Imagine Me Gone (10 page)

But it didn’t happen. Through the window by the bureau I saw the leaves of the Japanese maple and the roof of the house next door and clouds stretched across the sky. Particulars began to return. Dust in the sunlight. The weave of the carpet. The very things which earlier harbingered trouble by threatening to derail my attention and distract me from the through line of a conversation were now, strangely, signs of mental animation: the registering of color, the sharp delineation of objects against their grounds. I got out of bed. Talking seemed nearly impossible but I started eating again with the family. Margaret was exhausted but still she made sure to cook a meal most every night. I noticed again how oddly beautiful my children were, even amid the moroseness I had imposed on the house. Celia’s black hair shone in the buttery light of the sideboard lamp and her enormous eyes coursed with anger at the stifling fact of me and her mother. And Alec—uncannily already my height, always trying to keep up with his sister, measuring his opinions against the force of hers, guileless yet acting at the same time (perhaps his acting is what makes him guileless). I can’t imagine I was ever that young, not so unguardedly. He looks at me out of the corner of his eye, unsure of who or what I am.

And then there is Michael’s empty chair. He came back with us from Britain, but he couldn’t stand it here. Or maybe he couldn’t stand me. Simon, a friend of his from the comprehensive, said he could go back and live with his family to finish his last year of school, and eventually we consented. Of course it made sense. If I hadn’t created such a wreck of things he wouldn’t have been so miserable. The fact is, his being gone makes it easier. It’s harder for me to look at him than at the other two. When he was little he tripped on the stairs in Battersea and hit his head. It wasn’t a serious injury and Margaret didn’t ring me at the office. But around that time, midmorning, I got a terrible headache, bad enough that I left the building to get some air. Walking in the park, trying to shake it off, I sensed something had happened to him. When I rang Margaret I didn’t mention that I already knew what she had to tell me, because I didn’t want to disturb her.

Michael was quiet and very thoughtful as a boy. There were times when he had the air of a mystic about him, as children sometimes do, as if he were staring calmly into the nature of things and had the wisdom to know there were no words for it. But more often his prescience spun him into worry. Was there enough petrol in the car to get us to his grandmother’s house? Did we have enough time to make the train or would it leave without us? What if the water boiled over when his mother wasn’t watching? What if the policemen didn’t know where to find the criminals? His questions had no end and no answers sufficient to mollify him. I didn’t mind. Then he became old enough to realize his questions were childish and instead of asking them aloud, he turned them inward. We stopped having the conversations where I explained simple things to him. School, which made him so unhappy, took over, and whenever I tried to protect him from it, like speaking to a classmate’s parents about how their child was teasing him, I only made it worse. Now he’s taller than I am, thin as a rail, and he talks as fast as can be, not questions but endless invention, his imagination running out ahead of him, to make sure everything stays in motion, that he doesn’t get stuck.

A few weeks ago, the first night that I ate with Margaret and the children again, Celia kept scrunching her napkin on the table beside her, clenching and unclenching. When I told her to put it on her lap, she shouted at me that she would do what she wanted. Margaret slammed her utensils down and said if we didn’t stop it she would leave the table. But the next night was a little better. Michael wasn’t there to distract his brother and sister with laughter, but still, it was better.

Being up and about again, I started taking these walks. I wake early and bring Kelsey, who runs off the leash once we reach the woods. The cool oxygen of the plants and trees before the sun has dried them feels like a balm to my lungs. I’ve always preferred the woods in America to the woods where I grew up in Hampshire, which I can never help knowing are the hemmed-in exception to towns and villages and farms. New England is the other way around: a series of clearings in a forest. Keep walking north, and the clearings will shrink, until there are none. I don’t meet other people here, and that’s what matters. My mind can rest. Which is when my situation becomes obvious. There is no getting better. There is love I cannot bear, which has kept me from drifting entirely loose. There are the medicines I can take that flood my mind without discrimination, slowing the monster, moving the struggle underwater, where I then must live in the murk. But there is no killing the beast. Since I was a young man, it has hunted me. And it will hunt me until I am dead. The older I become, the closer it gets.

It’s midmorning by the time I cross back over the river and follow the path into the field at the end of our street, which is saturated now in the July heat. The grass is intensely green, the scrub-apple trees by the road past blooming, on into their pure summer verdancy, along with the rhododendron and the lilac, their flowers gone, their leaves fat with sun. The air smells of the fecund soil—the flesh covering the skull of the planet, the muck from which the plants rise, busy in the mindless life of heat. Celia and Alec were drugged with sleep when I left the house, as they always are, and I didn’t want to wake them. In summer, I can’t be sure of their whereabouts, but last night at dinner I paid attention, and got a sense of where they would be today.

Turning before I reach the house, I carry on into the center of the town. It’s quiet. Kids are away at camp or on holiday. The shops have bins and tables of merchandise out on the sidewalk and signs announcing sales. A few skateboarders sit glumly on the bench under the awning of the ice cream store watching the cars move slowly past. Across the street a woman smiles at me and waves enthusiastically and I nod and wave back, though I have no idea who she is. A mother of one of the children’s friends, in all likelihood, someone I’ve met at the school or in a driveway picking up Alec or Celia. I look away and keep walking lest she cross the street and begin speaking to me. In another time, I would have hooked into the aggression of her good cheer and doubled it up until running into her became an event with a momentum of its own. I’ve lived vicariously at times off that birthright of the American upper-middle class—their competitive optimism. It’s what I loved about working in this country.
What are your plans? How’s the project? How’s business?
When I left university in Britain, we didn’t have entrepreneurs. We had managers and industrial relations. Meeting someone at a party led to the circumlocutions designed to tease out where you’d been at school, one’s accent having made one acceptable company in the first place. In America, I flew all over the country talking to people about their wildest ambitions and they were always delighted to see me, even if I could promise them nothing. Calling them back a year or two later, after my partners and I had raised a fund, and telling them I wanted to help them create what they’d been dreaming of was a heady feeling. But that was a lifetime ago.

Back then, in Samoset, we rented a house for three hundred dollars a month. We had a secondhand station wagon, a vegetable garden, enough money that Margaret could stay home. Alec used to gallop up the street to meet me as I was walking back from the bus. He’d take my briefcase and carry it with him across the front lawn and around the house, where Michael and Celia would be playing in the tree fort or in the barn, and they’d come rushing over to push through the back door ahead of me, calling out to their mother that I was home. In the summer, we’d eat outside on a picnic table left by the previous tenants. I’d moved the table over toward the edge of the woods, onto a mossy square of concrete, and from there you looked back across the circular dirt drive to our octagonal house, white clapboard with a black roof and brick chimney. Margaret’s great-great-grandfather had been a carpenter in the town, and it turned out he was the one who had built the place for a Methodist minister. There had been an enthusiasm for the design among members of the Spiritualist movement. Having no right angles, the octagon was said to leave no corners in which evil spirits might become trapped. In the evening, with the windows illuminated, it resembled a squat lighthouse sending its warning in all directions. When the children were full and drowsy and had ceased their play I’d sometimes pretend with them that the house was haunted and tell them stories about the people who had gathered there a hundred years ago to speak with the dead by candlelight. Michael didn’t want to listen, pretending he was too old for ghost stories. Margaret would say, You’ll frighten them before bed, but Alec and Celia would squeal to me, No, no, keep going. I told them how the neighbors would come and join hands in the dark listening for the voices of their departed relatives, who would appear in our very living room and speak of the life of the dead. Alec clung to my side, Celia became very fixed and still, peering into the trees behind us, long after Margaret had cleared the table and Michael had gone off to his room, the three of us there together under the full-laden branches of the oak, surrounded by the hum of crickets. I sensed their tremendous need for me in those moments—for my voice to go on, to carry and protect them from everything that encircled us. And I did protect them. I told them they were safe because their mother’s ancestor had built our house so that no ghosts would ever stay, that all the frightening things that might ever have happened were long in the past and couldn’t possibly reach them now. Then I’d put Alec over my shoulder and take Celia’s hand and walk them into the house and up to their beds.

Walking past the cemetery of the Congregational church, I cross the street into the grocery-store parking lot. It’s barely half full and baking hot. Through the glass door at the rear of the building, I can see the row of three cash registers. And there’s Alec, leaning against the steel rim of one of the narrow black conveyor belts, talking to Doreen, a heavy smoker in her late sixties with a dyed-red bouffant and heavy jowls. Whenever I come into the store she tells me how much everyone loves Alec and she herself is clearly charmed by him, by how polite he is and how well he listens. He has a slightly precious manner for a fourteen-year-old, almost courtly. He asked me last year if he should take metalwork or theater, and I told him he’d meet more interesting people in the theater class. Which may be part of the reason for how he holds himself now, I suppose—the acting he’s been doing. But his formality he gets from his idea of me. He’s the only one born in America, the only one of the three who was excited when we told them we’d be moving to England.

I’ve never watched a child of mine strain to be an adult before. Michael and Celia have done it in private, away from my view, though their mother says I’m the one locked away from them, and I suppose I can’t deny that. But here is Alec now with his chin ever so slightly raised, nodding with judicial solemnity at whatever Doreen is pattering on about, while one foot taps rapidly on the linoleum floor and he holds his hands down at his waist, picking discreetly at his cuticles, his attention fixed on her. Something she says causes his eyes to widen in surprise, and he shakes his head, feigning indignation. And then his hands are out at his sides, he’s leaning forward, gesticulating with great vigor, and Doreen rolls her head back, laughing. Alec smiles, delighted by what he’s just said and the response it’s getting. The young actor with the audience of one. I find it almost repulsive. The overweeningness of it. Is this what I have bequeathed him? Doreen turns back to her register, and starts passing a woman’s groceries down the belt for Alec to bag.

All three of my children have jobs and more or less pay for their own things. Still, I don’t know how much of our situation they understand: that there is only debt. Their mother would never tell them, but she yells it at me at night. And though Celia has given up, Alec sometimes knocks on the living room door and pleads with us to stop fighting, and then the liquid in my skull becomes so heavy I can barely keep my eyes open, wanting so much for it all to go away—the tight air, the words contracting like muscle over bone. Alec pushes the woman’s grocery cart to her Volvo, but it’s only as he’s skating it back across the parking lot that he sees me off to the side and comes to a halt.

Business being slow, they don’t mind him taking his lunch break early. We walk down toward the town hall. I have no destination in mind and he doesn’t ask for one. It’s ordinary for us not to talk when we’re alone together, which isn’t often. He’s become prehensile, stretched up on spindly legs. He could probably bathe more than he does. He’s in that larval stage, the damp, pained shedding of the child’s body. This is what boarding school is for. To store them away during years like this, so they can suffer without the embarrassment of their parents watching. And much good that did you, Margaret would say. He’s fiddling with his fat little Swiss Army knife, picking out each blade and tool, folding them back down again, then fanning them out at different angles.

“I’m hungry,” he says.

We keep going past the Catholic church and the police station and the semi-detached white town houses set back from the road. There are free tables visible through the window of the diner; at least it will be cool inside. I spent a lot of time here last fall with a legal pad drafting letters to investors for what I thought might become a new investment fund. Tradesmen and retirees are the people who frequent the place. Not the young mothers or men on business meetings. The food’s too greasy and the inside not clean enough. The owner, a Latvian fellow who sat with me one afternoon and spoke for two hours about his life in the Soviet navy, waves from the kitchen. The smells from the fryers are unusually heavy. They fill my head and lungs, leaving me slightly nauseous. I notice the dandruff on Alec’s shoulders as he hunches over the laminated menu. He is asking me if I heard his question. The waiter is standing by our table. No, I tell him, what’s your question?