Everybody’s Out There

by Robert M. Marchese

  Everybody’s Out There

  Robert M. Marchese

  © Copyright Robert M. Marchese 2020

  Black Rose Writing | Texas

  © 2020 by Robert M. Marchese

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

  First digital version

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-68433-656-2

  PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  Print edition produced in the United States of America

  Thank you so much for reading one of Robert M. Marchese’s novels.

  If you enjoyed the experience, please check out our recommended title for your next great read!

  Nine Lies

  “This important, nail-biting crime thriller about MS-13 sets the bar very high. One of the year’s best thrillers.”

  –BEST THRILLERS

  To Robbie and Riley, with endless love and loyalty.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Recommended Reading

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  Note from the Author

  BRW Info

  Chapter 1

  The worst place to be after a tragedy is confined to a car for fourteen hours. I’m convinced the body and brain need their space to roam, to breathe, to bleed. The road trip, however romanticized, is agony. Despair becomes trapped, turning wild and even dangerous. But when you’re running away, you have no choice. So you wait it out, enduring the grueling drive from Illinois to Connecticut. There are the static radio stations you’re unfamiliar with - a quarter of a Hendrix tune you used to know all the words to in college, half a Marvin Gaye song that reminds you of a girl from your past who had beautifully big lips, the barely audible melody of a Sinatra ballad that you know would make you ache with such longing if only the reception would clear up.

  There are the other drivers with their dead-eyed glares and self-important hustle. There are the landscapes, dreary industrial slabs, boring suburban towns, lonesome rest stops and diners. But some lovely farms, too, with sprawling, graceful pastures that must’ve inspired countless strangers to contemplate some profound memory. And there are the bouts of imagination - the nonstop, riotous slideshows that always seem to illuminate the most unpleasant moments. Like the very recent ones between you and your ex-wife. It’s imagination on such a drive that’s the most brutal.

  Only when I stop to grab a coffee or one of those shriveled, shrink-wrapped sandwiches, or to fill the tank, do I even realize that I’ve been thinking about Laura. Once I’m in the parking lot and I turn off the engine, and the buzz of the highway leaves my brain, do I begin to truly feel the loss. I stay with it for a few moments, convincing myself it’s the mark of a dignified man to wade through the dense murk of heartache. Then I throw open the door to the Jeep and make as much noise as possible, creating a ridiculous diversion for myself. I’ll sing or hum or rant. At a Mobile station in Sandusky, I yodeled, scaring a woman into walking point blank into a trashcan.

  It’s not just thoughts of Laura that consume me. It’s also the idea of going back east after all these years - seeing the tiny town of Old Brookview; seeing the Old Man for the first time in almost four years; seeing the crazy goddamn kids he lives for and from whom he makes his modest fortune.

  I had actually stopped calling Connecticut my home a few years ago. Laura told me I was being dramatic when I made the declaration. Illinois, I argued, was where I felt I belonged, where I felt I’d always been, and where I felt I’d always be. I secretly thought that cutting the cord between me and my past was giving her what she wanted. That she would see it as the mark of true contentment for my life with her. That she would find it romantic and sacrificial. Dramatic was the only word she used, and the matter was summarily dropped.

  The Old Man and I barely kept in touch through the years. There was the occasional call on a holiday or birthday. And I was made aware of his stent only after his doctor badgered him into contacting me. On my end, I phoned when Laura and I got married. And when we bought into Grove Garden Estates. When we became pregnant, of course. As well as when we became unpregnant. One of my more urgent calls ended up being from an ashram outside of Aurora, when I revealed that I’d likely be heading back east once my affairs were in order.

  As far as visits, there were few. Maybe two or three on my end. Not one on his. I lied about the wedding, telling him that Laura and I eloped. He told me this was a fine idea. Keep it simple, he said. I suspected he knew I was lying - that we did in fact have a traditional wedding with guests and a cake and all the frills and fanfare - but was looking for me to pardon him from having to act like we were close for even a day. To account for the lack of my family at the ceremony, I ended up telling Laura and her parents that Rollie had to recover from a spinal injury he sustained after falling off a ladder, something that had actually occurred when I was nine. On our honeymoon, which we took in Saint Croix, I told Laura it was for the best. She knew we weren’t close, but nothing about how my father’s wanderlust had actually deserted him long ago. I told her he hadn’t traveled in over a decade. He was content to stay where he was, I said, doing what he did best, which was breathing life back into his collection of broken boys and girls. As far as what I was doing, he made it known that he felt it wasn’t terribly important.

  “So you’re writing for a newspaper,” he’d say. “Crossword puzzles and catastrophes.”

  The first Christmas after Laura and I were married, we surprised him by flying out east for a weekend. A few days before, I had received a small journalism award from the staff at the paper. Laura, wanting to brag about me, brought it up over a toast. Rollie hesitated for a bit, licked his lips, and clinked our glasses. Later, when we were alone, he told me he liked Laura. And then, as though he feared he needed something to weigh against his approval, he told me that if I wasn’t writing my column, someone else would be.

  “Isn’t that the case with anyone doing anything?” I asked. “Doesn’t the same apply to you?”

  He looked at me like I had switched languages midway through what I had said.

  “Of course not,” he scoffed.

  But I’m guilty as well. If he feels that what I’m doing is trivial, at least he’s taking the time to cons
ider it. I’ve been eight hundred miles away, writing my column for The Sun Times and submerging myself deeper into that parochial snobbery that disregards small town life; it’s as though when I stepped from the shell of Old Brookview, its cracked remains split into a million fragments that blew away the moment I left. That’s part of it. The other part is that I figured I knew where my father was at all times: He was in our hometown of Old Brookview, a sleepy, old-money town in southern Connecticut that on a map resembles a chipped diamond. And I knew what he was doing: He was overseeing the Hundred Acre School, or the HAS as it’s called, cashing those enormous tuition checks, and lecturing a hundred or so adolescent basket cases from his wobbly podium he keeps at the head of the dining hall. Christ, I even knew what he was saying: “What’s the point of man’s life? What sense can people make out of human existence? What’s the purpose of human events? All important questions - but there’re others you must first ask yourself: We’ll discover those questions together, kids.” It was commonplace for him to quote Kierkegaard or Descartes or Francis Bacon to a small sea of precocious, overly medicated lunatics.

  So I suppose I felt that I had seen that show, knew the lines, the props, the stage direction, and didn’t feel the need to see it again or even remember it any longer. I grew up among those lunatics. They tramped through my front yard on their way to class or mealtime. Or they huddled by the dense row of birch trees in my backyard to sneak a smoke before group therapy. There were only a hundred of them - “One student per acre; more than enough space to figure something out,” as the Old Man put it - but they seemed everywhere. And in a sense, they were. I saw them not only on the campus, where my father and I lived - we had a tiny three bedroom Cape that crouched practically in the middle of five boys dormitories - but also in town at the Roarick Arts Cinema, Tiny’s Drugstore, Cumberland Farms, Louden’s Diner, and at Page Turners, the town’s bookstore. To me, they were like pets I wasn’t much interested in, knowing they were in the care of others who were. Not that I ever mistreated them. When I ate among them in the dining hall, which was often, I was courteous and mindful of my manners. They were responsible for serving the food and clearing the tables, so I’d say, “Just some pancakes and sausage, please,” to the bipolar girl with the black eye shadow and permanent pout, or “Thank you very much,” as I handed my cutlery over to the gangly misfit with the Army boots and freshly gauzed wrists.

  They regarded my presence with unease. I was their opposite: a public school kid, who went just down the street, not even two miles away, to schools with courtyards and custodians and gleaming display cases holding pennant flags and trophies dating back to the 1940s. The Hundred Acre School, which is grades nine through twelve, is far too modest looking to be impressive. Classes are taught in one of two single-level schoolhouses. Essentially facsimiles of one another - the only difference is that one is fifteen years newer and was built to look identical to the other - they bookend the gymnasium. The older one has been named the Virginia House, after my late mother; the newer one is known as the Virginia II. Parked next to the Virginia II is a 1967 vintage, lime-green Winnebago the Old Man once drove around North America with my mother, courting her before they married. The vehicle no longer runs. Yet my father still washes it, refills its tires, and keeps its insurance active. It’s all in the name of some tacit memorial to his late wife, who died of breast cancer when I was three.

  When I grew up, my own peers thought nothing of wreaking havoc on the HAS kids. Often, their paths would cross downtown, which is a mile from the HAS campus. To their faces, they referred to the institution as “Straight-Jacket Central” or “Crazy-House High,” and asked questions like, “Who’s your mascot: a Bipolar-Bear?” In the presence of the HAS kids, they would feign epilepsy and disfigurement and mental conditions that always involved limps and lisps and drooling. They would call them “freaks,” “misfits,” and “weirdos.”

  Because the campus is on both sides of Wildwood Road, HAS students can be seen crossing at any time of day. Thus, these cruel gestures were often extended in drive-by fashion. It was not uncommon for students to be minding their own business, ready to cross the road, diligently checking for traffic, when out of nowhere came a bullet in the shape of a $30,000 Audi or Acura, which would spit out profane slogans at whiplash speed, followed by a glass bottle that would shatter at their feet. When I was nine or ten, I saw from my bedroom window a car fly by with shouting teenagers leaning from the windows, and, in its speeding wake, a HAS student fall over in the road after getting clubbed in the face with a raw, dead fish the size of a small pillow.

  Despite any magnanimous attempts on behalf of the town of Old Brookview or the Hundred Acre School to occasionally integrate both groups of students in certain functions - fundraisers, assemblies - the results were often polarizing. I remember a guest speaker coming to town to talk about drugs and alcohol when I was a senior at Franklin Duval High School. He spoke in FDHS’s gymnasium since it could accommodate its own students as well as the roughly hundred HAS kids, who were bused over. Minutes into the assembly, a brawl broke out between ten or more students, most of them girls. One of them, I remember, a HASER, as they call themselves, lost both of her front teeth. When I saw her in the dining hall the following day, I mentioned that I was sorry for the unfortunate melee. She studied me for a moment as she held her tray of food, wisps of steam rising from her soggy, Technicolor vegetables; then she opened her mouth and scowled at me, making sure to expose her hideous loss.

  My teachers often assumed that because my father ran a therapeutic boarding school that I was somehow blessed with a remarkable talent for sympathy. That I must have possessed an insider’s view of suffering. That I saw, firsthand, and on a daily basis, the intricacies involved in human dysfunction. “Grayson is lucky,” Mrs. Boyle, my junior year English teacher, used to tell the class when someone consulted me as the mental health pundit while we studied The Catcher in the Rye or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “He has privileged glimpses into what must be some intriguing stories, stories most of us will never know, but could most likely benefit from. Pathos is a rare mineral, children. Be envious.” Then she’d look at me and tell me again how lucky I was.

  Lucky was not something I considered myself. I always felt at the center of constant hysteria - highs and lows, and absurd, never-ending drama. I cared for none of it. None of it, after all, was my drama. It all belonged to a group of narcissistic strangers.

  When I was a sophomore, I remember a peer asking me if I hated my father for making me grow up among crazy kids. “That must be some type of abuse,” she said. “To live there with them. To expose you to that, everyday. I can’t even imagine.” I don’t recall my response. But if there was a benefit to it, I suppose it was the freedom it afforded me. When your parent is a firm believer in what he does, when he’s utterly devoted, passionate to the end, and when the fragile neuroses of a hundred teens hangs in the balance, you can get away with murder. So as he dealt with unruly HASERS - kids who refused to go to class, take their meds, go to therapy, get out of bed, put down the razor blade - I was exploring pseudo-adult life. I never had a curfew; I socialized with too many college-aged kids. I scored a fake ID when I was seventeen and was initiated into the New Haven bar scene, which is barely half an hour from Old Brookview; I was able to succeed academically and socially without much parental guidance whatsoever.

  Though Rollie never said as much to me, I must’ve looked pretty good when compared with the HASERS. I always imagined him, after a long, grueling day of suicide prevention and hackneyed pep talks, having an emotional outpouring with my mother’s photograph, which he kept sufficiently dusted by his bedside: “We got pretty damn lucky with Gray,” he might say. “Didn’t we? Intelligent. Independent. Hard-working. He’s got a good head on his shoulders, doesn’t he, Virginia?” But I could only guess. He had busied himself raising other people’s kids. As I discovered, depres
sion wins out over two consecutive Shoreline’s Best Young Journalist awards, and five-figure yearly tuition checks win out over just about anything.

  The truth is this: The HAS kids needed my father more than I did. So I gave him up, lent him out, whatever you want to call it. But I did so with more than a bit of recalcitrance. I wore whatever antipathy I had for the arrangement like some hard-earned badge of courage. But I never spoke about it. Not once.

  Going back now after years of being away does seem like the perfect irony. Anyone who knows me would agree to this. They would throw their head back and widen their eyes and say, “Really? You’re going to work for Rollie at the Hundred Acre School? After all this time? Isn’t that something?” They would wish me luck, walk away, and think, poor fucker…he’s hit rock bottom. And though I know I could explore this irony, indulge its fresh fascination, I won’t. I simply need to get away from Illinois and Laura and Grove Garden Estates. I need to put some distance between myself and the last year of my life. Rock bottom? Maybe. But the bottom seems appropriate for me right now. I wouldn’t know what to do anywhere else.

  There’s not a doubt that the Old Man will be consumed with questions: “Have you spoken with Laura lately?” “Is she all right?” “How’d things leave off?” And then the nexus, the one that would come so close to breaking his silence: “Can’t you two just try again to have more children?” He’ll refrain from voicing any of these, though. He has discipline. I’ll give him that. It’s impressive. I suppose it’s his business to know when to push, and how, and at what point, and when to simply back off and allow space. My defense will be simple: I’ll look around the school and comment on what looks the same and what’s changed. This will work. Rollie is famous for falling all over himself to point out even the slightest development in the Hundred Acre School, whether it’s in the programming or the aesthetics. His pride in the place is remarkable, endearing even. Sometimes, though, it can be too much. I remember him telling me, and thinking he was justified, that he reproved a staff member for giving a tour to a prospective student and her family and forgetting to mention the new carpeting in two of the dormitories.