by Marly Swick
When Teddy enters the classroom, all the kids stare and whisper until Mrs. Shimono orders them to get out their math workbooks and do the problems on page 95. It is the first time he has seen Eric since the afternoon it happened. Their families have been avoiding each other. At recess Eric walks over to him standing alone by the fence and says, “My mom and dad haven’t stopped yelling at me. And they took away my new bike.” Teddy knows that Eric is trying to get him to feel sorry for him. “How about your parents?” Eric asks. “Do they yell at you?”
Teddy shakes his head. He wants Eric to go away. He doesn’t even want to look at him. For the first time it occurs to him that it was really Eric’s fault. He wasn’t supposed to touch that gun in the first place. And he had practically shoved it into Teddy’s hands.
“No shit? They don’t yell at you at all?” Eric asks as if he can’t believe it. Teddy shakes his head again. “Goddamn, that’s not fair!” He sounds just like his father, who likes to cuss a lot. Eric frowns and kicks at the gravel. “You’re the one who shoots her, and I’m the one who gets yelled at. Go figure.”
Teddy walks away. He goes back to the empty classroom, sits down at his desk, and turns to the next set of problems in his workbook. He likes math. He’s good at it, and it takes your mind off everything else. He is trying to divide 1,640 by 20 when he feels a soft tap on his shoulder. He looks up and sees Chandra Patel, the prettiest, smartest girl in the class, standing next to him. Last year they were both in the Bluebirds, the top reading group in Mrs. Honey’s class. On field trips her mother always accompanied them wearing a sari and a red dot on her forehead. Her father is a surgeon. Dan saw him parked in front of the school once in his silver Jaguar and said, “You could feed a thousand Biafran families for a decade on what that car cost.” Chandra stares at him with her big brown eyes like melting chocolate.
“My father operated on your little sister,” she tells him. “He felt very bad. He said it was a very sad accident. I know you didn’t mean to do it.” She smiles a sad, sweet smile. Her dark eyes and long lashes remind him of Trina’s.
He feels his lip trembling and bites down hard. “How do you know?” he says and turns his back on her as she bursts into tears and runs back out to the playground.
Giselle settled back in the soft black leather chair — Italian, no doubt — and waited for the doctor to ask her where Dan was. Although the doctor had asked them to call her Hannah, Giselle was having a hard time feeling comfortable with that — even though they were probably the same age. Maybe that was why. It seemed too much like girlfriends. And what she wanted, at $130 an hour, was sage counsel — not girl talk. When the doctor didn’t ask where Dan was, Giselle felt compelled to state the obvious. “Dan couldn’t come,” she said. “He’s out of town.” And then realizing how odd that must sound under the circumstances, she added, “He went camping with his older brother for a couple of days. His brother lives in Arizona. He thought Dan needed to get away, you know, just for a couple of nights.”
Hannah nodded. She seemed to be waiting for Giselle to say more.
“His brother’s a doctor,” Giselle explained, as if that explained everything.
“And how do you feel about that?” she asked when Giselle didn’t continue.
“About his going camping?”
This time the doctor didn’t even bother to nod.
Giselle shrugged and gazed at the bright Haitian paintings on the stark white walls. At their first appointment she had assumed they were children’s paintings and was relieved that she hadn’t said anything about them when Dan, standing up close to one of the larger paintings, had asked the doctor if she had been to Haiti. And Hannah had replied yes and steered the conversation back to more pressing personal matters.
“I think it’s a good idea. I mean, it’s a very difficult situation.” She picked up a ceramic lizard sitting on the table next to her, next to the Kleenex box, and examined it. “He has some mixed feelings about Teddy right now, understandably. He’s trying to sort them out. These things take time,” Giselle said, as if she were the doctor. She set the lizard back down and looked at Hannah expectantly, thinking that it was her turn to hold up her end of the conversation. She could at least do that much if she wasn’t going to proffer any brilliant solutions. But the doctor just waited. Rattled by the silence, Giselle said, “I like your dress.” It was a loose bronze Moroccan caftan cinched by a wide studded copper belt. Giselle felt dowdy in her jeans skirt and tank top. She was just as glad that Dan wasn’t there to note the physical contrast between them. Then she felt a twinge of guilt for imagining that Dan would be so shallow. He wasn’t like that at all.
Finally, ignoring the compliment, Hannah said, “So you don’t feel any resentment?”
“Not really.” Giselle shook her head. “I understand.” She pulled a card out of her purse and passed it to Hannah. “He left me this note.”
Hannah looked at the card and then back at Giselle, clearly confused. The card was white with silver hands clasped in prayer: with our heartfelt sympathy in your time of sorrow. It was from some couple down the street whom they barely knew and had been slipped into their mailbox during the night. It was signed “Chip and Phyllis (yellow house on corner),” as if they realized that Giselle and Dan might not have a clue who they were, which had touched Giselle and made her like them more. “The other side,” Giselle prompted. “On the back.”
Hannah turned it over and read the brief note. Then she handed the card back to Giselle. They had a whole basket full of cards sitting on the kitchen counter. She especially hated the religious ones. All except for her sister Vonnie’s card. It had a picture of Jesus on the front, but inside she had crossed out the pious sentiments and printed god sucks in Magic Marker. Giselle could see that the doctor was waiting for a response. She had, in fact, forgotten the question. Something about how she felt when she read the note. She figured Hannah could see the card had been in the trash; she could probably smell the coffee grounds and week-old banana peels. Giselle didn’t know why the note had initially pissed her off; she was the one, after all, who had convinced him to take the trip. And when she reread it, she had found it perfectly tender and sincere. After all, what could he say? That it didn’t matter that Teddy had killed their daughter? Hey, it’s no biggie, don’t sweat it.
“Well, I suppose I felt a little abandoned at first. But also sort of relieved,” Giselle mumbled. “I told him he should go.”
“Relieved?” Hannah pounced.
Giselle shrugged. “Not to feel his anger and resentment.” She sighed. “I know Teddy feels it. And I know Dan can’t help it. That’s why he took off. It’s not his fault. I mean, can you really blame him?”
“So you blame yourself instead.”
It wasn’t exactly a question. Giselle shrugged. “I feel guilty. I don’t know if that’s the same as blaming myself, exactly.”
“If you don’t blame yourself and you don’t blame your husband, who do you blame?”
Giselle heard Teddy’s voice asking her, How can something be no one’s fault? echoing off the dark garage walls.
“What makes you think I blame anyone? It was an accident. Shit happens.” The office suddenly felt stuffy. Giselle fanned herself with the sympathy card. “Hasn’t anyone ever heard of an accident before?”
It was the therapist’s turn to shrug. “It’s human nature to want to blame someone.”
It had taken two days for the Los Angeles County Attorney’s Office to complete its investigation and officially declare it an accident. No charges would be filed. Up until that point Giselle had been so outraged, so fiercely protective of Teddy, so indignant that anyone could even fleetingly consider holding him legally culpable, that once she was able to breathe a sigh of relief on that front, something dark and debilitating had crept in through the back door. Her rock-hard clarity had crumbled to dust. Her brain felt like the inside of one of those cheap snow-globes.
“I blame the Beemers,” she shot back de
fiantly. “It was their goddamned gun.” She felt Hannah’s eyes on her, still waiting. Silent. Impassive. Waiting. “And I suppose maybe, sometimes, I blame Teddy,” she mumbled. Then she shut her eyes and slumped in her chair, head hanging. All along she had insisted, insisted, that she didn’t blame Teddy.
Hannah was nodding, almost smiling, as if Giselle were a slow pupil who had at long last, after much coaching, blurted out the right answer to a difficult question.
At the funeral service the priest had spoken about accepting God’s will and about sharing their common bond of grief. They had all cried together, but somehow you could feel the subtle undertow, the crosscurrents of grief. Always, at the back of everyone’s mind, was the awareness of how Trina had died, the knowledge that this didn’t have to happen. Giselle could feel Dan’s family thinking it every time they looked at Teddy. Lying in bed the night after the funeral, she thought about human accidents versus what she termed “pure accidents.” Accidents with no human error involved. Acts of God. There weren’t that many. And if you took away natural disasters — lightning, tornadoes, earthquakes — she was hard-pressed to think of any scenarios that did not involve some degree of human negligence. It had never occurred to her before that what accident meant was unintentional. It didn’t mean blameless. No matter how hard you tried to pretend it did.
***
After leaving Hannah’s office, she drove home and lay on the sofa, paralyzed. Her life had been so hectic, so scheduled, running from person to person, from place to place — trying to be a good mother, wife, and college student — that she didn’t know what to do with this sudden yawning vacuum of hours until it was time to go pick up Teddy at school. She knew that she should call her professors and negotiate extensions or incompletes or whatever, but she just couldn’t stand to talk about what had happened, to endure the awkward expressions of sympathy. She knew that her professors would bend over backward to help her complete the semester, but the idea of just continuing on as if nothing had happened made her sick. She felt as if she deserved to fail. She had always been so intent upon getting A’s. Flunking a couple of courses seemed like the least she could do — a small penance, a shabby sacrifice.
There were dishes in the sink, unmade beds, groceries to buy, bills to pay — but none of that seemed compelling enough to evict her from the sofa. Since she’d run out of the sedatives that Greg gave her, she hadn’t been sleeping much. She was exhausted, yet she knew she wouldn’t fall asleep. The phone rang, but she didn’t answer it. There was no one she wanted to talk to, except maybe Dan. She heard the answering machine click on in the kitchen and the caller hang up without bothering to leave a message. For a moment she worried that it had been the school nurse calling to inform her that Teddy was sick and needed to come home, but then she realized the nurse would have left a message. She clicked on the remote and lay there listening to a Spanish soap opera with her eyes closed. Despite her Spanish tapes, she could recognize only a word here, a phrase there. She remembered painting Trina’s room with Teddy when she was seven months pregnant, enjoying those last few intimate weeks before her son would cease being an only child. She clicked off the TV. Tomorrow Dan would be back.
They had buried Trina in a cemetery in Los Feliz, next to Dan’s father. It was a beautiful plot on a hill with palm trees. Still, Trina had never known Dan’s father; Giselle had never even met him. He was dead before she’d married Dan, and now Trina was up there all alone next to some strange man. It didn’t seem right. When Ed’s Great Dane, Dinky, had died at the age of sixteen, the vet had given Ed a choice: he could leave the body to be disposed of or he could take the body home. Ed had hauled Dinky home in the back of his pickup, wrapped in an old Indian bedspread from their dorm days, and buried him in a field, underneath a huge oak tree, behind his grandparents’ farmhouse. It was April and the ground was still frozen. It had taken him hours to dig a grave big enough. Giselle had sat there, five months pregnant, drinking mulled cider from a thermos his Granma Rose had provided, offering moral support. She wished they could have buried Trina in the backyard so that she would be near them, so that she would know they hadn’t abandoned her. But it was against the law, and they were only renting anyway.
Soon after their marriage, they had made out wills, in which they both stipulated their wish to be cremated. They had also appointed Dan’s brother as Trina’s legal guardian should anything happen to them. Giselle had hated the idea of splitting them up, her son and daughter, but there seemed to be no compromise available. Teddy would, of course, go to his father. It had been her first inkling of the biological fault lines running beneath their little family. But everyone in California lived with the threat of an earthquake every day and didn’t dwell on it. It was Midwesterners who loved to talk about the Big One, as if to console themselves for six months of shoveling snow. Dan and she had never actually discussed where or how the children should be buried or whatever — who would? who could? — and in the end neither of them could bear the thought of reducing Trina’s sweet, fresh body to ash.
***
At two o’clock she peeled herself off the sofa and drove to Teddy’s school, arriving there twenty minutes early. Usually she was rushing to get there on time. She used to complain that there were too few hours in the day, too much to do. If she could have her old life back, she would never complain again, not so much as a murmur of protest. Her stomach rumbled although she had no appetite. She remembered the emergency rice cakes she kept in the glove compartment for Trina. They were sealed in a plastic Baggie, only slightly worse for wear. She choked one down penitently, methodically chewing and swallowing the tasteless cardboard disks. They reminded her of communion wafers from her childhood; they had tasted disappointingly bland even on her First Communion, when she still believed in God. As soon as she spotted Teddy emerging from a throng of kids and trudging toward the car, she could tell that it had been a rough day. Even the flashing lights on the heels of his sneakers seemed dimmer. He climbed in the car and slammed the door without bothering to say hello. As kids ran by the car, he slumped down in his seat, striving for invisibility. “Let’s go,” he grouched. “What are you waiting for?”
She pulled away from the curb, into a caravan of school buses. Lois Beemer, of all people, was in the lane next to her, with Eric in the passenger seat of her Jeep Cherokee. They hadn’t spoken since the day of the accident. When Lois glanced over and saw them, her face blanched. Giselle nodded to her; she couldn’t really muster up all that much hostility toward Lois personally. When Giselle nodded at her, Lois looked abjectly grateful. Then the car behind her honked impatiently, and Lois made a belated left turn, nearly colliding with an oncoming minivan.
“Did you talk to Eric today?” Giselle asked.
“He’s a jerk,” Teddy said.
She wanted to ask more about his day but could sense that he wasn’t in a receptive mood. “Want to stop at Baskin-Robbins?” she asked. It was just a couple of blocks away. He shrugged. “Is that a yes or a no?”
“It’s a yes or a no,” he said like a little smart-ass.
She took a deep breath. You’re the adult, he’s the child. She flicked on her turn signal and pulled into the strip mall parking lot.
At Baskin-Robbins they sat silently at a small round table, listlessly licking single-dip ice cream cones. She remembered the last time they’d come here. She had picked up Trina at day care, then picked up Teddy at soccer, and he had wheedled her into stopping for ice cream even though it was too close to dinnertime. Giselle had ordered a small cup of chocolate ice cream for Trina, who kept grabbing for Teddy’s cone. He had held it to her mouth and let her take licks, mouth open like a baby bird.
“Dan’s coming home tomorrow,” Giselle said.
Teddy looked at her, alert to subtle nuances, waiting for her to go on.
“He just wanted to be by himself for a little bit while he’s feeling sad. Some people are like that. Some people like to go off alone when they feel bad. Other people
like lots of attention.”
“Like cats and dogs,” Teddy said.
“That’s right.” She smiled and leaned over to wipe a glob of mint chip off his T-shirt.
“What are you?” he asked. “A cat or a dog?”
“I’m a mother,” she said, and suddenly wondered what she would have done if she’d had the option, the luxury, of choosing to stay or go. The long night stretched ahead of them. “How ’bout we get a pizza and rent a movie,” she said, forcing a little doggy smile as she imagined herself sprawled in catlike independence on a king-size bed in some soothingly blank hotel room somewhere.
“If you want to,” Teddy said, as if he were doing her a big favor.
She tossed the rest of her cone in the trash.
***
When they arrived home with a frozen pizza and a video, the light on the answering machine was blinking. Her first thought was that it was Dan calling to say he wasn’t coming back.
“I bet it’s Dad,” Teddy said, punching the play button. Ed had been calling every day. The phone cord was extra long, and Teddy would carry the phone to some place private — the bathroom or back stoop. When she’d asked him what they talked about, he just shrugged and said, “Stuff.” And when she’d asked Ed, his response hadn’t been much more enlightening.
Sure enough, Ed’s deep voice rumbled self-consciously, too loud, into the kitchen. “Hi there, it’s your dad. Just wondered how school was. Give me a call. I’ll be home.” Giselle thought he always sounded like a foreigner with limited English skills whenever he left messages. A throwback to an earlier generation, Ed got stage fright talking to machines. Dan was at the other extreme. Before they had moved in together, he would sometimes call and leave a poem or some passage he’d just read that had struck his fancy. Coming home and turning on her machine was like finding a bouquet of wildflowers on her doorstep.