Just Another Kid (36 page)

Silence.

“What about him?” I asked.

She looked over at me, searched my face a moment and then looked away. Still she didn’t immediately respond.

“Bobby and I were close. We were only eighteen months apart. Less, actually, because my birthday’s July 21st and his is New Year’s Day.”

I nodded.

She looked at me. “I get the feeling sometimes that you don’t think I’ve ever been close to anyone. That I’m not very good at close relationships.” She paused. “Maybe I’m not in some ways. Maybe you’re right. But I was close to Bobby. I loved Bobby.

“See, I think it was growing up in our family that did it. You had to be close. What’s that adage? Comrades in adversity, or something. That was us. He was the only other person in the world who understood what it was like.”

She stretched her legs out in front of her and leaned back against the metal divider.

“Anyway, Bobby had an apartment near Asbury Park. That’s in New Jersey, down on the shore. And I was at Princeton on the project. I used to go over there all the time to see him. His apartment was really near the beach and we used to go down there all the time, walking, looking for things. You know, sort of beachcombing. It was just something we liked to do.

“Bobby was never a talker. Nobody in my family was. But he was easy to be with. I could just be myself and not worry. I came over once or twice a week, just to get away from Princeton. To get away from Tom sometimes too. I hid out with Bobby quite a lot.

“He had plenty else going on. He was an electronics engineer, and he was doing okay. He was into research too. And he had a girlfriend. Her name was Sarah. I’d met her a few times. I don’t think they were really serious. Just enjoying themselves.”

Ladbrooke fell silent then. There was a moment’s expectancy, as if she was still mid-thought, but then it passed, and a more complete silence came down around us.

I regarded her, trying to discern why she’d stopped talking.

She shifted position, pushing her hair back behind her shoulders.

“What next?” I asked.

“I went over this one time,” she said, her voice soft. Pulling her knees up, she hugged them. “It was September. A really clear day, you know, the kind you get in the fall. I was late. I’d said I’d be there by four, but then we had this meeting and I stayed longer than I’d meant to. Nothing special, but it made me late. And then the traffic was bad because it was a Friday. Still, I didn’t think anything about it. I hadn’t bothered to call him or anything. You see, usually I’m very punctual, but Bobby never was. He was terrible. He’d be, like, half an hour late somewhere, and that’d be early for him. No sense of time at all. So he wasn’t the kind to say anything if I was late. Usually, he never noticed.

“Anyhow, I got there about 5:30, I guess. I parked the car and went on up to his apartment. But when I got there, the door was locked. Now, this really surprised me because, normally, Bobby never locked the door if he knew I was coming. I had a key, but he usually left it open for me. His car was in the garage, so I’d assumed he was in. I couldn’t figure out why he’d locked his door.”

She paused.

“What I thought, see … was that he probably had Sarah in there. I thought they were in there, you know, making love or something, and he’d locked the door to keep me from barging in on them. So I decided to ring the bell. I rang and rang and rang. But no answer. So I thought he must have stepped out for a minute. There was a cash-and-carry down on the corner, so maybe he’d gone there. And I let myself in. All the lights were on. There had been a record on the stereo, but it was finished playing …”

She was silent a few moments, all her muscles rigid.

“It’s funny, you know, the way your mind works. The things you remember from an event. It’s always the little things, isn’t it? Little, tiny, unimportant things. Like I remember looking at the record on the stereo. It was Bach. Bach’s ‘Sheep May Safely Graze.’ And then I went out to the refrigerator to get something to drink. I was really thirsty and wanted something like a Coke, but all there was in there were a bunch of cans of that horrid cheap stuff that comes in flavors. You know, like black cherry and strawberry …”

“Lad, what happened?”

“I mean, what I remember is
that
, that stupid assortment of soft drinks in the refrigerator. Feeling really irritated that Bobby could never get in anything decent that I liked …”

She glanced over very quickly and our eyes met in that split second. She looked away. A long, intense silence followed. Her eyes filled with tears. They welled up, shimmered briefly on her lashes and then slowly trickled down over her cheeks.

“What had happened?” I asked.

“He’d killed himself. I went in to use the bathroom, and there he was. Hanging in the shower. And he’d left a little note on a piece of paper, lying on the edge of the bathtub. It said …” Her voice broke. “It said, ‘Sorry, Laddy.’ And that was all.”

Forehead on her drawn-up knees, she began to cry.

“He’d only been dead about an hour. That’s what the coroner said. If I’d only not been late that day … Why hadn’t I at least bothered to call? Why did I stand outside the door all that time instead of bothering to get my key out? Why did I go stick my head inside the goddamned refrigerator first?”

“Oh, Lad, I am so sorry.”

Ladbrooke looked over at me. Her jaw was tight in an effort to control the tears, so momentarily she could not speak. She looked down, then back over again.

“Hold me, okay?” she asked, her voice almost inaudible. “Would you?”

And I did. In the dingy confines of the toilet stall, I reached over and pulled her against me and held on as tightly as I could.

I
t took us a considerable amount of time to get out of the girls’ rest room and back into the classroom, and even then, we were both in a sorry state. My discomfort, however, was inconsequential compared with Ladbrooke’s. She sat at the table, drinking water out of my coffee mug and looking as if she had just survived a war. It was almost 5:30, but I didn’t have any of the necessary preparation work done for the next day, so I took a couple of aspirin and then sat down with my plan book to get on with things. Folding her arms on the tabletop, Lad lay her head down on them and closed her eyes. She remained like that throughout the time it took me to do the plans.

Finally, I rose from the table and went to put my work away. “I need to get something to eat,” I said, as I slid the plan book back into the filing drawer.

Ladbrooke straightened up. She rubbed her face and her eyes. “Don’t leave me alone just yet, okay?” She didn’t look up. “This has been a bit too much for me today. I don’t think I’m going to cope with it, not without having a drink.”

“Do you want to come with me? I’ve got to get something to eat, because my head is killing me. Do you want to come too?”

She nodded.

“Ring Tom first, though.”

“Why?”

“Just to let him know where you are. Then we’ll go get something to eat.”

“He won’t care where I am.”

“Just do it, okay?”

We went to a small, self-service restaurant that specialized in soup and sandwiches. I wanted a place where we could relax and not be hurried, but I was reluctant to go home. After the tumultuous afternoon, I wasn’t up to an evening entirely on my own with Ladbrooke. I needed other people around and the reassurance of normal life.

The restaurant was ideal: dark, quiet and fairly empty. The booths, while large and comfortable, still afforded me a view of the other patrons and the serving area without infringing on our privacy. Lad took a bowl of soup and a glass of milk, while I wolfed down soup, three sandwiches and dessert to appease an adrenaline-crazed body. Afterward, we relaxed in companionable silence while I had a cup of coffee.

“You know,” Ladbrooke said after a while, “the thing that hurt me the most about Bobby’s suicide was that I never saw it coming. I never had an inkling. I wasn’t just saying it; we
were
close. But he never said a word to me about it, never said he was depressed, never said things were going badly for him.”

“I can imagine it must have been a shock.”

She nodded. “I kept asking and asking myself why. I still do, sometimes.
Why?
Everything seemed to be coming together so well for him. He had a job he loved. He was earning a good salary. He had Sarah. So why did he do it?”

I shook my head.

“That eats at me, even now, even after—what?—almost six years. It always made the guilt worse to cope with, because I thought it was my fault for not seeing it coming, not preventing it. That, or God forbid, even worse, I mean, what
if
it was just intended as a gesture, if he’d just needed help and didn’t know how to ask for it? And if I’d gotten there that day when I’d told him I would, then … maybe it would have been enough to … I don’t know. I suppose it’s useless to keep thinking about it.”

“It’s useless to keep blaming yourself for it.”

She nodded wearily. “Maybe so. But it’s next to impossible not to. I even dream about it sometimes, about coming just in time … but even in my dreams, I never save him.”

A small silence came between us.

“I told you Bobby wasn’t much of a talker. I wonder now if perhaps he didn’t have the same kind of problem with expression as I do. He was better at getting on with people, but he never talked easily. In a way, that was nice, because he was the only person I never felt I
had
to talk with. But now, of course, I realize he must have had a whole lot more going on inside his head than I ever knew about. The sad thing is, if I didn’t know about it, chances are no one else did either.”

She sighed. “What I still can’t figure out is why he did it
then
.” She looked over, glancing in my direction but not directly at me. “You have to sort of understand about our family. We had a really rough childhood, Bobby, Kit and me. Not in the physical sense. Nobody abused us. But emotionally …”

I nodded.

“Kit never did manage. He had problems right from the start, both in school and at home. He was taken into care once, when he was about nine, because he got into trouble with the police. Even now he’s not gotten himself together. He’s been in and out of jail and detox centers all his life. But Bobby and me, we always managed to do all right. We kept each other going. We called ourselves the Two Musketeers when we were little. Not too original, I know, but that’s what we were. We used to make these blood pacts with one another—you know, one for all, all for one. We got really serious about it and cut our fingers and all that. I mean, it was silly. He already
was
my blood brother. But it worked for us. It got us over the rough bits and kept us going. We survived.”

Ladbrooke grew thoughtful.

“So I kept asking myself, why did he commit suicide then, when he’d finally made it, when he was finally free? If he was the kind of person to do that sort of thing, why hadn’t he done it earlier when he had all the reasons?”

“That’s impossible to say.”

“Bobby’s killing himself completely devastated me. For a long time, for like a year or more, I was absolutely numb. And then everything just fell apart. I lost all faith in myself. To have missed seeing something that catastrophic coming, to have misjudged someone I knew so well and loved so much—how the hell could I possibly trust my judgment on anything else?” She paused. “When I discovered I didn’t know Bobby, I suddenly felt like I didn’t know me any more either.”

She exhaled a long, slow breath.

“I spent a lot of time thinking about suicide myself after that. Before, it had never really occurred to me, but then suddenly, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. My biggest obstacle was not having the courage to actually do it. I made the plans. God, I made the plans at least a hundred times, and on each occasion, I fully intended to carry them out. But I was always too big a chicken in the end, which, like everything else in my life, left me feeling like shit.”

A quiet, grim silence wrapped itself around us. Ladbrooke just sat, her thoughts absorbing her. I glanced around. The restaurant had emptied further. There were only about half a dozen people there.

“Bobby’s doing that destroyed the whole image I’d worked up of us. I’d always thought of us as a couple of
real
survivors, the kind of people who can always make it, in spite of the odds. I used to get by on that quite a lot. Things’d go wrong, something awful’d happen, and I’d manage to keep going because I had this image of myself as a real survivor. But it was an image I’d built up from childhood, from Bobby and me sticking together through thick and thin, from all the Two Musketeers junk. It wasn’t an image of
me;
it was an image of
us
. Both of us, together. Because that’s why we survived. Then, all of a sudden, wham. He didn’t survive. And my world fell apart.

“I couldn’t believe it. You see, he was always better than I was. He was smarter. He was really well liked; people got on with him. He never drank. I was the one who was constantly screwing up, not him. He was the strong one. And then … and then, I mean, what hope is left after that? What’s the point of trying?”

“But you
are
a survivor, Lad,” I said.

“I don’t know. If you’re drowning and someone saves you, it doesn’t mean you won’t drown the next time you fall in the water.”

“But I don’t think you will.”

She shrugged noncommitally.

“You
have
survived, Ladbrooke, and that’s been no mean feat, by the sound of it. You’re a great deal stronger than you give yourself credit for.”

“I wish I felt like it sometimes.”

Eventually, Lad came home with me, and I made a place for her to sleep on the couch. Beyond that, we were both too worn out to do anything other than collapse in front of the television. Ladbrooke, stretched out on top of the bedding on the couch, fell asleep during the ten o’clock news. I turned off the set and went in to have a long soak in the tub to ease still-tense muscles along my back.

Tired as I was, I was unable to fall asleep immediately. The events of the day kept replaying themselves. However, my thoughts were haunted mostly by Bobby, whom I’d never seen, not even in a photograph, yet could visualize with heart-wrenching clarity. I wasn’t seeing a twenty-six-year-old suicide victim, but rather a little boy, undoubtedly like so very many of the little boys I’d encountered in my career. He was the small, quiet one in the back of the classroom. He was the kid we forgot at the fairgrounds because we didn’t even realize he was missing. He was the boy who continually came and pressed his face against the window of my classroom door but who always disappeared before I opened it. That was Bobby, the child no one quite managed to notice.

I visited Geraldine in hospital the following afternoon. Although her injury was not serious, there was some concern about possible nerve damage; thus, the doctors had decided to keep her for a period of observation.

She was in a room with three other children. When I first came into the room, it took me a moment to recognize her. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, and it completely altered the appearance of her face. She looked innocent, an attribute I hadn’t previously associated with Geraldine.

“Hi, pumpkin,” I said. “How are you?”

She smiled when she realized it was me. I don’t think she could see very far without her glasses.

“Here, I’ve brought you something.” I handed her a small package.

“What is it?”

“Open it and see.”

For a few moments she struggled one-handed to open the gift and then looked up. “Could you help me, please?”

I reached over and held it for her while she undid the wrapping. It was a very small stuffed lion. She smiled at it and cuddled it against her cheek. “Thank you, Miss.”

“I thought of you, when I saw that,” I said. “Brave as a lion. You were yesterday, you know. With all those men working over you. And going in the ambulance with Mr. Cotton. You were very brave.”

She squinted slightly, regarding my face. “I was afraid you’d be mad at me.”

“No. It was a rather unfortunate thing to have done, but I’m not mad.”

“Is Ladbrooke coming to see me?”

“Well, not today, I think. But if you’re still here on Monday, I’m sure she’ll come.”

“Is she mad at me?”

“No. You frightened her. I think she was more scared than you were, but she isn’t angry. Neither of us is.”

Geraldine looked down at the toy lion. She stroked its mane tenderly.

Sitting in the chair beside the bed, I watched her. I felt a desperate need to talk to her. With sudden, distressing clarity I was having to face the fact that somehow, somewhere along the line, she had slipped away from me.

“I wish I’d known that you felt so very unhappy yesterday afternoon,” I said quietly. “Perhaps if I’d known, I could have done something to help.”

Geraldine shrugged slightly. Most of her attention still appeared to be on the lion, which she was petting over and over again.

I glanced at the other children in the room. They weren’t being noisy or intrusive, but this wasn’t a very private place. Lowering my head, I studied my hands for a moment. Would it be better to wait until another time, until she was well again, until we had more privacy? Or had I lost too many chances already, waiting for a “better time” to come along?

Geraldine did not look at me.

“Can you tell me why you did what you did?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Was it Shemona saying she was never going back?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can appreciate where that must have hurt you a lot, her saying that. Sometimes things kind of pile up, and something hurtful like that can push us into doing things we ordinarily wouldn’t have done.”

Geraldine continued to regard the toy lion. “Like I said, Miss, I don’t know.”

I looked over. “Maybe we can try again. This was an unpleasant thing to happen, but now that it has, it’s probably better to put it behind us and concentrate instead on what we can do to keep you from feeling like you need to do that sort of thing again.”

She shrugged.

Silence came between us. Geraldine lifted the lion up to eye level and regarded it a long moment before finally reaching over and setting it on the table beside the bed. She then folded her hands in her lap. When I didn’t speak, she glanced briefly in my direction, catching my eye. She looked down then at the bandage on her left hand.

“I’m to see a skytrist now,” she said. “Did Auntie Bet tell you?”

“Yes.”

“His name’s Dr. Morris. I have to see him. It’s not a choice.”

“I’m sure that will help.”

Geraldine shrugged. “I don’t know. It’d be better if Auntie Bet used the money to just let me go home. That’d help me more.”

Of the other children, only Shamie questioned what had happened to Geraldine’s hand. Living with her, he had, of course, much more opportunity to know it was a self-inflicted injury. No doubt the adults in the household had discussed the matter, and perhaps even Geraldine herself had said something. I didn’t know. However, it was clear the episode preyed on him. Finally, during a quiet moment the following week, I called him aside.