Andrew Fox: Over Our Heads

Her sister called me.

‘Are you fucking serious?’ I said.

I wandered from room to room and began to feel a chill, a permanent empty sadness in the apartment. I unboxed the crib and spent an afternoon building it. Once I’d finished, I took a picture and listed it for free on Craigslist. I got four emails in under an hour and deleted them all. I tried to dismantle the crib again but the bolts wouldn’t budge. I tore the mattress from its stays and snapped the plywood caging, stuffed the pieces back into the box and dragged the box to the kerb.

I thought about calling my mother but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I emailed her instead and told her what had happened. I waited for a response — and waited. Nothing came.

I called the number that had belonged to my parents when I was a kid. Someone answered, a strange voice but a familiar accent.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Hello?’ the voice said. ‘Hello? Who is this? Are you still there?’

I hung up.

And then I got a call from Dessa Greene wondering if I might be free to fly out for a second round of interviews. I peeled off my sweats and stepped into the shower, turned the water on cold to shock myself into feeling. I shaved and went for a haircut, trawled Expedia for flights. I’d already spent my department travel allowance for the year, so I dipped into the money I’d been putting aside for the baby.

Indiana from the air was a chequerboard of greens and browns. I headed straight from the airport to teach a class of young MAs, who asked intelligent questions and who wanted to hear my answers, and who, long after the class had ended, stayed on talking with me and with a handful of faculty members. Dessa introduced me to her husband, a lanky physicist, and their baby son. The kid had a flat nose and intelligent brown eyes whose gaze I struggled to endure, and then avoided over dinner.

I slept poorly, woke early and went out running. The campus was a small compound of poured concrete surrounded by a copse of trees, beyond which farmland stretched away for miles in all directions. But the library was big and warm: I knew that, if unchecked, I could crawl in there and use up whole years of my life. That afternoon, I attended a brunch hosted by the department chair, a young-eyed old man with hair in his ears and a drooping moustache. It was my job to impress him, though I could hardly bring myself to speak. But as I said my goodbyes and thanked him, he clapped a hand on my shoulder.

‘I read an essay of yours somewhere,’ he said. ‘Some really smart stuff, son. And Dessa thinks the world of you. And I think the world of Dessa.’ He leaned close. ‘Listen, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this until it’s gone through the appropriate channels. But I’ll want to make you an offer. And what I want, I usually get.’

‘Long may that continue,’ I said.

‘Would you be interested?’

‘I would.’

‘Good,’ he said and thrust into my hand a paper plate of macadamia-nut brownies his wife had baked. ‘Best in state.’ He winked. ‘Take some for the plane.’

I caught a cab to the airport and hustled towards security. The TSA agent squinted at my Irish passport. Yes, I was in the country legally. Yes, I was allowed to work. Sure, here were my visa documents. At length, I made it to the gate. I ordered coffee and sat drinking it and eating the brownies. My phone buzzed, at last, with a call from my mother’s number. But when I answered, it was Eamonn.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Just put her on the phone.’

‘I’m afraid, son,’ he said, ‘that she can’t speak to you right now. She’s too upset.’

‘ She’s upset? Really, Eamonn, I’m not in the mood.’

‘I know the way it is. You’ve never wanted to know me.’

‘Christ,’ I said, ‘are you serious?’

‘But to be honest, I really don’t care. I’m not calling you to make friends. Your mother wanted someone to speak with you. And all she has is me.’ He paused, and when he resumed his voice seemed somehow to have galvanized. ‘See, you forget how long you’ve been away. You forget it’s me who’s taken care of her these years. I look after her. And you’re her son. So if you need any looking after, well …’

I laughed — I couldn’t help myself. But soon I felt close to tears. I remembered a morning long ago. The police were downstairs and I was sitting on the ground outside my parents’ bedroom calling her name, waiting to be told.

‘So, do you want to talk about the thing,’ Eamonn said, ‘or don’t you?’

‘I really don’t.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Indiana.’

‘What in blazes are you doing there?’

My departure time was nearing. The seats filled up around me. Through the window, beyond the runway, were waves of frosted cornfields.

‘To be honest, Eamonn,’ I said, ‘I really haven’t a fucking clue.’

At the first thaw, ploughs pushed the snow into heaps that sat on the corners steaming. I reread the dissertation in preparation for my defence, and as I did I was baffled by the confidence of the voice I heard speaking from its pages. I had expected to feel nervous, but on the morning I just felt embarrassed: of my own work and of myself for having to claim it; but mainly for my supervisor, who had pored over the thing for weeks, teasing it apart and testing it, and who now, unbelievably, pronounced it to be ‘excellent’. I batted away his questions easily, dismissed any lingering concerns and promised to address one or two issues in the book manuscript I would soon be under pressure to develop.

Once the formal offer arrived from Indiana, I gave notice to the landlord. I bought boxes for my stuff and set a date with a moving company.

‘So, that’s it?’ Darren said.

This was in his and Emma’s apartment the week after spring break. I’d run into Emma at the library and accepted her invitation to a bottle of wine in the evening.

‘That’s it,’ I said.

Emma dandled Sky on her knee and boasted about the traffic on her newly relaunched mommy blog. Darren stroked his cheek and wondered if he should get an MBA. No one mentioned Carol. And as the evening wore on, I foresaw for the three of us a future of dwindling contact. Darren and I would exchange a few jokey emails, invitations for visits that would never come off. Then things would settle down to a card at Christmas and one on Sky’s birthday, until inevitably I forgot even about that. On my way to the train, though I wasn’t hungry, I stopped at the cruddy noodle joint by the 103rd Street dorms where — sometimes five, six nights a week — I once had eaten dinner before I had anyone to eat with. The broth was a paste of heavy stock, the vegetables limp and pallid. But the taste, as it had been then, was warmth and comfort.

The next day, I collected essays and headed towards my carrel to grade them. On the library steps, I paused a moment by the bronze Alma Mater gazing over the quad. She sat in a throne on a marble plinth with her arms spread out in welcome, her knees pressed together to balance an open book. She held a sceptre in her hand; her head was wreathed in laurels. I watched a squirrel strike a nut against a fold of the statue’s gown, and stared up at the building’s dome that rose like a hill or an island. I felt at home, as I only ever have done in places I soon would leave. But when my phone rang, I remembered two red balloons printed on a grey sky, held aloft together, chasing a speeding river.

I wasn’t Carol’s boyfriend, and I wasn’t the baby’s father, but already as I answered I was racing for the subway, certain that if necessary I could run for miles. I didn’t need directions to the hospital.

I knew the way.