Slide - Kyle Beachy [99]
Ian yelled, “Fine! Fine, here, just get up.”
I stood and took the envelope from his hand.
He moved back into the grass in front of the parked cars and I followed. I did not remove the letter from inside and read it. I did not do anything except notice the absence of a return address and the absence of a stamp or any official postmark, just a single word typed across the envelope's back, single tiny word saying Irenia, right before the kid grabbed the letter back.
“And if hard work is gonna save us all like she says it is, why couldn't she work hard to be with my dad?”
“I don't know.”
“Why wouldn't she?”
“I don't know.”
“I don't want to do any of this. I want to go home right now.”
The sun on the drive back was blinding. I lowered both of my car's visors and also held up a hand to my eyes. Ian played with the radio until he found a local sports call-in show, then fell immediately asleep.
He awoke as I made the turn onto Waldwick Drive. On the radio, the Cardinals center fielder said, At this point you don't ask why. See the ball, hit the ball. That's all we're doing out there. We sat at the curb for a minute before he turned to face me.
“I don't think you should come over anymore.”
He dropped out of the car and I watched him walk the path to his house and I saw a weight to each of his steps, a sluggishness, and knew at least some of that weight was compliments of me.
five
at home the next day, I stood facing the kitchen phone, flipping through my mother's day-calendar on the counter. Perhaps the progression could be tracked in these pages: her anger, her loneliness, and finally sadness, her sorrow. In today's calendar box were the words Lunch w/ Nancy. Potential explosion of my plot nestled within bland but crucial peer support for my mother. If not now then soon.
I opened the junk drawer directly below the calendar. It had not always been this way, junked. Over time mess had trounced order, the frenzy of collected objects. I reached a hand inside and rummaged through the assortment of clothespins, scissors, batteries, old photographs, markers, and safety pins. How in the world would they decide to apportion all this shit? I came upon a photograph and lifted it from the drawer. Warped, corners bent and peeling, it retained its central image, which was me standing next to Audrey. Tough to discern our condition by looking. My arm was around her waist. We were smiling, standing next to a fountain in an obscure courtyard among the school's academic buildings. Our school and its myriad fountains. My mother out for a visit during sophomore year. Or was it junior? Frame the couple, press the button. The fountain was four cupid angels spitting streams that crisscrossed as they arced into the pool.
Anger comes first, but only in bursts because anger is exhausting. Loneliness, though, is effortless, a passive state. And from lonely, the slide to true sorrow is polished smooth, all but automatic.
Who were these two people in the picture? My only memory of this fountain was from a few months prior. February: a point in the saga when both Audrey and I worried openly, abandoning completely our pretext of joy derived from fortitude and longevity. It was almost eight o'clock, that hour when the desert chill settled down for the night and the campus burbled with quiet activity: the genius Asian and Indian premeds living up to their parents’ rigid expectations; the broad-shouldered basketball players, like Zeuses among our bespectacled and scrawny majority walking sorely from practice to private, late-hour meals in the dining hall; the light-skinned alcoholic sons and daughters of outrageous privilege, rolling bocce and pounding cans of Busch; the shy, bookish lovers tangled atop blankets in the quad. The future somethings of our great nation.
Valentine's Day, and we had plans for dinner in a few hours at the cramped Italian joint we defaulted to for most occasions. Our paths happened to meet in this courtyard. Which made no sense whatsoever; we both lived on the opposite side of campus. But there