“You son of a bitch. You left her alone at the water.”
I looked at Becky and my throat clenched off a reply.
After the emergency medical technician said Becky needed X-rays and a full exam before we would have any answers, Gail grew silent. Her face whiter than Becky’s, she reached past the technician and held our daughter’s hand. Though it was an unfamiliar act for me, I prayed in the ambulance, and at the hospital, and while they operated to relieve the pressure from the massive subcranial hemorrhage. I remember offering up all my own luck, every last bit of it, now or in the future, if they would just let her live. And I prayed all the way until Becky died one hour and thirty-five minutes later. The doctors said they had done everything they possibly could, but it was a terrible injury. Nothing could have saved her. But she never felt any pain. They said they knew that.
People are astonishingly kind when a child dies. The most distant acquaintances send cards and personal notes, and neighbors we never saw before came by with food, all of them as moved as if the loss were somehow their own. They offered help and assistance, and meant it, most of them not content until Gail or I thought of something they could do. Gail and I barely slept for days, our faces puffy and streaked with crying.
The funeral was agonizing. In the green cemetery under the hot August sun, people everywhere were sobbing. Even weeks and months afterward, though, the outpouring of sympathy continued. But with each day that passed, Gail grew sadder and colder and more distant.
The police questioned the boys, and the law did what it could, which did not turn out to be much. There were no laws governing boat safety on lakes in our state. Anyone over sixteen with a valid learner’s permit or driver’s license could pilot a boat. There was nothing in the state criminal code about driving a boat while drunk.
Everyone was enraged at the boys on the boat. I was, too, at first. I began a campaign to get laws on the books to regulate who can drive a boat, when, how close to shore, complete with sharp penalties for drunk driving. With Bobby’s and Laura’s and a lot of others’ help, the laws were passed by the legislature and signed by the governor within six months.
Gail and I started a scholarship fund in Becky’s name. But as the months passed, Gail got angrier and angrier. She said if I had been out there on the beach, it wouldn’t have happened. If Becky had been in the house with me, it wouldn’t have happened. No matter how she looked at it, it finally came down to the same thing. Yes, the boys in the boat were stupid and careless and irresponsible, but it was my fault they had the chance to express their carelessness so murderously. A parent’s first and highest duty is to keep his child safe.
Gail no longer held me in the long nights I couldn’t sleep, and she would not let me offer comfort when the grief became too much for her. While I did try to reach out to her, I did not try at all to defend myself. How could I? I agreed with her.
✳
The sense of thirst in my throat—or perhaps it is in my brain—is still there, crouching like a small, nervous, sharp-toothed animal, as I open the door to the restaurant. It is not too late for me to summon the resolve to leave the thirst alone, to grit my teeth and wait for it to subside. The secret thought that I might not leave it alone is guilty, faintly rotten, and delicious. In the direct light of the restaurant foyer, I notice Gail’s pale complexion. Usually her work leaves her with the beginnings of a tan even now, but not this year. I ask her if she has taken to wearing sunscreen. She shakes her head, smiles ruefully, and says her work is keeping her indoors more and more these days. She says the more work her firm gets, the less fieldwork she is able to do.
“I’m not complaining. We’re glad for the work,” she adds, “but I miss being out there.”
I remember our walks in the woods. Like many people who knew plants, she was pleased to be able to point out the burdock and the heal-all and the wild geraniums (though occasionally she would call them artcium minus, prunella vulgaris, and geranium maculatum). She could distinguish for Becky Queen Anne’s lace from cow parsnip—they always looked identical to me—but, unlike many people, she was also capable of regarding a leaf or flower or blade of grass with absolutely massive deliberation. She also liked bad weather nearly as much as she liked the good, so our walks were not limited to balmy spring days. Snowshoes in winter, mud boots on rainy days, hiking boots in the summer. There is no doubt she “misses being out there.”
After the accident, for a while I was still busy with the demands of my seventy- and eighty-hour-a-week job. While at first I welcomed the demands, over time I grew increasingly unequal to them. I began to find it harder and harder to face people—friends, relatives, colleagues, juries—and the constant pressure and time constraints, the very same conditions I had thrived on before, now left me always fearing I would forget something, or leave something out, or not do something, and I once again would cause a calamity. My boss, the county prosecutor, was patient with me. He, an ardent golfer, said I had the yips, as malady golfers sometimes get over short and easy putts. They lose confidence in their touch, in their ability to read the green, so they hit the ball too hard or too softly or off-line. Take a couple of weeks off, he said. Come back and you’ll be a new man. I did. And I came back feeling worse than ever.
I gave it another month, and, exhausted, I had to resign. I took a new job with Boyle Ferland Priester and Mitchell. First they wanted me as a litigator, but when they saw I no longer had the confidence and quickness and the ability to be alive in the moment I once had, they let me try some other areas of law. I tried doing some real-estate work and some tax law, but soon found that both of them required a great deal of face-to-face contact with clients, and that was hardly an improvement over trial work itself. Then I happened to find I had some talent for appellate work. If a trial lawyer is like a playwright and actor—someone who creates and presents a text—then a lawyer who specializes in appeals is like a critic who examines the text for flaws. It is a change similar to quitting the stage in order to be a scholar, but major as it was, it proved to be the perfect change for me. And in the years since, I have not given Boyle or Ferland or Priester or Mitchell very much reason to complain.
Gail and I made it one and a half years past that August afternoon. I was able to adapt my work to fit my changed sense of myself, but not our marriage. I proved to be not much of a partner. And she did not, perhaps could not, forgive or forget. She once said she could not ever look at me again without remembering what I had done. We tried counseling, briefly and halfheartedly. In court it was called the irretrievable breakdown of the marriage.
At the restaurant table, we ask each other over her vegetarian special, stiffly, about parents, siblings, and old friends. I sign the redundant waiver, and as I hand it back to her, she says she has something else she wants to mention. I put my water glass down.
“I’m getting married,” she says. “Next month.”
If I were not so distracted, I think I would have guessed. Why else might she be selling the cabin, or suggesting we go out to talk? Jeannie had told me a long time ago that Gail was seeing someone. I just had not put things together. After I congratulate her, I ask who the man is. She answers agreeably and openly, but I nonetheless begin to have the impression she has some other piece of information she is holding back. I file this impression at the back of my mind and focus on what she says. The man, it turns out, is the assistant director of the state’s Department of Environmental Management, an agency which, in our state, has its finger in nearly every pie that comes out of the oven, or goes in. Gail says it’s likely that in a few years he’ll become the head of the department. We talk about Peter for a while—this divorced white male who likes Mozart, movies, hiking, and camping—and Gail speaks of him with pleasure and admiration. I raise my glass and toast her happiness, touching her water glass, and I ask if this doesn’t call for some white wine, her usual beverage, which I see she has neglected to order. She grows pink
again and says that reminds her. There was something else she wanted to tell me.
I feel myself stiffen and think: no.
“This is just between us,” she says and shifts in her chair. “I’m pregnant.”
Yes.
Gail’s face has a complicated mixture of joy and elation and, at the same time, a tinge of sadness.
“Pregnant?” I repeat. She nods. “How?”
“In vitro fertilization. They bypassed the tubes.”
I collect myself, congratulate her yet again, but feel a wave of old desolation and a new one, too. I had always known I would someday become Gail’s “first husband” and was more or less prepared for it, but I am startled to discover how much I mind being left alone with what had been our loss. Of course, she will never get over it, either. But, whatever else it means in the recesses of her heart, Becky will become her “first child.” The world will not have frozen in place.
I clear my throat of a sudden huskiness before I ask about the details, the due dates, and amniocentesis.
She tells me and, once launched, also begins to talk animatedly about name choices.
I feel a sudden surge of suspicion and hostility. “Why did you suggest this?” I gesture at the restaurant table. “Is this a final spear you wanted to sink in me, up close and face-to-face?”
Her eyes widen. “No,” she protests, then she appears to give what I’ve said some thought. “No,” she repeats, more softly this time. “I’m sorry, Ben. I forgot myself. I thought of it as a courtesy, not letting the news come from someone else.”
“What do you care how I get the news? Maybe it would have been easier from someone else.”
She looks down at her plate. “I suppose. I wanted a chance to clear the air a little.”
“What do you care if the air is clear or not?”
“I just want to let go of some stuff, close the book on a few things.”
“Fine. Then let’s be clear about it. We’re having this little chat for you and for your air and your bookkeeping, not out of some overflow of kindness towards me.”
Her face hardens and her jaws clench. I wait for the anger and the name-calling. To my surprise, her face relaxes. “Fine,” she says. “I can accept that.”
Why am I disappointed we are not going to fight? And why am I suddenly uneasy about what she is going to say next? I fidget with my knife. “Let’s get on with it.”
She is silent until I look up at her. She holds my gaze and says, “I’m sorry I blamed you for what happened to Becky. You had some responsibility for it, but you weren’t to blame.”
I shrug and look down at the table. “What’s the difference?”
“It feels different, in here, to me. I’m not as angry anymore. At you. At a lot of things.”
I mutter, “Ain’t love grand?”
She shakes her head. “I felt this way before I got involved with Peter. I just never told you. I don’t think I could have gotten involved with Peter or anyone else if I still felt the way I used to.”
I am looking at her now. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. It just happened.”
I try not to stare. “How did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Find a way to start fresh…”
She looks at me for a moment. “I wish I could say it was something I thought or did. It just happened. One day I felt more like my old self. The thing that had hold of me began to let go.”
“You feel like your old self?” I hear the sense of incredulity and longing in my voice; my face heats with embarrassment.
“In some ways, yes, I do. In some ways I don’t, and won’t. Can’t. And even if I did feel the same, it isn’t the same…”
I shake my head in slow amazement. A few seconds later she asks, “Are you going to be helping Bobby in his campaign?”
I lean back, wondering why she is changing the subject, and also thinking it is odd I had not known I was leaning forward. “I don’t think so,” I say. “Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes it helped me to pretend I was my old self even when I wasn’t.”
“Campaigns aren’t something people can dabble in. They’re more like white water rafting. You’re either on board or on shore.”
“Yes,” she says. “I remember.”
“Did you…” I begin, then stop. “Did you think a lot about your past?”
“I don’t know.” She tilts her head. “You mean like my childhood?”
“Any time. Before…the accident, in my mind I used to live almost completely in the present. Or in the future. I mean, the past would pop into my head from time to time, but it was like a slide in a projector. Click—an image would appear. And then it would go away. Now I get full-length movies.”
“I’d never thought about it quite that way,” she says. “But yes. Something sort of like that happened. I went through a whole period where I called up old friends, looked at old photo albums, hiked and camped in places I used to go to only when I was younger.”
“And you don’t do that anymore?”
She shakes her head. “Not really.”
“Wonder what it is.”
“Maybe I was wondering which old self I’d like to feel like again.”
“You have a choice?” I say.
“No,” she says. “But I think it’s the only way to find a way out.”
“Out of what?”
“Out,” she says again. And I know what she means. Out of the 3:00 a.m. sense of loss and bewilderment, out of the daytime anaesthetic cloud, out of the old home movies, out of the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, out of the self that does not feel like yourself. Out. Just out.
The problem, though, is not to return to my old self. It was my old self that has brought me to where I am now. And my daughter to where she is.
Gail eats, looks at her watch, and says she had better hurry before the hour grows too late. She reaches in her purse for her wallet, but I wave her off and insist on paying.
“Aren’t you leaving?” she asks.
“Think I’ll have some dessert.”
“I just wanted you to know I wish you well.”
I thank her and stand to say goodbye. She gives me a quick kiss on the cheek, as if some old gesture is now permissible. I wish her luck.
She glances back at me just before she steps out, and I hold up a hand in farewell. I sit down and the waitress comes over to ask if everything is all right.
I consider that question for the briefest instant before, with a good imitation of casualness, I say, “I’d like a scotch, please.”
3
Over the last several years, once or twice a year—last year it happened three times—I come upon a weekend or a holiday or a bad period when I cannot work any longer. The papery feeling in my throat is there, the little sharp-toothed crouching animal, waiting patiently, and I decide to make it go away. Two or three days later, like someone shipwrecked and washed up on shore, I am done. Sometimes I am in a hotel room in Chicago or a “friend’s” house or mobile home or fleabag apartment God knows where, with a fellow drinker I have never met before and will not remember if I should ever see again. Once I ended up in my office on the floor, a BeSafe Security patrol of a German shepherd and a sturdy middle-aged woman in uniform standing over me. Every once in a great while I end up in my own home, usually in a chair in front of the television as it plays static from a tape in the VCR that has come to an end hours before. I do not feel better after these episodes, and they have begun to take longer and longer for me to recover from. Still, they do make the time go by.
I finish my third scotch at the restaurant, pay the bill, and leave. My next task is to get my car home, take a taxi to the corner of Division and Fourth, and make a visit on foot to a series of bars. Bars that share one essential quality: they are a pl
ace where no one knows your name. And after a while the desired happens, and you don’t, either.
It’s an ironclad rule with me. Three drinks and then home in a taxi. It isn’t that for someone of my weight three drinks keeps me under the legal limit, though that’s also true. It’s the more I drink, the slower I drive. Thirty miles an hour is a good speed, and I’m apt to stick to it even if the road I’m on calls for forty-five. But mostly I have a horror of losing count, something which, after three drinks, I know can happen.
Tonight, as usual, I take back roads where thirty is a good speed and no one behind me will get annoyed at my pokiness. About a mile from my house, I decide to take a shortcut through Blackhawk Creek Park. I congratulate myself on this decision. There will be no kids and little or no traffic on its wide, dark road at this hour.
As I round the steep curve near the picnic area in the middle of the park, I think how curves are easier at night than in the day. In the day, there are no oncoming headlights to warn you. Secure in the darkness I see ahead, I keep my speed. And then just ahead of my wheels in the middle of the road there are two eyes, high up off the ground, glowing at me.
I brake violently, swerve hard to my left, feeling my front wheels bump, think, Dear God, did I hit her? I hear gravel crunch under my tires and woody limbs snap. And then, in something that takes a short time on a stopwatch but feels like the endless slow motion of a bad dream, the car, completely out of control, begins to tip.
Dread rises in my chest as it keeps on tipping farther and farther. It is like being in a roller-coaster car that crests the hill and, instead of heading down, leaves the tracks entirely and goes into free fall. Nothing I do has an influence, and, screaming in terror now, I become part of forces that have their own logic. I half-feel and half-see the world sickeningly revolve in an impossible stomach-turning semicircle, the treetops moving toward the ground, my feet treading the sky and mashing my useless brakes, my hands gripping the useless steering wheel, the rolled car sliding and shuddering and scraping down an embankment an inch underneath my skull. Somewhere glass breaks, spraying my face, and beams of headlight jerk crazily as they light up tables and bushes and refuse cans, only they pass before me sideways and upside down, the car twisting as well as sliding down into the darkness, and everything is roaring and scraping in my head. My whole body is being shaken helplessly as a rag doll’s.
Sounding the Waters Page 4