The Kingdom of Childhood Read online

  Life can be ironic that way. They took his body for toxicology tests and then sent him to the funeral home to be cremated. And when I sorted through his desk and found the letters and underpants from the graduate student he’d had an affair with two years ago that I never knew about, I thought, well, we’re even then. You maintained the illusion that you wanted us to stay married, and I maintained the illusion that I wanted you to stay alive.

  It all seemed fair enough, in the scheme of things.

  On Christmas Eve, three things happened.

  I picked up Russ’s ashes from the crematorium. In the morning, because of their reduced holiday work hours.

  On the way home, I stopped at the automatic teller machine and discovered my paycheck had bounced. That was when I knew I did not have a job anymore. That my son did not have a school anymore. It still stood in the shadow of trees, set back from the road on its wooded lot, but it was a relic now of a vanished past. No money, no school. Even a fairy-tale kingdom can’t run without gold.

  And then there was the note from Scott, saying he had gone to stay with Russ’s family in Virginia, his aunt and uncle. Staying in the house freaked him out now, he wrote. But I knew the house was just a ruse. It was me he didn’t want to be near.

  I suppose four things happened on Christmas Eve, really. But the fourth happened because of the three.

  30

  My car had no trouble finding the town house development and the woods behind it, driving there as if of its own volition. When I arrived, two rotting wooden posts flanked a newer metal gate, secured by a chain, which blocked my entry. So I put the Volvo in Reverse, rammed down one of the posts, and drove right up to the edge of the trees.

  As I made my way into the woods I saw nothing of the lush landscape that had welcomed us barely months before. The trees jutted from the ground like dead sticks, not expansive and multicolored as they had been the day Zach brought me here. Where the crackling leaves had lain there was only a dry, dusty mulch, and the glint of sun through the trees was obscured by the mottled gray sky. Here was the tree he had leaned against, his hands weary as they rubbed his face, worn down by the immensity of his desire. Here was the patch of ground where I knelt above him, offering him a last chance to deny me before the jagged teeth of his zipper bit into the flesh of my inner thigh, before his indulgent grin tricked me into believing he could offer consent as competently as he offered pleasure.

  I leaned back against that same tree and squinted up at the tangle of branches. The bark felt rough through my thin cotton shirt, but the panorama of the forest, in all its rotting loveliness, was still enchanting in its way. I dug into my purse for a small bottle I kept there, opened it, and swallowed a few of Russ’s Nembutal pills. The police had seized all the large bottles I had pointed out to them, but I still carried quite a lot in my purse, for reasons that were now irrelevant. I shook a few more into my hand and looked into the middle distance. Not far away there lay a swamp I had never noticed before. The sight of it made my heart lift a little. A body of water would be a good place to be when I fell asleep. I could vanish utterly, pulled back into the earth without a sound or a sign, and with no chance at all of waking.

  I walked ahead a little ways and stepped into the swamp. The cold water squelched into my shoes. I bit my lip, but pressed on. Ankles, shins. The mud sucked my shoes from my feet, so I let them go. My toes, already adjusted to the temperature, shocked to the smooth, enveloping grasp of the mud. At the center of the mire I fell to my knees, steeling myself against the shock of the cold. I swallowed the pills that remained in my palm, then lowered my hand into the water to steady my balance against the shifting ground. My fingers came up covered in green and gray, like a swamp creature.

  A flash of colored light in the distance caught my eye. It was a police car—no, two—investigating my car at the edge of the forest. I sighed deeply and sat back on my heels. Very soon, they would come into the woods and find me. I had no time to die. They would take me home, or more likely to a psychiatric ward, where I would play sane and soon be sent home with a bottle of Prozac. It would buy me just enough time for the gloom to pass and anger to set in, and I would decide it was better to stay alive. And alive, I was a menace. I had done bad things, and they weren’t nearly as bad as the things I had left to do.

  The officers shone their flashlights into the woods: two discs of pale yellow light, like the centers of daffodils bobbing under a child’s hand. From the very bottom of my spirit I wished for only one thing—to speak to Bobbie now, to hear her speak the sorry truths about my dirty heart, to coax me into doing the right thing. But I knew Bobbie was not here to speak with, and if she had been she would have told me to use my liar’s talents for the good of all: to tell the story without embellishment and animation, so the listener’s mind can hear through the make-believe the sound of resonating truth.

  Man is both a fallen god, and a god in the becoming.

  With difficulty I rose from the dark water and trekked across the forest, my bare feet gathering leaf litter in their coat of mud. At the tree line the two officers looked up at me, their hands instinctively rising to their holsters.

  I said, “I would like to confess to the murder of my husband.”

  In the dark bedroom Zach’s mother appeared a bent black shape on the sheet, her body curved in a Z around the quilt. Rhianne’s inclined head was a shadow, hair sticking from her ponytail like raveled black threads, her whispers ghostlike.

  Zach sat on a chair in the far corner, his usual place when Rhianne was present, a silent watcher. His father, on his knees beside the bed, clutched his mother’s hand and whispered earnestly in a reassuring baritone. If Zach slipped out, no one would have blamed him. The normally cool room was downright hot, the thermostat kicked up to eighty-six degrees, and his mother wore a black athletic bra and nothing else, although at the moment her body lay entwined in the straining sheet. Rhianne’s usually warm and easygoing manner toward Zach was gone, replaced with an edgy impatience that made Zach suspect she was angry at him, or secretly expecting something to go wrong.

  But he was determined to be present. This was his sister, yes, but for some other, less explainable reason he felt obligated. It seemed a reckoning, to sit and observe helplessly this other side of passion, to watch how nature accounted for the pleasure. After all his indulgences, he owed himself that much.

  Despite the whispering, nothing in that room was quiet; specifically, nothing about his mother. Fighting through what Rhianne called transition, she groaned and sobbed, took great gulps of air, then clutched the corner of the pillow to her face and sobbed even more. Her ankles strained, pulling the sheet tight between them. The white of her face and dark of her hair flashed strobelike as she twisted against the pillow.

  Zach observed, not for the first time, that it looked disconcertingly like orgasm, this business of labor. The momentum of moans, the forgetting of breath, the pinpoints of sweat—at the crux he could not help calling forth images of Judy and of Fairen, their open mouths, the tendons in their necks, the wild hair. It was as though pleasure and pain were not a spectrum but a wheel, and when a woman pushed past one end or fell back through the other side, she would find herself in the state of his mother. Into his mind flashed a quote from her studio chalkboard: The end of birth is death; the end of death is birth. Therefore grieve not for what is inevitable.

  She screamed—a long, impossibly deep, animal sound—and swelled in a curl around the balled quilt. Rhianne waved a hand urgently, and Zach’s father climbed onto the bed and wound himself behind his wife. As he turned himself into a sort of seatback for her, Rhianne moved to the front of things, and Zach knew it was almost over. He unfolded himself from the chair and came forward, touching the tall bedpost, peering over Rhianne’s shoulder.

  “Can you see from there?” Rhianne asked him, and as he nodded, his mother grimaced and groaned and arched back against his father. Rhianne laid a hand intimately on the inside of her thigh and said, “S
hhh, there, you’re close now, so close.” His mother gritted her teeth, the muscles in her legs tensing and jumping, and Zach recalled Judy telling him Scott had been born at home, doubtless in a scene much like this one. Spontaneously he wondered how he could ever have presumed to know her, this woman who had traveled through time and pain in ways that seemed impossibly distant to him. She had borne Scott in her own bed, her darkly polished sleigh bed, and with him the chain of time that would bring Zach to that same place eighteen years later, his knees planted where her hips had been.

  With that, his sister’s fuzzy head burst forth into the world in a gush of water, mouth agape, fat limbs flailing, streaked in blood and greeted with their mother’s sudden turnabout laughter. And this, Zach thought, was the natural order, indeed: love everywhere, and also, a terrible mess.

  31

  When his body wrapped around mine, I felt safe. Behind me, chest to back, leg to leg, he became the opposite of a shadow: a stronger, larger, taller me who could not be bullied or broken. His hands cupping mine made a nest out of my palms, a promise that nothing would bite me, nor would I be allowed to crush what I held.

  Once, I had imagined that in a jail cell I would curl on the bed and think of nothing but the beauty of Zach’s body. But as I fell asleep in the back of the police car my mind sought only those hours with Rudi, in the barn or shed, in the snow. Where the world was the fairy tale, and hard nightmares were the stuff of books and outposts where Jesus did not tread. As I drifted off, in my mind’s eye I sat on a straw bale and rested my cheek against Rudi’s arm while he paged through my book of moral tales, laughing at the absurdity of horror. The bare wooden walls marked the edges of my world just then. I was a good little girl, not a bad one, and I had never considered that a teacher might be wrong.

  Seek out what’s beautiful, I had instructed Maggie, and love it before it rots. But I had been wrong. Beautiful men stay beautiful forever. That which is lovely remains so, preserved behind glass in one’s mind.

  And so I carried it all with me, the beautiful and the terrible alike, to keep me company, and left the ordinary world.

  ACKNOWLEGMENTS

  With deep appreciation, I would like to acknowledge the individuals who walked with me along the path of writing this novel.

  Stephany Evans, my wonderful agent, who had faith in my idea and my ability to bring it to light. Thank you.

  Susan Swinwood and the team at MIRA Books, for believing in the manuscript, and for doing a stellar job in editing and taking it to market.

  My first readers and tiny fan club: Amanda Skjeveland, Kathy Gaertner, Jassy Mackenzie, Sara Roseman, Randi Anderson (also known as Mom), Laura Wilcott, Hillary Myers, Elizabeth Gardner, Stephanie Cebula, Gary Presley—and a special thanks to Erica Hayes. I am also thankful to the judges and reviewers at the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award who gave the book an approving nod.

  D.S. and S., whose candid insights brought Zach and Judy to life in my mind.

  I would like to express gratitude, amorphous though it may be, to the cities of Greenbelt, Maryland, and North Conway, New Hampshire, as well as to a certain little Waldorf school that welcomed my family when we were young and broke. I hope my fondness for each of you is visible in this text.

  And finally, my husband, Mike, and all four of my children—for your sacrifices, for your patience and for the steady supply of caffeine, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

  We hope you enjoyed The Kingdom of Childhood, and that the following Questions for Discussion help to enhance your book club discussions.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  The story is set in 1998 amidst the release of the Starr Report and President Clinton’s impeachment, and as the novel opens, there is intense discussion in the media about these subjects. Do you feel the “national conversation” about the Lewinsky affair opened avenues of discussion that would have been inappropriate for Zach and Judy otherwise?

  The first few chapters of the novel show an increasingly skewed set of boundaries between Judy and Zach that allow the affair to occur. Did this seem realistic to you? Was the process of dissolving their boundaries similar to what happens in affairs between consenting adults?

  The Waldorf school movement is an educational approach that is widely practiced around the world and yet little known outside those communities. Its philosophy extends beyond the classroom to the entire lifestyle of the families involved. How did you feel about the way of life Zach’s family, and the others in the story, have adopted? Did it seem appealing or too intrusive? Were there any aspects that stood out to you? Judy’s children, Scott and Maggie, both rebel from their upbringing in different ways. Did you blame them for rejecting the Waldorf way of life, or did it seem understandable?

  Both Judy and Zach are influenced by experiences in which they are confronted with their parents’ sexual misdeeds. Each struggles to reconcile their idealized sense of their parent with their parent’s human failings. In what ways did you feel those experiences affected their choices with each other? In the case of Zach, did you feel that his mother’s affair made an affair with a middle-aged woman seem more natural to him, or only increased his level of guilt about his role in it?

  In the flashback scenes, Judy’s mother is institutionalized due to mental illness, which leads to Judy’s father’s affair with Kirsten and her own isolation and dependence on Rudi. All of these factors set the stage for her later affair with Zach, which in turn leads to her own unraveling mental state toward the end of the story. Did you sense she was mentally ill throughout the novel, or did the stress of the affair cause her to “crack”? How did her family history of mental illness factor in to your impressions of or sympathy for Judy?

  On the way back from Ohio, Zach and Judy discuss the song “Mrs. Robinson” and the idea of older women who pursue younger men. While society considers it “creepy” when an older man pursues a young girl, in popular culture it’s often held as funny or tantalizing when an older woman—a “cougar”—does the same with a young man. Do you agree that this double standard exists? Has your perspective changed after reading The Kingdom of Childhood?

  During the scene in which Zach comes over to spend the night, he reflects on his first kiss with Judy. In the version he remembers, she was the aggressor, which is quite different from the earlier version told from Judy’s point of view in which the kiss is instigated by Zach. Which version did you believe?

  In Part II, after Zach feels Judy forced herself on him in the car when he was sick, his attitude toward her changes significantly. Still, he continues to be with her. Have you ever had the experience of being in a relationship you knew was toxic while finding it impossible to let the person go?

  Throughout the story, numerous people—Sandy Valera, Temple, Rhianne—attempt to interfere with the affair (to the extent that they know about it). Yet none is truly successful in making a difference. Did you feel any of these characters pushed too hard, or not hard enough, in their attempts? How do you think they could have been more effective?

  Although it isn’t mentioned in the book, the story is set around the same time as the real-life conviction of teacher Mary Kay Letourneau for her relationship with a twelve-year-old student. Such cases are not uncommon in the news, and often the perpetrator is a devoted teacher who has a spouse and children. The question always asked is, “Why would she risk everything for an affair with a boy?” Did the story leave you with a different perspective on how these events occur? Do you believe that such relationships are criminal?

  At the end of the book, did Judy redeem herself to you in any way? Did you feel pity for her? Also at the end of the book, Zach is experiencing the birth of his sister. Did you have the sense that his life would get back on track after this, or that the story’s events would continue to complicate things for him?

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-1383-8

  THE KINGDOM OF CHILDHOOD

  Copyright © 2011 by Rebecca Coleman

  All rights reserved. Except for us
e in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, MIRA Books, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  MIRA and the Star Colophon are trademarks used under license and registered in Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

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