We Are Not Ourselves(151)

Connell said it a little louder than before. Jenna seemed to mean every bit of it. There was no denying her talent.

“Now take another step back. Forget about the distance. Say it as if they’re right next to you, only louder.”

“I love you,” he said weakly across the expanse. He didn’t know how to use his diaphragm, and his breath ran out too soon.

“Now two steps. This time shout it! This is love that gives a damn.”

He did as asked, coughing as he did. She was a figure in a row of people.

“Two more steps. Again!”

This time he didn’t say anything, only listened. He couldn’t make out any individual voices, only a collective one making an urgent appeal.

“One last step! Give it your best shout!”

Jenna was a blur on the other side. His throat hurt. He threw his arms back and shouted as loud as he could.



His mother had called and asked him to come home and he had said he had a responsibility to the director and the cast to be in the play. He could hear from her silence that she was shocked to hear him talk of responsibility in refusing to come home and help, and the truth was that he had shocked himself by saying it.

He hadn’t realized how scared he was to see his father until his mother’s call. He hadn’t intended never to return; he just had no immediate plans to do so. Jenna had been the best excuse possible, but now she didn’t seem like much of an excuse anymore. He could say he was staying in Chicago to work on things with her—my future wife, he could hear himself rationalizing later, or at least that was how I thought at the time—but he saw the truth of their relationship too clearly to allow himself to pretend later that he hadn’t.

Had he tried to grow up quickly to cover up feeling like a child? Had he asked her to marry him because he needed a grand unifying theory to explain his absence? The thing was, he himself had been scared of marrying her. He didn’t want it, really, any more than she did. He was more relieved than brokenhearted, but now he had to think about everything he wasn’t doing. He had run out of excuses not to go home.

? ? ?

He quit the play, crammed his pair of army duffels full of dirty clothes, and got on a plane. His mother said she couldn’t pick him up, so he took the bus and train and walked from the station.

He squeezed through the back door with the bags and was struck by the punishing volume of the television coming from the den. He remembered his mother saying tests had revealed that his father had lost some hearing. He headed toward the den but found his father in the vestibule, balanced precariously on a stepladder, looking through the little windows set into the front doors. Connell muted the television and went back and called to him, but his father only mumbled something, so Connell walked over and touched his shoulder. “Dad!” he said, more forcefully. “I’m home.” The news seemed to leave no impression at all, though he’d been away for almost a year.

“He’s out there.” His father gave Connell a serious, confidential look.

“Who?”

“The man,” he said darkly. “That man. He always comes.”

“Where is he?”

Connell raised himself on his toes and looked out. No one was there except the gardener, who had finished pruning the hedges and moved to the house next door.

“Do you mean him?” he said, pointing. “You mean Sal?”

“No, no, no.” His father’s eyes flashed; his hand twitched; his hushed tone and terrified stare implied that anything was possible. Connell wanted to believe in his father’s continued ability to perceive danger accurately. Had he arrived just in time?

Connell turned again to the window; then he backed away, feeling foolish.

“Come down off there,” he said, holding his father’s elbow, but his father stood frozen. “It’s just a step. Just put your leg forward.” His father offered a tentative foot, then retracted it and tried the other. “Lean on me,” Connell said, and his father did. Once on firm ground, he clapped a couple of times before he seemed to register his son’s presence and looked embarrassed. He went to the window again. He was animated now, his finger jabbing at it.

“He’s there! He’s there!”

Connell darted over. His father was right: the man was there, and he was famously unstoppable. He might deliver death and destruction; he might deliver circulars for the Food Emporium.

“Dad!” he said. “Don’t you know that’s the mailman?”

The mailman disappeared behind the hedge. “I don’t trust him,” his father said, and then headed for the kitchen with a surprising quickness in his step. He lifted one of the blinds in the window above the sink so high that his whole face would have been visible from the other side.

When his father moved aside, Connell saw that the blinds were bent in several places. His mother must have reconciled herself to living with them rather than replacing them over and over. This one change amounted to a revolution in her thinking.

His father opened the door and then the screen, which swung back hard and crashed into him as he headed outside. When he returned, he was pressing a bundle of mail against his chest with both arms. Some pieces fell to the floor and he released the remainder onto the island like a cascading pile of apples.

“What are you doing?” Connell asked, flabbergasted.