Sliding Past Vertical Read online

  He gave therapy a try.

  It wasn’t bad. He went twice a week, stopping at the library on the way home for a new pile of books to replace the ones he’d read. That was how Emerson McCann spent the spring of his nineteenth year. Reading. Attempting to write. Letting his mother pay a stranger to listen to him bitch about how women had made his life miserable. He was far from a complete recovery, but at least he felt less miserable than he had in a long time.

  Then his mother pulled the plug. Or, more accurately, it was her gentleman friend from the Church of Never-Ending Life, who, she announced, would soon become her husband. And no future stepson of his was going to a therapist, not when the Lord provided all the solace one could ever need, for a lot less money.

  Having no income at the time and no savings, there wasn’t much Emerson could say. “I won’t be coming back for a while,” he told the therapist, at the end of what would be his last session. It was one of those stupidly blue days, when the birds sang and the dew glistened on the grass and the clouds begged for cartoon smiles. All the worst moments of his life seemed to occur during absurdly beautiful weather or what were supposed to be the happiest times of the year.

  The therapist nodded. Emerson picked up his knapsack. “I mean…the money’s kind of tight…”

  He knew he was stalling, waiting for a reprieve. None seemed forthcoming. He’d gotten as far as the giant jade plant near the door when the therapist cleared his throat.

  “You’re a writer,” the man said matter-of-factly.

  Emerson blinked, his cheeks growing hot. Did the guy actually think that a bunch of lousy starts to a lousy short story about his brother and one stupid fake letter to Penthouse where he’d used his future stepfather’s name as a pseudonym was going to earn him enough to pay for therapy? The check he hadn’t gotten yet from the magazine would barely put gas in his car. “Yeah, so?” Emerson shot back.

  The guy swiveled inscrutably.

  Emerson glared.

  “Then write.”

  * * * * *

  Every night they did things—he and Sarah and sometimes, Rashid. They saw second-run movies at the cheap theater on Westcott, ate pizza, watched television, or lingered on the back porch after dinner. But it wasn’t until Sarah went to sleep that Emerson got his glass of milk and his chocolate donut and headed upstairs to offer Dirk’s latest adventures to the universe.

  Emerson doubted this was the sort of writing the therapist had had in mind: Dirk Blade, master of all he coveted, no responsibilities and no regrets, ready to drop his European briefs at a moment’s notice, with Marvin Gaye on the soundtrack in his head.

  But what had once offered solace was starting to fail him. Dirk was still there, of course, poking at the edges of Emerson’s dreams. But he was afraid to give Dirk voice, especially with Sarah across the hall.

  As he stared at the blank sheet of paper in his typewriter, he calculated magazine production schedules and consulted the deadlines on his calendar. It pleased him to discover that counting the two pieces he’d written during Sarah’s first night in the house, he was caught up for at least three months.

  Yet he needed something to show for all this effort, for the hours shut away in his room, so the next time Sarah couldn’t sleep and came in to ask what he’d been working on, he could tell her without having to lie.

  He opened a desk drawer and pulled out the latest start to the lousy story. He knew the beginning by heart:

  In an ideal world, children should never know the meaning of the word “irony,” much less become a symbol of it. My brother’s short life was ironic before he was even conceived. Designed in a whiskey-soaked haze by my mother to keep my philandering father at home, Thomas’s first act as a citizen of earth was to drive the bastard away.

  But not nearly far enough.

  * * * * *

  The summer before Emerson was supposed to leave for Syracuse University and rescue Sarah from fraternity louts and bad decisions, his father resurfaced. Living in California with an infertile wife, a high-paying job, and powerful friends, he sued Emerson’s mother for custody of Thomas.

  Apparently Emerson, his first mistake, at almost eighteen wasn’t worth the expense or the trouble. Thomas, not yet six, was easier pickings: alcoholic mother, unstable environment, partially raised by his older brother, who was about to start college three hours away and what then?

  It didn’t help that Emerson’s mother sat like a lump through most of the proceedings, when she bothered to show up at all, while Thomas, by order of the court, was placed in temporary foster care until the end of the trial.

  Thomas hesitated at the front door, fists full of his brother’s blue-jeaned leg when the woman from Child Services smiled and reached for his hand.

  In retrospect and as a writer, Emerson tried to infuse the hesitation with metaphorical significance. That somehow with a five-year-old’s intuition, Thomas was aware something awful was about to happen to him and didn’t want to leave.

  But the cynic in Emerson usually rebelled against this made-for-fiction moment. He reminded himself that in reality, Thomas had been an introverted child, made even shyer because Emerson taught him never to go with strangers.

  “It’ll be okay, Tommy,” Emerson whispered, unable to find his voice. Another lie of kindness. His mother didn’t stand a chance of winning custody or getting a new job any time soon. And as it didn’t seem that his father was willing to do him any favors other than his past contribution of a viable spermatozoa, the only way Emerson would see his brother again was if he could scrape up the plane fare himself. With college looming and books and part of his tuition to pay for, that didn’t seem likely in the immediate future.

  As he’d feared, it had been the shortest custody trial in the history of the county.

  “We’ll appeal,” Emerson said, the night before he was supposed to leave for school.

  She stared into her glass. “What’s the use?”

  For a long moment, Emerson searched her face for the pretty, doting young mother his memory had reconstructed from his early childhood. But he found only the wreckage: soft hair turned into straw, her once-creamy skin sallow, eyes slowly disappearing into her head, as if they’d decided there was nothing worth seeing anymore. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d prepared a decent meal or looked at their homework or read a bedtime story.

  He pulled in a deep breath and stood a little taller. “I’ll be eighteen in a couple of months,” Emerson said. “Maybe I could legally adopt him.”

  She turned on him, eyes scrunched into mean, swollen slits. “Then what? You gonna be like your father, whoring around at night, not giving a flying goddamn you got a baby at home?”

  Emerson stung from the knowledge that he’d been that baby. “Unlike some of us,” he said quietly, “I give a flying goddamn. I can take care of Thomas. I’ve been doing it his whole life…”

  He stopped, realizing he’d crossed a line.

  “You are taking that scholarship money and you are going to college,” she said through clenched teeth.

  Where was that defiance when they needed it, when he had to drag her out of bed for the deposition?

  “I don’t have to go away for school,” he said. “I could go to Erie, at least until you get help and get a job, then I can switch to nights, I could…”

  Eyes burning, she exploded off the sofa. Ice cubes clattered as she pounded her glass onto the coffee table. Then she silenced him with a hard slap across the cheek.

  Time seemed to stop.

  Slack jawed and in disbelief, he stared at her. No adult had ever hit him before. Heat flooded into his skin, and he could still feel her fingertips on him, cold and damp with the condensation from her glass.

  “You are not wasting your God-given talent in some backwater community college.”

  Something crossed her face that he couldn’t quite identify, a kind of softening, and a mist of feeling that could have been love, admiration, or regret. Or wonderment that
she produced a child who had somehow almost reached his majority with all of his limbs and most of his wits intact. Then the expression vanished.

  “I don’t know how you got those brains,” she continued. “It wasn’t from me and it certainly wasn’t from your goddamn father, but you are making something out of yourself in an institution that’s worthy of you and that’s final.”

  He stood still for a long moment, waiting for the intriguing mistiness to return. But she merely fixed herself another drink. Face still stinging, Emerson went upstairs to pack. That night when she passed out on the couch, Emerson left her there.

  * * * * *

  Over the next few weeks following Sarah’s arrival, Emerson took a few halfhearted stabs at his embryonic story. The beginning was still lousy. The meat of it, he couldn’t settle on. Blame shifted depending on his mood. Events, he found, had been mottled by time, emotion, and his tendency to invest small moments with disproportionate significance.

  But the ending was always the same.

  “Does it have training wheels?” Emerson asked Thomas. He’d called from the pay phone in his dormitory’s eighth-floor lounge, after his mother told him the new bicycle had been a gift from his father.

  “Daddy says training wheels are for babies.”

  His chest tightened, and he said in a calm voice, “Tommy, do me a favor and put Daddy on the phone, okay?”

  “What now, Mama Hen?” his father asked.

  “He doesn’t know how to ride a real bike yet.”

  “He’ll learn.”

  “But he’s only five. He’s too small.”

  The man who had abandoned Emerson twice just laughed.

  “What the hell’s your problem?” Emerson said.

  “How do you think you learned? I gave you a good shove down the road, and damned sure you figured it out. Fell over a few times, but you lived through it.”

  Emerson took a deep breath and said evenly, “Dad, Grandma taught me how to ride a bike.”

  His father snorted. “You always did remember things wrong.”

  Shortly after he hung up, Sarah came by his dorm room and gave him a hug and a kiss. For a long while he didn’t think about his father. Or training wheels. But he always thought about Thomas.

  He wasn’t thinking about him as much the following Saturday, a sparkling October afternoon. While he was getting ready to take a walk with Sarah, he got the phone call.

  The imagined crunch of metal on metal would live forever in Emerson’s bones, as would the irony: Dylan Thomas McCann, saved from one drunk, only to be killed by another.

  Chapter 18

  The start of the fall semester brought Emerson, Rashid, and Sarah two new housemates: Jordanian cousins who barely spoke English. This time, Emerson didn’t feel up to the effort of forming friendships, of getting attached to them, only to have them leave him behind.

  Enough people in his life had done that already. Soon there would be more.

  That night, he’d had dinner with two of them: another Indian feast, followed by a pot of tea and adjournment to the back porch, where Rashid taught Sarah to recite “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in Hindi, in Arabic, and in French.

  Emerson glowered on one of the old plastic chairs, arms folded over his chest, finding the whole picture rather nauseating. The tea tasted like spiced shampoo. The food wasn’t sitting well, neither was the smell of Rashid’s cologne. He hated the stupid crystal clear night and the way Sarah giggled when she flubbed something Rashid had taught her.

  When he’d imagined Sarah living in his house, this was not what he had in mind.

  “Don’t you have to be up early tomorrow for that meeting?” Emerson said.

  Rashid gasped and checked his watch. “Yes, you are right, and already it is so late. Tomorrow I begin training the students who will be assisting in the lab this term,” he told Sarah. Then he sighed and addressed both of them. “One of them is Indian. Very stupid, I am afraid, the son of a goat farmer. But my father knows the family and suggested that as a favor to them I allow this young dolt an opportunity to improve himself. If he doesn’t blow the whole place up first.”

  Sarah’s eyes widened. “You don’t let them do anything...important, do you?”

  “Of course not,” he said, waving a hand. “Simple tests, blood counts, errands. That is all. The important things I hope this year I am entrusted to do.”

  On that, Rashid departed. Emerson imagined him going upstairs, putting on his tidy pajamas, washing his face, brushing his teeth for exactly two minutes, and scheming about how tomorrow he could monopolize even more of Sarah’s attention. Emerson decided to have a talk with Rashid one of these days and remind him he was engaged.

  He would also tell his housemate that Sarah was vulnerable at the moment. She’d just had her heart broken and shouldn’t be trifled with.

  It was a conversation Dirk ought to hear as well.

  Sarah lay on her back on the padded chaise longue she and Rashid had been sitting on. She lifted an arm over her head. Her position and the yellow porch light did insanely unfair things to the curve of her cheek, her hair, her body, the bare slope of belly where her shirt had pulled up out of her jeans.

  Then he realized she’d been watching him too, her eyes softly glowing. The picture was closer to what he had in mind when he’d imagined Sarah living there: a quiet evening alone, her gazing at him with that sweet, wistful expression on her face, as if—

  “You look so tired,” Sarah said. “You should have more of Rashid’s tea. It’s supposed to cure insomnia.”

  Or, she could just be feeling sorry for him. “I don’t think it’s going to help.”

  Chapter 19

  The job that Sarah wouldn’t hate in six months continued to elude her. Tired of being broke, she signed on with a temp agency. For the most part her assignments were tedious, but not as tedious as sitting around Emerson’s house smelling the damp moldy smell and watching everyone else have lives. Even the Jordanians had lives, and important things to do, and they just came to this country.

  Several weeks went by. A month. Summer hardened into the first clear snap of fall. Among other things, she got used to the damp, moldy smell, the grimy kitchen, sharing a bathroom with men, and weathering Emerson’s moods.

  She looked in the classifieds to see what the rents were like, although she didn’t have enough money to even think about moving into her own apartment, let alone paying Emerson what she owed him. Still, her earnings kept her in groceries, pantyhose, résumés, and the occasional evening out.

  She’d been looking forward to this one all week. After cataloging Department of Public Works monographs in the basement of the county building for five days straight, even pizza and the movies with Emerson and Rashid seemed like the most luxurious of indulgences.

  When she tried to chip in for dinner, though, Rashid stopped her.

  “This one is on me.” He slipped the waitress a twenty, one step ahead of a glaring Emerson. “You can pay for the movie,” Rashid told him.

  “Gee thanks,” Emerson grumbled.

  “I’m working now,” Sarah said. “I can pay my own way.” Although she was beginning to wish she’d stayed at the County Building. Sludge Management magazine was better company than these two together lately.

  “You ought to be saving your money,” Rashid said.

  She laughed. He sounded like her father. “A couple of slices of pizza isn’t going to break me.”

  His expression was dramatically earnest. “Every little bit will help,” he said under his breath and excused himself to the men’s room.

  Then only one set of eyes was staring at her.

  “What was that about?” Emerson asked.

  Sarah blinked at Rashid’s empty chair. “I have no idea.”

  He picked at the label on his empty root beer bottle. Someone fired up the pinball machine. It clanked and beeped and whistled. “I, um, talked to the landlord today,” he said finally. “There are some things in your room�
��the radiator, that closet door. I told him I could live with it the way it is, but if you’re going to be staying, I could have them fixed. And maybe a new coat of paint?”

  His expression was one she knew better than Rashid’s. It wasn’t about paint. It expected the next thing she said to be hurtful. She touched his arm. His gaze dropped to her hand. She wanted to tell him she’d grown fond of the sticky yellow walls, the damp, moldy smell, the sun through the grimy curtains, the closet door that wouldn’t stay closed. And the comfort of knowing he was just across the hall. He’d never believe her. Or worse, he’d read too much into it. But he’d been so generous that she couldn’t bear to hurt his feelings by telling him not to bother. As soon as she had enough money, she’d move out, letting him get on with his life. After all, what woman would want to come home with a man whose old girlfriend was living in his spare room?

  “Whatever you want to do,” she said.

  * * * * *

  One of the second-shift orderlies had to go out of the country for a funeral, and Emerson volunteered to fill in. He liked the quiet of the evenings and was glad to have some time away from Rashid, the virgin Casanova. And he never would have imagined thinking this, but he could use a break from Sarah, too.

  He couldn’t help himself, but every time he looked at her, he saw an empty room across the hall. He envisioned a new apartment, a job, and a replacement for Jay. So much for the new life he had helped her move back to. Where, as he’d told Rashid, proximity and time were supposed to teach her to see him not as the boy who’d consumed her with his emotional frailty but as a secure man worthy of her romantic attention.