How to Talk to a Widower (11 page)

15

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Date:
Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Subject:
It's On

Talked to Simon & Schuster, Doubleday, and Riverhead. They're all interested. I can start entertaining offers as soon as you get me a formal proposal. We might even be talking auction! Come on, Doug, let's do this! What the hell else have you got to do?

—K

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Date:
Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Subject:
No Thanks

Sorry, Kyle. I'm just not up for it.

—D

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Date:
Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Subject:
Play the Hand You've Been Dealt

For fuck's sake, Doug! An auction! Remember all those years of shopping around one proposal after another? You would have given your left nut for this kind of opportunity!

—K

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Date:
Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Subject:
That Was Then

This is now. Please leave me alone.

—D

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Date:
Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Subject:
Strategy

Okay, you're playing hard to get. I like it. But just remember, you can only do it for so long. We need to make a deal soon.

—K

From:
S
ystem Administrator

To:
[email protected]

Date:
Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Subject:
Undeliverable

Your e-mail did not reach the intended recipient. Your e-mail address [[email protected]] has been listed as a blocked address by this recipient.

16

CLAIRE WAKES ME UP FROM A SWEET DREAM IN
the later part of the morning. It was nothing too intricate, just Hailey and me driving somewhere, colored leaves rushing past us in an orange blur, listening to the radio. It's always autumn in my dreams. She was talking to me, and even though I heard her in the dream, I can't recall a single word or the tone of her voice. I lie in bed, feeling the emptiness take hold, the now familiar weight in my belly, the darkness hanging in the back of my mind. There's always this moment, when I first wake up, these precious seconds where I feel like me, the me before this one, and then lucidity sets in and the desolation pours into me, dark and viscous, like crude oil. I close my eyes and try to will myself back to sleep, back to Hailey, but the consciousness is electric, spreading through my body at the speed of light, and there will be no turning it off.

“Come on,” Claire says. “Open your eyes.”

I roll over to find her sitting Indian style at the foot of my bed, just like old times. Her designer sweat suit is a bright emerald green that actually hurts my eyes. “What time is it?” I say.

“Ten thirty-three. I made you some breakfast, but then I ate it. Sorry.”

“It's okay,” I say. “I'm not big on breakfast.”

“It's the most important meal of the day,” she says brightly.

I close my eyes and groan. “Can you come back later?”

“No. Wake up!” She pulls off my comforter.

“That's it,” I say. “I think we need to lay down some house rules.”

“Right. Because rules actually mean something to me.”

I sit up groggily against the headboard. “What do you want, Claire?”

“Well, first off, I want you to put your soldier back into the fort.”

“What? Oh. You're the one who pulled off the blanket,” I say, straightening my boxers.

“Good point,” she says, tossing it back to me. “Now, are you ready?”

“For what?”

She flashes a wide, talk show host smile. “For the rest of your life!” She looks at me expectantly.

“What are you babbling about?”

“Okay, Doug. Here's the way I see things,” she says, pointedly patting her stomach. “Over the next little while, I am going to be creating an entirely new human being in here. Not only that, but I am going to do it with almost no conscious effort, right? So if I can build a completely new life in nine months with my eyes closed, I figure that we can rebuild your life in the same amount of time by focusing on it.”

I look up at her. “It's as simple as that.”

Her eyes are wide and unyielding. “As simple as you want it to be.”

“I don't know what I want.”

She nods. “And that's the beauty of having a twin who knows you better than you know yourself. I can know for you. If you needed a kidney or a liver transplant, I'd be your best bet, because inside we're the same. I'm just applying the same principle. I'm going to give you some of my heart to use until yours starts beating again.”

“So what is it that you're proposing, exactly?”

“That you trust me completely, and agree to do whatever I say.”

“Naturally.”

“I'm serious, Doug. You're so busy mourning Hailey, you don't have time to think about anything else. But rationally, you know you have to start living again. So do the smart thing: delegate someone you trust to get the job done.”

“What are you going to do, start setting me up on blind dates?”

She leans forward on her knees so she can get in my face. “I'm going to make you do anything that I think the old you would want to do.”

“But I'm not him anymore.”

“You're not anybody anymore.”

We stare at each other for a long moment. She wins, as usual. “What would I have to do?” I say.

“Two things,” she says. “And the first one is the hardest.”

“What's that?”

She pulls herself forward to sit on my legs, effectively pinning me to the bed, and places her hands on my shoulders, her face just inches from mine. “You need to tell me that you want this.”

“That I want what?”

“That you want to start living again, that you're willing to start being sad less often, that you're ready to move on, and you just need some help getting started. That you're willing to at least allow for the possibility of happiness.”

“Of course I want that.”

“So say it.”

“Why?”

“Because you need to hear it.”

“Claire.” I start to look away and she grabs my chin and forces me to look right at her.

“Just shut up and do it.”

“Okay,” I say. “I want to start living again. I want to be happy again, at least sometimes. I don't honestly know if I'm ready to move on, but I know I want to be. And—” My voice catches in my throat, but I force my way through it. “And I don't know how to do it.”

She brushes her pinky gently across my face to capture a solo tear I wasn't even aware of, and then kisses the tip of her dampened finger. “Okay,” she says with a playful grin. “Good enough.”

“What's the second thing?”

“Sorry?”

“You said there were two things I had to do.”

“Oh right,” she says. “That. That's actually pretty easy.”

“Well?”

“Just say yes.”

“To what?”

“To everything.”

“To everything.”

“That's right,” she says, pulling herself off the bed. “Everything. You've spent the last year saying no to everyone and everything that came your way, and what do you have to show for it?”

“I didn't say no to Laney Potter.”

“And it got you laid. Imagine if you said yes more often.”

“I don't know if I could handle all the excitement.”

“Well, we're going to find out. New rule: Just say yes.”

“I thought rules didn't mean anything to you.”

“They do when they're my rules. Now stop equivocating and just agree with me.”

“Should I really trust my life to someone who is in the process of fucking up her own so spectacularly?”

“Make no mistake!” she says hotly. “I am unfucking my life. And while, to the untrained eye, the processes might look somewhat similar, I assure you the endgame is entirely different.”

“Somehow, I don't think Stephen is going to see it that way.”

She shrugs. “What can I tell you? You want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. Now stop changing the subject, we can talk about me later. Are you in or not?”

I think about my father at dinner last night, smiling and lucid, so happy to be surrounded by his miserable, fucked-up children. I think of Debbie, weeping on his shoulder, and my mother's eyes following him as he danced. And then I think of Hailey, kissing me slowly on the Ferris wheel as dusk settled like a warm blanket around us. “I'm in,” I say.

“Okay,” Claire says with a wicked smile. “It's on.”

“So what happens now?”

“Now you get dressed and get your scrawny ass over to Radford Township High.”

“What the hell for?”

“They called about an hour ago. Russ got into a fight. He's been suspended.”

“Oh shit. Why didn't you tell me sooner?”

“It was on my agenda. I prioritized.”

“Well, why don't they just call Jim?”

“Okay,” Claire says, annoyed. “We're going to try this again. The school called you because Russ has been suspended. They would like you to come and get him. Are you going?” She fixes me with a stern look.

“Yes,” I say.

She leans down and kisses my cheek. “Right answer,” she says, heading for the door. “Now, was that so hard?”

17

RUSS GINGERLY PULLS OFF THE WET, BLOODSTAINED
paper towel wrapped around his right hand to reveal his torn and bleeding knuckles. His left eye is half shut and a penumbra of prune-colored swelling is spreading from the corner of his eye socket down into his cheekbone. A smattering of minor nicks and lacerations covers the left side of his face.

“Impressive,” I say. “What did the other guy look like?”

“Like a big guy with his knees on my chest pounding the shit out of me.”

I nod. “You want to tell me about it?”

“It was just a stupid fight, Doug. No need to get all Dr. Phil on me.”

We're sitting on two of four attached chairs that line the hall outside the guidance counselor's office. “So, what, I'm supposed to go in and talk to your guidance counselor now?”

He nods indifferently. “She's waiting for you.”

“I'm kind of relieved, actually. I thought I'd have to talk to the principal.”

“Dead mother gets you an express ticket to the school shrink.”

“I see.” A group of three cute girls sashays past us in short, short, hip-hugging skirts and tight, midriff-baring T-shirts, talking and laughing a mile a minute. We turn as one to watch them head down the hall. “I did not have girls like that when I went to high school,” I say.

“Neither do I,” Russ says glumly, staring at the floor. I look at him, bruised and battered, still wordlessly grieving, but, unlike me, forced out into the world every day, to long for unattainable girls and do battle in the unforgiving halls of high school, with no one to come home to when the day is done, and I suddenly feel like a selfish, self-pitying prick.

“We don't talk very much, do we?” I say.

He looks up at me. “No. We don't.”

“That's probably my fault.”

“Probably.” He shrugs, and holds his bloody hand up to the light, studying his shredded skin closely. “Jimbo and Angie are moving to Florida.”

“What?”

He nods miserably. “They dropped the bomb last night. It's the Sunshine State, you know.”

“Shit, Russ. That sucks. When?”

“After Christmas.”

I don't know how to process this news. “What the hell is in Florida?”

“I don't know, some job or something. I kind of stopped hearing everything after the word ‘Florida.'”

“Are you going to go?”

“What choice do I have?” he says, glaring at me. “It's not like I have anywhere else to live, right?”

I sigh, and put my head in my hands. “It's just not that simple, Russ.”

“It is from where I'm sitting.”

“Listen,” I say, feeling completely out of my depth. “He's your father, and your sole legal guardian. I'm in no position to tell him what to do.”

“Well, then. That makes two of us.”

There's an important conversation to be had here, questions to be asked, assurances to be made, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to do it. “Let me just go in and pay your bail or whatever, and then we'll go get some lunch and talk this through, okay?”

“There's nothing else to say.”

“Then we'll eat in silence,” I say, getting to my feet. “Don't worry, I'm used to it.”

“Doug,” he says as I'm opening the office door.

“Yeah.”

“Could you please just talk to him?” His uninjured eye is wide, red, and earnest, and right at that moment I feel an overwhelming surge of affection for this sad, fucked-up kid, and the sudden tremor in my chest tells me that there are parts of my heart still able to be broken.

“Okay,” I say, thinking resignedly, as I always do with regard to talking to Jim, that no good will ever come of it.

         

Russ's guidance counselor, Ms. Hayes, is younger than I expected, with straight black hair and milk-bath skin. “Mr. Parker,” she says, shaking my hand. “Thanks for coming. I'm Brooke Hayes.” Her hair bounces as she sits back down, and I can see whole constellations of earrings, hoops and studs and bands, hiding under it, definitely not standard issue for high school guidance faculty.

“You're the guidance counselor?” I say.

“I get that a lot,” she says. Her voice has the laid-back, slightly raspy quality of a rock singer, like she's just speaking between the measures and is about to break into a ballad of lost love.

“You look kind of young, that's all.”

Her smile spreads like a brushfire across the open meadow of her face. “Well, thanks, I guess. But I'm fully licensed, I assure you. You look kind of young to be Russ's stepfather too. What are you, thirty?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Twenty-seven,” she says. “I guess they figured the kids would relate to me.”

“Do they?”

“Sometimes.” She folds one knee under her, and beckons to the chair in front of me.

“So,” I say, sitting down. “What's the deal here?”

“The deal is that Russ took on half the football team this morning and, as you can see, he got his ass kicked.”

“They ganged up on him?” I say, feeling a hot band of rage tighten in my belly.

“According to witnesses, one of the guys made a remark and Russ just went off on him. The other kids were just trying to pull him off.”

“Wow. What'd the guy say?”

“No one's talking.”

“Was anyone badly hurt?”

She shakes her head. “Just the usual. But unfortunately for Russ, the high school enforces a zero-tolerance policy on violence. It's a mandatory three-day suspension.”

“Ms. Hayes.”

“Call me Brooke, please. And I'll call you Doug, okay? I mean, for God's sake, we're both under thirty, right?”

“Right,” I say, somewhat disconcerted by her easy, casual manner. “Brooke. You realize that I'm not Russ's legal guardian. That he lives with his father.”

“Yeah,” she says slowly, biting down on her lip thoughtfully as she sizes me up. “I had Jim in here the last time Russ got into a fight.”

“It's happened before?”

She gives me a curious look. “It's pretty much a regularly scheduled event these days,” she says. “Anyway, Jim gave me a fairly incoherent speech about kids needing to fight their own battles, and how he didn't raise his son to back down from bullies.”

“He didn't raise him, period,” I say.

She nods, peering intently at me. “Then he asked me when I got off.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. So this time I figured it might make sense to try another avenue. Russ speaks very highly of you.”

“He does?”

She grins and holds up her hands. “Okay, I might be reading between the lines there. I mean, you have to do that with a kid like Russ. He doesn't say very much. But from what little he has said, I can tell that he likes you. Also, I hope you'll forgive me for saying it, I read your column in
M,
and … ” Her voice trails off. “Okay. Never mind that part. It's not relevant.”

“What?” I say.

“I don't want to overstep my bounds.”

“You don't strike me as someone who is very big on boundaries, Brooke.”

“Sensitive and intuitive,” she says with an approving smile. “Okay. What I was going to say is that, in addition to sounding smart and sad, you strike me as a deeply angry person.”

“Angry,” I repeat. “Who am I angry at?”

“Take your pick. Angry at the world for letting what happened to you happen, or at God, if that's your thing. Or maybe at your wife for having the nerve to die, or at yourself for not stopping her.”

“You're psychoanalyzing me based on my column?”

“The very fact that you're writing that column is proof enough. You're lashing out, trying to hold the world accountable. It's perfectly natural to feel that way.”

“I'm so relieved. Now, can we actually talk about Russ?”

“But I am talking about Russ,” she says, ignoring my hostile tone. “When we are in the anger stages of grief, we will often subconsciously push away anything or anyone that we associate with the person we lost. And the tragedy is that the two of you are going through the same thing. He's as sad and angry and confused and alone as you are, plus he's a teenager, which means that on his best days his life is a shit storm. He needs someone to talk to, to help him through this, and there's no one better equipped to understand him than you.”

“You're saying that I'm pushing Russ away?” I say, pissed. “You don't know a goddamn thing about me.”

“You're right,” she says, leaning forward in her chair. “I just know that he's not going to get the help he needs from his father, and he won't open up to me. He's a good kid, you know that. A little introverted, but very bright and compassionate. And when a kid like that starts acting out and getting into fights, generally speaking, he's trying to get someone's attention, and you can be damn well sure it's not Jim's.”

Through the window behind her I can see a group of kids hanging out on cars in the parking lot, laughing, flirting, chasing, grabbing, kissing, and groping, and I would give anything to be any one of them, even if just for a few minutes, to feel the unspoiled future splayed out in front of me again as far as the eye can see.

“Doug,” she says after a bit, and I realize that I zoned out for a little while there.

“What?”

“You're angry.”

“So you've been telling me.”

“No, I mean right now. At me.”

“No,” I say softly. “You're probably right. I screwed up. I haven't been there for him. I wanted to be, I just wasn't.”

“It's not your fault,” she says. “You were grieving. And it's not like it's too late. Just reach out to him. Let him know you're there for him.”

“They're moving to Florida.”

Her eyes grow wide and her jaw drops, her lips forming a perfect little O of surprise. “What?”

“It's the Sunshine State,” I say dumbly.

“I meet with Russ every week. He never said anything.”

“He just found out.”

“Well, that explains today's fight, I guess,” Brooke says, leaning back in her chair, deflated. “Jesus Christ, Doug! No one under eighty moves to Florida. Isn't that like a federal statute or something?”

“Well, they are,” I say.

“If you asked me how to go about irreversibly screwing up that boy, you know what I would tell you to do?”

“What?”

“Take him away from his friends and his hometown and the memories of his mother, and send him to a new state with that father of his.”

“Somehow, I knew you were going to say that.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I don't think there's anything I can do about it.”

“And somehow, I knew you were going to say that.”

“Yeah,” I say sadly, standing up to leave. “I'm predictable like that.”

“Well,” she says, standing up. “Maybe you'll surprise yourself one of these days.”

“Maybe.”

“Doug,” she says hesitantly as she comes around the desk. “You didn't invent grief. My shrink once told me that.”

“Really? Your shrink told you about me?”

Her laugh comes from her belly, loud, musical, and completely unrestrained. “The point is, people become possessive of their grief, almost proud of it. They want to believe it's like no one else's. But it is. It's exactly like everybody else's. Grief is like a shark. It's been around forever, and in that time there's been just about no evolution. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because it's perfect just the way it is.” She smiles compassionately, and I can see there's a faint dusting of glitter in her eye shadow, which strikes me as sweet, a glimpse of the little girl who still lives there, the one who believes in fairies and princesses.

“Why did he say that to you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why were you grieving?”

She grins. “Now what kind of professional would I be if I discussed my personal life with you?”

“I guess you have some boundaries after all.”

“When they suit me,” she says, meeting my gaze. “Maybe I'll tell you under different circumstances. When I wouldn't be compromising myself professionally.”

There are only a handful of ways to interpret or misinterpret that last remark, but I've been out of the game for way too long to try, no matter how loudly the Claire in my head is calling me chickenshit. “Okay,” I say, extending my hand. “Thanks for the talk, or session, or whatever this was.”

“You're welcome.”

The doorknob sticks when I turn it. “You have to pull it up,” she says, and as she squeezes past me to open it, I catch a whiff of her, a pleasant blend of blow-dried citrus shampoo, spearmint gum, and cigarettes that makes me suddenly homesick for something I can't quite pinpoint. Not that I'm trying to smell her or anything.