by Marly Swick
“Let’s look at toys,” she said, scraping back her chair and standing up, colliding with a waitress. Ed reached out to steady her and kept his hand at the small of her back, guiding her out of the crowded restaurant, into the sudden blast of sunlight. She was fumbling in her purse for her dark glasses. Ed was whistling something cheerful sounding. She felt a twinge of resentment and envy. Her life was falling apart and his was just coming together. When she’d left for California, the Golden State, Ed was the last person on earth she could ever have predicted envying. The odds of dying in an earthquake would have seemed much greater. And she almost had. She had ended up moving right to the epicenter. Six point six on the Richter scale.
As they walked over to the toy store, she thought about her last conversation with Dan. After they had agreed to give up the house, he told her that he was going to some writer’s conference in Vermont next month. He said he’d been dabbling with poetry, and there was some famous poet at this place in Vermont whom he was hoping to study with. Maybe she could fly out and join him for a weekend, he suggested a bit tentatively. She didn’t know whether to attribute his hesitation to insecurity or indecision, whether he was afraid she’d shoot him down or afraid she’d take him up on the offer. Giselle wanted to ask whether this poetry business meant he had abandoned the ill-conceived book about the accident. His desk drawers were full of abandoned articles in various stages of incompletion. Two years ago he had sweated through the tenure process, squeaking by with a split vote, and since then hadn’t finished a single article, let alone his book on the confessional novel. So it wouldn’t be inconceivable for him to abandon this new book, even without her opposition to it.
Somehow from a distance of fifteen hundred miles, her anger had stretched itself a little thin. It was hard to keep the fire of righteous indignation burning brightly, especially when she missed him so much. She kept thinking of all the things they would never do again if the marriage was really over. No more reading in bed. No more anything.
“So, what do you say?” he said, nudging her.
“I’ll think about it. It would be nice to get away from this humidity for a couple of days.”
“Okay then.” He cleared his throat a couple of times. “I’ll check into the dates, what dates would work for me, and I’ll call you tomorrow or the next day.” Then he switched the subject to the damage deposit. He couldn’t remember exactly how much it had been, did she?
“Three hundred dollars,” she said, not really listening.
She had never been to Vermont. It sounded so cool and green. And she remembered seeing a list of all the states ranked by their relative safety. In the newspaper or Time magazine. Vermont was number one.
On the ride home from the toy store, the talk was mostly about the kennel. They were opening at a good time, people were taking off on summer vacations, Ed told her. They already had the dog kennels more than half booked and had a pretty fair number of cats, too. A lot of people tended to leave their cats at home and just hire someone to come by and feed them, he explained, since cats were such homebodies. He had also hired a pet groomer who was teaching him the tricks of the trade. “Groomed my first French poodle yesterday,” he said, smiling like a proud first-grader. “Simone. A former show dog, no less.”
“I could use a trim,” she said, and they both laughed. She had always liked his deep, goofy laugh. Her feet were propped up on the dashboard, the cool air from the vent blowing up her skirt. The radio was playing a golden oldie that sounded familiar, though she couldn’t have named it. For a moment, they could have been back in high school, cruising around in his father’s new pickup. Then a commercial came on, and Ed turned the volume down.
“So Teddy tells me you moved your stuff into storage out there,” he said. He waited for her to say something.
She knew what he wanted to know. Was she going back? Was the marriage over? Her good mood went up in smoke. She glared at him, then forced a smile. “I might be going to Vermont for the weekend,” she told him.
He looked surprised. “This weekend?” She knew she didn’t have to say who she’d be visiting in Vermont.
She shook her head. “Soon. I don’t know when exactly.”
Ed shrugged and turned the volume back up. She looked out the window and bit her lip to keep from crying. Somehow, the instant the words were out of her mouth, she knew it wasn’t true. She wasn’t going anywhere. Dan hadn’t called her back. She hadn’t heard a word from him in three days.
***
A couple of nights later she was working at the bar, as usual, washing glasses and emptying ashtrays, when Vonnie grabbed her by the elbow and led her over to the small TV mounted at the far end of the counter. Vonnie had protested against having a TV in the bar, but Val, a football fan, insisted that you couldn’t have a bar in Lincoln with no television. Most of the other bars had huge screens and all sorts of Big Red promos. Giselle looked at the screen. Some young couple was sitting on a sofa in a tacky but expensive-looking living room, talking to a blond interviewer, a Diane Sawyer clone. Giselle opened her mouth to ask what the big deal was when Vonnie said, “Shhh. Just wait.” They were standing in the smoking section; Giselle waved away a cloud of smoke as it drifted into her face, then let out a gasp as the camera panned to Dan sitting there looking casually professorial in his tweed jacket and black T-shirt, his longish hair falling into his face as he leaned forward toward the interviewer, hands clasped earnestly in front of him.
“In our case,” he said, “it was a member of our own family, my nine-year-old stepson. He was next door, at a neighbor’s house. The mother was at home in the rec room, exercising. My wife was in our backyard, adjacent to the neighbor’s, watching our twenty-three-month-old daughter, Trina, playing in a wading pool. The neighbor boy took out a .38-caliber Colt from its hiding place” — here Dan made quotation marks with his fingers around the word hiding — “and handed the gun to my stepson. Somehow the gun went off, and our daughter was pronounced dead in the ER an hour later.” His voice choked up, he hung his head and took a deep breath. As the woman and the man sitting on either side of him patted him on each shoulder simultaneously, it dawned on Giselle that this was one of those support groups. And sure enough, the handsome, prematurely gray man to Dan’s left spoke up and said, “We knew there had to be other parents who had been through this, or at least through similar situations, and we wanted to know how they were coping. Carol and I felt” — here he paused and covered his wife’s hand with his — “that it always helps to know you are not alone. So we opened up a web site on the Internet, looking for other parents whose lives had been shattered as the result of guns in the hands of children. In the first month alone, we made contact with fifty-two people, mostly parents. One for every day of the week.”
“Week of the year,” Dan corrected him.
The web site address flashed onto the bottom of the screen:
www.kidsnguns.com
“Kids ’n’ guns!” Vonnie screamed out, like a contestant on Wheel of Fortune, and snorted derisively.
Giselle felt sick. She had broken out into a cold, clammy sweat and felt her intestines knotting up, roiling inside her. She wanted to turn off the TV and run to the bathroom, but she was afraid of missing any of it. Of not knowing. Of not knowing what everyone else would know. After all, this was national TV. And those who hadn’t actually seen it would hear about it.
The interviewer turned back to Dan. “And I understand you’re writing a book about your family’s experience.”
“Fucking asshole,” Vonnie hissed and flipped him the bird, “thinks he’s Fred Goldman. Or what’s-his-name, Polly Klass’s father.”
Val gave him a Bronx cheer.
“Shut up!” Giselle glared at them.
A large-breasted woman in a too-small Kansas City Royals T-shirt stared at them, trying to figure out what the story was.
Dan nodded and cleared his throat — a classroom trick he used to get everyone’s attention. “Yes, I am. It’s called Johnny’s
Got Your Gun. It’s not an easy decision to write openly about such a painful and personal experience, but if it will help just one other family avoid such a loss, then the book will have been a success.”
“Yes, and where is your family, your wife, tonight, asshole?” Vonnie interrupted, perfectly mimicking the interviewer’s tone of voice. “And your beloved stepson?”
The interviewer moved on to another couple for some last words. The couple was holding a picture of their little boy, a grinning freckle-faced redhead who looked to be about four or five years old. The camera zoomed in for a close-up of the boy’s face. Then a row of children’s photographs flashed on the screen, including Trina in her red velvet dress. And below each child’s photograph was a caption with the child’s name and dates, like a row of tombstones. Vonnie groaned and snapped the mute button just as the network cut to a commercial. For Huggies disposable diapers.
“Jesus, diapers,” Vonnie shook her head. “They’re fucking shameless.”
Giselle was shaking. She reached over and swiped two cigarettes from a pack lying on the bar, along with someone’s Bic lighter. She walked outside and lit up. Standing in the dark, she smoked one, then the other. The smoke went to her head. She felt dizzy and nauseous. Vonnie came outside. “Are you all right? Do you want a drink or anything?”
Giselle shook her head.
“I swear, if I had a gun, I’d kill that pompous, self-centered bastard. I never did see what you saw in him.” Vonnie sat down on a wooden crate. “How do you feel about him now?” When Giselle didn’t say anything, Vonnie glared at her. “You can’t still love him.”
On the sidewalk across the street, in front of another bar, a young couple was arguing about whether he was too drunk to drive home. She kept trying to snatch the keys from his hand. He held them over her head, teasing her with them, as if she were a dog begging for a bone. But then he dropped them, and she scooped them up and he fell over reaching for them. Too late. She dangled the keys in front of his face. “Bitch!” he shouted, but then he started to laugh and she laughed with him.
“I think I’ll just walk back,” Giselle said, untying the green apron and handing it to her sister.
“Are you sure?” Vonnie asked. “I can give you a ride.” She leaped up, eager to be of service.
But Giselle was already gone. How do you feel about him now? Vonnie’s question kept echoing in her mind as she half walked, half ran, from the brightly lit downtown area into the dark, quiet residential streets of the Near South, working her way, block by block, up the alphabet.
***
The message light was blinking on the phone. The first message was from her parents. My God, did you see it? He was on that show. Dan. Talking about . . . well, you know. Did you know about this? Call us. Don’t worry about waking us up. The second was from some friend of Vonnie’s in Madison, saying she was coming to town the weekend of the Fourth. The third message was from Lois. She had seen it, too.
Giselle jotted down the message for Vonnie and erased the other two. She didn’t want to call them back. She sat on the sofa, holding the phone in her lap and trying to think what she wanted to say to Dan. The short version if she got a machine, and the long version if he actually answered. She felt like a flat tire, deflated and immobilized. It was too much. Too much to think about. Too much to feel. She wanted a shot of Novocain in her brain.
She wanted to blame Dan — she needed to blame someone — and he seemed, by process of elimination, the only choice. Teddy was a child at risk; he needed all the support she could muster. She was doing what she had to do as Teddy’s mother. And although she wanted to be morally indignant, energized by righteous wrath, she knew that Dan was doing what he had to do as Trina’s father. Early on he had seen how things would go. In a latter-day sort of Sophie’s Choice, she would choose her son over her husband. One of those choices that was really no choice at all. And he would choose his daughter’s memory over his stepson and his stepson’s mother. They were on different sides. Like two soldiers in opposing armies. It was, in a sense, nothing personal. There were forces at work, forces beyond anyone’s control — laws of nature. She understood this, but she would blame him anyway because she was Teddy’s mother. She had known almost from the beginning that it would come to this. From that very first night when he had said to Teddy, “You’re lucky you’re not my son,” and she had seen the expression on her husband’s face as he looked at her son, she had known in her gut that was it. If she had had the courage of her convictions, she would have taken Teddy and left right then and there. But she hadn’t. She couldn’t. She wasn’t strong enough — any more than Dan was strong enough to forgive Teddy for what he’d done.
She dialed Dan’s number — actually, Harvey’s number. Harvey and Lynn were in Europe for a month, and Dan was house-sitting, so at least she didn’t have to worry about getting Luisa. The machine picked up, Harvey’s voice telling her to leave a message. Some sort of highbrow jazz played in the background. She knew that Harvey had never really approved of her. The sound of his self-important, self-satisfied voice suddenly struck her like a lit match — phoompf! — and the fumes ignited. “You goddamned coward!” she shouted. “You could have at least warned us. This pseudo-crusade of yours makes me sick. Hope you sell a lot of books. You’re going to need it for the divorce settlement.” She slammed down the phone, shaking, waiting to see what would happen. She thought she might burst into tears. But she felt as cold as ice. Dry ice. Her heart was a steaming, freezing block of ice. If she touched it for an instant, it would rip the skin off her fingertips when she tried to pull her hand away.
It’s over, she thought, it’s really over. She knew the pain wasn’t far away, but for the moment she felt almost peaceful. Calm and full of resolve. She would find an apartment. She would find a job. She would get one of those quick-and-easy no-fault divorces. Look on the bright side — it would be a piece of cake — no custody issues to complicate things. And wasn’t California the state that had invented no-fault divorce? Or maybe that was car insurance. Whatever. The underlying principle was the same. She got up and fished the newspaper out of the trash can in the kitchen. Vonnie had emptied an ashtray on top of it. Giselle shook the ashes off the classified ads and then plucked two of the longest butts from the trash. There weren’t any matches in sight, so she bent down and lit the butt off the stove burner. It’s really over, she thought as she took the first drag. The smoke burned her lungs. She felt light-headed. She inhaled deeply and held in the smoke, trying not to cough. She wanted it to burn. She wanted to chain-smoke an entire carton.
***
The next afternoon when she returned from apartment hunting, there was a letter from Dan waiting for her in the mailbox. Postmarked from New York. Jess was in the kitchen with her law books as usual. It was hotter than hell. The plant mister was sitting on the table; every so often Jess would stop and spritz herself, then go on highlighting her casebook.
“Find anything?” she asked.
“A couple of places weren’t too bad.” Giselle kept on walking, into the bathroom, as if answering an urgent call of nature, and locked the door behind herself. Just the sight of Dan’s handwriting, so familiar from all those compositions she’d written what seemed like a century ago, made her break out into a cold sweat. She ripped open the envelope and didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed to see that it was a short note.
Dear Giselle,
I’m on my way to Vermont, stopped off in New York for a couple of days. I wanted to give you the address where I’ll be and a phone number. I still don’t know about the dates. I thought maybe I should get there and check it out first.
I hope Teddy is doing better. A day at a time is what they say, right? Don’t think I don’t miss you, because I do. Every day I’m alone I wonder what the hell I’m doing.
Every day I blame myself for not being a bigger person than I apparently am.
Love, D.
Enclosed was a check for a thousand dollar
s and a key to the rented storage unit where he had stashed their belongings.
She sat there staring at the note. It pissed her off that there was no mention of his television appearance. Was he crazy? Did he think they didn’t have TV in Nebraska? Did he think she wouldn’t hear about it? Or did he just think there was nothing to say? Nothing he could say. And then it dawned on her that he was no longer staying at Harvey’s, which meant that Harvey, that pompous ass, would come home and play back her message. She could just hear his ironic tone as he related the message to Dan verbatim. She wanted to tear up the check into tiny pieces and flush it down the toilet, but she couldn’t. And the humiliation of being financially dependent upon him further enraged her. She stormed out to the living room and retrieved the morning newspaper from the trash.
“What are you doing?” Jess said, sucking on one of Teddy’s Popsicles. She looked as if she were giving it a blow job.
Giselle ignored her. “Can I borrow this?” She pointed to one of Jess’s highlighters.
“Be my guest.”
Giselle took the paper back to the living room and started skimming through the want ads. By the end of the first column, her eyes filled up; the fine print blurred. A tear torpedoed an ad for a part-time cashier at Hobby Lobby. She wrote the phone number down. Want ads. The term suddenly struck her as terribly poignant, and sad. The terse, businesslike ads seemed so far removed from everything she had ever really wanted in this life.
***
By the end of the week she had rented an apartment in a rickety triplex on F Street. “F Street,” she had joked to her friend Laura when Giselle called to tell her she was staying in Lincoln. “It seems appropriate. Like I flunked out big-time.”
“Don’t say that,” Laura had chided her. “There’s no point blaming yourself.”
Easy for you to say, Giselle had thought to herself. How could Laura — how could anyone — know what it felt like to have a child die on your watch? A dead child was worse than no child. “’Tis better to have loved and lost” did not apply to children.