Life After Genius (40 page)

Thump.

Holy shit. Was that a chair falling over? Or maybe Aunt Jewel is trying to shoot herself, her hands got all sweaty and she dropped the gun. In which case there is still time. Now or never. Mead starts down the stairs, grasping the railing as if for courage, and says, “Hello? Aunt Jewel? Is that you down there?”

“Teddy? Is that you, Teddy?”

Relief sweeps over him like a cool breeze. “Yes, Aunt Jewel, it’s me,” he says and continues his descent. “I rang the doorbell but I guess you didn’t hear. What’re you doing down here?” And at the bottom of the stairs, he sees her. She’s dressed in an ankle-length nightgown, her hair up in rollers, standing next to Uncle Martin’s workbench. Her hands are buried in an open drawer and again Mead thinks gun.

“I’m looking for that snake you told me about,” she says. “I thought I’d try and find it myself but all I’ve found is this.” And she holds up a roll of electrical wire.

Mead laughs with relief.

“What’s so funny?”

He shakes his head. “I’m just glad to see you, is all.”

Jewel clasps her hands over her hair rollers in an attempt to hide them. “Don’t tell your uncle you saw me like this. Before my shower. He’ll have a fit.”

Mead zips his mouth shut with his index finger and thumb. “You’ve got my solemn promise, Aunt Jewel. I won’t say a word.”

The snake is hanging in plain sight on a Peg-Board above the workbench. Mead takes it down and follows his aunt back upstairs. The living room is just as bad as the rest of the house, with crumpled napkins and lipstick-stained coffee cups littering every flat surface. Clothes are draped over the banister that leads to the second floor. They hang from every doorknob. But among all this chaos and disarray is one sign of sanity. An ironing board. It’s set up in the middle of the hall, two button-down shirts on hangers dangling from one end of it, pressed and ready to wear. The door to his aunt and uncle’s bedroom is open, their bed unmade. More clothes draped over everything. But the next door —the door to Percy’s room —is closed. At the end of the hall is the bathroom.

The tub has not been cleaned in a while and soap scum is clinging to its sides like rust. Mead gets right down to work, feeds the snake down the drain and dislodges a ball of hair that looks like something a cat might cough up, only bigger. He wraps it in bathroom tissue and drops it into the wastebasket, which is overflowing with facial tissues as if someone in the house has been suffering from a bad cold. Or crying.

“Oh, what a dear you are,” his aunt says when he tells her the problem has been cleared up. “How about I fix us both a little something to eat after my shower?”

“That’s all right, Aunt Jewel. I just had breakfast.” This is a lie. Mead is actually quite hungry. Would, indeed, enjoy having something to eat but can think of nothing in his aunt’s kitchen that he would feel safe putting down his throat.

“Oh, but you can’t leave, Teddy. I haven’t seen you since you got home. You have to tell me what you’ve been up to. I’ll only be a minute. Please stay.”

How do you say no to a woman in pink curlers whose son has just died and whose funeral you missed?

Aunt Jewel closes the bathroom door and, as soon as the shower turns on, Mead hurries downstairs to call the store. To call for backup. “You’ve got to get over here, Dad,” he says into the receiver. “You’ve got to see this with your own eyes to believe it. Aunt Jewel needs help and she needs it now.”

A
UNT JEWEL ENTERS THE KITCHEN
looking no different than before her shower. She is wearing the same nightgown and the same pink rollers in her hair, the only indication that she has taken a bath at all being the ringlets of wet hair at the nape of her neck.

“My, my, my. Look how you’ve grown,” she says and takes hold of Mead’s hand. “Why, you were just an itty-bitty thing when you first went off to that big-city university. I was so worried. I was afraid you wouldn’t manage up there all alone.”

“You were?”

“Sure. And I aired my concerns with your mother too. Told her I thought it’d be better if you waited a year. Grew up a little.”

“I’ll bet she took that advice really well.”

“Wouldn’t speak to me for six months.”

Mead laughs. If not for the dirty dishes, unwashed clothes, and tumbleweed-size dust balls in every corner, he would think his aunt just as sane as the next guy. Maybe even more.

“Come. Sit down,” she says and pats the seat of a kitchen chair, then opens the refrigerator and takes out the half-wheel of cheese and box of saltines. To make room for them on the table, she has to stack a few of the dirty dishes one on top of the other —a real juggling act at this point —then cuts a slice of cheese off one end of the wheel, places it on a saltine, and hands it to Mead. The cheese is dry and hard on the side that was exposed to the air inside the refrigerator. Mead hesitates, but only for a second, then pops it in his mouth and chews and coughs when a fragment of saltine lodges in his airway. He coughs a second time but the damned thing just won’t budge.

“Let me get you some water,” his aunt says and walks over to the sink. She lifts a glass out of the pool of gray sludge, fills it under the tap, and hands it to Mead. Dysentery. That is the word that goes through his mind. He sees himself in a couple of hours, rolling around on the floor in pain, running to the bathroom every fifteen minutes. But he takes the glass from her anyway. From his nurturing aunt. The mother with no child left to pamper. He takes it from her and sips it so she can feel like a mother again. Even if just for a moment.

“There now, isn’t that better?” she says and pats his hand.

Mead nods, then starts to cry. Not from choking on the cracker but because he realizes that he has been acting as crazy as his aunt, pretending that everything is fine when in fact it is not. Sitting here in her fucked-up house drinking toxic water when he should be sitting at the desk in his dorm room writing his valedictory address. It’s just so unfair. Life is so unfair. Why did Percy have to choose that day to come visit him? Why did Mead have to cross paths with Herman? If only he
had
waited another year before going off to college, grown up a bit first as his aunt suggested to his mother, then maybe he wouldn’t have even run into Herman Weinstein in the first place. Simple as that. But he didn’t wait. And Percy did choose that day. And Mead did run into Herman. And so here he sits in his aunt’s fucked-up kitchen, both their lives in shambles.

A
WHITE HEARSE IS PARKED AT THE CURB, FEGLEY BROTHERS
inscribed across the side of it in gold lettering. A middle-aged man is seated in the front seat, on the passenger side. “Who’s that sitting in the hearse?” Mead asks his father.

“Dr. Breininger. He’s a psychiatrist. And it isn’t a hearse, it’s an ambulance.”

Mead studies the doctor’s silhouette. Stern. Impassive. His thoughts a secret from the world. A man like Mead’s father who has seen more than his fair share of what the rest of us go out of our way to avoid. “Did he bring along a straitjacket?”

“Yes, but I doubt we’ll have to use it. Jewel doesn’t seem to be in much danger of hurting herself.”

“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of Uncle Martin, about how he is going to react when he comes home and finds us here.”

Mead’s father gives Mead an I-don’t-think-that’s-very-funny look and steps past him into the house. But Mead didn’t mean for it to be funny. He is dead serious.

His father takes a tour of the house, walking from room to room, assessing the situation, weighing his son’s comments over the phone against his own perceptions. By the time he enters the kitchen, where Jewel is helping herself to a cheese-and-saltine sandwich, he has seen enough to know that Mead was not exaggerating. Not even a little bit. She rises to her feet and says, “Lynn, what a pleasant surprise. Teddy and I were just enjoying a little snack, would you care to join us?”

“Jewel,” Mead’s father says, “when was the last time you did the dishes?” But he might as well have said, “Jewel, have you lost you’re frigging mind?” Because his straightforward question changes the atmosphere in the kitchen from one of ignorant bliss to one of uncomfortable self-consciousness. Jewel looks around as if seeing the kitchen for the first time in weeks.

“And the dining room,” Mead’s father says, pouring salt into an open wound. “It looks as if you haven’t cleaned up in there since the funeral.”

Jewel’s eyes fill with tears. “Martin said I didn’t have to, he said I could wait until he gets back. But he hasn’t gotten back, Lynn, and I’m beginning to get worried.”

Mead’s father wraps his arm around Jewel and eases her down into a chair. “He just went to St. Louis, Jewel. He’ll be back later this afternoon, don’t worry.” She pops back up and says, “Really? You have no idea how relieved I am to hear that, Lynn. I’ve been waiting so long. Too long.”

“Okay, well, you just sit here and relax,” he says and eases her back into the chair, “and Teddy and I will start cleaning the house up, how does that sound?”

“You can’t!” Jewel says and pops up out of the chair again. “Not until after he gets here. All those people. They came to his party and brought all that food. They were so thoughtful and generous. He has to see. He has to see how much everyone loves him. If you clean it all up before he gets here, Percy will never know. And he’s got to know, Lynn, he’s got to know how much people love him.”

Talking rationally to an irrational person is a waste of time. Mead’s father knows this all too well from working for so many years with so many people in mourning. So instead of talking, he pats Jewel’s hand, nods as if he understands, and eases her into the chair yet again then sits down himself. He looks exhausted. As if he is trying to wrap his head around the size of this one. Mead places his hand on his father’s shoulder, as a way of showing his support, because for the first time in his life he understands —really understands —how hard his father’s job is. How brave and fearless the man is to do what he does for a living: to deal with people in their most vulnerable state.

“Dad,” Mead says but his father doesn’t respond. “Dad,” he says again and shakes the man’s shoulder. His father snaps back from wherever it is he goes at such times and looks up. “Maybe now would be a good time to go,” Mead says and nods in the direction of the waiting ambulance.

His father reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out two blue pills —pills that look like the ones the hospital gave Mead after he hit Forsbeck —and places them in Jewel’s palm. Then he picks up the glass of gray water and says, “Drink these down, Jewel. They’ll help you sleep.” And even though Mead is pretty damned sure his aunt has done little but sleep and dream about Percy for the past three months, she swallows them down and then allows herself to be eased out of the chair and up the steps to bed.

“How come you didn’t just put her in the ambulance?” Mead asks when his father returns.

“Because that is a decision only your uncle can make.”

“You’re kidding, right? I mean it’s not like the man hasn’t known what’s been going on around here all this time. Do you really think he’s the best one to judge?”

His father pulls a pair of rubber gloves out of a kitchen drawer and offers them to Mead. “Would you prefer to wash or dry?”

“What I would prefer to do is to get the hell out of here before Uncle Martin comes home and blows his stack, that’s what I’d prefer.”

The gloves hit the floor with a loud smack. “My god, Teddy,” his father says. “Do you really think every problem in this world can be solved by running away?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“Well, that sure as hell comes as a surprise to me.”

Mead has never before heard his father swear, never before seen him throw anything on the floor, never before been the target of the man’s anger. “Dad, why’re you yelling at me? This isn’t my fault.”

“Take a look around you, Teddy,” he says and waves his arm through the air. “Do you see this? Do you know what this is? This is what happens when you try to run away from your problems. They pile up all around you, one filthy dish on top of the other. Sure, you can walk around pretending you don’t see them, but the rest of the world will, Teddy. The rest of the world will see your mess even if you can’t.”

“What’re you saying, Dad, that I’ve made a mess of my life? Is that what you think? What the hell do you know about my life anyway?”

“Nothing. I know absolutely nothing because you won’t tell me. You won’t reach out for my help even though you so obviously need it. I mean, how the hell are your mother and I supposed to help you if you won’t talk to us? My god, Teddy, don’t you realize that we love you more than anyone else in this world?”

Mead stares into his father’s red face that can’t be more than twelve inches from his own, then turns and storms out of the room.

“There you go again,” his father says. “Running away.”

Mead stops dead in his tracks, his father’s tongue as sharp as a knife to his back, spins around and stomps back into the kitchen. “You of all people should talk,” Mead says. “I mean, who really has his head buried in the sand around here, huh? Your own brother is completely fucked up, his wife half out of her mind, and you didn’t have a clue. They were right under your nose the whole time and you didn’t have a clue. Even when I told you I saw her dressed up as if for Halloween in the freezer section of the A & P, you still chose to look the other way. God forbid someone around here should admit that there’s a problem that can’t be fixed by doing extra credit. God forbid someone should show any signs of weakness. What a horrible embarrassment that would be, right? It’d only bring shame upon the family to admit human failure, to admit to being anything less than perfect. Best to sweep it under the rug and keep going. Strap on a pair of blinders and pretend everything is fine. Don’t look left, don’t look right, just plow straight ahead. Well, guess what. Surprise, surprise. I’m the only one around here who isn’t wearing fucking blinders.”

His hand strikes like lightning, slapping Mead across the face. It doesn’t hurt so much as surprise. Mead had no idea his father was capable of such emotion; it’s a side of the man he has never seen before. He wasn’t sure it even existed and is relieved to know it has not been lost altogether. But then, like a popped balloon, his father’s anger deflates, replaced by a look of regret, a look that adds years to his face. He stares at the floor, the house so quiet Mead swears he can hear the ants in the next room. Chewing. A million of them all at once.