Some Hell

by Patrick Nathan

  “Have a party?”

  He laughed. Then he realized Colin was being serious. “Probably not,” he said, tapping his hand on the arm of the chair. “No. I’ll just sell it and start over with a new one.”

  Colin looked at the tile surrounding the fireplace, pretending he lived there. He thought of convincing his mother to buy the house, but it was too nice. They’d ruin it.

  “Well,” Quentin said. He set his glass on a coaster that looked like a ship’s rudder wheel. He stood up and brushed the wrinkles out of his pant legs. “Would you like the tour?”

  Colin carried his glass close to his chest as his grandfather explained the changes he’d made, the walls he’d moved, the colors he’d chosen, with names like Hampton Blue and Thirty-Year Merlot. He nodded in a way he hoped looked thoughtful, asking questions when the timing felt right. He tried to remember everything he was told but when he repeated these things in his head he realized he was missing new information. Eventually he stopped listening and let his grandfather’s voice give him the shivers. Voices could do this, if they were deep enough, and when his body began to like the voice he let out a small gasp.

  “Are you okay?” They were in a small alcove between the living room and the kitchen. One entire wall was a window, floor to ceiling, and the other two walls were books.

  Colin shrugged and walked toward the window, shifting his legs to try to hide it. “Yeah. I just thought I saw, um, a bird.”

  “I get so many birds here. I’m close enough to Lake of the Isles that I’ve seen bald eagles, now and again.”

  When he could, Colin turned around. The sun was letting itself in through the window, and when it was sparkling all over the shelf he realized his grandfather’s books were bound in leather and gold leaf, like in some wizard’s library. “Pretty,” he said, without meaning to.

  “You like books?” Quentin asked. Colin knew better than to disappoint, and he nodded as his eyes traveled over their spines, all names he didn’t recognize. “These are my babies,” his grandfather was saying, and he let his hand fall on Colin’s shoulder. “If you want to borrow one, you’re more than welcome.”

  Colin sucked a breath through his teeth. If this wasn’t a test, nothing was. How was he supposed to pick, to pretend this was all old news? Oh, everyone’s read Dickens, he imagined some snobby, alternate version of himself saying. Left of Dickens was Defoe, and before that Dante, a book called Inferno. This sounded familiar and Colin plucked it from the shelf. “Good choice,” his grandfather said, and Colin felt the hand on his shoulder give a quick squeeze before it disappeared. “Let me show you the kitchen.”

  As they walked into the next room, Colin peeked into the book. Anywhere else, he would’ve groaned aloud when he saw the long column of text. Poetry, he thought, and wished he’d kept searching. He let the book fall to his side, where he carried it like homework, an assignment that ambushed him. Inferno, he thought, again losing his grandfather’s words in the voice itself. Why did he know it? Dante’s Inferno—a pair of words he’d heard or read before. “Well,” Quentin said, in what must have been the last room. “Time to make lunch!” He stepped down the stairs with a new kind of energy. Colin’s heart was winding itself up in his chest. On the way through the living room he saw a small bathroom and stopped.

  “I’ll be right there,” he said. He went red when his grandfather told him to hold the handle down when he flushed, and locked the door with the softest of clicks. He didn’t have to pee, as he thought, and after too much trying there was nothing he could do but finish in a fury, biting his tongue so he wouldn’t pant. What’s wrong with you? he demanded of his sick, criminal soul. Why are you doing this? On the other side of the wall he heard the clang of metal bowls. “Mmm,” he said when he came. Already, he’d forgotten his grandfather’s advice and watched his handful of toilet paper circle and float back up. More than anything, that was shame. Look what he was doing! the scene seemed to say, as though the entire world didn’t already know.

  He was still cheerful, his grandfather, smiling as he whisked together herbs and oil and vinegar. “You’ll love Dante,” he was saying, but Colin couldn’t look him in the eye. You’ll disappoint me, is what he heard, and he wished there was some way to believe it wasn’t true. He glanced again at the first page, its stupid words like e’en and discover’d and forespent. Then he turned the page. If you ignored the names, it was easy to tell what was going on. “There’s a bag of greens in the bottom drawer,” he heard, and he snapped the book shut. “On the right.”

  Colin looked into the refrigerator. He found the bag—unmarked, reusable, plastic, a paper towel folded in with the leaves. “This doesn’t look like lettuce,” he said. His skin still felt a shade of bright, incriminating red.

  “It’s not iceberg lettuce, which is what you’ve been raised on. Iceberg lettuce isn’t good for you at all. It’s mostly just water.”

  He held the bag closer to his face, looking at the dark, flaccid leaves. “Iceberg,” he said.

  “I can’t believe anyone would eat that stuff. This will probably be your first real salad.” He reached into a high cupboard for a salad spinner. “If you wash it, I’ll chop the walnuts.”

  Colin took the strange, soft lettuce from the bag and placed it in the spinner. Quentin stopped him at the sink, his hand once more on his shoulder. “You’ll want to take out that one,” he said. “The brown wrinkly one. And that one. If it feels slimy, get rid of it. That’s the rule.”

  Colin took a deep breath, almost as though he was learning to biopsy a cancer patient or cut precious stones. When his grandfather let go he missed his hand, like when a blanket creeps up your legs and bares your feet. He’d ruined his chances—that he understood—but maybe there was still time, before his mom picked him up, to hear what a smart young man he was. As he washed the lettuce he tried to conjure the comment or observation that would elicit this praise. None of them were smart enough. None of them were good enough.

  The waiting room was exactly as she remembered it. But it had only been two months, Diane realized. Why should it have changed? Back in May, as she was leaving, Tim scheduled her for a second appointment. She’d intended never to come back, and in June, when the receptionist called to remind her, Diane spewed every nicety: how sorry she was, how foolish she felt, but she was just too sick to make it. What she hadn’t expected was the perseverance.

  “We’ll put you on the schedule for July,” the receptionist said over the clatter of computer keys. Diane wasn’t able to lie fast enough, and by the following month she’d forgotten what Tim looked like—only that something about his smile made her grind her teeth.

  Since May, she’d considered the transaction of therapy. Where was the advice on how to go on living, how to get out of bed? Those things weren’t a problem for her—at least not literally—but a therapist was supposed to understand what it meant to lose someone you loved.

  After that first appointment, she drove miles out of her way before going home, first into the northern suburbs, then back through Roseville. She passed the house and imagined she could see through its walls: Heather smoking her future away, Colin and Paul ignoring each other. She went back toward the freeway. When she got close to Minneapolis she turned around. It was almost nine o’clock when she arrived home. “I went to therapy,” she told Shannon over the phone, expecting a That’s wonderful! or a Congratulations! Instead, Shannon called it a first step and began to outline future steps. Diane, cradling the phone against her neck as she folded the boys’ underwear, felt defeated.

  Shannon was right, she realized. The session with Tim had lasted an hour but they hadn’t talked about anything. She was still sleeping on the couch, waking up every time the motion light in the neighbor’s backyard clicked on, staying up for an hour as she went to the kitchen for a glass of water and a cigarette. The street outside was different every night. When it drizzled, the streetlights looked predatory, like those monstrous fish in the ocean’s darkest places, a s
chool of black raindrops lured to their light. On clear nights you barely noticed the streetlights at all, and when the moon was full there was so much to look at that she lost track of time until she watched the sun rise, neither romantic nor adventurous.

  She was still smoking, Shannon never failed to point out. Your teeth will get yellow, she said until it meant nothing. On a morning in June, when they met at the doughnut shop down the street, Shannon showed her a printout of a calendar, something scribbled under each day of the month. “You smoke a pack a day. Estimate that at five dollars a day.” She pointed to the calendar. “If you carry it over, you get a hundred and fifty bucks every month. Stop smoking, and in a year you can take the kids to Florida.”

  “I hate Florida.”

  “California then, I don’t care. Do you see my point?”

  Shannon’s point was clear, but her own was not. She promised she would try to quit, but when she walked into the house and took her cigarettes out of her purse, the cellophane brought her youngest son into the living room like a dog who’d caught the smell of meat. “For you, Madame,” he said, using the fancy pronunciation. It made her want to grab onto him and tear him apart in her hands, just to bring him closer. Her arms twitched when she hugged him, as though they weren’t being used. She didn’t know why you couldn’t love someone without wanting to pulverize them.

  Another step was the basement office, unopened since October. Every time she did laundry she had to walk by the door, the gaps between its wood slats dark. Before she locked the door in October—there was a gun in there, after all—she’d thought about turning on the lamp and leaving it on forever, even if that very thing terrified her. Because his writing terrified her. It might have been when he bought a crate of notebooks from a wholesaler that she knew he was lost. Even if she hadn’t known for months he was suicidal, it was one more signal, one more stupid, obvious thing she’d chosen to ignore. The gunshot shouldn’t have surprised her at all.

  Looking at all those therapeutic steps, the future they climbed to seemed pointless. Even after she scheduled a new appointment she was apathetic. Nobody wanted to add anything to her life. Shannon only talked about taking things away, like how Colin lit her cigarettes, or the regularity of going to work every morning. “Take a vacation,” she kept saying, as if something were waiting for her in a godforsaken place like Florida. As she sat in the waiting room she imagined Tim saying the same thing. Already, she was preparing her defense, how Florida or California or heaven itself would be a waste of time.

  When Tim was ready, she followed him down the same hallway to that same office. “I’m sorry I missed you last month,” he said as they sat across from each other. “I was looking forward to hearing how the rest of your spring went.”

  “I was sick.” It sounded more petulant than she meant it to. “I just—I didn’t feel well.”

  “That’s what Kathy said.”

  There was a creak as she leaned forward in her chair to scratch her ankle, another when she leaned back. Her eyes fell to his hand, wrapped around the pen. He clicked it once as if to get her attention. When she looked up at him he was smiling and she felt cruel for giving the impression that she could be helped.

  “I see my husband’s car everywhere,” she said. The air in the room sharpened and she reached for a tissue. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’d be more concerned if you weren’t crying.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that it’s normal to be emotional. It would bother me if we discussed your husband and—” Tim frowned and looked at his notes. “Forget I said anything.”

  “Did you expect me to not cry?”

  “I didn’t expect anything. You try not to go into a relationship like this expecting anything.”

  Diane didn’t like the sound of the word relationship. “Do you really think that if I don’t cry, it means I don’t feel anything?”

  “That’s not what I meant at all. Like I said, just forget it. It was inappropriate and I’m sorry. You said you see your husband’s car everywhere. You mean cars that look like his?”

  She set the crumpled tissue on the table. “It feels like it’s the only car people drive,” she said. “It’s all over the damn place.” The tissue didn’t look right and she closed her fist around it. “I hated that car. I kept telling him to buy a new one. It was loud and it stunk. I started to hate him for not listening. Sometimes he was so easy to hate. I know that sounds horrible.”

  “It doesn’t sound horrible. It sounds like you were in love.”

  “Sometimes he was an idiot,” she said. “Like just before he—I heard him coughing, all the way down in the basement. I go down there and he’s smoking. I ask what the hell’s he doing, what’s Colin supposed to think, I guess a red convertible is next, all that stuff. He just said he thought he’d try it.” She laughed. Step one, she said to herself. “Who the hell starts smoking when they’re our age?”

  “He just started smoking? Out of the blue? Don’t you find that strange?”

  “I did. I mean I do.” She pulled her lips into her mouth. How to confess, if even a confession? “I started right after he did, so I don’t know. It’s strange, but I can’t comment.”

  Tim made a note on the pad. “Before or after?”

  “Before or after what?”

  He looked at her.

  “After.” Her eyes fell to the table. “A couple days.”

  “It’s certainly a unique reaction to grief. Your smoking.”

  She scrunched up her face and leaned away from him. “It’s stupid.”

  “Maybe not ideal, but it isn’t stupid.” He shifted in his chair like someone who’d found his topic of expertise at a dinner party. “I know it seems a little mysterious to you, and frankly it’s mysterious to me, but when you look at the big picture it seems very natural. It’s an ironic thing to say, but you could even call it healthy.”

  An unattractive laugh burst out of her and she covered her mouth with her hand. “Healthy?”

  “Like I said, it’s kind of ironic. People do strange, beautiful things when they’re upset, so it’s understandable.”

  “You don’t seem to understand it.”

  Tim shrugged his shoulders. “I guess understandable is the wrong word. Intuited?”

  “I feel like I’m making fun of you. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. And you’re not making fun of me. Not everything you say offends me, you know.”

  She rolled her eyes, then realized her childishness and began to shake her head. “Whatever you say.” The room felt as though it’d shrunk and she sucked in a long breath. Her hands felt empty. “Thanks for listening.”

  “That’s my job.”

  “I know it’s your job. I just thought—I don’t know.” She glanced at the door. She sensed her purse waiting under the chair. “To tell the truth, I could use a smoke right now.”

  Tim smiled. “If you want to step out for a couple minutes, that’s fine with me. I’ll put the session on hold. I don’t have a four o’clock, so we’ll go an extra five at the end.”

  “Thanks.” She stood up and had her purse over her shoulder before she made it to the door. Halfway down the hall she was already slapping the pack against her palm.

  It was a hot afternoon, the sun still an arm’s length from the horizon. In the street’s rising heat and exhaust the buildings around her looked painted on a curtain flirting with a breeze, even if the ash tapped from her cigarette told her there was no wind. She tried to focus on the world, on the sky coming down around her on all sides, sewn to the cityscape with an aberrant stitch. Strange, beautiful things, she thought as she sucked the cigarette down to its filter and dropped it in the ashtray by the door. She’d been off for a long time—dormant, powered down. It was clear, now, that she no longer had to keep herself that way. Coming back up the stairs, she thought of everything there was to mention. His car wasn’t all, sold to the first carbuncled teen who answered her ad
. What else could she talk about? What aspect of life had been dragged from its hiding place and beaten unrecognizable? The first thing that came to mind was the key she’d carried in her purse since October. She felt the urge to write it: Key, she imagined, all by itself, on a sheet of paper. Office. Gun. Notebooks.

  I’ll have to start a list, she thought.

  Man can do violence

  To himself and his own blessings: and for this,

  He, in the second round must aye deplore

  With unavailing penitence his crime,

  Whoe’er deprives himself of life and light,

  In reckless lavishment his talent wastes,

  And sorrows there where he should dwell in joy.

  Colin knew he’d read it before. In his father’s office he matched it up word for word. Like most of his father’s notes, it had passed right through him. Now he looked at every word, but all it said was what he already knew: his father, for ending his life, was in hell. He thumbed the pages of the notebook and his grandfather’s copy of Inferno side by side.

  “I thought we weren’t allowed in here.” Andy’s voice was too loud for that quiet, sacred room. He stood in the doorway, disrespectfully unimpressed. “The Hag let me in,” he said, pointing at the ceiling. “So here’s the famous journal. Where’s the good-bye-cruel-world part?”

  “Shut up,” Colin said when his throat unlocked. He slammed the notebook shut and backed the chair into Andy’s crotch. “We’re not supposed to be down here.”

  “You better hope I don’t tell your mom then.” Andy plucked another book from the shelf—one Colin hadn’t yet read—and flipped through it as if it were a guidebook at a gas station.

  “It’s the room where he killed himself,” Colin said, because nothing else made sense. It hollowed him out to say it, as though someone had drilled a hole in his stomach and siphoned everything out. Right here, in this chair.