One Last Thing Before I Go (8 page)

C
HAPTER 19

D
enise and Casey live in North Point, a pleasant if somewhat cookie-cutter neighborhood on the north side, with curving streets and no sidewalks to speak of, in a small, redbrick Georgian with a beard of ivy crawling up the front walls that, like beards often do, makes the house look like it takes itself too seriously.

Rich opens the front door, looking none too pleased with him. He still owns a smaller house just outside Elmsbrook, closer to the hospital, but he moved in with Denise and Casey about two years ago, taking over the payments, a move that demonstrated a level of commitment and optimism that Silver will never understand.

“Silver,” Rich says. People, once they’ve known Silver for a while, tend to pronounce his name with a certain weary inflection. It’s not so much a function of the specific syllables of the name but more a tone, really. Until now, he doesn’t recall Rich ever having attained this level of familiarity, but it’s clear now that he has. Silver feels a sense of loss. Rich was the last person in this house who liked him.

“Hey, Rich.”

“You don’t just walk out of a hospital.”

“Mitigating circumstances.”

“You’re going to die.”

“Not yet.”

Rich shakes his head at him, disapproving of his cavalier dismissal of medical science. If he thought about it, he’d no doubt come to the conclusion that Silver’s death would somewhat enhance his own quality of life, but after twenty years or so of saving lives, Rich doesn’t think that way.

He is still standing in the doorway blocking the entrance, and Silver is acutely aware of their positions, on the porch, in the family, in the universe.

“Can I see her?”

“Which one?”

“Both.” He thinks about it for a moment. “Either.”

“Now is not the best time.”

“That’s why I’m here, Rich.”

“I know. But they’re . . . in the middle of it right now. Why don’t I have Casey call you later.”

“I might be dead later.”

Rich opens his mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. Silver has stumped him. Doctors can be slow like that, he finds.

Rich looks tired, with a few more gray hairs than he had yesterday. He is supposed to be getting married in a few weeks. He is supposed to be dealing with florists and caterers and party planners or, more likely, making the right supportive noises as Denise handles the logistics. Instead, he’s dealing with a pregnant future stepdaughter, a hysterical fiancée, and now his fiancée’s somewhat unbalanced ex-husband. Silver almost feels bad for him. But then he remembers that it’s his ex-wife Rich is marrying, and his daughter he’s safeguarding from him, and he can feel the rage start to build inside of him.

“Rich,” he says.

“Yes, Silver.”

“You’re a good guy. You’re sleeping with the only woman I’ve ever loved, and that makes things uncomfortable between us, because sometimes when I’m talking to you, I picture you fucking her, and I picture her making the sounds she used to make when I fucked her, and then I picture myself fucking her, and I get jealous and upset and I hope like hell that you’ve got a small dick, and that when she’s underneath you, she has to be thinking of me. I mean, you can’t have sex with someone for that many years and not, in some way, just associate them with sex in general, you know what I mean?”

He’s gotten off point here. His brain is draining into his mouth at an alarming rate. And Rich, he looks like he’d like to punch Silver in the face, but he can’t, because, like Silver, his hands are his livelihood.

“You need to shut up now, Silver.”

“My point is this whole delicate dynamic we’ve been navigating like adults since you started dating Denise, it all falls apart if you start preventing me from seeing my daughter.” Silver looks him straight in the eye, to underscore the seriousness of what he’s just said. “The dynamic gets fucked.”

“As I said, now is not a good time.”

Be a better father. Be a better man.
A better man, Silver thinks, would come back tomorrow.

Silver looks up at the house. “Casey!” he shouts.

“She can’t hear you.”

“Casey!”

“Silver, don’t make me call the cops.”

Be a better man
.

Silver turns to say something to Rich when his legs suddenly buckle, and he falls against the railing. “Christ,” he says, his voice suddenly hoarse.

“What is it?” Rich says. He steps out onto the porch, alarmed, and right at that instant Silver ducks around him and slides into the house. He catches a glimpse of Rich’s expression just before he slams the door and locks it, and he swears to God that Rich actually looks hurt.

It takes a moment for him to get his bearings. Like all houses that have been professionally decorated, Denise’s looks cluttered, unlived-in, and, when you take in the throw pillows on the couch, the art over the fireplace, and the tasseled curtain valances, just this side of ridiculous. He leans against the front door as Rich bangs away on it, shouting his name. He is once again acutely aware of their respective positions. Yesterday he was hooked up to a heart monitor while Rich diagnosed his aneurysm. Today, he’s locked him out of his own house. The universe can be flexible like that.

“Silver!” Rich shouts. “Open this goddamn door!”

“Now’s not a good time,” Silver says, heading for the stairs.

The dynamic is most definitely fucked.

CHAPTER
20

H
e figures he has roughly two minutes before Rich comes in through the garage, or a back door, so he’s moving pretty quickly when he bursts into Denise’s bedroom, which scares the shit out her.

“Silver! What the hell?” She jumps off of her bed instinctively. Casey, on the window seat across the room, jumps up as well.

“Dad?” she says. His daughter’s voice, calling him Dad, his adrenalized assault on the house, it all packs an emotional punch he isn’t prepared for, and suddenly he’s crying.

“Hi,” he manages to get out, after a stifled sob.

“Where’s Rich?” Denise says.

“He’s outside.” He turns around and locks the bedroom door. Denise’s eyes grow wide.

“What are you doing?”

“I just . . . I just need to catch my breath for a second,” Silver says, leaning against the wall. Casey, her eyes red from crying, has moved across the room and is now standing in front of him. “Hi, baby,” he says, and cries a little bit more.

“What’s wrong with you?” Casey says.

“Nothing. I don’t know.” He can smell Denise’s moisturizer. In all these years, she hasn’t changed it. He used to rub it onto her arms and legs after she showered, her wet hair, longer then, dripping onto her naked shoulders, and he would think to himself, I will love this woman forever.

He looks down. There are patterns in the carpet. You don’t see them right away because it’s gray on gray, but they’re there—little floral shapes repeating until they make no sense. She picked this carpeting out herself, furnished this room, this house, by herself, because she was alone. Because he’d made her that way.

“You’re crying,” Casey says.

“So are you,” he says.

They look at him, these two women, his lost family, at an utter loss to understand him. He knows how they feel. “So,” he says. “What did I miss?”

Casey laughs. Denise doesn’t. “Why are you here?”

“My daughter is pregnant.”

“And suddenly you’re Father of the Year.”

“I’m just trying to be her father right now.”

“She has enough to deal with as it is.”

He turns to Casey. “You came to me. I’m here for you. Whatever you need.”

“Thanks, Silver.”

She doesn’t call him Dad. He guesses that that was a temporary thing. Still, it was something, right? Below them, the room shakes lightly as the motorized garage door opens. He’s running out of time.

“Listen,” he says. “This, right here, the three of us, we’re a family. We’re a screwed-up family, sure, and that’s my fault, but still. There was a time when the entire universe was outside the front door, and it was just the three of us, in our house, happy. And we’re still those people. That’s not gone.” He turns to Denise and he can see that she’s crying now. He’s made contact. “Please, Denise. I know you haven’t forgiven me. But the thing is, I still love you, I still can feel us, how we were then. Let me help my daughter.”

He can hear Rich’s footsteps pounding up the stairs, and then his body hitting the door. “Denise!” Rich shouts. His body hits the door again. Silver can hear wood splintering.

Denise looks at him for a long moment. He hasn’t been nearly as coherent as he needed to be. He doesn’t know exactly what he was hoping to accomplish coming here, but even though he can no longer recall most of what he’s said, he’s pretty sure he didn’t accomplish it.

“It’s OK,” Denise says. “I’m just going to let him in.”

As she moves past him to the door, he reaches out for her arm. She stops, and for one electric moment, he can feel her fingers come up and wrap themselves around his forearm, her nails digging into his flesh. He feels her connected to him, and once again, the universe seems to be shifting beneath his feet. But this all happens in a fraction of a second, and before it can settle into reality, before it can actually take on any weight, Rich, who is on the other side of the door and thus has no idea of the nature of things on this side, hits the door with his shoulder, hard enough to break the latch. And the door flies open with violent force, connecting solidly with the face of his bride, who flies back across the room, going down hard when the corner of the bed takes her out at the knees.

CHA
PTER 21

D
enise rides, pumping away fiercely as she hits the first incline. Lake Terrace Boulevard is a long, winding road with three major inclines, which makes it a favorite among the local cyclists, all gluttons for the punishing hills. Denise, in black spandex shorts and a yellow top, crests the first hill without the usual sense of adrenalized accomplishment to propel her. The sweat, originating beneath her helmet, is trickling down her forehead, stinging her in the thick scab that has formed at the corner of her eye.

It was the corner of the door that hit her, the effect both severely bruising as well as lacerating, and now she looks like the battered wife in a television movie. It’s been three days since Silver stormed the house—that’s how she thinks of it, in those exact words—and despite an aggressive regimen of prescription anti-inflammatories, the swelling is only now beginning to recede, the deep purple bruising starting to yellow at the edges.

As she hits the second incline, she hears “On your left” as another cyclist passes her. He’s forty-five or so, riding a carbon fiber Pinarello, for God’s sake, and wearing one of those absurdly colorful racing jerseys like he’s training for the Tour de France instead of getting in a morning ride before putting on his jacket and tie and heading off to an office somewhere. The Pinarellos start at $5,000, like you need a bike of that caliber to ride Lake Terrace Boulevard. Men and their hardware. Rich is the same way about golf, always looking for the latest equipment. And she remembers teasing Silver about his constantly evolving drum kit. He couldn’t walk into a music store without finding something to buy. She wonders about the nature of the hole they’re trying to fill with all of this gear.

She is suddenly filled with a fury that makes her bowels clench. Rising off her seat, she leans into her pedaling, unwilling to let this brightly colored asshole beat her. She has had it with men, with their gear and their holes, their relentless cocks, and the messes they make.

The cyclist, sensing her approach, takes a look over his colorful shoulder and Denise sees his own ass rise from his seat. It’s on. She shifts down one gear and speeds up her pedaling. Ahead of her, she hears the grind and click of his $5,000 gears, and she knows he’s done the same. He’s not about to let a woman pass him.

Fuck you, she thinks at him. Fuck your middle-aged, weekend warrior, veiny-calved, overcompensating, overspending ass.

She’s barely spoken to Rich since the accident. He’s been staying back at his house near the hospital, at her request. Denise told him she needed some one-on-one time with Casey, but she could see in his eyes that he suspected something more. She knows she’s being irrational, that it was an accident, as much Silver’s fault as anyone’s, but something happened in that room, something she hasn’t quite been able to wrap her mind around. In that instant just before Rich had broken through, she’d been looking at Silver, and she’d seen something in his expression—a passion and determination she hadn’t seen in years. The dull, defeated expression that had become his default in recent years disappeared, and she’d seen, well, her Silver. For that one instant, she had felt her family around her, Silver and Casey, and something in her, some long-dormant protective instinct, had sparked to life. And it had thrown her, badly. So much so that when Rich burst into the room, she felt like he—and not Silver—was the intruder. And then the door hit her in the face.

They have reached the second crest. There’s now a small straightaway, the briefest stretch of downhill, before the road curves sharply into the third and final incline. She is inches from his rear wheel. She bends over her handlebars and comes up one gear. “On your left!” she shouts as she starts to pass him. But the guy doesn’t yield. He stays where he is so that they are neck and neck, their legs pumping just inches apart from each other. The bike lane is narrow up here, and it’s nothing short of reckless to be riding abreast like this. She should let it go, give him his senseless victory, but something in her won’t yield. She’s on the left, closer to the passing cars, and as she leans in, she can feel their elbows tap lightly. She turns to look at him, sees the sweat sliding off his pointed chin, the long muscles of his forearm grinding as he presses forward. For the briefest moment they make eye contact. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

She is filled with a fury she doesn’t understand. Ahead of them, a large fallen bough lies across the bike lane. She’ll pass it with no problem, but it’s directly in his path. He will have to fall back to get behind her. Instead, he speeds up and tries to veer into her space. Are you kidding me? she thinks. She speeds up, forcing him back. The bough is a thick one, with numerous smaller branches that still have their leaves. He will not be able to ride over it, would be an idiot to even try.

He’s an idiot. She should have known. The jersey was a dead giveaway.

She hears the sound of the leaves and twigs swallowed up into his spokes, the almost musical sound of his small metal components vibrating against each other as the bike thrashes and then goes over. He lets out a short, panicked bark as the bike goes down, and she hears it slide into the gravel along the side of the road. She looks back to see that he managed to click out of his pedals and take the fall on his side. She wishes him dead in the same instant that she hopes he’s not hurt.

His voice fills the morning air like a call to prayer. “Cunt!”

Perfect.

She laughs and flips him a reverse bird, bends over her bike, and throws herself into the final climb, the wind whistling in her ears like a catcall.

* * *

Rich, sitting on her doorstep, stands up as Denise pulls her bike into the driveway. She leans the bike against the garage door and turns to face him.

“I got your message,” he says.

“I figured.”

She left him a message late last night after another marathon argument with Casey, apologizing for not calling him back for the last few days and suggesting, in a matter-of-fact tone, that they postpone the wedding.

“What’s this about, Denise?”

He is dressed in what she considers his unofficial uniform; dark slacks and a button-down shirt with some element of blue in it. His hair is cut close, revealing a high forehead, tanned and slightly weathered from his days on the links. She can remember how his forehead had appealed to her on their first date, its sand-colored, textured surface like the side of a rocky mountain. There was something strong and solid about it, about him. It was funny how a little subliminal imagery could determine the course of love, she thought to herself, how small visual grace notes could trigger lasting emotional changes.

“You’re so laid back for a surgeon,” she’d exclaimed over dinner, sounding younger and so much less cynical than she’d become. And he’d laughed, and she’d watched that forehead crease and go smooth, and she knew right then that she would go home with him that night. And now here she was, three years later, sweating in her driveway, hating herself for not being able to summon up any kind of warmth for him.

“I just think we need to push the wedding off,” she tells him now, unable to look him in the eye. “Between Casey’s situation and my face . . .”

“It won’t look that bad in two weeks.”

“It will still look like someone beat the shit out of me.”

He cringes when she says this, as she knew he would. His buttons have always been right there on the surface, just waiting to be pushed. She loves him for this readability, for all the time not spent wondering what he’s thinking or feeling. And sometimes she hates him for it.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You know it was an accident.”

“I don’t blame you,” she lies, once again picturing that single instant: Silver’s hand on her arm, his eyes ablaze with . . . something.

“Then why am I sleeping alone?”

“Listen to me,” she says. “My daughter is pregnant. Silver is dying.”

“Silver is being an idiot.”

“Silver has always been an idiot. The point is that I don’t want to get married while my life is in turmoil. You don’t want that either. You can’t. And I want to be a beautiful bride.” She chokes up at this, realizing that it’s true.

He steps over to her and runs his hand down her sticky wet face. “You are beautiful. A little bruise can’t even make a dent in that.”

She smiles. She knew he would say that, and she wonders to herself when it suddenly became a crime to always say the right thing.

“I just need a little time,” she says. “I need to focus on my family.”

“You mean our family, right?”

“Right,” she says, and can tell from his expression that he remains unconvinced.