her.
Charlene reaches over to the nightstand and picks up the telephone. But instead of punching in the 900 number of that psychic on the screen, she calls the only person who might be able to answer the question Philip asked downstairs: what if someone took it from his body afterward? Charlene is calling her ex-husband, Richard, in Palm Beach. Heâs a doctor, after all. A doctor who happened to be working at Bryn Mawr Hospital that summer night five years before, when the EMTs brought in the mangled body of their younger son.
chapter 5
PHILIP IS PARKED OUTSIDE THE OLIVE GARDEN RESTAURANT, looking over his midterm poetry portfolio and killing time before his shift. As a rule, he never ever gets to work early. But he and his mother had another one of their blowouts this afternoon, their worst yet, so he tore out of the house and drove aimlessly around Radnor and Wayne before finally ending up here in the parking lot, trying to forget the last thing she said to him before he left home.
Spread out on the passenger seat among his Madonna tapes, spiral-bound notebooks, and a soiled waiter apron are the drafts of the poems he has been working and reworking all semester, each of them marked with tomorrowâs due date: October 20, 1999. When he read over the revisions last night, Philip actually felt the slightest bit proud of his work. But as he scans the titles nowââDark All Day,â âUnfamiliar Family,â âDonât Try This at Homeââit is all he can do not to use the carâs cigarette lighter to set the pages on fire. He even contemplates tossing the entire portfolio into the Dumpster behind the restaurant, but a flock of dirty seagulls is hovering above, taking turns swooping down for scraps, and Philip has always had a phobia of birds.
At the very top of the pile is the poem he wrote last June for Ronnie, the one he worked up the courage to read at the funeral. Now he is mortified that he did.
âSharp Crossingâ by Philip Chase
You walked along a barbed wire fence
Between this field and the next
Ambling and happy, showing no sign of what was about to occur
You waited for the farmer to turn his tractor toward home
You waited for the horses to move to another patch of grass
Thatâs when you climbed the fence
You thought no one was looking
But I was
I saw you slip over to the other side
Tear your clothes
Cut your skin
But what did that matter now?
You were limping toward a new home with new rules in that faraway field
As the farmer disappeared behind his barn
As the horses returned to smell your blood on the grass
You were the one who was hurt
But I am the one who is crying
Dr. Conorton, Philipâs shaky-handed, bushy-browed poetry professor, had called Philip into his cramped office at the community college and told him that, in his opinion, âSharp Crossingâ was good enough to publish. He even scrawled the names and addresses of a half-dozen journals and reviews he thought might accept the poem for their summer issue. The news had been the first thing to remotely lift Philipâs spirits in a long while. For weeks afterward, he walked around feeling puffed up with pride and (even though he would never admit it) a tad superior to the other students. During class, he took to looking around the circle of desks at the faces of his peersâthe angry, divorced woman with the shaved head; the muttonchopped Italian guy with the pierced tongue and a leather vest he never seemed to take off; the plump, daffy hairdresser with overprocessed hair and extralong fake nails, each with a different swirling design and the occasional faux diamond chip near the tipâand Philip thought, Unlike you people, Conorton actually thinks I stand a chance of publishing my work. Someday, somebody besides the ten of us in this classroom might read my words.
All of that uncharacteristic arrogance and optimism is gone, though, as he sits in the restaurant
Charlene reaches over to the nightstand and picks up the telephone. But instead of punching in the 900 number of that psychic on the screen, she calls the only person who might be able to answer the question Philip asked downstairs: what if someone took it from his body afterward? Charlene is calling her ex-husband, Richard, in Palm Beach. Heâs a doctor, after all. A doctor who happened to be working at Bryn Mawr Hospital that summer night five years before, when the EMTs brought in the mangled body of their younger son.
chapter 5
PHILIP IS PARKED OUTSIDE THE OLIVE GARDEN RESTAURANT, looking over his midterm poetry portfolio and killing time before his shift. As a rule, he never ever gets to work early. But he and his mother had another one of their blowouts this afternoon, their worst yet, so he tore out of the house and drove aimlessly around Radnor and Wayne before finally ending up here in the parking lot, trying to forget the last thing she said to him before he left home.
Spread out on the passenger seat among his Madonna tapes, spiral-bound notebooks, and a soiled waiter apron are the drafts of the poems he has been working and reworking all semester, each of them marked with tomorrowâs due date: October 20, 1999. When he read over the revisions last night, Philip actually felt the slightest bit proud of his work. But as he scans the titles nowââDark All Day,â âUnfamiliar Family,â âDonât Try This at Homeââit is all he can do not to use the carâs cigarette lighter to set the pages on fire. He even contemplates tossing the entire portfolio into the Dumpster behind the restaurant, but a flock of dirty seagulls is hovering above, taking turns swooping down for scraps, and Philip has always had a phobia of birds.
At the very top of the pile is the poem he wrote last June for Ronnie, the one he worked up the courage to read at the funeral. Now he is mortified that he did.
âSharp Crossingâ by Philip Chase
You walked along a barbed wire fence
Between this field and the next
Ambling and happy, showing no sign of what was about to occur
You waited for the farmer to turn his tractor toward home
You waited for the horses to move to another patch of grass
Thatâs when you climbed the fence
You thought no one was looking
But I was
I saw you slip over to the other side
Tear your clothes
Cut your skin
But what did that matter now?
You were limping toward a new home with new rules in that faraway field
As the farmer disappeared behind his barn
As the horses returned to smell your blood on the grass
You were the one who was hurt
But I am the one who is crying
Dr. Conorton, Philipâs shaky-handed, bushy-browed poetry professor, had called Philip into his cramped office at the community college and told him that, in his opinion, âSharp Crossingâ was good enough to publish. He even scrawled the names and addresses of a half-dozen journals and reviews he thought might accept the poem for their summer issue. The news had been the first thing to remotely lift Philipâs spirits in a long while. For weeks afterward, he walked around feeling puffed up with pride and (even though he would never admit it) a tad superior to the other students. During class, he took to looking around the circle of desks at the faces of his peersâthe angry, divorced woman with the shaved head; the muttonchopped Italian guy with the pierced tongue and a leather vest he never seemed to take off; the plump, daffy hairdresser with overprocessed hair and extralong fake nails, each with a different swirling design and the occasional faux diamond chip near the tipâand Philip thought, Unlike you people, Conorton actually thinks I stand a chance of publishing my work. Someday, somebody besides the ten of us in this classroom might read my words.
All of that uncharacteristic arrogance and optimism is gone, though, as he sits in the restaurant
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