by Jeff Zentner
“What am I supposed to be doing?”
I explain.
“So I have to keep the squirrel on the path for eight seconds?” Jesmyn asks.
“That’s right.”
We pass people holding hands, having picnics, taking engagement photos, kissing, throwing babies in the air. Summertime parks are where the most vibrant displays of living go on. I wonder if watching people live is something that will ever again fade into the background for me.
I examine Jesmyn’s face for some clue of what she’s thinking. I’m unable to read her yet.
She busts me. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Do I have something on my face?”
“No.”
“Okay,” she says softly, pointing at a squirrel by the side of the path, its tail twitching. “Start the clock.” She moves carefully and steers the squirrel onto the path. It jumps a few feet and stops. She pursues it with quick, fine steps, her cowboy boots making a clip-clopping on the pavement, like little hooves. The squirrel leaps along the path a few more feet and starts to veer off to the right. She cuts it off and it keeps moving along the path.
I watch her in the yellow haze of the declining day. She moves with a certain natural rhythm; maybe because she’s a musician. It’s a relief to find beauty in something.
She turns back to me, smiling. “How long?”
“What?”
“Dude, you were supposed to be timing me.”
“I had a panic attack,” I blurt out, unclear on why I chose this exact moment to confess this.
Her smile dims; a cloud covering the sun. “What? Like while you were timing me?”
“No, no. The night of Blake’s funeral. I had a full-on panic attack. My sister took me to the hospital and everything.”
“Holy shit, Carver.” She motions to a nearby bench and we sit.
“I’m okay now. The doctor didn’t even give me any medicine.”
“What was it like?”
I start to answer but pause to let a couple with a stroller pass by. “Being buried alive. Falling through ice.”
“What are you going to do to treat them?”
I lean forward and run my fingers through my hair. “Maybe I’ll—I don’t know, actually. Maybe see if they keep happening, and if they do I’ll talk to someone, I guess.”
“Like a psychiatrist or something?”
“I don’t really want to.”
“It’s what I’d do if I were you.”
“Are you talking to someone? Professional?”
“Not besides my parents. But I would if I were having panic attacks.”
We sit there for a while without saying anything.
“I’m sorry this night’s turned into such a bummer,” I say. “It was supposed to be fun. Getting back to normal a little bit. Doing the tradition.”
“You knew Eli. Did you think all our dates were rainbows and ponies and ice cream?”
“No.”
“Not that this is a date.”
My face reddens. “I know.”
Thankfully, Jesmyn doesn’t acknowledge my embarrassment. “We talked about real shit that matters. I’m not scared to have genuine conversations.”
“Me neither.”
“Then this friendship has a shot, I guess.”
“I hope.”
We settle into a comfortable silence and watch the sky darken, the sun setting. The breeze is soft, as though the day’s breathing is slowing before it sleeps.
When I finally speak again, it’s not to fill the lull but because I want to talk. “Blake’s grandma invited me to spend one more day with her. I guess we’d do the things she wishes she and Blake had gotten to do together for his last day on Earth. Try to re-create his personality or story or whatever.”
“How would that work?”
“Never done one.”
“That sounds tough. Like emotionally.”
“Oh, I’ve considered that.”
“Are you gonna do it?”
“Not sure.” I want to tell her how hungry I am for some absolution. But that would be an admission of guilt, and right now, that’s my secret, a box of snakes under my pillow. I also want to tell her how afraid I am that I won’t be able to do Blake’s story justice and that’s what’s making me hesitant.
A few moments slip by. “You ever been to the beach in November?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“I have. Once. My aunt got married on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In November. Georgia and I were so excited to be going to the beach. We packed swimming suits and everything.”
“Isn’t it way cold?”
“Our parents tried to tell us that, but we didn’t listen. Anyway, we get there and everything is closed. Nobody around. The beach is freezing. But you couldn’t tell how cold the beach was by looking. There aren’t leafless trees there or anything. The ocean looks the same; everything looks the same. So it could be summer, except that the beach is deserted and everything’s closed. It’s a really sad and lonely feeling.”
Jesmyn tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I bet.”
“That’s me now, inside. Beach-in-November.”
Jesmyn stands. “Come with me.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“No, to where we can see the skyline. I’m still not used to getting to see skyscrapers every day.”
We walk to the other side of the park, where we have a view of Nashville’s skyline, twinkling in the humid distance. Jesmyn sits in the grass.
“Not worried about chigger bites?” I ask.
“Not really.”
I sit beside her. “I’d hate for us to have any unshared tribulation.”
“I can see why Eli liked you so much.”
“You can?”
“Yeah. You use words the way a musician uses surprise chords in a song.”
“That a good thing?”
“I’m not going to insult you after you’ve enriched my life by showing me squirrel rodeo,” Jesmyn says with a half smile.
“Did you and Eli talk about music a lot?”
“Does ninety percent of the time count as a lot?”
“Talking with me must be pretty beach-in-November.”
She shakes her head and stares at the buildings, rising bone white into the sky. She looks distant. Haunted.
I study her face. “Sorry if I said something dumb.”
“You didn’t.”
“What then?”
She keeps her eyes fixed on the skyline. She takes a deep breath. “I’m scared. School starts in two days and I’m not sure I’m ready anymore.”
“Me neither.”
“Even with Eli gone, I have one more friend going in than I expected. But I’m still terrified.”
“I have a lot fewer friends than I expected. So I get it.”
Jesmyn shifts position, sitting cross-legged. She picks at blades of grass. “And now I’m scared of dying before I do all the things I want to do in life. Seventeen years isn’t enough. There are so many pieces I want to learn. I want to record albums and perform. I never used to obsess about dying.”
“Me neither. I sometimes look at my bookshelf now and think about how someday I’m going to die without ever reading a lot of the books there. And one might be life-changingly good and I’ll never know.”
Jesmyn reaches over and gently picks a ladybug off my sleeve. “Will you go with me on the first day of school? Like walk into the school with me?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
Jesmyn lies on the grass with her hands behind her head. I stay sitting.
“I have an idea,” she murmurs.
“Yeah?”
“We should make a rule that we only spend some of our time talking about the past.”
“Probably a good idea.” I’m glad she suggested it, because I don’t feel like I have the right to.
“It doesn’t mean we care about them less. It just means that we s
till have to live.”
On the street adjoining the park, a car passes, blaring music from open windows. A group of seven or eight Vanderbilt-aged kids walks past, giggling and chattering. A father and mother stroll by on the path, the father carrying an exhausted toddler on his shoulders.
Night descends as a falling blanket. The city is a constellation of lights, each one representing a hand that turned the lightbulb. A hand attached to a mind containing a universe of memories and myths; a natural history of loves and wounds.
Life everywhere. Pulsing, humming. A great wheel turning. A light blinks out here, one replaces it there. Always dying. Always living. We survive until we don’t.
All of this ending and beginning is the only thing that’s infinite.
I text Jesmyn almost immediately after arriving home from dropping her off. I had fun tonight. I should wait. I don’t want to come off as a weirdo. But also I’m now keenly aware of how important it is to tell people what you want them to know while you can.
After a few seconds: Me too.
Let’s hang again soon, I reply. It felt good to talk.
Definitely, she replies.
A liquid rose-gold warmth—whatever color is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the color of aloneness—fills me briefly.
And then I wonder if Eli, wherever he is, can see me texting his girlfriend, talking about what a blast we had hanging out without him. I hope he can’t. I wouldn’t want him to get the wrong idea.
I’m sitting at home; it’s morning on the day before school starts. I’m psyching myself up for our meeting with my lawyer in a few hours and this weird surge of bravery comes over me. I feel ready to tell Nana Betsy Yes, I’ll do it. I’ll do the goodbye day. I’m strong enough to handle it.
I drive out to her house, park, walk up the driveway, and make it all the way to the door. Then I completely chicken out. It’s like my courage was playing a prank on me.
I consider knocking on the door anyway and seeing if she needs any help with anything and not mentioning the goodbye day. But I’m scared she’ll bring it up. She’ll read the cowardice on my face and smell the stink of guilt on me. So I slink away, hoping maybe she’ll forget ever suggesting it.
The lawyer’s oak-paneled waiting room smells like leather chairs, musty paper, and cigarette smoke on clothes from whoever was here last. Dotting the walls are paintings of golfers and hunting dogs with various fowl in their mouths. Generic waiting-room magazines (Sports Illustrated, Time, Southern Living, etc.) sit on an end table, but none of us are reading. On the whole, it’s a fairly shitty way to spend the last afternoon before school starts, but I seem to be in the “fairly shitty way” business lately.
I sit between my mom and dad. My dad shifts in his seat and keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs. My legs bounce while I rest my elbows on my knees and stare at the weathered hardwood floor. My mom lightly rubs my back. Her touch calms me a little. Thank goodness Georgia is at work. She’d be riled up and riling me up right now. The only sound in the room is the clicking of the receptionist’s perfectly manicured fingernails on her phone screen as she texts.
“Lawyers, bruh,” Mars says, pulling up the seat across from me.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Naw, for real, though, dude. I would know.”
“Your dad.”
“And my brother. Don’t forget my brother too. Just like my dad. Man, they would team up on me, lawyer my ass in the most mundane circumstances you can imagine.”
“Like?”
“Oh. We’re playing a board game and my dad’s like, to my brother, ‘Marcus, you cannot make that move,’ and my brother’s like, ‘Yes, I can, because if you examine the structure of the rules generally, they express the implicit intention that I should be able to make this move,’ and my dad’s like ‘Blah blah, but if you go beyond the text of the rules as written, blah blah, I don’t even know.’ ”
“Let me guess: whichever one of them won the argument, you lost.”
“Ding ding.”
“So here I am, sitting in a lawyer’s office, waiting for him to tell me how he’s going to argue with another lawyer to try to save my dumb ass. And whichever one of them wins, I’m going to lose. To some extent.”
“Correct.”
“One of them might win, but I’ll lose.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“You’re a real help, dude.”
“I try.”
“This sucks.”
“I know.” Mars gives me that lopsided smile of his and adjusts his glasses.
“We maybe should have gotten together and tried to avoid this mess.”
“I’m already avoiding it.”
“Good point. So how you doing, man? Everything good where you are right now?”
But he’s already gone.
A door opens at the end of a short hall, and a guy who resembles an anthropomorphic coyote, with icy blue eyes and facial tattoos, swaggers out. He looks like an outlaw. A tall, portly man with shaggy, longish white hair, wearing a gray pinstripe three-piece suit, follows him.
“Mr. Krantz? Carver Briggs is here,” the receptionist says to the white-haired man.
Mr. Krantz comes around the receptionist’s desk, hand extended. We stand as he shakes our hands.
“Folks, Jim Krantz. Call me Jimmy. Pleasure. This way.” He has a syrupy drawl.
We enter a small conference room with a round mahogany table, bookshelves full of green and tan law books with gilt lettering, more leather chairs, green-shaded lamps, and more hunting and golf pictures.
“Sit, sit.” Mr. Krantz gestures. He pulls out a chair, sits with a grunt, whips a pair of reading glasses onto his nose, and pulls out a legal pad and an expensive-looking gold pen. “All right, folks. Tell me what seems to be the matter.”
I sit there, mute. My dad clears his throat and tells Mr. Krantz about the Accident and Judge Edwards’s call for the DA to open an investigation. Mr. Krantz grunts and takes notes. Then he leans back in his chair and nods at me. “Okay, son. Tell me about this accident. What was your role, if any? I remember reading about it in the paper just after it happened, but I don’t recall that they said exactly what caused it. Something about texting?”
My legs start bouncing again. I hiccup acid, clear my throat, and take a deep breath. “I was at work. Um. I was supposed to hang out with my friends, Blake, Mars, and Eli. They were coming from Opry Mills Mall, where they’d gone to an IMAX movie. They were going to swing by my work and we were going to go to the park and hang out. So I texted Mars, ‘Where are you guys? Text me back.’ That’s all it said.”
Mr. Krantz doesn’t look up from his note-taking. “Who was driving?”
“Mars. Edwards.”
“That’s Fred Edwards’s son?”
“Right.”
“Did Mars text you back?”
“No, but there was a half-finished text to me on his phone when they, um. When—”
“Okay, I gotcha,” Mr. Krantz says softly, looking up from his pad. “Now Carver, everything we talk about in here is strictly protected by attorney-client privilege, which means nobody can force you to tell them what we discuss. That goes for your parents too, because they’re necessary parties to your defense. And that privilege exists so that we can be completely open and honest with each other, so I can best defend you if it comes to that, all right?”
I nod.
“So I need to ask: were you aware, when you texted Mars, that he’d probably text you back?”
I feel like I do that moment right before I’m about to slip on ice. I try to blink away the tears welling up in my eyes, but some spill. “Yes.”
“Were you aware Mars was driving at the time?”
“Pretty sure,” I whisper. It hurts to say this in front of my parents. I know I’m letting them down.
“Why text Mars and not one of your other friends in the car?”
“Um.” I’m crumbling.
“If you need a minute
.”
“Um. Because Mars always answered texts the quickest. Even if he was driving. I was being impatient. I wasn’t thinking.” A tear splats on the green carpet of the conference room and slowly expands. My mom rubs the nape of my neck.
“Okay,” Mr. Krantz says softly, and leans back in his chair. He sets down his pen, pulls off his glasses, and chews on one of the earpieces for a moment, apparently deep in thought, allowing me to pull myself together. Or at least try.
“It’s obvious he didn’t intend to hurt anyone,” my mom says. “This is ridiculous.”
“Well,” Mr. Krantz says, still chewing on his glasses. “Yes and no.” He rises, walks to a bookshelf, and pulls down a green volume. He puts his glasses on and leafs through it quickly. He sits.
“Folks, I won’t sugarcoat. Under Tennessee law, there’s an offense called criminally negligent homicide. Used to be called involuntary manslaughter. Criminally negligent homicide happens when someone takes ‘a substantial and unjustifiable risk’ and ‘the failure to perceive it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise under all the circumstances as viewed from the person’s standpoint.’ ”
I don’t fully comprehend what he’s saying, but I understand what “unjustifiable risk” and “gross deviation” mean. A purple spasm twists my stomach.
“Can you translate?” my dad asks, rubbing his forehead. “I’m a damned college English professor and you lost me.”
Mr. Krantz whips off his glasses again. “Means if you got a pretty good idea that you’re doing something that could get someone killed, and you go ahead and do it, you’re on the hook even though in your heart you never intended to kill anyone. This is sort of the hot new thing in prosecution. Up in Massachusetts, they tried to pin manslaughter on a girl who encouraged her friend by text message to commit suicide. Similar idea here.”
My insides are trying to crawl down my leg. An almost aggressive silence hangs in the room like a plume of nerve gas.
“So it’s not ridiculous. And the state’s best bet to prove it will be to wrangle Carver into saying exactly what he told me. But he doesn’t ever need to do that, because the Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination.” Mr. Krantz eyes me with a hopeful glimmer. “You haven’t told anyone what you told me, have you?”