Our firm thrived during the years when I designed the software systems for our Fortune 500 clients, employees built and implemented them, and Martin handled sales, support, and staff.
In college, I discovered I have an accidental talent for software design—it just fits my brain. Over the years, I’ve tried to train others to do what I do. No one we’ve hired seems to have the patience and discipline for it, though. It takes confidence and tenacity to eke out every detail of a client’s business processes in order to design software that serves them fully and effortlessly. The design has to then be translated into specs, which the technical staff can use to build the software. My attention to detail has led to high customer satisfaction, which has led to a steady demand for our services. This has allowed Martin to bill the big bucks, which lets us pay generous salaries, which keeps everyone happy.
Unfortunately for us all, endless hours of design meetings are beyond my capacity now. I realize shit still needs to get done whether I’m in mourning or not, and that lots of our employees can code, but no one else can design like me. I can only do what I can do, though. And lately it hasn’t been much.
Since October fifteenth, actually. Since that day, which is etched on my soul like a scar, I’ve had to take a step back from my old life. I have needed more space, a lot more space, to be alone. I’ve needed to be far away from everyone—employees, clients, family—everyone. After that first week of hell, I told Martin I would code for a while. He didn’t like the idea, but he agreed. What could he say? He would’ve agreed to anything at that point.
A compelling numbness overtakes my mind when I’m coding. Time escapes me while I’m occupied with the complexities of syntax and logic so that I barely feel the dull ache that seems part of me now, like a canker sore or a bad elbow.
When I send the code to Martin, he e-mails back within minutes:
Files received. I’ll get Steve on putting it all together, and testing will begin tomorrow. I don’t like cutting everything so close, but we should be OK to deliver on time. Thank God you had this system designed before you took off! It’s a real handicap not to have you here for the Langdon Logistics proposal.
On a personal note, your mom says to tell you that their computer crashed, so she and your dad have been off e-mail and wanted to make sure you’re OK. Can’t you ever answer your phone? Seriously, they worry.
I think of writing back:
What you like or don’t like is as irrelevant to me as you are. I already know I’m letting the company down, so you can shove your whining reminders up your ass. And hell no, I won’t answer the phone! I can’t stand to hear anyone’s voice; I’m sick of people crying in my ear and the worry woven into every sentence. So mind your own damn business for a change.
But that would tell too much, open communication lines, and he’d try to weasel his way back in.
I order my parents a new laptop online. They needed one anyway, even if Martin manages to fix their old PC. He’ll set up their laptop, of course. He’s been a better organized, more responsible son to them since he moved to our street when he and I were five years old. My dad used to joke about claiming Martin as a dependent on his income taxes because he was always around.
Martin and I shared a dorm room freshman year in college. We shared a house with other students after that. We started our business before graduation, with a small project automating schedules for the school rec center, which we then replicated for the local Y. We grew our company together, incorporated it, expanded, and won bigger clients and more complicated projects. Now I wish I’d never shared anything with Martin, ever. I wish I’d never seen his face.
I take a pop from the fridge. I eat another protein bar and some chips, chewing and swallowing until the hollow feeling in my stomach lessens. I haven’t made a meal in months. It just doesn’t seem worth it.
The little grocery store on this tiny island has nosy checkout women. There are so few people here off-season that a thirty-year-old bachelor is apparently everyone’s business, especially if he surfs alone in bad weather, has a tragic history, or both.
I was barraged with questions at the coffee house when I first arrived, so I never went back. The same thing happened at an island pizza joint and a seafood diner. So I order dry goods online and they come right to the house in cardboard boxes. I don’t want to see anyone, or for anyone to see me.
I close the blinds on the window facing the house next door. Last summer, the owner and I became friends. I knew the old man lived in London, that he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and that his place was usually a rental. Claude and I connected in a way that I hadn’t really ever connected with an older guy.
My dad prefers talking to listening, and he acts as if he’s on a perpetual lecture circuit. I’m a prop to him as much as I am a son.
Claude was refreshing because he didn’t mind being a bastard sometimes, or saying something off-color or rude. Maybe it was because he knew his life was ending, or maybe he’d always been that way. He said he was going back to London at the end of the summer, and I was relieved that I wouldn’t see him when I crawled back to the island without Katie. I didn’t want to tell him what had happened. I didn’t want to hear how sorry he was for me.
I wasn’t worried about running into anyone else that I knew here on the island. Claude had been the only homeowner Katie and I befriended that month. Most of our fellow beach dwellers were vacationers in rental houses, including a newlywed couple from New York, a French Canadian family, and an Ohio group who took up three houses with a boisterous week-long family reunion and the cutest kids I’ve ever seen. When I came back here, I didn’t expect to see a single familiar face.
One night after I came in from surfing, though, Claude’s traveling companion from last summer knocked on the door. Fritz said he’d looked out and been surprised to see me. He asked how I was, apparently trying to seem nonchalant, while he clearly thought I was crazy to have been out in those waves. He asked about Katie, and I gave him the short version: she’s gone. I didn’t invite him in. I didn’t even ask about Claude.
I realize that doesn’t reflect very highly on me. Like being relieved that my parents’ e-mail is down.
I know that I’ve shortened my reprieve by ordering their new computer, but I don’t want to hurt them by cutting them off completely. It was hard for them to give me the space I needed in the beginning; I could see worry in their eyes and hear it in their voices.
Now they make it clear that they think my time for indulgent mourning is up, that I need to rejoin the land of the living. I get several e-mails to that effect every week. I don’t disagree with their logic. There’s only one problem: I’m not ready.
When everything crashed down around me, they had wanted me to stay with them. I tried. I went there and brought some of my things. But I couldn’t stay.
I couldn’t remain at the apartment either.
I tried several places. Like a nomad, moving on, and on, and on. I didn’t realize that I was on my way here consciously until I crossed over the swing bridge and found myself on this narrow sandbar of an island, until I’d driven to this house, where Katie and I had spent the best month of our marriage. I called the rental company from the driveway and just stayed put.
I can feel her here; she’s still close to me, somehow. I haven’t had that feeling anywhere else. Only here. Moving on would mean losing that. And as I said, I’m not ready.
Chaser puts her head on my knee. I have a shorthand way to remember if she needs to go outside: if she’s dry, she’s got to go again. Her day is a cycle of running on the beach, romping in the water, then coming in to dry off—which takes hours. Then she repeats the process.
It makes me think of Katie and me during the time we spent here. The rhythms of our days were regulated by the need to eat, to surf or run, to make love, and to sleep. Life was so simple.
It seemed so simple.
It’s hard to believe that the gray, churning ocean is the same water
that was brilliantly blue then. That the thick, gray sky was clear and open, that the driving wind was a gentle breeze.
I’m drawn toward the chaos of the storm today. When I get into the water, the coldness will cut through my senses. I won’t think; I’ll only feel.
My wetsuit is hanging in the laundry room; Katie would have never allowed it in the house. Maybe I’m taunting her to speak, to yell, to talk to me. I struggle into my gear while Chaser follows me with expressive, worried eyes. She watches as I navigate the surfboard through the kitchen and living room.
When I open the door, the wind hits me like a shocking truth, like the rush of a truck braking too late. It threatens to blow me into oblivion.
Chaser runs down the many stairs ahead of me, looking back at every landing as if she’s afraid I’ll fall.
As I slowly descend to surf in the chaos of an ocean storm, I know that some parts of my mind will dull while others take over. This is what appeals to me. It’s something like coding, except that it’s violent, risky. The freezing water will awaken my senses and bring me to a primal state of survival, of board and strategy, of balance and failure. Afterward, I’ll need all my remaining energy to drag my body through the rush and whorl of the current, back across the wet sand, and up the stairs. Every nerve ending will ache with fatigue and heightened awareness, from my freezing ears to my saltwater-reddened eyes, to my shocked and overburdened lungs, to the muscles that will keep me upright, barely, until I can divest myself of all my gear and fall into bed.
And dream of Katie.
Chapter Three
IN WHICH FRITZ IS AMBIVALENT
As told by Fritz Forth, Esquire
Little Miss Dollywood, my pajama-clad project, must be somewhat woo-woo. Why else would she agree to come away with me, a man she barely knows, on such a bizarre pretext? And not only agree, but to practically throw herself at this absurd bargain, like she might dive from a car just before it careens off a cliff? Actually, thinking of Merry’s present life, perhaps I have just answered my own question.
Her yee-haw enthusiasm seems to be waning a bit, however, as we make our way across the Mountainside’s parking lot toward my rented SUV. I put my hand on her back in an attempt to hurry us along. I even open the passenger door.
I’m not accustomed to making this sort of chivalrous gesture. In the normal course of my life, Victor and I would get too many odd looks from passersby. I have risen to the occasion during exceptional circumstances, though, like when he sprained his ankle last winter. He would rather have had me carry him everywhere, but as Victor has thirty pounds of weight and about ten inches of height over me, and I have (and need) enough self-respect for the both of us, he hobbled along with the aid of the crutch he’d painted black and decorated with rivets.
I cast a worried glance over my shoulder. I’m afraid that at any moment Merry’s boyfriend, Phil, will come after us. He stared forlornly when Merry walked out the door, like an old hunting dog told he had to at stay home this time. But I’m concerned he’ll start barking and howling at any moment.
“Go on, then. Get in,” I say.
Merry stops in front of an old truck and folds her arms across her hideous T-shirt. “Where are we going?” she asks.
“Not far. I’ll explain on the way.” I make another go at coaxing her into the car.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she says, as slowly as it is humanly possible to say the words, “but I don’t like riding with people who aren’t used to driving in the mountains. Y’all can ride along with me, since we’re not going far.”
I wonder if elocution lessons could eliminate the obnoxious twang from her voice? Even if it were possible, though, there is no time to spare—a sad fact that I’m reminded of almost constantly these days.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not getting into your filthy vehicle,” I say.
The enormous Chevy pickup behind Merry is muddy and rusted, and frankly provides what Victor might call an “artistically perfect backdrop” for her present state of personal disorder.
I know from photos that she cleans up rather well, but right now Merry looks like she could almost blend into a depressing documentary chronicling the poorest inhabitants of Appalachia. Merry’s teeth are quite perfect, though, even by America’s impeccable dental standards. And while she’s curvy, she thankfully lacks even a trace of the slovenly fatness I’ve come to associate with indigent Americans. So she doesn’t fully fit the ramshackle documentary profile.
Still, in this particular setting, and wearing her particular outfit, it isn’t difficult for me to imagine her going either way. She could fail Mr. Pershing’s tests and fall victim to inertia, driving her muddy truck until it rusts itself away to nothing. Or she could succeed and thereby claim her inheritance. And then who knows? Perhaps when we go through the final papers, we’ll find that she has also inherited the London house, and then I’ll simply be her poor neighbor across the way.
“I made it up the mountain in one piece. I’m satisfied we’ll make it down one way or another,” I say, growing impatient. I point to the SUV’s passenger seat through the open door.
“Merry!”
I turn to see Phil coming toward us.
Let me just say that I am not a large man. Phil is, quite. Especially now, when this unfinished business of Mr. Pershing’s has Victor and me strained nearly to the breaking point, I can’t risk being swollen and ugly for our next Skype rendezvous across the pond. A broken nose would certainly test V’s love for me—he recently admitted that the symmetry of my face factors into his equation.
In order to preserve my own features and also to defend the stalling Dollywood, of course, I gear up for a briefcase assault upon Phil. I plan to model it after that of a spry old woman I once saw defeat a thug on the streets of London. She had used only her purse. It was a triumphant performance.
As Phil approaches, however, I begin to panic because I don’t see Merry anywhere. I think perhaps she’s given me up for dead and has gone back into the Mountainside through a side door.
“Get in!” I hear her call from within my SUV.
I jump into the passenger seat and slam the door. Merry squeals the tires on her way out of the lot.
I’m still breathing hard and looking behind us when Merry states the obvious. “Here we go!”
I sigh long and loud before echoing her, under my breath: “Here we go indeed.”
“Where are we going?” she asks.
“First, you’re pulling off the road so that I can drive.”
“I like to drive,” she says.
“That’s irrelevant.”
When she has found a suitable spot a bit further up the road and we have switched positions, I breathe somewhat easier. I turn the SUV around and head the opposite way we’d been going.
“Are y’all gonna tell me where we’re headed?” she asks.
Because I agreed to it, and I always keep my word, I try to sound like I believe this entire enterprise is perfectly reasonable. “We are going to your house so that you can explain to your mother and grandmother that you’ll be leaving them for a while.”
Merry is quiet for approximately three kilometers before she graces me with her twang again.
“To get there, you need to make a right at the next stop sign.”
“I know where to turn,” I inform her. I crack my window for some fresh air. Merry smells strongly of pine-scented aerosol cleanser.
“How do you know?” she asks. “And how did you know I live with my mom and grandma?”
“I know everything about you,” I say.
That is only a slight exaggeration.
For the past several weeks, I have studied Merry’s life like a subject I’ll be tested on at the end of term. For example, I know that Phil dominated her high school existence. He switched to a girl named Sarah while Merry attended college, then picked up with Merry again when she returned. That left Sarah heartbroken, but, I have to assume, better off.
/> I knew these facts about Phil before I met him today, and I had also seen photographs of him. But now I must concede that some details have to be experienced for full comprehension. For example, I didn’t realize that Phil is, quite literally, a red neck. Actually that sells him short because he’s red all over: from his shock of hair well above six feet off the ground, to his bear paw hands, to, presumably, every other extremity.
“You do not!” Merry says.
“Well, perhaps not everything, but I do know quite a lot about you,” I reply.
“Like what?”
I check the time before turning on the radio. I tune it to a program that will help me prove my point.
Merry rolls her eyes as distinctive music plays. “The Betty Answers Show? Big deal. So you know my aunt is weird. Everybody knows that.”
“Everyone knows she’s your aunt?” I ask pointedly.
“Well, no. She changed her name forever ago, and now pretends she has no family anywhere. So no, nobody knows that she’s my relative. And that’s fine with me because everybody knows she’s a nut job.”
Merry’s aunt’s voice comes through the stereo speakers.
“Listen, Jenny, I don’t know how many times I have said this over the years, but you don’t have to explain anything…”
Merry talks over the program. “I could figure out how many times she’s said that if I knew how many shows Aunt Betty’s done altogether. She says, ‘You don’t have to explain anything,’ about once every half hour, probably to reinforce the title of her book. She also mentions the whole title once in every two-hour show.”
“What’s the title?” I ask. I already know it, but I suppose I have a cruel streak.
“It’s awful,” she says.
“What is it, though? What’s the title?”
Help Yourself Page 3