Another Life

by Robert Haller

  Now, looking at her sleeping beside him on the bed, Paul wished he hadn’t done it. Hopefully, she would understand that it hadn’t meant anything, that it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Nothing meant anything to Paul anymore. Nothing was going to go anywhere. All the same, he couldn’t help admiring her blond hair, falling down in tresses on the pillow and around her face. He had stolen a cigarette from the pack in her bag and smoked it while he watched her sleep. She let out another soft murmur, and this time her eyes opened with a flutter. There was only one moment of sleepy confusion on her face before it bloomed into a smile at the sight of him.

  Paul did his best to smile back. “Good morning.”

  “Hmmm … morning.” She stretched out her arms, winced, and squinted. “What time is it?”

  Paul glanced at the alarm clock sitting on the table beside the bed. “Nearly six.”

  Nicki sat up, blinked and nodded, then motioned for the cigarettes beside the clock on the table. He handed her the pack and the lighter, and after she had taken a few drags she looked at him. “For a rock star, you get up early on a Saturday.”

  Paul snorted. “Maybe that means I’m not a rock star.”

  Nicki jerked her head in challenge. “Well, you’re definitely the closest thing Grover Falls has to one.”

  He shook his head but didn’t say anything. It was too early to talk about this—not that any other time of day would be better.

  Her big blue eyes studied him curiously. “I saw some stuff online, of your band in the city. You guys were good. What happened?”

  Paul tried to keep his voice light. “Oh, you know, the usual bullshit: creative differences, financial troubles, too much drugs and alcohol.”

  “It’s a shame.”

  He nodded. “A tragedy.” He meant it as a joke, but maybe it hadn’t come out that way.

  Nicki’s eyes suddenly brightened. “You should start another band. Here in Grover! Are you looking for any musicians? My little brother plays drums. He’s only eighteen but he’s decent. He would just die to play with you.”

  “Thanks, but I’m sort of enjoying lying low right now.”

  Nicki looked around the room, and the disgust was clear on her face. Paul couldn’t blame her. Dirty clothes were strewn across the floor and sat in mounds along the walls. His guitars (the only two he hadn’t yet sold) were gathering dust in the corner of the room. He decided he would throw a blanket over them later so he wouldn’t have to look at them any longer.

  “Well,” said Nicki, “if you ever decide to come out of retirement, let me know. I’ve got connections.”

  Before Paul could say anything, a voice called from downstairs. “Paul, are you up? Coffee’s ready.”

  He cleared his throat and called back. “Just getting dressed, Mom.”

  “Jesus, have you guys not heard of sleeping in on the weekend?” Nicki asked, lowering her voice.

  “My mom goes out for a jog at five thirty every morning. I’ve just been getting up early lately.”

  Nicki looked at him for a moment. “You don’t sleep much, do you?”

  Paul shook his head. “Not really.”

  “Will your mom mind an extra person for coffee? I’m not complicated; black is fine.”

  “I was actually going to ask if you wouldn’t mind leaving out the window so my mom doesn’t see you.”

  She laughed, then saw the look on Paul’s face and stopped short. “Seriously?”

  “That big maple tree has an overhanging branch that’s easy to grab. I got a lot of use out of it as a teenager.”

  “Paul Frazier, twenty-two years old and still sneaking his one-night stands out his childhood bedroom window.”

  Paul shrugged. One-night stand—she had said it, not he. “Sorry to spoil your image.”

  Nicki looked at him as if trying to decide something. “It’s kind of cute, actually,” she said at last. She gave him a quick peck on the lips, then hopped out of bed and began gathering up her clothes off the floor.

  Watching her slender naked body as she shimmied back into her underwear, then her jeans and shirt, Paul almost wished for a moment that he could tell her to come back to bed and he would bring her coffee and scrambled eggs. But then she was dressed, looking expectantly at him, and he got up and went over to the window and pulled up the shades. The sunlight was dazzling, and he squinted as he opened the window. Nicki looked out at the thick tree branch sitting almost level with the window.

  “I am sorry about this,” Paul said.

  “You owe me,” was all she said. She gave him another kiss—a longer one, one he had to return. Then she climbed out the window with surprising nimbleness, and a few seconds later, she was standing in the backyard. She gave him a goofy salute, then turned and headed around the house and out of sight.

  Paul went into the bathroom. He let the water run in the sink for a moment before he took some in his cupped hands and splashed it on his face. Then he opened the cabinet above the sink and took down two plastic vials. He took a pill out of each and swallowed them, washing them down with a Slurpee cup full of water.

  When he went downstairs into the kitchen, his mom, showered and dressed, her cheeks flushed from her jog, poured him a cup of coffee. “How’d you sleep?” she asked, handing him his mug.

  Paul shrugged. “A few hours at least.”

  “We need to talk to Dr. Schumer about adjusting your medication.”

  He leaned against the counter and yawned. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “I thought I heard you talking to someone earlier, when I got out of the shower.”

  “I had talk radio on,” Paul said, and sipped his coffee. It was a weak alibi—he had never listened to talk radio in his life—but his mother accepted it without comment.

  She took a seat at the table. “So,” she said, staring at him until he met her eyes, “are you ready for your interview?”

  Paul’s chest tightened and his heartbeat quickened. He had almost forgotten. He had a job interview today, although whether you could really call it a “job” was up for debate. And the feeling of dread it inspired in him said less about the position than about his ever-growing anxiety when faced with any structured social interaction.

  A week after moving home Paul had seen a rare now hiring sign at the Starbucks in the local mall and told the barista he was interested. She’d handed him an application and called for the next customer. Looking at the form with its cookie-cutter questions and spaces for him to sum up his life in a few words, Paul had begun to feel sick. He tossed the application in the trash on his way out the door.

  Later, he had decided it was the uniform—that black baseball cap and green apron. He just couldn’t work anywhere that told him how to dress. But the thing was, despite a diploma that would seem to suggest otherwise, Paul realized he wasn’t qualified for any job that trusted you to choose your own clothing every morning. In the paper, he’d come across a classified ad for a construction company looking for carpenters. The rugged, physical nature of the work had appealed to him in an abstract way. He pictured himself tan and glistening, arms corded with muscle, wielding a circular saw. But farther down the ad, the words experience required practically jumped off the page at him, and he threw the paper aside. Nobody had even taught him how to hammer a nail.

  And the longer Paul put off finding a job, the harder it became even to think about. Thoughts of résumés, interviews, and cover letters filled him with anxiety and sent acid rising up from his stomach. He couldn’t face it. But soon he would have to.

  On Monday he had received his first loan statement from Sallie Mae. Two days went by before he got around to opening it, and when he did, it felt like a death threat. The numbers looked positively unreal—the digits just kept coming. He had tossed the piece of paper onto the floor and collapsed on the bed. An hour later, shaken from a fitful half-sleep, he had woken to find h
is mother standing over him. She had news: the person who ran the sound department at her church was moving. New Life was looking for someone to work the sound board for Sunday-morning service, mix the music for the worship band, and handle and take care of all the equipment for the daily vacation Bible school that started up in a week. She thought it was the perfect opportunity for him.

  Paul had laughed. She couldn’t be serious. But Sharon had frozen him with a sharp glare. “Now, Paul,” she had said, “I know you think my church is some kind of nuthouse, and I’m a nut, too, now, but come off your high horse for a second. A job is a job. A paycheck is a paycheck. And it’s not the kind of thing where you’d have to submit a résumé and go through five rounds of interviews. I would tell Pastor Eric you’re interested, and he would meet with you to decide if you’re right for the position. Easy-peasy. It’s the kind of work you’re good at, and if you let yourself, you might even enjoy it.”

  As his mother talked, Paul had come up with a hundred lines of dispute to take, but suddenly, he couldn’t think of one. All he could think about were the digits that haunted his dreams only minutes earlier.

  Were it up to him, he probably would have gone on jobless, defaulting on his loans as long as he possibly could. But there was his mom. Sharon tried her best not to put any pressure on him to find work. She was fond of reminding him that the country was in a giant recession. But it didn’t matter—living in her house, eating her food, drinking her coffee, without contributing anything or even working toward anything, made Paul feel like some sort of parasite. The money from selling his instruments and equipment had almost run out, which meant that soon he would have to ask his mom for cash to buy a pack of cigarettes or fund his late-night drives. He needed a job, if only to avoid losing whatever scrap of dignity he had left. So, reluctantly, Paul had agreed: he would at least meet with her pastor.

  But since giving his mom the okay at the beginning of the week, Paul had dealt with the issue the way he dealt with all issues now: by ignoring it. He did his best to forget that he had agreed to talk to his mom’s pastor about getting a job he didn’t want. But now, here was his mother, reminding him, asking whether he was ready.

  “I can’t wait,” he answered.

  APRIL

  April Swanson stood out on the church green, thinking about Florida.

  It happened at the beginning of every summer: her mind began to drift down south, to Melbourne, where her sister lived. Maybe it had something to do with the heat or with the fact that school was over and she was through marking up papers and submitting final grades. But for the past few years, setting up for her church’s vacation Bible school was consistently haunted by visions of the blue-green Atlantic Ocean from Palm Beach, and the feel of thick, wet sand rising between her toes, the smell of the sea breeze, and the sight of her children charging headlong into the surf.

  That’s where you should be right now, whispered a woman in April’s head, who was not quite April, not quite her sister, and not quite her mother, but some strange combination of all three: Florida. Relaxing. Taking a vacation. Not spending your Saturday standing on your church’s lawn organizing a program you don’t even care about anymore. And, as she did whenever this voice sounded in her head, April did her best to ignore it, even though she couldn’t say she completely disagreed.

  She had been heading up her church’s vacation Bible school since President Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky thing. She remembered because, while everybody else had been talking about obstruction of justice and private versus public morality and whether a blow job really counted as sex, April had been thinking about ways to make the Ark of the Covenant out of papier-mâché, and whether the story of Samson and Delilah was too mature for ten-year-olds, and whether there was a simple way to explain the concept of the Trinity. She had been twenty-eight years old, a fierce young mother who had just moved to Grover Falls with her husband and two small children. Mortgage on a four-bedroom house in town, the obligatory minivan, new recipes jotted down and attempted. The obvious next step was to settle into her local church, and taking over the VBS had seemed a good way to start. A three-week program every July, open to all kids seven to fourteen—how hard could it be? She didn’t realize what she was getting into until Helen Walters, who had overseen the program for seven years and was stepping down only because her doctor had pretty much ordered her to, had invited her over for a tutorial. Chatting over iced tea on her porch, Helen’s face had been drawn and anxious as she talked about how much the VBS meant to the folks at New Life, how it was widely regarded as the vacation Bible school in the Saratoga area (giving herself most of the credit for this with a practiced subtlety), how unique and exciting and enriching it was in a way no other church could touch. April had left Helen’s house determined not to let anyone down.

  She could finally let out a breath of relief at the end of July, when the feedback started coming in: “My son had such a great time at the VBS this year! He fought tooth and nail not to go, but now he can’t wait till next summer!” “I was amazed when Erin came home with so many verses of scripture memorized, and she’s been reading the Bible on her own ever since. Thanks for keeping the focus where it should be, April!”

  The only thing that threatened to spoil April’s happiness over the universal praise she received was her suspicion that it was a rather pathetic thing to be happy about. Never in her wildest dreams would she have seen herself as the sort of person who could derive so much pleasure and satisfaction from a vacation Bible school. But she couldn’t help it. Since she quit teaching high school math after her daughter was born, it had been four years of dirty diapers and Sesame Street, Cheerios in Ziploc bags, applesauce, laundromats, and exhausted sex. The world of motherhood seemed to have rendered her invisible, a hidden moon stuck in ceaseless orbit. The VBS was the first thing she had done outside its gravitational pull, and she had a done a good job. She had “kept the focus where it should be,” and that made her proud.

  That had been in 1998. In 2001, she was divorced, with full custody of the kids, and a mortgage to pay. She began teaching again—a new era of carting her children off to preschool and kindergarten in the morning before work, balancing the checkbook on her lunch break, lesson planning at the kitchen table well into the night, after her kids had gone to bed. Suddenly, the VBS didn’t seem such a big deal anymore. Still, years had passed and she never quit heading up the program, although her sister, Sarah, had done her best to persuade her.

  Sarah was the assistant director at a large nonprofit in Melbourne that helped at-risk youth graduate from high school and prepare for college. For a long while now, whenever April and the kids came down to visit, Sarah spent half the time trying to get April to move down to Florida permanently and take a job at the program. Sitting on the beach watching their kids play in the ocean in the afternoon, or eating dinner out on the dock as the sun set, Sarah went on and on about how much meaning and satisfaction the job would give April, how great it would be if the kids could live near each other, how it would be so convenient to find Mom a nice little condo down here, too, and how April must be so bored up there out in the country and how she needed a change.

  “Sarah, I’m perfectly happy with my life, trust me,” April would always tell her. “Besides, I’m almost forty—too old to be moving to the other end of the country and starting a new life.”

  “I know you,” Sarah would counter. “You can do anything if you put your mind to it. And as for believing that you’re happy, I have my doubts.”

  April resented this allegation. Shouldn’t she be the best judge whether she was happy? Just because Sarah had a career she loved and had lucked out with a husband who had stuck around, was a good dad, and made killer grilled salmon to boot didn’t give her the authority to measure other people’s happiness. Anyway, it was such an abstract word: happiness—so vague as to be almost meaningless.

  Out on the church lawn, April tried to foc
us on the matter at hand, and looking back down at her notepad, she came to the odd but familiar realization that the matter at hand was absurd. Nevertheless, she studied her list, then looked up at the large green field spreading out until it met the golf course. Today the field was empty, but on Monday it would be filled with brightly colored tents and aswarm with children—running, shouting, laughing, crying children. The VBS had become a monster. The games and activities grew in number and extravagance every year, culminating, at the end of the program, with a weekend camping trip for the older children in the Adirondack Mountains.

  April had initiated this event her third year as supervisor. As a younger woman, she had always looked forward to the trip, giving all these kids a chance to experience the wilderness. She would wake up early and go down to the lake to listen to the call of the loons. But as the program grew, the trip had soon become a logistic and administrative nightmare, and she wondered why she had even started it. The sun beat against the back of April’s neck. She could hear the call of a lone crow. “If we put Zebulun’s tribe on the north end of the church,” she said after a moment of thinking, “we could still squeeze in Issachar and Levi.”

  Lydia Newman, standing beside her, nodded and scribbled something down in her own notebook. “That takes care of all Leah’s tribes. Now we just have Rachel’s and the Maidservant’s.”

  Five years ago, April had had the bright idea of dividing all the kids in the VBS into twelve different teams, or “tribes”: the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Each tribe got its own tent and team leaders, and all the tribes competed in games and contests throughout the summer, collectively earning points. The tribe with the most points at the end of the program was declared King of Israel—April didn’t mind admitting she had gotten the idea while watching one of the Harry Potter movies with her kids. “Ten points to Gryffindor!”

  When she first came up with the idea for the tribes, April had hoped it would promote friendly competition and a sense of unity, but it had grown into its own sort of monster. Loyalty to your tribe was a must, and hostility toward other tribes could be at once petty and extreme. Rivalries flourished; treaties were made and broken; resentments festered. This summer, April was trying to temper some of the contention by moving the tribes’ locations, as a way of keeping tabs on the factions. She hoped she was cooling the pot rather than stirring it.