The Best Kind of People
The Best Kind of People
Zoe Whittall
House of Anansi (2016)
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Family Life
Fictionttt Literaryttt Family Lifettt
To the shock of his family and community, George Woodbury, an affable teacher and beloved husband and father, is arrested for sexual assault at a prestigious prep school in Connecticut. While he awaits his trial in jail, his family is left to pick up the pieces.
His wife, Joan, a trauma nurse, is unable to triage her emotional reactions, and vaults between rage and denial. Daughter Sadie, the consummate overachiever, finds herself paralyzed on her boyfriend’s couch with a bong, while a local author attempts to exploit her story. Their son, Andrew, a lawyer in New York, assists in his father’s defense while wrestling with the unhappy memories of his own teen years in high school. Unfolding over a one-year period, the novel focuses on the Woodbury family as they struggle to support George while privately grappling with the possibility of his guilt.
With exquisite emotional precision, Whittall explores issues of loyalty, truth, and the meaning of happiness through the lens of an all-American family on the brink of collapse.
**
Also by Zoe Whittall
Fiction
The Middle Ground
Holding Still for as Long as Possible
Bottle Rocket Hearts
Poetry
Precordial Thump
The Emily Valentine Poems
The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life
THE BEST KIND OF PEOPLE
ZOE WHITTALL
Copyright © 2016 Zoe Whittall
Published in Canada in 2016 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Whittall, Zoe, author
The best kind of people / Zoe Whittall.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77089-942-1 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-77089-943-8 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8595.H4975B46 2016 C813’.6 C2016-900844-4
C2016-900845-2
Cover and text design: Alysia Shewchuk
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
For Jake Pyne
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
—
Wisława Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning”
[Rape Culture’s] most devilish trick is to make the average, non-criminal person identify with the person accused, instead of the person reporting the crime …
— Kate Harding,
Asking for It
PROLOGUE
ALMOST A DECADE
earlier, a man with a .45-70 Marlin hunting rifle walked through the front doors of Avalon Hills prep school. He didn’t know that he was about to become a living symbol of the age of white men shooting into crowds. He hadn’t slept in four days. He was the kind of angry that only made sense outside of language. He had walked three miles from his new studio apartment above Harry’s Cottage Times Bait Shop, oblivious to the downpour, the thin rip along the seam of his right leather boot. Soaked. Unaware. He walked, a head without a body. A head with one single thought, looped and distorted.
Students attending all twelve grades were amassed in classrooms, a blur of uniform plaid, settling in after the first bell. Except for Sadie Woodbury. She was standing in front of an open locker, retrieving her lucky koala bear eraser and straightening her thick brown bangs in a heart-shaped magnetized mirror. The sparkling unicorn sticker at the apex of the heart was beginning to peel away from the plastic glass. It was class speech day in the fifth grade. She had five yellow index cards in her kilt pocket with point-form notes In Praise of Democracy in America. She tongued a mass of orange peach gum to the top of her mouth, flavourless, unwilling to discard it just yet. Her parents didn’t allow chewing gum. Amanda had pressed the white paper strip into her palm on the playground before the first morning bell.
She saw him behind her in the mirror’s reflection. He was a smudge of indecipherable movement.
THE GIRL WAS
not part of the plan. He’d drawn a map using a feathered red marker on the back of a pizza box. There was no girl in the diagram. It used to be a ceremonial drug. It was called
crystal
. A jewel. Like all party drugs, it had purpose. It wasn’t like they make it seem now, on the commercials, like your life is over. They all had jobs and near-completed graduate degrees and they went to Burning Man and electronic music festivals and then back to work on Monday. He did it once or twice a year with friends and the point was to dance, dance, dance. Large groups of regular people. But friends who had jobs and babies now averted their eyes on the street. It didn’t used to be a big deal.
Except no one else did it anymore, and he had skin like punctured and torn fabric.
He stood still, staring at her, the gun hanging from a leather strap around his right shoulder. His grandfather used to hunt with that gun. Hounds at their heels. He had a daughter at this school. He’d forgotten about her too. He didn’t think it was possible, that a son could be disinherited, disowned, as an adult. That he would go “too far.” He never left this town. He didn’t go anywhere. He came to Sunday dinners when he remembered it was Sunday. He was
struggling.
But every addict is a liar. When he said that, he wanted to be excused from anything he did or said. He just needed to stop being punished by everyone.
SADIE CLOSED HER
locker. The sound startled him. He blinked in a way that meant to wish her away from sight. He was not a killer of children, he knew, despite all evidence to the contrary. Even he had his standards, for fuck’s sake.
Who have I become? Am I a killer of anyone?
These questions broke through the concentrated wall of destructive will, and then dissolved. He hadn’t thought this through. Hailstones pelted the arched front windows as it dawned on him. The black and white floor tile was messy with slush and the imprint of over six hundred children’s boots. He noted the weather and its impact on his body. He thought about turning back; but his focus returned. Nothing had been fair since his first black eye. He took the rifle off his shoulder. He cradled it in his arms as though it were a parcel to be delivered.
Even this he couldn’t do right. What kind of man can’t hold a gun?
If his dealer hadn’t gone to sleep finally, he wouldn’t have to be here.
Everyone is against him.
Especially her.
It’s always someone else’s fault, have you ever noticed that? Every story you tell, it’s always about someone who has done you wrong. But you’re the common denominator.
She’d said this as she was pulling on a pair of beige cotton tights at the edge of her bed, getting ready for work, her hands shaking with rage. Her big toe poked through a hole in the right foot. He had been apologizing, begging her forgiveness for banging on her door in the middle of the night. When she’d let him in, he’d crawled on top of her and she’d had to push him off. But she wasn’t as strong as he was, and eventually she just lay still, clenching her jaw and willing him to die.
When will you ever take responsibility for your own life? When will you grow up?
He didn’t have any money to give her for a morning-after pill. She’d grabbed a roll of twenties from the emergency cookie tin on top of the fridge. It was a bright red tin his mother had filled with Valentine cupcakes, before she had stopped talking to him and after she’d all but adopted his ex, whom she described as having “the patience of a saint.”
You’re pathetic
,
she’d said. He’d crumpled in the corner, agreeing with her. That only made it worse.
Your self-pity is disgusting.
The rage spiked.
His grip around the rifle tightened. The pad of his index finger, slippery with sweat, touched the trigger. He remembered what the gun was for. But the girl looked to him so much like his own daughter, the one he’d last seen by accident, through a window at the community centre where she was practising gymnastics dance, twirling a long pink and green ribbon through the air.
SADIE STARED AT
him for a beat, blowing a half-assed bubble that popped before fully forming. She wasn’t certain, from this distance, what she was seeing, but her heart had accelerated involuntarily. It took only a few seconds more to understand
danger.
The man lowered the rifle, pointing it at her,
then put it back on his shoulder. She brought into focus some motion behind him.
THE MAN THOUGHT,
Fuck it. I can turn it around. I can turn it around. This doesn’t have to be the way it ends for me. I can change.
I CAN CHANGE!
All at once he was euphoric, coming back into his own body.
SADIE’S FATHER, GEORGE
Woodbury, was a science teacher with a spare that morning. As the man stared at Sadie with a trancelike smile on his face, George yelled a string of astounded gibberish before tackling him. Sadie gripped the eraser, imprinting half moons in the gummy texture as it gave way to the pressure. A trickle of urine ran down her left leg, soaking her green cotton knee socks.
In the midst of their graceless pas de deux of grappling, the gun discharged an aimless bullet. It hit the windowpane behind them with a crack; a fireworks display of shards rained down on both men, shocking them into momentary submission. The janitor emerged from around the corner and wielded his mop to help secure the gunman to the ground. George’s chest was heaving, his sweater vest stuck with chunks of glass. It looked as though the man had fallen during a game of Limbo. He was pinned. He yowled, rabid, face in a bloom of madness.
