and the Langley house. Derek was at school, in the second grade, and Ellen was at her relatively new job at Thackeray, organizing their first annual literary festival.
I had been toying with the idea of killing myself.
When I was on the ladder, doing a second-story window frame, I thought about whether I’d be able to break my neck, fatally, falling from that distance. It seemed unlikely. An arm or leg, perhaps. A wrist, probably. Even if I could break my neck or back, I’d probably just end up paralyzing rather than killing myself, and what fun would that be? What were the odds I’d get another chance at this if I needed someone to feed me and wipe my ass?
While I was feeling pretty down, it was not a particularly good time for either Ellen or me. Ellen was in the thick of her dalliance with the bottle, and I was weighing the pros and cons of sticking my head in the oven.
I had found a note, about a month earlier, that Conrad Chase had written to my wife. Given that he was supposed to be some brilliant English professor-this was almost a couple of years before he managed to scale the
He hadn’t actually signed it, but there were enough other things around the house in Conrad’s handwriting with which to make a comparison, and conclude that he was the author. And the fact that he hadn’t actually started it with “Dear Ellen” didn’t matter all that much, considering that I found the note in her purse.
I hadn’t gone searching for it. I’m not even sure I had any suspicions at that point. Some resentment, maybe. Ellen’s new job took up a lot of her time. She wanted to make a good impression with the Thackeray administration and was under a tremendous amount of pressure. She’d organized plenty of events at the Albany public relations firm, but she’d always had plenty of help with those. And nothing she’d done for them was as ambitious as what she was pulling together for the Promise Falls college.
I was just looking for a five-dollar bill. It was a school morning, Ellen was still upstairs getting ready for work. I was down in the kitchen with Derek, who was already running late and taking forever to eat his peanut butter toast. It wasn’t the easiest breakfast choice to chow down in a hurry, but if he didn’t get his seven-year-old butt out to the end of the lane in the next three minutes, the bus was going to go right on by and get to school without him.
“Come on, pardner, you gotta move it,” I said.
There was still half a piece of peanut butter-slathered toast on his plate, and he must have realized he didn’t have a chance of finishing it, so he said, “I gotta go brush my teeth.”
“There’s no time, man.”
“I gotta brush-”
“Where’s your backpack? Is everything in your backpack?”
“Where’s my lunch?”
“Lunch?”
“Remember Mom asked you to make me a lunch?”
“Buy a lunch at school,” I said.
“Mom’s been making me a lunch so I won’t go to-”
“Derek, chill out. Tomorrow, we’ll all be a little better organized. Today, you can buy a lunch. Hang on.” I reached into my back pocket for my wallet, but there was nothing in it but a twenty. There was no way I was giving him a twenty. The odds I’d ever see my change at the end of the day were too long to calculate.
Ellen’s purse was on the bench by the front door.
“Hang on,” I said, and grabbed the purse. She had her wallet in there, but you could find cash in it almost anyplace. In the wallet, any one of the three or four inside pouches, or loose in the bottom. I could feel change down there, but counting out nickels and dimes and quarters was going to take too long. I glanced in the wallet and saw that Ellen was well equipped with twenties, but nothing smaller. Welcome to the ATM world.
I reached into a pouch, felt something papery, and pulled out two pieces of paper. One of them was a ten, which I immediately handed to Derek and shoved him out the door.
The other piece of paper was a note.
One moment you’re trying to get a kid to eat his peanut butter toast, and the next you’re seeing your whole world fall apart.
It was like I was seeing everything around me for the first time. That house, the furniture, the lane out to the road. It was as if, suddenly, none of it existed. All this had been some sort of mirage, a dream. My life, as I’d thought I’d known it, was nothing more than a piece of performance art.
“Hey!” Ellen shouted from the upstairs bathroom. “Did Derek make the bus?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“What?”
“I said yeah!”
As I heard Ellen’s footsteps at the top of the stairs I slipped the note into my pocket. For a moment, I thought of stuffing it back into the purse, pretending I’d never seen it. But that really wasn’t an option. I’d opened a door and had to know what was on the other side.
“Gotta go,” Ellen said, kissing me on the cheek. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You seem funny. You sick?”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Don’t you have to be going soon, too?”
“I don’t have to be in till ten today,” I told her.
“Okay, well, look, I’m off. I’ll figure out something for dinner tonight since I’m going to be home before you.”
“Sure,” I said, and saw her to the door. Once she was in her car, I went upstairs to the room she used as an office.
It didn’t take long to find a sample of Conrad Chase’s handwriting. There were notes from him all over Ellen’s desk, suggestions about who to get for the festival, phone numbers, a listing of public relations people for various publishing houses. I took the note from my pocket and compared it to the samples in front of me.
There was no doubt.
And then I got ready and went to work. What else do you do? Phone in, tell the boss you’re feeling too betrayed to come in today?
That night, Ellen had some lasagna ready when I came in the door.
“Hey,” she said. “How was your-”
I handed her Conrad’s note. Didn’t even take off my jacket. Ellen looked at it and burst into tears.
It was over, she told me between sobs. It was over before it really even started. They’d been working so closely together, she got carried away, she did a stupid thing, but she’d ended it herself. I had to believe her, she said. And I’d been so distant, she said, I-
So it was my fault.
No, she said. She slipped, she said. It was a slip. I had to know, she said, that she was telling the truth.
I had no idea what to believe, but I had some idea what might have drawn her to Conrad. I recalled the times she’d come home from work and talk about how creative he was, how inspiring it was to see someone so committed to harnessing the talents he’d been blessed with. He was everything I was not. He’d thrown himself into his art and I’d given up on mine, despite Ellen’s repeated encouragement.
I thought I’d be furious. But I felt too crushed to generate any anger. I left that night and didn’t come back for a couple of days. Stayed in a motel, still went in to my security job. One day, Derek phoned me at work and said, “I cleaned up my room, Daddy. Now will you come home?”
I did come back to pick up some more clothes, and Ellen was there, like she’d been waiting for me since the moment I’d left.
“I’ll do anything,” she said, but her words were slightly slurred. I could smell the booze on her breath. “Whatever it takes, just tell me.”
I decided to come back. Not so much because I was ready to move forward with this, to find a way through our problems, but if Ellen was starting to drink heavily, there needed to be someone else there to look after Derek.
I went through the next few weeks on autopilot. Went to work, came home, got Derek ready for bed, slept in
