One Last Thing Before I Go (14 page)

CHAPTER 34

S
ilver
undresses Denise delicately, like she might break. He pulls her blouse off and kisses her chest, inhaling her scent, reveling in the familiar topography of her body. The shape of her shoulders, the shallow pockets behind her collarbones, the small scar over her left breast from a childhood fall. It’s surreal to be here again, feeling her heat, tasting her skin, realizing that he has carried the sense memory of her inside of him all this time.

He watches her hands undo his belt buckle, and he is suddenly conscious of how his body has changed since the last time they were naked together. He is easily twenty pounds heavier, and the pathetically minimal muscle tone he has accidentally maintained through his drumming appears as nothing more than a shadow beneath the added weight. He thinks of his erectile snafu with the college girl and wonders if he will be able to perform. He can’t really feel himself down there, and it’s only when she wraps her fingers around him that he registers, with no small measure of relief, that he is hard.

She leads him over to his unmade bed, and he is acutely aware of his bedroom’s sparse furnishings, of the clutter on his night table and the floor beside it, of his ragged linens and the fact that he’s not sure when he last changed them. He hopes they don’t smell.

They come together slowly in his bed. He cannot stop touching her, running his fingers up and down the length of her arms, across her shoulders, down her belly. He opens his mouth against her breasts, kissing and tasting, feeling their familiar shape in his hands, and he considers the possibility that this is all a stroke-induced hallucination, that he’ll wake up paralyzed in his bed, or not at all.

Their rhythm starts to build and he feels the force of her beneath him, the growing urgency in her kisses. He always admired her abandon when it came to sex, the way she was able to lose herself in the pleasure. It always aroused him further, even as he wondered why it was never like that for him. He certainly enjoyed sex, but there was always a side of him that stayed grounded, observing the goings-on from a neutral corner in his brain.

“What’s wrong?” Denise says to him, panting hard, her breath filling his mouth.

“Nothing,” he says.

“Your heart?”

“Broken.”

“But beating.”

“Yes.”

She kisses him furiously, his hands sliding down her back to find the curve of her ass.

“Then can you please get inside me?” she whispers to him.

And so he does.

He wants it to last forever and to be over already so he knows what will happen next. He knows he can’t keep her, but he wonders if maybe he’s wrong. God knows he’s been wrong about things like this before. He can feel everything all at once; her fingernails digging into his skin, her chin pressing against his as she arches her back, the intoxicatingly smooth surface of her ass in the palms of his hands, the first beads of sweat forming on her neck, his heart beating furiously in his chest. Denise rolls in waves beneath him like a storm, lifting him off the bed with her hips, grunting to the beat like a tennis player, and he feels himself building, worries that he will finish too soon. He doesn’t want it to end, is terrified of the expression she will wear when they’re done. Is this a fundamental change, or is this good-bye? He was both amazed and relieved at how they arrived here in his bed without any discussion, but now he finds himself wishing he knew what the hell she was thinking, or even what the hell he was thinking, for that matter.

Denise comes, crying out with the pleasure of it, pulling him deeper inside of her like she’s trying to squeeze the last bit of something out of him. His own orgasm comes on the heels of hers, not nearly as impressive or animated, but it rocks him nonetheless. When he’s done, he rolls off of her, closing his eyes as the room flashes like lightning. He feels her hand land on his chest, her finger tracing circles there. She says something, but he can’t hear her over the ringing in his ears.

He stares up at the paint swirls on his ceiling and thinks about God, wonders what He might make of all of this. A wave of clarity washes over him, and he has a thought, an epiphany really. Suddenly he sees an answer, not a solution, but a truth floating above him, and he knows he needs to share it with Denise. But even as he starts to speak, the ringing in his ears becomes louder, and the thought dissolves before he can articulate it. He closes his eyes, trying to recapture it, but the darkness is soft and soothing and doesn’t lend itself to introspection. He hears a sound, as if from far away, a low rumbling that he only identifies as his own snoring in the instant before sleep consumes him.

CHAPTER 35

D
enise l
ies on her back, listening to Silver snore. She feels guilty, primarily about not feeling guilty, and wonders if that’s the same thing. She isn’t quite sure when it was she knew that this was going to happen—maybe when he walked into the dress store, maybe when he showed up to dinner at his parents’ looking freshly scrubbed and strangely childlike; she suspects it might even have been as early as when he burst into her bedroom that crazy day last week, eyes blazing, looking to somehow reclaim her and Casey. She realizes now that there has been a part of her for all of these years that never stopped waiting for him to do just that.

But whenever it was, she knows this crime was premeditated. Not by Silver, he never planned anything in advance. If he thought about his actions at all, it was always after he had committed them. That was emblematic of their differences in general. Denise considered and planned, while Silver looked back after the fact and wondered what had possessed him.

And yet here she is, lying beside the man who has failed her in every possible way, who has used up the best years of her life, feeling tenderness and . . . loss? It makes no sense, but if there is one kernel of wisdom she does possess on matters of love it is that sense rarely enters into it. Silver was the first man she ever loved, and even now, after all the anger and hatred, she still feels things shifting inside of her when he walks into a room. And that’s not healthy, or fair, or right, but there it is.

She rolls onto her side to watch him sleep. His face loses something in slumber, and he looks unfamiliar to her, like a word repeated endlessly until its syllables disintegrate into meaningless sounds. What have I done? she thinks, then chides herself for being dramatic. She moves closer to him and presses her index finger into his shoulder, watching his skin dimple around her finger. She looks around this small, depressing bedroom, with its cracking paint and generic, shit-brown carpeting; the plywood dresser with mismatched handles on its drawers; the random, scattered laundry piles; the lone cell-phone charger plugged into a wall outlet; and the smell of masculine desperation lingering like a base coat beneath the fresh smell of their recent sex. She experiences a shameful pang of vindication, as if these shabby surroundings are incontrovertible proof that the failure in their marriage had been his. But she also feels sorry for him, for the drab and empty life he’s been living all these years, and sorry for herself for being here.

What are you doing here?
she asks herself.
Do you love him at all?
She does, she supposes, but it’s a love, she knows, that’s been bent and twisted beyond repair. We don’t stop loving people just because we hate them, but we don’t stop hating them either. It’s just that, ever since he developed this condition, Silver seemed to become more and more the man he was when she first fell for him, the man he still is in her saddest dreams: honest, impulsive, childishly sincere, romantic. The way he spoke to her and Casey that day in her bedroom, the way he reached for her, the way he told her she was beautiful, the way he looks at Casey. He is her Silver again, and even though she knows all of these behaviors are the result of microscopic blood clots and ministrokes, she can’t help but be drawn to him again.

She thinks about his aorta, disintegrating inside of him, ready to come apart at a moment’s notice. He will either die very shortly or he’ll have the surgery and most likely go back to being the self-defeating, disengaged asshole he’s been for the last eight years. Either way, there’s no version in which tonight’s insane indiscretion will ever amount to anything. She knows that for certain, just as she knows that she will grieve him all over again in either scenario.

She is so lost in these thoughts that it takes her a moment to realize that his eyes have been open for the last little while, and he’s been gazing up at her.

“Hey,” he says drowsily.

“Hey.”

“You’re still here.”

She smiles. The man really takes nothing for granted. “So it would seem.”

They look at each other for a moment. There is no time more painfully awkward than the shaky moments after sex that should not have been had.

“What are you thinking?” Denise says.

“I’m thinking that that felt better than anything I can remember,” he says. “And I’d like to do it again.”

She smiles. “Well, if once was a mistake, twice would be criminal. Besides, I think my twofer days are over.”

“You love Rich,” he says.

She bristles momentarily at the statement. “Why would you bring him up like that right now?”

Silver shrugs. He meant no harm. “We just had sex, so you must be thinking of him.”

She’s forgotten how disconcerting his new frankness can be.

“Well, I’m not. I’m thinking of you, actually. Do you really want to die?”

He sighs and looks away. “I really don’t like talking about that.”

“Tough shit. You had the sex, you’re going to have to suffer through the pillow talk.”

He smiles at her, his expression so loving that she has to quell the sudden urge to throw herself into his arms.

“I want to have sex again,” he says.

“That’s not going to happen.”

“For sure?”

“For sure.”

He ponders that sadly for a moment, then seems to accept it.

“Silver.”

“Yes.”

“You’re just getting to know Casey again. She needs you. You cannot check out on us again.”

“I know.”

“I mean, I don’t know who got her pregnant, but the fact that she won’t tell us means she’s probably not seriously considering—”

“Jeremy,” he says.

Denise falls silent and looks at him. “What?”

“Jeremy Lockwood. She had sex with him.”

Denise feels her breath catching in her throat, feels a surge of anger rising up inside of her. “She told you that?”

“We saw him at Dagmar’s and I kind of guessed it. He used to do those magic tricks, remember? He would wear this cape and—”

“Silver!” Denise shouts. “Focus, please. Are you sure about this? Did you talk about it with Casey?”

“Yes,” Silver says. “She said it was lovely.”

“And you’ve known this all along.”

“For a while, yes.”

“And you didn’t think that was something we should talk about?”

Silver considers the question and shrugs. “We don’t really talk so much.”

Denise gets out of bed and starts to pull on her clothing. “You’re un-fucking-believable!”

“Why are you angry?”

“I’m not angry. I’m upset. My daughter is pregnant.”

“She was pregnant before you knew about Jeremy.”

“That little shit.”

She pulls her bra on and fumbles for the clasps. Silver is sorry to see her breasts disappear.

“I think you should calm down. Come back to bed.”

“Sure. Let’s fuck again. That will fix everything.”

“You need to relax, Denise.”

“And you need to get dressed.”

“What for?” he says. But, of course, he already knows.

CHAPTER 36

T
hey interse
ct in the front hallway, Silver and Denise coming through the front door just as Casey and Jeremy are coming downstairs from his bedroom. They stop to consider each other with wary surprise, the air between them charged with panicked thoughts and a complex knot of postcoital guilt.

Seeing her parents together, Casey recalls the years of dreaming that her parents would remarry. She would lie in her bed and dream up elaborately dire scenarios that would bring her parents back together. These scenarios usually involved something bad happening to her: cancer, a car crash, amnesia. She once went so far as to plan her own fake kidnapping, complete with a letter cobbled together from newspaper type. And maybe it’s because of that, that seeing them here now fills her with a sense of impending dread.

“What are you doing here, Dad?” she says, trying for all the world to sound like someone who wasn’t having sex with the boy next to her ten minutes ago.

“Your mother wanted me to come.”

“Hey, Mr. Silver,” Jeremy says. “Hi, Denise.”

Casey sees Denise look up at Jeremy, and in that moment, she understands what has happened. Whatever it is her mother is about to say, she knows that it will change everything, and while there’s a part of her that wants that, she doesn’t want it to happen like this.

“Mom,” she says.

But before anything else can happen, Valerie Lockwood comes in from the back, followed by Rich.

“Denise!” Valerie calls out, shouting to be heard above the Radiohead that seems to be coming from everywhere at once. “You made it.” Valerie, who has always had a tendency to dress too young, is wearing leggings and a sleeveless blouse and waving her half-drained vodka tonic around with a careless abandon that indicates it’s been refilled more than a few times. She kisses Denise’s cheek, oblivious to the grave, simmering look on her friend’s face. Rich steps past them, sizing up Silver. “Hey, Silver,” he says. “This is a surprise.”

“This is nothing,” Silver says.

* * *

Casey stares at Silver, her eyes beseeching him to do something. But doing something has never been his thing.

“Is something wrong?” Jeremy says, picking up on the vibe.

“Is something wrong?” Denise snaps at him. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Denise!” Valerie interjects, stepping instinctively in front of her son. “What the hell is wrong with you? What happened?”

“Mom!” Casey shouts. “Just stop it!”

“No!” Denise shouts back at her. “I’m not going to stop it.”

“They don’t know!”

That throws Denise, shuts her up for a moment. A small crowd is gathering in the hall, sensing some drama in the offing.

“We don’t know what?” Jeremy says.

Rich leans in to Denise. “What’s going on, honey?”

“Yeah,” Valerie says, looking pissed. “What the hell is going on?”

And then, to Casey’s abject horror, her mother starts to cry, right there in the Lockwoods’ front hall, and any lingering hopes of her making a clean escape are dashed. She looks over at Jeremy, standing pale-faced and confused beside her, and feels a surge of pity for him, in these last moments before everything changes.

* * *

Denise is suddenly dizzy. She can still taste Silver on her tongue, can still smell the sad, vaguely musty odor of his bedroom—God knows when he last changed those sheets, or what kind of ecosystem has evolved in those filthy brown carpets. The whole episode seems insane to her now, unreal. Did they really just do that? The music washes over her, confusing her as kids slide past her, in and out of the Lockwoods’ front door. She looks over at Rich standing beside Silver. For one crazy moment, she imagines that he is sniffing at Silver, that he can smell her on him. The room starts to spin, and somewhere in a room off the hall there’s a strobe light flashing in time to the music, and Denise realizes it was a mistake to come here. She wants it to be morning, wants to be lying alone in her bed, watching the shadows slowly retreat as the sun creeps across her duvet. If she can just make it to morning, she’ll be able to make sense of all this, get everything back on track. But right now? Now all she wants to do is find a way to gracefully extricate herself from this situation, from this house, without collapsing, or vomiting, or having to make eye contact with Rich or Silver, or Jeremy Lockwood, for that matter.

“I’m sorry,” she says through her tears, she’s not sure to whom. She is aware of everyone around her looking at her, and she feels exposed and scared. She needs someone to lead her out of here; she doesn’t care if it’s Rich or Silver. But no one does, and what’s the point of having two men in your life when neither is going to whisk you away in moments like these?

“Denise!” It’s Valerie, leaning into her. “Are you OK?”

Denise shakes her head, unable to speak. Rich steps forward and reaches for her elbow, to steady her. “What’s wrong, honey?”

“Please take her out of here,” Casey says, mortified.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Rich says, sounding lost and, Denise thinks, maybe a little scared. She feels a stab of intense guilt that threatens to double her over. He has been nothing but good to her, he has been loyal, gentle, and unwavering in his love for her, and all she has done lately is put him through the wringer. She pulls him into her and leans against him.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

“For all of it.”

He gives her a long look, like he’s trying to see through her. She looks up at him and wonders what he thinks, what he knows, and what he’ll be willing to forgive.

“Take me home?” she says.

But that’s not what happens.

* * *

Silver looks at Casey and Jeremy standing on the stairs and he can tell, from Casey’s posture, from Jeremy’s flitting eyes, that they’ve just had sex. He couldn’t say why, but he just knows. He wonders if they can tell the same about him and Denise. He is still reliving the last hour in his mind, the way they came together with no discussion, the way all of the walls between them had somehow fallen away in an instant, as if they’d never been there. There’s a part of him that knows he shouldn’t make anything more of it than it most likely was—a last communion before the world shifts again. But there’s something in him that dares to hope it might have meant something more. He has always had a dangerous tendency to embrace blind optimism in the face of hard facts. He knows this, knows it is largely responsible for the mess of his life these last ten years or so, but even knowing it, he can’t seem to shut down the voice in him telling him that everything happens for a reason, that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, that Casey’s improbable pregnancy bringing him back into Denise’s life just as she planned to marry Rich has a certain karmic potency that seems to have rendered the laws of love and probability up for grabs.

He can’t help himself. When he looks at Denise, even now as she sniffles wetly onto Rich’s shoulder, he knows that he loves her as much as anyone can love anyone. But she is not anyone, she is the mother of his daughter, and maybe he and Denise walking past their old house, then going home and having sex in his bed, as if that was where they belonged . . . maybe that was all fate, or Providence, or the God of his sand-swirled ceiling righting the old wrongs and setting them all on a new course together. In its own way, sleeping with Denise tonight then coming here with her to collect Casey feels right and portentous, like the start of their family all over again. He looks at Denise and he knows that this is what he had meant to tell her earlier; that lying naked with her, hip to hip, feeling himself inside of her, had felt like coming home after being lost at sea for years. He looks at her and he wants to tell her that, to tell her that kissing her and touching her and fucking her again has woken up something inside of him, the thing he lacked all those years ago when he let her and Casey slip away, and that if she gave him another chance, please, now that he has seen the stakes, now that he’s seen all the damage and the pain, all the lost and desolate years, he knows that this time he’d grab hold of them both and never let them go.

He looks at her, wanting to tell her all of this, but then he sees her expression, and the expressions on Rich’s face, and on Casey’s face, and on every other face staring at him, and he realizes, too late, that he already has.

* * *

Denise looks at Silver in horror, then at Rich, who is backing away from her like she’s just grown a pair of fangs. A cold sweat breaks out on her back, her stomach churns, and she feels the ground falling away from her, isolating her. She’s alone in this, like she was when Silver first left, and what the fuck was she thinking, going to bed with him like that? Pity? Closure? Both are an exercise in futility where Silver is concerned.

“Rich,” she says, but she has nothing to say beyond that. Just his name, which rolls off her tongue like a confession. Rich looks at her, his eyes filled with a hurt she’s never seen, and she is floating out of her body, observing the whole circus her life has just become from a perch somewhere over her own shoulder. Just as he reaches the front door, he offers her a small, barely perceptible nod, acknowledging all the pain to come, all the things he knows she will tell him after the fact, somehow validating her even as he flees. And beneath the chaos of the moment, Denise becomes aware of a painful truth about herself: she is never as deeply in love with a man as she is in the moment he leaves her. It was true of Silver, and it’s true right now. It’s the kind of epiphany she’ll forget by morning, but right now, with a piercing clarity, she understands this flaw in herself, sees how she will always be doomed by it to some extent.

She should go after him. She knows that. She is supposed to chase him, crying and begging, so that he can yell at her and say things that will cut her and scar her and leave her wailing on her knees while she watches his car speed off down the darkened street. She knows, without ever having been here before, that that’s how this is supposed to play out. But right now it’s taking every last bit of strength she has to simply exist. Any further exertion on her part, even as little as a sharp breath, and she’ll disintegrate like a thousand-year-old fossil.

And then Valerie is standing beside her, holding her up. She must have started to collapse, although she didn’t notice.

“Denise,” Valerie says.

“I’m sorry,” Denise says.

“Just tell me, what does this have to do with Jeremy?”

Denise looks at her friend, at the faint lines starting to break through the Botox barrier of her forehead, at the overdone eyeliner and the makeup flaking out of her crows feet, and feels a wave of tenderness for her. We’re all doomed, she thinks. Eventually.

And so she tells her.

* * *

This evening began with so much promise, Silver thinks. It was just two hours ago that he was sitting between Casey and Denise in the warm glow of his parents’ dining room, enveloped in the aromas of his childhood, feeling safe and loved and hopeful. And then, impossibly, he was making love to Denise, feeling her fingers slide down his spine the way they used to all those years ago, feeling her lips and legs opening for him, taking him back. And now, like he did all those years ago, Silver watches it all come undone. He watches Rich storm out, watches Casey’s expression fall, and then fall some more, watches Denise grow pale and collapse a little into Valerie. Valerie, for her part, looks like she desperately needs to sink her long painted nails into someone’s flesh, if she could only figure out what’s happening here and, more important, who to blame. Silver would like to get out of Dodge long before that happens. He would like to leave the country before he has to look at the next expression on Casey’s face, or see the recrimination and regret in Denise’s eyes. Everything I touch turns to shit, he thinks, not with self-pity, but with an almost scientific fascination at the truth of it.

He looks up at Casey, who lets go of Jeremy’s hand and comes down the last two stairs to stand in front of him. He now sees the tears he couldn’t see when she was up on the landing, with Jeremy’s shadow falling over her.

“What the fuck, Dad?” she whispers in a voice so low that only he can hear. There’s no anger in it, just a pained bewilderment that makes her seem like a little girl.

“It’s going to be OK,” he tells her.

She shakes her head and smiles bitterly, and now she doesn’t look like a little girl anymore, now she looks like every woman he’s ever known, shaking their heads in disbelief at what a fucking idiot he is, and at the fact that they ever might have thought otherwise. “Casey.”

She shakes her head again, and shreds him with a baleful stare. “I didn’t think my life could be any more fucked up than it was,” she says. “And then I let you back into it.”

He can’t look at her, can’t bear to see the hate that makes her older and uglier etched into her face, to know that he caused it. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Casey couldn’t give a shit. She turns and heads for the door. Just before she steps outside, she turns back to him. “If you’re going to die,” she says, fighting back tears, “I wish you’d just get on with it already.” And then she walks out, leaving him hotly eviscerated and vaguely suicidal.