The Things We Never Say: A Novel

Except for his wife, Evie, Artie told no one about the notes.

"Mr. Dam?"

He stood and bowed toward Rhonda Lazarre, who had raised her hand. "Yes?"

"Uhm, could I go to the bathroom?"

"You may indeed." He nodded at her gently. The poor girl was unfortunate-looking. Artie had had her in a study hall last year, and he had a special place in his heart for her. She was short, her neck was short, her glasses were always skewed; it's just who she was. Her mouth was often open, and she walked with her arms out. ("I don't understand much," she had written in her first-day essay, "and sometimes I get mad at God.")

Rhonda smiled shyly, looking down, covering her mouth with her hand.

"Thank you," she said, and she left the room.

When she returned a few minutes later, Artie saw Danny Marino rise up halfway in his chair and do an imitation of the way Rhonda walked, swinging his arms out, his mouth open, and Artie knew, as the students who saw this knew, that he was making fun of Rhonda.

An unexpected fury rose within Artie, and he stood up from his desk and said, "I just now saw that one of you thought you were better than someone else in this class." He did not look at Danny Marino or at Rhonda Lazarre. Artie could feel his face getting red, his face was hot—hot!—and he said, "Do not ever feel that you are superior to someone else. Because you are not." He sat down. He held out his finger to the whole class and shook it. "No one is superior to anyone else in this world."

He glanced fleetingly at Danny Marino and saw that Danny—and the fellow next to him—understood that he was the one being spoken about; Danny looked down at the floor. But as Artie finished with a final admonition—"Don't you ever think you are better than anyone else here on God's Earth!"—he allowed himself a quick look at Rhonda and saw that she had no idea that she was the one who had provoked this reaction in him. And so that was good; she did not know that she had been made fun of.

A few minutes later the bell rang, and Danny Marino left the room right away, but the rest of the students walked out quietly, almost sheepishly. Lockers in the hallway could be heard slamming shut, and then it was silent. For many moments Artie remained sitting at his desk, staring out the window. Finally, he roused himself and went down the hall to the teachers room, where Carl LeBlanc said to him, "You going to take a sail this weekend?" And Artie said, "You bet, the weather's supposed to hold." People understood that Artie loved sailing; his modest sailboat sat in the center of the small harbor, and he was often seen getting out of his dinghy and into the sailboat, and then off he would go. Evie did not like boats, she never had. But that was all right, he still went out when the wind was right.

*  *  *

As many people do, Artie and Evie had suffered a tragedy. Ten years earlier, when their only son was seventeen years old, he had been driving at night with his girlfriend and the car crashed and his girlfriend had been killed. Her name was Heather Morrison, and her family had—naturally enough—gone crazy with grief, and they tried for more than a year to sue Rob Dam, meaning his parents. The case was eventually settled; the Morrisons moved out of town. But Rob had never been the same.

Artie had sat at the conference room table in the law office with his son during depositions, and this is what he remembered: Rob sitting, pale, while he was questioned by lawyers. A woman lawyer had said, "Was there any sexual activity that preceded this crash?" Rob hesitated, his lips were without color, and he said, "No." And then he glanced at his father. And it was that glance that made Artie understand.

When the police had arrived at the crash scene, Rob had been found with the belt buckle of his jeans open. Heather had not been wearing a seatbelt and she had been crushed beneath the steering wheel. Rob had been saved by the airbags.

The accident, of course, had changed not just Rob but the family. It was as though the three of them had been walking on their lawn down by the water, peacefully, unknowingly, happily, and then the ocean itself had suddenly risen up, the whole world became an ocean overwhelming them with huge waves that swept over them and pulled them under, and they were all gasping and choking in the water. Within a year Evie started classes to become a family therapist—"I have to do something!"—and to Artie his wife became far more officious than she had been before the accident occurred; in his mind she had been a warmer person preceding this terrible event. It took years for them to reconfigure themselves, and they had.

But as these years went by, Rob—who had graduated from high school one month before the accident occurred—became a different person. Once a happy child filled with energy (he had often gone out on the sailboat with Artie), he had turned quiet, and at college in Cambridge—he had gone to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—he had not made many friends.