Though he didn’t comment, Dr Aziz wasn’t as inured to the gesture that was all too routine for me. Brows elevated, he climbed into the passenger seat and held on with both hands after fumbling for the nonexistent seatbelt. ‘Two rows over.’ He pointed. ‘The green Taurus.’
I slowed to keep from flinging him out the cart’s open side while making a U-turn at the end of the row, reflecting that my usual, antisocial incarnation would’ve been way less likely to get flipped off in the middle of a parking lot. I was a walking target, patrolling the campus in this damned costume.
Once I got his car started, I removed the cables and dropped the hood. ‘Be sure to get that battery charged or replaced – this box provides a jump, not a charge.’ I knew my engineering professor didn’t need this advice … but I assumed I was unrecognizable.
Wrong.
‘Yes, yes, Mr Maxfield, I think I am quite familiar with auto charging by this point.’ He laughed, still wheezing a bit. ‘This is a fortunate meeting, I think. I was mentally reviewing former students just this morning. I’ll be contacting a handful of these, inviting them to apply for a research project that begins next semester. Our objective is the development of durable soft materials to replace those normally damaged by thermodynamic forces – such as those used in drug delivery and tissue engineering.’
I knew all about Dr Aziz’s proposed research project – it had been animatedly discussed at last month’s Tau Beta Pi meeting with the sort of enthusiasm that only a bunch of engineering honour society nerds can supply.
‘You’re a senior, I believe?’
My brows rose and I nodded, but I was too stunned to reply.
‘Hmm. We’re primarily interested in juniors, as they’ll be around longer.’ He chuckled to himself before pursing his lips, watching me. ‘Nevertheless, the founding team of a project is critical, and I believe you could be an asset, if you’re interested. The position would be reflected as a special-projects course on your transcript, and we’ve received a grant, so we’re able to provide a small stipend to those ultimately chosen.’
Holy shit. I shook myself from my stupor. ‘I’m interested.’
‘Good, good. Email me tonight, and I’ll forward the official application. I am obliged to inform applicants that spots on the team are not guaranteed. They’ll be quite sought after, I imagine.’ He wasn’t kidding. A few of my peers would seriously consider pushing me into traffic to secure one. ‘But …’ He smiled conspiratorially. ‘I think you’d be a top candidate.’
When Heller gave the class their first exam, I had a day off from attending. Instead of sleeping in like a normal college student, I’d stupidly signed up for an extra campus PD shift. It was like I no longer had any idea how to chill out and do nothing. Between paid jobs, volunteer jobs and studying, I worked all the damned time.
The skies opened up around seven a.m., deluging the area with a surprise thunderstorm just in time to negate sunrise, so I bummed a ride with Heller instead of enduring a soggy, miserable drive to campus on my Sportster. After helping tote a box of books from his car to his office and agreeing on a time to leave for the day, I headed to the side exit.
The sun had emerged in the few minutes I’d been inside, granting a short reprieve from the rain, though trees and building overhangs still dripped fat drops on to the students trudging through puddles and hopping over miniature streams. Given the low, grey clouds gathering visibly overhead, I knew the sunburst would last five minutes tops, and hoped I could make it to the campus police building before the next downpour.
If the rain kept up – and all forecasts said that it would – I’d be stuck inside, answering phones and filing stacks of folders in the department’s wall of file cabinets instead of issuing parking citations. Lieutenant Fairfield was always behind on filing. I was half convinced he never filed anything. He simply waited for rainy days and unloaded the mind-numbing task on me. Strangely, I’d rather brave irate students, staff and faculty than be stuck inside all day.
And I won’t see Jackie Wallace at all today.
I willed my brain to shut up, sliding my sunglasses on and holding the door open for a trio of girls who ignored me, continuing their conversation as though I was a servant or a robot, installed there for the express purpose of opening the door for them. Damn this uniform.
Then I saw her, splashing through pools of water in aqua rain boots covered in yellow daisy outlines. I stood like a statue, still holding the door ajar, even though she was yards away and hadn’t noticed me – or anyone around her. I knew she’d be entering this door. She had an exam in econ in about one minute. There was no Kennedy Moore in sight.
Her book bag threatened to slide down her arm, and she hitched her shoulder higher while fumbling with an uncooperative umbrella that matched her boots. Her agitated body language and the fact that she’d never been late to class before – or arrived without her boyfriend – told me she was running behind this morning. Her umbrella refused to close. ‘Dammit,’ she muttered, giving it a hard shake while pushing the retract button repeatedly.
It folded shut a moment before she looked up to see me holding the door.
Her hair was damp. She wore no make-up, but the tips of her lashes were spiky – she’d clearly been caught in the rain on the way from her dorm or car. The combination of her wet skin, her proximity and the breath I took looking into her beautiful eyes nearly knocked me over. She smelled like honeysuckle – an aroma I knew well. My mother had encouraged a wall of it to vine over the tiny cottage in our backyard that she’d made into an art studio. Every summer, the trumpet-shaped blooms had infused the interior with their sweet scent, especially when she’d cranked the windows open. While Mom worked on projects for fall gallery showings, I sat across the scarred tabletop from her, sketching video-game characters or bugs or the innards of an inoperative appliance Dad gave me permission to take apart.
An astonished smile broke across Jackie’s face as she glanced up at me, replacing the scowl she’d given her wayward umbrella. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ducking through the open door.
‘You’re welcome,’ I replied, but she was already rushing away. Towards the class where I was the tutor. Towards the boyfriend who didn’t deserve her.
I hadn’t let myself want anything so impossible in a very long time.
4
Landon
Hours after Dad brought me home from the hospital, he’d totally lost it, using a box cutter to rip out the bloodstained carpet from the room, all the way to the structural floor. Without a mask over his eyes or nose, he’d switched on the sander and scoured the floor until the wood dipped like a bowl in the middle of the room. Sawdust wafted from the doorway like smoke, coating the room and everything in it, including my dad.
I sat in the hall with my back to the wall and my hands covering my ears, sick from the sound of his grief and rage, his hoarse tears and roars mixing with the deafening sander, all of it useless because none of it would bring her back. When the motor stopped, I crawled to the doorway and peeked inside. He knelt, crying and coughing, the hated stain fainter but still visible under the now-silent sander.
The day of her funeral, I woke to the sound of his footfalls in the hallway outside my door, trudging back and forth. My room was dark in the predawn, and I lay motionless, barely breathing, identifying the screech of hangers shoved together and the drag of drawers opened and shut before he tramped past my room and back again, over and over. An hour later, the door to their room snapped shut.
He’d moved into the small guest room downstairs. By unspoken agreement, neither of us entered their sealed and haunted bedroom after that.
Cindy stopped by a lot to check on Dad and me, bringing food or straightening up. Usually Charles came with her, or Cole – who said all the wrong things, even though they were the exact same things everyone else said.
‘Sorry about your mom,’ he’d said last night as we sat side by side on my bed, game controllers in our hands.
I’d
nodded, staring at the screen where we drag-raced down some famous street – I couldn’t remember which one – mowing down trash bins, trees, other cars and the occasional hapless animated pedestrian. I tried not to hit the people. Cole seemed to aim for them, especially if his little sister Carlie was around, because she freaked whenever he did it.
‘You hit a kid! You just hit a kid on purpose!’ she’d say when his car jumped the kerb and ran over a skateboarder.
I forgave Cole for hitting the people deliberately, and for saying what everyone else said, because he was ten, and because he treated me the same as always. He was the only person I knew who did that.
Murmuring voices drew me from my room and down the stairs one Saturday morning. Cindy and Dad sat at the kitchen table, coffee mugs gripped between them. Their voices reverberated in the room and spilled into the hallway, as quiet as they were. I knew they were discussing me before I heard what they were saying.
‘Ray, he needs counselling.’
Cindy had always joked that she’d happily trade both her sisters for my mom, who was her ‘true’ sister. Like a meddling aunt who’d known me my whole life, she’d always treated me like I was partly hers to raise.
For a long moment, Dad didn’t answer, and then he said, ‘Landon is imaginative – you know that. He draws all the damned time. I don’t think a few sketches are cause for a shrink –’
‘Ray, I’ve watched your child, her child, since he first picked up a pencil. Of course I’m familiar with how he expresses himself artistically. But I’m telling you, this is … different. It’s disturbing, violent –’
‘What the hell do you expect?’ he hissed, and it was her turn to go quiet. He sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Cin. But … we’ll deal with it in our own way. We don’t want to talk about it. When I think about that night –’ His voice broke. ‘I won’t make him talk about it.’
I heard what he didn’t say. That he didn’t want to hear what I had to say about that night.
But he was right. I didn’t want to talk about it.
‘He’s withdrawing, Ray. He barely speaks any more.’ Her voice was choked with tears.
‘He’s thirteen. Reticence is normal for thirteen.’
‘If he was this way before, I’d agree. But he wasn’t. He was happy and communicative. Watching him with Rose gave me hopes of having sons who’d still talk to me and laugh with me and kiss me goodbye when they become teenagers. This isn’t normal behaviour for Landon – thirteen or not.’
My father sighed again. ‘His mother is dead. How can he ever be normal again?’
She sniffed, and I knew she’d begun crying softly.
‘I can’t discuss this any more,’ he said. ‘I appreciate your help, and Charles’s – but I just can’t –’
‘What if I find a therapist for him? What if I take him, and you don’t have to be involved, until you want to –’
‘No. Not … yet. Give him time.’
‘But –’
‘Cindy.’ That was his I’m done voice. I was all too familiar with it. When I wanted something my parents didn’t want me to have, Dad had always been the one to deliver the final no, and that was how he said it. Landon, and that scowl. No use arguing once I’d got that.
Before I was born, the Maxfields and the Hellers began celebrating Thanksgiving together. They did it every year – through postdoc assignments on opposite coasts, Charles’s acceptance of an assistant professor position at Georgetown, and my father’s decision to take his PhD and work for the government instead of some university. After I came along, they kept the tradition, settling twenty minutes from each other in Arlington and Alexandria – both inside the Beltway.
This year was supposed to be our year to host. Instead, Dad and I drove to their house, each silent, hating and enduring the stupid Christmas carols on the radio. Neither of us moved to change the station.
My mother had loved holidays – all of them. For her, none were spoiled by too much hype or commercialism. She made heart-shaped cookies in February, oohed and aahed over fireworks in July, and sang along the moment Christmas carols began playing, no matter how many weeks it was until December 25th. I would never hear her voice again. My stomach heaved and my jaw clamped tight, my body launching a protest against the meal we were about to have. Without her.
I sat in the front seat with a store-bought pumpkin pie on my lap and a can of whipped cream in a bag at my feet. We’d burned the edges of the crust, and Dad had scraped off the blackened parts, leaving the pie looking as though squirrels had broken into the house and sampled it. It had to be the most half-assed contribution the Maxfields had ever made to Thanksgiving dinner.
I was smart enough to keep this thought to myself.
The meal was bearable, but grim and pretty quiet until Caleb – who was almost four and still considered cutlery optional – stuck his finger through the whipped cream and pumpkin filling and then sucked it off.
‘Caleb – fork,’ Cindy said gently, for the fourth or fifth time since we’d begun eating. She rolled her eyes when Cole copied him. ‘Cole,’ she said less gently. I couldn’t help smiling when both brothers stuck their pie-coated fingers in their mouths. Carlie snorted a laugh.
‘Wha?’ Cole asked his mother, faking innocence, unapologetically sucking whipped cream from his finger.
Giggling, Caleb copied his older brother. ‘Yuh – wha?’ Then, for some inexplicable reason, he glanced around the table, popped his sticky finger from his mouth, and lisped, ‘Where’s Wose?’ Everyone froze, and his eyes filled with tears. ‘Where’s Wose?’ he wailed, as though he’d just figured out that when your parents tell you someone has gone to heaven, that person is never, ever coming back.
All the food in my traitorous stomach surged up at once. I leaped from my chair and ran to the guest bathroom, the memory of that night condemning me. The sounds I would never forget. The futile screams I’d shouted until I could do no more than rasp her name, until the tears stopped because I literally couldn’t produce them. The useless son I’d been when she needed me.
I puked up everything I’d eaten, gagging on sobs when nothing was left in my stomach.
A month later, Dad quit his job, sold our house and moved us to the Gulf Coast – to my grandfather’s house – the last place he’d ever intended to live again.
LUCAS
I had dinner with the Hellers once a week or so – whenever Charles barbecued or Cindy made a huge pan of lasagne. The Hellers always tried to make me feel like I belonged to them, like I was one of them. I could pretend, for the space of one or two hours, that I was their son, their big brother.
Then I returned to reality, where I had no connection to anyone, except a man who lived hundreds of miles away and couldn’t look me in the eye because I was a reminder of the night he lost the only person he ever loved.
I knew how to cook, but I’d never moved beyond a basic range of meals, most of which I’d learned from my grandfather. He’d been a simple man with simple tastes, and for a time, I’d wanted nothing more than to be like him.
During meals with the Hellers, I steeled myself for the inevitable semi-veiled queries, especially from Cindy – lines of subtle interrogation her daughter had recently taken up. I wondered if Carlie had been deployed last month to find out if I was secretly gay or just perpetually girlfriendless. She was her mother’s daughter – interfering where she believed she was needed, and often too uncomfortably close to target.
I couldn’t be upset with either of them for trying to draw me out, but there was usually little, if anything, to tell. I went to school and I worked. Sometimes, I went downtown to hear a local band play. I attended monthly Tau Beta Pi meetings. I studied and worked some more.
I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring up Jackie Wallace, Charles’s student – and mine – who’d progressed from capturing my attention during class to stealing into my conscious and unconscious fantasies.
This morning, my alarm began blaring in the middle of a dream a
bout her. A vivid, detailed, solidly unethical dream.
She had no idea who I was, but that fact didn’t stop my mind from imagining that she did. It didn’t stop the sweeping disappointment when I woke fully and remembered what was real – and what wasn’t.
Purposefully arriving late to econ, I slid into my seat, pulled out my programming text and forced myself to read (and reread and reread) a section about transfer functions so I couldn’t watch her tuck a strand of hair behind her ear or stroke her fingers across her thigh in a measurable rhythm that progressively drove me crazy.
Definitely nothing going on in my life that would make it to dinnertime conversation.
I arrived to find that I wasn’t on the agenda, which was all good until I knew why. Carlie, who’d always been a wisp of a girl despite her hearty appetite, sat poking at her food with her fork and eating almost nothing. Cindy always made a small, separate dish of meatless lasagne in deference to her daughter’s refusal to eat ‘anything with a face’. It was Carlie’s favourite meal, but she wasn’t eating.
A worried glance passed between her parents, and I wondered what the hell was going on.
‘How did volleyball practice go, Carlie? Any more talk of moving up to varsity?’ Heller asked in an everything is normal voice.
Carlie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m done,’ she said, shoving halfheartedly at her barely touched dinner and rushing away. Her bedroom door slammed shut, but the thin lumber couldn’t block the sound of her sobs.
‘I’d like to kick that punk’s ass,’ her father growled.
Caleb’s eyes widened. He was constantly encouraged not to say ass.
‘I understand the sentiment, believe me, but what would that solve?’ Cindy set her plate on the granite counter and turned towards the staircase leading to her daughter’s room.
‘It would make me feel a damn sight better,’ Heller muttered.
Carlie’s pitiful wails grew louder when Cindy opened the door upstairs, and all three of us winced.