It was a bright, hot day. I looked around for the big man from the funeral home but couldn’t find him anywhere. Most of the students were banded together on the opposite side of the grave, including Katie’s classmates and a few St. Pius seniors. Even Peyton Chambeau showed up, slouching in cargo khakis, a loosely knotted tie, and round retro Ray-Bans. Not only did he look like a viable new character on
Beverly Hills 90210
, but one we should all suspect of ulterior motives. I was certain he’d only attended the service to satisfy a melodramatic lark and last-ditch effort for Emily’s attention. Mrs. Schell’s yelping sobs never ceased. The whole time she gripped Mr. Schell by the sleeve of his blazer, appearing as if, were he to remove his arm from around her waist, she’d crumple to her knees. Emily kept facing forward, jaw locked, cheek muscles flexed.
At the moment the priest urged us to grieve as a community, I noticed Mr. Schell turning from the casket. I thought at first he’d grown dizzy or nauseated staring down at Katie’s corpse, that he wasn’t looking at anything in particular, just looking away. But then he took his sunglasses off and knuckled at his eyes and he was staring directly at me, quizzical and severe, appearing ready to halt the proceedings in order to drill me for more concrete information. This was the point when I fully grasped that for a five-dollar fishing lure I’d let the incomparable Katie Schell sink to her death twenty-eight feet deep. I could feel the harangue roiling inside him as he put his sunglasses on and turned back to the casket. I promised myself I’d one day show up at his doorstep with my hockey stick. I’d say nothing, just hand him the hockey stick and listen to the way he breathed as he pummeled me. I’d stand up every time, letting him wear himself down, even after he knocked my teeth out.
Emily never broke down. When Katie was finally lowered into the lawn, she covered her lips with one hand and began to whisper. She was speaking to Katie and there was no stopping the derelict yowl that escaped when my slow tears advanced to heaving sobs. Smitty stepped up from somewhere behind me, wiping his face, placing a hand on my shoulder while his own shoulders cranked up and down in quick bursts. It had been years since I’d seen Zach cry, but even he was plagued by a shivering chin and splotchy red cheeks. Emily didn’t drop a single tear.
When it was all over, my dad took my mom’s hand and she took mine. Zach followed closely behind, trying to pull himself together. We’d almost reached the car when Hadley, Tino, and Ashley approached, trailed by a few others. They ended up patting my back and drifting away. Smitty stepped forward and hugged me and squeezed my shoulder and stared into my eyes like he’d never see me again. As we were driving I spotted Emily marching away amid her humbled clan. They were heading down the hill to the place where the sun was sneaking sideways around the arching cemetery gates. I imagined them walking forever, a meandering procession up and down every street in the city, all wailing Katie’s name.
Twenty-three
These days I most often think of Katie Schell when saddled at the kitchen table next to a stack of ninth-grade essays and a finger or two of whiskey creaking in a cold glass. This is especially true when faced with a sentence like the following, which I encountered a few nights ago: “It would be fallacious to say that the novel is dead, especially when the people who are eager to make this argument are mostly critics and poets—and critics have no imagination and poets are prejudiced against sanity—and so I can only challenge YOUR imagination and YOUR prejudice when you grade this paper that is now being written at three in the morning when I should actually be studying for a history test that will require me to rote memorize over one hundred supercilious people and places that have nothing to do with real life.”
When I picture Katie Schell now, I occasionally see her as a fourteen-year-old still chasing that brown trout like an underwater rodeo rider gripping the fishing pole with both hands, barely hanging on as she skis through the weeds and moss, cackling and climbing her way up the fishing line to snatch him by the tail. But in the days after her death my highly visual imaginings were horrifying. I have no idea how I passed the hours, though I recall spending a good amount of energy searching for random mementos such as Cub Scout merit badges, initialized pocketknives, miniature travel checkerboards, and wheat pennies, all of which I bitterly accused Zach of stealing. One raw morning when my sight seemed to have gone pixellated and night-vision green, I ended up in the basement digging through the boxes we’d never bothered unpacking since our move from Davenport. My most interesting find was a broken portable turntable and a box of records from my dad’s college collection. After spending an afternoon dismantling the player and making a parts visit to a stereo shop on the South Side, I played the
Pet Sounds
album several times from start to finish, relating so deeply to Brian Wilson’s lyrics that I felt he’d somehow tapped into the most simple and honest sentiments of my broken heart. (Perhaps “broken” is not as accurate as it should be; I felt my heart had simply departed my chest and floated into outer space, or some other black and weightless place where it pumped all its blood out, then continued sucking on whatever else it could find, stubbornly, for no reason at all.) I was so fearful of Emily’s blame and vitriolic rejection that part of me hoped that when I eventually found the courage to call her, I’d find her number disconnected, soon discovering that Schell’s Shirtworks had closed and her first college tuition check had been canceled and Mrs. Schell had convinced Mr. Schell to transplant their remaining family to Bolivar, Tennessee.
A week after the funeral, while scouring the garage for a hose nozzle—frantically, as though it were my most precious possession—I looked up from a box of garden tools to discover Emily standing at the sidewalk, staring into the grass with one hand pinching the back of her neck. She didn’t notice me at first, and the longer I watched her, the more convinced I became that her pose perfectly encapsulated a feeling of self-help massage connected to an ancient feminine heartache. “Hey,” I finally said, walking down the driveway to discover that she’d been staring at two spotted eggshells lying in the grass. She looked up and flashed a squirrelly little smile. Her eyes were two foggy fishbowls so caught by surprise that I felt I’d just woken a somnambulist during a middle-of-the-night flight. Emily’s gaze wandered up from the eggshells to a nest crooked in the branches of the cedar tree overlooking our mailbox.
“Where did you park?” I asked.
“Around the corner. I wasn’t sure I was coming here. I wasn’t sure if I’d make it to your front door.”
“It’s a steep driveway,” I said, attempting to joke, but not sounding like I was joking.
“I know,” she said.
“Do you want to walk around back? My parents are eating dinner. They won’t bother us.”
“Maybe we could walk somewhere.”
“All right,” I said, padding my pockets for keys or matches or something else I thought I needed. It was just past sunset when we started up the street and onto the Urbandale golf course. Emily was more herself than at the funeral, but still a stranger, someone I was hesitant to touch for fear I would startle her and scare her off. She walked along the fissures of the golf cart path, occasionally looking up to admire the view of lightning bugs flickering over the fairways like the lanterns of a thousand far-off soldiers. I would’ve waited all night to find the right words, but I had no idea what those words were and had a feeling they wouldn’t suddenly come to me. We moved step by step. I knew Emily would cry somewhere along the way—it seemed she was only searching for the best location—and it eventually happened on the pedestrian bridge over the interstate. Halfway across Emily backed up to the railing, gripping the chain-link fence and leaning away to stretch her arms. Our hair swirled in the wind of moving traffic and the hot exhaust of freighters that swept by in caravans along the right lane. When Emily finally let go of the railing and looked me in the eyes, my heart and stomach were one swelling, pulsing wad.
“What have you been doing?” she said. “I thought you would’ve called by now.”
I shrugged and smiled, I don’t know why. “I wish we could’ve talked. I wanted to apologize for showing up at the funeral home.”
“You can apologize now if you want.”
“All right. I’m sorry.”
“No problem,” she said, smiling, possibly mocking my own smile from a few moments before.
“So what have you been doing?”
“Reading Mary Higgins Clark. I’ve read three books in three days. I skip pages here and there. It’s fun to try to keep up when you don’t have all the information.”
“Is it working?”
“What do you mean?”
I stepped to the other side of the bridge. I didn’t step any closer to her. “Have you been crying a lot?” I asked.
“Why does that matter?”
“I just want to know if you’ve been crying or if you’ve been swallowing it.”
“Maybe I haven’t been
crying
, George, but I wouldn’t be reading Mary Higgins Clark if I wasn’t getting sick. Really fucking sick.”
“What kind of sick?”
“Forget it. I wouldn’t trust anything I say right now.”
“Try me.”
“Forget it,” she said, turning away. When she spoke again, her voice was lower and less concerned. “It’s kind of amazing really. They hardly ever cry at the same time. One turns it off, and then,
bam
, the other turns it on. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you. You hate my parents.”
“I don’t
hate
them. They think I lied about Katie’s life jacket. I know they do. Did you tell them I wasn’t lying?”
Emily grabbed the fencing and shook it several times, seeming to enjoy the sound of the links rattling against the poles. “The cops thought you were lying, too. Besides, that Eagle Scout at the rental hut said that when he went to check the canoes, he saw a
bunch
of life jackets by the shore.”
“A bunch? There was one. It was
your
life jacket. Why didn’t you tell him what happened?”
“How do I know how many life jackets were on the shore?”
“She slipped out of it. She was wearing the blue life jacket, and when she fell into the lake she slipped out.”
“I see,” Emily said, sarcastically, like I was really having a good time with the truth. “I guess she just felt like seeing the bottom then, huh?”
I buried my face in my shirt. I wiped my eyes with the butt of my palms. I tried to stay calm. “She never buckled the top buckle, but there were two other buckles and I know the straps on those were pulled tight. I watched her pull them.”
“So then how did she slip out of it? And even if she did slip out, why wasn’t it still buckled when we found it by the shore?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that she was wearing it when she was fighting that fish.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Emily said, flinging her arms in the air. “The cops aren’t interested in the details. Anyway, there’s no point in making any claims when there’s no evidence to back it up.”
“It matters!” I shouted, grabbing the sides of my hair, feeling on the verge of pulling and twisting it in every direction. “You need to quit the Mary Higgins Clark and tell your parents
what happened
.”
Emily covered her ears. She’d had enough of my voice, the highway, other sounds, too. It was as if in that moment she was declaring herself off-limits to the entire world. When she finally lowered her hands, I hardly recognized my girlfriend—or Emily Schell, even—in the cynic staring me down. (I pictured her character from
The Bridges of Madison County
leaping out of the screen, shaking her clamped right fist, pigheaded and proud.)
“I told my parents that she drowned, and I couldn’t hold my breath long enough to pull her out. All things for good reasons. Not like we can complain that our lives have been so hard. It’s just our turn for some tough luck. Probably just the beginning.”
“You really believe that?”
“We’ve had it good for a while and now our luck’s run out.”
“That’s bullshit. What was the good reason for Katie to drown?”
“Maybe she didn’t care enough to stop herself from drowning. For a fourteen-year-old kid, shit, free ride to heaven. Katie’s probably dancing on her head right now.”
“That’s hilarious,” I said, taking my turn to look away in disgust, to take a deep breath of exhaust like it was my first taste of freedom.
“It’s just the beginning of a bad string. I’m sure of it.”
“Then what’s next?”
“For who?”
“Us.”
“Suffering,” she said. “A good bout of pain to balance things out.”
“You’re not making any sense. Maybe you shouldn’t think so much right now.”
Emily laughed (“Cheers, doc!”) as artificially as the silent, pearly-toothed laughter of a cigarette poster from the fifties, perfectly timed to a freighter’s horn blowing long and low as it passed beneath us. I screamed into the noise. There were no words, just my voice pushed barbaric as far as it would go. I screamed until I felt a warm scrape in my throat, then plopped down on the bridge. A gray Jaguar switched to the fast lane, cruising along. The Emily I knew was full of logic and reason, even in her worst moments. While I expected a few surprises that night, I never guessed she was capable of such sabotage and spite. She wasn’t making any sense.
“All right, George. If you really want to know what I’m thinking, then stand up and look at me. That’s right,” she said, as I made my reluctant way to my feet. “Did you know that only four percent of people with MS get diagnosed as kids? When you consider the number of people with MS, that’s some serious fucking luck. And ever since Sunday, I feel it in me, too. I don’t know if it’s MS or cancer or what, but there’s something nasty inside me and it’s on its way up. I feel it, like a toothache where I don’t have any teeth.”