Bullyville (3 page)

After the
Times
reporter assigned to Dad's “Portrait of Grief” finally called us, the piece that appeared was the same old, same old about my saving my mom by being sick that day and how it would have made my dad feel better to know that I wasn't all alone in the world, that Mom had survived to take care of me. But how much better could he feel, considering that he was dead?

Already they'd started busting people for lying about losing family members, either so everyone would feel sorry for them or so they could collect the compensation money that we were supposedly going to get. Every time I read a story like that, I wondered if Mom and I were guilty of something sort of like that. I told myself we weren't. My real dad had really been killed. I hadn't made it up. The fact that he wasn't living with us hardly counted, compared to how horribly he'd died, and the fact that he was gone forever.

My mom had started tucking me in again at night, like she used to when I was little. And once,
when I was half asleep, I heard myself sort of mumbling, asking Mom if she thought we should tell someone…

I didn't have to finish my sentence. She knew what I meant.

She said, “We don't
have
to do anything. Except get through this and take care of each other. That's all. That's our job now.”

It crossed my mind that now I might
never
have to tell anyone that my dad had left us before he got killed. I wondered about when I grew up and got married. Would I have to tell my wife and kids? Or would I take it with me to my grave like some terrible deep dark secret?

 

Time passed in a strange way, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. One day I woke up and it was October. That was the day my mother got a letter from the headmaster of Baileywell Preparatory Academy.

Sometimes, when the mail was piled so high that it threatened to topple off the dining room
table and take over the whole room, Mom and I would rouse ourselves just long enough to sort through it and at least throw out the junk mail: the credit card offers, the charity drives, the disgusting letters from realtors who had read about Dad and were wondering if we'd be wanting to sell our home. I hid a lot of mail from her: notes she'd think she had to answer.

I was the one who first saw the letter from Bullywell Prep. I didn't even open it. I tossed it straight in the throwaway pile.

But there was something about it: the heaviness of the paper, the smooth cream of the envelope, the raised letters, and the crest. The crest! Something signaled authority and called out to Mom across the distance that separated the throwaway pile from her stack of unopened mail.

“What's
that
?” she said. “What's that fancy-looking envelope?”

Right from the start, it was as if I heard a voice inside my head, screaming:
Don't let Mom see it!
Maybe it was because whenever the subject of my
not-so-great grades had come up, she'd talked about Baileywell in a sort of dreamy way, as if it were a paradise pretending to be a school. As if it were the answer to all my problems.

That was back when not-so-great grades
were
problems, back before we knew what problems
were
. She'd tell Dad that if only I went to someplace like Baileywell, if only we could
afford
to send me there, I'd be interested in school,
engaged
(her word). Harvard would be practically begging me to go there. And when I pointed out what everyone in town except Mom seemed to know—that it wasn't heaven at all, but actually a hell full of vicious demon bullies—Mom had said, “Those are the kind of stories people always make up when they're jealous.”

“What's that envelope?” she repeated now.

Don't let Mom see it!

“Nothing,” I said.

“Let me see it,” she said.

D
R
. B
RATTON CALLED
and made an appointment, and actually came to our house. I watched him from the window, parking and getting out of his big-assed Yukon. I was a little surprised, because all the teachers and administrators at my old middle school drove crappy little Toyotas or (if they had families) minivans, mostly because that was what they could afford but also supposedly to teach their students a lesson, by example, about fossil fuel consumption. Dr. Bratton's giant steroidal SUV was sending another
kind of message, and it sent it all up and down our middle-middle-class block in our upper-middle-class suburb. It wasn't so much the size of the truck that was making the big impression. Several of our neighbors had shinier, even more luxurious cars. But something about Dr. Bratton made it seem as if he was a messenger bringing news from a shinier, more luxurious world.

I said, “I didn't know high school principals drove serious SUVs.”

“I didn't know school principals made house calls,” said Mom.

It was a Saturday morning. Dr. Bratton (I didn't yet know he was called Dr. Bratwurst) was wearing a V-necked cardigan over a white shirt. Tweedy jacket. Bow tie. He was slightly plump and balding, not at all the stately, white-haired, distinguished Founding Fathers type you'd expect to be running a place like Baileywell. He bounced a little on his toes. He wore steel-framed glasses. From the house, I could see them glinting at me, like headlights flashing in my eyes late at
night when Dad was driving.

It wasn't helpful to think about Dad at that particular moment. I watched Dr. Bratton bounce up our front walk as if he were coming to sell us life insurance, or convert us to some perverted new religion. To this day, I don't know why he came to see us instead of summoning us to his office in the heart of the heart of the castle. Maybe he wanted to observe us in our natural surroundings, maybe he wanted to see for himself the house where the half miracle, half tragedy had occurred, or maybe (and he would have been right about that, at least) he thought that Mom and I were too (as Mom said)
fragile
. We might never have accepted an invitation to come see him in his office. The strain and the effort would have been too much.

Because by that point, Mom was not in her most reliable get-out-of-bed-bright-and-early-every-morning mode. In fact, we'd both slipped into a kind of dream state. We didn't go out much, we mostly stayed home with the curtains closed
and lay on my mom's king-sized bed, the bed that used to be Mom and Dad's. By then we'd learned to navigate our way around the disaster newsreel footage and avoid the burning towers and the choking survivors stumbling through clouds of dust. We spent a lot of time watching
Law & Order
reruns.

Everyone understood. When Gran and my aunts drove over to bring casseroles and clean the house and do our laundry, they tiptoed around and whispered as if the slightest disturbance would make us shatter into a million tiny pieces. And they were right. It would have.

It had all come down on Mom at once: Dad's death, their separation, her own near miss. In fact, I thought that Dad's dying that way just wiped out the whole part about the separation and brought Mom back to the place where she and Dad were a more or less happy couple with a kid, a house in the suburbs, and the two jobs in the city. That was what she missed, and now that she'd forgotten the detail about having to see Dad and Caroline every
day, she also missed going to work. Every once in a while, she got calls from relatives of other people from her office; most of her coworkers were dead. The relatives asked how she was doing, and passed along the latest rumors about compensation payments and how the company might move somewhere else and start all over again. Mom didn't seem to care about that, or about anything much.

One day, someone called from the city coroner's office asking her if she could bring in Dad's toothbrush so they could match his DNA to whatever they found at the site. That drove Mom straight back to bed. She hadn't felt like telling them that he'd taken his toothbrush with him when he moved in with Caroline.

Once, Mom said she was glad that Dad's parents were dead. They'd both been killed in a car wreck not long before I was born. She'd liked them, they were sweet and kind, and it was fortunate they hadn't lived to see this. I didn't think it was so fortunate. I wished I had more grandparents. I wished
I had all the family it was possible to have.

Every so often, Mom would haul herself into the living room and sit straight across from me and stare into my eyes and say, “I know this is hard for you, baby. I want you to be able to talk about it to me. You need to talk about it. We're going through this together.”

But what was I supposed to say? I missed Dad, and the whole Twin Towers thing made me feel terrified and sick. If I said that, how was it going to help Mom? So I didn't talk about it, I got used to not talking about it, and after a while I sort of
liked
not talking about it. It made me feel in control, grown-up. Manly. I thought that my keeping my mouth shut was what Dad would have wanted.

I kept hoping Mom would get better, but she seemed to be getting worse. She almost never wanted to leave the house. She sent me out to the convenience store—the nearest one I could walk to—for small grocery items. The supermarket delivered, and we ordered a lot of takeout. Chinese, Indian, Mexican—we didn't eat much,
anyway. I Googled her behavior—her symptoms—on the internet. That was how I found out that Mom might be suffering from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. I don't think it helped her to know that she'd just been a few degrees (my fever!) away from getting killed, herself.

She stopped driving, and in the back of my mind I was beginning to worry that she was becoming a serious problem I was going to have to deal with. Should I tell Gran or my aunts? Mom got dressed for their visits, which meant that she hadn't totally run off the rails. And even if she hadn't gotten dressed, even if she'd greeted them in her nightgown, in bed, they would have accepted that, too.

And so when it turned out that Dr. Bratton was coming to see us, and it seemed like the first thing that had gotten Mom excited, or even interested, in weeks, I felt I had to get with the program. Fine, let the dude come visit. Let him get a good look at Mom in her bathrobe, with her hair unwashed. Let him see what basket cases we were.
Let him satisfy his sick curiosity about our semi-tragedy. And then let him regret the fact that, in his letter, he'd mentioned the possibility of my going to Baileywell Preparatory Academy on a full scholarship, a new and specially earmarked endowment from an anonymous donor.

In five minutes he'd be telling himself that he hadn't really made an offer, hadn't promised or committed himself. It had only been a
possibility
that was, after all, impossible. He could tell the anonymous donor that I was academically unqualified, that it wouldn't be good for me
or
the school to admit me at this point. Maybe they could keep looking until they found some worthy, high-achieving kid whose dad had been an undocumented restaurant worker at Windows on the World.

 

On the morning of Dr. Bratton's visit, Mom practically skipped downstairs in pressed jeans and a bright red sweater. Her hair and face were shining. She looked like a mother in a TV commercial,
waking up early to prepare her family big bowls of the hottest, steamingest, healthiest breakfast cereal.

“Dr. Bratton! Come in,” my mother said. “Would you like some coffee?”

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. But I
was
surprised, and scared. And the part that scared me most was this: Ever since my dad got killed, Mom would say, “I know people talk about good things coming out of bad things. But I wish someone could show me
one
good thing that's coming out of this. I don't count bombing Afghanistan, or some yuppie couple meeting as they fled up Fifth Avenue in the rain of ashes, or the wake-up call about terrorism, or the flag stuff, or the rest of that. And I don't count my surviving. I mean, this thing didn't
make
me live, it almost killed me. It
would
have killed me if you hadn't been sick. And not being killed doesn't count as something good coming out of something bad.”

I hated it when she talked like that. Because I didn't feel I could tell her what I really thought:
Nothing
good was going to come out of this. Sometimes bad things happen, and they're just bad. End of story. No compensation. No points earned for suffering. But no one wants to listen to philosophy from a thirteen-year-old, not even the thirteen-year-old's mother.

It wasn't until I watched Mom working to make a good impression on bouncy Dr. Bratton that I realized that my being offered a full scholarship to the fanciest, snootiest, most expensive school in northern New Jersey could have been seen by someone—not by me!—as something good coming out of something bad. In fact, my going to Baileywell was what Mom had always secretly—well, not secretly at all—wanted. To me, it was more as if something bad was leading to something even worse. I would explain that to my mom later, as soon as Dr. Bratton left. And it would have been fine with me if he'd left right away.

When had Mom made coffee? Dr. Bratton took his with tons of milk and sugar. We settled in
the couch, from which the plastic cups and Chinese-food containers and pizza boxes must have been removed by elves in the middle of the night.

Dr. Bratton sipped his coffee. All his gestures had a kind of delicate, chirpy grace that I couldn't quite put together with the headmaster of a school for manly bullies and future masters of the universe. Frankly, he reminded me a little of my aunt Grace, who had married a big mafioso and somehow managed to turn into a British person.

“I'm so sorry for your loss,” Dr. Bratton said, and we all did that sheepish nod.

“It's been hard,” said Mom in a way that made her seem even prettier than normal.

“I can imagine,” said Dr. Bratton. “I mean, I
can't
imagine.”

“You can't, actually,” said Mom. A silence fell, and we stared at one another. The ball was in his court.

He tapped his fingertips together, as if he was afraid they might be sizzling hot and he was testing
them to make sure. Then he joined them into a peak, like a church roof, with its spire just under his nose, as if he was sniffing the steeple.

“Like everyone else in this country, in the
world
,” he said, “the Baileywell community has been asking itself what can we possibly do. How can we help, how can we make a difference, how can we react to this terrible tragedy that has shaken us to the core? Of course, a number of our parents and faculty have been going to work as volunteers at Gro—”

He stopped short as he got to “Ground Zero.” He'd remembered who we were.

“And then we read the inspiring, hopeful story about you and your son, having lost so much and having been saved, by sheer chance, really, from losing so much more. And what I want to tell you, Mrs. Rangely, is that it wasn't your tragedy so much as the whole scenario: a mother who chose her child's needs over those of her job, a mother who even now must continue to put her professional life on hold because her orphaned child
needs her. And the simple eloquence and dignity with which you, Bart, have dealt with the reporters and with all the interviews that must have been so terribly painful.”

“To tell you the truth, I was pretty numb,” I said. “It was sort of like I'd gotten a big shot of Novocain. So the interviews weren't all
that
painful.” In fact, I could hardly remember any of my conversations with the reporters. I was about to say that, but I stopped because Mom and Dr. Bratton were staring at me as if they couldn't quite figure out what I was doing there, or if I was speaking English.

After a pause, Dr. Bratton said, “I wish I could claim this was my idea. But to be perfectly truthful, the inspiration first occurred to one of our more creative parents, who also happens to be one of our most supportive and generous donors. He was reading the paper, and he saw the article about you two, and he immediately called me and said, ‘This is the kind of student, the kind of moral fiber, the kind of wisdom and maturity we want in
our Baileywell population.' Naturally I agreed right away.”

Wisdom and maturity? What were they talking about? Two planes flew into a building. My dad died. I had the flu. My mom stayed home. What was so wise and mature about that?

“So,” he went on, “we would like to offer Brad—”

“Bart,” said my mom.

“Of course. Bart,” said Dr. Bratton. “As I believe I mentioned in my letter, we would like to offer Bart a full scholarship to Baileywell, all expenses paid, even including transportation in the van we run for our day students.”

“That's so generous of you,” said Mom. “Everyone knows that Baileywell is such an amazing school!”

Dr. Bratton smiled shyly—and proudly. “This is not the moment, I know, to burden you with the statistics of how many of our graduates go on to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, and other similarly elite institutions.”

“Stanford's awfully far,” said Mom.

“Columbia,” said Dr. Bratton. “Harvard.”

“How marvelous,” said Mom

Great, I thought. Just what I want. An elite institution.

“What's more important even than college,” Dr. Bratton continued, “are the lifelong friendships that Baileywell students form, relationships that are not only sustaining in every way, but are incredibly helpful as our graduates find their path through a world that gets scarier and more threatening every day. Sadly, it's not the same world we knew when you and I got out of college.”

“You can say that again,” said Mom.

Could she and Dr. Bratton really be the same age? He acted about a hundred years older.