Every Moment After

by Joseph Moldover

  “Thanks, Chris, this is awesome. I’m just wondering, uh . . .”

  “There’s more. That was just one stash. You should see what’s behind the mirror in the bathroom.”

  “Right. Great. Awesome.” I back us out of the driveway. I’m getting more confident with the van. “So—​you wanted a story?” I still have no idea what to expect. He’s quiet as we drive down the street, but when I check the mirror, he doesn’t look red and embarrassed the way he did last time. He looks determined.

  “I want to hear about something.” He takes a breath, and then another. I look back again, worried he’s having some sort of an attack.

  “Okay . . .” I say.

  “I want to hear about you and . . . and Rosie.”

  “Rosie?”

  “Rosie Horowitz.”

  “I know who Rosie is. I just don’t . . . What about her?”

  “I want to hear about sex.” I have no idea what to say, but Chris plows on. “You need something, Matt, and I’m giving it to you. I need something too.”

  “You want me to tell you . . . like, about . . .”

  “I want you to tell me what happened. Where you were, what you did, what it was like. All of it. And it has to be true; that’s the thing. I can look stuff up online, but I want this to be real.”

  This is not what I was expecting.

  “Yeah. I mean, yeah, I can do that . . .” I say.

  “You probably have a bunch of stories.”

  “Sure.”

  “So, that’s the trade, okay? Stories for more pills.”

  “Okay. Okay. I can do that.”

  This is going to be one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done.

  “So, yeah, here we go . . .” We’re maybe eight, maybe ten minutes from the PT clinic. I have no idea where to begin.

  “Where were you?” Chris prompts. “The first time.”

  “The first time, we were at her house. In her, uh, well, in her parents’ bedroom.”

  We drive on, me describing, trying to imagine that I’m telling him about someone else, like about a movie I saw, Chris sometimes stopping me to ask for more details. By the time we get to the PT center, I’m about halfway through. I wait in the van again while Chris goes in. I stretch my elbow, bending my arm behind my head, and it throbs. I stare at the low, brick building in front of me, the big sign announcing PHYSICAL THERAPY.

  Sarah Jessup hasn’t come back into the store. I keep an eye out, but I never see her. I don’t know why I can’t stop thinking about her. She’s pretty, but she’s not someone you’d stop on the street to stare at. Still, she’s stuck in my head. Her face, her voice. I keep on replaying that last moment, when she walked away. What did she say? I’m not as cute as I think I am? I don’t think of myself as cute. I know she was sort of insulting me, but there was something else. It’s like a knot that I can’t quite untie.

  I should be working on my arm. I know I should. They’re expecting me to start at second base in the fall, and I don’t know what I’m going to do the first time they ask me to throw the ball. Somehow, though, it doesn’t feel like a problem. It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel like the fall is ever going to come.

  I get out of the van and walk around the mostly empty parking lot, watching my shoes tracing the edges of cracked asphalt, weeds pushing their way through, slowly stretching my arm one way and then the other.

  I think about the night before. I’m still happy about Cole. I can’t believe he actually did it; he actually went over there and gave Viola that stupid book and asked her out. I can’t imagine Cole on a date. When I think about his future, it’s easy to see him married but impossible to imagine him dating.

  And then there was that crazy shit in the woods. I was more curious than anything else when we went back there, and then I was mainly disappointed that it was just some losers shooting at a statue. I laughed when that dude shot it, but it wasn’t really funny. Still, I wasn’t pissed or anything. Not until they started talking about Cole.

  Mike Antonucci was all about the gun, which was his, giving us stats on it that I didn’t really understand. I don’t like guns. I looked around, at the Monument and the gnomes, and wished that Cole would come back so we could leave. He had gone off to take a leak.

  “That’s Cole Hewitt, isn’t it?” Mike asked. “What’s up with the little motherfucker? I had math with him. He usually looked like he was about to cry.”

  “He had a tough year,” I said. I didn’t like him badmouthing Cole.

  “He was always having a tough year,” Tom said, laughing. “He was always like that.”

  “What the fuck do you know about it, Higgins?” I asked, taking a step toward him.

  “Whoa, whoa. I didn’t mean to offend you, Simpson.”

  I shook my head and looked around. It was time to leave. Where was Cole?

  “What happened to your boy?” the kid with the ponytail asked. “He have a problem? He have to sit down to pee?”

  That’s the kind of stupid, pointless comment I really hate. The kid was trying to sound tougher than he was. He probably lived in a two-million-dollar house in Alpine Falls. He probably drove his daddy’s car over here to act like a badass while pretending to do something righteous by messing with Sam Keeley’s old place. Before I knew it, I took two more steps toward him. I heard my own voice in my ears, louder than I meant to be, and the other two guys were yelling too, trying to calm me down by drowning me out. It wasn’t working.

  The kid with the ponytail didn’t look scared, which only made me angrier, and then he stepped right into my face and his eyes darted to the right, looking at something over my shoulder, and he smiled and whispered, “Your girlfriend’s back.”

  I had a sudden image of the gun coming up in this kid’s hand and going off. I imagined a bullet hurtling off into the night, past me. I imagined Cole lying in the grass in front of the Monument, bleeding his life away in front of the names of kids who died the same way eleven years before. In front of Andy’s name. And then, before I could even realize what I was doing, my hand had come around and made solid contact with Ponytail’s face, dropping him to the ground.

  I would have kicked him, too. Standing over him, I was lining myself up. I was going to break his fucking ribs. Crack them all. I wanted to kick him in the balls so hard they’d burst. I don’t know exactly what I would have done, but in the moment before I did it, Cole grabbed me and pulled me back. And we left.

  I’ve circled the PT lot ten or eleven times when I see Chris come out the front door. The session went by quickly. I sigh and head back across the lot to open the van, getting ready to continue the story.

  * * *

  I get back to Finn’s after dropping Chris off, and I punch in. I pause and hold my timecard alongside Cole’s. I figured when I took this job that he’d think it was cool for both of us to work here. Then it turned out that things were slow and Mr. Finn didn’t need us both at the same time, so we basically never saw each other, but that was all right. Our aprons hung side by side and we could swap stories about rotten produce and shitty custo­mers. It wasn’t until last night that I understood that Cole doesn’t want me here. Every hour on my timecard is an hour off his.

  I feel like such a rich kid. I feel like an idiot. I put the cards back in their slots and start sweeping the floor. I’ll find a way to make it up to him. I’ll make sure he gets to California, somehow, if he wants to go.

  A few minutes pass by, and then I hear a voice from the other side of the stockroom door. “Hello?” I push the swinging doors open and find Cole’s mom in the produce section.

  “Matt, how are you?”

  “I’m good, Mrs. H. How are you doing?”

  “I’m well.”

  She looks well, just like she did the other day. I think she even has makeup on. I’m glad to see her like this. She looked like shit for a while there.

  “Something I can get for you, Mrs. H?”

  “More of those peaches from yesterday?”<
br />
  “I don’t think so. Maybe tomorrow? I can go ask Mr. Finn . . .”

  “No, no, I’ll ask him myself.” She gives me a smile and heads for Finn’s office. I go back to the stockroom, finish sweeping, and take my break. I hoist a box of candy up onto a table, my elbow screaming at me as I lift it, and open it up. I’ll have a Milky Way. I’ll keep an eye on my phone, and I won’t let myself go over 300. I sit down on another box and take a bite.

  It is good to see Mrs. H. I feel badly that I don’t go over much anymore, but it’s a weird place to be. She needs to get better so that she can move on, and so that Cole can move on. Maybe she’s moving in the right direction. Cole seemed surprised when I told him about his mother last night, that she’d been in. It was almost like he didn’t want to hear that she was doing well.

  I finish the candy bar, throw the wrapper away, and get back to work using my left arm as much as possible. The afternoon goes by. Sarah Jessup doesn’t come in. I get off at five and drive over to the Gerbers’, thinking I can take Paul out again, but no one’s home. I walk around to their backyard and stand there, memories flooding back to me. There used to be a jungle gym over there, and a swing set, there. That spot over by the patio is where they set up the wading pool, the three of us—​me, Andy, and Cole—​splashing in it while Paul did his own thing and our moms sat nearby in floppy hats and big sunglasses.

  All of it is gone now. The yard is empty. It looks like someone tried to start a garden over to one side, but it’s all grown over. It’s quiet. I stop by the picnic table and look up at the house.

  Mrs. Ryan said that her house was just a place, but she was wrong. Places aren’t just places. Things stick to them, things remain, even when people move on, even when people die.

  The alarm on my phone goes off. I curse under my breath, quickly text my mom, and turn the app off. I go back to my car, trying to think of somewhere I can go other than home. A kid is watching me from the yard across the street. He’s a redhead. He’s lying on his stomach, holding a plastic toy rifle. He aims it at me. I step up on my running board so that I’m looking at him over the top of the truck. I smile, make my fingers into a gun, aim at him, and drop my thumb.

  “Bang.”

  He looks back at me, not impressed. “You missed,” he calls.

  I probably did. I shrug, blow imaginary gun smoke away from my index finger, get into the truck, and drive away.

  Seven

  — Cole —

  What’s worse: finding condoms while looking under your late father’s bed, or the fact that you were searching for stray pills when you found them?

  I’m willing to call it a tie.

  It’s the third of July. I’ve got my lunch date with Viola, and then later on, Mr. Finn is finally going to give me a few hours of overtime, but this morning I had an hour free and was nervous, really nervous, so to keep busy, I decided to do some quick cleaning up. This place had one really good cleaning after Dad died, by an aunt I had never met before, Mom’s brother’s second wife, who lives in Ontario. They’d come for the funeral, and although I don’t remember much about those days, I do remember this harsh-looking woman who seemed to think that the best thing she could do for us was to clean the entire house. It stayed clean for a while, but now there’s dust and mud that I’ve tracked in; there’s grease all down the side of the cabinet by the stove where the pots and pans spatter; there’s an ungodly amount of newspaper and mail and even some flowers that someone must have sent that have dried up in the vase they came in. Mom keeps on saying she’s going to hire someone to help, but it never happens.

  I opened up some windows and the back door to let the air in. I found a bottle of cleaning spray and paper towels, and I went to work. It felt good. It felt like progress. I was thinking about Viola, and about Matt’s and my plan, and that made me think about the pharmacy and wonder how we were ever going to come up with something for Eddie. And then I had this idea that maybe under the bed there was something. It was stupid, because if there had been, it might have been one pill, not some stockpile, but I got down to look anyway, and there wasn’t even that.

  There was something else, though. Three foil condoms under the couch nearby, attached to each other in perforated lines, two with their contents still inside and the third torn open and empty.

  So now I’m sitting and looking at these things. All right, I think. So the nurse, the hospice nurse, had these in her purse and she dropped them and they got kicked under the couch when she got up. Simple.

  Except that there had been only one nurse, and she was pretty open about liking other girls and telling us all about her girlfriend, so what use would she have for these things?

  Well, what use would anyone who’d been in this room have for them?

  Mom and Dad, I think. They’d tried to do it one last time in the hospital bed. It’s a thought that’s completely gross and also makes me really sad. And hopeful, in a way. Like, I hope that they did do it here.

  Still, I can’t quite believe it. I get up and stuff the rubbers in my pocket and keep cleaning, making my way into the kitchen. I want to put some music on, but I’m afraid it would wake Mom, so I work in silence and there’s nothing to keep my mind from racing. People had been in the living room. Matt came to visit, didn’t he? They could have fallen out of his pocket. But he hasn’t been here in months, and there was lots of dust under the couch, and the condoms were on top of the dust, not covered up by it.

  It’s eating at me now, partly because it’s a weird mystery and partly because it makes me feel like I’m outside of something. Like there’s a club that I’m not a member of, and everything would be clear to me if I was. All the satisfaction has gone out of cleaning. I have the stove half done, and I leave it that way and retreat upstairs. I’ll admit that my room’s a mess, but it’s comforting. It’s my mess. I plow through piles of laundry to get to my bed and throw myself down.

  It’s hot in here, stuffy, and I should open the window, but I like it this way. I wrap a blanket around myself despite the heat. It feels like a cocoon. I make myself breathe slowly and deeply. Slowly and deeply, one breath at a time.

  He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying / With a little patience.

  I’ve been reading Eliot.

  I roll over and wrap the blanket more tightly.

  I should get changed. I’m meeting Viola in just over an hour.

  The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract / By this, and this only, we have existed.

  I want to show her one of my poems. One of the ones I published. But thinking about it now, it seems pretentious.

  I turn my face into my pillow.

  The doorbell rings. I struggle free from the blanket and stumble out of my room and down the stairs, but Mom’s gotten there first. I thought she was out cold, but she looks awake and freshly showered, and she’s dressed for the day. It makes me think of what Matt said about her coming into the store and looking normal.

  Mrs. Maiden is standing on the doorstep with her little boy. Mom invites them in. It’s not the best house for a kid to play in, and for a moment I imagine him getting up and bouncing on the hospital bed, but Mom somehow produces a box of my old toys, and the boy—​Stephen—​settles right down in the middle of the dining room floor with some Transformers that I haven’t seen in years. I’d kind of like to get down there and play with him, see if I can still convert Optimus Prime into a tractor trailer, but Mom asks me to make tea, and five minutes later, I’m sitting at the table. They chat for a few minutes about nothing in particular, and then Mrs. Maiden leans over to glance at Stephen, sips from her cup, and turns to look at me.

  “Cole,” she says, “I didn’t have a chance to speak with you at graduation, and I’ve been meaning to come by. I’ve been making the rounds, you see.”

  Mom nods as if she knows what Mrs. Maiden is talking about, but I don’t, and my confusion must show. She takes another sip, blowing in
to the cup first, and continues.

  “Cole, I want to tell you something, and I want to give you something. So, first things first: I want to tell you how proud I am of you.”

  Now I’m looking at her in complete confusion, not even trying to look like I know what’s going on.

  “I’m proud of all of you, although I have a special place in my heart for you, Cole. You’ve carried yourself so well, when almost no one else could have.

  “After it happened, I remember you. That first holiday concert, the winter after. All of you onstage, all of us out in the audience. We were all so afraid, so overwhelmed. Could it be normal? Could we allow it to be normal? Such a mix of emotions. I can’t even . . . well, but you, Cole. I remember you so clearly. You stood there onstage with the other children, in your little khakis and your button-down shirt, and you were just so—​earnest; isn’t that the right word, Samantha? He was earnest.”

  My mother nods again. She sets down her teacup, reaches across the table, and squeezes Mrs. Maiden’s hand.

  “You stood there and held your head up,” Mrs. Maiden continues, “and you sang every song in the holiday repertoire with complete and utter conviction, as if it were the most important thing in the world. You were wonderful.”

  Mrs. Maiden came to all our class’s events; she was such a regular that sometimes I had to remind myself that Kendra wasn’t there anymore.

  “I remember that concert,” I say. “I was terrified.” At that point, my parents still hadn’t let me see any of the newspapers or magazine covers. I didn’t yet know that I was the Boy in the Picture. I didn’t know that everyone in the world had seen my face. Still, the weight of every pair of eyes in that auditorium was enough to petrify me.

  “I don’t know how you did it,” Mom says.

  I actually had no intention of doing it. I wasn’t going to go on, and the music teacher was going to let me stay behind in the band room. And then Matt came over to me and took my hand. “You’re shaking,” he said. “I get shaky when my sugar’s bad. Do you want some candy?”