by Adam Haslett
The deepest shade is beneath a maple further along the path. I lean up against it, sitting on the grass. The water of the brook is clear to the sandy bed. These beauteous forms / Through a long absence, have not been to me / As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye / But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din / Of towns and cities, I have owed to them / In hours of weariness, sensations sweet…That first time I went into hospital, during university, I remember being glad Mr. Gillies had made us memorize poems at school …that blessed mood / In which the burthen of the mystery / In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world / Is lighten’d:—that serene and blessed mood / In which the affections gently lead us on,— / Until the breath of this corporeal frame / And even the motion of our human blood / Almost suspended, we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul. The words meant nothing to me as a boy. They were just a rhythm. Jumbled up with Gilbert and Sullivan and “Onward Christian Soldiers.” But after the treatments, I would come back to my room bruised across the chest from my convulsions against the restraints, and for several days I wouldn’t be able to recall much of anything except passages of music and those stanzas. They became the way I measured time. By bringing back that earlier world, assuring me it had existed, and thus that when more time passed things might be different still. And so I began to piece together the meaning of the phrases. That the motion of our blood could almost stop, our bodies be laid to sleep, but somehow the soul be kept alive. Simply by the things we saw and heard, in any given moment. It was a report from the inside of another person’s head, someone who’d been in lonely rooms, who’d lived through hours of weariness but knew a path back to life. Which is what I found then. Returning to my college, being with friends, having happiness. I’d seen the monster, but I didn’t recognize it because I was young and had never encountered it before. Why should I think I ever would again?
In the Royal Signal Corps, I met Peter Lorian, and when our compulsory service was done we got an apartment in Chelsea together with two other friends and started having our parties. Where a few years later Margaret appeared. In her green satin dress and long dark hair, tall and slender. No woman had ever looked at me as directly as she did. I couldn’t stop trying to charm her because I wanted her to keep looking. And she kept blushing at my attempts, but laughing too, which made the difference, because then I could keep going, and we could acknowledge the game for what it was, and forgive each other for playing. It’s what let us fall in love. That we could laugh together.
These bits of poetry float back to me again now, and they still measure time, but cruelly.
It’s no use resisting this heat. My shirt is soaked, the sweat has seeped into my shoes. But I mind it less. There’s nothing of my person to protect anymore. The simplicity of this is a great relief. An empty stomach and throbbing temples are no more personal than a bank of thriving weeds, or the mirage of asphalt melting in the distance along the bridge. Such distinctions are made of tension, and the tension is melting. Why fight? The inanimate world has such unimpeachable wisdom: no thought.
“Where in Christ were you? It’s three o’clock.” Margaret’s stricken voice comes at me across the front lawn before I even reach the walk. “I just drove all the way out to the restaurant to pick up Celia and the manager tells me she didn’t show up today. No sign of her. None. Are you listening? I’ve had it. You understand? You need to get in the car and go over there to the Schefers’. That’s where she’ll be, with that Jason.”
I suggest maybe she’s at the track. Margaret explodes, shouting that school has been out three weeks! There is no practice! Arguing is pointless. Her anger spreads in too many directions, and I am the root of it. She has lost me already. But she refuses to know this, and the refusal drives her mad. It galls her that I gave us so many years and so much life together unmenaced, and then simply no longer could. Before, she had a choice. To break it off or go forward. Now she has none, any more than the children do. I don’t even provide money enough for food and clothing. They’re put on credit cards.
“I’ll go,” I say. “Give me the keys, and I’ll go.”
Mrs. Schefer lives on Raymond Street, up behind the post office. Her house is one of those split-level Colonials with brown siding and a garage cut into the hillside. A circle of large white pines blocks out most of the sunlight. A girl of ten or eleven answers the door and says that her mother is not there. I tell her I’m looking for Celia and she says she hasn’t seen her, and that her brother is out as well. There is a television on in the background. The girl has peanut butter smudged at the corners of her lips. “Celia’s pretty,” she says. “Are you her dad?” I am, I tell her, and ask if she knows where her brother might be. She has no idea but says he sometimes stays with their father on the other side of town. It strikes me as negligent to leave a child this age on her own, but who am I to judge?
It’s not because Celia missed or skipped work that Margaret wants me to find her. It’s because of Chris Weller. A few months ago, when I was deep in the fog, we were woken one night well after midnight by shouting in the front yard. A boy, clearly drunk, was yelling up at Celia’s window, “Give me back the fucking ring, give me back the fucking necklace.” Then he started knocking loudly on the front door. He was waking the whole neighborhood. Margaret shot out of bed and went to the window. Celia came running into our room. “Get up!” Margaret yelled at me. “For God’s sake, get up!” I swung my stone legs to the floor and pushed with my arms to bring myself to my feet. “What the hell is going on?” Margaret demanded of Celia. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, failing to hold back tears. I’d never seen her so terror-stricken. “You need to go down there,” Margaret said to me. “Go out there and tell that idiot he needs to be quiet and he needs to leave.”
I stood there mute in front of the two of them as they waited for my response. The boy kept hammering at the door. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go down those stairs and cope with it. It was as if the boy’s fist were hitting my chest and it was all I could do to stay upright. My wife and daughter gaped at me, appalled. “The police,” Celia said desperately, “we can call the police.” Margaret told her not to be ridiculous, that it would cause a scene; we weren’t going to have flashing police lights in front of our house in the middle of the night. “Where’s the jewelry?” she said. “Do you have it?”
Celia stopped crying then and went stony-faced. I saw the change happen. It took only an instant. She turned from us and left the room. Margaret and I followed, standing on the upstairs landing as she went into her bedroom and put on a pair of trousers, and then walked down the stairs on her own, to open the front door and confront that raging boy. As if we weren’t even home.
That was the last of Chris Weller. But not of Celia’s dating. Now there is Jason, with whom Margaret thinks she’s using drugs of some sort. Apparently when she comes home late her eyes are bloodshot and she doesn’t want to speak with her mother.
The little girl told me the name of the street her father lived on, where Jason might be, and she said the house was white, but that doesn’t narrow it down. There are no people out in their yards to ask. Stopped at an intersection, I see someone who I think might be Jason glide past in an old gray Audi, and follow him around the corner to another split-level Colonial with an unused flagpole mounted over the front door. He notices me pulling up behind him. I was expecting a lout like Weller, one of those oversize American high schoolers. But this boy’s face is more blurry than aggressive, his cheeks covered in an adolescent attempt at a beard and his brown curls flopping over his forehead. “Oh, hi,” he says, to my surprise, for I have no recollection of ever having met him. When I tell him I’m looking for Celia, he says he dropped her at the track, and from his hapless eyes I can tell that he is adrift, afraid he’s been caught at something but unable to focus sufficiently to defend himself. He isn’t Celia’s equal. He doesn’t have her will. Whatever she’s doing, it isn’t at his bidding. He asks if something is the matter,
if there is some kind of emergency, and I want to say, What business would it be of yours? But I can hear the concern in his voice, and I realize he spends more time with my daughter than I do. Margaret wants me to interrogate him, to find out what they get up to. But it’s too late for that. All of that is far away. It’s Celia I need to see.
I find her at the track, running sprints along the straightaways in front of the empty bleachers. It’s even hotter now than at midday, the afternoon haze pressing against the field. I open the gate and step onto the oval. She’s wearing shorts, a sleeveless shirt, and a bandanna round her forehead. She’s running away from me, and so doesn’t see me at first. When she comes to the end of her sprint, she pulls up and rests her hands high on her waist, leaning her head back and heaving for breath. I’m past the goalpost and well onto the field by the time she notices me at a distance of fifty yards or so. She bends forward, palms to her knees, still huffing.
Neither of her brothers is the least athletic, but Celia’s played on teams since grade school: softball, field hockey in Britain, volleyball, track. She’s kept it up through both our moves. For years, there has always been a practice to drop her at or pick her up from.
She jogs back down to the starting line as I approach, staying focused. I watch as she crouches into position, raises her knee, and then leaps into the lane again, arms swinging, chest forward and head back, shooting past me and over the finish line, jogging from there around the bend before turning once more to walk back to the start. Her breath’s still rapid when she reaches the steps of the bleachers where I’m standing. Every inch of her skin runs with sweat and her face pulses red.
“I told Mom I didn’t need to be picked up from work. She’s checking on me.”
She takes a towel from her knapsack and wipes her forehead. It’s no surprise that boys are attracted to her. There’s a precision to her good looks, a fierceness even. That, and the way she carries herself, with a confidence bordering on aloofness. Which I suppose she got from me. An earlier me. And what do I do now? I steal her confidence back, day by day, cheating her of steadiness and care. Of the three of them, she sees me most clearly, which makes it harder for her because she isn’t protected by distraction. Michael has never been able to bear the tension, so he disappears into other worlds. And Alec is too young to conceive of the situation independent of himself. But Celia’s ways of coping are already the adult ones: discipline, drinking, the search for someone else to love her.
She’s explaining why she didn’t go to work, and how irritating it is that her mother is monitoring her, but none of it matters and I don’t really listen. Which of course she notices, getting more irritated still. Once she’s gathered up her things, we walk together across the field.
Being beside her, close enough to sense the heat flowing from her body, I’m momentarily astonished at her existence—this child of mine. How narrowly we all avoid having never been. Yet even if the knife of chance did happen to cut her into being, I have the passing terror that it isn’t so simple, that in these ultimate matters time is collapsed into a single moment in which you are forever in danger of having the knife tilt the other way, as though, if I am not careful between here and the parking lot, I might go astray and she will be canceled, stolen back by not-being, like a thief grabbing her through an open window. But we make it to the car, and she tosses her bag over her shoulder into the backseat and puts her feet up on the dashboard.
I take us along Green Street past the dense thicket of the nature preserve. When I miss the turn toward the house, she asks where we are going, and I mumble something about the other route, carrying on under the rusting railroad bridge. We drive on in silence for a while, the motion of the air through the open windows offering some relief from the heat.
“How come you don’t have to be anywhere?” Celia asks. “Do you still work for that company?”
There are only woods now on either side of us. The evergreens are thick and the shade between them dark. It is a long, straight stretch and there is something mesmerizing about the lines of the trees reaching out toward each other in the middle distance. She is thinking of Roger Taylor’s firm. He is the one I had to ask for a job when we moved back. I had helped him start his consulting company a decade earlier. He gave me an office and a salary. And it lasted those eighteen months before he politely suggested it might make more sense for me to go part-time, which turned out to mean occasional projects, and eventually none. Margaret says he is ungrateful. The ending of it is so small to me, next to the defeat of leaving Britain in the way I did, that I have trouble thinking about it much.
“Did you hear what I asked?”
“I don’t work there anymore. The fact is, I’ve let you down. All of you.”
“You just missed the other turn,” she says.
I say I’ll go back, but she says it’s okay, she doesn’t mind. I suppose she’s in no hurry to get home. The road winds toward the less inhabited side of the lake. We pass the entrances to two or three mansions, the only houses out here, hidden away up the hillside. I sometimes get this far on my longer walks with Kelsey. It’s the first really quiet place I discovered when we moved here, a beech forest mostly. I pull into a turnout, where the road comes close to the water, and I switch off the engine. A gap in the stone wall leads onto the path around the lake. From here you can see across to the wooded shoreline of the college campus, and the two brick towers stretching above the trees, thunderheads gathering behind them.
“You haven’t let us down,” she says flatly, looking away into the woods. She is being kind. As she was raised to be. To strangers and relatives and those to whom it is good to show care. That is what it has come to. She doesn’t believe anymore that I’m strong enough to bear her complaint or frustration. And I can’t blame her. If she let herself love me, she’d be furious. So she shows me kindness instead. “Did you want to take a walk?” she asks. “Is that why you parked?”
It’s impossible, what I’m trying to do. To say good-bye without telling them I’m leaving.
I follow her across the edge of a meadow, through a patch of swampy ground, and then back under the cover of the trees, as we reach the first point along the shore. Her form is marvelous, the supple muscles of her legs, the gentle curve of her spine, her strong shoulders rolling back, her head balanced. I held her hundreds of times as a girl, tossed her shrieking above her bed, caught her in my arms. I’ve felt the weight of her head on my chest and the warmth of her body under the shelter of my arm. But her body has never struck me as quite the miracle it does now. It seems almost enough to live for, that she came from me and is part of me, and yet as soon as I think this I know again how selfish that is, and disordered, for a parent to need so hopelessly a child still so young.
“I broke up with Jason,” she says over her shoulder, turning only far enough for me to hear her. “If that’s who you and Mom are worried about. That’s why I wasn’t at work. I had to talk to him.” This business of teenagers having personal lives—it’s alien to me. I’ve never known what to say. “You don’t have to worry about me, though,” she says. “They’re not going to fire me. I still have a job.” Taking an offshoot of the path, she leads us to a log bench facing the water and perches at the far end of it, leaning her forearms down on her knees. The air has gone still between the peak of the heat and the break of the rain to come.
“I’m sorry you have to work,” I say, “that there isn’t more money. I know your mother and I don’t talk to you much about my difficulties. It’s a kind of sickness. When that other fellow came to the house this spring, when he was shouting at you, I wanted to help. But I couldn’t. And that isn’t fair to you.”
It’s not until she sits up and wipes her eyes that I realize she’s crying. My words are like knives; they cut into the people I love. It will be worse if you touch her, I think, a worse lie. But I ignore this thought, shifting down the bench to put my arm around her—my daughter—and as I do, she weeps openly, pressing her face against my
damp shirt.
I am a murderer. That’s what I am. I am a stealer of life.
A patch of water on the far side of the lake wrinkles under a new breeze, ruffling the black mirror to a scaly gray that shimmers dully under the gray sky. Peter Lorian has a house in the Highlands of Argyll, and standing at his front windows you can see the weather traveling over the hills from the Irish Sea, the bands of rain filling the valley and then the loch and then the fields in front of the house, all before the first drops arrive. You don’t get such views without elevation but here on the water’s edge, the sky and the expanse before us are big enough to see clearly the first motions of the storm: the branches of the trees on the far shore swaying like congregants to a hymn, the gray scales flashing now over the lake. The wind reaches us, cooling the slick of moisture on my face and neck. Celia sits up and wipes her nose. The dropping air pressure seems to slacken the pressure in my head. The whole static atmosphere is coming to life. A roll of thunder echoes in the distance. If it passes off to the south, this may be all we get, a stirring of the elements. We sit for a few minutes in the churn, looking onto the water. The clouds darken and take on a bluish tinge. And now the real wind arrives, carrying leaves and pine needles into the air, making a racket in the trees. We walk back along the path, me in front this time. As we cross the meadow, it flashes before us in the glow of lightning, thunder cracking the air. Loud, heavy drops are slapping our shoulders as we reach the car. We roll up the windows, which steam over almost at once. It sounds as if the roof is being pelted with stones. Sheets of water stream down the fogged windshield. The worst storm I was ever in happened aboard a sailboat in the middle of the English Channel, caught in a squall that nearly capsized the boat, and though Celia and I are perfectly safe here and mostly dry, the force of the rain releases some tiny fraction of that adrenaline that comes with fear of death, and I manage a sigh, so gladdening is the momentary sense of balance between me and the world, the violence everywhere now, unleashed. Celia asks what’s the matter. I tell her it’s nothing.