The Banks of Certain Rivers

by Harrison, Jon

  “Come on, I’m not stupid either.”

  This has thrown me. I don’t know what to say. What the hell, I think. It’s time. How do I even begin? I take a long swallow of my water, I ponder it for a moment, and the idea of framing my news with Christopher’s own experience comes to me. This might serve as a good way to bring it up. I take another drink, put down my glass, and rest both my hands flat on the table.

  “Chris, I have a question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Okay, when you and Jill were together….”

  “Dad!” he says, flushing, and I glance to see if any of the other tables have heard him. “Do you think I’m an idiot? We never did anything like that. Jill would have kicked my ass if I ever asked her for pictures like that.”

  “That’s not...that’s not what I’m asking.” Great, Neil. You’re getting off to a great start here. “It’s not what I’m getting at. At all. But, I am happy to hear the news.”

  “God, Dad.” Now Chris looks around to see if anyone has noticed our conversation. “What are you asking me, then?”

  “Okay, so, you and Jill, when you were together. You were close.”

  “We were super close. You know how much I liked her.”

  “And you were….”

  “We were…?”

  I force myself to keep my gaze directed at Chris. “Intimate.”

  My son presses his lips together, and snorts a little like he’s trying to not laugh.

  “What?” I say. “I’m trying to be serious here.”

  “I’m sorry.” He covers his mouth and laughs. “I’m really sorry, Dad. It’s like you’re warming up to give me”—he makes air quotes—“the talk. Do you really need to? Didn’t we cover everything pretty well the last time we had it?” He snickers at me, and I think: This conversation is a complete disaster.

  We did indeed have “The Talk” before. Twice, actually. Once, when he was in the sixth grade, Wendy and I sat Christopher down at the kitchen table and calmly asked him if he knew how babies were made. It was a very clinical discussion then, using words like ova and zygote. The technical aspects of conception were thoroughly covered. Later, having to deal with it all on my own, I knew—when Chris and Jill Swart started spending most of their free time together—that the topic would need to be broached in a more realistic manner. After what I thought was a reasonable courtship, an adequate amount of time for their relationship to have progressed, I left a box of condoms on Christopher’s bed for him to find. A good icebreaker to the subject, I believed. That night when he went back to his room and I braced myself for the questions he’d soon be asking, I was surprised to hear laughter coming from down the hall.

  “You’re a little late on this, Dad,” he called. “My girlfriend is on the pill.”

  “Are you serious?” I coughed. What did this mean? Jill was smart? Slutty? Both? “Does that mean you guys are doing—”

  Chris poked his head back into the living room. “It? No. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Have you ever? Or with anyone else?” Chris shook his head, and my body sagged into the chair with relief.

  “Has she?”

  “I don’t think so, Dad.”

  “Just be smart, okay? It’s a serious thing. Take it seriously when you guys decide it’s time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Be sure you’re ready. Both of you. You don’t need to push it.”

  “We’re taking it slow,” he said. “I really like her.”

  “That’s good, Chris. Be respectful. Keep taking it slow.”

  At the time, I thought it was good advice. Reflecting on it now, I shake my head in amazement at how naive I was in regard to the life of my own son, despite being confronted with the general craziness of teenage life on a daily basis at work. I’m also amazed by how lucky I got with him, even if now he is sitting here snickering at me while he munches on French fries. He is a solid kid, just like Alan says. And knowing this, I draw a breath and open my mouth to tell him what I need to say.

  “Chris, I have to—” My phone starts to buzz in my pocket. I’m certain it will be Alan calling me to pester me, or Lauren, but when I pull the thing out to check the display I see Peggy Mackie’s name, and I stop myself from silencing the call. “Hang on,” I tell Chris, tipping the phone up so he can’t see Mackie’s name on the screen. “I need to take this.” I turn myself away from the table to answer.

  “Neil,” Peggy says, sounding stern. “Are you going to be in tomorrow?”

  “God. Yes. I’ll be in. Can I call you back later, though? I’m kind of—”

  “You’ll be there in the morning?”

  “Just let me know when you need me,” I say, and Peggy ends the call without saying goodbye.

  “Who was that?” Chris asks as I return the phone to my pocket. I shake my head, and try to appear not dejected.

  “Work stuff,” I say. I can’t say anything else. The waiter comes back and asks if everything’s okay. I nod yes, absently, and for the rest of our meal and the whole drive home, I am incapable of saying anything about the situation with Lauren.

  Later, in bed, I find it impossible to get comfortable. I flop about in the dark, and listen to my son on the other side of the house: rustling around in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, laughing with a friend behind his closed bedroom door on a late-night phone call. God, the Mastersons, I’m thinking. How will Jo take it when we tell her? Will Denise be able to get beyond it, somehow? The boyfriend will not be so burdened. That’s always the way. Some kids got in trouble for it two years ago, and the girl’s family ended up moving away. How fair is that? Poor Denise. I can’t think about this now. I need to put it out of my mind.

  Additional texts come from Lauren and Al, and I ignore them. At eleven I sit I in my bed and see light spilling from below Chris’s door across the hallway. I could get up, I should get up, and go talk to him. I could sit at the foot of his bed like I did when he was little boy and tell him everything I need to say. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe, like Alan claims, he’ll be okay with it.

  But I don’t. I can’t, and after some time the light beneath his door goes out.

  Jo Masterson. I haven’t seen her or her husband Frank in months. We seem to run into each other a couple times a year, at the store, at the dentist. Not much is ever said; pleasantries are exchanged and Jo always smiles the same sad smile that makes me wonder if somehow Wendy’s accident affected her more than it did me. I wonder what her expression will be when she gets the news about her daughter. I try not to think about it.

  Now the clock shows ten minutes past midnight. I turn and turn within the sheets to try to make myself comfortable, and when I bring myself to glance at the clock again, it’s nearly one thirty. When later I get up to go to the bathroom, I don’t allow myself to look at the time when I bed back down. I know it would just be too depressing.

  Maybe I should have had that beer.

  I kick off my comforter, I pull it back up. This is hopeless. I rise from my bed and go to the spare room, where I power up my laptop and try to look at the news. Nothing worth reading. I open my gmail and there’s nothing there, but in my school email I discover another fifty or so new spam messages filling my inbox. Most of the subject lines are nonsense, but one appears repeatedly, reading: “TeshCo for the lulz!!!” As I select them for deletion, I find a message with the subject “THIS OKAY?” from the district’s domain, a student’s name that I don’t immediately recognize, and I open it. When I do, I reel back in my chair and cringe. The body of the message says: “U PROBLY LIKE SEX WITH THIS KIDS.” Attached below it is a photograph of three young girls in swimsuits running through a sprinkler. Thankfully, there’s nothing else with it.

  I quickly hit the forward button and address it to the network administrator’s email address, adding, “Cory, what the hell is this??” to the body of the message. After it’s sent, I delete it along with the rest of the spam messages. When they’re gone, I’m surprised to find a reply from Cory
, dated 1:41 am. The message says, simply:

  “I WILL LOOK INTO THIS NEIL K.”

  It’s not like that was the first weird email I’ve received in my school account, so I’m not going to worry about it. I’ll follow up with Cory tomorrow. I check my gmail account one last time before snapping the laptop shut and padding back to my room.

  I lie across the bed on my back, close my eyes, and breathe. There are times in the dark, when I’m spent, when I’m exhausted, when I’m incapable of thinking more coherent thoughts, that I wonder what it would be like to be, just for a moment, inside Wendy’s brain. I know there’s nothing going on—and I mean nothing—at the higher levels: I’ve seen the traces from her scans, and it’s just a tiny scribble indistinguishable from background noise. But deep inside, in her primitive, limbic core, there is something, something that keeps her going.

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  Breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe. Close your eyes and breathe without thinking; repeat, without question, ad infinitum.

  What does that feel like? Does it feel like anything? I keep my eyes closed, and focus on the rush of air in and out of my nose. What would it be like if that was the only thing I could know?

  Breathe in, Breathe out.

  Indefinite function, until all function ceases.

  With my eyes closed, it’s nothing more than static.

  From: xc.coach.kaz@gmail.com

  To:w.kazenzakis@gmail.com

  Sent: September 12, 1:01 am

  Subject:News

  _____________________________

  There is something I need to tell you: I’ve been emotionally and physically involved with one of your mother’s nurses, Lauren Downey, for nearly two years. I’m in love with her, and she’s pregnant. I want to marry her.

  I’m sorry. I needed to tell you this. I hope you understand.

  I need to tell Chris. I am not sure how to do it.

  I’ll always love you, and I’ll always take care of you. Really.

  -Neil

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Just when I feel myself finally drifting off to a deep sort of sleep, my phone buzzes with an incoming call. I blink my eyes into focus enough to accept and see the clock on the screen reads 5:20 am.

  “Uh huh?” I mutter, propping my head up on my phone-holding arm.

  “How did it go?” It’s Alan, and he sounds far too awake for me. And in his question, the events of the previous day—my whole life, really—return to me.

  “It...it didn’t go.”

  “What the hell do you mean it didn’t go? You didn’t tell him?”

  “I couldn’t. I have some other stuff going on. The timing ended up not being right.”

  “The timing is never going to be right,” Alan says. “I am planning to keep bugging you until you do this. Got it?”

  “Fine,” I say, and I terminate the call. I fall back to my pillow and hold the phone to my chest. I will do it when I’m ready. Really. I hold the phone aloft and press the power button to turn the thing off for good. I don’t need to be pestered.

  It’s a chilly, foggy morning, and we need to wipe heavy dew from the windows on Christopher’s car before we can leave. Little is spoken, and I’m grateful for it. Could I tell him right now? It might ruin his day. I will tell him after school. I am making a mental note to myself to absolutely do it after school.

  Chris drops me off at the science wing with a wave, and takes off for the student lot. With my pack and my coffee mug I shuffle to my classroom and let myself absorb the last minutes of eyes-shut quiet at my desk before my first students show up and take their seats.

  “Mr. K. looks tired,” I hear one of the kids whisper, and I manage a wan smile.

  The first chapter in my morning class text is called “Physics and You.” In an effort to show these underclassmen (or upperclass slackers) that the rules governing the physical world do in fact have some bearing on their lives, I like to embrace this opener with gusto, and we spend the morning watching an accompanying video that seems to consist mostly of trippy footage of soccer balls in parabolic flight along with—in an obvious nod to the delinquents found in every classroom—twenty minutes of slow-motion explosions and ballistics tests. I sit at the back of the room in the dark and try to rest my mind.

  “All right,” I say as the end credits go blank and I click the room back into light. The kids seem somewhat more attentive today than they were yesterday; maybe the explosions have perked them up a bit. “Do any of you snowboard?” A smattering of hands show across the room. Eyes blink, adjusting to the brightness. “Question: how rad would snowboarding be if there was no gravity? How fast would you go down the hill if the mass of your body was not attracted to the much greater mass of the earth?” Empty stares. “But if you didn’t have any friction,” I continue, “it might get scary. Friction between the snow and the base of the snowboard provides negative acceleration to keep you from going too fast.” My example doesn’t have much of an effect. “Okay, anybody play the guitar?” More hands, more blinking eyes. “So, when you tune up, say, your low E string, and you pluck that string, if it’s tuned right, it will vibrate a little more than eighty-two times a second.” Brows furrow as they process this. “That’s called the frequency of that string. The frequency is eighty-two hertz. Piano players?” No hands this time; the dedicated piano players in the room are most likely freshman girls too shy to admit it. “Middle C is about two hundred and sixty-one hertz. See? This stuff is all around you. So what I want you to do for me tonight, as we wrap up this chapter, is write one paragraph about how physics affects your life. Doesn’t have to be typed, you can rip a page out of a notebook if you want, just give me a paragraph. Okay? Questions?”

  A shaggy-haired kid by the door raises his hand.

  “How many sentences does it have to be to make a paragraph?” he asks.

  I’d like to reply with: “Are you kidding me?” but I decide instead to be charitable. “Let’s say more than one. Anything else?”

  A wannabe jock’s hand shoots up in the back of the room.

  “Yes?”

  “Why’d you have to be so harsh on Cody Tate?”

  The reactions in the room to this question vary from nervous laughter, gasps of shock, or looks of confusion. I’d put myself in the third group.

  “Who is Cody Tate?” I ask. The name resonates somewhere in my foggy head, but I can’t recall if he’s on any of my current or past rosters. I don’t get an answer, though, because the bell rings and all in the room is abandoned. Peggy Mackie is waiting outside my classroom door, and I nod hello to her as the class rises and begins to file out of the room, and call out: “One paragraph, guys, more than one sentence!” Peggy enters when the last kid has gone. The look on her face is serious.

  “I heard the pictures were pretty bad,” I say.

  “Neil, we need you, right now.”

  I look to the hall for Denise Masterson’s parents, but no one else is out there.

  “In Karen’s office” Peggy says. Karen Harmon is our principal. “Come on.” I follow Peggy down the hall. She’s walking at a good clip.

  “Wendy used to work with Jo Masterson.” I say. “Chris knows about it, he mentioned it last night. So I’m guessing it’s getting around the school this week.” Peggy shakes her head, and we go through the front office back to the principal’s office. This is Karen’s second year at the helm, and by all accounts she’s doing a pretty good job in the post. She’s in there, seated at her conference table, along with the school district’s attorney whose name I can’t remember, and Gracie Adams, the cold and childless president of the school board. The Mastersons are not present, and Peggy makes introductions.

  “Neil, you know Ms. Adams, and this is Stu Lepinski, our attorney.” Stu rises to reach over an open laptop on the table and we shake hands.

  “It’s awful,” I say, taking a seat between Gracie and Karen. “Do Jo and Steve know yet?”
>
  “Neil,” Karen says, looking up from a notepad in front of her. “What happened after school last Friday?”

  “What happened? You mean...” I look around the room. “This isn’t about Denise Masterson?”

  “It’s not,” Karen says softly.

  “Are you asking about…the fight I broke up?” They remain silent. “Or the ride I took in Cassie Jennings’s car? I…I was injured, I needed a ride home, I had Amy Vandekemp come so it wouldn’t seem inappropriate.”

  Peggy stares at my lip, and I touch my fingertips to the tiny scab there. “How did you get injured, Neil?” she asks.

  “I broke up a fight. We were just wrapping up after practice, and these kids in the parking lot started going at it—”

  Stu Lepinski clears his throat. “Would you take a look at this?” he says, spinning his laptop toward me. “Watch this.”

  He leans over and taps the mousepad, and a video begins to play full screen on the display. The footage is shaky, and in it a form runs toward the camera. I see that I am the form, that it’s me running, and I hear my own voice call “Hey!” The screen is a jumble as I come closer, it steadies again, and I watch myself—time expanding like I’m seeing a car accident as it unfolds—I watch myself grab a boy by the shoulders, shake him, and hurl him to the ground. The video cuts abruptly, and now the boy’s face is in close-up as blood runs from a cut over his eye and the bridge of his nose.

  “I had to like, fight him off me,” the boy says in a nasal, pubescent voice, and the video ends.

  “Wait a minute,” I say. I feel, as I say it, like I’m standing behind myself, watching all this unfold over my own shoulder. “That didn’t….” I take a deep breath and look around the room. “It didn’t happen that way. That has to be fake. It didn’t….”

  They all stare at me.