One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  I sighed. It sounded as if it came from the pit of my soul.

  “How do you feel?” he said.

  “Drained?” I said. “Yeah, I feel drained.”

  “I think that’s good.” His eyes did a little dance. “I guess the absolution worked, huh?”

  I smiled, faintly I was sure. Ned rubbed his hands together. “I have to go to a breakfast meeting, but if you want to talk again, any other morning this week, I’m free after the service. We can always come here.”

  I was almost too emptied-out to answer, but I managed to say, “I’ll think about it.”

  And, in fact, I thought about almost nothing else for the rest of the day.

  Until the call came from Seth that night.

  SEVENTEEN

  Seth had been gone for over three weeks and I hadn’t heard anything from him or about him. I didn’t expect Randi and Paul to keep me apprised, though Evelyn would have if she knew anything, and there was zero chance of that.

  So I wasn’t thinking about talking to him as I sat in the window seat watching for Lexi, who was bringing a selection of comedies for that night’s marathon. I was musing over the fact that it was the day Seth and I were supposed to return from Ireland and start our new life on Jones Street for real. So when the phone rang I was grateful for the interruption and answered it without looking to see who it was.

  “Hey, Tar,” Seth said. “Do you have a few minutes?”

  His voice was strong, but slightly hesitant, as if he were dipping his toe into my waters. I suddenly, inexplicaby, didn’t want him to find them cold.

  “Of course I do,” I said. “How are you? Really?”

  “Miserable,” he said, as if that were the new fine. “But that’s good. I mean, it’s bad, but it’s good.”

  “Okay,” I said. Oddly enough, I understood.

  “So,” we both said at the same time.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “I want to hear about you too,” he said. “But I do have some things I want to tell you. That I have to tell you.”

  It took every amount of strength I had not to end the call. I wasn’t sure I could hear any more of the sordid story that came out every time we talked. And yet, hadn’t my own confession left me drained of the ugliness?

  “Okay,” I said, and hugged my knees in.

  “This is going to be kind of random because I haven’t connected all the dots yet,” he said, “but it’s what makes sense so far.”

  “Okay,” I said again.

  “We decided not to have sex before we got married because that’s the Christian thing to do. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “And it was hard. But harder for you than for me—and don’t take that the wrong way.”

  I wasn’t sure there was any other way to take it, but I bit my lip and let him continue.

  “The reason for that was that I couldn’t have sex with you. Because of the porn, sex wasn’t a sign of love for me anymore. It was a sign of abuse. And I didn’t want to abuse you.”

  The image of the video I’d discovered that day at the townhouse slammed into view. I shuddered. I couldn’t even allow myself to replace the woman I saw there with a picture of myself. All I could manage to say now was yet another default, “Okay.”

  “What I’m trying to tell you,” Seth said, “is that my addiction isn’t about sex at all, so it definitely isn’t about me not wanting you or you not being everything any guy would want. Some of the guys here have shared with me that their wives felt totally . . . undesirable when they found out, and it was a huge thing to have to overcome. So don’t go there, Tar, all right?”

  That ship had sailed but I didn’t say so.

  “Can I go on?” he said.

  “Please,” I said.

  “Here’s another thing you have to know: I never enjoyed porn, not really. It wasn’t about pleasure for me. It was about releasing pain. But the more I did it, the worse the pain got because the secret was killing me from the inside out.”

  “I get that part.” I sat up straighter on the window seat. “But what pain, Seth? I don’t understand that.”

  For the first time in the conversation he paused, and I could almost see him measuring out his words into spoonfuls. That made me want to stop him again—to keep him from saying things that couldn’t be unsaid.

  And then he went on.

  “I’ve had anxiety since I was ten. Bad. Like I thought I was going crazy sometimes. We haven’t totally uncovered what that was about here and we will. But I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Again he seemed to regroup. I nodded to nobody.

  “The summer I went up to my cousin’s in Maine—I was thirteen—they had that old beach house and my cousin was all about the Playboys and Hustlers the guy who lived there before left in the basement. I knew it was wrong to look at them; I just did it because he dared me. And then I found out it . . .” He sighed into the phone. “I don’t know; it soothed me, I guess you could say? I could look at it at night and . . . do whatever . . . and I could really sleep for the first time in about three years.”

  I was doing fine until then. But the thought of my Seth at thirteen, using a centerfold and his barely pubescent body like a drug—it was another image I’d never be able to erase.

  “Is that helping you?” I said. “Going back and knowing all this?”

  “It is.”

  “Then I’m glad. But some of it I can’t—”

  “Does it make me seem dirty to you?”

  It was more an accusation than a question. If it hadn’t been partially true, I would have bristled more than I did. As it was, I still had to breathe before I spoke again.

  “It’s sad,” I said.

  “I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I just want you to understand.”

  “I’m trying. I am.”

  “But you don’t want the nasty details.”

  “Do I need the nasty details?”

  In the silence that followed I wasn’t even sure what Seth would be doing, what body language to imagine. He was looking into a past I thought I knew everything about and obviously didn’t, and it made me wonder in that chilling moment if I had ever really known him at all. Who was it, then, that I loved?

  “I’m just scared,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Seth said. “Maybe talking about it isn’t the best way. Maybe I need to get my thoughts down on paper, you know? They encourage us to journal. That’s helping.”

  “Good,” I said. “Really, I’m glad, Seth.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  It was the first hint of desperation I heard, and I couldn’t let that be the note we ended on. So I said, “I love you too.”

  But as we said our good-byes, I wasn’t sure. For the first time since I was fifteen years old, I wasn’t sure. And that was huge.

  There was no doubt in my mind after the service the next morning that I needed to talk to Ned Kregg some more.

  We went back to the room in the parish house and, sitting on the same salmon-colored brocade sofa, I told him about the phone call with Seth.

  “I tried to be compassionate this time,” I said. “But is it wrong of me not to want to listen to stuff that I can’t get out of my mind?”

  “No. Knowing the details isn’t necessarily going to make you empathetic.”

  “It’s going to make me throw up.”

  Ned’s eyes smiled, and then they grew wise. “What you do need to know is that Seth’s addiction to porn is only one manifestation of something more pervasive that’s going on.”

  “That anxiety he was talking about—that I never even saw. Where was I?”

  “You really are the self-flagellation queen,” Ned said. “You didn’t see because, one, he didn’t want you to see it and, two, the porn was relieving it enough that he didn’t feel it, until he needed another fix.”

  “So it really is like a drug.”

  �
�And it sounds like they’re helping him get to the source of the anxiety itself. That’s a good program he’s in.”

  “He got really defensive when I said I didn’t want the details. Then he didn’t want me to feel sorry for him.” I gave the shrug of all shrugs. “I don’t even know how to talk to him anymore.”

  “He doesn’t know how he needs to be talked to. The phone call was probably not the wisest thing at this point.” Ned studied his hands, which were small for a tall guy, and uncalloused. There was a faint ink stain on his middle finger. “I don’t know Seth so I can’t say this with certainty, but I’m going to guess that he’s more damaged than it even looks like right now. Something may have happened to him that he hasn’t dug up yet and, again, I can’t be sure about that.” He turned his head slightly. “Does Seth seem to fear intimacy?”

  I thought about it. Fear wouldn’t be the word I’d use for the night in the kitchen when he nearly shoved me against the dishwasher because I vaguely hinted that I wanted to go further than a kiss twenty days before our wedding—even though I didn’t mean head for the bedroom. But it had been something strong.

  “He didn’t want intimacy with me,” I said finally. “But he said—”

  I told him what Seth told me about abuse and the whole thing not being about sex.

  “I think that’s the truth,” Ned said. “And that had to come from somewhere. When you’re in pain you don’t see a reason for . . . Let me see if I can help you understand that . . . if you want.”

  “I do,” I said.

  Ned studied his hands again. “What have you been doing since Seth left and you don’t want all the thoughts and memories and images crashing in on you?”

  “Walking. Watching movies.”

  “Let’s take the movies. You’ve been using those as a distraction to kind of muffle the screams of your own pain. Does that ring true?”

  “Like a bell,” I said.

  “Seth’s distraction has been pornography. And once that got started, it was almost impossible for him to stop.” Ned’s gaze deepened. “He wasn’t lying to you when he said he wanted to. Deep down, he does. But some excellent studies have been done, and they’re discovering that the brain chemistry in a porn addict changes, just like it does in a drug addict or an alcoholic. But—this is the good news—the brain can be rewired.”

  “And that’s what they’re trying to do in Colorado.”

  “Right. Seth and his counselors and God.”

  I fingered the brocade and watched it blur as my eyes filmed. “He wants me to be part of that team. Why can’t I just do that?”

  “Because we’re not there yet.”

  “We?” I said.

  “I use that in a corporate sense. You, your team, whoever they are, and God.”

  I let the tears go, and I said, “Will you be on my team?”

  “I’d be honored,” he said.

  So I saw Ned Friday morning and we talked some more. I talked to my women too. I gave soup to Wendy and didn’t talk, which was probably just as well. I even talked to God, haltingly, like a person learning a new language. It was maybe helping. I wasn’t doubled over by spikes of anxiety in the core of me, so maybe.

  Still, when Lexi called late Friday to tell me she couldn’t make it for movie night—one of her siblings had an issue—I almost panicked.

  Ned seemed to think it was okay for me to distract myself sometimes, so I was plugging in The Princess Bride, which was the furthest thing from real life I could come up with, when Kellen came in. I almost dropped the DVD.

  “What are you watching?” he said. Nonchalantly. As if he hadn’t been avoiding me for however long. I could play that game.

  “Nothing yet,” I said.

  He nodded as if I’d given him a definitive answer. Then he ran his hand over his shaved head. Then he cracked his knuckles. Just as I was about to scream, “For Pete’s sake, what is it?” he said, “Were you gonna make popcorn?”

  “I can,” I said.

  “Look, Tar—I’m sorry.”

  I went still.

  “I should’ve been there for you through this whole thing and I wasn’t. I’ve been a jerk.”

  “I’ll give you that,” I said.

  “I was seeing it through the guy lens.”

  “And what did that tell you?”

  Kellen half-grinned. “You’re not going to make this easy on me, are you?”

  “Nothing about this is easy,” I said. “Brushing my teeth is hard.”

  He cracked his knuckles again, something I hadn’t seen him do since he was sixteen. “All I saw was you breaking Seth’s heart. I didn’t see what he could have done to tick you off that much, that couldn’t be worked out, until he told me he was going to rehab.”

  “Did he tell you what he was going to rehab for?”

  I immediately chewed at my lip.

  His eyes squinted. “He said he couldn’t talk about it because of his job. I assumed it was prescription drugs. I knew he took Xanax. That’s what he used to try to . . . kill himself, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll make us some popcorn—”

  Kellen grabbed my sleeve. “That’s not it, is it?”

  “I can’t say any more than he can.”

  “Is it porn?”

  I did drop the DVD then.

  Kellen swiped his hand across his shaved head.

  “I thought he quit.”

  “You knew?” I said.

  “I knew about it five years ago. He came to me, told me what was going on, wanted me to be his accountability partner.”

  “You knew?”

  “I stood there in his room while he deleted everything off his hard drives. I took the DVDs to the dump. I walked him through it for six months, and he swore to me he was clean. I wouldn’t let him start dating you until I knew he was done with it.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me?” I clutched at my hair. “You didn’t think that was something I should know?”

  “No, Tar, I didn’t.” Kellen licked his lips as if his mouth were the Sahara. “I believed him. You were happy. Why would I throw that in there when there was no reason to?”

  “Not even when I broke off the engagement? It didn’t occur to you then that that might be the reason?”

  “No. It didn’t. I asked Seth why you did it and he told me you just weren’t sure.” His blue eyes squinted. “Looking back on it now, even if I had thought of it, I would have also thought you’d say something to us—you know, your family.”

  “He asked me not to.”

  “Why did you agree to that?”

  “Because I didn’t want his whole life to be destroyed!”

  “No,” Kellen said. “Just yours.”

  I was in my big brother’s arms before I could think about resisting. I sobbed into his chest, and I could feel him weeping as well. It occurred to me that as close as we’d been, we had never cried together, not both of us at the same time.

  “This started way before you, Tar,” he said when he could speak.

  I pulled away and looked at him. “You have snot everywhere,” I said. “I’m getting you a Kleenex.”

  “Did he tell you about his cousin in Maine?”

  “Yeah. Here.” I handed him the entire box of tissues Lexi and I kept between us for tearjerkers.

  Kellen blew his nose as only a young male can do. It was like listening to the call of a bull moose. I had missed him so much.

  I picked up the wastebasket and let him drop the snot rag into it.

  “He told me about that back when I was helping him,” Kellen said. “He said it started then. The weird thing is, I was supposed to go on that trip with him and at the last minute Dad said I couldn’t. He said he had a bad feeling about Randi or Paul not being there with us. We had just about the only fight we ever had over that.” Kellen shrugged. “Anyway, Seth said, five years ago when we were working on this, that he was glad I didn’t go or I might be in the same position he was.”

  “I
don’t think so,” I said. “Even Paul says not everybody who looks at porn is an addict.”

  “Yeah, well, just for the record, I never did.”

  I pulled out another Kleenex for him.

  “So Randi and Paul obviously know about this,” he said after another moose-like blow.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “I still don’t get why you couldn’t have told us. Okay, maybe not me. I’ve been a jerk. And not Mama.” Kellen visibly shuddered. “I hope she never finds out. But Daddy—”

  “I told you. It was bad enough without everybody knowing. Like, right now, if Seth is healed, how would he come back here and face everyone if they all knew about it?”

  “Yeah, but it left you tearing yourself up.”

  “I’m getting help. From people who don’t know him. Or us.”

  Kellen pulled me against him again and let his hand go into my hair. “We’ve protected him too much, Tar,” he said. “Maybe we enabled him.”

  I pulled away. “Maybe. But there’s nothing we can do about that now. Besides, you and I can talk since you’re not acting like Heathcliff anymore—but let me tell Mama and Daddy when I feel like it’s time, okay? Please?”

  “Yeah. So are you gonna make popcorn or what?”

  “Do you have a broken arm?” I said.

  EIGHTEEN

  I was barely out of bed Saturday morning when I got a text from Randi Grissom, asking me to meet her at the Sentient Bean at ten. At least it was more like asking than usual, since there was actually a question mark at the end of it. That was the only reason I answered that I would.

  The Bean was all the way at the other end of Forsyth Park, and as I walked the pathways under a seamless January sky, I was pretty sure Randi didn’t frequent the place. It was too on-the-border with Ardsley Park, where the rich scarcely trod. My guess was she didn’t want us to run into anybody we knew, and she, too, had gotten a call from Seth, so she wanted to review my commitment not to tell anyone. I sure wasn’t going to confess that Kellen had guessed. I was pretty much over her.

  She wasn’t there yet when I arrived—probably a technique to set me off balance—so I resolved to stay calm. I sat at a table in front and listened to the conversation at the next one over.