In the Dead of Summer (8 page)

The current unwillingness to be sent any wretched refuse, including April Truong, would have to sting. She had come so far, was learning a whole new life and culture and language—the better to understand the hostility in those stories.

Her special summer was providing a harsh curriculum. Heartbreak compliments of Romeo, Juliet, gang wars, immigration policies, and a city that ranked number one in hostility. And something else, too. Something about the friend she wanted to see, something she didn’t want to or couldn’t talk about.

We worked on her project. My role was to help her organize ideas and polish written language skills. All the same, I had to stifle an urge to ask her why she had chosen this depressing topic.

“Do you think…” she said haltingly. Her paper, heavy with numbers and dismal projections, seemed like a weight pulling her under. She looked at me, her head tilted, a worry line between her brows. “If it is accepted that some people hate each other…”

I felt a nervous thrill. She was looking for guidance, for American wisdom. What could I say that offered comfort and wasn’t an outright lie? Everything from the Declaration of Independence, my own great-great-grandparents’ flights from poverty and oppression in Europe, to nightmare photos of Vietnamese boat people and massacres in El Salvador pushed for attention in my mind.

But when April spoke again, her words and worries were a surprise and my speech-making died unborn. “Juliet should have listened to her nurse, do you think?” she asked.

“Excuse me?” Juliet again? “Why?”

“Our elders know better. They have the wisdom of time.” April Truong, former human dynamo, spoke with almost no emotion.

“Sometimes differences are too great for young people to overcome,” she continued. “We are children who do not think ahead enough. Cannot.” I could almost hear a stern father or resolute mother imprinting those words on her brain.

“What are we really talking about here?”

“Look at the sorrow Juliet caused.” Her eyes were on her tightly clasped hands. I thought I saw a tear on one eyelash. “She should not have involved Romeo.”

“How could she not?”

“She could leave sooner. Right after they met.”

“But Romeo was also responsible for his reaction, for what he did. You can’t blame Juliet for everything.”

“If she tried more to make peace first. Tried harder,” she whispered. “If not, then what should she have done? Every choice sounds sad. Is there no good choice?”

“April, what is this about?”

She looked as if she’d just been brought back, as if the alien that had possessed her for a while had retreated. “Forgive me,” she said. “Many things confuse me.”

That clarified precisely nothing.

“And I am going to be late for work!” She stood up, curling her lips into an exaggerated downturn. “The café will fire me, and then I will have even more things confuse me.”

I glanced at my watch. “But
it’s only…” The hour wasn’t up. April had always been hungry to use every possible minute, and had never left this early before. “Did they change your hours?”

She looked flustered. “This time, I forgot to say, I have to leave early.”

“Is your brother waiting?” He seemed a strict taskmaster. Maybe that was it.

“Not today.”

Perhaps she had to take the bus, and that was why she had to leave early. Further discussion didn’t seem possible, and I wasn’t particularly eager to stay in the stuffy, quiet school any longer. Mackenzie and I were going to the Mann Center that evening, and it would be wonderful to be unrushed for once. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” I said.

She solemnly gathered up her notebook and papers.

“Remember,” I said as she left the room, “
Romeo and Juliet
is a story Shakespeare adapted. A
story
, not a how-to book.”

She looked at me as if checking whether I was mocking her, then she bit at her bottom lip, nodded, and waved farewell.

I halfheartedly tidied my room, packing a set of grammar exercises into my briefcase even though the odds against marking them tonight were astronomical.

I nervously lowered the shades, unable to stop constant glances toward the corner, where the pavement remained stained. I kept reminding myself that the square was back to being its normal busy but peaceable self.

I had covered two windows before my heat-saturated synapses connected and what was going on near the corner registered. April Truong, who had bustled away prematurely to her after-school job, was sitting on a bench next to a young man with a signature scowl.

April, her face a mask of misery, looked skyward, then directly at Woody Marshall, her mouth moving in an unending stream of words, all the while shaking her head in a long, emphatic no as he gesticulated and looked both angry and frightened.

I couldn’t imagine what he wanted of her, what the unlikely pair could have in common, or what could have upset both of them so quickly and thoroughly, but it didn’t take much imagination to understand that this meeting had been prearranged and was the explanation for April’s quick exit.

Woody Marshall and April Truong? She was quicksilver and determination and ambition. He was muscle and pout and resentments. And where were his eternal sidekicks, Tony and Guy?

Was April that naïve that she didn’t see trouble a mile off?

Or that romantic that she looked at his angry face and saw, instead, Romeo?

Dear Lord.
That
was what—that was who—she’d been worrying about?

I watched awhile. April bent forward and put her head in her hands. Her back shook. Woody lifted a hand as if to reach over and console her, but ultimately he did precisely nothing. His hand dropped to his side.

I pulled down the rest of the shades. I was supposed to help with English language skills, not meddle in affairs of the heart. After all, Juliet’s nurse and the priest were also culpable, for being older people enchanted with the dumb romantic desperation of kids. Besides, on a less lofty level, I knew how receptive I’d have been to a high school teacher’s decision to edit my love life. I backed away from the window.

They’ll work whatever it is out, I told myself. Everything will be all right.

I was not succeeding in fooling myself. Nothing so far had been all right, April bent over crying continued the not-all-rightness, so why should the trend suddenly reverse itself?

WE HADN’T PLANNED FAR ENOUGH IN ADVANCE TO
request bench seats. I prefer the romantic blanket-under-the-stars approach to al fresco concerts, but I quickly understood that the blanket-under-the-broken-leg has quite a different ambience.

We were enveloped by bugs and heat. Mackenzie sat with his cast straight ahead of him, like a log awaiting a bonfire. He made his discomfort acutely clear by incessantly denying it, overreassuring me that although he might look like a torture victim, he was actually quite comfortable. All of that was uttered in a tone that said:
I’m lying for your benefit. Aren’t I noble?

I passed him the insect repellent and pretended to believe that he was having the perfectly marvelous time he insisted he was.

During his endless convalescence, there weren’t all that many adventures we could easily share. He was not a man used to confinement or limits, so he was continually surprised and annoyed. I had thought, however, that music and stars and hot summer nights would soothe his soul.

I had thought wrong.

No sooner were we sticky with repellent than he began his oratorio. “I cannot tell you how boring it is to do nothing worthwhile, day after day,” he said.

Not only
could
he tell me, and not only
would
he tell me, but he had
already
told me. Countless times. Secondhand boredom is much harder to endure than problems are. Not that he asked, but at least my woes were variegated, different from day to day. His were the same—and that very sameness was their cause. The fact that this condition was finite and would soon end didn’t console him. I tuned him out and concentrated on the hums around me—distant traffic and very close mosquitoes.

“Not a single real buyer in the lot,” he grumbled. There’d been an open house, or open loft, the past Sunday, and only lookie-loos had shown up.

“They don’t have any idea who did the drive-by shooting,” I said.

“Damn, but the heat makes my leg itch.” I handed him the chopsticks we carried for under-cast scratching. They didn’t reach the afflicted spot.

“I wondered how much attention the police give to incidents like that drive-by.”

“You implyin’ we don’t care?”

“No, but—”

“We care. Thing is to try an’ find the guilty party before his gang does. It’s not easy, and then you have another killin’ to solve, and so on. I sometimes wonder who’ll be left eventually.”

“I can’t stop replaying that moment in my head.”

“Air-conditionin’s feebin’ out at my place.”

I gave up. His litany, even told in a lilting good ol’ boy from Louisiana voice as it was, and even sprinkled with glints of humor and self-awareness, as it now and then was, made me want to hold up a great silver cross and run for the hills. I again reminded myself that the morose man sharing my blanket wasn’t really Mackenzie, but Mackenzie’s doppelgänger who, I trusted, would disappear when the cast and reduced mobility were gone.

“What were those wise words by Epicurious?” I asked. “Weren’t they about attitude?” Philosopher, know thyself.

A violinist walked on stage, generating scattered applause. Slowly, the violinist’s fellow orchestra members straggled on and arranged themselves, their music, and their instruments, which, as usual, needed tuning. I never understood why they didn’t take care of this backstage.

“Who’s Epicurious?” Mackenzie asked. “Sounds like a clown.”

My compassion reservoir was drained, its last droplets drying in the hot sunset. “Epi-whatever, damn it! He who said something about men being tormented with the
opinions
they have of things, not the things themselves, that’s who. Don’t you listen to your own wise quotations? Life isn’t that bad if you’ll look at it differently. You have all the time in the world to catch up on everything you always wished you had all the time in the world for, including memorizing Greek quotations.”

“
Epictetus,”
he said. “The Stoic philosopher.”

Which only proves that you can lead a man to stoicism, but you can’t make it stick.

“He believed that there is only one thing which is fully our own—our will, or purpose. We aren’t responsible for the ideas that come our way, only for how we respond to them. As for me, I
am
puttin’ my downtime to use. I’m studyin’.”

Studying how to pontificate, and getting really good at it. “Greek lit, by any chance?”

“Why’d you say that?”

“Elementary, my dear Watson, given that Epictetus comes to mind so readily.”

He raised one eyebrow and said nothing. I got the message. A well-educated human being already knew who Epictetus was. My ignorance was so humiliating he spared any mention of it. “Studyin’ Philadelphia history,” he said. “I told you.”

“You did. What are you up to now?”

“The yellow fever epidemic.”

Still? The actual epidemic had lasted a shorter time than Mackenzie was giving over to the study of it.

“Real depressin’. Not only what happened, but also ’cause it’s eerie, lots of parallels to today, to our plague. Nobody knew where it came from, what to do, so they blamed it on refugees from Santo Domingo. That’s today’s Haiti. Sound familiar?”

“Why in God’s name are you still reading about it?” I asked. “Lighten up! It’s summer. You’re supposed to read fluff. Beach books.”

“I got shot at the beach. And I like history.”

“Then read happy history.” Except I couldn’t think of any. “You’ve got a few hundred years’ worth to pick from—why that? Why not sanitized, whitewashed textbook history where anything our side did was for the greater good, out of pure motives, and for the best?”

“I want to read
history
,” he said, as if that were an answer. “What I’m reading
is
history.”

“Speaking of which,” I said, “April’s paper on immigration is called ‘Wretched Refuse.’ Don’t you think that’s a negative—”

“They thought tobacco prevented it.”

“Immigration?”

“Yellow fever.”

I took a deep breath. He wasn’t himself. “I didn’t know that,” I said. “But I’m worried about April. She overreacted to
Romeo and Juliet
, and seems really troubled.” A mote that had seemed peripheral and had been resting in a side pocket of my brain floated into center field. “She ran away from the fountain Friday. Barefoot. Right at the time the others chased a boy. She knew Vo Van, the young man who was shot a few hours later in that same park. And she always checked before she went outside. Do you suppose all of those things are connected? Maybe she was afraid of Vo Van?”

“Don’ badmouth history,” Mackenzie said. “You should give it more of a try.”

I bit at my upper lip. He was injured, petulant, not himself.

Not himself.

Please God, let this not be himself!

“This drive-by thing,” I tried again. “If April—”