"I'm sorry," I said again, and put them in my lap.
She exhaled raggedly. "Forget it, then," she said. "I don't have to be privy to all your secrets, if that's how you feel. Friendships change. I—"
"No!" I said, my hands leaping to my throat this time. Why did I say it so loudly? Was the idea of the friendship between us changing, loosening, that unbearable to me—so unbearable I couldn't even stand to hear the words come out of her mouth?
Yes, I realized, it was. For two decades, she'd known me. I'd known her. It was sacred. I couldn't bear it. I said, "Sue, I'll tell you the truth. But, you'll think badly of me."
She turned her hands up on her knees and said, "Try me," as if she'd been waiting for this information, as if she'd brought me to her office to receive exactly the news I was going to give her.
"Sue," I started. I looked down into her empty hands. I said, "I've been seeing someone." I looked up at her face. "A man."
Sue opened her eyes wider, but then glanced away from me quickly, looking over my shoulder, at the bulletin board behind me. There was nothing on it—just tacks, and the holes left behind by previous tacks. Then she looked back at me. "Oh. My," she said, and seemed to be unable to say anything more.
Now, I had to tell her.
The silence between us was full of the sound of the fluorescent lights burning too brightly over our heads. The hallway outside her door was empty. The phone sat on her desk without the slightest indication that it had ever rung, that it would ever ring again. That silence simply hovered around us, waiting for me to fill it. I bit my lower lip, and then I said, "It started, you know, with those letters—"
At this, Sue snorted, and I sat up straighter, feeling stung. I looked at her for some explanation, but she just shook her head, looked down at her own shoes, flat, black, rubber-soled—the shoes of an older woman, nothing like the sandals and stilettos she used to totter around on in the halls between classes.
"They weren't from Bram," I said. "You know—Bram?"
"I know Bram," Sue said with such sarcasm it sizzled for a minute in the emptiness between us. "We all know Bram," she said, more softly this time.
"Well, the letters weren't from Bram, but, I thought they were, and then I met him, and—things started."
"Shit, Sherry. You're having an affair with Bram Smith?" Her mouth hung open for a moment. She was shaking her head in disbelief. She said it again. "Shit, Sherry. Are you—"
I couldn't stand to hear her say it again, so I said, "Yes, yes. Sue, I'm—I am."
She kept shaking her head for what seemed like a very long time, as if to clear something, or see something, or to deny something completely, and then she stopped and leaned toward me, her eyes narrowed, as if trying to see me through some sort of mist, or brilliant glare. She said, "Are you kidding?"
This time, I shook my head, but only a little.
She sat back and looked up at the ceiling. I would have followed her gaze, but I knew what was up there. Nothing. Ceiling tile. Gray, institutional, weightless.
I looked, instead, at the floor.
Neither of us spoke until Sue said, "Oh. My. God."
"Sue," I started, but could think of nothing to follow it with. "Sue," I said, making it sound, this time, like a statement, or an appeal.
"So," she said, in a more sober tone, as if we were discussing lesson plans or wallpaper choices. "So, are you going to leave Jon?"
"No!" I said. "No, of course not."
"Well," Sue said, "I'm sure Mr. Auto Mechanics is great in bed, Sherry, but have you ever tried talking to him?"
"No," I said. "I mean, yes, Sue, I've talked to him. He's a fine man. He's a really very gentle, and—"
She stood up then, quickly, deliberately, as if to silence me—and for a crazy moment I thought she might strike me. But, of course, she didn't. Her hands were on her arms. She was gripping her own arms so tightly I could see that the flesh on her biceps was turning white. She licked her lips, swallowed, then looked at me. She said, "I just don't think I can hear about this, Sherry. If you're going to start telling me you're in love with Bram Smith ... I mean—I just don't see myself sitting here taking this seriously. I think, honestly, that you should grow up, Sherry. I think this is disgusting, if you want to know the truth."
I flinched, as if she had struck me. I said, "Sue, please. I'm—I'm sorry. I'm—"
She said, "Please, quit saying that, Sherry. You say 'I'm sorry' way too much. And, hey, don't apologize to me. But I do think you might owe Jon some kind of apology."
"It's not like that," I told her. I put my face in my hands. I said into them, "It's not like that. Jon knows."
"Oh my god," Sue said. "So you are leaving Jon?" She began shaking her head so fast this time that her earrings—two little black ships on hooks—rocked wildly around her neck. They looked dangerous, I thought. Furious.
"No," I said, shaking my own head now. "Jon knows. And he's—he's not upset."
"What?" Sue asked, sinking back down in her seat. "Jon knows? Jon approves?" I said nothing. Sue opened her mouth. Nothing came out. Then, she said, standing up again, "Now I have heard enough, Sherry. I'm the one who's sorry now. We've been friends a long time, and I'll be there for you when this is over, but right now, I just—"
"I know," I said. "I know, I know, I know. I shouldn't have told you. It's just, I wanted you to understand why I've been out of touch. It's not us, Sue. I love you. You're my best friend. I'm just"—I shrugged, I tried to smile—"I'm just—really stupid right now. A stupid middle-aged woman, doing something incredibly—stupid."
Sue blinked, then opened her eyes widely, looking more amused, perhaps, than angry this time. She said, "Lord, Sherry Seymour. I thought I knew you, woman. I mean, you'll always be my best friend, but it's going to take me a while to get to know you again." She stepped over to me and put her arms around me. The act pinned my shoulders to my sides so I couldn't embrace her back. She stepped away, looked at me, and said, "I've got to go now. The boys have a dentist appointment. Just"—she hesitated—"just keep me posted, huh, I guess?"
She walked over to the door and opened it, then stepped out into the hallway, reached back in and flipped her light switch, shut the door behind her, leaving me still sitting on the edge of her desk in the dark.
I CALLED out when I saw him in the cafeteria in the morning, "Garrett!"
He was standing in the spot where he often stood in the mornings before his first class, Auto II. Again, he was talking to the boy who resembled Chad, and the boy was wearing, as usual, his red nylon jacket. When I called out Garrett's name, this boy looked over at me, too, and I could see a flicker of something like resentment cross his face as I walked toward them. I was a teacher, an old woman, someone's dull mother, interrupting something interesting. But Garrett looked pleased. He brightened, turning toward me. "Do you have a minute, Garrett?" I asked. "Can you come to my office?"
"Sure!" he said.
We walked together through the gathered groups of students, through the cafeteria. The chatter was deafening, the colors so vivid—jackets, scarves, skirts. Spring had come to the cafeteria. All the black down jackets, the heavy flannel, the browns and grays, had been discarded or packed away.
Now, it was like passing through flocks of tropical birds, through the furious mayhem of nature. Here and there, someone's iPod or Walkman, turned up too loud to be healthy, leaked a scrap of music from an earphone—a symphonic buzzing, a wailing teenager, the sad angry chant of rap. At one table someone was telling a joke, and although I couldn't hear the words, the rhythm of narrative unfolding was familiar enough, the building of a story, and then he said ... A small crowd of boys in T-shirts emblazoned with the names of football teams huddled around the joke teller, waiting with anticipation for the punch line. A female voice shouted, Fuck you!
Garrett walked ahead of me, making a path I could follow, parting the students as he walked, and then—I saw her coming, knew what would happen before it happened but could do n
othing to stop it—a pale girl in a white dress, walking backward, quickly, while waving to her friends, bumped into me with a strange force, more like a car traveling at a high speed hitting me than a teenage girl wearing a white dress slamming into my side, knocking me off balance. I stumbled forward in my high heels. Two steps, three steps. Garrett reached out to catch me by the elbow, and he almost steadied me, but it was too late. I fell to my knees at the pink ballet slippers of the girl, who was apologizing profusely before she could even have realized what had happened.
From the floor, the crowd around me seemed monstrous. Tropical birds—but hungry, wild ones. I couldn't, at first, stand up, then Garrett took my hand and pulled me to my feet, and the pale girl (Oh my god, oh my god, I'm so sorry, I'm such an idiot) brushed off my skirt with her hand.
"Thank you," I said to both of them when I was standing again.
I looked down. My panty hose had been torn, and both of my knees were skinned, bleeding, long stripes of blood already dripping from my knees to my calves.
"Mrs. Seymour," Garrett said, looking at the blood. "Jesus Christ."
The girl, again, Oh my god, oh my god.
But, truly, there was no pain, and the wound was superficial, I thought. That's why there was so much blood. I knew. I'd spent years and years tending to such scrapes. I assured them I was fine, that I just needed some paper towels, that no serious damage had been done.
And it hadn't.
I'd simply been knocked to the earth by the spirit of spring, which had continued its colorful, raucous babble—completely indifferent, uninterrupted, just as it would have, I thought, if it had killed me.
AFTER I'd cleaned myself up in the women's room, stopped the bleeding with damp paper towels, thrown my panty hose in the trash can (luckily it was warm enough I didn't need them anyway), I went back to my office. Garrett was outside it, reading, again, the poem on my door. (But the guts were out for the crows to eat) "Mrs. Seymour," he said. "Are you okay? I—"
"I'm fine," I said. "Really. I'm fine."
He looked at my knees.
The bleeding had stopped, but the skin was torn, a brightly raw pink on my left knee, a bruise-colored scab already forming on my right. He winced.
I opened my door, and he followed me in. We sat down across from one another, and I said, "Well, Garrett, before all that, I just wanted to talk to you about your plan. Your enlistment. I just wondered—is it too late? I mean, have you really thought this through? Don't you think you should finish school first, and then if you still want to, you can join then? Maybe after things, after the war, assuming it ends, ever, maybe you can—?"
"It's too late," Garrett said. He was nodding, smiling. "It's really nice that you're so worried. But, yeah, it's too late, and I feel really happy, really sure. I'm completely committed, Mrs. Seymour. It's what I want to do."
Garrett was wearing a gray T-shirt with MARINES written across his chest in what looked to me like incongruously girlish script. The T-shirt was so new, so fresh and stiff, it could have stood up by itself. It had never been worn until this day, I could tell—never been washed, never been put in a dryer. Inside it, Garrett's shoulders looked narrow, and bony, and I remembered the feel of them, pressed against my skirt, his tears on my blouse, his skinned knees bleeding on both of us.
I said, "Oh, Garrett," but he was smiling.
He said, "I'm really sorry, but I have to go to class, Mrs. Seymour."
He stood up, and I opened my door for him, and before more than an inch of light from the hallway had cracked between the door and the frame, I knew what was on the other side.
A scent, a vibration, a shadow, Bram.
He had his arms crossed. He said, "Hi, Mrs. Seymour, I was just reading your poem here. Hey, Garrett. Gonna be late for class, aren't you?"
Then Bram looked from my neck to my knees and said, "What the hell happened to you?"
"I DON'T like him. I don't want you alone in your office with him," Bram said later over dinner in the efficiency.
Chinese. I'd picked it up on the way over from work. Bram liked Mongolian beef, like Jon. I got chicken fried rice for myself. We hadn't turned the lights on. Outside, it was not yet dark, but there was a steady icy rain pouring down. Over the course of the afternoon, something cold and purple had blown in out of the west—winter back for one last blast—and the temperature had dropped, and this frozen rain had started. In the shadows, Bram's face looked featureless across the table from me, nothing but eyes and teeth.
"Bram," I said. "I've known Garrett since he was five years old. He's my son's best friend"—which wasn't true, but sounded, I thought, reasonable enough—"and there's certainly—"
"Have you been getting any more love notes?" Bram asked. He'd finished his plate of food. He'd put his fork down at the edge of that emptiness.
"No," I said. "I haven't."
"Well," he said, "since you know now that the notes weren't from me, who do you think wrote them?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Yeah, you do," he said.
I put my own fork down. I asked, knowing the answer, "Who?"
"Garrett Thompson, obviously," Bram said.
I inhaled. I said, "Well, Bram, even if it was—"
Bram stood up. He said, "Whether or not it was, that motherfucker better watch himself."
Bram came over to me at the table and took my hand, pulled me up to stand against him. His erection against me felt uncomfortable, insistent. He put his mouth to my neck, one hand at the small of my back, pinning me to him, and the other on my breast.
WHEN I woke, I realized it was much later than I should have slept. I'd forgotten to set the alarm, and the sun pouring through the window was high and bright. I could barely open my eyes, and when I finally did, they were filled with water, a landscape of brilliance and tears before me, painted on the blank space of the ceiling.
I didn't bother to hurry out from under the sheet, or to rouse Bram. Without looking at the clock, I knew it was already too late. My first class on Thursdays started an hour and a half before the sun could have gotten this high in the sky.
I lay there, resigned to it.
(Too late, too late, no hurry now)
And, with my eyes full of water and sun—too bright to see—I was reminded of how, when Chad was only three years old, Jon and I took him to Lake Michigan after a trip to the west side of the state, after visiting my father. It had been July, a day so bright blue that, even with my sunglasses on, to glance toward the water was blinding—that vast, frothing nothingness, impossible to really look at, shining as if it were generating its own super-radiance, a kind of white fire all the way to the horizon.
Before we'd gotten to the beach, I'd imagined laying our towels down, then taking Chad by the hand, walking him down to the edge of the water, letting his pudgy little feet baby-step themselves across the damp shingle of sand, over the layer of pebbles between the shore and the water, then his toes into the lake. Maybe we would make our way farther, up to his tummy, until he got scared, and then I'd take him in my arms, or pass him over to Jon, and we'd reassure him that if he stayed with us, he was safe.
But, while I was spreading the towels out, and Jon was taking his shoes off, shoving his car keys into the toes, tying the string around his bathing shorts tighter, each of us thinking the other was watching our son, Chad ran straight to the lake, and into the waves. I looked down at my side, where my son had been standing, and there was nothing.
When I turned and saw that he wasn't with Jon (two seconds having passed, really, or maybe only one), I opened my mouth and heard the words Where's Chad? come out, and then the bright empty shock of it crossing Jon's face. He looked toward the lake and said, pointing, "There!"
But what did there mean on a day of such luminous nothingness?
The water, an illusion, the sun smeared over it—there did not exist.
It was as indistinct as nowhere.
I was a blind woman in a bathing suit looking for th
e silver glint of a needle, and then both of us were running toward the water.
"There!" Jon continued shouting. "There!"
But there wasn't anything there. Water, sun; sun, water. Nothing.
And, then, suddenly, I saw him—a silhouette at the edge of the world, just before the world crashed over him in layers of brilliance and darkness, a huge flume of it snatching the silhouette off the edge of the horizon.
And then I was in the water, too, searching it wildly, unable to see anything but my own fingernails, painted red, and the pink back of Jon's neck as he bent over searching the water, still shouting, "There! There!"
White foot—or fish?—I lunged at it.
Grabbed it.
A miracle.
Something nature had snatched away, then tossed back up to me. My baby. Dragged out of Lake Michigan, laughing. I held his squirming happy form to me for too long. He started to cry.
After we dried off and calmed down enough to even speak to one another again, Jon and I packed up.
We drove home, in stunned silence.
In bed that night, we spoke of it in monosyllables.
"God."
"Lord."
"If—"
"I know."
"Fuck."
"Oh. Jon."
"So close."
"I can't—"
"I know."
Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw it:
That nothing, there, blazing, with my baby at the center of it.
"What are you thinking about, babe?" Bram asked. He'd propped himself up on one elbow and was looking down into my face. The shadow he cast there made it possible for me to open my eyes. I looked at him, and said, "I'm thinking we're too late."