Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  He didn’t even bother to watch whether it broke, only listened, with hope that bordered on prayer. Silence followed the shattering sound. Then he heard from somewhere in the house, “Dad!” And then the same voice, more desperately, “Moooom!” And he heard doors opening.

  He knew he ought to pick up the larger pieces of glass, find a broom and a dustpan, be there to warn anyone who appeared about the shards and apologize for depriving them all of coffee on a holiday morning. He ought to do a thousand things that real members of a family would do without thinking. But he found he lacked the will to do any of them. He went back to the closet, put on his peacoat, and went outside.

  Sunlight was slanting through the needles of the spruce trees. Maybe he should go out and get coffee—that would make up for all of it. “Don’t worry, Uncle Adam got coffee from town!” Someone would clean up the glass; surely, no barefooted child would step on the pile of glass, need stitches—shit, for all he knew, lose the foot.

  This was called catastrophic thinking, he’d been taught at Stone Manor, the Maine rehab he’d been through at the beginning of the year: His mind had a compulsion to seek out the worst possible outcomes. Why did it do that? Harder to say. But the point was, he shouldn’t trust his fear that breaking the coffeepot would lead to one of his nephews losing a foot. He could have another cigarette, and in a minute he’d go back inside and clean up the glass—and explain.

  But that was the part he couldn’t summon the energy for: the explanations. Having to say, over and over and over—to Jack and his mother and father and Kristen and Dan and Lizzy and Emma and Carrie and Toby and Sam and the baby whose name he forgot, and hell, to the cat while he was at it—tell them all about his meager hopes of making them coffee, and how with his graceful hands, he’d fucked it up. No, he couldn’t do it. Not after one cigarette, not after a hundred. Not sober.

  He dug in the pockets of his peacoat and found the keys to his rental car. He walked across the lawn and got in, put the car in neutral, rolled down the drive, stopped at the bottom of the hill, and started the engine.

  [ 2 ]

  Breakfast at Dunks

  Adam felt terrific as he drove. Turning along the curves of Burnette Road, he plugged his iPhone into the car stereo and put on a Wu-Tang mix he’d made. A second later, bass thumped so loud he imagined the glass of the windows bowing. The tree-pocked lawns and driveways up to boxy colonials—white siding, painted shutters—looked distant and remote, like he was staring down at them from the window of an airplane. He blew the stop sign at the end of the road and made a right onto the straight arrow of Parr Street, pressed the gas pedal to the floor and watched as the speedometer climbed all the way to eighty, the feeling of freedom swelling in his chest with each little number the arm of the speedometer glided past. He recalled the dream he’d been having: playing when it was at its best, when the boundaries broke down and everything was swept up in a single roar. You’d forget all about yourself—you didn’t have to be yourself.

  He came to a red light where Parr Street met Rector and was alarmed to feel the tumble of the antilock brakes before the car came to a halt. There must have been black ice on the road; he should take it easy. The good news was, he didn’t want a drink. On the road, you drank to come down from that feeling, to come down after any night onstage, good or bad, and then later to get up onstage in the first place, and finally to find the courage to look at the keys at all. But now, no, he didn’t want a drink, he told himself. He didn’t want one at all.

  The succession of driveways ended abruptly at Rector. On the corner was a gas station with a minimart, beyond that tracts of fallow farmland, a handwritten sign stuck into the soil by the road: Acreage for Sale. Adam was humming these words to the tune of “Address Unknown” when it occurred to him he didn’t know where he was going. A sign on the corner had an arrow to the right for I-91 North and South. He should go to New York City! He hadn’t been there for years, but he still had friends there, they wouldn’t all have moved. Then again—it was Thanksgiving morning. Even assuming anybody was home, how happy would they be to find him at their apartment doors today? He tried to avoid thinking about it, but he was pretty sure if he did, he’d remember a lot of reasons his welcome in New York might be less than whole-hearted. He had the vague sense of owing a lot of people in the city money.

  A car honked behind him; he hadn’t noticed that the light had changed. Ahead on Parr was nothing but more farmland—fields, he remembered, in which he and his friends had once gone cow tipping, in the exhilaration of polishing off their very first keg. Adam raised his hand apologetically to the car behind; the slouched silhouette of the driver only honked again. He turned right, toward the highway.

  Okay, New York was a bad idea. Where, then? He was approaching the roundabout where Rector met Route 32. On the opposite side of the road he spotted a Dunkin’ Donuts, its pink-and-orange logo like a flashy grin against the building’s asphalt roof. He made a U-turn across the double yellow and pulled into the parking lot.

  The sun had risen in an empty blue sky. If anything, though, the sweeping brightness as he got out of the car only made the morning seem colder—as if the sunlight carried its own form of chill. He banged his hands together, blew on his knuckles as he hurried across the lot, and pushed open the door of the Dunks.

  He was struck pleasantly in the face with heated air, tinged with the smell of sugared pastry. The surfaces beneath the florescent lights were all clean and bright pastels; “Sleigh Ride” by the Ronettes was playing.

  A short, doe-eyed young woman stood behind the counter, wearing a black headscarf topped with a pink Dunkin’ Donuts visor. She smiled as Adam approached.

  “Welcome to Dunkin’ Donuts,” she said. “What can I get you?”

  He’d skipped dinner the night before, and surveying the Willy Wonka racks of donuts, he found he was starving. “I’ll take a chocolate bow tie, a dozen jelly munchkins, and a large coffee with two creams,” he said. It was his high school order. He paid with his debit card, and the woman began loading his breakfast into a paper bag with a pair of plastic tongs. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said as she handed him the bag and the great Styrofoam cup of coffee.

  “Thanks,” he answered. “You just working today?”

  “I’m going over to my cousin’s tonight.”

  “Cool. Well, enjoy it. Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Thanks for visiting Dunkin’ Donuts,” she answered.

  He sat at a table by the window, watched the occasional car turning on or off the roundabout up the street. He could probably drive all the way to Chicago and back without hitting any traffic—anyone with somewhere to be was already there by now. Nat King Cole’s “Frosty the Snowman” started playing, which was pretty painful if you knew the jazz piano stuff Cole did earlier in his career. But that was just pretentious music nerd griping, Adam thought as he took a swig of the scalding coffee, and anyway, you did what you needed to do to get over. He sure as shit had.

  He plucked off one end of the bow tie, put it in his mouth. He was losing some of the ecstatic momentum of his initial flight. They’d probably be awake at the house by now; they’d notice he was missing. He imagined them standing in a circle around the shards of the coffeepot like a forensics team, trying to reconstruct what had happened from the pattern of shattered glass. Soon they’d start to worry. Jesus, was he really going to do that to them again? But then it occurred to him—he could still put it all back together. He was at the Dunkin’ Donuts. He could get one of those big paper cartons of coffee, like that had been the plan all along, set it triumphantly on the kitchen counter, and then . . .

  But they wouldn’t believe that he’d just gone out to get them coffee. They wouldn’t believe it, because it wouldn’t be true. Yet they’d spend the whole day pretending they believed it, and he’d pretend he believed they believed it, and then the day would still be ruined, only no one would be allowed to admit it. No, better to let them have their Thanksgiving. They were
used to his absence by now. They could talk shit behind his back if they wanted, they could feel sorry for him if they wanted. Either way, it’d be easier for everyone if he wasn’t there.

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket. He wasn’t sure which one of them to text, though. Once, Kristen would have been the obvious choice. He’d always had that bond with his older sister, an innate sympathy that was the yin to the yang of mutual antagonism that seemed to have existed between him and Jack since Adam was in diapers. But Kristen was different since she’d gotten married. Her husband, Dan, worked in finance, traded Asian currencies or something like that. The upshot was he was rich, and hence Kristen was rich, and she’d started acting like it, like somebody’s rich wife. She lived in Westport, she rode horses, she had a sailboat and an au pair, and she was always posting pictures of that shit on Instagram. Not that there was anything criminal about it. It was just that once, she and Adam would have laughed at people who lived in Westport, owned horses and sailboats. Growing up, Adam believed his older sister was the coolest person in the world: wry, tough, worldly (by the standards of suburban Roxwood, anyway), with a nose ring and an oversize green army coat she wore every day of high school and shoulder-length hair streaked with blonde. She used to give him drags off the cigarettes she’d sneak in the backyard. And when he was eleven, she gave him a cassette that changed his life, a mixtape of all her favorite bands, with the songs an eleven-year-old had hope of liking, too: “Psycho Killer” by the Talking Heads, “Heart of Gold” by Neil Young, “Battle of Evermore” by Led Zeppelin, “Casey Jones” by the Grateful Dead. None of this music was on the radio in the early nineties, and more to the point, at eleven, music to Adam was études and impromptus and Vladimir Horowitz. He even had a poster of Vladimir Horowitz on his wall! Listening to that tape was like stepping through the wardrobe into fucking Narnia. The music was simple, sure, but it was the simplicity that let it reach into your chest and drag you around by the heart.

  But now Kristen had abandoned him—set him on a path and then disappeared along the journey. Somewhere in his mind, jangly acoustic rockabilly started up, and a sardonic, untrustworthy singer: “Yer So Bad” by Tom Petty. On some shelf in his head was a sort of radio that broadcast his emotional background noise as songs he’d heard too often, or occasionally (painfully) written. He couldn’t open a credit card bill without the accompaniment of the galloping tremolo of Schubert’s Erlkönig; he heard a choral melisma he’d written for a Kiss and Kill album whenever he was about to come.

  When he was still playing, he could take this as a kind of affirmation: that he was doing with his life what his brain was wired to do. Lately, though, he identified a mocking quality to it—as though something in his mind was making fun of him.

  He didn’t remember the specific lyrics to “Yer So Bad”—he knew there was a sister in there, but lyrics were never his thing. In whatever band he was in, they were always someone else’s job. He remembered the sense of the song well enough, though: to hell with the squares, we’ve got each other.

  He didn’t need Tom Petty to tell him that he was angry at Kristen. At Stone Manor, he’d been led to the realization that he was angry at all of them. The problem was he had no right to be.

  He texted Jack because it would only confirm everything Jack already thought about him, and so it would be like a gift.

  Couldn’t do it. Had to go. Tell everybody sorry.

  Then he hit send. The phone answered with a bhwoop.

  It took him to the sixth Munchkin to realize how fucking stupid that text had been—that it could only ratchet up the alarm over his disappearance. He picked up his phone again. No missed calls, no texts back. Maybe they hadn’t seen the text, hadn’t yet noticed he was gone; or maybe they’d expected it, and didn’t need an explanation. He began another text to Jack.

  I’m cool, I just

  But then he didn’t know what to add, and hit send by mistake.

  Wasn’t done with that text

  But once again, he couldn’t think of what else to say. As he stared at the screen, a wheel of spinning bars appeared, and in the next instant, the screen was entirely black. “Aw fuck,” he said aloud.

  He looked around the Dunkin’ Donuts, as if a phone charger might be found lying around one of the tables. “Hey, do you have an iPhone charger?” he asked the woman at the counter.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Mine’s a Galaxy.”

  “These things die so quickly,” he said to her. “It’s like as soon as you unplug them, the countdown starts.” She smiled a little and shrugged.

  Just my luck, he thought as he shoved the phone back in his pocket. But no, he corrected himself, that was the dumbest, the most dangerous way to think: That it was bad luck; that he was its victim; that he was a victim at all. Self-pity was toxic to recovery. It was the vortex that pulled in all your resolve, all your good intentions, all your promises to yourself, until there was nothing left to do but drink, smoke, snort, fuck, whatever—because what other choice had life ever given you? No, he was the one who’d run out on his family. He was the one who’d written dumb, cryptic, alarming texts. He was the one who’d left his charger—all of his shit, for that matter—back at the house. It wasn’t bad luck. It was him: Adam being Adam.

  And it was obvious where he should go next. He should go back to San Francisco. That’s where his life was now: his job, his apartment, his stuff. So his attempt to spend the holiday with his family had flamed out. It happened. You dealt with it, sober, and you moved on to the next thing: the next flame out, the next triumph, disaster, challenge, whatever. You kept on moving, forward. That’s what recovery was—that’s what life was, if you were any good at it. Progress. One foot in front of the other, one day at a time.

  He was doing good in San Francisco, too. He’d chosen to live there after getting out of rehab because it seemed far from all the places he’d fucked up, all the people he’d fucked over; plus, he happened never to have played a Kiss and Kill show there, so none of it was overlaid with memories of Johanna. And it’d turned out to be a pretty cool place: low-key, good-natured, scruffy in a mild way, like your buddy’s dog or something. He had his job at the bank, had even gotten promoted recently, to General Accounts Manager, now got to help people open checking accounts and rent safe deposit boxes. It was the least exciting, least surprising, least rock job imaginable—he wore khakis and a tie every day, for Christ’s sake. But that’s exactly what he’d wanted: no surprises, no music. And while he hadn’t really made any friends in the months he’d been out there, he didn’t think of himself as lonely, exactly. At any rate, he was rarely alone. He shot the shit with guys at work, talked basketball, Netflix. And most Fridays and Saturdays, he was out on dates.

  He’d put a profile up on a couple sites—it wasn’t hard to find someone to have dinner with. Dating—“putting himself out there”—seemed to him another component of a rightly directed life. Granted, if he was honest, his heart wasn’t really in it, and often he sensed the women’s hearts weren’t in it, either. There was a predictability to the interactions that was stultifying, like they had the choreography of a Japanese tea ceremony or something: meeting; ordering from the menu; exchanging amusing anecdotes and snippets of biography; waiting for the check; paying the check; either having sex, or not. The sex was fun, sure, but it seemed to make another date less likely, as if it resolved the encounter in a way that made further meetings superfluous. But he’d come to suspect that everything beyond the act of the date itself was superfluous. The point was you were trying.

  “Last Christmas” by Wham! had started playing. The synths were pretty cool, though the Dunks’ speakers weren’t exactly doing them justice. Anyway, he figured he ought to get moving—what with the coffee situation, it wasn’t impossible his father would pull into the parking lot next. That would be a fun conversation: “Hey, Dad, no, I was just leaving, y’know, it turns out you guys are all sort of terrifying, and by the way, did any of the kids step on that pile of
glass and lose a foot? Anyway, happy Thanksgiving!”

  He stood, picking up his coffee. “Take it easy,” he said to the woman at the counter.

  “You, too,” she answered brightly.

  He got back in the car and turned on the heat. It was time to head to the airport. San Francisco, the bank, dating—trying. When would it end? But the point was it wouldn’t end—it couldn’t end, because it was his sobriety, his life. Thinking of it as temporary, as something that would lead to something better, or easier, was just another trap, another way for him to piss it all away. “So do it right for once,” he told himself: You won’t see Johanna again; you’re done with music. You tried, you failed, just like a million other kids with perfect pitch and a good left hand. But you didn’t die, and you got sober, and your liver’s not even in bad shape, the doctor said, so be grateful for that, and go to the airport. You’ll make it to Thanksgiving some other year.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” Through the window of the Dunks, he saw that he’d forgotten the rest of his donuts. He watched as the woman in the headscarf went to the table, picked up the bag, ate one of the Munchkins, threw the bag away. He put on his seat belt and put the car in reverse.

  [ 3 ]

  The Airport Sheraton in Windsor Locks

  Marissa knew she should change out of her uniform before going down to the lobby for breakfast. She should shower without letting her hair get wet, she should iron and put on the sweater she’d crammed into her rollaboard, she should grab a coffee and a muffin in the lobby, and get on the road. It was already past nine. Even assuming there wouldn’t be any traffic on a holiday morning, it would take at least an hour to get to Robbie’s parents’ house in Vermont. She’d never get there by ten, as she’d promised him. And the longer she delayed, the later she’d be.