CHAPTER SEVEN

Monday was a day of heartaches.

It started early on, in class, when Evan Stodley sat motionless and glassy-eyed at the back of the room. I saw Nancy Ortega and a couple of the other girls give him looks of concern while we discussed Rage of Man, but he didn’t look over at them or up at me. I kept my eye on him while class proceeded, and I let myself move casually around the room the whole hour, making points, gesturing, calling on students. When the bell rang, I was standing right in front of Evan, and I gestured at him to stay in his chair.

“Wednesday,” I said. “Have the book finished. Everyone have the book finished. That means you, Devante.”

“Hey, I only have a hundred pages to go.”

“Good thing you’re such a fast reader. See you all in a couple days.” Evan made no move to get up as the other kids filed out, and once the room was empty, I seated myself at the desk across the aisle.

“So what’s wrong?” I asked.

He hunched his shoulders, still not looking at me. “I—I didn’t have much to say, I guess. I—haven’t read the assignment.”

“And I wish you had, but that’s not what I’m concerned with right now. Clearly, you’re upset about something.”

He made a gesture as indeterminate as the shrug and gave no other answer.

“I know you and some girl broke up a couple weeks ago,” I said. “Is that it? Are you seeing her again?”

“It’s not her fault,” he said swiftly. “She told me—she was very clear. I just—see, I have these feelings, and they’re no good any more, and I have to get rid of them, but I can’t, I don’t know how.”

Boy, I’ve been there. “Sure would be a lot easier if it was like a water faucet, wouldn’t it?” I said. “Turn the emotion off and on. Not the way it works, though. Unfortunately.”

“Everybody says—time—it takes time—but I don’t think there’s enough time. I don’t think I can go through another week like this, you know? Another day. I mean, maybe I’ll feel better a year from now, but how do I get through the year? So I—” He stopped and shrugged again. He had lifted his hands as if to run them through his hair, but they were shaking so badly that he returned them to the desk, tightly laced together so their trembling was not so obvious.

“So you?” I prompted. “So you’ve been thinking about doing something to yourself? Hurting yourself, maybe?”

“I wouldn’t want her to know,” he said earnestly. “I wouldn’t want her to think it was her fault. That would be a terrible thing to do to someone, leave them behind with that kind of guilt. If it looked like an accident, maybe, you know, something to do with a car—”

If I’d had any doubts, I was now pretty sure this was way beyond my level of expertise. “Lots of ways to kill yourself, Evan,” I said evenly. “And none of them are good.” For the life of me, I couldn’t keep the little Dorothy Parker jingle from circling through my head: Guns aren’t lawful, Nooses give, Gas smells awful, You might as well live. But that wasn’t the tone I was going for here. “You’re twenty years old. You have every imaginable fabulous experience still waiting for you. Love with women you don’t know how to dream up—friendship with the most unexpected people—explorations of places it wouldn’t occur to you at this minute to go see. You kill yourself, none of that comes true.”

“I can’t think that far ahead,” he whispered. “I can’t see it.”

I couldn’t remember if Evan had family nearby or if he commuted in from a long distance, as I did. Even if he had family, that didn’t mean anybody was paying attention to him. “Who have you talked to about this, Evan?” I asked. “Your roommate? Your mom or dad? Anyone?”

“Umm—” He rubbed his face with his shaking fingers then quickly replaced his hand on the desk. “Nancy, a little. She’s the one who made me come to class. She said it would make me feel better.”

I was grateful for that; she had clearly meant to turn the problem over to me. “Well, she was right,” I said. “One of the best things to do for depression is distract yourself, did you know that? Someone told me that once when I was depressed. Sometimes something as stupid as a TV show or a phone call is all it takes to snap the mood, just enough to help you think a little straighter.”

He glanced at me quickly, sideways. “You were depressed?”

I smiled. “Everyone gets down now and then. Everybody in the world. The trick is to recognize when your situation is really serious and you can’t handle it on your own. Then you ask for help.”

He gave me another swift look. “You’re going to call somebody, aren’t you? Tell them about me.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Or I’ll walk over with you to the mental health clinic. It’s just across from Dorsett Hall.”

He shook his head. “I can’t make it that far,” he whispered, and suddenly crumpled forward over his desk, resting his forehead on his hands.

I jumped up and gave him an awkward hug. You can’t really get your arms around someone curled over a desk, and anyway, I’m not supposed to touch my students. But the hell with that. “It’s okay,” I murmured. “Evan, it’s okay.”

It took the mental health team about fifteen minutes to arrive after I called. I had been a little worried that they would arrive like pest-control professionals, brisk, efficient, and cold, but I relaxed when I saw them. The woman was petite and kind-looking, older than I was by maybe a decade. The man was burly enough to manhandle Evan out the door, but the expression on his face was of a gentle sweetness that instantly made me trust him.

“Hi, Evan,” the woman said, crouching down next to him. “I think maybe you should come talk to us for a while.”

It was another five or ten minutes before they had Evan calm and agreeing to walk on his own power to the electric cart they had waiting outside. I offered to come with them, but the woman seemed to think they’d do better without my help and Evan seemed willing to put himself almost bonelessly in their hands. I accompanied them to the outside door anyway, feeling helpless and stupid, and wishing I knew magic words. Spells for sanity and serenity, love potions, healing charms. All I could do was promise to call Nancy and let her know where he was, and then promise to check on him myself.

Once they’d left, I headed down to Caroline’s well-decorated office to tell her that a student was in trouble. She looked up rather blank-faced when I entered, and for a moment I had the impression she didn’t recognize me.

“Oh. Taylor,” she said, seeming to shake herself out of an abstraction. “What’s wrong?”

“One of my students is having an emotional meltdown, and I had to call the health center to come get him,” I said. “Is there something else I’m supposed to do? Notify his parents? Notify the dean?”

She motioned to a chair and I took a seat. “The clinic should get in touch with his parents,” she said. “I don’t think we need to notify the dean unless he ends up dropping out. What’s wrong, did you find out?”

“He’s obviously suicidal, and the cause seems to be a breakup with his girlfriend. I don’t know. He’s sort of a frail kid anyway. I wish there was something more I could do.”

“I’m sure you’ve done the best thing you could for him,” she said, but her voice was a little muffled. She had slumped back in her chair once I announced the cause of Evan’s troubles, and, like him, she seemed more interested in the patterns on her desk than the expressions on my face. “In fact, it’s probably no accident he chose to talk to you. You have a sort of—aura of safety about you. Makes people think they can confide in you.”

I was stunned, not so much by the comment as by the realization that Caroline herself was about to make a confidence. This extraordinarily self-possessed woman was looking, now that I took the time to examine her, like she’d spent the whole night sitting up drinking whiskey and contemplating the evils of the world.

“Caroline,” I said quietly, “is something wrong?”

She seemed to consider. “Yes, actually,” she said in a precise voice. “I don’t need suicide intervention, but I just—it’s been a hard week.”

I had read somewhere that the way to get people to tell you things was not to ask questions but to share your own experiences so that they felt comfortable replying in kind. Part of me did not exactly want to hear Caroline’s secrets—she was my boss, we had never been close, and this felt weird—but the part of me that is instantly roused to sympathy when a stranger at the teleport station is crying was the part of me that took over now.

“I sure know about hard weeks,” I said. “Hard years, too.”

She glanced up. “When you got divorced, how long did it take you to get over it? How did you get through?”

I hadn’t even known Caroline was aware of my personal history. “The divorce wasn’t the worst part,” I said. “The worst part was the year before the divorce, when everything was going wrong. When I would lie there next to Danny every single night and think, ‘What am I going to do? How can we stay together? But how can I leave him?’ I couldn’t envision the conversation in which I told him I was walking out. I couldn’t envision packing my clothes and going through the furniture and parceling out the books. I knew I would get better once we made the break, but I didn’t know how to make the break.”

She leaned forward, her perfect features intense. Today, her pale hair was pulled so tightly back from her face that it seemed her cheekbones hurt. Or maybe the pain that showed around her eyes was rooted in another cause. “But how did you know you would get better?” she demanded. “How could you be sure of that? Didn’t you ever think, ‘This man will leave me, and I will be quietly but irrevocably unhappy for the rest of my life’?”

“Not really,” I said honestly. “But things had made me sad before. High school breakups, my dad’s death. Events that were horrible at the time, but that I lived through anyway. I did know—” I gestured; how could I explain? “It would take a long time. Longer than I wanted, maybe. It’s like breaking your arm. It’s not going to heal overnight, no matter how unhappy you are that your bone is broken. But it will heal.”

“So how do you get through the time that it takes to heal? How do you endure it?”

Evan’s question exactly. “Well, me, I kept really busy. I would make plans for weeks in advance. Not a Monday rolled by that I didn’t know exactly what I was doing Friday and Saturday night. I joined a reading group that met every other Wednesday, so those were a couple of days I didn’t have to worry about. And I took some night classes, so there were a few more hours that were taken care of. I saw movies with friends. Had dinner with my family. It’s not so hard to keep yourself busy if you make it your life’s work.”

“It sounds exhausting.”

I laughed. “Well, it is. But the more you wear out your body, the more you distract your mind. And the more you hypnotize your heart.”

“Didn’t you want to get even with him?” she asked.

“With Danny? For what?”

“For hurting you. Didn’t you want to hurt him back?”

I noticed she hadn’t asked what went wrong with the marriage. She was assuming Danny had been the one at fault; she didn’t seem to realize that I could have been equally to blame. Clearly, in her own situation (which I was hoping not to delve into too deeply, to be honest), she perceived herself as the victim of some scheming and unscrupulous man. Or woman. With Caroline, I wouldn’t have taken any bets.

“No, I can’t say I wanted to hurt him,” I said slowly. “But I can’t say I really wanted him to be happy, either. I wouldn’t have minded if he went bankrupt or caught some nasty disease or got dumped by the next girl he fell in love with. But I didn’t want to be the agent of destruction. I just wanted my own hurting to stop.”

“So, how long?” she asked next. “Before you were better.”

“For me, three months is about the time I spend just enduring. Just getting through the days. Takes me another six months or so to have intermittent good days sprinkled in among the bad ones. Another three months where I feel good more often than I feel lousy. And then, one day, about a year after everything falls apart, I find myself laughing at something someone has said, and looking forward to some little thing that’s coming up in the next twenty-four hours, and thinking, ‘You know, I have a pretty good life.’ And then, at that moment, I realize I’m cured. I’m over it. No more pain.”

“A year?” she said. “That’s all?”

“Well, at the time, a year seems like a pretty long proposition,” I said. “But it goes by faster than you think.”

“Actually, it sounds like a pretty short time to me,” she said. “I was thinking in terms of decades. Lifetimes.”

“I guess you haven’t had too many bouts with despair.”

She shook her head. “No. Nothing like this, anyway. But you make me feel a little more hopeful.”

I couldn’t think of anything I’d said that could be remotely construed as comforting, except for the promise of a time limit. But I said, “As far as I can tell, the only benefit of suffering—I mean, the single, barest, most poverty-stricken reason to be grateful for it—is that at some point it gives you a chance to help somebody else through the same kind of pain. Other than that? Not profitable. It doesn’t build character, no matter what anyone tells you. It doesn’t make you smarter, kinder, more patient, anything. It just lets you tell someone else, ‘Hey, I was there, and I survived.’”

She gave me a tentative smile, the first one I’d seen this afternoon. “And you seem to have survived quite intact.”

I smiled back. “You know,” I said, “I have a pretty good life.”

*

Marika called while I was on my way to Bezos Terminal. She was crying. I supposed I should just expect everyone I spoke to this day to be in tears.

“What’s wrong?” I demanded.

“I know I shouldn’t have, but Axel called, and I said I’d go to lunch with him—just as friends, you know—but then he started flirting. And I really wanted—Taylor, I just wanted to jump up and run around the edge of the table and kiss him, so that made me mad, so then I was hostile—”

“You were in a public place, I take it?”

“Yes, and I—he said something, I don’t remember what, and I threw my water in his face, and then he started shouting—”

I couldn’t help a grin, which, fortunately, she couldn’t see. “So I guess you didn’t stay at the restaurant much longer.”

“No, he just stormed off, and I had to pay the bill, and I felt like such an idiot the whole time. And I just—I’m so miserable. Could you come spend the night and cheer me up? This isn’t how I thought my life would work out, you know? I’m thirty-four years old. I thought I’d be married and have kids by now, I thought I’d be happy. Instead, all I do is match up with abusive ex-boyfriends and do stupid things. And then—”

She continued on in this vein while I thought rapidly. It was close to five by now. I could get to Marika’s within an hour, but the time zone change meant I wouldn’t arrive until seven. We were close enough to the same size that we were able wear each other’s clothes, but there were certain items that just weren’t shareable.

“I can spend the night,” I said, “but we have to shop first. I need makeup and a toothbrush and underwear. And maybe an outfit.”

“Shopping would be fun,” she said, her voice sounding a little cheerier. “And maybe dinner.”

“Great,” I said. “See you in about an hour.”

*

Marika and I were out until almost midnight, talking over the disappointments of life and finishing off a bottle of wine before returning to her opulent house and tumbling into bedrooms on opposite ends of the second-story hallway.

I was only slightly hung over in the morning, so I was out the door with a minimum of groaning. Back to Olympic Terminal, back to Houston, and on to a light day at the campus. It was livelier than usual during my office hours, since about half of the students in my lit class dropped by to ask about Evan or give me updates. Nancy Ortega and her girlfriend, Simone, had gone to visit him at the clinic, where he’d been admitted. Nancy filled me in on his family history, which was none too savory, and expressed a belief that his mother and father would be of no help in this crisis.

“But we’ll be his family,” she said with calm self-assurance. “Devante rents a house with a couple other guys, and they’ve got an extra room. We’re going to move Evan there as soon as he gets out so we can keep an eye on him.”

I wasn’t sure that living with Devante Ross would aid anyone in the recovery of his sanity, but I applauded the spirit behind the decision. “You wonder sometimes how anyone makes it to adulthood, don’t you?” I mused aloud.

Nancy stood to go. “But so many people do,” she said, “so we know it must be possible. See you tomorrow, Ms. Kendall.”

I must admit, I was feeling just a wee bit worn down by the time I headed up to Chicago for my hour with Quentin Phillips. Not a good state in which to brace that eager and energetic young man.

“Hey, Taylor! Do you know what? I’ve joined an online chess club, and I won my first three games. Bram says I need to move up to the next higher level, but I don’t want to. I like winning. Did you see Marika? Did she give you my Braves shirt? She texted me, she said she bought it already. Did you watch the Cubs game last night? Two-run homer in the ninth inning, won the game. Man, I wish I had been there.”

“Oh—hell—the shirt,” I said, dropping my briefcase on the desk and taking a seat. “It’s still at my apartment. Sorry, Quentin. I couldn’t get it because I wasn’t home last night.”

“And then I—you weren’t home last night?” he repeated, his eyes widening. “Where—never mind.”

I smiled. “I was at Marika’s, in fact. I went over after work, and we stayed up too late talking, so I decided I’d just spend the night. But the shirt’s at my place, not hers, so I didn’t get a chance to bring it. Sorry. I’ll remember on Friday.”

“Maybe you forgot my homework, too,” he said hopefully.

“Maybe I did. Maybe we’ll have to come up with some creative class ideas.”

“You could read to me,” he suggested.

“Actually, you know, not a bad idea. Let’s read.”

So I picked up one of the Haycox Westerns that I had remembered to bring last Friday, and we started at chapter one. Amazing that such a restless boy could sit so quietly. Was it the power of words or the power of an adult’s attention? I made him do some of the work at first, having him read five pages to every ten of mine, though it was obvious it was much more effort for him to read than to listen. Eventually, I just took the book back and spent the rest of the hour with it in my hands.

“That was fun,” he said, when we finally stopped. “Let’s do that Friday, too.”

“No, Friday I’m going to remember all your assignments and I’ll make you work like a dog,” I said with mock sternness. “In fact, time for an assignment now. I want you to write a note to Marika.”

“I texted her yesterday!”

“Right. This is going to be an essay, only you’re going to write it to Marika, so it doesn’t have to be formal. But I’m going to grade on originality and creativity and proper sentence structure.”

He did not look entirely pleased. “What am I going to write her about?”

“You can pick the topic. You can give her the play-by-play on a baseball game. You can tell her about a typical day of your life—you know, which tutors come in, what kind of physical therapy you do with Dennis. You can describe all the people who live or work at your father’s house, a few paragraphs about me, a few about Dennis, a few about Bram Cortez. But I want you to pick a theme and stick to it.”

“How many words?”

“A thousand.”

“Due Friday?”

“I think you can manage that.” I gestured at The Earthbreakers , lying open on his desk. “And in your free time you can go on and read ahead. I won’t mind. I know it by heart.”

I had just closed my briefcase when there was a knock on the door, and Bram Cortez entered.

“Hey, Quin,” he said. He nodded at me. “Ms. Kendall.”

I gave him a look of exaggerated irritation. “Oh, please. Only my students call me Ms. anything.”

Quentin laughed. “Even I call her Taylor.”

“I never like to be too familiar until invited,” Cortez said gravely.

“Well, consider yourself invited. What can we do for you, Quentin and I?”

“Actually, I came to tell you the teleport system’s down,” he said.

“Down here at the house, or down-down, all over the city?”

He didn’t even crack a smile. “Down-down.”

“Great. I wonder how I’m going to get home?”

“You’ll have to spend the night!” Quentin exclaimed. “We’ve got tons of guest rooms.”

“Actually, I was coming to offer Ms. Kendall—” Bram Cortez stopped dramatically and gave me a deliberate look. “Offer Taylor a ride home. I have a car,” he added.

“It’s a jazz car,” Quentin admiringly. “A vintage Mustang in perfect condition.”

“Really?” I said, eying the security officer. “I would have expected you to have something less—flashy. More armored, maybe.”

Again, not a glimmer of a smile. “Like a HumVee-49?” he suggested. “That’s my corporate car.”

“Bulletproof,” Quentin interjected. “For when he takes my dad to important meetings.”

“I was kidding,” I said.

“Ah,” Cortez said. “In any case, the Mustang is at your disposal.”

“No! I want her to stay!” Quentin pleaded.

I couldn’t help glancing at Bram Cortez, who was thinking exactly what I was thinking. This is not a house where I would be welcome to spend the night. “Gotta go, Quentin,” I said gently. “I’ll be back on Friday. And—hey, tell you what. If Mr. Cortez takes me home, he can pick up the Braves shirt and bring it back for you.”

Too late I realized my slip of the tongue. “Bram,” Quentin said.

“What?”

“Yes, please call me Bram,” Cortez said civilly. “Since I’m to call you Taylor.”

He didn’t exude the chatty sort of bonhomie that would make me comfortable addressing him by his first name. I mean, he was no Dennis. He wasn’t even Francis. But it was rather a trap of my own making. “Well,” I said. “Bram. I’m grateful for the offer. What kind of name is Bram, anyway? Family name, maybe?”

“It’s short for Abramo,” he said. “I’m named after my father’s grandfather. And my sister Elena was named after our great-grandmother.”

I love glimpses into family life and would have liked to pursue the topic. Are you close to your sister? Is your father domineering and purposeful, or romantic and sweet? How does your mother fit into the family? With someone else I might have asked the questions, but Bram Cortez didn’t seem like the type who would dish about family dynamics with someone he barely knew.

“Well, Abramo, I’d love a ride home, if it wouldn’t inconvenience you too much,” I said. At the same time, I was thinking, What will we talk about in the car? It had to be a good forty-five minutes to my apartment. Maybe longer. “But doesn’t somebody have to stay here and, I don’t know, monitor the monitors?”

“I have a round-the-clock staff of guards on premises,” Cortez said. “I think I can leave for a couple of hours.”

Couple of hours. He was estimating even longer than I was. “Well, then. Great.

“Thanks. Quentin, I’ll see you in a few days. Don’t forget to write your essay.”

“Bye, Taylor. See you Friday.”