Suicide Forest by Jeremy Bates Read Free Book Online

it? We have no house, no savings. No—” She trailed off.
“What about children?”
    I swallowed. Kids again. She’d been talking
about them more and more lately. I would like to have one or
two…eventually. Thirty always sounded like a good age to me, though
I don’t know why I choose this number aside from the fact it’s the
beginning of a new decade. I suppose I figure I would have matured
the necessary amount to be a father by then.
    “You really want to have kids now?” I
said.
    “Soon.”
    “We’re too young.”
    “Young, young, young!”
    “You know how expensive they are?”
    “Exactly. It’s why we’re leaving Japan—and
why we can’t simply keep country hopping for however long you want.
Not on the salaries we’re making. We’re okay now because we’re just
supporting ourselves. But if we had a child? There’s schooling,
clothes, food, medical bills. In the States I could get a job with
the Board of Education. I’d have maternity leave, benefits.”
    “And you’d be in California. You know how
far that is from Wisconsin? I may as well be in Japan.”
    “You could come to St. Helena with me.”
    St. Helena? I was gob-smacked. St.
Helena was a small town in the Napa Valley whose only claim to fame
was that Robert Louis Stevenson had walked down the throughway with
his bride more than a century before. This was the first I’d heard
of the idea of relocating there, and it surprised the hell out of
me.
    I’ve come to believe there are four types of
ESL teachers in Asia. The first are young people looking to travel
for a year or two and save a bit of money before returning home and
starting the careers they would sink into for the rest of their
lives. The second are those who end up marrying an Asian and living
the rest of their lives as expatriates, maybe flying home every so
often for a wedding or a funeral or Christmas with their ageing
parents. The third are the more adventurous who are willing to give
up the better salaries and standards of living in Japan and South
Korea for a more laissez faire lifestyle in a tropical environment
in Southeast Asia. These are predominantly male and have little
interest in getting hitched in the near future, if ever. In fact,
many of them have dreams of retiring early, buying a hut on a
white-sand beach, and spending their twilight years with a constant
supply of fifty-cent beers and a revolving door of girlfriends half
their age.
    The final type are the Runners, and their
label is self-explanatory: they’re running from something.
    This was where Mel and I fit in. I was
running from Gary’s death, while Mel was running from her family’s
reputation.
    Her parents divorced when she was in her
senior year at UCLA, and her mother soon began seeing another man.
When her father found out, he broke into the new beau’s house and
suffocated him to death with a plastic bag. He was tracked down by
the San Diego Regional Fugitive Task Force and was now serving life
in Corcoran State Prison, the same shithole where Charles Manson
was spending his remaining years.
    After Mel graduated she returned to St.
Helena to be with her mother, where the population was something
like five thousand, and where the murder remained the talk of the
town. She was harassed constantly, and a month later she flew to
Japan to get away.
    You can’t run forever, however, and although
she’s made it clear she wanted to return to the States, I never
imagined to her hometown.
    Mel was looking at me expectantly, as if
waiting for my reply.
    “We can’t go back there,” I said.
    Anger darkened her eyes. “Why not?”
    “You know why.”
    “That was a long time ago. People
forget.”
    “Not in small towns.”
    “I didn’t do anything.”
    “That doesn’t matter.”
    “It’s a nice place.”
    “There are a lot of nice places, Mel. Why
St. Helena?”
    “My mom’s lonely,” she said after a few
seconds deliberation. “I think she’d like me back there.”
    Panic gripped me.