Chapter 15 2008
Al remembers a boy of seven years old, standing on a beach, eyes drowning in his first encounter with death.
He remembers a boy of twelve, bringing home a report card that read: “Shows some promise, but limits himself.” He remembers a boy, minutes old, heart rate plummeting, emerging for air from a cavity in the center of his wife.
The clock in the kitchen is ticking into the shrouded morning.
Viola, who he discovered last night nursing a bloody nose, has not emerged from her bedroom.
His son, whom he found fucked and remorseless at the end of the beach road, is sitting across from him, pushing soggy marshmallow cereal around a bowl of gray milk.
In an act of profound generosity, Al had saved the conversation for a soberer morning.
“What are we going to do, Seb?” he asks.
They towed Tillie’s car. Sebastian’s was still on the beach, a junkyard job.
Tillie had been remarkable, waving her hand breezily, saying: We’ll figure it out later.
She watched the car disappear with the acceptance of a woman for whom destruction has become commonplace; who understood boys and their lack of regard for the material.
But the house has taken on the charge of a war zone.
“You could ground me.”
“Do we think that’s sufficient? You hit your sister.”
The dishwasher begins to beep and old anger is rising in his chest, a sense of cosmic injustice. He cannot stop the crescendo of the words: “Violence is unacceptable under this roof.”
“So kick me out.”
Defiant, like Susie, to the point of dangerous. It’s arrogance, actually, obliviousness to the lives and needs of other people.
“Really. Where would you go?”
“I don’t know. The city?”
“Oh yeah? What about school?”
“I don’t have to go to school. Legally.”
The dishwasher is still beeping and Al clicks it with his hand. A jet of steam cones toward the ceiling, fogging the window and his glasses, and Sebastian slurps his cereal. How did he end up with this child, hell-bent on eliciting his anger, on injuring the women he cares for—
“Sure, Sebastian. You seem like you’ve learned everything you could possibly need to know.
Go on, see what the world makes of you! Because here’s how I see it: I leave for one night, and your rap sheet reads ‘drugs, physical assault, a hit and run’…
Am I missing anything else? Now’s a good time to say. ”
His voice reverberates. Sebastian is wide-eyed.
He’s beyond help, Viola said last night. She was leaning her head backward over the bed with a Kleenex jammed up it, staring at the ceiling, her voice detached.
“No,” Sebastian says. “That’s it.”
“Pretty frigging intelligent. You’re going to be a hell of a hit.”
Al had been raised to believe success was a linear march and any deviation led to ruin.
Susan grew up with no structure at all, pursuing her intuition through failure and degradation and jobs she didn’t want.
What would he have told her at seventeen?
Don’t do it. Don’t become the person you want to be.
Where would that have left them? As his words hang in the air, he knows this is not the way to deal with this, that his son cannot be blamed for the wilderness he finds himself in.
But without Susie he has no viable alternative.
Al wipes the fog from his glasses on his T-shirt.
“Who is going to pay for Tillie’s car?”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“It’s not going to be cheap.”
“It’s fine,” Sebastian says, in a way that isn’t. “But I want to move in with Sadie.”
Outside the window, the clouds are beginning to shift. When he calls Tillie afterward, she sighs and says, “Boys require room to grow.”
But Al has never known how to let people go.
Viola wakes to the loud chuckling sound of a car coming up the driveway.
Sugar Baby is a mess, coughing up smoke, front bumper aslant, scratched up with black paint.
Sebastian steps out and catches her eye through the window.
They hover for a minute, unsure whether there is language enough for this, whether language is the right tool.
The bruise is fading on the bridge of her certifiably nonbroken nose, the dark mark under her eye is covered up.
In a moment that demands embrace, Viola finds nothing.
She feels the edges of herself, the point at which she will give up trying to keep everyone happy.
Gravity is pulling her brother toward someone who isn’t there, who won’t catch him.
As she closes the door, she is surprised to find there is nothing inside of her that wants to forgive him.
Al watches limply as his sister-in-law gathers his son out of the car. “Hey, slugger. Come on in.”
“Thank you for doing this,” he says.
Al can tell Sadie is doing everything in her power not to say it out loud, not to weaponize the name of his wife, who would never have slipped up like this. They cannot be in a room together without conjuring Susan. A pain burrows between them that refuses to mend.
“Well, I’m sure it’s better than his ending up on the street.” She bites her lip as though this were sharper than she intended, but the implication—his inability to parent Susan’s child—is felt.
He watches his son—his lanky frame disappearing inside of Sadie’s house, not turning around, not glorifying the moment with so much as a wave.
Susie used to leave like that, walking straight through security, set upon her destination, not looking back to see whether he was still standing there hoping that she would run back.
Is there something broken about him, some manner that drives people away?
He has only ever wanted simple, happy things, for a family to find the same goodness in the world that he has found. Is that such a crime?
When the door closes, he is still sitting in the driver’s seat. If his wife were here now, would she run out after him? Would she find a way to say: I love you?
“Come on, kiddo,” Sadie says, and Sebastian remembers his mother used to call him kiddo. Is there an age, a line in the sand, where you become too old to be a kiddo? “Mi casa es su casa.”
The afternoon is spent cutting, sorting, pasting.
Sadie is starting an event planning company and determined that mood boards will set her apart.
Large clippings of flowers, spiky pop guitars, table settings, lipstick.
Better Homes and Gardens, Cosmopolitan, Boston Magazine, some more than six years old and yellowing.
Sebastian finds the process almost meditative, sifting through the magazines and waiting for an image to vibrate. An upturned hand, a palm tree.
At night, he settles into the bedroom that used to be his mother’s childhood room, and clicks his way to the forum.
NEW TOPIC: EPISODE 5950 (1996)
They killed Margie off, apparently, after his mom got the cancer diagnosis. A practice run at death. Car crash: clean, pedestrian. The kind of death that could happen to anyone.
If he can’t watch it tonight, he never will.
Now! Here she is, at the click of a button, in the passenger seat of a car racing down the highway, made up and dressed to the nines.
MARGIE
Slow down!
How did she make her eyes so wild?
Sirens wail in the background as the driver swerves through traffic. His mother twists to get a look out of the rearview.
MARGIE
It’s not worth it!
In slow motion, a man steps out in front of them.
The windshield, split-scattering into one hundred thousand pieces, the sucker punch of the airbag, and the barrel roll of the car: one—two—three—four flips, each one punctuated by metal slamming pavement.
The slow, bloody turn of the driver, another woman, devastated, wailing at the curled-up body of the pedestrian.
Orson Grey, his mouth moving over rising strings.
The cop cars pull to a stop, cut the sirens.
And then unbearable silence. A slow pan over guardrails wrenched spinal out of the earth.
Her body lifted on a stretcher, lifeless but hardly scathed. An elegant garnet trickle.
Sebastian replays the scene multiple times, biting his tongue to stiff himself, hunting for the moment of impact. Someone had to decide when exactly she died. Didn’t they? He flips through the comments below the video.
burger_mama: our angel has gone 2 heaven
Did it help to go through the motions of death? Maybe. But there’s a difference between practicing and letting go.
He picks up and puts down his phone, wondering whether he can text Lola with some pretense, to ask: “Are you okay?” But he doesn’t.
Later, they will remember it differently, who was the one to leave.