Page 14 of Kill Your Darlings

July

i

“He’s dead,” Thom said.

“Who’s dead?”

“Alex.”

Wendy turned away from her computer to face Thom, who was standing in her office doorway. He’d been there five minutes earlier,

talking about his rejected American-lit-survey syllabus, when the phone rang and he’d gone to answer it, saying that it was

no doubt Alex, calling to explain his decision. Instead, he was back in the same spot, shirt untucked, telling Wendy that

Alex was dead. He seemed shocked, dazed almost.

“Wait, what? Alex Deighton?”

“I know. We were just talking about him. He drowned on one of his swims. This morning. That was Linda on the phone.”

“Oh my God,” Wendy said, standing up and walking toward her husband. “He drowned ?”

“Apparently. I’m... I don’t know what I am. I mean, as you know, I hate the motherfucker, but I also thought he’d be in my life forever, you know?”

“Of course. Of course.”

“I can’t...” Thom brought his fingers to his mouth, tapping at a lip, a habit he’d developed since finally quitting smoking

just under a year ago.

“What else did Linda say? When did it happen? How was she told?”

“Um, she just said, ‘Thom, I have some terrible news,’ and you know what I instantly thought? I thought that I was being fired.

Which is ridiculous, of course, because I can’t be fired, but my first thought was that Alex had found some way to do it.

And then she said that Alex was dead, and I think I said the words ‘Our Alex?’ which is strange, right, since who else would

it be?”

“He drowned?”

“Yes, you know how he swims every morning over at Blood Stone Quarry?”

“He never shuts up about it.”

“He never did, did he?” Thom smiled, and the act of smiling seemed to relax his whole body, his shoulders lowering, his hands

returning to his sides.

“Who found him?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even think to ask. Linda just told me that he’d been found dead at the quarry, and that—”

“Who’s dead?” Jason had wandered into the room, holding a comic book in one hand.

“Alex Deighton,” Thom said.

Jason made a face, keeping his lips together and lowering his chin, then said, “So... you’re happy?”

“No, I’m not happy, Jason. He died.”

Jason put up a hand and said, “Sorry. I mean... it’s not like you liked him, though. Right, Mom?”

“You can keep me out of this,” Wendy said, although she thought her son had a point.

“Just because I didn’t like him doesn’t mean that I’m happy he’s dead, Jason.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” The book he was carrying was a threadbare copy of Tintin in Tibet , his favorite. Wendy noticed that he was carrying it with a finger slid between its pages as though he’d come into her office

to show her something, probably an illustration he loved or a joke he thought was funny. At thirteen, Jason had suddenly started

rereading all his childhood favorites, despite the fact that he was on the cusp of puberty. It was a strange reversion.

“Is Linda calling everyone in the department?”

“That’s what she said.”

“You should call Marcia.”

“I should, shouldn’t I?”

“How’d he die?” Jason said.

“He drowned.”

“Are you serious? Where?”

“I didn’t get a lot of details, but you know the swimming quarry?”

“Which one?”

“Blood Stone. We went there once with Justine and her kids, remember?”

“He was five years old,” Wendy said.

“I remember,” Jason said. “There’s a car at the bottom of it.”

“I don’t know about that—”

“No, there is. Timmy said he saw it. He went there with a snorkel once and told me that he saw it.”

“Okay, well, Alex swims there every morning, used to, anyway, and I guess he drowned.”

“How’d he drown?”

“I don’t know. I just heard about this myself. Jason—”

“Will you get his job?”

“Jesus H, I haven’t even thought about that. Who knows? Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Why’d you come in here, Jason?” Wendy said.

“Oh, I was going to show you something, but it doesn’t matter now.”

Thom noticed the book in Jason’s hand and said, “Aren’t you too old to be reading that?”

Jason shrugged and said, “Never too old to revisit the classics, Dad.”

Wendy laughed, more loudly and longer than the joke warranted.

“You okay there, hon?” Thom said.

“Yeah, fine. I think I’m a little in shock about Alex. Like you said, we didn’t like him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a

huge part of our lives. It’s strange to think he’s just gone.”

“Yeah,” Thom said. “I’m going to go call Marcia. I’m surprised she hasn’t called here yet.”

Thom departed and Jason asked if he could stay in her office and read.

She told him it would be fine, and he threw himself down on the throw rug and cracked the book open where his finger had been.

Wendy turned on her computer and did a quick search to see if there was any news online about Alex’s death.

There wasn’t, of course, not if he’d just been found that morning.

Still, she read his Wikipedia entry, surprised he even had one, despite the fact that he’d written two well-received novels in the 1980s, one of which had been turned into a TV movie that starred Blythe Danner.

She’d read some of that particular book years ago, just after they’d moved to New Essex.

It was some typical shit about a college boy who gets a job with a shipbuilder on the coast of Maine for a summer and has a sexual awakening with a young widow in the town.

She’d only read about a hundred pages and would have hurled the book into the trash, but she’d borrowed it from the library.

What had really bothered her was that its hero, an obvious stand-in for Alex, was presented as this innocent, sensitive kid, when in reality there was maybe a chance Alex might have been innocent once but zero chance he’d ever been sensitive.

Her cellphone rang, the screen telling her that it was Janet Brodie, no doubt calling because she’d already heard the news.

She flipped the phone open and said, “Hi, Janet.”

“Did you hear?”

“About Alex? Yes, Thom just got a call from Linda. When did you find out?”

“Linda called me as well, about twenty minutes ago.” Janet was an adjunct professor, but Wendy knew her from when they took

a poetry workshop together, years and years ago. “How do you feel about it?”

“How do I feel about Alex drowning? I didn’t like him. You know that as well as anybody, but I’m not dancing a jig.” Jason

looked up at her from his comic book at the word “jig.”

“I wonder how Tammy is doing.”

“Now, she might actually be dancing a jig.”

“I hope she has an alibi.”

Wendy began to laugh, then stopped herself. “Who knows how she really feels. Maybe she actually loved him.” Tammy was Alex’s

third wife, half his age, and according to everyone who knew them, they were pretty much separated despite the fact that they

still shared a house together.

“Stranger things have happened,” Janet said.

“Look, I should go. Can we talk later?” Even though Jason was now back into his book, she knew he was listening to every word

of their conversation.

“Of course.”

She closed the phone and sat at her desk for a moment. The rotating fan that was on low blew something into her eye and she rubbed at it. Jason, flipping a page, said, “How does someone drown if they know how to swim?”

“Oh,” Wendy said, swiveling toward him. “Lots of ways, I guess. He might have gotten a cramp or maybe something else happened

to him, like a heart attack or a stroke. He was pretty old, you know.”

“How old was he?”

“In his early seventies, I think. I asked him once but he didn’t tell me. Vain, I guess.”

Jason was reading again, and Wendy found herself thinking about his question, about someone drowning who knew how to swim,

amazed for a moment by her powers of compartmentalization. It was something she’d always been good at, putting all the different

aspects of her life in boxes and keeping them separated. Different realms, she supposed. It was one of many things that distinguished

her from Thom, who saw everything in his life as relating to everything else, one giant mural. She looked at her son, wondered

if he was more like her or more like Thom. Right now, he seemed to be like her, asking questions about Alex’s death while

fully immersed in his book. She could see the page he was looking at, all those little boxes, most of them filled with images

of snow. White compartments , she said to herself, then remembered that they’d given Jason a biography of Hergé, Tintin’s creator, last Christmas. He’d

read it in a day then told Wendy all about it. One of the things he’d told her was that Hergé had written Tintin in Tibet because he’d been having persistent death dreams that involved snow and empty spaces.

The sound of the dryer’s alert from the second-floor laundry room pulled her out of her reverie.

“Oh,” she said, getting up quickly to make her way to the second floor.

Thom never heard the washer and the dryer, let alone helped load and unload, but still, she wanted to make sure she got there first. At the top of the stairs she nearly tripped over Samsa, who must have heard the beep as well and was prowling around in the hopes that he could disrupt her folding by lying on top of a pile of clean clothes.

She swung the door open and pulled out the warm bundle, then carried it into the bedroom and laid it down on top of the made-up

bed. Samsa leapt up to sniff the pile, but Wendy scooped him up and put him back down on the floor. It was mostly underwear

in this load, Thom’s and Jason’s, but before she went about sorting those, she quickly pulled out the few items of hers that

had been the real reason for running a wash this morning. There was a beach towel, a plain white one, that she put back in

the drawer across from the washer and dryer, and then there was her one-piece black bathing suit that had been hung out to

dry, which she returned to the same drawer she’d removed it from earlier that morning.

ii

Not knowing what else to do that afternoon, Thom had driven to the university to talk with Linda face-to-face. The English