If You Were Here

by Stephanie Taylor

  Without looking back, I turned and followed Roger across the parking lot, leaving Jenny standing in the open doorway with her arms folded across her stomach as she watched me go.

  As we neared the street, the sense that I’d let Jenny down overwhelmed me. I was just steps behind Roger, but I could feel myself slowing, hesitating. I was having second thoughts about leaving her like that.

  Would she ever forgive me? I didn’t know. I wouldn’t know—not until I’d finished doing whatever I had to do to save Andy.

  We crossed the wet street at the crosswalk, striding down the sidewalk in our tuxedos like two runaway grooms searching for a taxi.

  “Any idea where we’re going?” Roger turned back to look at me. I shook my head. “Any idea how we’re going to get there?” I shook my head again. “Excellent. Then let’s soldier on.”

  And so we did, cutting through the center of town on foot, a light rain falling in the dark night.

  28

  December 26, 2016

  Sign of the Times

  It still felt like Christmas in the ICU, with tinsel swaying from the ceilings and holiday cards taped to the doors and windows of the patients. Lisa had spent Christmas at Daniel’s bedside, and now the following day she sat outside his room, taking a break from staring at his silent figure. She had her phone in her lap and was scrolling through Facebook, her fingers poised as though she had a cigarette between them, though that would never have been allowed inside the hospital.

  “Lisa?” A man’s voice interrupted her thoughts. She stared at his feet, toes pointed towards hers as she looked past the screen of her phone. “I’m sorry to bother you,” the man said.

  She looked up at him. He was reasonably tall and thin, with dark reddish hair. His face was familiar. She squinted at the man, trying to place him. Finally, she realized it was Roger Napoleon, her next door neighbor from childhood.

  “Roger?” Lisa stood up slowly, slipping her phone into the front pocket of her purse. “What are you doing here?” For some reason, seeing his face brought tears to her eyes. This man—this grown man in a sweater and jeans with a layer of strawberry blonde stubble on his cheeks—this man had known her when she was just a girl. He’d been friends with her brothers. Before she could stop herself, Lisa put her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly.

  “Oh! Okay.” Roger was surprised. He stood there for a moment before putting his arms around Lisa’s narrow body and hugging her back. She felt bony in his arms. “I wasn’t sure you’d recognize me.” His voice was muffled into the shoulder of her sweatshirt.

  Lisa pulled back to look at him. “Of course I do! But why are you here? Are you visiting someone?”

  Roger scratched at the hair behind his ear, a nervous habit he’d had for years when he wasn’t sure what to say next. “Uhh, I heard about your…son. I wanted to come and offer you my support.”

  Lisa’s hand flew to her chest and she didn’t even bother to try and hide the tears in her eyes. “You heard about Daniel?”

  Roger cleared his throat nervously. “I did.” He neglected to mention that he’d already been to the hospital before to see his old friend, because somehow it felt wrong to admit to Lisa that he’d been there and visited her unconscious eighteen-year-old son without any good reason for doing so.

  “He woke up on Christmas Eve,” she offered, taking a step back and assessing Roger at a respectable distance. He’d grown up. Gone were the gangly arms and legs and the goofy smile that she remembered from childhood. He had the tired eyes of a man who worked too many hours, and he wore a gold band on his left hand. “You’re married?” Lisa asked, changing the subject.

  “Oh.” Roger held up his hand. “Yeah. Ten years. We have two little girls.”

  “That’s really great, Rog,” Lisa said, folding her arms across her chest. She suddenly wasn’t sure what to say, but fortunately Roger kept talking.

  “I was hoping I would see you.” He shoved both hands into the pockets of his jeans and rocked back on his heels.

  Without realizing she was doing it, Lisa put one hand in her hair and shifted her feet so that she was standing with one hip out. It was almost flirtatious, but Roger didn’t even notice.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  “Yeah, I know it isn’t the best time to talk about this,” Roger said, his eyes drifting to the window in the door that looked in on Daniel’s room. “But do you remember the night of Andy’s accident?”

  Lisa’s hand fell from her hair. Her smile faded. “Of course.” She swallowed. “Of course I remember.”

  “Who found him?”

  “Who found Andy?”

  “Yeah. When the police came to talk to your parents and to tell them—”

  Lisa closed her eyes and shook her head. She held up her hands as if they might block Roger’s words. “No, I don’t want to talk about it. I really don’t.”

  Roger immediately backed off. “Okay, I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out with both hands and gently holding her arms as she started to shake. “I’m sorry, Lisa. I didn’t mean to upset you. I had a weird dream about it recently, and I had some questions.”

  “I can talk about Andy, just not now,” she said, her eyes pleading with him to understand. “Not with Daniel like this.”

  Roger felt pity as he looked at her now, her youthful face lined by years of smoking and stress. He’d heard through the grapevine that Lisa Girch had a taste for pills and the wrong men, but he hadn’t seen her in years and had hoped the rumors were wrong.

  “Listen, maybe we can catch up sometime. Have coffee. Talk about the old days,” Roger offered, releasing her elbows once she’d opened up her eyes again and calmed down. “I really just wanted to tell you I was sorry about your son, and that I’ll be thinking good thoughts for you both.”

  Lisa nodded. “Thanks, Roger. Thank you for coming by. And I’d like to have coffee sometime. That would be nice.”

  Roger smiled and gave her a single nod, backing away and turning towards the elevators. He wasn’t sure why he’d come, to be perfectly honest. At the elevators, he punched the button to go down, watching the numbers above the door impatiently. He’d told his wife he needed to run to the office for a few hours, but instead he’d driven to Westchester General again and made his way up to the ICU. There was something compelling about the thought of his best friend lying in a coma, and about trying to piece together what might have happened to Andy all those years ago and why it felt so integral to what was happening now.

  The doors slid open and Roger stepped into the elevator with an older woman and a doctor in scrubs. On the way down to the lobby and all the way home, he thought about Lisa’s panicked reaction to the mention of Andy’s name. It had been thirty years since Andy’s death—was it possible that Lisa still felt that shaken up by it? That time hadn’t dulled the pain of his passing at all? Or was it simply that her only child was laying in a hospital bed with a traumatic brain injury and she couldn’t cope with more than that right now?

  Roger let himself into the front door of his house and was immediately greeted by Hayley, his five-year-old daughter. She threw herself at him before he even had his coat off and he caught her, picking her up off the ground and holding her close. She put her hands on both sides of his face.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said, looking at him intently. “Are you done working?”

  “I have a couple more things to do, and then I’ll be done. Okay?” Hayley nodded at him with a serious face before he set her down.

  “Oh, you’re home.” Angela, his wife, peered around the corner from the kitchen. “I thought you’d be gone longer.”

  “I got a bit done at the office, but there’s one more thing I need to do here. Just an email I have to send, okay?” He leaned in and pecked Angela on the lips. “Where’s Maggie?”

  “Napping,” she said, casting her eyes up at the ceiling to indicate that their two-year-old was upstairs in her crib. “I put a ham in the oven for tonight.”

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bsp; Roger nodded and glanced again at Hayley, who had immediately re-immersed herself in her Barbie house and her dolls. The smell of baking ham filled the house. Roger went back to his desk in the den and closed the door behind him.

  Thirty years was a long time. He’d been thinking about Daniel almost non-stop since finding out about the shooting, and his dreams had been graphic over these long days, taking on more of a quality of remembrance than imagination. There had been mornings he’d woken up feeling as though he’d run a marathon in the night, visiting his old friend and living as an eighteen-year-old again. It had only been as he’d leaned into the mirror on the medicine cabinet to shave his lined face that he’d remembered he was, in fact, dangerously close to turning fifty.

  He sat behind his computer now at the desk he’d had since he was in his twenties and slid open a drawer. In it was a yellowed envelope that he’d held closed with a paperclip. Roger set it on the desk in front of him and turned on the computer. He pulled up his email. He really didn’t have any work at all to do that day, and part of him felt bad using it as an excuse to keep himself busy and quiet all day long, but there were too many things on his mind to just ignore them.

  With his work email open on the screen and the sound of Hayley making her dolls talk in the front room, Roger picked up the envelope again and slid the paper clip off the flap. Inside was a small collection of newspaper clippings that had grown thin and faded over time. The first one he slid out felt brittle to the touch.

  Local Sports Hero Killed in Apparent Accident the headline read. Beneath it was a photo of Andy Girch, his all-American smile grinning back at Roger in black and white. He scanned the details of the article as he had so many times before (though not in several years), reading and re-reading about Andy’s death that night in April and wondering whether there could have been any way to save him.

  He’d thought about Daniel over the years (of course he had—how could he not?) but somehow the magic of a time-traveling friend had been absorbed into the scenery of his life like so many other things, accepted and acknowledged, but unseen. Still, these past days had made him wonder: if Daniel had come to 1986 on a mission to save Andy, why hadn’t it happened? Was there something he could whisper in comatose Daniel’s ear right now that might make it all possible? The bends and folds of time were impossible for Roger to unwind and comprehend, but maybe it could happen. Maybe these timelines were somehow parallel and there was still a chance to change the outcome. Maybe there was some way for him to send a message to his old friend and have some hand in saving Andy. And maybe, if he did, everything would be different.

  He slipped the rest of the articles out of the envelope and laid them on his desk like puzzle pieces, poring over the words and looking for clues he might have missed or forgotten. If there was anything there, he’d find it.

  29

  April 12, 1986

  Disintegration

  We wandered the rain-slicked streets until my dress shoes gave me blisters. The frustration of not having a cell phone to contact anyone was starting to get to me. That one little invention would have put me in contact with Andy or my grandma right then, and it also would have allowed me to send Jenny a message telling her I was sorry. Just a way to smooth things over for the time being. But I had no phone, so I tried to swallow the aggravation I felt at being aimless and unable to reach out to anyone as we kicked around ideas about where Andy might be.

  “What about a friend’s house?” Roger said from behind me on the sidewalk. I’d immediately taken the lead as we trudged through the night, my head bent against the rain, water dripping from my forehead and cheeks.

  “He has too many friends,” I said shortly. Where would I even start? Andy Girch was one of the most popular guys in town. How could I possibly narrow down his whereabouts by friends? And even girls would be hard here, because he was constantly dodging and weaving them, dating this girl and then that one. I had no clue who his latest lady friend might be. “I feel like he went somewhere alone tonight.”

  “So should we just walk around like this?” Roger’s voice was strained. I knew his friendship was limitless and that he’d walk the streets of Westchester with me all night if he needed to (after all, how many miles had he walked with me as we’d searched for Jenny on New Year’s Day?), but he had a good point.

  I stopped walking. “We’re never going to find him.” My feet throbbed in the tight shoes, and my socks were soaking wet from walking through puddles.

  “No, dude. Don’t say that.” Roger came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ve got this. We just need to put our heads together and think.”

  “What we need is a car,” I said, wiping at the water dripping from my nose with the back of one hand. “And we need a clue. Because otherwise we’re flying blind here.”

  Roger nodded. “Okay, so where are we going to get a car and a clue?”

  Without answering, I turned my face up to the sky and closed my eyes. Rain fell on my eyelids. I breathed in the night air. I had no answers.

  *

  December 27, 2016

  *

  The night Roger visited Lisa at Westchester General he had another dream about Daniel and Andy and he woke up in a sweat. He got up early, while the sky was still gray and purple like a bruised plum, and put on a robe over his t-shirt and boxer shorts.

  Angela was still fast asleep in their bed, her back turned to him. She was snoring lightly. Roger checked in on the girls: both sleeping, eyes closed peacefully as they dreamed in the darkness of the early morning.

  In his dream he’d been walking in the rain, his coat and shirt collar drenched around his neck. It had been one of those dreams where something in your head corresponds with something happening in real life, because he’d woken up in a cold sweat, his shirt clinging to his shoulders and collarbone as he turned over in bed.

  The coffee pot was already set to start brewing at six o’clock, so Roger cleared the timer and hit “start.” He’d need a cup long before the sun came up.

  At his desk, he turned on a small lamp and powered up the computer again. He had no idea what he was looking for. After a quick scan of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal online, he impulsively pulled up Google and typed “Andrew Girch 1986” into the search bar.

  There were several hits, most of them short articles that had been archived and put online by the local papers. The ones he had the actual clippings of were all there, and as he scanned, Roger found a few others. He clicked on one of them.

  Local College Athlete Dies in Freak Accident. He’d never heard Andy’s death called a “freak accident” before. Roger picked up the reading glasses he left on his desk and peered at the screen.

  Andrew Girch, popular football player and college athlete, died Saturday night in Westchester. His car was found on Highway 22 in the early hours of April thirteenth, and his body was recovered several hours later. Details of the incident are still unclear, and police say they’ll have more answers in the following days.

  Roger sat back in his desk chair and exhaled loudly. Andy’s car was found first and then his body. He already knew that much. But who’d found Andy? For some reason he’d either never known, or had forgotten that major detail. This article hadn’t provided him anything new other than to reclassify Andy’s death as a “freak accident.”

  The coffee pot beeped in the kitchen and Roger ignored it. He clicked on a more recent article.

  College Athlete Remembered as Local Park Renamed in His Honor read a headline from the Westchester Daily News. Roger clicked on the link.

  It’s been years since Andrew Girch died on a rainy April night, it read, and decades since anyone has thought about his contribution to the town. But a small group of Westchester High students have worked tirelessly to raise the funds to re-name and clean up Lincoln Park in the center of town, hoping to call it ‘Andrew Girch Park’ in honor of the late, great football player who once walked the hallowed halls of their high school.
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br />   “It’s just, like, that we want to honor his memory,” says Ashley Feldman, sitting next to the other students on the fundraising committee. “He was a hero in the 80s, and he deserves it.”

  The details of Girch’s death have always been hazy, and time has only served to glorify and embellish what was, at heart, simply a sad loss.

  “I heard when they found his car there was no note,” says Brian Gomez. “Just his football trophy and his letterman’s jacket on the passenger seat.”

  “My mom went to high school with him,” adds Deven Hill. “She said he was really cool and that everyone loved him.”

  And so it is that, armed with these slight details of a faded football star from another time, these kids plan to add a new set of swings and a new name to the park that’s become known more for arrests and illegal activity than for happy kids playing on jungle gyms.

  “I didn’t want him to die for nothing, you know?” Ashley Feldman says. “And if we can honor him like this, maybe the tragic way his life ended won’t be the only thing he’s remembered for.”

  Roger scrolled to the bottom of the article and skimmed the comments. There were people both for and against the park’s name change, but people were overwhelmingly in favor of cleaning up Lincoln Park, even if they weren’t sure who Andy Girch was or why he might still be relevant. Roger had forgotten that they’d renamed the park a few years back, as it hadn’t made much of a ripple in a town that had nearly tripled in size since Andy’s passing. Without knowing why, Roger hit ‘print’ and sent the article to his printer next to the desk.

  He sat there for a minute, hands laced behind his head as he watched the sky slowly lighten outside the window. The trees were bare and the neighbors next door had their outside Christmas lights switched on, giving the snowy yard a multi-colored glow. He’d never heard the rumor about Andy’s jacket and trophy being in the car, though he did know that the Camaro was found abandoned along Highway 22. He remembered walking through the night with Daniel, watching the cars speed through the rain and hoping that Andy would simply drive by. He hadn’t.