One Last Thing Before I Go

by Jonathan Tropper

  Silver thinks he wouldn’t mind hearing that explanation himself.

  “Come on,” he calls up to Casey. “Let’s give Rich and your mom some privacy.”

  “Says the man who fucked up their relationship.” Casey boosts herself up onto the railing and swings her legs over.

  “What are you doing?” Silver says, alarmed.

  “Rich!” Denise shouts, pounding on the door.

  “He’s not going to open it,” Casey says.

  “I’m not leaving until he does.” She bangs on the door some more.

  “Why are you so angry?” Silver says.

  “Are you seriously asking me that?”

  “I am.”

  Denise stops hitting the door and looks over at Silver, then up to Casey, who slides her legs down until her heels find purchase on the thin ledge between the rail spindles. Then she leans forward into the air, holding on with one hand to the railing behind her.

  “What are you doing?!” Denise cries out, alarmed. “Stop it!”

  “Casey! Get back behind the railing!” Silver shouts up to her.

  “Please honey! Stop this!”

  “I AM PREGNANT!” Casey shouts at them, her voice cracking. “I am scared and lost and fucked, and you’re both too busy fucking up your own lives to give a shit! I need my parents! Real parents! Not this goddamn freak show!”

  She’s crying now, hanging off the railing at an angle that scares the shit out of Silver.

  “You’re right, honey,” Denise says, crying too. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Get off there!” Silver shouts up at her. He can already see her falling, can hear the sickening sound she’ll make when she lands.

  “Why should I?”

  “Please!”

  “You think you’re the only one who’s allowed to play suicide games?”

  Silver turns and runs full-speed at the front door, lowering his shoulder as he hits it. The door, though, is not screwing around, and he bounces off of it and lands on his back with the breath knocked out of him.

  “Silver! What the fuck?”

  Then the door flies open, and Rich is standing there.

  “Rich,” Denise says.

  “Rich,” Silver says, getting gingerly to his feet.

  “Is everyone done saying my name?” Rich says.

  “Sorry about the door,” Silver says.

  Rich looks at the utterly undamaged door, then at Silver, as if to say, You’re kidding, right? Then he nods, and then he charges.

  * * *

  What happens next isn’t very pretty: two inexperienced, middle-aged combatants, both of whom rely on their hands to make a living and so are unwilling to throw closed-fist punches. Instead, they circle each other, slapping, shoving, and briefly grappling. Rich takes a running start and kicks at Silver’s legs. Silver raises his front leg defensively, so Rich ends up kicking Silver’s foot. Silver swings at Rich’s face, but Rich is too tall and too far away and so he misses, his momentum spinning him around so his back is to Rich, who gets in a kick to Silver’s ass. Silver manages to grab his foot on the way back, and the two of them spin around, Rich hopping as Silver clutches his other foot to his chest. They make their way across the driveway like that, and then onto the dirt in front of the lake, until Silver loses his footing and they both go down in a tangle of flailing arms and legs.

  They roll down the small knoll and into the edge of the lake, kicking up water and dark scum as they wrestle. Finally, Silver manages to slip out of Rich’s grip and get to his feet, ankle-deep in the frigid lake water. Rich gets up a moment later and they square off, winded and panting heavily. Silver is vaguely aware of Denise and Casey standing together at the top of the knoll, screaming at them, and is relieved that Casey came down off the porch deck.

  “Can we just call it a draw?” Silver says.

  “You fucked my wife,” Rich snarls at him. He tries to kick at Silver again, but the earth beneath the lake is slick and soft, and both feet fly out from under him. He lands on his back with a splash. Silver steps over to him, and offers him a hand.

  “Come on,” he says. “I’m not the one you’re really angry at.”

  Rich takes his hand and pulls himself to his feet. “No, you actually are the one I’m angry at,” Rich says. Then he turns around and throws a punch straight into the center of Silver’s face. Silver goes down hard, stunned and tasting blood. Rich stands over him, grimacing as he shakes off his hand.

  “Rich!” Denise shouts at him.

  “I’ll be right there,” he says, all traces of his rage gone.

  Silver lies back in the water, resting on his elbows. The world has taken on an otherworldly orange glow, and a chilling breeze blows over him. This is death, he thinks. It actually seems perfectly manageable to him. But then he realizes, with something akin to disappointment, that the orange glow isn’t death but only the sunset. It would have been a strategically good place to die. He’d been thinking that every time Denise and Casey came up here with Rich, they would look out at the lake and feel him close by, maybe tell each other funny stories about him. He rinses the blood oozing from his nose with some lake water and then gets to his feet next to Rich, who is flexing the fingers of his right hand one by one, studying them.

  “How’s the hand?” Silver says.

  “Looks all right.”

  “You want to do it again?”

  “No. I’m good.”

  “OK then,” Silver says, turning back toward the house. “I’m glad we had this talk.”

  He steps out of the water and trudges up the knoll, his feet sloshing in his sneakers, to where Denise and Casey are standing, looking on in horror. Denise runs past him and down into the water to where Rich is standing. Silver stands beside Casey and they watch from a distance as Denise talks to him.

  “Your nose is bleeding,” Casey says to him without a trace of sympathy.

  “That’s OK.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not yet. But it will.”

  Denise is crying now, wringing her hands as she pleads her case to Rich. Watching them, Silver understands that they will not come apart over this, and he is both glad and, on some level, moderately insulted.

  “We should probably leave them alone,” Silver says.

  “Yeah,” Casey says. “You should probably leave us all alone.”

  “You’re still mad at me.”

  “What gave it away?”

  She won’t look at him, and that hurts. Her tone hurts. His bleeding nose hurts. He searches his fuzzy mind for a route to navigate through her anger, but he comes up empty. Lately he has no problem saying all the things he should keep to himself, but when it comes to saying the things that matter, he falls infuriatingly silent.

  “Thing is,” he says, indicating Denise, “she was my ride. You think Rich will lend me his car?”

  She shakes her head. “Jesus, Silver. I can’t believe what a douche you can be sometimes.”

  “I’d think you would be used to it by now.”

  She looks down at the lake, then back at him, and sighs wearily. “I’ll get my keys.”

  He follows behind her as she heads up the knoll, stopping to pull off his drenched sneakers. He turns to look back at Denise and Rich, still standing knee-deep in the lake, and forces himself to say a mental good-bye to Denise. Whatever happens from here on out, he knows that he can no longer think of her as his anymore. Which you would think should have been obvious all along, but Silver has a long and storied history, has in fact made something of a religion out of ignoring the obvious until it’s far too late.

  CHAPTER 41

  Denise sits on the porch deck slapping at mosquitoes on her arms and neck as she watches Rich fish from his boat. He has been out there all evening, and seems in no rush to co
me back in. She can’t actually see him anymore; the sun has long since disappeared and a thick curtain of darkness hangs over the lake. What she’s watching is the small red fishing light of his boat bobbing up and down a hundred yards out in the black nothingness of the lake. The neon bulbs of fireflies periodically ignite, tracing quick, psychotic flight paths that you’d have to be an insect to understand. Lightning bugs. Rich calls them lightning bugs, not fireflies. Rich, who built the dock below by himself, who takes pleasure in catching, filleting, and cooking his own dinner, and who is a man in almost all of the ways Silver isn’t, calls them lightning bugs. And sitting there in the darkness, Denise promises herself that from now on she will call them that too. Lightning bugs. It’s the least she can do.

  She slaps at another mosquito, even though she knows it’s pointless. They have the darkness and numbers on their side, and they will have their blood. She should go inside; she knows that, too, but doesn’t feel entitled to sit in the warm lights of his home without his blessing. So she sits on the porch deck, drowning the sting of the mosquito bites with the sting of her own slaps, self-flagellating as she berates herself mercilessly for sleeping with Silver. Admittedly, she had drunk a lot of Ruben’s kiddush wine, and as the night wore on, Silver had seemed younger to her, more like the man she had lost all those years ago, and the tragic notion that he couldn’t land on a single reason to save his own life suddenly seemed unbearably tragic to her. Had she been trying to save him? To trick him into thinking there was hope? Or maybe she was just saying good-bye? She keeps going back to the moment of that first kiss, trying to isolate what it was that had been in her head, but whatever she was thinking then, she can’t access it now. Which will make it pretty hard to explain things to Rich when he finally brings the boat in.

  When she got back up from the lake earlier, her feet soaked and frigid, her shoes ruined, she was relieved to see that Silver and Casey were gone. Let him sort things out with her. It won’t be easy; she knows that from years of doing battle with Casey, who isn’t above fighting dirty when she’s pissed. But more often than not, Silver seems to get a pass just for being Silver. She chafes at the injustice of his having acquired favored-nation status simply by being an irresponsible asshole of a father, but if she can sail through this one on his coattails, she’ll put that in the “wins” column and move forward. More than anything, what she needs now is to right her own ship, to save herself from this terrible mistake.

  She becomes aware of the crickets, their low, hypnotic chirping, and wonders idly, as she has before, if what she hears is ten crickets or a thousand. It’s one of those mysteries she has never bothered solving. Rich would know. She makes a mental note to ask him the next time they’re up here, as if having an agenda might ensure that there is a next time.

  She hears the scrape of metal on wood and realizes that Rich is docking the boat. Her perspective was skewed by the darkness and she couldn’t tell that the red light had been getting increasingly closer. She heads down the wooden staircase with the cold chill of fear in her belly, and then walks gingerly across the sandy knoll to the edge of the dock. Rich emerges from the darkness, walking down the dock, carrying a string of five or six healthy-sized trout. He sees her waiting for him and pauses for a second, then comes forward to face her. She can feel the dock beneath her shifting with each step he takes. They look at each other for a long moment. The leaves whisper as a mild wind blows through them, and the calls of nocturnal birds haunt the woods around them. She looks out at the dark canopy of trees surrounding the lake, senses the vast array of unknowable creatures living out their lives beneath them. We could live here, Denise thinks. We could make this our home.

  “I forgot how peaceful it is here at night,” she says.

  She thinks that maybe he smiles. It’s hard to tell with the shadows playing across his face. Rich holds up his catch; six long speckled trout, gleaming silver in the faint glow of the distant porch lights. “Paperbellies,” he says. Fireflies are lightning bugs. Lake trout are paperbellies. He can call them whatever he wants and it will sound right rolling off his tongue.

  “Rich.”

  He shakes his head, not wanting her to say anything more. “I’ll fillet,” he says. “You cook.”

  He moves past her and heads up to the house. Denise turns to follow, feeling her heart finally begin to slow down its frenetic rhythms. She feels the dark veil that descended on her future like the night on this lake finally lifting. Rich understands. A small part of him hates her for it, and someday in the future, during an intense fight, he will pull this event out like a chit he has saved and polished for just such an occasion, and he will render her furiously mute. But that future slap will be a small price to pay for his forgiveness today. And they will get past that, just as she now knows that they will get past this. Because Rich understands, maybe even better than she does, that her momentary indiscretion was the end and not the start of something.

  And now there is only their own life stretched out ahead of them, a thought that fills her with a sense of peace that for the entire stretch of their engagement, she realizes now, she had been lacking. She would like to tell him this; she thinks it would reassure him, but he has made it clear that he doesn’t want to talk about it, and so she must swallow, maybe forever, the elation she feels in this moment, the clarity of her love for him washing warmly over her. She will have to feel it by herself. The thought makes her sad, but she thinks to herself as she follows him up to the house, which is bathed in the warm glow of the incandescent lighting spilling out from the kitchen, there are far steeper prices to pay for forgiveness.

  CHAPTER 42

  For the first hour of their drive back, Casey drives in silence, refusing to look at him. He tries to wait her out until he can’t take it anymore.

  “Are you going to say anything?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t know. I just think we should talk about this.”

  “Which part?”

  “What?”

  “Which part would you like to talk about? The part where you betray me and tell Mom about Jeremy? Or the part where you betray pretty much everyone by having sex with Mom?”

  “Are those my only choices?”

  “Joking, right now, would be a serious fucking mistake, Silver. And I say that with the full knowledge of your incredibly rich history of serious fucking mistakes.”

  “I’m sorry. Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

  “What I’d like you to do is to unfuck my mother.”

  “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”

  “Fuck you, Silver. I’ve done nothing but make it easy for you. And in return, you’ve turned my life to shit. You’ve turned all of our lives to shit. That’s what you do.”

  “There’s a rest stop. Let’s pull over and get some ice cream.”

  “Fuck you, and fuck your ice cream.”

  “You say ‘fuck’ a lot.”

  “Every single fucking ‘fuck’ is earned.”

  “You know, what happened between your mother and me isn’t really something for you to be angry at.”

  “No?”

  “I mean, if you think about it, it’s really not any of your business. It’s just a mistake made by two consenting, slightly intoxicated adults. And we’ll face the consequences of that mistake, if there are any, just like you have to face the consequences of, you know . . . yours.”

  “I think you need to stop talking now.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Just hold it in.”

  “I’ve been trying all day. It just keeps pouring out of me. It’s like something is loose.”

  “Something is loose, all right.”

  “I think you should forgive me.”

  “I’ve spent my entire life forgiving you.”

  “And I appreciate it
.”

  “You’re such an asshole.”

  “I am. I know I am. Just tell me what I can do to make it up to you.”

  “You can stay away.”

  “What?”

  “From all of us. Mom, Rich, and me. We’re a family, the only one I’ve got. And now, thanks to you, that may all fall apart. I’ve already lost one family, and I can’t do it again. Not now. Not ever.”

  “Casey.”

  “I’m not saying it to be mean. I just need you to understand.”

  “Please.”

  “Do you understand?!”

  “I understand.”

  CHAPTER 43

  On the elevator ride up, he collapses against the wall and sinks down to the floor, unable to summon the strength required to remain upright. He is profoundly exhausted, can feel his remaining energy slowly seeping out of him like blood in a horror film. He watches the door open onto his floor, sees the faded wallpaper of the hallway. He’s never seen it from this angle before, at eye level with a small constellation of scuffs and tears from the corners and wheels of countless suitcases and pieces of furniture, as sad, defiant, angry, lost men moved in and out of the Versailles. They should leave marks, he thinks. Gashes and smears, scars for all the lives and families coming undone, for all the damage still to be done.

  The door slides closed, and the elevator is still. It feels strange to be in an unmoving elevator, like time has stopped. Maybe, when the door opens again, he will walk out into another world, one in which Casey didn’t say all the things she said to him on the drive home, things that are now permanently etched into the scuffed hallway walls of his brain.

  It’s quiet. Someone will push a button soon, and the elevator will either take flight or descend, and life, or whatever the hell it is he’s living here, will start again. But for now, there’s nothing but the piercing stillness of this immobile box, and the soft, intermittent sounds of his shallow breathing. The elevator would be a strange place to die. On the plus side, though, he’d be found pretty quickly, before he had time to ruin his apartment with the stink of his rot. He’d become something of a legend in the Versailles, the former rock star discovered dead in the elevator. Speculation will run rampant about the fact that he was found barefoot, with his damp sneakers in his hand. And then, after a little while, with a bit of turnover, he will just become one more footnote in the vast compendium of the building’s ever-growing tragic lore.