Life Among the Terranauts Page 7

  When the server came with our food, she ordered two whiskey sours, both for her, although she usually nursed one beer all evening. “Was he in your class ever?” she asked me, doing the math.

  Zach Nowak was eighteen, barely, when he threw the brick. I’d taught at Walleye Lake’s only elementary school for fifteen years, and I admitted he’d been in my class.

  “What was he like? If you remember.”

  “I remember.” He had seemed like the kind of kid who might someday throw a brick off an overpass, was what he’d seemed like. But I didn’t know how to say that without sounding either flippant or irresponsible for not doing something to stop him.

  I was sure we all remembered him, every single teacher who’d ever been in a classroom with Zach Nowak. But we’d also known crooked kids who’d turned into straight arrows, or at least into adults who held down jobs, went home and watched TV, and didn’t throw bricks off overpasses. We’d known sweet kids who went the other way. Life is long and strange and none of us sees what God does.

  But what I’d seen in Zach had scared me. When other kids angered him, he didn’t yell or hit. He waited until they were distracted and then he took his revenge. It wasn’t always violent. He liked to piss on things—people’s backpacks, books, faces. One winter, when the hallway was lined with snow boots, he’d walked along spraying the whole row of them. “Honestly, he was creepy,” I said. “But—kids. You have to believe in them. You have to assume there’s time for them to turn out okay. If you can’t reach them, maybe someone else can.”

  Once Zach had flagged me down during a math test. I’d laid one palm flat on his desk while we spoke. He stabbed me in the back of the hand with his sharpened pencil as hard as he could. When the principal asked him why, he said I’d made the test too hard. Zach got a week’s suspension. After the week, he was back.

  “What did you do after that?” Helen asked. “Help him via megaphone? I wouldn’t have been willing to get within arm’s length.”

  I mostly hadn’t helped him, was the real answer. I’d ignore his waving arm as long as I could. I had thought that at parent-teacher conferences I might discover that his parents were neglectful or cruel in some obvious way that I could report and then whatever was messing this kid up could start to get fixed. But when the parents came, they were tidy and polite and kind. Which doesn’t always mean anything, of course, but then they’d started telling me everything they’d tried, every kind of therapist they’d already been to see, driving three hours down to Lansing for appointments. “Don’t give up on him,” they begged. “We know he’s a difficult kid. Just please don’t give up.”

  Of course I wouldn’t, I said. He was just a child. And maybe if I’d managed to be kinder to him, he would have risen to the kindness, turned toward it like a plant and flowered. I watched Helen demolish her napkin, tearing it into small strips, and felt like maybe I could have spared her this, like she was one more person Zach had managed to hit with the brick I hadn’t stopped him from throwing.

  Speaking to the police, Zach didn’t pretend he hadn’t understood what brick plus overpass plus windshield plus driver might mean. He was just curious, he said, just messing around, but he said it like a toddler who looks straight at you before pouring his milk all over the floor. A toddler is old enough to understand overturned cup plus milk plus floor; he just wants to watch it happen. Zach was arrested when he drove back to the same overpass that same night to do it again.

  “It was probably for the best,” Helen said, “that the woman didn’t make it. I’m not supposed to say that. I’m not even supposed to think it. But the injuries she’d sustained…”

  “Zach was scary,” I said. “From the moment he started school. Before, probably. We weren’t supposed to think that. But he was.”

  The last time I spoke to Zach he was thirteen and buying a yellow pouch of Sour Patch Kids at Walgreens. He was ahead of me in line, and I hoped he wouldn’t look back; I was buying tampons and a bottle of dandruff shampoo. When I went through the sliding doors, he was waiting for me outside. “Hey, Ms. Z.,” he said, the name I’d asked the kids to call me. My married name was very long and Polish and had never seemed worth it.

  I said hello and he asked me what dandruff was.

  “Not really your business,” I said first, then felt childish. You’re an educator, I thought. I wasn’t going to be a wife much longer by then, and after four miscarriages I knew I might never be a mother. But I was still an educator. “Dry scalp,” I explained. “It gets itchy.”

  “Where’s your itch, Ms. Z.?” he asked, and smiled like he was ten years older.

  I shook my head and started walking.

  “You don’t have your car, Ms. Z.?”

  I’d walked, because it was autumn and the weather was going to turn cooler any day but hadn’t yet, and I was grateful for the warmth. My house was a quick trek through a patch of woods behind the drugstore. It was township land, the trails no more than deer paths. A track spit out at the end of my street, so familiar it didn’t occur to me that I should stick to the road. But then Zach was following me through the trees with no one else around.

  “Ms. Z., are you still Ms. Z.? Or are you something else now?” My husband had left me three months earlier, and Walleye Lake was so small that everyone had heard the news.

  “I’m still Ms. Z. to you.”

  “You sure? Can I call you Trisha, Ms. Z.? Since I’m not at your school anymore?”

  I’m still not sure how he knew my first name. “No, you can’t call me that.”

  He kept following me. At first it was just his footsteps on the path, crunching through the autumn leaves, and then it was “Hey, Trisha.” Over and over: Hey, Trisha, hey, Trisha, hey. Hey. Hey. Hey, Trisha, hey. Hey, Trisha, hey, Trisha, hey. Hey. Hey. Hey, Trisha, hey. Hey, Trisha, hey, Trisha, hey. Hey. Hey, Trisha, hey. Hey, Trisha.

  This went on for half a mile. I didn’t see or hear anyone else. My lungs got tight, my breath fast and shallow. Sweat trickled down my sides. I wound the plastic drugstore bag tighter around my left hand. Finally I stopped dead on the path. I’d seen a gray rock half covered in leaves and bent to grab it with my other hand. I’d planned to rise in one smooth motion, rock raised, but it was almost too heavy, almost too big to hold in one hand, and I staggered a little before hefting it up and over my right shoulder like a baseball.

  For a moment he looked startled, and then he grinned. “You’re not going to throw that at me,” he said. “You’re a teacher.” Puberty had barely gotten started on him. He was still shorter than I was and probably fifty pounds lighter. His voice was high and thin. Was I really going to aim a rock at a child like he was some stray dog? It would be an admission that I was afraid of a thirteen-year-old boy. A boy with his whole future, supposedly unwritten, still ahead of him.

  I didn’t throw the rock, but I didn’t put it down. All the rest of the way home I carried it, cradled it in the crook of my elbow as I unlocked the front door and dived inside. He waited at the bottom of the drive, as if politely making sure I’d gotten home safely. He stood out there a few minutes longer, then walked away.

  “You can’t save everyone,” Helen said. I could tell she was still thinking about the woman in the driver’s seat with the obliterated face. She’d shoved the napkin strips aside and started tearing the red-and-white-checked paper underneath her fish and chips.

  When she said it as a nurse, it was true, but if I said it as a teacher, it would be sacrilege. Yet it’s true, it’s true, you can’t save everyone. For years I thought that if I’d been the sun, the rain, the patient breath of kindness itself, maybe I could have brought him into flower. But now when I remember that moment in the woods, all I can think is that I should have thrown that rock. I should have thrown it as hard as I could, straight into his smiling face.

  23 Months

  I met this guy at a party, is what happened. But that seems like a lousy way to start a story. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea; the juicy
part’s not all that juicy. I arrived at the party alone and he told me about the pod people and I told him something I had never told anyone else and then I was home alone before two thirty. That’s pretty much the shape of the thing.

  The party. I counted twenty-one people when I got there. It was a funny number because you could tell Miranda had expected a lot more, and I felt a little embarrassed for her. A little glad too, because it was a new thing to see Miranda embarrassed. But twenty-one was enough to spread through the house and spill out onto the back patio with at least a few people in every place, so it didn’t look so bad. I’d meant to show up at ten thirty, two hours late, so people would have had some drinks and be easier to talk to. But I got lost when I got off the freeway and ended up pulling in at eleven.

  Miranda gave me a tour of the house, low and stucco with huge bathrooms. She had two roommates and it made me wish I knew people to move in with, to afford to rent a house like this. She introduced me to some of her friends. How brave, a few said, you came here on your own, how brave. And of course what they meant was How sad. How sad that you don’t know anyone and had to come alone, a woman alone at a party, all dressed up and sipping half a glass of wine and is there anything sadder than that?

  One of the bedrooms was almost bare, nothing but brown cardboard boxes and a double bed with a green comforter. “One of my roommates,” Miranda said. “He’s moving out next week.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “Prison. For a while.” She’d paused before saying it, but not too long, because it might be rude to tell tales on your roommates but it was also fun to have a great story, to be able to say, My roommate’s headed to prison.

  “What did he do?”

  “He was in a car accident. He caused a car accident. But he hadn’t been drinking.”

  “You go to prison for that?”

  “His girlfriend died. They’d been driving to Tucson to visit her parents. He was speeding. A lot, I guess. Her parents asked for jail time.”

  I’d never been in the bedroom of someone who had killed someone else. “Is he here?” I asked.

  “Out back, last I saw,” Miranda said. “On the patio.”

  Isn’t that something, I thought, to be at a party with a guy who killed his girlfriend. Everybody eating and getting drunk and making nice, and there he is, that guy with the glass of Chianti, he killed his own lover. I wanted to go find him. Talking to him seemed like a good way to spend the party, knowing a secret about somebody and that person not knowing you know and maybe telling you about it just because he wants to, because you’re a girl he wants to tell things to.

  “Thanks for the tour,” I said, and Miranda asked me if I’d be okay schmoozing around on my own. She wasn’t so bad, really. I could see that she’d let me stick close by her the whole night if I wanted to and she wouldn’t try too hard to ditch me. It made me wish more people had come to her party.

  Miranda and I weren’t friends. We both worked for the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association. I had my own cubicle where I researched funding opportunities for member hospitals. It wasn’t interesting. I had a cousin who had put in a good word for me at AHHA and I’d been hired over the phone a month earlier. The job hadn’t been worth coming halfway across the country for. I wasn’t all that good at it, and they probably wondered why they’d bothered to bring someone like me all the way from Minnesota when there were people like Miranda here in Phoenix who could do my job twice as well and who made sure everyone knew it. I don’t care all that much about public health, really. I kind of feel like people should just look after themselves.

  My cousin had me over to his house in Scottsdale when I first arrived. He’s got a wife and two kids and a big house. After he’d gotten me a job and fed me dinner, I think he figured he’d pretty much done his duty by me, and I guess he had. He worked in a different part of the building and I never saw him. I checked the weather in Minneapolis online every day: 22 degrees, 17, 2, –5. It made me feel better about being where I was.

  I walked back through the living room and kitchen and passed the food by. If you’re the girl alone at a party, you don’t want to be the girl alone at a party eating. The patio was just a long rectangle of concrete covered by a wooden roof with Christmas lights tacked all along the edge and a porch light on the wall beside the back door. Other than that, it was dark. Just beyond the edge of the patio the light gave out in an almost perfect line. Concrete and a few inches of grass and then darkness. There was no moon and I squinted to see the bodies standing out on the lawn, smoking. You could catch the lit red ends of cigarettes moving up and down. It was February and the weather was soft and warm and it was still strange to me, the way winter felt sweet in the desert. It had rained that afternoon and the air had a spiky, gray smell someone would finally tell me was damp creosote the week I left Arizona for good.

  On the far left side of the patio, this guy was standing by himself, and I knew that it was the roommate, the accidental murderer. Nobody else came near, like he was quarantined. He had a quiet face, black hair. He was wearing jeans and a green T-shirt. If he’d been lying on his bed, he would have matched the comforter. The T-shirt was too big—the shoulder seams falling partway down his arms—and while he was probably just wearing an oversize T-shirt, it made me wonder if he’d been heavier once, if there was less of him now than there used to be. I was wearing a black dress and felt stupid. It was too formal for standing in a backyard with a plastic cup of wine.

  I’d been a fat kid, which made me notice certain things, like the way people wore their clothes and the way the other white girls at the party were thin and hard and all one color, a tanned orangey brown. It made me notice people who were fat like I used to be and that made me feel good but also embarrassed, because I would think: That’s the way I used to look, that’s the way I used to move, taking up too much room in the world. I was glad I wasn’t fat anymore. I liked being able to walk up to some guy, a nice-looking one, and stand beside him and feel like I had a right to be there.

  I walked over to the roommate and said, “I’m Leah. I work with Miranda.”

  “Sasha,” he said, which I’d always thought was a girl’s name. He was leaning against the house, looking out at the yard.

  I thought about saying, I hear you killed your girlfriend. Instead I said, “It’s dark out there.” I say a lot of dumb things.

  “Yeah,” Sasha said. “It’s dark.”

  “How do you know Miranda? Or did someone else invite you?”

  “I live here,” he said.

  “So you can tell me what the yard looks like,” I said. “When it’s not dark.”

  He thought about this for a while. “We have a trampoline.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You can’t see it from here, but it’s out there.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Sure it works. It’s a trampoline.”

  “The springs could be broken.”

  “They’re not,” he said, and I wondered if he was annoyed because I’d implied that his trampoline was all busted. He took a drink of his Newcastle. “There’s a grapefruit tree too,” he added. “Behind where they’re smoking.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Do you want some grapefruit?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Sure? Miranda and Sam don’t like them. I’ve juiced some but the rest will just stay on the tree.”

  “Why not juice the rest? Shame to waste them.”

  “There’s only so much grapefruit a guy can eat,” he said, which wasn’t what I was going for. I know why they’ll go uneaten, I wanted to say. I already know about you.

  “So holler if you decide you want some grapefruit. I’ll grab you a plastic bag.”

  “Okay.”

  We stood there awhile. For a guy who had killed somebody, he wasn’t very interesting. Someone had attached a phone to some little speakers on the patio picnic table. People kept walking by and changing the song.

 
“There’s a garden out there too, or a place I think used to be a garden. The dirt’s all turned under but none of us planted anything.”

  “You could plant stuff now.”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to plant now. It’ll get hot soon.”

  “I forget. The seasons are all backward here. Spring comes and everything starts to die.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Minneapolis.”

  “So I guess you got a lot of snow,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m used to snow.” I put my cup to my lips and tipped it back but it was empty. I swallowed anyway to make it look like I’d gotten something, but I forgot that the cup was clear.

  Sasha was watching me and he seemed glad that my drink was so visibly gone, that I had to leave now to get another if I wanted something to sip on like a normal person.

  “I’ll just go get some more wine,” I said. “You need anything?”

  “I’m okay.”

  The back door opened into the kitchen, and the wine was lined up along the counter. The bottle I’d brought was half empty, the plastic cork stuck back inside. I poured a cup and read the magnetic poetry on the fridge. They seemed to have two sets of magnets, dog poetry and French poetry. Dobermans sont grandes, I read. Vous mangez chew toys. I wondered if there were poems they’d taken down, if they’d taken words like car and road and girlfriend and hidden them in a drawer somewhere until the day Sasha left and they could stop watching the things they wrote. If I’d taken Spanish in high school instead of French, I’d be in a whole different salary bracket with the AHHA now. Je suis stupide.

  “I tried to mingle,” I announced when I returned, even though I hadn’t. Sasha was still standing where I’d left him. “It was a bust. I tried to take myself off your hands but I don’t know anybody. Sorry.”