Wintertide: A Novel (6 page)

"Spoiled?” That caught my
attention. “Are you kidding me?” I looked at him carefully. Did he really
believe what he was saying?

Seth swallowed before he answered.
“It really used to piss Eddie off.”

“What? You and Eddie talked about
this?”

He shrugged offhandedly.
“Sometimes. But then you stopped hanging out with us and we found other
interests.” He smiled at me, but it wasn’t real. He looked hurt.

“I wasn’t the one who stopped
hanging out with you,” I told him. It was hard to understand how his perception
of events differed so much from mine.

"Sure you did. Besides, by
senior year you were always with your girlfriend. What was her name?"

"Kristen and she had nothing
to do with you and me."

"Whatever it was. You just
stopped hanging out with us."

I shook my head but I didn’t say
anything else. There was no point in arguing with him about events that
occurred over a year ago. The truth was that after a couple of uncomfortable
incidents, the lack of inclusion was unspoken but mutual and filled with
resentment. Seth could not have forgotten that night on the ledge or that
afternoon in Eddie's garage with his father.

Seth finished off his sandwich. I
turned to look out the large picture window behind the table, but only saw my
own reflection staring back at me. I was surprised to find that I was still
wearing my coat.

"You should come out with us
tomorrow night," he said.

I was confused for a moment when I
turned back to him. "Who's us?"

"Eddie and me."

"You still talk to
Eddie?"

"Sure, when I come home. He's
working over at that garage out on Route 6."

I don't know why I was so shocked
to hear this. Just because I had distanced myself from South Seaport didn't
mean that life ceased to exist here. Maybe I thought Eddie would be in jail by
now. Or that he would have left town to escape his father's fists. "Does
he still live at home with his dad?"

"Sometimes, but usually he
just sleeps on a couch at the garage."

"Does his father still....I
mean is his dad still....”

"I don't know,” he answered,
saving me from having to say it out loud. “I don't think so. He's hasn't said
anything about it in a long time. Why don't you come out with us?"

I stood up, pushing my sleeve back
to examine my watch. It was just past eleven, and I had to work for Professor
Sheffield tomorrow. I hesitated answering while Seth watched me expectantly. "Well,
I might have to work late...."

"Hey," he said raising
his hands in the air, "no one's twisting your arm. Don't sweat it if you
don't want to." His expression seemed to say that he had expected me to
turn him down.

The truth was, I did want to go. To
think that Seth had been hurt by my disappearance from his life was surprising.
I had thought he’d written me off, and apparently he felt the same way about
me. I still mourned the loss of his friendship. Was it possible that he wasn’t
entirely at fault?

I left Seth’s house feeling uneasy.
When I returned home, I half expected my mother to be waiting up for me, but the
house was dark. After fumbling blindly for several moments, I finally found the
keyhole, unlocked the door and stepped inside. Not once could I recall an
evening when my mother had not left the outside light on for me. I wondered if
something more than the usual was wrong.

It never fails to amaze me, the way
in which the mind can rationalize even the most glaringly alarming situations
and repress something that it just doesn’t want to recognize. There were many
things that I should have seen much more clearly during those frigid winter
days before Christmas. Had you asked me one week earlier if I ever intended to
spend time with Seth Cooper or Eddie McKenna again, my answer would have been a
swift negative. It seemed that I was one person at college and another in South
Seaport. All the confidence I thought I had developed simply fell away, and the
old Dan Hiller re-emerged timidly and about as welcome as an insect infestation.
But that is the truth of the matter, which I can see now. At that time, I
didn’t have this kind of clarity. Instead, a deluded voice inside me explained
that I was simply looking for closure. There was never a definitive ending to
my friendship with Seth and Eddie. Spending one evening with them could
effectively tie up all the loose ends and sever any regrets I now harbored.

That was what I told myself that
night as my head rested against the musty pillow. The acrid scent of mothballs
invaded my nostrils, causing a dull headache. How could I have so easily put
aside that last afternoon in Eddie's garage? As I mentioned there was no exact
point where I can say that our relationship ended. In a small town, you can't
help but run into people almost daily, at school, at the market or in the
drugstore.

Eddie could be violent. I had seen
him mercilessly bloody the face of a freshman who had dared to bump into him in
the hallway between classes. But if I had to choose one moment where I mentally
decided that Eddie was not a person I wished to be around any longer, it would
have been that unusually warm and sunny afternoon toward the middle of senior
year. It was a day so bright that a record number of car accidents were
reported, citing the glare of the sun off the white snow as the cause.

I had only seen Mr. McKenna a few
times, and he had always appeared pleasant enough, not at all the monster one
might expect. He was hardly ever at home during the few afternoons we spent at
Eddie's house. But on this one particular day, he was in the garage, covered in
grease, working on his car, his baby, a red Mustang convertible. My family was
poor, but Eddie's was one small step away from the welfare system. He and his
father lived in a four room house of which only two rooms were actually usable.
The other two had leaky roofs. Seth told me that in Eddie's old bedroom, there
was a hole in the roof the size of a basketball. The neighbors had apparently
gone to the town hall and complained that the McKenna home was causing property
values to plummet.

We all walked into the garage that
day after school with a pleasant beer buzz on, having spent last period sitting
in Eddie's car drinking rather than in gym class. Mr. McKenna was just wiping
down a wrench with a grease-stained rag. He smiled when we entered, greeting us
happily. I always thought Mr. McKenna looked as though he stepped right out of
a fifties movie, like
Rebel Without A Cause
. He greased his dark, salt
and pepper hair back and wore leather jackets. He was sort of wiry and so thin
that every muscle and tendon was visible beneath his skin. He was tall, too, about
six foot three, but with a bent, hunched over posture. I recall him offering us
all a beer and trying to act like one of the guys rather than someone's dad. Seth
and I smiled incredulously at each other, quickly accepting his offer, but
Eddie declined. It was the first time I had ever seen him turn down a drink.

Mr. McKenna returned with three
bottles of beer, twisting the caps off for us and taking a long deep pull from
his own before returning to the open hood of his car. Eddie wanted to leave,
but his father suggested that we keep him company while he worked. Seth and I
both knew that Eddie's dad hit him, but I think that for a moment we doubted it.
Mr. McKenna was trying to win us over. That was how he was able to beat his son
without anyone in the community stepping in to stop him. He simply turned on
the charm for whatever audience was at hand. In those moments, as you watched
and listened to this friendly man, you thought
no,
he couldn't be
beating his kid, not him
.

As Seth and I sat there that
afternoon, drinking our beers and laughing at Mr. McKenna’s interesting
anecdotes, Eddie stood away from us, on the other side of the car, fidgeting,
his anger building. He knew exactly what his father was doing.

At one point, Mr. McKenna put down
his beer, sat down on the cold cement floor and pulled himself under the
Mustang. We eyed the bottoms of his dirty sneakers as he continued talking, his
voice muffled. Eddie slowly moved toward a shelf at the back of the garage. He
fumbled around for a moment and returned with a plastic yellow bottle of
antifreeze and a small white funnel. Silently, his face expressionless, he
stuck the bottom end of the funnel into his father’s beer bottle. Carefully, he
twisted the cap off the antifreeze and poured the green liquid down the funnel
and into the bottle where it mixed with what was left of the beer. When Eddie
finished what I could only think of as a prank, he turned to us and smiled
before he neatly replaced the funnel and the yellow container.

I turned to look at Seth. He
returned my nervous glance with a noncommittal shrug, whispering, "He
won't let him drink it."

Eddie came over and stood next to
us when his father reappeared from beneath the car, grunting as he pulled
himself to his feet. He walked over to the table and wiped his hands off onto
that same dirty rag. Can you smell antifreeze, I wondered? How much could you swallow
before you realized it? The container probably had one of those poison control warning
labels which listed instructions on what to do if your child accidentally
swallowed some.

Mr. McKenna smiled at us and picked
up the bottle with a large greasy hand. I felt my muscles tensing. Seth put a
hand on my arm. I looked at Eddie. He stood there silent, stoic. I knew he was
going to let his father drink it. Mr. McKenna was saying something, telling
another story, but I couldn't understand the words. I only saw his lips moving
and the top of the bottle being lifted toward his mouth. Suddenly, I thought
this was crazy. We were all going to stand here and let this man drink that? Eddie
really wanted to kill his father, and we were sitting here laughing at Mr.
McKenna’s jokes as he was about to drink down a bottle of antifreeze. I
remembered Eddie on the ledge that night. He had truly intended to jump despite
what he later said, and now it seemed he was going to let his father drink
poison.  

The rim was merely inches away from
the man's mouth when I finally jumped up, lunged toward him and smacked the
bottle out of his hand. His eyes widened, staring at me as though I were crazy.
The glass hit the floor shattering, spraying liquid in all directions, a dark
stain seeping across the cement. Seth's eyes traveled nervously from me to Mr. McKenna.
Eddie glared at me. Mr. McKenna finally overcame his shock and yelled,
"What the hell!"

I didn't stay to hear the rest. Without
a word, I turned and walked away. I walked all the way home, three miles, told
my mother my stomach hurt, went to my bedroom and closed the door. I avoided
them both at school the next day. Seth finally sought me out. He approached me,
smiling and shaking his head. "You can be such an idiot sometimes,
Dan," he said.

Just as he did after the incident
on the ledge, Eddie pretended that nothing had happened. Except things were
different now. I was colder to him, and he no longer bothered to include me in
his plans with Seth. For all intents and purposes, from that point on, the
friendship was over. That left Seth with a choice to make. He didn't choose me.

The next morning I found my father
in the kitchen cleaning the dishes from the night before. Apparently, Mom was
sleeping in again. Tomorrow night was Christmas Eve. I wondered if my mother was
going to make the traditional ham dinner. I greeted Dad, lying again, saying
that I had slept well. I swallowed two aspirin with a glass of orange juice and
walked out into the bitter morning air.

I enjoyed the ride to Professor
Sheffield's house, not even realizing how much I missed the freedom of driving
a car, something I never did anymore living in the city. I was having second
thoughts about the coming evening. I’d texted Seth this morning, letting him
know that I was joining them tonight. The plan was for me to pick him up around
ten o'clock since his mother needed their only car, and we were to meet Eddie
at a bar by the ocean called the Southside Tavern. It was new. I had never been
there before. The last time I was in a bar was the last day of classes just
before finals began. I met a red-headed sorority girl who came home with me. The
next morning she gave me her telephone number with her name, Traci, written
above it, a smiley face dotting the i. But she didn’t wait for me to call her.
She’d been calling and texting me ever since. I had yet to get back to her.

Thinking of school, remembering
that night with Traci and knowing I would be spending the entire day in a place
that seemed far away from South Seaport, lifted my mood considerably. By the time
I parked the Buick in the professor's driveway, I’d decided that tonight would
simply be a fun time out, no more and no less. It was better than lying on that
lumpy yellow couch in the living room, watching television all night and
keeping my mother company.

Professor Sheffield ushered me in
out of the cold. Like yesterday morning, he offered me tea. This time I joined
him in the kitchen to make sure I would actually receive it. The kitchen was
bright much like the rest of the house, with white tile floors and white
cabinets. An island stood in the middle with a cook top and a breakfast bar. I
sat on a wooden stool as Professor Sheffield filled the kettle with water. He
handed me a large wooden box and instructed me to choose. I opened the lid and saw
an assortment of teas inside, English breakfast, lemon, cinnamon, red
raspberry, honey and chamomile tea.

"It was a gift," he
explained.

I chose cinnamon, opening the
package and placing the tea bag in my mug. Professor Sheffield picked out a
lemon one and poured the steaming water into both cups when it was ready. The
sweet smell of cinnamon lifted my wary eyelids.