Everybody’s Out There

by Robert M. Marchese

  The writers group welcomes him back the following afternoon. Not that there’s much fanfare. There isn’t. Just Adam announcing his friend’s return with a slap on the shoulder and a brief chastisement for holding up their great dumpster diving show-off. Adam points to the table where the Old Man sits everyday among the therapists and administrators. Mounted on the wall just beneath the window is a tabletop jukebox the boys installed earlier in the day. Its chrome is as faded as the pink and white song tags behind the abraded glass. It’s scuffed and worn, but the machine appears intact and the installation looks clean. Sali’s, the downtown pizza joint, is doing some renovations, the boys tell us, and they swiped this after spotting it wedged between rusted out bathroom fixtures at the bottom of a dumpster.

  Walking over to it, some of the kids comment that they can’t believe the boys knew how to install the machine. Others can’t believe Rollie let them install it by his table - or install it at all.

  “We’re wearing him down for the Winnebago,” Adam says. “I think the jukebox was his way of giving us an inch, testing our abilities.”

  Meredith flips through the sleeves of song selections. They’ve rigged the machine so it doesn’t require money, Matt tells her. Then he asks someone to pick a tune, something that will be the group’s unofficial anthem. Meredith sees something she likes. B9, she says. She presses the buttons. After a moment, “Shake Your Groove Thing,” plays from the scratchy speakers. Dorian asks if Meredith can play Black Sabbath instead. Then others begin making requests. Before long, though, they accept the tune she’s chosen. There’s even some foot-tapping and head-bobbing. This soon turns into full-on dancing. Ridiculous dancing. Uninhibited dancing.

  “What do you think?” Adam asks me in the midst of some absurd shimmy.

  “I think we here at the Hundred Acre School like to offer and encourage a wide diversity of experiences, from writing screenplays and poetry to dancing to the song stylings of Peaches and Herb.”

  “That’s hardcore,” he says.

  “That’s what we’re all about here.”

  Matt ends his odd leg kicks and display of zero rhythm to tell me how he recalls the song from a movie. Meredith, who sidles up to me and ceases with her own bizarre jig, also has something to say:

  “Interesting,” she says, “that you’re using the we pronoun when discussing this place. Before, I believe, it was them, wasn’t it? Now it’s we. Don’t you think that’s interesting?”

  “Incredibly,” is all I can think to say.

  . . .

  That evening, J.R. III’s silver Lexus, one of his many cars, pulls onto campus moments before the cop car with its flashing lights and wailing siren. This is in the middle of dinner. The kids and the staff must be used to these sightings by now - strange vehicles and persons on their school grounds - that they react accordingly. A few quizzical stares. Some obstinate mutterings. Even a little apathy. But as far as shock or incredulity, no way.

  Rollie, his phone pressed into his ear, is halfway out the door when he suddenly halts. All eyes are upon him when he looks in the direction of the Homer House table and yells at me to follow him. I’m swallowing my last bite of one of Mickey’s better meals - a perfectly cooked fillet of cod in some kind of lime salsa - when I find myself hurtling towards the door and out into the warm night, side by side with my father.

  The commotion is near the Homer House. The cop car, its siren off, but lights still flashing, is angled in front of my private entrance. J.R. III’s Lexus is angled the other way, so both vehicles form a V against the building. The cop, a thickly built woman, probably in her early forties, with a braid of black hair swinging from her duty cap, is speaking with J.R. III. The security team of Louise and Jimbo are sandwiching who is clearly the reason for the chaos: Austin. He’s puffing his chest out and jabbing his hands into the folds of his love handles. It’s still light out - light enough to see his expression, which is both subdued and worried. When he sees me and Rollie, he shifts his weight and nods in my direction.

  “Jimbo caught him walking out of the Homer House,” Louise tells us.

  “Just as plain as day,” adds Jimbo.

  Louise mentions they discovered a rear window with a torn screen. Austin snorts an ugly laugh at this. His father, now at his side, silences him with a piercing glance. Jimbo turns to me and says that Austin told him I’d given permission for him to enter the dorm. After learning this, Jimbo contacted Louise, who didn’t believe Austin’s story. She immediately phoned the police, and eventually the Old Man, who I sense is looking at me.

  Before I can respond to the absurdity of Austin’s lie, he announces that his father is still the owner of the school. This is fact, he says. Then he adds that he works for his father and it’s his father alone to whom he’ll answer. J.R. III turns to his son, pauses for a bit, then thrashes him upside his face with an open hand. Austin barely flinches while his father strikes him several more times. In between each blow is a quick, hostile rant. The featured words are useless and pathetic. The abuse is rough, but not enough to gain Austin any defenders. And it’s over in a moment. A quick, angry burst of violence. No police interference. No outsiders expressing judgment. J.R. III apologizes to everyone and tells his son to get in the car. Austin begins to explain that his own vehicle is nearby, but soon stifles himself. He climbs into the Lexus, avoiding eye contact with the crowd. Sunken into himself, all his bravado and hopes for nepotism vanished. Before father and son embark on the winding road that cuts through the campus, the campus they do rightfully own, the silver Lexus pulls alongside me and rolls down its driver-side window. J.R. III leans his head out just slightly and looks up at me.

  “I’ll assume you’re foreign to the feeling of being an absolute embarrassment to your own father. You seem like you’ve got your shit pretty well together. That’s good, you know. Rollie appreciates it, you not being a goddamn embarrassment. Fathers everywhere appreciate it. Hell, I appreciate it.”

  Looking past him for a moment, I fix my eyes on Austin, who’s staring stonily ahead, his face contorted into a miserable shadow against the oncoming twilight. There’s no doubt he’s heard every word of this. The window suddenly shoots up and the Lexus drives off.

  . . .

  That night, I’m on duty. Minutes before the boys settle down, hysteria erupts. Yelling and cursing and confident accusations. Several of the boys, J.J., Cal, Noah, and Cliff, are involved. Their things, they say, have been moved or misplaced.

  “Blow me!” Noah shouts at the boys, “I didn’t fuck with your stuff!”

  “Punch, you do have a habit of borrowing our shit,” says Cal.

  “Fuck off!” says Noah, his eyes beginning to water.

  He swears up and down that he’s touched nothing, and, in fact, his things - cologne, watch, ukulele - have also been tampered with. More boys begin coming forward - Alex, Albert, Dustin - claiming similar charges. It’s then brought up that Nick’s things especially have been disturbed. It’s not clear if anything’s missing, but definitely moved.

  “It’s like Punch ransacked our shit looking for his missing balls,” says Cal.

  With clenched fists, Noah, gritting his teeth, encroaches upon Cal. I extend my hand out to his chest and tell him I believe him. His eyes continue to water. Then I turn to the rest of the Homer House boys who’ve gathered in the name of what they naively regard as some great mystery, and I tell them it’s a lousy time to begin turning on one another. No one asks me to explain myself, so I mention again that Noah, their roommate, their sometimes friend, and most likely their only Hawaiian connection, is innocent. Then I give a brief dissertation on short-term memory loss and explain to them that they’re too young to give in to such an inconvenience. They agree in an endearingly dumbfounded way. Lots of tired, sideway
s glances and slow head nods. So I remind them of Austin and his father and the police and all that occurred just hours earlier.

  “Oh yeah,” Cal says, “that fat fuck. I forgot all about him. I guess we all did.”

  “Not Gray,” says Noah. “Gray didn’t forget about him.”

  All eyes are suddenly fixed upon me. So I agree with Noah, that I have in fact remembered Austin.

  “More importantly, though,” I added, “I’m positive the police will also remember him.”

  The boys nod. They seem satisfied. In their own way. Satisfied enough, I suppose, to drop the misunderstanding and head off to their rooms in peace to settle down for the evening.

  Chapter 14

  There was that one dream, stark and brutal as anything I could imagine. It was the kind that ties itself so tightly around reality that it takes a bout of sweat soaked breathless panting and feverish blinking to break from it long enough to calm down and see my wife lying there beside me in the late night darkness. I began to lose track of how many times I’d been woken by this dream. It seemed like every time I shut my eyes. And it became impossible to go back to sleep. So I’d sit up in bed, breathing deep, loud breaths, hoping to wake Laura. I secretly wished she would hear my distress and pull me down towards her and console me with whatever she had left to offer. I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly that might be. But she never did this. She continued to sleep the impossibly heavy sleep of one who’s fought in a war and has lost everything and foolishly thinks they can regain it in the morning with a fresh, blinding sunrise. Ben told me I was being too hard on myself when I suggested the dreams were some kind of divine punishment.

  “Maybe I deserve it,” I told him one morning, cornering him before he could even get a cup of coffee in him. “Maybe I’ll be plagued for the rest of my goddamn life.”

  I didn’t tell him I was beginning to question the decision I had forced upon my wife. Ben knew me. So I was fine with him knowing my entitlements and arrogance. We were, after all, kindred spirits in these ways. But I could never have him thinking I was full of such serious regret, something I wasn’t even certain of myself. Such regrets signify defeat. And men seldom admit to other men they’ve been defeated, especially at their own hands. Perhaps on the tennis court or golf course where there’s a finite score, a winner and loser. But not in ways where it truly counts.

  “It’s natural for your mind to be fucking with you right now,” he said. “Your world has just been given intense shock therapy, for Christ’s sake.”

  Part of me was hoping he’d be harder on me, that he’d agree that these dreams were a type of cosmic intervention, a harbinger to dark times. Instead, he put his hand on my shoulder and told me I knew better than to buy into the notion of interpreting my dreams.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Maybe?”

  “It’s just so goddamn heavy. The dream.”

  “Of course it is,” he said. “What’s occurred is pretty goddamn heavy. That doesn’t mean you need to break out the tarot cards and start looking for signs.”

  Ben was right in everything he was saying. But being right wasn’t enough to deter me from obsessing. I thought about the dream like it was some looming prison sentence I’d be forced to serve once I got my affairs in order. From night to night, it was more or less the same. Laura never returns from the hospital. No phone call. No word from her family. Days go by and nothing. All my attempts to reach out are futile. Then, one day I receive a letter. Laura has fled to some remote part of the country where she’s given birth to our baby. It’s her intention to raise the child by herself, which she does. And proudly. And she meets a man, a man more accepting and generous than her husband. A man who gives her the life she and our child feel destined to live. She resigns to never tell our child about her real father, the coward, the quitter, the selfish, hurtful prick who threw it all away so he could free himself of explanations and excuses as to why his family wasn’t like he had hoped it would be.

  But Laura had returned to me. And her return, I soon discovered, was as terrifying as the dream. The haunting possibility of her absence, and the bloated sadness of her presence: Each loomed in dark hanging gray things that I couldn’t push away or tear down or remove long enough to examine and understand them. She was different, too. And not just in her belly, which flattened after a few weeks. Her voice had changed. Its vibrancy had been dialed to zero and replaced mostly by sheepish, inaudible mutterings. Her movements had also changed. What was once a breezy and self-assured stride gave way to an awkward delicateness, as though she feared her most important organs might disconnect inside of her body at any moment. And her eyes – they now seemed colorless and opaque, the kind of eyes torn from the pages of a children’s grim fairy-tale where good encounters evil for the first time and is struck so hard that it has no choice but to change forever.

  We ate most of our meals together. We spoke about baseball and the weather and the lousy economy. She thanked me for replacing the broken window in the baby’s room. We slept in the same bed. We dressed and undressed in front of one another. And time went on.

  We eventually had a small memorial service for the baby. For family only. It was me and Laura and her parents and siblings and their spouses and children. It was through a local parish. The headstone was blue pearl granite with flowers etched around its perimeter and an epitaph that read Emma Elizabeth Loveland, Beloved Daughter, Granddaughter, Niece, Cousin. The dates were at the bottom. I wasn’t consulted on any of the details for the service or the stone.

  Through all of this, I never contacted my father. I’d end up waiting several more weeks before sending him my unexpected complications text. In my message, I said I’d call him, and I asked for him to please not be in touch. We were fine, I said. Laura was fine. It was all fine. We were doing better than we had anticipated.

  One evening, Laura and I, lying in bed, began to embrace. We fell asleep in one another’s arms. When I woke at a little after midnight, her arms were wrapped around my neck and we were nose to nose. Her breath was warm and her breathing steady. Inching back a bit, I studied her face. It was flawless in the dark, neutral and unburdened, all traces of its sorrow gone. I wondered about the dreams she might be having. Maybe I could slip back into them, I thought. There must be some smooth crawlspace in there that I could wedge myself into, some smoky recess where I could hole up for a bit, count to a million, then rise and wade my way through the density and be seen and heard and loved and understood once again. I promised myself that if I made it I would do everything I could to remain there, boldly and proudly intact, forever claiming it my true and righteous place in this life. By the next morning she had woken before me and was out of the house without a sound. She came home at close to 9:00 that night, missing dinner and eventually falling asleep on the sofa in the living room. This pattern continued over the next few days. I never spoke a word about it.

  I made the mistake of researching the procedure Laura went through in the hospital. Countless websites came up when I entered my search. Many of them, I would learn, based on their abrasive and even hostile wordings, were Christian anti-abortion sites. They were unforgiving in their brutal depiction of the process. Forgoing all professional nomenclature, they relied instead on hard-nosed, tactless language that, once I cross referenced with less fanatical sites, proved nevertheless accurate. Words I had never considered - dismember was among them - were used often, and in the most casual of contexts. The procedure seemed as invasive and horrifying as anything I could imagine. This cemented my guilt over not having been there. Absorbed with the sting of self-loathing, I considered sending bitter tidings to some of these sanctimonious Puritan fuckers, but the effort hardly seemed worth it.

  My instincts were failing me. There was a desire to tell Laura I knew what she’d been through. Tha
t it must’ve been unthinkable. Or surreal. Or both. Or maybe she was numbed to the entire experience, having shut herself off from it so as to not break down. But I was wary of offering sympathy. Sympathy would only support the animosity I knew was there.

  We began seeing less and less of each other. Her family whisked her away whenever they could, and she’d often spend entire evenings and weekends with them. She returned to work around this time, and began volunteering at the Pleasant Pantry, a local soup kitchen. When I saw her, it was brief and hurried. The way she regarded me reminded me of that noncommittal way an exhausted tour guide regards their party. There’s a little boredom, a little distance, a little waning perfunctory courtesy.

  The way I viewed her had changed. Laura, to me, was someone who had actually suffered. And I began to hate her for this. The suffering validated her sorrow, making me feel more unworthy than ever. As I thought of what it was to suffer, to truly suffer, I found myself thinking about Rollie’s school, a place where suffering was imbued into the atmosphere. And though I grew up with this all around me, I always managed to avoid it at any cost. Certainly I could brush up against it and look it in the eye over a quick meal or a walk through campus, but I would never learn its source or feel the dire weight of its tendrils. It wasn’t my place to. Or interest. And I knew early on that it would never be my vocation. If it was at all possible to exist on the opposite side of such suffering, for as much of my life as possible, then that’s what I would strive for.

  Laura and I had become a different entity from what we’d once been. What this meant was obvious to us both. Yet it wouldn’t be anything we’d discuss. She was too busy erasing me from her life and I was too immersed in self-pity and my unreasonable contempt towards her. This isn’t to say we were apathetic over the idea of reconciliation. Laura, I found out through an appointment card she left on the kitchen counter, began seeing a therapist. She didn’t tell me about it, opting to go alone, showing her notion of reconciliation to perhaps be a bit self-centered.