November 21, 2006
Chapter 18
(Filed under: The Novel)Monday morning was back to school.
"Spot any celebrities this weekend?" Lynn asked before biology class started.
"Does Mabel count?"
"Who?"
"Richmond's postal lady and gossip queen," Anwyn answered.
"Not unless she goes crazy and shoots the place up," Lynn said. "But she's probably the only employee, and if you don't kill anybody in your postal rampage I'm not sure that qualifies as criminal celebrity. No one ever got a made-for-TV movie just for shooting an empty building."
"But what about all those poor, innocent letters?" Anwyn asked.
"Oh, they'll be mourned, perhaps get a commemorative postage stamp, but I don't think that gives Mabel a TV movie," Lynn said. "Maybe an indie film starring Susan Sarandon."
"Why the questions about celebrities?" Anwyn asked.
"Sounded better than just asking how your weekend was," Lynn said with a shrug. "So, how was your weekend? See, it's just blah."
"Not much of a weekend anyway," Anwyn said. "More running and old folks visiting."
"Geez, you're really getting into this visiting thing," Lynn said. "Do you have a route? Do the Meals on Wheels folks know about you. They could save a lot of volunteers."
"Sorry, I don't drive yet," Anwyn said.
"Really, I thought—"
"Yeah, yeah," Anwyn interrupted. "I know everybody else in town my age already drives. I'm the poor city girl who always took the bus and never needed a license to drive as a farmhand."
"My bad," Lynn said, holding up her hands like she was innocent. "It is one of our redeeming qualities so I had to make sure you knew. But no matter, the Meals on Wheels folks can get you to do the visiting and Oliver to do the driving. I'm sure he wouldn't mind."
"No, probably not."
"Prom material," Lynn said. "Totally."
"So how about you," Anwyn said. "Did you spot any celebrities this weekend?"
"I saw Chet Dahlman hanging out at the Carver Cemetery on Saturday. He's the guidance counselor, right? That's kind of celebrity-like."
"Yeah," Anwyn said, remembering sitting in his office on her first day at Howe High School. "He's the guidance counselor. What was he doing in the cemetery?"
"I don't know, looking at gravestones?"
"What were you doing in the cemetery?" Anwyn asked.
"Putting flowers at grave of my sister—she killed herself. Tragic, really." Lynn held a straight face and Anwyn started giggling.
"That's not funny," Anwyn said, finally controlling her giggles.
"No, it's not. I should have told you earlier," Lynn said.
"I said I was sorry about that."
"I know, I just have to rub it in," Lynn said. "No, I live next to the cemetery."
"Creepy," Anwyn said.
"Sometimes," Lynn said. "Makes Halloween a lot more fun."
Anwyn just nodded, wondering about Chet Dahlman and graves and her sister.
"What does her tombstone say?" Ms. Jonas had asked during one of her counseling sessions with Anwyn back at St. Paul Western High School.
"I don’t know," Anwyn said, shaking her head and staring blankly at the wall behind Ms. Jonas. This was one of the early sessions, and it usually took Ms. Jonas at least 15 minutes to break through Anwyn's resistance and get her to talk.
"Sometimes tombstones don't sum up a person's life very well," Ms. Jonas said. "If you could have written the words, what would you write?"
Anwyn shrugged. But her mind started turning.
"C'mon," Ms. Jonas urged. "What would it say? 'Beloved daughter, sister and friend'? Or maybe 'Annoyed Older Sister'? Or how about 'Threw her potential down the toilet'?" Anwyn finally smiled and Ms. Jonas stopped pushing.
"I think the tombstone said something about potential," Anwyn finally said. "I don't really remember it. My dad picked it out. I think he thought it was kind of lame, but he didn't have much time and my mom was usually better at that type of stuff. And, well, she was kind of useless at the time. Still is."
Ms. Jonas waited a minute to see if Anwyn would elaborate on her mother, but she didn't.
"That's what I mean," Ms. Jonas said. "Often the words on tombstones are hastily chosen. So what would you say? Write a few things down, see what feels right." She handed Anwyn a yellow legal pad and a purple marker.
Anwyn sat back and thought and thought.
"It doesn't have to be profound or permanent or public," Ms. Jonas said. "Nobody has to see it. Write one or a dozen. Just think about your sister and how you'd want to remember her."
Anwyn put the marker to the paper and wrote, 'Isabelle Miller' across the top. She paused and then started scrawling several potential tombstone messages:
"Selfish daughter, sister and friend. Killed herself."
"She did what she wanted. Including dying."
"Killed herself, but ruined my family."
"Suicide. Nobody cared."
She finally pushed the legal pad back on to Ms. Jonas' desk.
"Can I read them?" Ms. Jonas asked before touching it. Anwyn nodded and Ms. Jonas picked up the legal pad and read over Anwyn's epitaphs. Then she set the pad down on the desk.
"How'd that feel?" Ms. Jonas asked.
"Good," Anwyn said.
"It's OK to be angry with your sister."
"I know," Awnyn said. "Sometimes it just doesn't feel like it, though. I'm supposed to be mopey and depressed and what people expect when your sister commits suicide."
"Is that what they expect?"
"Maybe," Anwyn said. "I don’t know. It just feels wrong being happy."
"It's not," Ms. Jonas said. "Isabelle killed herself. She didn't kill you."
Anwyn remembered writing those epitaphs in Ms. Jonas' office and later talking to her about feeling bad for writing them. She remembered thinking she should go back to Isabelle's grave and read the actual words, but she could never bring herself to do it.
Mr. Craven's introduction to cellular biology cut off Anwyn's bantering with Lynn and her recollections of St. Paul counseling sessions. But later in the day it would come back to her.
"Today we're running the mile," Mr. Graves shouted to the class after blowing his whistle. There were a few quiet groans in the back, but the gym teacher ignored them. Anwyn shifted her feet and stretched her neck to the left and then the right. They ran a decent warm up every day in gym class and then moved on to a game or whatever physical test Mr. Graves was required to put the students through. They'd apparently been building up to the mile for the past few months.
Mr. Graves led the class out to the football field encircled with a running track. The class of a dozen students followed behind, few talking. Anwyn was in the middle of the back, not talking to anyone. She usually didn't. She found she usually ran and played harder than most of the girls, which was something she experienced in St. Paul as well. It just meant she didn't connect with the girls while jogging slowly at the back of the pack. So she had yet to connect at all. Missy was in this class, the excitable pillar of school spirit that had shown Anwyn around on her first day. Everyday she's wave at Anwyn and make some attempt to talk to her, but she did the same with everybody. Anwyn didn't think of it as much of a connection.
Mr. Graves barked out instructions, how they'd have to run four laps around the track, how he's shout at times as they went, how they'd need to run each quarter mile in two minutes if they wanted to get a mile under eight minutes, a respectable mile for a bunch of untrained high school students.
The students started to line up and Mr. Graves called Anwyn over.
"I know you just moved here not too long ago," he started. "We've been training for this for a while, so if you want to sit out, it's OK. You can run it again before the end of the year."
"I can do it," Anwyn said.
"You sure?" Mr. Graves asked and she nodded, giving him a stern look. "OK, OK, I had to ask. Mr. Douglas told us all you were new and to take it easy on you. I didn't think a mile would be easy, so I thought I'd offer. But you're right, you always run hard in warm ups. Go get 'em,"
It was the kind of talk that could have ended with a pat on her butt, but that didn't happen in Kansas, no matter how white trash Lynn wanted to make it sound.
Anwyn lined up with the others and Mr. Graves blew his whistle and they all took off. It was still morning, the sun low in the sky and the dew still on the grass. Anwyn breathed in the air and felt the sky and the few puffs of clouds and could smell the freshly cut grass of the football field. The sky stretched in every direction around her, and she realized she loved that feeling. It made the world seem big, seem real, seem physical. It made her feel like she could run across the globe, to the very horizon.
She had broken away from the pack by the first corner and was now towards the front with a few boys in front of her and a couple stragglers behind her stretching back to a small clump of girls that constituted the pack.
Anwyn's thoughts jumped around as they always did when she ran. She thought of Isabelle. She thought of the boys she'd chased, Danny and what may or may not have happened with him at St. Paul Western High School on a Saturday; Nick, the terrifying boy from the library; Dominic Warren, the Kansas boy and victim of the underwear raid; Justin Crenshaw, a one-time crush and maybe nothing more. And maybe so much more. There were others. There were always others. Anwyn could remember other stories, other boys, other glimpses of Isabelle kissing a boy on the front porch before her dad flicked on the porch light and went back to his book with a sly grin.
But no matter how many instances Anwyn thought of, none of them gave her any more insight. None of them explained Isabelle's actions, none of them gave a reason or a pattern or a sense that something was wrong and dark and spiraling out of control.
Isabelle liked boys. What teenage girl didn't? She made a few dumb choices. What teenage girl didn't?
She thought of Oliver's words that simply asking for help could have saved a life. Would it have been that hard to ask? To cry out? Anwyn knew her father would have done anything. It really wouldn't have mattered what issue Isabelle had. Jack would have handled it with resolve and not erupted. Jill might have, but that wouldn't have mattered. Jack would have done what needed to be done.
And that was just it. Suicide didn't seem to want to do whatever needed to be done. It just wanted to escape. Isabelle permanently escaped something that could have easily been dealt with. So what made her think the easier route was so impossible?
The solutions didn't come to Anwyn. They never did come. She ran on, passing another boy and passing the halfway mark. Mr. Graves shouted out the times as they passed, well under the two minutes per quarter mile standard he had suggested, which was purely motivation and guilt for some of the crowd lagging back in the pack.
Anwyn thought about Isabelle's tombstone and the epitaphs she wrote in Ms. Jonas' office. Her dad had asked if she wanted to go back and visit Isabelle's grave before they moved. Anwyn just shook her head and her dad didn't say anything. He expected Anwyn not to want to go, and he went alone. He took a single flower, something he did every few months when he could stand to go. He always mentioned that he was going or gave some small hint to Jill—when she was around—and Anwyn in case either of them wanted to go. They never did.
Graveyards weren't exactly attractive to Anwyn. She wasn't sure how Lynn could handle living near one. And then she remembered her Grandpa Frank visiting a graveyard. It was probably the same one in Carver that Lynn lived next to. Anwyn and Isabelle waited in the car while Grandpa Frank got out—in the rain—and took a flower to a grave. He stood outside in the rain with nothing but a hat keeping the rain off. He came back to the car and they drove off, nobody saying anything.
As she finished the third lap and picked up the pace Anwyn guessed it had probably been Lily's grave. Her Grandpa Frank never said much about the trip, and he never said much about Lily. It was just a hunch, but it made sense.
And now another question nagged at Anwyn: How had Lily died? She tried to remember the story from what her dad had told her, but she just remembered that Lily had died when Jill was 10, and at the time Anwyn couldn't think about anything but the prospect of losing her own mother at 10 and what upheaval that would cause in her family. While Jill didn't die, Anwyn effectively lost her at 15, and it did cause upheaval.
Going into the final corner Anwyn finally shook the thoughts of Isabelle and Lily and death and graves and pushed harder, feeling her heart pounding and the blood coursing and seeing the sky stretch so far behind the finish line where Mr. Graves stood that she wanted to just run straight and not stop.
"6:04!" the gym coach cried in triumph when Anwyn crossed the line. She beat her last time by a good 20 seconds. She slowed to a walk and put her arms behind her head, sucking in the oxygen as fast as she could.
"Nice work, Miler," Mr. Graves said, turning away from his timer. Anwyn was far enough ahead of the next student that he didn't need to keep calling out times. "Another ten seconds and you would have beat Mr. Warren and been the best in the class."
The name clicked. Anwyn looked ahead and not ten feet in front of her, shaking his hands to relax them, was Dominic Warren.
Posted by kevin at November 21, 2006 10:26 PM
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