One Last Thing Before I Go (15 page)

CHAP
TER 37

“H
ey, Silver? What the fuck?”

Even before he opens his eyes, he wonders at how often people seem to say that to him. What the fuck? It feels like those three words have followed him throughout his adult life. They ought to be carved onto his tombstone, he thinks, a fitting epitaph for the encapsulation of a life that has, from most standpoints, made no sense at all.

DREW SILVER

1969–2014

WHAT THE FUCK ?

Yeah. That would pretty much sum it up.

* * *

“That would pretty much sum what up? What the hell are you babbling about?”

He opens his eyes to find Jack and Oliver standing in front of him in their bathing suits, blocking out the sun. “Nothing,” he says.

“You’re soaked,” Oliver tells him. “Did you sleep out here like that?”

He feels the wetness of his clothes plastered against his skin, and he shivers. He vaguely remembers standing at the head of the pool late last night, thinking dark, lonely thoughts, but he has no recollection of jumping in, or climbing out afterward. Clearly, he did both.

He shivers in his chair. Now that he’s awake, he’s freezing.

“What the hell happened to you?” Jack says. He looks worried.

“Rough night,” he says. He can feel his jaw trembling as his teeth chatter.

“We have to get him out of those clothes,” Oliver says. He leans forward and begins unbuttoning Silver’s shirt.

“What, right here?” Jack says.

“Get his belt,” Oliver says.

Silver looks down as the two men undress him. He is wearing the same dark pants and shirt that he put on to go to dinner at his parents’ house last night. He is wearing one loafer. He remembers buttoning the shirt Oliver is now pulling off of him, checking himself in the mirror. It was less than twelve hours ago. Feels like years. A lot can go wrong in twelve hours.

“Get him in the hot tub,” Oliver says.

Jack and Oliver help him up off the chair and walk him over to the hot tub in his underpants. He is shivering uncontrollably now, barely able to stand on his own. The water is so hot that for a moment it burns him, but as he settles into it, he can feel the heat entering his muscles and then his bones, can feel his body relaxing into it. Jack and Oliver take off their shirts and sit down in the hot tub on either side of him.

“Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub,” Jack says.

Silver smiles wanly.

“You feeling any better?” Oliver says.

“Getting there.”

“There’s something in here!” Jack says, alarmed. He reaches down into the frothing bubbles and comes up with Silver’s loafer. “Yours?”

“Yeah.”

Jack tosses it onto the pool deck behind him. “So, what the hell happened to you?”

Silver shakes his head. Even the idea of recounting last night is exhausting to him. He just wants to sit here and dissolve into the hot water until there’s nothing left of him. He closes his eyes and sees Denise, naked, looking up at him with desire. How does something like that happen and disappear so damn quickly? And why can’t the bad shit disappear just as fast? What . . . The . . . Fuck?

“Shit,” Jack says.

“What?”

He points. “It’s the Fucking Coopers.”

The Fucking Coopers: Courtney and Shaun Cooper and their fucking kid, Tyler. Through a series of events and misunderstandings that have never been fully explained, the Fucking Coopers thought the Versailles would be a fantastic place to start their young family. Courtney is beautiful in that way Midwesterners are, blond and cheerful, her face always lit up with a relaxed smile. Shaun has a full head of hair and an athlete’s physique. And Tyler, well, he looks like a Tyler. Courtney and Shaun look at each other when they talk, and when they lie on their lounge chairs watching Tyler play, she will often have her hand resting on his arm, and they are an oddity here, a freak show, and so effortlessly, casually in love that it’s borderline offensive. The Fucking Coopers.

Courtney takes Tyler into the water, where he splashes around happily. Shaun pulls off his shirt, revealing an enviable six-pack, and starts filming them with his iPhone.

“Good morning, guys,” he says as he moves past the hot tub.

“Good morning,” Oliver says.

“Fuck you,” Jack says under his breath, but his heart’s not in it. It’s hard to hate the Fucking Coopers, which just makes you hate them more. The Fucking Coopers are a fingernail picking and pulling at every hardened, crusty scab on every man in the Versailles.

“One day,” Jack says. “One day she is going to fuck a trainer or the goddamn UPS guy, or he’s going to fuck someone on a business trip, or her best friend, or maybe her sister. Or he’s going to hit her, or gamble away their nest egg, or become an alcoholic, or their kid is going to turn out to be a little sadist who drowns kittens in the bathtub . . .”

Silver stops hearing him. He watches Shaun climb into the water, sees the way Courtney smiles at him, leaning back against his chest while they watch their son swim. He remembers with painful clarity how it felt to be young and in love, with so much living left to do. He would hate them too, he knows, just like Jack, if he wasn’t so goddamned tired.

* * *

It’s late afternoon by the time he gets up to his apartment. He fell asleep in the sun and can feel the first flickers of sunburn spreading across his forehead like a fever. He steps into his kitchen to find Denise sitting at his kitchen table, in jeans and a black T-shirt that makes her look ten years younger, sipping thoughtfully from a can of diet soda. She has been in his apartment exactly twice, last night being the first time, and her presence here is deeply disconcerting to him. His feelings of shame and exposure were ameliorated last night by the darkness and mutual nudity. But now the sun is out and everyone is dressed, and while he’s been known to misread signals before, he’s pretty certain that no one will be getting undressed today.

He has lost her, he realizes. In truth, he realized it last night. He saw the look on her face when Rich walked out, and he understood that whatever insanity had moved her to sleep with him last night, it was not love, or, at least, not a love with any practical implications. He thinks about Denise and Casey and feels a sense of grief, and then frustration, because it doesn’t seem fair that he keeps losing the same things over and over again.

Denise looks up at him, her expression tired, her eyes red and somewhat swollen. “You don’t lock your door,” she says.

“I lost the key.”

Denise nods. “Of course you did. I assume she didn’t sleep here last night.”

He doesn’t actually know. He looks around and shrugs. “I guess not.”

“She didn’t come home.”

“Did she stay at the Lockwoods’?”

“No. Valerie has circled the wagons. She’s somehow reached the conclusion that her son is an innocent victim in all of this.”

“She’s just upset.”

“Yeah, well. Join the club.”

Denise sits back in her chair and looks around his kitchen, taking in the shabby veneered wood of his cabinets, the industrial granite countertops, the crappy appliances, the unwashed dishes in the sink. “I feel like you,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

She hesitates for a second. “Last night I sat in my house. Rich was gone, Casey was gone, and I sat there, on my living-room couch, just wishing they would come home, even though I knew they wouldn’t. And I felt alone and terrified, and then I thought about you, and I realized, this must be what it feels like for you every day.” She looks up at him, her eyes searching his face.

He has no idea what she wants him to say. He has always felt this way around distressed women, that there is something they’re waiting for him to say, and if he could only figure out what that is, he could soothe the thing in them that needs to be soothed. He has never figured out what those words are, and he has always believed that if, just once, someone had given him this vital piece of information, his entire life would have shaken out differently.

“Is that how it is for you?” Denise asks him.

“Sometimes.”

“And the rest of the time?”

He thinks about it for a moment. “I guess I just feel like I’ve disappeared. Like I’m already gone.”

She absorbs that for a moment, blinking back a couple of unanticipated tears. “I’m sorry, Silver,” she says. “I’m sorry you’ve been so alone.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

She smiles when he says that. “Oh, I know that. Believe me.” He is struck by how beautiful she looks. There’s a version of his life that was meant to be spent with her, and every so often she looks a certain way, just for an instant, and he sees this version of her, the one that stayed in love with him.

“I know where they are,” she says.

“Casey?”

“And Rich.”

“You think they’re together?”

“Yes. At the lake house.”

“What lake house?”

“Rich has a lake house. Up in Essex. Casey loves it up there. I’m sure that’s where they would both end up.”

“Are you going to go up there?”

“No.” She takes a long, final swig of her soda and gets to her feet. “We are.”

CHAPTER 38

T
he
lake house is a haphazard mix of wood and stone that could be kindly designated as postmodern in that it doesn’t seem to adhere to any traditional school of architecture or design. But the skylights, the massive bay windows, and high wooden deck facing Lake Kearney render all sins against design forgiven. It’s a spacious house, bright, well kept, engineered to let the sunlight in and hold on to it. A narrow dock, stained the same color as the house, extends into the lake like a broken finger directly below, and tethered to the end is Rich’s rowboat, retrofitted with a small outboard motor.

Casey has always loved how quiet it is here, how you can step out onto the deck in the morning and feel embraced by the air and kissed by the sun. Being out here, away from the suburban sprawl, surrounded by trees and facing the glistening lake, always calms her and gives her hope for the world. As long as there are still unspoiled places like this, there is the sense that it’s never too late for things to turn around.

She sits on the deck, in the porch swing Rich had built for her when she and Denise started coming out here with him. He loved having her here, and she’d intuited, even back then, that it was a little sad to own a house like this by yourself, and that Rich had been lonely here before he’d found them.

She can hear him inside, moving around mugs and spoons, operating the coffee grinder, trying to find some measure of peace in the routine. She’d driven up here alone, after finally managing to elude Jeremy, who was still reeling from the shock of it all, and kept saying over and over again, “What do you want to do?” which was only a slight improvement over the first half hour of “Why didn’t you tell me?” Like telling him last week would have made all the fucking difference.

“Go to Europe,” she said.

“I can’t,” he’d said, though he clearly wanted to.

“You can,” she said. “I’ll let you know how it turns out.”

And when he took her hands and said to her, “We’re in this together,” it took every ounce of her will to not kick him and run away screaming. Because they weren’t. Jeremy would go to Europe, and even if he didn’t, she knew enough to know that he was as much a kid as she was, that there was nothing sustainable between them. He was saying all the right things, but the right things didn’t matter. No one was in anything together. Not her, not Silver, not her mother, not Rich. Everyone was fucked and everyone was in it alone. She didn’t want that to be true, but she was pretty confident that it was.

Rich steps out onto the deck carrying two mugs. He hands one to Casey, and she’s touched by his thoughtfulness. She would think he’d want nothing to do with her. After all, she was the one who pulled Silver back into their lives. If she hadn’t done that, Silver and her mother never would have hooked up last night, and no one would be in this mess.

For some reason, she hadn’t anticipated his being here when she drove up last night. She figured he and Denise would be at their house, saying horrible things to each other. She’d come up here, in part, to avoid that whole drama. She fell asleep on the couch and woke up after noon to the sound of him scrambling eggs. When she came downstairs after showering, there was a plate waiting for her under the heat lamp, but no sign of Rich. Until now.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him.

He nods, attempts a weak smile, and then looks away. “It’s not your fault,” he says.

“Yes, it is.”

“Can we not talk about this?”

He holds his coffee mug up to his face, inhaling its aroma.

“What’s going to happen?” she says.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Please don’t hate her.”

He looks out at the lake for a long moment, standing absolutely still. Then he turns to head back inside. “I’m doing my best, honey.”

C
HAPTER 39

D
enise drives them in her BMW. Silver inhales the scent of high-end leather as the suspension massages his lower half. Rich seems to dole out cars like Oprah, either as bribes or maybe consolation prizes, depending on how you look at it.

Silver sits in the passenger seat, lulled into a light trance by the thrumming engine and the passing scenery. He has always loved car rides, always felt most at peace on the road, the blacktop churning beneath him, the horizon stretched out to infinity in front of him. He is aware of the obvious metaphor: You can’t run away from your problems, but you can definitely put some distance between them and you. He closes his right eye. His left seems to be functioning again.

“I can see,” he says.

Denise doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t spoken since they hit the parkway. She sits erect in her seat, both hands resting in the bottom crescent of the steering wheel—a habit he remembers from their earliest days. Her expression is grimly set, her lips moving almost imperceptibly as she rehearses what she’s going to say to Rich. Silver feels bad for her.

“I feel bad for you,” he says.

“I feel bad for me too.”

It’s not exactly anger in her voice, but a not-too-distant cousin—somewhere between a cold shoulder and outright hostility. Silver remembers the disgust and contempt in Casey’s eyes just before she ran out last night. He doesn’t know if he can bear to see it again.

“So,” he says. “What’s the plan?”

“The plan,” Denise says, “is to ask for and receive exactly the kind of forgiveness that I would never give. I’m counting on the fact that Rich is a better person than me—or you, by the way. And maybe, just maybe, he will still consider marrying me, or at least not dumping me. And while I’m doing that, you will talk to our daughter and do whatever it is that you do that seems to make everyone who by all rights should hate you somehow find you appealing, so we can get her squared away.”

“And how do I do that?”

Denise shrugs. “When in doubt, grovel.”

* * *

Silver comes out of the service-station food market carrying two ice-cream cones. He hands one to Denise, who has just finished pumping the gas. She gives him a strange look, but the thing is, Silver knows, when someone hands you an ice-cream cone, just like when someone offers their hand to shake, you generally take it. And Denise does, offering the thinnest smile as she takes a lick.

“I forgot about you and rest stops,” she says.

Rest stops have always made him strangely happy. He couldn’t say why. Just the idea of everyone on their way somewhere, united by wanderlust, no one belonging more than anyone else.

“And ice-cream cones,” she says. “What is it with you and ice-cream cones?”

He licks around the edge of his cone as he considers the question. “I guess no one ever eats an ice-cream cone at a funeral, or a fire. The Red Cross doesn’t drop ice-cream cones into third-world countries. If you’re eating an ice-cream cone, it’s just very hard to believe that things have gone completely to shit. That there isn’t still hope.”

Denise licks her cone thoughtfully. “So there’s still hope.”

“I think so, yes.”

She nods, and they just stand there for a moment, quietly licking their cones at the side of the highway while the light Saturday traffic speeds past them like missiles.

She looks at him for a long moment, then sighs deeply. “Silver,” she says, her voice tinged with a profound sadness with which he is all too familiar. All the things you can’t get back, all the things you can never make right. No matter what happens after, you’ll always carry them with you.

He looks away from her. “I know,” he says. “Believe me, I know.”

* * *

They exit the highway, driving past strip malls, car dealerships, and department stores until the road narrows and starts to wind through the trees. The sun flickers kinetically through the leaves, like a dying light, hurting his eyes. He didn’t think to bring sunglasses. He closes his eyes, feeling flushed and tired from his sunburn, and the car and Denise slip away a bit. He can feel his breath moving up and down his windpipe, can feel the silent, dogged contractions of his heart. It’s hard to imagine your heart simply stopping, but at the same time, it’s hard to believe that it didn’t give up years ago.

“I can’t live like this anymore,” he says.

He can hear Denise absorbing the remark. “Like what?” she says.

“Like there’s some new life that’s going to kick in at some point and I just need to hang out in this holding pattern until it does.”

Denise looks over at him. “What changed?”

He shakes his head, trying to figure it out. “I don’t know. I think I lost track of time. Every day felt the same, so it felt like forever, but also like no time was actually passing. Like the universe was on pause. And then Casey showed up pregnant, and you’re getting married, and I realized that there’s always been a part of me that thought I would catch my breath and then pick up where we all left off. But then I turned around, and it was too late. You had both moved on.”

Denise nods sadly. “You’re quite the asshole, Silver,” she says, her voice devoid of any anger, like she’s just pointing it out to be helpful.

“I know it,” he says.

“And now you’re just going to wait for your heart to burst and take the easy way out.”

“In the absence of any better ideas.”

“Well, do me a favor and don’t die today, OK? Today I need you. Can you do that much for me?”

He nods and closes his eyes again. “You got it.”

* * *

They pull up to the lake house at the latest part of the afternoon, just as the light is changing and the sun is starting to dim over the far side of the lake. Casey’s white Infiniti is parked behind Rich’s Audi. Silver steps out of the car and looks up at the house. “Nice place,” he says. He looks over at Denise standing on the other side of the car looking agitated.

“You want me to wait in the car?” he says. “You know, until you’ve made contact.”

She gives him a withering look. “Don’t you dare wimp out on me.”

“I’m not,” he says. “I just thought, given the circumstances, that seeing me here with you might upset him.”

“He’s already upset.”

“You know what I mean.”

“He hates me. They both do. How do I even face them after fucking up so badly.”

He offers up what he hopes is a slightly rakish smile. “Stick with me,” he says, heading toward the house. “I do it every day.”