Another Life

by Robert Haller

  I was watching a part where the potential priests had to go to Miami for some conference and ended up at this beach party where dozens of girls in bikinis flocked around them, offering them beers or martinis. The camera captured the guys’ awkwardness and embarrassment as they politely turned down the drinks and tried to keep their eyes off all that cleavage.

  That was when my mom walked in. “What are you watching, Ben?”

  I quickly grabbed the remote and changed the channel, trying to answer casually. “Nothing, just flipping through.”

  My mom folded her arms across her chest and frowned. “I’m not sure I like the idea of you having a TV in here. That was meant just to be for your games.”

  “I wasn’t even really watching,” I said. “I’m just bored.”

  “Why don’t you go outside?”

  “It’s raining.”

  My mom shook her head. “Not anymore. The sun’s coming out. Go on, you and DeShawn should be outdoors. Soon, you’ll be cooped up in school all day.”

  When we got outside, I saw that my mom was right: the sun had come out, and the clouds were racing away across the sky, as if running from something. DeShawn and I walked wordlessly over to the garage and got out our bikes. By now, it was an unspoken assumption.

  We rode down to the park and met Dylan by the river, where he had leaned his bike against a tree and was standing down by the shore, skipping stones across the water. We joined him. “Jason’s on his way,” Dylan said, and tossed a stone out. It skipped at least eight times before it sank. He was the best at skipping stones, but DeShawn was also getting pretty good now. I was terrible. I had a hard time getting even one skip out of my stone before it sank. So I just stood and watched as Dylan and DeShawn competed for the farthest-skipped stone, every now and then complimenting each other or arguing over whose rock had gone farther.

  We heard Jason’s bike skid to a halt behind us, and before we had even turned around, he was talking. “Oh, my god, guys, wait till you hear this. You’re not even gonna believe me.” He didn’t even lean his bike against a tree. He just let it fall on the ground and ran over the sandy shore next to us.

  “What?” said Dylan, bending down on the ground to find another stone. “Did your dick finally fall off from jerking off too many times?”

  “Ha ha,” said Jason. “This is serious, actually.” But he had wide grin on his face. He looked at me. “Oh, man. This is gonna really kill you, Ben. I’m not even sure you should hear.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Just promise me you won’t have a heart attack or anything.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Just tell us, Jason,” said Dylan.

  “Okay, okay. So just before I left, Pastor Eric came over to our house to talk to my mom. I came downstairs to get a glass of water and heard what they were talking about. They didn’t know I was there.”

  “And?” I said, feeling my heart speed up.

  “And apparently, Bethany … she’s been like, hooking up with that Nola girl.”

  “Hooking up?” Dylan repeated. “What do you mean?”

  “Like hooking up, like … they’re lesbians, I guess.”

  “What?” said Dylan.

  Jason looked at me. “Ben, you’re still standing. Did you hear what I said?”

  I shook my head, pretending to be surprised. “Wow,” I croaked. “Wow, that’s crazy.” I glanced at DeShawn for the first time. He was staring at me hard.

  “Yeah,” Jason was saying, “Pastor Eric seemed really upset. I’ve never heard him sound like that before—like he was about to cry, even. What do you think they’re gonna do to her?”

  “Ground her till she’s eighteen?” said Dylan.

  Jason snorted. “Try for life. I bet they lock her up in her room, only let her come out for meals and the bathroom. It’ll be like in that stupid movie we watched in social studies last year, Nell.”

  “That’s different,” said Dylan. “In that movie, the girl wasn’t socialized at all, ever since she was a baby.”

  “You’d still be pretty weird if your parents locked you up for the rest of your life.”

  “Yeah, but Nell didn’t know anything. She had to learn basic English.”

  “Her parents are really gonna be that mad?” DeShawn asked suddenly.

  Jason looked surprised by the question, for a second, then nodded. “Oh, yeah. I mean, this is like the worst thing she could possibly do to them. I’ll bet they’d be happier if they caught her with drugs, or even pregnant, because at least, that would mean she was doing it with a boy.” His smile faded. “And I guess things aren’t good. I thought I heard Pastor Eric say she was even threatening to, like, kill herself.”

  Nobody said anything for a moment, so I could feel my heart sinking.

  “I wonder how they found out,” said Dylan finally.

  I swallowed. For a second, I wanted to say it: I was the one. It was me. I told your mom, Jason, and she must have gone to Pastor Eric about it even though she’d told me she wasn’t going to. I was the reason Bethany’s life was ruined.

  “Man, that’s sad,” DeShawn said. “I liked Bethany.” Speaking about her in the past tense, as if she was dead.

  “You didn’t really know her, DeShawn,” I said.

  “I knew her,” he said defensively. “She always talked to me at Bible school. She liked me.”

  “That’s just because you’re black and from the city. That’s the only reason people in this town like you.” The words were out of my mouth before I even knew what I was saying. There was a horrible moment of dead silence. DeShawn was looking out at the river. Jason and Dylan were looking at me wide-eyed and openmouthed. Then, without a word, DeShawn turned and walked back up the bank onto the grass, where he got on his bike and rode away.

  “Man, what the hell is wrong with you?” said Jason.

  I didn’t look at him. I began to hunt around for a smooth stone, keeping my eyes on the ground. I heard them get on their bikes and follow DeShawn.

  After a minute of searching, I found the flattest stone I could, held it in my hand for a moment, then flung it out over the water, the way I had seen my friends do so many times. It sank without a single skip.

  I sat down on the damp sand. Although I didn’t think DeShawn would tell my parents, I wondered what they would say if they found out what I’d said. Usually, in my imaginary arguments with my parents—the ones that came before the actual arguments—I could come up with a pretty solid defense. But now I couldn’t think of anything.

  I remembered the day back in the summer, during VBS, when DeShawn argued with Jon Newman over that song “Amazing Grace.” DeShawn had said there was no way he needed grace as much as the man who wrote the song, John Newton, the slave trader. And now I decided DeShawn was right. People like us, modern-day Americans who followed the rules, we’d never done anything even close to as bad as what that guy had done, and we never would. But that didn’t make me feel better. Because it seemed to me that in the world there were really good people, like Michael Keegan, and really bad people, like slave traders and murderers and rapists and pedophiles, and Jesus had come for the really bad people. But what about the people in between? People like me, who would never do anything really horrible—just millions of little things, like being mean to our foster brothers for no reason, or sitting on our asses all day playing video games, or mouthing off to our parents, or just knowing there were people out in the world in trouble and still not giving a shit. I didn’t think we deserved hell, but I didn’t think we deserved heaven, either.

  The sun was now setting over the river, making the sky bleed red. I thought that maybe we didn’t deserve anything, so that’s what we got.

  PAUL

  Paul Frazier didn’t have what it took to kill himself. He’d had the fantasies: a gun to the throat, the c
old metal against his skin; a razor to the wrists, the warm blood vacating his arms and turning the bathwater a deep, dark scarlet. But these were only fantasies. He was jealous of those who could do more than fantasize. Suicide was the definitive life statement, the ultimate mike drop. One single act, and the way you were perceived changed forever. Were Paul to take his own life, he would no longer be a pathetic failure without a job, who lived with his mother, but a tragic artist who died too young. The problem, of course, was that he wouldn’t be around to enjoy this reputation.

  Despite everything, Paul still loved his life. No matter how empty or hopeless it had become, no matter how banal, he just couldn’t bear to part with it. And he hated himself for this. He hated how it so thoroughly undermined the legitimacy of his depression. If his life was really that bad, he’d have no qualms about letting it go. Suicide gave you a way out, and if you didn’t take it, could you really complain about where you were? Deep down, he was just a selfish, frightened kid, clinging to life like a child clinging to a security blanket, desperately and with sweaty palms.

  So, since he couldn’t actually be dead, for the rest of the summer he did the next best thing: he pretended to be. Again, the mornings spent in bed till well after noon, the shades pulled down over the windows. Again, he dodged his mother’s questions and probing looks, her pleas for him to make an appointment with the doctor. He did his best to view his life trajectory as a forgone conclusion, something he had no power or control over. He did his best to block from his thoughts anything that triggered his anxiety: his jobless status, the unopened letters from Sallie Mae that kept coming, sustained reflection on just about every person he had ever cared about. He couldn’t keep thoughts of April at bay, but he did his best to think of her in the past tense, as a person who had once existed but could no longer be attained. She was beyond his reach. This gave his extended fantasies a doomed, tragic mood.

  Nicki’s pregnancy was another matter.

  On the Sunday when Paul returned from the VBS camp, when Tommy told him Nicki was pregnant it had taken him a moment to catch up to the words.

  Paul had stood there confused. Mine? It’s not mine. I didn’t ask for one. I don’t want one. Then rudimentary biology kicked in, and he felt a heavy weight pressing down on his chest. “Where is she?” he asked.

  Five minutes later, Paul was in his car, speeding up the road to Saratoga, where Nicki worked at an Olive Garden. Barreling through the sunny afternoon, he concentrated on breathing as slowly and deeply as he could. The bag of weed Tommy had given him sat in the passenger seat like a dumb, happy-go-lucky companion, not taking his problems the least bit seriously. For a moment, he even considered pulling over to the side of the road and toking up.

  When he reached the Olive Garden, he couldn’t find a parking spot right away. It was Sunday afternoon, a time when many families chose to gorge themselves on their idea of Italian cuisine. Paul drove around the building twice before spotting a couple and their three kids making their way from the restaurant to a white Suburban. He tried to be patient, keeping his hands wrapped around the steering wheel so he wouldn’t honk the horn. But these people were so slow, waddling their way across the parking lot like a herd of landlocked walruses. They had to see him there, waiting for their spot, yet they took their sweet-ass time. He gave his horn two quick beeps. The parents shot him fierce glares without quickening their glacial pace, and he had to wait another minute and a half before the spot was free.

  In the restaurant foyer, he brushed past the line of people waiting to be seated, ignoring their indignant looks. “Can I help you, sir?” someone asked him, but Paul wasn’t listening. He was scanning the restaurant, looking at all the waitresses. It occurred to him that she might not be a waitress—Tommy had said only that she worked here—she might be in the kitchen, for all he knew.

  He spotted her in the corner, waiting on a family at a round table. Jesus Christ. Was it the same family from the parking lot, coming back for more? It was the same family! No, all these middle-American families just looked interchangeable: fat, dumb, and hungry. Nicki smiled widely at them and threw her head back to laugh at something the father had said. She was being a good waitress; she would make a decent tip. “Sir?” somebody said in his ear. Paul turned distractedly to see a towheaded kid with teenage acne still on his face, addressing him uncomfortably. His name tag said Kevin.

  Paul pointed. “I just need to see …”

  Nicki turned her head. She caught Paul’s eye. For a moment her smile faded, then she turned back to the family. In that moment, Paul hated her. She clearly knew what he was here for, yet she was ignoring him. This family’s lunch was more important.

  “Sir, you need to wait to be seated,” Kevin said.

  Paul shrugged him off. “No, I don’t want to eat I just need to—”

  “I think you’d better leave, sir.”

  Was he really about to get kicked out of an Olive Garden? Had his life come to this?

  The next second, Nicki was in his face, eyes flaring. “What are you doing here?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Can’t you see I’m working?”

  “Your brother told me, Nicki,” Paul said.

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Kevin hadn’t left. Paul kept Nicki’s gaze and waited. “Meet me out back in ten minutes,” she said, then walked away toward the kitchen.

  The first thing Nicki did when she came out the back door of the restaurant, into the empty lot where the dumpsters sat, was to pull a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and light up. “You don’t have to say it,” she said, taking a long drag. “I already know smoking’s not good for the baby.”

  Paul had been standing out on the asphalt, baking in the hot sun and the rotting-vegetable smell of the dumpsters. He already felt a little sick, and when Nicki said the word “baby,” he thought for a moment that he might vomit.

  He coughed and cleared his throat. “How long have you known?”

  Nicki thought for a moment. “Since Monday, so a week now, I guess.”

  “Were you planning on telling me?”

  She studied him for a second, holding the cigarette just away from her lips. “I hadn’t decided yet.”

  “Seriously? I have a right to know, Nicki.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Yeah? Okay, so what are you gonna do, now that you have this knowledge that is rightfully yours?”

  Paul hesitated. He had seized eagerly on the idea of Nicki’s not telling him being some horrible injustice, but she had just called his bluff. She knew, even if he wouldn’t admit it, that he would much rather never have found out. He ran his finger and thumb down the length of his nose. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I’m sort of in shock. I thought that night you told me you were on the pill.”

  “I was on the pill.”

  Paul nodded. “Okay.”

  Nicki let out a breath of disbelief and took another drag. “Wow, you don’t believe me. That’s great.”

  “No, I do. It’s just … incredibly bad luck, I guess.”

  “Well, that’s me: Nicki Chambers, the girl with incredibly bad luck.”

  Paul asked the question he’d been waiting to ask ever since Nicki confirmed she was pregnant. “So … have you thought about, you know, taking care of it?”

  Nicki shook her head and chuckled. “Why can’t guys ever say the word? It’s like ‘Voldemort’ or something with you. Abortion—am I going to get an abortion?”

  Paul sighed. “Yeah. Are you?”

  Nicki paused. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  Up until now, Paul had been anxious, but his anxiety had had an escape route, somewhere it was heading. He had fully expected Nicki to tell him yes, she was getting an abortion, and would he go with her to the clinic. Now all escape routes were quickly getting sealed off—a disaster zone inside his head.

  “Nicki
,” he said, keeping his voice calm, “you can’t really be thinking about keeping it.”

  “Last I checked, it was still legal in this country for a woman to keep her baby.”

  “Come on, think seriously about this. You’re not ready to have a kid. You’re not—”

  She cut him off. “Oh, you don’t think I’ve been ‘thinking seriously’ about this?” She tossed her cigarette on the pavement and ground it out. “That’s all I’ve been doing for the past seven days. And you don’t fucking know me, Paul, so don’t tell me what I am and am not ready for. I’ve had an abortion before. Did you know that? I was sixteen, and my boyfriend convinced me not to tell anyone and brought me to the clinic. Two weeks later, he dumped me—said I was getting too emotional. I don’t know if I want to do that again.”

  “It would be different this time,” Paul said quickly, “I would—”

  “You’d what, Paul?” Nicki snapped. “Hold my hand? Tell me everything’s gonna be okay? You don’t know what it’s like, and you never will.”

  “Having a baby is a lot to go through, too.”

  “Oh, jeez, I didn’t know that!”

  Paul took a deep breath and looked up at a clean slate of blue sky.

  “Look, I gotta get back in there,” Nicki said after a moment. “Call me later if you want.” She turned and went back into the restaurant.

  Paul stood in the glaring sun, his breath coming fast and sharp. He knew he should wait, come up with a solid, reasoned argument, and call her later. He had logic on his side—history, statistics. He could create a PowerPoint, go through all the reasons with her, slide by slide. Use visual effects. But the prospect of driving back home with this lump in his chest, and sitting in his bedroom, his breath coming so heavy he couldn’t even smoke the pot Tommy gave him, the idea of finally calling her, and her still unwilling to listen to reason—it was all too much to handle. Everything was narrowing to a pinpoint. He had to do something. Now.

  So he charged through the doors, into the hot, stuffy kitchen. The clatter of dishes, fog from running water, people calling to each other. Before anyone even noticed him, he was already through another set of doors, back into the dining area. People eating their pasta and ziti and lasagna without a care. Sheryl Crow on the speakers, soaking up the sun, telling him to lighten up. His eyes scanned the room. Nicki was at a booth near the windows, asking an elderly couple if they were enjoying their meal.