Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

Rhianne regarded him with a hardened gaze, her lips pressed together. “Then you just have to resolve it to yourself, Zach. Tell yourself it’s over and stay away from her. If you want, I can talk to her for you.”

With a grimace, he turned down the offer. “Uh-uh. That would just be a bad idea.”

“Promise me you won’t see her again.”

“I can’t do that. If I could promise anyone that, I would have promised myself a month ago. I tell myself I won’t and then out of nowhere I’ll want her. It’s like bloodlust. It just comes over me and then there’s nothing but that. I can’t control it.”

Rhianne listened, eyes watchful. For a long moment his words hung in the chilled air. Then she said, “Well, don’t fool yourself into thinking she can’t control it. She’s using you, Zach. I don’t have to know who she is to know that. She’s flattered you into thinking you’re her unstoppable sex god, but really, she’s got you by the balls.”

Zach looked at her sharply. “No, she doesn’t. Nobody does.”

“Then break it off. You’re not so hopped up on hormones that you can’t turn down a middle-aged woman. She’d like you to believe you are, but you’ve got your free will.”

He sighed heavily, his breath clouding the air between them. “Well, it sure doesn’t feel like it right now. I keep laying down rules for myself about lines I just won’t cross, and then I run right over them. Before this, I thought I was a pretty nice guy. Now I look at myself in the mirror and think, ‘what a scumbag.’”

Rhianne reached for his hand and held it between her two gloved ones. He felt his teeth begin to chatter, but it didn’t seem to be from the cold so much as from his hammering heart. When he dared to look at her, she gazed out at him with hard eyes beneath the rim of her wool cap.

“You are a good person, Zach,” she said quietly. “Too young to know how ordinary these things are. Everybody struggles. Everybody loses sometimes. Even the people we love and look up to. I think you know that.”

He gritted his teeth and searched her eyes for meaning.

“If you want to solve your problem nice and quickly,” she continued, “turn her in to the police. Or if you don’t want to, I will. It’s the right thing to do. A teacher, for God’s sake.”

He shook his head and let his hand drop from hers. “No way. If I did that, everybody would know. It’d be in the newspapers, and—no.” With a grimace and a shudder along his shoulders, he wiped the thought from his mind. “I just want to make it go away. Break it off, like people do all the time. I’m not out for blood or anything. I just want to stop wanting her.”

A shadow of irritation moved across Rhianne’s face. “Get your head away from the idea that she’s somehow your lover. She’s manipulating you. Coercing you. This is what abusers do, Zach. They make the victim feel like they deserve it.”

He looked away. Now he wished he had never confided in her. She meant well, but she heard him only as a mother would, without comprehension of the roiling dark inside him. He could leave bruises. He could delight in seeing her on her knees.

“If one of your friends was in your shoes,” asserted Rhianne, “what would you tell him?”

Zach considered the question for only a moment. “That it’s stupid. That there’s no reason to be all hung up about some old chick when you could hook up with somebody hotter.”

“So why don’t you follow your own advice?”

He bent his head and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, weary with the fruitlessness of the conversation. “I’ll think about it.”

“Tell me her name.”

He looked up. “What?”

“Her name. Tell it to me.”

She looked calm and even-tempered, but he shook his head, for the first time ever feeling frightened of her. “I’ll deal with it on my own.”

It began to enter my mind that I should see a doctor.

The reason was Bobbie. I had managed to stay composed for so long, but now my grief over her loss came in thundering waves. All day long tears welled up at unexpected moments; the cuffs of my sweater were constantly damp. The more perceptive of my students gazed at me with serious faces, their brows tightened by worry. I found that intolerable. My job was to shelter them from the fraught world of adulthood, not to wander among them trailing it like noxious fumes. I took to drinking glasses of apricot juice dribbled with Bach’s Rescue Remedy. The five homeopathic flower essences didn’t seem to be enough for whatever ailed me, and I envied Russ his stash of meds.

You can talk to me about her, Sandy had said. She had offered herself up as a new friend, one who could be the rock for me that Bobbie had been. But what would I tell her? That I was afraid my sixteen-year-old lover was growing tired of me? Haunted by the characters in children’s tales? Anxious that I often looked at the silvery-eared blonde who, at five, had been nicknamed Fairygirl by her mother, and pondered how much more pleasant my life would be without her?

It could be worse. I knew, because it was getting there.

Inexplicably, Russ canceled his Friday night class the week before finals. He stayed home, and instead of locking himself in his office upstairs, he sat in front of the television and watched old episodes of Three’s Company.

From the kitchen, I stared at the back of his head. I drummed my fingertips on the counter. Earlier I had snagged Zach in the parking lot and told him I would meet him in the church lot at seven; when Russ changed his plans, I’d been forced to make a dangerous phone call which fortunately Zach, and not either of his parents, had picked up. The longer Russ sat in front of Three’s Company, the more I seethed. What right did he have to cancel the class they paid him to teach, for no reason at all, and throw all my plans for a loop? And so what if those plans weren’t exactly kosher? It wasn’t as though he planned to spend time with me, ever, or consider that I might deserve a husband who did more than take up space. Were it not for the fact that my lover was sixteen years old, I might rub the fact of him in Russ’s face just to make the point that my life as a woman hadn’t ended the day he fell in love with his thesis.

I headed upstairs to the master bathroom and began drawing myself a nice hot bath. If I couldn’t have Zach, I could at least have that. Then I noticed the pill bottles cluttering the sink: the Nembutal, the Xanax. These days he took them by the handful, right in front of me. The quantities were appalling. I was sure he was in imminent danger of an overdose, but nothing ever happened.

I picked up the bottle of Nembutal. This was the one he took in the evening, to counteract whatever the Dexedrine had been doing all day. I shook three capsules into my hand, then four. Then six.

The water had filled the tub halfway. I shut it off, let it drain and returned to the kitchen. Russ was still watching television. The laugh track rose and fell in waves, although Russ sat mute, his stocking feet perched on the coffee table. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper. When the first cup was finished, I poured myself another.

Eventually the sound of a commercial came on: an arthritis remedy, targeted depressingly at people our age. Russ got up and went to the bathroom. Very quickly I slipped into the living room and, one two three, dumped out all six caplets into his soda can. By the time the toilet flushed, I was back at the kitchen table reading the articles of impeachment against President Clinton.

Six might have been too many. Or, it might have been too few. I didn’t know. Also, I didn’t particularly care. As long as he fell asleep long enough to serve my purposes, I couldn’t bring myself to care when he woke up, or if.