The Whole World (8 page)

“How could you?” I shouted, and I meant,
How could you laugh?
How could he have a personal squabble about it?

“I’ll be fine,” Mom mouthed at me. I’d forgotten about her for a moment. I’d made myself forget.

I turned and ran the other direction, into the courtyard. First court, second court, around Pepys Library and into the Fellows’ Garden. Some of the colleges are fussy about their Fellows’ Gardens, but Magdalene’s is open. I followed the path that leads away from the river; there are always too many people near the river. I hid in a private little wood that turned out to be a pet cemetery. I sat on the tombstone of a dog that had died a hundred and fifty years ago and put my face between my knees. Breathe.

I thought my mom had been arrested, tactfully. And I thought to myself,
My God, she did it. It happened again
.

I ran to Millington Road, panting. I knew Liv was at Gretchen’s.

Harry let me in. “Polly! What can I do for you?” He wore an apron and smelled of vanilla.

“Please. I need Liv. Can she come out, please?” I had meant to ask to come in, but I couldn’t face it.

“Liv!” he called over his shoulder, keeping me in sight. I had never heard him speak above a polite volume. I must have looked a wreck.

Liv came around the corner. “Polly?” she asked. We hadn’t spoken since the revelations at the gallery.

“Liv …” I said, and then my eyes cracked open to release a torrent of tears.

“Nick?” she asked, of course assuming that the worst had been discovered.

I shook my head, tossing tears to both sides. “No, no. At least, I don’t think so. I—please come with me.”

She told Harry that she had to go and pulled her jacket out of the closet next to the door. Her arm was in one green sleeve when Gretchen came up from behind. “What’s going on? Is there an emergency?” She sounded concerned but also annoyed.

“Please,” I said. Meaning,
I just need to speak to my friend
. But she took it differently. She insisted I come in and pulled on Liv’s arm.

She dragged us both into the lounge. Harry prepared hot drinks in the kitchen. Gretchen tried to be stern and parental with me, which was exactly the worst thing under the circumstances. I sobbed till I was almost choking. It was minutes before I could speak.

“My mother,” I croaked out. “My mother,” I said again, with a bit more control. I was getting it together.

“Is she hurt?” Liv asked. It was like Twenty Questions. All I could manage were short answers.

“No. No, she’s all right.” They waited for me to elaborate. I could only hiccup.

“Is she still in Cambridge?” Liv is so sensible. I really admire her.

“Yes, she’s here. She wouldn’t leave.”

“Polly.” Gretchen took me by the shoulders. “You’ve got to talk. You must.”

“Okay,” I said. Harry pressed a cup into my hand. It burned my fingers. That kind of got me together. “Okay. My mother’s been arrested. They took her away.”

“Harry,” Gretchen interjected. “Call Jim. He’ll have a recommendation for a solicitor.” Harry jogged upstairs. Gretchen continued: “Drink up. You’re in shock.”

“Thank you,” I said. I sipped. Time passed.

“I’m lost here,” Liv admitted. “What’s she been arrested for?”

Gretchen knew. She’d connected the dots.

“It’s Nicholas, Liv,” said Gretchen. I nodded to thank her, which was thoughtless.

Harry had come back. He put a pink Post-it on the table in front of me. “Grant Tisch. Would you like me to phone him for you?”

“No,” I said, honestly surprised. “No, I think she did it.”

Gretchen sat up straighter. “Harry, phone the man.”

Things happened around me. Liv gaped. I tried to protest the lawyer, but Gretchen was a force.

The room seemed to be growing larger. The cushions on the couch swelled up and pressed on all sides, lifting me up toward the ceiling. Liv and Gretchen lengthened before me. Liv asked, “Are you all right?” and I said, “Yes,” because I had no force of my own. I didn’t have it in me to explain anything to anyone.

The inside of my head had become bigger than the world around me. It was a terrible place.

Gretchen spoke to the solicitor in front of me, to reassure me that my mother was in good hands. She used a tone with him that suggested he should have preemptively prevented my mother from being arrested in the first place.

“Grant Tisch is going to meet your mother at the police station, Polly,” Gretchen said. Harry put food in front of me, which I ate, I think. Liv was doing whatever she was asked, and generally wringing her hands. I missed a lecture on “Order and Disorder in Material Science.”

No one asked me again what I think it was my mother did.

Gretchen put me into the guest room even though it was daytime. Gretchen has this way. It wasn’t physical how she did it, but with force nonetheless. I said, “I think I should go home now,” and she acted like she didn’t hear it.

There was a telephone in there, which I unplugged. I locked the door and considered climbing out the window. If only the world outside the window didn’t have my mother in it.

I opened drawers. There were stationery and pens and stamps. Also an address book. This must be Harry’s writing room when it wasn’t accommodating guests.

I considered writing Nick, but where could I send it and what would I say? I couldn’t apologize, because I’d tried to save him. That I’d failed was not my fault.

I eventually collected myself and wandered back down to the lounge. Liv wasn’t there anymore. Harry wasn’t around either, not even in the sounds of distant puttering. The curtains were pulled. Gretchen sat at the table, running her fingers over a book.

She was startled by my steps. “Polly!” she said. “I urged Liv to attend her lecture. The most important thing was for you to rest.”

“Okay,” I said, still not fully under my own power.

I sat down across from her and she closed the book.

“Polly,” she said, “I think you should tell me what happened.”

I’ve played in chamber groups and I’ve played in orchestras. In a quartet, we follow each other, we follow the music, we follow what we’d agreed together in practice. Orchestras are a whole other thing. In performance, the orchestra itself becomes an instrument, played by the conductor. His hands point and waft, dictating pace and emphases. We absorb the emotions from his face and posture, to return them through our instruments. We’re open receivers. It’s an unequal situation. An orchestra does what it’s told.

“Polly,” she repeated, just that one word, just my name. It was like that moment when the conductor raises his hands. Everybody sits up straight. Elbows out, bows hovering over strings.

“Okay,” I said. And I opened my mouth to tell her.

CHAPTER 3

I
’m surprised Gretchen let me leave the house. She was pretty upset by what I’d said.

I walked up Grange Road, turned left onto Adams and then straight to the Coton Footpath. It took me over the rush hour M11, still full at eight p.m., then past fields to a cheap little playground: a slide, a spinning thing, and two swings. I pumped with my legs, back and forth, higher and higher. The air was misty but it wasn’t actively showering. It was dark.

Before Jeremy and I had gone all the way, we used to make out in a park like this one.

Usually we came to the park together, but sometimes we met there. Once, I got there first and sat on a swing. He came just a little later, but for a few minutes watched me from a distance. He told me later that he liked to just look at me. And that my skirt blew up above my knees when I went up, and that my legs were the longest and prettiest he’d ever seen. I was, he said, the prettiest girl in school, which at the time had staggered me as an impossibly enormous compliment. It had made me the prettiest girl in the world.

I waited for him now. He might step out from behind a tree any moment.

He sat on the seat next to me. I said, “Hi.” He started to swing too, but we weren’t quite in sync. So it was hard for me to be sure it was him. He was behind me, then blurring past, then it was the back of his head. Over and over again. I kept trying to change my pace, to widen or shrink my arc so as to catch him. He stayed out of range. I couldn’t look him in the face. Perhaps this was a purposeful kindness. Perhaps this wasn’t five years ago, and was instead three or two or less. Perhaps his face wasn’t whole anymore, and he was sparing me from seeing it. He was a gentleman that way.

I stopped trying to catch up with his swing and just enjoyed his company. “Jeremy,” I said. “Do you like England?”

I didn’t expect him to answer. I knew he wasn’t really there.

Jeremy had blond hair. It’d been lighter than mine, except when I caught up in the summer. He was nice, a good swimmer, funny.

My father stormed in on us once while we were in the living room playing cards. “Polly,” he said seriously, clearly holding something back, “I need to talk to you.” Jeremy offered to excuse himself; Dad had been obviously ready to blow up about something. “No, son …” Dad said, seemingly conversational. “You need to stay.”

We’d looked at each other, Jeremy and I, feeling the hook pierce our gaping mouths. It was obvious what this was going to be about.

He’d found a cache of condoms in my room. He held up a sample.

I tried the offensive. “What were you doing in my room?” But he just shook his head. He wasn’t going to be derailed.

I tried again. “Okay. So what? You can see we’re being responsible.” At “we,” Dad’s head swung to Jeremy, who shrank a little.

“I care very much about your daughter, sir,” he said, as steadily as one can. It felt like a script, even though it was true.

“Do you?” Dad said, nodding to himself. “Okay, okay. You care. That’s nice.” He paced.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked, because he was kind of freaking me out.

“She’s out. She doesn’t know yet.”

My face gave it away. He put the condom into his pocket. “I see,” he said. I had told Mom months before.

He made Jeremy leave, then yelled at me. He told me I lived under his roof. It was all standard, as I understand these things. Dad seemed pretty okay afterward, like he’d got out what he needed to.

Jeremy and I became careful. We didn’t do anything for weeks. I stayed in most evenings too, to show Dad. The condoms were gone and I didn’t buy new ones; I didn’t want the pharmacist or one of the supermarket cashiers to maybe tell him something and set him off. But it wasn’t just me being good. Dad and I had this truce going on. Dad didn’t say anything when I spoke to Jeremy on the phone sometimes. Once, Dad even handed me the handset and told me who it was.

About a month later, my brother, Will, broke his arm. He and a friend had been horsing around on skateboards, his favorite summer activity, which Dad didn’t like. Mom took the minivan to the hospital, where Will’s friend’s mom had taken him. I was out with the yellow car and didn’t know what was going on. That left Dad stranded at the bus stop when he came home from work. It was later revealed at trial that he’d had an ugly confrontation at the mill with his supervisor, about a forklift accident that had been covered up and some structural damage Dad was certain was worse than was being admitted. Dad had been the good guy in that conflict, and risked his job over it. Coming home that day, he’d been indignant and afraid of being fired. He’d been worried about the people who might get hurt if the company didn’t take action. He was worried that my brother was skateboarding at the parking lot of the vacant strip mall, which he’d told him not to do. He was worried about me and Jeremy. And then there was no one to meet him, which was either fundamentally disrespectful on a day he totally didn’t need that, or evidence of bad news. He was in a panic, or a rage, to get home.

I need to linger here, because if my brother hadn’t broken his arm, Dad probably would have been a hero. He would have followed through with things at work. Maybe he would have gotten fired for it and sued them and gotten the press after them. Or he would have forced them to shape up himself, and maybe no one would have known what he’d done, but he wouldn’t have minded that. My dad was a good person and, if Will hadn’t broken his arm, would still be one.

Because Will broke his arm, Dad had to walk home. The walk from the bus wasn’t too long, but it was a drizzly day. If Mom had picked him up, she would have driven the long way around, down Campbell Street, because she didn’t like the left turn onto Warwick. In a car it doesn’t really matter if you go the little-bit-longer way. But Dad was walking, and turned onto Warwick no problem, and then right onto Minerva, and then left onto Cowper. This was the more direct way. As he was walking he imagined all the things that could have made Mom miss picking him up. They involved hospitals, police, or fire trucks. He was really worried, and, just underneath all that, suspicious that there hadn’t been an emergency after all, and that no one really cared how hard he worked or what he’d done that day.

When he turned the corner from Cowper onto Lang, he saw our yellow car parked in the driveway. This is where his brother, Joe, lived. He wondered if we were all in there; if perhaps Joe had had a heart attack, or Rain had been arrested for shoplifting (he didn’t like Rain). He bounded straight across the lawn rather than detouring the long way up the walk. He could vaguely hear the TV running, but it could have been a lot of people talking. He pushed in the front door, and heard worrying, potentially medical sounds under the TV noise. Was someone having a terrible asthma attack?

I know all of this because “state of mind” figured heavily in his defense.

Just a few steps farther in, he recognized the sounds. He knew what they were and, worse, recognized me. He said later, on the stand, that he knew it was me because I used to breathe just like that when he tickled me when I was a kid: a distinctive kind of breathy whooping.

He didn’t walk through to the TV room, but he called out to make us stop.

We did so immediately. We dressed. When Jeremy turned off the TV, I squeezed my eyes shut. I needed something to dull the full effect of what was about to happen.

“Are you dressed?” Dad boomed from the front room.

“Yes,” I called back. Jeremy shoved the sheet into his backpack and took my hand to go meet him.

Tears slid down my face, but I didn’t cower.

Dad told me to walk myself home. He wanted to drive Jeremy to his house to talk to his parents. Jeremy shrugged. What else could we have done?

Jeremy kissed me on the cheek and said he would call me. I smiled bravely in return, and walked out past Dad without acknowledging him. From the next street I heard the yellow car start up in Uncle Joe’s driveway.

Dad said that when he and Jeremy got into the car, he saw Burger King bags on the floor of the passenger side, and a couple of big bags from a camping store in the back. We had used the car that day to buy a tent from a store out of town; a bunch of us were going to go up into the White Mountains later in August. Jeremy and I might have otherwise met at Uncle Joe’s on foot, and Dad would never have known we were there. But we’d had the car and, after getting a tent and a small grill, had stopped at Burger King on the way to Uncle Joe’s. When the lawyer prompted him, Dad described everything from this point onward—Burger King bags, camping stuff—in emotionless detail. He gave everything equal weight, to dull it, I guess. To flatten it all out.

When I got home no one was there, and I’d given Dad my key ring for the car. I sat outside on the step. I heard it happen, three streets over.

Dad admits that Jeremy didn’t say anything during the ride, which made it difficult for Dad’s lawyer to prove provocation in the moment. Dad says he doesn’t know why he did it, he just felt, compellingly, that it needed to be done. He makes it clear that this feeling wasn’t rational, and it isn’t one he retains. In fact, he says, as soon as it was over he recognized it for the horror it was. But as he did it, he said, it was as unthinking as a routine. You don’t put on your tie in the morning because you want to, he said. You do it because that’s what you do.

The prosecution had a slow ramp-up to their full description of the act. They had street diagrams and skid marks and experts on that particular engine to indicate where and how quickly Dad had accelerated. Apparently, Jeremy would have briefly seen it coming. Dad drove straight for the oak tree in the Palmers’ yard, no swerving. He had nothing against the Palmers; it was just a big tree near the road.

The defense tried to make it look like an act of suicidal depression, but Dad had aimed the car so the passenger side would impact the tree and the driver side wouldn’t. One could argue that that was luck more than good aim, but Dad admits it was intentional.

Jeremy had been thrown into the windshield. His face got shredded and sprayed blood like a cloudburst. His head was cracked open by the impact, and Dad said he could see Jeremy’s brain. He said it like it was just a detail, the same way he had seen the Burger King bags. Dad said Jeremy had seemed unconscious, but breathed in a rattly way for a while beside him. The coroner says that death was instantaneous, but I believe Dad because he was there.

Dad had had an airbag. He cracked three ribs.

In the trial, there was some haggling over whether Dad knew that the passenger side didn’t have an airbag, whether he knew that his side did, and whether he’d noticed that Jeremy hadn’t put on his seatbelt. He was given seven and a half years, and will likely serve only five.

And all of this happened because Will broke his arm.

I finished high school at home with tutors. I didn’t have too many credits outstanding, so there wasn’t that much to do. The school was nice. They didn’t make me come in for classes, but let me continue to be in the orchestra. I like being surrounded by the swell and flow of all those musical machine bits; I like being one of those bits. I like being part of something that works.

I spent the year after that at home with Mom and Will, planning. I was going to get away, there was no doubt about that. I had to get away, but I wanted to get somewhere good.

I haven’t seen Dad except at the trial. He sent me a present for my last birthday, a beautiful copy of a sixteenth-century planetary model, a pre-Copernican Earth-centered universe, to go with my intended studies. It spins beautifully, representing the best effort of an early scientist, all of whose hard work hinged on an error. I think Dad was admitting that he’d been wrong about a lot of things, fundamentally wrong.

The card was in Dad’s writing, and the model was the kind of detailed, physical, well-engineered item he liked to share. But I think my brother helped him get it—I assume it was he who bought it and wrapped it. He probably helped Dad figure out to choose it in the first place. Why would Will do that? Why would he want to help Dad?

I didn’t try to see Jeremy’s family or attend the funeral. I think they would have flipped. I know that if you pressed them they wouldn’t say they held me responsible, but of course they did. I actually didn’t know his family that well. Jeremy and I had mostly seen each other at school.