No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

The blogs talk about Laurence’s mental state of mind. They discuss the chance of him making a comeback, of him declaring. Maybe he’s not ready for this; maybe he has been through too much. But they’re split on Homme, and the younger elements of the party, those who want to move the party forward, are willing Laurence’s return. Better a man in touch with his feelings than a man who can’t see past the past, the blogs say. Laurence can mourn for now: the presidential election isn’t for another eighteen months. They agree that he’s the best man for the job. Somehow, his son’s death is a driving force; it is, in some small way, almost a validation for his policies.

Laurence is called in front of the delegates and they ask him again. He says yes. It’s announced that afternoon. Deanna and he don’t speak, because he didn’t talk to her first. His excuses – that he has done this for the family; that he is trying to be the man he knows that he can be – fall on deaf ears. He apologizes to her, but he doesn’t back out.

The delegates remind him to complete the ClearVista questionnaire. Even since he first agreed to it, the process has advanced. More questions, more answers, more data kicked out at the end. The process can take months to get the results that they desire: the visualizations, the computer-generated videos. The report, ClearVista say, will tell you what sort of man you are and what sort of president you will be; it tells the world that they can trust you. Amit agrees: if there are any concerns about Laurence’s wellbeing, his state of mind, his ability to run the country, the ClearVista algorithm will solve them. Laurence asks him how he’s sure it will show he’s the right man. Amit tells him that that’s what the software does. It looks for best-case scenarios. It finds out who you are and it predicts what you will do. The other candidates are using it and their results will be out first, so this has got to be done. Be honest, Amit tells him.

Laurence fills in the form that night. He’s regretful about so much of his life and he wants to lie, to electioneer, even here, to a faceless computer, but he doesn’t. He tells the truth. It’s cathartic, ticking the boxes that measure his sense of his own pain. He sends the results off.

ClearVista will, the email he gets in return informs him, be in touch.

Laurence and Deanna try with their marriage as much as they can. They go out for dinners in the town, but everybody knows them and they say hello and stop them from having to talk to each other. It lets them dance around the idea of speaking about anything that is actually important. They both know that they need to talk about Sean more than they do; Laurence has finally noticed Alyx talking to herself, and Lane going further off the rails. They all need a break. One night, he suggests a vacation.

‘We should,’ he says, and that’s really it decided. He books a hotel in Rome. It’s the furthest they’ve ever been, but nobody will know them there – Laurence doesn’t want anything that will remind them of their son. They force Lane to come, but she’s secretly pleased to be getting away. Her friends talk about the same things over and over and she’s bored by them. She wants more, now. She wants a purpose. The first night they land late, after the longest flight of their lives, and they find a small restaurant in the city and eat the dishes that they recognize on the menu: pasta and pizza, the stuff they’ve eaten at home, but it tastes so much better. Even just being somewhere else makes it taste better. They’re tired, but it’s already good for them to be out of America; and they walk the streets, and see the sights at night. They pass a fountain, famous, in all of the guidebooks, and Deanna can’t help but focus on the cherubs, spitting out water into the tiered pools. She tries to not let it get to her. She doesn’t sleep, because she feels guilty that they’re having this fun without him. She tells herself that she has to get over it, but she doesn’t know how she will. The next morning, on the rooftop terrace, Lane comes out in her bikini and they see the extent of her tattoos, running up one side of her body a creeping vine and flowers budding from it. Each flower is an item, an icon. Each one has meaning, they think. Laurence stands up when he sees her, but Deanna snaps at him and tells him to leave it.

‘What will it achieve?’ she asks. That’s what she worries about. She wants the family to be what they can be: as normal and whole as possible. She has lost her son already and now there are the four of them. She will do anything to preserve what she has and Laurence would likely say things to Lane that could irreparably harm their relationship. She begs him to calm down. He spends the afternoon looking at the tattoos through his sunglasses, quietly seething. In one of them, there is a toy dinosaur that Laurence recognizes as the one that Lane buried. He thinks, by the end of the day, as the sun is setting around them, that the print on her skin is, in some ways, even beautiful.

At the end of the week, Deanna realizes that Alyx hasn’t been talking to herself. One night as she’s tucking her into bed she asks about it, asks outright if her daughter has been seeing Sean since he died.

‘Sometimes,’ Alyx says.

‘Not this week though?’

‘He can’t come on vacation,’ Alyx says, and that seems to be enough for Deanna. She holds Alyx for a while on the little girl’s bed and they both fall asleep, because there’s something about Alyx’s smell that’s calming. The next day they go walking and there’s a moment where it seems as if Alyx has reverted, but she’s singing to herself. And when they get home, after a week that they all needed, and that they are all desperately sad to say goodbye to, Deanna watches for it, but the Sean-fantasy isn’t there. Alyx cries in the kitchen when she can’t find him – or, at least, that’s what Deanna supposes. They don’t talk about it. Alyx is sick from school for a few days and she watches cartoons and eats Pop-Tarts and lies on the sofa where Sean used to lie. She takes up the whole space.

Birthdays come and go. Alyx’s is quiet, and they think about Sean, because there’s no other choice. They try, though. The therapist tells Deanna that it’s important that they don’t ignore it, but that this is Alyx’s birthday. There are ways, she explains. So they have a cake, and a party, and they try to distract themselves. They don’t know how else to do this. For Lane’s birthday, they ask what she would like. She asks for money to extend her tattoo. Laurence gives it to her, on the condition that she talks to them about it as it goes. She agrees.

His campaign begins in earnest. Laurence goes out on the road, around the state, drumming up votes. He speaks at conferences. He does everything that’s required. On the calendar, his name is blocked out on almost every single day. There’s a gap, a week where there’s nothing booked in, and none of them can avoid it because it’s the anniversary of Sean’s death. A week of nothing at all, even though there are major events he’ll be missing. It’s a countdown, they all know, as the weeks before it are ticked off. He flies home on the last day with something written in it and the very next day they all wake up early and drive to the graveyard.

There was a time that they visited it a lot, at the start, but Deanna had to stop herself. She worried that if she kept coming she would become too used to this place: to the faded glory of the more ancient headstones, the manicured grass, the wrought iron fencing that blocked some plots off from others. As if it wasn’t all the same under the soil. So now it’s once a month, or less. It’s been so long since they were all here at the same time. Grass has grown all over the plot and they can’t see where they buried the toys that day. Deanna puts flowers down, which is ridiculous, she thinks. He didn’t like flowers and here I am, having spent nearly a hundred dollars on them. But she puts them down because they make her feel better. Around them, some plots don’t have flowers at all, and she reads the headstones. Some of them were young; nearly as young as Sean was. She plucks some flowers from his arrangement and leaves them on the other graves and she says a little prayer to them as well. Alyx cries and Lane holds her close. The little girl buries her face in her sister’s stomach.

In the car on the way home, Laurence says how quickly the year has gone. He says, ‘I can’t believe it’s been a year.’ The girls are silent. Deanna thinks, I don’t know if it’s been fast or slow. Everything has slipped into an expanse. Sean might as well have died a year ago, or yesterday, or tomorrow. It can never be undone.

She sits in the back, between her daughters, and she holds them close and kisses their heads: the soft child’s hair on one side, the harsh brittle bristles on the other.

4

Laurence brings all four of his favored news shows up in different corners of the screen and sits at the breakfast bar and eats his bacon and drinks the revolting milkshakes that Amit insists he has every morning. A blogger made a GIF from pictures of him that had been taken over the last thirteen months, showing his decreasing weight, a morphing slideshow sold as somewhere between comedy and tragedy; and that set the other blogs to speculating what it could mean. They touched on his personal traumas, of course, but also mentioned the S word: sick. They asked if there was maybe something wrong with Laurence that the public hadn’t been told about, and that made Amit flip out. He called in the middle of the night after reading something that speculated with actual medical terms and told them – told Deanna, in no uncertain words – that it was something they had to change. They must never, ever use the S word and they weren’t to let others use it either.

‘As soon as people start asking about the health of any normal candidate, their campaign is essentially screwed,’ he said. ‘Somebody can go from weight-loss to cancer in two or three posts and all of a sudden they’re out of the running. Laurence can take that even less than any of the others. Better a fat candidate than one who looks like he’s the S word, Dee.’

So she began to cook pasta for dinners. She made rich sauces, with real cream, and she started baking breads with cheese running through the dough. Amit bought them an old Paula Deen cookbook as a partial joke, along with a packet of real butter, and he told them to deep-fry everything. She sets the cooker to fry the bacon rather than griddling it, and she takes it out when it’s done and puts it into a thick-cut doorstep sandwich with full-sugar ketchup. It’s not helping. His belts are new, and his trousers. He has to tuck his shirts in more; in the worst cases, Deanna pins them at the back to make them taut again across his new frame. When he undresses for bed, she sees his ribs, a ladder of loose skin. He’s seen a doctor, quietly, to appease her – in case there was something wrong, the S word again, uttered privately – but he’s medically fine. He’s just thin. He’s not eating enough, was the diagnosis. That and stress, but one is an easier fix than the other.

He’s been away working for a fortnight, and only came back last night. Today, he’s off again. This, he’s warned them, is pretty much how it’ll be for the next year of their lives. So breakfast with him feels rare, suddenly, as if it’s a special occasion. His face appears on Fox, top right corner of the screen, and he selects it and maximizes it. He jacks the volume up to hear a man talking to camera as if it’s his friend, casual and smooth. His name is Bull Brady, the front wave of a new type of shock-pundit for the political channels as they attempt to make something dry considerably more popular. They’re met a few times. He doesn’t like Laurence, is the recollection.

‘So, most predictions have Walker managing to climb another three points in his key demographics today,’ the host says, ‘which, of course, means very little at this stage. Three is nothing: three can be lost by spending time in the wrong place at the wrong time. So how does he hold? Get out.’ The host stands and does a little walk-on-the-spot move. ‘Get out, talk to people. He’s had too much time off, and he lives in Podunk, Nowheresville; he needs to work more if he wants back in. He’s got a big old chunk of the country, catching the more, shall we say, cosmopolitan parts of our great nation; but he hasn’t got a chance in the red states. Not even close. Now, Homme might. He can win some of them, that’s the word. So Walker plays well in New York. So he plays well in Boston.’ (The host does the accent of these cities. That’s his shtick.) ‘So he plays well with core democrats. Big deal! If he can’t play well with big oil, he could lose this before it’s already begun. If they want to go Democrat, they’ll go with Homme. Walker’s going to Texas to try and see what he can do, but I’ll be damned if he’s walking away from there with anything but a suntan.’ He puts on a cowboy hat and climbs a mechanical bull in the corner of the studio, and he moos. Laurence mutes and minimizes it as Deanna walks in.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ she says.

‘I know. But people watch him. They like him.’

‘People like spectacle.’

‘He says I’m not doing enough of that.’

‘Which is why you’re up three points.’

‘That’s nothing. Three points is nothing. He said it himself.’

‘Okay,’ she says. She puts his plate in the dishwasher. ‘Go and wake the girls and say goodbye, would you? They’ll miss you.’

‘They barely noticed that I was back.’

‘Because you were only here for one night. They miss you. I don’t know what else to say.’

‘Lane?’

‘Even Lane.’ She kisses him. It’s everything, these moments: they remember Sean with every single kiss and it doesn’t stop them doing it. He calls for the girls from the hallway. School has just gone back. Alyx comes out and smiles at him in the doorway of her room.

‘Hey, Pumpkin,’ he says. ‘I can take you, if you’re quick getting dressed.’

‘In the car?’

‘In the car.’ The car is a big black cross-country thing that his party has recently leased to drive him around, less conspicuous out here than the town cars, coming complete with low-paid driver and super-strict fuel budget. Laurence knows that budget doesn’t extend to taking Alyx to school, but he doesn’t care. ‘Lane?’ he calls, ‘you up?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘I’m off soon,’ he tells her. ‘Want to say goodbye?’

‘Bye,’ she shouts.

‘Look at the college applications,’ he says. She hasn’t decided about what she’s going to do next year yet and they’re not pushing her too hard, in case it scares her off. They mentioned college once and she countered with a desire for a year to find herself. He and Deanna both hope that she likes what she finds. He rolls his eyes at Alyx who has reappeared, clutching her clothes. She starts to pull them on in the hallway.

‘No shower?’ he asks.

‘Later,’ she says, and she runs downstairs, past him and to the kitchen. ‘Dad’s taking me,’ she tells Deanna. ‘Can I have my breakfast to go?’ She says it in a voice that she’s heard on a TV show. Deanna pulls bread from the grille of the toaster and the spread out of the cupboard, and she puts it down in front of Alyx with a thick, rounded knife.

‘You get the honor,’ she says to her daughter, and then she leaves for the hallway and finds Laurence there, at the foot of the stairs. He’s in the lemon tie, and she knows exactly when he was last wearing it. Exactly what day it was. She balks and stands back.

‘What’s up?’ he asks.

‘Nothing,’ she says. If he can’t remember it, she reasons, there’s no point in saying it. The suit still hangs in the wardrobe. He hasn’t worn it since Sean died. He’s blamed it on the weight loss, but she knows that’s not true. She’s told herself that it was because of the connotations. The breast of it still has smears from her eyes on it, the dark tear-runs of her mascara like a print of her face. Deanna didn’t see the point in cleaning it. She thought, instead, that they should just burn it, but they haven’t. She doesn’t know how they go about it without making it seem like ceremony, so it’s inside a vacuum bag at the far end of the closet, beyond the part that you can see when the doors are opened. Out of sight, out of mind. But the tie is the first part of the puzzle to reappear, and he hasn’t realized what it means that he’s wearing it. Somehow it isn’t water-stained. Somehow it doesn’t need ironing.

He doesn’t comment on it. Instead, he adjusts it in the mirror.

‘I’ll take Alyx,’ he says. ‘It’ll be nice to spend some time with her.’

‘Sure,’ Deanna says. She focuses on his neck, his hands up and fiddling with the knot, and she wishes that he would realize what he’s done.

As he hands his bags to driver, he notices that the side gate to their house is open. ‘Shit,’ he says. The trashcan lids are up. He goes to them and peers in. ‘The bags are gone. Assholes.’

‘Again?’ she says from the porch.

‘I know,’ he says. He pulls the gate shut and looks at the cut-through lock that he put on after the last time that this happened, in the weeks following Sean’s death. ‘Can you buy a lock next time you’re at Henderson’s, something that’ll keep it shut, something they can’t cut through? Trent’ll know what sort of thing. A chain or something.’

‘Why do they do this?’ Deanna asks, coming out to look at the fractured remains of the cheap lock. It’s a rhetorical question. She looks at the pieces. Somebody came during the night and they were prepared. Laurence kicks the gate hard enough that it slams shut but swings right back open again, a clang of metal as the hinges meet and bounce against each other.

‘Don’t get stressed about it,’ Deanna tells him. ‘Please.’

‘I didn’t sign up for this part,’ he says. She kisses him, and he breathes out, an exhalation that’s part calm, part relief. ‘Let’s go,’ he says to Alyx.

In the car, Alyx clambers. She presses the window button, making it descend and then rise again, watching the world be taken away by the slick blackness of the glass. When it’s shut, the glass changes tone and shade, allowing just enough light in while still letting them see outside. She coos.

‘This car is awesome,’ she says.

‘I know,’ her father tells her. He puts the seat-back TV set on, flicking through the presets he’s established. Alyx turns her attention to it and the people talking.

‘Are you on here today?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Next week.’ The only time Alyx watches him on TV is when he’s in a one-to-one, because he always does a shout-out to her; always tells the family that he loves them. It’s a recent thing. The cynics, and there are many, think it’s working his personal situation to his benefit. Sometimes he wonders if he’s been that cynical himself and just not realized. ‘What have you got in school today?’

‘We’re reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,’ she says.

‘That’s it?’

‘I don’t know what else.’ She undoes her seat belt and he sees past her, to the traffic on the streets, the busy morning intersections, the reckless drivers. It’s the route chosen by the computer’s algorithm, the most likely route to get them where they’re going in the most efficient way possible. Traffic is mostly (but only marginally) better thanks to their ClearVista branded devices. But still, you can’t account for other people and human error, Laurence thinks. Some things simply cannot be predicted.

‘Sit down,’ he says, and he reaches over and clips her in himself. ‘Be more careful, okay?’ She nods and he kisses her forehead. He looks behind and out of the window, to see if anybody’s following them. He doesn’t know why, but it doesn’t hurt to be paranoid, he tells himself. This is what they want: the press, his enemies. They want him when he’s dropped his guard.

Deanna’s finished her new book. She’s opened the file every day for the last week and read it all morning, right the way through until she picks up Alyx from school. It takes that full stretch of time: not because it’s especially long, but because she focuses on it, gets as deep as she can. She’s been editing it for weeks now, going over and over the words, searching for the truth in what she’s written. It’s important to find it because that informs the story, the characters. Every word is careful; every word has meaning. It’s arduous; but, she reminds herself, it probably should be.

It’s eleven when she finally hears Lane waking up. Doors slam – bedroom, bathroom, bedroom again – and then comes the sound of her boots on the stairs. Deanna shuts her laptop, so that her daughter doesn’t see what she’s been working on – as if she would care, Deanna thinks – but then Lane is gone without even coming into the kitchen. Another slam, this time from the front door. There’s no shout of goodbye.

Deanna thinks about going after her, but it would be pointless. She would yell at her and Lane would ignore her; or she would chase her and Lane would bite her hand off. They’re losing her, Deanna thinks. She’s old enough to leave home but she has no job or indication of a desire to do anything with her life, and that’s all that keeps Deanna hopeful: that Lane’s own lack of ambition, of drive, will keep her here for a while. While she’s at home, they can keep an eye on her; and it means that the house doesn’t become even emptier. Because Lane makes noise. Alyx is quiet, appearing in doorways and padding around in her bare feet, but Lane is noisy, and she’s difficult, and she fills the house with her presence.

Deanna returns to the manuscript and her emails. As well as the new book she has got an email in draft. It’s been half written for the last few weeks, addressed to her agent. He stopped calling after Sean died, most likely because it suddenly became something that he would have to talk about but clearly wanted to avoid; and, Deanna reckons, he wrote her off. There was no chance of her finishing a book while she was still in mourning. And she felt the same, until she realized that the feeling of mourning was never going to go away. Then it became freeing, and that’s when the words came. And it might be that he’s not the best person to represent her now. Her previous books were flowing and grounded and real, but this new one is so sparse and fantastical he might be the wrong person to try and sell it for her. The email says all of this, but then it introduces the book to him anyway. Into the Silent Water, she’s called it.

She describes the setting, the characters: a woman has forgotten who she is, but she wakes in a land that’s flooded, a thick and grotesque scar marked across her forehead. Her mark means that she did not die accidentally: it means that she killed herself. In her hand there is a picture of a child, and all that she knows is that she is there to find him. But he is lost, and she wonders, as she goes, how intentional this all was; that maybe her own death was the first part of a quest that she cannot possibly hope to complete.

As she reads the synopsis, the novel, she thinks how thinly veiled it is, but that it doesn’t matter to her. Not with this book. She wants to publish it under a pseudonym, if it’s good enough to even be published in the first place. She can’t tell; she’s never been able to tell. She’s sure that nobody will want to hide who she is, especially if Laurence gets further in the race. After that, everybody will want their blood; she just hopes that it’s harder to take it if you don’t know it’s there, waiting to be tapped.

As they wait at the airport’s check-in desk, Amit talks to Laurence about how this will be once he’s secured the nomination.

‘Then,’ he says, ‘they’ll wheel out the plane to ferry you around. No waiting. Think about that. And then, you know, a couple of years down the road, Air Force One.’

‘You’re cursing it,’ Laurence says.

‘It’s not a curse,’ Amit says. ‘You’ve seen the polls. Can’t curse that.’

‘I’ve seen three percentage points.’

‘Exactly. Foundations.’ In front of them an elderly couple bicker about the flight. They throw statistics at each other like curveballs. The airline hasn’t had an accident in a while, the woman says; that means, statistically, they are now more likely to. She talks about safety protocols and how likely they are to have slipped, reading probability numbers from the ClearVista app on her phone. The man counters that, behind the scenes, the airline is likely to have picked their game up specifically because of the existence of ClearVista. They’ll want to reassure their customers that they can be trusted. The woman asks why the likelihood of an accident – a percentage that’s higher than the airline’s nearest rivals – isn’t higher, then. The man says that they haven’t taken that into account yet. It hasn’t propagated. Laurence listens while trying not to, and watches Amit tweeting about their day, about where they’ll be and what they’ll be doing.