In the Middle of All This (22 page)

Martin just nodded and half smiled.

“You know what you're good at, Marty? You're good at taking the focus off yourself. That's a skill there, Marty. You work with that and you'll be all right.”

“Right,” Martin said.

“So your sister isn't coming back. Makes you feel pretty awful, I bet. But, really, isn't this what everybody secretly wishes for—the dying person going off to die by herself so that nobody else has to deal with the pain and unpleasantness of it? Kind of like what some animals do. Why, in some cultures—”

Martin stood. “I've really got to get back to work.”

“What about that girl's suicide, Marty? They clear you in that?”

“Charming,” Martin said. “Now could you get the fuck out of my office.”

“I'm sorry, Marty.” Ruben was grinning halfheartedly, as if he were sorry. Maybe he was. “I guess I was just trying to see how many buttons you had to push. I like you. I really do.”

“I don't care,” Martin said. “I don't give a rat's ass who likes me.”

“That's the spirit. That'll only help you.” He slouched off up the hall.

Martin locked the door after him. The phone rang, and he turned on his computer and waited for it to boot up as the phone kept ringing and dwindled into voice mail. He'd been sending her unanswered e-mails since he'd returned—just in case she was somehow checking—chatty messages that made no mention of her escape, piling in cute details about the kids, trying to lure her into a response. Now all the fucking e-mails came up, from the dean, the provost, the director of security, the chair of the Faculty Review Committee. He opened the one from his mother. A report on how his father was progressing. The guy had been sick for twelve or thirteen years, and every time he made the tiniest step toward improvement she offered,
I think he's really turned the corner this time
. Quintuple bypass with an endoarterectomy. Congestive heart failure. Prostate cancer. Congestive heart failure again. How many fucking corners could he turn? His mother had long since concluded that he no longer respected his father, and she ranted at him about it, and he'd learned to keep his mouth shut. He hit the
REPLY
key, typed in “Great!” and hit
SEND
.

Don't get him wrong. He loved his father. Loved how they'd walked shoulder to shoulder with the rain coming down. His father could slog through anything. His father, through a thirty- or forty-year bath in depression, had apparently inured himself to anything ultimate. They'd been forecasting his death for thirteen years. All he got was slower.

Martin typed in Elizabeth's address and for the subject line wrote
Max
. She alternated between which of the kids she favored, but she loved playing favorites. It was another entitlement she exercised, like commanding him here or there. He paged through the last days for anecdotes. They'd been to the SuperGiant several times, and around town, and whenever Max encountered a heavyset person he'd point and say, “That man is really fat” or “Look how fat that woman is.” Finally Lauren had pulled him aside and told him it wasn't nice to call people fat, that it hurt their feelings. Then they'd walked to the pharmacy, and on a bench in front of the building sat an enormously fat woman, the fattest they'd seen lately by at least a hundred pounds, humongously fat, extraordinarily fat, just really fat. Max stood there staring at her, his mouth slowly opening. Lauren led him away. He was speechless. “Honey, what is it?” she asked. “That woman,” Max said, groping for words, “she was really … beautiful.”

That story Martin tried.

“Could you come here and look at this?”

It was his wife calling as he got groggily from bed, the late April sun already cutting the room into swaths of light and dark. Sometimes he thought daylight saving was worse than jet lag. And sometimes he luxuriated in the earliness of it, the end of the day more and more distant, as if more seemed possible.

“What?” he said.

She was in Sarah's room trying to argue her into getting dressed for school.

“Up there,” she said. “In the corner. There's a stain.”

He walked to the corner of the room, where the low bookshelves met the desk. On the ceiling spread a rust-colored pattern, a circle.

“The roof is leaking?” he said.

“The roof is leaking,” she said.

He looked at it closer, a faint, large swirl with wisps of dark streaks. The roof was leaking. How much would this cost? He hurried toward Max's room. He was at the play table canoodling with a set of construction toys. Martin patted him on the head and headed for the matching corner. A fainter circle had entrenched itself. Matching circles opposite each other across the chimney. He pulled down the attic stairs and creaked up them. The attic told him nothing. In his own bedroom he put on slippers.

“I'm just going outside for a minute.”

“Okay.” Lauren sounded exasperated, but she'd give him this last minute.

Outside, he looked up at the chimney and at the roof near where the stains were. The wood under the gutter by Sarah's room had a four-foot crack down the middle, and by Max's room it was growing ragged where it met the chimney. He went back inside.

“You gotta come see this!” he called upstairs.

“Not now!” she yelled.

He went upstairs and took over Sarah, and Lauren pulled on clothes and went out. By the time she came back in, Sarah was almost dressed.

“The wood is rotting under the gutters,” she said.

“Oh,” he said.

“At least it's not the roof itself.”

“Fuck this house,” he said.

“Martin!”

He looked at Sarah. “Sorry.”

“Daddy's mad,” Sarah said, dragging the last word into three syllables, trying to be cute.

“No kidding,” he said.

They hustled her across the street to school and then he looked up roofers while Lauren distracted Max. He reached only answering machines and one woman who promised that she'd pass along word to the field estimator. He was confident he'd hear from no one.
Easy
, he told himself,
easy
. He set down the phone, took Max from Lauren, and glanced at the calendar. They'd been gone seven weeks. He wondered again where the fuck they could be. Sometimes he concluded India, and sometimes he thought Amsterdam, and sometimes he imagined a tropical island. He wondered a hundred times a day what it was like to be cut off from everything you knew and always realized that that had happened to her, in one form or another, from the instant of diagnosis.

“See you,” Lauren said, kissing him.

“Bye,” Max said to her.

“Bye,” Martin said.

From the window they watched her walk up the street toward campus.

“What do you want to do?” he asked his son.

“What do you want to do?” Max asked back.

Frankly, he wanted a shot of vodka. He poured himself a glass of water and slugged it down. “Whatever you want to do,” he said.

“Wolf Hollow?” Max searched.

“That's fine.”

He packed a picnic of peanut-butter foldovers, peeled sliced apple, orange juice, and wheat crackers. He tried to love these solo days with Max, and for the most part—after the fact—he did. But in the middle of it, he couldn't help feeling that there was something else he should be doing—housework or job work or something about Elizabeth—and he was distracted and easily annoyed. You had to give in to such days, had to give up doing anything you thought you wanted to do, and convince yourself that what you wanted most was to give in to your kid. A very basic concept, he knew, but he still had a hard time doing it.

When he turned onto the battlefield road toward Wolf Hollow, Max began to shriek at him.

“What is it?” he said. “What is it?”

“I want the forest,” Max screamed.

“What forest?”

“The Wolf Hollow forest!” He kicked at the seat.

As far as he knew the Wolf Hollow battlefield was all large boulders that Max loved climbing on. There were no trees that he could remember.

“The forest,” Max screamed.

“Okay, okay.”

He drove around toward Wolf Hollow. A few parking spaces at the head of a thick grove of trees slipped by over his shoulder.

“There!” Max bawled.

“Where?”

“There.” Max was crying. “The Wolf Hollow forest.”

There was no one behind him, and he backed up and parked. It looked to be a wide, sloping field of trees, underbrush, and poison ivy, at the very bottom of which must be Wolf Hollow. A worn path cut through all the growth.

Max wiped his face with his hand and started ahead.

“Come on, Daddy,” he said.

They walked hand in hand into the thick of it, where they couldn't see any roads or hear any cars. Everything was green and limby and leafy and smelled of spring. Clots of gnats bobbed and whirred.

“I have to pee and poop,” Max said.

“I didn't bring any toilet paper.”

“Then I just have to pee.”

“You can do it here.”

“Right here?”

“Yup.”

“I've never peed outside before.”

“It's easy,” Martin said. “Here.” He aimed the boy off the path and pulled down his pants and underwear. “Now pee.”

Max peed. “Wow,” he said. “That was great.” He looked down at his pants and pointed. “Oh no,” he cried. There were a few drops of urine on the front of his pants.

“It's all right,” Martin said, as he buckled him into his pants again. “It'll dry easily.”

“Wow,” Max said again. “This is a good place.”

They hiked slowly down the path. At Wolf Hollow they crawled on and around and between the boulders and watched a television news team from the State Capital film a segment on how there was no place to bury all the bodies once the shooting was over. They kept having to refilm to get the right backdrop, and Martin had to keep maneuvering Max out of any shot. He felt his patience draining.

“McDonald's?” he offered.

“Yep,” Max said, as if, despite the packed lunch, he'd expected it all along.

They walked up the slow path through the forest.

“Should I pee again?”

“If you have to.”

“I don't have to,” he said glumly.

“Another time?” Martin said gently.

The boy kicked at the dirt. “Okay.”

They drove home with a Happy Meal, and while Max ate and began a half hour of television, he tried Elizabeth and Richard without success and then he tried the neighbor.

“It's Martin,” he said.

“Of course it is,” the guy said. “I can tell by your voice. Did you know that your brother-in-law's back?”

“What?”

“I saw him last night. He's definitely back. This morning, too. He's puttering about.”

“I tried to call him.”

“Maybe he's not answering his phone.”

“Oh.” He hesitated. “And my sister?”

“Haven't seen her, mate.”

“Well,” he said. “Could you do me a favor? When you see Richard next would you mind telling him to call me?”

“No problem, Martin. No problem at all.”

“Thanks.”

“Cheers yourself, mate.”

He dialed Richard again. Still only the answering machine. “Richard, it's Martin. I
know
you're home. The neighbor told me. Would you call me, please? I hope you're well.”

He stood by the phone while the television washed over Max in the living room. Come on, he thought. Call back.

“It's over,” Max shouted from his chair.

“Could you turn it off, please?”

“It was a great show.” He clicked off the television and came into the kitchen. “What now?” he asked.

“Healthy lunch?”

The boy sat in his chair, and Martin unpacked for him the picnic lunch. It wasn't yet noon. Max ate and began to look sleepy.

“I need to rest,” he said.

“I'll read to you.”

They sat on the sofa, and Martin read him a book about a mother bunny who got chosen to be the last Easter Bunny because she was so kind and good and fast at being a mother, and just when her strength failed on the last round of Easter basket delivery the grand old Father Easter Bunny gifted her with a pair of golden boots and she became faster and kinder and better than she could have ever imagined. It was another goddamn story that hit him, and he had to hide himself from Max as he brushed at his face.

“What's the matter?” Max asked.

“I'm sleepy.”

“Me, too.”

They leaned into each other on the sofa, and he felt himself dozing off. Then the phone rang and Max leaped up to get it, and he had to race after Max and Max beat him to the phone and was already talking into it, and “GIVE IT TO ME,” he screamed at Max, and yanked the phone from his hand, and Max bawled and he could barely hear the voice on the other end—

“—is going on over there?”

It was Lauren.

“Oh,” he shouted over Max. “I thought you were still teaching.”

“Nope,” she said. “Just checking in.”

“Richard is back,” he shouted as he pushed the crying child into the living room and switched on the television and the boy quieted himself. “Richard is back,” he said. “I talked to the neighbor.”

“But you haven't talked to Richard?”

“No.”

“He's sure it's him.”

“Oh yes.”

“Well,” she said.

The Call-Waiting line beeped.

“Gotta go,” he said. He double-clicked the phone. “Hello?”

“Is this a bad time?” It was his mother. “You sound out of breath.”

“Richard's back. I just talked to the neighbor.”

“I told you they'd come back,” she gloated. “They're even early.”

“He didn't say anything about Elizabeth.”

She ate something in his ear. “You know how she holes up after a long trip.”