The Sorrow King (3 page)

He resisted the urge to turn and watch her walk the rest of the way down the street, under the lamps where he could see her a little better. That was just his teenage hormones, he figured. Each day was a struggle against the pesky hormones racing through his body, threatening to lift his sex and turn it rigid at the most inopportune times.

Walking with his back to the girl, he wondered why they had both looked away so quickly after spying one another. It seemed like they should have waved or exchanged a knowing nod or struck up a brief conversation. After all, it wasn’t every day he found someone else wandering the streets of Green Heights at two o’clock in the morning.

And who was the girl, anyway? She didn’t look familiar. That must have meant she was either in junior high (which made his restrained ogling seem a little disturbing) or out of school (which made her that much more alluring). Regardless, she took his mind from the other things that haunted him.

Turning the corner, he walked along the north side of the suburb, finishing up his cigarette and looking to his right, where he could see the water tower looming over the park that rested in the middle of the block. The water tower was immense, one of those that was almost as fat at the bottom as it was at the top but not quite. It reminded him of a more angular chef’s hat.

He tossed his cigarette into the street, stealing another glance up at the clouds, thinking about the girl he had just seen and looking forward to crawling back into his warm bed.

The walks always worked.

Lying in bed that night, Steven was totally unaware of the world that was ready to open up for him.

The dream. The clouds. The names of the dead. That was just the beginning.

Three

Good Morning, Death

The pupils of Gethsemane High (or Get High, as some of the wittier stoners were fond of calling it) learned of Jeremy Liven’s death over the morning announcements. The principal, Mr. McFee, unable to shift between emotions with the alacrity of an evening newscaster, came on with the announcement about Jeremy’s death and signed off with a moment of silence. Nothing about the upcoming battles of the baseball or softball teams. Nothing about the lunch menu that day. Nothing about any policy changes or the usual timewasting nonsense that filled the corner loudspeakers in each room.

Steven didn’t know what to think about the announcement.

McFee didn’t say the boy committed suicide but Steven felt that had to be the case. There was a moment, hearing Jeremy’s name, when his heart leapt up into his throat. He found something intrinsically terrifying about writing this boy’s name in his notebook before knowing he was dead, lumping him in with the others who were
known
to be dead. Yet, there was something about it that was not shocking at all. Steven would have been more shocked if it had been someone else’s name. Somewhere inside, he had known what writing that name meant.

Surrounded by stony silence, he sat in Ms. Hennessy’s first period English class. Jeremy had been in middle school and this was a senior class so it wasn’t like anyone there actually
knew
Jeremy. Still . . . there was plenty about it to make them collectively uneasy. The fourth suicide of the school year.

Steven wondered how many thirteen-year-olds committed suicide. If a boy that age had that many problems, weren’t those problems usually obliterated by youthful naïveté?

The predominate feeling in the small class of twenty was that of being
hunted
. Steven could sense a tangible shift.

If something could cause a thirteen-year-old boy to kill himself, then how safe were any of them?

The question did not seem to be, “Would one of them be next?” No, the question on the students’ minds was, “
Which one
of them would be next?”

So many questions were raised by that fourth suicide. Actually, they weren’t so much raised as strengthened, given a new voice.

Could suicide be some kind of epidemic?

Was it possible to catch the desire to kill yourself?

Who was to blame?

Who was the enemy and who was the victim?

What did it
feel
like?

Would you get
sick
?

Would you
know
you were going to kill yourself?

Ms. Hennessy cleared her throat, bringing the class out of its grim mass reflection.

Steven guessed Ms. Hennessy to be in her mid-thirties. She was attractive in a dark older woman sort of way. While he could imagine many of the teachers as half-witted, giggling cheerleaders in high school, Ms. Hennessy seemed fiercely intelligent. As far as he knew she had never been married. She dressed more fashionably than was usually seen in Gethsemane—especially amongst the faculty. She wore her long dark hair pulled back from her forehead, clipped with a large wooden clasp. Her dark brown eyes made her look perpetually sad. Normally, a bit of shadow beneath them made him imagine she had been awake all night, reading or brooding. This morning, he thought it looked like she had been crying all night. Yes, there was the usual smudgy shadow beneath the eyes but her lids were rimmed with red, too.

She came around to the front of her desk, holding her black coffee mug in her bony right hand, the knuckles red and chapped-looking, her left arm crossed under her small breasts, the hand buried beneath the other arm. The desk dug in just below her buttocks as she leaned against it.

“
I think we need to talk about something other than Shakespeare today.”

She sat the mug down on the desk with a dull clunk that resonated amidst the heavy silence of the room. Lowering her head, she raised a hand to wipe away a tear. She sniffed, making a snotty sound. Steven half-expected her to leave the room.

“
Is something going on that I don’t know about?”

No one answered her.

“
That’s four . . .
Four
suicides this year in a very small town.” She took a shaky breath. “Let’s start with an easier question. Do these suicides seem odd to anyone else?”

Many students nodded, their eyes open wide. There was a bracing air of hesitation, like they might have to think instead of taking their turn in the game of education. The morning had suddenly turned spooky.

“
And when odd things happen, one cannot help but think maybe there’s a reason. Something to unify these relatively bizarre events.”

A dimwitted jock named Aaron Something-or-the-other raised his hand in the second row.

“
Let’s not bother with raising our hands today, Aaron. If you have something to say, then say it. This is a free forum. Nothing you say has to leave this room.”

“
Well,” Aaron stammered, “it’s just . . . how do you know that it was suicide? They didn’t say it was suicide.”

Ms. Hennessy looked at him like he was stupid. It was a withering look and Steven was glad he was not the recipient. “The ambulance pulled him off a wrought-iron fence that surrounded his house this morning. He had no other marks. Nothing that indicated any kind of struggle. He threw himself from his second-story window.”

“
Oh.” Aaron fell quiet.

“
What would make a thirteen-year-old boy kill himself?”

“
Maybe he was having a hard time at home?” Elizabeth Towson said from just in front of Steven. He found that to be a relatively pat kind of answer, the kind supplied by watching too many heartfelt talk shows.

“
Does that warrant killing himself?” She picked up her mug, took a slow sip from it and said, “Because if it does, then I’m
sure
he’s not the only one. Do any of you feel like you’re having such a hard time at home that you would kill yourself just to get out of it?”

More silence. It seemed ghastly, a little more unfathomable, the way she said it.

“
Some people are just wired up wrong,” Elizabeth supplied another fairly obvious answer. Steven wanted to tell her to shut the fuck up.
No
, he thought.
At least she has the guts to try and say
something.

“
So you’re saying some people are born to commit suicide?”

“
Well, not really
that
 . . . It’s just that some people are more depressed than others, I guess.”

“
Then how do you know you’re not one of them? How do you know you’re not going to kill yourself next?”

“
I’ve never even thought of doing that. I couldn’t.”

“
Why couldn’t you?”

“
Because I have friends. I like my life. I look forward to my future.”

“
And you don’t think Jeremy had any of those things to look forward to? His mother is a professor and his father is a doctor. Do you think that boy did not have a bright future?”

“
But money isn’t everything. Rich people get depressed too.”

“
But why . . . why wouldn’t he try
talking
to anyone first? Why wouldn’t a doctor and a
psychology
professor realize the warning signs?”

“
Maybe he didn’t have anyone to talk to? Maybe his parents weren’t home enough to notice?”

“
And how sad is that? I guess that’s the point I’m really trying to make. What kind of society are we living in if a child kills himself because he doesn’t understand what is going on around him and doesn’t have a single soul to talk to? If there’s no one who can even
tell
that a person is suicidal. I mean, that’s a pretty extreme mental state.”

“
I think we’re intolerant,” Patrick Sedgewick said from Steven’s left. “It seems like half of ‘society’,” (and here he actually raised both hands and did the index-middle-finger bending motion to denote the quote marks), “understands things like depression and the medication available and the other half thinks all that is just a myth. I would say that, in a place like this, the latter is more predominant.”

“
So, you think maybe if he lived somewhere else, in some other town, he would have had someone to talk to? He could have found a way to work through this?”

“
Maybe. Who knows? I think people in larger cities understand mental illness better. Who ever really knows why anyone kills themself?”

“
I think it’s a cry for attention,” Alison Mobe said from the other side of the class.

“
But what good is attention when you’re dead?” Ms. Hennessy turned toward her, trying to drive the question home.

“
Maybe he didn’t really
mean
to kill himself.”

“
He jumped from the window of his house toward a spiked iron fence. What about the other three . . . were those also accidents?”

“
Well . . . no.”

“
Don’t think I’m discounting your opinion, Alison. It’s good you’re saying something. I’m trying to work through a lot of things myself. I’ve just always heard that, was brought up with that being like some catch-all answer for suicide: he was just trying to get attention. I could never really buy into it.”

Now she paced back and forth in front of the class. Steven liked the idea of her trying to bring all this out in the open. With the other deaths, the teachers had merely carried on with their lesson plans in a grimly determined manner. He knew he wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t lend anything to the discussion—he was much too quiet for that—but he really was very interested in what the other students were saying.

Kate Barrington, a mousy girl who always wore dresses, said, “Suicide’s a sin.”

Another jock, Dave Smoltz, sitting next to Aaron near the front of the class said, “So nothing leaves this room, right?”

“
Right,” Ms. Hennessy nodded.

“
Then you want to know what I think about all this suicide stuff?”

“
I think we all want to hear what everybody thinks.”

“
Fuck ’em.”

Ms. Hennessy nearly lurched backward. “Excuse me,” she said.

“
Yeah, fuck ’em. It’s all bullshit anyway. I mean, we all know how it’s gonna go. In a couple days, they’re gonna let us off school early so we can go to this kid’s funeral and we’re supposed to feel so sorry for him because he . . .
killed
 . . . him
self
. That’s just the same as murder and why should we feel sorry for him if he wasn’t strong enough to get through life. We all have problems.”

Ms. Hennessy was shaking her head back and forth. “You can’t honestly tell me you feel that way.”

“
I have a hard time feeling sorry or sad about a person who kills himself. That’s just my opinion.”

“
This is a
child
.”

“
It doesn’t matter. He should know better. So that’s why I say fuck ’em all. We don’t need them.” He looked over at his fellow jock, John Skidmore, for support. John was consciously looking away from him, staring at his desk.