“What does that mean?” Elena asked.
“What do you think of your life so far?”
She laughed harshly. “Shit. Pure endless shit.”
“What do you think the rest of your life will be?”
“Shit. Pure boring shit.”
“So?” Evan huddled farther into his clothes. “What do you propose?”
Chad was quiet for perhaps five minutes. The stars were huge over them, like animals in the indigo sky. Not all of them were white. As she lay back staring at them, she could see blue and yellow and red. It was as if they were in outer space looking around. It did not feel like earth. She felt as if they had left behind everybody else, and there was no one alive, really alive, except the three of them who were one unit, one self. She touched the stud in her nose, a sign of their union, that their bodies belonged to each other as their souls did. It felt as if they were on the moon, or some asteroid private to them.
“I think we should go as far as we can, because it’s fun and we’re together, and it’s the best game I ever played. But if they’re going to catch us, or the money runs out and we’re at the end of our game, then we should end it.” He clapped his hands together, a sharp report like a small explosion.
“You think we should kill ourselves,” Evan said.
“Some combination of that,” Chad said calmly. “I’m not going back to my old man. I’m not going to let him destroy my mother and put me in military school. I’d rather die. It’s that simple.”
Evan was silent, tense. She could feel his body drawn into itself, coiled. She did not want to speak until he did. She felt calm about the idea of killing herself. It sounded curiously neat and soothing. She could imagine how sorry Suzanne and Rachel would be for the way they had treated her.
“Of course, if you’re scared…” Chad said. “It takes nerve.”
She could imagine how impressed all her classmates would be. She would go from slut to heroine. She would be a story no one would forget. That’s how it was, if you really did it.
“I’ve thought about it,” Evan said. “Ever since I can remember, I’ve thought about it. But then I used to think all the time about flying.”
“You couldn’t fly,” Chad said softly. “But you can walk out that door.”
“There’s always that,” Evan said.
She tried to imagine it. Like a huge orgasm. A crashing into sleep. She thought of what Suzanne would say, and how her sister would cry and cry. Everyone would think how mean they had been to her, and they would feel guilty. Suzanne would think how she had yelled at Elena about the dishes and her room and smoking and grades and clothes and her tattoo. Suzanne would really be sorry, but it would be way, way too late. After the assembly in school, counselors would come in to tell the kids it was all right, but nobody would think so, not the adults, not the kids. A month later, some other kids would kill themselves in homage. A copycat suicide. But theirs would be unique. “We can’t let them catch us and put us in jail,” she said aloud.
Evan said, “We’re underage.”
“I’m not,” Chad said. “I’m sixteen. I’d go to jail. But I won’t.”
At dawn, he showed them all how to load and fire the gun. It hurt Elena’s ears. It really hurt. But she learned to hold the gun.
“It isn’t like you have to be a good shot,” Chad said. “It isn’t like you’re trying to hit a target forty feet away.” He held the gun to his temple, and Elena thought for a moment he was going to do it right then.
“I’m hungry,” Evan said. They had hardly slept all night. “Do we have anything left to eat?”
“We’ll stop in the next town. We need gas anyhow,” Elena said and began walking toward the car. She did not want to die, not particularly. Not right then, anyhow. Later. Now the wind was fresh and cold as a fish’s belly and the east behind them was a lemon stripe at the horizon. It was strange how in the desert, she thought of the sea. The mountains she was staring at looked near, but they had driven until well after dark across the desert surrounded by ridges of mountains they climbed and then descended and back onto the desert again. She felt like an ant crawling over a bedspread. But she did not care. She walked in the middle, with her arms around each of them.
“If they catch us,” Evan said, “they’ll separate us.”
“Of course,” Chad said. “But we belong together.”
“We’re a set,” Elena said happily. “A family. A unit.”
“Don’t call us by nasty names like family,” Chad said, slapping her butt. “We’re loving to one another. My father never loved anyone but himself and expensive whores and expensive cars. Never. We’re not a family, we’re a little tribe. A tribe of three.”
“I don’t think I ever loved anyone but a spaniel I had named Audrey, my grandmother, who died when I was twelve, and you guys,” Evan said. “My grandmother was so warm I always wanted to be with her, but my parents could barely stand her. She had an accent. They called her ignorant, when she spoke five languages.”
“Whatever we are,” Chad said, “we stay together. If we need to, we die together.”
They had driven for maybe half an hour. A police car had passed them going the other way right after they pulled out onto the highway, but it didn’t seem to pay them any mind. It wasn’t really light yet, just gray dawn with the sun not yet up over the last mountain range behind them and the sky still dark ahead, westward where they were going. Elena was curled up in the backseat, using the blanket that they had found in the trunk. Chad was driving and Evan was sitting beside him. Then they saw a police car coming behind them with its lights rotating. They couldn’t hear the siren. No cars were in sight before them, just a couple of trucks on the other side of the highway. Chad stepped on it, but the police car was gaining on them, still far behind but getting bigger as she knelt on the seat facing backward. “I wish we had the fucking BMW,” he muttered.
Suddenly Chad swerved off the highway. The car spun around, rocked as if it would go over but then finally came to a halt facing back toward the police car still getting bigger. Chad pulled the gun out of his jacket. “This is it,” he said. “I’ll go first. Then, Evan, take the gun, do Elena and then yourself.”
Evan made a noise that sounded like a yeah, but he was probably as scared as she was. She felt a weird elation and total panic at once. This was it, like Chad said. The end. The finish. The final scene in the movie. She imagined music and she wished they had the tape deck on.
Chad was facing away from her toward the police car. She saw him lift the gun and put it to his temple. There was a noise so loud she bit her tongue. Her head rang and her eyes dripped tears. Then she felt something wet and slimy on herself. She looked down. It was his blood, and some gray matter like snot. “His brains,” she screamed. “His brains are all over me!”
Chad slumped forward over the wheel with part of his head gone and blood and brains all over her and the seat and the window. It was horrible, not at all the way she had imagined. He had turned into garbage. She pawed at herself, but she could not bear to touch the stuff. She realized that Evan was screaming. He had blood all over him. Chad had fallen on him and he was frantically pushing him away.
She opened the door and stumbled out, vomiting. It was a dry vomit because they hadn’t eaten for twelve hours. But she kept heaving, bent over and then rising to her feet and staggering onward. She was coughing and crying and trying to vomit but on her feet because she had to get away from that thing in the car, she had to escape it.
The police car had slowed down and was pulling off about thirty feet away from them. Two state patrolmen got out, one from each side, and started toward them. She stared at them as she lurched forward and it seemed to her as if she were traveling toward them and gazing at them for minute after minute. One was taller and wore sideburns like Elvis. The other was stockier and had light curly hair that reminded her of Rachel. It felt as if she was moving ever so slowly toward them and they were staring at her as if she was somethin
g fierce and wild, like a bear. Then they both looked past her. Evan got out of the front passenger’s seat. He had taken the gun but it hung loosely in his hand.
“What are you doing with that?” she screamed at him. “Are you really going to shoot me?”
Evan didn’t say anything. His mouth was hanging open and he looked as if he might throw up too. Chad had fallen half out of the open door, blood all over him. The cops were coming toward them. “Drop the gun,” one of them shouted. “Put the gun down. Put your weapon down on the ground now! Then raise your hands. Put your weapon on the ground.” They had their guns trained on Evan. One cop had dropped to a knee and held his gun in front of him in both hands. The other was still coming forward, also holding his gun out with both hands. Evan just kept staggering toward them. Then he made some kind of gesture. She was sure he was raising his hands to surrender, but he still had the gun and the cop in front shot, then the other trooper. The gun in Evan’s hand went off as he was hit, but the shot just went into the earth. Shot after shot. She could not tell who was shooting, but she saw Evan jerk and spin. Then he went down. She ran to him. The cop was on her and grabbed her and pushed her against the car. She was screaming. She did not even feel herself slam into the metal.
She heard the cop who had shot Evan say, “He’s dead.” At first she thought he meant Chad. But she kept screaming. She couldn’t stop. She didn’t think she would ever stop. They had shot Evan, who hadn’t wanted to die, who hadn’t had any intention of shooting her or them or anybody, anybody at all. Who was just so freaked-out at what Chad had done, for real, that he wasn’t even aware he was holding the gun. They had shot him dead. She waited for them to shoot her too. Why should she care?
19
Suzanne
Suzanne was sitting at Marta’s kitchen table, her head in her hands. “I don’t see what else I can do.”
“You haven’t considered a nursing home?” Marta was still dressed for court. She hadn’t yet changed, except for kicking off her pumps and removing her suit jacket.
“Marta! You know Beverly. She isn’t senile. She’d go mad in a nursing home. I can’t do that to her.”
“But neither can you stay home and take care of her.” Marta was sensuously caressing her own toes, freed from her court pumps.
“We’ll have to see how much taking care of she needs. I can hire someone. Marta, what else can I do? She can’t live alone. I let her apartment go months ago. I have to move her in. I have no other choice I can see, no other viable and reasonable choice.”
“Beverly and you under the same roof. You’ll move up here.”
“Maybe we can reach a rapprochement. She needs me. I always wanted her to give me her approval. I’m aware of how childish that is, but it’s been there forever. For her to say, Yes, you are a good lawyer, you did know what you were doing. You are truly a political person whose standards I can respect. And so on and on and on.”
“And you seriously think moving her into your flat is going to accomplish all that? There’ll be the wrong room, wrong furniture, wrong city, wrong food, and so on and on and on.”
“Realistically I know that. But my fantasies come into play. And I want to do right by her. She deserves being taken care of. She has been a good person, she has given her life to good causes. Now I should throw her in the garbage because she’s damaged?” Suzanne thought of a new line of argument. “How about your own mother? If she hadn’t died of breast cancer…suppose she’d had a stroke?”
“But, Suzanne, I was close to her. I never stopped being close. I could have lived with her. It isn’t the same thing. She was my bud.”
The carpenters came to put up railings and ramps. Her house was in utter chaos for days. Elena flirted with the younger carpenter. Suzanne would come home from work to find him still there, sitting at the kitchen table looking into Elena’s eyes while she practiced her Spanish on him.
“Are you interested in him?” Suzanne asked cautiously.
“If what you mean is, am I screwing him, no. He’s awfully young and naive, frankly.”
Then the plumber, the electrician. Then the carpenters came back. Then Elena and Suzanne repainted. “You think she’s going to give a damn if the paint is white or yellow?” Elena asked, her hair tucked under a red scarf.
Suzanne shrugged. “I don’t want her to feel that anything is shoddy or that we don’t care to make it right.”
“I will never let myself fall apart! It’s because she smoked all those years.” Elena shook her head. “Even I stopped smoking finally.”
“Well, she did cut down on her smoking. Beverly’s always been healthy. She had more energy than six other women put together.”
“It used to be so much fun to run around New York with her. She always knew bargain shops and cool places to have espresso or Chinese-Cuban food.”
“She never spent much money on herself, but she always looked good. She had dozens of friends.” Suzanne found herself on the verge of breaking into tears. They were talking about Beverly as if she had died. She sniffed hard and rubbed her eyes. “Anyhow, I think this pale, pale green will suit her. She’s always said her favorite color was green. To match her eyes.”
For three weeks, workmen had been in the house almost every day. She tripped over her treadmill when she ran to check a fax. In the middle of the night, when she woke up to pee, she ran into the exercise bike. Everything felt overcrowded. Constricted. She must endure it and not complain, not be martyred. Never let Beverly feel she was putting anyone out. The room next to the kitchen—which had housed a student who had lived with them for the year after Elena’s disaster, which had once been her office, which had recently been her gym—was now fixed up into a sickroom. It had a hospital bed, railings. Everything was designed to be reachable from the bed or easily gotten to. The bathroom off the kitchen had been modified with a chair in the shower, a new higher toilet, faucets that turned on or off at a touch. The kitchen had been changed to make it more accessible. The front porch had a ramp, since Beverly could not climb stairs with her walker or her wheelchair. The ramps too had railings.
Suzanne’s house, her refuge, her aesthetic retreat, her comfort hole, was all changed around to meet the needs of her mother, with whom she had not lived since she had gone away to college. She could still remember those fights. They had been fighting since she was eleven, but the fierce arguments reached a crescendo her senior year of high school. “What’s wrong with City College?”
“I have a scholarship to Brown.” She could scarcely say that she had applied to thirty colleges to get away from home. Brown was the most prestigious place to take her and offer tuition as well. Suzanne had earned a four point average, was class valedictorian and coeditor of the high school paper, and was terrific at taking tests. Her SATs had been gorgeous. She was convinced to this day she had done all that not so much in order to succeed as to escape. Now they were about to become roommates.
Mud slides and more mud slides. I was supposed to go to a conference in Big Sur, but Route 1 is closed again. The meeting got moved to a hotel in San Jose.
My friends are buying me out of my half of the house. The wife’s pregnant again and they think they can fill it just fine. It isn’t divided into apartments, like your house. We just all shared the kitchen and the family rooms. I’m glad we don’t have to put it on the market. It should make clearing out of here easier.
Have you thought about joining the board? There’s a lot of enthusiasm here for the idea.
I haven’t had two minutes to think about your board. My apartment is full of carpenters, plumbers, plasterers, electricians, all because my mother is coming to live with me in approximately two weeks. I am considering taking on one of the trickiest appeals I’ve ever faced. I wonder when you first had the idea of my joining the board?
I will not let it bother me, she thought, if he is trying to recruit me in bed. She promised herself she would not take it seriously. If he did not want her skills, she would never have come
alive again sexually, would never even have guessed it was possible for her. After all, everybody had motives, everybody had his or her own agenda. Still, it felt a little tarnished. It made her wonder if she could possibly continue to carve out time for him if he did move east. Whenever he brought up her joining the board, she took an emotional step backward.
When I came back from Boston and mentioned I’d met you, immediately my boss got excited. He suggested I ask you at once. I still think it’s a great match of talents and need.
She was not convinced, but she was mollified.
Basically, Beverly had to be taken from the rehab center because Medicare and the insurance covering rehabilitation had run out, and with Rachel still in college and Elena at home, Suzanne could not pay for a continued stay. Plus every time she visited, Beverly whispered in that strange cracked voice, painfully forming the words or something like the words, “When go home?”
She was not sure that Beverly understood that home, meaning the old apartment, was gone forever, but surely a room of her own in Brookline would be a lot better than this dreary room with a partially deranged roommate who kept babbling about events in her distant past and sometimes calling her dog for an hour at a time. Suzanne had saved her mother’s things—some pieces of furniture, lamps, bric-a-brac, books, clothing—and they were waiting for her in Brookline. Perhaps those familiar objects would help make Beverly feel at home.
The day arrived when the move could no longer be put off. It was a Saturday in late May, a cool overcast day when colors, instead of fading in the mist, seemed to glow as if lit from within. The pink dogwoods on the lawn of the rehab center looked as if they might explode. Suzanne was wheeling Beverly to the curb. She had borrowed Marta’s van to transport the wheelchair and the walker and the other paraphernalia. “Look, Mother,” she said, pointing at the pink dogwoods.
“Suburbs,” Beverly said and shrugged her good shoulder.