Eighty-Sixed : Chapter 5 - Coffee and Donuts

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Pounding music, heavy with synthesizers and bass and a repeated noise that sounded like an angry crow — caw caw ca cah! caw caw ca cah! — blared from every room and corner of the sorority house. It poured out of the windows and echoed down the street, drawing college students to it like a cacophonous spotlight.

It was another Friday night and officially sweater weather with the air cool but not yet sharp — or as sharp as it gets in South Carolina — with the icy blade of winter.  Earlier that day, the trees on Blossom Street in the University of South Carolina’s Greek Village were resplendent with oranges and yellows and reds that shimmered and nearly glowed in contrast to the bluest skies of the year. 

Olivia’s senior year of college was finally underway, and with it came Susan’s last desperate attempts to bring Olivia into the sorority fold. Susan Drummond, her unendingly optimistic roommate from their freshman year, loved the sorority life and never stopped believing that at one of these functions, she’d finally convert Olivia.

Even before they walked through the door, Olivia was already conjuring up the excuse she’d give to leave at the first chance of escape.

“I don’t know why I still agree to go to these things with you,” she told Susan as they entered. She felt like she was shouting to be heard over the boom boom boom of heavy bass.

“There are more than just frat boys here,” Susan yelled into Olivia’s ear. “We need to get you a man!”

Susan — who’d been dating Doug Rummel on and off and then on again for the better part of the last two years — never stopped trying to match Olivia with a double date.

“I don’t need a boyfriend,” Olivia said. “I just need to finish this year and get on with my life.”

“So says you,” Susan protested.

In truth, Olivia didn’t need a boyfriend.  But she wouldn’t mind having one.

But then again, there would be time for that later.

Inside, Susan screamed whenever she saw another one of her “sisters” and they’d embrace and push their cheeks against each other’s. She’d then turn and discover another sorority sister — who she most likely had seen just a few hours earlier when preparing for this soirée — and repeated the same overly animated greeting.

“Ohmygawd! You look so awesome!”

Olivia slunk into the crowd and was pulled as if by a magnet — as she always was — to the back wall of the room, on the outskirts of everything where she could observe from a guarded distance. Outskirts were safe. It’s where bookshelves and record collections and knick-knacks congregated and gave introverts something to occupy their attention at unfortunate events such as this.

Her security didn’t last long. Within minutes, Susan, now with a red Solo cup in hand, spotted her from across the room. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, Susan pushed her way through the crowded living room, pulling a boy by the hand behind her. The young man was most definitely not Doug Rummel.

“Liv!” Susan shouted. “You remember David?”

“What? No, hi,” Olivia said. “We’ve met?”

“Yeah, no, sorry about this,” the young man said, looking as blindsided by Susan as Olivia felt most of the time.

“Yes, you did!” Susan continued yelling. “Spring fling! Woo hoo! Remember?”

Olivia and David both grimaced and raised their eyebrows at Susan and then at each other.

“You two talk!” Susan commanded as she faded back into the bouncing, crowded room of drunken college students.

“That was odd,” David said.

“That was Susan,” Olivia responded.

“David LaGrange,” the young man said after Susan departed. He awkwardly held out his hand and Olivia took it.

“Olivia Fogleman.”

David ran his hand partway through his hair, then scratched, then smoothed it out. He looked into his cup and moved to take a drink, but then lowered it again having not taken even a sip. Then he looked back up at Olivia and smiled awkwardly. Olivia had to admit to herself that it was a cute smile, nonetheless.

“You’re not drinking?” David asked.

“I haven’t found the keg yet.”

“Here, want mine?” He held out his cup. Olivia looked at it doubtfully.

“I actually don’t drink much and haven’t even touched it,” he said. “Or, you know, here, hold it and I’ll get you a fresh one.”

Before she could respond, he disappeared into the growing throng of students, leaving her holding his cup, which felt warm from where it had been in his hand.

A chair opened among the seats against the wall. Olivia sat and began flipping through a bridal magazine that had been tossed on the end table. David was gone a surprisingly long time, long enough that Olivia kept looking at her watch and was just about ready to make a line for the front door when David returned as quickly as he’d left. He was empty-handed.

“So I was thinking,” he said. “Do you like donuts?”

“Donuts?”

“Yeah, donuts. You like them?”

This kid was peculiar. And yet, endearing. Olivia couldn’t help but smile.

“What kind of question is that?” she asked, grinning. “Who doesn’t like donuts?”

“People with gluten allergies.”

“Even people with gluten allergies love donuts.  They just feel like they’re going to die when they eat them.”

“Or they could die.”

“This turned morbid!” Olivia said and laughed.

“So why don’t we go get a donut?”

“Why don’t we?” she responded, and together they went to a twenty-four-hour donut shop and ordered a half dozen donuts and two coffees.

“These are too many for just two people,” Olivia told him.

“Wait until you have these donuts,” David answered as they walked to an empty two-seater booth in the back of the donut shop.

“So, obligatory questions, then?” David said. “Major?”

“Fine Arts.”

“Wow, really? Like painting and such?”

“Graphic design. I’m thinking advertising and the like.”

“That’s genuinely really cool. I’m much more boring. Business major.”

“Well you can do a lot with that, I’d think.”

“Here’s hoping,” David said. “So where are you from? You don’t sound like you’re from the south.”

“Illinois.”

“Wow, that’s quite a distance from here.”

“I knew I wanted to go east, as far from home as possible but wanted it warm. But not Florida warm. I applied for a partial scholarship to cover out-of-state fees and that was good enough for me.”

“So Illinois. Chicago?”

“Oh, no way. Too big for me,” she said. “I’m from a podunk farming town, practically in Iowa. You?”

“North Carolina, about three hours north of here.”

“Why not UNC or Clemson, then?”

“Like you, I wanted some distance from home.”

“I never eat like this,” Olivia said as she took a nibble from her donut. “These are really good. I’m actually considering being a vegan. Or at least a vegetarian.”

“I’ll join you.”

“And why exactly would you do that?”

“Because I have a sense you want to take care of yourself. But not because you’re vain. You just have this aura of self-respect that sort of floats around you.”

“That’s awfully new agey.”

“Oh man, I am in no way new agey,” he said with a warm laugh. “No. Seriously. It’s how you carry yourself. You just seem to not just care for stuff, but you care, like, deeply about it. You made a very specific plan to move far away and made it happen. You want to design for advertising, and you’re making that happen. We were at a party and you’d rather read a book or something. You’re just very self-assured in all the good ways. Am I right?”

She took another bite and just smiled.

After, he drove her back to her apartment. At her door, Olivia began scrounging around the bottom of her purse.

“I can’t find a pen,” she said.

“Yes!” David said, smiling. “I get your number?”

“If I can find a pen,” she smiled back.

David whipped his hand to his back jeans pocket and rapidly presented a ballpoint and took off the cap.

“Done,” he said.

“And something to write on.”

David held out his hand, and Olivia took it into hers and wrote her phone number on his palm.

“Thanks for the donuts,” she said, and the time that followed in the days, weeks, and months ahead began to swirl so rapidly that they all wrapped up in a blur.

Olivia had fallen almost immediately in love with him, with David’s honesty and forthrightness, with his ability to acknowledge when he didn’t know something or when he did something wrong, for his ability to apologize truly and completely, and for his equally admirable ability to forgive. She’d fallen in love with his brown hair which always looked soft and clean and well-kept, as well as for his perpetual five o’clock shadow and the way he smelled when he picked her up for a date.

When she came back to school after Christmas, David proposed.

“I don’t ever want you that far away again,” he told her.

Her friends were dumbfounded that she agreed so quickly, and the wedding was just a month after graduation.

Marriage suited them both, and of course, there would be children, they believed.

“How many?” she asked on their honeymoon.

“As many as we can. As soon as we can.”

They settled in Charlotte, not too close to David’s parents, but close enough to his brother, Jeremy, who treated Olivia like the sister he never had.

Marriage at first was perfect. Olivia felt purpose and drive and excitement that she’d never known growing up in a small town where she never quite fit in.

But their first year passed, and then another. And soon ten years had disappeared and no children had arrived.

“It’s okay,” David said. “If it’s meant to be, it’ll happen.

Then suddenly they were both approaching forty, and they’d tried their best to be content with just the two of them. Susan from college now had three boys — she and Doug got married, as well — and their oldest, unbelievably, was starting his freshman year at their alma mater.

Yet here Olivia was.

Jeremy, the perpetual bachelor, was always glad to be their third wheel, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t the same as having children.

But the choice wasn’t hers.

She still loved David after all this time, of course. He forever remained a caring husband, considerate and thoughtful.

Shortly after she turned forty — the age when surely all hope was gone — she realized that she was three weeks late.

“You’re late?” David said in disbelief. He, too, had learned to manage his hopefulness.

“But I don’t feel any differently.”

Then time sped up once more.

David rushed to the store for a pregnancy test, and there it was: two blue lines.

There were ultrasounds and special vitamins because of her age, and then more ultrasounds where they heard not just one heartbeat, but two.

“Twins!” David nearly screamed in her face.

“We’re making up for lost time!” she said and cried as she hugged him, all while the nurse wiped the gunk from her ultrasound off of her belly.

When they were in the hospital the evening the twins were born, David said to Olivia, “Isn’t it amazing how we made them? How everything fits together? Like perfect little puzzle pieces.”

Photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash

And more time passed, and now it was mid-morning back in North Carolina, and David and Jeremy had gone on their kayaking expedition of which they’d always dreamed. Olivia was up early, making pancakes for Mark and Rosie, who were already preparing for high school graduation and their own lives beyond. And she was thinking about David, and wondering if he and Jeremy were having fun on their trip.

Hundreds of miles away, Jeremy sat on the edge of his hotel bed. He hadn’t slept at all because he couldn’t stop feeling the weight of his brother’s body in his arms.

All night at the hospital, during the ride back to his truck in the passenger side of a police car, alone in the hotel room with the second bed empty next to his, and every time he ever so slightly moved his arms, he could feel David’s head cradled in them.

And now David was tucked away in a metal drawer where countless other bodies had lain in the shadows of that tiny county morgue, awaiting transport back to North Carolina.

It should have been the first thing he did upon arriving at the hospital, but Jeremy had yet to call Olivia to let her know she was now a widow, and that Mark and Rosie’s father was gone.  That he had drowned in his arms and there was nothing he could do.

How could he possibly make that call?

What good would it have done to call before then? What could Olivia have done from hundreds of miles away other than grieve and cry throughout the long, miserable night?  How could Jeremy have consoled her when he himself didn’t believe his younger brother was gone?

He could have called her in the middle of the night through his own choked tears, his every muscle still burning from the struggle to stay afloat amidst the raging current, from slogging David’s body like a lead sack out of the water and onto the bank’s trudging black dirt where he knew right away that David was lost.

What good would it have done to drag Olivia from her bed? He would have done nothing but trap Olivia in the dark loneliness of their house, hovering over their two children who’d unknowingly forever lost their father as they slept deeply in their beds.

Finally, slowly, he dialed the number.

“Liv, it’s Jeremy,” he said with a voice so dry and cracked that it didn’t even sound like him.

“Oh God,” Olivia said. She immediately feared the worst. “What happened?”

“We’ve had a terrible accident.”

“What happened?” she said again.

“I’m so sorry, Olivia.”

“What is it, Jeremy?” she demanded, the awfulness of her stomach swimming and her heart dropping so suddenly as she grasped for the kitchen counter. “What happened?”

Mark and Rosie stopped eating and watched their mother from the kitchen table. She tried to force a smile at them, but worry had already flooded their eyes. Olivia turned off the stovetop burners and retreated through the door that led from the kitchen to the attached garage.  She stood barefoot on the cold concrete floor, surrounded by the faint smells of old grass clippings and gasoline.

“David’s kayak hit a rock just as we came on a terrible patch of rapids.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s gone, Liv.”

“Gone where?”

“We lost him, Olivia,” Jeremy said, and the words choked in his throat and came out cracked and broken. “He’s dead. Drowned. I tried to save him. I did. But we came around a bend that ripped him right out of my arms and…”

Jeremy went silent on the other end except for the sound of harsh, scattered breathing.

“I couldn’t hold him up!” Jeremy sobbed over the phone.

Pinpricks attacked Olivia’s face and she faintly realized she was holding her own breath. Mark and Rosie followed her to the garage and stood close to her sides.

“Who is it?” Mark asked.

“Your uncle Jeremy.”

“What’s happened?” Rose asked.

They pressed their ears against the phone in their mother’s hand, the three of them standing in the garage of all places, listening as Jeremy shared the remaining details, that David would be transported home in a couple of days. That he’d do everything to help plan the funeral. That she just needed to be with Mark and Rosie. He’d see them that afternoon, he said, and they hung up the phone.

Olivia opened the door to David’s sedan and climbed inside.

“Mom?” Mark said.

He and Rosie followed their mother into the car. After a few moments, the interior lights faded to darkness in the frighteningly cold silence of the garage that was now hers and hers alone. David’s tools on the table in the corner of the garage were no longer his for he was no longer here to possess them.

She allowed a single scream to erupt, so harsh and desperate and drawn out that her throat burned before she furiously wiped the tears from her face. From the back seat, Rosie reached her arms around her mother’s neck, and Mark leaned over from the passenger side. The three of them wrapped each other up in a tangle of grief.

Hours later, Jeremy was at their table, slumped and defeated. He looked years older than when she saw him just days before when he and David were leaving for their kayaking trip.

“I wish we’d known each other longer,” Olivia said. “We’ve been married all these years, but it wasn’t enough. Isn’t that what they always say? The other widows?”

“It’s only been one day he’s gone but it feels like forever already,” Jeremy said and dropped his face into his hands. “I’m so sorry, Liv. I’m just so sorry.”

Gone was that sweet awkward boy from college who became a man of great love and strength, taken away from Olivia and the children that together they had formed and she carried in her womb after so many years of waiting.

Her neighbor, Kay, had given her some sleeping pills, despite Olivia’s protestations.

“I don’t want to be drugged,” she’d said.

“But you’ll be glad you slept. You’ll need to sleep.”

Everyone was concerned about Mark and Rosie. Olivia couldn’t imagine how different their pain must feel.

Kay had offered to stay the night, on the couch, just in case they needed anything. Olivia turned down this kindness but relented and accepted the pills.

Rather than making her sleepy, the capsules instead awoke an endlessly cascading waterfall of memories, mostly of David, but also of snapshots from the times she’d long forgotten. Random incidents, some of which she wished had stayed buried.

For the first time in years, so randomly, she remembered a high school history teacher - what was his name?

Mr. Fairchild. That was his name. Fairchild. American government teacher. She’d forgotten all about him, or at least had relegated him to a section of her mind she had no desire to visit. He was one of the many reasons she sought to get away from that town so many years and decades ago.

He’d once patted Olivia on the rear as she left his classroom, smiling smarmily with his mustachioed lips curled back to show teeth with blackened edges. It was a quick pat, like what baseball players give each other when they do a good job. Olivia had entered his emptied classroom during lunch to ask for clarification on a test question she’d missed. But there it was, a pat, uncomfortable and creepy.

A moment later, with the same randomness, as she lay in bed she remembered eating eggs when she was twelve and unexpectedly breaking down into a mournful wail.

“Goodness, Olivia!” her mother almost scolded. “Are you ever hormonal or what?”

“These could have been chickens!” Olivia cried, genuinely upset.

That afternoon, Olivia started her first period, and her mother drove her out of town to the mall almost an hour away, and bought her a new purse to celebrate. Recalling the memory brought back feelings of shame, though. Shame and anger. Shame for having cried over eggs. Shame for having her period, though it was the most natural thing in the world. But she’d bled through her pants and her mother had to soak them in the sink overnight before they’d come clean. Anger, because rather than apologizing for her harsh words, her mother instead tried to buy her affections with a cheap Gucci knockoff that she didn’t even really want.

She stopped eating eggs after that day, but it was still several more years before she abandoned meat altogether. This realization brought her back to the night she and David met.

“I’m actually considering being a vegan,” she’d told him in the donut shop, so many years ago. “Or at least a vegetarian.”

She held no grudges against her husband, as she held against her mother and that teacher, except for the fact David was gone too soon. There were no missed words or lingering need for forgiveness of any kind. Just longing for the man who, on their annual week in Nag’s Head, would quietly brew coffee and slice fruit early in the morning before the children woke as Olivia sat at the dining table with its view of the Atlantic, working on a jigsaw puzzle.

But now her life was a puzzle missing a piece. She needed her other piece.

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