The Possibilities: A Novel (4 page)

I wonder how he’s doing up there. I’m sure he’s enjoying Kit’s company too much. I’m positive he’s already asked where she’s from, what her parents do, how old she is, why she’s in Breckenridge, where she went or goes to college, what she wants to do with her life, and if she put ten percent of her earnings into savings. Hopefully he hasn’t asked if she’s on oxy whatever or if she’s a cutter.

I place the folded clothes into shopping bags for the Salvation Army. They are just clothes, just objects.

“What is it, exactly?” I ask. “The party at the Broadmoor.”

“It’s just that,” Suzanne says. “A party.”

“So, no speeches or—”

“All I know is that Morgan has been working very hard,” she says.

“Okay,” I say, detecting defensiveness and responding as such. “I just wanted to be a little prepared, let my dad know what to expect.”

“It will be like a cocktail reception,” she says, suddenly assured. “A party. Just a little something where the college can recognize one of their own. In fact I think Morgan is setting a precedent. It’s never been done before.”

For other dead kids
, I can’t help but think.
For dead alums
. It’s strange the new ways I’m meant to feel good or honored.

“I bought this for you the other day,” Suzanne says. She walks to her purse on the dresser. I can tell she has read my thoughts, maybe wants to corroborate, but that would mean taking something away from her daughter. She hands me a red bottle. “Love this stuff,” she says. “It’s some miracle skin cream made by monks in their rice paddy fields.”

“Thanks,” I say. “Is it expensive?”

“Of course.”

“Does it work?” I ask.

“I don’t know, does it?” She angles her face toward me.

I look at her eyes, her forehead and smooth cheeks. She looks the same as she did last week, last month, last year. “You have such nice skin,” I say.

I remember the pot I found and walk over to his bedside table and open the drawer. “Here. I have something for you too. Made by farmers in their marijuana fields.”

I hand her the three baggies.

“Oh wow,” she says.

I have never seen anyone smoke so much pot besides Billy, Cully’s dad, but he was a kid then. Suzanne is almost fifty and this pot stuff is a new thing she’s taken up since the trouble with Dickie began, that and the eating, and she’s gotten very good at both.

“And I have no idea what this is,” I say, handing her something with a cord and plug.

“That’s a vaporizer,” she says.

“What’s that?” In my day I have smoked from a hookah, an apple, a glass pipe, a Pepsi can, and a bong named “the reverend” but have never heard of a vaporizer.

“It’s to breathe vapor and not smoke,” she says. “So it’s clean. Pure.” Then she adds, “And so parents can’t smell it.”

We both raise our eyebrows at the same time and I smile even though there’s a tug—an irritation and shame that he kept a secret from me, but of course he did stuff like that. The shame comes from having Suzanne witness it. I keep moving, filling the bags, then moving them to the hall.

“Well, go ahead and have it all,” I say. “Smoke it or vaporize it, or whatever.”

“I don’t know,” I hear her say behind me. “I feel like I shouldn’t. It’s something of his and—”

“For Christ’s sake, it’s drugs. If it was Xanax, I’d take it. I’m not going to frame it. He’d be grounded if I had found this before . . . ”

“Sorry, I was just trying to be respectful.”

“I guess I wouldn’t ground a twenty-two-year-old,” I say. “I’d just yell at him. I was always pestering him, nagging him.” My eyes water. I keep moving, willing away emotion.

“He would have moved out soon,” she says. “He would have gotten it together.”

I walk back in and over to the stereo and put in a different CD—an old one by someone called Common Sense. I like it. It’s rap, but not so angry this time. There’s a happy beat. He has a charming lisp.
They say become a doctor but I don’t have the patience.
That’s good. Clever. I take a deep breath, the emotion waning.

Suzanne goes into the closet. I take another box of books to the door, scanning the titles on the spines:
Death of a Grown Grandson: A Survival Guide
,
Lullabies for Bereaved Grandparents
, and
Chicken Soup for the Bereaved Soul
.

I have not read a single one of them. The only thing I read was an article I found on the internet the very day of his death. It was an article called “The Golden Hour”: the sixty-minute window a victim has after an accident to get help. It’s an hour of hope and promise, better outcomes and statistics. I was so desperate, so foolish, and I can’t believe I did that kind of research at that time. The day of his death. I must have been so lost.

We were far beyond the golden hour. Even though I had already seen him on the pass, my dad and I had to go to the hospital to confirm his death with Dr. Braun, whose hair was a fortresslike hedge of frizz. She wore cargo pants, a turtleneck beneath her white coat, and heeled Crocs, which made her untrustworthy. I wanted an old doctor, a white male alcoholic one, the kind I grew up with. Doctors like that could unfreeze him somehow.

Dr. Braun had said, “The parents of the other boys are on level three if you’d like to see them.”

My immediate thought was,
What other boys?
No one else existed for me then.

I realize this is still my problem. I’m not happy about it. I don’t want to be this way. It isn’t that I value myself more than others. Maybe I just want to protect others from the likes of me, save them from having to draw from their deck of learned expressions and emotions.

“Good job,” Suzanne says.

“Yes,” I say. “We’re doing good.”

We’ve been working efficiently and I wonder if this has something to do with the tension in the room, if she even notices it. I take a look around, the bags of folded large T-shirts, the thirty-four-inch-waist jeans, the one snowboard poster, a remnant of his teenaged self. This is a room that belonged to someone who didn’t intend to live here much longer.

“You want a glass of wine?” I ask.

“Of course,” Suzanne says.

•   •   •

I GO UPSTAIRS
and pour us a glass of chardonnay, the only kind of wine she likes. I think of it as the drink of old ladies. I’m about to go back downstairs, but the sight of my dad and this girl outside together makes me stop and watch. They are both chipping the ice off the front deck in what seems to be a chummy sort of silence. It looks like she’s trying to chop down a tree with a butter knife, but she seems to enjoy it. I would—the repetitive choreography, late sun on my back, the lifting of big chunks of ice. It would be satisfying, like peeling paint or sunburned skin, or doing penance.

I put the wine down, get cash from the drawer in the kitchen, and walk to the deck door, sliding it open. “You guys okay?”

“We’re doing well, aren’t we, Miss Kit?”

My dad heaves his body into his shovel and grunts like he’s bench-pressing. He does more in one dig than she does in five.

“I should get going soon,” she says.

“Yes, you’ve got beers to twist open,” my dad says.

“No,” she says. “Just things to do.”

I search my dad’s face for disappointment. This is the most active I’ve seen him in a while. “You go sow your wild oats,” he says. “Make a sweater.”

“My wild oats have been sown,” she says, and looks briefly at me. “I think I’ll just go lie down.”

“How much do we owe you?” I ask.

“I’ve got it,” my dad says.

He takes his wallet from his back pocket and takes out more than the task warrants.

“It’s okay,” she says.

“What do you mean, it’s okay?” my dad asks. “Are you doing community service or are you making beer money?”

He hands her the money and she takes it.

“Thank you,” she says.

They look one another in the eye. I feel for him. He must miss having young company. He and Cully would snowboard together all the time. Cully had gotten him off his skis and onto a board years ago. Sometimes they’d take the shuttle and when they got off, walking with their boards tucked under their arms, beanies pulled down, from a distance, they’d look the same age. They’d look like friends. I wish I could see this again.

“Come back tomorrow,” my dad says. “Then I’ll really put you to work. Bring better gloves next time. Or hey, I have some for you.” He looks at me, excited.

“We have all this stuff if you want it,” my dad says. “Do you like rap? Or punk rock? New and old school. We’ve got tons of records, I mean CDs you can have. We’ve got gloves, hats—”

“They might be big—” I say, feeling a possessiveness.

“Books,” he says. “
You
can have it all.” He says this last line like a salesperson, then bats his hand in front of his face, swatting away his own joke.

She looks at me and seems to register something in my expression though I’m trying my best to remain blank.

“I should go,” she says. She leans the shovel against the rail—a shoveler who borrowed our shovel. Our street is so quiet I feel as though we’re on a stage. A soft spray of snow is beginning to fall.

“Really,” my dad says, less enthused this time. “We really do have a lot of things you could use. You’re welcome to come in and take a look.”

I don’t object. Something about her reassures me, an intelligence and sensitivity. My first inclination was to say, “It’s mine,” followed by the desire to hide, to not let her see who we are, what’s happened to us. But my purpose is to clean out. So why not come in and shop his life? It would be nice to have her want something, to put his things to use. I imagine her with one of his books or one of his sweatshirts, something of his going on her adventures.

“You should,” I say. “Come in. We’re cleaning things out.” I don’t want to say the things belonged to my son who is dead, not yet. She’d feel like she was in a horror film. “My son has outgrown them,” I say instead, and exchange looks with my dad.

“I need to go,” she says.

“Snowboards, movies,” my dad says. He is let down. “So much. A ski pass. I bet you could sell it. I guess that would be illegal. Clothes, but they’re boys’ clothes. You don’t want boys’ clothes.”

“Dad,” I say. I touch his shoulder. “Next time.” We need to let her go now.

“Oh,” Kit says. She looks confused, alert. “I thought you were husband and wife.”

We both laugh and she looks at us, concerned. My dad revels in her mistake, but I watch her carefully. Something has shifted. She is not at all amused by the innocent mistake. I don’t know what I should say or that I need to say anything. I don’t think I’m capable of dealing with anyone more unusual than myself.

“Nope,” I say. “This is my dad.”

“Thank you, though,” he says. “You made my day.”

She looks like she has more to ask but is holding back.

“It was nice meeting you both,” she says, rushing now toward the steps. “Thank you for letting me . . . do this.”

“Thanks for your help,” I say. “Be careful.” I look at the top of the ice-covered stairs that they never got to. The ice has little dips in it like a golf ball.

“Your book,” my dad says. She turns and looks at the black book on the railing.

“It’s for you,” she says. “It’s a calendar.”

“Okay,” my dad says, and we watch her go. She walks fast as if we’ve said something that has offended her.

“That was different,” I say. “You think she’s Mormon?”

“Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know. Don’t they leave Bibles with you or something?”

“It’s not a Bible,” he says.

She gets into her truck and we watch her drive down the street. My dad waves, but she doesn’t wave back.

“That was kind of odd,” I say. “Did you guys talk much?”

“Sort of,” my dad says.

“What did you talk about?”

He stares out onto the street, arms crossed in front of him, pondering something. My question finally reaches him.

“Uh, let’s see,” he says. “She loves the mountains. She just graduated from college. East Coast. She’s from Bronxville, New York. She isn’t ready to go to med school—her dad wants her to. She had a good cadaver physiology program at her high school. What else? Her name isn’t short for Katherine. She’s named after her grandfather, Christopher Lux. She was ready to go back home. She’s lived here since July, but someone who lived here urged her to stay.”

“Who?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“What else?”

“Hon, I wasn’t taking minutes.”

“Actually, it sounds like you were. You covered a lot.”

“I like to talk,” he says. “These kids all stalling. Figuring out what they want to be. It’s nice to hear about their plans, or lack of.”

Like Cully. I imagine this girl moving here and remember my longing to leave here, to forage for happiness, change, escape, renewal, my own ground. At DU, I’d lug around my huge video camera and tripod. They became a shield in some way, a way to overcome shyness, a way to make my curiosity legitimate.

“Oh, and we talked about soups,” my dad says. “Hearty soups. And I may have mentioned a few things about the ski business—coping with losses, new initiatives—”

“You must have bored her to death.”

“No, I . . . she seemed interested. She held her own.” He puts his hands on his hips. “We made a dent out here,” he says. “That was good.”

“Good,” I say. I try to think of more work, more tasks, things to make him feel useful and strong.

My dad takes her calendar from the railing, flips to today’s date. Blank.

•   •   •

I WALK BACK
downstairs, stopping in the doorway. I wonder if my dad will move into this room, since it’s larger than the one he’s in, or if it would be too strange. Then again, he lived in the room he shared with my mom. There may be something comforting in the reuse. I walk in and put Suzanne’s wine down on the desk.

“Much better,” I say, my voice sounding different in the emptier room. “Where are you?” I hold my elbow with one hand, my glass of wine with the other.

She walks out of the closet, holding his newest ski jacket. “I think you should see this.” Her voice hesitant, almost fearful.