In the Middle of All This (12 page)

As he walked to his office, he jammed his hands deeper into his pockets and tersely shook his head. Nailed to the brick wall of the dining hall were banners.
WE
MISS
YOU
.
GOD
BLESS
YOU
! A few wrapped bouquets sagged on the lawn. Along the path toward him marched Annka. He swallowed a gasp. Now, as he looked at her, he tried to feel a complexity in her face that would speak to him, that would tell him she was capable of empathy. She taught less than he did and she made nearly twice as much money, and all he could see behind the clear-framed glasses, framed by the blond hair pulled back into a bun, was that she was capable of empathizing with herself.

“Hello, Martin.” She smiled quietly. “How are you holding up?”

“Fine, I think. And you?”

“You know.” Again she smiled without teeth, her pointy chin pointed down. “It's hard.”

“Did you have her in any classes?” he asked gently.

“Oh no,” she said, as if, had the girl been under her instruction, she would never have killed herself.

“She was in mine.”

“I know.” Her hand fluttered at her side. He was relieved it did not touch him. Briefly they waited for the clock tower to toll. It didn't.

“I just had the class she was in,” he said anyway.

“I know.” Now she patted him on the shoulder. He recoiled. She looked at him, still tightly smiling. “We missed you at the town meeting this morning. It was
so
cathartic.” Again her chin dipped toward the ground. “I sang a solo of a hymn.”

This time the clock did toll. He could have kissed it. “I have to run,” he said.

“There were more than a thousand people there,” she called after him. “It was
really
something.”

He hurried back to his building. She sang hymns?

In his office the voice mail light blinked its
orange
bulb. He dialed Lauren.

“Hey,” he said.

“I know,” she said, “we missed the town meeting. But listen, Elizabeth called. She thinks Richard has left.”

“What?” he said. At the mention of her name, he'd been all prepared for awful medical news. This was somehow … worse? Better?

“I could tell you more, but she's waiting for your call.”

“Uh-huh.” He felt his stomach beginning to cave. The last time he'd seen Jane Wilson, she'd smiled shyly as she passed in her paper.

“Too bad we couldn't make that baby happen,” Lauren said.

She'd come back from what… what. Shopping? The spa? Someplace neutral. Someplace she couldn't quite name. And there was something not subtle about the house. Something off. He wasn't due for another few hours, but she sensed a dysfunction beyond the usual dysfunction. An opening, a hole, a gap, a chasm. Her mother had tried to warn her. Missing. He had gone.

Three pairs of shoes missing from the closet, two sweaters from the drawer, and, when she brought out the ladder and climbed to the attic door and pushed it open, a carry-on from the attic. Had he told her he was going? In the kitchen she checked the calendar. Against her cheek she felt for the impression of his last kiss. There wasn't one. She called his office. His voice mail. “I can't come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, I'll get back to you.” He didn't have a secretary or an assistant. She called the main number.

“Richard Perkins,” she said.

“I'll put you through—”

“I just—”

And there he was again. “I can't come to the phone right now …”

She hung up. Was there a note in some secret place? Her pillow? The bath? On top of the goddamn telly? In the refrigerator? Inside the microwave? The checkbook? He'd left the checkbook, not a check missing. He had credit cards, a bank card.

“Richard,” she called.

The phone rang. She snatched it up.

“Hello?” she said.

“Is this Elizabeth Kreutzel-Perkins?”

“Yes.”

“I'm afraid I have a message for you.”

“Go on.”

“Your ball therapy session for Thursday has been canceled. Alan has taken ill.”

Good Christ. “Thank you,” she said.

“We will reschedule.” Reshedwell. Brits.

She hung up the phone.

“Richard,” she said uncertainly, as if just saying the name might break the plumbing.

That was all hours ago. She'd combed out her hair, stuck on a morphine patch, decided which rings to leave which nieces, and then had a glass of wine and a chat with Lauren across the pond. She wasn't quite ready for her mother. The wine felt awful in her stomach, at the back of her throat, along the crust of her brain, wherever it went. The morphine tried very hard to take the edge off, but seemed only to make everything more jagged. Uncomfortable. Tangled. In a disarray.

Ray, ray, ray, the house seemed to say.

The phone.

“Hello,” she slurred.

“Elizabeth?”

“Hey. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.” It was good to hear his American voice. It was good to hear her own American going back to him.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Yes.”

“I can get there on Friday.”

“That would be great,” she said.

“Anything else?”

“I hope not.”

“Well, we have a little crisis here. I've got to—”

“Really?” She tried to feel interested. “What?”

“One of my students.” His voice dropped to something almost below a whisper. “Killed herself,” he said. “Anyway, I've got to go. Love you.”

“Love you.”

She hung up and stared at the blank television. There'd be hours and hours for it. She could see herself hooking up to it like it was another dose of pamidronate. All these people who lay solitarily—was that a word?—dying in their hospital beds, gazing at a last football game or talk show. She already knew that she was alone. Was this going to be such a big deal? So he was gone. So she was alone alone. She'd be alone in her coffin, for god's sake.

Maybe he was her cancer. Maybe he had his own cancer. Maybe they could squeeze into that box together.

She switched on the telly.

“Do you know,” asked the girl's biology professor, “if there's anything like client privilege between us and her?”

The provost shrugged. On the surface he was always affable, almost dopey. You could fall asleep to his lush, modulated voice. “I don't think, and I'm not going to suggest, that we need to be adversarial.” He smiled at the five professors around the table. “If you know anything, you need to be honest about it. But for the sake of privacy, we all”—and here he nodded at two attorneys to his right—“feel that no one
needs
to speak to the press. For the family's sake, the less public speculation—or even analysis—the better.” He frowned slightly and then relaxed his face in a gesture of neutrality and harmlessness. “We'll work with the authorities. We'll work with all parties. But we have no official stake in this. We're not asking to be in any loop. Every loss of this nature”—now he was quoting an e-mail he'd sent that morning—“is both private and communal. It is with us all. Further questions?”

“I told you I could see this coming,” Martin's mom said. “Didn't I?”

“Yes.” He tried to hide his impatience. “Yes, you had an inkling.”

“An inkling.” She bit into what sounded like an apple. “Let me tell you, we've known a lot of people who've had this kind of thing, and none of them, and I mean
none of them
, have devoted themselves to it the full-time way that she has.”

“And what happened to them?” he had to ask.

“They died.”

“Well, maybe that's just it. Maybe you have to do it full-time to have a chance to live.”

“I don't think so.” She took another bite. “I think he probably had another—you know—woman.”

“So you've said.” Martin thought of hanging up, but she was one person you couldn't hang up on.

“Or he's gay. Or bi. Or whatever you call it.”

“Whatever,” Martin said.

“Good thing Lauren isn't having that baby.”

“Mom.”

“So when do you leave?”

He told her. Then, to get her off his sister, he told her about his student.

“Did you know her?”

He tried to give her as much as he could stand, and she riddled him with questions about what she was like.

“What do you have to do with any investigation?” she asked.

“I don't really know.”

“Well.” She finished her apple. “If you need any help, you can always call Martha.”

“Mom.” He swallowed whatever he could think of saying. “I've got to go.”

“Call from Elizabeth's.”

“I will.”

He set the phone on the charger and stared at the suitcase he'd been trying to pack while he'd talked to her. He'd forgotten underwear. Max toddled in and stuck to his knees.

“I'll miss you,” the boy said.

“I'll miss you, too.”

He took up his son and felt him sinking into him, the chest against his shoulder, the head heavy and dropping into his neck, the warm breath on the hollow of skin around his collarbone. Max rested there. Then he pushed himself up and pointed.

“TV?” he said.

“Okay,” Martin said. He picked up the remote and clicked it on, and Max wriggled free and sat on top of the suitcase, watching. The phone rang. He let it go. From downstairs, he heard Lauren pick up. He tried to listen closely. It was someone she didn't know that well. She called to him to get on.

“Hello?” he said.

“Professor Kreutzel?”

Somebody official. God, he hadn't even helped out with the laundry or dinner or the kids or whatever else was down there in the toy-strewn swirl of the kitchen and dining room and living room. He wanted to say no, he was just another numb nut watching an almost-three-year-old watch TV, while his skull closed itself tighter and tighter over his brain and his lids clenched over his eyes and his dick shriveled into minisculity and his balls withered and shrank—

“What,” he said. “What is it?”

In the emptiness she heard the ruffle and smack of the morning mail being pushed through the door slot. A dull gray light spread across the ceiling and out into the hall. At her elbow, at the base of her neck, and at the top of her skull various niggles announced themselves. Hot spots, one of the healers had called them. And she understood him to mean that these were zones where tumors could erupt at any moment.

She plunked her way downstairs and cut and ground wheatgrass and then drank it from last night's wineglass as if she were trying to turn her stomach out. She sat at the table and began taking her vits. The doorbell rang its lame, cranky ring, and she rose to answer it.

“Martin!” For some reason she'd thought it was tomorrow he was coming.

“Elizabeth,” he said.

They hugged.

“I thought it was tomorrow,” she said.

He set his bag in the foyer and followed her into the kitchen with his briefcase.

“Do you want something to drink?”

“Wine,” he said hoarsely. “Or scotch.”

She smiled and pulled out an unopened bottle of thirty-year-old scotch.

“You shouldn't,” he said.

“Richard's.” She shook her head.

“Oh, well then.” He took it from her and tore it open. He grabbed what little ice there was in the pocket-sized freezer and poured a few fingers. He took a sip. “Wow,” he said.

“Can I smell it?”

He held it to her nose. It was smoky, peaty—whatever—but she bet it was smooth anyway. She pushed it back to him.

“So what's the plan?”

She looked at him and tried to tell how scared he was for her. “I have reiki at eleven,” she said. “Other than that…” She shrugged her shoulders.

“What do you want to do?”

“Want
to do?” She felt the tears start and strangled them back. There were so many choices! “I don't have anything I
want
to do,” she said.

He reached for his briefcase. “I brought you some magazines.” He stopped himself. “I don't mean to be this pathetic.”

“Neither do I.”

They stood looking at each other.

“Shit,” she said.

“I guess.” He looked at the ceiling, then made himself look back at her. “I guess it must have felt to him like I was acting like he wasn't here.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. But there was a lot of time he was acting like
I
wasn't here.”

“You don't want to find him?”

“I don't know.” She continued inspecting the floor. “Sometimes I think he'll come back when he's ready, and sometimes I know this is it. You know. The beginning of my end.”

“God,” he said.

“It's not so bad. I mean, it's awful. But if you take away reasons for living—or if they go away all by themselves—then this whole thing makes sense.”

“So you're just going to lay down and die?” He took a big swallow of scotch.

She forced a laugh. “Some people do. When they're ready. And some people fight and they still die. And some people fight and they get to live. Maybe he knows I'm not going to get to live—”

“And maybe he's just a selfish asshole.”

“A lot of people think I'm the selfish one.”

“Everyone's selfish,” he tried.

“When you're in a lot of pain,” she said, “you sink more and more into yourself. Nobody can jump in to join you.”

“This is cheerful,” he said.

“You're the only one I can say this to.” She wiped her eyes. “You won't lose it.”

“I just drink.” He shook the ice in the otherwise empty glass. She watched as he poured himself another. “I bet he's at one of the ashrams.”