In the Middle of All This

by Fred G. Leebron

  “Leave us the shower,” his mother called.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He waited to see if his father was going to drop in the front hall, and when it was apparent he wouldn’t, Martin shut himself into the bathroom with the tub and stripped off his clothes while the water ran and slowly turned warm. Then he got in and slowly, slowly sank down until he couldn’t hear anything.

  “That is one sorry door.” The guy from Potterstown Overhead peered at it while keeping some distance. “You’re lucky that thing didn’t fall on your head.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  He shook his head. “If it hadn’t of fallen, I could. You can jerry-rig practically anything for a while. But a big old wooden door like that, cracked up like it is,” he said, still shaking his head. “You put it in your fireplace. Insulated aluminum. Light as silk, and runs as smooth as it, too. Practically will keep the whole house warm. That’s the way to go.”

  “You want me to get a whole new system?” Lauren said.

  “They don’t make doors like that anymore. Everything it’s attached to is part of that door.”

  “Nuts,” she said.

  “No one wants to go spending fifteen hundred on a new system if they don’t have to.” He grinned at her. “You have to.”

  “I’ll be inside.” She gestured a hand to indicate that he go ahead with it.

  Fifteen hundred dollars? She pulled the checkbook from its hiding place in the kitchen cabinet. They had it.

  In a trance Max lolled in front of the television. He wouldn’t even come out to meet the guy, and he usually loved men in hard hats. “That door’s going to fall again,” he’d said. “I don’t want to be there.” “It can’t fall again,” Sarah had said. “It’s already fallen. It’s on the ground.” And then they’d started in on each other. Now she could hear Sarah still pouting from up in her room.

  “You awake?” she asked Max.

  “Yeah,” he said, not turning from the television.

  “We’re getting a whole new door.”

  “Okay.”

  As she trudged up the stairs, Sarah launched into a keening moan. Lauren opened the door to her room a bit wider.

  “You always take his side!” the girl cried between sobs. “He gets to watch TV, and I get sent to my room. It’s not fair!”

  “We’re getting a brand-new garage door,” Lauren said brightly.

  “When’s Daddy coming home? I want my daddy.”

  “Soon,” she said hopefully.

  “You don’t know, do you? You don’t know when he’s coming. Soon means you don’t know. That’s what you always say when you don’t know.”

  “Sarah—”

  “Maybe he won’t come home because he doesn’t like you anymore.”

  Lauren gasped and then tried instantly to cover the hurt. “I am sure Daddy loves all of us,” she said. “You can come talk to me when you calm down.” She shut the door partly closed.

  “I’m never going to calm down,” Sarah shouted after her.

  The phone rang. Lauren glared at it. Sarah popped from the room, wiping her face.

  “Let it ring,” Lauren said.

  “No.” She darted past her and plucked up the phone. “Daddy?” she said.

  Lauren snatched the phone from her and set it back down. “I told you not to answer it.”

  “It was Daddy!” Sarah cried.

  “He can call back,” Lauren said. “Now go to your room.”

  “I hate you,” her daughter said, quickly, as she closed herself behind the door. “And when I grow up, I’m gonna hate you more.”

  “That’s nice,” Lauren muttered under her breath as she scooped socks and shirts into the clothes hamper. “That is really nice.” When she dialed Star 69, it came back as untraceable. She wiped down the sink in the kids’ bathroom and sprayed an organic antimildew agent onto the shower curtain. Still the phone didn’t ring.

  “You awake?” she called down to Max.

  “Yeah!”

  She knocked lightly on Sarah’s door.

  “What!”

  She ducked her head in. “Was it really Daddy?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  It was between five and six, the time the phone and credit card people usually called. That was probably who it was.

  “Can I watch TV?” Sarah asked.

  “All right.”

  Sarah got up and hurried downstairs. It was impossible to keep them to the hour limit when you had them on your own. It was impossible to keep the bathrooms clean, the recyclables in order, the newspapers stacked, without the television. She’d give them another half of a show, and then, she swore, that was it. She refolded the towels over their racks and pulled the blinds in both their rooms and set the night-lights on. Just a few more minutes, and then she could face them.

  “Hello!” someone called from the kitchen. At first she started, thinking it was Martin. Then she remembered the door guy.

  “I’ll be right down,” she called.

  In the kitchen he stood reading the stuff on their refrigerator door. He was smiling. “Come on and see what I’ve done.”

  From the back of his truck the old garage door stuck out in dismantled panels. The garage ceiling had been stripped of its various mechanisms. A light wind rattled the leaves against stacks of toys and the clutter of bicycles. Big flakes of snow had begun to fall.

  “No door,” she said.

  “No door. I’ll bring it by tomorrow and install it.”

  “Okay,” she said. The last time they’d left the door open all night the garbage had been ransacked by animals large enough to leave streaky tooth marks. At least the weather wasn’t anywhere close to good, or the weirdos who were always there would be playing basketball in the dark.

  He climbed into the truck and drove off with her door. When she looked again she realized her eyes were stinging. She seemed to be a little blinded. She felt her way inside and popped a migraine pill.

  She prepared dinner and pried the children from the television and sat at the table with them and tried to eat and keep a place inside her head from which she could still see and figure out things. Then while Sarah did her homework, she bathed Max, and while she read him bedtime stories Sarah bathed herself, and the phone didn’t ring and Max finally laid himself down and willed himself to sleep. She combed Sarah’s hair out, her face resolute, and read to her and then let her read to herself while she organized her papers for the next day.

  At last she was in her own room, sorry about the garage door and sorry that everyone had gone to bed unhappy. She had to do better. Tomorrow she’d make it to the store and buy treats and cook their favorite dinner. Tomorrow the migraine wouldn’t be there. Tomorrow there would be a new door.

  She slept, or thought she’d slept. When she woke, or when she became aware that she’d always been awake, her chest was tight with an inexplicable but loud pounding that muffled her ears. She put her hand to her chest and felt her heartbeat. She got up and went to the window, the pounding growing louder. Then she knew what it was and instantly she felt better, light. The weirdos were playing basketball in the snow.

  EVENING

  The line into the Fine Arts Program headed downstairs through the cafeteria and then up into the gymnasium, and Martin still hadn’t figured out what was wrong with the camcorder. It was supposed to zoom in, but every time he got half the distance there, it dissolved into blurriness. After watching the afternoon performance, Lauren had given him Sarah’s exact onstage position. But by the time he found a seat in the gym, he was stuck in the tenth row, too far out to get a decent shot of her.

  Mrs. Stingle came out on the stage and offered various announcements, rules, and mild scoldings, as if the audience were all her students. Finally the three-piece orchestra of the special-ed teacher, the phys-ed teacher, and the music teacher struck up, supported by a recent graduate on the violin, and the first of the acts marched out. The kindergartners and the special-ed class
sang a song about purple—the theme, this year, was colors—then a section of first grade gave a spirited rendition of golden, and Martin played and played with the camcorder and still could not get it to bridge the distance. A tie-dyed ensemble offered a multicolor song, and then the light darkened and his program informed him that this was it, and he wheeled around and focused his camera on the rear of the packed room and out came Sarah’s second-grade section, in white top hats, white T-shirts, and blue skirts or pants, waving American flags. They sang, he was certain, the same song he had sung in an elementary-school play thirty years before, while marching like soldiers with their flags held like rifles to their shoulders. Up onstage they came, almost briskly, and one group retreated to the wooden bleachers while four kids manned one microphone stage left, and Sarah and another girl commanded the microphone stage right. In Sarah he could clearly see, when he finally solved the blur of the zoom lens, a little of the ham and a little of the wannabe. She looked stunning. Her wavy, knotty hair was combed out in wild tresses, and her pale face was ablaze with a smiling glee. The piece she recited she’d written herself, and it was about how red must be the most important color of all, because people always said red-white-and-blue, not blue-white-and-red, and it was the second-longest recitation of the entire section, and she offered it without a single hitch, at almost exactly the right speed, and he was proud.

  Afterward he shut off his camcorder and waited for the show to be over. He had a coveted aisle seat, but beside him the Italian guy from around the corner who ran a bicycle shop and had about thirty grand worth of toys in his backyard (numbers or drugs, the neighbors whispered, as he rode his John Deere industrial tractor-mower around his half acre or his daughter blared the latest Britney Spears from the Bose CD stereo system in her wired playhouse, he’s Sicilian) kept doing the European thing and invading his body space. The curtain closed for another set shift, and out strode a plain-looking third-grade girl to stand at the microphone by herself. Martin felt his heart pinch for her, though she didn’t look terrified. She just looked uncertain. She nodded at the music teacher and the music teacher nodded at her, and distinctly he heard the first strains of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” She sang in a thin, steady, unremarkable voice, its subtle underdevelopment offering sketchy variance between high and low notes, the differing pitches caught more by volume than tone. All by herself, in front of the shut curtain, in the stuffy gym, she sang, her hands clenched to her sides in fists, her feet never moving, still except for the lilt and sway of her compact upper body. By the middle of it, he felt his eyes welling, and he knew the Italian was watching him, and just as he reached to dab the tears before they escaped, the Italian turned to face him, taking him in, then turned back, crossed his arms over his belly, and shook his head.

  In the hall outside their daughters’ classroom, the Italian’s wife murmured to him, “Sarah had the big lines, eh?”

  “Everyone did well,” he said, not wanting to engage her limited English, knowing that she was so unhappy here she slept most days, as if waiting out a permanent hangover.

  “Yes,” she said. “Sophia, she had no lines.”

  “Next year,” he said.

  The husband would not look at him.

  Sarah came out and he took her hand, and they bumped down the hall filled with familiar strangers.

  “I’m proud of you,” he told her, when they were outside.

  “The teacher said I talked too fast. Did I talk too fast, Daddy?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you have that camera pointed at me the whole time?”

  “I’m making a video for Aunt Elizabeth,” he said. “She asked me to.”

  “Today?”

  “What?”

  “I mean did she ask you today?”

  “No,” he said, as they crossed the street, passing parents in clusters talking in quiet, apparently cheerful conversation as their kids tugged at them. “A while ago.”

  “Hey, Martin,” a woman from around the block called to him. “Nice to see you back.” Her mother had died a few months ago. “How is she?”

  “Hanging in there,” was all he could say.

  She squeezed his forearm. “That’s good. You’re a good brother.”

  They crossed the street and cut up their path and into the house. Lauren sat at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper.

  “How was it?” she asked.

  “It was great,” he said. “Sarah was great!”

  “Jenn fumbled a line,” Sarah said.

  “Don’t gloat,” he said. “Any messages?”

  “Just the dean.”

  He picked up the portable and took it into the study. The dean answered on the first ring. Martin spoke, the dean spoke. It was all quite cordial. He had an interview at nine A.M.

  “I know you must be jet-lagged,” the dean said. “But we need to do this. For the family’s sake and for our sake.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “I’ll see you then.”

  “Thank you.”

  Now he felt fuzzy headed. He hadn’t felt that way watching the show, watching that girl sing. He’d felt incredibly sharp, clear, alive, in a tenuous way, just like her voice had seemed. Now he was numb. An interview. He dropped the portable on the foldout futon and switched on the computer. He began typing. What Jane Wilson was like the first day of class, what he remembered from all the other days, exchanges they’d had. He knew he was caustic and sarcastic in class. He knew that he’d said any number of complicated and culpable things. He knew he hadn’t called Psychiatric Services about her. She had four other teachers. It wasn’t only about him.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and jerked around.

  “I thought you were still on the phone,” Lauren said.

  “Kiss good night?” Sarah said.

  “Oh.” He kissed her good night. “Congratulations, sweetie.”

  “Thank you, Daddy.”

  She went off up to bed.

  “I’ve got an interview at nine,” he said.

  “Lovely,” Lauren said. She looked on the screen at his notes.“These look good.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They can’t pin a suicide on anybody.”

  “You never know,” he said.

  It was never accusatory was how he would characterize it later, when he had time. It was investigative. They were trying to learn. They were trying to know. They had no opinion. They had no agenda—except for the truth. The provost, the dean of residential affairs, and the director of security sat around a table, and Martin in a sense sat with them. They weren’t against him. They just wanted to know. His class was the smallest she had been in, and so perhaps he could shed even more light than the other professors. Nothing was tape-recorded. They took notes. He offered what he had typed the night before, and they politely declined.

  “No one’s on trial,” the dean said.

  “This has no effect whatsoever on your tenure case,” the provost said.

  “Look,” the director of security said. “She killed herself. Nobody else killed her. There’s no need to even think defensive.”

  They asked about the last day he saw her. He described how she’d come into class looking slightly hollow, slightly pasty, not as put together as she usually looked. He told how she laid her head on her desk—the little arm desk that the students sat in—and how he asked her if anything was wrong and she shrugged. She was wearing sweatpants and a sweat shirt and ratty sneakers. Well, can you pick your head up? he asked. Okay, she said. And she kept her head up the rest of the class. It was odd because she was usually the class talker. At the end, as she filed with the others from the room, he asked her if she was all right. Just the flu, she said. Get better, he said. She’d smiled shyly when she handed in her paper.

  “That was it?” the director of security said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you call her afterward to check up on her?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t usually—”<
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  “Did you call or contact her advisor in any way?”

  “No.”

  “Did you talk to or contact anybody about this?” He shook his head.

  “Well, then,” the provost said. “Thank you.”

  “Is that it?” Martin said.

  All of them nodded. They rose. The provost, a man who had shaken his hand at various formal occasions, reached out to him.

  “Good job, Martin,” he said. He had a weathered yet firm clasp. Powerful and odd. “In the future, when you see or notice anything unsettling, you can be more aggressive. We all can be more aggressive.”

  “Okay,” Martin said.

  “Don’t be afraid to get to know your students,” the provost said. “That’s really what Lincoln College is all about.”

  “I understand,” Martin said.

  “That’s important,” the provost said.

  “Good-bye, Martin,” the dean said.

  “Good-bye.”

  When he returned to his office, the message light was flashing. He picked up the phone to retrieve whatever messages there were, but there was no dial tone.

  “Hello,” a voice said.

  “Hello?” he said. It was one of those weird times when the phone hadn’t rung because he’d picked it up right when it was about to.

  “Is this Professor Kreutzel?” the woman said.

  “Yes,” he said uneasily.

  “This is Mary Lou Wilson. Jane’s mom.”

  “I know,” he said, his voice going soft. “I’m very sorry.”

  “I’m just, you know, calling around. Tying up loose ends. That kind of thing.” Her voice sounded as if it would erode at any moment.

  “How can I help you?” he said.

  “Could you send me any papers you might have of hers? Anything like that?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Maybe if there were … I don’t know how it really works there, Jane just said she always loved it… but if there are pictures you know of… of her, you know, participating in a class, that kind of thing, you could send them.”