“I thought you hated it there,” I said (coughing? falling out of my chair? bursting with panic-stricken flatulence?), again raising my voice.
“I didn’t hate it. I thought I had to come home is all. I’ve been home, so now I can go back.”
“In the middle of the semester?”
“Oh come on, George. What are we gonna do, spend our whole lives hiding?”
“We can do whatever we want,” I said, almost believing it. “We just have to want it and then do something about it.”
“Did we want everything that happened to us at Saylorville? Can we really do something about all that?”
“How about a martini?” I said.
“What are you talking about? You really think these cocktails are free, don’t you? We’re not even supposed to be drinking in this place.”
“Let’s have martinis,” I said, knowing how ridiculous I sounded but unable to stop myself. “I’ve never had a martini. We’ll be like old actors from the fifties getting drunk in a hotel. We’ll drink the place dry and then get a room upstairs.”
Emily set her glass down, letting it slip at the last second so that it dropped and rattled and spilled. The green carpet soaked her drink in seconds, leaving only the ice cubes like emerald lozenges. “Wake up, George. Don’t you ever consider that we should’ve just stayed friends? Maybe none of this would’ve ever happened if we’d just stayed friends.”
“I’m not asking you to get married,” I said, contradicting my intention to let her know I was prepared to stick it out to the end, to weather the storm however long it took to build ourselves back up to the sturdy young people we once were. “Let’s get a room upstairs. A suite. I just got paid.”
“This isn’t my kind of place.”
“All right. Forget it. But how can you go back to Chicago in the middle of the semester?”
“I don’t know,” she said, setting her empty glass back on the table. I grabbed both glasses and pushed my chair back like I was going for refills. Emily held her hand out, stopping me and reaching for her roses. “I’m sorry, George.”
“Just a few more minutes. You didn’t tell me what happened with Nicholas Parsons? At least you could stay that long.” Emily set the roses across the table. She closed her eyes for a minute, trying to calm herself enough to remember where she’d left off. “Nicky was in the garage. He was on the ground, putting new pedals on Missy’s bike.”
“Mr. Patterson was shocked,” she said, more or less pulling herself together. “Especially when he saw the blood on Nicky’s hands. He screamed or something. Obviously I don’t know the details, but I guess he screamed, and then shut the door and locked it and called the cops. They showed up a few minutes later, but all they found was an empty garage with a bunch of bloody fingerprints. The report said that Nicholas had just come from the Drake Diner where he’d shot up the place.” Her voice cracked and she started to cry, though she didn’t stop or even slow down. “He killed a waitress who sort of looked like Missy. He shot her six or seven times.”
By now the cast were all staring at us, whispering about her fallen drink, my fancy clothes, our past, etc. I wanted to pull the velvet curtains around us. I wanted to hug Emily, even knowing she didn’t want to be hugged.
“You shouldn’t have performed tonight. Tony should’ve postponed the premiere.”
“He should’ve replaced me a long time ago,” she said, wiping her face on her sleeve and standing up.
“You look dizzy,” I said.
“I feel dizzy.”
“Let me take you somewhere. Let me take you home.”
“No thank you,” she answered, politely, without another thought, and started across the room. I shot to my feet, but didn’t move beyond that. Under the paralyzing glare of the entire cast panning back and forth between us I didn’t say a word or move an inch as Emily inspected bar stools draped with coats, attempting ease and balance but causing half a dozen coats to slide to the floor amid the search for her own. She wrested her hands into her leather gloves and threw her woolen scarf around her neck so that it swung low on one side and barely clung to her neck on the other. I sat down again, picking up one of the long-stemmed roses and twirling it. I stared hypnotic into the bloom as my stomach filled with heat, roiling with the thought of never again knowing Emily’s fierce loving gaze, the sharp rupture of her blushing orgasm. When I looked up she was already gone. A bulb of blood appeared on the tip of my thumb and broke. I pulled the curtains back just in time to catch her cross the street and turn the corner, which is when I understood there was no sight more beautiful or crushing than Emily Schell walking away.
Forty-nine
If you want to know the entire truth of the evening, several hours later I found myself soaking in a steaming bath with the lights off and shower curtain pulled, designing various suicide plans that would fool family, friends, and enemies into believing that I’d parted this world in a selfless act of gut-wrenching heroism. I came up with a number of plausible death scenarios as the bath cooled, during which time my weak stomach for damning and culturally uncouth endeav ors was steadied by the hurtful understanding that at that particular moment (and numerous other moments I intentionally neglected to mention) I viewed Katie’s death and her parents’ grief as nothing more than insults toward my happy future with Emily. My amoral resolve waned within the hour when my testicles sank lower than perhaps they ever had, lending the impression of their shame and hinting at an exploratory underwater search for a more courageous host. With chattering teeth I dripped my way down the hallway to my bedroom above the garage, soon weeping wet-headed under the covers, incubating myself in sheets and blankets in a way that triggered memories of all those early-morning swimming lessons with the Guppy Group at the YMCA back in Davenport. One memory led to the other and soon I was reliving several boyhood episodes that made me crack up under the covers and feel I had not entirely lost myself, that deep down I was still the same kid who’d made his mother laugh like a fool on mundane trips to the grocery store and dry cleaners, who’d put his life on the line defending the weaklings from Dan Burns, the school bus sadist, who’d even been bucked from a lunatic horse at wilderness camp and landed flat on his feet, arms in the air like an Olympic champ. I remembered all those first dives into the freezing-cold pool at the Davenport YMCA, when I spent every water-treading minute waiting for the moment when our instructor would blow the whistle and I’d scurry up the ladder, tear across the slick deck despite the signs and shouts to where my mom was waiting with her turquoise half-hoop earrings and gigantic diamond-patterned purse that always slipped off her shoulder and down her arm as she kneeled to wrap me up in a big towel hug and take me home. Later that night I sat by the window for a while and prayed, then removed the batteries from my two-way radio and tried to go to sleep.
Fifty
When I set out on the final night of the Tinker run at the Garage Theater, I had a good idea where I’d end up, though I didn’t exactly plan it. I started off driving west on Hickman, eventually cruising past the water tower in Clive and crossing into Jordan, flipping through radio stations while rehearsing arguments from both sides, trying to decide where exactly the story started and ended, all the while unconsciously making turns in one direction or another as I curved my way around the semirural outskirts of the city. I had no idea what route I’d taken when I pulled into the Schells’ neighborhood, despite my strange suspicion that it had been tracked by radar monitor in their kitchen. The house was dark but for the candelabra fixture over the bare dining room table in the front window.
Soon after ringing the doorbell, I heard the approaching thumps of bare heels on hardwood floor. Mr. Schell opened the door in suit pants and gold-toed business socks. His face was slightly darkened by a five o’clock shadow and there were yellow pit stains in his undershirt. Appearing more worn out than surprised, he cranked his shoulders back and widened his stance, offering nothing more than a lame gaze that related a feeling that I’d been bug
ging him all week and had better have a damn good reason this time. He wiped his face, waiting for me to say something. I had no energy for being brave.
“Can I come inside?” I asked, my graveled vocals doing the work of acknowledging my audacity.
“Emily’s not home,” he said, staring me down and wiping his face some more. It was obvious that our Days Inn rendezvous since Christmas weren’t much of a secret.
“I was hoping to talk to you for a minute. You and Mrs. Schell.”
Mr. Schell leaned to one side, eyeballing my truck parked at the curb. (Something about Mr. Schell’s small sparkling eyes made me feel I wasn’t talking to the real Mr. Schell, but his doppelgänger stand-in. This intuition forced me to consider that I wasn’t myself, either, which added up to a set of circumstances that might have proved beneficial to the negotiations that lay ahead.) He took a long time answering. “Does Emily know you’re here?”
I shook my head.
“Do you mind speaking up when I’m talking to you?”
“She would have no way of knowing,” I said.
Mr. Schell nodded, seeming to understand the full implication of the remark. To his credit, he didn’t wallow in the satisfaction that Emily and I were no longer on speaking terms. “Your nose is crooked,” he said.
“It’s broken.”
“Somebody clocked you?”
“That’s right. On New Year’s Eve. He got arrested.”
“Did you fight back?”
I shook my head, remembering a second too late Mr. Schell’s warning against nonverbal responses. He noticed my slipup, but didn’t call me on it. I had a feeling this was the only freebie I would receive, and that he’d only given it to me because we were still warming up.
“Turned the other cheek, huh?”
“Security broke it up,” I said.
Mr. Schell nodded, acting like he preferred whatever version he’d come up with for the story. “Can I come in?” I asked.
“Suppose I say yes and then my wife says no?”
“Then I’ll go,” I said, matching my irritated expression to his, trying to apologize for showing up without throwing myself off the porch at the same time. After a while he turned sideways and flung his arm in a sweeping motion, ushering me inside. I stepped into the front hallway and bent down to take my shoes off.
“I don’t think I’d bother,” he said, upsetting whatever expectations I had for a thorough tête-à-tête. He led me through the living room to the kitchen, flipping the lights on and turning around to check the floor for tracks. After pointing to the nearest chair, he disappeared upstairs. I sat down, noticing the countertop littered with plates and glasses, an empty calzone box and a plastic container with soggy leftover salad. There were only three chairs at the table now, the fourth chair piled high with newspapers, moved to the corner next to a tower of Schell’s Shirtworks boxes. Out the back window a pair of crows roosted on opposite fence posts. Faint whispers like scampering cats seeped down from the upstairs balcony. When the Schells finally made their entrance, Mrs. Schell started off by lowering the drapes above the sink, then loading the dishwasher. Mr. Schell sat down across from me, following his wife’s movements over my right shoulder. His chin was jutting out now and his head seemed a thousand-pound weight on his neck and shoulders. I imagined he’d been on the road all week, and just pulled into the garage a few minutes before I showed up.
When Mrs. Schell finally sat down, she folded her hands on the table and glanced up at me with the physical disposition of a public lawyer forced to defend some sicko she knew was guilty as sin. She’d clearly just gathered her hair in a bun; it was tightly combed and pressed to her scalp, not a strand out of place. But she was also wearing an old Lake Okoboji T-shirt and short bedtime shorts, showing off more of her humble unmade self than ever.
“I saw you at Emily’s performance, sitting by yourself,” she said, turning to Mr. Schell and raising an eyebrow, like I’d been up to something funny in my private seat all alone. She probably thought my visit was no more than a cheap trick to win Emily back.
“I saw you, too,” I said, wanting to add that she, too, was alone, but deciding instead to act like I’d said it. Mrs. Schell smirked and scratched her nose, like that’s all I represented to her, a little nose itch easy enough to scratch away. Mr. Schell was struggling to sit still, uninterested now in whatever small talk he’d tested me with at the front door. His deliberate tone let me know it wouldn’t take much for him to change his mind and throw me out.
“You said you wanted to talk,” he said. “So why don’t you say something?”
“I thought you might have some questions for me,” I said, my conviction less apparent than I’d intended. “About the day we all went fishing. I thought you might have some questions that I could answer. Emily only remembers that day in bits and pieces. But I remember it all. I remember it perfectly.”
Neither of them answered right away. It was so quiet for a while that I eventually found myself focused on the most timorous of ding ing sounds that I ended up tracing to a deluxe barbecue pit out back: a metal spatula swinging back and forth in the breeze, tapping against its leg. I already regretted my approach, feeling I’d inadvertently taunted them with the fact that I knew what happened and they didn’t. In the end it was Mrs. Schell who nodded for me to continue. “Go ahead and tell us,” she said, clearing her throat against what might have emerged as a vocal quiver. I also cleared my throat, then adopted the bearing of an unaffected cop. (I accepted Mrs. Schell’s view of the situation as similar to an attorney’s jailhouse conference, but was still mindful enough to recast myself as someone other than the accused.) I had no intention of breaking down at any point during the forthcoming narrative that would for the most part have the Schells on the edge of their seats, clinging to every word, even if they did their best to appear skeptical and unimpressed.
“I’ll start with the mosquitoes,” I said, already sighing and fixing my gaze, attempting to establish patience and accuracy as the central tones. “They were all over the place. We got mauled on the path to the lake, and Emily and Katie were pretty annoyed by the time we found our canoe, which ended up being the one canoe lying facedown in the mud.” (I passed over my failure to insist that the girls buy fishing licenses, an omission in the service of a streamlined story more than an avoidance of personal misdeed.) “When Emily saw it all mucked up with crickets and spiderwebs, she decided right away she’d be fishing from the shore. That’s why Katie and I set off on our own. Of course the guy at the rental hut gave us three life jackets, but when Katie and I set off she was the only one wearing hers. Emily left hers on the shore, and I tossed mine in the bottom of the canoe, where Katie ended up grabbing it to use as a seating pad. Anyway, since Katie wasn’t much for casting and kept getting her lure tangled, we spent most of the first hour paddling around”—a slight exaggeration, given that I did all the paddling; I considered it a gimme after such an unflinching clarification in concern to Katie’s life jacket—“to different coves where she could just drop her line and wait for a bite. But it was hot that day and we started late. The fishing wasn’t looking very good. We tried top-water lures, divers, jigs, but none of us got even a nibble.
“Eventually Katie decided she wanted to move from the middle of the lake and try our luck along the shoreline. I’m talking about the shoreline almost directly opposite the beach. For the first couple of casts it was more of the same; she kept plopping the lure down right next to the boat. But when she finally let one go, she really let it go and it ended up sailing into the trees. The situation went even further downhill when she snapped the line trying to yank it out. That’s when I jumped out and swam to the shore, to get the lure back—”
Mr. Schell stopped me. He waved his index finger and rapped his foot against the stem at the bottom center of the table. “So you tipped it,” he said, his voice cracking high and windy, as though it had whistled through a gorge. “What did you think would happen jumping out like t
hat?”
“I didn’t tip it,” I said, flatly, like it wasn’t as simple as that and the story was far from over. “I was careful, and the canoe hardly rocked. It’s not such a hard thing to do. And if you want to talk about the lure, well, everyone I know would’ve gone after a lure hanging in the trees like that, one way or another. The bigger mistake was the anchor. I shouldn’t have jumped out without dropping the anchor.”
Mrs. Schell stared down at Mr. Schell’s leg until he stopped shaking it. She didn’t care about the life jacket or the anchor. She wanted the rest of the story (which I’d only related twice before: once to the police and once to my parents, in fewer details at that; the only other person I’ve trusted with this account since then was a young Mexican divorcée I ended up dating for a few weeks following an award dinner for “Iowa Teachers of the Year”). Mr. Schell leaned back and crossed his arms. I craved a cigarette and for the first time considered myself an addict, increasingly dependent on muscle tension and aggravation to continue where I’d left off.
“I climbed the tree,” I said. “I was in the middle of reaching for the lure when Katie ended up hooking a brown trout. She was using my fishing rod, which had a different reel that she didn’t know how to use. But she cast it perfectly and when she hooked her fish I actually saw it swallow the lure and take off, in the water right below me. Katie started shouting and cheering for herself, even though she didn’t really know what to do next.”
“Did she land it?” Mr. Schell blurted.
“She almost did. The canoe tipped as she was taking the hook out.”
“So she took her jacket off while you were out in the middle.”
“She undid the top buckle, but she didn’t take it off. Maybe I should’ve said something, but it wasn’t like the whole life jacket was loose. Not at all. She was still wearing it when she hooked that trout.”
Mr. Schell laughed. His laughter wasn’t nearly as precise as Emily’s, and until his ears turned bright burning red I didn’t know exactly how to interpret it. He regained his previous composure while fixing his gaze on the leaning T-shirt boxes. It wasn’t easy. He didn’t want to break down in front of me, either.
Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter Page 29
