One Last Thing Before I Go

by Jonathan Tropper

  “Why are you angry?”

  “I’m not angry. I’m upset. My daughter is pregnant.”

  “She was pregnant before you knew about Jeremy.”

  “That little shit.”

  She pulls her bra on and fumbles for the clasps. Silver is sorry to see her breasts disappear.

  “I think you should calm down. Come back to bed.”

  “Sure. Let’s fuck again. That will fix everything.”

  “You need to relax, Denise.”

  “And you need to get dressed.”

  “What for?” he says. But, of course, he already knows.

  CHAPTER 36

  They intersect in the front hallway, Silver and Denise coming through the front door just as Casey and Jeremy are coming downstairs from his bedroom. They stop to consider each other with wary surprise, the air between them charged with panicked thoughts and a complex knot of postcoital guilt.

  Seeing her parents together, Casey recalls the years of dreaming that her parents would remarry. She would lie in her bed and dream up elaborately dire scenarios that would bring her parents back together. These scenarios usually involved something bad happening to her: cancer, a car crash, amnesia. She once went so far as to plan her own fake kidnapping, complete with a letter cobbled together from newspaper type. And maybe it’s because of that, that seeing them here now fills her with a sense of impending dread.

  “What are you doing here, Dad?” she says, trying for all the world to sound like someone who wasn’t having sex with the boy next to her ten minutes ago.

  “Your mother wanted me to come.”

  “Hey, Mr. Silver,” Jeremy says. “Hi, Denise.”

  Casey sees Denise look up at Jeremy, and in that moment, she understands what has happened. Whatever it is her mother is about to say, she knows that it will change everything, and while there’s a part of her that wants that, she doesn’t want it to happen like this.

  “Mom,” she says.

  But before anything else can happen, Valerie Lockwood comes in from the back, followed by Rich.

  “Denise!” Valerie calls out, shouting to be heard above the Radiohead that seems to be coming from everywhere at once. “You made it.” Valerie, who has always had a tendency to dress too young, is wearing leggings and a sleeveless blouse and waving her half-drained vodka tonic around with a careless abandon that indicates it’s been refilled more than a few times. She kisses Denise’s cheek, oblivious to the grave, simmering look on her friend’s face. Rich steps past them, sizing up Silver. “Hey, Silver,” he says. “This is a surprise.”

  “This is nothing,” Silver says.

  * * *

  Casey stares at Silver, her eyes beseeching him to do something. But doing something has never been his thing.

  “Is something wrong?” Jeremy says, picking up on the vibe.

  “Is something wrong?” Denise snaps at him. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Denise!” Valerie interjects, stepping instinctively in front of her son. “What the hell is wrong with you? What happened?”

  “Mom!” Casey shouts. “Just stop it!”

  “No!” Denise shouts back at her. “I’m not going to stop it.”

  “They don’t know!”

  That throws Denise, shuts her up for a moment. A small crowd is gathering in the hall, sensing some drama in the offing.

  “We don’t know what?” Jeremy says.

  Rich leans in to Denise. “What’s going on, honey?”

  “Yeah,” Valerie says, looking pissed. “What the hell is going on?”

  And then, to Casey’s abject horror, her mother starts to cry, right there in the Lockwoods’ front hall, and any lingering hopes of her making a clean escape are dashed. She looks over at Jeremy, standing pale-faced and confused beside her, and feels a surge of pity for him, in these last moments before everything changes.

  * * *

  Denise is suddenly dizzy. She can still taste Silver on her tongue, can still smell the sad, vaguely musty odor of his bedroom—God knows when he last changed those sheets, or what kind of ecosystem has evolved in those filthy brown carpets. The whole episode seems insane to her now, unreal. Did they really just do that? The music washes over her, confusing her as kids slide past her, in and out of the Lockwoods’ front door. She looks over at Rich standing beside Silver. For one crazy moment, she imagines that he is sniffing at Silver, that he can smell her on him. The room starts to spin, and somewhere in a room off the hall there’s a strobe light flashing in time to the music, and Denise realizes it was a mistake to come here. She wants it to be morning, wants to be lying alone in her bed, watching the shadows slowly retreat as the sun creeps across her duvet. If she can just make it to morning, she’ll be able to make sense of all this, get everything back on track. But right now? Now all she wants to do is find a way to gracefully extricate herself from this situation, from this house, without collapsing, or vomiting, or having to make eye contact with Rich or Silver, or Jeremy Lockwood, for that matter.

  “I’m sorry,” she says through her tears, she’s not sure to whom. She is aware of everyone around her looking at her, and she feels exposed and scared. She needs someone to lead her out of here; she doesn’t care if it’s Rich or Silver. But no one does, and what’s the point of having two men in your life when neither is going to whisk you away in moments like these?

  “Denise!” It’s Valerie, leaning into her. “Are you OK?”

  Denise shakes her head, unable to speak. Rich steps forward and reaches for her elbow, to steady her. “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “Please take her out of here,” Casey says, mortified.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Rich says, sounding lost and, Denise thinks, maybe a little scared. She feels a stab of intense guilt that threatens to double her over. He has been nothing but good to her, he has been loyal, gentle, and unwavering in his love for her, and all she has done lately is put him through the wringer. She pulls him into her and leans against him.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “For all of it.”

  He gives her a long look, like he’s trying to see through her. She looks up at him and wonders what he thinks, what he knows, and what he’ll be willing to forgive.

  “Take me home?” she says.

  But that’s not what happens.

  * * *

  Silver looks at Casey and Jeremy standing on the stairs and he can tell, from Casey’s posture, from Jeremy’s flitting eyes, that they’ve just had sex. He couldn’t say why, but he just knows. He wonders if they can tell the same about him and Denise. He is still reliving the last hour in his mind, the way they came together with no discussion, the way all of the walls between them had somehow fallen away in an instant, as if they’d never been there. There’s a part of him that knows he shouldn’t make anything more of it than it most likely was—a last communion before the world shifts again. But there’s something in him that dares to hope it might have meant something more. He has always had a dangerous tendency to embrace blind optimism in the face of hard facts. He knows this, knows it is largely responsible for the mess of his life these last ten years or so, but even knowing it, he can’t seem to shut down the voice in him telling him that everything happens for a reason, that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, that Casey’s improbable pregnancy bringing him back into Denise’s life just as she planned to marry Rich has a certain karmic potency that seems to have rendered the laws of love and probability up for grabs.

  He can’t help himself. When he looks at Denise, even now as she sniffles wetly onto Rich’s shoulder, he knows that he loves her as much as anyone can love anyone. But she is not anyone, she is the mother of his daughter, and maybe he and Denise walking past their old house, then going home and having sex in his bed, as if that was
where they belonged . . . maybe that was all fate, or Providence, or the God of his sand-swirled ceiling righting the old wrongs and setting them all on a new course together. In its own way, sleeping with Denise tonight then coming here with her to collect Casey feels right and portentous, like the start of their family all over again. He looks at Denise and he knows that this is what he had meant to tell her earlier; that lying naked with her, hip to hip, feeling himself inside of her, had felt like coming home after being lost at sea for years. He looks at her and he wants to tell her that, to tell her that kissing her and touching her and fucking her again has woken up something inside of him, the thing he lacked all those years ago when he let her and Casey slip away, and that if she gave him another chance, please, now that he has seen the stakes, now that he’s seen all the damage and the pain, all the lost and desolate years, he knows that this time he’d grab hold of them both and never let them go.

  He looks at her, wanting to tell her all of this, but then he sees her expression, and the expressions on Rich’s face, and on Casey’s face, and on every other face staring at him, and he realizes, too late, that he already has.

  * * *

  Denise looks at Silver in horror, then at Rich, who is backing away from her like she’s just grown a pair of fangs. A cold sweat breaks out on her back, her stomach churns, and she feels the ground falling away from her, isolating her. She’s alone in this, like she was when Silver first left, and what the fuck was she thinking, going to bed with him like that? Pity? Closure? Both are an exercise in futility where Silver is concerned.

  “Rich,” she says, but she has nothing to say beyond that. Just his name, which rolls off her tongue like a confession. Rich looks at her, his eyes filled with a hurt she’s never seen, and she is floating out of her body, observing the whole circus her life has just become from a perch somewhere over her own shoulder. Just as he reaches the front door, he offers her a small, barely perceptible nod, acknowledging all the pain to come, all the things he knows she will tell him after the fact, somehow validating her even as he flees. And beneath the chaos of the moment, Denise becomes aware of a painful truth about herself: she is never as deeply in love with a man as she is in the moment he leaves her. It was true of Silver, and it’s true right now. It’s the kind of epiphany she’ll forget by morning, but right now, with a piercing clarity, she understands this flaw in herself, sees how she will always be doomed by it to some extent.

  She should go after him. She knows that. She is supposed to chase him, crying and begging, so that he can yell at her and say things that will cut her and scar her and leave her wailing on her knees while she watches his car speed off down the darkened street. She knows, without ever having been here before, that that’s how this is supposed to play out. But right now it’s taking every last bit of strength she has to simply exist. Any further exertion on her part, even as little as a sharp breath, and she’ll disintegrate like a thousand-year-old fossil.

  And then Valerie is standing beside her, holding her up. She must have started to collapse, although she didn’t notice.

  “Denise,” Valerie says.

  “I’m sorry,” Denise says.

  “Just tell me, what does this have to do with Jeremy?”

  Denise looks at her friend, at the faint lines starting to break through the Botox barrier of her forehead, at the overdone eyeliner and the makeup flaking out of her crows feet, and feels a wave of tenderness for her. We’re all doomed, she thinks. Eventually.

  And so she tells her.

  * * *

  This evening began with so much promise, Silver thinks. It was just two hours ago that he was sitting between Casey and Denise in the warm glow of his parents’ dining room, enveloped in the aromas of his childhood, feeling safe and loved and hopeful. And then, impossibly, he was making love to Denise, feeling her fingers slide down his spine the way they used to all those years ago, feeling her lips and legs opening for him, taking him back. And now, like he did all those years ago, Silver watches it all come undone. He watches Rich storm out, watches Casey’s expression fall, and then fall some more, watches Denise grow pale and collapse a little into Valerie. Valerie, for her part, looks like she desperately needs to sink her long painted nails into someone’s flesh, if she could only figure out what’s happening here and, more important, who to blame. Silver would like to get out of Dodge long before that happens. He would like to leave the country before he has to look at the next expression on Casey’s face, or see the recrimination and regret in Denise’s eyes. Everything I touch turns to shit, he thinks, not with self-pity, but with an almost scientific fascination at the truth of it.

  He looks up at Casey, who lets go of Jeremy’s hand and comes down the last two stairs to stand in front of him. He now sees the tears he couldn’t see when she was up on the landing, with Jeremy’s shadow falling over her.

  “What the fuck, Dad?” she whispers in a voice so low that only he can hear. There’s no anger in it, just a pained bewilderment that makes her seem like a little girl.

  “It’s going to be OK,” he tells her.

  She shakes her head and smiles bitterly, and now she doesn’t look like a little girl anymore, now she looks like every woman he’s ever known, shaking their heads in disbelief at what a fucking idiot he is, and at the fact that they ever might have thought otherwise. “Casey.”

  She shakes her head again, and shreds him with a baleful stare. “I didn’t think my life could be any more fucked up than it was,” she says. “And then I let you back into it.”

  He can’t look at her, can’t bear to see the hate that makes her older and uglier etched into her face, to know that he caused it. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  Casey couldn’t give a shit. She turns and heads for the door. Just before she steps outside, she turns back to him. “If you’re going to die,” she says, fighting back tears, “I wish you’d just get on with it already.” And then she walks out, leaving him hotly eviscerated and vaguely suicidal.

  CHAPTER 37

  “Hey, Silver? What the fuck?”

  Even before he opens his eyes, he wonders at how often people seem to say that to him. What the fuck? It feels like those three words have followed him throughout his adult life. They ought to be carved onto his tombstone, he thinks, a fitting epitaph for the encapsulation of a life that has, from most standpoints, made no sense at all.

  DREW SILVER

  1969–2014

  WHAT THE FUCK ?

  Yeah. That would pretty much sum it up.

  * * *

  “That would pretty much sum what up? What the hell are you babbling about?”

  He opens his eyes to find Jack and Oliver standing in front of him in their bathing suits, blocking out the sun. “Nothing,” he says.

  “You’re soaked,” Oliver tells him. “Did you sleep out here like that?”

  He feels the wetness of his clothes plastered against his skin, and he shivers. He vaguely remembers standing at the head of the pool late last night, thinking dark, lonely thoughts, but he has no recollection of jumping in, or climbing out afterward. Clearly, he did both.

  He shivers in his chair. Now that he’s awake, he’s freezing.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Jack says. He looks worried.

  “Rough night,” he says. He can feel his jaw trembling as his teeth chatter.

  “We have to get him out of those clothes,” Oliver says. He leans forward and begins unbuttoning Silver’s shirt.

  “What, right here?” Jack says.

  “Get his belt,” Oliver says.

  Silver looks down as the two men undress him. He is wearing the same dark pants and shirt that he put on to go to dinner at his parents’ house last night. He is wearing one loafer. He remembers buttoning the shirt Oliver is now pulling off of him, checking himself in the mirror. It was less than twelve hours ago. Feels like years. A l
ot can go wrong in twelve hours.

  “Get him in the hot tub,” Oliver says.

  Jack and Oliver help him up off the chair and walk him over to the hot tub in his underpants. He is shivering uncontrollably now, barely able to stand on his own. The water is so hot that for a moment it burns him, but as he settles into it, he can feel the heat entering his muscles and then his bones, can feel his body relaxing into it. Jack and Oliver take off their shirts and sit down in the hot tub on either side of him.

  “Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub,” Jack says.

  Silver smiles wanly.

  “You feeling any better?” Oliver says.

  “Getting there.”

  “There’s something in here!” Jack says, alarmed. He reaches down into the frothing bubbles and comes up with Silver’s loafer. “Yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jack tosses it onto the pool deck behind him. “So, what the hell happened to you?”

  Silver shakes his head. Even the idea of recounting last night is exhausting to him. He just wants to sit here and dissolve into the hot water until there’s nothing left of him. He closes his eyes and sees Denise, naked, looking up at him with desire. How does something like that happen and disappear so damn quickly? And why can’t the bad shit disappear just as fast? What . . . The . . . Fuck?

  “Shit,” Jack says.

  “What?”

  He points. “It’s the Fucking Coopers.”

  The Fucking Coopers: Courtney and Shaun Cooper and their fucking kid, Tyler. Through a series of events and misunderstandings that have never been fully explained, the Fucking Coopers thought the Versailles would be a fantastic place to start their young family. Courtney is beautiful in that way Midwesterners are, blond and cheerful, her face always lit up with a relaxed smile. Shaun has a full head of hair and an athlete’s physique. And Tyler, well, he looks like a Tyler. Courtney and Shaun look at each other when they talk, and when they lie on their lounge chairs watching Tyler play, she will often have her hand resting on his arm, and they are an oddity here, a freak show, and so effortlessly, casually in love that it’s borderline offensive. The Fucking Coopers.