David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

The students finished up their lunches and settled into sharing, according to rules laid down with demented enthusiasm by a junior advisor, the details of their lives. Tammy, said advisor, exuded a blond, bland kind of commonplace beauty: her vacant smile would later make her a natural for real estate sales or fund-raising and development. She produced a big cellophane bag of M&M’s and instructed the girl next to her to take a handful.

“Let’s see. You took… five. Five? You can do better than that.” Tammy demonstrated what constituted a proper handful and dumped them into her victim’s waiting hand. “Count them. How many do you have? Sixteen? Now we’re talking! Now you tell us sixteen things about yourself.”

The second girl, an auburn giantess with an intriguing gap between her front teeth and unfortunate bangs, saluted the group. “Hi. My name is Vanessa Darby. I grew up in Glens Falls. I was captain of my varsity volleyball team. Go, Indians! My favorite color is magenta, though with this skin I’ve been told I shouldn’t wear it. Is that the sort of thing I’m supposed to say?”

Tammy gave a thumbs-up.

“My favorite food is pizza. I have no idea what I want to major in. Journalism, maybe. Or maybe premed. Is that sixteen?”

“Six,” shouted some sadistic stickler for rules.

After Vanessa had completed her struggling autobiography, she passed the bag of M&M’s like it burned, and round they went with the sugar-amped sharing. It might have been a balm to Benji’s mind to let Bob from Sleepy Hollow or Barb from Anaquassacook siphon some calm little current of thought where he could escape the waters that sooner or later spilled into that hospital waiting room, that bright linoleum box where he’d slept for two nights, where he and Cat and Claudia (who couldn’t bear to look him in the eye) and Evelyn and Nick and Arnav joined Jim and Amanda Davis (who also couldn’t bear to look at him — or any other Fisher, for that matter) on a diet of soggy sandwiches and vending machine coffee, hopeful, now that Henry had made it out of the woods, that Max would soon follow, leaning on the doctors’ cautious optimism, on their We have to wait and see , on their We have some promising news until the winds changed and, like that, he was gone— subdural hematoma were the words they used — and nothing, nothing, nothing could ever be done to make it right.

But Benji found he could no sooner float in the calmest, most inconsequential pools of Bob’s or Barbara’s lives than he could pretend that he belonged where he was sitting. He heard voices, needling, implacable voices that had been building in volume since the memorial service that the Davises refused to let him or his family attend, a chorus of voices that positively screamed now with the inanity of his present situation and told him to go. It was wrong. Everything he was doing was wrong. Fake. Nothing but more ruin crouching on the road ahead.

When an impressively muscled boy with three freckles under each eye like a cartoon drawing placed the candy sack in Benji’s lap, Benji took his handful with the enthusiasm of a machine, but found he couldn’t speak. His eyes had fallen onto his zippered lunch sack, an orange nylon bag stuffed still with his uneaten lunch, which lay on the grass before him, bright as a coiled snake. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.

Tammy, nearly preorgasmic with the biographical trove promised by his baker’s dozen of M&M’s, tried to get the ball rolling. “I love your T-shirt,” she said. “Where’d you get it?” It was black, adorned with a picture of Harold Gray’s loveable, empty-eyed Orphan Annie and the words “Tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow).” A gift from Brandon Wright and the rest of the Macbeth cast.

She wanted thirteen things? Benji could have come up with thirteen things. He could have told her about the great, good success of the drama club, what he’d gotten from it, yes, but also what he’d given up for it. He could have said that, two hours before his parents’ house burned down, he’d slipped into the side yard like a wounded animal and given Sam Palin a faint but final no. That Sam had said, “It’s your life, buddy,” as if he could see the end of it, and, “It’s all good,” as if it was anything but. Benji had chosen a path that afternoon. A life. The sort of life in which he’d build on the $600 he’d saved to buy Cat’s ring or don a rented tux for the premiere of Max’s opera. He chose this life, which changed on him in the blink of an eye, which left him falling without warning from the sky as life has a tendency to do.

Last year, on a desperate August night, he’d stood on the bridge and found no one separating him from the pitiless black gorge. Now he had Cat. He had his mother, his sister. He had the blessing that was Max, until that crucifying moment he no longer did. He’d spent the last year climbing up, out of that ravine, and this, in the end, is where the effort landed him. What role did he think he was playing? And where did he think it would lead? He was a fool strutting his disastrous time on the stage until, in the time it took to run a three-mile route he’d run a hundred times before, he destroyed everything.

Max was gone. Max was gone. And one day, no one knew when, no one knew how, the others would follow. He would lose Henry. He would lose Cat. He would be back where he started. Alone. All of these thoughts — was that thirteen, Tammy? — somehow fit into his little zippered pouch as snugly as a baggie full of carrots, a banana, a ham and cheese on rye. It was, at that moment, the saddest and most dangerous thing he’d ever seen. It was the rest of his life. If he let it, it would follow him through the years. It wasn’t Cat and children and a two-car garage. It wasn’t love or forgiveness or the possibility of being redeemed. It was 6,500 sandwiches before he stepped his way to a dusty death. It was 6,500 bags of baby carrots, 6,500 bananas. If he died today, he’d be worse than forgotten. It would be as if he’d never been born.

With that, Benji stood. Dropping his M&M’s like empty seed husks into the grass, he left everything — lunch sack, orientation packet, campus map — where it lay and, ignoring Tammy’s surly protest, started the long walk back to parking lot D.

She sat on the edge of Henry’s bed and read the letter aloud. She’d been working on it since the day Max died, since the day she watched her opportunity to tell Claudia the truth come and go on that endless drive to the store. Evelyn might have unburdened herself then, though she couldn’t shake the notion that telling would do nothing but add to her load. And not only hers. Claudia, too, would bend with the weight; Evelyn’s bold and upright girl brought to the ground by a forty-year-old lie.

Excepting the reverend who married her, never had Evelyn admitted to anyone that she had opened the door one day and took into her arms another woman’s child. Never had she wanted to. Never had she seen the need. She and Henry had worried for a time that the secret they kept from Claudia would be exposed by nasty children or gossiping neighbors or the self-appointed scourges of a small upstate town. But the elderly neighbors who knew of Jane’s disappearance had, miraculously, moved on or gone demented or died before her daughter reached the age that may have tempted them to disclosure. And the young families who took their place had never seen the woman named Jane. They knew of no scandal, no secret, and so Claudia grew, as Henry and Evelyn intended, with a sense of belonging she had no cause to doubt.

Except, on some level, Evelyn knew, she did. As soon as Max appeared at her door, Evelyn couldn’t avoid seeing just how much her daughter did. Why else would Claudia keep such an enormous and essential predicament from her? Why else would she turn from her mother’s guidance? Her love? Why else would she leave buried the lie of her own child, year after year, decade after decade, until the child came crashing into their lives like an avalanche? Evelyn came to see Claudia’s secret as retribution for her own. For now that Henry’s mind had dissolved, and with it the oath he insisted they keep, the fault rested entirely on Evelyn’s shoulders. Thus, the letter.