The Happiest People in the World Read online

  No one would wonder why Matty had fired her. The only thing they would wonder was why it had taken him so long.

  7

  It turned out Sheilah’s brother, Ronald, wasn’t in the Dominican Republic at all. He’d just gone to see a movie down in Utica.

  “Did you ever go to a movie and then realize halfway through that you’ve seen it already?” Ronald said.

  “You really weren’t in the DR?”

  “And I didn’t even like the movie the first time I saw it,” Ronald said. “That’s the part I don’t get.”

  “Why did I think you were in the DR?” Sheilah said.

  “No offense,” Ronald said, “but only stupid people say things like ‘the DR.’ ”

  “Oh really,” Sheilah said. It was Saturday, late morning. They were walking on the towpath, which used to run alongside the Watertown-Barneveld Canal. Now there was no more canal, and the towpath had been repurposed to be a surface on which people who don’t really like to exercise could walk and call it exercise. Repurposed was an ugly word. So were towpath and canal. Especially since everything around them was so beautiful. Lovely, steep hills and deep ravines and creeks rushing over mossy boulders, and many different kinds of conifer—some runtish and scrappy, some tall and senatorial. There was even a bald eagle soaring overhead. Sheilah didn’t know much about birds, but there was no mistaking its regal white head. A bald eagle! It was incredible that an animal really could come back from the verge of extinction. Life! Rebirth! Majesty! But all Sheilah could think was, Repurposed, towpath, canal, the world is so full of such ugly fucking words. God, she was hungover. “And what do the smart people say?” she wanted to know.

  “They say, ‘the Dominican Republic.’ ”

  “You might be right,” she admitted. Ronald was three years older than Sheilah. A couple of years before, he’d gotten his left hand kind of injured at the sawmill and somehow had parlayed that into a lifetime supply of workmen’s comp, and all of that—his advanced age, his somewhat gnarled hand, his sinecure—made him seem wise to her in ways he hadn’t when they were children. Truth was, she had no idea why she’d started saying “the DR.” Possibly she’d heard one of the kids at school call it that.

  “I got fired,” she said.

  “No offense,” he said, “but I’m sure you deserved it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you sounded hammered.”

  “When?”

  “On your phone message,” he said.

  “I didn’t eat dinner beforehand,” she said. “That was my main problem.”

  Ronald nodded. “I’m guessing your Bossman didn’t enjoy being called Bossman by his screaming-drunk guidance counselor.”

  “But it’s not like that’s the first time that’s happened.”

  “Well, yeah,” Ronald said.

  But it wasn’t like it was the first time she’d gotten drunk at the Lumber Lodge and run into the principal, her boss, and said something inappropriate to him. It had happened many times; it was almost as though it had to happen, as though it was meant to happen. After all, there were only two bars in Broomeville, and the other bar was where the younger Broomevillians went, and no doubt if she went there, she’d run into some of her former students, and if they were as drunk as she, they’d no doubt remind Sheilah that, as their guidance counselor, she’d given them neither guidance nor counsel, and in drunken response she’d say something inane, something she’d probably said to them already, something like, “Hey, it’s all good,” which was perhaps the most idiotic expression on the planet, more idiotic even than “the DR,” and she’d hate herself for saying it, ever, not to mention many, many times, and hating herself, she’d get even drunker and maybe do something even more self-hate-worthy, like end up trying to have sex with one of these people, one of her former students whom she had not successfully guided, had not adequately counseled, and either this person would refuse, laughing, or accept, laughing, and in either case, the next morning she would wake up even sadder and lonelier and more full of the hungover death wish than normal. No, it was better to go to the Lumber Lodge and make a fool of herself in the company of people her own age, which was forty-seven, which she knew was ancient in bar years and felt older even than that. And since Principal Klock’s wife owned the Lodge, it was inevitable that Sheilah would see him there on occasion and make a fool of herself in his presence and end up insulting him in the bargain. It was fate, pretty much. She’d accepted that, and Principal Klock seemed to have accepted it, too. He’d never even given her a talking-to, never even given her a warning, in the eleven years of her employment, before he fired her, right there in the bar. That was the weird thing. And you know what else was weird? The look on his face after he’d pulled Sheilah to her feet and hauled her over and sat her down at the table under the moose head and delivered the bad news. It looked like he was going to cry; it looked like he hated himself. She recognized the look, because it was so often her own. His mouth said, “You’ve left me no choice,” but his face and eyes said, I can’t believe I’m really doing this.

  Yes: the more Sheilah thought about it, the stranger it seemed, and the stranger it seemed, the more Sheilah had a sense that she’d been wronged. Fired! On a Friday night! In the bar! Nearly two months into the school year! For reasons that would have seemed obvious to anyone, but that Sheilah knew were not the obvious ones, even though she didn’t yet know what the real, less obvious reasons were. She would definitely need help finding out.

  Meanwhile, Ronald had stopped to tie his shoe. Sheilah watched him. He did it with only one hand, because of his accident. Before the accident, Ronald had been an ordinary guy who tied his shoes the ordinary way. But now, look at him! Look at him do this incredible thing! Life! Rebirth! Majesty! The bald eagle was still soaring above them, too, showing them that anything was possible, even a return from near extinction, as long as you had a little help.

  Ronald finished tying his shoe and stood up, and Sheilah said, “Ronald, I need help with something.” She told him the story. He listened carefully. When she was through, he nodded and said, “You’re right. Someone is missing.”

  “Someone?” she said. “Don’t you mean something?”

  Ronald stroked his bad hand with his good. His sister was wrong about most things, but she wasn’t wrong about his hand. He really did believe in it. Some people got hurt and acted as though their injury made them better people. He was not one of those people. He got hurt and his injury gave him the power to see through the lies that other people told themselves when they got hurt. “No, I mean someone,” he said. “Someone is definitely missing.”

  “The new guidance counselor?” Sheilah said.

  “Obviously,” Ronald said. But he needed to see what was not obvious. This was difficult, even with his one hurt hand. Sometimes he wished that both hands were crippled. But then how would he drive? “But there’s someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know,” Ronald said. “Maybe the new guidance counselor can tell us.”

  8

  It was Sunday night at the stone house. They were all there: Matty, Ellen, Kurt, plus Matty’s older brother, Lawrence, who was definitely not Larry. Matty and Ellen were in one part of the kitchen, making drinks. Meanwhile, in another part of the kitchen (it was one of those ancient stone houses upstate that had been kept as close as possible to its original colonial condition except for the kitchen, which had been added onto and added onto until it began to resemble a house in miniature, with its own entrance and mudroom and bathroom and TV nook and sitting area and of course the woodstove, which in the fall and winter and spring was always vibrating with heat and the absolute center of everything and in the summer was covered in a shroud like the religious object it basically was), Kurt sat on the couch and watched football on TV, while his uncle Lawrence sat in an adjacent easy chair, reading the newspaper. Lawrence taught eleventh- and twelfth-grade history at the school, but mostly he thought of himself as
something of a world traveler, and he found inventive ways to remind people of that fact. For instance, there was a town just to the north of Broomeville called Turin, and Lawrence was the person who had to call it Torino. In any case, Lawrence was reading the paper, making those clucking sounds designed only to make the person sitting with you finally ask, What? But Kurt refused to ask it. He was busy feeling melancholy. Watching football on Sunday made him feel this way. It wasn’t that he cared so much for the game itself. It was just that on the other side of the game was Monday and school. It made him sad to the point of wanting to hurt someone. Exactly like a football player, come to think of it.

  Anyway, his uncle Lawrence was clucking and Kurt was ignoring him.

  “Syria!” Lawrence finally blurted out.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Fifteen people were killed in Syria!” Lawrence said. He sighed, dramatically, through his mouth and nose. Even his pores seemed to be exhaling. “Have I ever told you about my time in Amman, Jordan?” he said. “It was the summer, 1983. Oh, I’ll never forget the kubbeh nayyeh I had there. Some people in this country call it kibbeh but that is incorrect.” Lawrence looked at his nephew warningly: Do not be the kind of person in this country who mispronounces this word in this way, his look seemed to want to communicate. Kurt was still watching football and trying not to pay attention. But he thought: He’s talked about the food. Now he’ll talk about the people, how generous they are, especially the one who took him into his home. “And the people!” Lawrence said. “Such amazingly generous people! Ibrahim, for instance, the bead artisan I befriended in the market who took me into his home!” Lawrence had been taken by so many generous strange men into their homes that Kurt sincerely wondered whether his uncle was gay. He’d asked his father about this once: “Is Uncle Lawrence gay?” His father had thought about it for a long time before admitting, “I don’t know what he is.”

  “Amman is so close to Damascus, too!” Lawrence was saying. “I was dying to go. I would have given a body part to go to Damascus. A vital organ, even. But of course, the political situation made that impossible.” He sighed again, transparently thinking now about the political situation. Kurt continued to watch TV, although it was halftime, which meant he was even closer to Monday morning. Halftime! Kurt was so full of sadness he could sort of feel it around his eyes, like it was a sinus thing. If his uncle didn’t stop talking, Kurt thought he might stick one of their heads into the woodstove. That would at least spare both of them the agony of Lawrence being Kurt’s teacher in a couple of years. “Fifteen more people were killed in Syria,” Lawrence said again, flapping the newspaper. “It drives me crazy!”

  “What does?” Ellen asked. She had her glass of white wine, and she handed Lawrence a glass of raki, several bottles of which Lawrence had brought back from his tour of the Bosporus. To Kurt it smelled like sweet kerosene. It tasted that way, too. Kurt knew this because his uncle sometimes sneaked Kurt sips of it when he thought no one was looking. The stuff was awful, then it was terrible, and then it wasn’t so bad, until finally, when you got used to it, you could pretend it was pretty good.

  The room was full now, everyone with their drinks: Lawrence and his raki; Ellen and her white wine; Matty and his martini, which was really a vodkatini; Kurt and his Coke, into which Lawrence clandestinely poured a little of his raki.

  “What drives you crazy?” Ellen asked Lawrence.

  Lawrence didn’t answer right away. He sipped his drink and then smacked his lips while regarding the contents of the glass as though actually having deep thoughts about what was in there. Kurt mimicked all this—the lip smacking, the regarding—without realizing it. When he did realize what he was doing, he was horrified. Am I turning into my uncle? he wondered. Was there a worse person in this room to turn into? Was that a rhetorical question?

  “The recent massacre in Syria,” Lawrence said, and then he described it. The government had killed a group of its citizens who wanted a new government. The citizens had been raped and beheaded. Their bodies had been burned and dumped into a pit. Everyone in Syria was horrified and outraged, including the government, which insisted that it had had nothing to do with the massacre. The citizens had done it to themselves. And seen a certain way—the government’s—that was pretty much the case.

  “Let them kill each other,” Matty said. He was like a lot of off-duty educators: after years of pushing cultural enlightenment on his students, he allowed himself to turn nasty on occasion, especially if the occasion included his consumption of a martini.

  “They’re not killing each other,” Lawrence said. “It’s one group killing another.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” Kurt said. “That’s what makes it a massacre.”

  But Matty was having none of it. “I say let them kill each other,” he said.

  This then began a long argument that no one except the two main combatants much listened to. Ellen stood up, walked into the kitchen, and then returned with a full glass of white wine and the glazed, slightly detached look of someone who occupies the same room as arguing people whose arguments basically have nothing to do with her. She sat down on the couch next to Kurt and smiled at him. The smile was real. But also tired. Her eyes were bright, bright blue, as ever. But also tired. And old. Kurt could suddenly picture his mother’s death—not the manner of her death, just the fact that she would die, and way too soon. He would not be ready for it, whenever it happened. I love you, he wanted to say. Please don’t die. But Kurt hadn’t drunk enough raki to say something like that. Instead he looked back at the television screen and thought, Monday, Monday, Monday.

  “If they want to kill each other in the name of Allah,” Matty was saying, “then I say let them.”

  “Oh great,” Kurt said.

  “Actually,” Lawrence said, “the Alawite rulers of Syria have quite a vexed relationship with radical Islam.”

  “Actually, the Alawite rulers of Syria have quite a vexed relationship with radical Islam,” Matty mocked. This was the way they argued: Lawrence would try to reason with Matty, and Matty would give Lawrence every reason to abandon his reason and say, Wow, I’d really like to punch you right in the face right now. They would argue like brothers, in other words. Brothers: to Kurt, an only child, being around them could make him feel very lonely, or lucky, depending.

  “Matty,” Ellen said. Because this was her role: to finally distract the arguing brothers from their argument. No wonder she looked so tired. “Tell your brother about why you fired Sheilah Crimmins.”

  And then something weird happened: his father lost his grip on his martini glass and some of the booze spilled onto his lap, and then he said, “Shit,” and stood up, thus spilling the remaining booze on his shirt. “Shit, shit,” he said, looking mad and guilty, the way you do when you spill something on yourself, except even madder and guiltier than that.

  “Napkin,” Lawrence said, and he handed one to his brother. Matty took it and started wiping himself with it, still muttering, not looking anyone in the eye, like he’d done something really wrong. Kurt noticed it, and so did his mother. “Matty,” she said, “what’s your problem?”

  “Nothing,” he said, and only then did he seem to recover. Matty met Ellen’s eyes and smiled, and then turned to his brother and said, “I fired Sheilah because she’s a terrible guidance counselor and also because she’s a drunk,” and then all the adults took up the subject, talking about Sheilah’s famously alcoholic ways, how they couldn’t believe it had taken Matty this long to fire her, and how much better the new guidance counselor would automatically be, asking Matty whether he had any leads on a new guidance counselor, and in fact Matty did have some leads, he hoped to have someone new start next week, but his leads were all on people from out of town, they might have to put up whomever he hired in one of the rooms above the Lumber Lodge until the new guidance counselor found a place of his own, etc. Kurt didn’t say anything during any of this. The moment his father had spilled his drink, the room had st
arted to feel spooky, like something or someone had entered it. Kurt looked around. His family was all here. So who else was there? His English teacher, Ms. Andrews, in lieu of taking attendance, often just asked, “Is everyone here? Who is here? Who is not here?” Kurt sipped some more raki and Coke and wondered, Is everyone here? Isn’t everyone here? Who is here? Who is not here?

  9

  Two days later. The plane was in the air. They were well on their way to New York.

  “If you want to ask any questions,” the agent said, “now would be the time.” Jens couldn’t believe how loudly she was talking. Apparently everyone, even secret agents, talked on airplanes as though everyone near them were deaf or in any case couldn’t possibly be interested in listening to their private conversations. Then Jens noticed how tightly she was gripping her armrests. She was nervous, he realized, although he couldn’t figure out whether it was flying that made her so nervous, or the prospect of going to New York, or something else entirely. Jens stood up slightly and acted as though he were just casually looking around the airplane. But of course he was really looking for people who might want to kill him. Three rows in front and to the right, there was a woman in a headscarf, sitting next to a dark-bearded man wearing a skullcap. The man was reading a book; the woman was tapping the video screen on the back of the seat in front of her in an irritated way. She said something to the man in German. Jens didn’t speak German, but he was fairly certain that what she was saying was not, Is that the Danish cartoonist we’ve been wanting to assassinate back in 24E? but rather, This stupid thing is broken. Why do I always get the broken one? Jens sat down again. He and the agent were sitting in the leftmost two seats of the six-seat middle row. The agent was in the aisle seat. Next to Jens were an older man and woman, Americans, who were having their own loud, oblivious conversation.