A man in a sport coat and tie was standing near the porch steps. He said his name was Corey Sanderson. He was a reporter for the Gilbert Times-Chronicle. He was writing a story about Danny’s suicide.
VII
I’m very sorry about your son. I know the last thing you want to do is talk to a reporter.” Sanderson looked to be in his early thirties. He stood perfectly straight, like a soldier, and cleared his throat three times before he spoke. He did it before he introduced himself, when he excused himself for being there, and again when he said, “Danny was the second boy who killed himself in the past week, and, unfortunately, that’s news. At least in Gilbert it is.”
“Second boy?”
“My editor—”
“Who was he? What’s his name?” Jack wanted to ask where the boy lived and where he went to school. He wanted to ask if Danny had known him. But all he asked for was the name.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you. Not until the story’s published. I’m sorry.”
“Christ almighty,” Jack breathed. “Can you tell me where it happened?”
“I can’t tell you that, either.” Sanderson said this apologetically, plaintively, and told Jack, “But it wasn’t anywhere near the place where Danny—it was nowhere near the ruins.” He shook his head and tugged awkwardly at his tie. Cleared his throat three times before he said, “I’m awfully sorry about this, Dr. Owens.”
“How old was he? Danny’s age?”
Sanderson shook his head again, but Jack wasn’t sure if that meant the other boy wasn’t Danny’s age or that was another question Sanderson couldn’t answer. “I know I’m being extremely insensitive.” Sanderson took a step backward and leaned his hand against the porch railing. “This can’t be anything you want to do, but my editor thinks it’s important that I talk to you. Maybe we can…”
Jack wasn’t listening, all he could do was think about this “other boy” and wonder if his suicide had anything to do with Danny. Which is what he said to Sanderson.
The reporter blinked his eyes a couple of times. “Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t really know.”
“Have you talked to the other family?”
Sanderson answered, “No,” drawing out the word, adding an extra syllable. “I’m sorry if I seem coy, Dr. Owens, but I didn’t know anything about this until I got to the office this morning. Not even about the other boy.”
“Have you talked to Detective Hopewell?”
“A little while ago.”
“Isn’t that enough for your story?”
“It’s enough for me. My editor, however, wants me to talk to everyone concerned. I was hoping to avoid some of that at least by talking to the woman who found your son. I just came from her house, as a matter of—”
“You know who she is?”
“That’s right.”
“He told you?”
“What?”
“Hopewell told you? Hopewell told you who she was?”
“I really can’t—”
“You really can’t—You spoke to her?”
“In a manner of speaking. I just came from there. She wouldn’t talk to me until I spoke with you first. She said what happened to your son wasn’t anyone’s business but yours and she had nothing to tell me until I talked with you and you said it was okay if I spoke with her.”
“But she was the woman who found Danny? You’re sure of that?”
Sanderson said yes, she was the woman who found Danny.
Jack needed to see her. She was part of Danny’s history now and she must have understood that and that was why she wouldn’t talk to the reporter. At least that’s what Jack wanted to believe. He needed to talk to her. There were questions he needed to ask her. She’d been standing in the wings waiting for him to find her. Maybe she understood that, too.
Sanderson was saying, “Look, I’m going to tell my editor that I came here, you didn’t want to talk, and that’s all there was to it. I’ll say the same thing when I write my story. Okay?”
“Who is she, the woman who found Danny? Where does she live?”
It was not a very warm day but Sanderson was perspiring. “You’re putting me in kind of a tough spot, Dr. Owens.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “First of all, I don’t know if she wants you to know that, and second, I still have to answer to my ed—”
“If I tell you what you want to know, enough to satisfy your editor, will you tell me who she is?”
Sanderson looked down at the porch floor, tugged uncomfortably on his tie. He cleared his throat the mandatory three times and told Jack, “This was a terrible idea. I’m really sorry.” He turned and walked down the stairs, repeating, “A terrible idea, a terrible idea,” all the way to his car, opened the door, started to slide onto the front seat, then he looked back at Jack and said, “Her name is Kim Connor. She lives at 517 North Seventh Street.”
Three blocks from the railroad tracks on North Seventh Street the houses stood atop raised, ragged lawns, in pitiful need of care. These houses had been built in the 1880s for up-and-coming merchants, for the men who managed the coal mines and the railroad. Though never beautiful, the houses were functional two-story wood jobs with high ceilings and deep narrow rooms, wedding-cake molding along the walls, indoor plumbing, coal furnaces, ample windows and carriage houses in the back alley; a step up from the company houses that the miners lived in.
Over the years, the college had bought a few of the houses and used them for faculty residences and, later, faculty offices. A few remained in the original families that owned them, bequeathed from fathers to sons to grandsons, who, feeling the entrepreneurial urge, broke up the houses into small two-and three-room flats with some Sheetrock and linoleum, a dormer window in the attic, and rented them to students, or married couples, who worked at the department stores or supermarkets or one of the shifts at the factories. Time and the constant turnover of humanity had taken their toll. The houses now all needed fresh coats of paint and new screen doors. The lawns were neglected and bare.
The corner house, 517, was in no better shape than any of the others. The linoleum on the stairs was worn to the original wood. The hall was dark and smelled of last night’s supper and this morning’s burnt toast. More than a few babies cried behind the old wood doors.
Kim Connor lived behind one of the quieter doors, on the second floor. She didn’t look much older than most of Jack’s students. She was tall, with long auburn hair that hung straight past her shoulders, her body was strong and athletic, snugly tucked inside her jeans and blouse. She stood firmly, proprietarily, in the doorway, looked Jack over and said, “Yes?” without much enthusiasm.
“I’m Jack Owens. The father of the boy who killed himself in Fairmont Park.”
It was the first time he’d identified both himself and Danny by Danny’s suicide, and he could not stop the feeling of defeat, capitulation swelling within him, as though he’d made a wrong turn on a dark road and while he could not know where he was going neither could he turn back. It was a bottomless feeling, and his face must have shown the recognition of this, or the recognition of something, which was reflected in the look of sadness and sympathy on Kim Connor’s face.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” she said, “for what happened, Mr. Owens.”
Jack nodded his head, he asked if he could talk with her for a little while.
She said, “Of course,” and stepped back from the door.
It was a three-room apartment, the rooms built at odd, slapdash angles, with not a lot of sunlight. They had to walk through the kitchen, which was painted mint green, to get to the living room, which was a shade deeper than white. The floors were uneven and warped, thick with the paint of ages, and currently a lively carnation red. A heroic attempt had been made to breathe the comforts of home into the place, fresh flowers stood in a cut-glass vase, crisp white curtains fluttered across the living room windows. A lot of rose-colored fabric covered the thrift-shop chairs and couch, several frame
d photographs and art posters hung on the wall with no small amount of attention paid to symmetry. There were none of the cast-off bric-a-brac and junk-store throwaways that tend to accumulate in small spaces. The air had the sweet aroma of a potpourri.
Jack sat in one of the chairs, the cushions sagging under him. Kim Connor sat on the couch facing him. Jack thanked her for not talking to Sanderson.
“I believe a person should be allowed to keep his life private until he decides otherwise,” she said, formally, the way her mother must have said it to her.
Jack had come here to ask questions, but until this moment he did not realize what those questions were, and, really, there was only one question to ask: Was Danny still alive when Kim Connor found him? If there was still breath remaining in him, had he used it to talk to her, to tell her what he had been unable to tell anyone else?
Jack spoke softly, as though he were trying to excuse himself for asking, for wanting to know. Kim Connor looked at him with the same expression she had when he’d stood outside the door. She said, “Do you know what I told the police?”
“Tell me,” he answered, in that same excuse-me tone of voice.
“I usually go running in Fairmont Park in the morning with my husband,” she said. “But we both worked double shifts the night before, so I didn’t get out till late in the morning, and I let him sleep in. I was running in the direction of where your son was and I could see him lying there with the—you know, the bag over his head, so I ran flat out to get to him.” She ground down on the words, sliding her jaw to the left and right. “By the time I got there he was already—he was lying on his side. Are you sure you want to hear this?”
Jack said he was sure.
Kim Connor waited another moment before she said, “I tore the bag off. He’d tied it really tight, so I just ripped it open. I tried to revive him with mouth-to-mouth and CPR. I’m studying to be a paramedic at ISU, over in Terre Haute, part-time, in case you’re wondering if I knew what I was doing.” She ground her jaw against these words as well. “I could tell that it happened only a little while before. His body was warm, his head and his hands. That’s why I thought I could revive him.”
Jack was thinking about Kim Connor touching Danny’s skin. He wanted to know if she did it gently, or did she push his body around trying to get him in the right position? Did she hold his hands when she felt for body heat, was she careful not to hurt him, or did she just give them a rough squeeze? When she held his head did she cradle it in her hands? But that’s not what he asked. He asked, “Was he still alive?”
She shook her head. “I tried to get him to breathe, for ten, fifteen minutes. Then I put his jacket over him. I didn’t want to leave him alone but I had to walk over to a phone on Third Street and call 911. Then I went back and stayed with him until the police came with the paramedics.”
“You didn’t happen to see anything there? A note?”
“No, but I didn’t do much looking around. I just sat and waited.”
“You didn’t do anything at all?”
“No. When the police got there, they made me sit in their car. All I could see was the back of the detective walking around your son while the paramedics tried to revive him, and the detective kind of looking through your son’s pockets or whatever.”
It disgusted Jack to think of Hopewell touching Danny, poking Danny’s body with his fingers.
Kim Connor asked, “Are you sure you’re going to be okay? Do you want a cold drink or something?”
“I’m all right. What else did the police do?”
“The detective came over to the car and asked how I happened to find him and if I knew him, and was it me who tore the bag off and how come I did it. He acted like I was lying to him and asked me a bunch of questions about did I always run in Fairmont Park and things like that. He made me sit there until they took your son away. Then he drove me back to his office and made me tell it all over again into a tape recorder.”
“I think Danny left a note behind and the detective has it.”
“I couldn’t see if he took anything or not. I was over in the car.” Kim Connor pushed her hands through her hair, away from her face, framing the arc of her cheekbones. “I’m not the smartest person you’ll ever want to meet, and I’m not very good at making sense of things, but when a thing like this happens, I don’t mean what happened to your son, I mean the way people meet and their lives sort of, you know, cross paths, I believe it happens for a reason. Like God wanted me to be the one who found him. Like I’d know the right thing to do. Or else I can’t see the logic to it.” She looked straight at Jack, making strong eye contact with him, and smiled, not a self-satisfied smile, or a sympathetic smile, either, but a sorrowful smile, like a midwestern Madonna, then she looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get going. I work the afternoon shift over at the Kirby’s on North Ninth. Now you know why I’ve gone back to school.” She smiled again, but it was an entirely different smile now.
They went downstairs together and out to the sidewalk.
She said, “My heart goes out to you, Mr. Owens. I know I can’t begin to imagine how sad you must feel.”
Jack watched her walk to the corner—if she’d been running a little faster, if she’d left her house a few minutes earlier, she would have had time to resuscitate Danny. If she’d—it was ridiculous. It made as much sense as thinking God had sent her to Danny just to be five minutes late.
There was a moment when he would turn the corner of his street and the front porch came into view, the porch swing, the white railing, and Jack would see Danny and his friends sitting there, talking, teasing each other, joking, laughing, sometimes pushing each other around, wrestling on the floor, or throwing rocks at the crows in the field across the road. Today, only three boys appeared, like a mirage, sitting on the porch as they’d done hundreds of times before—their bikes leaning against the trees—as though at any second their friend would come bounding out of the house and they would all ride away.
They kept to the pecking order: Brian in the chair at the top of the semicircle, Rick, on one side of him, Danny’s chair, empty now, on the other side, and C.J. No one was throwing rocks or pushing anyone around. There was no bantering, just some talking without much animation, until they saw the car pull up, then the boys sat silent and motionless.
They watched Jack walk up the porch steps, pull up a fifth chair and sit at the mouth of the arc.
Brian said, “We’re going to miss Danny very much, Dr. Owens.” C.J. shook his head to let Jack know that he’d kept his word.
“Your parents told you,” Jack said flatly.
“We’re going to miss him,” Rick repeated.
“He was great.” Brian’s eyes started to well up and he was having a difficult time holding back the tears. “We’re very sad about it.”
They were Danny’s friends, who had sat on the porch on other afternoons like this, when the sun moved a little deeper toward the solstice, when the air wasn’t quite summer but close enough. When they confessed their fears to each other, spoke their plans. But none of them could have planned on this. You can’t be fifteen years old and be on the lookout for death.
Jack looked at their faces and he thought about Danny, who had been their arbitrator, their peacemaker, the swing vote, and he wondered what that told him that he didn’t already know.
Brian looked at Jack but only for a moment, then he sat forward, rested his elbows on his knees and looked down at his hands. Rick looked over at Brian, then lowered his eyes and tugged at his shirt-sleeves. C.J. stared at his backpack. No one moved. No one spoke.
It was disturbing to watch their sadness, their inability to make sense of Danny’s death. They were waiting for an explanation. Waiting for Jack to tell them why Danny would want to kill himself. Jack could only say, “Maybe we can help each other understand it a little better.”
Brian said, “That’s what we’ve been trying to do, Dr. Owens. Believe me, we’ve been trying, but we don’t know wh
y.”
“It’s not an easy thing to understand, is it?”
Rick said no it wasn’t and repeated Brian’s “We’ve been trying but we just don’t know why he did it.”
“Did he ever talk about being depressed?” Jack wanted to know. “Or give any indication that something might have been bothering him?”
The boys glanced at each other.
“Nothing he told us about,” Rick answered, keeping his eyes on Brian.
“Nothing,” Brian said. “He was the same old Danny. He was just like he always was.”
“Maybe it was something he only talked about once,” Jack said.
“Not to any of us.” Brian’s voice was shaky. He started to say something else, stopped, looked over at Rick, then at C.J. “He didn’t say anything to us.”
Rick crossed and uncrossed his long legs, gave his sleeve another tug. “Like Brian’s saying, he was the same old Danny.”
Jack looked over at C.J. and then at the other boys. “There wasn’t anything he talked to any of you about? Anything he ever hinted at? Being depressed or feeling overwhelmed by school or anything?”
Brian shook his head without looking up. “He was the same old Danny.”
“Was he eating?” Jack wanted to know.
“Eating?” Brian and Rick asked together.
“He wasn’t eating much last week,” Jack explained. “Was he eating when he was with you guys?”
“You mean lunch and like that?” Brian looked at the others. “Danny was eating, wasn’t he, guys?”
“Yeah,” Rick said. “We all ate together. Lunch, and the usual junk after school.”
“He ate supper at my house at least once,” Brian said. “Honest, Dr. Owens, if there was anything bothering Danny, we would have known about it.”
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