The Keeper (3 page)

Daddy? Daddy, did you do this?

He was walking toward her, and he wasn’t smiling.

But then the tunnel got farther away, and his body became a speck in the distance. Then the sparks returned. And the pain. Then she was on her side, gasping at air that tasted so sweet it might have been sugar. Just as quickly as it had happened, it was over. Susan had released her. Susan had let go.

Liz coughed. She looked up at her sister. The blood had matted Susan’s blond hair into something dark and wet. Her face was bloody, too, so that she was unrecognizable, save for her wild, blue eyes.

Overhead, a breeze came and the trees shook in the wind. The snow they carried fell on the two girls, sprinkling their hair with white. If there were birds foolish enough to venture into these woods, they would have flown away. If Liz had not been prostrate where she lay, she would have run. It did not matter where.

Susan pointed at Liz, and though she did not speak, Liz knew what she was thinking.
You. It should have been you.

“No,” Liz rasped.

Susan nodded:
You.
And then she retreated, her bare feet treading soundlessly, deep into the woods.

P
aul Martin wondered if he might be suffocating. But that was life, you were always suffocating. The radiators at the Bedford High School were on overdrive today, and beads of sweat ran down his back and under his arms. He kept his elbows bent as he wrote on the board, but only a red-eyed albino wouldn’t notice the crater-sized pit stains on his shirt.

He drew an isosceles triangle with a phallic-looking pipe at its apex and the words “Capital” and “Jobs” at either angle along the base. Couldn’t make it much simpler. He looked down at their bent heads. He had asked them a question about the mill, and they were supposed to be reading about subsidies in the handout he had given them from the
Wall Street Journal
in order to answer it. Most were examining their fingernails or doodling on the white space of their Xeroxes. Even their doodles looked bored; little hearts, lyrics to songs. A few were looking out the window.

He followed their gaze and noticed that it had just begun to rain. Although he’d lived in Bedford for almost twenty years, he’d never gotten used to the rain.

Some people could predict when it was going to come or how bad a year it would be. They said they could feel it in their fingers, their knees, and their lungs, as if it came from something inside them.

Last year, the rain had flooded all of Main Street and filled up the valley like a bathtub. The water had mixed with the chemicals from the mill so that when it rolled down his nose and inside his lips, he’d tasted rotten eggs and acid rain, the stuff people used to breathe every day here, on his tongue.

The Clott Paper Mill had closed one month ago, but even now Paul could smell traces of the sulfur that had leached to the air and water. Vats of the volatile stuff were still sitting in the vacant mill, waiting for pickup by waste management vendors. If a few kids, or better yet, brain-damaged former employees, set off a couple of firecrackers in the old place, the town could go up in a puff of smoke.

Paul looked at his students. There had been no rebellion from them the day the mill had closed its doors for good. No indignant editorials in the student paper. No efforts from the town council to lure new industry. Just tight-lipped, New England resignation. And now the rain that came every year was falling, and none of his kids seemed surprised. They did not marvel at it or wonder why it happened only in Bedford. They were crazy, like everyone else in this town.

He sighed. “What’s the news?” he asked the nineteen high school seniors in his American history class. He taught both history and math and tried, whenever possible, to combine the two into economics. It was one of the few perks about teaching in a low-paying district with a small population and only a handful of teachers. You could do whatever you wanted and no one gave a damn. That, and down here in the valley there wasn’t any cell phone reception, so he didn’t have to compete with phones chirping to the beat of Kelly Clarkson’s latest crap anthem in the middle of his lectures.

His students stared off, watching the metal clock that hung behind him. It was three-fifty on a Thursday afternoon in March, five minutes before the bell rang and school let out for the day.

“It’s raining,” Carrie Dubois said. She smiled an aren’t-I-cute? sort of smile, but he did not smile back.

“Yeah. That happens. What do you think about what you read?” he asked, then pointed at the board. “I don’t have to explain this, do I?”

No one volunteered a hand. He tried to think of something that would make them laugh. He could not. It made him feel old. It made him feel like he couldn’t blame them.

He looked at them again. A showdown. Talk, people. Talk. Say anything. Jaine Hodkin, the self-declared trendsetter of the class because she visited New York during Christmas breaks and carried purses made out of junked seat belts, yawned. Paul glared at her. She directed her eyes at the window as if to say:
The rain. Sorry buddy, it’s the rain.

He cleared his throat and pointed at the triangle. “I’m assuming you know what this means. I won’t insult your intelligence. What about subsidies? Do you think they could work?”

No one answered. He tried to lock Louise’s eyes. Maybe even Craig’s; he always had something to say. They stared down at their hands, which were folded over their notebooks, and he knew they were counting down the seconds until the bell rang.

He took a breath of wet air, opened a window, and considered running away. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter. Hey, it was just a mill. It smelled anyway. And look what the chemicals did to our water. So what if all the amphibians are dead, and we’ve got five times the pediatric asthma rate as the rest of the country? They don’t owe us anything for all the years they’ve stolen, do they? What do you care that the company moved to Canada? No skin off your backs. It’s not like your parents were canned, right?” he asked.

He caught the eye of Owen Read, whose long legs were wrapped around the seat of the girl in front of him like he was Christ’s gift to anything in a skirt. Paul felt his control give way. In its place burgeoned a dull, impotent rage.

He knocked on Owen’s desk until Owen reluctantly sat up straight. “This isn’t study hall,” he whispered, knowing as he said it that he sounded like an ass.

“Hey, it’s not like I care. I’ll keep my job for at least another year, until so many people move away that the school shuts down. And anyone who leaves here’ll be fine, unless your parents stay, in which case you might have to support them. But that’s okay, too. You’ll just let ’em starve, right? Who the hell cares?” He raised his voice and noticed that most of the class was looking in his direction now, surprised expressions on their faces. “Who the hell gives a shit?”

Bobby Fullbright raised his hand. Paul nodded at him in a way that said:
Make it short.
Bobby was a basketball player. All those kids were pretty dumb. Hell, all the kids in Bedford were pretty dumb. Liz Marley had even written that the European Economic Community was comprised of “sugar, spice, and everything nice,” on the last current events exam.

“I don’t understand why we’re talking about this. The mill’s not gonna open again. Even if we’d gotten government subsidies, it was a losing business. There’s no reason for a grant to reopen it or anything, it doesn’t make sense. It’d be buying time.” Bobby’s voice was soft and croaking like a dying frog. Paul had to admit he respected the kid. But he always had the easy answer. He never thought things through. Or maybe he did. Maybe he was the heartless descendant of Adam Smith.

“Does anyone agree with Bobby?” Paul asked. No one raised a hand. Bobby blushed.

“Do you care at all?” he said, maybe to Bobby, maybe to all of them. “How can you people give up like this? How are you going to get through life if it’s this easy for you to give up? There won’t be another industry. We’ve gotta have subsidies unless we want to turn into a micro Worcester where everybody looks like they’re two paychecks away from a park bench and their teeth are black because they can’t afford a dentist. That’s how the world works. It doesn’t need to be efficient. It just needs to keep everybody with a job.” Paul leaned over Bobby’s desk. “Tell me this—who cares about economic sense when you’re dealing with real people, real live people who have to stand in line for day-old Dunkin’ Donuts crullers in a church basement while some doctor who puts in four-hour days at his country club gets to send his kids to private college in the good old U. S. of A. Tell me, Bobby.” Paul finished by waving his arms in a big, sweeping gesture.

Bobby opened his mouth. The bell rang. Students filed out.

“So read your texts tonight!” he called out to the second-semester seniors who had either been accepted at a college and didn’t care, or weren’t going to college and had stopped caring a long time ago. “Do some homework, for once,” he said as the last student exited the class.

A
half hour later, Paul was looking over some papers at his desk. The door to his classroom was closed, and he took a swig from his metal thermos. Absolut vodka and lime juice. His stomach gurgled queasily and he wished he’d brought something else, maybe a big ole martini. No, that wouldn’t go down any better. His favorite was scotch and soda, a wee splash of soda. This morning, he’d found his liquor cabinet to be depleted of the scotch. He’d have to remember to drop by Don’s Liquor Bonanza on his way home in case Cathy forgot.

Since Cathy had gotten better two years before, which, coincidentally or really not so coincidentally, coincided with Paul’s affinity for morning nightcaps, she’d stopped buying booze. She said she didn’t want to be a codependent. From her years of lying in bed and watching
Oprah
all day, she had learned words like “straight talk” and “tough love.” She used them frequently, and it reminded Paul of that movie
The Stepford Wives,
where all the women turn into mechanical robots that repeat the same meaningless bullshit over and over again. If it weren’t his life, it would be funny.

Unfortunately, it was his life.

Cathy liked a mix of lithium and Prozac. At first they put her on Xanax, but that just made her cry more. Then they tried pure lithium. That was around the time Paul would come home straight from work, dress her, plant her at the kitchen table, and cook dinner for the kids. When she’d start crying over her pasta, he’d say things like:
Mom’s crying happy tears!
After that they tried straight Prozac and that was better, but not much. She’d get up at night and dig at the Saran Wrap–covered leftovers with her fingers. She gained thirty pounds and wouldn’t go out in public because she said she looked pregnant. Finally, two years ago, they found a doctor who prescribed the perfect combination. It was like finding the right drink, really. Two parts scotch, one part soda, a little lithium with your gin? And she became cool and busy and never got sad and never got really happy, either.

Paul wanted to say he liked the change in her. But he couldn’t help feeling that people don’t miraculously get better in the same way that people don’t just get sick. There is something inside them, some chemical imbalance, that makes them who they are. The pills might chain it down for a while, but any day now, it would surface. Funny or not so funny, he hadn’t seen that sickness in her until after they were married.

Paul knew that he was a magnet for nuts. In the same way that they had something inside them that made them sick, he had something inside him, some special pheromone, that drew them to him.

He sipped his drink again, swallowing hard to keep it from coming back up. “Cheap shit,” he muttered, because it sounded funny, like something a hard-core drinker would say.
But you are a hard-core drinker,
a familiar and unwelcome voice whispered in his ear. He ignored it.

He pulled out Bobby’s paper, then put it away. The mood he was in, he’d probably give the kid a D. He pulled out Louise’s paper. Now she was a lot like Susan Marley, at least in the looks department. Except Susan probably knew what the EEC stood for. That was one thing, he could never say Susan was stupid. A borderline schizophrenic with a mean streak the size of Texas, but not stupid.

And the nuts go marching on.

Paul took another drink. Louise had confused imports and exports. He drew a double-ended arrow between the two, then wrote: “Do they still teach English in English class? Look it up.”

He was on his fifth paper when he heard a knock at his classroom door. He dropped his thermos into a drawer and called, “Yes.” Kevin Brutton, the principal, walked in. Kevin was always wearing these cheap suits like he picked them out at the Salvation Army thrift store and threw a little starch on them. He also always smiled. No matter what he said, he was always smiling. It was the politician in him. “Heya, Kev.”

“Hello, Paul.” Kevin brushed his finger across the souvenir conch shell from Mississippi that Paul’s elder son had given him five years before. “I always wondered how they did that,” Kevin said.

“What?”

“Made these carvings—this picture of the water and the beach with the tree in it without cracking the shell.”

“Tiny elves, Kev.”

“Yeah.” Kevin replaced the shell. “Sleep well last night?”

Paul shrugged.

Kevin rubbed his eyes. “Well I didn’t. I had a nightmare about that friend of yours. Susan Marley. My wife, too.”

Paul rolled his eyes. People around here were obsessed with Susan Marley. They thought they saw her behind their mirrors, outside their houses at night, and even in their dreams. Paul was safe from such things: Never once in his adult life had he been able to remember his dreams.

“Dreamed the mill was on fire,” Kevin said.

Paul looked at him. This was what happened when you lived in the sticks. You turned into a half-wit. “Mmm, Kev. That’s a real coincidence. Maybe you and Allie should be special guests for the Psychic Friends’ Network.”

Kevin’s voice got far away. “There’s something wrong with that girl, Paul. Anyone can see it.”

Paul cleared his throat. “You stop by to say hi?”

“No,” Kevin said.

Paul swallowed a burp, and the air got caught somewhere between his esophagus and stomach. “Then what is it?”

Kevin walked over to the open window, stuck his hand out, and felt the rain on his palm. They all liked to do that, the people of this town. They liked to touch the rain. Kevin spoke with his back to Paul. “I never said anything about the girls, although I didn’t agree with it, you know that.” He waited for Paul to offer some sort of confirmation, but Paul offered none. Kevin shrugged. “Forget the legal problems. It’s just not smart.”

Paul stood. “You’ve been listening to crap.”

Kevin turned from the window. For the first time that Paul had known him, he wasn’t smiling. He leaned over Paul’s desk and they locked eyes. “Yeah, Paul. It doesn’t matter. That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because they used to like you. Not because you hung out at their little dive bars, but because you did your job. Now they’re coming into my office asking for transfers because you’re staggering around the classroom.”