This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  My body falls against hers, and when my erection, straining underwater against my soaked underpants, falls lightly against the curve of her ass, she emits a low groan.

  “Listen,” I say. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

  “Tell me tomorrow,” she says, pressing herself hard against me. “Just do that now.”

  10:25 p.m.

  PENNY LEFT A little while ago, after kissing me a few more times. Now I’m horny and throbbing and sleep is an impossibility, so, for some twisted reason, I dial Jen’s cell.

  “Hello?” Wade’s voice. I should have realized he’d be there. Wade’s not the sort of guy who would pass on the opportunity for some hotel sex. I hang up, wait a minute, and dial again. “Hello?” he says with a little more emphasis, like maybe the mystery caller hadn’t understood him the first time. It’s Jen’s cell; why the hell is he picking up? I hang up and dial again. This time his voice is thin and clipped. “Judd,” he says. I listen to his breathing for a long moment and then I hang up. On my next call, Jen picks up.

  “Hey, Jen.”

  “Judd,” she says, probably with a sardonic, knowing nod for Wade’s benefit. I picture them lying in bed, him running his thick fingers up her naked thigh to the curve of her ass as she talks to me, his other hand fondling his thick, semi-erect cock, getting it ready for her. Wade could not get enough pancreatic cancer to satisfy me.

  “So, we’re going to be parents.”

  “It’s late, Judd. Can we talk tomorrow?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Am I interrupting something, again?”

  “No. I’m just exhausted.”

  “Would you have left me?” I say, surprising both of us. “If you hadn’t gotten caught, do you think you would have left me or left him?”

  I can hear her breath catch on the phone. “I honestly don’t know,” she says.

  It is one of those questions that can’t possibly have a right answer, but hers still hurts.

  “I’m sorry I disturbed you. Go back to sleep.”

  “Can we talk tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “I hope we can.”

  “Bye.”

  I wait about three minutes and then dial Wade’s cell phone.

  “Hello?” he says.

  I hang up. It’s a small victory, but you learn to take them where you can get them.

  Never marry a beautiful woman. Worship them if you must, go to bed with them if you can—by all means, everyone should have carnal knowledge of physical perfection at least once in their life—but when it comes to marriage, it’s a losing proposition. You will never stop feeling like a gatecrasher at your own party. Instead of feeling lucky, you will spend your life on edge, waiting for the other stiletto to fall and puncture your heart like a bullet.

  11:55 p.m.

  I AM RUNNING through darkened halls. Behind me I hear the jingle of the rottweiler’s tags, the scrabble of his paws on the floor, the low gurgle of his breath as he gains on me. I am sweating and panting, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to pick up any speed. And then I round a corner and my prosthetic leg falls off, clattering woodenly to the ground. I scream as I go down, and even though the dog is not yet upon me, I lurch awake knowing he will be soon.

  Chapter 28

  Alice Taylor was standing against the wall at Jeremy Borson’s house party, sipping spiked punch from a plastic cup and smiling at something one of her friends was saying. We’d gotten friendly over the last few months; she had started touching my arms when we talked and walking closer to me in the halls, so that our hips occasionally bumped. Just a few days earlier, walking home from school, I had impulsively taken her hand when it grazed mine, and she had squeezed back and we’d stayed like that for the rest of the walk, never mentioning it. For the first time in my high school career, a girlfriend appeared to be within my reach. We’d be meeting tomorrow afternoon at the mall for burgers and a movie, and I fully intended to hold her hand again, maybe even try to kiss her during the movie.

  And there she was, at Jeremy Borson’s party, in cutoffs that showed off her smooth, tanned legs and a white V-neck sweater, her wavy brown hair pulled up off her forehead with a headband. Even as she laughed with her friends, I saw her eyes wandering over the rim of her cup to find mine, saw the little surreptitious smiles being aimed at me, the light dancing across the surface of her lip gloss. There was something new in those smiles, something bold and promising, and I began to make my way through the crowd, marshalling my resources and chugging down my spiked punch for courage. Maybe we’d go outside for a little while and I’d kiss her tonight. I was pretty sure she wanted me to.

  The room was hot and throbbing; Tears for Fears blasting on the stereo system, girls dancing awkwardly in the square left by the prudent removal of a coffee table, kids pressed up against each other in the crowded living room, drinks held aloft at high angles to avoid spilling. Here and there couples made out against the walls, although the ones with any class went out to the yard to grope and suck in private. There were viral whispers of vomit in the powder room, of porno in the basement, of controlled substances in the garage.

  I don’t know exactly what happened. Someone bumped into someone across the room, maybe clowning around, maybe completely by accident, but we were a roomful of sweating dominoes, knocking one into another, until I was thrown forward into Tony Rusco, who had a beer bottle in his mouth right at that moment. The bottle banged audibly against his teeth, and he spewed his beer all over his shirt. He turned around, wiping his face on his arm, and, with no preamble, kicked me in the balls.

  If you have no balls, or have some but have somehow made it through life thus far without ever having injured them, then you’ve missed out on one of the most exquisitely nuanced variations of agony known to man. It is the piano of pain, melody, harmony, bass, and percussion all in the same instrument.

  First there’s nothing. A surprising amount of nothing actually. No pain at all, just white noise and the shock of having been hit there, in your softest of places. And because the pain has yet to arrive, you dare to hope that it won’t come at all, that the impact was less direct than you first thought. And then it comes, like thunder on the heels of lightning, at first just a faint rumble, a low, steady hum of discomfort. If it were a musical note, it would be one of those bottom bass notes they use in horror films to create an ominous sense of dread, of dark, fanged things hiding, poised to spring. It’s a loaded hum, because you know a note that low only has one direction to go. And as you feel the dull, pulsating pain emanating from the center of your being, from your core, you think to yourself, I can handle this, this is nothing, I can kick this pain’s ass, and that’s the exact instant that you find yourself suddenly on your knees, doubled over and gasping, with no memory at all of how you got there. And now the pain is everywhere—in your groin, your gut, your kidneys, the tightly flexed muscles of your lower back where you didn’t even think you had muscles. Your body is tensed too hard to breathe right so your lungs are constricted, and you’re drooling because your head is hanging, and your heart can’t pump your rushing blood fast enough, and you can feel yourself teetering, but you have no muscles left to correct with, so you end up collapsing onto your side, your nerves fusing together into knotted coils of anguish, your eyeballs turned up into your skull like you’ve grabbed hold of a live wire in the rain.

  There’s really nothing else like it.

  Rusco didn’t belong at this party. He had graduated two years ago, a small miracle considering the record of suspensions he’d racked up for fighting, drugs, and vandalism. Now he operated a forklift in the warehouse at one of the furniture outlets gathered in a cluster at the top of Route 9 and lifted free weights with his buddies in his front yard. He was rumored to have pulled a switchblade on Mr. Portis, our aging phys ed teacher, who had subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown; to have punched out the bouncer at the Dark Horse when they wouldn’t serve him a beer; to have beat the shit ou
t of his own father in the eighth grade.

  So even if I could have gotten to my feet at that point to fight him, he’d have only knocked me down again, so I just curled up into the fetal position while the room spun around me and psychedelic colors swam across the insides of my eyelids, and Rusco put his boot on my head and said, “You want to watch where you’re going, shithead.”

  And then he was gone, and Alice was hovering over me, helping me up, she and Jeremy taking me upstairs to Jeremy’s parents’ bedroom, where they lay me down on a paisley bedspread. “Are you okay?” she kept saying, while I tried my best not to cry. I was enjoying her concern and her proximity, her hair intimately brushing my face as she leaned over me, but I hadn’t exactly kicked ass out there, and I would be damned if I was going to compound that by crying in front of her.

  “He’s such an asshole,” Alice said.

  I rolled away from her and closed my eyes. I think I might have dozed off because when I woke up she was gone, and a couple of seniors were making out in Jeremy’s parents’ bathroom, their quiet moans reverberating off the tiles.

  I was limping home when Paul pulled up beside me in Dad’s Cadillac. He’d been granted unlimited use of the car from the moment he was awarded his baseball scholarship, which was why, instead of being at the party, he’d been off somewhere getting laid in the backseat. “Hey!” he said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I heard you got your ass kicked.”

  “It wasn’t my ass.”

  I looked over at Paul and, to my surprise, saw that he was simmering with rage. “Get in,” he said.

  “It’s past my curfew.”

  “Fuck curfew. Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  Paul hit the wheel and looked straight ahead. “Just get in the car, will you?”

  The Cadillac smelled of perfume and sex, and my balls throbbed with every bump and curve. “Fucking asshole,” Paul muttered as he steered across Centre Street. “Let’s see how he likes it when I stand on his head.”

  I was scared and still in considerable pain, but I felt safe next to Paul and touched that he was so angry that someone had hurt me. We had drifted apart in high school, but we were still brothers, and here he was, interrupting his own evening, which surely had involved some degree of female nudity, to stand up for his little brother.

  “Quit crying,” he said softly. “You can’t let him see you like that.”

  It was a cloudless night and the neighborhood was bathed in the blue light of a low moon. Paul sped through the empty streets, and I fantasized that we were headed to the diner by the interstate, two brothers out for a late dinner to tell each other about their respective nights. We weren’t those kinds of brothers anymore, but I often wished we were. A few minutes later, we pulled up in front of a dilapidated Victorian with a sagging porch. Rusco was out on the front lawn, perched on his weight bench, drinking a beer. The two guys he’d been with at the party were sitting on his front steps, each with a beer in hand. I watched as Rusco registered my presence in the passenger seat, watched him take in Paul’s tall athletic frame as he strode angrily through the glow of the Cadillac’s headlights and up the driveway, and, for one delicious moment, saw the fear that spread across his face as he realized what was happening.

  “Hey, man,” he said, getting to his feet. “You’re on private property. Get the fuck off—”

  Paul’s fist hit his open mouth with a loud crack, and whatever euphoria I’d been feeling disappeared in an instant. Rusco went down hard as his two friends jumped up off the stairs, not sure what to make of Paul, who was now standing over Rusco and shouting, “Get up and fight, you little pussy!”

  I jumped out of the car and ran up the sidewalk to where Rusco lay on his back, dazed. Blood spilled from his mouth, and my stomach turned when I saw that his two front teeth were gone. “Forget it, Paul,” I pleaded, suddenly terrified. “Let’s just go.”

  “Come here, Judd,” he called to me. I came up and stood beside him as Rusco rolled over and tried to sit up. His chin looked like it had been dipped in red paint, and his eyes were rolling unfocused in their sockets. When he got to his knees, Paul kicked him in the stomach and he went down again. A light went on in an upstairs bedroom, and from in the house, I heard the sounds of barking.

  “We have to get out of here, Paul.”

  “Kick him in the balls,” Paul ordered me. His eyes were blazing, the cords on his neck standing out angrily against his skin.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We have to go.”

  The front porch light came on. I grabbed Paul’s arm and started pulling him toward the car. “Come on!” I pleaded.

  From the ground, Rusco lashed out with his leg, ineffectively hitting Paul’s ankle. Paul grabbed the leg and lifted it, spreading Rusco’s thighs. “Kick him in the nuts and then we’ll go,” he said.

  The blood gathering on Rusco’s chin started to run up his cheeks as Paul lifted his leg higher. When he opened his mouth to spit out some more blood, it looked like the very tip of his tongue was missing too. “I don’t want to!” I shouted.

  And then, behind us, the front door opened and a fat woman in green sweatpants and a large bra appeared, clutching the collar of an enraged rottweiler, who strained ferociously against her grip. She had the same jutting forehead as her son, the same small, humorless eyes. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “We’re leaving,” I said, my voice cracking as Paul and I backed away.

  “Tony, what happened? Oh my God! Is he okay?”

  The rottweiler snarled and barked at us and I could see his spit flying in the yellow light of the porch as he fought to escape Mrs. Rusco’s grip. We were almost at the curb when she said, “Get ’em, Max,” and let go of the collar. The rottweiler flew off the stairs, and we turned and ran as fast as we could. I could hear his claws tearing at the concrete walk, his low growl vibrating deep within my bowels. Paul overtook me on the sidewalk and jumped through the open window into the passenger seat. I jumped onto the hood and then up onto the roof, feeling the aluminum bend under my weight. I turned just in time to see the dog leap through the window after Paul. The car shook under me as the dog snarled and growled, and Paul’s screams changed from terror to agony. I screamed for help at the top of my lungs, screamed until my voice cracked and then refused to come. It would take three days before it returned, three days spent sitting in the hospital while they operated on Paul’s shoulder and performed skin grafts onto his ruined arm. I screamed and cried and pissed my pants, helplessly stomping on the roof as Paul screamed and wept.

  It was Rusco who ultimately got the dog out of the car. He came staggering down the walk, his chin and mouth caked with blood, and yanked open the door, yelling, “Down, Max!” as he went. By now the dog was in too much of a frenzy to heed his master, so Rusco pulled him out by his hind legs and tried to hold him back. The dog lurched out of his grip and tried to run back at the car, barking furiously, but Rusco stood in his way and yelled at him. The rottweiler danced around him, barking and snarling, and at first I thought it was blood dangling from its mouth, but then I realized it was a wet strip of Paul’s red T-shirt. “Get out of here!” Rusco shouted. “He’s going to get past me!”

  “Hold him!” I yelled hysterically from the roof. Beneath me, the car was distressingly still.

  “Just get in on the other side!”

  I don’t remember coming down off the car or opening the door. I remember Paul’s head jammed under the steering wheel, his body spread across the bench at odd angles, the blood pooling up in the cracks between the vinyl seat cushions, the suffocating stench of blood and shit. He didn’t make a sound when I moved his head out from under the wheel so that I could sit down, but he groaned when I slammed the door, so I knew he was alive. So eager had Paul been to beat the shit out of Rusco, he hadn’t even bothered to turn off the engine, so I was able to raise both windows immediately. A few seconds later, the rottweiler hit the side of the ca
r with a thump, his teeth gnashing against the glass. I stared numbly past him at Rusco, who looked back at me expressionless, his face painted with blood like a savage, while the dog howled and threw himself repeatedly against the car. At some point I threw the car in gear and drove slowly away, not wanting to shake Paul. Through the rearview mirror, I watched the rottweiler chase us for a little bit, then stop in the middle of the street to bark furiously at us. I should have thrown the car into reverse and run him over, but I didn’t, I just kept driving, and the ignored impulse became one more thing that would haunt me in the days and years to follow. If only I had backed over the dog. If only I had jumped off the roof of the car to help Paul. If only I had refused to get in the car with Paul to begin with.

  At some point I managed to get my bearings and drive us to the emergency room, but I have no recollection of that. I vaguely recall a nurse sticking a needle in me because Paul had lost a lot of blood, and then my parents showed up and they stuck needles in them too. The police briefly impounded the Cadillac for evidence, which is why at some point I woke up in a panic in the back of the police car that was taking me home. My parents would be spending the night in the hospital. The cop driving me was an old guy whose face I couldn’t quite make out from the backseat. He told me I’d saved my brother’s life. It would soon become clear that Paul didn’t see it that way. The silent consensus, evident in Paul’s glare, my father’s pained expression, and my mother’s lack of intervention, was that the wrong brother had been mauled. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the night we broke, and in the years to follow, the jagged pieces of us would continue to drift further and further apart, small vital bits getting lost here and there, until there was no hope of ever putting us back together.