by Ellen Datlow
All three of us on the couch in tears, me in the middle with my arms around the shoulders of the two women, as the cops do their best not to transgress their professional code of noninvolvement.
The bell goes again, and the lady cop murmurs to us that she’ll get it.
Moments later she’s leading a small wan figure in by the hand.
Christopher.
Of course, Alice and I are all over him, and for some minutes we completely forget about Marian, still on the couch, still grieving for her husband and son. The lady cop—professional standards be damned—goes to sit beside her, comforting her in the clumsy way strangers have. Soon the lady cop is weeping too. The guy cop doesn’t know what to do with his emotions, just stands there wishing they’d go away.
What happened? we ask Christopher once we have our throats under control. What in the hell happened? Why weren’t you in the car with? …
A guilty look at the couch and Marian, but her face is buried in the blue of the lady cop’s shirt so she can’t hear anything we say.
Something about the Cowardly Lion not being needed in tonight’s rehearsal so, rather than hang around a couple of hours waiting for his lift with Harry and Mr. Charters, Christopher decided—bizarrely, as nine-year-olds can behave—to walk home instead.
All fourteen miles home.
There’s nothing serious in Alice’s scolding of him for being such an idiot, he’s been told not to be out after dark on his own, doesn’t he realize his route must have taken him through some dangerous areas?
Not as dangerous as Dick Charters’s car on the freeway, I don’t say.
It’s a long night. The cops are the first to escape from it, of course, closely followed by Christopher, filled with a brace of comfort sandwiches and some M&Ms ice cream and a mug of cocoa. We decant the rest of the wine into Marian—no question of her going home to an empty house—and then pitch into the liquor cabinet until there’s little sense in her trying to get any further cousins and aunts on the phone. At last we’re able to haul Marian up the stairs to the guest room, which Alice has carefully cleared of anything reminiscent of childhood. Marian is snoring like a flooded drain when we tiptoe away to our own room to see if we can find some sleep ourselves.
It’s a week before we let Christopher back to school, and nearly a month after that before we go to see him be the Cowardly Lion on stage with Dorothy and the rest, including an underrehearsed Tin Man who isn’t Harry Charters.
Waiting outside while the shrieking thespians are changing back into their ordinary clothes, we chat with Bill Slocombe, the drama coach, telling him what a fine performance it was, especially given the circumstances.
We just thank every god in the heavens, says Alice, that our Christopher wasn’t needed for rehearsal that fateful night.
Bill looks at us oddly, puzzled by her meaning.
Her voice falters. The night, she reminds him, when (and the need to euphemize takes her over) you lost your Tin Man.
He says nothing, and later I discover why.
2
The natural state of everything is unpredictability.
Once-widowed Marian and I are in bed on a Sunday morning. We share custody of Christopher with Bill Slocombe and my ex-wife Alice, Chris’s mother, and this is one of our weekends off. When you’ve been married only six months, living together only a few months longer than that, there is nothing else to do on a Sunday morning when you have it to yourselves than stay a long while in bed. Curiously, Marian finds it more of a wrench to see Christopher go off to his other home than I do; he has become her substitute for her son Harry, I think, but I have never dared ask her.
It’s predictable that when parents lose a child they may either be bound closer together or they may be driven apart. It is not predictable that the death of their own child’s friend should drive them apart. Yet something flickered that night between Alice and Bill Slocombe after the Wizard was revealed for the sham he is. Such things happen fairly frequently to all of us, of course, and they make no real difference to the orderly progression of living; but this time it coincided with the start of a veering apart of the hitherto parallel lines which were Alice and myself, and that drift led us to the places where we now are, and both probably the happier for it.
Alice and I have become better friends than we have ever been, and if occasionally nostalgia leads us to stray beyond the borderlines of friendship, well, who’s to know? Not Marian, probably. Not Bill, certainly.
But I’m not thinking about any of that right now because Marian’s relaxing with her head on the crook of my shoulder and there’s sweat on her forehead that I’m in the process of licking off in between drowsy phrases of a meandering conversation concerning the depleted contents of the fridge and whose turn it is to get brunch together. There is nowhere in the world I believe I’d rather be right now, nothing else in the world I’d rather talk about.
So, of course, the phone has to go.
Leave it, I say.
It might be Alice or Bill calling about Christopher, Marian says.
She gets up, wrapping a light robe around herself as if a curve of breast or buttock might be glimpsed through the telephone. I watch, looking forward to the unpeeling of the robe, then let my eyes close.
Distant sounds of Marian’s voice, then it’s rising and not so distant anymore.
And she screams.
I’m beside her by the phone, arm around her waist, chilly in all the wrong places.
She can’t speak anymore. Her mouth is just a cavern, her face one of the crumpled pillows I’ve just left. She holds the phone toward me as it were a furiously fighting rat.
I take it.
Mrs. Harbren. Lives just down the street from Alice and Bill and, this weekend, Christopher. A fire.
We’re in our clothes somehow, and filling the car with the smell of sex as we cross solid lines and run lights on the orange. Then we’re being enfolded into the crowds around a place that stinks of wet ash and misery, and somehow we make ourselves known to a cop so that we pass on through to where the firemen are looking at the steaming remains of their industry. There’s a bit of the kitchen wall still standing, with a window in it that’s like a five-year-old’s grin. A fridge. A cooker. The seventeen-inch monitor Christopher was so pleased with. The three charred bodies are long gone, we’re told as we look unbelieving at the bones of three lives; to judge by where the bodies were found, says a fireman from whom I think I sometimes buy pickles when he’s not being a fireman, all three of them slept through it all and never felt a thing. It was the suffocation to blame, not the flames. The flames reached them later. An electrical short in the basement or the garage … .
Back in the car, we follow the road the three of them took. I can hardly see to drive.
Of course, there’s not much anyone can tell us when we get there, and far less are they yet going to let us see what’s left of Alice and Christopher and Bill. At any other time we’d probably joke about being just redundant thumbs and cope with our feelings of uselessness that way, but as it is there’s nothing we know how to do except cling to each other and wish the world were some other place than this.
And then there’s a doctor in our faces, failing to make us understand what he’s saying. He has a brown face from generic southern Asia, and soft brown eyes like a lover’s.
So at last we follow him to where Christopher’s just beginning to sit up in bed. Christopher has a burn on his bottom that’s going to trouble him for a few days, Doctor Seepersahd tells us, but aside from that he seems to be fine even though the paramedics in the ambulance could find no pulse and thought he was dead, and even though his bedclothes were charred beyond all recognition like Alice and Bill were, and even though his bed dropped through his bedroom floor and then the roof collapsed on top of it. They’ll keep him in overnight, says Doctor Seepersahd, to check for any lung damage there might be consequent upon smoke inhalation, but right at this moment he looks to be fine.
A luck
y escape.
A miracle.
These things happen, Seepersahd assures us, with the kind of smile you reserve for times when all the other news is incomprehensibly dark but the single gleam of light is dazzlingly bright.
Marian has fewer inhibitions. She’ll mourn later for her two friends. I try to imitate her, for her and Christopher’s sake, though it’ll be forever before the pain will subside in the place where Alice used to live.
Christopher is well enough to smile, and to cough out a few hoarse words.
For the moment, that’s all that can be allowed to matter.
3
The first we hear about the summer-school disaster is on the news that night, when somebody we recognize comes up on screen while we’re eating our salads and so we turn off the mute. It’s Gene Sendak, who’s one of the teachers at the school, and he’s letting the paleness of his face do most of the talking for him as he blurts out his horror at how a whitewater expedition could go so disastrously wrong for all concerned. No names because all of the parents haven’t been contacted yet, which means us.
I sort of know what’s going to happen next, but when I say so it doesn’t calm Marian down and I realize it doesn’t really calm me down either. She hits the phone while I pour some scotch for the both of us, being extra careful so that the shaking of my hand doesn’t make the bottle’s neck crack the rims of the cute crystal glasses we got at a yard sale somewhere.
Minutes later we’re in the car, with Marian driving because I had to finish both of the scotches so they wouldn’t go to waste, plus a gulp or two more straight from the bottle when she wasn’t looking. It’s sixty-five miles to Harmony Canyon and she does it in something under an hour, by which time I desperately need to pee. I seize onto the urgent call from my bladder as something to think about because it stops me from having any brain space left over to think about what we’re going to discover.
Yes, sure enough, Christopher had a bad dose of the runs this morning so he stayed behind while the others went out on the boat.
Only Gene Sendak didn’t know that when he was talking to Marian on the phone an hour ago, and he looks as if he’s not terribly happy about knowing it now.
I don’t blame him.
I think Gene Sendak watched with both eyes as Christopher climbed into the boat, and saw Christopher there as the kids waved him good-bye on their way off to the biggest and, as it proved, final adventure of their lives.
At least, or so Gene Sendak must be reassuring himself, he has one less lawsuit to cover his ass against. It must be every educator’s nightmare—having some fatal accident happen to a kid whose parent happens to be a lawyer.
Christopher himself is almost as pale as Gene Sendak, and all the way home in the car he doesn’t have more than half a dozen words for us. Marian more than makes up for the paucity, holding the steering wheel so tight her knuckles show bone, chattering away about relief, about good fortune, and about guardian angels working overtime—most of the words complete shit, of course, but most of the meanings behind them having a core of truth.
Tonight as I tuck Christopher into his bed—something I haven’t done for years, because he’s thirteen coming on fourteen now and I should respect his privacy as a young adult and all, but which seems very necessary tonight—I ask him to tell me what really happened.
His eyes are confused as he looks at me. Just like I said, Dad, he says. I think it was the fried chicken we had last night that did it, but I was in the latrines before dawn and it was the middle of the morning before I dared get too far away from them.
And I believe him because I have no other choice.
From the corridor Marian overhears my questioning him and it opens up a fissure between us.
4
The air’s like chilled white wine up here on the slopes as I wait for Honey and Chris (as he now prefers to be called, the name being, he claims, “more adult”). They were still finishing breakfast when I set off for the ski car, ostensibly to check out the condition of the snow at the top but in fact because I want some time on my own to think. Honey believes we should get married and, while I imagine it perfectly possible that I love her, I’m not so sure I can face being married again. I loved Alice and I loved Marian, and I married them, and, although I still love both of them—hell, I still have the hots for both of them—well, look where it led us. I scattered Alice along the shorefront where she and I spent our honeymoon, and Marian is living with a stockbroker who hits her and/or Chris when the Nasdaq takes a plunge, which is why Chris is here with Honey and me in Switzerland, complicating logistics and emotions alike.
It crosses my mind that in a couple years’ time I might have to worry about leaving him and Honey too much alone together. I’ve seen his glances at her, and how she sometimes gets semiconsciously puzzled about the way she can’t figure out whether to react to him as a child or as an adult.
There’s a little chalet up here where they’ll sell you schnapps to bolster your breakfast, and I’ve already done a little bolstering. It’s not helping me come to any conclusions about the desirability of the marital state, but it’s making the internal argument seem remote from me.
It’s too far away for me to see the ski car at the bottom of its course as more than a little brown dot among slightly larger brown dots that are the buildings of the resort, but I imagine I can watch Honey and Chris boarding, him still somewhat clumsy and overlimbed as boys his age are, her with a few blond strands sticking out like wayward optical fibres no matter how hard she’s tried to get them all tucked neatly away under her woolly hat. Then the car begins its lurching course up toward me. Nearby I can hear the machinery grunting as it hauls its load summitwards.
As soon as the noise of the engine changes its pitch I realize I’ve known all along that it would. The other trippers around me start looking at each other with concern, mouthing imbecilities in several different languages, but I stay absolutely motionless, possessed by the inevitability of the tragedy that will soon start to unfold.
And sure enough it does.
Bad maintenance? Freakish circumstances?
A million lawsuits will determine something everyone else but me can accept as the truth.
Whatever the cause, there’s a sound like a rifle being detonated close to both of my ears at once, and then all the rest of the anxious awaiters are throwing themselves to the ground as the cable whips over our heads.
Why should I bother ducking? I know I’ll be—physically, at least—all right.
So I stand where I was, hands knotted around the rail of the railing in front of me, watching the ski car lurch to one side as if it were throwing out a hand to seek invisible support, then, seemingly in slow motion, topple forward as it begins its inexorable plummet to the rocky snowy slope a thousand feet below, black insects spilling from it as it falls.
Only a few seconds later do we hear the tiny screams, like poppings among the hiss of an old vinyl LP.
Some of us, me among them, ski down to where the wreckage lies.
The other “rescuers” have just bodies and debris to examine, searching hopelessly for fickle signs of life. I have a boy to fetch.
5
Like recidivist alcoholics who, having lost yet another battle with the bottle, decide they might as well opt in future to embrace it as a way of life rather than fight it any further, Marian and I are back together again. No talk of remarriage: we’ve both been down that road too often before. Chris says he approves of the relationship, and I think I believe him, even though perhaps he says it a little too frequently and a little too spontaneously.
We’re comfortably off, of course—more than comfortably. My law practice has flourished over the years, and has now reached the point where I need to do little work there myself, just show up as an appropriately gravitas-endowed figurehead at partners’ meetings or to impress the more moneyed clients. One of the last occasions I actively participated in a suit myself was getting compensation out of Marian’s stoc
kbroker for all the abuse to which he’d subjected her, and I got plenty. Before that, I personally handled the class action for the ski-car tragedy.
Of course, I know the status quo can’t last. Marian poo-poos my apprehensions, so I’ve largely given up talking about them to her, but I spend most of my life just waiting for the axe to fall. I assume that this time it’ll be her that’ll suffer from being around Chris, but it could as well be the girl he’s been going with steady the past year or more, a pretty little thing called Andrea whom I judge to have quite considerably more brains than she deems it fashionable to reveal. He brings her home from college sometimes during the vacations, and Marian and I show how openminded and in-touch we are by letting them share the guest room.
So there’s no surprise for me when I get the phone call during one of my increasingly rare afternoons in the office to inform me that the car I gave Chris for his eighteenth birthday, with Chris at the wheel, has been involved in an inferno on I-80 when a gas truck jackknifed and exploded and twenty-four other vehicles piled into the flames.
No: one surprise.
Marian was in the car as a passenger along with Andrea, so he managed to take both of them out at once.
As I put down the phone I notice that my hand no longer even shakes when I hear news like this.
I go home and wait for Chris to arrive. Somehow I cannot conjure up any interest in what his explanation might be.
6
As a young assistant professor seeking tenure, Chris takes like a duck to water to the traditional academic pastime of screwing the prettier and more impressionable students. I will never know if he is aware of the fact that he’s been infected at some stage of his enthusiastic sexual career with the HIV virus. Eight of the girls contract full-scale AIDS, and before you know it there’s a mini epidemic going on at the college. There are plenty of indications that Chris is the root source of it all, but he’s lucky enough to have a lawyer as a father and I’m able to use a mixture of litigation threats and general obfuscation to make sure no retaliatory measures are ever taken—except, understandably, that his tenure is not granted.