Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

In the Royal Signal Corps, I met Peter Lorian, and when our compulsory service was done we got an apartment in Chelsea together with two other friends and started having our parties. Where a few years later Margaret appeared. In her green satin dress and long dark hair, tall and slender. No woman had ever looked at me as directly as she did. I couldn’t stop trying to charm her because I wanted her to keep looking. And she kept blushing at my attempts, but laughing too, which made the difference, because then I could keep going, and we could acknowledge the game for what it was, and forgive each other for playing. It’s what let us fall in love. That we could laugh together.

These bits of poetry float back to me again now, and they still measure time, but cruelly.

It’s no use resisting this heat. My shirt is soaked, the sweat has seeped into my shoes. But I mind it less. There’s nothing of my person to protect anymore. The simplicity of this is a great relief. An empty stomach and throbbing temples are no more personal than a bank of thriving weeds, or the mirage of asphalt melting in the distance along the bridge. Such distinctions are made of tension, and the tension is melting. Why fight? The inanimate world has such unimpeachable wisdom: no thought.

“Where in Christ were you? It’s three o’clock.” Margaret’s stricken voice comes at me across the front lawn before I even reach the walk. “I just drove all the way out to the restaurant to pick up Celia and the manager tells me she didn’t show up today. No sign of her. None. Are you listening? I’ve had it. You understand? You need to get in the car and go over there to the Schefers’. That’s where she’ll be, with that Jason.”

I suggest maybe she’s at the track. Margaret explodes, shouting that school has been out three weeks! There is no practice! Arguing is pointless. Her anger spreads in too many directions, and I am the root of it. She has lost me already. But she refuses to know this, and the refusal drives her mad. It galls her that I gave us so many years and so much life together unmenaced, and then simply no longer could. Before, she had a choice. To break it off or go forward. Now she has none, any more than the children do. I don’t even provide money enough for food and clothing. They’re put on credit cards.

“I’ll go,” I say. “Give me the keys, and I’ll go.”

Mrs. Schefer lives on Raymond Street, up behind the post office. Her house is one of those split-level Colonials with brown siding and a garage cut into the hillside. A circle of large white pines blocks out most of the sunlight. A girl of ten or eleven answers the door and says that her mother is not there. I tell her I’m looking for Celia and she says she hasn’t seen her, and that her brother is out as well. There is a television on in the background. The girl has peanut butter smudged at the corners of her lips. “Celia’s pretty,” she says. “Are you her dad?” I am, I tell her, and ask if she knows where her brother might be. She has no idea but says he sometimes stays with their father on the other side of town. It strikes me as negligent to leave a child this age on her own, but who am I to judge?

It’s not because Celia missed or skipped work that Margaret wants me to find her. It’s because of Chris Weller. A few months ago, when I was deep in the fog, we were woken one night well after midnight by shouting in the front yard. A boy, clearly drunk, was yelling up at Celia’s window, “Give me back the fucking ring, give me back the fucking necklace.” Then he started knocking loudly on the front door. He was waking the whole neighborhood. Margaret shot out of bed and went to the window. Celia came running into our room. “Get up!” Margaret yelled at me. “For God’s sake, get up!” I swung my stone legs to the floor and pushed with my arms to bring myself to my feet. “What the hell is going on?” Margaret demanded of Celia. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, failing to hold back tears. I’d never seen her so terror-stricken. “You need to go down there,” Margaret said to me. “Go out there and tell that idiot he needs to be quiet and he needs to leave.”

I stood there mute in front of the two of them as they waited for my response. The boy kept hammering at the door. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go down those stairs and cope with it. It was as if the boy’s fist were hitting my chest and it was all I could do to stay upright. My wife and daughter gaped at me, appalled. “The police,” Celia said desperately, “we can call the police.” Margaret told her not to be ridiculous, that it would cause a scene; we weren’t going to have flashing police lights in front of our house in the middle of the night. “Where’s the jewelry?” she said. “Do you have it?”

Celia stopped crying then and went stony-faced. I saw the change happen. It took only an instant. She turned from us and left the room. Margaret and I followed, standing on the upstairs landing as she went into her bedroom and put on a pair of trousers, and then walked down the stairs on her own, to open the front door and confront that raging boy. As if we weren’t even home.

That was the last of Chris Weller. But not of Celia’s dating. Now there is Jason, with whom Margaret thinks she’s using drugs of some sort. Apparently when she comes home late her eyes are bloodshot and she doesn’t want to speak with her mother.

The little girl told me the name of the street her father lived on, where Jason might be, and she said the house was white, but that doesn’t narrow it down. There are no people out in their yards to ask. Stopped at an intersection, I see someone who I think might be Jason glide past in an old gray Audi, and follow him around the corner to another split-level Colonial with an unused flagpole mounted over the front door. He notices me pulling up behind him. I was expecting a lout like Weller, one of those oversize American high schoolers. But this boy’s face is more blurry than aggressive, his cheeks covered in an adolescent attempt at a beard and his brown curls flopping over his forehead. “Oh, hi,” he says, to my surprise, for I have no recollection of ever having met him. When I tell him I’m looking for Celia, he says he dropped her at the track, and from his hapless eyes I can tell that he is adrift, afraid he’s been caught at something but unable to focus sufficiently to defend himself. He isn’t Celia’s equal. He doesn’t have her will. Whatever she’s doing, it isn’t at his bidding. He asks if something is the matter, if there is some kind of emergency, and I want to say, What business would it be of yours? But I can hear the concern in his voice, and I realize he spends more time with my daughter than I do. Margaret wants me to interrogate him, to find out what they get up to. But it’s too late for that. All of that is far away. It’s Celia I need to see.

I find her at the track, running sprints along the straightaways in front of the empty bleachers. It’s even hotter now than at midday, the afternoon haze pressing against the field. I open the gate and step onto the oval. She’s wearing shorts, a sleeveless shirt, and a bandanna round her forehead. She’s running away from me, and so doesn’t see me at first. When she comes to the end of her sprint, she pulls up and rests her hands high on her waist, leaning her head back and heaving for breath. I’m past the goalpost and well onto the field by the time she notices me at a distance of fifty yards or so. She bends forward, palms to her knees, still huffing.

Neither of her brothers is the least athletic, but Celia’s played on teams since grade school: softball, field hockey in Britain, volleyball, track. She’s kept it up through both our moves. For years, there has always been a practice to drop her at or pick her up from.