Kill Me

by Stephen White

  To her, maybe. “His stepfather killed himself by drinking and driving. That’s all he was saying—that he doesn’t want me to do that. He’s a kid. He’s concrete. That’s how they think.”

  Thea’s eyes told me that she was trying hard to be patient with me.

  I could read people if the question was about power. I was great at poker, decent at chess. Put me in a business negotiation and I could identify my adversary’s bottom line before she recognized she had one.

  Seduction? I was practiced and reliable.

  But nuance and love? Sadly, until I met Thea, I was almost illiterate.

  Thea took a deep breath and exhaled slowly before she said, “You think Adam is a concrete thinker? No, don’t answer that. Don’t. I don’t even want to hear that rationalization. Because he’s not, not even close. From where Adam stands, risk is … risk. It’s a simple thing, but monumental for him. I think you should step back and try to see all this from his point of view.”

  I saw the vague outlines of a plot developing, and shot from the hip to defend my lifestyle. “I should just give it all up? All the things I love to do?” I was a little ambushed by the fact that my words sounded so petulant and so immature. Even to me. “I’m sorry,” I said immediately. “That didn’t come out right.”

  Thea, I think, suspected the words came out exactly right and that I wasn’t as sorry as I would like to appear to be.

  She said, “What’s more important to you? Those crazy things you love to do? Or the people who love you? Is that really such a tough call?”

  “Thea …” Belatedly, I realized that we were no longer talking only about Adam’s feelings about all of my “X Games crap.” Thea had some deep feelings of her own.

  “You want me to back off, too, Thea? You’ve never said anything. I thought you—”

  She stopped me with a quick shake of her head. “He only has one father now. When he came here the first time, he didn’t know what he was going to find when he knocked on our door. Me? I knew what I was getting into with you when I said ‘I do.’ My eyes were wide open. But … earning Adam’s love—long-term love—may be trickier for you than it was to earn mine.”

  Her tone wasn’t self-congratulatory; it was self-mocking. The self-mocking tone made it all quite disconcerting to me.

  “What does that mean, Thea? What are you saying?”

  She pulled her hand away from mine, climbed over me, and rolled onto her side of the bed. She pulled the covers up under her armpits and was staring at the ceiling when she said, “I hope you get another chance to ask your son what he thinks you should do. I bet he has some thoughts. Some perspective on all this. You know, about responsibility, and … and recklessness and … loss. Something that might help you understand what he told you tonight on the phone.”

  “Thea.”

  “I’ll raise our daughter by myself if I have to. Adam, too, if I get the chance. Happily. I will. I love you, and I knew what I was getting into when I fell in love with you. But if the time comes that I have to bury you, and it turns out that you bailed out on all of us—all of us—for some stupid, selfish, macho thrill, I’ll …” She left the thought unfinished, except for a throaty growl.

  I suspected the omitted part had something to do with defecating on my grave.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Things were not the same with Adam.

  After his dramatic disclosure about the true circumstances of his stepfather’s death, and my obviously inadequate response, Adam never expressed any interest in moving in with us in Colorado. He’d stayed with Bella in Cincinnati and continued his homeschooling adventure.

  Thea stubbornly maintained that my even more stubborn adherence to a lifestyle that was chock-full of risk had short-circuited Adam’s desire to move west. I wasn’t convinced. I placated myself by rationalizing that it was my son’s risk-avoidance, and not my risk-approaching, that was the real issue. He was looking for an excuse to stay within the odd cocoon he enjoyed with his mom, and my X Games lifestyle provided him with a convenient reason to do it.

  My wife and I disagreed about Adam’s retreat from our home and our lives, and chose not to argue about it. We didn’t exactly agree to disagree. We merely agreed not to bicker.

  Although Bella had previously been unwilling to cash the checks that Thea and I had been sending to Cincinnati to help support my son, she finally relented and began to allow us to contribute financially to Adam’s care. Bella, whose employer had recently stopped providing his staff with healthcare coverage, was especially grateful that I put Adam on our family health insurance policy.

  I was thrilled to provide the support. But I recognized the irony, too: Now that Adam was excluding me from his life, I was becoming a caricature of an absentee father. To cushion my hurt, I focused my paternal energy where it was always accepted with a wide smile: Berkeley.

  Thea and Adam and I settled into what for me was an unsatisfying routine. Thea and I phoned him frequently. He didn’t answer. We left messages. He rarely returned our calls. When he did call, the conversations were brief and awkward. He’d ask about his sister. They’d talk and laugh.

  We frequently invited him to join us at our home in the mountains in Ridgway. He would say he’d think about it. We’d never get an actual reply. He never showed up on that doorstep.

  He didn’t totally avoid seeing us. We managed to lay eyes on him occasionally. But the visits were in Ohio, not in Colorado; they lasted for a night or two, not a week or two. We took him out to dinner at neighborhood places he liked near his home in Cincinnati. He gave us good-natured lessons on how to eat a three-way without getting covered in chili and cheese. He laughed and giggled with his sister and was cordial and friendly with Thea. But when he was alone with me he acted like he had someplace else to be.

  The biggest change in my life? The connection—the one that had been growing between us since that first day he’d asked me if Cal was his sister—disappeared. My son treated me like a distant uncle.

  Each time I saw him, each time we spoke, though, I fell more and more in love with him.

  Each time I yearned to get a little closer.

  Each time he eluded me.

  I did manage to finagle one more extended visit with Adam. It took my best bait.

  At my invitation, Adam agreed to accompany me on a visit to see Connie before his uncle’s health declined any further. The father-and-son trip to visit the brother and uncle took place in 2004 shortly before I broke my wrist in the Bugaboos—and therefore before I knew anything about the Death Angels—but not before Connie’s illness had robbed him of his ability to maneuver around his own house in his chair.

  Adam refused to let me pick him up in Cincinnati in my plane on the way east, so we took separate commercial flights to New York City. My first chance to hug him didn’t happen until he strolled up to me on the platform at Penn Station only five minutes before the Acela was scheduled to head north toward New Haven.

  Our embrace was awkward. I hugged him, forcing myself to temper the exuberance I felt. He didn’t hug me back.

  Morosely, I thought that the physical act was a lot like hugging my disabled brother. Emotionally, it was more like hugging a statue.

  Connie and Adam connected during the visit like two flat surfaces painted with contact cement. Connie was wheelchair-bound and both his energy and his mobility were gone by then, but despite his limitations he and Adam were inseparable for the few days my son and I were in New Haven. When Connie slept or rested Adam didn’t hang out with me, he hung out with Felix. Adam peppered Felix with questions in fluent Spanish about his uncle, or about Guatemala. He was fascinated by Felix’s stories about the history of hostilities and the local politics in Chocola. He had a particular curiosity about the plight of the local coffee economy. I was hurt at being excluded, and actually considered the possibility that Adam was using his relationship with Connie as retaliation for whatever it was that had fractured between him and me.

  On another le
vel, I was touched by Adam’s connection with my brother. I saw evidence of what was missing between my son and me, and I felt an unfamiliar emotion, too.

  Envy.

  Adam made long solo walks to campus to spend time in Yale’s libraries and to visit the philosophy department where Connie had taught for so long. He read every word that his uncle had written since he’d arrived at Yale as an assistant professor. He somehow tracked down videotapes and DVDs of lectures Connie had given and even got hold of a copy of the old dissertation his uncle had written at Penn more than two decades before on the ethical considerations of post–World War II foreign policy in Europe.

  Connie gave Adam gifts of books from his personal library—dozens of volumes of texts that were full of his penciled annotations. To ensure that the tomes wouldn’t be bruised or battered on their journey from Connecticut to Ohio, my son and I packed the books up as though they were Fabergé eggs. I took pleasure in the mundane tasks of wrapping and shipping because the chores gave me time with my son.

  For Adam? I could’ve been the guy behind the counter at the local pack ’n’ ship store.

  That trip to New Haven was all about nephew and uncle, not about father and son.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Remember the phone call that interrupted the board meeting I was attending in that wonderful conference room that floats above infinity on the hillside above Santa Barbara?

  The phone call that caused me to gather my things, interrupt the meeting, and stumble from the room?

  That telephone call?

  No? How about the riff of my ring tone?

  Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, bra/La la how the life goes on.

  Not mine. Not my life. My life seemed to stop right then and there.

  With that phone call.

  The bones in my wrist—the one I’d busted in the Bugaboos in the spring of 2004—hadn’t healed properly. My arm was still casted more than five months after I followed Newton’s Law and the crumbled cornice down that icy chute in Canada. Every time my local orthopod did a final X-ray to check how my two fractured bones were fusing, he would shake his head and say, “You’re really a slow healer. You know that?”

  I didn’t know that. I’d always thought that I’d bounced back from injuries like a kid.

  I remember being puzzled for a minute or two. But that was all.

  The woman on the phone that day, the one who’d surprised me with the call on my cell during the board meeting, was an orthopedic surgeon at the Health Sciences Center in Denver. She was also the Rocky Mountains’ designated wrist goddess—“the best wrist guy in the state”—my local doc had called her. By any measure, she was brilliant; she was an Israeli who had trained at Brown and Harvard, and had ended up in Denver to be close to the mountains. I’d heard from friends who had seen her in the back bowls at Vail that watching her attack the bumps was a physics lessons and a dance recital all at once. But her bedside manner? Think about the attitude an Israeli soldier might adopt at a border checkpoint in the West Bank: That was the atmosphere in her clinic.

  Cuddly, she wasn’t. But she was the doc that I’d been referred to after my wrist bones seemed immured from the prospect of healing.

  My wrist, and its bones’ prolonged reluctance to fuse, had caused my Israeli genius some head-scratching angst. After making a not-too-subtle insinuation that the root cause of the medical mystery was probably my fault—it certainly wasn’t hers—she’d questioned me at great length about my diet, my current health, and my exercise habits. I’m sure my aggravation at her digression showed as she’d focused particular attention on three things that to me seemed immaterial to understanding the genesis of my recalcitrant scaphoid: I’d had a recent pattern of headaches, some intermittent mild nausea, and I’d had a cartoonish episode on the treadmill during which I’d lost my balance and almost broken my other wrist.

  After hearing my litany of woes, she’d mumbled something in a language I didn’t speak and ordered—yes, ordered—me to submit to a slew of additional tests, including a bone scan and two MRIs, one of my wrist, the other of my head.

  I squeezed the inconvenient scans into my schedule early in the morning of the day of the board meeting I had to attend in California. The second the technicians were done with me, I raced from the clinic to the airport where Mary was waiting for me with a warm jet and hot coffee.

  The phone call to my cell phone in Santa Barbara was my Israeli wrist guru’s way of passing along the results of that morning’s workup.

  “You have an aneurysm,” she’d said. “In your brain. It’s not good.” No warm-up. No “Is this a good time to talk?” No “I have some bad news.”

  Simply “You have an aneurysm. In your brain. It’s not good.”

  Just like that.

  My first thought upon hearing the news? How the hell would you know? You’re a wrist guy.

  La la how the life goes on.

  I’m an n of only one, but days later, when I was finally able to take a deep breath and reflect on what had happened, the post-diagnostic blur struck me as something like waking up and suddenly finding myself being escorted into the front car of a particularly sinister roller coaster.

  The events of those days flashed by rapidly, way too fast for my senses to experience them as any more than momentary blurs. Landing at Centennial, driving to Denver, checking in at the wrist doc’s clinic, her hushed but perfunctory “I’m so sorry,” the raw images from the MRI, the elevator ride to see another doctor, this time a neurosurgeon—a frigging neurosurgeon, Jesus—his take on my bulging artery, and his use of the words “natural history” to describe the life cycle of aneurysms like the one I had sitting in such an inconvenient location in my brain. The guy actually wasn’t a bad artist and drew a cartoonish depiction of my brain and its aneurysm so I would have a concrete representation of my condition to share with friends and loved ones.

  Appointments were made for me at clinics for more tests, prescriptions filled. Instructions given. I passed by person after person whose faces were saying “I’m sorry about your news.”

  The greatest irony? The guru still didn’t know why my wrist wasn’t healing.

  Ha.

  I drove home that first day and tried to be even-keeled as I told Thea the news. How bad was the timing? It could hardly have been worse. Thea was in the beginning of the third trimester of her pregnancy with our second child.

  She nodded a lot and held my hand. Underneath, I was a wreck. I was counting on her to be my rock. She was, undoubtedly, counting on me to be around to help her parent our children.

  I gave her all the good parts of the bad news first.

  “It may have been there my whole life,” I said.

  “The doctors say it could be stable,” I said.

  “Nothing may have to change at all,” I said.

  By nature, Thea wasn’t as optimistic as me. Or her denial was worse. Sometimes I can’t tell those two things apart. “Can they operate?” she asked.

  “He said it’s not in a good location for surgery. They can’t get to it easily. It would be risky to go in.”

  “How risky?” she asked.

  “There would almost certainly be some damage.”

  “Damage?” She swallowed. “To your brain?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much damage?”

  I pondered the question. I’d pondered it plenty already, but I wanted to be clear as I presented the dilemma to Thea. The truth was this: Where damage to my brain was concerned I’d already concluded that there was no such thing as an acceptable amount. Finally I said, “Much more than if they leave it alone and it doesn’t rupture. A lot less than if they leave it alone and it does.”

  My wife recognized the conundrum immediately. “Dear God,” she said. “Now what?”

  “More tests. More opinions. We take it slow. No rush to judgment.”

  Overnight I’d become a medical cliché machine.

  I’d also decided to let my optimism, or my de
nial—whichever is the part of me that lets me believe I can survive anything—do the talking. “Hey? Maybe it doesn’t change,” I said. “Ever. It could’ve been there my whole life, right? That’s what they said. It could be stable. They said that, too. They did. It could just … stay there. But I’ll get all the new tests. I’ll listen to the doctors. For now, though … for now we just sit tight and we watch it.”

  Thea’s inclination was to fix broken things, not to watch them. “Then why are you having headaches? And why the nausea? If the bulge is stable, why did you fall off that treadmill? Why all that? Why now?”

  I could tell that maintaining my denial around Thea was going to be a chore. I said, “I don’t know.”

  “After the tests, if the doctors say it isn’t stable, then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If it blows?” she asked, dabbing away tears. “Ruptures, I mean. What then?”

  Blows? I had a sudden image of my head exploding like Krakatoa. I shook it off. “It could kill me. Or it could end up being … like a terrible stroke. I could be …” I decided to use the word from the conversation with the comic in Nobu. “Gorked.”

  I didn’t reveal the derivation of the acronym.