Light of Day (12 page)

As he cleaned and waxed, while he alphabetized the books in his study by author—then title, then subject, then back to author—he'd yell: “I was too busy to know what was happening. I had to do my work.
But I still made time for you. You could have told me.” He'd say, pathetically and desperately: “You could have
talked
to me. We still had time.” Then he'd look around quickly and whisper: “This isn't normal.”

Some days he would think about Anne. He would see her in quick flashes, her face against the gray urban sky, sitting at her easel, her hand poised above the canvas, out of context, out of time. Sometimes he would recall the sound of her voice or a piece of conversation. He would remember the expression on her face when she spoke to him, when she said, “Sometimes people lose the thing that makes them each other,” and how that had confused him, how he didn't understand it.

He would remember things he had not allowed himself to remember before and it made him feel guilty, it felt like a betrayal. Only there was the box he'd found under Danny's bed, and was that all the permission he needed? He would wonder if he'd forced Danny to hide his memories. “Would that have made a difference? Would that have…”

At night he'd lie awake thinking about Danny, thinking about Anne. Or fall into a shallow sleep knowing that he was losing more than the illusion of control over a capricious universe, he was losing control of himself. He'd whisper “This isn't normal” into the dark, and assure himself that tomorrow he'd walk out to the creek, take off his shoes and wade in the water. He'd eat more than the few crackers, the cups of coffee. He'd make himself a full meal…Tomorrow…The next day, definitely…Or maybe the day after that…

 

Jack was standing on a stepladder in the pantry, reaching into the corner to smooth the shelf paper he'd just put down. He'd been working on this particular shelf since early morning and wasn't even half done—at this pace he wouldn't be finished until sunset. The air breezed through the screen door warm and heavy with the earthy scents of pasture and field. “July. You can smell it,” he said to himself. He thought of where he would have been, where he had planned to be, this July Fourth weekend: “Yankees-Detroit.” He had the tickets in his bedroom. “Two days after that we'd be heading to the Cape. That was going to be fun, the Cape with Bob and the kids. Danny was looking forward to it, sailing with the
boys. Tacking to the wind.” He nodded his head. “Danny always looked forward to that. He was also looking forward to turning sixteen and getting a summer job. He was getting too old to be seen with you.”

He wasn't sure if she'd heard him, he hadn't been aware that she was standing there until he heard her knock twice on the side of the house.

He turned too quickly and his foot slipped just like one of those old-time burlesque comics who steps on a banana peel and does airplane whirls with his arms to keep his balance. He managed to grab the shelf at the last second and hang on, leaning his body into the wall. Over his shoulder he saw Mary-Sue Richards, Sally's daughter, holding a covered dish.

“Dr. Owens?” she said, as though she'd wandered up to the wrong house, or was speaking to the wrong Dr. Owens. She looked a little frightened, maybe it was Jack's appearance, the three-day beard, the torn cutoffs, maybe it was just the look in his eyes. She took a step back and stayed on the other side of the door.

Jack smiled at her and said, “Working around the house. I'm starting to go to seed.”

Mary-Sue smiled back. “Mom thought you might like to taste someone else's cooking for a change. It's cold marinated steak. She said to be sure to tell you she would have made it for you sooner but we were down to Brown County until the day before yesterday.”

Jack said, “Tell her thanks. I appreciate it.” He got down from the stepladder and opened the door. Mary-Sue handed him the covered dish—he would have to remember to label and freeze it.

“Mom wanted to bring it over herself, but I told her I would.” Mary-Sue looked down at the floor and twisted her torso a little to the left, then the right, awkwardly, not like a teenager, but all shoulders and knees in her T-shirt and shorts, and just for that moment she wasn't a fifteen-year-old but the little girl who used to come over with her mother and run around the house with Danny and get modeling clay in her hair.

“I suppose I should have called first and asked if it was okay…” She raised her eyes and looked at him sadly. “I guess…” and twisted her torso uncomfortably, again.

“I'm glad you came over,” he told her.

She stared at him silently, started to speak, stopped, lowered her eyes and just stood there.

“There's something you want to talk about, isn't there?” Jack said, in the voice he used when Danny had something to say and didn't know how to get started.

Mary-Sue nodded her head. “Danny. I'm really sorry about—about what happened.”

“I know.”

“I miss him a lot.”

“I know you do.” He asked her to come in and sit for a minute. “Please.”

He went to the pantry, opened one of the tins, put a few cookies on a plate and poured her a glass of milk. It made him feel good to do this, to give cookies and milk to one of Danny's friends.

Mary-Sue sat stiffly in the chair. She looked at the glass and the plate and then down at the floor. Her blond hair was long and straight, gold-streaked by the summer sun. She gave the few stray ends a tug and twirled them around her finger, but she said nothing.

“Can you tell me what's on your mind?” Jack said to her.

“I don't know…I mean…I don't know…”

“There's nothing to be afraid of.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I was kind of worried about him, that's all.”

Jack leaned forward, just a little bit. “What was he doing that worried you?”

She went back to twisting her hair. “I mean—I could just tell something was bothering him, about a week before…”

“Was he acting depressed? Something like that?”

“No. It wasn't real obvious or anything anyone else at school would have noticed, but you know, Danny and I were like brother and sis—” She started to cry. Jack reached across the table and put his hand on hers.

“It's all right,” he said softly. “It's all right.” He told her, “It's very sad, I know,” and that she didn't have to talk about it if she didn't want
to.

She picked up a paper napkin and wiped her eyes. “I could just tell,” she sobbed. “I could just tell.”

“I'm sure you asked him about it.”

She shook her head. “No. I didn't. I should have but I just thought he was angry at me or maybe he was just in a bad mood, you know because of the baseball game. But I've been thinking about it and—I don't know.” She folded the napkin and placed it next to the glass. “It's given me some bad thoughts.”

Jack wanted to ask her why she'd waited so long to come over, why she'd waited so long to tell him. He wanted to know what she saw in Danny that had upset her. He wanted her to know what Danny hadn't been telling him. He felt a rush of anxiety beginning to overwhelm him, his legs started to shake and his hands, his neck felt cold and damp and he was sweating. He walked over to the window and kept his back to her so she wouldn't see him trembling, so she wouldn't be frightened.

He asked, “Didn't he say anything to you about, well, didn't he say anything at
all
?”

Mary-Sue answered, “No, but there was
some
thing—like when he thought no one was watching him. And like when I was teasing him one day on the bus about him and Jeanie Bauer.”

“What about Jeanie Bauer?”

“Oh, nothing. I saw him talking to her a few days before, that's all. He got really weird about it.”

“Weird?” Jack turned around and braced himself against the wall.

“He was like, ‘Go bother someone who might care,' and like that. Actually, he said, ‘someone who gives a shit.' And then the next day—the next day he gave me a
kitten
.”

“A kitten?”

“A little orange and white kitten, with a broken leg. He came over to my house to say he was sorry about yelling at me, and he gave me a kitten. He said it was a stray that he found and he was worried about it and he couldn't take it home because Mutt would hurt it. He said I should take it to the vet and then keep it. He made me promise to keep it.” She picked up one of the cookies, turned it over, looked at the underside and
held it between her thumb and index finger. “He was real intense about it, about
everything
.” She put the cookie on top of the napkin.

“What do you mean, intense?”

“Like the kitten was the most important thing in the world to him. It wasn't like Danny to be so, I don't know how to describe it. Like he was all locked up inside. It was more like a feeling I had about him. I could just see something was bothering him but I thought it was just—that he'd snap out of it in a day or so. I should have made him tell me—I don't know—like I should have taken it more seriously and done something about it. I shouldn't've been—I thought he'd probably talk to you about it, anyway.”

“I asked Brian and the guys and they didn't see anything out of the ordinary,” he told her, not as an argument.

“They wouldn't notice the rain until their boots overflowed.”

That made Jack smile, and Mary-Sue smiled with him.

“In the cafeteria when they would just be talking and acting stupid,” she said, “I could see Danny wasn't really into it.” She picked up the cookie and examined it again. “There was this one day when Brian was giving C.J. a hard time, they'd cut school a few days before, an end-of-term thing that no one was supposed to know about, but I overheard them planning it on the bus. I guess it's okay to tell you now. A lot of kids do it, and Brian was talking to C.J. like he might have told his mom or something. Then Rick got on C.J., making him look real whipped, like he just wanted to run away. Usually Danny would take C.J.'s part, but this time he was just letting Rick get in his face. It was like Danny was in his own thoughts or something. But they just went on and didn't notice a thing. Even when I talked to him, it was like he was way off somewhere.”

“Could he have been fooling around with drugs? Was that why Brian was giving C.J. such a hard time?” When she didn't answer, Jack promised, “It won't go any further than this room if they were.”

“I think I would have found out—honest, Dr. Owens. I don't think any of them was doing drugs.” She took a deep breath. “I feel real bad about not making Danny talk to me. I could always get him to open up and say what was bothering him. But I guess I thought he'd snap out of
it and be Danny again.” She looked down at the table. “You're not mad at me, are you?”

“
Mad
at you?”

“For telling you about Danny and crying in front of you.”

“No, I'm not mad.”

“I felt like I had to tell you.”

“You did the right thing.”

“I keep thinking that Danny must have talked to someone. I mean, when something's really bothering you, you have to tell
someone
about it.”

“Any idea who that could be?”

“Usually me.”

“Maybe Jeanie Bauer?”

“No
way
.” She looked at him, Jack thought, with disappointment. Or maybe it was his own disappointment that he felt for having nothing better to offer.

Mary-Sue sat forward and rested her elbows on the table, raised her eyes and stared sorrowfully at the ceiling. She stayed like that for another minute, neither of them saying anything, then she pushed her chair back. “My mom made me promise not to make a pest of myself.”

“You haven't,” Jack assured her. But she stood up, anyway. He asked her to wait a moment, and that's when he told her about Lamar Coggin.

“His sister's on my soccer team.”

“Did Danny know him?” Jack's voice seemed to shrink inside his throat.

“No. I don't think so.”

Jack squeezed her hand and they walked outside together. “I'm glad you came by. You were a good friend to Danny.”

Mary-Sue blushed. “I'm glad I came by, too,” and she started down the back steps. “Oh, my mom says for you to come over on the Fourth of July. If you feel like it.”

Jack stood on the porch while Mary-Sue slipped under the fence and hurried through the field, swinging her arms, her hair swaying back and forth like a mane.

“In the movies, the girl comes to the house of the grieving man and inspires him to rise above his sorrow. In reality, the girl tells the man his son had a sad, intense look on his face, that he was acting
weird
a week before he killed himself. She tells him his son wasn't laughing with the other kids, and no one noticed. But
she
did. She doesn't understand why—it is not understandable when you're fifteen—that while the other kids were busy being the other kids and Danny was busy being Danny, she, being Mary-Sue Richards, saw something no one else saw in Danny's face and thought Danny, being Danny, would snap out of it.” Jack went back inside. “But you can't always rely on the constancy of personality, and even though Mary-Sue doesn't know that she knows it, this awful fact of life gives her bad thoughts. But what makes
you
go bloodless is knowing that you were too busy being Dr. Owens to see what was inside your son's sadness a week before he killed himself.”

 

Jack had worked his way through the house. He was in the attic now, where it was hot and he was stripped naked, dripping sweat on the bare wood floor while he sorted through the old photographs: Danny's first birthday…Danny's first Little League game…Filling up boxes and labeling them, talking to himself, worried that the telephone would ring at any moment with bad news, worried about
What next?