No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

Once Sean is finally put into the ground, Deanna and Laurence take the girls to his grave, to do something that’s small and private and just for them. They stand around the stone – the dates make Deanna feel sick to look at, so she avoids that – and they all tell stories about Sean and why they loved him. They have decided to bring some of his toys, to put them in the soil with their hands. Alyx buries one of her own toy ponies, the one that Sean always used to steal when he was younger; Lane chooses a dinosaur that he claimed he didn’t like any more, but that he had absolute trouble letting go of as he grew older. They don’t say why they’re doing it, but they think that it might help. As they bury them, scooting the soil on top of them, pushing them under, Deanna feels a rip in herself: so much of her beloved son now relegated to the ground. She will miss the toys, because they would have reminded her of him. She thinks about coming back at night, when the rest of them are asleep, and pulling them from the soil; but she wonders where she would stop, or if she would just keep on digging.

They sit Alyx down and ask if she would like to talk to anybody about her brother, because they’ve heard too many stories about what happens if children are left to bottle up their emotions, how dangerous it can be. They hire a therapist, a specialist in childhood bereavement, and Lane is allowed to do whatever she wants for a while. Three weeks after her brother’s death, Lane shaves her head almost down to nothing and she doesn’t bat an eyelid when Laurence shouts – screams – at her about it.

‘We had a deal!’ he yells, and she doesn’t respond or even acknowledge it. Deanna’s listening and that evening they have a conversation about his career.

‘What was that about?’ she asks, when he gets off the phone then, because they haven’t yet spoken politics yet. She had assumed. They’re in bed and he’s propped up like always, tablet on his lap. The ClearVista survey deadline has long expired; all of that stuff was forgotten in an attempt to find relative peace in the wake of Sean’s death.

‘The delegates called,’ he says. ‘They still want me to run.’

‘This year?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I haven’t thought about it. I don’t know.’ She knows that this works in the party’s favor; that their loss will be used, Sean an inadvertent sacrifice to the voting gods.

They have The Daily Show on as they lie in bed and they both laugh at the same joke and immediately feel guilty, as if they’ve forgotten too quickly about Sean. Then Jon Stewart starts talking about Homme’s laughable efforts at beginning a campaign. He mentions Laurence dropping out and then he looks to the camera, full of actual sincerity, and sends out his best wishes to the Walker family. No jokes: just an appreciation of their tragedy. When they switch the set off, Deanna tries to sleep, but she imagines that she’s drowning: she can see the sky above her, but the water is between her and it, a fluid mass of tropical blue that’s destined to do nothing but end.

Amit, the man who would be Laurence’s Chief of Staff, comes to the house with a plan. It’s a year-long breakdown of their lives: of the things that they have to do and how they might set about moving everything forward. He doesn’t mention Sean either, but the boy is there, floating in the air above them. Everything that Amit says is tinged with the knowledge of how this might have been before and how it will be now. He has an argument that makes Deanna feel sick to hear: that this is a chance for Laurence to do something truly good, a chance to use his awful situation to his advantage. The words aren’t Amit’s: they come from the delegates, Deanna knows. They’re desperate to harness this. The tragedy can mark every facet of the campaign, should Laurence choose to step up again: the charities that he will vouch for; the events that he will attend; every single time that he mentions the word family in a speech. Nobody will be able to forget what has happened. Deanna is about to start arguing: that Laurence shouldn’t be running, that the family needs him, when Lane comes home. She walks into the kitchen in front of them and doesn’t say a word. A month after her brother has died and she’s tattooed herself again: this time across her right shoulder blade, a single word. It isn’t announced, but it’s flaunted, red and angry, on her thin skin, so much bigger than her past tattoos. Her parents freak out, shouting at her, and they get close to read it. She lets them, because this will happen sooner or later. It’s her brother’s name, clear as anything, in a slick, italicized script, framed on a bed of flowers and leaves, a vine stretching out and away from them. It leaves them breathless. Lane leaves the house again without saying a word.

In bed that night, Deanna asks Laurence how they can be angry with her for it. She wishes it was something else: a swear word, or the name of one of the stupid bands again. That would make it easy to have something to rally against. This, though? It’s grief, manifested as words and made indelible.

Alyx seems fine, but they know that she is not; not quite. She talks to the therapist and sometime Deanna goes along and watches through the false mirror in the room that they use. Alyx talks about anything but Sean: even when pushed, it’s as if there’s a gap there, where she doesn’t know what’s wrong and why she should be talking about him. The therapist sometimes leads her into those conversations, but it’s always stilted, and Alyx is always unwilling to give anything up. One day they leave her alone in the office and Alyx doesn’t know that she’s being watched. The therapist and Deanna talk in the little room, Alyx playing behind them, past the mirror, and she talks to him. She says his name and she holds something out, a toy pony, and then she shakes her head. She agrees with the nothingness: it’s not the right pony. In the little hidden room both women know what’s happening.

‘This is relatively common,’ the therapist says, ‘especially with twins. This isn’t something to worry about.’ She squeezes Deanna’s arm, and Deanna thinks of the hospital receptionist leading her through to the pale room where they were told what had happened. The same squeeze that tells her that everything will be all right in the end, even if it isn’t right now. She’s not sure. They don’t tell Alyx that they know and Deanna doesn’t tell Laurence about it either. Instead she stands outside the twins’ room – No, she reminds herself, it’s only her daughter’s room now, because Sean is under all of that soil, face up, maybe even trying to get out, somehow – and she listens for what might be happening behind the closed door. She imagines a conversation, or a play and she wonders if Alyx sees her brother as he was, or if he’s something else, a vague and loose version of himself. She tries to fantasize Sean into being there herself while she listens, imagining him in front of her as she attempts to re-form him. Crouched on the floor, her eyes shut, she wonders if she can hear his voice herself if she tries. It would be so easy to go in and join Alyx in her fantasy.

Laurence is asked to do an interview on one of the bigger current affairs chat shows, as a pundit and nothing more. He’s still a good talker, charismatic and personable, and he’s more willing to say what needs to be said, to give sound-bites, than many others. He is, the TV producers think, good value for money. He has to buy a new suit as the others don’t fit him any more. It’s the same color as the one that he wore when he made his announcement. He gets the size smaller around the chest and waist, because he’s lost weight. He hasn’t been trying to, but it’s happened. His middle-age puppy fat is almost completely gone. If he sucks in his belly when he’s dressing he can see his ribs.

They talk about schools and healthcare, the topics that he’s there for, to actually try and pass judgment on some of the things going on across the country. And then the host rolls that into a conversation about Sean, blindsiding him. Laurence has no choice but to go with it. They talk about how the hospital tried to save him, and how hard they worked. They talk about universal healthcare and what it needs to work properly for the people. They talk about how it felt for him to lose his son, and Laurence cries, partly from the shock of being asked and partly because he simply cannot keep it in. There’s something honest about this; everybody watching can see that.

He says, ‘We have to move on. We have to go out and brave the rain. There is no other choice.’

Deanna doesn’t watch the interview, but writes instead, her own form of catharsis, abandoning the book that she was working on (which suddenly feels like frippery), taking only fragments – themes, emotions, some passages describing events that only now she feels she can do justice to, with all that she has been through – and she starts to create instead. She’s never written anything that she would term as fantasy before, but this is it: a mirror of our world that is underwater. It is the story of a woman and her son. The book has started to write itself and, fingers on the keyboard, she is powerless to stop it.

Lane does see her father’s interview. She is in a mall, in a bar that she shouldn’t be in, and it’s on the TV. She is with her friends and they point out her father and they joke – but then they remember. He cries, and she sees it, and they all fall silent. This is serious, they know. After that, she goes back to the tattoo shop. More ink on her skin: to turn what she has, as crude a beginning as anything has ever had, into something more.

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 (#ulink_0362e667-51a3-54a9-993c-db7aaf5622cb)

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?’