Bad Things (31 page)

But, you don’t
want
to, do you?”

And I’d remind him of his duties, pointing out that what was

in my head was
dumb
and
dangerous
and made
no sense
. That Carol deserved better. That I had a family. That I was being that cartoon

asshole, the married man having an affair, and the correct thing to

do was sever contact, be grateful I hadn’t yet fucked up the important

things—and think about something else until the whole thing faded

into something mildly interesting and long ago, like the fi rst moon

landing.

And he’d shrug again, and say: “Sure, I get all that. You make a

good case. But . . . we’re still having the same conversation, right?

And you
still
can’t forget the smell of the skin on her neck where her jaw curves up toward her ear. That’s something I can’t touch. With

the neck thing, you’re on your own.”

In the end I stopped inviting the Right Thing to come on walks

with me. He was no help at all.

In the meantime I became distant and strange. I was prone to lapses

of concentration and a cramp in my stomach that made food uninter-

esting and my temper shorter than it should have been.

I knew how much I loved my wife, my
family,
how lucky I was. I

didn’t perhaps
understand,
didn’t get it in the way I did after it was all gone, but I knew well enough. You realize what makes sense is to con-sign your emotions to a moment in time with no forward momentum.

B A D T H I N G S 219

You may even fantasize about having this conversation with the other

party, both accepting—with sadness, but a straight-backed sense of

what’s right—a course of action that would have God nodding in ap-

proval, picking you up in His big warm hand and moving you back to

a more acceptable part of the moral landscape.

But you never get to the closing sentence of this discussion, because

what this fantasy is really about, if you only had the sense left to know,

is conjuring a situation in which the two of you are together again.

We did the right thing, several times.

We said, in words or via e-mail or text, that it was over—and

behaved that way. But it’s
hard
. After years in which your life has

melded with that of your partner, suddenly you’ve spent a period as an

individual again. An affair is such an
active
circumstance. You make

choices about how/when to be in contact, whether/how to lie, what

words to say and how much to expose; searching reality for inter-

stices in which you can pursue this thing. Dealing with someone new

makes
you
new again, too, shaken awake by trivial differences. Carol

seldom wore perfume, for example. This other person did. Carol al-

most never wore jewelry, whereas the other woman even made a few

pieces of her own from time to time (including a silver bracelet which

she gave to me, and which I lost track of, toward the end).

To be drunk on adrenaline and then dropped back into the daze is

to die before your time. Suddenly the charge of the future is switched

off, and life feels like the rusty skeleton of an abandoned amusement

park. No longer does it echo with the sounds of glee and chatter, no

more is it fi lled with the smell of sun lotion and ice cream and lit by

neon and cotton candy so pink it hurts your eyes. Now it is empty

and silent. You keep trying to fi nd your way out, to locate the parking

lot where you know there remains only one vehicle now—your own.

As you search, you keep your head down, trying not to glimpse the

swooping rides that only a few days before were making your heart

dip and soar, and which are now dark and dead and creaking in the

wind. You don’t want to leave—you never
wanted
the place closed

220 Michael Marshall

down, however much money it was losing, however dangerous it had

become. You want this place to still be vibrant and alive, you want to

climb back on the ride—and you do not want to be here to watch the

whole edifi ce crumble to dust. When you fi nally fi nd your car, lonely

under a single lamppost in the vast and empty lot, you want to drive

away into the night leaving
something
to which you can return in your dreams and in the wistful watches of long afternoons. You want to

be able to hear the echo of your own heart, when it last laughed and

shouted on the roller coaster of a summer afternoon.

You want to think that maybe, if you were to run back here on

the right night, and at the right time, you might fi nd that person still

standing waiting after all, smiling that smile and holding two tickets

for one last ride—one that might last forever this time.

You get through those times, trying to take contentment from the fact

the experience was had. But that’s a poor kind of reward and speaks

from a soul growing older and less vital, more inclined to settle for

retrospective comfort than risk a future that seems too uncertain, too

hard, or simply too short. It seems this way especially when you’re

old enough to realize the memories you’re cherishing will degrade,

fading from the intensity of a just-woken dream into a dusty book of

old photographs; to fi nally become little more than words—nothing

remaining vibrant except, perhaps, a split-second memory of some-

one looking at you with greedy glee, the bottomless gaze of someone

who, just for that instant, wants to be nowhere else in the world.

Which is why, however fi rmly it had been fi nished—and episodes

of noncontact went on for weeks and even months—sooner or later

one of us would be unable to resist adding some coda that wasn’t re-

ally a coda. There would be a coda to the coda. Finally another meet-

ing would take place. It would be somewhere public, where two adults

could legitimately encounter each other under the auspices of friend-

ship: but after a few drinks we’d catch each other’s eye and know that,

B A D T H I N G S 221

just for this evening, neither of us cared if we caused the universe to

crack in half.

I tried not to be an asshole. A lot of the time it worked. Some of

the time it did not.

We saw each other, on and off, for thirteen months. It started, in

other words, when Carol was fi ve months pregnant with Tyler. You

can ask how I’d let myself get into that situation, but I have no answer

for you. It would be like asking a ghost why they stepped in front of the

car. Because they didn’t see it coming. Because they didn’t know what

would happen until it was happening, and then they couldn’t stop.

Just because.

Something happens, and other things happen as a result. If you

believe heaven and hell have more complex roots than this, then

you’re either a more subtle man than me, which is entirely plausible,

or you have a lot to learn.

Here’s the bottom line. I could have been out on the deck of the

house Carol and I shared, drinking that beer and spotting that my

son wasn’t in vision, twenty minutes earlier. I could perhaps have got

to him before he reached the end of the jetty, before whatever hap-

pened had gone too far.

I wasn’t and didn’t because I spent those twenty minutes in my

study, enjoying a phone conversation with Jenny Raines. Bill was

out, she was bored, so she called. It was the fi rst time we’d spoken in

weeks, and we lingered over it, and my boy died.

Things happen because.

Scott knew that, and he was only four years old.

Kristina listened while I told her these things, or a heavily truncated

version of them. It took maybe ten minutes. It is instructive to dis-

cover how compact your history becomes when you verbalize it to

someone else, how small your big deals can seem.

She sipped her own coffee for a while after I’d fi nished, her eyes

222 Michael Marshall

elsewhere. “What exactly happened to your son?” she asked eventually.

I had alluded to Scott only once. “He died.”

“How?”

I gave her the bones of that, realizing that she was the fi rst person I

had ever told about this, too, except for my father. She closed her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

She had ignored or seen past everything I had said about my be-

havior, and gone straight to what was real about my life now, things I

had spent the last three years dealing with alone. While I wasn’t sure

I deserved that kind of consideration, I was grateful for it.

“Thank you,” I said.

She shook her head, as if I had missed her point. Her hands were

laid out on the glass covering the tabletop, and I noticed the long,

pale fi ngers were trembling slightly.

Knowing what I was doing, but not why, I placed one of my hands

on top of one of hers.

She opened her eyes and looked down at it, but did not move. I

felt I ought to say something, but knew the placing of my hand al-

ready had. My mind hadn’t caught up with what my body was trying

to communicate. I was aware that my heart was thudding, hard, as if

each beat stood alone.

“No,” she said, and moved her hand.

I smiled crookedly, not very hurt, or not yet. “After everything I

just told you, I’m not surprised.”

“Nothing to do with that,” she said. “I’m not hearing that this

woman means anything to you now.”

“No. I guess I’d like to hear she’s still alive, but other than that . . .

I haven’t spoken to her since the day Scott died. I look back and it’s as

if a crazy person did what I did. Or it’s a story I heard about someone

else. Someone really dumb.”

“You’re not the only human who’s been an asshole. Get over it.”

I laughed. “You cut right to it, don’t you?”

“It’s been said.”

B A D T H I N G S 223

I looked her in the eyes. “So?”

A curt shake of her head. “You just don’t want to get involved,

chum.”

“Okay,” I said, though I realized that this was not true, and that

she hadn’t actually moved her hand very far: but also that the one I’d

put on hers had grazes from the fi ght with Bill, and that if there was

ever going to be a time for this conversation, it probably wasn’t now.

“You want another coffee?”

“No,” she said. Then, more gently, “I should get back to the bar.”

“Didn’t seem too busy in there.”

“No,” she said, and smiled, a little. “But—”

She stopped talking because she saw I was staring out of the win-

dow. “What?”

I stood. A car had just driven past, not fast. I thought I recognized

it. “Wait here a second.”

I headed quickly out onto the street. The car was still moving

toward the intersection, but losing momentum, as if the person in

charge had taken their foot off the gas. It took me a moment to be

sure, because I’d always seen the vehicle with the roof up and music

pumping out of it, but yes—I knew this car. I ran along the sidewalk

and caught up with it just as it fi nally came to a halt.

I ducked down and saw Becki was driving, and that Kyle was

strapped into the passenger side, asleep or crashed out, head lolling

forward.

Becki’s hands were clamped to the wheel, and she was staring

straight ahead.

“Becki?”

She turned to look up at me, as if in disbelief. Her left eye was half

shut, the cheek beneath it swollen.

“John?”

“What are you
doing
here?”

But I couldn’t hear what she said next.

C H A P T E R 3 0

I squatted down by the side of the car, awkwardly reaching my arms

through the open window to put them around Becki’s shoulders.

When she’d stopped crying—which didn’t take long—I retreated to

let her rub her face dry and push the hair out of her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Call me, maybe?”

“John, I’ve just driven all the way up here from fucking Oregon.

Does that sound to you like a phone call kind of situation?”

I heard the door to the pizza place open, and turned to see

Kristina coming out onto the sidewalk.

“We’re paid up in there,” she said.

“Kristina,” I said, but I didn’t know what to follow her name

with. She walked away.

Becki watched her go. “Who’s that?”

I ignored the question. “What’s going on here, Becki?”

“What’s going on is we’re in deep shit,” she said, with a terrible

little smile.

B A D T H I N G S 225

I drove to the motel, with Becki following. The office was shut but I

eventually roused Marie from her television and got the keys to the

room next to the one I had. It took a while to get her to understand

that friends of mine had arrived and I was getting the room on their

behalf, but I didn’t want her to see Becki’s face. Partly because motel

keepers can be funny about renting to women with facial bruising.

Also because such things are memorable.

When I got back out Becki was standing leaning against the side

of her car, smoking. Her idiot boyfriend was still passed out in the

passenger seat.

“What’s the deal with Kyle?”

“He’d been awake seventy-two hours straight.”

“Wake him up and move him inside.”