All the Time in the World (28 page)

“What do you want me to do?” I say.

“When you pick up George from school, could you come down here with him? Maybe seeing his grandson will make Simon forget whatever retaliatory agenda he came to push,” he says.

“It could add more fuel to the fire,” I say.

“I'm not saying it's not a risk,” Scotty says. “But it's the only thing I can think of. Will you come?”

“Text me the address,” I say, and he says thank you with more relief in his voice than I can handle emotionally. I hang up the phone. The last thing I need is to start bawling and have Everett think it has anything to do with the fact that I suspected him of sleeping with Jess.

“You have to go?” he asks.

“I do. Please believe me when I say I had no idea that phone call was coming though.” I grab my jacket and keys and start tying up the trash bag with all the rotten food in it. It would be very unfortunate to have it come undone halfway down the stairs.

“I'll wait for you,” says Everett.

“There is no way that I will make it back here tonight,” I say. “I'm sorry.”

“You know,” he says, “I believe that you really are. I wish that it made me less pissed at you.”

I open the door and wait for him to walk through it. He doesn't offer to take the heavy garbage bag from me, so I haul it out into the hallway and lock the door behind me. We walk down the stairs without saying anything, our out-of-sync footsteps the only noise.

He watches me struggle to open the dumpster with one hand, and after I've dumped the trash bag in and gotten the lid closed, he's still standing on the sidewalk, looking at me.

“Some things are more important than money,” I say.

“I know.”

“Some things are more important than my art, than art in general.”

“I know that.” Everett pulls a set of car keys out of his pocket. I wonder how long it took him to find a parking spot in this neighborhood.

“Okay.”

“Now are you going to tell me that some things are more important than friendship? Is that what's next?”

I reach for his hand, and he takes a step back. I step forward and grab it anyway, even though he doesn't want me to. “Love is not a limited resource, like oil. There's an infinite amount. Okay?”

Eventually, I have to let go of him and catch a cab if I'm going to get to Georgie on time.

*   *   *

“ME RIDE IN
the troller?” George and I are on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, and neither one of us is in a good mood.

“I didn't bring the stroller. You walked today, remember?”

“You hold me?”

“I have a lot of stuff, Georgie. Can you please try to walk a little bit? Just to those big doors.”

“Want somebody to hold me!” George says, and when I don't say anything, he is insistent. “Tahr-lette, you hold me? I want you to hold me! Tahr-lette! TAHR-LETTE!” My resolve not to let him get what he wants by throwing a tantrum is wavering in the face of my need to get him where I want him to go. He starts to make a loud, tearless cry-noise and cry-face as I dump our things onto the ground and squat down to concentrate on their consolidation. George stamps his foot once and then again.

“Please don't get so angry with me, George. I need you to wait a second so I can get organized, and then I will see if I can carry you. But not if you're going to yell at me. That hurts my feelings, and I don't like it.”

He stops making the noise but stamps his foot again. “I'm sorry that you're frustrated, love. When we get inside, we'll find your dad and your grampa, and we'll figure out a snack for you.”

I finally manage to shove everything into one bag, pick up George with the other arm, and secure my hands under his bottom. It works until we get to security and have to wait in line to pass through. I keep trying to put George down, but he is clinging to my neck and refusing to let go, which makes dismantling our bag much more strenuous.

We find the court we're looking for at the end of an empty hallway. It reminds me of a middle school classroom, which is not at all how I pictured such a fate-deciding room. Simon Edgerly is sitting outside the door on a long wooden bench, next to another man. They are both wearing expensively cut suits, and as I release George, and he starts to run down the hall in their direction, I realize that the other man is Scotty.

He is different, but I can't put my finger on why. It's like all the calm, all the dullness that had settled in, has dissolved. In this person I can see a stirring, a motion under the surface. A digital image with a higher pixelation. A man who is no longer comfortable blocking out his consciousness. Georgie can see it too, this awakening of sorts, and he runs to him as if he knows his real dad has come back to obliterate the impostor. It takes me longer to identify him than it took George though, as if they are on the outside of a cloud I'm still stuck in. It should feel like a return to the Scotty of yore, and it should overwhelm me with joy, but there's an edge I can see now that I've never seen in his face before. So instead of recognition, I have this feeling of foreboding. If we are out of denial, where are we headed?

Simon, on the other hand, is in a familiar posture, a posture I am comfortable with. He looks heavy, like a rebel who has won his war and has no idea what to do next, and therefore sits immersed in his memories, his grief, his deflated passion. He doesn't move a muscle as Georgie reaches the end of the hall and flings himself into his father's lap, not even a tiny flinch. There is no acknowledgment of me or of his grandson, no trace of Mae's courageous faith, and as I approach, I am desperate for a clue to what's been happening between Scotty's phone call and now.

Scotty looks at me with burning eyes and says, “It's over. They just read out the sentence. He's getting pretty close to the maximum, but he'll have the possibility of parole. I think that was part of the plea bargain. He wasn't drunk. He wasn't on drugs. He wasn't texting. He just didn't pay attention. He wasn't paying attention, and her life is over.”

For a moment, all I can think is, it's not real. That can't be the end of her life, a moment of inattention.

“Are they still inside?” I say.

“Yes,” he says. I don't have to ask what we're waiting for.

When the door opens, several men walk out, one in handcuffs, with a teary-eyed woman and a uniformed officer trailing them. As they pass, Simon speaks for the first time since we got there.

“That's the man who killed your mother,” he says.

George's eyes track the handcuffed man down the hallway, and for a moment, I think I see compassion flash across his little face.

*   *   *

SIMON STAYS WITH
us for a week, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why he is hanging around. He doesn't help with the kids. He doesn't eat dinner with the family. He doesn't even hang around the house. As far as I can tell, he goes out and walks around all day, not downtown or to any of the tourist attractions, but from east to west through the park and all around our neighborhood. He doesn't say it, but it's almost as if he is looking for Gretchen, taking in her old haunts and trying to reconstruct her trajectory.

Scotty is gentle with him. I keep waiting for him to call Mae so she can organize a retrieval, but he doesn't. Eventually, something shifts, because Simon tells us he'll be leaving the next day. But whatever the change, it is invisible to my eyes, as if it's happening underground, and I try not to worry that there'll be an earthquake or some kind of volcanic eruption somewhere down the line.

George is in his room, alternately pleading and demanding to come out, having been punished for picking a tulip from someone's window box after being told not to. I try my best not to be one of those adults who punishes a kid because I'm embarrassed by their behavior, but this incident pushed all of my shame buttons, particularly when I was being ripped a new asshole in the middle of the sidewalk by the woman who lived there for not “SUPERVISING MY CHILDREN” properly. George refused to apologize to her, and when we got home, I told him he could come out when he was ready to say he was sorry to me for having to endure the consequences of
his
actions.

That was forty-five minutes ago. Every time I go to check on him, he wants to show me something or play a game, but he refuses to acknowledge why he's being punished. I am so frustrated that I can't even laugh with Scotty when he gets home from work, hears the story, and then dubs the tulip the “shame flower” and puts it in a vase in the kitchen.

“Does that mean you think I should let him out?” I say.

“No. But I don't want this beautiful, hard-won tulip to go to waste.” Scotty dips a piece of ancient-grained bread into the spaghetti sauce I'm stirring. “This is great. What are we eating it on?”

“Brown rice rotini with eggplant and turkey meatballs,” I say. “Maybe you should talk to George. I'm spectacularly ineffective right now. He's looking at me like I'm making the honking noise from Charlie Brown every time I say something. And then he asks me if I want to see Chickie wear a diaper.”

“You're upset about this,” Scotty says, in his even-keeled lawyer tone, leaning his hip on the counter. I want to fling spaghetti sauce at him off my spoon.

“Well. Yes. Mostly about what that woman said. She was kind of right. George has ignored everything I've said, all afternoon,” I say.

“That's just kids,” says Scotty. I'm not sure he could have picked a more infuriating phrase. “Do you want me to try? Not that I think I'll get different results. But I want him to know we're together on this, and it's not just mean Sheriff Charlotte raining down the law on the cowboys.”

Before I can answer, Grampa Simon appears in the doorway, holding George by the hand. George looks solemn.

“Tahr-lette,” he says, and I sigh, because his eyes are shiny, and I'm a sucker.

“Yeah, bug?”

“Tahr-lette, sow-ee I picked that flower, sow-ee you're mad,” he says, and I don't know what the version of events in his head looks like, or why he thinks I'm mad, but I can tell that he's sincere.

“Okay, buddy, I forgive you. Where's Chickie's diaper?”

“He fell out of my bed,” he says and runs back down the hall, ostensibly to retrieve the diaper-bottomed Chickie. Scotty hands me an oven mitt, and I take the sauce pot off the burner.

“Thank you,” I say to Simon. “How did you get him to do that?”

“I told him it's important to make sure that the people you love know that you love them, and when their feelings are hurt, you have to make it right while you can.” I have a flash of understanding, right then and there. This man will never get over losing his daughter. The rest of us will be changed, for sure. We will always be different, even after we move on—Lila, Mae, the kids, Scotty. But her father has shown no sign that he will ever move on.

“Well, thank you,” I say. There's not a lot of point in saying anything else. Scotty is setting out bowls and forks, offering no indication as to whether he is taking in this conversation or not. As to whether George will now live his life in the constant fear that everyone he loves will die, I suppose that will have to be dealt with later. Simon putters off to the living room to watch TV with Matt.

“George and I will have to find a way back into your good graces,” says Scotty, sliding plates underneath each of the bowls he has set the table with.

“I'm not mad at you,” I say.

“Maybe you're not mad, but you're not over it,” says Scotty. “I'm determined though. You will be by the end of the night, no matter what I have to do.”

All through dinner, Scotty is on. Teasing the boys, deferring to me on small decisions, telling stories about Grampa Simon's business days and how Uncle Patrick and Uncle Max both tried to get Simon to hire them when they heard Scotty and Gretchen were engaged—this is a pre-tragedy side of Scotty. By the end of the meal, I am laughing, mostly because the boys are laughing, and we are all having fun together. There is a moment where Scotty looks at me to assess whether or not he has gotten back to the right side of my graces. He knows he has. Maybe I'm too easy, as Jane and Claudia repeatedly suggest.

After dinner is over, Scotty and the boys bring me dishes to load into the dishwasher, and I can't help thinking that now, three and a half months later, when Gretchen no longer occupies our every waking thought, the time has arrived when our postmortem relationships with her will get more difficult. The memories attached to her will be less black and white, will start to run together into a messy, muddy puddle. Wading out into the middle of a mess and living there until the silt settles around me isn't something I've ever been particularly good at, and the thought keeps me up late that night, questioning whether or not I've ever really seen to the bottom of anything.

 

PART FOUR

Charlotte

 

May, eleven weeks after

Scotty, sitting on the couch in sweats, stares at a news anchor reporting on a tornado somewhere in the Midwest. I bring his reheated plate out and hand it to him, and he takes it without looking away from the television. The anchor is a young man, and he is speaking loudly, standing too close for comfort to the disastrous weather as the wind dislodges lawn ornaments from the ground behind him. Scotty is horrified and enraptured, the look on his face similar to those on Matt's and George's every time they watch the dad lion fall off the cliff in their favorite animated movie. I hid that DVD after Gretchen died, though no one has asked for it since then anyway.

“We don't have to watch this,” I say. “I was listening to them comment on a statement from the White House while I made dinner, and I never turned it off.”