The Banks of Certain Rivers (17 page)

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 you 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.