by Susan Wilson
Adam is powerless. His reputation has been sullied forever by his loss of control that day, that moment. The grinding ambition coupled with the misleading message, exacerbated by hunger and an incipient, if phantom, attack of angina, topped by his personal assistant’s increasing and unrepentant ineptitude had triggered a breakdown. A self-immolating act of breathtaking nihilism. He’s paid for that error. But all the press or blogs or watercooler conversations ever recall is the act, the unforgivable act, of slapping Sophie.
He sees himself in Gina’s eyes and is horrified. To her, he is a man who acts upon a baser impulse. She can’t know that it’s one driven up from the dark reaches of his background and upbringing. The raised hand. He’s watched other foster children younger than he put into closets. He’s sat hungry while others ate. He’s seen the belt slide out from under the belt loops, the snap of it, halved and threatening. He’s been struck. All in the name of good behavior, manners, respect. Mistakes.
But he has conquered this, pulled himself up out of the morass, bettered himself. He has denied himself the self-indulgent practice of remembering the darkness, recalling in his rare stories only the two foster mothers who were kind to him, and even their kindness was of the practical kind. Marge and Mrs. Salter. He’s never gone back to see them, these two out of seven. He’s pushed them and their kisses on his forehead into the same closet as the five who treated him as a piece of inventory.
Adam wants to tell Gina all of this, to explain himself to her, to get her to stop looking at him with these wary eyes. Eyes that tell him no matter how civil she is to him, how impressed that he’s taken on Chance, she will always be aware of his single self-destructive act and judge him by it. The lifeline snatched from his hand.
“I’m not the person you think I am. What happened was an aberration. I’m much better than that. I don’t …” He is about to say “hurt women,” when he hears the anger in his own voice, the rising volume of frustration. Adam startles the dog out of his doze. “Come on, Chance.” He leaves his cold coffee and newspaper behind.
Chapter Forty-one
The jagged edge of panic slices through Adam. Daylight demons, far more insidious than those of the night, circle his mind.
With his record, he won’t even be able to get a job at McDonald’s. He can’t even get his old job of bus driving back. He’s going to end up in line with the men at the center, being served, not serving.
The savings that the court allowed him to keep, out of which he’s been paying child support and every other court-determined expense of his estranged family, has diminished to a laughable amount. He’s got maybe three months’ worth of rent and car insurance money. When he hears those “get out of debt” commercials saying if he has more than ten grand in credit-card debt, call today, he sometimes thinks he should make the call. He has never been so out of control of his finances. He gets the irony of it. He lost control; therefore, he is out of control. The man for whom the platinum credit card was invented, who had never allowed a balance of two dollars owing at the end of the month: unemployed, unemployable.
Despised by his daughter, his ex-wife. And the woman that he finds he thinks about, whose good opinion is being withheld because of his control issue. A woman who is so unlike Sterling. Who is comfortable with herself, content with her life as it is. Whose ambitions have been realized in the owning of a shop filled with fish and a home filled with rescued dogs. He would call her a simple person, but that would suggest mediocrity. Gina is anything but mediocre, and he feels her disdain more powerfully than even his family’s. If his life had been different, if he’d pursued a less ambitious course, he might have found someone like Gina and settled down. Lived his life worrying only about fuel prices, not corporate takeovers. Accepted his rough beginnings and improved on them by being a good husband, a good father. Chosen to get his satisfaction from his family, not his career. Chosen a wife who loved him for who he really was, not for his potential success.
Adam sits on the edge of the futon and puts his head in his hands. He should call Stein, he knows this, knows he needs a voice other than his own in his ears. He needs someone to tell him that he is going to be all right; that this is the dark time, but the light will come.
Absent a comforting voice, Adam’s thoughts sink deeper. If he were to disappear, who would miss him? Disappear like Veronica? Unlike his sister, he has no sibling to wish he would come back. His family might even be relieved to have him gone. Adam knows that disappear isn’t the word for what he’s thinking. Oblivion. Release from this black hole that he inhabits. How painful it is to think that his death might bring only a momentary regret to those who know him. Too bad about Adam March. Sterling could enjoy a social notoriety as an ex-widow. Ariel would get time off from school. Compassionate leave. Sympathy grades. His life insurance is paid up—a policy that he bought a week before they were married, and then proudly adjusted to designate their newborn daughter as a beneficiary along with Sterling. Adam has the unoriginal thought that he is literally worth more dead than alive.
So it has to look like an accident.
Unless his ultimate revenge is to leave Sterling and Ariel without that money. A slap in the face for their treatment of him, for their rejection of him as a man who is, at heart, not a bad man.
Adam thinks of Sophie. How glad she might be if he were dead. He’d be doing her a favor.
The bottle of scotch has appeared at his hand. The glass is empty. How much scotch would he have to drink to die of alcohol poisoning? There must be a formula. If he weighs 160—okay, maybe 170—and is six feet … He’s not up to the math. Can he do it with the half liter left in this bottle, or should he run out and buy some more? Would vodka be more efficient? Add a little Tylenol PM?
Adam pours another half glass of scotch. No sense rushing things and vomiting up all his hard work. He has all day. Oops, no, he hasn’t. For the first time in his adult life, Adam calls in sick. Rafe takes the call with good grace, “Take it easy, man. Don’t worry about it.” Rafe’s swallowing his story of ‘feeling like crap’ adds an additional helping of guilt to Adam’s quota.
No note. That would screw everything up. Unless he left one in an unobvious place, to be found later, after the inquest. After the insurance is paid out. After his sorry body is cremated and his ashes are scattered. Or not. He’ll probably get left in a box in Sterling’s closet, eventually to be discarded with other out-of-fashion possessions. Or left at the crematorium. Unclaimed freight.
This is such a good plan. He has been forcibly disconnected from the world, and now he’ll make the disconnection permanent. There is no one who cares about him, or needs him. Or will notice for five days that he’s missing. Except Big Bob. Well, that’s good. They’ll find him before he starts to stink.
Chance walks up to Adam and sits down, lowers his big boxy head and drops something out of his mouth: the tennis ball that Gina gave them, which Adam hasn’t seen since that day a month ago. The ball bounces; the dog pounces, scrambles around as if the thing were alive and worthy of capture, then returns to sit in front of Adam. He drops the ball again.
“Who taught you that game?” Adam kicks the ball across the room with his toe.
The dog’s tail end is in the air, the ball between his paws. He noses it in Adam’s direction, where it clunks up against the scotch bottle. Adam retrieves the ball, tosses it in the air, and catches it a couple of times, then flings it against the opposite wall where it hits with a dull thump. The dog plunges after it ecstatically, tail wagging, barking at Adam to keep up the game. He drops the ball at Adam’s feet, looks at him with eager eyes, eyes that declare he is the one who will care. A dog will be the only one to miss him.
And what would happen to Chance if he died? Back to the shelter? Back into the hands of the boys who fought him? Would Gina take him?
Like a rust-stuck wheel, Adam’s thoughts begin to loosen and turn. He is the hub of the wheel, his thoughts spokes leading to the faces of Ariel and Sterling. Sophie
. Their voices connect to him with the rivets of scorn and accusation. He has failed them; he has frightened them. He has damaged them. They have reacted to him—his behavior, his temper, his unresolved issues.
He is unredeemed, despite the punishment of community service. Loss of job, loss of status, wife, daughter, friends. Most of all, he’s lost his humanity.
This conversion from victim to villain is stunning to him. Guilt, embarrassment. Shame. “This isn’t who I am.” This is what he’s said to Gina, and yet it is. The person he has become, the person so tightly wound that he can be undone by a minor misunderstanding. The person no one wants to be around. A pariah.
Until and unless he makes amends, he will never regain his humanity. He will never find redemption.
Chance drops the ball. He makes his little rrooorr sound, but this time it sounds like speech. This time, it sounds like approval. The dog shoves the damp tennis ball against Adam’s closed fist. The two, man and dog, stare at each other for a moment, the man taking great comfort in the reflection of himself in the dog’s brown eyes—the only eyes that don’t look at him with disappointment.
Chapter Forty-two
Who knows where the tennis ball-playing gene comes from. All I knew was that this object fell to the floor from the counter—perhaps a mild earthquake, or perhaps I nudged it when I was reaching up to snag a half-eaten sandwich from the countertop. At any rate, the ball fell and I hit upon a great way to get my man out of his self-indulgent slump.
He was sitting there with his hand wrapped around a glass and his eyes fixed on the floor, just like the day he sat with his eyes and nose running and first touched me—the first time he acknowledged that I lived alongside him, and from then on it was much better being in this crib. I admit it. So now the sharpish scent of the fluid he was knocking back worried me. He hadn’t been indulging in this as much lately, which meant that he’d had more time for me. I was alert to the fact that he was agitated, pacing around, sitting, banging his fists against his skull. Drinking. The odor of his beverage began to seep out of his pores, mingled with an amalgam of fear, anger, grief. He reminded me of a dog I’d known in the cellar who chewed himself with a self-destructive obsession until his skin was a bloody mass of scratches and sores.
I watched him for a long time while he drank and muttered, sinking deeper into a state of anxiety. Even as I grew increasingly fretful about him, I wondered why I was wasting my time observing him, worrying about him. This wasn’t something that I came to naturally, this concern about a human. Yes, I knew all about dogs who did, who saved Timmy from the well. But I am not that kind of dog, I told myself firmly, reminding myself that once I was a professional fighter. All along I have been telling myself that I am not a pet. My plan had always been to book it for greener pastures in the spring, or early summer at the latest. Not to get attached. If the door opened right now, I reasoned, I would leave. Sayonara, pal.
I had been kind to him once before, but that didn’t mean I was a permanent fixture in his life. I was not going to be part of one of those pathetic bonded pairs, man and dog, that I’d been observing a lot lately. Watching the dogs in the park play with their people—undignified romping, tails upright and wagging like out-of-sync metronomes. Happy looks on their faces—dog and man. Lavish face licking. For what? Nothing more than I had right here, a bowl of water, although mine was empty right now, and a twice-a-day meal of dry, crunchy bits and pieces. An occasional pat on the head. No no no. I’m an independent creature, a creature of self-possession, a dog who belongs to no man.
It was nearly dark, and I thought that if I could get him to take me out now and let me off the leash at the empty lot, then maybe it was time to go. To bid farewell to this solitary human.
Even as I thought it, I knew that I wouldn’t go. He was talking, but clearly not to me. His speech was slurry, equivalent to the low moan of a defeated champion. I felt a twinge in my heart, a clenching against independence. I went over and stood in the bed that we’d taken away from the woman who liked to give me cookies. Although I frankly preferred the futon, this cushiony substitute curled nicely around my back; snuggling into it felt like a return to puppyhood. This time, I couldn’t get comfortable, so I went back to stand and stare at him, urge him to look at me and remember that I had needs, too.
I took a deep sniff, filling my nose with his scent. Beyond the odor of his emotions and his drink, I could still detect the underlying essence of him. For the past days or weeks, or whatever the artificial enumeration of time is for these people, I had been feeling something beyond a normal thanks-for-the-kibble gratitude. Thanks for not hitting me. Thanks for not handing me back to those boys. I was grateful for the times we sat on the couch together and he let me rest my head in his lap. I was grateful that he talked to me, not for his scintillating conversation, but for the sound of companionship. That’s the scent that was being overwhelmed, the odor of calm, of partnership, of connection. I was afraid that something very powerful had hold of him, something that mere companionship wasn’t going to scare off.
Then the ball dropped. I picked it up and forced him to look beyond his trance to see me. Could I get him to play with me? Could I remind him that I needed him? I needed him.
At first, he looked at me as if with someone else’s eyes. Me, a critic of play, I urged the ball forward with my nose until it jammed between his feet. Looked at him with a silly dog grin and waited. Something slid away from his eyes and at last he saw me, saw the ball and picked it up.
He threw that ball hard against the wall, where it bounced crazily around the room until I trapped it. Over and over he smashed that ball against the wall, and over and over I pounced after it like some demented retriever until we both collapsed on the futon. I was panting, and so was he. Then he picked up his glass and, with the same violence as throwing the tennis ball, he flung it against that long-suffering wall and it smashed into a thousand shards. I flinched; the sound hurt my ears.
He reached an arm around my shoulders and dropped his head against mine. We might have been littermates snuggling. “Good boy.”
I knew then that I might never again entertain the notion of leaving him. Not as long as he needed me. I raised my muzzle, lifting my head backward until I could reach his face with my tongue. My own version of “good boy.”
Chapter Forty-three
The insistently repeated rhythm of his cell-phone tone penetrates the haze of alcohol-induced sleep. It is an annoying sound that has periodically entered his dreams as voices or objects or touching. Coupled with a full bladder, the sound of his phone ringing finally brings Adam awake. He fumbles for the teeny-weeny button but misses the caller. His missed calls function identifies a number he doesn’t recognize. Tossing the instrument on the coffee table, Adam extricates himself from the gravity of the futon and stumbles to the bathroom.
Chance is waiting for him in the kitchen, the empty water bowl an indictment against Adam. He hasn’t seen to the essential well-being of this animal. Adam rinses out the bowl, pours in fresh water, and watches as the dog laps up half. Which reminds Adam of his own thirst. Downing two glasses of water and a handful of aspirin, Adam becomes fully conscious of a new day. He looks at the shards of glass and the yellowy streaks of scotch that finger down the bland white wall.
“Ready to go out?”
Rrooorr says the dog, and Adam takes that as an okay.
The dog needs to go out. He needs to start his day. This new day.
Gina’s store is open, the parrot sign turned to WELCOME. Adam walks in, Chance at his side. The parrot named Fred squawks a greeting, or an alarm. Gina holds a bucket of water and her window-washing pole. She sets both down, stands still. She doesn’t smile at him, and her left hand goes to her throat, an unconscious gesture that makes her appear nervous and at the same time demure, persuadable.
“You’ve checked me out, haven’t you? On the Internet.”
“Yes. I was curious. I mean, after I realized who you were, I just wondered
why you were living here, why you weren’t at Dynamic anymore.”
Adam is pleased that Gina isn’t denying her curiosity. “Why didn’t you ask me?”
Gina’s supple mouth purses. “Wouldn’t be polite.”
“Ask me.”
“Will you tell me the truth?”
“What I’ll tell you will jibe with what you’ve read, only it’ll be my side of the story. Can you accept that?”
“Yes.” Gina locks eyes with Adam. In hers is a glistening of something that urges him on: a desire to believe him, to reconcile the two Adam Marches, the one she’s found on the Internet and the one who stands in front of her.
Adam picks up the bucket and the squeegee. Taking Chance’s leash, Gina follows him outside. He wrings out the sponge into the warm water, then wipes it in broad strokes across the rainbow and the dancing fish. As he draws the rubber blade down the window, smooth lines of water rushing ahead of the edge, he begins to talk.
The story he tells her spools out from deep within. He hasn’t rehearsed, and so his story comes out in chunks, in truths that he has never before voiced. She knows a little bit about his sister, but he tells her about his childhood among strangers, about his father. As he talks, he finds himself elaborating, bringing old memories up from the depths of his subconscious. Stein would say that he was free-associating. He not only tells Gina things he has yet to speak about in therapy; he tells her about therapy. About Fort Street. About his anger at being assigned to serve food to the homeless and now his dependence on that place as the center of his days.