Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  Reginald was watching him, a knowing smirk beneath his camo hat. “And people say I’m crazy being out here three weeks every winter.”

  Adam smoked another cigarette as he walked across the parking lot. The lines on the blacktop marking the spaces looked to him like staffs of some arcane musical language, waiting for notes. His anger at Kristen vied with his resolve of a few minutes before to get better at all this shit. They didn’t trust him; they’d never trust him, and why should they? He wanted to run away again, all the way back to San Francisco. But it was too late, he told himself, and he had to face what he’d done: what he’d done this morning, and what he’d done before that, the long compounding chain of Things He’d Done that stretched back farther than he could or cared to remember.

  Marissa’s red Sonata was parked in front of the gas station shop, but he didn’t see her. He wasn’t going to leave without saying goodbye, though; if Kristen showed up, she’d have to wait. He stood by the back of the Sonata, lit another cigarette with the one he’d been smoking. Almost simultaneously, Kristen’s BMW minivan shot into the station and stopped with a tire screech across two spots. She’d hurried.

  Kristen shoved the door open and got out, staring at him with a look that tangled relief and hatred so thoroughly, it would have taken Adam all day to pull them apart. “God, you’re skinny,” she said. Her hair was very short now—cut to the middle of her neck, a smooth wave across her forehead. She had on a black quilted coat, zipped to her neck, black leather boots, silver bulb earrings. He flicked the cigarette in the direction of the gas pumps. Unfortunately, nothing exploded. There really would be no escaping.

  “I need to wait for my friend,” he told her.

  She folded her arms over her chest, took some long, winded breaths, as if she’d been running. “Your friend. Of course.”

  He leaned back on the Sonata, tried not to meet her gaze. It was like being near her turned him back into a little brother: young and petulant and a little in awe.

  “Nice minivan,” he said.

  And she was an inch from his face. “Oh, fuck you, Adam,” she shouted. “Just fuck you. You want to explain to me what you’re trying to do to us? Why you’re punishing us? And for what? For what? Because I didn’t want my kids to see their uncle passed out on the lawn?”

  He’d turned his face to the side, stared down at the lightning crack in a frozen puddle on the ground. “I’m not punishing anyone,” he told her, with a distant, eerie calm, like he was only listening to himself speak, too.

  “Bullshit!” she shouted. “Bullshit! Then why do you keep acting this way? Why do you keep torturing us, every chance you get?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, trying to focus on the crack—trying to cope. Rely on your coping strategies, his one-on-one therapist at Stone Manor would always tell him. Use your coping strategies. Only he couldn’t remember what they were.

  “And you know what the sad part is? I was the one who convinced everyone to invite you! I paid for your goddamn ticket, Adam!” They hadn’t told him that; he’d thought it was his parents. “Because you told me how great you were doing!” she was shouting. “And how do you think it makes me feel, when Mom spends the whole morning sobbing at the kitchen table? Did you ever think, for a second, how it makes me feel to have to explain to my children—”

  “Really fucking bad!” he said, swinging around to face her. “I bet it made you feel really, really fucking bad, that your brother is such a goddamn loser who keeps ruining shit for you, over and over and over. I can’t imagine how ashamed you are to—”

  “Oh, just shut up. Will you just shut up for once?”

  “And let me go down on the ground and kiss your boots for convincing everyone, doing me this big favor, paying, when obviously nobody wants me there, I mean, what a wonderful person, what a wonderful sister you are.”

  She had her eyes closed, shaking her head. “I am your only friend in this family. I am your last friend.”

  “I don’t even recognize you anymore, with this persona you have now, of this like, like, rich soccer mom, this Burberry Nazi or whatever you’re supposed to be.”

  Her face was momentarily wounded, then tightened again with wrath. “Sorry I didn’t want to get high and go to shows for the rest of my life. Sorry I grew up and became an adult. Sorry if my little brother nearly drinking himself to death ruined the scene for me.”

  “Yeah, well, as long as we’re blaming people, are you sorry for giving me sips of Zima in the backyard when I was eleven? Have you ever thought maybe it’s your fault that I—”

  Her neck and shoulders jutted toward him, and for a moment he thought she was going to hit him, and he recoiled. But then her whole body went slack, like some cord inside her had snapped, and she sank to the ground, sat on the curb and started to cry. “You’re so mean,” she was saying. “You were never mean. When did you get so mean?”

  Adam was shaking. All he could think to do was to walk into the gas station, walk to the cold cases, take out a case of Budweiser, rip it open, and just stand there and drink beer after beer—drink beer after beer after beer. He could almost hear the crackle and fizz of the can opening, could almost feel the cold ring pressed into his lower lip. He went so far as to turn his head to look through the shop’s window. Marissa was standing in the doorway, a cup of coffee in her hand, a stunned, deer-frightened look on her face.

  The unmistakable fear in her eyes wrenched him back into himself, to the reality of it all: This was happening. This was real. And it was all too late. He could never undo any of it. He couldn’t look at Kristen, instead he looked back at the crack in the ice, how it zigged, how it zagged.

  Eventually, her sobbing got quieter, petered to silence. Her coat rustled as she stood. “I don’t think we were ready for this,” she announced. “Not you, not me, not any of us.” He knew there were so many things he had to say, but he didn’t think he could summon his voice—like any words were buried and compacted deep and silent in his chest. “I’ll make up something. How does that sound to you? I’ll make up something. I’ll tell them it was your decision. I’ll tell them . . .” Her voice wavered. “How great you’re doing.”

  He heard her open the car door, he heard the door shut, he heard the minivan pull out onto the street. He sat down beside where she’d been sitting. He tried to explain to himself why he’d done what he’d just done. But it was all so ugly and violently stupid and cruel, crueler than ever, what explanation could there be? Revoltingly, a series of digital kicks were popping in his head, looping: “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” by Britney Spears. Oops, I did it again.

  “You need to go to a meeting.” Marissa was standing beside him. She put the plastic bag down on the blacktop, sat next to him on the curb. “I can take you to a meeting.” He discovered he was too ashamed to look at her, either. “My mom, sometimes, would decide to go to meetings. She wouldn’t want—your sister wouldn’t want—”

  “You don’t know shit about it.”

  She was silent for a moment. “I guess not,” she said. “I guess not.” She put her hand on his shoulder. It occurred to him he’d like to cry, but it would be so unfair of him to cry, he wouldn’t allow it: not that, not self-pity, too.

  “You’ll be okay,” Marissa said. With some terrified animal instinct, he pushed his face in her shoulder. And then he couldn’t stop it. Worthy or not, the sobs started bursting from his chest: “Aguh, aguh, aguh,” he heard himself sobbing.

  “Don’t give up,” Marissa told him. A while later she repeated, “Don’t give up.”

  [ 3 ]

  The Russells’

  She couldn’t just leave him. “I couldn’t just leave him,” she rehearsed telling Robbie in her mind—telling Robbie, Roz, Laila, Leo. She shouldn’t have said the thing about Adam being a flight attendant because she’d need to maintain that lie, and the list of deceptions was already long enough. But what choice did she have? He didn’t get up after he stopped crying, just sat there twisted on the
curb, like a crack had opened in his body—the right side stiff, supported on one arm on the concrete, the left drooping over itself toward the ground. Maybe it was all his fault: All he’d needed to do was say sorry, or say nothing at all, just stand there and take it. But she knew by now that he was not the sort of person who knew when to keep his mouth shut. And even if it was his fault, did it make any difference? He looked so ruined, so shattered, slumped there on the curb outside the gas station. She had few pretentions about the kind of person she was, maybe fewer than ever, given what she’d done to Robbie. But Marissa couldn’t leave him like that.

  And so she helped him up by his two hands, like he’d gotten knocked on his ass on the lacrosse field. He didn’t object, he didn’t resist; the barren look on his face didn’t change. She led him to the car, opened the door for him, went so far as to reach across him and buckle his seat belt. And then she got back on the highway, back on 91 North, heading toward Vermont and her husband and her in-laws.

  The highway ran straighter here, the ribbon of asphalt pulled taut under charcoal clouds. There were hardly any other cars, as if they were the last ones still to get where they needed to be that day. Adam didn’t speak. He sat with his face turned toward the passenger-side window; all Marissa could see of him were half a rounded ear and clumped stalks of black hair above his collar. Eventually, she turned on the radio, listened with half attention to a call-in show about pets: an incontinent cat, a pug with a yeah-probably-fatal tumor. The trees along the highway thickened as Marissa and Adam traveled farther north, the spider-arm branches reaching out above the road to form a sort of tunnel.

  It was as the pet show went to commercial after a discussion of ferret law reform that Adam at last sighed loudly, turned off the radio, lowered the window an inch, took out and lit a cigarette. She was relieved he was no longer catatonic, but still, “Could you not? Please?”

  “It’s sort of essential right now.”

  “I told you, this isn’t my car.”

  “So buy some air freshener or something.”

  “Will you just put it out?”

  “What do you do when people smoke in the bathroom on the airplane?” he asked, with oddly blithe curiosity.

  “Open the emergency door and throw them out. What do you think we do, Adam? Would you put it out?”

  “Fucking junior high in here,” he mumbled, and flicked the cigarette out the window. Then, more sharply, he added, “Your friend better have lung cancer or something, I mean, Jesus fucking Christ . . .” He’d closed his fist around his pack of cigarettes; she watched as he opened it and stared at the crushed box, a few of the cigarettes split and seeping curlicues of tobacco. “Here’s the thing,” he said toward his hand. “She’s not usually like that. Kristen, I mean. My sister.”

  “Sure,” Marissa answered, uncertain where this was going.

  “Like, you probably think she’s some rabid crazy bitch right now. But the truth is, she’s a really great person. I shouldn’t have said what I said. She was right, I was being a total asshole. I don’t know why. And what she said about bailing today, putting my parents through that—she was right about that, too. I’m really sorry about all of it.”

  His tone was strangely detached—not insincere, exactly, but it was like he was reading from a script someone else had written. “Maybe you should call her and tell her that.”

  Adam grunted bitterly. “Yeah, like she ever wants to talk to me again.” He pushed the broken cigarettes through the gap in the window, and closed it. “There’s something else,” he announced. “I shouldn’t have talked to you about Johanna. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about her, either. What I told you about her being in the institution—you should just forget I said that. It’s not anybody’s business, okay? And with the cheating—that was really only at the end, after things were already all fucked up. We were really in love. Okay?”

  It sounded close to a demand. “Yeah, okay,” she said.

  “You can’t put these things into words but we just got each other. When we were together, or we were writing music, we just knew what the other one was thinking. It was motherfucking magical. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  All at once she remembered the first days of her and Robbie—how they’d lie naked and packed together like sardines on the narrow dorm room bed, just talking and talking for hours, like they’d never been permitted to talk to anyone before, sharing every memory, every secret, like she’d been holding onto them just so she could tell him.

  “Yeah, Adam, I understand.”

  “And if she cheated . . . It wasn’t because she was a bad person. She just didn’t quite understand what people wanted from her, but she wanted to give it to them, so bad. You’ve gotta understand how beautiful she was, and how gifted, I mean, Johanna found melody in the clear blue sky. Someone like that, people are drawn to them, and the weird part is, it can make you sort of lonely . . .” He hesitated, like he’d gotten a little confused in his own thoughts. “But we had each other. Y’know?”

  The question was urgent now; when she looked over at him, his eyes were wide, pleading. There was some affirmation he was looking for, but Marissa didn’t know how to give it to him. Maybe she should have just let him smoke the fucking cigarette. “She sounds really special,” she said. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

  He stared at her for another moment and then it was like the light of need was switched off in his face. He went back to sulking, went so far as to pull his knees up and hug them to his chest. She gave a worried glance to his sneakers on the fabric of the seat, but didn’t bother giving him shit about it. He’d taken enough shit, warranted or not. She missed Robbie—not the Robbie she’d get when they arrived at the house but the Robbie she’d call from bed while he was in the kitchen making her huevos rancheros on a Sunday morning. The Robbie she never had to explain herself to, the Robbie whose growing up could not have been more different from hers but who understood, too, what it was like to long to flee from your family. She’d forgotten that about him—how earnestly he used to talk about feeling like a stranger among his parents and sister.

  Adam reached over and turned on the radio, scanned among the stations, paused momentarily on some song and before she could come close to identifying it, muttered, “Oh, fuck no,” and turned the radio off. “If you want to get depressed, listen to the radio,” he said grimly. Everything shadowed and sunken and creased in his face appeared to have become more so. “Suicide music . . .”

  “Look, Adam,” she began. “It’s sort of important that things go well today.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, without interest.

  “I’m not exactly my in-laws’ favorite person to begin with. And things with Robbie are . . . complicated.”

  “That’s one word for it,” he said under his breath. Before her anger could take hold, he swung his hand nonchalantly. “Don’t sweat it. I’m great with parents.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” she replied, skeptical. “But I told them you were a flight attendant, okay? So you have to, like, say that to them, too. Tell them we worked the flight from Seattle together. And if anyone asks you—”

  “Flight attendant. I got it.”

  “Adam,” she said, getting frustrated. “I’m counting on you. You can’t—”

  “Can’t what? Fall off the wagon, drink all their bourbon, tell them you’re pregnant, and steal the coffeepot?” She couldn’t tell if this was a joke, but she wasn’t within a mile of laughter. In fact, she was considering whether she would be punished for her compassion, and if the smarter thing would be to leave him on the next curb she could find. Whatever ruin he’d made of his life, she couldn’t allow him to make one of hers, too. But when she looked at him, his expression was so remorseful it was almost tender. “I know the last thing I deserve is to be in this car,” he told her, his voice quiet, strained. “You picked my ass up a couple times today when you didn’t have to. I know that I’m a dick but I’m not a dick like that. So I
am a flight attendant with nowhere else to be today, and I am so thankful to be with them in their home, and by the way, I love doing dishes.”

  “Okay . . . ,” she said. “Fine.” A little needle of worry was still boring into her chest, but her instinct was he’d at least do his best. “Don’t worry about the dishes,” she muttered as they pulled off the highway at the Brattleboro exit. “It’s not that kind of Thanksgiving.”

  The Russells’ country cottage (so-called) was a couple miles outside of Brattleboro, in the town (village) of Wantastiquet, on a winding, wooded road, edged by a leafless thicket half-buried in snow. The driveway of number 51 was steep and narrow, with two switchbacks; Marissa took a measure of pride in being able to mount it even when it was covered with snow (Robbie had trouble), but on this late morning the blacktop was clear and freshly salted. She pulled in behind a Range Rover that she identified from the Harvard decal as Laila’s. The house’s façade featured a trio of great, sanded tree trunks, extending from the ground to the upward slanting roof. Two levels of floor-to-ceiling windows glowed yellow in the cold overcast midday. Adam studied the house for a moment after he got out of the car. “So your in-laws . . . ,” he said. “They’re, like, rich.”

  “Pretty much,” Marissa answered.

  He paused another moment; then, as he started up the slate steps twisting around the side of the house, he added, “Atta girl.”

  She didn’t move, a fuck you poised on her lips, but he had already disappeared around the house. There hadn’t been anything malicious in his tone. It was more like a congratulations. She weighed his words another second, but by now he would already be at the front door, and she didn’t doubt he might ring the bell and just start talking to whoever opened it.

  She hurried up the steps, taking care not to slip on their ice-gleaming surface, and came around the house to the garlanded front door just in time to see it open. A total stranger stood in the doorway: a trim young Asian man in a white button-down shirt. “Robbie,” Adam said, with a sort of gravitas. “It’s good to finally meet you.” He stuck out his hand. The stranger blinked a couple times, shook.