"The Whole World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Winslow Emily)

CHAPTER 3

I’m surprised Gretchen let me leave the house. She was pretty upset by what I’d said.

I walked up Grange Road, turned left onto Adams and then straight to the Coton Footpath. It took me over the rush hour M11, still full at eight p.m., then past fields to a cheap little playground: a slide, a spinning thing, and two swings. I pumped with my legs, back and forth, higher and higher. The air was misty but it wasn’t actively showering. It was dark.

Before Jeremy and I had gone all the way, we used to make out in a park like this one.

Usually we came to the park together, but sometimes we met there. Once, I got there first and sat on a swing. He came just a little later, but for a few minutes watched me from a distance. He told me later that he liked to just look at me. And that my skirt blew up above my knees when I went up, and that my legs were the longest and prettiest he’d ever seen. I was, he said, the prettiest girl in school, which at the time had staggered me as an impossibly enormous compliment. It had made me the prettiest girl in the world.

I waited for him now. He might step out from behind a tree any moment.

He sat on the seat next to me. I said, “Hi.” He started to swing too, but we weren’t quite in sync. So it was hard for me to be sure it was him. He was behind me, then blurring past, then it was the back of his head. Over and over again. I kept trying to change my pace, to widen or shrink my arc so as to catch him. He stayed out of range. I couldn’t look him in the face. Perhaps this was a purposeful kindness. Perhaps this wasn’t five years ago, and was instead three or two or less. Perhaps his face wasn’t whole anymore, and he was sparing me from seeing it. He was a gentleman that way.

I stopped trying to catch up with his swing and just enjoyed his company. “Jeremy,” I said. “Do you like England?”

I didn’t expect him to answer. I knew he wasn’t really there.

Jeremy had blond hair. It’d been lighter than mine, except when I caught up in the summer. He was nice, a good swimmer, funny.

My father stormed in on us once while we were in the living room playing cards. “Polly,” he said seriously, clearly holding something back, “I need to talk to you.” Jeremy offered to excuse himself; Dad had been obviously ready to blow up about something. “No, son…” Dad said, seemingly conversational. “You need to stay.”

We’d looked at each other, Jeremy and I, feeling the hook pierce our gaping mouths. It was obvious what this was going to be about.

He’d found a cache of condoms in my room. He held up a sample.

I tried the offensive. “What were you doing in my room?” But he just shook his head. He wasn’t going to be derailed.

I tried again. “Okay. So what? You can see we’re being responsible.” At “we,” Dad’s head swung to Jeremy, who shrank a little.

“I care very much about your daughter, sir,” he said, as steadily as one can. It felt like a script, even though it was true.

“Do you?” Dad said, nodding to himself. “Okay, okay. You care. That’s nice.” He paced.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked, because he was kind of freaking me out.

“She’s out. She doesn’t know yet.”

My face gave it away. He put the condom into his pocket. “I see,” he said. I had told Mom months before.

He made Jeremy leave, then yelled at me. He told me I lived under his roof. It was all standard, as I understand these things. Dad seemed pretty okay afterward, like he’d got out what he needed to.

Jeremy and I became careful. We didn’t do anything for weeks. I stayed in most evenings too, to show Dad. The condoms were gone and I didn’t buy new ones; I didn’t want the pharmacist or one of the supermarket cashiers to maybe tell him something and set him off. But it wasn’t just me being good. Dad and I had this truce going on. Dad didn’t say anything when I spoke to Jeremy on the phone sometimes. Once, Dad even handed me the handset and told me who it was.

About a month later, my brother, Will, broke his arm. He and a friend had been horsing around on skateboards, his favorite summer activity, which Dad didn’t like. Mom took the minivan to the hospital, where Will’s friend’s mom had taken him. I was out with the yellow car and didn’t know what was going on. That left Dad stranded at the bus stop when he came home from work. It was later revealed at trial that he’d had an ugly confrontation at the mill with his supervisor, about a forklift accident that had been covered up and some structural damage Dad was certain was worse than was being admitted. Dad had been the good guy in that conflict, and risked his job over it. Coming home that day, he’d been indignant and afraid of being fired. He’d been worried about the people who might get hurt if the company didn’t take action. He was worried that my brother was skateboarding at the parking lot of the vacant strip mall, which he’d told him not to do. He was worried about me and Jeremy. And then there was no one to meet him, which was either fundamentally disrespectful on a day he totally didn’t need that, or evidence of bad news. He was in a panic, or a rage, to get home.

I need to linger here, because if my brother hadn’t broken his arm, Dad probably would have been a hero. He would have followed through with things at work. Maybe he would have gotten fired for it and sued them and gotten the press after them. Or he would have forced them to shape up himself, and maybe no one would have known what he’d done, but he wouldn’t have minded that. My dad was a good person and, if Will hadn’t broken his arm, would still be one.

Because Will broke his arm, Dad had to walk home. The walk from the bus wasn’t too long, but it was a drizzly day. If Mom had picked him up, she would have driven the long way around, down Campbell Street, because she didn’t like the left turn onto Warwick. In a car it doesn’t really matter if you go the little-bit-longer way. But Dad was walking, and turned onto Warwick no problem, and then right onto Minerva, and then left onto Cowper. This was the more direct way. As he was walking he imagined all the things that could have made Mom miss picking him up. They involved hospitals, police, or fire trucks. He was really worried, and, just underneath all that, suspicious that there hadn’t been an emergency after all, and that no one really cared how hard he worked or what he’d done that day.

When he turned the corner from Cowper onto Lang, he saw our yellow car parked in the driveway. This is where his brother, Joe, lived. He wondered if we were all in there; if perhaps Joe had had a heart attack, or Rain had been arrested for shoplifting (he didn’t like Rain). He bounded straight across the lawn rather than detouring the long way up the walk. He could vaguely hear the TV running, but it could have been a lot of people talking. He pushed in the front door, and heard worrying, potentially medical sounds under the TV noise. Was someone having a terrible asthma attack?

I know all of this because “state of mind” figured heavily in his defense.

Just a few steps farther in, he recognized the sounds. He knew what they were and, worse, recognized me. He said later, on the stand, that he knew it was me because I used to breathe just like that when he tickled me when I was a kid: a distinctive kind of breathy whooping.

He didn’t walk through to the TV room, but he called out to make us stop.

We did so immediately. We dressed. When Jeremy turned off the TV, I squeezed my eyes shut. I needed something to dull the full effect of what was about to happen.

“Are you dressed?” Dad boomed from the front room.

“Yes,” I called back. Jeremy shoved the sheet into his backpack and took my hand to go meet him.

Tears slid down my face, but I didn’t cower.

Dad told me to walk myself home. He wanted to drive Jeremy to his house to talk to his parents. Jeremy shrugged. What else could we have done?

Jeremy kissed me on the cheek and said he would call me. I smiled bravely in return, and walked out past Dad without acknowledging him. From the next street I heard the yellow car start up in Uncle Joe’s driveway.

Dad said that when he and Jeremy got into the car, he saw Burger King bags on the floor of the passenger side, and a couple of big bags from a camping store in the back. We had used the car that day to buy a tent from a store out of town; a bunch of us were going to go up into the White Mountains later in August. Jeremy and I might have otherwise met at Uncle Joe’s on foot, and Dad would never have known we were there. But we’d had the car and, after getting a tent and a small grill, had stopped at Burger King on the way to Uncle Joe’s. When the lawyer prompted him, Dad described everything from this point onward-Burger King bags, camping stuff-in emotionless detail. He gave everything equal weight, to dull it, I guess. To flatten it all out.

When I got home no one was there, and I’d given Dad my key ring for the car. I sat outside on the step. I heard it happen, three streets over.

Dad admits that Jeremy didn’t say anything during the ride, which made it difficult for Dad’s lawyer to prove provocation in the moment. Dad says he doesn’t know why he did it, he just felt, compellingly, that it needed to be done. He makes it clear that this feeling wasn’t rational, and it isn’t one he retains. In fact, he says, as soon as it was over he recognized it for the horror it was. But as he did it, he said, it was as unthinking as a routine. You don’t put on your tie in the morning because you want to, he said. You do it because that’s what you do.

The prosecution had a slow ramp-up to their full description of the act. They had street diagrams and skid marks and experts on that particular engine to indicate where and how quickly Dad had accelerated. Apparently, Jeremy would have briefly seen it coming. Dad drove straight for the oak tree in the Palmers’ yard, no swerving. He had nothing against the Palmers; it was just a big tree near the road.

The defense tried to make it look like an act of suicidal depression, but Dad had aimed the car so the passenger side would impact the tree and the driver side wouldn’t. One could argue that that was luck more than good aim, but Dad admits it was intentional.

Jeremy had been thrown into the windshield. His face got shredded and sprayed blood like a cloudburst. His head was cracked open by the impact, and Dad said he could see Jeremy’s brain. He said it like it was just a detail, the same way he had seen the Burger King bags. Dad said Jeremy had seemed unconscious, but breathed in a rattly way for a while beside him. The coroner says that death was instantaneous, but I believe Dad because he was there.

Dad had had an airbag. He cracked three ribs.

In the trial, there was some haggling over whether Dad knew that the passenger side didn’t have an airbag, whether he knew that his side did, and whether he’d noticed that Jeremy hadn’t put on his seatbelt. He was given seven and a half years, and will likely serve only five.

And all of this happened because Will broke his arm.

I finished high school at home with tutors. I didn’t have too many credits outstanding, so there wasn’t that much to do. The school was nice. They didn’t make me come in for classes, but let me continue to be in the orchestra. I like being surrounded by the swell and flow of all those musical machine bits; I like being one of those bits. I like being part of something that works.

I spent the year after that at home with Mom and Will, planning. I was going to get away, there was no doubt about that. I had to get away, but I wanted to get somewhere good.

I haven’t seen Dad except at the trial. He sent me a present for my last birthday, a beautiful copy of a sixteenth-century planetary model, a pre-Copernican Earth-centered universe, to go with my intended studies. It spins beautifully, representing the best effort of an early scientist, all of whose hard work hinged on an error. I think Dad was admitting that he’d been wrong about a lot of things, fundamentally wrong.

The card was in Dad’s writing, and the model was the kind of detailed, physical, well-engineered item he liked to share. But I think my brother helped him get it-I assume it was he who bought it and wrapped it. He probably helped Dad figure out to choose it in the first place. Why would Will do that? Why would he want to help Dad?

I didn’t try to see Jeremy’s family or attend the funeral. I think they would have flipped. I know that if you pressed them they wouldn’t say they held me responsible, but of course they did. I actually didn’t know his family that well. Jeremy and I had mostly seen each other at school.

The media was kind to me. I was never mentioned except sympathetically. They didn’t draw Dad right, though. They just assumed conservatism was involved. Dad’s actually agnostic and liberal. Who the hell knows what happened in his head?

I was made to go see a counselor; that was part of getting such a sweet deal with school attendance. I actually got a great one. Her name was Laurel Bell. Two nouns, just like that.

She said I didn’t have to say anything, but I did have to stay for the full hour each week, to give myself the chance to say something.

For most of the sessions I just played my cello.

For the last month before I left, I swear to God, we played poker. No kidding. She was awesome. We actually laughed.

When I told all this to Gretchen, she’d said, “What about your mother? How did she deal with all of it?”

And the answer was, I didn’t know. I didn’t think about her.

This is what I think happened here in Cambridge: I think Mom talked with Nick and found out what had passed between us. I think she saw another Jeremy. And I think she was another Dad.

It’s probably not rational to think that. Mom hadn’t been in the car with Dad and Jeremy. She hadn’t freaked about the condoms. But I’m sure there is this orbit around me, this moon-path, that Mom follows as much as Dad ever did. She takes too much of an interest in me. She’s too attached. I keep trying to cut her loose, but my gravity hauls her even across oceans. Some people think that Dad must have been antifeminist or Saint Paul obsessed, but they don’t understand that it wasn’t philosophy steering that car. It was an attachment to me. It’s me.

I walked back to St. Peter’s Terrace in the dark. The dark was nice. I feel safe when no one can see me.

My mother had been recorded on closed-circuit TV talking with Nick at New Square, at ten o’clock on the Wednesday night. That was the night before he was gone. The camera recorded her catching up with him and having a conversation that looked serious and, at the end, confrontational. When they parted, he went on toward the Grafton, chased by her a few minutes later. Mr. Tisch told me that the police actually don’t care about Jeremy. Isn’t that bizarre? They would have arrested her even without the taint of his death.

It also came out that Nick’s room at the Chanders’ had been burgled that night. It’s unclear exactly what’s missing, but the room was a mess and his laptop was nowhere to be found. Mrs. Chander has admitted that they sometimes leave the front windows partly open, because of the uneven winter heating of the town house.

To make it all worse, Nick’s friend Peter, who’d been with Nick that evening, says that Mom had been looking for Nick. Like how she did with Liv.

I’d never even met Peter. Apparently, he’s Nick’s best friend. Which is why it’s incredibly stupid that anyone thinks I was Nick’s girlfriend. I didn’t even know his best friend. Peter’s a grad student too. Liv says he always has a different girlfriend. Even Liv knew him. I know she’s been here a year longer than me, but that’s not the point. Liv knew him.

Nick’s wallet was found in a skip on Trumpington Street. A student says he saw it just lying on the top of the trash. Mom wasn’t anywhere near that part of town yesterday morning, but I guess she could have dropped it anywhere and someone else picked it up. I mean, that’s what the police think.

I’m not sure what I think.

I haven’t asked Mom what happened because I don’t visit jails. I made that decision three years ago and I’ve stuck to it.

Gretchen got pretty mad at me, actually, when I told her I didn’t want to help my mother. She didn’t seem to understand that this isn’t my problem. She took it far too personally. I know she worships her mother and all, but not all of us do.

While she lectured me about my “duty,” she accidentally knocked over a small unlit candle. It split from its brass dish and rolled off the coffee table. Before that moment, I’d never seen her scramble for anything. She thrust herself after it, missing again and again. For the first time she really seemed blind to me.

I tried to avoid the river on the day they dredged it, but little brooklets all over the city lowered with the Cam. The assumption of Nick’s death was everywhere.

An urge to memorialize him blew through the University. The choristers at King’s dedicated a service to him, tactfully aimed toward praying for God’s care for him, whatever his current condition. The voices of those little boys flew up to the ceiling, that elaborate ceiling eighty feet up. I’d not heard boy sopranos before. Their voices lack the weight and ringing of the grown female versions; they have a hollow, airy sound that floats and fills instead of aiming for a target. The effect is truly corporate, rendering the individual voices anonymous. It was difficult to imagine Nick once so small, a skinny little thing inside a cloud of white surplice.

It was difficult to imagine Nick at all, actually. And he’d been gone barely a week.