Bright Before Us (4 page)

The children were tucked safely inside the classroom, waiting to go home, and still their parents had persisted.
Did Bridget see it? Did she in particular seem upset afterward?
They wanted to know what their child had said. They wanted to know if their child had been quiet or withdrawn on the way home. They wanted to know if their child had cried.
Did Mariana mention anything about my mother dying last year? Was Benjamin one of the ones that came and got you?

I told them,
These kids are tough, and smart, and they'll get through this. They will need your help. They will want to talk about it with you. Together, we can create a network of support.
But their questions continued. They didn't ask their children; they asked me. They asked me questions as though I were holding out on them. They asked me questions so that I would see how concerned they were. How angry they were. They asked me questions because they genuinely wanted the answers, yes,
but none of them asked what they truly wanted to know: How badly is this going to fuck
my
kid up?

My attempts at reassurance tacitly accused them of melodrama, my tone implying that all this clamor was an overreaction. But I was transparent, standing before them. My clothes were soaked; I didn't even have it together enough to carry an umbrella. The ink on my credential certificate wasn't dry. I was twenty-three years old—some of them were my parents' age—and I was being exposed as a fuck-up, a kid. I remember saying,
I'm sorry, but I really must use the restroom
, and being ignored.

In the end, though, they would have to accept my answers. They had no choice. They hadn't been there. So we continued this pained one-act until they realized that I had nothing else to say, then they tapered off, holding their kids' hands tight. Mrs. Stone stayed behind a moment, placing three fingers on my arm.

Mr. Mason,
she said,
go home and get some rest.

 

After everyone had gone, I walked back into the classroom and grasped the phone as though I were strangling it, shaking as I dialed my home number. Greta answered on the first ring—
You're still there?
she said—and I felt myself go inexplicably mute.

Frank?
Her voice sharpened.
Hello?

Greta,
I said.

I don't—I don't know,
I said stupidly.

There was a suicide at the beach,
I said.
The kids saw a girl jump from the bridge.

She said nothing.

Hello?
I said.

I'm here,
she said.
Are you alright?

Through the window I watched the cars pass, the fierce red glow of their brake lights irradiating the classroom.
I don't know,
I said again.

Her voice was stern as she said,
Come home
.

 

After we hung up I went outside and sat in my car for a while, thanking God for the weekend—a break to gauge the Sisyphean weight of what would come next. I realized I had never answered the parents' first and most primary question:
Where were you?

And where had I been? Close enough to pretend I had my eye on them, far away enough that I could miss something like that. I pressed my head against the steering wheel and mistakenly hit the horn, a sharp blast echoing down the side street. I didn't want to think, didn't want to experience anything except quiet: a white room, a soft landing. But all I could hear were the questions still to come.

I drove in silence, examining everything like it held an answer. At a stoplight on Fourteenth Street a bum walked a leashed cat; on Fulton sat an orange tweed armchair, abandoned on the sidewalk. The houses rubbed shoulders like people in an elevator, fog obscuring the edges of things, erasing what couldn't be seen in direct light.

I turned onto my old street and stopped in front of the house where I had once lived. It was a San Francisco house in the style of most San Francisco houses—tall and
narrow, pastel-colored, floors joined by a perilously steep staircase. Requisite bay windows on the first and second floors, one set stacked atop another; a pointed roof; sunken concrete leading into the garage. There was no car in the drive. The lights were off. The bush out front had grown wild. It was a habit of mine; when I felt nervous or unsettled or lost, this was an easy destination.

I let the engine idle and closed my eyes, exhausted. I could pull up the image—the most repellent, magnetic thing I had ever seen. And it was most definitely a
thing
, having ceased to be human. The basic form was there but had shifted, like a totaled car. The skin had split from the inside, like pavement after an earthquake. It was no longer the color of flesh but green-black as a crocodile, features swollen into a ballooned mask. The hair was mostly gone; what was left was discolored and bleached white apart from a few red-orange strands, splayed against the bug-addled sand. Wounds pocked the skin all over. The absent limbs hadn't been removed cleanly, the joints bore rip marks: some creature or rock or undertow had tugged until the arms and legs came free.

I left the car, headlights illuminating the walkway and porch. The next-door neighbor's lamp flickered on, a curtain moved. I knelt on the stoop, reaching toward the bush beside the porch, pulling the branches away. The minibar bottles glinted in the faint streetlamp glow. Their paper labels had corroded into pulp. I still had a key. I held it, my hand in my pocket.

I pressed my forehead and hands to the window on the front door and peered in. Mail lay strewn on the foyer floor. I fingered the key uncertainly. The lights in the fish
tank were on, visible in the living room beyond the entryway. I put a hand on the porch railing to steady myself. The parents would want deeper answers, would think of more questions over the weekend. The children, too, would need reassurances. There would be no more room for glossing, no more needlepoint phrases. I walked back down the steps, got into my car, and headed out of the city, toward home.

 

Greta was chewing a fingernail when I walked in. I glanced at the clock, forgetting the time even as I looked away.

We spoke two hours ago,
she said, her irritation a fungus growing over the words. She saw my smeared, reddened face and relented.
Frank,
she said.

I know,
I said.
I'm sorry.

I walked to the kitchen and retrieved our lone bottle of alcohol: spiced rum, kept above the refrigerator for the holidays. I fished some flat ginger ale out of the fridge and mixed the two in a coffee mug.

She followed me.
Will you tell me what happened?

I shook my head.

Please,
she said.

We were on the bridge, and we saw a woman jump,
I said. The refrigerator motor switched gears, the sound gnawing.
She went right over, no one could stop her.

Oh my God,
she said.

I downed the drink and poured another.

Our age,
I said.

Debt had aged us. We were in our early twenties and poor in a way that felt like being ground into a fine powder. We scouted out ATM machines that dispensed ten-dollar bills because we never had twenty in checking; we kept a ledger of what we owed Greta's Aunt Janine even as we borrowed more. Living in San Francisco would have been financially impossible, so after my graduation we had taken up residence in Vallejo, a dirty East Bay suburb on I-80: less a town than a series of half-liquidated strip malls. Greta found us a two-bedroom rental house that we couldn't afford but took anyway, and we set about destroying our credit. I thought that was what adults did: they bought bookshelves to fill, placed four chairs around a dining table though they never entertained. When we didn't make our loan payments for six months, we started parking our cars in a 7-Eleven lot to throw off the repo men. We never thought to sell one, to make a choice to live differently. If we couldn't afford a comfortable life, we wanted at least the semblance of one.

Though it was just the two of us, the space was never enough. Even with the extra bedroom, our possessions choked the house. To move about, one had to turn sideways or lift a leg over something. And our sloppiness made it feel smaller: tiny stains hovered above the stove—tomato sauce stirred too vigorously and never wiped—and striated dirt caked the place where the wall met the floor. Greta dug up prizes from thrift stores and antique markets. To me, age didn't improve status—it had been junk in '65 and would be junk a hundred years hence. But here was a bust of a girl, chin in hand; there was an orange piece of banded
china. These items were showcased around our house as though pride of place overrode worthlessness.

The two bedrooms lay at opposite ends of the hall. Our bedroom, though the smaller of the two, received plenty of sun. The other bedroom had trees outside both windows and stayed dark and cool even in the summer. When the shades were up, light filtered across the wood floor. It was peaceful, serene.
This room is perfect,
Greta had said as we unpacked,
for the nursery—

I remember the phone rang as she spoke, and before she finished her sentence I had run, relieved, to answer it.

 

And despite all of that—all the sharp words, the household annoyances, the moments when our mutual disgust sat up and made itself apparent like an intrusive houseguest—I loved her. Greta was my first girlfriend, my first sex. Being around her was like being in a warm bath. She made me laugh; she left me alone most of the time; she was smart, kind, and uncomplicated; she didn't begrudge anyone's happiness except her own. In the beginning, I often looked at her with a feeling I couldn't quite identify—a feeling like she needed my protection, like I should bear our burdens for her, like I should be the one to guide us. I thought at the time that this was kindness. I understand now that the name for what I've just described is condescension.

It was never that I didn't love her. It was that I loved her, from the beginning, incorrectly; the motives were wrong, rooted in politeness, comfortable companionship, inequality. It was that I loved her wrong and she let me. She erected no limits. She might bite back, but her innermost impulse was to forgive. Those who are weak, as Greta was
weak—and I say this with no malice, only honesty—are like tests to people like me; I often wondered if she solicited my cruelty to know what sort of man I was. I suppose I showed her.

She told me once, not long after we were married,
I know this isn't what you wanted from your life.
She searched my eyes.
You can tell me. I want you to tell me, so I know we're always honest with each other.

I told her what she already knew: that things had turned out so differently than I had planned. That we had never planned anything, really.

She turned to the wall beside our bed and sobbed. In the morning, she woke, dressed, and made pancakes and bacon.
Good morning,
she said at the table, smiling, her eyes like pink pillows.

From the moment we met, she had extended an unknowing invitation to hurt her. In a shorter time than I would like to admit, it became a challenge not to accept.

The metronome mercifully off, I cleared my throat.
I don't think I can go today,
I said.

Of course not,
she said.

Despite her words, I could feel her disappointment, the sting of this new indignity—we got so few weekends together; we had planned to soak up the outdoors now that it had finally stopped clogging our gutters with leaves. I had even said the words—
I promise
—and now I was canceling. And why? To deal with a tragedy, yes. But one I had at least partially invented.