by Larry Brill
“Don’t go there. The mistake is to beat yourself up over it. Better to beat up his car.” He winked.
“I’m so embarrassed by that.” Julie shook her head slowly. “I just snapped.”
“Jules, you don’t know snap. I know snap. I’m an expert in snappage. I could teach a class in snapology.”
He was teasing her now, trying to cheer her up. It helped even if he was lying. “Right. You are the most easygoing, un-snappable person I know.”
“You’re right. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
He stirred his milkshake and she knew his mind had wandered off again. “What are you thinking? What’s going on in there?”
“It’s nothing. Forget it.”
“No way. You brought up something; you can’t take it back now.”
Nate continued to stir, wrestling with whether to say more, while Julie watched and sipped her drink. He had pulled so much out of her with so little effort, could she do the same? “If it’s none of my business, just say so.”
Nate continued his mental gymnastics in silence before he picked up Julie’s iPad. “They have wifi here.” He poked, stroked and typed as he navigated the screen. “I would be the last one to make light of what you’ve been through. But I want to show you someone who really snapped his nut.”
He handed the tablet back to her as a YouTube video rolled. “Isn’t that the TV dog? Yes, I’ve seen this before,” she said.
“You and three million others.” He sighed.
Julie scrunched her nose. “Ouch! That poor little dog.” She watched the scene play out. And when it was over, she asked, “But what does this have to do with anything?”
Nate moved around the table to the seat next to her and told her to play it again. He draped one arm along the back of her chair. That was nice. When the video reached the point where that poor sap crushed Ruffles the TV dog, Nate reached out and stabbed the screen to freeze the video. It was a bit fuzzy, but the crusher’s face was unmistakably familiar. And at that moment, it was inches away from her own, deliberately absorbed with the image on her tablet in order to avoid her eyes. They sat there in silence. She studied his face, but even now, Nate had a sense of relaxed acceptance, calm as always.
Finally he said simply, “I jumped from a balcony.”
“But why?”
“Oh. I was having a bad day.”
“A bad day.”
“A bad day. A bad month. A bad year, well, several actually. A bad life, I guess. That was the same day the Air Force blew up my home. I told you about that.”
Yes, he had. Though every time he told it, he added more humor, until everyone at the school could laugh at his misfortune.
Now, he told her that, for reasons he didn’t want to dwell on, he wound up at a party in the most depressed mood ever. “I took a pill that was supposed to make me feel good. You know those commercials for antidepressants that come with the warning they may cause suicidal thoughts? Believe it. I took something—Ecstasy, actually—and it is way stronger.”
“Not to mention illegal,” she cut in. Amazing, but as she thought about it, not shocking given his history of bouts with common sense the way other people fought off the flu.
“The doctor said it only heightened the anxiety I was feeling. Instead of making me feel better, it made me think there was no use in going on, so I snapped. I jumped. Seems suicide—I couldn’t even get that right.”
What in the world did you say about something like that? To someone like that. She wrapped her lips on her straw, thinking. Finally she nodded and said, “You’re right. That is major snappage.”
Using Nate’s own words made him chuckle, but she wondered how he could treat something as serious as suicide so lightly. She didn’t think at all when she bashed Russell’s car; she acted on impulse. It couldn’t possibly be the same, could it?
He moved back to his chair on the opposite side of the table. “What were you thinking?” Julie knew she sounded like a mother scolding her child for getting sick for eating crayons, and rainbow barf was not easy to get out of a beige carpet.
She reached out and took his hand. With gentle curiosity, she asked what made his life so bad. The way she saw it, his life seemed so successful and glamorous, better than most and way better than anybody she knew, but Nate shook his head. “Let’s save that for another time. Another place. This isn’t it. Besides, right now we need to keep you from doing any more damage to Festerhaven. We need to keep you out of jail.” Julie pulled back ever so slightly as Nate reached out. He took her chin between his thumb and forefinger, drawing a smile from her.
He looked at her with lines at the corners of his eyes turned up, almost laughing on their own, and she couldn’t help but look away. She hated when he did that, because she loved when he did. It was his flirty look, and she believed he saved it for special occasions. When they were young, he used it and the rest of the world melted away. God, she was such a…such a girl back then.
“You’re trying too hard, Evans.”
“What?”
“You know what. You are not getting out of this with just a look.”
“What look?” His face was neutral except that the eyes were still dancing.
“That look.”
“I didn’t know I had one. Is it working?”
“It depends. What are you going after?”
“It’s this. I have an idea of how to give you some perspective on this mess that may help. How much do you trust me?”
“I trust you totally—but only up to a point, that is. You’re not going to suggest fake skydiving again, are you?” Julie felt something risky coming on. Nate had been right about the skydiving day and how a few minutes of thrill added color to her life.
He said, “If you thought that made you feel good, then how about this?” And what he suggested stole her breath away. She inhaled, forgetting about the straw in her mouth. It forced her to swallow quickly. Bubbles tickled her nose. Words failed her. Her response mortified her.
Hiccup.
CHAPTER FORTY
When the Stars Aligned
Nate had to drag Julie to his bed; she put up a good fight. He could have taken her in his arms and carried her across the threshold of the bedroom like a groom on his honeymoon. He could have hoisted her over his shoulder like a fireman escaping from a burning house. Instead, he hooked one of her arms around his neck and one of his arms around her waist to steer her across the living room. She was like a child who refused to surrender to sleep, wanting to stay up long past her bedtime even though she could no longer keep her eyes open. At one point, she stopped moving her feet, in a drowsy but playful mood, leaving Nate to lug her the last few feet with the toes of her socks picking up dust as they slid across the pine floor. While he’d hardly consider it the stuff of his fantasies, he hadn’t held Julie this close, close enough to feel her heartbeat in his own chest, since their relationship was still in the minor leagues.
Julie stroked his hand after Nate laid her out on the bed and spread a thick quilt comforter over her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He asked her what there was to be sorry about, but Julie only mumbled something indecipherable before drifting off. He backed out of the bedroom and softly closed the door. There was a guest bedroom in the beach house, but Nate pulled an overstuffed chair to the bay windows facing the ocean. The sun would be rising soon enough, and the morning fog would roll in, but it was still clear out there, and he decided he could sleep later. Like Julie, he wasn’t ready to give up without a fight what could easily go down as the most perfect night of his life.
He was tempted to ask her a second time, just to prove he wasn’t hearing things when she agreed to spend the weekend with him. No, he didn’t dare press his luck. He made the offer thinking it would help Jules escape her heartache if only for a spell, and Lord knows he was an expert in that area. He didn’t expect her to accept. Jack had arranged a weekend for him, getting the house so Nate could spend i
t writing in solitude and nudge him toward whipping out a full story treatment for Tina Farnham’s company, Dangling Participle Productions. It was on a private cove between Santa Cruz and Capitola and belonged to one of Jack’s friends of a friend of an associate of someone who knew someone who agreed to lend them the property for the weekend so that Nate could work without distractions. He was supposed to be alone, so having Julie along guaranteed he would be distracted, but he didn’t care. Like sleep, he could catch up later.
They arrived long after sunset but the weather gods couldn’t have provided a better, clearer, milder winter night than if Nate had hocked his soul to pay for it. He would have done it, too. And the forecast called for clear skies through sunset tomorrow, Valentines Day. Nate built a campfire on the beach. He and Julie formed a V above it lying in the sand on their backs, snuggled into separate sleeping bags with their heads side by side and their toes pointing to opposite sides of the cove. They talked without looking at one another, staring instead at the millions of stars splattered across the sky on a moonless night like a Jackson Pollack painting. For Nate, the drive over the pass had all the nervous energy of their very first date without the pimples. He tried too hard to be witty, and Julie laughed too hard at his lame jokes.
Conversation lapsed into long stretches of silence, silence that he might have ruined with random thoughts or mindless chatter in another setting. Ah, peace, vastly underrated these days. He let his weight and his worries sink into the sand and sensed Jules did as well.
Julie stared up and said to the stars, “I’m really glad you’re such a screw-up.”
“Should I take that as a compliment?” Nate let the waves fill the silence with their rhythmic wash on the beach as if they were saying to him, “Hush. Hush.” It wasn’t easy to take their advice.
She sighed a full-throated exhale drawn out like someone enjoying a back rub. “I still can’t get it through my head. Suppose you had been successful, the suicide, I mean. That would be so awful. I just can’t imagine.”
“Hush. Hush,” the sea said. Nate said nothing.
“Mmm. This is nice,” Julie said.
He let his mind float. “I had a night like this—it was New Year’s Eve, as a matter of fact—right after the marriage hit the rocks for good. Talk about a real shipwreck. So I jumped on the first plane out of Dodge, and I wound up with my butt in the sand under the stars and the sound of the surf washing out all the noise in my head along with those damned mariachis I could hear at the bar way down the beach. It was Mexico, and I felt like I had dumped all my troubles at the border. Millions of stars were out, just like this. In fact, I’m sure this is exactly the same sky. It hit me then. I realized how enormous the universe is and how small our problems are by comparison. I really felt at peace for probably the only time in my life.”
“Until now?” There was hopefulness in Julie’s voice.
“This? Nah.” Nate let that hang between them as if the notion was ludicrous. Then he chuckled, “This is so much better.”
Julie rapped the top of his head with the back of her hand.
“It didn’t last, of course. It never does, but so what? It helped me at the time. I thought maybe this could help you now.”
“Well, it seems to be working.” Julie paused. “I wish we could stay like this forever.”
“Jules, I would move heaven and earth to make it so. Move heaven and earth to make you happy.” In a way, Nate felt as if he was halfway there.
“God, that is so sweet.” Julie snuggled deeper into her sleeping bag and tucked the top layer under her chin. Wiggling as she did and shifting the sand beneath her in a way to get more comfortable brought her head closer to Nate so that he could almost feel the warmth of her cheek next to his. “That would be nice. Impossible. Impractical, but nice.”
“To hell with being practical all the time. You need to learn to let go a little more. I mean, if buying lottery tickets is the big, decadent fun in your life each week, you need to up your game."
“Who told you that? Carla?”
“Carla and everybody else. But they all think it’s cute. I do.” He stopped her before she could defend herself. “Wait. Listen. You hear that? The waves. Listen. They’re talking to us. They’re saying”—he paused to time his words so they echoed the incoming surf—“hush. Hushhh.”
And Julie listened. It was a long time before she said anything. “I get it—that feeling you had on the beach in Mexico. That’s what I’m feeling.”
“Don’t fight it.” Nate turned his face away from her toward the fire. The flames were gone but the driftwood refused to die out. It glowed a dull red and warmed his nose and added a flavor of charred bark to the salty ocean air. He thought if only Julie had been on that beach in Cancun with him, he’d never have come home.
He had rolled his head back and pointed her to one particular dim star in a small patch of black just below the Little Dipper. It was his star, he told her. His life was faint but unmistakable like the light from the star alone in a tiny spot of sky. “That bright one over there, surrounded by all the others? That’s you.”
With the fire dying out and the chill settling in, he suggested they move indoors and climbed out of his sleeping bag. He took Julie’s hand as she awkwardly worked her way out of hers like a butterfly shedding her cocoon. He wrapped it around her shoulders and stood close behind her, watching the waves catch the starlight.
They turned back to the house, and it was on the last incline to its deck that Julie asked, “So. Have you remembered the first time you kissed me yet?” She bumped him playfully with her shoulder and lost her balance so that he had to catch her from behind, both arms wrapped around her and one hand accidentally cupping a breast. He let it linger longer than he should. She let him get away with it.
“You bet,” he replied as they righted themselves. He had prepared for this, hoping he’d get the chance to show off. “It was on the field trip we took to Alum Rock Park in eighth grade, behind the gazebo with the sulphur water fountain. Ha! Take that. Didn’t think I would. But I’ve known it all along. I was just messing with you last time.”
“Well, you’re messing again. You are so wrong.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Strike two. You aren’t even warm.”
“Okay, back to the bench.” He’d better hit the next guess out of the park. “I think you’re making this up. But just in case, I’ll give it more thought and get back to you on that one.”
What followed into the early-morning hours was a pair of rambling dialogues. They were part confessional, a bit of reminiscing, and a truckload of discovery as they shared episodes from their life stories. At one point, Julie spoke slowly and chose careful words to explain how she dropped out of Stanford, got married before she was twenty and started raising a family. It wasn’t the life she had envisioned.
Nate thought he was finally living the life he wanted. He had taken control for a change and made it real.
“Last time I asked, you said you wouldn’t go back and change anything because of your kids. Cool enough. So now that they’re gone and you’re on your own again, what’s on the Jules Cooper bucket list of things you wish you had gotten to do but didn’t? Do you want more hot chocolate?”
“No. I think I’d want more than that out of life.”
“I meant…”
“I know what you meant.” She laughed.
He left her to think about it while he went to the kitchen to start another pot of milk and get cocoa mix from the cupboard. When he came back, she was stretched along the length of the sofa staring at the ceiling.
“If I could, I’d buy a motorcycle and ride it across the country.”
That was a shocker. But it made sense as she explained.
“In one of those nights at the hospital, Mom and I were talking about my dad and how the only passion he had outside of work was his motorcycle, and the rides he used to take with a bunch of other people, mostly accountants and lawyers and s
uch on weekends. Some days I think the only fun memories I have of him are riding with him on his bike when I was little.”
“So I’ll ask again. What’s stopping you?” He went back to the kitchen to stir the milk barely simmering on the stove.
“Silly question. Those days are long past.”
“They are not. Go for it.”
“They are, too.”
“Are not.”
“Are, too.”
Nate was enjoying it. They were like two children in a sandbox, squabbling for no reason other than for the fun of disagreeing. Tag, you’re it.
Then he went back and stood in front of her with his hands on his hips. “Seriously, though. Stop making people drag you kicking and screaming to have a little fun. Do something big that makes you happy, just once before it really is too late. If that’s a motorcycle, there you go. You could do it if you wanted. Didn’t you say your son-in-law owns a bike shop?”
“He manages one. In Texas now, thank you for reminding me.” She rolled onto her side and buried her cheek in the sofa’s pillow. She talked to the floor. “But it hasn’t been lost on me that maybe it’s not coincidence that Tiffany married a guy who rides motorcycles the way her granddad did.”
“See? It’s in your DNA. I think you should do it. You could get a tattoo and wear a leather vest. Put a little vroom-vroom in your life.”
She turned her head and gave him that childish, toothy smile and a dreamy, unfocused gaze. “I thought that’s what we were doing this weekend.”
Oh, that was the most perfect come-on he had ever encountered. Where had all this sexual tension come from? No matter, he was a boy who wanted to kiss her badly, and she was a girl badly in need of kissing, but before he could move, the milk on the stove hissed. It was bubbling over. He went to rescue it and reached for the metal handle of the pot without thinking. It burned his fingers and he spilled milk all over the stove when he dropped the pot. By the time he cleaned it up and went back to Julie, she was dozing.
Nate replayed their conversation in his head as he sat in the easy chair after putting her to bed. Sometimes he replaced her response to some topic they had covered with what he wanted to hear, or he replaced his own response with something he wished he had said instead. Sometimes he imagined dialogue on a topic they never approached. Mostly he sat back and enjoyed the afterglow of being with Julie when they said nothing at all.