Till the End of Tom

by Gillian Roberts

  I sat down at a desk next to the one he was in.

  I waited till he felt ready to say whatever had brought him to my door. We’d established what I thought was a good relationship. I trusted him to tell me what was going on, and to be honest about it.

  He cleared his throat. “So I guess you’re wondering what the cop wanted with me.”

  “Bingo.”

  “He wanted to know about the man who died here.”

  No surprise. “What about?”

  “Where I was when . . . when it happened.”

  “Why you?”

  I had never realized how large his eyes were, or how burning. “Because—look, I need to explain something. Wallenberg isn’t my real last name. I mean it is my real last name now—it’s my legal name, and all, but that’s because when she divorced my father, my mother took back her maiden name, and changed mine to match hers. She—she said she didn’t want any part of him. Except me.” He paused, to make sure I was following.

  “Got it,” I said.

  “So my name was once Severin.” He watched me closely, obviously noting my confusion. “That man was my father,” he said. “And I hate him.”

  “Oh, Zach!” I tried to keep my expression neutral, but the area around my heart suddenly felt frostbitten.

  He shook his head. “But I didn’t push him down the stairs, I swear. The thing is, we had a . . . kind of a quarrel a week ago by e-mail, and the cop, he knew about it. You think my—you think he—”

  “He?”

  “My—the dead man—went to the cops about it?”

  I shook my head. “What was it about?”

  Zachary swallowed hard. “College. I barely ever see him, or ever had. They made jokes, in fact. That the reason I wasn’t a Tomas, like all the firstborn sons, was because I was a trial kid. An experiment, to see if he liked it. I guess he didn’t. One of his new kids, one of the twins, he’s Tomas. But two years ago, he said that if I didn’t get into any more trouble, if I buckled down, he’d pay for whatever college I wanted to go to and got into.”

  “And you’ve worked your butt off, I know. He should be—should have been proud of you. Wasn’t he?”

  He shrugged. “Not exactly, because the reason we had that . . . disagreement was that he sent me this e-mail that said I was turning eighteen next August, and I would have therefore achieved my majority, legally, and he had changed his mind about all that. That he was under no further legal obligation to pay for my education and he wasn’t going to.”

  “Why on earth not?” I shouldn’t have let the words burst out, but I had.

  “Because he didn’t have to. The law says he doesn’t have to. He pays for this school. Said that was enough. And that’s all he said. Oh, yeah, and that he was having a cash-flow crunch, expenses coming up.” He clenched his fists. “He’s getting divorced again. That’s the expenses. And anyway, he could get divorced ten more times and still afford whatever I would have cost him. I read in the newspapers how rich he is. But he said he didn’t have to support me anymore, so he wasn’t going to.”

  I could only judge how much his father’s words had rankled, by the fact that Zach had repeated the “doesn’t have to and wasn’t going to” idea three times.

  “Did you respond to the e-mail?” I asked quietly.

  He inhaled deeply, and nodded. “I shouldn’t have, I know, but I hit reply and said ‘drop dead.’ In big caps. In red. I meant it. I meant I didn’t care if he didn’t care about me. I wouldn’t need his money. I’d find a way, or my mom would, and we’d show him. She’s finishing school and she’s working part-time because child support’s going to end. We’ll figure it out. But I didn’t say all that. All I said was ‘drop dead.’ And then he did.” He looked down at his hands, or more accurately, his one visible hand, and the other, in which only the fingertips showed from under the now gray and ragged cast.

  I didn’t want to think about that cast.

  I stood up and walked to the window, giving him time to collect himself while I silently cursed Penelope Koepple, who had surely gone through Tomas’s e-mail files. Tomas had been staying at his mother’s, and probably using the house computer for minor mail, like brushing off his son. Penelope Koepple had combed through his personal mail. She must have been ecstatic to find Zachary’s message.

  She was expending a huge amount of energy keeping everyone’s eyes on anyone but her.

  In all fairness, however, I admitted to myself that given the circumstances of Tom Severin’s death, I might have done the same thing, if the e-mail had involved anyone but Zachary.

  And in ultra-fairness, the police would have gone through Severin’s mail themselves, but that wasn’t as satisfying as being angry with Penelope.

  From behind my back, the voice was low and without animation. “The policeman—he thought I did it, but I swear I didn’t. I wouldn’t lie to you. People say ‘drop dead’ all the time. They don’t make it happen.”

  I turned and walked back to the chair next to his, and sat down again. “I believe you,” I said, and I meant it, but I could feel how difficult it might be to convince other people.

  “I didn’t do it. I swear I didn’t. I left assembly and went out back and had a cigarette.” He immediately put his good hand up. “I know it’s wrong.”

  It was no time for an antitobacco lecture.

  “Can you help me?”

  I couldn’t imagine what I could do, except get over my resolve to run away from this unfortunate event. But perhaps Mackenzie and I could hang on to Penelope Koepple’s payroll a little longer. It was an excellent cover for a continued investigation, for finding out who had actually drugged, battered, and killed Tomas Severin—as long as it wasn’t Zachary. “Tell me one thing. Did you also phone him?”

  He shook his head. “We didn’t talk much.”

  I suddenly remembered his composition, about how a divorced parent shouldn’t also divorce his child.

  Zachary asked again. “Can you help me?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  He looked relieved, the poor, trusting child.

  * * *

  Eleven

  * * *

  * * *

  I looked at the afterimage of his back for too long, willing my train of thought to halt halfway to its destination and wait there for me, for a time when I wouldn’t feel as pushed, or frightened by where those thoughts might take me. Besides, I was already late for the meeting at Rachel Leary’s office.

  Edie Friedman, the gym and health teacher, was there along with Geneva Kiel, who taught biology. We were trying to find the proper inroad to the starving girls’ psyches. “It isn’t about bulimia per se.” Rachel looked exhausted and pale. “It’s about their entire self-image. Their screwed up self-images.”

  “Screwed up by . . .” Geneva let the rest of the sentence dangle.

  “The world. Life, Mom, ads, movies . . .” Edie herself worried incessantly about not being married and owned every spot-reducing device ever patented, and now she waggled her head. “Not enough exercise.”

  Thus spake the gym teacher. We each have our windows on the world, and perhaps mine looks like the tiniest of portholes to Edie.

  “It would help, you know,” she insisted. “Certainly more than upchucking!”

  “What are we supposed to do?” Rachel’s voice reflected the fatigue on her face. “Where do you start when the abuse is about food, a basic necessity of life being used the wrong way? Lots of wrong ways. It’s obesity, and anorexia, and . . .” She rolled her head on her neck.

  “Yoga!” Edie Friedman said. “Try it! Your neck wouldn’t hurt that way.”

  Rachel regarded her blankly. I could almost hear her thoughts, and could only assume she was simply too tired to ask Edie precisely when she was supposed to find the time for yoga, as lovely as it sounded. With a full-time job, three children under three, and an unemployed and possibly depressed househusband, she must have thought yoga beyond her imagination, if only because of the
silence of the sessions.

  “So what are we really talking about here?” Geneva asked softly. “Can you name a woman who is happy with how she looks? I mean really happy? I don’t think we’re supposed to be. I think it helps business if we always feel incomplete, or over the hill, or out of shape—if we’re always afraid, if we always know there’s something else we should be doing to look better.”

  “That’s so negative!” Edie said.

  “All we have to deal with—all we can deal with, if anything—is the health issue.” Rachel yawned.

  “Sorry,” Geneva said. “I only meant—”

  Rachel nodded. “I agree with you. It’s way bigger than the four of us or the school. It’s way bigger than food. What’s it about? Wanting love, approval? Wanting mastery over self, over all kinds of appetites?” She yawned again. “Sorry,” she said. “But to tell you the truth, I’ve had some bad experiences trying to deal with this one-on-one. Parents who wouldn’t admit their daughter was starving herself to death because Mama was just as concerned as the kid was that nobody put on weight. I swear, they wouldn’t blink if their daughter became a terrorist, unless she was a fat terrorist.”

  “Okay—so I’ll do a unit in girls’ health,” Edie said. “Not that we haven’t tried that before. We can talk about fitness, different body shapes, fad diets, crazy ways of exercising . . .”

  “I’ll coordinate plans with you,” Geneva said. “I mean we could really talk about what happens to the body chemically, physiologically, when it starves, or binges, or deliberately regurgitates. My classes are coed, however, and this is a ten-to-one girl’s problem. So I’ll have to do the general route. They’re not going to talk as honestly is what I’m trying to say.”

  “My classes aren’t coed, so I’ll work on getting them to talk about body images, about being manipulated,” Edie said.

  “Help yourself to any materials I’ve got,” Rachel said.

  We were collegial, supportive of our own good intentions, but I’m sure not a one of us thought we could make a difference. Maybe the girls would stop leaving evidence of their problem in the school, but that wouldn’t make them feel they were lovable and acceptable. That wouldn’t cure a thing. I nonetheless would do my part. A week or so after the health and science units, I would structure writing or discussion—a debate, perhaps—about what a teen should do if she thought a friend was putting herself into jeopardy. Something like that. And I was going to find a way to interest the newspaper staff in writing articles about body image, about pop culture icons, and what the message being sent was. Maybe we could examine it as a form of propaganda, which I suppose it was, although I wasn’t sure for whom.

  “The bottom line remains that it’s a profoundly deep problem,” Rachel said. “Most of these children need counseling. Not once a week in my office—real, intensive psychotherapy. Maybe their families, too. Sometimes they need a residential program. We aren’t going to cure slow suicide with classroom units and warnings. But you gotta try, right?”

  And with those words we all knew to be true, we left to tilt against this week’s windmills, and I was sure each one of us was saying, the way we do almost every day: Who knows? Maybe this time it’ll work.

  As soon as I approached the staircase, images of Zachary pressed back on me. Whoever administered the push was probably acting on a spur-of-the moment flash of rage and as much as I couldn’t bear the idea that it had been Zachary, as far from his personality as that seemed, I knew that no one was immune from fury.

  Of course, that still left the question of the drug unanswered.

  On the other hand, one mystery had been solved. The ever-annoying question of why Tomas Severin had come to Philly Prep now seemed obvious. He’d either wanted to see his son, or come to see about his son. Maybe he’d meant to say Call Amanda Pepper rather than Calls, then decided to simply drop in. Easy enough to find my room. It was the first at the top of the stairs, and my name was on the board.

  I wished I knew precisely what he’d wanted, whether he thought I could find something out that he couldn’t get directly from his own child.

  My cell phone vibrated against my hip. Since it was used only for business, I was sure it was Penelope Koepple, and I didn’t want to speak with her. I took a deep breath. I thought about something I did want: to be able to pay the mortgage. To help clear Zachary’s name. I took another deep breath and looked at the phone, at the number calling me. Then I needed to take yet another really deep breath, risking hyperventilation.

  “Mom,” I finally said, “this is a business phone. You’re not supposed to use—”

  “What choice do I have? You’re not returning my calls, and anyway, this is business. The business that prints invitations takes a long time to do it, and then there’s the business of whether you will address the envelopes yourself or the business of hiring a calligrapher and in fact, the entire business that you haven’t even chosen a design yet!”

  It wasn’t mean-spiritedness on either side, or stupidity, or anything malevolent. It was a simple failure to communicate, an illustration of what different meanings we give the same words.

  Theoretically, Mackenzie and I were in charge. We made all the decisions. Everyone agreed.

  In actuality, we made suggestions and choices and they were ignored or vetoed. We made plans and were told they really wouldn’t work out. Meanwhile, the bridal banshees made countersuggestions—they called this “helping out”—and we were expected to rubber-stamp their ideas. If we didn’t, then it was patiently explained to us why we were in error.

  We’d long since reached an impasse and at this point, my preferred tactic was the Possum Strategy. Play dead. Do not agree or disagree. Pend.

  I actually tried to listen to my mother, to get into the spirit of invitation urgency while I made my way down the staircase. It didn’t work. The words became aural wallpaper to my own thoughts, and they were banging down these stairs, toward Tomas Severin’s death and Zach Wallenberg’s misery when I realized my mother had paused, either waiting for a response or, as I feared, stunned into silence because I’d just agreed to something. I had no idea what. “I’ll call you later,” I said, and hung up when she bemoaned the fact that I hadn’t chosen bridesmaids yet.

  I wasn’t going to have bridesmaids. I’d told her—and Beth—that, but they had selective hearing problems. I wasn’t going to force my friends to wear ugly matching dresses and dyed shoes. My sister would be my “attendant,” and I found even that concept amusing, as if I were suddenly about to lose my ability to take care of myself in the most basic of ways, but so be it.

  It had always been painfully obvious that my mother was eager to see me married. What I hadn’t understood was how literally she meant that. The act of getting married seemed more important than the meaning of it, than the lifetime following it. And what seemed most important of all was Doing It the Right Way.

  My brain hurt. Too many voices clamored and babbled inside: Zach’s pleas, Rachel’s dark and true pronouncement about the limits of our ability to help, Steinbeck’s wisdom, Penelope Koepple’s haughty pronouncements, and, of course, my mother’s nonstop plans and demands.

  I stopped at the office on my way out as I was supposed to, to check for any late-breaking emergency directives from the headmaster. There were none, but there was a note written in Mrs. Wiggins’s tiny, nervous script, saying that Liddy Moffat wanted to know if anything was happening about the “situation.” I wondered if the euphemism was Liddy’s or Mrs. Wiggins’s.

  “Find everything okay?” Mrs. Wiggins looked anxious, as if worried her note might have been substandard. It took a great deal of energy to make sure Mrs. Wiggins didn’t become overly anxious.

  She’d been chewing something. She usually was, and when she wasn’t, she was sucking on something. She’d confessed to loving sweets, though she didn’t have to tell me. Her body had a feather-pillow consistency without a single angle. She was obviously not the culprit in the great bulimia situation.


  “You understand what she meant by that?” she asked me. “I told Liddy to be more . . . more clear, you know. I was afraid you wouldn’t—”

  “Thanks, but it’s fine. Apparently, we have some girls who are mixed up about how to diet, or control their weight.”

  Her face mottled as I’d seen it do before, her version of blushing. “I hope I’m not speaking out of line,” she finally said, “but I mean it’s odd for a custodian . . . I mean what would a custodian . . .” And then she understood and her eyebrows raised. “Oh, my,” she said. “They want to be thin, is that it?” Her arms went to her chest, as if to protect herself. “Everybody, of course . . . everybody does but . . . ,” she murmured. “Poor dears. Make themselves sick for life.”

  “It’s going to be all right,” I said. “We’re going to help them as best as we can.” At least we’ll try, I silently added.

  Most of the student body had long since taken to the hills, but ragged remnant groups—the student body parts—sat in the park across the street, or milled farther down the block.

  A black sedan moved slowly down the street, then paused in the loading zone as I walked down the steps. Parents still carpooled, even in the center of a city that had fine mass transportation, so even though it was late to pick up a student, there were after-school activities, and parents were also known to keep their children waiting, I’d have ignored the black car had it not—abruptly and much too quickly for a school zone—pulled off again the moment I was on the sidewalk.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Stop!” I raised an arm as if that would make a difference. Teens were oblivious, so a reckless driver was a disaster in waiting. But luck favored the driver in the form of a clear path and the car moved across the intersection. I put my arm down with the retroactive sense that the car had been waiting for me, that somebody wanted to know where I was, and what time I left the school and had paused just long enough to find it out. Why?