Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

“You’re contemplating something,” Michael says, watching me from the top of the steps, holding his computer tome down at his side. He’s thin as a beanpole, which is only more apparent in shorts and a T-shirt. It’s one of the reasons he’s unhappy at school, being teased for it.

“Am I?”

“You’re staring fixedly into space with an expression of mild bemusement. That’s how people are described when ruminating .”

“Where’s your father?”

“He’s mucking around in the boat. He took Celia and Alec.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

He glances over the shimmering water, ignoring my question. “What are you cogitating about?”

It’s been a week and John hasn’t spent ten minutes alone with him yet, and now he’s gone off with the other two. Michael plays with his brother and sister some, but fills most of his hours with reading and sketching out his elaborate parodies, the latest one being of our local newspaper. I found it on his bedside table this morning. The Pawtucket Post-Intelligence: Local Family Goes on Holiday by Accident, Returns. A special joint-investigation with the 70 °Club, plus weather .

In my generous moods, I think John just forgets what I’ve asked him to do, and, being freedom-loving, thinks the children should all do as they like, but at other times my frustration intuits that it’s more than absentminded. He doesn’t know what to say to his elder son; it’s sticky and awkward, and he’d just as soon glide over it, flicking the switch from treating him like a child to treating him like an adult who can teach himself how to cope with the world. John was sent to boarding school at eight. He’s enlightened enough to believe that was and is a form of organized cruelty, but having gone through it himself, some remnant of the fear of being associated with weakness remains lodged in his gut. Michael gets the silent brunt of it, Celia and Alec none at all.

“What about Sand Dollar Beach?” I say. “We haven’t been there yet.”

“Are you suggesting a divertissement ?”

“I’m suggesting a walk. It’ll be cooler in the woods.”

“Cooler, but treacherous in the event of a hurricane.”

“Come on,” I say, “let’s go.”

He puts his book down on the bench and with a pensive look of his own passes by me into the house. They’re polite, my children. We’ve raised them to be polite. It never occurred to us to do anything else. It’s not the British relegation of them to silence in the presence of adults. But manners teach them the forms of kindness. The way to greet a stranger, and eventually how not to make a scene over every little feeling because there are other people to consider. Overdo it and it will stifle them. I don’t think my mother ever stopped to wonder what good form costs a person, because the cost could never be greater than someone having a poor opinion of her. It could never exceed the failure to live up to the standards of propriety. John’s mother is more hidebound still, appalled that we don’t better contain the children’s energy. She told John it’s my American influence. She blames me for her son being in the States, as if I’m the one in control of where we live.

We didn’t discuss raising our children differently than we were brought up, it’s just a natural softening, I suppose. As if Celia would ever be a debutante, even if we had the money; it’s absurd. Of course I want others to think well of my children but they already do and through no great labor of mine. It’s just a matter of pointing out what’s rude and what’s the proper way to thank a person, and the importance of imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes, that’s all. John spanked Michael and Celia when they were much younger, and he’s spanked Alec two or three times, but it was only when they lied or refused repeatedly to obey. And now with the older two it barely arises. They’ve learned how to behave. We’re not a formal family, but we set the table for meals, and we eat meals together, and they have to ask to be excused when they’re done. I suppose some people would consider it dated. I should encourage their whims in case they are the seedlings of genius. But that doesn’t make sense to me. Whatever they do, there will be other people around and they’ll have to converse with them and be polite. I want them to be happy. That’s the point.

At the trailhead, Michael holds the branches of the blackberry aside for me as he leads the way through the overgrown stretch of path up the slope and into the trees. The beach is twenty minutes away, which is perhaps too far a round trip when I should be getting supper ready, but it’s good to stretch our legs. He’s talking about Mr. Carter, the man he got his king snake from, but the breeze carries every other phrase out of earshot. I stay close enough not to lose track entirely.

Last night it rained and the mushrooms are out — I should know their names but I don’t. There are the perfectly white billowy balls, like bits of solid cloud floating over fallen branches, and the creamy clusters with brilliant orange tips massed on the sides of rotting stumps, and those extraordinary zigzags of brown crescents wending their way up the bark of the older trees like staircases for the Lilliputians.

It’s amazing how many thin young pines and spruces strive to reach the sunlight lavished on the mature trees, and how many of them lie fallen like oversize matchsticks on the forest floor, the ones that didn’t make it, hosts for the lichen and moss, food for bugs.

We climb up and down the steps that Bill Mitchell cut into a giant Douglas fir that must have fallen years ago across the path and now has ferns growing in its opened seams.

I wish Michael enjoyed the wonder in all this more, but his asthma has taught him to be cautious of the outdoors, or of too much running in the field behind our house, and even of the winter cold, which can set off an attack.

“…where he keeps the iguanas,” he’s saying as I come up beside him, now that the path has widened, “with the little stream running through his downstairs, he says he’s thinking of getting a small crocodile if he can build a big enough habitat, but he’s not sure, because it would take up the two spare bedrooms.”

John met David Carter a few years ago when he came to a minority entrepreneurs’ forum. If I remember rightly, he wanted to expand his pet business, and John tried to convince his partners to invest. They didn’t, but John stayed in touch, and he took Michael over to see the reptiles. One day, without consulting me, they brought back a four-foot-long black king snake. I could hardly say no given Celia’s rabbits, Alec’s hamster, the birds, and Kelsey. Michael has never given it a name, which seems right somehow. It’s apparently a constrictor, not a biter, but if that is meant to reassure me, it does not. He takes good care of it, mostly, cleaning its terrarium in the playroom, feeding it those awful dead mice, but he did leave its sliding door open a slit one night, and it got out, somehow making its way up into his bedroom, leading to a terrible commotion when he woke to use the bathroom and placed his foot on it. I didn’t mean to yell at him the way I did, but the whole thing was too awful.

“If he got the crocodile,” Michael continues, “then he’d have a complete collection, or almost with the boa and the python, and the monitor lizard.”

“He doesn’t let you get close to those other creatures, does he?”

“It doesn’t matter, ” Michael says, swatting at ferns with a stick. “They’re tame.”

We walk for a minute in silence.

“I think he’s sad,” he says. “I think that’s why he keeps so many pets in his house.”