The Banks of Certain Rivers (21 page)

“Chris, I have to—” My phone starts to buzz in my
pocket. I’m certain it will be Alan calling me to pester me, or
Lauren, but when I pull the thing out to check the display I see
Peggy Mackie’s name, and I stop myself from silencing the call.
“Hang on,” I tell Chris, tipping the phone up so he can’t
see Mackie’s name on the screen. “I need to take this.”
I turn myself away from the table to answer.

“Neil,” Peggy says, sounding stern. “Are you going
to be in tomorrow?”

“God. Yes. I’ll be in. Can I call you back later, though?
I’m kind of—”

“You’ll be there in the morning?”

“Just let me know when you need me,” I say, and Peggy
ends the call without saying goodbye.

“Who was that?” Chris asks as I return the phone to my
pocket. I shake my head, and try to appear not dejected.

“Work stuff,” I say. I can’t say anything else. The
waiter comes back and asks if everything’s okay. I nod yes,
absently, and for the rest of our meal and the whole drive home, I am
incapable of saying anything about the situation with Lauren.

Later, in bed, I
find
it impossible to get comfortable. I flop about in the dark, and
listen to my son on the other side of the house: rustling around in
the bathroom, brushing his teeth, laughing with a friend behind his
closed bedroom door on a late-night phone call.
God, the
Mastersons
, I’m thinking. How will Jo take it when we tell
her? Will Denise be able to get beyond it, somehow? The boyfriend
will not be so burdened. That’s always the way. Some kids got
in trouble for it two years ago, and the girl’s family ended up
moving away. How fair is that?
Poor Denise
. I can’t
think about this now. I need to put it out of my mind.

Additional texts come from Lauren and Al, and I ignore them. At
eleven I sit I in my bed and see light spilling from below
Chris’s door across the hallway. I could get up, I
should
get up, and go talk to him. I could sit at the foot of his bed like I
did when he was little boy and tell him everything I need to say.
Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe, like Alan claims, he’ll
be okay with it.

But I don’t. I can’t, and after some time the light
beneath his door goes out.

Jo Masterson. I haven’t seen her or her husband Frank in
months. We seem to run into each other a couple times a year, at the
store, at the dentist. Not much is ever said; pleasantries are
exchanged and Jo always smiles the same sad smile that makes me wonder if
somehow Wendy’s accident affected her more than it did me. I
wonder what her expression will be when she gets the news about her
daughter. I try not to think about it.

Now the clock shows ten minutes past midnight. I turn and turn within
the sheets to try to make myself comfortable, and when I bring myself
to glance at the clock again, it’s nearly one thirty. When
later I get up to go to the bathroom, I don’t allow myself to
look at the time when I bed back down. I know it would just be too
depressing.

Maybe I
should
have had that beer.

I kick off my comforter, I pull it back up. This is hopeless. I rise
from my bed and go to the spare room, where I power up my laptop and
try to look at the news. Nothing worth reading. I open my gmail and
there’s nothing there, but in my school email I discover
another fifty or so new spam messages filling my inbox. Most of the
subject lines are nonsense, but one appears repeatedly, reading:
“TeshCo for the lulz!!!” As I select them for deletion, I
find a message with the subject “THIS OKAY?” from the
district’s domain, a student’s name that I don’t
immediately recognize, and I open it. When I do, I reel back in my
chair and cringe. The body of the message says: “U PROBLY LIKE
SEX WITH THIS KIDS.” Attached below it is a photograph of three
young girls in swimsuits running through a sprinkler. Thankfully,
there’s nothing else with it.

I quickly hit the forward button and address it to the network
administrator’s email address, adding, “Cory, what the
hell is this??” to the body of the message. After it’s
sent, I delete it along with the rest of the spam messages. When
they’re gone, I’m surprised to find a reply from Cory,
dated 1:41 am. The message says, simply:

“I WILL LOOK INTO THIS NEIL K.”

It’s not like that was the first weird email I’ve
received in my school account, so I’m not going to worry about
it. I’ll follow up with Cory tomorrow. I check my gmail account
one last time before snapping the laptop shut and padding back to my
room.

I lie across the bed on my back, close my eyes, and breathe. There
are times in the dark, when I’m spent, when I’m
exhausted, when I’m incapable of thinking more coherent
thoughts, that I wonder what it would be like to be, just for a
moment, inside Wendy’s brain. I know there’s nothing
going on—and I mean
nothing
—at the higher levels:
I’ve seen the traces from her scans, and it’s just a tiny
scribble indistinguishable from background noise. But deep inside, in
her primitive, limbic core, there is something,
something
that
keeps her going.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe. Close your eyes and breathe
without thinking; repeat, without question, ad infinitum.

What does that feel like? Does it feel like anything? I keep my eyes
closed, and focus on the rush of air in and out of my nose. What
would it be like if that was the only thing I could know?

Breathe in, Breathe out.

Indefinite function, until all function ceases.

With my eyes closed, it’s nothing more than static.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Sent: September 12, 1:01 am

Subject: News

_____________________________

There is something I need to tell
you: I’ve been emotionally and physically involved with one of
your mother’s nurses, Lauren Downey, for nearly two years. I’m
in love with her, and she’s pregnant. I want to marry her.

I’m sorry. I needed to tell you
this. I hope you understand.

I need to tell Chris. I am not sure
how to do it.

I’ll always love you, and I’ll
always take care of you. Really.

-Neil

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Just when I feel myself
finally drifting off
to a deep sort of sleep, my phone buzzes
with an incoming call. I blink my eyes into focus enough to accept
and see the clock on the screen reads 5:20 am.

“Uh huh?” I mutter, propping my head up on my
phone-holding arm.

“How did it go?” It’s Alan, and he sounds far too
awake for me. And in his question, the events of the previous day—my
whole life, really—return to me.

“It...it didn’t go.”

“What the hell do you mean it didn’t go? You didn’t
tell him?”

“I couldn’t. I have some other stuff going on. The timing
ended up not being right.”

“The timing is never going to be right,” Alan says. “I
am planning to keep bugging you until you do this. Got it?”

“Fine,” I say, and I terminate the call. I fall back to
my pillow and hold the phone to my chest. I will do it when I’m
ready. Really. I hold the phone aloft and press the power button to
turn the thing off for good. I don’t need to be pestered.

It’s a chilly, foggy morning, and we need to wipe heavy dew
from the windows on Christopher’s car before we can leave.
Little is spoken, and I’m grateful for it. Could I tell him
right now? It might ruin his day. I will tell him after school. I am
making a mental note to myself to absolutely do it after school.

Chris drops me off at the science wing with a wave, and takes off for
the student lot. With my pack and my coffee mug I shuffle to my
classroom and let myself absorb the last minutes of eyes-shut quiet
at my desk before my first students show up and take their seats.

“Mr. K. looks tired,” I hear one of the kids whisper, and
I manage a wan smile.

The first chapter in my morning class text is called “Physics
and You.” In an effort to show these underclassmen (or
upperclass slackers) that the rules governing the physical world do
in fact have some bearing on their lives, I like to embrace this
opener with gusto, and we spend the morning watching an accompanying
video that seems to consist mostly of trippy footage of soccer balls
in parabolic flight along with—in an obvious nod to the
delinquents found in every classroom—twenty minutes of
slow-motion explosions and ballistics tests. I sit at the back of the
room in the dark and try to rest my mind.

“All right,” I say as the end credits go blank and I
click the room back into light. The kids seem somewhat more attentive
today than they were yesterday; maybe the explosions have perked them
up a bit. “Do any of you snowboard?” A smattering of
hands show across the room. Eyes blink, adjusting to the brightness.
“Question: how rad would snowboarding be if there was no
gravity? How fast would you go down the hill if the mass of your body
was not attracted to the much greater mass of the earth?” Empty
stares. “But if you didn’t have any friction,” I
continue, “it might get scary. Friction between the snow and
the base of the snowboard provides negative acceleration to keep you
from going too fast.” My example doesn’t have much of an
effect. “Okay, anybody play the guitar?” More hands, more
blinking eyes. “So, when you tune up, say, your low E string,
and you pluck that string, if it’s tuned right, it will vibrate
a little more than eighty-two times a second.” Brows furrow as
they process this. “That’s called the frequency of that
string. The frequency is eighty-two hertz. Piano players?” No
hands this time; the dedicated piano players in the room are most
likely freshman girls too shy to admit it. “Middle C is about
two hundred and sixty-one hertz. See? This stuff is all around you.
So what I want you to do for me tonight, as we wrap up this chapter,
is write one paragraph about how physics affects your life. Doesn’t
have to be typed, you can rip a page out of a notebook if you want,
just give me a paragraph. Okay? Questions?”

A shaggy-haired kid by the door raises his hand.

“How many sentences does it have to be to make a paragraph?”
he asks.

I’d like to reply with: “Are you kidding me?” but I
decide instead to be charitable. “Let’s say more than
one. Anything else?”

A wannabe jock’s hand shoots up in the back of the room.

“Yes?”

“Why’d you have to be so harsh on Cody Tate?”

The reactions in the room to this question vary from nervous
laughter, gasps of shock, or looks of confusion. I’d put myself
in the third group.

“Who is Cody Tate?” I ask. The name resonates somewhere
in my foggy head, but I can’t recall if he’s on any of my
current or past rosters. I don’t get an answer, though, because
the bell rings and all in the room is abandoned. Peggy Mackie is
waiting outside my classroom door, and I nod hello to her as the
class rises and begins to file out of the room, and call out: “One
paragraph, guys, more than one sentence!” Peggy enters when the
last kid has gone. The look on her face is serious.

“I heard the pictures were pretty bad,” I say.

“Neil, we need you, right now.”

I look to the hall for Denise Masterson’s parents, but no one
else is out there.

“In Karen’s office” Peggy says. Karen Harmon is our
principal. “Come on.” I follow Peggy down the hall. She’s
walking at a good clip.

“Wendy used to work with Jo Masterson.” I say. “Chris
knows about it, he mentioned it last night. So I’m guessing
it’s getting around the school this week.” Peggy shakes
her head, and we go through the front office back to the principal’s
office. This is Karen’s second year at the helm, and by all
accounts she’s doing a pretty good job in the post. She’s
in there, seated at her conference table, along with the school
district’s attorney whose name I can’t remember, and
Gracie Adams, the cold and childless president of the school board.
The Mastersons are not present, and Peggy makes introductions.

“Neil, you know Ms. Adams, and this is Stu Lepinski, our
attorney.” Stu rises to reach over an open laptop on the table
and we shake hands.

“It’s awful,” I say, taking a seat between Gracie
and Karen. “Do Jo and Steve know yet?”

“Neil,” Karen says, looking up from a notepad in front of
her. “What happened after school last Friday?”

“What happened? You mean...” I look around the room.
“This isn’t about Denise Masterson?”

“It’s not,” Karen says softly.

“Are you asking about…the fight I broke up?” They
remain silent. “Or the ride I took in Cassie Jennings’s
car? I…I was injured, I needed a ride home, I had Amy
Vandekemp come so it wouldn’t seem inappropriate.”

Peggy stares at my lip, and I touch my fingertips to the tiny scab
there. “How did you get injured, Neil?” she asks.

“I broke up a fight. We were just wrapping up after practice,
and these kids in the parking lot started going at it—”

Stu Lepinski clears his throat. “Would you take a look at
this?” he says, spinning his laptop toward me. “Watch
this.”

He leans over and taps the mousepad, and a video begins to play full
screen on the display. The footage is shaky, and in it a form runs
toward the camera. I see that
I
am the form, that it’s
me running, and I hear my own voice call “Hey!” The
screen is a jumble as I come closer, it steadies again, and I watch
myself—time expanding like I’m seeing a car accident as
it unfolds—I watch myself grab a boy by the shoulders, shake
him, and hurl him to the ground. The video cuts abruptly, and now the
boy’s face is in close-up as blood runs from a cut over his eye
and the bridge of his nose.