Are You Sitting Down?

  After lying on the examination table with a doctor’s finger in my rear, hearing that everything else about me was fine was a relief I guess. The doctor reminded me that Dad had died of a stroke. If I kept up my eating habits and current lifestyle, I’d be seeing Dad again sooner than I wanted to. So I took the doctor’s advice and started walking. That was last summer shortly after Travis’s boyfriend died. I’d lost twenty-five pounds since then, but I still kept up the walking.

  We live next door to Mom, and the distance between our property and hers is equivalent to almost an acre. I’m pretty sure the four acres our house sits on was once part of the Dogwood family orchard many years ago. A few old spindly apple trees lapsed over onto our land back when we bought the house. I had them removed since they no longer produced fruit and we replaced them with a row of dogwoods all the way down the property line, paying homage to the neighborhood.

  Marline liked looking out the windows on that side of the house in the springtime and seeing all the pink and white blossoms. I liked seeing the kids running and playing beneath the trees as the petals rained down. It reminded me of my own childhood back when I played hide and seek with Ellen in the orchard while Mom and Dad picked apples.

  I preferred to walk early in the morning before the sun was up. A year ago I was doing it because I didn’t want anyone to see me out walking. I didn’t want anyone I knew to drive by and frown at me the way people do when you are struggling to get into shape. They pity you for being out of shape, rather than applaud you for trying to do something about it. I’d always been an early riser so getting up and walking at that hour was not hard to do. Even back when I was the only kid in the house, I remember being a light sleeper and crawling out of bed as soon as I heard Mom stirring downstairs. She always tried to make me go back to bed, but I wouldn’t go. She’d fix me a glass of milk or a link of sausage, and then turn on cartoons for me in the living room while Dad finished sleeping.

  Standing at the sink now, I filled the pot with cold water so the coffee would be ready by the time I got back. Looking out the window, the dogwoods resembled boney hands sticking out of the ground. Their branches were covered in the fluffy white snow that fell in the night. We lived up a hill, so from the kitchen window I could just see the roof of Mom’s house over the branches. A billow of smoke rose from her chimney and disappeared into the cobalt morning sky. I was admiring the fading stars when I saw a light come on in one of her upstairs windows. Like always, she was awakening to start her day too.

  The crunching of the snow beneath my boots was the only sound as I wandered around the yard for a bit before starting my two mile walk. Although we only have four acres, walking the property was an old habit I’d picked up from Mom and Dad. Mom hated the thought of selling off part of the property back when Dad died. With Dad gone, it was as if enough of the house was gone already. Why should she downsize anymore? When the old barn crumbled, I asked the new land owner if he wouldn’t mind cleaning it up and hauling it away. I offered to help him if he needed me to. We’d told Mom the guy had just torn it down. It’d break her heart to know that barn caved in right after Dad went. It had been their getaway from the world on Sunday afternoons when they went out walking.

  After a slow amble around the property to stretch my legs, I walked to the end of the gravel driveway and turned in the opposite direction of Mom’s house. Back when I first started walking, I would go in her direction because it felt good to pick up the pace by having to walk down the hill. Once, Mom had just stepped out to pick up her newspaper and saw me. Of course, I stopped to say hi and see if she slept okay. The day after that she was sitting on the porch waiting for me to come by. She waited by the road for me a few days after that and decided to join me for the walk. It was nice because I had not spent much time alone with her in quite a few years.

  We talked about my work a lot of the time. Like my father, I became a Biology teacher. I shared my stories of the week with her, having already recited them to Marline at the end of the day before. I think Mom found them consoling because Dad had done the same thing at the end of his day. Protozoa, bug collections, plant phylum, animal kingdoms, and frog dissection were parts of regular conversation at our dinner table then and now. Mom was always eager to listen to Dad, and to me. I knew that she found my classroom stories comforting because they reminded her of him.

  Teaching school was much different now than when Dad did it. My stories often involved confiscating knives from students, breaking up fights caused by racial tension, or going in early to monitor the metal detectors as students entered the building. Sure, dad had to break up fights, but those were over girls. He searched lockers monthly and picked up porn magazines and cigarettes. Students could come and go through the doors as they please without having to have their bags x-rayed, unlike now.

  Walking each morning was not only working on the gut, but it also helped to clear my head. I felt much better about facing the day after accomplishing a brisk stroll. In the early spring, I watched the grass turn green and the flower stems stretch for the sky. Rabbits and quail greeted me along the roadside, awake from the long winter. In summer the flowers bloomed and baby rabbits chased each other in the tall grasses. I watched the leaves change in the fall from lush green to crispy brown and orange. I always looked forward to that first morning dew of the season and knew it’d be time to pull my windbreaker out from the top of the closet.

  This walk was practically meditative on the days Mom didn’t go with me. The quick wave of my arms, the cadent steps of my feet, and the rising heart beat inside my chest was the percussion of nature’s sympathy around me. Birds chirped in the trees and the crickets settled down from their night song. Wind whistled in the limbs overhead that hung over the narrow road.

  My route was to walk to the end of the road. Once I reached the highway, I turned around and came back one block turning opposite the side we lived on. One street over, I walked the length of the main road until I reached another cross road that came out just a few feet up from our house. The long rectangular path was exactly two miles. I’d walked it everyday for six months straight. Mom still joined me about twice a week.

  “How are things going this week?” she always asked.

  “Great,” I would answer, and then usually rattle into how I stayed up late the night before grading tests, or how I’m debating on whether or not to make the kids do a leaf collection this year.

  There had never been a day of bad news on my behalf to break my mother’s heart. I was my father’s son, but I could not be a father to the broken lives of my four siblings. We babysat Jake for Clare when she had to pick up a shift at work. I drove Sebastian to Memphis to pick up his car, and helped him move to a new apartment back when that girl overdosed in his bed. We picked up Robbie and Rachel from school and let them stay with us for a couple of days while Ellen was testifying in court against Judge Railen.

  Travis was the only one who had never asked or expected something from us, not even when he lost Justin. I don’t know why. I remember the shock on his face when Marline and I came to the funeral home. He humbly told us we didn’t have to come as I hugged his neck, as if his loss didn’t affect us. It was as if paying our respects was somehow bothersome. Travis had always been like that. He’d step back and let Clare and Sebastian go in front of him when in line for anything, always giving up part of his dinner or dessert when there wasn’t enough.

  As the oldest, the only standards I was expected to set were the ones in the eyes of my proud parents. Ellen followed almost immediately in my footsteps, going to college and finding a good job. We were the only two in the family married with children. Of course, then Clare had Jake. Children out of wedlock were kept hushed back when I was her age, but there had been at least one pregnant girl in school each year for the past six years where I taught.

  Seeing a white boy dating a white girl had become uncommon these days. The guys who dated guys even flaunted their homosexuality with rainbow stickers on their note
books and pink triangle buttons on their jackets, symbols far more advanced than the white dove and the peace sign of my day. Love was still free, but just not as safe.

  Love was also not always permissible, but the human heart possessed no knowledge of the laws our society bestowed upon us. Our brain may know right from wrong, but the heart doesn’t always listen. The rules of love may certainly be unwritten. It’s who we fall in love with that can find us breaking the rules that are penned in a law book somewhere. I don’t know why we act upon such urges. The temptation is there, and we know it can send our world spinning out of control. It’s a hunger, a sin to some that demands to be satisfied.

  I was no different.

  Her name was Danyele Child. Her friends called her Danny. She had crisp brown eyes and stringy brown hair when she was in my sixth grade homeroom period. She would not become an actual pupil of mine until eighth grade. Like all the other girls going through puberty around that time, Danyele attracted the attention of her share of young men. I’d had other students who pretended to have crushes on me, but Danyele was different. Her notebook for my class had MR. WHITE’S BIOLOGY painted on it with white-out encircled with a large heart and several small hearts around that. I dismissed it as the doodling of an eighth grader. All the kids decorated their notebooks with hearts, crosses, initials, peace signs, and the renowned I WUZ HERE that made the English teachers cringe.

  She had a habit of dropping her pencil if I walked by her desk, and meeting me face to face beside her desk when I knelt to pick it up for her. She always seemed to be wearing a skirt in my class, which she pulled up a bit to cross her legs in the aisle. She was an honor student and passed every test with flying colors. I was relieved that she never had to stay after class to ask questions or complete a lab experiment. She never made reason to have time alone with me, so when she graduated I dismissed her actions as being my own perverted thoughts. I had always kept student-teacher relationships extremely professional, and had only known one teacher to cross that line during all my years of teaching.

  Two years later, I’d forgotten all about Danny when I took a teaching position with the high school science department. All the students had passed through my junior high classroom at one time or another and were excited to have me as their teacher again. I’ll never forget the day that Danny walked through the door and took a front row desk. She was taller with make-up and full-bodied hair now. She wore tight blouses which brought attention to her perky breasts. Her jeans were also tight, except for the days she wore a skirt, which was a bit shorter than the skirts that had met the junior high dress code.

  High School Biology was just a bit more complicated for Danny. She stayed after to complete tests and was always finishing late on lab day. Her A average was slowly dropping to a B, which truly brought fear to her eyes because it endangered her full paid scholarship to the college she’d chosen.

  “Is there anything I can do to keep this from happening?” she asked one day after class in an ill-attempted slow and sultry voice with her back arched so her chest stuck out.

  “Study harder, maybe get a tutor,” I said walking out of the classroom and leaving her standing there.

  Weeks later I was touching her chest in the supply closet in the back of the lab. I don’t know what language temptation speaks, only that it had taken control of my body. My brain had shut down. Common sense left me. Danyele loosened my tie and kissed my neck. Chills rocketed through every nerve ending down my back, both from the soft touch of her lips against my skin and from the thought of getting caught.

  There, among the microscopes and beakers, I jeopardized everything in life that I had. My wife, my kids, my job, and my freedom were all at stake as I reached under the skirt of a seventeen year old girl. I wouldn’t call it blackmail, but Danyele passed the class with an A. Without my “assistance,” she would have received a high B. Although it seemed inane, I wondered if Danyele would look back on our small affair some day while in college and think about how she prostituted herself for just three average grade points. It probably didn’t matter to her. In her eyes, those three points were worth about ten thousand dollars each towards her college tuition.

  Danyele had two other male teachers that semester. She received A’s for both of their classes. One teacher was Coach Powers for Health. Sitting next to him at lunch, I envisioned Danyele practicing her CPR on him instead of the dummy. The other teacher was Mr. Kindle for Business and Typing. Role playing adventures of secretary and boss polluted my head while sitting across from him at a staff meeting.

  I only snuck to the supply closet twice with Danyele. She disappeared six weeks before the end of the school year, like a ghost. Her chair sat empty in my class, a haunting effigy for me. Her classmates gossiped in the hallways about what happened. I listened with intent to make sure their rumors didn’t involve me. They didn’t. Her picture graced the cover of the local newspaper for several days. POLICE HAVE NO LEADS IN MISSING TEEN CASE, the headline read.

  “Did you know this girl?” Marline asked reading the story.

  “Yeah, she was in my junior class,” I said with as much grief as I could muster.

  “A good student?”

  “Straight A’s. No signs of any problems. Never slept in class. No boyfriend trouble that I know of. Nothing.”

  That’s what all of her teachers told the police. They called us for a meeting one day after class. I was thankful they didn’t want to meet with each of us individually. I looked hard in the faces of Mr. Kindle and Coach Powers, but saw no signs of worry or fault. Like me, they looked very concerned. I was concerned for Danyele’s safety and I hoped that she was okay. In the lounge, the other teachers had picked up the stories that were circulating among the students. A nameless boyfriend had kidnapped her or killed her, but Danyele’s closest friends had all confirmed that she wasn’t dating anyone that they knew of.

  Guilt was the name of the monkey on my back. I had not had time to feel any sorrow about the affair between Danyele and me. The possible repercussions had blinked in my head a time or two, but were shadowed by the lust in my eyes when I was in that dark closet pushed up against her. Then, she was gone. It was as if some phantom lurked in the dark beside us and was on my side. Before we were exposed, before I lost my job and went to jail, before my family was torn apart, it stopped all of this by taking Danyele out of the picture.

  Danyele’s picture, taunting me, soon disappeared from front page news. For weeks afterwards, groups of volunteers could still be seen searching the sides of the roads, or holding bake sales in front of the grocery stores to raise money to help fund further investigation. Posters with the word MISSING across them in bold letters above Danyele’s face hung in windows of businesses across town for months. On my walks, I caught myself searching the ditches along the road for clues: a scrap of cloth from her skirt, a biology book, her body.

  I woke up at night having dreamt that I did find her body beside the road while out walking. I knelt beside her and brushed the hair from her face. Her eyes were closed. Her skin was cold to the touch. In the distance, in the trees, I could hear laughing. It was that deep boogey man laughter from cartoons that sounded like a slowed down tape recorder. Someone wanted me to find her.

  I didn’t know if it was Danyele showing me these thoughts at night or if my mind made them up out of fear of being exposed. There was no evidence that I had kidnapped or killed her, because I had not done it. But what if? What if someone devised a plan to frame me, and they planted clues to point toward me? Every morning, with the family still asleep, I persistently walked the property to search for anything out of place. I checked the house for a window that might have been left open allowing someone to plant something inside the house while we slept. I searched my car every time it was left alone for any period of time. I even ran to the mailbox everyday expecting to find a blackmail letter or some incriminating photographs.

  Nothing ever came.

  The MISSING posters faded and were rep
laced with yard sale announcements and day camp advertisements. The yearbook staff dedicated the yearbook to Danyele. The bake sale volunteers soon went home to their own families to enjoy summer vacation. As the temperature rose, Danyele’s case went cold. We started the new school year having forgotten all about her, but I didn’t forget. It had now been almost one year since what happened between us. I stopped checking my car and stopped dreaming about finding her body. I stopped waiting for the day the police would knock on the door wanting to ask questions, but in the back of my mind a part of me still couldn’t help but think someone thought they were doing me a favor.

  “Hello darling,” I whispered into the phone.

  It was a little joke Mom and I shared. When I called her, I always said that when she picked up the phone. It was from an old Conway Twitty country western song she listened to back when we were young.

  “Hello there. Did you just come in from your walk?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Sorry I wasn’t out there to walk with you this morning. I was up late last night cooking and cleaning.”

  “That’s okay. I know you have things to do to get ready for today.”

  We all knew that Mom didn’t cook much these days. Most of her Christmas spread came from the deli. We didn’t mind though, and never said anything about it. When taking the trash out a few years ago after dinner, I found a bag already in the trash can filled with empty plastic containers for green bean casserole, creamed corn, and mashed potatoes. I’d known ever since then most of the holiday dinner was store bought, but Mom had slaved over that stove year after year when Dad was alive. She deserved a break now.

  Instead, I knew she’d spent last night wrapping gifts while watching old black and white holiday movies. She’d also put out all those little trees in every room like she did when we were kids, wanting us to believe they had been there all month long. Before going to bed last night, I looked out the window and saw her lights still on across the grove of trees. I could barely see the yellow light of her bed lamp glowing in the window as the heavy snow fell. It was a comforting feeling to talk to her on the phone now and look out the window and know that she was there at her house in the distance, even though I could not see her.