No Harm Can Come to a Good Man. James Smythe
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