In Broken Places

14




THE PLAY WAS coming together well, much to Meagan’s excitement, and we were closing in on the last two weeks of rehearsals before Christmas break. I’d been seeing a lot more of the cast than just during our practices, as some of them had acted on their threats and invited themselves over for the occasional dinner-and-games evening. It was apparently a common thing in this place where half the student population was in the boarding program, but I’d never encountered anything like it in other schools where I’d worked.

Because the students came from all over the world to study, they were given fewer but longer vacations, which allowed them to fly home at Christmas and Easter to spend much-needed time with their parents. So there was a three-week break coming up—in which I hoped the actors’ talent and memorization wouldn’t atrophy—followed by just five weeks of rehearsals before their two performances.

Given that timeline, it was with renewed focus and drive that I approached our pre-Christmas practices, though my focus seemed increasingly undone by random and not-so-random encounters with a certain sandy-haired coach. My frantic monologues had subsided and I now faced our times together with a mixture of expectation and dread. Expectation because I really enjoyed spending time with him—in a daydreaming-then-smacking-myself-upside-the-head kind of way. And dread because, in the back of my mind, it was always Saturday and my dad was singing in the shower again and there was a faint whiff of chocolate chip pancakes in the air.

The actors had grown accustomed to Scott’s impromptu visits, and I had grown accustomed to ignoring the meaningful glances and eyebrow wiggling that went on while he was there. The visits had been coming more frequently lately, and I wondered who was teaching the boys how to throw big balls through little hoops in the gym while their coach was loitering downstairs in the auditorium. He’d always have a word or two for me, like asking about Shayla’s tummyache or planning a trip to the hot baths nearby (“Ix-nay on the athing suit-bay” had been my immediate reply). Then he’d get drawn into whatever argument or deliberation or joke-telling contest the actors were involved in. He had a casual way with students, entering into their lives without losing his authority, and I loved to watch them being drawn to him like . . . well, like Shayla. He’d become something of a fixation for her, and she never drew anything, learned anything, or lost anything that she didn’t want to tell Scott about. She clung to his attention and hung on his words and responded to his remonstrances better than she did to mine. And that chocolate-chip-pancake part of me feared for her heart. But I just kept shoving down the fear—forcing it away—because the Scott I saw at school and out, as a teacher and a friend, was not the singing-in-the-shower type.

Mind you, he wasn’t exactly perfection incarnate either. There were days when he was preoccupied and barely even verbal, and there were times when his energy seemed too diffuse to do anyone any good, and there had been one occasion, when one of his players had been suspended for drinking, when it had taken every bit of persuasion in me to get him to gain some perspective again. The irony. But Scott was a good man, and getting to know him had been fascinating and stimulating . . . in a completely terrorizing kind of way.

Life was . . . Could I say “good”? Not yet. There was too much expectation attached to the word. So I stashed it away in my “to be determined” file, along with “I am a good play director,” “I can be a good mother,” and “Losing control over my heart could be a good thing.” Good—it was a word that bore investigation.

Kate and Seth were at it again on this particular day, but we’d all come to the conclusion that this was merely the way they functioned best, so we allowed the friction and oddly supportive disagreements. Off to the side of the stage, Thomas, the sole member of the cast who had British blood, was trying to teach a bunch of American boys how to speak with convincing accents. I’d found that the students often resorted to good-natured ribbing about the limitations and peculiarities of the multiple cultures represented in the school, and that habit had extended into the auditorium on this noisy afternoon.

“Ben!” Thomas yelled in exasperation—he was a bit dramatic that way. “You’ve got to sound bored. Terminally bored. Otherwise, you’ll sound American.” His phlegmatic accent took all the authority out of his instructions.

“What—are you saying Americans are less bored than Englishmen?”

In a long-suffering voice, Thomas responded, “The English sound polite and bored, and Americans sound obnoxious and way too friendly. It’s not a good or a bad thing; it’s just the way it is!”

“Hey!” Kate said from the stage, pausing in a conversation with Seth to address Thomas’s declaration. “Just because we’re friendly doesn’t mean we’re obnoxious!”

Thomas threw his hands up and said, “Just say the line like you’re a stuffy old Englishman, Ben!”

Ben did his best to say, “Where men have intellect, women have soul,” in a convincingly bored British accent, but he failed so miserably that a chorus of dejection went up around him.

I left Thomas to his ranting and approached the stage, where Kate and Seth had been working on a critical scene in which Joy found out she was dying of bone cancer and Lewis discovered how deeply he cared. Kate had lived up to the potential she’d shown during tryouts. She’d come to the play with the fiery temperament her character required, but she’d learned in the weeks since then to modulate her strength and mollify her bluntness, and her acting, in turn, had become infused with the heart of a tough American woman coping as best she could with imminent death and the tender, sweet bloom of love. She was mesmerizing.

“You ready to run the scene again?” I asked. The two actors nodded and stowed their scripts under their chairs. I stepped back and gave the rest of the cast a be-quiet look. Seth and Kate whispered something to each other, then marked a pause and began.

“Can I say anything I want, Jack?” she asked softly, resting her hand on Seth’s arm and inflecting her voice with just enough roughness to express her illness.

“Yes.”

“Anything?”

“Yes.”

“You know it anyway.”

Seth covered her hand with his and paused a moment. “Yes.”

“I’m still going to say it.” There was a bit of humor in that last statement and I loved Kate for it.

“You say it.”

“I love you, Jack.”

Seth seemed startled by the words, as if he’d never read them in the script before, then he grasped her hand more tightly on his arm and, blinking away an invisible fog, masked his own need with his concern for her by gently asking, “Better now?”

“Better,” she said.



Trey was determined to get better. And by “better,” he didn’t just mean “over it.” He meant stronger in every way than he’d ever been before. He was so diligent in his recovery that I worried about his mental health for entirely different reasons. He faithfully downed his happy pills and was on time to all his appointments. He attended two support groups like elderly women go to bingo. He even started going to church occasionally. He was the poster child for suicide recovery, and I knew it was because he’d faced off with his demons, thrown himself into their hades, dared them to take him, and somehow survived. They hadn’t destroyed him, and he wouldn’t allow them to maim him anymore.

He still had down days occasionally. He’d get a little too quiet—his face would seem to harden and shrink, and his eyes would fade back to dirty-swimming-pool gray—but those times never lasted long. He’d learned what to do with them, I guess. I was so proud of him for that.

Trey also took stock of what he wanted from life in the months after his hospitalization, and that led him to do some major purging. No more borrowed soccer dreams for Trey Davis. He gave up his full-ride sports scholarship, quit college, and enrolled in a prestigious school of culinary arts in Chicago. I guess he figured he’d rather be in debt up to his ears and in flour up to his elbows than kick a ball around a soccer field in honor of a man who’d abandoned him years before. It seemed like a logical conclusion to me.

As the end of my freshman year of college approached, I got busy with my own career plans. Well, kinda. It was more like tiptoeing around my options and hoping a vocation would rear up and smack me in the face. The problem was that I had absolutely no ambitions. I didn’t have a burning need for recognition or a passion for, say, stocks and bonds. And I didn’t want Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection any more than I wanted Donald Trump’s fleet of private jets. I was actually quite happy with one nice pair of pumps and Trey’s hand-me-down Civic.

Trey and I seldom saw each other during the week, as he was a commuter who spent too much time on trains going in and out of Chicago. But we always made it a priority, at some point on Saturdays, to crawl up to our hut and solve the world’s problems.

“The problem with soufflés,” Trey said on one rainy afternoon as we gazed up at the sagging sheet above us, “is that they’re incredibly finicky.”

“Uh-huh.” It was my standard response to Trey’s culinary monologues. Not that I wasn’t interested, but my fascination with food was more practical than theoretical. I wanted to eat it, not discuss it.

“If you don’t pull it out of the oven at exactly the right moment, it’ll either fall or overcook.”

“I liked you better when you were a sports geek,” I said.

He turned his head. “You did?”

I nodded. “Our talks made me less hungry.” I popped a Reese’s Pieces into my mouth.

“So have you decided yet?”

“I think Tom Cruise. He’ll make a better husband than Bruce Willis because he’s shorter—therefore he has more to prove.”

“Oh, good. I was afraid you’d settle for Rob Lowe.” He came up on his elbow. “I mean,” he said patiently, “have you decided on a major?”

“The serious answer or the sarcastic answer?”

“I have a choice?” He seemed genuinely surprised, which made me wonder if I didn’t overdo the sarcasm sometimes.

“I’m going to major in nutrition—the donut variety; minor in potatoes—the deep-fried variety. And if I get bored, I might do an independent study on the health hazards of slimness.”

“So I didn’t have a choice.”

“Nope.”

He smiled. I liked it when he smiled. It reminded me of those months when all he’d done was snarl and sneer and generally be un-Trey. This post–Looney Tunes version was a vast improvement. I felt healthier when he was happy.

“I think I might need another decade or two before I decide on a major,” I said.

“You have a year, max.”

“Don’t pressure me.”

“What do you like to do?”

“We’ve been over this before.”

He sighed and tried again. “What do you like to do other than eat and watch I Love Lucy reruns?”

“I like to read. And I like to watch you bake. But as far as I know, a person can’t major in Erma Bombeck and minor in vicarious baking, so . . .”

“Shell.”

“Well, science and math are out. That narrows it down.”

“And underwater basket-weaving is a made-up thing, so that’s out too.”

“Really? Darn.”

“That leaves . . . ?” He raised an eyebrow and waited for me to fill in the blank.

“That leaves way too many options.”

“Your adviser’s got to hate you.”

“I think we’ve come to terms with it. She doesn’t tell me I have to make a decision quickly, and I don’t tell her plaid went out with the ’70s. It’s a great arrangement. Tell me more about soufflés.”

He laughed and plopped back down on his back. “You don’t care about soufflés.”

He was right. I really didn’t. But I did have an issue that I’d been tangling with for a while. I figured this was as bad a time as any to raise it, and I dove right in.

“Does life scare you?”

He didn’t laugh or sigh or anything like that. He pursed his lips and thought about it. That was one of the things I loved most about Trey. He only laughed at me when I was being really stupid. The mildly stupid stuff, he actually considered.

“There are things about life that scare me,” he said after a while. “But life in general? Not really—not anymore. I’ve learned a few lessons that have kind of de-scary-ized it for me.”

I pushed myself up into a cross-legged position, my mussed-up hair touching the lowest part of the Huddle Hut’s sheet. “I’d like a Trey Davis tutorial on de-scary-izing, please.”

“Tutorial?”

“On what you’ve learned. The main lessons. Maybe if I get those out of the way, I’ll be able to concentrate on choosing a major rather than sitting around waiting for the sky to cave in.”

He smiled and squinted at me. “You know you’re a nutcase, right?”

“Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“The lessons I’ve learned . . .” He pondered the concept, concocting an answer.

“And please hold the sports metaphors.”

“Well, that eliminates lessons one and two.”

“Trey . . .”

“Things are never as bad outside my brain as inside.”

“That’s a lesson?”

He nodded.

“What does it mean?”

“It means my worst-case scenarios hardly ever happen in real life.”

“Mine usually do.”

“They do not,” he said.

“Marie Fallon,” I said. He raised his hands in an I-give-up gesture. “Tenth grade?” He still wasn’t remembering it. “She invited me to a dance at her house and I refused to go because I was fairly sure I’d make a fool of myself, but you told me I should go anyway. Which I did. And I came out of the bathroom halfway through the evening with my skirt tucked up in my panty hose, and—because you’d told me to be bold—proceeded to dance up a storm in the middle of the floor. Now that, my friend, is a worst-case scenario. Next lesson, please.”

He laughed and didn’t push the issue. Now that I’d jogged his memory, I was sure there were a lot of other worst cases of mine running through his mind. “Fine,” he said. “Second lesson.” He thought for a moment, and then his eyes widened as he figured it out. “Here it is.”

I put on my eager face. “Oh, please, Yoda, your wisdom with me share.”

“The best things in life take risk.”

“Survey says . . .” I made a sound like the Family Feud buzzer. “Nope. Don’t like that one. Lesson number three, please.”

“You can’t just pick and choose,” he said.

“Sure I can. What’s number three?”

He thought for a while, and I could tell he was wondering if his lessons would do me any good, given my casual approach to all things requiring an honest assessment of my life. He had a point, but his lessons did make for better conversation than soufflés, so I let him go on.

“My third and final lesson is that you can’t pick what life throws at you,” he said.

“That’s encouraging.”

“But you can pick what you do with it.”

I’d been hoping for something a little more optimistic. Like “You’ll develop miraculous analytical skills and coping mechanisms the moment you turn twenty, and nothing will ever be confusing to you again.” I guess that was asking a bit too much. “That’s supposed to be helpful?” I said.

“Sure. It means you get to determine how much you’ll be affected by things that happen to you.”

I had a vision of my future, dark and ominous, creeping in for the kill. There was no part of me that wanted to determine what to do with it, as Trey had suggested. I just wanted to run from it, screaming. And maybe hide in a closet until it passed. “I don’t think your lessons work for me.”

“I didn’t think they worked for me either.”

“Until . . . ?”

He pulled back his sleeves and showed me his scars.

“Maybe next time I ask you for life lessons, you could recycle an old standard like ‘self-fulfilling prophecy.’ It’s less taxing on the brain.”

“Fine,” he conceded. “Next time, I’ll tell you that if you expect something bad to happen, it probably will.” He looked at me. “Happy?”

“Yeah.” Like a flailing spider circling the drain. But at least this latest lesson required less self-assessment. Life was safer that way. “So there’s a chance I’m going to wake up in the middle of the night sometime in a casket filled with rattlesnakes?”

“You’re like conversation cyanide. You know that, right?”

“And yet you still attempt it. You’re my hero.”

“Just remember me when your prophecies come true.”

I knew what he was getting at. “I like being alone, Trey. There’s less guilt when my head’s in the fridge and less turbulence when I’m trying to sleep.”

“You don’t really enjoy sleeping alone. Nobody does.”

“Well, I do. Except in the winter. But that’s why God created hot-water bottles. They keep your toes warm, but you don’t have to cook for them and they never, ever burp.”



I was used to Illinois winters, where the wind-chill factor decided everything from the undergarments I wore to the moisturizer I used. Winters in Germany were quite a bit milder, and I found myself less prone to weather-induced funks. Which was nice for anyone who had to live with me—namely Shayla. As quirky and scenic as Germany was in the fall, it turned whimsical and ethereal in the winter, particularly in the small towns and villages, where snowplows were scarce and salt was even scarcer. So the beauty was somewhat unevenly balanced with danger. Germans were so intent on protecting the grass that grew along the side of the road from the damage salt might cause that they were willing to sacrifice their cars in the process. I wasn’t quite so generous with my own wheels, and the lack of road upkeep scared me so much that I actually bought myself a large box of salt and sneaked out into the street at night to keep at least my part of Germany safe from slips and accidents.

Shay and I had risked life and limb driving up to Marzell to go sledding on a couple of occasions. Marzell was a small village fifteen minutes out of Kandern—fifteen straight up minutes. Because of the difference in altitude, there was often snow galore in Marzell when it was gray and rainy in Kandern, snow enough for Shayla to wear herself out dragging her sled to the top of a hill and squealing down to the bottom, then dragging the sled back up again. I’d never really understood the appeal of spending so much time and effort climbing only to enjoy a fraction of the time sliding, but Shayla seemed to love it, so I was happy to stand at the bottom, cheering her down the hill and telling her what a great job she’d done when she got there.

Christmas in Germany was a sight to behold. It seemed each of the larger towns in the area hosted elaborate markets that lasted all of December, filled with stands displaying ornaments and other items made by local artisans, wooden toys, live manger scenes, lots of fatty food, and hot spiced wine. We took Bev along to a Christmas market in Gengenbach one afternoon, as much because we loved her company as because we didn’t quite know how to get there. I’d heard that it was one of the more beautiful markets in the area, about an hour from home, so off we traipsed on a sunny afternoon, the three amigos out to conquer the world.

Darkness had fallen by the time we reached the medieval city, and the crisp night air was saturated with sounds and smells that made my heart sing and my mouth water. We walked down narrow cobblestone streets in search of the main square, past crooked homes with half-timbered facades, through alleyways that practically rustled with the whispers of centuries past. It was an enchanting fairyland that drew us in, and we walked slowly, hushed by the mystery and charmed by the simple, otherworldly beauty.

When we reached the town’s historical square, Shay immediately declared that she wanted a gingerbread cookie, which, lucky for me, was a staple of German markets—so were candied peanuts, waffles, wurst in fresh rolls, warm apple cider, and steaming hot chocolate. It was an overeater’s paradise and I felt right at home. Shayla, however, declared an instant dislike for the hard, nearly tasteless cookie I’d bought her. Fortunately, a kindly gentleman at a bakery stand gave her a free Berliner that reconciled her to the tradition of Christmas markets.

We wandered around for a while, tasting, touching, and absorbing as much of the festive uniqueness as we could. We bought two hand-painted glass ornaments, kept a safe distance from a slightly overzealous Saint Nicholas, watched a children’s choir sing “O Tannenbaum” from the balcony of the town hall that overlooked the square, and finally declared our adventure complete. We decided on the way home that Americans really had a lot to learn from their German counterparts, especially when it came to community Christmas activities.

In other areas, however, Shayla felt they fell a little short.

“Do they know they’re doing it wong?” she had asked on a trip to the grocery store.

“Doing what wrong?” It took so much self-control not to imitate her accent.

“The Christmas stuff. It’s all blue.”

“What’s wrong with blue?”

She’d looked at me like I ought to know better. “It’s supposed to be wed,” she’d said in a patronizing voice. And she was right, of course. Christmas was supposed to be red. But in Germany, where they did things decidedly differently, the decorations were largely blue. So when Shayla and I did dishes to the sound of her favorite Christmas CD, we sang our own words at the top of our lungs, trying to drown out Frank Sinatra’s voice.

“I’m dreaming of a blue Christmas,” we’d sing. And Shayla would find it so funny she’d forget to keep drying.

It was on a particularly chilly December evening that we invited Scott to accompany us on a tree-hunting expedition.

“He’s here! He’s here!” Shayla screamed. She’d been kneeling on a chair by the living room window, her nose plastered to the glass, waiting for Scott to appear. She was at the door waiting for him before he’d had time to stamp the excess snow from his boots.

“Ready, Lady Shay?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” She was a little excited.

“How ’bout your mom? Is she ready too?”

I waited to hear Shayla say, “She’s not my mom,” but she’d been saying it less and less these days. I rounded the corner into the entrance hall, pulling on my gloves. “Ready.”

Scott carried Shayla upside-down into the street, then fastened her securely into her car seat.

We spent the next hour trying to figure out how two finicky adults and an overexcited four-year-old could possibly come to an agreement on the shape and dimension of the perfect Christmas tree. Scott liked tall and skinny, I liked short and fat, and Shayla liked anything with a price tag outside my budget. The person running the tree lot finally came to our rescue and virtually ordered us to buy the one he selected for us.

“Schoen! Schoen!” he said, pointing at the straight trunk and the way the branches sloped down close to it. It was an okay tree, if you liked them shaped like marathoners. I liked mine shaped like sumo wrestlers, and Shayla, apparently, liked hers shaped like dollar bills.

Shayla wrinkled her nose at the tree the salesman held up for us to see, I shrugged my shoulders, and Scott said, “We’ll take it.”

As he’d been holding my hand for a few minutes, I didn’t put up a fight. I was busy trying to keep my neurons firing and my Jell-O legs from buckling.

Scott secured the tree on the roof of my car, installed Shayla in her usual spot, and walked me around to my door, pulling me into him just long enough to say, “We done good,” plant a kiss next to my ear, and assist me into my seat.

When he was settled behind the wheel, he looked at me like he had something to say, but the moment was interrupted by Shayla yelling, “Home! Home! Home!” at the top of her lungs.

And off we went to my apartment, where Scott got a little testy trying to get the tree to stand up straight and Shayla did all she could to distract him from the task. She tried on her ballerina skirt and twirled around him like a top. She told him the story of Rudolph and the Seven Dwarfs. She tried to measure his arm with the tape he’d used to determine how much of the trunk to cut off. And then she brought him the hot cider I’d made for him, which gave him a reason to sit down and contemplate his handiwork.

I joined them in the living room and took a seat on the couch.

“What do you think? Is it straight?” Scott asked.

I pursed my lips and squinted an eye. “No, but I’ve always wanted to see the Tower of Pisa, and this’ll save me the trip.”

“What?” He was out of his chair and standing in front of me, trying to see the tree from my angle. “It’s straight!” he protested.

“Well done.” I smiled.

He pointed at a giggling Shayla. “Don’t laugh, young lady. Your mom’s messing with my mind!”

She giggled some more, so he picked her up by her middle, swung her around in a circle, then plopped down on the couch next to me with Shayla sprawled across him.

He turned his head on the backrest—which meant his face was alarmingly close to mine. I stared straight ahead and tried to concentrate on the marathon-runner tree while the ice-skater in my stomach tried some new, original leaps.

“Wanna go to Riedlingen for supper?” he asked.

I turned my head and looked at him, which took way more courage than, say, wearing a bathing suit in public. Up close and personal, he was no less attractive than from a safe distance, and the fact that my daughter was sprawled across him, perfectly content as she played with the measuring tape, was all the more endearing.

“What’s in Riedlingen?” I asked.

“A museum-café I guarantee your daughter will love.”

His breath was warm against my face. My inner skater slipped and fell—flat on her back, breath knocked out of her. The Russian judge was not amused.

“But will I like it?” I tried really hard not to look at his mouth. Really I did. Really.

“The food?”

Uh . . . “Yeah, the food.”

“How ’bout we drive over there and find out?”

Or maybe we could just stay like this for a decade or so—staring at the tree or something—and let whatever was uncoiling in my chest finish what it was doing.

But Shayla had other concerns. She slid off Scott’s lap to the floor and looked up at us with a frown. “Are you mushy?” she asked.

Scott laughed.

I tried to cough around the cider that had gone down the wrong pipe.

And Shayla giggled.