Imagine Me Gone (12 page)

In the Royal Signal Corps, I met Peter Lorian, and when our compulsory service was done we got an apartment in Chelsea together with two other friends and started having our parties. Where a few years later Margaret appeared. In her green satin dress and long dark hair, tall and slender. No woman had ever looked at me as directly as she did. I couldn’t stop trying to charm her because I wanted her to keep looking. And she kept blushing at my attempts, but laughing too, which made the difference, because then I could keep going, and we could acknowledge the game for what it was, and forgive each other for playing. It’s what let us fall in love. That we could laugh together.

These bits of poetry float back to me again now, and they still measure time, but cruelly.

It’s no use resisting this heat. My shirt is soaked, the sweat has seeped into my shoes. But I mind it less. There’s nothing of my person to protect anymore. The simplicity of this is a great relief. An empty stomach and throbbing temples are no more personal than a bank of thriving weeds, or the mirage of asphalt melting in the distance along the bridge. Such distinctions are made of tension, and the tension is melting. Why fight? The inanimate world has such unimpeachable wisdom: no thought.

“Where in Christ were you? It’s three o’clock.” Margaret’s stricken voice comes at me across the front lawn before I even reach the walk. “I just drove all the way out to the restaurant to pick up Celia and the manager tells me she didn’t show up today. No sign of her. None. Are you listening? I’ve had it. You understand? You need to get in the car and go over there to the Schefers’. That’s where she’ll be, with that Jason.”

I suggest maybe she’s at the track. Margaret explodes, shouting that school has been out three weeks! There is no practice! Arguing is pointless. Her anger spreads in too many directions, and I am the root of it. She has lost me already. But she refuses to know this, and the refusal drives her mad. It galls her that I gave us so many years and so much life together unmenaced, and then simply no longer could. Before, she had a choice. To break it off or go forward. Now she has none, any more than the children do. I don’t even provide money enough for food and clothing. They’re put on credit cards.

“I’ll go,” I say. “Give me the keys, and I’ll go.”

Mrs. Schefer lives on Raymond Street, up behind the post office. Her house is one of those split-level Colonials with brown siding and a garage cut into the hillside. A circle of large white pines blocks out most of the sunlight. A girl of ten or eleven answers the door and says that her mother is not there. I tell her I’m looking for Celia and she says she hasn’t seen her, and that her brother is out as well. There is a television on in the background. The girl has peanut butter smudged at the corners of her lips. “Celia’s pretty,” she says. “Are you her dad?” I am, I tell her, and ask if she knows where her brother might be. She has no idea but says he sometimes stays with their father on the other side of town. It strikes me as negligent to leave a child this age on her own, but who am I to judge?

It’s not because Celia missed or skipped work that Margaret wants me to find her. It’s because of Chris Weller. A few months ago, when I was deep in the fog, we were woken one night well after midnight by shouting in the front yard. A boy, clearly drunk, was yelling up at Celia’s window, “Give me back the fucking ring, give me back the fucking necklace.” Then he started knocking loudly on the front door. He was waking the whole neighborhood. Margaret shot out of bed and went to the window. Celia came running into our room. “Get up!” Margaret yelled at me. “For God’s sake, get up!” I swung my stone legs to the floor and pushed with my arms to bring myself to my feet. “What the hell is going on?” Margaret demanded of Celia. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, failing to hold back tears. I’d never seen her so terror-stricken. “You need to go down there,” Margaret said to me. “Go out there and tell that idiot he needs to be quiet and he needs to leave.”

I stood there mute in front of the two of them as they waited for my response. The boy kept hammering at the door. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go down those stairs and cope with it. It was as if the boy’s fist were hitting my chest and it was all I could do to stay upright. My wife and daughter gaped at me, appalled. “The police,” Celia said desperately, “we can call the police.” Margaret told her not to be ridiculous, that it would cause a scene; we weren’t going to have flashing police lights in front of our house in the middle of the night. “Where’s the jewelry?” she said. “Do you have it?”

Celia stopped crying then and went stony-faced. I saw the change happen. It took only an instant. She turned from us and left the room. Margaret and I followed, standing on the upstairs landing as she went into her bedroom and put on a pair of trousers, and then walked down the stairs on her own, to open the front door and confront that raging boy. As if we weren’t even home.

That was the last of Chris Weller. But not of Celia’s dating. Now there is Jason, with whom Margaret thinks she’s using drugs of some sort. Apparently when she comes home late her eyes are bloodshot and she doesn’t want to speak with her mother.

The little girl told me the name of the street her father lived on, where Jason might be, and she said the house was white, but that doesn’t narrow it down. There are no people out in their yards to ask. Stopped at an intersection, I see someone who I think might be Jason glide past in an old gray Audi, and follow him around the corner to another split-level Colonial with an unused flagpole mounted over the front door. He notices me pulling up behind him. I was expecting a lout like Weller, one of those oversize American high schoolers. But this boy’s face is more blurry than aggressive, his cheeks covered in an adolescent attempt at a beard and his brown curls flopping over his forehead. “Oh, hi,” he says, to my surprise, for I have no recollection of ever having met him. When I tell him I’m looking for Celia, he says he dropped her at the track, and from his hapless eyes I can tell that he is adrift, afraid he’s been caught at something but unable to focus sufficiently to defend himself. He isn’t Celia’s equal. He doesn’t have her will. Whatever she’s doing, it isn’t at his bidding. He asks if something is the matter, if there is some kind of emergency, and I want to say, What business would it be of yours? But I can hear the concern in his voice, and I realize he spends more time with my daughter than I do. Margaret wants me to interrogate him, to find out what they get up to. But it’s too late for that. All of that is far away. It’s Celia I need to see.

I find her at the track, running sprints along the straightaways in front of the empty bleachers. It’s even hotter now than at midday, the afternoon haze pressing against the field. I open the gate and step onto the oval. She’s wearing shorts, a sleeveless shirt, and a bandanna round her forehead. She’s running away from me, and so doesn’t see me at first. When she comes to the end of her sprint, she pulls up and rests her hands high on her waist, leaning her head back and heaving for breath. I’m past the goalpost and well onto the field by the time she notices me at a distance of fifty yards or so. She bends forward, palms to her knees, still huffing.

Neither of her brothers is the least athletic, but Celia’s played on teams since grade school: softball, field hockey in Britain, volleyball, track. She’s kept it up through both our moves. For years, there has always been a practice to drop her at or pick her up from.

She jogs back down to the starting line as I approach, staying focused. I watch as she crouches into position, raises her knee, and then leaps into the lane again, arms swinging, chest forward and head back, shooting past me and over the finish line, jogging from there around the bend before turning once more to walk back to the start. Her breath’s still rapid when she reaches the steps of the bleachers where I’m standing. Every inch of her skin runs with sweat and her face pulses red.

“I told Mom I didn’t need to be picked up from work. She’s checking on me.”

She takes a towel from her knapsack and wipes her forehead. It’s no surprise that boys are attracted to her. There’s a precision to her good looks, a fierceness even. That, and the way she carries herself, with a confidence bordering on aloofness. Which I suppose she got from me. An earlier me. And what do I do now? I steal her confidence back, day by day, cheating her of steadiness and care. Of the three of them, she sees me most clearly, which makes it harder for her because she isn’t protected by distraction. Michael has never been able to bear the tension, so he disappears into other worlds. And Alec is too young to conceive of the situation independent of himself. But Celia’s ways of coping are already the adult ones: discipline, drinking, the search for someone else to love her.

She’s explaining why she didn’t go to work, and how irritating it is that her mother is monitoring her, but none of it matters and I don’t really listen. Which of course she notices, getting more irritated still. Once she’s gathered up her things, we walk together across the field.

Being beside her, close enough to sense the heat flowing from her body, I’m momentarily astonished at her existence—this child of mine. How narrowly we all avoid having never been. Yet even if the knife of chance did happen to cut her into being, I have the passing terror that it isn’t so simple, that in these ultimate matters time is collapsed into a single moment in which you are forever in danger of having the knife tilt the other way, as though, if I am not careful between here and the parking lot, I might go astray and she will be canceled, stolen back by not-being, like a thief grabbing her through an open window. But we make it to the car, and she tosses her bag over her shoulder into the backseat and puts her feet up on the dashboard.

I take us along Green Street past the dense thicket of the nature preserve. When I miss the turn toward the house, she asks where we are going, and I mumble something about the other route, carrying on under the rusting railroad bridge. We drive on in silence for a while, the motion of the air through the open windows offering some relief from the heat.

“How come you don’t have to be anywhere?” Celia asks. “Do you still work for that company?”

There are only woods now on either side of us. The evergreens are thick and the shade between them dark. It is a long, straight stretch and there is something mesmerizing about the lines of the trees reaching out toward each other in the middle distance. She is thinking of Roger Taylor’s firm. He is the one I had to ask for a job when we moved back. I had helped him start his consulting company a decade earlier. He gave me an office and a salary. And it lasted those eighteen months before he politely suggested it might make more sense for me to go part-time, which turned out to mean occasional projects, and eventually none. Margaret says he is ungrateful. The ending of it is so small to me, next to the defeat of leaving Britain in the way I did, that I have trouble thinking about it much.

“Did you hear what I asked?”

“I don’t work there anymore. The fact is, I’ve let you down. All of you.”

“You just missed the other turn,” she says.

I say I’ll go back, but she says it’s okay, she doesn’t mind. I suppose she’s in no hurry to get home. The road winds toward the less inhabited side of the lake. We pass the entrances to two or three mansions, the only houses out here, hidden away up the hillside. I sometimes get this far on my longer walks with Kelsey. It’s the first really quiet place I discovered when we moved here, a beech forest mostly. I pull into a turnout, where the road comes close to the water, and I switch off the engine. A gap in the stone wall leads onto the path around the lake. From here you can see across to the wooded shoreline of the college campus, and the two brick towers stretching above the trees, thunderheads gathering behind them.

“You haven’t let us down,” she says flatly, looking away into the woods. She is being kind. As she was raised to be. To strangers and relatives and those to whom it is good to show care. That is what it has come to. She doesn’t believe anymore that I’m strong enough to bear her complaint or frustration. And I can’t blame her. If she let herself love me, she’d be furious. So she shows me kindness instead. “Did you want to take a walk?” she asks. “Is that why you parked?”

It’s impossible, what I’m trying to do. To say good-bye without telling them I’m leaving.

I follow her across the edge of a meadow, through a patch of swampy ground, and then back under the cover of the trees, as we reach the first point along the shore. Her form is marvelous, the supple muscles of her legs, the gentle curve of her spine, her strong shoulders rolling back, her head balanced. I held her hundreds of times as a girl, tossed her shrieking above her bed, caught her in my arms. I’ve felt the weight of her head on my chest and the warmth of her body under the shelter of my arm. But her body has never struck me as quite the miracle it does now. It seems almost enough to live for, that she came from me and is part of me, and yet as soon as I think this I know again how selfish that is, and disordered, for a parent to need so hopelessly a child still so young.

“I broke up with Jason,” she says over her shoulder, turning only far enough for me to hear her. “If that’s who you and Mom are worried about. That’s why I wasn’t at work. I had to talk to him.” This business of teenagers having personal lives—it’s alien to me. I’ve never known what to say. “You don’t have to worry about me, though,” she says. “They’re not going to fire me. I still have a job.” Taking an offshoot of the path, she leads us to a log bench facing the water and perches at the far end of it, leaning her forearms down on her knees. The air has gone still between the peak of the heat and the break of the rain to come.