Long Division (32 page)

“I don't know, Stephen, but I like to think that if he knew, he'd have looked for us. I mean, not expecting to join the family or anything, but to say hello. To say
Look, I turned out okay. Thanks for feeding me and snuggling me those first three months.
” And after I said those words I got really sad again for my parents. I'm always thinking about the Alden thing as it applies to me. Annie playing Chutes and Ladders alone. Annie watching Care Bears with nine different stuffed animals in her lap. Annie being a shy, awkward preteen because she has no sibling with whom she can socialize. Here I've been mourning something I never had while my parents were totally crushed by the loss of something real and precious. A child they loved and fed and snuggled. A child that was as much theirs as I was. Maybe the emptiness I felt over Alden's being gone wasn't all for me but comprised partially of actual empathy for my parents? Not just a simple A. Harper Pity Party. Was that possible? Is Miss Harper capable of such semicomplex, not-entirely-selfish emotions? Alden is their story, not mine. I am just a supporting character in a family drama. I'm the child actor who still has time to go to normal school because her role in the movie is that small. My parents went through something huge that I will never fully understand. Everything I've gone through has been fake and romanticized. Jesus Christ. I realized I was cussing silently in my head in a cemetery with a friend who I was supposed to be talking to. And so I piped up.

“I guess we'll never know,” I said to Stephen. And then my phone rang. 012345678. David. “David,” I said out loud and made some awkward motion to Stephen that signaled I needed to take the call and step away for a few minutes. After I picked up the phone and started the usual “howareyous” with David, I wandered down to the bank of the cemetery's glassy pond. I was telling David about my first days in Boston, and I sat in this wooden chair under a tree. The chair was carved out of a girthy log—an oblique angle sliced and sanded to form a surprisingly comfortable recline. Our conversation was pleasant but unremarkable. David seemed in okay spirits, and he cited his proximity to completing the deployment several times. He asked if I had received the birthday package he sent me yet,
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and I told him I had not. He teased me a bit for being on a picnic with another man and I told him he'd been picnicking with other men for months so it was fair. And then a giant stone fell from the sky and pinned me to the ground by my chest. It was a true scientific miracle since the stone was made of a previously undiscovered element called Guiltesium Infintesibitchide. The mass of Guiltesium Infintesibitchide in grams/mol is 983, which if you give a fuck about chemistry at all you'll understand is a wicked dense material. Luckily, I walked away from the scene with only minor bruising.

 

When I returned to our picnic spot, we packed the scraps back into our bags and Stephen led me toward the grave of e. e. cummings. He had asked “Do you want to see the grave of e. e. cummings?”

And I had said “Okay!” with a lot of enthusiasm because I was on vacation and it was sunny and I was up for anything that might distract me from the horrible thought I was thinking at that moment.
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Stephen said nothing to prepare me for the sight of the famous modernist's grave. Since the cemetery hosted many a beautiful and extravagant monument, I was expecting e. e.'s to be the same, but with some quirky twist. A sentence fragment embodied in an oddly cut stone.

“Almost there,” Stephen said, and we scrambled up a little hillside to a shady line of graves along the trees. “Ta-da,” he said and stopped. I swung my head to each side, expecting something big and eye level. Stephen pointed down, directly to our feet.

 

EDWARD ESTLIN CUMMINGS

1894-1962

 

And then I laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a very inappropriate thing to do in a graveyard—the noise turning the heads of foraging squirrels and bouncing off the marble facades of somber memorials—but the full name and the all-caps lettering struck me as hilarious. When my bellowing faded into an exhausted sigh, I looked right at Stephen, whose arms were folded over his chest, his posture slouched back, head tilted in amusement.

“Funny,” he said flatly. “When I took Gus here in college, he had the exact same reaction.”

 

Stephen and I took the same bus back downtown and then parted ways. He had to meet a prospective Harvard dental student for drinks, and I was headed back to Michelle's to clean up for dinner. Maybe it was being around all the corpses or thinking about Alden or talking to David in his war zone, but I had this really sick fantasy on the subway ride to Cambridge. There was a middle-aged man sitting next to me on the train. I only looked at his face right before I sat, but there was something very tense about it. A tightness in his jaw. A severity in his eyes. He was wearing a Red Sox hat and a frown so profound that I figured the team must have lost some important game that afternoon. And for several minutes I really wanted to turn and look at him. To check and see if the frown was accompanying him through every lurch and turn of the subway car. But I didn't. Instead, and I really don't know why, I imagined he was a terrorist. It was my first terrorist fantasy: wholly uncomfortable and completely transporting.

The scene. Terrorist silently pulls a gun from his jacket and positions it against my temple.
Hey,
he shouts.
Everybody, listen up.
People put down their magazines and math textbooks. Conversations halt. The snoozers lift their heads and force their wimpy eyes in our direction.
If anyone comes near me before I'm done talking, I shoot this girl. I have a bomb in this bag that I can detonate simply by pressing this button at my hip. I am going to blow up this entire subway car, killing myself, all of you, and this young lady right here. It is my destiny to die today. Just moments from now. However, if one of you will give me permission, if one of you can say the words “Sir, please kill the girl,” I will shoot her, I will shoot myself, and the rest of you sinners will be spared. If no one speaks up, the bomb blows and we all die together. Any of you. It could be your decision. You could be a hero. That is, if you have the courage to watch this pretty lady's brains splatter across this window. And then my brains. Just say the words and the future is yours. When I finish this sentence, you will have thirty seconds to decide.
And suddenly everyone in the car is looking at me, judging me, wondering what sort of sins I've committed and what sort of companion I will make as we all hold hands and walk toward the gates of heaven. I see a woman with a small child scan my fingers for a wedding ring. I can almost see her thinking that it's worth sparing her child if I have none of my own. A professorial-looking type across from me is twisting his fingers, trying to deduce some logical way out of this story-problem disaster. In the fantasy, Tyler from the café is in the car. He's standing, white-knuckle grip to a pole, staring at me, shaking his head, and mouthing the word “sorry.” But the time is ticking away and no one is saying anything. The man beside me is still, silent. Hand on the gun: steady. Other hand on the belt: steady. Counting silently. What number is he at? Twenty-one? Nine?

And though I don't want to die, I don't, I don't, I don't, I am restless and anxious and so full of some pungent elixir that is the combination of every possible emotion ever. It's like mixing all the fountain sodas together at a pizza parlor. Strong. Overwhelming. Indescribable. The people on the train keep turning their faces to each other, searching eyeballs for approval.
Are we worth it? Am I worth it? Are you worth it?
All these people with families and babies and bigger hearts and more life insurance than me. And no one is saying anything. Why can't they? Don't they get it? One is less than fifty.
It won't be your fault!
I want to scream.
No one will blame you. No one will blame you. Say it. Say it. Say it.
But that's the thing. Humans (ME) inherently don't want to hurt each other (DAVID), but the universe is such that we end up doing it anyway (I THINK I LOVE GUS MORE). I am so close to the bomber my upper arm makes a seal against his rib cage and I feel his lungs swell significantly, purposefully, because he knows it's his final breath. I make my most pleading look at the professor, Tyler, the mother, David, Gus, Caitlin Fucking Robinson. Somebody say it!

“Sir, please kill the girl.” The voice is calm and kind of sweet. Quiet to almost a whisper. A very intentional volume because its speaker wants both to be heard by the killer and then not heard by the rest of the crowd. I have just a few moments, the time it takes for the gunman to release his final measured shot of carbon dioxide into the air before his scattered remains take over in chaotic decomposition. And in that last moment, I get it. I see that I've found the loophole. I recognize the voice. It's mine.

 

Totally fucked up. Right? Luckily, the somber man beside me was not a deal-making terrorist, so I got off safely at my stop and started walking to Michelle's house. I tried to put my finger on where such an elaborate, violent fantasy came from. What were the origins of this desire to paint myself as the valiant martyr? The only way I could emerge from my present situation as the martyr is to tough out my relationship until David returns and it becomes clear whether or not there is something worth preserving. And really, that's the wimpiest form of martyrdom I've ever heard. What do I lose? I tolerate another two months of scratchy phone calls and blasé, irritable e-mail chains. Big whoop! But the terrorist fantasy has left me feeling something urgent. The man made it crystal fucking clear. Someone has to lose. Someone must be the bad guy.

 

The rest of the trip was fairly lovely. There was some bar hopping with Michelle's friends in honor of my twenty-fifth birthday. A cozy night in, where we baked brownies and watched girly movies. Michelle braided my hair while I rattled off a few of my concerns over mine and David's dehydrated relationship. I came so close to telling her that somewhere between a chewed-up apricot and a plaster hand turkey I had fallen in love with my childhood buddy. Michelle is smart and articulate and clever (and perhaps more perceptive than she lets on), but this was the sum of her advice: “Just wait, Annie. I guess you just have to wait.” So much for the terrorist's urgency.

 

I had a morning flight back to Seattle. The coffee I drank at the airport was pumping robust surges of energy through my limbs, and I was disappointed to waste such a buzz by sitting down and strapping into the airplane. I had the middle seat. Before the plane took off, I pulled a spiral notebook from my bag to take some notes about the week,
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and after writing for several minutes I discovered some papers tucked into the back of the notebook. It was Max Schaffer's essay on spiders. I had thrown it in there on the last day of school with the plan to read it over again at my leisure when I wasn't rushed by the stack of twenty-eight other papers to grade. So I read it again there on the plane. It delighted me so much that I was all smiles and giggles when I ordered my ginger ale from the flight attendant. When I finished, turning back to my notebook and sticking to the Annie Harper the Second trajectory seemed dull and stifling. I remembered
Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919
, which I was already halfway through, but I had foolishly checked it inside my luggage. I considered striking up a conversation with the people next to me,
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but since we'd been in the air for about fifteen minutes already, it felt as though the window of opportunity had passed. And so I did something I hadn't done since the fifth grade. (It came fairly easily since I'm such an evil, lying memoirist.) I wrote a short story. Extra credit for me!!!

 

Back in the Seattle airport I had about twenty minutes before my parents arrived to pick me up. I was rather pleased with the effects of my morning coffee, so I swung into a line at a Starbucks kiosk and bought more: a refueling to help me through the vacation roundup that my parents would surely require. As I was stirring my milk in with the little wooden stick, watching the swirls and thinking fancifully of Tyler and his silly hearts, I heard a familiar voice. “Okay, I love you. Bye.” And then the snap of a flip phone. It was Charese Atkins.

“Oh, hey, Charese.” She was adding packs of Equal to her latte two at a time.

“Miss Harper.” She seemed a bit rushed but still genuinely glad to see me. “Headed out for vacation?”

“No. I'm just back from Boston. Visiting friends. And you?”

“For better or for worse, I'm headed back down to San Diego.” She gave me a look that said
I can't believe I'm doing this, but if you think I'm crazy, it's okay because I also think I'm rather crazy.
I resolved to work on my version of that look when I get home. It's probably quite handy.

“To see your ex?” I asked tentatively.

“That's right. He's being deployed in a few weeks and he said he really wanted to see me before he left. Missed me. Loved me. All that crap. And so, fuck, I'm going down.”

“Wow. Intense.” I took a dribbly sip of my coffee.

“No kidding. At first, I wasn't going to budge. I thought I was so done with him. But he's Lacey's daddy and he was my husband and he's going into something so lousy that maybe he kind of deserves to be cut some slack. He could die over there without ever getting to see us again.”

“So Lacey's coming too?”

“Yeah. My mom's bringing her down in a few days. Rick and I thought it was best for us to reconcile a few things before we bring her on the scene. He's dying to see her.”

“I can't blame him. Lacey's a great kid.”