The Weight of Him(15)

“Hardly no one,” Tony said.

“Yeah, okay, not no one, but most people don’t seem to care nearly enough.”

Tony seemed to squirm on his chair. “Well, I think it’s that there’s still a bit of … well, silence around it all.”

Billy pushed back his temper. Before Michael, Billy hadn’t known any better. Now it enraged him how people talked, and mostly didn’t talk, about suicide. There was still so much stigma and ignorance—the persistent belief by too many that it was a sin, a crime, a sign of weakness, and something shameful to be hidden. He drew a deep breath. He needed to stay calm and stay the course. “My whole life I’ve never felt this way about anything. I know I’ll see this through and that I can do a lot of good.”

Pity oozed from Tony’s small, dark eyes. “Fair play, that’s all I can say. I wish you the best of luck.”

“Is that a no?”

“I said I’d talk to my board.”

“Yeah, thanks, thanks a lot.” Billy pulled himself free of the squeeze of the metal chair with as much grace as possible.

On his way out, Lucy looked up from her desk and said something, but he couldn’t hear her through the fog of temper.

Inside the elevator, he looked down at the floor and away from his exaggerated reflection in the silver doors, where he appeared ever more the freak.

*

That evening, Billy pushed back feelings of guilt and steered the car for home, reneging on his earlier plan to drive to the little-used cove outside the village for a long, brisk walk. He needed to go straight home and eat. He’d taken nothing since the limp salad in the canteen. Starting tomorrow, he would attempt at least a mile of the cove, five times a week.

He should at least place some phone calls tonight, to spread word of his diet and the march. Should put up flyers around the village this evening, too. He’d start with the two places boasting the most foot traffic—Caroline’s shop and Kennedy’s pub. He could get to the other places in the village and in town on the weekend.

As he neared home, he changed his mind again. He was too knackered to face Caroline or Ben Kennedy tonight. He would go home, eat, watch TV, and fall into bed. Maybe tonight he’d get his first decent sleep since Michael. He blared the radio to drown out the whispers of guilt and the pleas of his empty stomach. On the road up ahead, the wet spot shimmered.

Just last summer, when he was driving Michael someplace, to town, or a football game, or his guitar lesson, Michael had remarked on the optical illusion. He said how it was always getting away. A place like the horizon, he said, that you could never reach. At the time, it struck Billy how he’d seen that wet spot on the road all his life, but had never once thought about it, and here was his son making poetry out of the thing. It hit him now how wistful Michael had sounded, how full of yearning. He should have noticed that then. He should have said something.

The evening sun glared through the windscreen, its strength remarkable for the time of year. Billy fished his sunglasses out of the center compartment. He felt self-conscious in shades and rarely wore them, but this sun was blinding. He especially hated the pinch of the inevitable too-small frames on his large head. The day he’d bought the sunglasses, the salesman, with a smear of ginger hair on his chin, had said the Italian manufacturers smashed and repaired the glass, a process that made it stronger. Billy had liked the idea at the time, but now it maddened him. Why not make the glass strong enough in the first place?

He drove faster, his sunglasses tinting everything he passed in a sepia brown, as though the world were rotting.





Five

Later that evening, Billy entered the kitchen right as Tricia was closing the back door to Deveney. Billy startled. What now? Tricia ripped open the white envelope. The summons for Michael’s inquest, Billy realized. She read it first, and handed it to him. Outside, Deveney’s car peeled away. While Billy read, Tricia busied herself, dropping the fish into beaten egg and then dusting the slick fillets in flour. Michael’s inquest would take place in two months’ time, in Moran’s Hotel, on the other side of town. Proceedings, in a courtroomlike setting, that would subject Billy and Tricia to the results of Michael’s postmortem and the official ruling on his death.

Billy returned the summons to its now-jagged envelope. Moran’s Hotel, and not the courthouse, that was something, at least. But there was still the undercurrent of criminality and victim blame to the whole thing—the police, the coroner, the ruling, the order to appear. It was the same with how people said committed suicide. As if suicide were a felony and not the last desperate act of someone out of his mind. He placed the summons in the drawer with the rest of the important documents. He wanted, instead, to rip it to pieces.

*

Michael’s final night had fallen dark and chilly. Billy coasted home from the factory amid warnings of hazardous road conditions, and in particular black ice. He arrived into the kitchen, imagining himself safe, and headed straight to the fridge, looking in at everything illuminated and feeling the familiar disappointment. Tricia stood at the counter, preparing beef stew. In the living room, the children’s eyes were locked on the TV.

Michael lay on the floor in front of the fire, his bare feet too close to the flames. Billy said, “Careful, there, Michael, or you won’t be at the football for much longer.” Michael was a star full forward, destined, everyone said, to someday bring home the Sam Maguire. Michael pushed his dark curls out of his eyes. “I’ll be all right, don’t you worry.” Looking back, there was maybe something ominous in the boy’s voice.