Chapter Sixteen
The sheets were thrown off the bed. The tray that held his uneaten breakfast has been shoved aside, obviously by someone agitated by something far more than stale food.
The absence of anyone created a vacuum feeling, pulling me into the room and chilling my bones.
“Max?” I whispered.
From the corner of my eye I could see the bathroom door was open. He wasn’t in there. He wasn’t anywhere. I took a few more steps forward. Something beneath my feet crunched.
I knew what it was instantly, but I still forced my eyes to look down. The newspaper. The pages were lying in an unorganized heap beside his empty bed.
“Max!” I yelled as my body began to shake. “Max please come out.”
The silence racked my body even harder. I turned to run back to the nurse’s station, by a slight movement caught my attention. I looked back and saw the blinds over the windows were moving just a touch in the wind. They’d been pulled up further than they were yesterday, revealing an open window. The morning chill rolled in.
My stomach rolled along with it as I ran to the window and leaned out, praying I wouldn’t see what I was afraid I might. I leaned as far forward as I could and looked down at the street. Standing four stories up, I saw the ant colony of New Yorkers scrambling through the streets, but no body was flattened against concrete. Once again, I sighed and began to pull back in. And that’s when I saw him.
Slowly turning to my right, I found Max, standing on the ten inch stone ledge that wrapped around building. He was pressed up against the wall, eyes shut, trembling.
I did what could probably be counted as the stupidest thing to do. I screamed, “Max!”
He jumped, swayed forward then tilted back against the wall. Gasping violently, he opened his eyes and looked in my direction.
“Maddy? What are you doing here?”
“Who cares what I’m doing here? What are you doing there?” I cried. “Never mind! Just get back inside.”
He quickly shook his head and tried to look down, shuddering as he made eye contact with the street. “Am I afraid of heights?” he asked as he leaned back and squeezed his eyes closed again.
I smacked my palm on the sill. “I don’t know, Max. I’ve never stood on a ledge with you. Just get back in here.”
His looked back at me with a wrinkled forehead. “You say that like you’ve been on a ledge with someone else.”
“It just so happens I have, but that doesn’t mean I want to with you.” And then without thinking, I climbed up onto the window sill and slid one leg out.
“Maddy, what are you doing?” Max asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied and pulled my other leg out. “Just get back inside.”
“No.”
My insides twisted into a knot as I watched him throw himself forward. I didn’t have time to scream, but everything inside of me did as his heels came up. Then all of a sudden he looked down. Terror shot through his eyes and the survival instinct kicked in, involuntarily slamming his body back against the wall. I suddenly understood. He was trying to kill himself. All of the things to feel at that moment, I got angry.
“Peter Maxwell, you get back in here right this minute!” I yelled.
He just shook his head.
Growling, I clutched the frame of the window and pulled myself up, slipping on the sock of my now shoeless foot. The tremendous gasp that ripped through me as I swung out got him to open his eyes and look over.
My eyes met the pavement as I pulled myself back against the window and my imagination saw my body smashed and broken.
I turned back to Max and scowled. “Come on.”
“No,” he shot back.
I stamped my foot, effectively throwing myself off balance again. That time I practically squealed with furry. “Max, so help me, if you throw yourself off I’ll throw myself off too!”
“Oh, Maddy, don’t be ridiculous.” He frowned at me, apparently trying to look reproachful.
“Ridiculous? I’m not the one trying to get over a fear of heights just long enough to throw myself off a building. I don’t think I’m the ridiculous person here. Now, get back inside.”
“I can’t,” he yelled so loud, I stepped back. He took a sharp, painful breath said, “Didn’t you see the paper?”
The words brought up such a rush of sorrow my anger started to melt. Mechanically, I forced myself to nod.
“Then you know.” His voice fell to a soft tone.
I’m not sure if the wind intensified at the moment. All I knew was as I stood there, looking into his tormented face, I suddenly felt like my skin was frostbitten from head to toe.
“Max…” I began and held my hand out.
He wrenched his body away. “I can’t, Maddy. I can’t face what I am any longer.”
“You’re a—”
“A murderer!” he wailed. I saw the tears fill his eyes. The sight shook me so hard I almost let go of the window.
“A what?”
“Maddy, don’t you understand? I got that kid off. Not only did I let him get away with one murder, I allowed him to commit another. I might as well have killed that girl last night.”
“Max, don’t—”
The look he gave me squeezed my throat shut. “Tell me, Maddy. Tell me if you think I did the right thing?”
It took me a moment to clear the fear in my throat, but even then my mouth would not cooperate with my heart. I wanted to soothe him. Instead I said, “I-I don’t know.”
He nodded. “Yes, you do. You know deep in your heart I was wrong.”
“How could you have known he was the killer?” I cried desperately. Guilt started to strangle me.
Again, he shook his head, almost savagely. “I bet I knew. I bet I could tell just looking at him. I use to be good at seeing into people. I bet I knew and didn’t care. Just like my father.” He slid down and sat back on his heels, burying his head in his hands as he did. I could hear the sobs racking his throat. “Oh, God, fifteen years!” He hiccupped. “You know, when my dad did come home, he would talk about his cases. He would tell me how he could easily tell when someone really was guilty, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to look at it from the view of the law. If the guy could legally be gotten off, my father would do it.” Disgust and anger surged. “My mother and I hated him for it. I swore I’d never be like him, but look at me now! I might as well be his clone.
“I’ve given up relationships I should have held onto. Ignored chances I should have taken. Allowed killers to go free. And dragged others down with me.”
He looked up at me with his watery eyes and I understood what he was saying. I felt like a dead, gutted fish. Everything inside of me drained.
“Tell me why I should keep going,” he said softly.
I tried, but failed to answer because there wasn’t anything left in me. It seemed like my entire life was a blank. All that dawned within the darkness was a very faint, “Please, God. Please.”
“Don’t do it,” a clear, strong voice said from behind me.
I went ridged and looked back. There, standing just outside the window on the same ledge, was Jim Wagner, looking like he’d never feared heights in his life. He just stared at us with intense eyes. Eyes that, for the first time since I’d become acquainted with Jim, held something bright, something alive.
Max looked up at him, tear stains running wildly down his cheeks, and shook his head. “You should push me off.”
Jim took in a deep breath and shook his head. “Maxwell, if you were meant to die, I think that car would have finished you off.”
“What are you talking about?”
Jim shook his head again, but in a retrospective sort of way. “Maxwell, I’ve never put much faith in providence or some sort of Divine plan, but all I’ve got to say is I’m here. I should be dead. I tried my hardest to die,
but here I am.” He locked eyes with Max. “And here you are.”
“But—”
“I forgive you,” Jim cut in.
The words literally shook the air and loosened all my joints. I could have slipped off the ledge at that moment, but Jim put a hand on my shoulder to steady me.
“Why?” Max cried, curling his fingers into his skull.
The frown lines around Jim’s mouth, so deep they looked like he must have had then since childhood, lengthened. “What’s done is done. We can’t go back. What would be the point in holding it against you? Especially since you can’t even remember.”
My head snapped back to Max, who seemed to be visibly falling apart in front of me, and in that instant the dim light inside me turned to a complete dawn. He couldn’t remember what he’d done for better or for worse. All he had was an itemized list of things he done over the past fifteen years that he could compare and contrast to all his hopes and ideals. There were no present day moments to muddy the issues or hide behind. Just a bare analysis and basic understanding.
That’s when I saw it made sense. The God I so shamefully neglected was not destroying my life. He was giving me a, “Second chance,” I whispered then met Max in the eyes and raised my voice. “A second chance!”
“What?”
“Don’t you see, Max?” I called out. “We’ve been giving an opportunity like few people ever get. You can’t remember any of your mistakes or justify making them. All you know is what you did.”
“And that’s good?” he cried in desperation.
“Yes!” I’m sure I sounded a little giddy. “You’ll have to start your life completely over, entirely from scratch, ground up. But you’ll go in knowing all the mistakes you’re capable of making. You can now see the hard-lines, the dangers, the realties. It’s like facing life with a cheat sheet.” I took a deep breath. “Don’t you see, we’ve been given a chance to start over? Things could have gone on forever the way they were and we both would have lived without fulfilling anything.” I reached out my hand as far as it would go. “But God is giving us a second chance, Max.” I must have started crying because my eyes were burning badly. “I want that second chance. Please, Max.”
He eyes remained fixed on mine, but his body started to lean toward the edge.
“Max, no,” I whispered, but the leaning did not halt.
I opened my mouth to scream then suddenly his hand was in mine, grabbing onto it for dear life. I felt my body move forward, but I yanked back with all my might. It seemed he was off the ledge entirely by that point, but I had closed my eyes and put all my focus on staying up. Then Jim’s hand tightened around my waist. I felt him reach out his other hand past me for Max.
An instant later we were all standing in a huddle on that ledge, each clinging to each other, breathing in sporadic fits and gasps. We must have stayed that way for a while because Jim finally said, “Can we go back inside now? It’s getting kind of cold and I never really liked heights anyway.”
I actually had a single laugh left in me for that.
We edged back enough to slide into the window one by one. Linoleum floors never felt as good as they did at that moment. Max came down beside me and then stared at me for a minute.
I smiled and a second later he was holding onto me, crying like I didn’t know a man could cry. That’s when I knew for sure that the Max I’d lived and worked with was really and truly dead. This wasn’t going to be the sort of happy ending that people who allowed themselves to dream envision. But maybe it was something even better. A new beginning.
Max never has remembered me or any of those years. That is fine as far as I’m concerned. I guess that’s how forgiveness works. Once God gives it to you, the past no longer matters.
Sometimes when Max holds me I can’t even remember that decade, or who I was back then. I become an ordinary teenager from New Jersey who still believes and dreams.
The End
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The Moment Max Forgot Me Page 15
