by Alan Rossi
Louis Walters was saying something, his face slightly blurred and pixelated on Katherine’s laptop’s screen, about how he wished he could be there with her, that he was glad she had contacted him, because he wanted to be there for her and this way – meaning through the computer – he got to be there for her. He hadn’t called or tried to message her, he said, because obviously she was around David a lot and also he didn’t want to complicate an already difficult thing, so he’d been feeling just totally and completely helpless. He was so glad she’d called. He wanted to hug her through the screen, hold her close.
She typed that she felt like shit for contacting him. Real shit. She continued to write, without looking at his face, that she hated that she’d contacted him so much, actually, that she was going to log out of Skype right now, after she said her piece. Which was this. She shouldn’t be doing this. They shouldn’t be doing this. This was something they shouldn’t be doing and they should’ve both known they shouldn’t be doing it, she wrote. Doing what, he said quickly. Doing what, exactly? Because I hope you’re not saying what I think you’re saying, and if you are saying that, I think you need to just give it a little time. This is a stressful time for you. He cleared his throat, swallowed. A very stressful and difficult time, I understand that, and you shouldn’t be making, you know, rash decisions.
She picked up her coffee, which was lukewarm. It had been made in the little Keurig machine supplied by the hotel. She knew that the plastic of these Keurig cup things was somehow dangerous for her health, cancerous or something, as well as being ecologically unsound, but it was just for a few days. Plus, the package, the Keurig cup thing, said hazelnut mocha on it, and the picture of a hazelnut mocha in a ceramic mug on the foil of the little plastic cup had looked so good. Also, she’d thought while staring at the cup, what wasn’t cancerous and ecologically unsound? She looked at Louis Walters while drinking her coffee. He was probably cancerous and ecologically unsound, she thought. Then, without immediately noticing, she laughed, and then noticed she had laughed outwardly, when Louis Walters said, What’s funny? She shook her head. Since she wasn’t speaking, she could take as long as she wanted to reply. She looked at the rest of the room. The laptop was angled in such a way that she could view the entire room, but Louis Walters couldn’t. He could see the wall behind her, maybe some of the window. She wrote, Hold on, then she sipped the coffee again and watched him reading her words. Let me help, he said. Let’s think about something else. Tell me about the town or something. She wrote that she’d been there for less than a week and she disliked the town more than ever, in the same way she disliked herself right now. She wrote that the problem with the town was the same as her own problem with herself: it was in the middle of nowhere, destitution and rural decay all around, mountains cutting it off from everything else, in the same way that she was alone in her life, the mountains of thoughts in her mind finding no expression or understanding in other people, cutting her off in the same way the mountains isolated the town. Except me, Louis Walters said. You find understanding in me. She just looked at him. I can feel me understanding you, he said. So you must feel it too. Just barely, she wrote. Plus, I shouldn’t even be talking to you. We shouldn’t be talking at all.
She put the mug down feeling as though she was doing something right, finally. Louis Walters made a pained face and she typed out an apology. You don’t have to apologize, he said. And you’re not cut off. I want you to know that. And you’re understood. I understand you. Her own small face hovered in the corner of the Skype window, the cliché of grief: her hair wild, her face appearing old, no make-up, washed out in the dull light coming through the hotel window, her eyes far off, red. It looked like she’d been in the woods all night on the run from an insane serial murderer, whose chasing and murderous intentions toward her in turn made her insane. That she had this thought, and many others, that she was even talking to Louis Walters, that she was doing anything when Nicholas was dead seemed like a kind of betrayal, like what she should be doing, somehow, was being in constant mourning, in non-stop grief, which she was, sort of. She didn’t know anymore. She didn’t know where her mourning stopped and her life began, as though the two could be separated. But it felt that way: it felt like, here Katherine, these are moments supplied for grief, and here, these other moments, don’t forget, they’re your life. She knew this was a falsehood, yet she felt it. She pulled her hair back in a ponytail, which made her look worse, her face even more tired. She rubbed her cheeks for a moment, reddening them, then looked at herself in the Skype window again. She was wearing her Professor Sweater. David called it that. I see we’re doing Professor Sweater with jeans, David liked to say. Very professorial of you. Immediate profundity. A presence of ever-refining knowledge. Cute, too. The thought of David out in the world, her in here talking with Louis Walters, made her wince, close her eyes. When she opened them again she couldn’t understand why she was talking to Louis Walters when she didn’t want to be talking to him, didn’t want to be hurting David, didn’t want to be doing any of this. Yet she was. It sometimes felt as though the universe had given her her life in the form of a puzzle, and she’d dumped the box, spread the pieces, turned them over, and slowly started fitting the pieces together, but when the picture became too clear – there she was! – she began forcing pieces into her neighbor’s puzzle, messing it up purposely. Who wanted to complete a picture they already saw, already knew? And now that Nicholas was gone, it was as though she was again looking at the puzzle she’d started long ago, and then had abandoned. A little layer of dust covered all the pieces, obscuring what had once been clear.
Katherine watched Louis Walters on the screen. His face was larger than it seemed in real life, and somehow more unattractive. Then she thought that this was his face in real life. It was just on a screen. She watched him read her message again and then watched his nodding head and him say, Just get out of there. I don’t see why you’re staying. There’s nothing you can do there, really. If I was there, I’d tell David there was no point in the both of you staying there. What’s that going to do? Why is it when something terrible happens people believe that proximity to the event matters? We have phones, we have computers, we have automobiles, planes, what the hell. I don’t get it.
She looked at his speaking face and wrote, It’s not about Nicholas. Or being close to Nicholas. We have to help pack the house and get everything cleaned up. It’s also Jack. It’s about who will take him. Louis Walters read, nodding, then shaking his head, then was saying, I know, I know, but why can’t that be accomplished with a phone call, a text, an email, then a quick drive into rural depression and a quick drive out. Part of the reason you feel so shitty is because you’re in a shitty place. She put a finger up, stopping him. The mother-in-law is supposedly coming, she wrote. April’s mother, I mean. That’s why. She called Nathaniel and told him. Apparently she started Monday night, and was now driving across the entire country. Four full days on the road, staying in motels, and eating junk food. It’s, what, Tuesday, so she’ll be here by the end of the week. Why else would she be driving out here from South Dakota or wherever she’s coming from? Huh, Louis Walters said. I mean, wow. Does she have any legal right? Katherine wrote to him that she didn’t think so, and then, after pausing a moment, wrote that David believed that they had to present the seriousness of their concerns through the seriousness of their presence. Also, he wanted to help Nathaniel pack, so we’re here, she wrote. That sounds like David, he said. She wrote, David seems to have closed his mind to the fact that we will never see Nicholas again. He’s being who he is – focused on the problem at hand, what to do with the material possessions, the house, the distribution of things, and to some degree, what to do with Jack. He’s being the distant observer and eventual fixer of all situations, the lawyer, the mediator and moderator of all conflicts and problems and emotions into the simplicity of fact. I can’t stand it.
The last line was unnecessarily mean. After all, David was the one who w
as trying to take care of things, he was the one who was out, first to help Nathaniel pack some boxes at Nicholas and April’s house and then to look for the will just in case this Tammy woman was thinking she had some right to guardianship, and then he was going to pick up some essentials for their hotel room’s small refrigerator because Katherine couldn’t stand meeting any more people from the town. David was doing all this and here she was typing to Louis Walters that she couldn’t stand him. David was taking care of her, trying to, and maybe it was all a little overdone: you stay here – I’ll get some groceries, I’ll help Nathaniel pack, and when the time comes, if it comes to it, I’ll meet with this Tammy person. You don’t need to even think about it. Plus, maybe this Tammy person just wants some of her daughter’s things – that might be it, too, he’d said. Let’s wait until we find out what she’s doing, though Katherine had thought that if she was driving over thirty hours, it probably wasn’t for some clothes. She’d written to David on her phone, while he stood waiting, that she wasn’t going to miss talking with this Tammy woman, if it came to that, but then she’d thanked him and said she felt bad and frustrated at herself that she couldn’t do anything, couldn’t go out and deal with the people in the town again. It was as though her annoyance at herself translated into annoyance with him. Before leaving for the cabin, he’d asked her if she would be okay alone. Because I don’t have to help Nathaniel pack today? he’d said. I can stay here. She’d typed to him, on her phone’s screen, that she’d be fine, please, go. He’d gathered his wallet, put on his shoes, and went to the door, only to step back into the room. I shouldn’t go, he said. It feels wrong. She typed on her phone, GO. I can’t see it, he said, stepping back into the room. Go, he said. Go, then I’ll go. Are you sure? She looked at him, raising her eyebrows. Okay, he’d said. The message I’m getting is that you’re going to be fine, you could actually use a little time alone, and I can go? She’d looked at him flatly, coolly. I’m going, he said. Then, as soon as he was gone, she’d wished she hadn’t sent him away.
She told Louis Walters that she’d be right back, and got up to make another Keurig thing. She stood before the machine, debating about whether to use it again, and thought of how this time in the hotel room was the first time she’d been alone except for maybe the bathroom or the shower, completely alone with the idea that Nicholas was now dead, he had died in a car accident last week, nearly a week ago. She felt confused, as though time was working in some way she no longer understood. Every other moment, there’d been someone there with her. Back in Charlotte, David was in the house with her, Nathaniel and Stefanie had stopped by on their way out of town to go be with the boy and to start packing up Nicholas’s house, and the next day her sister came over and stayed a night. Her sister had taken her on a walk through the neighborhood. On the walk, the neighborhood had seemed changed, seemed to lack depth, as though she were on a sound stage, and that if she went into any of the houses all she would find was the wood supports holding up the faces of houses, and behind that, barren land, no lives being lived. She told as much to her sister, Margaret, who told her, It’s just because it’s so new. It’ll stop feeling like that. Walking next to her sister, unreal houses around them and tree branches creaking in the wind, Katherine had said, You don’t understand. It’s felt like this for years. She felt her sister look at her. Then they’d walked on without any more speaking and Katherine had felt mean, unreceptive. She’d given her sister a hug when they got back to the house, thanked her. She told her sister, Thank you for getting me out of the house, though as she said it, she was aware she was saying it without meaning it, saying it because she knew it was what her sister believed she was doing for her, and so, Katherine had tried to return this consideration to her sister, and said this clichéd thing – thank you for getting me out of the house – in an attempt to be considerate of a clichéd attempt by her sister. Anything you need, her sister had said, as though she were being given the line from a director behind Katherine’s head.
In the first few days after Nicholas died, people seemed to huddle around Katherine like she was some delicate, slightly old animal, whose fur wasn’t so thick anymore, was a little ratty in fact, and it was cold out. People seemed to believe she was in need of cocooning or deep hibernation, covering her in blankets and bringing her food. Eat, they seemed to suggest, and then sleep for a couple months, and once you wake, you won’t have to deal with this at all. It’ll all be gone. Hibernation Therapy. Eventually, people left, and she went into her office at school to be alone. She stepped into her office, left the light off, closed the door, and took a breath. She sat at her desk and turned on her computer. She didn’t know what else to do. She checked her emails. There were several from colleagues. Condolence emails. A moment later, there was a knock. Colleagues came by with kind, understanding words, withdrawn and pained body language. Some came with flowers. One came with chocolate, which she couldn’t understand. Apparently David had alerted them. The younger faculty members didn’t come by. They were the ones who sent their condolences as emails, a distancing Katherine almost admired. She also knew they couldn’t come by. Young men and women who, while intensely intelligent, had not seen death in their lives. She barely had time to see it herself – Nicholas was dead, a car accident, and all she kept thinking from that first moment was, That’s not possible. She was a faculty mentor to one of the lecturers, one of the ones who’d emailed her a note of personal sorrow and sympathy. Kylie Newman. She wore vests, a grey, a black, a green one over a starched shirt. She’d once said, This is my lesbian uniform. She had dark hair, short on the sides and long on top. Vigilant, semi-aggressive, hip hair. Hair that it seemed you could have a conversation with and might be more interesting than the person beneath it. This hair, coupled with the vests and starched shirts, jeans, and weirdly, cowboy boots, made Kylie Newman look like a dorky version of a gunslinger. Katherine liked her. Thirty or so, intelligent, her work focused on digital media, of course, and yet Katherine saw the child in this woman still. Everything about her was still at play. Katherine thought that Kylie Newman knew sadness only as a romantic reaction to actual suffering. It was a game still. She’d broken up with her girlfriend, she once confided to Katherine. They’d been talking about the election of a conservative governor, how this deeply worried Kylie and the girl’s eyes had become far off, glazed, the vest and the entire persona she presented to the world appearing like a costume. She told Katherine that her girlfriend, now ex-girlfriend she corrected herself, had gotten into a graduate school in Illinois and it made more sense to separate than to try to do a long-distance thing. She told Katherine that her girlfriend, now her ex-girlfriend, had said that they were either going to pony up and get married, or it was time to move on. Kylie Newman had said it was something about the phrase ‘pony up’ that had allowed her to see with clarity that this wasn’t the person for her. It was so hard, and she was afraid of being alone, but she’d done it. Jesus, Katherine had said. Luckily, Jesus has nothing to do with it, Kylie Newman had replied, which seemed to Katherine yet another occasion to exclaim ‘jesus.’ Still, Katherine envied the ease of this separation, the un-actualized suffering of it. Something as simple as moving to another state, an off-putting phrase, could cause it. Katherine found herself secretly missing, as Kylie Newman relayed her breakup, her more careless days. Friends that came and went, boyfriends, too – time didn’t seem to exist then. It was as though she’d once been living in a kind of Bob Dylan-y heartbreak album, where the world had a rhythmically structured sadness that contained a little note of hope or defiance: the sadness of people leaving! But it’d be okay, there were always more people to get to know/to meet, bars to drink in, mountains to hike, countries to see, and people she didn’t, couldn’t know! When Katherine was young, everything had been enriched by the uncertainty of her future: would this person merge with her, become part of her, or would he leave her? Who was this man, what was his existence like, would he really see her? What about this friend, was she a rea
l friend, an authentic person? Anxiety and worry about the future now seemed like a gift, and whatever difficulties Kylie Newman had, Katherine knew that there was a deeper suffering there that she hadn’t even touched, and she knew this was true because she longed for Kylie Newman’s type of pain. If she could have that anxiety and worry again, that uncertainty about life. That uncertainty seemed to be endless, until it wasn’t.
Katherine lifted a corner of the tinfoil lid of the Keurig cup. The coffee inside emitted almost no odor. She tried to smell it like a Folgers commercial, the one where the robbed mother around Christmastime seems physically warmed by the act of smelling. Yet now she smelled very little, a scratch-and-sniff of actual coffee smell. She held the plastic cup containing ground coffee. How long had the coffee been in this plastic entrapment? She placed it in the machine, turned it on. Water gurgled and began to move. She considered why the world had changed for her. There had been a kind of subtle shift in her understanding and perception – so subtle it might not be there, like tremors you believe you’re imagining – that had permanently altered the ground upon which she viewed the world. It wasn’t marrying David that had done it, it wasn’t having children, it was some time after that, some time she could not precisely discern. A slow transformation, like a jagged rock rounded after years in a stream, and after that, ever more eroding away, until that rock was a small, smooth pebble, and then that pebble a grain of sand, washed away. Driving on a freeway out of town no longer meant experiencing the open country, an easy freedom. The summer no longer meant the feeling of endlessness, time seeming to stop, of everything bloomed and alive as though it would never change. Drinking too much didn’t mean the loss of inhibition, it meant an escape from her anxieties and worries, often about Nathaniel and Nicholas and their respective families. Her children were no longer the incredible beings who, as babies, pooped their diapers and giggled about it, who as toddlers fumbled hilarious nonsense into the world, who as children found awe in everything: a tree, a cat, a cloud, a bottle cap. They were now men whose lives seemed to be made much like hers: repetitive days of certain frustrations, certain anxieties, their own worries, their worlds reduced in the same way she felt hers was reducing every year, year after year. She looked back at Nathaniel with a kind of surprise: she’d found him such a troublemaker when he was in his teens, rebellious and unkind, drinking, smoking, getting frequent speeding tickets, almost in trouble for stealing the Nelsons’ car, but luckily Janey Nelson had been in the car with him, pleaded with her father that it was her idea. While maybe he got a little nicer after high school, he continued doing stupid things in college: arrested for drug possession, failing out of classes, not even going to classes according to his dorm mate. Katherine had been so scared for him for so long, but then he’d found cooking and things had changed. Music, sports, books, he’d always liked these things, but he was never any good at them. She told him to become a teacher, but he laughed at her and told her he had no interest in going back into what he’d hated for so long.