Tag: romance

Afterthought

Autumn. Leaves just beginning to fall. The seminar room is filled with counselors, faculty, and caregivers. Marcus stood, along with a few others, mostly men, who, like him, had been among the last to arrive. They leaned with their shoulders against the reluctant gray concrete wall opposite the high windows on the other side of the room.

There were slide presentations, personal stories, some gruesome and some not, role play, Q&A, prompts from the leader (“Perhaps it was someone close to you or even yourself,” was the way she put it) to which many raised their hands (some slowly and some quickly) or nodded, or touched their hand to the shoulder of a person next to them. He had not responded in that fashion, nor was he moved to.

As an afterthought, though, later, during the lunch break, he recalled there had been a student of his, Rodrigo, who’d hanged himself over the door closer arm of his dorm  room and was found the next day. And, of course, there was Ralph who’d refused food and water and died a week later in his bed in St Vincents, and then, too, his own lawyer, Friedman, who’d driven his car into a bridge abutment on the Bronx River Parkway and survived but remembered nothing about it. Yes, there were those.

“Shit!” he said, shaking his head. Where had his mind been?

After the evaluation forms and the chit-chat with other faculty in the hallway and in the parking lot, he got into his car,  put down the pamphlets and notes he had taken and, only then, when he retrieved the key from under the seat, holding it cold and firm in his hand, about to insert it into the ignition, he shuddered… and it came so very clearly to him as if it were, in fact, the present …

He is thirteen…

… kicking his shoes through dry brown leaves along the curb, walking home from the school bus. The late bus. Mrs. Gormley, his homeroom teacher, made him stay after to clean the chalkboard erasers.

Walking behind Francis Romeo. Francis always has to take the late bus home, and he always sits in the back, smoking.

The front door had been left unlocked and wide open.

The house quiet. Dim, behind pulled-down shades. He puts his books on the stairs. No TV on. The door to the baby’s room is closed.

“I’m home. Sorry I’m late. Mrs. Grumbly made me stay after. Don’t tell Dad, and don’t tell Angie, but did you know that Francis smokes?”

No answer.

The hall bathroom door is closed.

“Mom?”

She says something.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

In the kitchen, he pours a glass of milk.

“Mom? I got myself some milk. Ok?”

He knocks once on the bathroom door. “Mom?”

“Leave me alone. I’ll be done in a minute.”

“Is there anything wrong?”

“No. Go away.”

He knocks again. “Do you need anything?”

“Noo-oo-oo,” in a whimpering wavering tone.

He jiggles the doorknob. It is locked.

“Get away from the door.”

“Mom, please, can you open the door?”

“I can’t. Just go away.” Her angry voice.

“Mommy, I can’t go away. I live here. Are you sick? Can I help?

No answer.

He waits… and waits… and then…

“Mommy, if you don’t open the door I’m going to get Angie.”

“Don’t you dare do that!” she screams.  

At that, doorknob turns, the door clicks open.

With his hand pressing against it, he looks in.

His mother is standing at the sink, facing the mirror, dressed in the yellow housedress she was wearing this morning as he left for the bus. Barefoot. Her hair hanging down on either side of her face.

Her glasses folded at the back of the sink, her eyes red-rimmed and wet. Her nose is dripping onto her upper lip.

She is rocking, slowly, side to side.

“Mom, what are you doing? What is wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong,” folding her arms across her chest. “What are you talking about?”

“Mommy, I can see that something is wrong. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Please, Marcus, just go out and leave me alone.” She smoothes her hair back.

Her left hand, the one closest to him, is balled into a fist.

“What’s in your hand?”

“Nothing.”

A bottle of Bayer aspirin lays in the sink. The cap off. The bottle empty.

His knees shake. Heat rises into his head. Tears fill his eyes. He is frightened. So alone.

He reaches forward to take hold of her arms, to turn her toward him. She moves responsively at first and then pulls sharply away.

“Don’t touch me!” she screams. “You can’t stop me. No one can.”

White streaks run from the corners of her mouth.

“Mom, please. ”

He sees how miserable and sad she is. He has never ever seen her like this before.

She swallows hard. Gags.

He backs away.

“Mom,” he pauses, then says no more.

She looks at him.

Then slowly, assuredly, his voice calmer and softer now…

“Ok,” he tells her. “I don’t want to stop you.”

Silence.

“I know I can’t. Believe me. Just let me see how many pills are in your hand.”  

She looks into his eyes.

“Open your hand and let me see how many are there. That way I can tell the police when they get here how many you took.”

She keeps her gaze on him. He takes her closed fist in his hand.

“Please, just open your hand a little to let me see them.”

They watch her fingers uncurl. A cluster of tablets, some moist with her sweat, rests in her palm.

They both look down at them. Counting.

And, holding her hand firmly in his, he suddenly, with his free hand, strikes the bottom of hers with a violent, concussive blow. The pills scatter, hit the mirror, bounce into the sink and into the tub.

She gags and retches, lurching forward grasping for the edge of the sink, losing her grip, she slips back.

Her full weight falls against him, forcing him hard against the wall and the towel bar. He grabs hold her from behind. Together, they slip, drop, and fall as one, hitting the edge of the sink and curling tightly beneath it onto the cold, checkered, green-and-black tile floor.

Adelaide On the Beach

When Sedgwick saw the body on the beach in the morning he resisted believing it was Adelaide, the woman he had been seeing until they had wordlessly drifted apart without, he thought, having made any sort of commitment, save for the unspoken assumption that they’d spend an evening or two together when she was in town, mostly on the weekends, at one of the beach bars along the A1A strip up by Fort Pierce for drinks, slow dances, and sharing their stories over a bowl of peel n’ eat shrimp or maybe the conch fritters which she liked better even though they were greasy and she’d have to take a Zantac later but truly because the lingering smell of shrimp on her fingers kept her from teasing herself with the smell of Sedge on them after he would leave with the sky beginning to lighten over the water in the east through the windows of the condo she rented in the winter months, but before the beachgoers had set up their chairs and umbrellas, save for the brown-skinned men in Panama hats, long sleeve shirts, and their tall fishing rods to catch the blues or whatever was running from the tuna that early in the day and, when Sedge, that day, saw the body, a shudder ran down his spine to behind his knees from the adrenaline or whatever chemical it is that shocks into your veins and your heart and lungs and stomach even before your eyes have adjusted to what you are seeing, like how your brain knows what is coming before the tires screech and the metal crushes you into the exploding airbags and breaks your nose, and he realized then that it was her, with the leathery men and women around her with their tucked-in towels and their heads bent, and she, lying on her stomach with her arms spread out limp and wide and her head turned away from him as if she could not bear to think of him looking at her lying flat on the beach in the black bathing suit she loved and thought she looked stunning in and how he might think then that she’d worn the same bathing suit two days in a row instead of how she washed it each evening and hung it to dry on the railing of the deck of the condo, soaking up the morning sun and the freshness of the sea and, with her hair red and clogged with clumps of brown seaweed, and the drying sand adhering to her back and her thighs in a way that she would feel made her look dissolute and un-ladylike, and as if she wanted him turn and walk back up the beach while the other men and women standing over like mournful Neolithic sarsen Stonehenge pillars created long slow shadows across her body, with one of them pointing toward her as if questioning whether or not to cover her before the police came, and talking in soft funereal tones to spare her from hearing what perhaps only she, if she were alive, would hear, as she always had, as criticism and fault with her, as had her father in the years before he left her mother and herself in the one bedroom apartment in Kissimmee where she had slept on the pullout couch and, even then, at the age of seven, was expected to have washed and dressed herself and made her own breakfast and folded the bed back up into the rank and moldy innards of the couch that had been in the apartment they rented by the month, and hearing, on the first day of every month, the rapping on the door as she picked up the trash and bottles from the kitchen floor and put them in the bin as she had been told to do whenever the landlord came for the rent, peeking in over her shoulder, breathing his rancid breath with his hand on the small of her back in a way that chilled her and made gooseflesh on her arms and she would tell him that he should come back in the evening to see her father who had the money for him, while her father, at that very moment, was laying in his shorts and tee shirt with his arm across her mother, before she dressed and left for work at the nail salon in Orlando six days a week, knowing that the life she had was not the life she wanted nor wanted for her daughter and prayed that when Adelaide was old enough she would leave this tawdry place and its guns and ammo shops and have a life that would bring her a little happiness, a little rest, and a man who would treat her right, like a woman wants to be treated, and which, she told Adelaide, that that life would come to her because she was smart and strong and wily, to which Adelaide would laugh and say that she never wanted to be like Wile E Coyote because he’s the one who always runs off the edge of the cliff or has an anvil falling down on him and maybe he dies or maybe he doesn’t but she didn’t really know because she’d always put her hands over her eyes when she saw that starting to happen and she hoped that it never ever would happen to her, and her mother would grab her up in her soft white arms and hold her as tight as could be and squeeze Adelaide’s breath out of her and say to her, “Adelaide, my baby, that will never happen to you,” and, when Sedge saw her lying there in her black bathing suit in the center of the growing crowd on the early beach with the receding tide, his heart sank and his knees sank, falling to the rough sand, he shielded his eyes in his arms, wanting in desperate hopeful hopelessness for what he had seen to be unseen, undone, and erased from the eternal memory of the universe and feeling, too, that somehow, someway, he had what?…. failed her?…. forsaken?…. her by not caring enough to avert whatever had happened to her, while knowing in the deepest depths of his being that, yes, that was, in truth, what he had done.