He smashes headlong into a wall by ACCIDENT? A wall he knew perfectly well was there, a wall that’s stood at the end of that street since before he was born?
Well, he’d been drinking.
He wasn’t drunk, though.
Yes, but, you know how it is …
Face it. He really did kill himself.
And then finally the last thought.
No, never the last thought.
Sometimes he tried to believe that everyone on earth walked around with at least one unbearable guilty secret hidden away inside. Maybe it was part of growing up. Maybe if he went and confessed to his mother she would say, “Why, sweetheart! Is that all that’s bothering you? Listen, every last one of us has caused somebody’s suicide.”
Well, no.
But if he told her anyway, and let her get as angry as she liked. If he said, “Mom, you decide what to do with me. Kick me out of the house, if you want. Or disown me. Or call the police.”
In fact, he wished she would call the police. He wished it were something he could go to prison for.
But if he told his mother she would learn it was a suicide, and everyone assumed it was an accident. Driving under the influence. Too much stag party. That was the trouble with confessing: it would make him feel better, all right, but it would make the others feel worse. And if his mother felt any worse than she did already, he thought it would kill her. His father too, probably. This whole summer, all his father had done was sit in his recliner chair.
Once his mother asked, “Ian, you don’t suppose Danny was depressed or anything, do you?”
“Depressed?”
“Oh, but what am I saying? He had a new baby! And a lovely new wife, and a whole new ready-made family!”
“Right,” Ian said.
“Of course, there could have been little problems. Some minor snag at work, maybe, or a rocky patch in his marriage. But nothing out of the ordinary, don’t you agree?”
“Well, sure,” Ian told her.
Was that all it had been? A rocky patch? Had Ian overreacted?
He saw how young he was, how inexperienced, what a shallow, ignorant boy he was. He really had no idea what would be considered out of the ordinary in a marriage.
On Sundays when the family gathered, he sent Lucy sidelong glances. He noticed she was growing steadily paler, like one of his father’s old Polaroid photos. He wanted to believe Danny’s death hadn’t touched her, but there she sat with something still and stricken in her face. Her children quarreled shrilly with Claudia’s children, but Lucy just sat straight-backed, not appearing to hear, and smoothed her skirt over and over across her lap.
Privately Bee told the others, “I wish she had someone to go to. Relatives, I mean. Of course we’d miss her but … if she had someone to tend the children so she could get a job, for instance! I know I ought to offer—”
Doug said, “Don’t even consider it.”
“Well, I’m their grandma! Or one of them’s grandma. But lately I’ve been so tired and my knees are acting up and I don’t see how I could handle it. I know I ought to, though.”
“Don’t give it a moment’s consideration.”
Did Lucy ever think, If only I hadn’t gone out with Dot that night? Did she think, If only Dot’s car hadn’t broken down?
For it was Dot she’d gone out with. And the car had broken down, someplace on Ritchie Highway. That much emerged at the funeral, which Dot had attended all weepy and disbelieving.
Did Lucy ever think, If only I had been a faithful wife?
No, probably not, for Ian couldn’t shake off the feeling that he was the one she blamed. (At the very least, he’d made Danny drive him home that night.) He was almost positive that she slid her eyes reproachfully in his direction as she smoothed her skirt across her lap. But Ian looked elsewhere. He made a point of looking elsewhere.
Only Cicely knew the whole story. He had told her after the first time they ever made love. Lying next to her in her bed (her parents had gone to a Memorial Day picnic, taking her little brother with them), he had thought, Danny will never know I’ve finally slept with a girl. His eyes had blurred with tears and he had turned abruptly and pressed his hot, wet face into Cicely’s neck. “I’m the one who caused Danny’s accident,” he blurted out. But the thing was, she wouldn’t accept it. It was like some physical object that she kept batting away. “Oh, no,” she kept saying. “No, that’s silly. You didn’t do anything. Lucy didn’t do anything. Lucy was a perfect wife. Danny knew you didn’t mean it.”
He should have said, “Listen. You have to believe this.” But her skin was so soft, and her neck smelled of baby powder, and instead of speaking he had started making love again. He had felt ashamed even then at how easily he was diverted.
Or here was something more shameful than that: In the emergency room that awful night, when the doctors said there was no hope, Ian had thought, At least now Cicely can’t stay mad at me for missing our dinner date.
Despicable. Despicable. He ground his teeth together any time he recalled it.
That summer he worked again for Sid ’n’ Ed’s A-l Movers. Lou had been fired for bleeding all over some lady’s sofa after he sat on his own whiskey flask; but LeDon was still there, along with a new man named Brewster, a rough-and-tough, prune-colored type who didn’t have two words to say from one day to the next. That was fine with Ian. He felt grateful just for someplace to escape to, some hard labor to throw himself into.
One move he helped with was obviously upward, from a tiny house in Govans to a much nicer one in Cedarcroft. Workers were swarming around the new place, patching the roof and resodding the lawn and measuring for window screens. In the kitchen he found a man installing wooden cabinets, and he stood watching as one was fitted precisely into place. The man plucked nails out of nowhere. (Maybe he had a mouthful, like Bee with her sewing pins. His back was turned so Ian couldn’t tell.) He hammered them in with quick rat-a-tats. And he didn’t act the least self-conscious, not even when Ian said, “Looks good.” In fact, he didn’t bother answering. Or maybe he hadn’t heard. Ian said, loudly, “Nice piece of work.”
Then he understood that the man was deaf. It was something about his head — the way he held it so steady, not troubling to keep alert for any sounds. Ian stepped forward and the man glanced over at him. He had a square-jawed, deeply lined face and a bristly gray crew-cut. “Looks good,” Ian repeated, and the man nodded briefly and returned to his hammering.
Ian felt a twist of envy. It wasn’t just the work he envied, although that was part of it — the all-consuming task that left no room for extraneous thoughts. It was the notion of a sealed-off world. A world where no one traded speech, and where even dreams, he supposed, were soundless.
He dreamed Danny stood in the doorway jingling a pocketful of change. “I nearly forgot,” he told Ian. “I owe you.”
Ian caught his breath. He said, “Owe me?”
“I never paid you for baby-sitting that evening. What was it — three dollars? Five?”
Ian said, “No, please,” and backed away, holding up his palms. He woke to hear his own voice saying, “No. No. Please.”
His parents drove him to school on a hot day in September. Cicely had already left for her own school, near Philadelphia, but since that was just an hour from Sumner College there had not been any big farewell scene. In fact, they were planning on meeting that weekend. And Andrew was close by too, at Temple. But none of Ian’s friends were attending Sumner, and he was glad. He liked the idea of making a new beginning. His mother said, “Oh, I hope you won’t be lonesome!” but Ian almost hoped he would be. He saw himself striding unaccompanied across the campus, a mysterious figure dressed all in black. “Who is that person?” girls would ask. Although he didn’t actually own anything black, come to think of it. Still, he had his plans.