Mr. Oral Fixation made the call to Sam, related by college to Donny Zurkus’ dad. The old-boy network. This time I’m connected. Vectors of relation. While the old boys do what they do, make things go away, play Ollie North, White sends me to Rehoboth Beach, a Board of Trustee member’s summer cottage, away from reporters, carnivores of carnage. Call me Mr. Roadkill.
“Taylor, this is Song. Please excuse the intrusion,” I said into the white phone with the little note taped to the table next to it: Please use your own long-distance calling card. Of course, Miss Cheapskate Cottage Owner.
“Song, where are you?” Ms. Rower said.
“On holiday.”
“Right. Just a little vacation,” she said. Sarcasm. Smart for a rower.
“Of sorts. I’m calling about Carla.”
“You heard.” Ms. Rower’s voice went quiet.
“Bad news, you know.”
“Mrs. White loves to talk.”
“Queen Gossip.”
“Well,” Rower said, “Carla’s in the psych ward.”
“Wilmington?”
The shiny linoleum, the fluorescent lights, the smell of Pine-Sol that takes a half-life to get out of your nose, all floors are the same. The blood unit. The psych ward. East Coast hospital, West Coast hospital, all the same.
“She went last week, should be out soon.” Her voice didn’t rise, a flat wave.
That’s what we always said about our grandfather, “He’ll be out soon,” from the concentration camp, Total Control Camp No. 7. When my father and his brothers were very young and very hungry, my grandfather stole a beet root on the way back from his fourteen hours at the mine. He was arrested on the spot, and that’s the night my father and the family left for China. Then, they made their way to South Korea, came to the U.S. That’s the story. Somehow we learned where my grandfather was taken. No one ever saw him again.
“For what?” I said to Ms. Sounding Guilty.
“She said she was going to kill herself, had it all planned out.”
“And you believed her?” These new teachers, gullible.
“Heard of contagious suicide?”
“Psychobabble.”
“You weren’t there, Jack.”
“No, but you aren’t exactly there, either, Taylor.” The dinners where she stopped her fork midway to her mouth, didn’t pass the gravy to Eager-to-Feed Second Formers, walked through the halls with her long rower arms hugging her books like they were life vests.
“What are you talking about?” Ms. Rower’s voice goes up. More air, less space to pass through.
“You’re a new teacher. You haven’t taught a year.”
“But I know what she said.” Ms. Rower’s back in grade school.
“How can you be sure?” My father’s voice in my mouth, the riddles, the twisted logic is the ventriloquism of age. No science in that.
“What’s your point, Jack?” Young Rower turns resistance.
“There were options.”
“Maybe for you.”
“Meaning?”
“You know her. You know St. Tim’s. St. Tim’s knows you,” Alta says in her high voice, too little air through too few years.
“Empirical evidence suggests the school knows little of me.” I point out the obvious. “I will always be the outsider.”
“You’ve been there awhile.”
“That’s true,” I say. The weight Newton failed to measure transfers from Rower Dyke’s shoulders to mine. “And you are too new to know what twists the adolescent mind will take. Carla is like Kyle, too bright, too different.”
She takes a breath. “Exactly,” she says, “Carla is too much like Kyle.” And Alta turns into a planet, creating gravitational pull. I might explain G or any number of things I didn’t tell Kyle. The power of connection, through blood, diseased or not, the hyo of loyalty between siblings or students, all of it collides. The vacuum created by collision is filled by responsibility, mine to Kyle, mine to Carla, and the greatest, to my family.
“You’re right, Taylor,” I say.
Houston, we have touchdown. Ms. Rower, the teacher, has landed.