One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  “It’s not that deep, really,” I said.

  He stopped at the corner of Harris. “You won’t join me for coffee and dessert? We can cut right through here and go to the—”

  “No. Thank you. I really need to get home.”

  Paul nodded as if that had been his idea in the first place. “Then let’s head that way,” he said.

  We were still ten blocks from Gaston Street. Plenty of time for him to try to ferret out the issues I didn’t have.

  “Where are you with God right now?” he said.

  “I’m good,” I said. Was that blasphemous?

  “Okay.”

  We walked in silence for a block, during which I wanted to cave. He was just doing his job as my pastor. If he had all the information, he would be talking to his son, not me. I couldn’t blame him. Not really.

  Just after we passed Madison Square he said, “I can understand why you don’t want to talk to me about this. I just thought it was worth a shot since we go way back.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said for the eightieth time that day. And I was.

  “Don’t be. You have to feel comfortable with whoever you talk to, and I want you to talk to someone. I know some great counselors, one of them I think you’d really relate to. She’s—”

  I stopped so abruptly he took three steps beyond me before he realized I’d done it. I left my attempt to cut him slack back at the corner. “Why do I need a counselor?” I said.

  “Because you’re confused. Maybe a little depressed.”

  I dug my fingernails into my palms through the sweater. “We’re separating you as Seth’s father from you as my pastor?”

  He smiled down at me. Come to think of it, he was doing everything down at me. “We’re trying,” he said.

  “Then I’m saying this to you as my pastor: I am not the one with the issues.”

  “I’m not saying Seth doesn’t have his, but Tara, there are always two sides.” He shoved his hands into his pockets more roughly than he meant to, I was sure. The softening of his eyes was deliberate. “If you can’t work this out together, then at least try to work out your individual stuff separately or you’ll never have a chance at a relationship.” He pressed his lips together before he finished with, “And that is your pastor talking.”

  I could have said at least five things that would have made Paul my pastor order an immediate exorcism. He didn’t deserve any of them. But since there were no other options, I didn’t say anything except—

  “Thanks for being concerned. I’ll work it out, okay? I’ll work it out.”

  Then I turned and ran, undoubtedly leaving Paul the whoever convinced that I was just as messed up as he thought I was.

  TEN

  For the next two days I slept and worked and tried to forget that I was supposed to be getting married on Saturday. Seth made that last one hard to do.

  Thursday he insisted we go for a drive, and I gave in on the condition that we wouldn’t talk about it. We went to Hilton Head and back before I made him take me home. The whole thing had turned into a shouting match—about it—that neither of us had a chance of winning.

  That was why on Friday, the night we should have been celebrating our rehearsal dinner at the Harper Fowlkes House, I drove instead in the slapping rain to the townhouse and banged on the door. I still had a key but I didn’t want to walk in on something.

  Seth answered immediately wearing the sweats I’d seen hanging over the desk chair and a Choose Life! T-shirt with a glob of turquoise toothpaste stuck to it. His face didn’t light up when he saw mine. He seemed to have stopped hoping. Maybe that would make this easier.

  As he let me in he gave my head a dry touch. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “I was just about to make some eggs.”

  “I’m not staying.” I rewrapped my sweater and tried to remember what I’d rehearsed on the way over.

  “You don’t want to try out the new couch?”

  For the first time I realized the living room was full of the furniture we’d picked out as we giggled and dreamed and tried out every chair in Georgia Furniture and Interiors. I had spent hours after that envisioning what the designer called casual elegance—a subtle palette of cream and blues, mixed with chrome and bright overstuffed pillows—and imagining us with our feet up on striped cube ottomans, snuggling on the rounded couch that pushed us together. Seth had arranged it just the way we planned; even the throw pillows were set at perfect angles. But it looked so cold and impersonal it might as well still be in the showroom.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  Seth dragged both of his hands through his hair. “What does that mean?”

  “It means . . . until you get help, I just can’t see you. That’s what it means.”

  His face blanched. “I need your help, Tar. I can’t do this without you beside me.”

  “I would walk beside you if you were going anywhere. But what are you doing? Just saying you’re going to stop? Trying to will yourself to do it? That obviously doesn’t work.”

  “I’m looking for help.” Seth parked his hands on his hips and stared at the ceiling as if the crown molding could be the source of aid. “I’ve been going to the church every morning before work and every night after, and just sitting there begging God to take this away. I go to sleep praying. I wake up praying.”

  His voice caught, and something in me sagged and softened.

  “Is it helping?” I said.

  “Have I stopped having urges, you mean?”

  “I guess that’s what I mean. I don’t even know how to think about this.”

  He shook his head. “I just keep coming back around to the same thing. If I had you, right here with me all the time, I wouldn’t need—”

  “You can’t put this all on me, Seth! We were twenty days away from that and you couldn’t wait. What makes you think my living here is going to make any difference?”

  “Because then I’ll know you aren’t going to leave me. Then I’ll have a reason to keep fighting. Please, Tar. I know you said you’d wait, but if I can’t even see you, I don’t know if I can believe that.”

  The air itself became heavy with the words that pressed on my head. I need YOUR help. If I had YOU with me all the time. If YOU gave me a reason.

  You, Tara. All you.

  But that wasn’t what I came to hear, and agreeing to it wasn’t what I came to say.

  “I can’t,” I said. “It has to be you first. You have to show me you’d do it whether I was here or not. Until then, I can’t see you anymore.”

  “Tar—”

  “I can’t look at you and want you and get pulled back into what we hoped our life was going to be. I can’t—and that isn’t just for me, Seth. That’s for you.”

  I turned to go. He groped for me and found the tail of my sweater, and he used it to pull me against him until our lips were close.

  “If you leave me alone with this I’ll fail. I know I’ll fail.”

  I shook my head. “If I stay, you’ll never even try.”

  Why he still attempted to press his mouth against mine, I didn’t know, but it was the final thing that made me wrench away. Because never before had he tried to manipulate me with a kiss. And it was so wrong. So very wrong.

  “Don’t,” I said, and once more yanked myself from him. I caught my foot on the leg of the chair that was never there before and stumbled toward the door in a headlong rush to be gone—before I could change my mind.

  Only Seth’s voice crying, “Tara!” tried to pull me back. I slammed the door on it and ran, down the sideways steps I loved so much and across the bumpy brick sidewalk to my Mini Cooper. If I had locked it I might still be standing there, trying to find the button on the key amid the tears and the rain and the blacked-out vision that was never going to come again. As it was, I pulled the car door open too hard and slipped back almost to the ground on the slick leaves. By the time I got into the driver’s seat and closed myself in, I was cryi
ng so hard I had to sit there until I was sure my heart was still beating.

  Seth didn’t come out after me. That was the only thing that finally allowed me to turn the key and pull away from the curb at Jones Street.

  Where I was going from there I had no idea. Everything I thought of—Just drive around the squares or Cruise down Bull Street or even Go to Lexi’s apartment—only taunted me with the memory of where I was supposed to be going tonight and who I should be seeing and what I should be doing. No. No more visions. No more dreams. No more memories.

  I put on the brakes so hard at Liberty and Montgomery, the tires grabbed and I lurched forward and back. If I didn’t have any of that, what did I have? What else was there to live on?

  All I could think to do was get away from it, and as fast as possible. Go someplace else, out of Savannah, where there were no jeering reminders.

  Fritzie didn’t come to mind until I was ten miles south of town, headed inland, where the Georgia pines mixed in with the nearly leafless oaks and the deep forests on either side of Interstate 95 seemed shriveled and forlorn, just like me. A green sign indicated that Jesup was fifty-six miles. That was the town where our sometime-nanny lived.

  I hadn’t seen Fritzie since my wedding shower. She’d texted me several times after Mama told her the wedding was postponed until further notice, but I hadn’t answered. My phone was so full of unreturned messages it would take me days to go through them. If I wanted to.

  Now, though, wouldn’t Fritzie be the one to go to? Not to tell her everything but just to be in her raspy-voiced, Bohemian presence and chill? That was what she used to tell Kellen and Seth and little Evvy and me when she was hanging with us for a weekend while the parents went off to a church conference or some business thing.

  “We’ve been doing stuff all day,” she would announce after a full morning and afternoon of Burger King and Baskin-Robbins and the roller rink and all the other things said parents never took us to (even then I couldn’t imagine my mother at the roller-skating rink in an Ann Taylor ensemble). “So now we’re going to chill.”

  That meant a movie marathon—always something very boyish and noisy and full of cartoon punching and explosions—and her homemade pizza—and me falling asleep with my head in her lap, which always smelled like patchouli. Every time I’d gotten a whiff of that passing someone’s dorm room in college, I’d felt a wave of homesickness for Fritzie.

  Yeah. I should go to Jesup and curl up on her ancient yard-sale couch and let her brew me some kind of tea she’d made up from the things growing on her windowsills. She wouldn’t try to get me to dish, or tell me I needed to reveal “whatever it is” to some neutral party, or attempt to convince me that the problems were all mine. She wouldn’t tell me I was better off without Seth. She would just let me chill.

  I drove as far as the Georgetown exit before it occurred to me that I should call her before I just showed up at her door. It was Friday night. She could have a date.

  Okay, that wasn’t entirely plausible. Fritzie was into the second half of her thirties now, and her prospects for getting married and having her own kids seemed to grow thinner every time I saw her. She wasn’t the lean, raven-haired hippie who looked great without makeup anymore. The years had added pounds to her waist and an early cragginess to her face and a sardonic outlook to her whole being. At my shower she’d said to me, “Better you than me, honey, but I wish you all the best.” I’d thought at the time that was kind of an inappropriate thing to say, but none of the appropriate things were working now, were they?

  I got off on the Richmond Hill exit and pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store to call her on her cell. I almost gave up after three rings but on the fourth she answered with a breathless, “Hey, girlfriend!”

  At the sound of her cigarette alto I sank into the seat. “Hey, Fritz.”

  “I’ve texted you, like, twelve times. How you doin’, girl?”

  “Not good,” I said. “I thought I’d come see you.”

  “Awesome. No, I want them fried. Who eats calamari that’s not fried?”

  I held the phone out and blinked until I realized she was talking to someone else. Country music blared behind her voice.

  “Sorry,” she said. “When are you coming?”

  “Um . . . now? I’m on my way.”

  “Now’s not gonna work, babe. I’m in Panama City Beach.”

  “Oh.”

  “I took time off for your wedding, so I thought as long as I was on vacation I oughta get away.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Sounds like you need to get away too. Listen, do you just want to go to my place? The key’s under the mat. I don’t think there’s anybody sleeping there tonight.” She laughed—something akin to sandpaper rubbing on a two-by-four—but I got the feeling she was serious.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll do it another time.”

  “I’m planning on coming up for Christmas Day,” she said. “Madeline said I should still come.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s—that’ll be good.”

  “Hey—are you okay?” The sandpaper softened to a finer grade.

  “Not really,” I said. “I did get a job.”

  “I need another one of these. His is on me too. Sorry, Tara—what?”

  “No worries,” I said. “I’ll see you Christmas Day.”

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  Did I not just say I wasn’t? This was a mistake. But then, actually, maybe everything I did was a mistake.

  “Yes,” I said. “Have a good time.”

  I ended the call and dropped my phone into my bag. Then I drove south some more and turned around at the next exit and went back to Savannah. The rain stopped, but the kind of drizzle that makes you adjust your wipers over and over continued to dot the windshield. Between that and turning the defroster on and off, I could see, then I couldn’t see, then I could see again. By the time the pines gave way to the live oaks again, I wanted to scream. Maybe I would have if the phone hadn’t jarred with jazz piano.

  Seth.

  What was it about “I can’t see you; I can’t talk to you” that he didn’t understand?

  I let it stop ringing, but I pulled into the parking lot of the bank next to the Distillery and waited for the voice mail. When it came, I didn’t listen to it. I just called him back. Maybe it was time to scream.

  “Tara,” he said. His voice was faint. “I took too many.”

  The scream died in my throat. “Too many what? What are you talking about, Seth?”

  “I took too many pills. I can’t do this—but I wanted to say good-bye and tell you I love you.”

  “Where are you? Are you home?”

  “I’m at our home,” he said.

  The call didn’t end—I could hear rustling and thumping—but he didn’t say any more, even when I cried into the phone, “Seth! Seth, answer me!”

  There was nothing.

  What I did and how I did it, I’m not sure. Whatever it was, it brought my father and a screaming ambulance and several flashing police cars to the townhouse moments after I got there and found Seth half on, half off the couch. His eyes were almost closed and his chest rose and fell so slowly I expected his next breath to be his last. Sweat gleamed on his forehead and his upper lip—everywhere his pale skin was visible. When I leaned over him, a strong odor of urine filled my nose.

  Faceless voices asked me questions. How long since you talked to him? How did he sound? How many pills did he take? What did he take?

  I wasn’t even sure I answered, or how Daddy and I got to the hospital, or when Mama arrived. I sat pressed in my father’s arms on the edge of a bench outside the ER watching the thick double doors that stood like sentinels between Seth and me, waiting for him to walk through them smiling and whole and no longer sweaty and pale. I wasn’t even aware of Randi Grissom until I looked up and found her scalding me with her eyes.

  “Are you satisfied now?” she said.

  D
addy pushed me onto Mama, who was on the other side of me, and stood up. He looked past Randi at Paul.

  “She needs to back off,” he said—to the man he played golf with and went to men’s retreats with and opened his Bible with every Sunday morning. “We’re not going to do this.”

  Randi sidestepped Daddy and leaned down into my face. “Do you see what you’ve done? If he dies, Tara, it’s on you.”

  “He’s not gonna die! He won’t die!”

  “Paul,” Daddy said.

  Paul put an arm across Randi’s chest from behind and pulled her back. That didn’t stop her from spitting words at me.

  “You crushed his whole world.”

  “Enough!” Daddy said. “Madeline, take Tara out of here.”

  Mama pulled me off the bench and walked with her arms around me through the automatic outer doors and into the glass foyer.

  “Is she right?” I sobbed into her shoulder. “Is it my fault?”

  “No, sweet darlin’. She’s wrong. She’s so wrong.”

  But was she? Didn’t I leave him crying out my name? Didn’t he tell me before I left the townhouse that I was the only way out for him?

  “How are we doing?”

  Daddy’s voice pulled me out of Mama’s arms and into his.

  “Randi is out of her mind right now,” he said into my hair. “But you listen to me. This is not your fault. A man makes a decision like that on his own. Nobody else is responsible.”

  “I shouldn’t have told him I couldn’t see him any more until he got it fixed.”

  Daddy took my face in his hands and searched my eyes. “Got what fixed, Tara?”

  The doors sighed open behind us. “The doctor’s coming out to talk to the family,” said a woman in scrubs.

  I broke away from Daddy and followed her back into the hallway where Randi and Paul stood staring at the double doors the same way I had. They opened just as we arrived and a small man in a white coat with glasses too large for his face came through. He wasn’t Seth. I wanted him to be Seth.

  Randi wasn’t the only one out of her mind.