The Banks of Certain Rivers (32 page)

I cannot believe I’m having this conversation. With my
mother-in-law.

“Maybe I’ll go say hello to her now,” I say.

“You do that,” Carol says. I think she actually winks at
me as she says it.

Lauren’s unpacking some groceries when I find her in the
kitchen.

“Oh.” she says. “You’re here. Hi. How is
Chris?”

“He was pretty mad about everything last night, and he left for
his basketball camp a bit ago without really saying anything. I might
try for some dad time with him tomorrow night.”

“You do dad time,” she says, and she wraps her arms
around my waist and buries her face in my shirt so I can’t see
her. “I don’t know about this.” She’s
sobbing, and her shoulders shake beneath my arms. “I just don’t
know if I can do this.”

“We’ll be okay,” I say, perhaps with desperation.
“We will.”

By saying it, can I simply make it so?

“You’d better go,” Lauren says. She pulls a worn
tissue from her pocket and wipes her eyes. “I need to check on
Carol. Call me later.”

Back home, I clean
up
the kitchen, deliberately washing and drying Christopher’s
plate before putting it away in the cabinet. The bottle of whiskey,
nearly empty, sits on the counter by the window; the taste of it
still lingering in my mouth seems vile so I pour the last of it down
the drain and drop the bottle into the recycling bin beneath the
sink.

Chris. Why did he react this way? He’s a teen boy, I must
remind myself, large in size and tendency toward kindness, but not
yet an adult. I forget that sometimes. And I’ve really been
lucky with him, so lucky, especially knowing as well as I do from
school how far things can go wrong in some families.

He’ll cool down tonight at camp, I know it. He’ll have a
chance to work out on the court, burn off some steam, and he’ll
come home tomorrow and we can talk about it.

If anything, I feel relief right now. The greatest burden I’ve
felt over the past two years, the burden of secrecy, the burden of
hiding something from my son, is gone. Even as everything falls
apart, the heaviest of weights has been lifted.

I go to the spare room and wake up the laptop. YouTube is up; I close
it and open my personal email.

And I type a letter:

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Sent: September 14, 9:12 am

Subject: Chris, and Other

_____________________________

Dear Wendy,

Christopher, as I said, did not take
the news about Lauren very well. He is angry, with a teen boy’s
sort of rage: he shouted and knocked things over last night, and
locked himself in his room. He gave me the silent treatment this
morning. As unpleasant as it was, though, and as rotten as I’m
feeling right now, I feel much better getting it out.

There’s something I want to
tell you. Something, actually, I’ve wanted to tell you for a
long time. But first, a digression: I notice, in my life, that the
greatest organizer of memories, the way I file and assign the events
of my existence into some sort of chronological order, is by
remembering how old, or what grade, Chris was at the time. It’s
odd, because I feel like I’m a constant in these memories, but
Chris is always changing, getting bigger and bigger. It’s like
a form of archaeology, dating my stories by the size of our son.

You are a constant too, with two
distinct states, pre- and post-accident. AM, PM; BC, AD. Wendy
Before, and Wendy After.

Anyway, it was late spring, almost
the end of the school year. Chris was in the seventh grade. I
attended some conference in downtown Chicago; I don’t even
remember what the conference was about, but I do know Christopher was
thirteen and it was the springtime. It was, in fact, unusually warm
in Chicago, and I got a sunburn on my face and arms when I walked
around the city one day because I was so used to it still being
winter at home and forgot to put on sunblock.

I think you remember Anne Vasquez.
Maybe she was still Anne Stedman at that point, I don’t recall
if she was married yet, or if she was still just engaged. I’m
pretty sure she was engaged to be married then. You met her at the
conference I took you to in Philadelphia, and maybe at another one
after that, and you would certainly remember her for the catty
nickname you made up for her, “Anne of the Rack,” because
she had a big chest.

Anne was at that Chicago conference
too. Springtime, Chris in seventh grade conference. She and I were
friends, you didn’t like that, you never liked that, and it
made me sad because I think you would have really liked her if you’d
ever had the chance to spend time with her. You rolled your eyes when
I told you she was going to be at that last one with us in Wisconsin,
and you sarcastically told me to have a nice time with Anne of the
Rack.

So, to continue the story of Chicago,
the story I need to tell you: the last night of the conference most
of the attendees from districts in Michigan met up to go out for
dinner. It was a big table, there was drinking, Anne was sitting next
to me. To be honest, as I was drinking, maybe I was glancing at the
rack a little bit. I think she noticed, and teased me about it.

We settled the bill and a handful of
us went to a bar. People were dancing. Not me, you know I’m not
a dancer, but Anne danced, she was having fun, I just stayed back and
watched her dance. That was good enough for me. But she kept bugging
me, she kept bugging me: “Come on, Neil, come here, come dance
with us, it’s fun!” and I had been drinking enough that I
thought, sure, I’ll dance, why not. So I did. I danced, and
Anne laughed at me for my stiff dancing, but it was fun.

Things were a little foggy by then,
but at some point, maybe it was closing time, the few of us who were
still standing made our way back to the hotel. I had the highest
floor of all our rooms (floor seventeen, how do I remember that?) and
everyone got off one by one, and I noticed when Anne didn’t get
off at her floor (twelve) but I didn’t say anything about it.
She stayed on, and when we got to my floor, just her and me, she got
off the elevator and walked with me to my room. I didn’t say
anything about that either.

We kissed in the room. We stood
there, barely staying up, we were swaying from drinking so much, and
we kissed. I had my hands on her hips, and she untucked my shirt. We
kissed, and one of us said “we shouldn’t” and the
other said “no, we shouldn’t,” but we kept kissing
for a while more, and my hands were inside her shirt, kind of, and
everywhere else, kind of. Time passed. Then one of us said “God,
we really can’t do this,” and the other said “you’re
right,” and she left the room and that was it.

The next morning at the hotel
breakfast, she sat down at my table, and when no one else was around
she said: “Bad, bad, bad, Neil. Never again.” I said,
“Never.” And that was all we ever said about it.

So, there it is. Springtime,
Christopher in seventh grade.

--Neil

CHAPTER TWENTY

My cell phone buzzes in my
pocket just
before one; I grab for it hoping it’s Chris,
hoping he’ll say we should go out on Tabby, and my spirits lift
when I see “TC REC CENTER” on the display.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Neil, it’s Janine.” Janine is one of the
coordinators for the basketball program. “Was your kiddo
planning to show up today?”

“Pardon me?”

“Chris is on the roster but no one here has seen him.”

I don’t speak.

“Neil?”

“I’m not sure….” I gather my thoughts. “You
know, I don’t know if you saw what’s going on with me,
the video—”

“I have. I’m really sorry.”

“Thank you. And Chris got some more news last night on top of
that.” I wonder, for a moment, if he’s been in an
accident, but stop the thought before it spirals into panic. “I’m
going to say he’s not going to make it tonight. I’m sorry
for the inconvenience.”

“Oh, no worry,” Janine says. “We’ll miss him!
The kids are going to miss him. He’s such a great guy.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Do me a favor, okay? If he
does show up, will you call and let me know?”

“You got it. Hey, good luck with everything, Neil.”

“Thanks.” I tap to end the call and rub the back of my
neck. I consider for a moment calling Pete Tran to ask if he’s
heard of any car crashes involving old Volvos, but I don’t.
Instead I dial the nursing home, and ask to be put through to Wendy’s
wing.

“Long Term Care, this is Linda,”

“Linda, it’s Neil Kazenzakis. Wendy’s husband. Is
Shanice there?”

“Sorry, Mr. K., it’s her day off today.”

“Oh. Has my son Christopher been over there?”

“You just missed him. He left maybe ten minutes ago.”

“Really? Did he seem…upset?”

“Not that I could tell. We chatted a little bit. He said he
wanted to say hi to his mom.”

“Thank you. If he comes back, will you call me?”

“Is something wrong, Mr. Kazenzakis?”

“Oh, no…we’re fine. I’ll catch up with him
soon.”

After I hang up, I dial Chris. The call goes right to his voicemail,
and I need to pause for a moment to think what to say.

“Chris, hey. Hey. I know you’re upset. Rec Center just
called, Janine said you hadn’t shown up. So don’t worry
about that. Just…be safe, okay? Don’t get mad and go
driving around all crazy or anything. Just come home when you’re
ready, and we can talk.”

I orbit the room, pacing, pacing, and make my way out onto the deck.
The air is not as cold as it was earlier, and the sky is a
crystalline, cloudless blue. I duck inside to grab a pair of shoes,
and head back out and over to the basketball court. Three balls rest
at the base of the basket on the end of the court closest to the
house. I pick one up and take a few clumsy shots, as if that will
somehow conjure my son, or induce him to come home.

Years ago, standing where
the basketball court is now, Dick Olsson had a red, metal-sided pole
barn. I never ever went in there as a kid when we were visiting, and
I still felt odd entering as an adult, even when I was invited. It
was Dick’s hideout, filled with several decades’ worth of
tools, guns, car parts, disabled tractors, assorted fittings,
snowblowers, expired jugs of herbicide and animal trophy mounts hung
in the rafters, staring with their dead glass eyes down on all the
detritus—along with the beatific gaze of Ronald Reagan from
over the workbench. After Dick’s heart attack, it fell on me to
clear the space of all his stuff, a job that ultimately took me three
and a half years. The roof needed repair, the sliding door didn’t
work, and we decided the best thing to do would be to clean out the
building and raze it to the ground.

After I’d taken away all of the obviously useful things like
tools and good lumber and stowed them in my garage, and his friends
had come to pick over everything else, I had an auctioneer come to
look over what was left. Drill presses, metal lathes, fifty-five
gallon drums and more were all carted away and sold downstate.

Still, this left me with a lot. I had the sanitary department deposit
a full-sized industrial dumpster outside in the grass, and I built up
my arms and strained my back throwing thirty-year old chrome car
bumpers and ripped up draftsman’s chairs in there. Wendy helped
too. We spent hours, it seemed, going through his things. Sometimes
Chris joined us to search for some new treasure; we just had to be
sure to check how potentially lethal any find might be before letting
him run off to play with it.

Some things couldn’t be just tossed. Practically, I could not
in good conscience discard seven pounds of gunpowder, twenty cases of
.45-caliber ammunition, or a three-foot sword. Sentimentally, I
certainly wasn’t going to pitch a lock of hair labeled as
coming from Dick’s mother, or the box I found of Dick’s
medals—including a purple heart—from his time in the
Marines. Those things went over to Carol.

I’d never even known Dick had been in the military. I’d
spent an awful lot of time with the man, building our house and doing
other things, but he just wasn’t the type to talk about his
past that way.

As I got the place cleared out, I found myself becoming oddly
attached to it. It seemed much larger inside with all the stuff gone;
there was a long, solid workbench, and a fridge if I wanted to come
have a beer in peace. The roof wouldn’t be too hard to fix, I
remember thinking. I started to feel the charms of the space, and
began to understand why Dick loved it so.

I was almost done with the job when Wendy had her accident, and I
didn’t go back in there for a while. I couldn’t. There
were other things to deal with at the time.

Chris is still not
home
by four in the afternoon. He hasn’t called either, and, despite
all efforts to keep myself calm, my worry has hardened into something
visceral I feel in the center of my body. It’s not like him to
keep me in the dark about where he is and where he’s going, and
not having this knowledge is disorienting. I’ve almost run my
phone dead from checking it so frequently, and now I have to keep
running into the spare bedroom where I have it plugged into the
charger cord next to the laptop.

If he’s gone much longer, I’ll move the cord to a more
convenient location.

I check the phone again, and no there’s no text waiting, no
missed call. I try Chris, and once again I go direct to voicemail. I
don’t leave a message, and I call Lauren right after.

“Hey,” she says. “Neil, about earlier, I’m
sorry, I was—”

“Stop. Chris is sort of missing. He’s not where he’s
supposed to be.”