Nine Perfect Strangers (21 page)

26

 

Napoleon

It was dawn at Tranquillum House. The fifth day of the retreat.

Napoleon parted the wild horse's mane three times both sides.

He enjoyed the soft swooping moves of tai chi, and this was one of his favorite moves, although he heard his knees crunch like a tire on gravel as he bent his legs. His physio said it was nothing to worry about: people Napoleon's age crunched. It was just middle-aged cartilage.

Yao led this morning's class in the rose garden, quietly and calmly naming each move for the nine guests who stood in a semicircle around him, all wearing their green Tranquillum House dressing gowns. People seemed to be wearing the robes more often than not now. On the horizon behind Yao, two hot-air balloons ascended so slowly above the vineyards it looked like a painting. Napoleon and Heather had done that once, on a romantic weekend away: wine tasting, antiques shops; multiple lives ago, before children.

It was interesting: when you have children you think your life has
changed forever, and it's true, to an extent, but it's nothing compared to how your life changes after you lose a child.

When Masha, an extraordinarily fit and healthy-looking woman, clearly passionate about what she did (his wife mistrusted passion and Zoe was young enough to still find it embarrassing, but Napoleon found it admirable), had spoken on the first day about how this experience would change them “in ways they could never have imagined,” Napoleon, once a believer in self-improvement, had felt an unusual sensation of bitter cynicism. He and his family had already been transformed in ways they could never have imagined. All they needed was peace and quiet, and certainly an improvement in their diets.

While I admire and salute your passion, Masha, we do not seek or desire further transformation
.

“The white crane spreads its wings,” said Yao, and everyone moved in graceful unison with him. It was quite beautiful to see.

Napoleon, who stood at the back, as always (he'd learned to stand at the back of every audience once he hit six foot three), watched his wife and daughter lift their arms together. They both bit their bottom lips like chipmunks when they concentrated.

He heard the knees of the guy next to him crunch too, which was pleasing, because Napoleon guessed he was at least a decade younger than him. Even Napoleon could see this guy was notably handsome. He looked at Heather to see if she was maybe checking out the good-looking guy, but her eyes were opaque, like a doll's eyes; as usual, she was somewhere deep and sad within herself.

Heather was broken.

She had always been fragile. Like a piece of delicate china.

Early on in their relationship, he thought she was feisty, funny, a tough chick, athletic and capable, the sort of girl you could take to the football or camping, and he was right, she
was
exactly that type of girl. She was into her sport, she loved camping, and she was never high-maintenance or needy. The opposite: she found it hard to admit she needed anyone or anything. When they first started going out, she broke
her toe trying to move a bookshelf on her own, when Napoleon was on his way over and could have lifted that piece of plywood junk with one hand. But no, she had to do it herself.

The fragility beneath that feisty demeanor came out slowly, in odd ways: a peculiar attitude toward certain foods that may have just been a sensitive stomach, but may have been something more; an inability to make eye contact if an argument got too emotional or to say “I love you” without bracing her chin, as if she were preparing to be punched. He'd thought, romantically, that he could keep her funny, fragile little heart protected, like a tiny bird in the palm of his hand. He'd thought, full of love and testosterone, that he would protect his woman from bad men and heavy furniture and upsetting food.

When he first met her odd, detached parents he understood that Heather had grown up starved of love, and when you're starved of something you should receive in abundance, you never quite trust it. Heather's parents weren't abusive, but they were just chilly enough to make you shiver. Napoleon became excessively loving in their presence, as if he could somehow
make
them love his wife the way she should be loved. “Doesn't Heather look great in this dress?” he'd say. “Did Heather tell you she came top in her midwifery exams?” Until one day Heather mouthed the words:
Stop it.
So he stopped it, but he still touched her more than usual whenever they visited her family, desperate to convey through his touch:
You are loved, you are loved, you are so, so loved.

He'd been too young and happy to know that love wasn't enough; too young to know all the ways that life could break you.

Their son's death broke her.

Maybe a son's death broke any mother.

The anniversary was tomorrow. Napoleon sensed its dark, malignant shadow. It was irrational to feel frightened of a day. It was just a sad day, a day they were never going to forget anyway. He reminded himself that this was normal. People felt like this on anniversaries. He'd felt this same impending sense of doom last year. Almost as if it was going
to happen again, as if this were a story he'd read before and he knew what lay ahead.

He'd hoped that doing this retreat might make him feel calmer about the approach of the anniversary. It was a marvelous house, so peaceful and, yes, “tranquil,” and the staff seemed kind and caring. Yet Napoleon felt skittish
.
At dinner last night his right leg began to tremble uncontrollably. He'd had to put a hand on his thigh to still it. Was it just the anniversary? Or the silence?

Probably the silence. He didn't like having all this time with only his thoughts, his memories and regrets.

The sun rose higher in the sky as the Tranquillum House guests moved in unison with Yao.

Napoleon caught a glimpse of the profile of the big chunky guy who had tried to smuggle in the contraband. It had seemed like he might be a troublemaker, and Napoleon had kept his teacher's eye on him, but he appeared to have settled down, like one of those students you thought was going to be your nemesis for the whole year but then turned out to be a good kid. There was something about this guy's profile that reminded Napoleon of somebody or something from his past. An actor from some old TV show he used to enjoy as a child, perhaps? It felt like a good memory, there was something pleasant about the feelings he invoked, but Napoleon couldn't put his finger on it.

Somewhere in the distance a whipbird called. He loved the sound of the whipbird: that long musical crack of the whip that was so much a part of the Australian landscape you had to leave the country to realize how much you missed it, how it settled your soul.

“Repulse the monkey,” said Yao.

Napoleon repulsed the monkey and remembered three years ago: this day, this time. The day before.

It was around this time three years ago that Napoleon was making love to his sleepy wife for the last time in their marriage. (He assumed it was the last time, although he hadn't given up entirely. He would know if she was ever ready. All it would take would be a look. He understood.
Sex felt cheap now, tawdry and tacky. But he'd still be up for some cheap, tawdry sex.) She'd fallen asleep again—she used to love her sleep back then—and Napoleon had quietly left the house and headed for the bay. He kept the surf ski on the roof rack of his car throughout the long summer holiday. When he came back, Zach was eating breakfast at the sink, shirtless—he was always shirtless—hair sticking up in tufts. He looked up, grinned at his father, and said, “No milk,” meaning he'd drunk it all. He said that he might come with Napoleon for a paddle the next day. After that Napoleon worked for a few hours in the garden and cleaned the pool, and Zach went to the beach with his friend Chris, and then Napoleon fell asleep on the couch, and the girls went out—Heather to work, Zoe to a party. When Zach came home, Napoleon did ribs on the barbecue for the two of them, and afterward they had a swim in the pool and talked about the Australian Open, and Serena's chances, and conspiracy theories (Zach liked conspiracy theories), and how Chris had told Zach he wanted to go into gastroenterology. Zach was gobsmacked by the bizarre specificity of Chris's career plans because Zach didn't even know what he wanted to do
tomorrow
, let alone for the rest of his life, and Napoleon told him that was fine, there was plenty of time to settle on a career, and these days no one had just one career anyway (he absolutely told him it was fine; he'd double-checked his memory about a thousand times), and then they played table tennis in honor of the tennis—best of three, Napoleon won two—and then they watched a movie,
The Royal Tenenbaums.
They both loved the movie. They laughed a lot. They stayed up too late watching the movie. That's why Napoleon was tired the next morning. That's why he hit the snooze button on his phone.

It was a split-second decision he would regret until the day he died.

Napoleon knew everything about that day because he'd examined his memories over and over, like a homicide detective combing through the evidence. Over and over he saw it: his hand reaching for the phone, his thumb on the snooze button. Over and over he saw the other life, where he made a different decision, the right decision, the decision he
normally made, where he didn't hit snooze, where he turned off the alarm and got out of bed.

“Grasp the bird's tail,” said Yao.

It was Heather who found Zach.

The sound of his wife's scream that morning was like no sound he'd ever heard before.

His memory of running up the stairs: it seemed like it took a lifetime, like running through mud, like something from a dream.

Zach had used his new belt to make the noose.

It was a brown leather belt from R.M. Williams that Heather had bought him for Christmas, only a few weeks earlier. It cost ninety-nine dollars, which was ridiculous. “Expensive belt,” Napoleon had said to Heather when she showed it to him. He remembered fishing the receipt from the plastic bag, raising his eyebrows. She shrugged. Zach had admired it once. She overspent every Christmas.

You broke your mother, mate.

The kid did not leave a note or a text. He did not choose to explain his actions.

“Carry the tiger over the mountain,” said Yao, who was a young man, maybe only ten years older than Zach. Zach could have worked somewhere like this. He could have grown his hair long. He would have looked good with one of those beards they all had these days. He could have lived a fantastic life. So many opportunities. He had the brains, the looks, the facial hair. He was good with his hands. He could have done a trade! He could have done law or medicine or architecture. He could have traveled. He could have done drugs. Why didn't he just do drugs? How wonderful to have a son who made bad choices but not irreversible bad choices; a kid who did drugs, who
dealt
drugs even, who got arrested, who went off the rails. Napoleon could have got him back on the rails.

Zach never even owned his own car. Why would you choose to die before you knew the pleasure, the spectacular pleasure, of owning your own car?

Apparently, that young bloke in front of him drove a
Lamborghini
.

Zach had chosen to turn his back on this beautiful world of whipbirds and Lamborghinis, long-legged girls and hamburgers with the lot. He chose to take a gift from his mother and use it as a murder weapon.

That was a bad choice, son. It was the wrong thing to do. It was a really bad choice.

He heard a sound and realized it was him. Zoe turned to look at him. He tried to smile at her reassuringly.
I'm fine, Zoe, just yelling at your brother.
His eyes blurred.

“Needle at the bottom of the sea,” said Yao.

My boy. My boy. My boy
.

He was not broken. He would never stop grieving for Zach, but he had made a decision in the week after the funeral.
He must not break
. It was his job to heal, to be there for his wife and his daughter, to get through this. So he studied the literature, he bought books online and read every word, he downloaded podcasts, he Googled the research. He attended the Tuesday night Survivors of Suicide group as faithfully as his mother once went to Sunday mass, and now he ran the group. (Heather and Zoe thought he talked too much, but that was only in social situations. On Tuesday nights he hardly spoke a word; he listened and he listened on his foldout chair and did not flinch while a tsunami of pain crashed all around him.) He gave speeches to parent groups and schools and did radio interviews and edited an online newsletter and helped with fundraising.

“It's his new hobby.” He'd overheard Heather say that on the phone one night to someone, he never found out to whom because he never mentioned it, but he never forgot it, or the bitter tone; it sounded close to hatred. It hurt because it was both a malicious lie and the shameful truth.

He could find hatred in his heart for her, too, if he went looking for it. The secret of a happy marriage was not to go looking for it.

He saw his wife's thin arms curved up toward the sun to “master its life force” and his heart filled with painful tenderness for her. She could not heal and she refused to even try. She never went to the support
group except for that one time. She did not want to hear from other parents who had lost sons because she believed Zach was superior to their stupid sons. Napoleon thought Zach was superior to their stupid sons too, but he still found solace in giving back to this community he had never asked to join.

“The white crane spreads its wings.”

Sometimes there are no signs.

That's what he told the newly grieving parents at the Tuesday night group. He told them there was research to suggest that teenage suicide was often the consequence of an impulsive decision. Many had suicidal thoughts for only eight hours before their attempts. Some idiotic kids put as little as
five minutes' thought
into their catastrophic choice.