Plan B (21 page)

“I say let him go hungry,” Chuck said, tossing the door knob onto the floor in disgust. “You’d think we were doing this for our own health.”

“Well,” Lindsey said wearily as we headed back downstairs, “he has already gotten his breakfast, so I guess we’ll figure something out later.”

“American Cheese,” I said. “Fruit Roll-Ups.”

“What?”

“I’m just thinking of food we can slide under the door.”

“Cold cuts,” Lindsey volunteered.

“Wheat Thins,” Alison said with a grin.

“I think we’ll be able to find representatives of all the major food groups that come in flat packages,” Chuck said, smiling wickedly. His competitive nature wouldn’t allow him to be bested by Jack, even in this screwy situation.

“Of course, we can’t make him eat,” I observed.

“No,” Alison said. “But we couldn’t do that before anyway. It’s like there are these unspoken rules. We’ve put Jack in that room. It’s our job to feed him. If we can’t, we have to let him out. But if we can, I’m pretty sure he’ll eat it.”

“Restraint was never his strong suit,” Chuck observed.

Peter Miller’s funeral took place at noon in the Carmelina Lower School’s auditorium, just a few blocks out of the town center. The church had been deemed too small for the event. Peter had been a teacher at the local elementary school, so the place was packed with students and ex-students, parents, and faculty. Alison, Lindsey, and I sat in one of the back rows, feeling slightly out of place in what was clearly a community event. Lindsey had decided to join us at the last minute, leaving Chuck in the house to keep an eye on things.

The hushed din of a few hundred whispers was abruptly silenced as the pallbearers wheeled the brown, lacquered coffin to the front of the auditorium. As soon as the pallbearers had taken their seats, the minister, an angular man whose lips appeared to be fixed in a permanent grin, stood up at the podium. I was surprised by the sudden realization that I’d never attended a funeral before. Jeremy Miller, sitting up front sandwiched between his mother and sister, looking pale and scared, would carry this experience
with him into adolescence, his teenage years, and his adulthood. I wondered if it would give him some greater depth, some wisdom or sensitivity that I as yet still lacked, if every thought he formed, every relationship would be in some way tempered by the grief he was now experiencing. I felt a pang of something that might have been a distant cousin to envy, but my subconscious banished it before I could feel ashamed.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” the minister began. I couldn’t help noticing that hanging directly above the podium was a large, dark blue banner with a basketball that said “Carmelina Jaguars, 1998 State Champions.” The minister then paused and looked out across the auditorium, as if trying to establish eye contact with everyone in the room individually. “We hear this psalm of David read at every funeral,” the minister continued. “It is a psalm of comfort, maybe because of its imagery, or maybe because of its familiarity. Hearing these familiar words over and over again at funerals, we recognize that death, too, is a familiar occurrence to us. Tragic though it may be, it is still a natural part of life and we recognize it as such.”

He paused again, staring meaningfully at the front row of chairs, where the family members sat. “But when I read this psalm today, I will not read past the first line. Because I believe that right there, in the first sentence, there is a word that tells me all that I need to hear about Peter Miller. The Lord is my shepherd.’ That is true. But it is an anthropomorphism, a personification of the Lord. It is the attribution of a human quality to God. We do this in an attempt to qualify God’s divine actions, to somehow fit them into a category we can understand. And I now submit to you, Peter Miller was a shepherd here in our field, and in calling him a shepherd, I am referring to the exact human virtues and qualities that David was ascribing to the Lord when he wrote this psalm.

“Peter tended to our most valuable flock, our children. As any
of his students and their parents can testify, he was so much more than an English teacher. He was a magnet to the students of the Carmelina Lower School, giving of his love, his energy, his enthusiasm, and his time well above and beyond the call of duty. As a substitute teacher here, I was privileged to work alongside Peter, and I cannot remember a time when I saw him walking down the hallways of this school alone. The children flocked to him, their shepherd, for support, for humor, for camaraderie. He made every single child feel special, and I know from experience that the children valued the distinctive nicknames he bestowed upon as many of them as he could.” Here there was a light murmur from the crowd, and I looked around to see a number of people smiling at the reference. “When Peter gave a child a nickname, that child was reassured that he had a place in the school, that he fell safely within the shepherd’s sphere of protection, and parents knew their flock was being tended by the very best.”

I stared at the coffin and tried to develop a mental image of the man being described. Judging from the sniffling and tearing that seemed to be happening everywhere I looked, the minister’s words were striking a true chord. I looked up at Alison, who was crying quietly, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue every few seconds, and at Lindsey, who was staring intently at Jeremy and Melody Miller.

“When I think of shepherds I think of Moses,” the minister continued, “who led the Israelites out of slavery and into the promised land. As a young man, Moses grew up as an Egyptian prince, but he could not find peace living in the bustle of the big city. Instead, he fled Egypt altogether, and became a shepherd in Midyan. Only there, tending to his flock in the fields, was Moses finally able to find God, who appeared before him in the burning bush. Our Peter, who was born and raised in Manhattan, felt the same need to leave the city and find God and peace up here in
the country. In Carmelina, Peter tended his flock, just as Moses did in Midyan, and I believe that he was blessed to have found his burning bush. To know him was to know a man of absolute contentment, a loving husband and father, a great friend, a Godfearing man whose ample intelligence did not serve to complicate him, as it does so many people. He had the wisdom to simplify his life, so as to better appreciate his world, and better serve his family, friends, and this entire community. And while his passing is tragic, we can take some measure of comfort in the fact that Peter Miller died a happy man. A man with more blessings than he could count, from his loving wife and beautiful children, to the friendship and admiration of every person in this room.”

The minister paused, giving everyone a chance to digest all that he had said. Lindsey now had tears in her eyes as well, and when I looked around the auditorium I had trouble finding any dry eyes. “I would now like to call upon Mark Miller, Peter’s older brother, to say a few words.”

The funeral went on for another half hour or so, and then the coffin was wheeled out, followed by the bereaved. I saw Jeremy scanning the crowd as he followed the coffin, and suddenly felt unequipped to meet his gaze. Ashamed for reasons I couldn’t understand, I looked at my shoes until he’d passed.

Driving home we sat in a subdued silence. I found myself thinking of shepherds. And trucks. Trucks could come out of nowhere and end your life, no matter who you were or what you were doing. I pictured Peter Miller, sitting in an expansive green pasture with his white robe and his shepherd’s rod, when suddenly, out of the blue comes an eighteen-wheeler, scattering sheep right and left in its path as it veers toward him. And the look on his face, as the truck is bearing down on him, is one of pure exasperation. With the universe, with God, with life. Because if a shepherd in a field
isn’t safe from the cruel vagaries of fate, who the hell is? “Do you think he smoked?” I asked out loud from the back seat.

“What?” asked Alison, who was driving.

“Peter Miller. Do you think he was a smoker?”

Alison frowned at me in the rear view mirror. “I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”

“I’ll bet he didn’t smoke,” I muttered.

Lindsey, riding shotgun, flashed me a perplexed look. “What are you babbling about?”

“We could all die tomorrow,” I said glumly. “Any of us. We could all die at any time.”

“That’s what funerals are for,” Lindsey said. “Contemplating our own mortality.”

“Impending mortality,” I said. “It’s coming. Peter Miller is the statistical anomaly that proves it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, this was the last guy who should have died like this. He took himself out of the city and moved to a safe little community in the mountains. What do you think the rate of violent crime in Carmelina is? Probably lower than in any one city block in New York. He was a teacher and a father, leading a quiet, risk-free life in a quiet, risk-free community.” I thought about it for a moment. “No way did he smoke,” I said.

“And your point is . . . ?”

“He still died, a horrible violent death. Which means no one is immune. Every morning we wake up and assume it’s just the next day in what will be a long series of days. But any one of those days can be it.”

“Have you been to many funerals?” Alison asked.

“This was my first.”

“Shocker.”

No one spoke for a while. The weather was cooperating with our moods, with pregnant, gray storm clouds that obliterated the sky. “It’s just that, you try so hard to get it right, you know?” I said. “To get your life to this point you’ve imagined in your head and you tell yourself that if I can just get to there, I’ll be happy. You all accuse me of living in the past, but the truth is I’m thirty years old and I’m still counting on the future to bail me out. And that’s a crock. You can spend years working toward something and get killed before you reach it, so what’s the point?”

“Because you probably won’t,” Lindsey snapped at me. “Chances are you’ll live until you’re ninety, which is a lot of time to spend in an unhappy life. Peter Miller may be dead, but look at how many people he affected before he died. He lived in the present. You’re worried that you might be wasting your time trying to achieve something when you might die tomorrow. You should be worried about getting your life together as quickly as possible so that if you did die young, at least you’d have lived. You’re young, you’re healthy . . .”

“Health,” I said, “is just the slowest possible rate at which one can die.”

Lindsey twisted around in her seat to glare at me. “Shut up, Ben,” she said. I did, for a minute.

“I agree with you,” I relented. “It’s just that, you know, I was thinking about this guy. He was only around six or seven years older than me, and look at all he had to show for himself, all the people who cared, who will miss him. If I died tomorrow, I don’t think I could fill three rows in the church.”

“Well, you are Jewish,” Alison said with a smile.

“You know what I mean.”

Without turning around, Lindsey reached behind her and groped for my hand. “Well then,” she said. “I guess you just can’t
die yet.” I held onto her hand, wondering if the low vibrations I felt in our conjoined palms were originating from within us, or if it was the world that was shaking and we were perfectly still.

We stopped briefly in town, to replenish our food stocks and buy a paper. I was surprised to see that none of the newspaper vending machines had
The New York Times
. Lindsey said that all New Yorkers make the mistake of thinking that New York is America, which is ironic when you consider the map. We settled for a
USA Today
. The piece on Jack was mercifully small, something between an article and a blurb. Jack Shaw was missing, the police were concerned, but no one was speculating any foul play.

Shortly after we returned from the funeral, I was shooting hoops in the driveway when Jeremy came out of his house to walk Taz. Judging from the many cars still parked in the Miller’s driveway and on the road in front of the house, there was still a large crowd at the wake. Jeremy was still in his suit and tie, which combined with his solemn expression and carefully combed hair to make him look like a sad little man. I always felt awkwardly unqualified to deal with the bereaved, or to even make eye contact with them, as if anything I said or did would be an intrusion into their privately painful experience. So I smiled at Jeremy, but turned quickly back to catch my own rebound. The sky still looked threatening, jammed with dark clouds, and the air was laden with the heavy promise of a thunderstorm, but the rain had yet to come.

“I saw you at the funeral today,” Jeremy said.

“Yep.”

“Why’d you come?” he asked. “You didn’t know my dad.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But you know, funerals aren’t just about the person who has died. They’re also about the people left behind.”

“You mean my family?”

“Yep.”

“But you don’t know them either,” he pointed out.

“I know you,” I said.

“Was that girl with you your girlfriend?” he asked.

“What?”

“The girl who you were with, next to Alison. Is she your girlfriend?”