The Debt

by Tyler King

  “I hate you,” she muttered through broken sobs.

  “I know. I love you, too.” I pulled the box out from under the sheet and turned up her palm to place it inside. “I need you to be my wife.”

  Her fingers curled around the box as she raised her head. I opened it for her and revealed my mother’s engagement ring.

  “Marry me, Hadley.”

  She stared at the solitaire diamond on a platinum band. It wasn’t big, but it held the purest love I have ever witnessed. Together, my parents had been as close to perfect as two people ever were. I hoped to live up to just a fraction of what they’d shared.

  She stared, without a sound, for a goddamn fortnight.

  “Say yes,” I begged. Say anything.

  “No.”

  “Try again.”

  “No, Josh.” Hadley closed the box and set it on the table beside the bed. “I’m not taking that ring.”

  “You want a new one?” I reached for her hand but she stepped out of my reach. “Punky, get back here.”

  “I don’t want a new ring. I’m not saying yes.” All color drained from her face and she held her arms around her stomach.

  “You don’t want to marry me.”

  “More than anything I want to marry you,” she replied. “I love you. You’re it. End of story. But I’m not taking a deathbed proposal. Ask me again when you don’t have a gun to your head.”

  “That’s not what this is,” I argued, sitting up and about to tackle her to the ground and drag a yes out of her. “Hadley—”

  She pushed me back down and placed her lips to mine. “I’m right here,” she whispered. “You have me. When you wake up, I’m going to be right here to hold your hand. One step at a time.”

  “You’re really turning me down?” My fingers weaved into her hair, holding on, unable to give her up. This felt so…wrong.

  “I’m giving you something to look forward to.”

  Two nurses walked in. After a few goodbyes, I was riding up an elevator to go under the knife.

  Chapter 34

  So much worry and to-do over cutting a hole in my head, but that was nothing. A dreamless sleep that came and went. Death was easy. Living, that was the challenge. And my struggle was an intensive course in genuine fucking agony with a humiliation enema thrown in for good measure.

  I awoke from surgery far worse for the wear. The reminder that I would recover was no consolation for the wires that hung from my chest, the IV and arterial lines running into my arms, and the goddamn catheter shoved up my dick. My throat had played host to a drag race. One trip in with the breathing tube and one back out, stripping the soft, spongy lining of my trachea.

  On the doctor’s orders, I had starved myself to prepare for surgery. I’d spent hours with my attorney finalizing the details of all that I could leave behind. Again, I’d dragged Simon away from work, asking that he drop everything to cater to my latest emergency. I’d made Punky cry, and that shit was unacceptable. All of that, and I still had a goddamn headache. Hadley could have gone six innings with a bat across my skull and not done one tenth of the damage.

  Beeping machines, bright lights, and constant voices passing in the hallway populated my corner of hell. Ticking, popping, swishing, dripping noises in my head, the result of air trapped inside my skull, left me questioning my sanity. The doctor had skipped that part during his cursory consultation before they put me under.

  Hours passed without relief. It seemed the second I was able to glimpse the possibility of sleep, the nurse was back to poke and prod, and fuss over my vitals.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Give me more drugs and fuck off.

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  The hour of my discontent. Asshole.

  “Can you tell me your name?”

  I am become Death. Up my goddamn dosage.

  Then they moved me to the neurological acute care unit. I wore fewer wires and tubes, but I was sporting a fancy new monster of a bruise where the arterial line had been stuck in my wrist.

  “Hi, hon. My name is Sheryl. I’m going to take that catheter out now. It won’t hurt a bit.”

  Lying cunt.

  When the day came that I got my first bite of solid food, I promptly saw it again as I hugged the toilet. Later, they pumped me full of laxatives and stool softeners, for fear a rough shit would burst open the hole in my head, and insisted that I keep shoving food down my tender throat. So, one way or another, I spent a fucking eternity over that porcelain depository.

  Simon was lucky enough to hear me throw a tantrum over the exhaustively long process of building up the strength to reach back and wipe my own ass. Punky was awarded the unenviable duty of remembering how many times I shit, pissed, and threw up. Because the nurses were real fucking fascinated by everything that came out of me. These indignities did have one upside. I hardly gave a damn about the severe bruising over half my face and my eye that was swollen shut.

  When they finally took me home after my two-week stay, I brought my Punky pillow to bed and checked out for eighteen straight hours.

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  “Don’t ever let me do that again.”

  Chapter 35

  Session 11

  “Most people consider afterlife to mean some plane of existence after death. Even the term is misleading. If we have consciousness after we fuck off this mortal coil, isn’t that still life? Afterdeath sounds better.”

  I watched as the coin tumbled over my fingers. After four weeks, I had gotten pretty damn good at this. Gradually, I was regaining dexterity and control in my right hand. My knee bounced in time with each peak and trough the quarter traveled.

  “Mortal coil,” I repeated. “I think Hamlet gets the points for most recognizable use of the phrase. It’s supposed to mean ‘the bustle and turmoil of this mortal life.’ Whatever. But here’s something you didn’t know.”

  I sat forward, captivated by George Washington’s head somersaulting over my knuckles.

  “In the second volume of Parerga and Paralipomena, Arthur Schopenhauer suggested that we’ve been using it wrong. Mortal coil. He thinks the word shuffle was a typesetter’s mistake and that it should be ‘shuttled off.’ Like weaving, not space shuttles. Those didn’t exist in 1851.”

  Shit. George botched the dismount and landed headfirst on the floor.

  “So Schopenfucker says that the phrase should mean ‘when we have unwound and worked off this coil of mortality.’ He’s referring to the Fates and the idea that life is a thread coiled on a weaver’s spool. See?”

  “Josh,” Reid said.

  “Right,” I answered with a nod. “Sorry. Tangents.”

  George got his ass up to try again.

  “So, what is life? The atoms that make up our bodies—the same that compose the stars and rocks and toilet seats—are repurposed, recycled, and reused. A tree falls in the forest and becomes bird shit and mushrooms and fur on a deer.”

  George was a little shaky, traveling the hurdles of my knuckles.

  “Afterlife is a stupid word,” I said. “However, if it must exist, I prefer the second usage: later life.”

  George took a nosedive to the floor. Fucking amateur.

  “Did I miss the point or are you getting to it within the hour?” Reid tossed her chopsticks into the empty takeout container and threw it in the trash can beside the desk.

  I sat back, pocketing the coin. “You’ve gotten mean.”

  “Only when you ramble to avoid my questions.”

  “Maybe if you asked better questions…”

  “You’d find more creative ways to distract yourself?”

  I rubbed at my eyebrow. Four weeks after surgery, I still had stitches through the incision, but the bruising and swelling had subsided.

  “French and German scientists have created light bullets. Can’t we just ponder that for a minute? Let’s sit here and contemplate the astounding, terrifying implications of achieving the pew-pew eff
ect.”

  “You died,” she said.

  “You make it sound so final.”

  “For most people—”

  “I’m not most people.”

  “Your heart stopped for twelve seconds on the operating table.”

  “That’s not a stop. A stutter, at best.”

  “You died.”

  “Impossible. I promised Punky I wouldn’t.”

  “And yet…”

  “Here I am. Spectacular, I know. But not a figment of your imagination.”

  “You died.” Reid rolled forward in her chair, right up to the edge of the coffee table that held magazines and a candy dish and the untouched remnants of my lunch, but not coffee. “And you have nothing to say on the topic?”

  “Of death? No.”

  “You’ve seen more of it than most people.”

  “The fuck do I know about dying?”

  “What, then?”

  “Later life,” I said. “For me, the surgery happened and then it was over. What matters is what happens next.”

  Reid rolled away. With her poker face on, she appraised me, deciding how best to deal with my mood. I wasn’t interested in looking backward. There was nothing there for me anymore. Everything I wanted, all that I needed, lay ahead.

  I closed my notebook and set it aside. This was my last session with Reid. In the months she’d spent picking me apart, I’d done most of the talking. And while a confluence of events had transpired to insist that I face some of my deepest troubles, I could offer her the benefit of the doubt and say she helped a little. When she wasn’t being argumentative and calling me names.

  “How did it make you feel?” she asked.

  “What are we talking about?”

  Reid hated it when I did that, but my head was a cluttered place.

  “Learning that your abuser had died. How did it make you feel?”

  A few days before Hadley and I returned to school, my dad got a phone call. His lawyer informed us that the man sent to prison for molesting me had been found stiff and frozen under an overpass. Dead of a heart attack. He had been homeless since his release three years ago.

  I stared at the ceiling and flicked my tongue piercing between my teeth. “I figured it out.”

  “Is that an answer or a segue?”

  “The song,” I said as I ignored her interruption.

  It wasn’t that I was avoiding the topic. There were few secrets I had left to hide from Reid. I couldn’t respond to her question because I didn’t have an answer. Truthfully, I didn’t know what I felt.

  “Right about the time the headaches started, there was this song I couldn’t pin down. I couldn’t get rid of it, no matter how long I spent trying to parse it out of the noise in my mind.”

  “I remember.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, tilting her chin to rest on her folded fingers. Her “I’m listening” face.

  “I mean I spent hours at a time scribbling clips and phrases on paper. Every time I picked up my guitar to work it out, the tune got farther away. Like trying to pick a speck of dirt out of a full bathtub. The closer you get, the more your hand displaces the water, and the harder it is to catch. The speck eludes you, twisting away in the current.”

  “What did you figure out?” she asked.

  Reid had come to realize some time ago that asking leading questions, interrupting my tangents, tended to keep me on topic. My thought trains had a habit of skipping the tracks. I guess that was why we meshed well. She knew how to handle me. And I was the sort that needed a bit of handling or I’d steam halfway to Georgia before I realized I’d run out of rails.

  “Help me out?” I had too much on my mind.

  “You figured it out,” Reid prompted. “How?”

  “Right. I drained the tub. See, you don’t know what you’ve forgotten until you remember. The images in my memory were always so vibrant, so present, that I didn’t realize there were holes. So we get the call from the lawyer that the man is dead, and I get to wondering if it matters. The man is dead, but that doesn’t change anything. A heart attack seems too elegant an end for such a disgusting monster.”

  I couldn’t stop fidgeting. My knee bounced as I pictured his body cold and stiff. But my throat was clear and my pulse was steady.

  “I took those thoughts to bed. Hadley fell asleep quickly, but I stared out the window with a song playing in my head. For a while there, I’d thought maybe it had been excised during surgery along with my headaches. Simon said Carmen sometimes heard music near the end. I could have bought into the same explanation. Only the melody came back.”

  Without any idea what I was looking for, I had taken my headphones to the piano room that night and went hunting for the E minor in the haystack.

  “He had this old record player. The needle was so dull that everything beneath it came out among pops and crackles. Noise. He used to play the song to cover the sounds behind his bedroom door. To mask my cries. The same song. Every time. I don’t know, it must have meant something to him. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe he was just a creature of habit or he was too fucking lazy to put on a new record. It doesn’t matter, right? Because he’s dead now, so why should I obsess over a fucking song I haven’t heard in eighteen years?”

  But I did. I did obsess, because I’d forgotten, and that was a goddamn revelation. Little details had slipped my recollection. Like I couldn’t actually picture the tattoo on his back, only that I knew it was there. I didn’t remember the color of his eyes, though I could still feel the texture of his hands. I smelled his foul breath, but I didn’t remember the precise tone of his voice.

  In a fit of rage, I had branded the memory to my chest. There was no ignoring the obvious. Truth be told, I didn’t want to ignore it. If I let myself bury the memory, then it would be like it had never happened. Erased. That boy deserved better than to be swept under the rug.

  “I sat at the piano and played for I don’t know how long. Over and over, repeating chorus and verse. I recited the melody until it lost all meaning, until the notes were only sounds and the sounds were indecipherable from the hum of the air conditioner or the leaves rustling on the trees beyond the windows. White noise. Benign.”

  I had let the memory overtake me that night, overwhelm my senses and squeeze. I trembled at the piano. In a cold sweat, I felt my pulse race as my chest constricted. I had no idea how long I’d been at it until Punky walked in with a blanket and draped it over my shoulders. The first colors of the sunrise found their way inside the room as she sat beside me with her head on my shoulder.

  “Are you still having panic attacks?” Reid asked.

  “They’re less frequent. A little less intense. I’m never going to get over it,” I admitted. “I’m never moving past what he did, and I’ve accepted that fact. I’m not angry anymore. Really, what good does it do me to curse the dead? Maybe, in time, the memories will cease to rule me.”

  I had a goal, something to work toward. Reid had once made it a point to mention that I was lacking in that area.

  “Forgiveness is something you’ve worked on lately,” she said. “You forgave Scott.”

  “Mostly, yes. I’m trying to.”

  The ability to forgive had never come naturally to me. Like trust, it was something I tended to only dole out in small doses. But in Scott’s case, I made the effort.

  Chapter 36

  On the Monday before final exams, I waited in a conference room with my attorney at the county courthouse. Scott was set to stand trial after the New Year, and the closer it got to the holidays, the more I thought about him sitting in jail and what it must have been like to detox in a prison cell. I didn’t want to feel sorry for him, but a nagging sense of culpability had eaten at me since the break-in.

  “You’re certain this is what you want?” my attorney asked. He slid the stapled sheets of paper in front of me. “Look it over again. This is your last chance to change your mind.”

  Simon was right; I couldn’t take responsibility
for Scott’s actions. But I would shoulder the blame for my part. Truth was, I should have helped him sooner. Looking back on all the petty bullshit between us—missing rehearsals and flaking on the band—that was a poor excuse for turning my back on a friend when he didn’t have the will or wherewithal to help himself. Because if my circumstances had been different, I might have ended up like him somewhere along the way: angry, hopeless, and looking for anything to numb the pain of waking up and taking the next breath every day.

  It didn’t matter why Scott got hooked. Hell, maybe it was a fucking accident that spiraled out of his control. I didn’t care about the why. Just that he be given a second chance to live a better life. I had gotten that when I needed it most, and it made all the difference.

  “The prosecutor has already agreed to the terms,” my attorney said, scrolling through e-mails on his phone. “And I’m confident the judge will sign off on it as long as Scott consents to be remanded into his parents’ custody.”

  A pair of thick wooden double doors creaked and groaned. Escorted between a uniformed officer and a public defender in a cheap gray suit, Scott shuffled in wearing orange hospital scrubs and slip-on shoes. His hands cuffed at his stomach and chained to the shackles at his ankles. He jingled with every short step scuffed across the shiny floor. Those jingles, his little old-man steps, they laughed at him. Set deep inside his pale, gaunt face, his sallow eyes held profane humiliation. It hurt to look at him.

  “Scott...”

  I had come to tell him I was dropping the charges. To meet face-to-face and say that I could forgive him as long as he took this opportunity to start over. My attorney had worked it out with the court that Scott could avoid more jail time if he checked into rehab and stayed clean. I’d foot the bill. But seeing him hunched over the table, a broken shell of his former self, I knew that facing me in his condition only deepened his shame. Because it wasn’t Scott who had threatened me or broken into my house. It wasn’t the kid I’d known since high school who had pulled a gun on me at the bar. That person was a chemical creation that died of the DTs weeks ago. In front of me was the leftovers, and they didn’t owe me anything.