And this was largely how things went. He earned straight A’s through high school, except for the B he received intentionally in his senior English class so that he wouldn’t have to go onstage at graduation to give the valedictorian’s speech. He kept to himself, ignoring as best he could the taunts and the giggles and the whispers—which, he knew, would still continue today in certain quarters if he were ever to return home. His adolescence was marked by the pain of isolation and shame, and he wondered now, tossing the darts again and again, waiting to see if the lights would come back on, whether what he had done in that blue bathroom so long ago was actually all that unusual or bad. He had no knowledge of sex, really, other than his private imaginings and the occasional glimpses over the years of Helen in the nude—and the wedding night, the harrowing wedding night, there was that—but it seemed to him that many fourteen-year-old boys would have reacted in the same way to the discovery of Ellen Murchison’s undergarments. He wondered if Ellen Murchison had ever thought of this. According to the last report he had received from his mother on “the Murchison girl,” she had married an architect directly out of college and moved to Boston. Did she ever remember the incident in the bathroom, and, remembering, did she think to herself how it wasn’t that serious a crime for
a young boy to commit, and feel her own sense of guilt and shame at what she’d done to him? Did it occur to her, all these years later, that she could simply have lowered her eyes and closed the door and walked quietly away?
It wasn’t that he’d never gotten over it—he had, of course, eventually. He had moved away and he had made a career for himself and a life, such as it was, for himself and Helen. But in thinking about that day now and how vividly it had always been impressed upon his memory, his imagination, he began to wonder—rather uncharacteristically, because Brice Habersham didn’t much go in for idle speculation—whether almost everything he had done afterward could be traced back to that one point, to that terrible embarrassment and how he reacted so strongly against it, vowing never to let it happen again. For instance, there was the decision in college to take up criminal justice, which he pursued with a zeal that often wore out both peers and professors. Here was the extensive set of rules to guide behavior, here was the painstaking attempt to define the nature of wrongdoing, an area of study Brice Habersham could sink his teeth into. There was no wild youth, no period of experimentation—rather, there was strict regimentation. He looked only to the future, and his future was secure.
He was settled both financially and professionally, already an agent in the relatively new Drug Enforcement Administration when, just before turning thirty, he met Helen McSweeney. She was a clerk in a department store in Chicago, working in the area of home furnishings. Brice Habersham had recently bought a home in the expanding suburbs, in order to gain more space away from his neighbors than he could have in his downtown apartment. It was summer, and he was enjoying
the upkeep of his neatly trimmed lawn during his hours away from work, but it occurred to him one day that the house’s interior was threadbare. It was to Helen McSweeney that he applied for help.
She showed him blenders and microwave ovens and silver-ware, dinette sets and sofas, bed frames and draperies. Most of what she suggested, he purchased. She was not friendly, but neither was she impolite. The same age as Brice Habersham, he would later learn, she was not pretty, but neither was she unattractive—straight brown hair very neatly cut, a thin, rather nervous body, a plain face with regular features, tiny hands and feet. She didn’t look like the love of anyone’s life. Maybe, in some way, it was the setting. Brice Habersham watched her move through the simulated environment of a home. She was dour and solemn and timid and somehow sad, and that also helped. She struck him as someone who would not judge his careful ways harshly.
He kept returning—buying napkins, steak knives, a lamp. On his fourth visit he lowered his head and smiled rather shyly and asked her to dinner. Six months later they were married in a Catholic church on the north side, her father wearing a Cubs cap to the ceremony. For the honeymoon, they rented a bungalow on the Outer Banks. It was early spring, and the weather was not in a mood to cooperate. A nasty squall blew up from the gray ocean, slashing the windows with rain. They went to bed early. Helen wore a plain yellow gown that reached to her ankles. She lay on her back with her arms at her sides. Brice Habersham kissed her and received no real response, and, not knowing what to do, finally lifted her gown carefully and ran his hands over her small, soft breasts. There was nothing from
Helen but her heartbeat and her breathing. Soon he became agitated, and began prodding at her awkwardly, his fingers in the strange curly hair of her pubic area. Helen’s mouth began to emit an odd sound—it did not seem to come from Helen herself, the Helen he knew—a gurgled kind of whistling, and for a few moments Brice Habersham mistook this noise as a sign of pleasure.
Then came the most terrifying minutes of his life. Brice Habersham had walked into rooms with armed men who would have killed him if they thought they had the chance, but there had always been a way to analyze the possibilities and outcomes of these confrontations, to place himself at a calculated advantage beforehand—he was known in the agency for his ability to defuse potential violence. His work required courage and skill, but it was a courage and skill that could not help him with Helen. The whistling sound became a piercing scream reminiscent of Ellen Murchison’s, and Helen’s tiny hands clutched his own with such ferocity that he thought his bones were cracking. Suddenly she was standing over the bed, a looming silhouette in the window frame, spewing language so foul that he felt it could not be directed at him, mild-mannered Brice Habersham, and could not come from the woman he knew, his quiet wife, Helen. He was a fucking this and a goddamn bastard that and a cocksucking so and so if he thought that she would ever let him touch her, if he thought she would ever let him put his disgusting penis in her cunt. Brice Habersham lay motionless on his side throughout, crying hard with his eyes shut tight, until Helen locked herself in the bathroom, where he heard her weeping on the floor. He did not try to go to her. After a while, for some reason, maybe to
comfort himself, he masturbated, and then he felt ashamed.
In the early morning hours he woke from awful dreams to find Helen back in the bed with him, slowly rubbing his bruised hand. She was sorry. She hadn’t meant the things she’d said, but he should never have married her. She was not what he thought she was. She had pretended to be someone else. Really, she was a pathetic woman in love with a man named Nolan Bridges, the supervisor of the men’s clothing department at the store where she had worked. Nolan Bridges had swept her off her feet, he was handsome and charming, but he was not a good man, he had cheated on his wife and made Helen promises and taken advantage of her and then dumped her with no more feeling than he would have had for a discarded pair of shoes. She was glad that she was married to a good man now—but he would have to give her time.
At this moment, at precisely 11:32 p.m. according to Brice Habersham’s wristwatch, on a Thursday night in June in the year 2007, looking around the bar at the suspects all reassembled, all the poor characters in the drama, the ones who would have to be arrested, who would have to be shamed for their transgressions, and feeling so low that it was as if the monster stenciled on the back of his own shirt were trying to swallow him, he had given Helen nearly half his life, over twenty-seven years.
One Last Dart in Hand
Russell Harmon sat alone
in his truck cab, looking at the photograph of the little girl. No matter how he angled it under the dome light, it was still his own face looking back at him.
Kelly Ashton had gone back into the bar to “give him a minute to himself,” but how he was expected to use this minute remained unclear. His brain seemed to him a little bit numb, even more so than usual. He could do a line of coke, he supposed, but he couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for it all of a sudden. He supposed that, having just fucked Kelly Ashton, having just discussed the possibility of cohabiting with her—
tell me
that
story, Russell
—having just found out that he was the father of her child, it was best to go back in the bar and try to think of something to say.
There was a distinctly new feel to the air outside, an atmospheric shift following the storm, but whether it was warmer or colder Russell couldn’t tell. His body seemed to have undergone a temperature change, as if he were connected to another
beating heart—tucked away in the wallet in the pocket of his shorts now—that either warmed him or cooled him, he didn’t know which. He even
looked
different to himself. His large feet in the Birkenstock sandals, for instance, looked strangely like an alien’s. As he walked through the open door of the 321 the first person he saw was Tristan Mackey, who Kelly Ashton had slept with just recently, who had invited Kelly Ashton out tonight for reasons that escaped Russell, who sat now all by himself listening to the open mike guy strum his guitar, some sort of crazy music that didn’t sound like music at all. The candles were still out. The lights hadn’t come back on. He should have known that from the darkness on the street, but he hadn’t paid any attention. He went to the bar and ordered a beer from Bill. He headed toward the back, and the first two people he passed were his own father and Vince Thompson’s. As usual, his father refused to acknowledge him. Russell noted the ridiculous muscle shirt, the outdated feathered hair, and he felt a little embarrassed. Other than that, what struck him most was that his father’s face was very much the same as the face in the photograph. Then as he came nearer the dartboard there was Vince Thompson himself, a cartoon version of Vince Thompson sporting a puffed-up, discolored eye and dried blood on his face and a lump on the side of his head, glaring steadily not at Russell but at his father, or at Russell’s father, Russell couldn’t tell. And there was Kelly Ashton, sipping a glass of red wine and talking on her cell phone. Russell tried to smile, more or less how he thought he was supposed to—but how was he supposed to, under the circumstances? What kind of smile did the occasion call for? And there was Brice Habersham, looking at Russell from over by the dartboard. He was still here.
And there was Matt, sitting at a table with a pitcher of beer, grinning at him conspiratorially, knowing he had left the bar with Kelly Ashton. Reliable old Matt. Something about looking at Matt now made Russell Harmon want to cry, but he hadn’t cried in such a long time that he wasn’t sure he could remember how to get started.
Once, when they were maybe twelve or thirteen or fourteen or so he and Matt had ridden their bikes down to City Beach on a summer day. They had just quit the baseball team so they would have more time to look at girls, and City Beach was the place to do that. All of the girls were junior-high or high-school age, lying around on towels, applying sunscreen. Russell and Matt dropped their bikes in the grass and sauntered a bit self-consciously toward the beach hut, where you could buy hot dogs and sno-cones and soft ice cream. They stood digging through their shorts to figure out how much money they had between them when Russell’s father came strolling out of the hut, wearing nothing but a Speedo and a thick gold chain around his neck, checking out all the young girls lying in the grass and peering down toward the sand and the water to make sure he wasn’t missing any. He didn’t see Russell and Matt until he was right next to them. A hitch in his step, just for a moment. “Boys,” he said, nodding, and walked on past while Russell tried to record the sound of his voice, so that he could recognize it if he ever heard it again, upon answering the telephone, for instance, maybe. His father’s retreating thirty-something-year-old ass sagged a little bit sadly in the Speedo despite all the hours in the gym, and Russell knew who he was, knew what he was supposed to mean, watching him walk off like he had a number of times before, always seeing him from behind, it
seemed, feeling a kind of rolling in his gut, and Russell turned his attention back to counting the change because he didn’t know what else to do, only to find that Matt was gone. Russell found him around the corner of the beach hut by the men’s restroom, sitting there on the concrete, bawling like a baby. That was the kind of friend Matt had been for all these years, the kind of friend who would do your crying for you, if necessary. He would be the first person Russell would tell.
But not now. Right now Russell Harmon couldn’t tell anybody anything. It was as if he’d walked through a revolving door and was now busy holding it shut behind him, so that he could see and almost hear people trying to get in but no one could, not Vince Thompson, who might be trying to murder him and who he’d been so scared of half an hour before, not his own father, who didn’t seem to matter much, not Brice Habersham and the dart match, not even Kelly Ashton. He was behind some sort of glass door that separated him from the world where other people moved, alone with the picture he carried in his wallet, which seemed to absorb all his attention even though he couldn’t see it anymore and didn’t know what to think about it or how it made him feel.
Brice Habersham approached him. “You ready?”
“For what?” Russell said.
Brice Habersham looked confused, rotating the darts in his hand, the flights clacking. “Our dart match?” he said.
“It’s dark,” Russell said.
Brice Habersham looked over at the dartboard. “We could scoot those tables closer,” he said. “There’s light enough with the candles.”
What a strange man Brice Habersham was, thinking about
darts at a moment like this. Why was it so important to him? Hadn’t he said he needed to go home? Didn’t he know that Russell Harmon had responsibilities? For God’s sake, the proof was right here in his wallet, a three-by-five glossy of a little person with his own face and hair. Russell sighed. “Give me a sec,” he said, and he sat down next to Kelly Ashton, who was still talking on the phone—
But how do you know she’s asleep, Mother? All I’m saying is would you please go back and check . . . Mom, you’re smoking in the house, aren’t you? You’re
smoking.
Yes you are. That’s why you won’t go back there. Put out the cigarette and go check. You’re
drunk.
Yes you are. All I’m saying is go check on Hayley.