They dropped his belongings at the freshman dorm, where the only sign of his roommate was a khaki duffel bag and a canvas butterfly chair printed to resemble a gigantic hand. (At least Ian assumed the chair was his roommate’s. All the other furniture was blond oak.) Then they walked over to the Parents’ Reception. Ian was in favor of skipping the reception and so was his father, but his mother insisted.
At the college president’s house they were given three paper cups of 7-Up with orange sherbet floating foamily on top, and they stood in a clump by a blond oak table trying to make conversation with each other. “Quite a crowd,” his father said, and his mother said, “Yes, isn’t it!” Ian started eating spice cookies from a plate on the table. He ate one after the other, frowning and chewing intently as if he could have made many interesting comments if only his mouth weren’t full. “Are these all parents of freshmen, do you suppose?” his father asked. “Well, maybe some are transfers’ parents,” his mother said.
She stood among these ruffly people in her ordinary navy dress, and her shoes were plain flat pumps because of her knees. Without high heels she seemed downtrodden, Ian noticed, like somebody’s maid. And his father’s suit was rucked up around his calves with static cling or something. He had the crazy appearance of a formally attired man standing shin-deep in ocean breakers. Ian swallowed a sharp piece of cookie and felt it hurting all the way down his throat, all the way to his chest where it lodged and wouldn’t go away. He wanted to say, “Take me back to Baltimore! I’ll never complain again, I promise.” But instead he joined in the small talk, and he noticed that his voice had the same determined upward slant as his mother’s.
They left the reception without having spoken to another soul, and they walked together to the parking lot. The family car looked dusty and humble. Ian opened the door for his mother, but she was used to opening her own door and so she got in his way and he stepped on her foot. “Sorry,” he said. “Well …”She kissed his cheek and slid hurriedly inside, not looking at him. His father gave him a wave across the roof of the car. “Take care of yourself, son.”
“Sure thing,” Ian said.
He stood with his palms clamped in his armpits and watched them drive off.
His roommate was a zany, hooting, clownish boy named Winston Mills. Not only was the hand-shaped chair his, but also a bedspread made from an American flag, and a beer stein that tinkled out “How Dry I Am” when you lifted it, and a poster for a movie called Teenage Robots. The other boys thought he was weird, but Ian liked him. He liked the fact that Winston never had a serious discussion or asked a serious question. Instead he told the entire plots of movies Ian had never heard of — werewolf movies and Japanese westerns and monster movies where the zippers showed clearly between the scales — or he read aloud in a falsetto voice from a collection of syrupy “love comics” he’d found at a garage sale, meanwhile lolling in his butterfly chair with the huge pink fingers curving up behind him.
Ian dreamed Danny drove onto the quad in his Chevy, which didn’t have so much as a dented fender. He leaned out his window and asked Ian, “Don’t you think I knew? Don’t you think I knew all along?” And Ian woke and thought maybe Danny had known. Sometimes people just chose not to admit a thing, not even to themselves. But then he realized that was immaterial. So what if he’d known? It wasn’t till he’d been told point-blank that he’d felt the need to take action.
As far as Ian could see, college was not much different from high school. Same old roots of Western civilization, same old single-cell organisms. He squinted through a microscope and watched an amoeba turn thin and branchy, curve two branches around a black dot, thicken to a blob and drift on. His lab partner was a girl and he could tell she liked him, but she seemed too foreign. She came from someplace rural and said “ditten” instead of “didn’t.” Also “cooten”. “I cooten find my notebook anywhere.” He lived for the weekends, when Cicely rode out to Sumner on a tiny, rattling train and they hung around his dorm in the hope that Winston might leave for one of his movies at some point. Supposedly Cicely was bunking with the older sister of a girl she knew from home, but in fact she shared Ian’s narrow bed where late at night — silently, almost motionlessly, all but holding their breaths — they made love over and over again across the room from Winston’s snoring shape.
He called home collect every weekend; that was easier than his parents’ trying to call him. But the Wednesday before Halloween his mother phoned, reaching him purely by chance as he was passing through the dorm between classes. “I hate to bother you,” she said, “but I thought you’d want to know. Honey, it’s Lucy.”
“Lucy?”
“She died.”
He noticed that a sort of whirring silence seemed to be traveling down the corridor. He said, “She what?”
“We think it was pills.”
He swallowed.
“Ian?”
Oh, God, he thought, how long will I have to pay for just a handful of tossed-off words?
“Are you all right, Ian?”
“Sure,” he said.
“We got a call from Agatha last night. She told us, ‘Mama keeps sleeping and won’t wake up.’ Well, you know that could have meant anything. Of course I made plans to get right over there but I did say, ‘Oh, sweetie, I bet she’s just tuckered out,’ and that’s when Agatha said, ‘She wouldn’t even wake for breakfast.’ I said, ‘Breakfast?’ I said, ‘This morning?’ Ian, would you believe it, those children had been on their own since the night before when she put them to bed. Then she went to bed herself and just, I don’t know, I mean there’s no sign she did it on purpose but when we walked in she was flat on her back and breathing so slowly, just a breath here and another breath there, and this pill bottle sat on her nightstand totally empty. There wasn’t any letter though or anything like that. So it couldn’t have been on purpose, right? But why would she take even one of those pills? Our family’s never held with sleeping pills. I always say, get up and scrub the floors if you can’t sleep! Do some reading! Improve your mind! Anyhow, we called the ambulance and they took her to Union Memorial. She had gone on too long, though. If they’d got to her right away, well, maybe; but she’d been lying there a whole night and a day and there wasn’t much they could do. She died this noon without ever regaining consciousness.”
Can’t we just back up and start over? Couldn’t I have one more chance?
“Ian?” his mother was saying. “Listen, don’t breathe a word to the children.”
He found his voice from somewhere. He said, “They don’t know yet?”
“No, and we’re not ever going to tell them.”
Maybe the shock had sent her around the bend. He said, “They’re going to have to find out sometime. How will you explain it when she doesn’t come home from the hospital?”
Or when she fails to show up for Thomas’s high-school graduation or Agatha’s wedding, he thought wildly, and he almost laughed.
“I mean we’re not going to tell them they might have saved her,” his mother said. “If they’d phoned earlier, I mean. They’d feel so guilty.”