by Kim Powers
“Why’d you think I married you? You gotta let me be the best at something.”
Her mother brushed the keys off on her nylon jacket—a squishy, scratchy sound—and opened the door to her father’s SUV.
“We’re gonna make s’mores tonight in the fireplace, so it better be lit when I get back.”
Her mother moved the driver’s seat up a little and put the keys in the ignition. Metal sounds. Levers. The seat stopping when it got to the right place and locked in. The door was still open, so Skip heard a burst of music from the radio: classic rock that her father had left it on. Her mother switched it to NPR. Voices, not music. She closed the door—a creaking sound, like it needed oil—and waved to her family.
That was the last look at her mother that Skip ever had: the last look memory.
Actually, there was another one: one Skip didn’t really see, but kept imagining. A scene that had all the senses in it. She dreamed about it all the time, and she knew it made her cry in her sleep because she’d wake up with her eyelashes glued together. Her father would have to get a warm washcloth to unstick them.
Her mother drove down the road, the SUV settling into grooves in the snow that other cars had made during the day. She veered a bit, but righted herself. She was still fiddling with the radio as she approached a stop sign. She knew to tap the brakes lightly in the snow, but the road was already icing over. She tapped on the brakes a little harder—she still had time, a few dozen yards—but the SUV wouldn’t stop.
It was like driving on glass, on her glass mirrors, Skip thought.
Now, there was just her mother, and the ice.
Black ice. That’s what the police called it; ice under the snow that you can’t see.
Fire and Ice—that’s what Skip called it when she got to the part where her mother crashed into the concrete overpass and the car caught on fire. It was from a poem they had to learn at school, by Robert Frost. It was about the world ending. Sometimes Skip thought that was the day it did, even though she and her dad were still living in it.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Just say it. You didn’t like it.” Skip turned around, running backward in the early morning air so she could face me. And berate me.
“I loved it. I told you that. I loved it and I love you. You’re my best girl. Ever. I loved the party and the cake and everything . . . I just . . . that fight on the DVD . . . I just needed some advance warning. I felt like I was being ambushed.”
“It happened. It’s not like you’ve forgotten it. And I felt like I was being ambushed by Dr. Doolittle. So there. We’re even.”
“Not quite. ‘I wish it was you that was dead instead of Mom’?” I asked it like a question; she didn’t have an answer to that one. At least she knew how much she had hurt me. “Sweetie, ya’ gotta give me a break. I’m just making this up as I go along. I’m doing the best I can.”
We were a mile into our run, an easy ten-minute-mile pace through the woodsy, secluded part of town we lived in. We could see cows down in the meadows below us, appearing and then disappearing into the cloud of fog that still hung low to the ground at 7:30 A.M. Up where we were in the Berkshires, on the road that went past Victorian gingerbreads into town, the November air was crisp; we were in that last gasp of razor-sharp clarity before the gray winter pall settled in and didn’t lift for three months. Right now, we could see our breath; big puffs from me, little wisps from Skip. You’d think, after a lifetime of running, I’d still be good at it. But no, now it hurt. Because of that lifetime of doing it. My bones and muscles were worn out. Tendons stretched and frayed. Six feet tall, but not as broad as I used to be. The floaters in my eyes took longer to get rid of in the morning. And when they did disappear, it was all too easy to see the salt that was beginning to mix in with the pepper of my dark hair. When I shaved the stubble on my chin away—the jawline that got me a “hawt” rating on RateYourProfessor.com—I saw the beginning of a double chin.
Still, I endured the run, because I liked the time it gave us together. Skip would tell me about her dreams from the night before or ask for an increase in her allowance for more art supplies or go on about the boy in drama club she has a crush on, then say, “But he’s probably gay.”
We had some of our best conversations when we ran.
We were best friends when we ran.
Not this morning.
We were still talking, only none of it was good, as Skip picked up mid-stream from some conversation only she was privy to. “ . . . and it’s not fair to Mom. We were a family. And now she’s there. Next thing you know, she’ll be staying over and making breakfast.”
“Skippy, listen, we’ve talked about this. I treat you like a grownup; you treat me like one. That’s the deal. Your mom’s been gone five years, and I miss her like anything, but it’s not fair to me that . . . ”
“You want fair? Then I’ll bring my boyfriend over tonight . . . ”
“ . . . you don’t have a boyfriend and you’re not going to have a boyfriend until . . . ”
“ . . . then I’ll get one so you can hear us fucking . . . ”
“You’re just making stuff up now. Enough.”
“Hey, any of you wanna be my boyfriend?” Skip yelled out to the track team that Sig was putting through its paces as we rounded the curve of the college track and came onto the outlying reaches of the campus. “I need one so I can show my dad . . . ”
“Skip, I mean it . . . ”
“ . . . what it’s like to hear old people FUCKING at the top of their lungs . . . ”
“Stop it. Now. Nobody was fucking, as you so politely put it.” I came to a stop and bent over to stretch my thighs. Skip ran in place, nothing winding her. She was just getting started, in more ways than one.
“Well, you probably wanted to. Last night was supposed to be fun, and you ruined it. I spent all that time on the DVD . . . ”
“ . . . which I loved until you smashed it, thank you very much . . . ”
“ . . . getting all those tapes loaded, getting all that old stuff from Sig at the field house and from up in the attic, but you didn’t watch it because you’re too busy getting mad about some stupid fight that’s ancient history and making kissy faces with Dr. Doolittle and . . . ”
“Don’t you need to take a breath about now?” I said.
But at least it stopped her. For a second. Just to get enough air for round three. “Do you even get what it’s like to be a teenager and have all this crap happen to your body and you don’t know what it is or if it’s good or bad or even if you’re dying because there’s this blood coming out but there’s no adult around to ask about it? And then, just when you think you can, there’s somebody else taking up all of your dad’s time?” That look—just on the verge of tears, but she wouldn’t go there. She wouldn’t let me see. “Oh. I forgot. My show-and-tell project for today. Finger painting.”
She flashed her fingernails at me: “I HATE WENDY” was spelled out on them, one letter per fingernail.
“Jesus Christ, Skip. If you don’t wash that crap off your hands right now . . . ”
She didn’t hear the rest—I didn’t get a chance to finish, even though I don’t know what my “or else” would have been—because she raced off, leaving me in the dust with another finger pointed in my direction. Her middle one.
“Can anyone translate ‘shit’s creek’ into Latin? I just realized it this morning. ‘Shit’s creek.’ It could be another name for the Ninth Circle of Hell, where my day started.”
I was in my old classroom in Lanham Hall, a creepy old auditorium that looked more like the theater where Lincoln had met his maker than a classroom. There actually was a stage there, with a circular staircase leading up to the catwalk. Maroon velour curtains you could hide behind and long stained-glass windows. Houdini had once performed there, and his wasn’t the only ghost you could still feel in the room. It seemed like the right kind of place to learn about the past.
“‘Shit’s creek.’ I’m sure that’
s what Dante really had in mind. He was kind enough to give us the Italian. Now can any of you give us the Latin?”
“In flumine stercoris?” my best student and teaching assistant TJ Markson said, without missing a beat. He was right, he knew he was right, he was always right, but he asked it like a question anyway. If only he knew how good he was, how smart; he was going to have to find out the hard way it took some bravado to go with the brains, to get a teaching job, which is what he was destined for. “It’s not really idiomatic, but it’s the closest . . . ”
“And we have a winner!” I said, cutting him off. “But maybe my TA will let one of the students answer next time.”
“Then you’d be waiting a long time.” That was rare, a sarcastic quip back from TJ. Normally, he’d look back down into his books the minute he said anything, pushing his hair out of his eyes, leaving a greasy streak across his glasses in the process. It was unusual you could even see his eyes, between the flyaway hair and the always looking down, too shy to look up. He wouldn’t look half bad if he just washed his hair and got some sleep. And the coffee. Always guzzling from the paper cup of coffee from Wawa’s. But now, he was looking right at me, to see if I smiled at his joke.
He reminded me of me, in some weird way. Deep down, the kid I used to be in high school, that I hid by pumping up my body and clamming up about what went on at home: my father always berating me, pushing me, my mother suffering in silence and visiting her orphans for charity. Maybe that’s why I’d taken TJ out to Shiner’s Pizza at the end of last year, to ask if he wanted to be my TA for this year. The crown of his head bobbed up and down—at least that’s all I could see, wolfing down his tuna grinder like it was the first meal he’d had in weeks—because he kept looking down at the laminated placemat that had a map of Italy on it. When we left, he awkwardly hugged me and left a greasy handprint from the garlic knots on the shoulder of my jacket. I took that for his “yes.”
On the chalkboard now, I drew a quick visual to go with his “in flumine stercoris”: a rowboat thrashing in a sea of shit, indicated by rows and rows of things that could be splashing waves, or sea gulls, or floating shit, or sea gulls pecking at waves of floating shit. And I gave Phlegyas, the old ferryman who paddled Dante and Virgil across the River Styx, a thought bubble that read, “I’ve had enough of this shit.”
A thought bubble, stolen from Skip’s DVD of the night before.
I began writing a passage from Dante on the portable blackboard, something I’d written hundreds of times before.
And I, who stood intent upon beholding,
saw people mudbesprent in that lagoon,
all of them naked and with angry look.
They smote each other not alone with hands,
But . . .
But what? Squeezing the nub of chalk between my right thumb and forefinger, I stopped. I couldn’t remember the rest. I looked at that word “mudbesprent” and all I could think was how strange and wonderful it was, as if I were seeing it for the very first time. I tried to focus, looking at my hand poised to continue, midair, but I couldn’t see the next words in my head, just my two fingers holding that piece of chalk.
And then my fingers became Skip’s fingers, with “I HATE WENDY” etched in fingernail polish on them.
I knew Dante hadn’t written “I HATE WENDY,” but I couldn’t remember what he did write. It was like I had felt last night, a déjà vu of a déjà vu, watching those old training and Olympic tapes, and disappearing into them.
“Professor Holt?” TJ was the first one to speak. “Uh, the Fifth Circle . . . the Wrathful, the Sullen? Canto Seven?”
Mark Casey and gravel in my face and the broken DVD and Skip telling me I had ruined everything and blood was coming out of her body and she didn’t know if she was dying because she didn’t have a mother anymore but I had a girlfriend and . . .
“TJ, can you take over for a while? I need to get some water. I’m feeling a little Ninth Circle right now . . . ”
At least I remembered that much. The Ninth Circle.
Maybe it was just the vodka tonics from the night before.
“The Ninth Circle . . . for traitors. That’s the lowest level of them all,” TJ explained to the class, always prepared for an Oprah-esque teachable moment. “Those who have betrayed a special relationship in committing their crimes. Judas, Brutus, and the like . . . ”
When TJ looked back from the class to me—eager eyes through thick glasses—he gave me the strangest smile. At least I thought it was a smile. His incisors were prominent, and for just a split second, he looked like a wolf. Snarling.
I went up to my office on the third floor of Lanham to change back into my running clothes and track shoes. I needed to sweat. I needed to apologize to Skip. I’d do something special for her tonight; just us, Chinese takeout, no Wendy. I hit the speed dial for the landline in our house; I wasn’t sure she’d pick up if she saw “DAD” come up on her cell phone.
One ring, then two, as I looked out my leaded window to three stories below, onto the central quad of the campus. Orange leaves, blue sky, copper bell tower of the campus chapel. A bench made of fieldstone, ringing around the bottom of an ancient silver birch. That’s where Titania and Oberon played out one of their squabbles in the school’s outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, twinkle lights and all. Skip had been a fairy in it, on loan to the drama department whenever they needed a kid for a play.
“Peaseblossom? Mustardseed? Cobweb? Which one are you again?”
“Dad, I’ve told you a million times . . . ”
“Hair dryer? Saxophone player? Rice-A-Roni?”
“Daa-aaad.”
Then a tickle attack.
At our house, a third ring, a fourth, then our outgoing message from Skip clicked on, one made in happier times, before fingernails got painted black and white with initials.
“You’ve reached the Holts. That’s ‘Hercules’ . . . ”
I remembered swatting her then, and her having to turn away from the phone she was laughing so hard, putting her hand over her mouth to keep the microphone from picking up her giggles. My voice took over on the outgoing message, even though I was laughing as much as she was.
“That’s Ethan, Ethan Holt . . . ”
Skip came back up for air. “ . . . and his lovely daughter Skip. Leave a message.”
“Now we’ll have to re-do . . . ” I began, still laughing, but the beep came on, cutting me off.
I started leaving my message. “Hi, honey. I wanted you to hear my voice, first thing when you got home from school. I’m sorry about this morning . . . and last night.”
She should’ve been home now, but she wasn’t picking up. She was going to make me work for this. “You’re right. I am acting like a horny teenager all over again. Truce?”
How many dads said “horny teenager” to their kids? That would make her forgive me, wouldn’t it? Make her laugh at how goofy and square—and good?—her old man was?
“Say I bring home Chinese . . . scallion pancakes, spare ribs . . . just us, no Wendy. How’s that? Forgive me? Love you, peapod. Love you more.”
It’s what I always said to her, after she said “I love you” first to me.
I love you more.
It was an eerie thing for a small college to have, its own cemetery. But it did, and it was one of my favorite places to run, ever since I had been a student here. I loved the old words and carvings on the tombstones; I loved how people were remembered there, and even then—at twenty-one and twenty-two—I knew I wanted to be remembered too. If I won at the Olympics, as my father had always pushed me to do, an only child who had to make his dreams come true, I would be.
Inside, rows of lichen-covered tombstones tilted in every direction, inscribed with the names of the original movers and shakers. On nice days, when the students’ minds were a million miles away and I couldn’t get them to focus on anything, I took them out here, to do our version of brass rubbings of the tombstones, using ordinar
y paper instead of brass. I could pretend I was teaching what those dead people had left behind for us.
Mortui vivis docent. The dead teach the living.
As I ran through now, a dig was going on inside the cemetery walls. Not for a burial; except for one Iran War vet who’d been an alumnus, and left a quirky will and lots of money, no new bodies had been laid to rest here since Vietnam. No, this was an old settler’s cottage that had recently been detected. It had belonged to Ephraim Gresh, after whom the town had been named. A square of land had already been excavated about eight feet across, down six or so feet, to reveal the bare bones of his cottage basement. In a month or two, when the winter snows came, the pit would be covered over by a tarp, but for now, it was empty, with the outlines of what had once been separate rooms.
Open. Tempting.
Huhn. Could I do it?
Forget it.
At Sydney, I’d done 29 feet, 1 inch in the long jump; not the world record by three inches, but still . . .
I was loose, warmed up, my legs pliable and urging.
C’mon. Old times’ sake. If you make it across, everything will be fine with Skip when you get home.
I always made silly bargains like that—with myself, with God, I guess.
If this happens, then that will, too.
I jumped, to prove I still had it.
I didn’t.
I landed hard, down on the bottom, and felt as old as Ephraim Gresh.
“Hey, Skippy, get your butt down here.” Sweating from my run, and my tumble in the dig, T-shirt sticky and glued to my chest, I called upstairs to her and dropped the bags of Chinese takeout on the kitchen counter. There was already another grocery bag there, full of the ingredients for a meatloaf. It was Skip’s “I’m sorry” meal, one of her mother’s default recipes. Skip must have gotten the stuff before I left my message. Nice to know we were both on the same wavelength, both of us willing to say I’m sorry.
I yelled upstairs. “Getting the ingredients is half the battle, sweetheart, but I’m hungry. Now. You know how gummy those scallion pancakes get if they’re cold. Let’s eat.”
