Prep: A Novel (30 page)

When I was in college, I always had a phone in my room, and my father called often—I think the pay phone system at Ault had simply struck him as a pain in the ass—and sometimes he didn’t even leave a real message but uttered a single absurd sentence into the answering machine, or recited jokes. (
How do you make a Kleenex dance?
Or, on Halloween,
Lee, why can’t witches have babies?
) My roommates, of course, thought he was very funny. Later, after I graduated from college, he bought a cell phone, and then he called me daily. I always talked to him, even at work, even when I was busy, and I always let him be the one to end the conversation. It was not that I really thought I could redeem myself for that weekend, or for going to Ault to begin with. (How was I supposed to understand, when I applied at the age of thirteen, that you have your whole life to leave your family? Or maybe it was going to Ault that turned me into the kind of person who would always, for reasons of schooling, then work, stay away.) No, it wasn’t that I thought I
could
redeem myself, more that I thought I owed it to him to show I was trying. As for my mother: She never punished me, she never even scolded me. And because of this, because unlike my father she never asked me to pay her back, it made what I owed her unpayable. It was an ocean, or a whole cold planet.

Once when I was visiting my parents’ house, nosing around in my brother Tim’s room, I paused before his bulletin board and noticed a nametag pinned up there, a stiff cream-colored rectangle with a thick red ribbon affixed to the top and an image of the Ault crest in the left corner.
Timothy John Fiora,
it said, and below that,
brother of Lee,
and after my name, the year I’d graduated. At the time it had been written, that date had been nearly two years in the future; at the point when I stood in my brother’s room examining it, it was more than ten years past, and Tim himself had finished high school and started at the community college. What surprised me was that my brother’s name was not in my mother’s handwriting but in my father’s. Had he grabbed the extra tag when he’d taken them for my mother and himself, I wondered, written Tim’s name (probably he’d made one for Joseph, too), and passed it off to my mother to transport back to Indiana? Or all that Saturday at Ault, had he carried it himself, tucked in the pocket of his khaki blazer, taking care when he sat not to let it bend? And then in the car driving back, had he set it somewhere safe, on the dashboard maybe, or on the seat next to him? They drove straight through, I found out later, and my father drove the whole way. They’d planned to stop around Erie, but my mother fell asleep, and my father decided to keep going. A little after midnight, my mother woke, startled. The engine was off and my father was sitting beside her, cracking his knuckles, gazing out the windshield. “Where are we?” my mother asked.

“We’re home,” my father told her.

6. Townie

JUNIOR WINTER

An ambulance took Sin-Jun to the ER in the early evening, right around when formal dinner started. In fact, when Tig Oltman and Daphne Cook found her—Tig and Daphne were sophomores who lived in Sin-Jun’s dorm—they were on their way to the dining hall. They opened the door of their room in time to see Sin-Jun appear on the threshold opposite theirs and crumple to the floor, mumbling unintelligibly, one arm pressed to her abdomen as if she’d folded up her shirt to carry a bunch of pebbles, or maybe corn kernels, and she was trying to prevent them from spilling.

It was a Wednesday, and after formal dinner there was an all-school lecture—it was by a black woman who was the choreographer of a dance troupe—and Martha and I were about to enter the auditorium when Mrs. Morino, Sin-Jun’s dorm head, stopped us. When I think of the whole incident, the whole rest of the winter even—it was late February then—this is the moment I remember. Martha and I were cheerfully talking about nothing and I was keeping track of Cross Sugarman, who was several feet ahead of us, watching to see where he and his friends sat so Martha and I could sit close by, but not so close that it would occur to him our proximity was intentional. And then Mrs. Morino was approaching us, and I thought maybe she was waving hello—why would she have been waving hello when we were just a few feet apart, when neither Martha nor I had ever had her as a teacher or coach and we therefore hardly knew her?—and I was startled when she stopped in front of us and reached out to take my hands.

“I have some difficult news,” she said.

Dread surged through me. Already I was scrolling back in my mind to identify any recent wrongdoing, and so I felt relief—relief that would soon seem shameful and cold-hearted—when Mrs. Morino said, “Sin-Jun is in the hospital. She took some pills. The doctors had to pump her stomach. And she’s stable now—I’ve just come from seeing her—but she’s still very fragile.”

“Is she sick?” I glanced through the double doorway. Cross had disappeared into the auditorium, nearly everyone was seated, and the lights were dimming. I looked back at Mrs. Morino, surprised she was making us late for the lecture; I didn’t yet understand that I wouldn’t be attending the lecture.

“She took
pills,
” Mrs. Morino said, and still I didn’t get it—I think this had more to do with my specific idea of Sin-Jun than with my general naÏveté, though maybe it was a little of both—and then Martha, who could tell I didn’t get it, said, “On purpose, Lee.”

“I want to drive you over to the hospital,” Mrs. Morino said. “She’s a little woozy, but it would be good for her to see another familiar face.”

Sin-Jun had taken pills
on purpose
? She had tried to kill herself? More than it seemed shocking, the idea seemed impossible. Sin-Jun wasn’t even unhappy; certainly she wasn’t suicidal.

I swallowed. “And Martha is coming, too?”

“Let’s hold off for tonight,” Mrs. Morino said. “I don’t want to overwhelm Sin-Jun. You understand, don’t you, Martha? You can go on in.” Mrs. Morino tilted her head toward the auditorium. “And, Lee, we’ll go this way. My car is right out front.” She started down the hall, and I followed her. As I walked away, I glanced behind me. Martha was still standing outside the auditorium, an expression of bewilderment twisting her features. When our eyes met, she lifted her hand in farewell, and I felt like a mirror of her—waving back, also bewildered.

Over the next decade, the speaker that night, the choreographer, received more and more national attention—the dance troupe focused a lot on political, especially racial, issues—and I regularly came across articles about her in magazines. I never saw her name without feeling slightly sick in just the way I’d felt after I learned Sin-Jun had taken the pills: that distinct brand of disoriented apprehension when you know something bad has happened but you still don’t know all the particulars.

Mrs. Morino drove a navy blue station wagon. Scratch-and-sniff stickers were affixed to the dashboard and dog hair covered the seat. Mrs. Morino taught geometry and Mr. Morino taught American history—I’d never had him as a teacher, either—and they had three children whose names I didn’t know, the oldest of whom looked about six; you’d sometimes see the kids in the dining hall, crying or clutching Cheerios or crawling around on the floor. The radio in Mrs. Morino’s car was tuned to a classical station and the volume was low, audible only when we weren’t speaking. Because it was dark out, I could sense more than see the passing fields and woods.

“Let me ask you,” Mrs. Morino said. “Was Sin-Jun ever depressed when you were roommates?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did she talk about hurting herself?”

“No.”

“Did she get upset about things?”

I tried to remember if I had seen her cry, and a time came back to me, over a grade on an English test. I’d stood by her desk and patted her back, and as I had, I’d caught sight of the grade itself, written in blue at the top of the first page—it was a B minus, which was no worse than most of my grades in English or any other subject. I’d always known, though I’m pretty sure Sin-Jun hadn’t been the one who told me, that the year before she got to Ault she came in first in a national math and science competition in Korea, and that she was the first girl who had ever won.

“She worried about her grades,” I said to Mrs. Morino. “But besides that, no.”

It was true that even when we’d shared a room, Sin-Jun and I had never confided in each other. But when you lived together, you couldn’t
not
know a person: When Sin-Jun awakened in the morning, her black hair stuck up in the back, her face was pale, she couldn’t carry on a conversation for a good fifteen minutes; her favorite snack was those crunchy, spicy dried peas that come in foil packs, and also, anything caramel; she most feared snakes, even pictures of them; and the person she loved best was her sister Eunjee, four years younger, still living with their parents in Seoul. But, I thought, maybe this was only information, not true knowledge. And, of course, in the two years since we’d been roommates, our lives had overlapped less and less. Sophomore year, Sin-Jun had started rooming with Clara O’Hallahan, and I’d started rooming with Martha, and we hadn’t been in the same dorm anymore.

“Have there been any recent changes in Sin-Jun’s life?” Mrs. Morino asked. “Either with her family or here?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Problems with teachers or other students?”

“Wouldn’t Clara know better than I would?” (Was I indicating that I was a bad friend?
Was
I a bad friend?)

“In theory, yes,” Mrs. Morino said. “But Clara’s pretty distraught. She went over in the ambulance, and she’s with Sin-Jun now.”

There didn’t appear to be much else to say. It wasn’t as if we were going to make small talk, and it was clear that I couldn’t answer her questions. As we drove, my mind alternated between consciousness of the foreign experience of riding in Mrs. Morino’s car and speculation about Sin-Jun, especially about Mrs. Morino’s seeming certainty that Sin-Jun had taken too many aspirin (aspirin, apparently, was what she’d taken) on purpose; as far as I could tell, Mrs. Morino had entertained no other possibility. And then, considering this, I’d be distracted by the physical fact of sitting beside Mrs. Morino. Where had she grown up, I wondered, and how old had she been when she’d married Mr. Morino? Based on her appearance and on the ages of her children, I guessed she was in her late thirties. As I calculated, my mind jerked back to Sin-Jun. Had she said or done anything, ever, to indicate the capacity for suicide? Did she just want attention? She had not seemed to, particularly, in the past.

I tried to recall when I’d last seen her, and it was as mundanely foggy as remembering which clothes I’d worn the day before, or what I’d eaten for dinner. At the hospital, we walked into the main entrance, automatic glass doors beneath a brightly lit porte cochere. It was a small hospital, only three stories, and this seemed comforting—surely if Sin-Jun were in serious danger, they’d have whisked her to Boston in a helicopter.

Inside, the light was bright white, reflecting off the white linoleum floor. We signed in at a desk on the first floor and took an elevator to the third floor, then walked through double doors and past a nurses’ station. As soon as we’d opened the doors, a moaning wail had become audible, a kind of crazy wail, and I wondered if we were in the psych ward. And then I thought, so everything Mrs. Morino had said was true. Sin-Jun had attempted suicide, and now she was in the hospital. It wasn’t that I’d suspected Mrs. Morino of lying, more that it seemed so hard to believe anything ever happened, or was happening. The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never
feel
big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, or your arm itches, or what people are saying strikes you as melodramatic or sentimental, and it’s hard not to smirk. You have a sense of what this type of situation should be like—for one thing, all-consuming—and this isn’t it. But then you look back, and it
was
that; it did happen.

Most of the doors were open, and as we passed the rooms, I could hear the canned laughter and loud voices of television. Suddenly, I remembered: the Friday before. That was when I’d last spoken to Sin-Jun. We had walked to lunch together after chemistry, and we’d talked about spring break, which would be in March. She had said she was going to stay with an aunt in San Diego. Nothing stood out from the conversation, not even a glance or an inflection. I wondered if she’d been planning it then, or if taking the pills had been an impulsive decision. And again, I thought, but why? Didn’t she have a perfectly good life? She was not popular, but she had friends—certainly, it was impossible to imagine anyone disliking her. And on top of that, she did well in school. Her English, still, was surprisingly broken, but it was clear she understood other people. And her parents, whom I’d met when we were freshmen, had seemed fine, and even if they weren’t fine, they were so far away. Could that have been it, the distance? Or that she missed her sister? But that didn’t entirely make sense, either; you didn’t take pills because you were homesick.

When we entered the room, Sin-Jun was in bed, and the mattress was raised so she was half-sitting. She was staring ahead with no particular expression on her face, wearing a pale blue hospital gown, and the skin around her mouth was, as Mrs. Morino had warned me, smudged a powdery black from the charcoal the doctors had used to pump her stomach. But she was not the one commanding attention—that was Clara, the source of the wailing I’d heard before. Clara was bawling as openly and recklessly as an infant: Her face was a splotchy pink, and tears were streaming down her face; her nose was dripping; her mouth was open, with strings of spit running between her upper and lower lips; and from her mouth issued a wordless cry, sometimes sustained, sometimes broken into gasping chunks, that was both grotesque and spellbinding. She was seated in a chair on the right side of Sin-Jun’s bed, leaning forward with both her hands pressed against the edge of the mattress, and because the mattress was at least a foot higher than the chair, Clara’s posture resembled that of a supplicant. Sin-Jun appeared to be ignoring her completely.

Over the considerable noise, Mrs. Morino yelled, “Look who I brought!” She set an arm around my shoulders and smiled widely.

“Hi!” I shouted.

Sin-Jun did not look at either of us.

It seemed like maybe I ought to hug her, or maybe not. I stepped forward and set my hand against the mattress by her feet, and at last she looked up. “Hi, Lee.” She sounded tired but not at all emotional—not embarrassed or regretful or apologetic.

“I’m glad to see you,” I called. Sin-Jun hadn’t raised her voice, and I’d been able to hear her fine, but I could not check my own impulse to yell.

Apparently, Mrs. Morino felt the same way. “I’m running back to campus,” she hollered. She was now rubbing Clara’s back. “I need to put the kids to bed. But, Lee and Clara, when Mr. Morino brings me here to stay overnight with Sin-Jun, he’ll take you two home. Okay? Does that sound good?”