Lauren nodded, but said nothing. She seated herself on the opposite side of the bed, and took Wendy’s wrist in her fingers. At first I was surprised by the intimacy of the gesture, but then realized—given her vocation, maybe it was just habit—that Lauren was feeling for Wendy’s pulse. Lauren kept her fingertips pressed there for a long time.
“This is Wendy…” I repeated, trailing off.
What could I say? If my old love could meet my new love—truly, coherently—what would even be discussed between the two? Would Wendy approve? Would Lauren approve? Would they argue? Would they caution each other, suggest I was toxic, suggest that the other should consider not getting involved? Perhaps my worthiness would be discussed. Or maybe they would simply talk about the weather.
I stood up. The whole situation seemed too absurd. “This is just…I’ll be at the van.” I went outside and stood in the chilly air. Why did I agree to it, really? Maybe I’d imagined some sort of absolution, or some sort of direction toward the proper path going forward. But there was nothing of the sort, and I stood in the cold and stewed about it. Lauren took longer than I thought she would to join me, at least five minutes, maybe it was almost ten, and I was nearly shivering when she came back out.
“Okay,” she whispered when she rejoined me, and she unlocked the car so we could get inside. She didn’t speak again until we’d been driving for a bit.
“It’s a very nice place,” she finally said.
“Yes, it is.” I stared ahead at the road.
“And a good staff?”
“Yep.”
The van rolled over a series of hills, and Lauren started to cry. “God, I’m sorry, Neil. I should have never—”
“It’s fine,” I said flatly. “How is your neighbor doing?”
“Stop it,” she said. “Stop. Don’t be an asshole, Neil.” She shot me a look with her red-ringed eyes. “I like you so much, but please don’t ever be that way. I just never really understood.” She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket. “I never understood how it had to be for you, I mean. The whole thing, all of it. I’m sorry.”
After the girls finally stop complaining enough for us to complete long workout (notable for no mention of my nearly-healed lip, for no one being crapped on by a bird, and for the way Cassie Jennings and Amy Vandekemp seem to have bonded since last Friday), I have a surprisingly invigorating run home. There’s a nice breeze, it’s cooled off a bit, and my legs feel fresh. In my body’s effort, the drudgery of the day is washed away, and the news about Denise Masterson is, at least for the time being, forgotten. I find Chris has beaten me home when I get there, and he’s talking to someone on his phone in the living room.
“I tried to flip it in the pan,” I overhear him saying. “Wait, I swear I did it exactly like you showed me. I did! I tried it and it was like, complete disaster. I was scooping noodles up from everywhere. I don’t get…I don’t get how you can do it with your left hand too. No, I did not throw it out, I had it for lunch. I was hungry!”
He talks for a while more while I sit in the kitchen and tap out a couple emails on my phone. I hear him say goodbye, and he comes in to join me. He has to sit at our kitchen table at an angle so his long legs can stick out into the room.
“Hey,” I say. “Was that Uncle Mike?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s he doing? You talk to him more than I do, now.”
“He’s good. He said there might be a little scholarship if I want it. Emphasis on the word little.”
“Do you want it?”
“Dad,” he says dramatically, rolling his eyes and throwing up his hands. I laugh.
“What? I’m serious! This is your call.”
“I’m not ready to make this call.”
“When does Mike need an answer?”
“The deadline is November thirtieth.”
“That gives us a little time. Are you cooking for us tonight?”
“I thought I would. Do you want to know what I’m making? Or do you want it to be a surprise? Uncle Mike emailed me the recipe.”
“Let’s make it a surprise,” I say.
I head back to my room to clean myself up. On my phone I find that Lauren has texted me a single word: LOVE? The question mark is intriguing. I don’t think of it as needy, really, but it doesn’t seem like Lauren. She’s often more assertive. Maybe because I’m feeling so invigorated by my run home, I send the word LOVE as a reply. No question mark. A simple confirmation. An instant passes, and my phone begins to buzz with an incoming call from ELL DEE.
“Hey,” she says. “Thank you for your text.”
“So that counts as saying it?” I ask.
“I think it counts.” A pause. “Good day?”
“The kids were in a daze today, but it was all right. Summer’s over. What about you?”
“Studying. Drank too much tea. I’ll be up late.”
“Test is Wednesday? In Lansing? Or Thursday?”
“Wednesday. Making the drive tomorrow morning. But I’ll stop to see Carol before I go.”
“I wish I could see you before you go,” I say.
“I don’t think you can. Not tonight, and how would you be able to come during the day tomorrow?”
“You’d probably want me to go check the utilities in the basement if I showed up.”
“You can say no whenever,” she says tonelessly.
“Go study,” I say. “Get rest for your drive tomorrow.”
There’s a small sound, an almost-sigh, and Lauren simply says: “Goodnight, Neil.”
I’m feeling just a little unsettled after the odd conclusion to our conversation, and I sit on my bed for a few long moments holding my phone between my hands before the rich aroma (and off-key singing) coming from our kitchen draws me back out into the house.
My brother Michael’s new, latest, soon-to-open restaurant on Chicago’s South Side is a French-Vietnamese hybrid, and his current menu planning is seriously influencing his young disciple in my home. The house is filled with the smell of chili, cinnamon and anise, and Chris warns me not to come into the kitchen lest I ruin the surprise.
“This is a quick one tonight, Dad,” he says. “Too much homework for a major production. Keep out of here!”
Our landline rings while I wait. I’d like to get rid of the old phone and go cell-only, but I hang onto it and a listing in the phonebook so my students can get in touch. The caller ID says UNKNOWN, but I answer anyway.
“Hello?” I say. There’s no greeting in return, no sound on the line, so I say hello again. There’s nothing, so I end the call and return the handset to its charging cradle. I take a step toward the couch, and the phone rings again. Once again: UNKNOWN.
“Hello?” I say slowly. Now there’s a little sound in return, almost like suppressed laughter.
“Not cool,” I say, and hang up.
About thirty seconds later, the phone rings again. I’m ready to shout something into the handset when I pick it up this time, but I don’t because the ID says Samples, which is the last name of a pair of identical twins in my AP class.
“Hey, Mr. K?” a young but confident voice greets me. “It’s Ross.” The twins, Ross and Justin, are practically indistinguishable from each other.
“Ross, what’s up? Did you just try to call me?”
“Nope. But hey, Justin is having some test done on his liver Wednesday morning, and he was thinking you could—”
“Whoa, wait up, is he okay? Is he going to miss class?”
“Oh, no, he’s fine, he’s just having this thing where they use radioactivity to test his liver. He’ll be back in the afternoon. We were thinking it would be cool if you used your Geiger counter on him.”
“Are you messing with me? Is Justin there?” There’s a pause, and a voice more or less the same as the first comes on the line.
“Hey, Mr. K.”
“Justin, why is Ross telling me this and not you? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I was just busy. Do y
ou still have the Geiger counter from regular physics? We could play like, identify the Samples twins through radioactivity.”
“Justin, is your mom or dad there?”
“Hold on.”
A moment later Susan Samples comes on.
“Hi, Neil, how have you been? Did you and Chris have a good summer?”
“Sue, is your son okay?”
“Oh, it’s nothing. He’s fine. They think he has an infection in his gallbladder. His liver enzymes were messed up. So he’s getting a test. No biggie.”
“Is it a biggie if the rest of the class knows about it, and if I check how radioactive your son is with a Geiger counter? I think I’d need your approval to share something like that with the group.”
“Sure! That sounds terrific.” Sue Samples is a complete free spirit, a literal product of the original Summer of Love.
“Let me talk to Justin again.” The phone is handed off once more. “All right,” I say, “if you’re okay with it, we’ll do something fun. Maybe you guys could dress identically.”
“Right on, Mr. K.”
I laugh after hanging up, both at the ridiculousness of the exchange and the sudden interesting possibility of having a radioactive individual in my classroom. I could graph how ‘hot’ he was over the course of the class (which, I’m sure, the girls would find pretty funny), or, if he’s game, he could hide in a locker somewhere in the science wing while we try to find him with the counter. I’ll chew on this one.
Chris calls me into the kitchen to a great bowl of steaming broth framed by chopsticks and little bowls of Asian-looking condiments. Chris keeps a vast stash of Mike’s ‘secret ingredients’ stored in a red plastic milk crate in our pantry, and many of them seem to be on display over our table now.
“It’s pho, Dad,” Chris says, making sure he’s correct in his pronunciation. Fuh. “South Vietnamese. Uncle Mike calls it the original fast food.”
I’ve had pho before, but never like this. Whatever Mike calls it, Christopher’s rendition is incredible.
“Okay,” I say between slurping bites. “This is going in your greatest hits. You are making this again.”
“Serious? You’ll tell Uncle Mike? I don’t think he believes me when I tell him stuff came out good. It was actually pretty easy to make.”
“Of course I’ll tell Mike. This is awesome.”
I clean up the kitchen while Chris chips away at homework out in the living room. The landline rings again, and though I’m expecting it to be Ross or Justin calling back, Chris hollers, “Unknown name! Should I pick up?”
“Let it go.” I turn off the kitchen faucet as my answering machine greeting plays so I can hear better, and after the beep my house fills with a raspy older woman’s voice.
“That was just despicable,” the voice says. “You deserve what you have coming. They shouldn’t just sue you, they should have you arrested!”
I freeze while I listen and the machine beeps again, and it takes my son’s laughter to snap me out of it.
“What up, wrong number?” he says. “I kind of wish I’d answered.”
“Jeez, you think she was mad about something?” I say, shaking my head while I step over to tap the delete button on the machine.
“Maybe just a little. You didn’t piss anybody off lately, did you, Dad?”
“Not that I can think of.” I start to laugh too. The woman sounded furious. “What about you?”
“No,” he says. “No one I know of.”
I go back to cleaning the dishes. When I reach to flip on the light over the sink, the light burns out with a pop! An instant later, Chris peeks in through the entryway.
“Light go out?” he asks. “I’ll get you a bulb.”
When Christopher was little, around six years old, he developed a terrible fear of the dark. Seemingly out of nowhere—it had never bothered him before—he refused to enter any room that wasn’t first illuminated. Bedroom, bathroom, basement, garage; if he needed to go to one of those places, it was always, “Mommy, can you come with me?” or “Daddy, will you turn on the light?” I think of this fondly now, but at the time it was really a sort of a pain.
Bedtime was the worst. I felt the easiest thing would be for us to just leave a light on for Chris out in the hall, or put a bright nightlight in his room, but Wendy thought it was necessary for Chris to tough it out and get over it. This was a real reversal for us: Wendy was usually the softie in questions of parental direction, where I always seemed more ready to be stern. I guess if I think about it, I probably was just exhausted by being woken up by our son’s nightmares every night. But, as I often did, I gave in to Wendy’s wish. We’d push Christopher through it.
My wife developed a little script for when we put Christopher to bed. She’d sit next to him to tuck him in, and she’d offer to tuck in all of his demons as well.
“Now,” she’d say, “it’s time to tuck you in, then we’re going to turn off the light, okay?”
“No,” Chris would reply, shaking his head. It went almost the same every night. “I want the light on.”
“There’s nothing you need to be afraid of, Chris.”
“There’s a shadow. It’s a scary face on the wall.”
“We can tuck that shadow in. Here we go.” She used her hands to arrange the covers next to Chris. “Goodnight shadow!”
“My jacket looks like a ghost the way it hangs.”
“Let’s tuck that ghost in. There. He’s not so scary. Goodnight ghost!”
Chris would start to smile, in spite of himself. “What about mean skulls? Or monsters?”
“Mean skulls and monsters are pushovers for a big guy like you. Let’s tuck them in too. There. Ready for lights out?”
Our son would shake his head. “I don’t like the darkness.”
“The darkness is good, Chris. It’s like a soft blanket that lets you sleep. I’m going to tuck the darkness in too. Here we go. We’ll tuck the darkness right in.” She’d draw the covers up tight under his neck and give him a kiss, and I, standing by the door, would flip out the light. “There. Now everyone is cozy. Are you cozy?”
“Yeah.”
“Goodnight, Chris.”
“Goodnight.”
After a couple weeks of this, or maybe it was more, the darkness was no longer an issue. The routine didn’t stop, though. Not for a year at least. Even when he was a little older, and far past his fears of the night, Wendy would ask if he needed her to tuck the darkness in before he went to sleep. He’d only say yes if I wasn’t around, but she’d tell me about it after.
I couldn’t do it for him. I didn’t have the right touch with the darkness. I lacked the proper delivery. And after Wendy went away, there was no one to banish that darkness for either of us.
Following Wendy’s accident, after weeks of restless nights, I gave in and put a nightlight out in the hallway. It’s been there ever since.
While Chris settles in to work on his homework, I return to my room to try Lauren once before I go to sleep. The nightlight in the hallway flickers as I walk past. I dial, and the call goes immediately to voicemail.
“Hey,” I say, “You’re probably studying, give me a call if you get the chance, okay? That was…sort of a weird goodbye we had earlier.” I end the call and sit there, at the foot of my bed, staring at the phone like a zombie. I almost call her once again, but instead I send a text:
“Call me when you can. Love.”
Why is it so much easier to express it that way?
From: [email protected]
To:[email protected]
Sent: September 10, 11:08 pm
Subject:No Reply
_____________________________
I wait and I wait, Wendy.
Shouldn’t I be pretty good at waiting by now? Shouldn’t I be an expert?
CHAPTER TWELVE
In the morning, after a night of fitful rest and several more hangups on the landline, there’s no reply—text or otherwise—waiting for me
from Lauren. Her upcoming exam is a big one, I know, and she takes her studies very seriously, so I guess it’s not too unusual that she hasn’t had the time to get back to me. There’s that goodnight, though, that strange goodbye that’s been bugging me, really troubling me; there was a gravity to it that threw me off.
What the hell. I am getting myself wound up over nothing.
Chris and I share our ride in to school, and he seems chagrined by the fact that I have not packed any leftovers from his outstanding batch of pho for my lunch today.
“It’s mostly liquid, Chris,” I say. “The thing would probably come open in my pack and get all over my stuff.”
There’s no text waiting when we get to school, and there’s not one before the first bell of the morning, either. I have a strict no-gadgets-in-class rule for the students, and I adhere to it myself, so I keep my phone stashed deep in my pack, no matter how much I wish I could sneak over to check it. The kids’ attitudes today are not so different from how they were yesterday: a foggy mix of boredom and shell shock. Isn’t this academic ennui supposed to start a few weeks later in the school year? At least, as far as I can tell, there is no audible gossip about Denise Masterson. I try my best to keep my first period class engaged, and I do manage to score some points toward the end of the class when I let them know we’ll be watching a movie tomorrow.
No texts come during any of the early class periods. Now I’m starting to worry that something might actually be wrong, and, knowing that she’s going to be driving this morning, I’d like to be sure that’s not the case.
I know it seems stupid but, was it something I said?
I leave a message at lunchtime, and another during my open afternoon period. And one more after that for good measure. Good luck on your test, I say. Drive safe to Lansing. Call me when you get there? Is everything okay?
Really, is everything okay?
I have an open period in the afternoon, and after setting going over some homework assignments I check my district email. I’m surprised to find that, instead of the six or so messages I usually have waiting for me in there, I have more than eighty, all coming from a different random Yahoo! email address. Beth Coolidge got burned and unleashed a virus on the school network by opening something like this last year, so I delete them all without looking and make a note to myself to mention it to Cory the next time I see him.
The Banks of Certain Rivers Page 13
