Christy Stillwell
The Bertrams were on our flight to Seattle. We pretended not to see each other in the gate area and they boarded before us. They were seated in first class, so we had to pass them. My husband stared, daring them to look up, but they didn’t.
Two weeks ago, their son side swiped our son’s car. The incident was handled poorly but it wasn’t the reason we ceased being friends. That came after the events of last year. We were never best friends, but we had been out for pizza and beer. Without the kids. Twice. It was a shame because at our age, friends are hard to come by.
In Seattle we had an hour to kill before our flight to New Zealand, our first time ever crossing the dateline. We browsed in the leather shop and saw the Bertrams again. We decided to order sushi at Koi Shi. The Bertrams were at the other end of the bar. Boarding for Christchurch, my husband stopped in his tracks. There, handing over their boarding passes, were the Bertrams.
“What are the odds?” he muttered. The odds were low. Very low. Yet there they were walking down the ramp before us. Again they were seated in first class, lounging in the pod chair-beds. Jerry Bertram saw us coming down the aisle and slammed his magazine shut, a kerfuffle of pages in his lap. His face turned red. Briefly, excruciatingly, my husband stopped in the aisle. The two men glared at one another. I don’t like it when my husband reminds me of my puffed up, high blood-pressured father, who was easily enraged. In the exact same way my mother might have done, I put my hand on my husband’s back to signal he should move on.
Seated, we did not discuss the strange coincidence. I opened my book but could not concentrate on the words. I was a little afraid. Maybe they had been in our house, seen the guidebooks on the living room side tables. Or they had placed listening devices and knew how excited we were to get away after all the difficulty with our son.
“You have too many cars in the first place,” Jerry Bertram said to me after the side swiping. “Your son parked ten inches from the curb. He was probably drunk.”
This was a reference to the DUI Ben got last year. The side-swiping incident brought up all that unpleasantness. On the phone Jerry went so far as to say that we ought to pay for the damage to his son’s Jeep. A missing side mirror and scratched up paint. Jerry said the body work would cost at least three grand.
“Ben’s car was parked,” I said. Ben did not drive, having lost his license, a fact I didn’t feel I wanted to mention. I did not think we should have to pay for what Jerry’s son had done to a parked car. I thought we should pay for what our son had done. I just did not know for how long.
In Christchurch baggage claim we waited on opposite sides of the carousel like civil adults. My husband and I went to the bathroom to change out of our warm clothes and when we came out in our short-sleeved T-shirts, the Bertrams had gone. “Well, that’s over then,” my husband said. I didn’t like him saying that. I didn’t want to acknowledge that it had happened, so I could pretend that it hadn’t. But I did relax a little. A tightness in my chest loosened. I thought maybe it was going to be okay. Then we got on the bus to the resort and there sat the Bertrams. There were no seats left except the two facing Jerry and Tam, which we did not take. Instead we walked to the back and stood, holding the bar, swaying with every turn.
I was glad Ben was not with us. We had invited him, but only out of politeness. We needed time away, an actual vacation, days when we did not discuss him or think about him. To think about Ben was to worry about Ben.
He was arrested after a car accident out on Cottonwood Road. He rolled a friend’s Toyota 4Runner. Four people were in the vehicle, including Finn Bertram, Jerry and Tam’s son. Finn’s face was ripped open, all down the right side. He was scarred for life. Another classmate, Patrick Collier, was thrown from the car. He was in ICU for two weeks and when he came out, he had lost his left eye. The other two were not seriously injured. The vehicle was totaled.
Though we were never religious, Ben prayed for one-eyed Patrick Collier. We witnessed this. In the early days Ben needed us to tuck him in as when he was six years old. He would kneel under his window, hands together, lips moving. Our son visited Patrick Collier in ICU every day. He sat in the waiting room enduring the family’s grim looks, everyone hating him. When Patrick woke up and it was clear he would live, our son brought him flowers. And when he went home, our son brought him pizza. They played video games over the computer, building worlds and shooting zombies in Minecraft. Both finished high school online and when Patrick left for college our son insisted we pay one semester of his tuition as retribution. Ben did not go to college. He took the bus to and from Target, where he stocked shelves. He intended to pay off the debt for Patrick’s tuition and medical bills, as well as Finn Bertram’s medical bills. He also wanted to pay for the totaled truck. He spoke of apprenticing with a plumber, which seemed sadly appropriate to me. Pipes and waste. He would become an underground person.
***
Our room at the resort was superb, a king bed overlooking the back of the property which was all forest. We showered and changed without a word about the Bertrams or where their room was or if we’d see them at every meal. It was afternoon, two days after we’d left home. An entire day of our lives had vanished in the air. Is that why this is happening, I wondered. Perhaps we were not in the actual time calendar, but had slipped into the lost day when we crossed that mysterious line around the planet. Perhaps it was not an arbitrary line. Perhaps it was very specific and purposeful, a kind of time pocket that some moved through while others, like us and the Bertrams, got caught inside. Our vacations would be had inside this alternate universe, a place where coincidences like this could happen.
Ridiculous. Yet so was the fact that we came across the world and found ourselves at the same resort with the two people we would least like to see. There was no accounting for it, as there was no accounting for the last year of our lives. The sharp turn our son’s life had taken and our struggles to adjust. We fought about what we should say to him, how often to bring it up, what was fair and what was too much. We argued bitterly about paying Patrick’s tuition; we had already paid his medical bills. My husband wanted to retire and this seemed possible if Ben wasn’t going to college, but not if we were paying for Patrick’s first year at a private school back east. I took a full-time job. Neither of us could imagine a future in which all of this had died down.
We elected to stay awake until seven to adjust to the time lapse. We ordered margaritas at the tiki bar and set up chairs by the pool, one in the shade for me, in the sun for him. I wasn’t the least surprised when I looked over and saw the Bertrams sitting by the same pool. They wore sunglasses and were looking at us just as we were looking at them. A table between them held cocktails just as the table between us held cocktails. After a long moment, I lifted my hand in a half-wave. Tam half-waved back. The women ambassadors.
Jerry Bertram’s head moved; in my peripheral I could see my husband’s head move. I got up.
“Don’t,” said my husband.
I ignored him. I did not wrap in a towel, didn’t even put on sandals. My soft body wiggled with every step. My feet burned on the cement; I had to step in and out of the pool gutter and my footprints were like proof this was happening, whatever it was.
I sat on the chair next to Jerry and said, “This is funny.”
“This is not a bit funny,” he said.
Tam peered around him. “The universe is trying to tell us—”
“The universe doesn’t give a shit,” hissed Jerry. “You and Mike will have to go stay somewhere else.”
“We most certainly will not!” shouted my husband.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Jerry.
“If you would just pay us for the damage to the Jeep,” said Tam, looking at me. “I think that would settle it.”
“We are not paying for your son hitting a parked vehicle,” boomed my husband.
I sat watching this shouting exchange and wondered how on earth we would get to what mattered. I wasn’t sure it was possible.
Turning his red face to me, speaking loudly enough for my husband to hear, Jerry said: “Our son is disfigured. Another boy was nearly killed. I think the least you can do is pay for the Jeep.”
“We paid your medical bills,” called my husband. He was out of his chair now, hands on his hips. “We are trying to get on with our lives. Heal.”
“How about our boy?” cried Jerry.
“We are sorry for the accident,” I said. I was dehydrated from the flight so my voice was thick and husky. Even I was surprised by it. “We are sorry for his scar and we are sorry about Patrick.”
“You should be sorry,” Jerry said to me. “Your son should be in jail.”
Hearing this, my husband ripped off his sunglasses and came marching around the pool. What little hair he had left stood on end. His face was so red it looked brown. His hands were in fists. I stood to prevent him from coming closer. His shadow fell across the Bertrams.
“It was an accident!” he yelled, pointing. “We don’t want you blaming him for the rest of his life. What we want, all we have ever wanted, is for you to leave us alone.”
Is that what we wanted? I wanted for it never to have happened. Any of it. I wanted that time back. I wanted to know what Ben might have become had there not been any accident. I put my hands on my hips and opened my mouth as if I was about to speak but nothing came out. This was it, what was supposed to happen, what was meant to happen. Some dark irony brought the four of us to the same pool in New Zealand so that this precise thing could happen. I recalled Ben lying in bed with his head on my lap as I scratched his back, eighteen years old, a grown man needing to be coaxed to sleep. And I knew the answer to my question about how long we pay for what our son had done. Forever.
The doors to the lobby burst open and a child came running towards the pool carrying a ring shaped like a duck. An angry set of parents came storming out after him, the mother with an armful of towels, the father carrying his phone. They were both shouting at the boy to wait, to stay out of the water, don’t you dare—
But he jumped.
He was small, not more than five years old. His little legs scissored the air; his mouth was open in a naughty grin. The pool ring flew from his arms and he sunk. It was astonishing, his lack of buoyancy, as though he were made of stone.
Several things happened at once. The Bertrams leapt out of their chairs; all four of us ran to the water’s edge. The bartender came running over. The mother shrieked and dropped the towels as the father tossed his phone and dove in. He had the boy and was back to the surface before she stopped screaming. Up the ladder he climbed, the boy gasping and coughing under his arm. The mother dropped to her knees, holding out her arms but the father sat the boy up on a chair and clapped him on the back a few times. Breathe, just breathe, the father was saying.
“Some people shouldn’t have children,” Jerry said.
My husband turned sharply, thinking the comment was aimed at us. Maybe it was. Maybe we shouldn’t have. It was remarkable, what children could do to people. All these bad feelings were because of our boys, no longer friends, living lives separate from ours, on an entirely different day.
“The tragedy is,” I said, “they think this is as bad as it can get.”
I turned to find them all looking at me. Tam’s mouth was open. Jerry’s eyebrows were slightly elevated. My husband with his thinning hair, his bright eyes full of sorrow.
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Christy Stillwell’s first novel, The Wolf Tone, won the 2017 Elixir Press Fiction Prize. Stillwell holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, an MA from University of Wyoming and a BA from University of Georgia. Her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Literary Mama, The Tishman Review, Hypertext, Salon, and Subtropics. She has received a residency at Vermont Studio Center and Chateau Orquevaux. Learn more at http://www.christystillwell.com.