Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 39
“Your father’s not home,” she said. “I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
I was confused. I knew my father had wanted to see me off—we’d talked about it only a few days before. I assumed that he had forgotten I was coming by. In the last year, he’d often forgotten when we had plans. I wasn’t surprised, exactly, but something about it still didn’t seem right. Directly above where my grandmother and I stood, the sound of a radio came through the open window of my father’s bedroom.
I shrugged at Gam, pretending not to care. “Okay, then, I guess tell him to call me later.” I moved toward her for a hug, and she put her arms around me stiffly. When I turned to leave, I heard the door close. I walked down the path and down the stairs to the driveway, got on my bike, and rode home. I left for school the next day. Dad never called me.
I was watching a movie in the brand-new auditorium of the Ethel Walker School when the projector went dark and the lights came up. The students were there to watch The Other Side of the Mountain, an uplifting story about an Olympic skier who becomes paralyzed in a skiing accident. Instead, The Other Side of Midnight—a decidedly different kind of movie with an early rape scene—had been ordered. The faculty were in a bit of a tumult trying to figure out what to do next, while we students thought it was hysterical.
As I sat talking and laughing with some kids from my dorm, I saw Diane Dunn, a phys ed teacher, making her way through the crowd. Dunn was also a counselor at the sailing camp I went to every summer, so I’d known her since I was a little kid. To everyone else at Walker’s, she was Miss Dunn, which I found impossible to wrap my head around. At camp she was Dunn and I was Trump, and that’s what we continued to call each other. She was largely responsible for my having decided to go to this boarding school, and after I had been there for only two weeks, she was still the only person I really knew.
When she waved me over, I smiled and said, “Hey, Dunn.”
“Trump, you need to call home,” she said. She had a piece of paper in her fist but didn’t give it to me. She looked flustered.
“What’s up?”
“You need to call your mother.”
“Right now?”
“Yes. If she isn’t home, call your grandparents.” She was speaking to me as if she’d memorized the lines.
It was almost 10:00 p.m., and I had never called my grandparents so late, but my dad and grandmother were both in the hospital pretty frequently—Dad due to his years of heavy drinking and smoking, and Gam’s tendency to break bones fairly often because of her osteoporosis. So I wasn’t really worried—or, rather, I didn’t think it was anything more serious than usual.
My dorm was adjacent to the auditorium, so I went outside, crossed the oval lawn between them, and climbed the two flights of stairs to my floor. The pay phone hung on the stairwell wall on the landing right next to the door.
I placed a collect call to my mother, but there was no answer, so I dialed the House. Gam answered and accepted the charges—so the emergency wasn’t about her. After a quick, muffled “Hello,” she immediately handed the phone to my grandfather.
“Yes,” he said, brisk and businesslike as usual. For a moment, it was easy to believe that there had been a mistake, that nothing was really wrong. But then something had been urgent enough for me to be pulled out of the auditorium. I had also seen the way Dunn’s eyes had widened in panic as she looked for me in the auditorium. It would only occur to me much later that she already knew.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Your mother just left,” he said. “She should be home in a few minutes.” I could picture him in the poorly lit library standing next to the telephone table wearing his starched white shirt, red tie, and navy blue three-piece suit, impatient to be done with me.
“But what’s wrong?”
“Your father has been taken to the hospital, but it’s nothing to worry about,” he said as though reporting the weather.
I could have hung up then. I could have gone back to trying to fit in with my new classmates at my new school.
“Is it his heart?” It was unheard of for me—for anyone but Donald—to challenge my grandfather in any way, but there was obviously a reason I’d been told to call.
“Yes.”
“Then it’s serious.”
“Yes, I would say it’s serious.” There was a pause during which, perhaps, he was deciding whether to tell me the truth. “Go to sleep,” he said finally. “Call your mother in the morning.” He hung up.
I stood there in the stairwell with the phone in my hand, not knowing quite what to do. A door slammed on the floor above me. Footsteps followed, growing louder. A couple of students passed me on their way to the first floor. I put the receiver back into the cradle, picked it up, and tried my mother again.
This time she answered the phone.
“Mom, I just spoke to Grandpa. He told me Dad’s in the hospital, but he wouldn’t tell me what’s going on. Is he okay?”
“He had a heart attack,” my mother said.
From the moment she spoke, time took on a different quality. Or maybe it was the next moment, which I don’t remember, and the effect of the shock was retroactive. Either way, my mother kept talking but I didn’t hear any of the words she said. As far as I could tell, there was no gap in the conversation,