Forsaken (26 page)

For a month I saw what it was like to be part of a family. Though Kacey, Simon, and Meg weren’t my real family, they were the closest thing I’d had for a long time. As confused as I was about Simon, I was still in no hurry to go back to being alone. But Kacey’s psychiatrist concluded that she was ready to take the next step to overcome her fears.

It was time for me to leave the Mason house.

As I prepared to move out, I felt blinder than ever. It’s hard to describe what it’s like to be alone—not just for an afternoon or for a week, but as a permanent condition. I’m sure that it’s difficult for people with families to understand how hopeless, how utterly dark, loneliness is. After all, even a dysfunctional family provides occasional comfort.

The easiest way for me to explain the kind of loneliness I’m talking about is with an example from my senior year in college. I lived in an apartment complex that bordered a pond. It was a small, shallow pond, not far from a creek that ran along the edge of a narrow woods. Like most college towns, College Station, Texas, was fertile ground for planting apartment complexes. In my neighborhood the apartments ran thick and stark right up to the pond. Then the buildings stopped and nature took over for nearly a mile until the bricks and mortar regrouped on the other side of the woods. In a sense, the thirty-yard strip of grass between the sliding glass back door of my apartment and the pond was the border between civilization and nature, at least in my little part of the world.

The pond was beautiful in a simple, wild sort of way. It had frogs and turtles and bugs, and kids from the subdivision down the road frequently fished from the bank. Several families of ducks lived near the water.

I lived in the apartment complex for three years, and each year the duck families added to their numbers with the spring hatch. Even in this relatively protected
nature sanctuary, life was difficult for new hatchlings. A mother might start the spring with up to a dozen young, but usually only three or four would survive to become adults.

My last year in the apartment, several weeks after Easter, I looked out my sliding glass door one evening and saw Patsy, the research assistant who taught my economics lab. She was a bookish woman, with narrow shoulders and big, round glasses. She was standing near the pond with a loaf of white bread in her hand. I went outside to say hello. As I approached, three fuzzy ducklings, nearly full-grown but obviously very young, waddled near the water a few feet from Patsy’s feet. They were picking up pieces of bread that she’d dropped onto the ground, lifting their bills toward the sky, and jiggling their heads until the bread dropped down their slender throats.

After exchanging hellos, we talked about the unusually mild spring weather and watched the ducklings gobble the offered bread. Eventually I nodded toward them. “Where’s the mother?”

Patsy looked at me and wrinkled her forehead. “There is no mother.”

I shoved my hands in the back pockets of my jeans. “How can there be no mother?”

“They’re Easter ducklings.”

“What do you mean, Easter ducklings?”

“People use live eggs for the Easter egg hunts at their kids’ Easter parties. The guests take them home and keep them warm because the kids are excited about them. It
seems like such a cute idea. Then they hatch. Pretty soon it’s not so cute to have ducklings making a mess in the backyard. So people dump them at places like this.”

“Real duck eggs? I thought Easter eggs were hard boiled.”

“Not these. It’s the latest thing.”

“How do you know about this?”

“My daughters came home from a party with real duck eggs a couple of years ago. I called the mother who threw the party and chewed her out. We took the eggs back to the farm where she got them.”

I looked around the pond. Two duck families paddled in tight formation. One mother had six ducklings, the other had four, all much smaller than Patsy’s Easter ducklings. “Will the other ducks take them in?”

“Not a chance. They’re on their own.”

“How can they possibly survive without a mother?”

She dropped more bread on the ground.

One of the ducklings, the yellow one, was the leader of the three. Larger and more daring than the others, he waddled to the water’s edge, stuck his bill beneath the surface, and came up shaking his head from side to side, water splashing in all directions. Then he turned and looked at his brother and sister, as if checking to make sure they were okay. The other two watched him intently. After a few quacks, the smallest sat down, curled into a ball, and tucked her head into the brown, fuzzy feathers at her side. Soon her other brother, a black one, stretched his neck and sat down practically on top of her. They huddled there, a few feet from the cattails,
each moving with the other’s breathing, neither willing to move away from the other’s touch. They watched their yellow brother as he continued to explore at the edge of the water.

“They haven’t got a chance.”

Patsy shook her head. “Probably not. I’ve been bringing them food for the past two days.” She wadded the empty bread bag into a ball and put it in her pocket.

“If they can get through the first couple of weeks, maybe they can survive,” I said.

“Maybe. Well, I’ve got to go.”

“See you at class.” I turned and walked back into my apartment.

The next morning I grabbed a dinner roll from the pantry and went out to the pond as soon as I awoke. At first I didn’t see the ducklings, but then I spotted the black brother and the brown sister. They were still huddled together in a tight ball, about two feet from the cattails. I didn’t see the yellow one anywhere.

I walked around the pond looking for the yellow duckling. There was no sign of him. Finally, I walked back to where the smaller brother and sister were huddled together. About five feet away from them, under a thin pond cypress, I found a flattened cluster of yellow feathers and a picked over skeleton. As I watched, the two remaining ducklings stood, shook themselves, and stared at the water. Before long they waddled to the bank and gently dipped themselves before settling into the water and paddling in tight circles, never straying more than a few feet from the bank.

I wondered whether their brother had died defending them, or if that was just my effort to make the whole thing into a Disney drama. I tore up the dinner roll and tossed the pieces onto the ground. The ducklings quacked tentatively, paddled onto the bank, and gobbled the roll chunk by chunk. Then they walked in circles for a few moments before plopping down so close to one another that they appeared to be a single, two-toned duck with two bills. Out on the pond the other duck families paddled about, the mothers in the lead, paying no attention at all to the two orphans.

That evening I walked to the pond again. The two ducklings were still huddled next to each other but were fifteen feet or so from where I’d left them that morning. They looked up at me expectantly. I dropped pieces of bread for them to eat.

The next morning the black duckling was gone. The smallest, the little brown one, waddled back and forth from the roots of the pond cypress to the edge of the water, quacking the entire time. She never got in the water, and I wondered whether she was too afraid to do it without her brothers around. I walked around the pond but found no sign of the black duckling. I fed her some bread and went to class.

That evening when I went to the pond, the brown duckling huddled alone, her back pressed tightly against an exposed root of the pond cypress. I brought her pieces of bread again, but she ate little. I sat on the grass beside her and cried.

When I finally left to go back to my apartment, she was still there huddled against the tree root, waiting for night to come.

There is nothing worse than being alone.

Nothing.

I MOVED OUT OF Simon’s house on a Friday morning and slept the entire afternoon in my apartment. Around five o’clock I ordered a pizza and ate it in front of the television, still in my pajamas. I almost poured myself a bourbon, but I got a diet soda out of the refrigerator instead. It had been more than a month since I’d had a drink, and going cold turkey hadn’t been hard at all while I was at Simon’s.

Now, however, I was alone again, and things weren’t going well. I sat on the floor and watched a rerun of
Everybody Loves Raymond
. I ate the whole pizza. When I finished, I turned the sound down and looked around my apartment. Expensive furniture, a minimalist theme,
a sparkling view of the Dallas Arts District skyline—all the things that had made me feel hip and young now seemed cold and depressing when compared to the warm boredom of family life.

On the television the muted characters worked their mouths, gave exasperated looks, laughed, mugged, and ate together. Even with no sound it was obvious they were a family. I tossed the empty pizza box across the floor and went back to bed until ten the next morning. When I awoke, I shuffled around the empty apartment for a couple of hours, then felt tired and went back to bed again. This time I slept until five. That’s what depressed people do—they sleep.

That evening I decided enough was enough. At around nine o’clock I put on a short, tight cocktail dress and walked a block down McKinney Avenue to a bar called Purple. It had only been open a few months, and the
Morning News
was calling it the hottest new place in the city. I figured that getting out of the apartment was just what I needed, and a drink or two might raise my spirits.

I’d gone to plenty of bars alone during my life. The thought didn’t trouble me at all. I had never, though, seen anything like Purple. It was already dark outside, but my eyes required several minutes to adjust when I stepped through the triangular entryway. Once I could make out my surroundings, it became apparent where the bar got its name. Nearly everything in the giant room was purple: the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the furniture, the clothing on the employees. To top it off,
a flashing purple light came on every ten minutes or so and bathed the entire bar in an eerie, throbbing glow.

The place was an epileptic’s nightmare.

When the purple light was on, the customers’ faces became iridescent and their teeth took on a radioactive gleam. Even the aquarium behind the bar had purple water, though the tropical fish were various shades of yellow and orange. I couldn’t help but wonder whether a long-term market really existed for this theme.

Making my way around several clusters of Dallas’s young and beautiful, I headed straight to the semi-circular chrome bar that enclosed one end of a raised dance floor. The dancers’ hips twisted and thrust at eye level as I climbed onto a low-backed stool. I ordered a bourbon, straight up.

I hadn’t been at the bar for ten minutes before a wavy-haired lifeguard-type in a tight designer polo made eye contact from a nearby bar stool. I turned in the opposite direction. By the time I turned back he was standing so close to me that his thigh touched my knee. I moved my leg away.

He leaned against the bar. “My radar is pretty good, and it tells me that you like to dance.” He looked directly into my eyes. I felt like I was being hit on by a sales trainer for a surfboard company.

“Actually, you’re wrong. I don’t like to dance.” Just as I was about to tell him to get lost, I noticed that my glass was nearly empty. I’d been viewing the situation wrong-headedly. This guy was not an irritant; he was an opportunity.

I picked up the glass. “I like to drink, though. Will you buy me one?”

His eyes lit up. I suspect that he was imagining an opportunity also. “Sure. What are you having?”

“Bourbon, straight up.”

He waved at the bartender. “One bourbon, straight up. And get me a chocolate martini.”

It figured. I hated him.

He held out his hand. “I’m Rob.”

I wasn’t certain, but his fingernails appeared to have been manicured. I didn’t take his hand, I just let it dangle there until he dropped it to his side.

“I’m . . . Kristin.”

“Hello, Kristin. I dated a girl named Kristin in high school. She was hot—like you.”

Even the bartender rolled his eyes at that one. He placed our drinks on the bar. Rob held up his purple martini glass and said, “To Che.”

I sipped my bourbon. “Who’s Che?”

“Che Guevara.”

So, Rob was not only a pretty boy but a pro-Communist pretty boy. The sun was really rising on my world. “You’re a student of Cuban history?”

“Not really. I saw
The Motorcycle Diaries
, though. He’s been my hero ever since—living free, riding around on motorcycles, standing up for what he believed in.”

I couldn’t take it any longer. “You’re exactly the type of guy whose head he had a tendency to put a bullet in, you know that, don’t you?”

He shrugged and picked up his chocolate martini.
“I don’t really like politics. I just think he was cool, that’s all.”

I swallowed the last of my bourbon and put the glass back on the bar. “You’re not from Texas, are you?”

“No.”

I held my glass up and tipped it. A few drops of bourbon landed on the floor. “Uh-oh, I’m empty.”

He waved at the bartender. “Another bourbon, please.”

In a couple of minutes the bartender was back. I drank the whole thing down. “Do you want to dance?” I said.