Under the Influence

by Joyce Maynard

  “Keep him all week if you think it will be good for him,” Dwight suggested, sounding almost relieved.

  The next day, Monday, I called Elliot. I hoped that what had taken place the day before might have changed something between us, but it was clear, hearing his voice on the other end of the phone, that the kindness he had shown Ollie and me after the accident had come strictly out of a place of friendship and compassion. Nothing in his tone suggested that he saw us getting back together. Elliot was loyal to the ends of the earth, but he could not forget my profound betrayal. I had recognized how wrong I’d been to attack him for his distrust of the Havillands. But this happened too late.

  Now, though, out of kindness, he offered to drive Ollie and me over to the Havillands’ house to pick up my car and my camera.

  When we got to Folger Lane, Elliot got out of the car, but only long enough to open my door for me. He stood next to the driver’s-side door and with an unmistakable air of finality, he reached down to shake Ollie’s hand.

  “You’re a fine young man,” he told Ollie. “Whatever happened up there, don’t let it change your opinion about what kind of a person you are.”

  It was the kind of thing a person says to another when he does not expect they’ll see each other again.

  To me he said, “Take care of yourself, Helen.” He put his arms around me, but very briefly, and stiffly. He got into his car and left.

  My son and I stood in the driveway, watching him drive away. Then I turned to look at the house: the camellias and the jasmine, the tinkling wind chimes, the sign, ALL DOGS WELCOME HERE. AND SOME PEOPLE. It was a sight that used to lift my heart every time I pulled into the driveway. Now I felt relief that from the looks of it, the Havillands weren’t around. No sign of either of their cars, though I recognized the van of a cleaning company, and another belonging to the party rental company, who must have come to take away the chairs and tables and whatever else remained of the wrecked birthday celebration.

  “I don’t want to go in,” Ollie said.

  “That’s okay,” I told him. “You can wait outside. I’ll only be a minute.”

  He opened the door of my car and lay down on the backseat. I made my way up the path to the front door. On either side of me were the puddles left by melted snowdrifts and the remnants of the ice penguins that had lined the walk just a day and a half earlier.

  Estella would be at the hospital with her daughter now, of course, waiting for Carmen to wake up. Cooper must have taken off with his fiancée—back to business school and the rest of his life. I figured Ava and Swift were probably staying up at the Tahoe house a little longer, preferring to avoid Folger Lane until the last remnants of the disastrous party were safely cleared away. No problem with that: What did I have to say to them? Now or ever again? About as much as they intended to say to my son and me, evidently.

  Every other time I had shown up here, the dogs were there to greet me. (Lillian and Sammy, anyway. While somewhere, lurking behind them, Rocco growled.) But there were no dogs in evidence. As I opened the door—unlocked—I was met with an unaccustomed sound. Silence.

  Somewhere out by the pool there must have been workers packing up, but here in the house, no one. There were pools of water everywhere from the melted sculptures, and a few place mats blowing around with Swift’s face on them. Unopened presents had been piled on the living room table, along with a basket filled with the envelopes that must have contained the contributions made by the birthday guests that night to the Havillands’ foundation. Stacks of extra copies of the book we’d produced, The Man Is a God.

  I picked up a copy and flipped through the pages. As familiar as I had become with every image between the covers—as well as I knew all the players—I was curious to see if, studying them now, I might discern something in their faces that I had failed to detect before. Maybe it had been there in the pictures the whole time: the essential truth about the man with whom I’d spent so many hours over the course of so many months, who had finally revealed his character to me just twenty-four hours earlier. Maybe it had been here in these pages the whole time and I’d just missed it.

  I was just setting the book down again when I heard a voice behind me.

  “They’re such amazing people, aren’t they?” I turned around. It was Ava’s new friend, Felicity.

  “They’re unbelievable, all right,” I said. “I never met anybody like those two.”

  I did not add that I hoped I never would again.

  “It’s just such a tragedy, what happened,” she said. “They’ve been so kind to me. Meeting Ava changed my whole life.”

  “She does that,” I said. “Is there any news about Carmen?”

  “Carmen?” said Felicity. “Who’s that? I was talking about the Havillands’ dog.”

  “Their dog? Which dog?” I asked. What was she talking about?

  “Rocco,” she said. “I thought you knew. It’s just unbelievable that those two wonderful people would have to endure this after everything else. As if having the whole party ruined wasn’t enough. I don’t know if Ava will ever get over it.”

  Rocco. In my mind’s eye I saw his sharp little teeth, which he bared whenever he saw me. More than once, they’d drawn blood. I continued to stare at Felicity. Baffled.

  “After all hell broke loose and you and Ava took off, Rocco got out of the bedroom where he’d been left for the party. You know Rocco, always getting into things. He came downstairs and ate the entire birthday cake. Chocolate. Must’ve made him thirsty, because then he drank champagne from that crazy ice sculpture. We found him yesterday afternoon, dead on the laundry room floor. Who knew chocolate and alcohol are poisonous to dogs?”

  She went on to explain that Ava and Swift were at the crematorium now, making arrangements for Rocco’s ashes. Lillian and Sammy were with them, “to help them understand and say their final good-byes.”

  All I could do was shake my head.

  From the kitchen, I heard the phone ringing. “I bet it’s Ava,” Felicity said, running to pick it up. “This is such a difficult time for her.”

  My camera was where I’d left it, on the chair by the door, but for once, I felt no impulse to record the scene photographically. No need for a picture. I’d remember, though I might wish I didn’t.

  I stood alone in the middle of the room then, just taking it all in—this place where I had believed, for almost a full year, that I’d finally found my home. I looked out at the garden—the paper lanterns, the strings of snowflake lights still blinking because nobody had thought to turn them off, the last of the melting snow and ice—and breathed in the eucalyptus candles. Noted the cashmere sweater Ava had given me once, draped over a chair. Left it there.

  I was just heading to the door when I spotted the little carved bone Chinese figurines of the man and woman: the good-luck charms, the happy fornicators, stretched out blissfully on their tiny carved bone bed. I slipped them in my pocket and headed out to my car, back to my son.

  69.

  That night, I made Ollie the most comforting dinner I knew: macaroni and cheese. Afterward, I ran him a bath and, as was his preference now, let him be by himself in the tub, though I sat just outside the door, listening to make sure he was okay.

  At first all I heard was the sound of water running, and then Ollie making sounds like a motor. Often, at bath time, he would take out his Matchbox cars and run them along the edge of the tub.

  “Faster, faster!” he was yelling. “Yeehaw!”

  Then his voice changed, so what I heard sounded like a man, or a child’s imitation of a man, anyway. One of his plastic action figures must have entered into the drama now. “Slow down, buddy,” the voice said.

  Then a different voice, also male, but deeper, tougher than the first. “You want to see how fast this baby can go?”

  “I want to go home,” said a third voice. Higher, softer. Ollie’s voice. “I don’t like it here.”

  No response from the deep male voice. “What are you, a
pussy?” Followed by an eerily familiar laugh.

  “I’m scared,” said the smaller voice. “I’m going to throw up.”

  The laughter grew louder, like something in a fun house.

  “Are you a baby?” the deep voice said. “I thought you were a big boy.”

  Then came another sound. Vowels and consonants all mixed together. The soap dish clattered against the side of the tub. The sound of metal hitting metal—the shower wand, maybe, hitting the faucet, then splashing, followed by a high voice. My son’s rendition of a girl.

  “Help, help! I’m drownding!”

  More. A weak cry, followed by a raucous sound from the male voice.

  “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.”

  “I told you to rest.”

  “I want my mom. I think we should call the police.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Are you okay in there, Ollie?” I called to him through the closed bathroom door.

  “I’m fine,” he said, his voice back to normal again. Just my son again. My small, pale, anxious son.

  After I dried Ollie off, I put on a DVD. I chose one Elliot had given us that Ollie had loved: Laurel and Hardy pushing a piano up a mountain and across a bridge. He’d watched this DVD a dozen times, but he laughed every time at the part where Hardy dangles off the side of the bridge. This time he was strangely silent.

  When the movie was over and he’d brushed his teeth, I tucked him into bed.

  “You don’t have to talk about what happened up at the lake if you don’t feel like it. But it might make you feel better.”

  “If I told, you’d be mad.”

  “I won’t be mad. I promise.”

  “I don’t want Monkey Man to get into trouble,” he said. “He made me promise not to tell.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You get to tell me. A kid should always get to tell his mom.”

  So he did. The whole story this time, including everything he’d left out in the car driving home from Lake Tahoe. And unlike his mother, my son never makes up stories. What he says has always been the pure and unsparing truth.

  70.

  They had gotten to the lake house just after ten on Saturday morning. Ollie knew this because he was wearing the watch Monkey Man had given him, that he never took off—his special diver’s watch, good up to a hundred meters underwater.

  The minute they pulled into the driveway, they realized that Cooper must be there. That bright yellow sports car.

  “They call that baby a Viper,” Monkey Man told Ollie. “You got to promise me, bud, that you’ll never be caught driving a boring car.”

  He promised. When he grew up, he would drive a Viper, too, just like Cooper.

  They thought he’d be in the house but he wasn’t, though it was clear he had been. (“Sort of like with Goldilocks and the three bears,” Ollie said. “When they say ‘Someone’s been sitting in my chair.’”)

  Monkey Man offered to make Ollie breakfast—his Tahoe tradition—but Ollie said no. (“No thanks,” he told me.) They’d had a banana in the car already and anyway, he wanted to get out on that boat. He had been waiting a long time for this day.

  So Ollie and Monkey Man went down to the boathouse. One of the Jet Skis was gone, which is how Monkey Man knew Cooper must be out on the water. But the Donzi was there.

  “It was like a rocket ship,” Ollie told me. Even now, after everything that had happened, he spoke of the boat with awe. Awe mixed with horror.

  Monkey Man said they’d take a quick ride first, find Cooper, then come back to the house and make a nice breakfast.

  “We were going to have bacon and flapjacks,” Ollie said, “then go back out on the boat.”

  Because it was late in the season, there were hardly any other boats on the water that morning. “That’s good news,” Monkey Man told Ollie. “It means we can really crank this baby up to warp speed.”

  “I should probably put on my life jacket,” Ollie told him. “I promised my mom.”

  “Sounds like a plan, bud,” Monkey Man said. “Me, I was never one to do what my mom told me, but if you’re that type, good for you.”

  Ollie had brought his camera along. Monkey Man had brought a cooler on the boat. He popped open a beer. “You want a taste?” he said.

  “I’m too young for beer,” Ollie told him.

  Then Monkey Man started up the Donzi, and they were flying across the water—so fast, Ollie said, that he felt like his cheeks might blow off his face, so he put his hands on them. His Giants hat blew off, and Monkey Man told him not to worry, he’d get him another.

  They tore around that way for a couple of minutes. Monkey Man was laughing and waving his hand in the air. Ollie wanted to yell something, too, but he was actually feeling sick. He was worried he might throw up on the boat.

  Actually, Ollie hated being on that boat. He closed his eyes tight, holding onto the railing, wishing it was over.

  “I didn’t want Monkey Man to think I was a baby,” Ollie said.

  “Monkey Man kept yelling stuff like ‘Banzai,’ like we were cowboys or paratroopers or something, and I tried to yell, too, only I couldn’t catch my breath,” he told me. “I was just wishing it was over.”

  That’s when they spotted the Jet Ski. Even from a distance, Monkey Man could tell this was his son, Cooper. Possibly because of the way he started zigzagging around when he spotted the Donzi.

  He was headed toward them, coming up from behind, and there was someone on the back of the Jet Ski, though Monkey Man couldn’t tell who it was. Ollie was just keeping his head down, trying hard not to throw up.

  Just at the point where the Jet Ski got close to the Donzi, Cooper started doing this crazy thing, Ollie said. “He was making it go all wobbly, to get the Jet Ski to ride over the big waves the Donzi made. When he hit one, the Jet Ski seemed to lift right out of the water for a second, like he was flying. Then it crashed back down onto the water, smack. Then more zigzagging, to do it again. Cooper was shaking his head back and forth and he was laughing, the same way Monkey Man did, but even more than that.”

  He took his hands off the handlebars of the Jet Ski. He was close enough now that Ollie could see it was a girl riding behind him. She was yelling at him to put his hands back on the handlebars.

  Monkey Man started doing the zigzagging thing, too, Ollie said. Like the two of them—the boat and the Jet Ski—were dancing with each other or playing tag.

  Then the Jet Ski veered toward them, and it was like Cooper had given it an extra shot of power, because it was coming faster than ever, right toward the Donzi. Too fast and too close for Monkey Man to get out of the way.

  Then came a crashing sound. Ollie got knocked on the floor of the boat. The Jet Ski turned upside down, and its engine sputtered and stopped. Cooper fell in the water, but he came up a second later, not even looking like anything bad had happened, just rubbing his hand. He wasn’t laughing anymore, but he was smiling.

  The girl had fallen in, too, but she didn’t come up. She yelled something one time, but then she was under the boat and they didn’t see her anymore.

  “I think she hit her head,” Cooper said. He was talking in a funny voice, like he had marbles in his mouth.

  “She didn’t have her life jacket on,” Ollie said. “I was waiting for her head to come back up, only it didn’t.”

  That’s when Monkey Man turned off the Donzi’s engine. He dove into the water. There was a lot of splashing, and a few seconds later Monkey Man came up, holding the girl, keeping her head above the water, which wasn’t so easy because she was all floppy.

  Cooper was still lying there against the side of the Jet Ski, like he was watching TV. He was singing this song about beer bottles on the shelf. The numbers were supposed to keep getting lower only he couldn’t keep them straight.

  “He didn’t seem to get it, Mom,” Ollie said. “It was like he still thought it was funny. I’m just a kid and I knew it wasn’t funny.”

  Then Monkey Man h
auled the girl out of the water and onto the boat. Cooper still wasn’t doing anything besides watching.

  The girl wasn’t moving. She was just lying there, like a dead person. Then Monkey Man bent over and at first Ollie thought maybe he was giving her a kiss, but it turned out he just wanted to know if she was breathing.

  “She’s probably going to wake up in a minute,” Monkey Man said to Cooper. “Meanwhile, we need to get you sobered up, buddy. Looks like you started in a little early today.”

  Then Cooper told his dad he’d had four bloody somethings. It didn’t make any sense but he seemed to think this was funny. He thought everything was funny.

  They tied up the Jet Ski alongside the boat. This was when Monkey Man started making Cooper drink all that water.

  They sat around a long time then. Ollie said maybe they should call someone. Maybe his mom.

  “My phone doesn’t work out here,” Monkey Man told him.

  By this point, Ollie was feeling hungry. He’d been too excited to eat breakfast earlier. They never did go back in for their flapjacks, and now it was probably past lunchtime. But the girl still hadn’t woken up. She wasn’t like a normal person that’s asleep, either. She was breathing, but not in the regular way, and she still wasn’t moving.

  “It’s like that time I got hit with a lacrosse stick, junior year,” Cooper had said. “I was knocked out for a while. They say you see stars and it’s true. Then I was okay.”

  He wasn’t laughing anymore. To Ollie, he sounded a little worried. But he was still talking funny, and Monkey Man was still telling him to drink more water. He had an old box of crackers in the boat. He told Cooper to eat those. Cooper said they were gross and soggy.

  “I don’t give a shit if you like them or you don’t,” Monkey Man told his son. “I want you to eat them all.”

  By this point, Ollie was so hungry he wished he could have one of the crackers, but Monkey Man didn’t offer him one. It was really hot on the boat, and Ollie’s hat had blown off, and since I had made such a big point of reminding him to keep his hat on, he was worried he’d get a sunburn and I’d be mad. They had covered up the girl with Monkey Man’s jacket. Ollie was thirsty, so Monkey Man handed him the water.