“What?”
“Drinking NyQuil and pills just because life got a little hard. You’re nothing but a coward!”
“You’re being abusive and downright insensitive.”
“You’re being a pussy!” she yells back, and then she hits me a dozen or so times until it feels like my face is going to bleed and my ears start to ring.
I start flashing back to the day of Edmond Atherton’s attack—experiencing it all again, my body flooding with anxiety, the sound of the aluminum bat breaking my bones, shattering my elbows and kneecaps like dinner plates, the hate in Edmond’s eyes—until I break down and start to weep and beg. “Please! Stop hitting me! Please! Just stop! I can’t take this happening again!”
I reach out to grab her like a hockey player trying to end a losing fight, and the next thing I know we’re both on the floor crying and our arms are around each other and she’s saying, “You can’t kill yourself because you’ll kill the best part of me,” which is a hell of a thing to say, and I’m saying, “Thank you,” over and over just because she’s stopped hitting me.
After we finish crying, we eventually stand and clean up the wine and pills together silently and then retire to my living room again, where we sit on the couch.
“I feel as though I should be calling someone,” Portia says, “because you are clearly a threat to yourself.”
“Maybe I should call the police and file assault charges, because you just broke into my home and beat the hell out of me.”
“Did you stop making Official Member of the Human Race Cards before the attack?”
“What? Why do you want to know that?”
“Just tell me.”
“I stopped in the late nineties, actually. It felt like a waste of time. I used to spend days making those cards, and half of them ended up on the floors just as soon as the bell rang. The last year I had enough energy for Official Member cards, I saw several students throw theirs directly into the wastebin on the way out of my classroom. They disposed of them right in front of my eyes! If they had spit in my face, I wouldn’t have felt as crestfallen.”
“Do you remember Chuck Bass?” she says, undaunted. “Class of ’eighty-eight?”
“How am I supposed to remember a name from two and a half decades ago when I taught thousands of—”
“He still carries his Official Member of the Human Race Card in his wallet. He graduated before I did, and he still reads the card daily. Every single day of the year he reads your words. Your efforts, your message—it’s gotten him through a lot. He hopes to tell you about it himself someday.”
I find that hard to believe—anyone reading that stupid card on a daily basis—but I must admit that it gives me a little thrill, arouses something deep within.
“Okay,” I say. “Sure, I’m glad that those cards helped a few people, but it takes a lot of energy to maintain a belief in—Why am I even trying to explain this to you? I should be dead by now.”
“And yet you’re not.”
“I am not dead. Correct.”
“Will you give me a chance to revive your spirit? Get you believing again?”
Her eyes are wide and hopeful enough to make me feel sorry for her.
I do not want to tell this little girl that there is no Santa Claus. Who would?
“I promised your mother,” she says. “And I intend to make good on that promise.”
“Then why did you leave earlier?”
“Because you were being an absolute bastard.”
“Why did you come back?”
“You’ve been good to me more times than you’ve been a bastard. You’re still in the plus column.”
Goddamn, she looks so hopeful, it’s killing me. “What do you propose, Ms. Kane?”
“Leave this place with me for a few days—just a few days. Allow me to take you on an adventure.”
“Will we be hunting for pirate treasure?”
“No, we’ll be hunting for you. The old you.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“It’s a surprise. You were just about to kill yourself. You have nothing to lose whatsoever! So why don’t we hit the road like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty? We can be fabulous Roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky!” she says, paraphrasing the naively enthusiastic Jack Kerouac poster I had hanging on my classroom wall back when she was a student, back when I myself was wildly naive. I resist the urge to tell her that Kerouac drank himself to death.
“Is your mother still alive?” I ask.
“Yes. Why?”
“I bet she’s still hoarding, right? Why don’t you go save her instead? Keep all of this happy namby-pamby business in the family?”
“Because she isn’t able to do what you can in the classroom. And not everyone can be saved.”
I laugh. “Ms. Kane, you sure know how to romanticize the past.”
“If you give me three days—just seventy-two hours—and at the end of it, you still don’t want to teach again, I’ll leave you alone forever.”
“If I give you but three little days, you’ll leave me the hell alone afterward? I’ll be able to kill myself in peace? No more interruptions? You promise?”
She nods.
“And you aren’t going to drive me to some psych ward and lock me away, right? Tell them I’m a threat to myself and throw away the key? I don’t want to end up in a straightjacket drugged out of my mind, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.”