“What did he mean by … problems with myself?”
“You’d know that better than anyone, I guess.”
“I can guess what he thinks. He told me once that I always want what I can’t have. And if I do manage to get it, he said, I want something else.”
I shrugged, then remembered again that she couldn’t see me. I wasn’t sure how to respond. “Is that true?” I finally asked.
“If he’d married me, I don’t think it would be true.”
I didn’t answer, and because I didn’t, she said, “Thanks, Alice, for being honest with me. How are you, incidentally?”
“I’m doing fine, Crystal. This will be my senior year, and I’m features editor for the school paper. I’m excited about that.”
“Wow! I should think so!” she said.
“How is your little boy?”
There was a pause, and then she laughed. “He’s great, Alice. But you know, now I want a little girl, so … well, maybe Les has a point. Anyway, tell him hello from me. Tell him there won’t be any more letters. Tell him if he wants to get in touch, he knows where to call. No, don’t say that. Just tell him that Crystal said … good-bye. Tell him that, will you?”
“Sure.”
I think that Mr. Watts hated to see us go. He said we were more fun than a barrel of monkeys—insane monkeys, but fun anyway.
Les called from the apartment to tell me they were back, that the place looked great, thanks for the brownies, and that he looked forward to sleeping in his own bed. He’d tell me all about the trip later. When I mentioned that David Reilly wouldn’t be there for the big Labor Day sale at the Melody Inn, Les said he’d plan to come in that day and help out.
We were approaching the middle of August, and I was eager for school to begin. It would start later this year, not until after Labor Day, but I wanted to be busy again. I wanted to work on my ideas for The Edge and take my mind off Patrick and whether or not he’d make it home before Thanksgiving.
Gwen and I were the only ones working in the same places we had the summer before—I at the Melody Inn, Gwen continuing a high school internship at the National Institutes of Health. She must have impressed them, because this was her third stint there, and she had definitely decided to go for a medical degree once she got out of college.
Pamela was clerking in a fabric store; Liz was working mornings in a day-care center at her church; Keeno worked for his dad in a hardware store; and Mark pumped gas at a service station. I wasn’t sure what the others were doing. It was as though all of us inhabited separate worlds during the day that had nothing to do with any other part of our lives, and we didn’t come back to our own bodies until we got together in the evenings—at the movies, the mall, bowling, or the Stedmeisters’ pool.
We didn’t talk about what we did during the day. Pamela never said, Do you want to know about my afternoon at G Street Fabrics? and Mark never said, I must have pumped three hundred gallons today. Work just was. Play just was. We just were—enjoying the second week of August, knowing all too well how intense things would get in our senior year.
“It’s fun seeing Elizabeth laugh,” I said to Sylvia the following Sunday after I’d watched Liz and Keeno horsing around together on her porch. “She laughs a lot more around Keeno. And he seems a little more serious. Like they sort of meet on middle ground.”
Sylvia had finished the peach preserves and was starting to make grape jelly; Les and Paul were thinking about a new roommate after George left to get married; Carol sent a thank-you note for our wedding gift… .
And then …
Tuesday evening, August 18:
6:00 p.m.: Dad and I closed up the store and drove home.
6:30 p.m.: Sylvia made grilled pecan chicken, and Dad and I made the salad.
7:00 p.m.: We ate our dinner out back on the screened porch, and Dad dished up the ice cream. It was a gorgeous night and all the windows in the house were open.
8:00 p.m.: Patrick called and we talked on my cell phone for twenty minutes. I figured he was lonely.
8:22 p.m.: I had ended my call with Patrick and had started downstairs when the house phone rang. I didn’t bother answering because I thought Sylvia was still in the kitchen and would pick it up. But the phone kept ringing, and I heard Dad yell, “Al, would you grab that, please?” I realized they were outside inspecting the shrubbery.
“Got it!” I yelled back, clattering on down and grabbing the hall phone. “Hello?”
There were great gasping sobs from the other end. “Hello?” I said anxiously. “Who is this?”
“A-Alice!” came Elizabeth’s voice. “Oh, A-Alice! I’ve been trying to call you!”
“I was on my cell with Patrick,” I told her. “Liz, what’s wrong?”
“Alice … ,” she said again, and her wail was so awful, so full of grief, I couldn’t stand it.
“What?”
“Mark’s dead!”
I screamed. “Liz! No! Oh, God, no!”
“K-Keeno called me. He t-tried to call Mark.” She was crying so hard now that I mistook my own tears for hers, wetting my hands. “It … happened around six thirty … somewhere near … Randolph Road.”
“Oh, Liz! Oh, Liz!” I sank to the floor, leaning over on one side, bracing myself with one elbow.
“He was just sitting there, Alice, waiting to make a left t-turn! He wasn’t doing anything!” We sobbed together, and I felt I couldn’t listen to the rest, but I had to. “He was sitting at the light behind an SUV, and a truck came up from behind and d-d-didn’t stop… .”
I could only cry.
“A neighbor’s there at the Stedmeisters’ taking calls. He told Keeno that Mark didn’t have a ch-chance. He was trapped! He wasn’t d-doing anything!”
Dad and Sylvia came through the front door just then, talking about turning on the sprinkler, and Dad saw me there on the floor.
“Alice!” he yelled.
“D-Dad!” I cried. “Oh, Daddy! Mark’s dead.”
18
Believing. Or Not.
We sat on the long couch in Elizabeth’s living room—Liz and Gwen and Pamela and I. It might have been nine or ten or even eleven o’clock, I don’t know. Keeno sat bent over in the chair next to us, head in his hands. Dad and Sylvia and Mr. and Mrs. Price were grouped around the dining room table. Little Nate was asleep upstairs.
Dad had called the Stedmeisters and talked briefly with Mark’s dad. The minister was there at the house, Dad was told, and Mrs. Stedmeister was on sedation.
Everything seemed surreal. I had been in Elizabeth’s living room hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times since we’d moved here, but now the colors didn’t look the same. I stared at details I’d never noticed before: a frayed corner of the carpet; two bookends shaped like halves of a globe; a spot on an armchair; a grandparent’s picture.
The tissue in my hand was so wet, it was useless, and I reached for the box on the coffee table. When any of us spoke, our noses sounded clogged. My eyes traveled from one friend to the next, and I wondered if tomorrow someone else would be missing. I’d called Patrick as soon as I’d been sure I could speak, and I knew without asking that he was crying. He wanted to know when the funeral would be, and I promised to find out.
I had just seen Mark the day before! I was thinking. We’d all gone to Gepetto’s for dinner that evening. Mark had been laughing. He’d been alive. He’d been wearing a white shirt with broad black stripes on it and a large seven-digit inmate’s number on the back, which had made us laugh. Keeno had told us that if he and Mark could earn half the money toward that old car they wanted to buy, his dad would donate the rest. Then Keeno had dramatically pulled off his baseball cap and passed it around the table.
It was as though, if I closed my eyes, I could step back a day in time and make things turn out differently—get Mark to go another route, get the light to change, get the truck to stop… .
“If ever there was an example of just being in the wrong place at the wrong time
… ,” Mr. Price mused from the dining room.
“But if his blinker was on, as the police said it was, how could the truck driver not have noticed?” Sylvia said. “Was the man on drugs, I wonder?”
Did it make any difference? I thought. Mark is dead.
“Traffic is awful around Randolph Road and Macon during rush hour,” Dad said.
“As usual, though, the truck driver survived. It’s always that way, it seems—always the other person who’s killed,” said Elizabeth’s mom.
And Mark is dead, I repeated to myself.
Pamela was sobbing softly, and Liz began to cry again. Keeno got up and sat down on the arm of the couch, putting one arm around Liz. She buried her face against him.
I found I could cry without making a sound. Without even knowing it. I could feel tears on my arms, my hands, and I looked down to see spots on my shirt.
“I’ve talked to one of their neighbors, and they’re starting a list for dinner deliveries to the Stedmeisters,” said Sylvia. “I signed up for next week.”
“I’ll call tomorrow and put our name on the list,” Mrs. Price said.
I didn’t want to think of food. Didn’t think I could swallow. Elizabeth’s mom had made coffee and put out a plate of cookies, but no one touched a thing. Food couldn’t help, I thought. Mark is dead.
Mark wouldn’t be buying a car and fixing it up. He wouldn’t be going back to school. He wouldn’t attend homecoming or football games or band concerts or the prom. He wouldn’t be going to Clemson. He would never marry, and there wouldn’t be any grandchildren to keep the Stedmeisters company.
Mark is dead, and he’s not coming back.
Wednesday evening:
It was dark about nine. Liz came over to ride with me. We picked up Pamela, then drove to Gwen’s to get her and Yolanda.
When we got to the Stedmeisters’, there were already cars stretching along the curb down the block, friends leaning against their cars, talking in soft voices. Liz walked along the row, distributing the tiny battery-operated candles she’d borrowed from her church, which they use sometimes on Christmas Eve.
The upstairs of the Stedmeister house was dark, but there was a light in the living room and another on near the back.
Every person we could think of who had ever swum in Mark’s pool had been asked to come by on this evening. There were the five of us girls; there were Keeno and Brian. Jill and Justin. Karen and Penny. The only person missing from our group was Patrick, but some other kids from school, all of whom had been at the Stedmeisters’ to swim at least once, gathered there with us in front of the house, eighteen in all.
We made no sound. Didn’t speak. Didn’t sing. We spread ourselves out about four feet apart from each other and formed a semicircle around the house, facing the front, holding our lighted candles. Just stood—a silent tribute from the old gang, gathering there one last time.
A tribute to all the years Mrs. Stedmeister had given us food, served us drinks, cleaned up after our messes on their patio, mopped up their bathroom after we’d changed out of our wet suits.
For all the times Mr. Stedmeister had vacuumed the pool for us, tested the water, scrubbed the coping, put on the cover. For every year, every summer, this house and patio and pool and yard had been our gathering place, our home.
For all the things they would miss now that Mark was gone. For all the things we would enjoy that he would never know.
I’m not sure how long we stood there. Forty minutes, perhaps. Maybe an hour. Cars drove slowly by in a silent parade. Neighbors stood quietly on their porches, possibly expecting us to do something. But there was nothing we could do except be there, offering a sad thank-you to the friends these two parents had been.
The door opened. We did not expect it, but we welcomed it. Mr. and Mrs. Stedmeister came hesitantly out on the front porch. Mark’s dad looked gray and older than he’d ever looked, but he had one arm around his wife’s shoulder.
She came to the edge of the porch and looked around at all eighteen grieving friends. Then, in a trembling voice we had to strain to hear, she said, “It was so nice of you to come. I wonder if you would all walk around to the pool and just sit there for a while. I would so love to see that. And please … may I give you some lemonade?”
For me, the next few days went by in slow motion. It took forever to get out of bed. Once in the bathroom, I’d stand under the shower till the water turned cold; eat half a slice of toast, then quit. At work I moved on automatic. I answered the phone and found the sheet music or guitar strings that a customer wanted, but I felt exhausted, frayed.
It wasn’t just that we had lost a longtime member of our crew or a place to hang out. It was also that the risk factor for staying alive had altered. We always knew that if we drove too fast and went off the road, we could die; that something could go wrong inside our own bodies that could kill us; that if we went to dangerous places, we might get caught in a cross fire. But none of us had seriously considered that we could be minding our own business, sitting perfectly still, in fact, and end up dead. If Mark had been in the “wrong” place at the “wrong” time, couldn’t every place we had thought of as okay turn out wrong?
Gwen drove us by the spot where Mark had died. Each day the little memorial at the side of the road grew larger: flowers, teddy bears, wreaths, and even toy cars—for the car Mark and Keeno had wanted to buy. Someone added a car’s headlight; then someone contributed a hubcap. MARK, WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU, read a hand-lettered sign, streaked a bit by rain.
But we knew Mark. People who didn’t would glance over at the sad little collection and think, Another drunken teenager. Another kid driving too fast.
“I miss him, but I can’t really think what I miss most,” Liz said.
“His smile?” I suggested. “Mark had a great smile.”
“He was always up for anything,” said Pamela. “Whatever you wanted to do, Mark was ready. That’s what I liked about him.”
Liz said it best: “He was just an average guy—wasn’t a jock or star student or anything—but somehow, if Mark was missing, we knew it. We just needed him there.”
“Did you see what he did at the party—just moved in on those guys and took the ball?” Gwen asked.
I let out my breath. “After bringing Keeno around, Brian’s virtually left the gang, Keeno’s stayed, and Mark … he seemed to be changing, more sure of himself… .”
“And then things changed forever,” said Pamela.
There was a brief story about the accident in the Metro section of the Post:
SILVER SPRING YOUTH KILLED IN ACCIDENT
A sixteen-year-old boy was killed Tuesday when his car was struck from behind by a delivery truck. Mark B. Stedmeister was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident, which happened around 6:30 p.m. when his vehicle, waiting to make a left turn onto Randolph Road at Macon Drive, was propelled into the rear of an SUV. The truck’s driver, Rodney Johnson, was taken to Holy Cross Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The results of drug and alcohol tests are pending. The driver of the SUV was unhurt.
Sixteen-year-old just didn’t say it. It didn’t say sixteen years of the Stedmeisters looking after their only son—welcoming his friends, worrying about some of them, watching him slip, watching him thrive, and then, suddenly, losing him. Things can be dismissed so easily with words. Words can be so full or so empty.
We called or texted each other every day—five or six times. Sometimes all we said was, “You okay?”
“How are you doing?” I asked Pamela when I called her on Saturday. I was paying special attention to Pamela because she and Mark used to go out together.
“All cried out,” said Pamela. “I just feel flat. A sort of nothingness. Like the whole thing was beyond anyone’s control, so what’s the use?”
“The use of … ?”
“Of anything! If you can’t plan for anything—you can plan but you can’t guarantee—why bother?”
“No one can guarante
e anything, Pamela—not ever. But you still have to plan for a life or you won’t have any at all.”
“Yes, you will. I could just sit around forever. Eat, sleep, pee, and I’d exist. But what’s the point?”
“To see how long you can live before something zaps you, if nothing else.”
“Mark was just starting to get his act together,” Pamela said. “He and Keeno had become a team. That crazy Naked Carpenters thing. They were good at fixing up old cars. Mark could have started his own business, I’ll bet. And then some bastard of a truck driver plows into him… .”
“I know.” We were both quiet for a moment. “Dad said that the driver’s blood tests turned out negative. He’s a sixty-seven-year-old man, and they think he may have fallen asleep or had a ministroke or something.” We’d even been robbed of a reason to hate the driver.
“Oh, God … I just can’t figure it out,” said Pamela. “All I seem to want to do is sleep.”
“Me too. Do you want us to drive you to the church tomorrow?”
“Dad’s driving. He said he’d go with me.”
“We’ll see you there, then.”
Patrick was there. He had flown in Sunday morning, and a neighbor was taking him back to the airport right after the service because there was a birthday celebration for Patrick’s father that evening. We hugged each other in the church foyer.
I hate funerals. When my grandfather died, it was so sad. I hate the long faces, the dark suits, the funeral men who speak in soft voices and direct traffic. I hated having to look at all the scrapbooks and photos of Mark on display to show people all we’d miss now that he was gone. I just didn’t want to do this. Didn’t want to be there, didn’t want it to have happened. But it did and I was and I would and I did.
Patrick and I sat together holding hands. Dad and Sylvia and Les, looking sad and tired, sat on the other side of me. A lot of friends from school were there—those who weren’t on vacation, anyway.