Why They Run the Way They Do (14 page)

It wasn't the anticipation of actually delivering the news that was suffocating the chaplain. He just wanted it to be over. He did not like knowing what they didn't know. He had a secret, and once the secret was told, nothing would ever be the same for the people to whom he was going to tell it. The father was at a meeting, the chaplain imagined. At this very moment he was at a meeting and he was not thinking of his son. His son was nestled in the back of his brain, nestled as surely as he had once been nestled in a bed when the father came home late from work and peeked in on him to make sure he was sleeping soundly, to whisper good night. The son was in the bed of the father's brain, tucked away. The mother, the chaplain admitted to himself, could be a different story. The mother was running errands, and this created a variety of terrible possibilities. Perhaps the mother was buying birthday presents for the boy, was at this very moment trying to decide which of two sweaters he would prefer. The boy's file was right in front of the chaplain and the chaplain could see plain as day that the boy was turning nineteen next month. The mother didn't know that her son was not going to turn nineteen. But he, the chaplain, a man who had never spoken to the dead boy, he knew. He, a stranger, knew the most important thing that had ever been known about the boy—that he was no more—and the mother and father who had known the boy intimately, knew nothing. If only he could tell them, then they would know too, and he wouldn't have to carry the weight any longer of him knowing and them not. The rest he could deal with. Tending to grieving students. Speaking to the media. A service, likely outside, during which a tree would be planted, perhaps a plaque dedicated. Future conversations with the parents, meeting them when they came to campus to take the boy's things home. All of this he could handle, could, in fact, excel at. If only he could reach them.

He hit redial again. The machine would pick up after four rings, and he would set the receiver down and—

“Hello?”

His veins turned cold. Wait . . . just wait . . . just . . . never mind. He was happy to keep the secret. Of course he was. He would keep it forever. What had he been thinking? He would—

“Hello?”

But this is not—could not be—that story.

A little before two that morning the boy was outside looking for a cigarette. The RA, a young woman who faced the world with a desperate, self-effacing cynicism, was standing in the cold, shivering, sucking down a Marlboro Light. She shook one from the pack and extended it to the boy. She had known him for six months. He was among the twenty-four freshmen who were her responsibility, and she had gotten to know him better than most because he was very social and not afraid, like so many of the others, to make friends with the upperclassmen. He was drunk, but not unusually so (she had seen much worse) and thus nothing seemed out of the ordinary until she dropped her finished cigarette onto the fresh snow and saw that the boy wore no shoes.

She nodded to his feet. “Nice. Little cold there?”

The boy shrugged, took another drag off the cigarette.

“Long night?” she asked.

Another shrug. “Hangin' out. You know. Whatever.”

“Anywhere fun?”

“Not really.”

She was cold, ready to go in and curl up in her afghan. She gave him another cigarette, for the road, and went to bed.

She was the last to see him alive. Because of this, she was forced to recount the meaningless conversation over the cigarette at least a hundred times. On several occasions she was tempted to make parts up, because the conversation (if you could even call it that) had been so utterly dull. She wished that he had said something poignant, or that she had, so that a little solace might be found in his last moments. She was a writer—wanted to be, anyway—and she wanted something writer-ly to have happened there at the end. She wanted to have seen it coming. She wanted to have had a premonition. But all she had was a cigarette. At least she had given him one. At least there was that.

She was not the type to let these things go. It would stay with her forever, his bare feet on the snowy steps outside the dormitory. She would revisit it, seize it with something resembling passion, any time her life veered off course. She would blame herself, exaggerate her role in things, create for herself hundreds of opportunities to save him, opportunities she would have certainly taken advantage of if she'd only been smarter, kinder, a better RA, better friend, better person. Returning to campus for her ten-year reunion, she stepped onto the balcony and felt a grief more acute than she'd felt for her own dead mother.

But this is not that story either.

Why no shoes? Perhaps the boy had returned from the party, gone into his room and kicked off his battered sneakers, emptied his pockets, checked the answering machine. Possibly he had stepped into the hallway, bound for the bathroom, and inadvertently allowed the door to close and lock behind him, his roommate asleep inside. “Shit,” he might have said. It's likely he paused for a moment, considering. There were a dozen rooms he could crash in, friends up and down the hall who would still be awake. But now he wanted a cigarette; if the evening wasn't going to be over, a cigarette was in order. He'd find one to bum, out front, and then figure out where to sleep.

He wasn't in a bad mood, just weary and sobering up, not in the mood to chat. He was glad when the RA gave him an extra smoke and went off to bed, because he wanted to smoke alone. Something nice, really, about smoking alone, enjoying it not because you were being social but because you weren't. But why not just smoke it there, on the steps out front? Maybe he wanted a view of the campus, brilliant and new in the snow. Maybe that was the image of himself he was picturing as the elevator carried him to the fourth floor. A still night, snow falling on his bare feet and head, he alone and above it all.

How did he fall? Everyone has a theory. The railing was high as his chest, so a mere slip on the slick balcony would not have sent him over. Here is what I think: he saw something. Thought he saw something, or someone. Maybe he was waiting for a girl he liked to come home. Maybe he heard voices, friends' voices, from around the corner of the building. Or maybe it wasn't a person at all. Maybe it was a rabbit, or one of the campus cats, trotting down the walk, snow puffing under its light feet. I think he leaned over to get a better look.

But what do I know? Most of this story is mostly made up. Some readers might believe it to be thinly veiled fact, when in truth it is thinly veiled fiction, a fabrication gently draped with the netting of what actually occurred. Half the characters are no more than letters stumbling across my computer screen; the other half have been lovingly adorned with lies and conjecture. “The truth escapes me,” people say, though surely we are willing accomplices to its flight. We loosen its chains, leave its cell door slightly ajar, allow ourselves to become distracted as it lumbers off into the waning light. It's easier that way, for then everything and everyone is fair game. Yes, this story's possibilities for the introductory fiction workshop are vast: an exercise in character, in plot, in beginnings, in endings. An exercise in point of view. A story about a college, about a generation, about a culture of excess. A story about the splintering of friendships, about priorities, about the weight of the past, the weight of the future, the weight of the single moment and how it resonates through dorm rooms and classrooms, into bedrooms and waiting rooms, days and months and years away. This story could be all those things, yet it is none of them. So what, then, is the story? Only this:

A boy died.

The suitcase I drag down
the attic stairs belonged to my grandmother, so it's one of those old-time deals that already weighs about fifty pounds even without a stitch of clothing in it. I have a photograph of my grandmother with this suitcase. She's standing on the tarmac about to get on an airplane—this was a long time ago, right, when you walked up the stairs onto the plane—that's going to take her to New York and then on to Switzerland, to visit her lifelong pen pal that she started writing to when she was in third grade or something. So she's standing on the windy tarmac, all smiles despite the fact she looks like she's about to be blown off her feet, with this giant suitcase next to her. She's not holding it, 'cause this is the kind of suitcase that even if you just stop for a couple seconds, to have your picture taken, you want to put it down. That's how heavy it is, and when I drag it down the attic stairs it goes
ka
-
thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk
and I can hear the cats scatter.

The cats. I'll have to leave them. When a woman walks out on her husband she can't take her cats along. How would that look
? “I'm leaving you, but hold on a minute while I wrangle these cats into the car
.” That's no kind of exit to make. So maybe I'll come back for them. Maybe in a couple months, when I'm settled someplace else, I'll show up in the middle of the day, while he's at work, and I'll use my key (because he wouldn't change the locks . . . it wouldn't even occur to him) and then I'll gather the cats up, one at a time, in a heavy blanket so they don't scratch me to death when they see I'm putting them in the car.

By the time I have the suitcase mostly packed (the essentials—your basic toiletries, the book from the bedside table, underwear and socks and the kind of clothes one would travel in, nothing fancy) it's 4:30 and he'll be rolling in in about fifteen, twenty minutes. By that time I'll have everything straightened and I'll be standing at the door putting on my coat, just slipping my arms into the sleeves as he walks in, so I'm ready to pick up the suitcase and go at just that moment, so I don't have to run back and go to the bathroom or put on my shoes or anything.

His face. It'll go blank first, like somebody's asked him a question in a foreign language. The smile he's worn through the door will sink into his face like cream into coffee. Then, after the blank look, his eyes will narrow, first at the suitcase and then at me. This will only last a moment. The wheels in his head will be turning. At this moment I might feel a little sorry for him.
What did I do to deserve this?
he'll be thinking. I come home from a normal day of work, thinking everything is A-OK, and here's my wife in the front hall with her suitcase packed and her coat on. But he won't say any of this. Instead, he'll swallow really hard, so hard it's like he's trying to get down a pill the size of his fist. Right now he'll be thinking that he can't cry, but he'll want to. He'll be thinking about all the things he should have done differently, how he should have treated me better, how that girl he liked wasn't worth all this.

I wish I had a pen pal in Switzerland. When is it too late to have a lifelong pen pal? Does it count if you start when you're twenty-five? Thirty-five? What if you pretended you were ten? What if you wrote a ten-year-old girl in Switzerland—found her somehow, you know, through the internet or something—and you pretended you were in third grade and your whole life was in front of you and you had all these dreams? Would that be a rotten thing to do? How disappointed would she be when you got off the plane with your big blue suitcase and instead of being ten you were a grown woman? Would she hate you? Or would she just be surprised, and then she'd get over it, and you could still go stay at her Swiss house and eat Swiss-cheese sandwiches and curl up to sleep in a cozy Swiss sleeping bag?

I make the bed. It seems right that I should make the bed, that I should do the dishes, that everything should be just so. I shouldn't leave the house in ruins. It's better if everything is perfect, so he can watch it go to hell once I'm gone. I shake the pillows snug into their pillowcases, imagining how long it will be before the sheets are washed again, how long he'll sleep alone on dirty sheets, how that girl he liked
(It was five years ago, for Chrissakes!
he'll think as he falls asleep on his dirty sheets, as if that makes a difference, as if having cancer for five years is better than having it for one) is with someone else now and now he's got nobody, not her, not me, only two disillusioned old cats. Which I'll be coming back for.