No One Tells Everything (23 page)

“None of that,” she says.

And finally there is a spark of anger from him.

“You don’t get to decide, Grace.”

He stands and runs his hands through his hair, pacing before the window.

“People don’t just not show up for work and run away after spending the night and drive drunk,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” she says, chewing on her thumbnail. “I’ve been doing something. Trying to help this kid.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Out at Emeryville College. The boy they say killed the girl.”

“I don’t get it,” he says. “I thought they caught him and he confessed.”

“They did. He did. But it doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes sense because he was a loser. A bad person,” Brian says in a high voice, near hysterical. “What are you talking about?”

“I know him. We talk. I know it didn’t happen like they say it did, like they’ll prosecute him for. He’s not some psychopath.”

“So his lawyers can explain it for him.”

“They won’t! Because he doesn’t want to save himself.”

Brian is down on his knees in front of her.

“Stop, Grace. Stop it.”

“I can’t,” she says. “It’s too important.”

He leans back on his heels and puts his face in his hands.

“Why don’t you just come back to work and we can date like normal people? Why is that so bad? Why is being normal such a terrible thing?”

Her uncovered eye darts around the room.

“Why do you care about this guy so much? Why does it matter? He killed a girl, Grace.”

Brian stands and goes back over to the couch.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” she asks.

“What?”

“You. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“Goddamnit, Grace,” he says in a plaintive voice, “this isn’t about me. This is crazy. Just stop.”

“I’m serious,” she says, dropping the peas into her lap.

He exhales, drained, his chin in his palm.

“What if that one thing, that one moment of darkness or selfishness was your definer?”

He shakes his head.

“It doesn’t matter what came before it or after it, nothing will ever measure up. Nothing else will ever matter,” she says. “That one second determines you. Forever.”

“Okay,” he says, “so it’s not fair. But it happens all the time. That’s the way the world works.” He is spent. She wonders if it is enough to make him let her go. “Walk away, Grace. You need to pull yourself together.”

Brian runs her a hot shower and hands her a T-shirt and boxers. He tucks her in on the couch. She sleeps like a stone, then wakes sometime in the night. Miraculously her car has not been towed, and there it waits, its hazard lights the heartbeat of a battered body.

###

“How are you?” Grace asks.

“My mood is pretty dark, I guess. I’m not sleeping very well. My thoughts get jumbled. I’m doing okay though,” Charles says.

“I tried to see you.”

“What? When?”

“Yesterday. But they wouldn’t let me in.”

“That would have been nice. I would have liked that. A real visitor. My parents were supposed to come this past weekend from Ohio but they didn’t. My dad had the flu.”

“Have you heard from Caroline?”

She is sorry she asked as soon she has said the words.

“Nah. She’s busy. With school and field hockey and stuff.”

“I’ve been thinking about Sarah,” Grace says. “And how she must have felt out of control. Maybe even desperate.”

“Yeah. I think drugs made her do things that she never would have done otherwise.”

“Like what?”

“Like the money borrowing. It got more and more intense, until one time I told her ‘no more.’ I wanted so much to help her. I didn’t care about going to class or doing homework or writing papers. All I cared about was her.”

“What did she do when you cut her off?”

“She looked like I had just slapped her. She was stunned. She said, ‘I thought we were friends.’ I felt terrible. She walked out.”

“What did you do?” Grace asks.

“I shut all the shades and sat in the dark. I watched a lot of pornography on the computer. I gorged myself. Donuts in the morning, fast food in the afternoon, alcohol at night. It felt like the world was swirling. Sometimes I would drive around campus looking for her, to make sure she was okay. But I never saw her.”

“What about the motel?” Grace pushes ahead. “Why were you there? Why was she?”

He lets out a low sound from deep in his throat.

“Tell me,” she says.

“I went to that awful motel because—I went there because I wanted to kill myself. I was finally going to do it, for real this time. I took a knife and a bottle of vodka. I didn’t want to do it in the condo because the manager was nice to me, so I drove around until I found that disgusting place. I checked in. I set the knife on the bedside table and started drinking. And I couldn’t even do it.”

“You were alone?”

“Yes.”

“Charles. What happened?”

Grace hears his labored breathing.

“My cell phone rang. It was Sarah. She wanted me to pick her up.”

Y
ou told your father that you couldn’t concentrate in the dorm because of all the partying. You wanted to move away, and he made it happen. That’s something he’s good at. He increased your allowance by a thousand a month to cover rent. You have never been a huge fan of the beach, having to go without a shirt is reason enough, but you want to be able to say you’re living large, to be able to say, “You should hang at my crib at the beach.” You imagine Sarah arriving at your door and how you’ll walk with her down to the water’s edge at the end of the day and hold her in the sand that still hums with warmth from the sun. She hasn’t come to visit yet but your hope is a dormant seed waiting for water in the dark soil. You are infinitely patient even though she is so mad at you she hasn’t talked to you in weeks. Or maybe she never thinks about you at all, there’s that option, but it just can’t be, can it?

You have never kissed a girl. Yes, there was the transaction with the prostitute that helped alleviate something for a moment, but there was never a girl who liked you, who closed her eyes and leaned her face toward yours with dreamy anticipation. You tell the guys here that there’s a girl from home—blond, nice rack—who’s at Ohio State and who’s coming to visit soon, who’s killing you, man, because there are so many hot chicks running around Emeryville. And you tell your old classmates at Hunter High, via an online post, that you have a girlfriend at Emeryville who rocks your world.

You drive your Land Rover around Campus Drive when you’re supposed to be in Western Civilization discussing The Sorrows of Young Werther. You don’t see Sarah but you do see Amy waiting for the shuttle and she flags you down. You slow to a stop and quickly eject a Sade CD, winging it into the backseat, and you turn on the rap station.

“Hey, Raggatt,” Amy says. “Can you drop me off at the mall? I need to get a birthday present for Megan.”

“Sure, no problem,” you say, as you always do. She gets in and slouches down in the seat. “Did you change your hair?” you ask.

Her natural red has been bleached. She flips the ends between her fingers.

“For fun,” she says.

But she’s clearly self-conscious about it. It’s too obvious, too out of character. You recognize something familiar in Amy. She watches the popular girls with a hunger akin to lust.

“Do you mind?” she asks, reaching for the radio.

She turns it up and you can feel the bass in your feet.

“Where have you been, anyway?” she yells.

“I moved to the beach,” you say. “I have a sweet setup. You should come hang out some time.”

“That’s cool,” she says, nodding, knowing she never will because you have already been deemed uncool and she can’t risk it. Using you is fine and easily explained away, as long as she doesn’t get caught being your friend. “So John gets a single then?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

You underestimated your roommate. You thought he was a math nerd but he found a pretty girlfriend within weeks. You never get it right.

“Lucky bastard,” she says, turning down the music a little. “I guess that means no more happy hours.”

She smiles wanly since you both know people stopped wanting to come to your room. Even free alcohol wasn’t enough to lure them in.

“Rush starts next week,” she says, trying to sound upbeat, but her voice betrays her anxiety.

Amy will want to get into Pi Phi but will probably have to settle for a sorority where the girls are nice but not as hot or popular.

“Good luck,” you say.

The SAEs still chant “Ra-ggatt, Ra-ggatt” when you roll a keg in from your car or when they fake-box with you, but at some point you realized that you weren’t one of them, just the butt of their jokes, so you won’t humiliate yourself further by trying to become official. You tell them you’ll help with hazing and they say, “Yeah you will, Raggatt,” and laugh and give you high fives.

“Which side do you want?” you ask, pulling into the mall parking lot.

You have lost your desire to even feign jocularity.

“In front of Macy’s is good,” Amy says, checking her lip gloss in her compact mirror.

You feel pressure in your temples and heaviness in your limbs. Your mouth is too rubbery-limp to smile.

“Thanks for the lift,” she says, hopping out. “See you at casino night on Friday?”

You nod and wave, your eyes behind your sunglasses blurring out of focus.

You drive back to the dark, bare-walled condo where your clothes are still in garbage bags and your computer is on the floor and your TV takes up one whole wall, like a giant mouth waiting to swallow you up. Your mother sent you a box of things for the kitchen, which you haven’t opened. It sits on the counter with your unused textbooks. You crawl into the corner of your bedroom.

You have been asleep for hours when a door slamming in the parking lot startles you awake. It’s dark and you are on the floor, your head under the bed. You had your chance with Sarah and you blew it.

“I thought we were friends,” she said.

Maybe the money was not what made her say it. Maybe you really did hurt her feelings. Maybe it is you who is the jerk.

You skulk over to the computer and go to a bestiality website where you have gone before but it doesn’t do much for you. You try other porn sites but the colors and images flash without much effect. You might as well be dead, you think, and then you think it again, over and over: you might as well be dead. It could be a lot better than all this. It might even be nice.

In the kitchen you open the box from your mom. There is no note. There is a silverware organizer, six mugs, some dish towels, a nonstick frying pan, a set of knives in a wooden holder. Your parents were going to help you move but something came up and they stayed home. You dump the contents of the box into the sink, breaking two of the mugs.

You look through the slats of your blinds at the dark and empty backyard and the barbecue pit that no one uses. You slump down to the kitchen floor—gravity is too strong a force to combat—and you wonder how long it would take someone to find you if you never moved again. But then you think of the knives, a serrated one for bread, a large one for chopping, a paring knife, and the small one with the curved tip to separate meat from bone.

The hotels in town are too nice or too busy, so it takes a while to find the right location, an isolated, decaying place that will take you in and leave you alone. You find the Econo Lodge way out in Hickton.

Underneath the smell of synthetic air freshener, the room is dank with mildew. Next to the bed you place the knife and a bottle of Stoli, and you pick up the phone to call Caroline one last time, but you’re afraid one of your parents might answer so you don’t. You turn on the TV to an old repeat of Law & Order and drink as much vodka as you can before it starts to come back up. When the show ends, you stare at the pale undersides of your wrists and imagine the knife going in, popping through the skin, vertical lines from your hands up to your elbows. You want to prolong it, that moment when you first press the blade in. The guy at the counter was nice so you think you will do it in the bathtub to make cleanup easier. You doze.

When your cell phone rings and jerks you awake, you see it’s 1:02 a.m. on the clock radio and you scramble for your phone, lost within the folds of the slithery, stiff bedspread. Your heart is uncontainable. The name on the caller ID gives you the shock of your life.

“Sarah.” Your voice cracks.

“Hey.”

“Hey, hi, how are you? I thought you hated me.”

“Of course I don’t hate you.” There is a staticky pause. “Could you come get me? So we can talk?”

“Um, yeah. Totally,” you say.

You know you sound too eager and loud but you can’t help it. Sarah Shafer has said she needs to see you. You are not crazy. You leave the knife and the bottle and pull the flimsy door behind you.

You find her outside the dorm where she sits on the curb in the dark. She looks a little burned-out in her sweatpants and old T-shirt, her hair disheveled, her face gaunt, but she’s still pretty in a way that buoys your spirit. When she gets in the car she doesn’t look at you but that’s okay, because she’s really there.

“Are you okay?” you ask.

“Have you ever taken GHB?” she asks, tapping her finger against the window.

“No, I don’t think so,” you say.

“It’s kind of cool, I guess,” she says with an unfamiliar spaciness. “A little mellow for my taste.” She laughs.

You drive for a while and then you say, “When you called I was in a motel room. I was going to kill myself.”

“What?” she turns to look at you in the red glow of the stoplight. “Shit, Charles. You poor thing.”

You shrug, but you want to weep at her show of concern.

“You have to always think about how awful it would be for your parents, you know,” she says. “Even when there don’t seem to be any options left.” She takes her hair and ties it in a knot on top of her head but it quickly falls. “Let’s go there,” she says. “To the motel.”

You will do anything for this girl.

“Sit next to me,” she says, patting her hand on the bed. She picks up the knife and traces the blade across her fingertip. She sets it down on the bedside table. “Come here,” she says with a soft purr, her eyelids heavy.