I Knew You'd Be Lovely (5 page)

He found the perfect spot, about five hundred feet from the car. Not bumpy, not wet, but dry and flat, with a tree nearby. A Goldilocks spot. He headed back to get the tent, but when he was still several yards away, he stopped. He knew something was wrong even before his mind could register what it was. Then he saw: Derek was holding a gun. The barrel was pointed at his own temple.

“Derek,” he said. To his horror, he observed that the boy's hand was not shaking. It was Fetterman's hands that had begun to tremble. “Don't do this,” he said.

“This way you won't have to deal with me anymore,” said Derek.

“You know I didn't mean that the way it sounded,” Fetterman said. Derek wouldn't look at him. “Son,
whatever it is, we can get through it. I'll try harder, things will be different—”

“Save it!” Derek shouted. “I already know all the bullshit, and I can tell you, I'm not interested. There isn't one fucking word that could come out of your mouth that would possibly interest me.” It occurred to Fetterman that his son must have been preparing for this—perhaps for a long time. He felt his body go blank. Derek's eyes squeezed shut.

“We didn't want you,” Fetterman said. “You were unplanned. We had only been married a month when your mom found out she was pregnant. Things were just getting going with my job, and—” He paused. “We didn't think we were ready for a child. We wanted more time.” He let out a laughlike huff. “And then you came early. I was playing a gig in Tucson when your mother called to say she was going into labor.” Derek was still holding the gun. His eyes were still closed. But he was listening. “You were born on July fifth, but it was after midnight—really, it was the night of July fourth. I left the club and made it from Tucson to Phoenix in just over an hour. For the entire drive, the sky was exploding. There were fireworks going off on both sides of the road, for miles and miles. And they weren't ordinary fireworks, they were”—Fetterman felt his throat constrict—“beautiful,” he said. “It was the most beautiful sky I've ever seen.” Now that the words were out, his face collapsed. “Please don't do this. I'm begging you. Not as a father to a son. As a brother to a brother.”

“You didn't want me,” Derek said. “That's perfect, that's fucking priceless.”

“Not at first,” Fetterman said. “But when you arrived, it was the best thing that ever happened to us. Sometimes you don't know what you want until you get it.” He swallowed. “I know you're in pain,” he said.

“You don't know anything!”

“Then tell me. Tell me how I can help you.” Derek made no motion and no sound; it was possible he was considering. “Tell me what to do,” Fetterman said, slowly moving closer to the car.

“I just want to be left alone!” Derek said. His arm slackened a little. Fetterman continued his advance.

“We can make it better. But not if you end it. If you end it now, it will never get any better than this.”

As Fetterman reached the car, Derek broke down. Fetterman opened the door. “Give me the gun,” he said. Derek was crying silently, his chest heaving. He handed the gun to his father and continued to sob. Fetterman locked the weapon in the glove compartment and sat in the car with his son.

“Do you want to talk?” he said.

“I want to go home.”

On the way back to Phoenix, Fetterman stayed fifteen miles below the speed limit. His body ached as if he'd just run a marathon; he drove like an old man. He
was
an old man. A gun. Where on Earth had Derek gotten such a thing? He'd save the interrogation for the morning; tonight he was too exhausted, and he still had the three-hour drive ahead of him. His ambition was singular: Bring the child safely home. Still, the feel of the weapon's
heft lingered in his hand. One of Carla's friends, an army medic, had recently shipped off to Iraq, and before she left, her commanding sergeant told her to take as many Tampax as she could fit in her suitcase. Apparently they were perfect for plugging bullet wounds in the field and stanching the flow of blood.

In the rearview mirror, he caught Derek surreptitiously flipping through the camping book. He was probably reading about the poisonous mushrooms with names like angel destroyer and jack-o'-lantern, or how snakes have been known to inflict fatal bites by reflex action even after death. Fetterman and Carla agreed: Their son had a bizarre attraction to the medically macabre. When Derek was in the sixth grade, Fetterman had to have an appendectomy. His son came running after him before he left for the hospital; Fetterman thought it was to say good-bye. “Dad, did you know that you can wake up while they're operating on you, and feel the pain of everything, but not be able to talk?” Fetterman did not know this; in fact, he hoped it wasn't true. Derek went on about how redheads were more resistant to anesthesia than other people, and how the inventor of anesthesia had gotten the idea from Genesis, the part where it said that God put Adam into a deep sleep before removing his rib.

By that point, Fetterman and Carla already knew that their son was going to give them trouble. What they didn't know, what they had no way of knowing, was that the rebellion and the acute pain of adolescence would pass, but that the fascination with medicine would endure; that their son would go on to become a doctor, who in the course of his lifetime would help bring thousands of
people out of their suffering. On the way to the hospital, Fetterman had turned to his wife. “Is that true, about the anesthesia wearing off?” he said. “It's extremely rare,” Carla said.

As they drew close to home, on the narrow stretch of 117, at almost the exact spot where they'd passed the deer before, they came upon a dead deer in the road. Fetterman pulled over and put on his hazards. He got out of the car and grabbed the animal by its legs, but he was weak, and the deer was heavier than he'd expected. “Help me,” he said to Derek. Derek took the front legs and Fetterman took the rear, and together they began to drag the deer to the shoulder. Halfway there, Derek stopped.

“She's still alive,” he said.

“That doesn't matter!” Fetterman snapped. It was dangerous to be standing in the middle of the road, in the dark, just ahead of a curve. “Help me get her across.”

From the safety of the side of the road, Fetterman could see that his son was right: The limbs were supple and freighted with life; the eyes still had light in them. But the body was broken. In the distance, he could hear coyotes' yips and yowls. Derek was waiting for him to speak.

“Get the gun,” Fetterman said, handing him the keys. Derek obeyed, and a moment later, Fetterman was holding the weapon. Derek knelt beside the wounded animal, staring into its face as if he recognized something. Then he stood back. Fetterman had never fired a gun before. He placed the muzzle between the doe's brown eyes, braced himself, and pulled the trigger.

At night, for an hour before going to sleep, Ginny read the personal ads. Not because she was looking for a lover, but because she was mesmerized by the language people chose to describe themselves. She found herself underlining standout lines by women and men, old and young.
Platinum frequent flier, phenomenal legs, does museums in two hours max
wrote a thirty-six-year-old businesswoman.
Generally a barrel of laughs when not contemplating thoughts of an untimely death
quipped a fortysomething filmmaker. Ginny also enjoyed
Capable of holding entire conversations with answering machines
, and
Rides badly, speaks three foreign languages badly, cooks badly, but does all with vigor & enthusiasm
. She sometimes thought of pairing up two ads with each other:
Zero maintenance
having sushi with
Non-needy seeks other non-needy
. Her affection was stirred by the fellow who claimed to
appreciate all manner of candor
—he was seeking a mate with
poise, wit, and joie de vivre. There
is no such thing as too much information
, another singleton declared. Ginny laughed; she loved that. Her friends found the personals to be categorically depressing, but Ginny had developed a near-obsessive fascination with them, and found in them a source of hope both mundane and profound.
Still trying to chance upon a unified theory of everything, but in the meantime, searching for a soul who is wildly intelligent and in possession of some sadness
. This from an eighty-year-old retired physics professor, who sounded like a winner to Ginny, in spite of the forty-five-year age difference. But by far her favorites were three of the simplest:
Adventuresome, liberal, hair; Got dog?;
and
Good in a crisis
.

Ginny was in no way looking for a mate herself. She described herself as happily married to the single life, and didn't want to be responsible for anyone else's socks or chicken dinners. If she were a plant, her instructions would have read: “Needs ample sunlight; thrives in solitude.” Some winter evenings she would turn off her phone, start a fire, open a book—and swear there was no home happier than hers. Her friends called her commitment-phobic to her face, but why label as fear what was simply a choice? When she told them she dreamed of being an old spinster one day, of course no one believed her. But she knew her recent restlessness had little to do with love.

Ginny had no illusions about marriage. To her it looked like boatloads of work and a lifetime of compromise. She realized she was in the minority in her disaffection for the institution; the world was peopled with the betrothed. Still, occasionally her friends confided
details that supported her aversion: Jessica's husband, Ted, taped
The X-Files
over their wedding video; Katrina could never cook with her favorite spice, dill, because Leo didn't care for it. And parenthood—parenthood looked like slavery. Ginny found herself newly in awe of her own parents now that her peers had begun to procreate, and she could see up close what was involved. To consider all they had given up—the time, the freedom. “Maybe I'm just too selfish to have children,” she confessed to Jessica over the phone.

“Let's not forget, a lot of people
have
children for selfish reasons,” Jessica said. “In order to have someone to play with, or to take care of them when they're old. Or because they're bored and don't have anything better to do.” Jessica herself was pregnant with baby number four, and Ginny knew her motives were of the more magnanimous variety: She wanted to adore her children in a way she had never been adored.

Truth be told, Ginny already had children—five classes full of them. Despite frustrations, her favorites were the seniors. Twenty seventeen-year-olds were hers for AP English every day, fifth period, right after lunch, when all the blood in their bodies that wasn't already servicing endocrine glands was busy digesting pizza and Gatorade. Nonetheless, she made it her duty to try to love them. And she attempted to impart a few morsels of wisdom; she tried very hard, but more and more she felt that something was being lost on them. She did everything she'd always done: She took them on the field trip to Walden Pond; she read from writers' obituaries; she told them who were the alcoholics, who slept with whom,
who were the geniuses and who were the hacks, which one subsisted on a diet of only white wine, oysters, and grapes for so long she had to be hospitalized for anemia. Still, they looked at her with what could only be called accusation. As if she were withholding something. As if there were something that she, Ginny, was supposed to be doing for them, or giving them, but she was simply too selfish or too lazy to do it.

She'd heard of the great teachers who said they learned more from their students than they taught them, so she examined her teenagers' faces with fresh scrutiny and pored over their essays with renewed vigor, wondering what she was supposed to glean. Her kids were so disaffected, so sophisticated, so urbane. A couple of times she could have sworn Marc Campbell had winked at her in the hallway. She had them read
Suite Française
, a World War II novel whose author had perished at Auschwitz while the manuscript was rescued by her daughters. Ginny asked if there were any questions.

“Do you think the sum of the good things mankind has done outweighs the sum of the horrible things?” It was Julia, her star student. Ginny panicked for a second, genuinely stumped, then made up an answer about how it's not always useful to quantify things.

If they wanted difficult questions, she'd give them the difficult questions. “Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual,” she said the following Wednesday. She was reading to them from
The Labyrinth of Solitude
by Octavio Paz. “It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even
fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is—”

“And you, Miss Porter?” asked Jimmy Galway, interrupting. He was a confusing child: He had the attitude of a tattooed rebel but the fresh-pressed shirts of a diplomat.