Everybody’s Out There

by Robert M. Marchese

  “Just so we have all the facts. I think that’s important.”

  Though I couldn’t get the word responsible from my mind, I was careful not to use it. This was Ben’s idea. He surmised that by using it, she could interpret my meaning to suggest that she was behaving irresponsibly. She could therefore become defensive. Then, according to Ben, I’d really have my work cut out for me. The plan would be to keep it neutral and light. Which I did, refilling her plate and glass in between humble, soft-spoken pleas.

  “And what do we do once we know?” she asked. “What’s the purpose of this information?”

  Pausing for a moment, I repeated myself:

  “Just to know.”

  Her position, she explained, was as simple as my own. She valued the surprise of the experience. The excitement. The spontaneity. As an adult, she argued, there are so few opportunities for such sensations. She wanted the pregnancy to offer all of this.

  “But if something’s wrong, sweetheart, I think we should know beforehand.”

  She looked at me. The faintest trace of orange soda was on her lower lip.

  “And what if something is wrong?” she asked.

  “Then I think we should know.”

  “And then what? What happens after we know?”

  Turning away, I focused on a painting on the kitchen wall. It was of a European bistro where a lone couple sits under the twilight, drinking wine and staring at one another. It was done mostly in yellows and reds. I knew it was a wedding gift, but I couldn’t remember who gave it to us.

  “We’ll deal with it,” I said softly, turning back to Laura.

  She was about to say something when I cut in:

  “You want the element of surprise? You want excitement and spontaneity? Well, I can guarantee all of that and more. I can guarantee it.”

  I went on, telling her that we were in for something unlike anything either of us had ever known. I laughed and told her it was going to be wild. I said that I could hardly stand all the surprises we had waiting for us - the joy and excitement of starting a family. Hesitating for a moment, I reached across the table and ran my finger over her lips.

  “All of that’s not going away with some stupid test,” I said. “Trust me.”

  I told her I could sweeten the deal for her. Then I reached for my phone and found the confirmation of the two first class tickets to Key West I purchased that morning. Sliding it across the table, I reminded her that she had plenty of vacation time coming up. She picked up the phone and studied it for a moment. Her tongue slid behind her top lip while her eyes became focused and sharp. I knew that expression. It meant she was trying to play it cool, but was actually excited.

  “Is this the best bribe you could come up with?”

  I said it was. She tapped her fingers on the screen while pretending to think. After a moment, she leaned towards me and said there was a way for me to sweeten the deal even further and ensure that I would get my way. Now I pretended to play it cool. Leaning back in my chair, I asked what it was. With deadpan delivery, Laura hesitated for a moment and then asked for me to bring her the last piece of lasagna.

  . . .

  Glenn Kilburn had grown a beard. Not a self-pitying or lazy man’s beard. And not a bushy or spotty or an up-to-your-cheekbones beard, but a good beard. The kind that the tanned, chiseled TV stars so effortlessly grow. The kind that draws attention to an already attractive face, complementing it, and giving it a shaped masculinity and even an enigmatic quality.

  I was able to chart the development of this beard on a daily basis. Glenn, who worked evening shifts at Saint Joseph Hospital in the city, could be found at my house most days upon my return from work. Laura, who always arrived home at least two to three hours before me, would be entertaining Glenn. They’d be drinking - always straight whiskey on ice for Glenn, and orange soda or cranberry juice for Laura - and talking and laughing and getting to know one another. Glenn would leave almost as soon as I walked in the door, but never before downing his whiskey and telling me I was lucky to have such a winner or peach or gem of a wife. He would clap me on the shoulder and thank Laura for her hospitality.

  “Should a doctor be drinking so much?” I’d ask once Glenn had left. “Seems a bit reckless.”

  “He’s a grown-up.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And he’s quite the character.”

  Laura said this with a modest degree of affection. She was getting to know Glenn Kilburn, and must’ve liked what she was learning. And because Laura and I weren’t the jealous types, she never felt the need to justify his presence in our home or assure me that Glenn, after as many as four or five whiskeys, was behaving himself. What she would share instead were trivial anecdotes about Linda, his soon-to-be ex-wife. They would all end the same way: with her declaring that Glenn likely endured unbearable shallowness, coldness, even cruelty.

  “The poor guy,” I would say, barely concealing my sarcasm.

  One evening, just minutes after Glenn’s hurried, half-drunken departure, I asked Laura what she thought of his new beard. And I’ll be goddamned if she didn’t make a face I knew all too well. A face that tried to play it cool, but was a thin disguise for something else - curiosity maybe, or some kind of keen interest that imposes itself on matters it likes to ponder in private.

  “I didn’t really notice his beard,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Well, it’s there. Trust me. It’s all over his face.”

  “Then I guess he grew it in the right place.”

  “But you’re saying you haven’t noticed it, right?”

  “Maybe I’m just not as observant as I should be.”

  I was on the verge of breaking this ruse wide open with some self-righteous gesture or comment that would expose it and in fact embarrass her a little. I didn’t, though. I stopped myself. It’s just a beard, I thought. Besides, I knew better than to antagonize a pregnant woman.

  . . .

  Aside from waiting on the results of Laura’s amniocentesis, there was a lot of additional drama during that summer. A colleague of mine, Marty Nye, lost his wife in a rock climbing accident. She was forty. That same week, Laura’s mother, Abby, was driving home from a luncheon with friends when a motorcycle darted out from a side street and crashed into her. Abby was seriously shaken, and her Volkswagen was totaled. The man on the bike, though okay, was banged up pretty badly. And, finally, Laura and I would learn one morning that Great Caesar’s, our favorite restaurant, had burned to the ground, killing one employee and severely burning at least three others.

  “It’ll be nice to get away,” Laura continued to say after each tragedy.

  We were both looking forward to Key West. The last trip we took, nearly two years prior, was to Wind Lake, Wisconsin. And though it was pleasant, it was with Laura’s siblings, their spouses, and their children.

  It was never clear to me whether Laura was anxious about the amnio results. All that was clear was that she was never interested in the test to begin with. The reluctance she felt was something I often thought about. It bothered me. We were usually in agreement. Movies, food, politics: Whatever the matter, we almost always saw it the same. Yet I never got a sense of how she wanted her family life to be. She managed to keep hidden whatever her mind may have conjured on the subject. Of course she wanted what every parent wants - to see their kids play and laugh and grow and fall in love and fall down and get back up and become the type of adult to give thanks for how they turned out - yet there was no denying that I married a woman whose levels of acceptance and even forgiveness transcended my own. And by a lot. In fact, all I can recall ever hearing her say w
as, simply, I want to be someone’s mother. Maybe it’s just that elementary for women. Maybe men are more ego-driven, and their progeny must be constant and glorious tributes to them.

  Women, meanwhile, are swept up in the miracle of their bodies and the godlike sensations they want to feel forever. Maybe everything else, comparatively, becomes unimportant. Maybe, when you’ve been gifted such abilities, and can perform in some divine-like fashion, nothing else really matters.

  We had waited a total of twelve days before we heard from Dr. Rose’s office. It was a Thursday when we received the news. It was a brutally hot day. I remember learning that it was the hottest weather on record in the city in ten years. I arrived home from work to find Glenn in my driveway. With a drink in his hand, he was walking back to his house. Guiding me towards him as though he was an air traffic controller, he greeted me with a faint smile. When I stepped out of the car, he took a seat on a large landscaping rock in his front yard and watched me approach him.

  “Mr. Grayson, the man of the house,” he said, sipping on his ice, “welcome home.”

  The glass, as usual, was one of ours. I wondered if he was returning them.

  “Good day for a drink,” he said. “It’s brutal out here.”

  The truth is he didn’t look the slightest bit affected by the heat. With a black golf shirt, army-green shorts, and leather flip flops, he appeared cool and comfortable. I, on the other hand, started sweating the moment I stepped from my car. Agreeing with him about the heat, I mentioned that it was the hottest day on record in ten years.

  “How’s the journalism business? Always a lot to report on, I’m sure.”

  “Like your business, I imagine, it’s unending.”

  We both agreed that as long as we did our respective jobs well, we’d probably never be out of work. Then Glenn said something that I found interesting, something that suggested to me that he was not only stacking us up side-by-side for the purpose of comparison, but that he had done it before, and possibly several times. I’m not sure if this was revealed to me through the quiet, confident way he said it, or in the way his body seemed to go limp a little, as though he was relieved by this small revelation.

  “You see,” he said, shaking the ice in the glass, “we do have something in common. And I bet you thought we were fire and water.”

  “I never really thought about it,” I said, which was a lie.

  Setting his glass down on the rock, Glenn stood up. He was probably three or four inches taller than me. I noticed his beard had become fuller.

  “That’s the kind of stuff I think about a lot,” he said. “What connects people. How we’re related. All of that.”

  I nodded my head, wondering if it was the alcohol that was making him approach the precipice of sentimentality. Glenn and I stood there for a few moments, not saying much of anything. After a while, I told him I should head inside to see Laura.

  “She’s waiting for you.”

  I half-expected him to offer me some type of assurance that he had just enjoyed my wife’s company, that she was helping him through a difficult time and there was nothing more to it than that. But he said nothing of the sort. We said goodnight and headed our separate ways. But just as I was about to enter the house, Glenn called my name from his front lawn:

  “You know what else we have in common?” he asked. “All of us, I mean. We all just want to avoid a major tragedy in life. If we can pull that off, well, that’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it?”

  He never waited for a response. He just turned and went inside his house. The empty glass was left behind on the landscaping rock. Laura was on the phone when I entered the kitchen. Later, I would find out it was with her father. She barely greeted me when I walked towards her and whispered hello. Just a slight nod. She stayed on the phone for a few minutes, mostly listening and confirming what she was being told. When she hung up, she looked at me with an entirely new expression. Her mouth moved into a slightly pursed position, and her eyes appeared dark and defeated. It wasn’t an offensive look, yet its foreign quality made me worry that it might be her new face forever.

  It was with this face that she told me our news. She had spoken with Dr. Rose, who had called in the afternoon. They had a lovely talk. Dr. Rose was positive and encouraging. She had some literature for us to read. Some on the science of what we were facing, and some on the psychological end.

  “She’s good at what she does,” Laura told me.

  She began cleaning the kitchen. First, she wiped the counters and polished the stovetop. Then she began reorganizing the fridge, removing its contents and running a sponge over the glass shelves. Taking a seat at the table, I decided to let her non sequiturs and trivial domestic gestures run their course. This took a few minutes. During that time, I was able to articulate what I wanted to say. But when her pretense of busyness finally halted, I forgot every word.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  The truth was that my mind was not at all focused. Probably it was swimming in confusion, but I could articulate nothing. So I lied.

  “Glenn’s beard.”

  She asked if I was serious.

  “I can’t imagine that in all your visits with one another, the topic of his beard was never once brought up. Yet you maintain that you’ve never even noticed it.”

  Staring at me with cold eyes from across the kitchen, Laura called me a bastard for coaxing her into taking the amnio test. She glared at me for a few moments and then stormed past me towards the stairs. After some time, the door to our bedroom slammed.

  My mind felt like it was now able to unfurl a complete thought. And it became focused on Glenn Kilburn. But not on his fucking beard. Instead, I was focused on what he had said to me earlier from across his front lawn - about how what we all have in common is the hope of avoiding a tragedy in life. He was quite the philosopher, Glenn Kilburn. I thought of how he looked and sounded when he said this, how he must’ve felt slightly self-conscious to deliver such a heady statement to a neighbor he hardly knew. Suddenly, my mind, as though on a timer, cleared all these thoughts and made room for only one: the notion that it was a very real possibility that Glenn Kilburn had in fact learned the fate of my family hours before I did.

  Chapter 9

  There was never any choice but for Rollie to have a relationship with Old Brookview’s police department. It’s part of running a therapeutic boarding school in town. His students occasionally run away or shoplift downtown or cause a public disturbance. Or, they find the body of a dead girl in the woods on their school’s campus.

  Because the Old Man is so protective of his kids, he views everyone in town as an outsider. The local cops are no exception. Rollie knows what the town thinks of his students. They’re seen as pariahs - poor, mysterious creatures who are damaged and sometimes dangerous.

  Since the murder, though, he’s cooperated. He’s given the authorities the freedom to scour the premises, ask questions, and collect evidence. The Dimitri Ames situation is different. I think the Old Man is not only fed up with catastrophes at his school by the time this occurs, but he must feel that he has the upper hand in this one. This is a situation where I believe he feels he’s the victim. He’s been duped by this young predator. And then, once Ames was confronted, he had the audacity to be belligerent, going so far as to threaten the Old Man.

  To show up at the school late at night, get caught sneaking around, and then get mouthy, and even physical, goes well beyond ballsy. And there I was. Not hundreds of miles away, sleeping soundly in my own home. Not living anything resembling the adult life I thought I’d be living as a grown man. But tramping through the familiar grounds of the HAS in the dense summer darkness, supporting my father, helping him subdue a complete stranger.
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  By the time we reach the scene, which has progressed from the woods behind the girls dormitories to just outside the SOD office, Ames is pretty much wound up. He’s throwing his arms in the air, darting from side to side, and cussing at Louise and the other security staff, Jimbo and Paddy, both of whom are paunchy, middle-aged men. Louise shines a flashlight in Ames’ face while she rests her other hand on the butt of a thin club holstered at her hip.

  Ames is telling the threesome that they have no authority over him and to fuck off, that he’s done nothing wrong. The cops are on their way, Louise tells him, and it’s they who can decide. When Ames spots Rollie hurrying towards him, with me and Nussbaum in tow, he laughs. It’s the kind of laugh filled with fresh terror and an uneasy heart that can’t decide between obstinacy and deference.

  “Six on one,” Ames says. “What the fuck?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” says the Old Man, spreading his arms and lifting them in the air. “What the fuck?”

  “I still have friends on campus.”

  “I don’t give a shit. This is private property. You’re not welcome here.”

  Ames becomes still. For a moment, no one speaks. The fist of light thrown around from Louise’s hand finally settles on Ames’ face. He’s tall, dark-haired, and cleanly shaven.

  “Look out now,” Ames said, his smile wide and brash, “he’s going to start quoting fucking Nietzsche or something.”

  “Nietzsche?” I said, “you wouldn’t understand it if he quoted Scooby Doo.”

  Jimbo and Paddy laugh. The Old Man turns to me.

  “What I mean,” I said, capitalizing on the tacit approval I assume I have from everyone, “is that you’re obviously not a bright guy. My father has apparently asked you several times to disassociate yourself from this place and everyone here. But you don’t seem to grasp that simple concept.”