Some Hell Page 5

  When Jack London first saw snow, he wrote that “one could not survive it.” Born in California in 1876, on a warm January day, he began traveling when he was sixteen. First to Japan, on the schooner Sophie Sutherland, and—in July of 1897—to the Canadian Yukon. Like tens of thousands of other would-be prospectors, he did not arrive until the summer of 1898, malnourished and stricken with scurvy. He likened snow to a “silent assassin” that could “slit a man’s throat.” Since she’d read this, scrawled in Alan’s hand, flat on his desk as she waited for the police, Diane had welcomed snow in all forms. It was silencing. You could hear it hush the neighborhood, even the traffic on Lexington Avenue a few blocks away, like it’d come from behind and put its hand over the city’s mouth. Alan had written this between a list called “Curious Parasitoids” and a quote copied out from the New York Times: “Louise McPherson, head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a participant in the study, said that examination of dead bees had found residues of more than 100 chemicals, insecticides and pesticides.” Alone with his remains, she couldn’t decide if her husband was a genius or a madman. She kicked his leg and called him a fucking idiot, and she kicked him again until it no longer felt like kicking a person, someone who might kick back. It was just an object on the floor.

  His office was how he’d left it. The gun was now emptied of bullets and returned to the bottom drawer, against the investigator’s advice, against her mother’s wishes, against her own sense of self-preservation. But she would never go that far. She knew that the moment she found him. Standing over his body, she’d looked into the future to see if she too could end her life. Instead, the future conceded to Heather and Colin, standing just outside, and Paul somewhere upstairs making a noise she’d never heard. She left the gun in his hand and waited for the police. He’s gone, she wanted to say when she let them in—or, Help him—but she only shook her head.

  Almost every night she went to bed early, carrying her pillow and her blanket to the couch. It was snow, or the thought of snow, that kept her asleep until morning, even when it wasn’t falling. It wasn’t until spring came, quickly with a week of forty-degree rainy days, that she began to worry. She’d always loved spring and its morning thunderstorms, its birds you heard on the way to work. Even though she’d given up gardening for motherhood, she loved spying on the neighbors in their flowerbeds, wiping their gloves on old jeans, cradling geraniums or snapdragons like infant animals as they untangled their braided roots. But that spring, watching them trade spades or boxes of growth hormones, putting words to their silent bickering—she felt cheated. She no longer slept through the night.

  As they approached summer she still woke up sobbing three nights a week. Against the May sunshine and evening warmth, her grief was suddenly abnormal, and her friend Shannon came armed with the name of a therapist.

  “What can a therapist say that you can’t?” Diane asked, moving her mug in a gentle circle to watch the coffee inside try to catch up. They had brewed their usual Sunday-night decaf and sat with the windows open.

  “You’d be surprised at what they come up with,” Shannon said. “When me and Frank were fighting a few years ago—nonstop, you remember—we tried it out. It wasn’t like he knew something we didn’t, but without him it might not’ve worked. They’re just good listeners.”

  She tried to be patient as Shannon listed on her fingers what was left of Diane’s life as though symptoms of a common infection. “You haven’t stopped smoking,” she said after Colin came into the room to light her cigarette. “You’re spending how much a week on this? Without your husband’s income?” Diane rubbed her hand on Colin’s shoulder as he slipped the lighter back into his pocket, hoping he wasn’t ashamed for supporting his mother’s habit. But he wasn’t ashamed. She could tell by the way he raced to find her, every time she called to him, and even when she didn’t—even when the crinkling cellophane was enough.

  “I’ll quit eventually. I know it’s stupid.”

  “You’re still sleeping on the couch. It’s been—” Shannon looked down at her coffee. It was clear she knew how a word like months could be offensive, just like weeks. Right then, Diane felt like years would be offensive, or decades. A lifetime. “I don’t know,” Shannon said. She took a sip of her coffee. “Are you still missing a lot of work?”

  It was hard to get people like Shannon to understand. Diane would talk about things like the kids, her job at the plant, how the car took three turns to start on a cold morning, her trays of makeup in the bedroom. These were things that hadn’t changed. Everything, except one thing, had stayed the same. “That’s the cruelest thing of all,” she’d tried to tell Shannon. “Talk about God’s mysteries.” Even now, on the way to therapy that very afternoon, she had the wind knocked out of her by the sight of a maroon Oldsmobile with rings of rust around the wheel wells. In high school she’d suffered anxiety attacks; a grief attack wasn’t all that different. Her vision glossed over and she missed her exit, one hand on the wheel as she dug through the glove compartment for a napkin. By the time she turned around and got back on the freeway everything around her looked strange, as if she’d never been there before, and she was no longer bound by love.

  Just as she began to grow impatient, shuffling through the leftover issues of National Geographic on the table next to her, a man emerged from the hallway across the room and smiled at her as he passed. He approached the receptionist, who surrendered Diane’s clipboard without a word. As he looked over it he touched the upper ridge of his right ear. Diane saw him gently fold the cartilage there, like a girl testing a flower petal’s strength. When he’d read enough, or had come to some conclusion, he returned the clipboard to the receptionist. Diane looked away as though she’d been caught peeking into a window.

  “Diane?”

  As she turned to face him she arched her eyebrows as though surprised. “Yes,” she said. She saw that he was tall and growing a beard, that he wore glasses, his hair more grey than not. He wasn’t that different from the man she had imagined, and this disappointed her.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” she said.

  “You don’t have to thank me.” He waved his hand. “After all, let’s not forget that it’s you who’s paying me. So I guess I should thank you for coming.”

  Diane forced a laugh and looked at her shoes. The whole thing seemed like a waste of time, despite the week spent thinking it over. That same Sunday, she told Shannon there was no way. “Can you imagine me sitting on some couch blathering on about my life? It’s so self-involved.” She laughed, then laughed at how her laugh sounded fake. “Sorry. That’s just not me.”

  She’d been saying that a lot—that something wasn’t her, that she wasn’t something. It was a convenient way to stay at home or be alone. What she couldn’t figure out was the mysterious something that would fit into her life. What was that word, Diane, supposed to represent?

  “Come this way,” the therapist said. His office walls were mostly bare, like he’d just moved in, and the only significant thing in the room, other than his metal desk, was a round table with two cushioned aluminum chairs. There was a small bookcase in the corner, its shelves cluttered by models of classic cars.

  “Have a seat.” He pointed to the far side of the table, next to a box of tissues.

  She nodded and eased into the chair. She kept her eyes on his hands, watched them center a large legal pad on the table in front of him, watched them lay a black pen parallel to the top binding. A waste of time and money, she was thinking, even though she’d finally received, just last week after a long battle, the insurance check for Alan’s life. All those zeroes, and for the first time in her life she couldn’t think of a single thing to spend them on.

  He looked up and she met his gaze. “My name is Tim Jacobson,” he said. “This whole process works much better if you call me Tim.” He smiled.

  Diane only nodded. His eyes were brown with a green tint. A tooth in the corner of h
is mouth was discolored and eerily matched his eyes.

  “That was just a joke back there,” he said. “About payment. Sometimes it doesn’t go over well. I should really stop using it.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “So.” He placed his hands on the table. “So I understand you’ve lost someone.”

  Diane looked over her fingers, searching for imperfections, uncultivated cuticles, uneven nails, the importance of which seemed suddenly imbalanced with everything else in her life. I could be doing laundry, she thought, running her thumb across the nail of the other.

  “Diane, why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

  She placed her hands flat on the table, a mirror image of Tim. “I have three kids.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Heather is the oldest.” She pursed her lips as she scraped the top of her mouth with her tongue. “Paul is in the middle. He’s autistic. Colin is the youngest.”

  “That sounds like quite the family,” Tim said. “Does everyone get along?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Is this important?”

  “It could be.”

  “Maybe Heather and I don’t get along. I don’t know what the hell to say to her. But I guess I don’t know what to say to Colin, either, so maybe I’m totally clueless.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Heather’s seventeen,” she said. “Almost eighteen. So that makes Colin…” She looked at the ceiling. That she sat there calculating embarrassed her. “He’s thirteen.”

  “That’s a tough age, thirteen. Is he starting to go his own way?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. Except he wants to see his grandfather. My father. Something I don’t really approve of.” Her neck cracked as she turned her head to look at the wall, and for the first time she realized the room had no windows. She imagined Colin going his own way, as Tim put it, screaming at her like Heather, calling her names and telling her she was ruining his life. “But that’s not why I’m here,” she said.

  “I know that. At least, I know a little.”

  She looked down at the table.

  “May I ask who?”

  Diane was silent. She arched her fingers with a slow grace and flattened them again, stretched out against the fake wood.

  He’d always liked her hands, Alan.

  “Diane, if you’d rather—”

  “My husband.” She let the word settle into the room’s vulnerable spots. It still tasted like ash. “He went downstairs and shot himself one night, last fall, while everyone was home.” A smile crossed her lips and she shook her head, almost like she’d malfunctioned, just for a second. She closed her eyes. “I don’t know what to do or what to say or what to think and that’s why I’m paying you.” There was a sound like a ruined bell as her voice cracked on the final word. When she opened her eyes she focused on Tim’s hands. They reached for the pen but pulled away.

  Her heart kept beating. It wasn’t like she expected it to stop, but she noticed how it didn’t. She looked down, ashamed for smiling, a moment ago. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Tim looked at her and took a long breath. When he spoke he articulated each word as though giving instructions. “I’m sorry this happened. You say you don’t know what to do—that’s good. To be honest, there wouldn’t be many people in your position who would know what to do.” He put his hand over his mouth and looked at her, then let it fall back to his lap. “Death is a part of life, but it also puts a huge dent in it. The death of someone you love is hard, but it isn’t fatal to family and friends. You’re still here, Diane, and you’ll see there’s still a lot of life left to live. You might not see it right now. I’d be surprised if you saw it right now. But you will.”

  She put her hands on her kneecaps and tried to hold them still. The clock on the wall made her silence feel incriminating, and she exhaled and looked at the legal pad. She no longer felt vulnerable. She felt like saying something funny, maybe making fun of his office or asking what was wrong with his secretary. Who wears sweaters with cats on them? she wanted to ask, then thought again that she shouldn’t be here. His speech sounded canned, as though for someone’s grandmother who’d passed away in her sleep. That’s what he was used to, she could tell—Tim’s patients’ loved ones just passed away. It was their time. She shook her head and reached for a tissue, her eyes suddenly wet. “This is just a lot to deal with. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. We’ll get to those things soon enough.” Tim picked up the pen and tapped it against his temple. “Let’s just take it easy today. Tell me more about your kids.”

  Diane wadded the damp tissue in her hand. “Colin is such a sweetheart,” she said, scanning the room for a wastebasket. When she saw it under his desk she tossed the tissue and swore when it landed on the carpet. She stood up and threw it away with a petulant flick of her wrist. “I think he thinks he has to protect me,” she said as she sat down. “Like he’s the man of the house or whatever. I mentioned Paul? Autistic? It’s very sweet, the thing with Colin. I just wish he’d forget about his grandfather.”

  “What’s the issue there?”

  Diane touched the back of her hand and traced a vein, alarmed at how far it protruded from its place under her skin. “I don’t”—she frowned and shook her head—“I don’t want him around my kids. He has no sense of how to raise a child.” She thought of her weak moment, right after the service, when she let Colin ride over to the cemetery with her father. She kept wondering what they talked about, what he told her son that made him want to spend more time with him, why Colin was so adamant. He’d asked her twice each week since November to drive him over to her father’s house. He’d begged her to invite him over for Christmas, even though Christmas was nothing special. They hadn’t even wrapped their presents.

  “I take it you had difficulty growing up with him?”

  She looked at him like she’d been interrupted. “What do you mean by difficulty? It’s not like he beat me or anything.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Tim wrote something on the pad. “We don’t have to into that right now. I made a note. We’ll go back to it sometime. Just tell me more about how this affects your son. You think he’ll feel the same way you did?”

  “I don’t see how he couldn’t.”

  “A child’s relationship with his grandparents is very different from the one he has with his parents. Grandparents are there to share their knowledge, or wisdom, as some people call it. Parents are there for protection. Guardians. That’s not set in stone, but that’s usually how it works. Across a lot of cultures, actually.”

  “And?”

  Tim shifted his weight. Diane was glad she’d made him uncomfortable. “My point is, your father’s impression on you might be very different from his impression on…”

  “Colin.”

  “Colin. He might view your father as someone entirely different.”

  Diane looked at the calendar across the room. There was nothing written on it—no days crossed off and no reminders in the little boxes. It made him seem fake. A real therapist would listen more closely. He wouldn’t forget Colin’s name. She cleared her throat and sat up straight. “I don’t think he should spend time with him. You don’t know him the way I do, so I don’t know how you can say these things.”

  Tim nodded. “That’s fair. I’m not here to push you. I understand that you know him better than I do. If you’re truly not comfortable, I’m sure it’s the right decision. It’s usually your heart that knows what’s best. I will say, though, that no one ever grew by staying comfortable.” He smiled and reached for his pen. “Tell me about Paul.”

  Diane pursed her lips and looked him in the eye, trying to make him uncomfortable again, but she’d lost her power. This is stupid, she thought as he kept smiling. Her insurance would only cover the first ten sessions of therapy, no matter where she went. The clock kept ticking, asking he
r to say something. She thought of all the phone calls she could make, the therapists she could seek out who could actually help her. She wished she’d done her research and not taken Shannon at her word. Tim was still waiting, though his smile had begun to shrink. It would be a long hour.

  “Paul is autistic,” she said as though he’d forgotten.

  The strongest recorded earthquake occurred near Lumaco, in southern Chile, on May 22, 1960. Its name—the Valdivia earthquake—comes from the city it most devastated. It’s possible that Valdivia weathered the earthquake itself, holding on as it buckled roads and toppled churches, but there are no photographs that show the disaster before the proceeding tsunami, which, only an hour later, scraped away whatever hope the survivors had with thirty-foot walls of water and debris. In photos taken after the tsunami, the houses still standing have to lean against one another. Bent parking meters reach out of the rubble like the dactyli of dead squid. Fishing trawlers are docked in the cracked streets and cars look to be gliding down man-made canals. Casualty counts are in the thousands but there are no bodies. Outside of Valdivia, centuries-old Spanish forts crumbled into the ocean, landslides turned farmland into swamps, and the region’s electrical and utility systems collapsed, leaving Valdivia without drinkable water for weeks. The waves continued across the ocean to Hawaii, killing 61, and Japan, killing 142. Two days later, nearby Cordón Caulle erupted and fed the sky with ash for two months. Today, from Ruta T350, you can still see the mast of the cargo vessel Canelos, brought under by the waves. During the earthquake, the village of Toltén vanished altogether.

  Four years later, 143 died in Anchorage, Alaska, after a 9.2 earthquake struck the region. Tsunamis measuring up to twenty-seven feet affected several other Alaskan villages, as well as British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii, and Japan. Evidence of the earthquake—the second most powerful in history—has been noted on seismographs all over the earth.