Sliding Past Vertical (11 page)

Chapter
17

Emerson had never intended to kill
himself in his freshman year of college by leaping out the eighth-story window
of his dormitory room. He’d never even intended to kill himself with the vial
of prescription pills someone named B. Finklestein had left behind on a
dining-hall tray. All he wanted was a break from the sting of Sarah’s fickle
heart and to stop feeling for a while. But the medication turned out to be diet
pills, and he’d leaned out the open window because he was sweating out the bulk
of his bodily fluids and couldn’t breathe. Somehow in his metabolically
enhanced state, he thought that the farther he got his head out into the
courtyard, the more oxygen he could suck into his lungs.

His roommate saw the situation
differently. When he came in from dinner and found the screen hacked away with
a letter opener and Emerson dangling ass-up out the window, he called the
resident assistant, 911, the suicide hotline, and any able-bodied male within
shouting distance.

Twenty minutes later, Emerson was
in the Medical Center emergency room with a tube shoved down his throat.

The next day his mother arrived,
sober, having recently substituted God for alcohol, in the guise of a gentleman
friend from the Church of Never-Ending Life. The two of them pulled Emerson out
of school with barely a word.

Once ensconced in the bosom of what
was left of his family, Emerson balked at his mother’s suggestion of the church
youth group, volunteer work at the local nursing home, and—with lowered
eyes and a whisper—a therapist. Instead, Emerson preferred to bask in
tortured adolescent self-pity. But after a few weeks, this grew tiresome. A
tortured adolescent mourning the loss of his five-year-old brother and charged
with alternating currents of love and hate for the girl who’d held his heart
hostage and then dumped it bleeding onto the tarmac didn’t make for very good
company. Neither did his mother nor her gentleman friend from the Church of
Never-Ending Life.

He gave therapy a try.

It wasn’t bad. He went twice a
week, stopping at the library on the way home for a new pile of books to
replace the ones he’d read. That was how Emerson McCann spent the spring of his
nineteenth year. Reading. Attempting to write. Letting his mother pay a
stranger to listen to him bitch about how women had made his life miserable. He
was far from a complete recovery, but at least he felt less miserable than he
had in a long time.

Then his mother pulled the plug.
Or, more accurately, it was her gentleman friend from the Church of
Never-Ending Life, who, she announced, would soon become her husband. And no
future stepson of his was going to a therapist, not when the Lord provided all the
solace one could ever need, for a lot less money.

Having no income at the time and no
savings, there wasn’t much Emerson could say. “I won’t be coming back for a
while,” he told the therapist, at the end of what would be his last session. It
was one of those stupidly blue days, when the birds sang and the dew glistened
on the grass and the clouds begged for cartoon smiles. All the worst moments of
his life seemed to occur during absurdly beautiful weather or what were
supposed to be the happiest times of the year.

The therapist nodded. Emerson
picked up his knapsack. “I mean…the money’s kind of tight…”

He knew he was stalling, waiting
for a reprieve. None seemed forthcoming. He’d gotten as far as the giant jade
plant near the door when the therapist cleared his throat.

“You’re a writer,” the man said
matter-of-factly.

Emerson blinked, his cheeks growing
hot. Did the guy actually think that a bunch of lousy starts to a lousy short
story about his brother and one stupid fake letter to
Penthouse
where he’d used his future stepfather’s name as a
pseudonym was going to earn him enough to pay for therapy? The check he hadn’t
gotten yet from the magazine would barely put gas in his car. “Yeah, so?”
Emerson shot back.

The guy swiveled inscrutably.

Emerson glared.

“Then write.”

* * * * *

Every night they did
things—he and Sarah and sometimes, Rashid. They saw second-run movies at
the cheap theater on Westcott, ate pizza, watched television, or lingered on
the back porch after dinner. But it wasn’t until Sarah went to sleep that
Emerson got his glass of milk and his chocolate donut and headed upstairs to
offer Dirk’s latest adventures to the universe.

Emerson doubted this was the sort
of writing the therapist had had in mind: Dirk Blade, master of all he coveted,
no responsibilities and no regrets, ready to drop his European briefs at a
moment’s notice, with Marvin Gaye on the soundtrack in his head.

But what had once offered solace
was starting to fail him. Dirk was still there, of course, poking at the edges
of Emerson’s dreams. But he was afraid to give Dirk voice, especially with
Sarah across the hall.

As he stared at the blank sheet of
paper in his typewriter, he calculated magazine production schedules and
consulted the deadlines on his calendar. It pleased him to discover that
counting the two pieces he’d written during Sarah’s first night in the house,
he was caught up for at least three months.

Yet he needed something to show for
all this effort, for the hours shut away in his room, so the next time Sarah couldn’t
sleep and came in to ask what he’d been working on, he could tell her without
having to lie.

He opened a desk drawer and pulled
out the latest start to the lousy story. He knew the beginning by heart:

In
an ideal world, children should never know the meaning of the word “irony,”
much less become a symbol of it. My brother’s short life was ironic before he
was even conceived. Designed in a whiskey-soaked haze by my mother to keep my
philandering father at home, Thomas’s first act as a citizen of earth was to
drive the bastard away.

But
not nearly far enough.

* * * * *

The summer before Emerson was
supposed to leave for Syracuse University and rescue Sarah from fraternity
louts and bad decisions, his father resurfaced. Living in California with an infertile
wife, a high-paying job, and powerful friends, he sued Emerson’s mother for
custody of Thomas.

Apparently Emerson, his first
mistake, at almost eighteen wasn’t worth the expense or the trouble. Thomas,
not yet six, was easier pickings: alcoholic mother, unstable environment,
partially raised by his older brother, who was about to start college three
hours away and what then?

It didn’t help that Emerson’s
mother sat like a lump through most of the proceedings, when she bothered to
show up at all, while Thomas, by order of the court, was placed in temporary
foster care until the end of the trial.

Thomas hesitated at the front door,
fists full of his brother’s blue-jeaned leg when the woman from Child Services
smiled and reached for his hand.

In retrospect and as a writer,
Emerson tried to infuse the hesitation with metaphorical significance. That
somehow with a five-year-old’s intuition, Thomas was aware something awful was
about to happen to him and didn’t want to leave.

But the cynic in Emerson usually
rebelled against this made-for-fiction moment. He reminded himself that in
reality, Thomas had been an introverted child, made even shyer because Emerson
taught him never to go with strangers.

“It’ll be okay, Tommy,” Emerson
whispered, unable to find his voice. Another lie of kindness. His mother didn’t
stand a chance of winning custody or getting a new job any time soon. And as it
didn’t seem that his father was willing to do him any favors other than his
past contribution of a viable spermatozoa, the only way Emerson would see his
brother again was if he could scrape up the plane fare himself. With college
looming and books and part of his tuition to pay for, that didn’t seem likely
in the immediate future.

As he’d feared, it had been the
shortest custody trial in the history of the county.

“We’ll appeal,” Emerson said, the
night before he was supposed to leave for school.

She stared into her glass. “What’s
the use?”

For a long moment, Emerson searched
her face for the pretty, doting young mother his memory had reconstructed from
his early childhood. But he found only the wreckage: soft hair turned into
straw, her once-creamy skin sallow, eyes slowly disappearing into her head, as
if they’d decided there was nothing worth seeing anymore. He couldn’t remember
the last time she’d prepared a decent meal or looked at their homework or read
a bedtime story.

He pulled in a deep breath and
stood a little taller. “I’ll be eighteen in a couple of months,” Emerson said.
“Maybe I could legally adopt him.”

She turned on him, eyes scrunched into
mean, swollen slits. “Then what? You gonna be like your father, whoring around
at night, not giving a flying goddamn you got a baby at home?”

Emerson stung from the knowledge
that he’d been that baby. “Unlike some of us,” he said quietly, “I give a
flying goddamn. I can take care of Thomas. I’ve been doing it his whole life…”

He stopped, realizing he’d crossed
a line.

“You are taking that scholarship
money and you are going to college,” she said through clenched teeth.

Where was that defiance when they
needed it, when he had to drag her out of bed for the deposition?

“I don’t have to go away for school,”
he said. “I could go to Erie, at least until you get help and get a job, then I
can switch to nights, I could…”

Eyes burning, she exploded off the
sofa. Ice cubes clattered as she pounded her glass onto the coffee table. Then
she silenced him with a hard slap across the cheek.

Time seemed to stop.

Slack jawed and in disbelief, he
stared at her. No adult had ever hit him before. Heat flooded into his skin,
and he could still feel her fingertips on him, cold and damp with the
condensation from her glass.

“You are not wasting your God-given
talent in some backwater community college.”

Something crossed her face that he
couldn’t quite identify, a kind of softening, and a mist of feeling that could
have been love, admiration, or regret. Or wonderment that she produced a child
who had somehow almost reached his majority with all of his limbs and most of
his wits intact. Then the expression vanished.

“I don’t know how you got those
brains,” she continued. “It wasn’t from me and it certainly wasn’t from your
goddamn father, but you are making something out of yourself in an institution
that’s worthy of you and that’s final.”

He stood still for a long moment,
waiting for the intriguing mistiness to return. But she merely fixed herself
another drink. Face still stinging, Emerson went upstairs to pack. That night
when she passed out on the couch, Emerson left her there.

* * * * *

Over the next few weeks following
Sarah’s arrival, Emerson took a few halfhearted stabs at his embryonic story.
The beginning was still lousy. The meat of it, he couldn’t settle on. Blame
shifted depending on his mood. Events, he found, had been mottled by time,
emotion, and his tendency to invest small moments with disproportionate
significance.

But the ending was always the same.

“Does it have training wheels?”
Emerson asked Thomas. He’d called from the pay phone in his dormitory’s
eighth-floor lounge, after his mother told him the new bicycle had been a gift
from his father.

“Daddy says training wheels are for
babies.”

His chest tightened, and he said in
a calm voice, “Tommy, do me a favor and put Daddy on the phone, okay?”

“What now, Mama Hen?” his father
asked.

“He doesn’t know how to ride a real
bike yet.”

“He’ll learn.”

“But he’s only five. He’s too
small.”

The man who had abandoned Emerson
twice just laughed.

“What the hell’s your problem?”
Emerson said.

“How do you think you learned? I
gave you a good shove down the road, and damned sure you figured it out. Fell
over a few times, but you lived through it.”

Emerson took a deep breath and said
evenly, “Dad, Grandma taught me how to ride a bike.”

His father snorted. “You always did
remember things wrong.”

Shortly after he hung up, Sarah
came by his dorm room and gave him a hug and a kiss. For a long while he didn’t
think about his father. Or training wheels. But he always thought about Thomas.

He wasn’t thinking about him as
much the following Saturday, a sparkling October afternoon. While he was
getting ready to take a walk with Sarah, he got the phone call.

The imagined crunch of metal on
metal would live forever in Emerson’s bones, as would the irony: Dylan Thomas
McCann, saved from one drunk, only to be killed by another.

Chapter 18

The start of the fall
semester brought Emerson, Rashid, and Sarah two new housemates: Jordanian
cousins who barely spoke English. This time, Emerson didn’t feel up to the
effort of forming friendships, of getting attached to them, only to have them
leave him behind.

Enough people in his life had
done that already. Soon there would be more.

That night, he’d had dinner
with two of them: another Indian feast, followed by a pot of tea and
adjournment to the back porch, where Rashid taught Sarah to recite “Twinkle,
Twinkle, Little Star” in Hindi, in Arabic, and in French.

Emerson glowered on one of
the old plastic chairs, arms folded over his chest, finding the whole picture
rather nauseating. The tea tasted like spiced shampoo. The food wasn’t sitting
well, neither was the smell of Rashid’s cologne. He hated the stupid crystal
clear night and the way Sarah giggled when she flubbed something Rashid had
taught her.

When he’d imagined Sarah
living in his house, this was not what he had in mind.

“Don’t you have to be up
early tomorrow for that meeting?” Emerson said.

Rashid gasped and checked his
watch. “Yes, you are right, and already it is so late. Tomorrow I begin training
the students who will be assisting in the lab this term,” he told Sarah. Then
he sighed and addressed both of them. “One of them is Indian. Very stupid, I am
afraid, the son of a goat farmer. But my father knows the family and suggested
that as a favor to them I allow this young dolt an opportunity to improve
himself. If he doesn’t blow the whole place up first.”

Sarah’s eyes widened. “You
don’t let them do anything...important, do you?”

“Of course not,” he said,
waving a hand. “Simple tests, blood counts, errands. That is all. The important
things I hope this year I am entrusted to do.”

On that, Rashid departed.
Emerson imagined him going upstairs, putting on his tidy pajamas, washing his
face, brushing his teeth for exactly two minutes, and scheming about how
tomorrow he could monopolize even more of Sarah’s attention. Emerson decided to
have a talk with Rashid one of these days and remind him he was engaged.

He would also tell his
housemate that Sarah was vulnerable at the moment. She’d just had her heart
broken and shouldn’t be trifled with.

It was a conversation Dirk
ought to hear as well.

Sarah lay on her back on the
padded chaise longue she and Rashid had been sitting on. She lifted an arm over
her head. Her position and the yellow porch light did insanely unfair things to
the curve of her cheek, her hair, her body, the bare slope of belly where her
shirt had pulled up out of her jeans.

Then he realized she’d been
watching him too, her eyes softly glowing. The picture was closer to what he
had in mind when he’d imagined Sarah living there: a quiet evening alone, her
gazing at him with that sweet, wistful expression on her face, as if—

“You look so tired,” Sarah said.
“You should have more of Rashid’s tea. It’s supposed to cure insomnia.”

Or, she could just be feeling
sorry for him. “I don’t think it’s going to help.”