4
Rob
On the eighth day after the accident, Rob got dressed. He pulled on his socks at the edge of the bed, whispering, “Kwa heri. Odabo. Ha det.” He stood up shakily, got his left foot through the pant leg on the second try as he went on reciting. “Do pobachennya. Ajo. An lot soleil.”
The last was West Indian Creole. When he wasn’t sleeping, Rob memorized ways to say good-bye. He’d found memorizing a good way to narrow his attention so he wouldn’t think about things. Thinking was the enemy. He now knew how to say good-bye in many languages. Lorelei’s performance at the window had given him the idea, though Lorelei hadn’t memorized her good-byes—she’d been reading off a feed with one eye. Just as he’d been watching her with one eye when he ran over Winter West.
Rob pulled a New Peregrines sweatshirt over his head, relishing the darkness that enveloped him, feeling disappointed when his head popped through the neck hole and his room returned, with its sagging ceiling, its pocked walls.
He stared at the doorknob. The knob had a dent in it he’d probably put there when he was a kid. In this old house his parents had owned for the past thirty-five years, this hundred-and-sixty-year-old house meant to last fifty, you still had to grasp a knob and twist it to open a door. Right now it seemed far too definitive an act.
He saw the flicker of a shadow beneath the door, but no muffled footsteps. His mom. Or, more accurately, a holographic image of his mom that roamed the house to keep his father company, ten years after his mother’s death. Rob kept expecting his father to move on, to find Mom gone one day. It hadn’t happened yet.
He decided to go back to bed. Maybe tomorrow.
Dad, looking gaunt and raccoon-eyed, brought dinner. If Rob could have eaten anything—a roll, a forkful of baked beans—he would have, just to bring a shade of relief to Dad’s eyes. The last thing Rob wanted was for his dad to suffer along with him. Dad had enough to deal with; he didn’t need a second ghost roaming his house. But Rob couldn’t eat, and didn’t know how else to release Dad from sharing his misery. Maybe he should try harder to get out of the house during the day, to give Dad some relief from his presence, from the constant reminder that a woman was dead because of his son.
Maybe it would have been better for everyone if Rob had been over the legal limit, and sent to prison. He winced, recalling the DA’s ferocity at the inquest, her outrage that he was going to get away with it. Should he have been allowed to walk, simply because he hadn’t been quite intoxicated? He hadn’t felt drunk at the time, but surely the drinks had affected him. He was still surprised he’d passed. Three vodka martinis seemed like a hell of a lot of alcohol, even if spread over a few hours.
Seeing that Rob wasn’t going to eat, his dad sat on the edge of the bed. “So how are you feeling?”
“I’ll be okay. I just need a few weeks.”
Dad considered this and nodded, somewhat skeptically. “I’ve got to say, you don’t seem to be getting better.”
Rob muttered something that was incoherent, even to him, then a long silence stretched, and Rob couldn’t seem to find the energy to break it.
“Why don’t you go out, get some fresh air?” his dad said.
Rob opened his mouth to say he wasn’t up to it, but his father cut him off.
“Even if you don’t feel like it, you should go.” He used that calm yet piercing tone that insisted Rob hear him. “You may have to go through the motions for a while, you know?”
Here was something he could do to ease his father’s suffering: Go Through the Motions. He grabbed his jacket from the closet.
He went out the back door to avoid neighbors who might want to chat, his chin tucked against a chilly breeze. He crossed their small dirt-and-weeds backyard, vaulted a low concrete wall into the gray-water recycling canal that ran behind the houses, and headed toward the abandoned mall. He could lean up against the wall for a few hours, read the graffiti.
Each step was an effort. All he wanted was to be back in bed, memorizing salutations in foreign languages.
The Backmans’ dog barked as he passed behind their house. He eyed the cluster of ancient, cracked solar panels set along the edge of the canal behind the Royers’ house.
The sun felt unnaturally bright, and when he glanced up, it stung his eyes. Better if he were in Low Town with its muted daylight, the buildings hugging the sidewalks. There was too much open space in the burbs.
“Rob?”
Rob flinched at the sound of Lorelei’s voice. He spun, foolishly expecting her to be standing there in the flesh. Instead her screen was there, large enough that her face was actual size. Several hundred smaller screens flitted behind her.
“You’ve got to be kidding. Get the fuck away from me.” He turned his back. It burned his skin to have all those eyes looking at him, judging him, in all likelihood firing comments back and forth about how utterly consumed with guilt he looked.
“Rob, I just came to say I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ve been trying to contact you. Haven’t you seen my messages?”
Yeah, he’d been eagerly reading all of his friends’ and exes’ messages. Sorry you killed someone. Feel better soon. He turned to face her. “Thank you. I appreciate your concern, I really do. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone.” He looked toward the mall. It was semipublic space, there would be nowhere to go where Lorelei couldn’t follow. Better to go home. He ducked around Lorelei, stormed right through the solid-looking wall of frames, rudely shattering their illusion of solidity for a moment. If he’d been wearing a system, the fine for defiling their personhood would have ticked off immediately. As it was, he wasn’t sure if he could be identified and fined or not. He really didn’t care.
“I can’t help feeling partly responsible for what happened.”
Rob glanced back. Lorelei and her entourage were following three paces behind him.
“I’m sorry. I can’t help what you feel.”
“Will you please stop and talk to me for a minute?”
Head down, Rob kept walking. “Didn’t we break up? I seem to recall we did.”
“That doesn’t matter. None of this petty shit matters, after what happened.”
“Amen to that.” Another hundred yards, and he’d hit the block he’d set up around the house eight days ago. Thank goodness for private property.
“I’m sorry about what I did. I stopped airmailing your stuff as soon as I heard. I have it at home. Some of it.”
“Toss it out. I don’t want it.”
“Rob, please.”
If she’d been there in person, she could have grabbed his shoulder and yanked him around to face her. But as things were, there was nothing she could do to stop him from climbing out of the canal and into his yard.
Actually, if she had come in person—alone—he might have talked to her. Maybe she could have convinced him that throwing his stuff out the window had been some sort of temporary insanity. Rob still couldn’t believe she’d done it. Lorelei was not your typical person, but he’d never sensed cruelty in her before that night.
Relief flooded him as he closed the back door.
Rob’s father was in the kitchen, watching Lorelei out the window, his old handheld on the table. “I see you didn’t get far.”
Rob’s mom was at the table, studiously chewing some invisible meal.
“Made it to the Royers’ before she chased me back.” Rob eyed the three ancient barber chairs that stood in a row in the front room, in “the Business Room,” as Dad called it. They were empty at the moment, but a customer might push open the door and saddle up at any time of day, seven days a week, and Dad would power up the scissors. It was so simple, so beautifully simple. Dad carried on a pleasant conversation with his customer, and cut hair. He avoided politics and mean gossip, hiding behind a wall of polite “Uh-huh’s” if a customer brought up either, and went about his days in blissful simplicity. Before the accident, Rob had zero interest in carrying on the family business, but if there’d been anywhere near enough business, Rob would happily begin learning the trade today. Snip-snip, talk about last night’s boloball game.