Bad People (27 page)

“I’ll probably just go to the U-dub.” He shrugged.

“Is that where you
want
to go?”

He shrugged.

“What about Evergreen?”

“Well that’s even cheaper, true.”

She felt a burn rising in within herself. “That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s not a question of the money, at this point. First we need to see what kind of education you
want
.” Evergreen was a progressive school, with a more self-directed curriculum, yet still, like the University of Washington in Seattle, it was a state school. “For the right kind of person Evergreen is one of the best schools in the country.”

“And you want me to tell you if I’m the right kind of person?”

“I’m trying to have a conversation with you Stephen-David.”

“Now? He have to talk about it now?”

“Soon! We have to talk about it soon. We don’t have all the time in the world.” God, he was going to be eighteen in months! “
You
might not care about your future now, but that is a luxury you aren’t always going to have.”

As a mother, Connie had never had that luxury concerning him.

“Well you should have had more kids.”

Her mouth fell open. She started to ask him what he meant, but she couldn’t find words. He told her anyway.

“Then it wouldn’t have been so bad that I turned out so bad for you.”

She wanted to burst into tears; she wanted to leap up and slap him.

“That’s so unfair of you,” she whispered. “You have no idea.”

“And then you’d be even more like Demi Moore,” he said.

She almost assumed she must have imagined him saying that.

She looked at him. She saw it. She saw it but it lasted only a second: the curve of the smile that she knew so well. His father’s smile. His special smile of disappointment. And then it was gone.

Her voice cracked. “Go to school,” she whispered.

His eyes widened in fear and regret, but she couldn’t deal with him now. “Mom…” he said.

The smile was gone, that single moment of possession by his father was gone, but still for the moment, she had trouble looking at him. She was afraid if she did she would hate him, and she couldn’t risk that, she couldn’t bear that.

“Mom, I’m sorry,” he said.

“I know,” she said but she still couldn’t look at him. “It’s okay.”

“Mom,
please
,” he said.

“It’s okay, I’m not mad,” she said. But he wasn’t leaving. She would have to deal with the hole ripping open inside her later. She made her face serene and lifted her head. She forced herself to smile, she willed her face forward to the time when she
would
forgive him, because of course she would, he was always her son, no matter what else happened to her she was going to hold onto that. “Go to school. We’ll talk about it another time.”

He was visibly ashamed, and he left ashamed, quietly and ashamed, which was something. His Dad wouldn’t have felt empathy here.

When she was alone she took a deep breath. The emotion caught her again, and then she thought she really
would
break down, no helping it this time, but she didn’t. She bit at her thumbnail and almost succumbed to the temptation to rip it right off. Instead, she contented herself with biting down on it, testing its give. Her nails were not brittle anymore. That had happened because she had been forcing herself to eat a real diet. Fresh fruits and vegetables hadn’t helped her moods though.

She picked herself up, and passing through the front room noticed Stephen-David’s laptop open on the coffee table. She wondered if he would need it for school. She went over to close it, and being in sleep mode, her hand upon it caused the screen to jump to life. There was a page of text, or lines of text, at least. The form of a poem caught her eye before she could do what she had intended to do, which was close it without snooping. But she had never known Stephen-David to write poetry:

forget me I return to the hole

renounce me I return to the hole

poole within me dark of power

was I at the beginning tower

and will I return to my future home

and leave you alone

Connie shut the laptop. She opened it again, parsing the lines, the words.
Renounce me
. It sounded so dark. What did it mean? Was it a suicide note? Not a suicide note: a suicide gesture, at least that’s what they used to call it.

The intercom buzzed. Connie left the notebook and went to the intercom. She assumed it was Luke coming back for his jacket, and it was. She buzzed him up, and opened the door to let him in.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” she whispered as she waited. Her son was thinking about killing himself. She herself was a little younger than he was now when she first encountered (and eventually conquered—or had she?) the impulse to suicide.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree
, old folks they used to say.

When Luke came in she leaped on him and hugged him, which caused him to emit a exhalation of air in return.

He looked at her. Curious? Bemused?

She wanted to show him, she wanted to show somebody, but now she even had to recover from her absurd show of emotion. Too much. She had already violated Stephen-David’s trust, she certainly couldn’t share his private writings with someone else.

“Nothing!” she said, turning her voice positive. “I’m so surprised to see you, is all. You left your jacket!” she turned and walked back to the coffee table, leaned down and closed the laptop.

“See anything interesting?” he asked. Smiling.

She stammered a denial, not exactly convincingly. His smile faded and she didn’t know why she felt guilty all of the sudden, in her own house. He now looked at her, puzzled.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Look at this,” she said on impulse. Her impulse control was going to shit. She picked up the notebook, opened it again and turned it toward him. “Look at these lines Stephen-David wrote. Do they sound, do they sound…” She almost said
disturbed
,
depressed
. “How do they sound?”

Luke touched the keyboard lightly. He looked at the screen, but his eyes did not move back and forth like he was reading. He really seemed to be staring past the document into nothing and thinking.

“This is Stephen-David’s computer.”

“Yes?”

“But it looks just like yours.”

“It does. Tell me, am I overreacting, this is just normal adolescent stuff, right? Here, take it.” She pushed the laptop at him and he took hold of it.

He glanced at her a moment, then turned his attention to the screen. She watched him read.

He closed it and dropped it on the sofa. Then he went to the chair by the front door where Connie had laid his coat and picked it up. He opened the door.

Connie almost let him walk out the door she was so stunned. “Luke! Are you leaving!”

He stepped through the door, stopped, and shut it. Then he turned back. “I don’t know anything about poetry,” he said.

“So you walk out!” Her cheeks burned. “I’m sorry if this is a little too domestic for you!
Not
quite what you thought this would be, is it!”

Luke’s face muscles slackened and he touched his forehead. “Of course you’re right. I’m sorry, I only just got some terrible news,” he took out his phone and showed it to her—showing her the call? “That’s the main reason I came back, not my jacket. I wanted to see you.”

She knew something was wrong, she could see it now, and she had been too selfish and self-absorbed to see it before. “Tell me,” she said.

“It’s just my ex— “ he said. You see that name on my caller ID? That’s her roommate, and I just spoke to her a little while ago, and she told me some news. It seems my ex has just been killed.”

Chapter 30: Luke

Luke had been asked by Connie to leave, not stay that night.

She had asked him to do that before when he had been over but he’d managed to talk her out of it, talk her in to letting him stay.

Not this time. She was insistent that he go, she wanted to be up early. She wanted to talk to her kid about college and wanted to be up early enough to catch him in the morning. Without Luke. The message was pointed.

The kid was a nuisance, and Luke mostly avoided him if he could. Luke had the tougher time getting males to like him, except when they had glaring weaknesses of character like Barry or were uncommonly compelled to him like Jay Porter. Stephen-David, being some kind of worm inching along in its own blind desperation, was too dull to react in much of any way to Luke, but Luke knew the kid did not like him. That alone, despite the amount of focus having a dependent took from Connie, was reason enough that Luke hated him. For this reason, he didn’t argue with Connie about staying all night this time. In fact, he could have stayed. Connie had drifted off next to him after securing his promise. As he looked at her in what little moonlight came in through her bedroom window, he thought about just laying back down and, in the morning, explaining that he had fallen asleep too. However, this time he
did
want Connie and Stephen-David to talk. The sooner the kid was settled on a college, the less Connie would have to deal with him. He would be gone next fall at the latest.

She slept soundly, usually, so Luke was able to slip out of bed and get dressed easily. He crept out of the bedroom closing the door behind her. He had done this before when she slept, searching in drawers and cabinets about the house, not looking for anything in particular, but merely seeking to satisfy his natural curiosity. He hadn’t found anything.

He pissed around the kitchen, reluctant to truly leave for some reason. At the counter he thought about leaving her a note of some kind. Something to remind her that he had left as she had wished, but deliberated over what to say.

He needed something that would work on her emotions, and make her regret asking him to go.

Irrelevant that he had decided to go anyway, and wanted to in this case. Now, in the kitchen, he realized
why
he was finding it difficult to go out the door.

The Mind was taking over, cautioning him. Luke had let Connie appear to have the upper hand. He was virtually training her to give him orders. This could not stand. But neither could he come right out and tell her so. Her ego would not allow her to hear that. She was complicated, it might takes months—even for Luke—to get her to do everything he said. To that end he had to play coupling games. He needed now to find some gesture that would make her feel guilt for asking him to leave, and also make her miss him more than ever. Something romantic.

He wandered into the living room and saw a laptop sitting on the table, which was odd, as Connie usually put it away. He sat down on the sofa and opened it up. He did not bother to investigate the laptop, as he’d done that before and not found much of anything. Since he had last checked it, he noticed now that she had removed the desktop photo of a rocky shore and now her desktop was a plain blue panel. He noticed also that she had cleaned up the desktop icons, leaving only a couple for the most common programs visible. He found Word in the desktop and opened it. He figured to write something, a note for her, that would touch her whenever she opened her computer next—like a romantic surprise. When the program started up and the white square representation of a page hung open on the screen for him, he put his hands on the keyboard—and hesitated. He had everything ready to go but the substance.

What did he want to say to Connie. Or even better, what did he want to say to the world.

He stared into the whiteness. The screen was the only light in the black living room.

Like a fire.

He stared into the whiteness, the wall of fire. Something about it said poetry. He had never written a poem, and no poem he had ever happened to read jumped into his mind as a model. But he knew what poems were: short lines of expression that filled a page.

His fingers started to move, picking out letters on the keyboard under their shadows:

forget me

He read that back and thought about what that meant: by telling her to forget him, at the moment, he was reminding her of himself, a gentle rebuke to her for thinking she could push him away. It would make her miss him immediately.

Then he would tell her the consequences of that. He was whole without her, and any rejection of him was meaningless to him because he was the center, the world, the whole, on his own. She needed to know that too. No matter what happened to her, he would always return to himself. He was wholeness:

I return to the hole

He repeated the line with added emphasis:

renonce me I return to the hole

He started to type easier now. The words flowed sensibly, logically from each other: