My Beautiful Failure (22 page)

“That’s right. You know the Mary Alice of Mary Alice’s Variety?”

“Next to the hospital?” I pointed with my thumb.

“That’s my mother.”

Novello finished his coffee and handed me a slice of
bacon without using utensils. “There’s a lot to learn in a small town. You can never get to the end of it.”

I nibbled the bacon. The waitress refilled his coffee and left the check.

“There’s one other version of the story,” Officer Novello continued.

“What’s that?” I wondered if he always told stories or if he knew I would be receptive because I had been a Listener.

“There’s a version that says that Emma wasn’t trying to rescue Mary Alice. That Emma was in love with the same guy. Mary Alice’s boyfriend. It was my mother’s fiancé who got killed, but Emma loved him too. So even though she had no prospects along that line, when she heard about the death, she took her own life. Because, you know, there had been some kind of long-term fantasy there. Which now was not going to be realized.”

“She wasn’t a hero?” How complicated people’s motivations could be.

“Everybody’s a hero. Is what I’m learning.”

“Is everybody a villain, too?”

“Too neat.”

I still had one egg left, so I ordered another English muffin and more jelly. Someone in a jacket and tie walked by the window and looked at the cop, then at me. Officer Novello waved to him: Move along.

“You know,” he said, putting away his wallet, “I’ve gone to calls like your friend’s half a dozen times, and I still have the same reaction. I can’t fathom what could be so bad that someone would want to leave this earth.”

“I guess not.” I almost could, though. I heard what Jenney’s voice was like when she lost Melinda. Maybe those of us who couldn’t fathom it were the lucky ones.

“Should we tell your mom and dad what happened?” he asked, leaning toward me as if he were my new friend.

I mimed lip-zipping, then folded my arms on the table. “I’m not telling anybody anything. Besides, my parents are riding high right now. I wouldn’t want to ruin everything by giving them bad news.”

We got up. Officer Novello patted his thighs, checking for all the paraphernalia he had to carry. There must be stuff there that people have no idea of. High-tech, secret, spy-type stuff. Like me, and maybe like others in our town, he was a carrier of secrets.

“All right, well, if you don’t want to talk to your parents, just talk to somebody. Okay?”

A
ndy and I tucked into our plates of American chop suey. Mitchell had a meatball sub and two containers of milk. Gordy had brought corned beef with sauerkraut and Russian dressing.

“How’s it going at Life Savers, R?” Mitchell asked in between milks.

“We parted ways,” I said casually. “You know, philosophical differences.”

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Andy said, looking earnest, like I was an adult he had to impress.

“What friend?” My spine stiffened. Had they heard about Jenney?

“Margaret,” he explained. “The Listener. I’m sorry about what I did to Margaret.” The apology was a long time in coming. I wondered if Gordy or Mitchell had put him up to it.

“I can’t talk to you about her,” I said.

Andy stopped eating and pressed his head against the
back of his wrist. His fork, in this awkward position, protruded from his forehead like a cockatiel crest.

“But did you ever stop to think that maybe I called because I needed to call?”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it. Why does someone call a suicide hotline, even as a prank? Doesn’t it have to be a cry for help, even if they’re covering up?”

He had a point, actually. I had assumed that his call was just to make fun of us, but I shouldn’t have assumed anything at all. To be truly compassionate I would have to try living on the Andy-as-Hagrid Planet. I put down my fork. “Are you all right?” I asked.

He whispered,
“No.”

“Andy? Were you having a bad day the day you called? It’s all right, Andy. You can talk to me.”

Andy’s face started to redden, and his mouth crumpled into a crooked line.

“I always seem to push people away,” he said. “Even you guys. Even the people I really like.”

“You think you push people away sometimes.” I reached across the table and rested one hand on his shoulder.

Andy stabbed my arm with his fork. “Gotcha!”

Mitchell and Gordy laughed, or maybe just made sounds of astonishment.

“I wasn’t in the mood for that,” I told them.

“Tasteless, yes,” Mitchell said. “But you have to admit, funny.”

“I’m an idiot,” I said. “I should have known you guys
were pulling my chain. Andy would never be serious about calling a help line.”

“Sure I would,” Andy said. He stopped eating and folded his arms in front of his tray.

“Oh, yeah? What would you call about?”

Andy looked right into my eyes. “That of all your friends you like me the least. And you remind me of that every single day.”

The edges of the caf seemed to dissolve until nothing existed but Andy and me staring at each other. I wished I could stab him with a fork to break the mood.

“What would you call about, Mitchell?” Andy asked.

“He wouldn’t,” I said. The tomato sauce tasted sweet against the soggy, chewy elbows of pasta.

Mitchell sat back and ran one thumb under his suspenders. “I’m not suicidal over it,” he said, “but my dad just moved out.”

“No way.” Mitchell’s parents and my parents had been in and out of each other’s houses for my whole childhood. “Wow, Mitchell, that’s huge. I’m really sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You seemed preoccupied,” he said.

“I’m not anymore,” I told him.

The four of us sat there, tearing bread, gulping soda, and watching the parade of girls and guys and their sometimes knowable, sometimes mysterious lives.

I
signed a piece of paper.

But maybe I could tell one person, someone I knew would keep it a secret.

“So you know I’m not at Listeners anymore,” I began on the way home from school. Gordon was walking while I rode really slowly on my bike. I didn’t know how much I would say. I hated burdening other people with my problems.

“Because of the girl?” he asked.

“Yeah. But it’s not what you think.”

“What’s going on? Are you two together?”

“No, we’re not together. She’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“She’s dead. She died.”

Gordy glanced at me, then looked out at the water and nodded. I felt Jenney separating from me and joining the ranks of all the other people who had died. She had more in common with Gordy’s mom now than she had with me.

The wind along the boulevard made goose bumps on the surface of the gray water, then whistled past our ears. I smelled damp pavement and beer from the yuppie microbrewery nearby. I stopped my bike at the wall that listed the names of Hawthorne’s fishermen who had died at sea, and Gordon and I climbed up and sat on the wall.

“The girl you liked died,” he said, “and you weren’t going to tell me?”

“I signed a confidentiality agreement. Like you said, I had to play by the rules. I wasn’t allowed to discuss her. I wanted to do things right. I shouldn’t even have told you her name.”

Gordy hopped down from the wall and stood close enough to me that he blocked my entire view.

“I know she died, Billy,” he said. “It was in the newspaper. A girl named Jennefer, a few years older than us, who was a swimmer. I’ve been waiting for you to say something.”

“I’m sorry. I . . .” Maybe I told myself I had a knack for dealing with people, but in fact I was totally inadequate. Maybe I had what Andy described: I was always pushing away the people I liked.

Gordy turned his back and looked out at the harbor, which already was almost dark. The lighthouse at the end of the stone breakwater that enclosed the harbor had begun its sweep, sending a ray of light around in a circle, over and over, the visual equivalent of the tolling of a bell.

“No,” said Gordon. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I have no right to be mad. I know she was really important to you.
I just don’t understand the way you think sometimes.”

I banged my heels against the monument. The darkness gave us privacy and connected me to the nights with Jenney. It made me want to talk.

“I don’t know if I was thinking or not. But I’m starting to realize that I feel really bad now. I mean . . . I almost feel bad enough to call Listeners myself.”

The captain of a fishing boat told me once that seasickness climbs up your back, and you can stop it at different points along the way. But once it reaches the back of your neck you’re a goner. I realized now that the same was true of crying.

Gordy stood beside me at the wall. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?” he asked when I was done. “I mean, as much as you think you should say?”

I started telling him everything, about doing a great job for several weeks and being one of the best people there, listening to Jenney, getting to know her. How I started to care for her a huge amount and said some things I shouldn’t have said. Then about Jenney getting more desperate, the pills, looking for Jenney, and the police finding her.

“It sounds like you blame yourself for what happened,” Gordy said, checking my face.

“I do,” I answered.

A foghorn sounded from the lighthouse. I had to admit that it was one of my favorite sounds.

“I’m trying to figure out who
is
responsible,” Gordy said, “but it’s pretty complicated. What do you think?”

“Her parents.”

“They don’t sound like the greatest. If what she said is true.”

“Her therapist, Melinda. I wonder if she feels the same way I do today. Like, if she can’t stop puzzling over everything she did and deciding what she should have done differently.”

“Maybe she played a part. But the full responsibility?”

“Her two friends?” I thought of Stacey and Rebecca falling apart at the funeral. How long had it been since they were real friends to Jenney?

“It doesn’t sound like it.”

“I think I have it,” I said.

“What do you have?”

“Jenney herself is responsible.”

“That’s what I think too. She made the final decision. Whether it was a good one or a bad one is on her shoulders. I think she made a bad call.”

“Because it was a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

We both listened to the foghorn a while more, and I started rolling my bike again.

Gordon and I stopped at his house for nachos and soda. I noticed Dad’s
Three Dories
hanging above the bookcase in the living room.

I rode home the long way, from Beauport back to Hawthorne past Murray into Intervale and back again. I wondered whether Jenney’s problems really had been temporary. The newspaper article made it sound like her parents may not have been as rich and important as she had made them out to be. If not, maybe what she said,
or believed, about Tobey also was not true. Maybe that memory of Tobey would have tortured her for the rest of her life. Or maybe she would have let go of it, and some other problems would have come into her life. Maybe peace was never in the cards for Jenney.

I could have checked her stories by doing some research. But so what if Jenney hadn’t been telling the truth? Like the length of her legs, the color of her hair, and the size of her eyes in relation to her mouth, those facts didn’t really matter. They made no difference in how well I knew Jenney.

I
ran into Pep in, of all non-life-and-death places, Schneider Lumber, our town hardware store. She was with her roommate, shopping for plant hangers. I was doing errands with Mom, and I felt neutered by the parental presence even more than I did by Pep’s. Pep and I stared in different directions—we weren’t supposed to know each other, since our acquaintance stemmed from a secret organization—then met by intentional accident in front of the Venetian blinds.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

She adjusted one blind, opening and closing, letting light in, shutting it out.

“How are things at command central?” I asked.

“The same. Naturally I can’t reveal anything about any specific Incoming or Incomings.”

“Naturally. The same staffers there?”

“Pretty much the same.”

I flipped through a booklet of color samples. “Any promising new people?”

“Two recruits still in training. One looks like a hotshot. But you never know.”

“No one ever knows much. For sure. This is the most general conversation I’ve ever had in my life.” Heat rose to the back of my neck. I still didn’t entirely agree that I should have been let go.

Pep shrugged and glanced in the direction of her roommate.

“So, how will you spend your extra time now?” Pep asked, using her best Salton manners.

“Actually, I’m here to pick up some things for Habitat for Humanity.” I pulled a random paper from my pocket and brandished it.

“Is that woman with Habitat too?” she asked, angling her head toward Mom because she was too polite to point.

“That woman’s my mom. She’s the director of a museum and does a lot of good in her own way.”

“Well,” Pep said. “All’s well that ends well. Good luck with Habitat.”

Pep wandered off. Mom wheeled two wreaths and a box of Christmas ornaments toward the register. I don’t generally lie, so I used what little money I had on three tubs of spackling compound I could donate to Habitat for Humanity, as soon as I got their address.

I
remembered my Grandma Pearl’s death from cancer, and how afterward I could recall her only as she was in the hospital. The hospital room doorway was the museum frame that held her image, until one day she came back to me, running water over a package of frozen strawberries. Do you choose the way you remember someone? No, you remember them the last way you saw them, until you make that go away and replace it with something else. And so, when I felt ready, I went to the main lobby at the end of a school day, when all the buses had left. I stood in front of the trophy case.