The Best Kind of People

by Zoe Whittall

  Also by Zoe Whittall

  Fiction

  The Middle Ground

  Holding Still for as Long as Possible

  Bottle Rocket Hearts

  Poetry

  Precordial Thump

  The Emily Valentine Poems

  The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life

  The Best Kind of People

  Zoe Whittall

  Copyright © 2016 Zoe Whittall

  Published in Canada in 2016 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Whittall, Zoe, author

  The best kind of people / Zoe Whittall.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77089-942-1 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-77089-943-8 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8595.H4975B46 2016 C813’.6 C2016-900844-4

  C2016-900845-2

  Cover and text design: Alysia Shewchuk

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  For Jake Pyne

  After every war

  someone has to clean up.

  Things won’t

  straighten themselves up, after all.

  Someone has to push the rubble

  to the side of the road,

  so the corpse-filled wagons

  can pass.

  Someone has to get mired

  in scum and ashes,

  sofa springs,

  splintered glass,

  and bloody rags.

  Someone has to drag in a girder

  to prop up a wall.

  Someone has to glaze a window,

  rehang a door.

  — Wisława Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning”

  [Rape Culture’s] most devilish trick is to make the average, non-criminal person identify with the person accused, instead of the person reporting the crime …

  — Kate Harding, Asking for It

  Prologue

  almost a decade earlier, a man with a .45-70 Marlin hunting rifle walked through the front doors of Avalon Hills prep school. He didn’t know that he was about to become a living symbol of the age of white men shooting into crowds. He hadn’t slept in four days. He was the kind of angry that only made sense outside of language. He had walked three miles from his new studio apartment above Harry’s Cottage Times Bait Shop, oblivious to the downpour, the thin rip along the seam of his right leather boot. Soaked. Unaware. He walked, a head without a body. A head with one single thought, looped and distorted.

  Students attending all twelve grades were amassed in classrooms, a blur of uniform plaid, settling in after the first bell. Except for Sadie Woodbury. She was standing in front of an open locker, retrieving her lucky koala bear eraser and straightening her thick brown bangs in a heart-shaped magnetized mirror. The sparkling unicorn sticker at the apex of the heart was beginning to peel away from the plastic glass. It was class speech day in the fifth grade. She had five yellow index cards in her kilt pocket with point-form notes In Praise of Democracy in America. She tongued a mass of orange peach gum to the top of her mouth, flavourless, unwilling to discard it just yet. Her parents didn’t allow chewing gum. Amanda had pressed the white paper strip into her palm on the playground before the first morning bell.

  She saw him behind her in the mirror’s reflection. He was a smudge of indecipherable movement.

  the girl was not part of the plan. He’d drawn a map using a feathered red marker on the back of a pizza box. There was no girl in the diagram. It used to be a ceremonial drug. It was called crystal. A jewel. Like all party drugs, it had purpose. It wasn’t like they make it seem now, on the commercials, like your life is over. They all had jobs and near-completed graduate degrees and they went to Burning Man and electronic music festivals and then back to work on Monday. He did it once or twice a year with friends and the point was to dance, dance, dance. Large groups of regular people. But friends who had jobs and babies now averted their eyes on the street. It didn’t used to be a big deal.

  Except no one else did it anymore, and he had skin like punctured and torn fabric.

  He stood still, staring at her, the gun hanging from a leather strap around his right shoulder. His grandfather used to hunt with that gun. Hounds at their heels. He had a daughter at this school. He’d forgotten about her too. He didn’t think it was possible, that a son could be disinherited, disowned, as an adult. That he would go “too far.” He never left this town. He didn’t go anywhere. He came to Sunday dinners when he remembered it was Sunday. He was struggling. But every addict is a liar. When he said that, he wanted to be excused from anything he did or said. He just needed to stop being punished by everyone.

  sadie closed her locker. The sound startled him. He blinked in a way that meant to wish her away from sight. He was not a killer of children, he knew, despite all evidence to the contrary. Even he had his standards, for fuck’s sake.

  Who have I become? Am I a killer of anyone? These questions broke through the concentrated wall of destructive will, and then dissolved. He hadn’t thought this through. Hailstones pelted the arched front windows as it dawned on him. The black and white floor tile was messy with slush and the imprint of over six hundred children’s boots. He noted the weather and its impact on his body. He thought about turning back; but his focus returned. Nothing had been fair since his first black eye. He took the rifle off his shoulder. He cradled it in his arms as though it were a parcel to be delivered.

  Even this he couldn’t do right. What kind of man can’t hold a gun?

  If his dealer hadn’t gone to sleep finally, he wouldn’t have to be here.

  Everyone is against him.

  Especially her.

  It’s always someone else’s fault, have you ever noticed that? Every story you tell, it’s always about someone who has done you wrong. But you’re the common denominator. She’d said this as she was pulling on a pair of beige cotton tights at the edge of her bed, getting ready for work, her hands shaking with rage. Her big toe poked through a hole in the right foot. He had been apologizing, begging her forgiveness for banging on her door in the middle of the night. When she’d let him in, he’d crawled on top of her and she’d had to push him off. But she wasn’t as strong as he was, and eventually she just lay still, clenching her jaw and willing him to die.

  When will you ever take responsibility for your own life? When will you grow up? He didn’t have any money to give her for a morning-after pill. She’d grabbed a roll of twenties from the emergency cookie tin on top of the fridge. It was a bright red tin his mother had filled with Valentine cupcakes, before she had stopped talking to him and after she’d all but adopted his ex, whom she described as having “the patience of a saint.” You’re pathetic, she’d said. He’d crumpled in the co
rner, agreeing with her. That only made it worse. Your self-pity is disgusting.

  The rage spiked.

  His grip around the rifle tightened. The pad of his index finger, slippery with sweat, touched the trigger. He remembered what the gun was for. But the girl looked to him so much like his own daughter, the one he’d last seen by accident, through a window at the community centre where she was practising gymnastics dance, twirling a long pink and green ribbon through the air.

  sadie stared at him for a beat, blowing a half-assed bubble that popped before fully forming. She wasn’t certain, from this distance, what she was seeing, but her heart had accelerated involuntarily. It took only a few seconds more to understand danger. The man lowered the rifle, pointing it at her, then put it back on his shoulder. She brought into focus some motion behind him.

  the man thought, Fuck it. I can turn it around. I can turn it around. This doesn’t have to be the way it ends for me. I can change. i can change! All at once he was euphoric, coming back into his own body.

  sadie’s father, george Woodbury, was a science teacher with a spare that morning. As the man stared at Sadie with a trancelike smile on his face, George yelled a string of astounded gibberish before tackling him. Sadie gripped the eraser, imprinting half moons in the gummy texture as it gave way to the pressure. A trickle of urine ran down her left leg, soaking her green cotton knee socks.

  In the midst of their graceless pas de deux of grappling, the gun discharged an aimless bullet. It hit the windowpane behind them with a crack; a fireworks display of shards rained down on both men, shocking them into momentary submission. The janitor emerged from around the corner and wielded his mop to help secure the gunman to the ground. George’s chest was heaving, his sweater vest stuck with chunks of glass. It looked as though the man had fallen during a game of Limbo. He was pinned. He yowled, rabid, face in a bloom of madness.

  Sadie stood stationary as chaos began to reign around her. The emergency task force. The volunteer firemen. The organized rows of oblivious children marching past her with their hands on their heads, heading towards the parking lot where they were counted and then released to their parents. Her father cradled her in his arms as though she were still a toddler. “It’s all okay now, Sadie. Everything is fine. You’re safe,” he’d said as she saw a blur go by, her chin tucked into his corduroy shoulder. The smell of electric-blue dandruff shampoo. Ivory soap. She hadn’t been lifted up by anyone in years.

  The story came out later that the gunman, the recently disinherited son of a wealthy business owner, was the school secretary’s boyfriend. He had come to kill her, and then himself. The front page of the newspaper declared George Woodbury a hero for ambushing the armed man. “It was just instinct,” he’d said. “I saw my daughter. I saw the man with the gun. I knew it was better that he get me than her, than the other children. I did what anyone would have done.”

  Most people, when they read that line from the front page of the Avalon Hills Gleaner or the back of the news section of the New York Times, asked themselves, Could I have done that? Who am I in this world if not someone who would do just that?

  After the incident, Sadie spent an hour every Wednesday with Eleanor Rockbrand, a child psychologist with an office above the stationery store on Peabody Street. She would doodle intricate butterflies in the margins of her feelings journal, and talk about the banal details of her days at school. She didn’t tell her that she had kept the koala bear eraser, and carried it with her everywhere. If she didn’t, she would be overcome by heart palpitations. Even now, at sixteen, if she forgot it at home, she would go back to retrieve it. It didn’t smell pleasant anymore, and the koala’s eyes had rubbed into a stoner blur. She sewed a special pocket for it on the inside lining of her uniform skirt. After that, Mr. Woodbury won Teacher of the Year every year without exception, until the second incident, the one that split the town in half.

  no one in the Woodbury family had a particularly memorable face. George could be recognized by his trademark brown tweed jackets with the corduroy elbow pads, and his perpetual armload of books and papers. Everybody knew him, from school or from the many boards and committees he sat on. He was a fixture in town. He remained the man from Woodbury Lake who’d saved the children. The older people knew him as the son of George Woodbury Senior, at one time the sole general practitioner in town, turned real estate tycoon and land developer.

  But even after George’s face was splayed bare across page-one newsprint for the second time in a decade, it was hard to conjure the precise shape of his nose, the angle of his chin. He was a type of every older white man who could be a politician or a dentist, someone advertising a credit card on television. His wife, Joan Woodbury, under five foot two with the practical haircut of every nurse on the trauma ward, also blended into the faceless mass of small-town life. There were four Woodburys before their son Andrew grew up and moved away. They motored around together in the Volvo through all kinds of weather, to track meets and debates, school plays and speech nights. When Joan thought about her family, they appeared in her mind as a foursome around the table every night at six o’clock sharp, or driving down route 32, stopping for ice cream at the Lakeside Super!Soft!Serve! Their faces paled in winter, reddened in summer. No one stood out as particularly attractive, until daughter Sadie was midway through her sixteenth year and morphed into a striking young woman. There was a practical sort of utility to their bodies, draped in corduroy with sturdy hemlines, shirts of strong cotton blends. Say the words wealthy and Protestant and picture a family. That’s them, or close enough.

  No one saw it coming.

  part one

  the first week

  Sunday Night

  one

  sadie turned seventeen years old on top of her boyfriend, Jimmy, in the Woodbury family boathouse. It was a white wooden structure with turquoise trim, both colours frayed and chipped around the edges, on the shore of Woodbury Lake in rural Connecticut. Jimmy had a small tattoo of her name in an Old English gangster-style font cupping his right pectoral muscle, a secret hovering underneath his crisp school uniform shirt and blazer. She had gripped his sweaty hand in the tattoo shop in Boston when they’d stolen away for an hour on class trip day. He’d peeled back the bloody gauze on the bus afterwards, kids crowding around in quiet awe. A lot of students in their class had tattoos — including a girl whose entire back was covered in a passage from a Father John Misty song — but no one had proclaimed his devotion to a girlfriend so permanently before. Sadie thought that she’d get his initials tattooed sometime, maybe inside a tiny illustrated heart. “I can’t handle the pain,” she’d say, but it was the permanence that felt dizzying.

  His watch beeped midnight as she pressed his wrists to the tarp that separated their bodies from the splintery floorboards. Her long brown hair formed a tent around his face, which smelled of sixty-proof sunscreen, an organic brand redolent of almonds. Sometimes she rubbed it on her hands to smell during the day when he wasn’t around. She made a birthday wish for continued academic success while pressing both thumbs to his radial arteries. She knew that if he had a wish, it would be to stay with Sadie forever, to suspend time so that there would be only her and him. She was a Virgo, and therefore infinitely more practical.

  She curled her toes, pulled away, her lips bruised and pillowed from kissing.

  “Wanna?” He wrestled his arms away from her grasp and cupped both hands around her ass and squeezed, pulling her even closer.

  “Swim first,” she said, sitting up but still straddling him. “The lake is so still right now, it’s the best time.”

  Outside, the September air aped mid-July heat.

  Jimmy pulled her in for a pre-swim kiss and sang “Happy Birthday” into her mouth. They could hear the slight waves under the boathouse, occasionally a dog barking across the lake. Sex was a relatively new thing. An amazing thing. The primary reason for hanging out in the otherwise damp and spider
-filled world of the Woodbury family boathouse.

  A raccoon they’d nicknamed Conan O’Brien wobbled across the roof and pushed his face against the screened-in skylight, pawing at a rip in the seam. He had a distinct patch of reddish fur above his eyes. Sadie turned towards the noise to lie beside her boyfriend, pinning her shoulder blades to the floor. The boathouse ceiling peaked in an A-frame and was jammed with Woodbury family detritus going back to the 1970s. Between the rafters: yellowed life jackets, canoe paddles, a rusty-handled tricycle, deflated water toys, and decaying file boxes labelled with words like 1997 Taxes.

  “He wants to celebrate your birthday,” Jimmy said.

  “He just loves an audience.”

  They’d been back at school for one week. Their senior year in high school at Avalon prep had begun with aplomb. They were both in the accelerated stream, their sights set on prestigious universities, afternoons filled with student government meetings, sporting events, community volunteer hours, making out between the rows of woody ancient texts in the school library. The week had been busy and thus ordinary. This was the last weekend that anything would feel normal until they were halfway through college.

  Conan sat by the ancient weather vane atop the boathouse, watching as the couple peeled off their simple tanks and cut-off shorts. They ran naked out onto the dock, launching knees to chests in cannonballs, breaking up the swarms of night insects circling the lake in a uniform frenzy.

  Sadie thought about how her body would pop up with a force equal to the weight of the water that was displaced, something her father taught her as a child that she found hard to grasp while it was happening. Her body cooled instantly. She launched forward into the darkness, a swim of pure muscle memory, with Jimmy in pursuit.

  They reached the floating dock near the middle of the lake, clambering up the ladder slick with wet moss. They sat with their knees touching under the full moon, Sadie twisting the lake water from her hair and then retying it with the elastic band around her wrist. She crossed her arms over her breasts. Jimmy reached under her elbow to touch her right nipple.