Writers & Lovers(53)

The panic feels loud as hell in my head, like being next to a speaker at a concert. I turn back on the light and try to read. The words remain words. I can’t hear them. I can’t lose myself in them. A friend in college once said that she didn’t understand how people read for enjoyment. She couldn’t see or feel anything beyond the words. They never transformed into anything else but the sound of her internal voice reciting sentences. She concluded she had no imagination whatsoever. I wonder if I’m losing my imagination. This fresh fear is ice-cold. Never to be able to read or write again. But really, what does it matter? Two more rejection letters came this week.

I spend the night that way, passing through layers of anxiety, humiliation, and despair. Somewhere close to dawn I lose some consciousness. It isn’t sleep exactly, but I have to think of it as sleep because it’s all I ever get anymore.

When the sun comes up, I surrender and go out running. It has to be a long one, because Oscar and the boys are taking me to play miniature golf. John never forgot my boast that I could beat his father, and today is the day I have to live up to it.

It’s cold, the coldest morning yet. There’s already traffic on Beacon, and I have to wait for the light. The river is flat steel, the sun not high enough to hit it yet. I’m still running in shorts because I don’t have sweats, and after a few miles I lose feeling in my thighs. I run to the Watertown Bridge and come back on the Cambridge side. I pass the tall gray hospital with its stacked rows of windows. On the lower floors you can see flowers on some of the sills. Bless them, my heart seems to say. Bless them all. And my throat closes from the thought of people dying in those rooms and their loved ones losing them, and I have to stop running to suck in enough air.

When I get back, a man and a woman are peering into my windows.

‘Can I help you?’

They whip around. The man sticks out his hand. ‘Chad Belamy. Belamy Realty. You must be the writer.’

The writer. Adam is using me to add some clout to his garage.

‘Jean Hunt.’ She’s my age, but her hair is shellacked in place, and she wears a gray suit, stockings, and pumps, all on a Sunday morning.

She asks about the neighborhood. From her tone and the way she phrases her questions I know she thinks I’m younger than she is. I tell her it seems like a mix of families and empty nesters.

‘And you pay to live in there?’ she says.

‘It’s a very desirable location,’ Chad Belamy says, urging me with his eyes to agree.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks from the outside. You’re welcome to come in.’

She and Chad share a look. ‘No need,’ she says. ‘I’d start from scratch.’ She looks at the yard on the other side. ‘It’s a smaller lot than I’d expected. But it might be all I can afford.’

Adam has listed the property for $375,000. And then she’ll have to build a house on it. All she can afford.

She asks me what kind of writing I do, but I say I have to shower before a friend comes over and excuse myself.

That conversation eats away at the protective coating the run gave me, and I’m feeling pretty jagged when I get in Oscar’s car.

Jasper’s crying. I ask what’s wrong and he shows me his hand, his tiny smooth hand with a fresh bloody scrape across it.

‘Oh my God. What happened?’

Oscar bounces a flat hand covertly near the steering wheel, trying to signal that I should lower my voice.

‘Oscar, he has this gash across his hand.’

The hand bounces more emphatically.

John starts shrieking.

‘What’s going on?’

‘He hit me first. He hit me in the eye!’ John screams.

His face is so red it’s hard to tell, but I think I see a purplish bruise to the side of his left eye.

I turn to Jasper. ‘Did you do that?’

Jasper wails a long incomprehensible sentence.

‘Casey, please turn around,’ Oscar says. ‘You’re just inciting them.’

‘Inciting? They’re clobbering each other back there. You need to pull over.’

He laughs. ‘If I pulled over every time they beat on each other we’d never get anywhere.’

‘Oscar, he’s bleeding.’

‘I mean it,’ he says sharply. ‘They’ll be fine.’

I don’t like his tone of voice, but after a few miles they both stop crying. They are laughing about a dog in a pink coat and booties Oscar points out.

Then I start to smell something revolting.

‘God, what is that?’ I try to put down the window but the child locks are on.

There’s giggling from the back seat. Oscar smiles into the rearview. I wheel around.

‘It’s him,’ John says, pointing to his brother. ‘It’s him.’

Jasper gives me a big smile. Then the smell gets even worse.

‘That is so gross. It’s like poop mixed with rotting seagull.’

They all laugh. I’m not trying to be funny.

‘Please let me put down a window.’ I’m trying so hard not to swear in front of them.

‘Someone left her funny bone at home today,’ Oscar says.

‘Someone forgot to take her giggle medicine,’ John says.

Oscar unlocks my window. I lower it and stick my head out as far as it will go.