One Last Thing Before I Go

by Jonathan Tropper

  Chuck turns to look at Silver, offering a sheepish half-smile as he clears his throat. “We were once close,” he says. “I don’t know what happened. It’s like, you moved into that building and you just disappeared. You used to come by for dinner after you got divorced. You’d just show up while we were eating and pull up a chair and talk to the kids and make them laugh. They loved having you around. Then we’d have some beers on the deck, talk about stuff. Do you even remember that?”

  Now that he says it, Silver does. But until this moment, he hadn’t thought about it in years. Is that the same as forgetting? He guesses that, for all practical purposes, it is.

  “I don’t know why you stopped coming over,” Chuck continues, gathering steam. “Why you stopped returning my calls. I don’t know if it was something I said, or did, or didn’t do, but we never should have let it drag on like this. I’ve missed having a brother. I see my own boys playing . . .” His voice cracks a little, and Ruby, shaking the baby in her arms, comes up behind him to rub his back. They form a picture like that, Chuck seated, Ruby over his left shoulder, holding their new baby, like they’re being posed for a Christmas card. And looking at them, Silver can feel a familiar, inexplicable anger rising up in him.

  “Why is Daddy crying?” Zack says.

  “He’s not crying,” Ruby says. “He’s talking.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s crying. Look.”

  “You boys go play in the basement.”

  Ruby ushers the boys out of the dining room and then comes to stand behind her husband, doing this little dance to shake her baby back to sleep. She rocks on her heels, swaying left and right, and probably has no idea that she’s doing it.

  Chuck wipes his eyes and takes a deep breath, ready to bring it home. “I don’t want you to die,” he says. “I think maybe this aorta thing is like a wake-up call for you, a way for you to come back to all of us.”

  Silver can feel the weight of all the eyes in the room, which move as one across the table to land on him. He fervently hopes he’s not about to say what he’s thinking.

  “You’re an idiot,” he says.

  Shit.

  Ruby gasps. Chuck flinches like he would when they were kids and Silver would pull back like he was going to punch him. If he didn’t flinch, Silver would hit him.

  “And we’re off,” Casey says, under her breath.

  “I’m sorry,” Silver continues. “I know you’re being sincere, but I still want to hit you until you bleed for saying it, and I’m not really sure why. I think maybe it’s because you have everything I lost, a pretty wife, kids, a home . . . And part of it is because you’re so damn smug about it. I stopped coming over because of the way you always made sure to hold Ruby’s hand while I was there, and pat her ass, or kiss her when she brought in the brownies. I mean, it was a Duncan Hines mix, for fuck’s sake. And I don’t know if you were like that because the obvious shittiness of my life made you appreciate yours more, or if it was some subconscious way of throwing it in my face because I was always so much smarter than you—you had all those tutors—”

  “I had ADHD!” Chuck says hotly.

  “The thing is,” Silver continues, “I would always imagine, whenever I left your house, that you’d be up in your bedroom, lying next to Ruby, appreciating how good you had it compared to your loser brother—like I was this cautionary tale that made your life seem better. And after a while, I just couldn’t stand that anymore.”

  “You twisted fuck. I was trying to help you.”

  “I didn’t need your help.”

  “You needed somebody’s help, and you’d already shit all over everyone else.”

  “OK, honey,” Ruby says, her hand on his shoulder. “We’re getting off message here.”

  “Fuck the message,” Chuck says, getting to his feet. “I’m sorry that you took the fact that I love my wife so personally. What an asshole I’ve been.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “No shit, it’s not my fault.” He turns to their parents. “I’m sorry, I tried. But there’s no talking to him. There never was. I mean, for God’s sake, he still thinks he is a rock star.” He looks at Silver, shaking his head. “I do feel sorry for you. I pity you. You’ve pissed away everything good in your life because once upon a time you wrote a hit song.”

  “It was a bit more complicated than that,” Silver says.

  “Not by much.”

  Silver considers it for a moment. “No, not by much,” he agrees.

  Chuck heads for the door. “I have to get out of here.”

  “Don’t go,” Elaine says. “We’re eating.” She turns to Silver. “Apologize to him!”

  “I’m sorry I upset you,” Silver says.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Chuck!” Ruby says.

  “I’m going to take a walk,” he says, heading for the door. He stops to flash Silver one last baleful look. “You’re a dick, Silver.”

  “I know,” Silver says. “Where are you going?”

  Chuck looks at him, nonplussed. “I don’t know where I’m going. Away from you.”

  Silver nods and gets up from the table, grabbing the bottle of kiddush wine. “I’ll come with.”

  * * *

  They walk a few blocks in silence, over to the pond behind the Livingston Avenue cul de sac. It’s a cool night, the smell of honeysuckle and cut grass wafting across the pond, taking Silver back in time. When they were kids, they would fish out of the pond, pulling in small bass, bream, and the occasional catfish. Silver always had to bait Chuck’s rod because Chuck couldn’t handle running his hook through live worms. They would sit up on one of the large flat boulders that ringed the pond, and they would invariably end up discussing what Silver came to think of as the three S’s: Star Wars, sports, and sex. When the pond froze over they would skate on it, and some of the older kids would play broom hockey, but after Solomon Corey fell through the ice and drowned, no one ever skated on the pond again.

  Solomon had been a year ahead of Silver in school—a tall, impossibly skinny kid who walked with the jerky stride of a marionette, and his death had weighed heavily on Silver for a while, the impossibility of someone he knew simply being gone. Silver was twelve, and death was a concept that had dwelled at the periphery of his consciousness for many years, but now it had infiltrated his world, and for a while, everything felt unreal. He would lie in bed at night and try to intuit the thoughts that must have flashed through Solomon’s head as the icy pond water filled his lungs. Did the reality of his dying occur to him? Or did he pass out figuring he’d wake up in his bed the next morning, same as always?

  “You remember Solomon Corey?” he asks Chuck.

  “Yeah,” Chuck says, tossing a pebble into the pond. They both fall silent for a moment, watching the ripples radiate outward and fade. “I used to think he was still down there. It never occurred to me that they’d have pulled him out.”

  They are sitting on one of the flat rocks, passing the kiddush wine between them. There are very few occasions where kiddush wine tastes good, but Silver is pleased to discover that this is one of them.

  “He was the first person I knew who died.”

  Chuck nods and takes a long swig of the bottle, cringing as it goes down. “Wow, that’s some bad wine.”

  “I kind of like it.”

  “So,” Chuck says. “What’s the plan here? I mean, why are you doing this?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  Chuck passes him the bottle. “I think you should try.”

  Silver takes another drink, savoring the wine, the taste of both his childhood and God. He sits back on the rock and looks up at the sky. The pond is one of the darkest spots in the neighborhood, and you can see a greater array of stars than usual.

  “They can go in and fix me,” Silver says, “
but when I wake up, I won’t be any better. For the last bunch of years, ever since Denise and I got divorced, I’ve been treating my life as this pit stop, just kind of regrouping before I move on. But it’s been seven years, and I never moved on. I haven’t done anything. I just . . . stopped. And now they want to save my life, but if it’s just to go back to the life I’ve been living, well, I’ve been there for about as long as I can stand.”

  Chuck nods sadly, absorbing it, and Silver looks away, suddenly unable to maintain eye contact with his little brother.

  “But I think that’s a good thing,” Chuck says. “You’ve taken stock. You know you need to make a change. So have the operation, and then start making changes.”

  “Don’t you think if I was able to make some changes, I would have already?”

  “Things are different now.”

  Silver shakes his head. “I’m not. I’m the same fuck-up I always was. And I honestly don’t see that changing.” He thinks about it for a moment. “When I think about having that operation, I think about waking up in a bed, with no one there waiting for me. No one to take me home.”

  “We’ll all be there.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Chuck smiles sadly. “I know. I know what you meant.”

  They sit in silence for a while, tossing pebbles into the pond, listening for the splash as the dark water swallows them. Out in the darkness, a frog’s plaintive croak reverberates over the water.

  “I could help you, you know,” Chuck says. “We could come up with a plan, set some goals; a better job, more time with Casey.”

  “You want to be my life coach?”

  “I guess I do, yeah.”

  Silver shakes his head. He is both moved and very tired. The wine has worked its way into his system, and he can feel his eyes closing. He wonders if he might die, right here, next to his brother at the pond. There’s something about that, a symmetry that makes sense. But even as he thinks it, Silver knows there’s nothing symmetrical about death. Just ask Solomon Corey.

  “Well,” Chuck says. “For what it’s worth, fuck-up or not, I still find myself wishing I could be like you.”

  “Well, like I said,” Silver says. “You were never very smart.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Later, he walks Denise home. Casey left while he was out with Chuck—she is stopping by the Lockwoods’ for a bon voyage party for Jeremy, who is heading off to his semester abroad with no idea of the mess he’s leaving behind. Silver is a bit confused about Casey’s motives for attending the party, but he has never really understood women, and now that his daughter has become one, she is every bit as much of a mystery to him as the rest of them.

  Denise and Silver walk side by side in companionable silence. She’s on his left, so he can’t actually see her—his peripheral vision is still compromised—but her arm brushing lightly against his orients him. He can remember nights like this when they were first married, walking home from his parents’ house on Friday night, anticipating the quiet warmth of their little house. He realizes that they will pass that old house on the way to her new one, and the thought fills him with a quiet dread.

  It’s a small house, a Cape Cod with a large family room off the kitchen that was added sometime in the ’70s. Once Denise and Casey had moved out, the house became Silver’s, until the bank foreclosed on it. Shortly after that, in a drunken pique, Silver had driven his car up the front lawn and through the living-room wall. The criminal charges were eventually dropped, but his car was totaled and he hasn’t owned one since.

  They reach the corner of their old block, and Denise says, “You want to walk a different way?”

  Silver looks down the block. For a while after the divorce, after he had played a gig and loaded his drums into the old station wagon he’d borrowed from his mother, he would find himself driving to the house on autopilot, only remembering as he turned the corner that he didn’t live there anymore. The life you build feels like the entire world, and when it’s suddenly gone, the world doesn’t make sense for a while. Or, in his case, ever again.

  “No,” Silver says. “It’s fine.”

  Something in him wants to walk past the house with her. He doesn’t know if that’s because it might heal something or if it’s just an extension of the masochistic streak he’s cultivated over the years, the need to punish himself for all Denise – and Casey-related matters.

  The house is the fifth one on the right. As they walk down the sidewalk, he feels the dread grow in him. He reaches over and takes her hand, feels her fingers wrap themselves around his, anchoring him to the moment. And then they are there, standing in front of the small, white house. It looks exactly the same. He thinks of all the years he walked up those three stairs and through the front door without a second thought, never imagining he’d one day be standing on the sidewalk like this with Denise, the house now nothing more than a monument to all they’ve lost. This small, dark house that once contained them, its quiet television flickering through the gossamer shades like the last faint sparks of a dying fire.

  “It was all my fault,” he says.

  “We were young.”

  “Not that young.”

  There is movement inside. A man crossing a room lit by the large flat-screen television. You catch glimpses of them now in every house you pass, large LCD screens humming away, everyone plugged into the same hypnotic glow. Maybe if they’d had one back then, he’d have been less restless. Maybe he would have succumbed.

  Denise looks at him and there’s kindness in her eyes and also something else, something familiar that sets the pace of his heart a bit faster.

  “Listen,” he says.

  Denise turns her body, so she is now standing directly in front of him, shaking her head with a sad smile as she reaches for him. He wishes like anything that they could go back to that wedding where they met, and start it all over again. He knows what to do now. He knows the stakes.

  “I wish that too,” she says, running her thumb across his jaw.

  Something is happening here.

  She steps into his embrace and kisses his face, underneath his eyes, so that when, a moment later, she kisses his lips, he can taste his tears on hers. The kiss is long and deep and he feels his chest trembling as he pulls her close. He wants to keep kissing her right here, in front of their house, until his aorta snaps and he dies in her arms.

  But the kiss ends, like everything else. And he knows that now Denise will say something, something honest and practical and beautiful and devastating, something to move them gently back into their separate orbits again. But instead he feels her lips on his again, and a small groan, almost a sigh, escaping from her as her mouth opens his.

  When this kiss ends, he no longer doubts her intentions.

  “Let’s go,” she says.

  CHAPTER 33

  By the time Casey summons up the nerve to walk over to Jeremy’s house, the party is in full swing. She cuts through the yard, past the pool, and up the Lockwoods’ sloping lawn. Jeremy has been texting her on and off for days now to come to his party, and so she has, unsure of her agenda.

  The music is pumped up loud enough that the bass and drums are escaping through the double-paned glass and floating across the yard before dissipating into the air. A handful of kids are gathered in a small clump at the far end of the pool, surreptitiously smoking a bowl. A couple lies on a single lounge chair in the missionary position, dry humping as they make out. She feels a million years away from all of this.

  A small group of adults are sitting on the deck, drinking mojitos and trying to hear themselves above the music. They are either too drunk to register the illicit activities down by the pool or else consider themselves too cool to intervene. Casey sees Rich, leaning back in his chair, nursing a beer. She waves at him, then thinks about sitting at dinner with her mother and father
, and feels guilty. She moves around the deck to give him a quick kiss.

  “How was dinner?” he asks.

  “A clusterfuck,” she says.

  “You OK?”

  “Define OK.”

  He nods and offers up a small but genuine smile. “Is your mom here yet?”

  “She’s on her way.”

  Rich nods and takes a sip of his beer. “Well, you go hang with the cool kids. I won’t cramp your style.”

  “I have no style to cramp,” she says, and heads inside.

  She comes through the back door and it’s every house-party movie you’ve ever seen: more kids than the house was built to hold, standing in every nook and cranny, drinking, yelling, dancing, making out. She sees a handful of kids from her graduating class, says hi to them, never stopping to talk. Motion is the key here. If you stop, the party will swallow you up. Someone hands her a beer and she takes a nervous sip or two before she remembers that she shouldn’t. But she holds on to it anyway, because holding it makes it a shield of some kind.

  Jeremy is leaving for Paris on Monday. He will take a few classes, sit in cafés, start wearing a scarf, experiment with facial hair, develop an affinity for an obscure local cigarette brand that he will express yearning for in the years to follow, and sleep with more than a few of the French girls in his dorm. It will be five months that will feel like a small lifetime, and he will return to the United States believing that he has changed in some fundamental way, but by the end of his junior year, he’ll be clean-shaven again and back in his Abercrombie & Fitch, and he’ll have stopped Skyping with the one or two girls to whom he had pledged eternal fealty.

  We’re all clichés, Casey thinks, all following scripts that have been written and played out long before we landed the role.

  She doesn’t know why she’s here. Or, rather, she does know, but doesn’t know if it’s a good idea or not. Her mother is certain she should have the abortion. She was too, until Silver had his stroke. Then something changed, although she’ll be damned if she can say what. It’s been strange, spending this time with her father, both gratifying and deeply frustrating. And he’s been utterly helpless in this one regard. He will not direct her, other than to say that he has her back either way. She suspects, with budding awareness, that this lack of a firm position on her pregnancy is not unique to her father, might even be a defining characteristic of his. And this realization is both edifying and immensely disappointing. She is seeing her parents not as parents, but as people, and while it has brought her closer to her father, it has also had the effect of making her pity him, which, in turn, profoundly saddens her. She cannot keep track of how she feels from minute to minute. She wonders, briefly, if it might be hormones.