5. Wednesday, September 6, 2023 #5
Before going out to the pool, he passes by Quinn’s and Polly’s rooms. There’s still light coming from underneath their doors.
He’s about to knock on Quinn’s and tell him that he should probably get some sleep, but he stops himself.
It’s only ten p.m. and the kid is fifteen.
He doesn’t need his dad telling him when to go to bed anymore.
The thought makes some indistinguishable part of him ache.
It’s not his heart, or his brain, but somewhere deeper, where the longing for what has passed lives.
He knocks on Quinn’s door, suddenly desperate to connect with him. To feel that grounding bond between parent and child that, in the early years, felt like a thick, unmovable muscle but that in adolescence has shrunk to a tendon that could snap at any moment.
Quinn doesn’t answer, so he opens the door, figuring if he were doing something private it would be locked.
Quinn’s so fixated on the screen in front of him, he doesn’t notice his dad’s arrival, causing Geoff to wonder for a split second if his son even does private things amidst all the gaming.
Quinn’s face is lit up with a shifting kaleidoscope of color.
Geoff steps in front of the TV screen, throwing Quinn into shadow.
Quinn reels back like he’s been slapped. “What the—” He stops himself short, pulling his headset off. “Dad, what are you doing?”
“Feel like going for a night swim with me?”
Confusion crosses Quinn’s face before he shakes his head. “Ahh, it’s okay, thanks.”
There was a time his son would have jumped at the chance to go for a late-night swim.
Now his body is fused to that weird gaming chair they bought him for Christmas last year.
Geoff hadn’t been in support of it at all, telling Alice he didn’t want to promote the videogame addiction, but she’d insisted.
She was always looking for ways to win Quinn over.
“Okay. No problem,” Geoff says, trying hard not to let the hurt show in his voice. “Don’t stay up too late.” Quinn nods and moves his head to see the TV around Geoff’s body. The light flashes on his eyes, which seem unusually bloodshot. Is he high? Geoff wonders.
“You got allergies, buddy?”
Quinn’s face scrunches in annoyance. “What?”
“Your eyes, they’re all bloodshot.”
Quinn quickly turns his face so that he’s no longer looking directly at Geoff. “Oh yeah, allergies,” he mumbles. “They are kinda bad.”
“Well then, take an allergy pill if you need to.” Geoff has a feeling it’s not allergies at all.
Honestly, he doesn’t want to know. He always counted on Quinn being kind of nerdy, caring too much about school to get into drugs.
He’ll mention the suspicion to Alice, when they’re talking again, and see what she thinks.
“Night, bud,” he says before leaving the room.
Outside, he stands at one end of the pool, poised to dive in. The night air is still warm and it smells like dry leaves. The sky is full of stars, and all of it is set to a symphony of crickets. Perfect night for a swim, he thinks.
Then the ghost of the faceless raccoon floats across the surface of the pool.
He gives his head a shake to rid himself of the image, but it’s too late.
Now all he’s thinking about is the blood and particles of the dead animal that may still be in the water.
He hadn’t even thought to put more chlorine in the pool that morning.
Stepping away from the edge he turns and crosses the lawn, barefoot, to his writing shed.
Is it just his imagination, or is there now a chill in the air?
Clouds scud over the moon and the crickets go silent, replaced by the sound of leaves rustling.
He feels a sudden sense of urgency to get into the cabin, as though something is tracking him.
Alice’s goddamn paranoia about the dead animals has gotten to him.
He throws open the door and slams it shut behind him, relieved to be inside.
He pours a generous bourbon, hating himself for proving Alice right, then sits down on the couch with his laptop.
He waits to open it, enjoying the first few numbing sips of the alcohol.
They’ve lived in the new house for almost two weeks now and yet things feel so different.
Has his family always been this fucked-up?
Are other families like this? An ever-present undercurrent of conflict between husband and wife, sons secretly getting high and disconnecting through videogames, daughters you barely know anymore, mothers-in-law you want to murder, and dead animals in the pool?
Truth is, nothing’s been right since the night of the car accident.
A new house, a change in scenery, is not going to change that.
The thought’s a depressing one, but he’s always been a realist, more so than Alice, who thinks the move is going to fix everything.
It’s because she never knew how broken things were before. Even before Lucy died.
Alice has no idea that leaving his teaching job wasn’t his choice.
He’d been advised to take a one-year leave after one of his female students had made a sexual-misconduct complaint against him, claiming that he failed her because she refused to have sex with him.
It was bullshit, but what predator doesn’t say that, and how does a non-predator prove a negative?
She was the one who came to him, asking for an extra-credit assignment “that involves just the two of us,” while biting her bottom lip.
When he rebuffed her and she failed for not handing in the final assignment, she went after him.
He explained all this to the dean, who said he understood, but who also had all the paperwork ready for Geoff to fill out for the leave.
“Take some time, finish writing that book you’re always talking about, just until she graduates and the whole thing blows over. ”
Alice also has no idea that the night Lucy died he hadn’t been at a work party.
He’d been drinking alone in a bar after learning earlier that day that he’d been fired.
The board had taken his leave as a sign of guilt and terminated his employment.
Why had he let the dean so easily convince him to take a leave that in hindsight looked exactly like he was running scared?
He was afraid. Not of the girl who got too drunk at a frat party to finish her final assignment and blamed him for the bad mark.
He was afraid of every other infraction coming to light.
The remarks between himself and other male coworkers about attractive female students, the glances down his TA’s sweater when she squatted to get books off a low shelf, the arm around the shoulders of female coworkers at Christmas parties without asking permission first.
He was a smart man. He knew how insidious male entitlement was. But knowing it didn’t protect against that deep social conditioning that taught him he could ignore boundaries. It was all minor stuff, but it added up.
Falling on the heels of his professional downfall, Lucy’s death felt like punishment.
How could he not see the two were related?
Part of a pattern. He had failed as a provider to his daughters, his wife, his son, and then failed them again and suffered the ultimate loss.
The entire time he sat in that hospital waiting for news of his daughters, Geoff silently swore that he would do better, be better, if only they both survived.
One did, but one didn’t. Geoff got the message.
He deserved to suffer.
He takes another sip of bourbon, pops open his laptop, and finds the bookmark of the last video he watched.
By the time he slides his hand down the front of his bathing suit, he’s forgotten it all—the fight with Alice, his fifteen-year-old son high and addicted to videogames, the dead animals, and the woods that produced them.