Free Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett Page B

to Mom telling him it would be okay, that he would meet people and it would get better. That was when the two of us had still played together with Kelsey on Sundays, steering her into the same room as the white Persian cat that had come with the house, so we could watch them fight. But now Michael usually went into Oxford to go record shopping instead. And during the week he didn’t get home until suppertime, and always studied afterwards.
    “Where’s Dad?” I asked, fiddling with the shoelace.
    “In bed,” Michael said. “Where, of late, he is wont to be.”
    “Why does he sleep so much?”
    “I guess because he’s tired,” Michael said. “Very tired. Apparently unemployment will do that to you.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “He picks you up from school, doesn’t he? Did he ever do that before?”
    Dad had started coming to get me from school in the last month, in the blue Skoda wagon. On the way home, on the straightaway of the country road, he’d speed up to eighty or ninety miles an hour, and then shift the car into neutral and turn the engine off. We’d swoop into the valley, freewheeling through the open fields, seeing how far we could get, if we could make it all the way to the pub at the bridge, until we were going only a few miles an hour and cars behind us were honking and passing.
    “He’s not still in there, is he?” Mom said, agitated now. “This is ridiculous. Where’s your father? Michael, get your father.”
    I leaped to the sink and put my clothes on. And then went to the door, and was about to slide the lock open but I didn’t. I waited. For Dad’s footsteps on the ceiling above me. For the sound of him moving in their bedroom. He would have to get up now. He’d have no choice. And then I heard him on the stairs, and heard his voice just on the other side of the door.
    “Alec?”
    “Yeah?”
    “What’s the trouble, then?”
    “The lock. It’s jammed.”
    He walked out of the hall without saying anything and came back a moment later, and I heard a scraping at the base of the door, and saw the tips of a pair of pliers. But they wouldn’t fit through the crack. He got up again and returned with a smaller pair, which he slid through to me.
    I clasped them to the knob and scraped them along the metal.
    “You have to squeeze,” he said.
    I stopped the scraping and made a little grunt. “It doesn’t work,” I said. “It’s still stuck.”
    “For God’s sake,” Mom said, charging back in. “The food’s on the table.”
    “Open the fucking door,” Celia said.
    “You will not use that language,” Mom said.
    All four of them were there now, and Kelsey, too. Dad didn’t say anything.
    The blood was pumping in my ears.
    “That’s it, then?” Mom said to Dad. “You’ve got nothing else to offer?”
    “Alec,” he said. “Step back, step away from the door.”
    “What are you doing, John?”
    “I’m going to break it down,” he said.
    “No!” I said. “Wait, let me try again.” And I grabbed the pliers, biting the steel with them and yanking the bolt across.

John
    From the clearing in the woods, I can see down through the spruce trees to the river, where a long slab of rock parts the slow-moving waters covered now in morning shade. The rock is mute and still in the encroaching summer heat. It has the inhuman patience of objects. A reminder that mineral time does not care for sentiment, or life. Every human thing, a ruin in waiting. On a planet that is a ruin in waiting. Which says nothing about divinity, one way or the other. I only know that this trial is what has become of my sliver of time.
      
    My great return to Britain was a great failure. There was a recession. Purposeful risk was a hard enough sell to my complacent countrymen. The declining market made them more cautious still. I did what I had told all the entrepreneurs I ever trained not to do: moved my family before I had sufficient commitments. These, at least, are some of the excuses Margaret