Plan B: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  The minister paused, giving everyone a chance to digest all that he had said. Lindsey now had tears in her eyes as well, and when I looked around the auditorium I had trouble finding any dry eyes. “I would now like to call upon Mark Miller, Peter’s older brother, to say a few words.”

  The funeral went on for another half hour or so, and then the coffin was wheeled out, followed by the bereaved. I saw Jeremy scanning the crowd as he followed the coffin, and suddenly felt unequipped to meet his gaze. Ashamed for reasons I couldn’t understand, I looked at my shoes until he’d passed.

  Driving home we sat in a subdued silence. I found myself thinking of shepherds. And trucks. Trucks could come out of nowhere and end your life, no matter who you were or what you were doing. I pictured Peter Miller, sitting in an expansive green pasture with his white robe and his shepherd’s rod, when suddenly, out of the blue comes an eighteen-wheeler, scattering sheep right and left in its path as it veers toward him. And the look on his face, as the truck is bearing down on him, is one of pure exasperation. With the universe, with God, with life. Because if a shepherd in a field isn’t safe from the cruel vagaries of fate, who the hell is? “Do you think he smoked?” I asked out loud from the back seat.

  “What?” asked Alison, who was driving.

  “Peter Miller. Do you think he was a smoker?”

  Alison frowned at me in the rear view mirror. “I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”

  “I’ll bet he didn’t smoke,” I muttered.

  Lindsey, riding shotgun, flashed me a perplexed look. “What are you babbling about?”

  “We could all die tomorrow,” I said glumly. “Any of us. We could all die at any time.”

  “That’s what funerals are for,” Lindsey said. “Contemplating our own mortality.”

  “Impending mortality,” I said. “It’s coming. Peter Miller is the statistical anomaly that proves it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, this was the last guy who should have died like this. He took himself out of the city and moved to a safe little community in the mountains. What do you think the rate of violent crime in Carmelina is? Probably lower than in any one city block in New York. He was a teacher and a father, leading a quiet, risk-free life in a quiet, risk-free community.” I thought about it for a moment. “No way did he smoke,” I said.

  “And your point is . . . ?”

  “He still died, a horrible violent death. Which means no one is immune. Every morning we wake up and assume it’s just the next day in what will be a long series of days. But any one of those days can be it.”

  “Have you been to many funerals?” Alison asked.

  “This was my first.”

  “Shocker.”

  No one spoke for a while. The weather was cooperating with our moods, with pregnant, gray storm clouds that obliterated the sky. “It’s just that, you try so hard to get it right, you know?” I said. “To get your life to this point you’ve imagined in your head and you tell yourself that if I can just get to there, I’ll be happy. You all accuse me of living in the past, but the truth is I’m thirty years old and I’m still counting on the future to bail me out. And that’s a crock. You can spend years working toward something and get killed before you reach it, so what’s the point?”

  “Because you probably won’t,” Lindsey snapped at me. “Chances are you’ll live until you’re ninety, which is a lot of time to spend in an unhappy life. Peter Miller may be dead, but look at how many people he affected before he died. He lived in the present. You’re worried that you might be wasting your time trying to achieve something when you might die tomorrow. You should be worried about getting your life together as quickly as possible so that if you did die young, at least you’d have lived. You’re young, you’re healthy . . .”

  “Health,” I said, “is just the slowest possible rate at which one can die.”

  Lindsey twisted around in her seat to glare at me. “Shut up, Ben,” she said. I did, for a minute.

  “I agree with you,” I relented. “It’s just that, you know, I was thinking about this guy. He was only around six or seven years older than me, and look at all he had to show for himself, all the people who cared, who will miss him. If I died tomorrow, I don’t think I could fill three rows in the church.”

  “Well, you are Jewish,” Alison said with a smile.

  “You know what I mean.”

  Without turning around, Lindsey reached behind her and groped for my hand. “Well then,” she said. “I guess you just can’t die yet.” I held onto her hand, wondering if the low vibrations I felt in our conjoined palms were originating from within us, or if it was the world that was shaking and we were perfectly still.

  We stopped briefly in town, to replenish our food stocks and buy a paper. I was surprised to see that none of the newspaper vending machines had The New York Times. Lindsey said that all New Yorkers make the mistake of thinking that New York is America, which is ironic when you consider the map. We settled for a USA Today. The piece on Jack was mercifully small, something between an article and a blurb. Jack Shaw was missing, the police were concerned, but no one was speculating any foul play.

  Shortly after we returned from the funeral, I was shooting hoops in the driveway when Jeremy came out of his house to walk Taz. Judging from the many cars still parked in the Miller’s driveway and on the road in front of the house, there was still a large crowd at the wake. Jeremy was still in his suit and tie, which combined with his solemn expression and carefully combed hair to make him look like a sad little man. I always felt awkwardly unqualified to deal with the bereaved, or to even make eye contact with them, as if anything I said or did would be an intrusion into their privately painful experience. So I smiled at Jeremy, but turned quickly back to catch my own rebound. The sky still looked threatening, jammed with dark clouds, and the air was laden with the heavy promise of a thunderstorm, but the rain had yet to come.

  “I saw you at the funeral today,” Jeremy said.

  “Yep.”

  “Why’d you come?” he asked. “You didn’t know my dad.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But you know, funerals aren’t just about the person who has died. They’re also about the people left behind.”

  “You mean my family?”

  “Yep.”

  “But you don’t know them either,” he pointed out.

  “I know you,” I said.

  “Was that girl with you your girlfriend?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The girl who you were with, next to Alison. Is she your girlfriend?”

  “That, my friend, is a very good question,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, grabbing the ball from me and dribbling in for a lay-up. “What’s the answer?”

  “It’s not that simple,” I said.

  “Oh.” He put up another lay-up.

  “Don’t you belong inside?” I asked.

  He looked toward the house, and for the first time I could truly see the grief in his eyes. Taz seemed to sense the boy’s desolation, and bounded onto the driveway, reluctant to leave his side. “I don’t feel like going in there right now,” Jeremy said, rolling the ball between his fingers.

  “I don’t blame you,” I said. “From what they said at the funeral, it sounds like your dad was a great guy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry I never met him,” I said.

  “That’s a cool shirt,” Jeremy said.

  I was wearing a collector’s edition Star Wars T-shirt with an artist’s rendition of the characters all superimposed on a larger, translucent portrait of Darth Vader’s face. “Do you like Star Wars?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. We have all three movies on tape. The new versions.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Did you like The Phantom Menace?” he asked me.

  I paused before answering. There was no question that I’d been terribly disappointed by the movie, which I thought felt like an overb
lown cartoon and contained none of the magic of the first three. But if the film had somehow done for Jeremy what Star Wars had done for me at that age, I didn’t want to ruin it for him. “It’s hard for me to get used to all of the new characters,” I said weakly. “What did you think?”

  “I liked it,” he said with a shrug. “But I liked the first three better.”

  There was hope after all.

  “I was around your age when Star Wars came out,” I told him. “It became my favorite movie of all time.”

  “My dad, too.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Hang out here a second, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  I ran into the house and came back out a minute later with the Darth Vader mask.

  “Cool,” Jeremy said, turning it over in his hands. I was pleased to note that he held the rubberized plastic up to his nose for a good sniff. He pulled it on over his head and made some harsh breathing noises. “Darth Vader,” he said, trying to make his voice sound low and menacing. I felt a pang, maybe sympathy for the kid, or maybe because I missed being him. A fat raindrop fell on the crown of the mask and disappeared under the front ridge just above the black, styrene eyes. When he took off the mask, his hair crackled with static electricity, the thinnest strands floating up around his head like a blond halo.

  “You can keep the mask,” I said.

  He looked at me. “Really?”

  “You bet.”

  “Thanks a lot,” he said, and he meant it. “This is great.”

  There was the sound of a door slamming from behind him, and his mother stepped out onto the deck. “Jeremy,” she called. “Come on in now, sweetie, okay? It’s going to pour.”

  Taz shook himself into a standing position and looked questioningly over at Jeremy. I looked across the front yard to Ruthie, feeling suddenly sheepish about standing outside with Jeremy, about the basketball, the mask, and my T-shirt. She was in mourning, and I was an overgrown child. I waved awkwardly and she waved back, the small, delicate gesture of someone not quite certain the world around them is made of the same things it was yesterday.

  “I gotta go,” Jeremy said.

  “Go ahead,” I told him. “I’ll see you around.”

  “Yeah.” He turned to go, and then turned back to me again. “You sure about the mask?” he said.

  “Positive,” I said. “It’s not so smart for a man my age to have too many toys. It makes people uncomfortable.”

  He smiled at me, a sincere expression that seemed to contain more understanding than it should have. “Thanks, Ben,” he said, and headed back up to his mother.

  “Hey, Jeremy,” I said, softly so that she wouldn’t hear.

  “Yeah?”

  “May the force be with you.”

  There’s something about the rain in the country that I find viscerally satisfying. The rain in the Catskills doesn’t screw around. It comes down harder and more violently than in the city, with little concrete infrastructure to absorb its wrath. The trees hiss under the deluge, and it’s as if you’re hearing the collective sighs of all the leaves slaking their thirst, interrupted only by the thunder, which reverberates powerfully across the sky and rattles the windows. You’re one with the trees and the grass, part of a living tapestry, unlike in the city where you’re insulated and separated. Lindsey and I brought two chairs out onto the porch and sat there quietly, watching the rain and looking for lightning bolts over the lake. It was the first quiet time we’d shared since our ill-fated walk through town two days before.

  “I’m sorry about our argument the other day,” she said, putting her hand on my arm. “I overreacted.”

  “God, that seems like a long time ago,” I said. “It was my fault. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You’ve been distant to me ever since.”

  “I don’t mean to be.”

  We sat there for a few moments and then she reached for my hand and I watched our fingers combine. I felt myself tremble slightly and realized that, despite the last few days’ distractions, I’d still been seriously depressed about what she’d said and how it had left us. I opened my mouth to say something else, but then willed myself to stay silent, to hold onto her hand, listen to the rain, and be in the moment. And I was.

  An hour or so later the clouds broke and the sky reasserted itself. I brought Lindsey down to the lake to see the geese. The sun was disappearing behind the trees, causing reflective glints on the dripping leaves and bleeding crimson streaks into the low clouds on the horizon. The still, dark water of the lake reflected the sunset perfectly. We sat on the bench, my right knee against her left, watching the geese go about the business of finishing off the day. Some continued to hunt for food, their posteriors pointed comically at the sky as they submerged their heads. Most of them, though, were selecting spots on the shore to turn in for the night. They would swim up to the shore and then, with a thrashing of their wings, leap up onto the land. The whooshing sound the geese’s wings made was like a concentrated blast of wind, powerful and elemental.

  “It’s such a simple existence,” Lindsey marveled. “They wake up with the sun, and they go to bed with the sun.”

  “And in between, all they do is swim, eat, and rest,” I said.

  “Not exactly a complicated lifestyle.”

  “You sound envious.”

  “I am.”

  “Are you worried?” I asked her. “About the whole thing with Jack, now that it has gone public?”

  She thought about it for a minute. “Not really. I guess I just feel like it would be so absurd for us to end up in jail, you know? Who would waste their time putting us in jail?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I can’t believe Jack would ever voluntarily press charges . . .”

  “Oh, quit worrying about it,” she said, leaning into me. “It’s just too beautiful here to be thinking about all of that.”

  “How do you think Alison’s doing?” I asked.

  “She seems all right. I think being up here is good for her. And, this is going to sound awful but, I think that the funeral wasn’t such a bad thing for Alison, you know? It took her mind off Jack for a while.”

  “Poor kid. He doesn’t deserve this.”

  “Jack?”

  “Jeremy.” I told her about my earlier talk with him.

  “I always loved the way you liked kids so much,” she said. “You know, I’m thinking of getting back into teaching.”

  “Really?” I looked at her. “That’s great.”

  “Well actually, I’m done thinking about it. I’ve already decided.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. “You love teaching.”

  “I guess I also want to be a shepherd,” she said, smiling so that the lines of her cheeks formed perfect parentheses around her mouth.

  We got up and began strolling at a leisurely pace along the side of the lake, taking care not to frighten any of the dozing geese. I kept sneaking glances at her profile, watching the way the cherry gloss of her lips rested so perfectly against her clean white teeth when she opened her mouth to breathe in the cool air.

  “I cried the night of your wedding,” she said suddenly, not breaking her stride.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re going to make me say something like that twice?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “It’s bad form to tell a married man you’re not over him,” she said with a sardonic grin.

  “Even when you know he’ll never be over you?”

  She stopped and turned to face me. “What would you have done, Ben? Really.”

  Her face had a rosy blush from the cold air, and as I looked at her, framed by the trees and water behind her, I knew that I would always be in love with her. It was a force coursing through my veins with the whooshing sound of geese’s wings. “I would have done the same thing I did,” I said. “I would have put all my energy into loving someone that wasn’t you. I would have tried in vain, every day, to not think about you, and w
hat could have been. What should have been. I would have tried to convince myself that there’s no such thing as true love, except for the love you yourself make work, even though I knew better. I would have driven Sarah away by poorly pretending it was okay with me that she wasn’t you, like I did, and we would have ended in a quick divorce, like we did.”

  “You got divorced because of me?”

  “Well, you disguised as a whole bunch of other reasons. The bottom line is I never had any business marrying anyone who wasn’t you.”

  She smiled sadly. “That’s exactly what I thought when I heard you were getting married.”

  “Well, after you left . . .”

  Lindsey looked down at her shoes as we continued to walk. “I . have this problem,” she said. “I instinctively mistrust any situation that seems to be working out too easily. I have no idea where I got it from, but I think it had a lot to do with why we broke up. Something in me just rebelled at the idea that it could really be that easy to find the right person. It’s like I’m a film critic watching the movie of my life, and if the plot’s too simple, the film’s not believable.” She laughed quietly, almost to herself. “And when you brought it up a few days ago, it was the same thing. I was so filled with regret, so sure we were over forever, and then suddenly, against all odds, here we are six years later with a second chance. It just seemed to have worked out too easily to be true.”

  “Come on,” I said to her, turning to face her. “You have to think about the right kind of movies. Complex plots may be important for Oliver Stone or Quentin Tarantino, but the romantic comedies are never too complicated. If this were a Rob Reiner film with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, the critics would be saying that it’s been way too complicated already.”