Lost, Almost Page 10

  “I’m not hungry,” Curtis said. He turned to Adam. “May I be excused?”

  “All right,” Adam said. “But thank your mother for making you this wonderful dinner.”

  “Thank you,” Curtis said, his back already half turned as he retreated to his room. Angeline bit the inside of her mouth. She knew it wasn’t so, it couldn’t be so, but it felt as though Curtis were blaming her, as though he had intuited that it was her fault, that she had the power to fix it.

  “Don’t take it personally,” Adam said when they’d heard the door to Curtis’s room click shut. “He’s seventeen. He’s upset. The chicken is delicious.”

  “I’m sure he’ll have a whole slew of offers,” Angeline said. “They’ll come all at once. By the end of the week, five or six.”

  “Yes,” said Adam, “I imagine so.”

  “I still think it’s coming,” she said. She was aware of the silky fabric of her blouse on her skin, of the clasps of her bra on her back.

  “Are you really feeling better?” Adam asked. “You seem tired. Maybe you overdid it today.”

  “Maybe I did,” she said.

  “I’ll give you a hand with the dishes.” The two of them were still at the sink when Curtis came out again, his arms full of books.

  “I’m going next door,” he said. Angeline drew a breath, intending to impose some limit. Melanie, the neighbors’ daughter, was a year older than Curtis but the same grade in school. As they’d grown, they had become formidable competition for one another, and then powerful allies, and now, though Curtis refused to discuss it, obviously something more. The slow evolution had made it difficult to draw the lines she otherwise would have drawn. But Curtis looked miserable and this was the only thing that seemed like it might offer comfort.

  “Have a good time,” she said. Her voice cracked on the last word. She turned back to Adam. He had put down his dish towel and was staring at the reflection in the kitchen window. “What is it?” she said.

  “That Anderson boy,” Adam said. “You know perfectly well our post office is as good as any other.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said. “He must have gotten in. You were so certain.”

  “I’m never certain of anything,” Adam said. “None of us is.”

  “It wouldn’t kill him to consider some other options,” she said. “Even if he does end up in Pasadena.”

  “I just don’t understand,” Adam said. “With me, and your father, and his grades, and all the work he’s done. I just don’t see how it could have happened.”

  “He’ll be accepted,” Angeline said. “I think he’ll go. I’ve just got a feeling.”

  “You’ve got a feeling,” Adam said. “That’s wonderful.” Abruptly, he sat down, right there on the kitchen floor. It took a moment for Angeline to realize what was happening; she had never seen it before. Her husband was crying.

  When she’d first seen, that fateful Sunday, what had happened to her ceiling, she let Adam have it. “You moron,” she said. “You could’ve burned the house down!” There were a few other names she would’ve liked to call him, but not in front of Curtis.

  “I miscalculated,” Adam said, “I’ll admit. I’m not a chemist.”

  “Clean it up,” she said, leaving dangerous pauses between each word.

  “I’ll clean it up,” Curtis said. “I was the one who dropped that piece in.”

  “No, sweetie,” Angeline said. “Your father started this mess. He should’ve known better.”

  “We were working on it together,” Curtis insisted. “Researching new fuels.” And just as Angeline was about to refuse a second time, she saw Adam, out of the corner of her eye, draw a finger quickly across his throat.

  But Curtis, infinitely more perceptive than his father, had seen. “What did you just do?” he said. “Dad?” But Adam didn’t have to answer. Curtis had understood everything in an instant, understood that it was his father telling his mother to let him pretend, because the experiment was all a sham, part of a carefully calculated program designed to make him feel like the adult that he clearly was not. He had been betrayed, and he was wounded to the core. He took the pot, still cloudy with burned sodium, and flung it to the floor by Adam’s feet. Angeline yelped and jumped back.

  “Liar,” Curtis said. His sweet face, the face with Adam’s chin, was red and crumpled. Secretly, silently, Angeline cheered him on. She would catch him gently. She would reward him.

  Adam, backed into a corner, shifted his stance. He had processed the situation, all the possible resolutions, in the space of three seconds. “I apologize,” he said. “You’ve outgrown it. You want to be an adult now?” Curtis didn’t answer, but Adam barreled on. “Here’s your first real adult assignment. No kid stuff. You clean up this kitchen. Get it perfect. I don’t want to see that there were ever any scars on that ceiling.” Curtis looked around the room, tears streaming. He looked up at the ceiling, ten feet above, and down at the floor. “Quit crying,” Adam said. “I mean it. You’re an adult now.” To Angeline’s horror, Curtis drew one more shuddering breath, then got down on his knees and began soaking up the water with a towel.

  Angeline could not bear it. She had to intervene. “You don’t need to do this, sweetie,” she said. “Let’s go for a ride. We’ll get an ice cream. You’ve done enough.”

  “I can do it,” Curtis said. “I can fix the ceiling.”

  “Leave it,” Angeline said, her voice rising. “Adam, let him be. Curtis, you get up off that floor right now.” But even as she spoke, she realized what her insistence had set in motion: Curtis ran straight to his father, leaving her there with her hand outstretched.

  “Wait here a minute,” Angeline said to Adam, with her greatest tenderness. With speed, with lightness, she was in the bedroom, in the drawer, her hands among the silky things. She felt a rush of warmth for her husband. She left the drawer open a little, thinking they might return to it once the air was clear. Then she was back in the kitchen, sinking to the floor beside him.

  “I didn’t mean to keep this from you,” she said. She touched his damp cheek. He didn’t understand what it was. He was still crying, not sobbing, but hiccuping, trying to get ahold of himself. “See?” she said. “He got in. He’ll go, if that’s what he wants. You did it.” He took the envelope, still sealed.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, as though he didn’t quite believe it was real.

  “It came in the mail,” she said. “I kept it with me when I went to the store, so he wouldn’t come home and find it without us, and then I— I—”

  “I’ve got to go tell him,” Adam said. He got to his feet so quickly that Angeline had to step back to avoid the swinging of his arms.

  “Wait,” she said. “We can put it in the mailbox tomorrow. He’ll get it. He’ll be fine for tonight.”

  “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I just wanted another day or two,” she said. “I thought maybe more would come, and if he had a different one first, he might really think about it. I’ve never done anything like this before. You know I haven’t.”

  “You’re torturing him,” Adam said. The word hung between them for a moment. She thought of saying something about the comfort of their lives, about pain. They knew about suffering, both of them did, from their work, and this was not it. But Adam spoke first.

  “This is the only thing he wants and now he thinks he’ll never have it.”

  “I’m not sure it’s what he wants,” Angeline said. She wanted to say more but she held her tongue. Adam was already on his way out the door, storming across the yard, envelope in hand. He didn’t even bother with the road; he cut straight through the pine trees that separated their yard from the Driscolls’. She wanted to go after him, but this had been coming for years, and she had allowed it. Now she could no more stop it than she could split an atom with her bare hands.

  Angeline Brooks, 1958

  His hand is under her nightgown, tugging at the elastic of her unde
rpants.

  “Stop,” she says. “Adam, stop.” He does not stop. His other hand is there now too, tugging, sliding them down her hips. His breath is hot on her neck. She hadn’t awakened when he came in, does not know what time it is. His chin is rough against her neck.

  She lies still another minute as he works the fabric down to her knees, summoning her strength, then gives a great twist, all her strength focused on this one movement, to the far side of the double bed.

  “At least let me get the diaphragm,” she says. She sits up. The window behind the bed is open a few inches. A breeze comes in, smelling of smoke, raising goosebumps on her arms. Somewhere not too far from here, she has heard on the radio, a fire is raging its way through the pine forests.

  “You don’t need to,” he says. She gasps without meaning to, without realizing it was coming.

  “We haven’t thought this through,” she says. “I’m not sure.”

  He sits up beside her and snaps on a light.

  They have been at the lab for a year, gotten settled into a better house. There are other young families among them, a daycare, an elementary school.

  “Do you think we’re all going to still be here in a couple of years?” she says. An owl hoots somewhere out in the yard. In the dim light, she spies a cobweb high in the corner, stretching halfway down the wall.

  “In New Mexico?”

  “Come on, Adam. You must think about this.” She reaches down and pulls her underpants back up to her waist, then smooths the nightgown back down around her legs.

  “Of course there’s a chance,” he says. She looks him straight in the face. And there they are, the tiny lines at the corners of his eyes that appear when he is really worried, not about bills, or pneumonia, but about the End. She imagines she is the only one in the world who can see that sign, who knows what it means. He again extends a hand but she shrinks back, her right leg off the edge of the bed now, her foot anchored to the floor. “We really have to talk about this now?”

  “I can wait,” she says. “I can wait as long as you want.”

  “Listen,” he says, “I really don’t think this will be a problem. I’ve thought it through.”

  “You can’t just think it through yourself and pronounce it done,” she says. “This is a decision for two people to make together. We’ve got to talk about it. We’ve got to agree.”

  “Well, what do you want to know?” he says. “We’ve got nuclear weapons. The Soviets have nuclear weapons. It is within the realm of possibility that we, or they, will use them. They are massively destructive. Many, many times the power of the ones used in Japan. And we are still here on this planet orbiting the sun with lives to live.”

  “We couldn’t protect a child from that,” she says. “The world has never been like this before.”

  “There are people all over the country having children at a rate we’ve never seen before. You know what they’re calling it, don’t you? The Baby Boom?”

  “But they don’t know what we know,” Angeline says. “They only know what’s in the papers.”

  “So they can’t prepare the way we can.”

  “We’d have to build a shelter,” Angeline says. “We could set aside everything we would need. Tell me. Be honest. Could we make it safe?”

  “Reasonably so,” he says. He reaches across the bed, puts a hand on her hip. “There would be a problem, though.”

  “With building a shelter?”

  “If we have a shelter,” he says, “a real one, a good, safe one, and we have it stocked with supplies that would allow us to survive for some time—”

  “Which we would need,” she says, “if we were to do this. Enough for three.” Instinctively, she puts her hand to her abdomen.

  “Yes,” he says. “But if we had such a thing, and others did not.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Oh, lord. Could we turn them away? We couldn’t. Adam, we couldn’t.”

  “And yet if we didn’t,” he says, “how long could we last? We build it for three, or for four, and suddenly we’ve got twenty.”

  “Or we’ve killed seventeen.”

  “It’s very late,” he says. “It’s nearly four.” He switches off the light. She stays propped up beside him, trying to make out the shape of the cobweb on the ceiling in the darkness. The breeze keeps blowing, colder now on her bare skin. She realizes that a part of her had wanted him to try again; he doesn’t often touch her, and she feels now, with this talk of explosions, of mortality, a deep physical need. Adam begins to snore lightly, and she wonders how he can sleep.

  Velocity

  She had been trying to get to the lab. This was the first thing Melanie remembered. She realized where she was almost instantly, without opening her eyes: it was the smell and the sound of a hospital, the same hospital where she had spent the night two Aprils before when her appendix had nearly burst. Upon opening her eyes she thought it might even be the same room, its tiny window, its curtain down the middle.

  She had been trying to get to the lab, and now she was here. She must have fallen from her bicycle, or been thrown. Something was wrong with the right side of her body. A dull ache ran the length of her arm. A sensation more like an itch encircled her leg, which she realized was in a cast. Breath was painful.

  She felt sure that something terrible had happened. Not the accident, but that something had been lost, something in her life altered. She couldn’t remember what had happened, what had changed, but the dread was clear as day.

  And where was Dean? She missed his big, gentle hands. It occurred to her that she might have been here a long time; it could have been days. He could have come and gone, waited, then gone again. She felt around for the button that had been beside her bed the last time she was here. It was right where she expected it to be. She pressed it.

  “She’s awake!” the nurse said brightly as she swept into the room. She looked young, perhaps not even yet Melanie’s age, her long hair tied in a ponytail, freckles on her cheeks. “How are you feeling, Ms. Driscoll? Or shall I say Dr. Driscoll?”

  “I feel fine. How long have I been here?” As she asked, it started to come back to her. She had defended her dissertation. Somebody—Dean—must have explained that to the nurse.

  “Just since last night,” the nurse said. “Your friend was here most of the night, the big fellow.”

  “My fiancé. Where did he go? What time is it now?” Why had he left her here? It wasn’t like him. After the appendix, she’d had to shoo him out the door of their apartment so that she could get a little time on her own to think.

  “It’s just about noon. We can get a phone in here if you’d like to call him. Do you have any memory of the accident?”

  “No,” Melanie said.

  “It was a pick-up truck that hit you. That’s what the witnesses said. Fled the scene. Last I heard, they were still looking for him. All in all I’d say you were lucky. Lucky and smart, to have that helmet on.”

  “What’s wrong with me? What did I break?”

  “Two ribs, tibia, and patella, plus a pretty nasty bump to the shoulder and elbow. But it looks like everything’s going to heal without surgery. How’s the pain?”

  “I don’t feel much.”

  “Well you let us know if it starts to wear off. The doctor should be by around two.” And the nurse was gone, ponytail swinging.

  The defense had not gone as she’d expected. They would give her the degree—they did not allow students to schedule a defense if they weren’t ready—but the questions had been more pointed than she had anticipated. One of the committee members in particular, a professor she didn’t know well, had a set of concerns about her research that she had not considered. And worse, she realized as he spoke that he was right. She had been so occupied with writing down his comments that she had nearly failed to respond to his questions.

  Dean had smiled at her from his seat at the edge of the room. He had smiled the whole time, easily visible over the heads of the other spectators, with his
height, his hair that had grown long this last year, grazing his shoulders. As soon as the program had concluded, he’d descended on her, all hugs and congratulations, and she had wondered, had he not heard the same exchange that she had? Had he not recognized the deep incompleteness that one of the committee members had identified in her work?

  “Hold your horses,” she told him as he folded her into his arms, where she could practically disappear. “I’ve still got a lot of work to do.” The hallway where they stood dead-ended, and she had her back to the corner. People were milling around outside the classroom where the presentation had been. The defense had been better attended than most, as she’d known it would be. She was, everybody knew, the best student they had. She wanted them to go away. She wanted to change out of this itchy blouse and get to work, thinking through the implications of the questions that had been raised. She did not want to shake hands, or accept congratulations. She did not want to talk about it.

  “They’re going to give you the degree,” Dean said. “Didn’t you hear the other three committee members? Full of praise.”

  “I don’t want praise. I want to get it right.”

  Dean fumbled in his pocket where he used to keep his cigarettes before they’d both quit three months before, then drew his hand back out, still empty.

  “Please,” he said. “At least we can celebrate this step. A few letters after your name. It doesn’t have to be about the dissertation.”

  “I’ll catch up with you later,” she said, already picturing herself in her tiny office off the lab, her feet tucked up under her, her favorite green pen. “I’ll be home by ten, I promise.”

  “Oh no no no no,” he said. “The least you can do is pretend to have fun with me. Just for a couple of hours.”

  “Keep your voice down,” she said, eyeing the cluster of people ten feet down the hall, her advisor, the head of the department, students she saw and worked with every day. There were some younger students there, even some undergraduates, she thought, who might have been in one of the classes she’d had to teach. She knew she had developed a reputation in the department as the one to watch, and this made her even more ashamed. She had not lived up to it.