between streetlights. As the ball flew, so did a shadow beneath it: Diana, leaving Kris’s side with a wild scratch of claws in the hard dirt. A bounce, a scrabble, and then she reappeared, racing straight to Kris. She swaggered and teased for a moment. Then Kris got the ball in one hand and Diana’s collar in the other and released both winging into the shadow again.
On her way back with the ball, Diana sensed Phillip. She stopped, staring straight at him with one front paw raised. Kris stepped to her side and also stared, and with her mistress’s hand on her neck, Diana was encouraged to a muffled whoof, lips puffing out around the ball in her teeth.
Phillip stepped forward, and Kris visibly relaxed. “Phillip.”
“Hi.” He took a breath to say something flippant. But his heart was black and heavy in his chest, and suddenly he couldn’t speak. He put his hand on Diana’s head. After a moment she nudged his hip, offering the slimy tennis ball. Mechanically Phillip took it. Kris watched him soberly.
“Let’s go sit on the swings,” she said at last.
It was years since Phillip had sat on a swing. They were closer to the ground than he remembered. Gently he pushed himself off, in a small arc. Kris established an opposite and exactly symmetrical arc, so that they crossed just in the middle. Diana lay on the ground next to her green ball, chin on paws, and watched disapprovingly.
“When I was really little,” Kris said, after a while, “my father used to bring me here and push me. It seemed huge.”
“You’ve lived here all your life?”
She snorted, Aunt Mil-like. “Doesn’t seem old enough for a person’s whole life, does it?”
“No.”
“I remember when my hand wouldn’t go all the way around the chains.” Suddenly she kicked dirt, hard, and shot way back, out of sync. Her voice rose. “I remember when Victor Nugent went all the way around the top bar. They had to come with a ladder to unwrap the chains.”
“He didn’t fall?”
