Chapter 18 “If Only I Could Get a Scholarship to McLean.” #2
The district attorney may have been willing to offer me a plea deal with a misdemeanor charge and a fine, but for different reasons, my father and I were loath to accept that: me because I hadn’t touched the target, my father because any admission of guilt would increase his or my fiscal jeopardy in the subsequent civil trial or settlement.
“This winter,” I murmured.
“Yes. And let’s be clear: we would only settle before then if you told us that you were the one who’d cut the target off the net and then stashed it away in your golf bag,” he said, and there was something ominous in his tone, as if he’d forgotten for a moment that he was talking to a girl in a hospital bed who’d taken an X-Acto knife to her wrists.
When I said nothing, he asked, “And you didn’t, right? ”
“Right.”
I didn’t want to look at him, and so I turned toward the window that faced the hospital parking lot.
I’m sure, at the time, he viewed my unwillingness to meet his gaze as an admission of guilt, a confession, not merely the response of a girl who was tired of craving and being denied her father’s approval.
“You’re positive?”
“I’m positive.”
“Can you look at me and say that?”
It was an interesting standoff. But I capitulated fast. I looked at him and reassured him that I was positive.
Before I left the hospital and went home, Ethan came for a visit.
My parents were in the cafeteria, and I was watching The Phil Donahue Show on television, an oddly comforting throwback to my evenings watching TV with my aunt and uncle.
I silenced the television as he settled into the chair beside the bed.
“Here he is,” I said, smiling and trying to sound charming, “my knight in shining armor. My war hero.” I knew my hair was greasy and unkempt and I was in a hospital shift, but I managed to suppress my vanity. He’d seen me in a far worse state.
“Man, your housemates? Way scarier than the Viet Cong,” he said. “Way more formidable.”
“Girls can be pretty mean. I know.”
“I had a long talk with your roommate. I told Tina she should be ashamed of herself.”
“She just…she didn’t expect a roommate like me.”
“She was fucking awful.”
“I seem to bring that out in people.”
“You don’t,” he said. He was wearing a red-and-white flannel shirt and looked like my suburban idea of a handsome farmer. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay. Thank you for pulling me out of the tub,” I said, framing my thanks in euphemism.
He raised a finger into the air. “You know, if you’d said to me when we were at the bar, ‘Ethan, I see a naked girl in a bathtub in your future,’ it wasn’t what I would have pictured.”
“I’m sorry. I suppose I owe you for a new shirt and new jeans.”
“You don’t.”
“Probably wasn’t the first time you had someone else’s blood on you.”
He shrugged and didn’t answer. “How’s the food here?”
“I like Jell-O, so I’m very content.”
“Content. Good. You scared us.”
“Us. Meaning?”
“I don’t know. Everyone. Your parents, I figure. Me. Your housemates.”
“If I scared them, it’s just because they’d never seen an almost dead body. It’s not like any of them would have cared if I’d succeeded.”
“Not true. Think of the guilt you feel about Kenny Foster—and that was just bad luck. You die in that tub? Tina and her pals would be feeling that guilt forever. Their parents would tell them it wasn’t their fault: you had to be really ill to kill yourself and you’d probably been thinking about doing it forever.
But they’d remember the things they said to you that night. It would haunt them. It still might.”
I didn’t tell him that I had indeed been thinking about this forever. But, otherwise, I thought he was right.
“When we met,” I murmured, “Tina said something about how you used to sit on your helmet in the helicopters.”
“Yeah. I did. We all did. You wouldn’t think someone could shoot through the bottom of a helicopter. But they could.”
“You ever feel guilt about the people you killed?”
“Sure. But I was doing a job, and I was trying much harder not to get killed than to kill someone. And I never knew which of the dead bodies were mine.”
“What?”
“I would jump out of the chopper, spray the landing zone, and jump back in. Maybe help carry the wounded onto the Huey. The times they made us CC—”
“I don’t know what that means. CC?”
“Sorry. It’s gross.”
“Go ahead.”
“Count the corpses. Or casualty count. It was both.”
“That is gross.”
“They always wanted the highest possible number. We were there, usually, for what we called a dust-off, which meant recovering the wounded or our own dead, but sometimes there was a major who needed to report a big number of VC killed. Anyway, I was younger than you are right now.”
“I feel very old.”
“You’re older than your peers. That’s for sure. And not just by that year you took off.”
“It isn’t just Kenny. Or Theo. In some ways, it was all that golf.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am. Golf has to be the most adult sport there is. I mean, people play it into their nineties. And because I was so much better than everyone else my age, I was always hanging around with grown-ups. And mostly grown men. The only exception was this little summer camp I led. I had these girls a few years younger than me, and I’d create these elaborate miniature golf courses around the club.
I was a glorified babysitter, but the girls had fun. They called themselves Mira’s Moppets.”
“Sounds kind of sweet.”
“It was. Tina sure thought so when I told her. Of course, I ended up fucking the father of a friend of the Moppets. Kind of made it disgusting and nasty instead of sweet.”
“You know, don’t you, that no Catton kid ever tried to kill herself?”
“I guess. But you looked into that?”
“I did, yeah. Because I knew it was insane, and I wanted to reassure you.”
“Thank you.”
“It was nothing.”
“Well, nothing compared to kicking in a bathroom door.”
“Maybe.”
I lay back in bed and looked at my arms. “Do you have any scars?” I asked.
“I do not,” he said. But, of course, he did. Of course, he does. They’re just on the inside.