A Density of Souls (6 page)

“It wasn’t stupid,” she answered, her gaze moving back to the river.

“It was something . . . else.”

She heard Greg let out a snort. When she finally worked up the nerve to look at him again, she saw that he was crying.

Hours later, Meredith was unable to fall asleep. Eventually, she kicked the covers to the floor. She got out of bed and crawled silently downstairs to her mother’s liquor cabinet, which was routinely unlocked.

She was about to pour herself a glass of Stoli when she decided to take the bottle and the glass upstairs with her.

Meredith knew why she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t forget the moment when Greg began to cry. She downed half a glass, wincing as the vodka burned a path through her throat. Her skin felt warmer, her feet lighter. At her desk, she opened her Biology notebook to a section of blank pages. If the memory of Greg’s weeping was plaguing her so much, maybe there was a way to rid it from her system.

She wrote. The words flowed almost effortlessly. She grew frustrated with how much her hand could not keep up with her thoughts, the specific details—Greg with his muscular shoulders hunched, head bowed, face contorted with anger at his own tears. She found herself describing the river behind him. Meredith paused; she felt dizzy. The spiral notebook originally intended for Biology would become her journal. By day, it would rest under her bed next to the bottles of Stoli she would begin to swipe from the liquor cabinet.

By three A.M., Meredith had filled three pages. By the fourth page, she found herself writing Greg Darby a letter she would never give him.

I don’t want the responsibility of you. Because some day something’s going to tear open that hole I pierced last night—like two fingers The Falling Impossible

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gouging through a tiny slit in paper and wiggling until they tear the entire paper in half. And when that happens, Greg, you’re going to fall through. And the chances are you’ll try to take someone with you. And if that someone isn’t me, if you try to take other people into the fucked-up madness that you’re trying to coat with muscles, then I’ll rush to save them before I even think about you.

5

T
o Carolyn Traulain’s quiet pleasure, Stephen made it to audi-tions for the first musical of the Cannon Drama Club season. She cast him in the role of the tenor in The Mikado. The theatre budget being absurdly small, she staged the elaborate musical as a concert version with three microphones across the front of the stage and cast members dressed in coat and tie and evening gown. The four performances were poorly attended, but Saturday night’s closing performance gar-nered the best crowd—twenty parents and friends in an auditorium that seated three hundred. In the front row, Monica realized she had had no idea her son could even sing.

In the back row, Meredith watched the performance, after lying to Kate and Greg that she was having her period and didn’t feel like sneaking into Fat Harry’s with Kate’s sister’s expired ID.

In the wake of David Carter’s altercation with Carolyn, he and his wife broke tradition and did not attend any of the performances.

After the performance, Monica tried not to cry as she handed her son a bouquet of white roses. Stephen opened the card, which read

“I’m very proud of you and I’d like to take you to Rome this summer so you can see some Michelangelos.”

Meredith did not go backstage. She snuck out during the curtain call.

Their freshman year, Greg Darby and Brandon Charbonnet were members of an accomplished football team that nearly won the state championship before losing to the Thibodaux Boilers. Coach Stubin often compared Brandon—his best defensive tackle—to Brandon’s older brother, Jordan, who was, he declared, “the best wide receiver The Falling Impossible

41

I’ve ever seen.” Meredith cheered them on with a dedication that was as emphatic as it was hollow. Jeff Haugh was elected cocaptain for next season’s team; he had given up the theatrical ambitions that his parents, friends, and coach had all found so puzzling, and he had played without distraction. Still, he did not want the position and in the ballot he had not voted for himself.

In January, the school receptionist finally noticed the absence of Jordan Charbonnet’s picture outside the headmaster’s office. The headmaster eventually dismissed it as a student prank, and he told his secretary to put any of the Charbonnets right through if they called to inquire about the missing picture. They never did.

By March, Meredith Ducote was downing a bottle of Stolichnaya a week. It helped her vomit after lunch. Trish Ducote had fired two housekeepers over the missing bottles. Meredith’s secret notebook was half-full.

Greg decided not to go out for basketball. Brandon did, causing Greg to quickly reverse his decision. To Meredith’s delight and the boys’ shared fury, Brandon and Greg warmed the bench all year, neither of them having the skill necessary to move the ball with grace and panache.

Brandon ended up passing David Carter’s freshman English class with a D-minus. He was the first and last student David Carter ever let pass with such a grade. The thought of having to teach Brandon for another year quelled any delight David would have taken in failing him. Stephen made honor roll with straight As, except for a B in Alge-bra, a course he hated. Meredith finished her freshman year with four Cs and a B, out of deference to Greg and Brandon. Kate’s mediocre grades reflected the fact that she had routinely copied Meredith’s work in the three classes they had together, and that Meredith had decided to answer many multiple choice questions incorrectly because she felt it would not be right for Kate to get As. Greg had lied to Brandon about his own “even Cs” and Meredith found out that he had actually earned two As and three B-minuses. She never asked him about it, but after several glasses of vodka late at night she dedicated a journal entry to detailing the scenario of telling Brandon that Greg had deceived him.

In early May, Stephen heard from Carolyn Traulain. Her cancer had recurred. He asked her what that meant. She would not tell him so he would not cry.

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A Density of Souls

They sat alone in her office for several empty, quiet moments before Carolyn said anything more. She told him she wanted to enhance the profile of the Cannon Drama Club: They could raise money through bake sales, schedule regular meetings, and name a chairperson—him.

When Stephen jumped up to embrace her, Carolyn believed that for an instant she could feel the lump the ultrasound had discovered in one of her lymph nodes.

As he left her on that day—the last day of his freshman year—Stephen walked numbly past Jeff Haugh in the English Hallway. Jeff nodded to him and mumbled a “hey” as he passed. Stephen didn’t notice.

By the middle of June, the time of the year when two years earlier four children would have been riding their bikes to Lafayette Cemetery and chanting rhymes in the rain, Stephen and Monica left for Rome, Brandon was relieved of his position as a runner in his father’s law firm for calling one of the senior partners “an asshole”, and Greg and Meredith decided to have sex.

Greg parked his father’s Bronco several yards from the lone street lamp illuminating the muddy bank of the lagoon in City Park, and turned to grab Meredith. He cocked his head toward the rear of the car. “More space in the backseat,” he said. She knew he was proud to have been considerate enough not to lose his virginity in his own room, which was right next to the Power Rangers-studded bedroom of his seven-year-old brother, Alex. Greg loved Alex hugely and dumbly, Meredith knew, and he probably treated him with more tenderness than he was exhibiting with her now, as he parted her clothes and her legs, pressing himself against her prone body, before shoving himself all the way in.

Fire lit the base of Meredith’s spine. She bit her lip. Greg mistook it for arousal.

She waited for the pain to subside, the way she had been told it would. It didn’t. He held her breasts as if they were handlebars and rode her as if her vagina was his own fist. Meredith tried to tell herself not to feel disappointed after he finished, dressed hastily, and kicked open the back door, letting in the sticky night air, which played over her body as she lay pressed to the leather. The drone of cicadas wafted into the car. After this night, Meredith would always associate the buzz The Falling Impossible

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of insects with the feeling of sudden, flushed exposure. Greg had not even bothered to remove all of her clothes.

“Did it hurt?” he asked her, standing several feet away from the open door and smoking a cigarette from a pack he and Brandon had shoplifted earlier that evening.

“No,” Meredith lied.

He nodded, without looking at her. “We gotta go to Brandon’s,” he said, dropping the cigarette in a flutter of sparks.

Brandon’s parents had flown up to New Jersey to visit his older brother Jordan, who has just completed his freshman year at Princeton, and was threatening not to come home for the summer, mentioned taking some time off—which spurred Elise and Roger Charbonnet to book themselves on the first available flight.

When Greg and Meredith arrived, Brandon had already set out three bottles of Tanqueray he’d retrieved from his parents’ liquor cabinet. Brandishing a Gatorade bottle, Brandon let his gaze drift from Meredith to Greg, who was standing behind her. Meredith felt a hot blush cross her cheeks before her neck stiffened and her hands curled into fists.

A smile broke across Brandon’s face. He knew.

He laughed and leaned against the kitchen counter, surveying the two of them as if sex might have lengthened their limbs. He picked up a Gatorade and gin off the counter and extended it toward Meredith.

“Congrats, Mer!” he said, laughing.

She took it. Greg stepped from behind her and Brandon shot one arm around his shoulders and wrestled him into a headlock. Greg let out a grunt muffled against Brandon’s chest. Meredith looked from the green-tinted drink to Brandon, whose face leered like a child’s, his tongue poking from between his teeth. He drove the knuckles of one fist into Greg’s scalp.

“Dude! Stop!” Greg spat. Brandon was threatening to bring Greg to the linoleum floor.

Meredith watched in rigid silence as Brandon spun Greg around by his neck. Brandon’s laughter was growing more high pitched as the other boy struggled. Their tussle had turned into a mad dance of flailing arms and stumbling feet. It was the first time she had seen anger, envy, and joy so confused.

She brought the plastic cup to her mouth. The first slug tasted foul, but she drained the entire cup and felt the veins in her neck constrict 44

A Density of Souls

her burning throat. Brandon finally hurled his friend to the kitchen floor. Greg landed on his back, both hands going up to block any possible blows. Greg’s smile was weak and defeated.

“You dog, man. You’re a fucking dog, Darby!” Brandon shouted.

He pivoted and faced Meredith, looking her up and down the way he and Greg had done on the first day of the school year.

“Am I any different?” she asked, with gin-induced bravery. She managed a sarcastic smile.

Greg lifted himself off the floor with one hand clenching the edge of the counter.

“Naw, you look pretty much the same. Course, if you were naked maybe I’d be able to—”

“Brandon, man! Shut up!” Greg groaned between guffaws.

Meredith and Brandon locked eyes, but Greg didn’t notice. She often directed the same glare at Greg, but he had met it with only bafflement. Brandon, on the other hand, gazed back at her evenly.

Greg moved into the adjacent living room and flopped down on the sofa beneath a photograph of Jordan, a Gothic building with naked vines behind him. Jordan looked like his brother, but a larger more perfect version executed by a master sculptor who had known better than to give Jordan the sharp angularity of Brandon’s rigid features.

“You’re happy for him?” Meredith whispered to Brandon.

Greg switched on the television and flipped through the channels.

He had lost his virginity and wrestled his best friend—plenty of accomplishment for one night.

“What’s up with you, Meredith?” Brandon asked softly.

“You’re relieved, aren’t you?” Meredith said.

His dark, narrow eyes slanted with suspicion.

He’s afraid of me, she thought. He snorted and followed Greg’s path to the living room. He sat next to Greg, who was intently watching the big-screen image of a car flying through a bridge guardrail in a shower of sparks. Meredith poured herself another drink.

“Brandon?” she called.

“What?” he barked back.

“You’re not supposed to mix alcohol and Gatorade. Gatorade’s got electrolytes in it and it puts the alcohol right in your bloodstream . . .”

“That’s the idea . . .”

He lowered his voice, finishing to Greg, “. . . you stupid bitch.”

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Greg exploded into laughter and cocked his head toward the kitchen with a mischievous grin.

Later that night, she wrote in her journal what she had wanted to tell Greg when he smiled at her so wildly. Drunk, she had to tense her entire shoulder to keep the pen against the page.

I know more of your whispers than you think I do. And sometimes I think both of you would do to me what you did to Stephen. But instead, you both kept me. That’s really why you wanted to do it, isn’t it, Greg? Not because you like my body. But maybe because the only way to keep me from being a link to the past, a link to what you want to forget, is to fuck me. Am I different now? I think so. One time, a time that seems so long ago but really isn’t, I was one child among four. Now I’m owned by two.

6

D
uring his first days in Rome, Stephen seemed intoxicated.

Monica watched with pleasure as the city’s Baroque beauty caught him by surprise, transforming his jet lag into gleeful delirium. Monica had booked the penthouse suite of the Hotel Hassler. Situated five stories above the Spanish Steps, their suite’s plate glass windows offered a spectacular view of the Roman skyline more believable on a postcard.