Another Life

by Robert Haller

  Besides, what eleven-year-old boy would run away when he’d been promised McDonald’s? Paul brought over the loaded plastic tray and put it on the booth table, then sat down on the opposite bench. “Well, I called the Waids,” he said, “so they know you’re okay.”

  DeShawn looked up from unwrapping his burger. “They mad?”

  Paul shook his head and grabbed a fry and popped it in his mouth. “More relieved, I’d say. I think they really care about you, DeShawn.”

  DeShawn took a bite of his Big Mac and nodded.

  “You don’t really hate them, do you?” Paul had to ask.

  DeShawn, his mouth full, shook his head. When he swallowed, he said, “You still gonna go to New York?”

  “I have to take you back to the Waids.”

  “Yeah, but after?”

  A french fry stopped halfway to Paul’s mouth.

  After? Of course he was going back to New York—why wouldn’t he? But it was late now. By the time he brought DeShawn back to Grover Falls, it would be past midnight. He might as well stay the night. He had a vision of himself getting up the next morning, driving to Nicki’s apartment with a bouquet of flowers in hand, kneeling at her doorstep, begging forgiveness. It was a ridiculous thought, but still, it was funny to imagine her face melting in compassion and grace, her asking him to stay, and himself standing up and nodding. Embracing on the doorstep like at the end of a romantic comedy. He’d find a job somewhere close by—a different sort of job, where he worked with his hands, outside in the weather, his hands growing tough and calloused, his hair growing long. He didn’t know how to do anything, but he could learn. He was a fast learner. He’d take care of Nicki through the pregnancy, bring her takeout after work to satisfy her pregnancy cravings, shovel the snow out of her driveway when winter hit. He’d be at her place so much, he’d practically live there, so it would make sense for him to move in. And when her water broke, he’d be there to drive her to the hospital, one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding hers. He’d be there in the delivery room to see the baby take its first breath.

  Nicki would have to stay home to take care of the baby for a while, wouldn’t she? Working with his hands, Paul would put in overtime at his job to keep them afloat. He imagined coming home after a long day, exhausted but content, to sit with the baby on the sofa, a record playing on the turntable. Something wonderfully dad-like—maybe Springsteen or the Beatles. If things went okay, it would make sense for him and Nicki to get married, just to simplify things. And in a couple of years, when the child was a little older and they’d managed to put away a little money, they could move. Somewhere new. Paul imagined a stone house on top of a hill, surrounded by rolling yellow fields and, beyond them, forests, red and gold in October hues. Somewhere in New England, it must be. They could raise animals. Collecting chicken eggs—a cow, even, grazing in the pasture. On weekends, Paul would take the kids (they would have two now) out on hikes in the woods. They would learn to distinguish birdsongs, one kid scrambling ahead, the other atop his shoulders. A dog barking at their heels.

  But, of course, all that was fantasy—whether fairy tale or horror story, Paul couldn’t say. He barely knew Nicki, and didn’t even know for sure that she was keeping it. And even if she was, what made him think she could ever forgive him for what he had done to her? And what made him think he could get a job with his hands? He barely knew which end of a hammer to hold. And what made him think he’d be happy shoveling snow in January in upstate New York, when he could be drinking beer on a beach in California? He was going on tour across the country. Big things were going to happen. What was he supposed to do with his guitars if he moved back to Grover Falls? Let them sit in a corner with a blanket over them for the rest of his life? Or should he give them to this kid sitting across from him eating McDonald’s, this kid who wanted to learn guitar more than anything? What should I do, God? No—what should I do, April? In the note, April said she had made a mistake, that she thought he should give DeShawn guitar lessons. But later, she had also told him to move on with his life. So.

  DeShawn was looking at him strangely. But after?

  Paul Frazier wondered. Maybe mediocrity wasn’t as bad as it was cracked up to be. Maybe a life working a dead-end job, paying child support, seeing his kid on the weekends, could be better than anyone ever let on.

  He let out a breath. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I guess I have a little while to decide.” He bit into another french fry. They were already getting cold.

  LAURA

  I needed to sleep. The sofa was so comfortable, all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and shut my eyes. But all around me, kids were laughing, drinking, talking too loud over the music. Dustin had his arm around me, so I couldn’t rest my head completely against the back of the sofa. Every now and then, he looked at me as if he wanted me to tell him something important or do something, but I didn’t know what and was too tired to care, so I just looked down at my lap.

  I had to keep my eyes shut or focused somewhere close, or else the room started spinning or things started to split apart and become two—faces, bodies, pictures on the wall—and I couldn’t tell which version was real and which was in my head. I was afraid I’d be talking to somebody but actually be looking in the wrong direction, at their hallucinated twin, and they’d think me rude or just crazy. I didn’t know why this idea filled me with so much anxiety, but it did.

  I tried watching a few kids dance slow in the middle of the room. There was Jen, tall and beautiful, swaying in time with a dark-haired boy. They were barely touching, barely even looking at each other, but they moved in perfect synchronicity. It was beautiful. I watched Jen, and she didn’t split apart.

  The song changed to something soft and sad. Jen raised her long, pale arms over her head. “This song is pretty,” I murmured.

  Dustin’s voice was suddenly in my ear. I’d forgotten he was there. “The Magnetic Fields. I prefer the Bright Eyes version myself, though.”

  Boys were always spoiling songs by naming them. Boys were always promising you a better version. “I didn’t ask you,” I said.

  “Hey, calm down, kid.” His laugh was fake and stupid. He squeezed my arm too tightly. I needed to sleep, but I didn’t want to rest my head against Dustin. His hand was still on my arm. The room was beginning to spin. I tried to stand up.

  “Whoa, where are you going?” he asked, holding my arm. I looked around. The room had gotten darker, and most of the kids were gone. The ones who were still there were locked in each other’s arms, kissing. I realized that was what Dustin expected us to do.

  “Let go of me,” I said, jerking my arm away and hearing myself slur.

  “Buffy, calm down. Come sit with me.” He tried to pull me onto his lap, but I leaned forward and pulled my arm free of his grip.

  For a second, he looked angry. I saw a face not too different from Martin’s when I had touched him. I had a flash of clear thinking: this idiot would believe anything I said—I just had to smile prettily at him. I smiled and laid my hand on his shoulder. “I’m just going to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.” I let my hand reach up and touch his cheek for a moment, for good measure.

  Then I stumbled through the room, past the bodies locked together on the couches and exchanging saliva, past boys leaning against the wall, holding bottles of beer and leering, past the few couples still standing in the middle of the room, dancing slowly to the music, looking like true lovers.

  I found the stairwell and began to climb up, up, holding on to the railing for balance. It seemed as if the stairs never ended. My head hurt. I could barely keep my eyes open. I wondered suddenly where Jordan had gone. I wanted to apologize to her, tell her I didn’t hate her for tipping over the boat that day back in July, that I was happy for her and Bethany and wanted to be friends again.

  On the second floor, the first room I tried had a bed, but two bodies were in it
, writhing under the sheets. I shut the door, ignoring their annoyed shouts, and tried the next room. This time, the bed was empty. I stood for a moment just looking at it, relieved. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Then I heard Dustin’s voice.

  “Buffy, where’d you go?”

  I shut the door and looked for a lock.

  The knob began to turn. “Buffy?”

  I slammed my body against the door and leaned all my weight into it. “Leave me alone,” I said.

  “Buffy, open the door. I need to show you something.”

  The door began to open, and I pressed harder, digging in my feet. At the same time, I felt around with my hands for the lock. I had the horrible fear that there wouldn’t be one and eventually his weight and strength would win out over mine. Then my hands closed around a sliding bolt, and I latched the door shut.

  “Come on!” Dustin sounded furious.

  “You’ll wake up the neighbors,” I said in a loud voice.

  With the boy still calling out my fake name and pounding on the door, I stumbled over to the bed, so spacious and cool and inviting. If I could just close my eyes for a moment, I thought, that moment would stretch on and on, forever. Suddenly, a conversation I had online with Martin at the beginning of summer came to me from far away. We’d been talking about death. I was afraid, but Martin told me it was okay because it would feel like nothing, be nothing. Now, though, that idea wasn’t comforting; it was terrifying. What if I closed my eyes and never woke up? I didn’t want to sleep, but I was so, so tired.

  My head sank into the pillow. I rolled onto my stomach. Far, far away, the boy was still pounding on the door. What if the lock should break? What if he came charging in and tried to touch me? What if I fell asleep and never woke up? What if … what if … what if … Something was pressing against my thigh, and I rolled over again and pulled the thing out of my pocket. It was my phone. I looked at it in amazement. I’d forgotten it was even there. Then I turned it over and realized someone was calling me—the sound was off—and when I saw who it was, I felt relief wash over me like a flood. I answered the call.

  “Mom?”

  On an early September Sunday morning in Albany, New York, the Johnsons were going to church. There were five of them—Mark and Lisa and three kids—and only one bathroom, so a Sunday morning was fraught with hassle and resentment. Mark complained that Lisa spent too much time on her hair with the bathroom door locked. Lisa shot back that if Mark would ever help with the kids’ breakfast, she would have been done with her hair an hour ago. The kids had their own squabbles and feuds, most of which they saw fit to inform their parents of. By the time they emerged—all scrubbed and starched and shined—from the house and got into the car, everyone had resolved their various skirmishes or, at least, tamped them down so they didn’t show until they began again the next Sunday morning.

  The Grahams were going to church, too—even Chrissy, although she didn’t want to. It was part of the deal she had made with her mother and new stepfather: she could move back in, but she had to quit using and she had to come to church. Since she wasn’t entirely complying with the former condition, she felt that the least she could do was submit to the latter without complaining, though that didn’t mean she had to look happy about it.

  Greg Felix didn’t like going to church, either, so he didn’t. But his wife did. It saddened Mary Felix to no end that her husband had slowly but surely lost his once-vibrant faith, and she didn’t shy away from telling him so. And no matter how many times Greg replied that he hadn’t lost anything—he still believed in God, he just liked to sleep in and relax at home on the only day of the week he could—Mary wasn’t convinced.

  On that September Sunday morning in Albany, April Swanson didn’t go to church—she woke up in one. Specifically, at United Believers of Albany, in an empty upstairs classroom, in a sleeping bag on a camp cot. Her daughter was sleeping beside her, her back spooned close against April on the narrow cot. Laura’s hair smelled horrible—a mixture of perfume, cigarette smoke, pot, and who knew what else. But lying there with her head resting on the thin pillow, April breathed in deeply, and it was the most wonderful thing she had ever smelled. Here was her daughter, lying next to her. She could wrap her body in a hug; she could hold her tight; she could squeeze her arm.

  Instead, April sat up and picked up her phone from where it lay on the floor. It was past nine, later than she usually slept, but that still meant they’d gotten only a few hours of sleep last night. By the time Laura had at last answered her phone and told April where she was, by the time April had gotten to the party house, by the time she had taken Laura to the emergency room for the bump on her head, by the time they were discharged from the hospital and they got back to the church, it had been too late to return home to Grover Falls. The easiest thing to do was just camp out in the church for the rest of the night.

  And it was up here, as they lay together on the cot around three in the morning, that Laura told her mother the real story—or, more precisely, the part she had left out until everyone else was gone. Yes, she’d gone to a party, but that was not why she left the church group in the first place. For the first time, April learned about Martin. She learned that her daughter had been posing as a forty-year-old woman online for over a year. She learned that she’d met this man in a restaurant, and she learned what had happened after.

  Hearing all this, any mother had the right to go ballistic. She had a right to lock her daughter up till she was eighteen. She had the right to scream and rage. But April didn’t feel like doing any of that. In fact, she felt a surprising sense of calm. She didn’t even doubt her own parenting skills. Instead, she felt, maybe for the first time since her daughter became a teenager, that Laura was opening up to her, revealing herself. And this only prompted a wave of relief and love for her daughter to wash over April. There was much more to talk about and resolve. She would have to think long and hard about this in the weeks and months to come. But drifting off to sleep together on the cot, it was enough that Laura had told her, and it was enough that she was here beside her, in this empty Sunday-school classroom in Albany.

  April stood up and looked down at herself. In last night’s rush to get down here, of course she hadn’t thought to bring anything, certainly not pajamas. But Laura, who had packed for a night away from home, had let her borrow one of her T-shirts to sleep in. It was blue, and across the front were the words “Sonic Youth,” just above her breasts, and below, four angry-looking kids. April rather liked it. She put back on the same jeans she had worn yesterday, and her sneakers. She dug into her purse for a pen and something to write on.

  Laura, she wrote on a pink sticky note. Went to get us something to eat. don’t go anywhere. Mom. April took the sticky note and stuck it on the screen of her daughter’s cell phone, lying beside her on the bed.

  April went down the stairs and walked down the hall, to the vestibule. The early churchgoers, the ambitious ones who attended Sunday school before the regular service, were filtering in through the open front doors, letting in the bright morning light. Worship music played softly through speakers somewhere above April’s head. In a small room off the atrium, she could see people standing and chatting in groups around a table set up with coffee and juice and bagels. Standing in the middle of the room, she began to notice the curious glances she got as people made their way into the church. Was it the Sonic Youth shirt? Was it the slept-in hair and the un-made-up face? Was it simply that she was new here and they didn’t recognize her? Or had word already spread about the crazy woman whose daughter ran away while attending a pro-life rally? Any one of these possibilities seemed plausible, but whatever the case, no one was rude. After the initial curious looks, they all smiled and said good morning, and April smiled and said good morning back to them, feeling that it really was good.

  Jon Newman came rushing out of the next room with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand. �
��April!” he said. “Great! Pastor Darren was wondering if you were up yet. He wants to say hi. There’s coffee and stuff.”

  Jon looked at her expectantly. Last night, he had, of course, apologized profusely for what happened with Laura. But April had felt something lacking. Every apology had been laced with a subtle denial of responsibility. Sure, technically, losing Laura had been his fault, but really, it wasn’t his fault. “I know I should have confirmed with you, April, about her leaving for dinner. I’m so sorry. But it just didn’t even occur to me that Laura would lie to me like that, you know?” At the time, April had let it go—she had much more pressing matters on her mind—but now, seeing his wide, smiling face, free from any trace of remorse or contrition, she bristled inside. She did her best to let it go. After all, what did it matter? What was one more American boy living life in carefree, blameless denial? Instead, she nodded and pulled out her phone. “I’ll be right there,” she said. Looking at her phone as if at a compass, April turned and walked toward the church’s big, open front doors. She didn’t want to talk to Pastor Darren, who surely wanted to say more than just hi. She was done talking to pastors for a while. Besides, she knew that the coffee would be too weak.

  Outside, the sky was dazzling blue, with not a trace of yesterday’s clouds. She stood on the church’s front steps and blinked and searched her phone for the nearest coffee shop.

  April walked down the street. She was going to buy a cup of coffee for herself, an orange juice for her daughter, and two maple doughnuts. They were going to eat their breakfast up in their room, then they were going to gather Laura’s things and go. No further explanation required. She found, with surprise and relief, that the strange sense of happiness she had felt walking home last night, before all this, had not abandoned her altogether as she had expected it to. Again she felt a new world making itself known, a hidden door cracking open. And again she felt the desire to talk to Paul, and for a moment, she felt a stab of regret—how nice it would be to walk down the street with him now, holding hands, laughing at some dumb joke between them. But the feeling lasted only a moment. She stopped at a crosswalk, waited for the signal, and stepped out into the street.