The Grievers (5 page)

P
ILLS HE
could almost see, Neil said as we picked at tuna salad sandwiches and sipped iced tea in a booth at a chain restaurant in the strip mall across the street from the bank where I worked. Going to sleep and never waking up was one thing, but jumping from a bridge?

“Telling your legs to do this thing,” he said. “That last second. I can only imagine.”

“I don’t want to think about it,” I said.

“I went up in a helicopter once. You look down, and your bones freeze. You can’t move a muscle.”

My glittery dollar sign lay next to our table like an abandoned prop from
The Price Is Right
. Whenever I moved it or shoved it into the backseat of my car or slipped in the mud, a few sequins would flake off, but so far, the costume wasn’t looking too bad—for a giant, glittery dollar sign, anyway. The only problem was that the costume made me look like a joke wherever I went, and I wasn’t in much of a mood for joking.

“Do you remember New Year’s Eve?” I said.

“Which part?” Neil said. “Packer hitting on Karen or you grabbing Madeline’s ass?”

“That was an accident,” I said.

“You don’t grab someone’s ass by accident,” Neil said. “Especially when your wife is standing right next to her.”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” I said. “What would possess me to grab your wife’s ass when Karen was standing right there? If I really wanted to grab Madeline’s ass, wouldn’t I have waited until we were alone?”

“I don’t know,” Neil said. “You do a lot of things that don’t make a whole lot of sense lately.”

“This isn’t about me,” I said. “It’s about Billy. Did you see his wrist or not?”

“No,” Neil said. “I didn’t.”

“Well I did, and I didn’t say anything.”

Neil chewed on the inside of his lip, and our waitress breezed by the table to ask if everything was okay. Almost in unison, Neil and I turned to the woman and said that everything was great. Delicious, Neil added, though he’d barely touched his sandwich. In my mind, I thanked her for not asking any questions about my giant dollar sign, and in real life I asked for another glass of iced tea.

“He was hardly there,” I said, looking away from Neil. “On the night of the party, he left after twenty minutes.”

“He was in a bad place,” Neil said.

“His fingers were so skinny,” I said. “I remember thinking that. I remember looking at his hands and thinking that his fingers were so skinny, so bony, and then seeing the stitches in his wrist and not saying anything.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Neil said.

I raised my eyebrows. “Stitches in his wrist? What else could it have meant? He spent the whole time telling me that he was going back to school for computers. Twenty minutes of this, and then he stopped and apologized and asked if he could use the phone, and all I could think about was how glad I was that he finally stopped talking.”

“Who did he call?” Neil asked.

“His mother,” I said. “She dropped him off at the party and came home to a ringing phone.”

“She told you this?”

“She told me a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

I shook my head. “He got off the phone and said he had plans. I knew it was a lie, but I let it go. It was the last time I ever talked to him.”

Neil told me again that I couldn’t have known, that our friend was in a bad place, that there was nothing I could have done, but all I could think about was Billy standing in the cold and waiting for his mother to come and pick him up while the rest of us laughed and drank and listened to loud music—while Greg Packer hit on Karen and I grabbed Madeline’s ass.

W
EARING THE
dollar sign was easier than carrying it, so I climbed back inside the costume after Neil and I finished our sandwiches, and he held me steady as we crossed six lanes of traffic on our way back to the bank. If I did grab his wife’s ass, I said as drivers leaned on their horns by way of telling us to get out of the intersection, I didn’t mean it in a sexual way. I just thought it would get a few laughs.

“That’s kind of sick,” Neil said. “Is that your reason for doing everything?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“I feel sorry for Karen.”

“You and me both,” I said. “But that’s why I need your help with this Billy Chin situation. I want to do something for him—something in his memory, anyway, but I don’t want it to turn into a joke like everything else I do.”

Neil warned me to watch out for the curb, and soon we were squishing back across the lawn in front of the bank. Maybe we could raise some money and make a donation in his name, Neil said. He didn’t mention the Academy, but we both knew what he had in mind. He could make a few calls and get our friends together for dinner some night. We could say a few words about Billy and pass the proverbial hat.

“Who are you thinking?” I asked.

“The usual crew, I guess. Dwayne Coleman and Sean Sullivan. Anthony Gambacorta, if we can get a hold of him. Greg Packer, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “It wouldn’t be a party without him.”

Back at the Academy, the rumors about Greg and his family sounded more like the stuff of soap operas and comic books than the lives of any teenagers I’d ever met. In some versions of the story, Greg’s father was the heir to a massive fortune, the child of a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, or a DuPont, but he had to keep his relationship with Greg’s mother a secret for fear of losing any and all rights to his legacy. In other versions, Greg had accidentally killed his father by putting the family RV in reverse and backing over him on the eve of a planned cross-country vacation to celebrate Greg’s fifth birthday. Depending on who passed the rumor along, Greg’s father could have been an artist, an inventor, a hit man, a priest, a rock star, an oil man, an embezzler, or a politician, while his mother’s roles tended to alternate between failed Olympic hopeful and disgraced nun.

When my turn came to build on the elaborately inconsistent mythology of Greg’s life, I made him an heir to the Holy Roman Empire and said that his father had developed a formula for tires that never wore thin, which led a sinister cabal of tire manufacturers to have him eliminated before he went public with his invention. That Greg never confirmed nor denied the veracity of any of these rumors only contributed to their weight as they echoed up and down the polished halls of the Academy. What they all had in common was that Greg’s father was out of the picture and that Greg and his mother enjoyed a steady unearned income, the limits of which were anybody’s guess.

The real trouble with Greg started after we all graduated from the Academy and he fell into the habit of sliding from one disappointment to the next. His official story when he dropped out of Princeton was that he was homesick, but that didn’t explain why it took him five years to complete a four-year degree at Saint Leonard’s University in lieu of the ivy league education he’d always aspired to. Good scores on the LSAT got him into law school a year behind Neil, but by then he was so far out of the game that it didn’t matter. Three car accidents, two of which involved collisions with parked cars, led to long periods of what Greg liked to call meditation and reflection but which largely consisted of chasing painkillers with bottle after bottle of Bud Light. When he wasn’t busy hitting on my wife, he was, in his words, gathering strength for his next big move.

“What’s he been up to lately?” I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer but knowing in a guilty way that it would make me feel better about my own life. “Aside from pining away for Karen.”

“Nothing good,” Neil said. “Failed the bar exam again, defaulted on his student loans, still fighting with his mother over whatever the hell they fight about.”

“Is he at least good for a donation?”

“Sure,” Neil said. “As long as I write the check. Sullivan’s pushing for an intervention, by the way, and Dwayne wants to lure him into the city for a forcible commitment.”

“He can do that?” I asked.

“In Philly? Please. The guy’s a cop. It’s the paperwork he’s dreading.”

We stood by Neil’s car for a minute, not saying anything. When I caught my reflection in his windshield, I looked away. Dressed as a giant dollar sign, I looked like an idiot.

“So why do you think he did it?” Neil asked, keys in his hand. “Billy, I mean. Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I don’t think he was like us.”

“No,” Neil said. “I guess not.”

“He wasn’t an asshole is what I mean. Not that we’re assholes, exactly, but think about guys like Frank Dearborn. People like us, we knew how to deal with him—or we figured it out, anyway. People like Billy, though? He took things too personally. The Academy was sink or swim, and Billy could barely keep his head above water when guys like Frank were around. And that was just high school. Imagine being Billy in the real world. Imagine dealing with assholes every day and taking everything they did personally. Imagine how lonely he must have felt. How disconnected.”

“He was in a bad place,” Neil said.

“Yeah,” I said. “He was in a bad place.”

Neil opened his door and slid behind the wheel of his car. I gave him a wave as he pulled out of the parking lot, but his eyes were on the road ahead of him. As the sound of his engine faded into the hum of traffic on Route 202, I tramped out to my post and finished my shift on the muddy wet grass that stretched between the bank and the highway.

  CHAPTER FOUR  

I
n the years following my graduation from the Academy, Phil Ennis gave up on watching his students mutilate dead cats in the name of science and migrated instead to the world of administration—first serving as Chair of Admissions, then as Vice President for Student Life, and finally as Director of Alumni Relations and Giving. It was in this final capacity that the man flourished. Unfettered from the constraints of dealing with pimply teens on a daily basis, he could spend the majority of his time composing longwinded pleas for cash, stock, real estate, and other gifts without ever having to worry about some misguided youth finding a cache of dead kittens in what he thought was a scrotal sack. What Ennis did have to worry about, however, was fielding calls from alums who expected him to remember their names despite the passage of time and the fact that they had yet to make a sizable donation to the school. Or, in my case, any donation whatsoever.

“Schwartz,” Ennis said when I called from inside my dollar sign the day after my lunch with Neil. In the background, I could hear my former biology teacher tapping at a keyboard. After a brief pause, he pretended to retrieve my name from the soupy haze of his memory. “Class of ’ninety-one?”

“Yes,” I said, playing along. “I’m flattered.”

“We’re a family, Schwartz. You know that. But as I recall, we haven’t really heard from you lately.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to get in touch.”

“A small consideration is all we ask. Pecuniary or otherwise.”

“I understand,” I said. “That’s sort of why I’m calling.”

“Sort of?”

“Do you remember Billy Chin?” I asked.

“Chin,” Ennis said as if trying to put the name to a face.

“He was my lab partner in your biology class.”

“Of course,” Ennis said. “How could I forget?”