Everybody’s Out There

by Robert M. Marchese

  “I guess so.”

  “We heard about your writers group,” says Mrs. Hart. “It sounds wonderful. Danny’s always loved to write.”

  It’s unclear whether I’m now obligated to sing her son’s praises. I have no experience doing this. Yet it doesn’t appear that this is what she’s after. But the truth is that I feel strongly that Dan is a fine songwriter. So I mention it, telling his parents that we at the Hundred Acre School enjoy hearing his tunes.

  “I hope he’ll continue to write,” I tell her while looking at Dan.

  This is not a reference to his destroyed guitar, yet the smashed instrument comes to mind almost immediately. I now can’t help but wonder if he has a second one somewhere, or if he has plans to buy a new one, or if he even wants a new one. Part of me wants to ask these questions. Part of me wants to even encourage him to continue writing and playing. But I know I haven’t earned the right to do this, even after what happened that night he was on the roof of the dining hall. He must regard what I did as some type of visceral gesture that carries with it no meaning whatsoever. If ever accused of this, despite wanting to, I wouldn’t know how to defend against it.

  Dan’s parents ask him to say his goodbyes to me before meeting them in the main office where they’ll be signing some papers. We shake hands one last time. Mr. Hart tells me I’m welcome in their home if I ever find myself in North Carolina.

  “I remember one of our first conversations together,” I say to Dan once we’re left alone. “You tried to coax me into letting you come late to class everyday.”

  “I remember.”

  There’s no levity in his tone; he’s serious and appears almost embarrassed in my presence. Despite this, I don’t alter what I had planned to say:

  “I thought you were full of shit if you want to know the truth,” I tell him.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “I don’t, actually.”

  “C’mon, Danny,” I said, curious to see where the conversation might go.

  “You don’t even know me. Do you think that being my teacher for a few months and forming some fucking writers group makes you my friend?”

  “Just confirm it for me. Confirm it for me that you’re full of shit. First this Dan Juan bit, and now the brooding, suicidal poet. Just confirm it for me.”

  Peeling the sunglasses from his face, he’s wide-eyed and at first speechless. He heaves a few deep breaths and then tells me to go fuck myself.

  “Not exactly the farewell I was looking for, Danny boy.”

  “Are you expecting gratitude? Do you somehow think I should be grateful to you? Because I’ll tell you how I feel: I feel like now I have to spend the rest of my life finding a way to look my parents in the eyes again.”

  My mind goes to the kid’s dead sister. It was Dan who found her. She had used his knife. It suddenly seemed like a miracle that he could ever walk upright after this.

  “Why don’t you start by putting these away?” I said, taking the sunglasses out of his hand and putting them in his shirt pocket. “Start there. Your parents will appreciate it. As far as you and I are concerned, I don’t expect gratitude. All I expect is that you stand here before me like a young man about to say goodbye to his teacher of a few months. Nothing more and nothing less. No entourage cheering you on. No guitar in hand. No pretense. I understand this relationship. And I understand you better than you think I do. So just say goodbye and that you’ll keep in touch, even though we both know you won’t. But please put the bullshit aside - for now anyway - and shake my goddamn hand.”

  Thinking on this for a moment, he shifts his weight a little and pushes his hair out of his face.

  “Fine,” he says, offering me his unbandaged left hand.

  “Have you considered all of your admirers?” I said, walking with him towards the office. “They’ll probably light candles in your memory.”

  He smiles for the first time since we’ve been talking. Then, true to his quick nature, his response is lucid and well timed:

  “Would you blame them?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “I’m glad. Because no man should begrudge another over a well-deserved vigil.”

  This stops me in my tracks. Dan walks farther ahead before turning to look back at me. He throws his arms in the air and fights off another smile. Then he tells me that he’s sure he’ll write about the HAS someday and all the madness that’s occurred since he’s been a student here.

  “Do you really think so?” I ask once I catch up with him again.

  “Someone should,” he says. “Someone definitely should. So yeah, why the hell not?”

  . . .

  Eileen Russo and Rollie have it out again. Having arrived on campus early that day, she’s been consistent with her threats; most of them involve the team of attorneys she claims she’s going to hire. To this, my father can say only one thing:

  “I think given the circumstances, that’s exactly what you should do.”

  This enrages her further. She calls him a bastard and gets in his face and threatens to sue him and his staff.

  “I can’t protect him anymore, Eileen,” he tells her, both of them standing outside the therapy lounge. “He’s been unwilling to talk to us since he came back. We’ve tried to prolong it for some time, but it’s a police matter now.”

  She says it’s the job of the Hundred Acre School to get her son to talk. With a little forced dignity, Rollie says manipulation is never part of the therapeutic process.

  “Don’t give me that therapeutic process shit! You wanna know about Nicky and that girl. You have questions about those pictures he sent. And about his relationship with this Austin Roarick character. And there’s the issue of the drugs and the ring and the running away. You want to know, so you need to do what’s necessary to find out!”

  “Don’t you want to know, too, Eileen?”

  He’s not using guilt; he appears genuinely taken aback by the woman’s flippancy. Pointing out the obvious - that these are serious matters, legal matters, and ones that play a vital role in Nick’s future - the Old Man takes a gentle approach and softens his speaking voice. Almost immediately, Eileen bursts into tears. Rollie watches her sob for a moment before gently taking her by the arm and ushering her into the therapy lounge.

  Nick is on the verge of being taken into police custody. His day began by being put in the back of a cruiser and questioned by two officers all through breakfast and first period. Rollie, now deferring to the cops, made no objections to this. Nick is eighteen, and the police are within their rights to question him without a guardian present. The Old Man still calls Eileen, who was in transit during the interrogation.

  “She should be ashamed of herself for waiting this long to see her kid,” he told me.

  Yet he understands her reasoning. She’s stalling. Nick will not be returning to the Hundred Acre School in September, so Eileen, who must be imagining her imminent struggles with her son, realizes that life as she knows it is about to change for the worse.

  Nick isn’t being fractious with the cops; he’s simply vacillating between spells of silence and modestly asked questions of his own - random questions posed with passive curiosity. What type of firearms do the officers carry? Have they ever fired them? How long have they been partners? Do they have to clean their own cruiser? The officers, Stansky and Gladstone, are reasonable in their reactions. They’re both mild-mannered men in their forties. They explain to Nick how they each have kids around his age. The boy is unmoved by this. So they explain the seriousness of the matter to him and tell him his cooperation will serve him well. Then they try again, plying him with questions abou
t running away and Nicole D’Ambrosio and Austin Roarick.

  “He’s not cooperating,” Officer Stansky tells the Old Man. “The only time he flinched was when we talked about Roarick, about his disappearance, as well as this so-called confession your boys apparently dug up. He was interested in that.”

  There’s no actual evidence to make an arrest. Eileen continues to remind everyone of this. But Nick is taken downtown, his mother in tow, probably swearing and crying during her drive to the station.

  “I want these people gone,” said Rollie, referring to Nick and Eileen. “Let the cops have them now. We’ve done our part.”

  We gather Nick’s things from his room. The Homer House boys watch as we hastily cram boxes and suitcases with everything the kid owns. Once it’s all packed, we make two trips to the SOD office, where we store it until his eventual return. The campus settles down for the evening. By 9:00 p.m., it feels like any ordinary Wednesday. A modest card game has begun in my father’s basement. By the fifth hand, he gets a call from Louise; Eileen and Nick have returned to campus. The Old Man and I meet them walking across the road towards his house. Eileen is practically pulling Nick by the collar. The awkwardness over her and I seeing each other is belied by the circumstances.

  “Tell them what you told me on the way over here,” she demands of her son.

  The four of us are standing on the side of the road. Nick is weaving himself out of his mother’s grasp.

  “Tell them!”

  Nick laughs scornfully. Rollie asks Eileen to pick up her son’s things in the SOD office; they should get a motel room and return in the morning for the necessary paperwork. For now, though, he says, he’s had enough.

  “The topic of those pictures came up,” she says, trying to control her temperament. “I told Nick that he needed to get them back. He started talking about Nicole. And then about those pictures. She was even more beautiful in person is what he said. Those pictures didn’t do her justice. Isn’t that what you told me, Nicky?”

  The kid is smiling with obstinate pleasure. He tells his mother she’s wasting her time.

  “Tell them!”

  Nick says again that she’s wasting her time. Rollie agrees and asks her to come back in the morning to settle her son’s affairs once and for all.

  “He told me why he sent you the pictures,” Eileen said, looking at me.

  A modest breeze suddenly gathers. A truck drives by with its high beams on. My father tells Eileen he’s going to call Louise and Jimbo to escort her and her son from the property. She ignores the threat. Her focus is on me. Maybe she senses my curiosity.

  “He trusts you,” she says. “He said it was one outcast to another.”

  The police, she tells us, remained unsuccessful in their interview. But the fact remains that there’s no evidence to make a formal arrest. Any narcotics Nick may have sold downtown cannot be linked with anything serious like the Sandrey overdose or the traces of the drug found in Nicole D’Ambrosio’s autopsy results.

  I start to wonder if Nick would still trust me if he knew I slept with his mother.

  “Will you talk with him?” Eileen asks. “Just the two of you. Please.”

  Rollie points out that Nick has had many chances to speak up. Now, he adds definitively, it’s a police matter. She asks me again if I’ll speak with her son.

  “He’s got nothing to do with this,” my father says, pointing at me.

  There’s something compelling me to want to help them. It’s true that Eileen is pushy and by all accounts a bad parent. And Nick is by far not my favorite Homer House resident; I didn’t care for him from the beginning. He’s a bully and a punk. Yet I find myself interested in their plight, Eileen’s as a parent and Nick’s as a misfit. Maybe it’s because she’s the first woman I’ve slept with since Laura. Maybe it’s because I can somehow relate to Nick in not being ready to talk about the trauma that’s become your life.

  My father relents and gives me the keys to the Winnebago; Nick and I take a drive. Almost immediately, I acknowledge the strangeness of our togetherness. Nick, sitting at my side, asks if we might forget about all the bullshit and drive out to Chicago. He says he’s always been interested in that part of the country. Then he asks why I left.

  “I thought we were going to discuss you,” I said, taking a turn down a dark beach road.

  “It’s a simple question.”

  An animal darts across the street, missing the vehicle’s tires by a narrow margin.

  “I don’t know. It became too big, I think. And too small. It was just the wrong size, I guess. For me, it was just the wrong size.”

  “And what about this place? You grew up here, didn’t you? How does this fit? After all these years, I mean. How does it fit now?”

  It was a good question. I told him it was, too. Then I said I didn’t have an answer.

  “Weren’t you married or something?”

  We drive past a stretch of impressive waterfront homes. Nantucket style colonials with red gardens illuminated with floodlights. Restored Victorians with sweeping wrap-around porches. An old high school acquaintance of mine, Jack McShane, lived in one of them.

  “Listen to me,” I said, “I know you’ve become known for this sort of macho indifference thing, but I think the reality is that my father is serious about expelling you. So we can either drive around and talk about my charmed life, or we can work on getting some people off your back.”

  He’s been thrown out of plenty of schools, he tells me. This, he points out, is how he ended up at the HAS. Then he asks again about my wife, wanting to know what she was like. I tell him. We drive the Winnebago on side streets and main roads and through the downtown, and I talk freely about my past with Laura. I find it’s easy to do so. To the point where I don’t seem to come up for air. He learns about the pregnancy and Glenn Kilburn and even my job at the paper. He listens well. When I’m through, he has only one question:

  “Can we stop for cigarettes?”

  We pull into a convenience store where Nick buys a pack of Camel Lights and an energy drink. For the next hour, he chain smokes as we drive some more around Old Brookview and I listen to him finally tell his own story. He starts with Austin. The two met downtown one afternoon when the older man introduced himself. Weeks earlier, he’d hired a few of Nick’s peers for some odd jobs, which is how he recognized Nick as a student at the Hundred Acre School. Not long after their introduction came Austin’s offer to sell the boy some pot. Nick accepted. The two went for a ride in Austin’s car and got high. Then another offer was made: Austin needed help selling his products downtown. His business was modest, but with the help of someone younger, he figured he’d be able to change that. Nick accepted and soon began selling mostly prescription pills to local kids. This is how he met Nicole. The two hit it off and began seeing one another. Nick became inspired. She was fun and beautiful and interested in him. And though the girl found convenience in her new boyfriend’s trade, he gave up dealing almost immediately upon meeting her. His downtown privileges were now sacred, and they needed to be used for spending time with Nicole, not slinging pills to line Austin’s pocket.

  Nick’s ties with Austin were thus broken. There seemed to be no ill will over the split. Meanwhile, there was still Nicole’s habit to consider. She was at first content to take the pills Nick would save her from his own meds. This soon proved to be not enough. So Austin became her dealer. And the three of them began meeting whenever and wherever it was convenient - mostly downtown, sometimes on a remote part of the Hundred Acre School that’s adjacent to the interstate. As time went on, Nicole’s habit increased. She began meeting Austin alone. Soon enough he began making passes at her and telling her she was pretty, far too pretty for Nick. Often, he
suggested the two of them get high together, which they did on occasion. Then he’d talk about someday owning the Hundred Acre School property; he told her he was working on a big deal and that it was just a matter of time. Nicole, torn between being disgusted and amused by Austin, told Nick everything of their visits. Nick asked her to only meet Austin when he could go with her. She agreed.

  “But she continued to meet him,” he said, lighting a fresh cigarette. “Alone. No one knew about their meetings. No one knew about Austin. Not her friends. Not anyone. Just me.”

  Nicole’s substance dependency was increasing, as were the frequency of her meetings with Austin. It wasn’t always possible for Nick, whose freedom was limited, to accompany her.

  “But she told me about all of them,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because he really started to freak her out,” he said. “She thought he was a fucking lowlife.”

  Nick explained to me how Austin would brag about his future business ventures, telling the girl he was on the verge of rivaling his own father. He made absurd claims that he was on his way to becoming a multimillionaire as well as a pillar of the town; then he’d pocket the modest amount of cash from their recent transaction. More disconcerting to Nicole were the advances Austin would make on her. They began as furtive attempts to steal a kiss here and there, but soon escalated to full-on propositions. Nicole, who was anything but demure, nevertheless found it awkward to reject the much older man. She held her ground, though, telling Austin she was in love with Nick. To this, he would sneer and laugh, calling Nick a freak, a loser, and insist that she could find a worthier boyfriend if she picked a name out of a hat.

  “She told him off one time,” Nick said. “He said some shit about me, so she called him a pathetic fat fuck or something like that. And...”

  Nick takes a long drag on his cigarette before finishing what he was saying:

  “And he hit her.”

  That, ostensibly, was the last time she met with Austin. Nick saw Nicole downtown the following afternoon. She was affectionate and in good spirits; she even had some pictures for him, one of which was racy. They made plans to see each other Sunday morning. That would never come to be. He’d never hear from her again. Her strangled body was discovered three days later by two of Nick’s own classmates. The corpse was found in the same proximity where Nick, Nicole, and Austin met just weeks earlier.