Every Moment After

by Joseph Moldover

  “How’s packing?” she asks.

  “Okay.” The truth is that I haven’t packed a thing. My mom has stacked boxes in my room, but they’re all empty.

  “Are you taking everything? All your stuff?”

  “Not really. I mean, I’ll still have my room at home. I’m not going to take my stuff from when I was a kid. Like, all my baseball trophies.” She nods but doesn’t say anything. “Have you ever thought about going back to school?” I ask. “Going to college?”

  “No. Yes. Yes, I did. When I was a lot younger.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Money, I guess. For one. Not really that, though. Dad didn’t think much of the idea.”

  “Of college?”

  “Of me and college.”

  “I think you could go to college.”

  “I guess I could. I thought about it. Not college so much as just leaving New Jersey.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “Nebraska.”

  “That’s a strange place to want to go.”

  “No stranger than anywhere else, I guess. No stranger than here.”

  I think back to what Lucas had to say about Officer Jessup. “What kind of guy tells his kid not to go to college?” I ask.

  Sarah doesn’t respond for a moment.

  “My dad loved me.”

  “Sure.”

  “And I loved him. And I hated him.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He was a cop. He was always a cop. Did your dad do dad-stuff with you? Play catch?”

  Only for about a hundred thousand hours. “Yeah, I guess he did.”

  “My dad took me to a carnival once. Just once. Out at the fairgrounds. He bought a bunch of tickets and let me go on rides. He didn’t come on with me, just watched me go on them by myself. He said the tickets would last longer that way.”

  “That’s nice, I guess.”

  “It was the day my mom was leaving. They didn’t tell me. He took me out, and when we got back, she was gone. She was gone, and all her stuff was gone.”

  “You ever see her?”

  “No.”

  “And then it was just the two of you?”

  “Yeah. And he was hard to be around. Off-duty, he was okay. Not really warm, but okay. But when he was in uniform, he was ‘Officer Jessup.’ Not ‘Dad.’ Never ‘Dad.’ ”

  “Literally, you had to call him Officer?”

  She nods. “And he worked a lot. And the shooting happened, and he was in the photo. Everyone thought he was a hero. He was on TV and everything. Do you know that people wanted him to sign copies of that picture?”

  I shake my head.

  “I watched it all and thought: If only you really knew him. The real him, what he’s really like. You wouldn’t think he was such a great police officer. You wouldn’t think he was a hero.”

  “He’s gone now.”

  “He’s gone,” she says, “but I’m not. He’s gone because a blood vessel burst in his head. I didn’t leave. I didn’t do anything. If that hadn’t happened, I’d still be living with him. I didn’t decide anything about it.”

  She suddenly seems restless, picking at a seam on the couch, pushing herself away when I reach out to put a hand on her knee. “You want to go somewhere?”

  “Sure.” We haven’t been out of her house since the ball field. “Where?”

  She’s quiet for a moment, and then she looks at me. “Show me where you live.”

  “Where I live? You want to see my house?”

  She nods.

  “All right.”

  My truck is at home, so we take her car. Neither one of us talks much on the drive over, other than me giving her directions. I’m tired, and I can tell she is too. It’s like a blanket lying over us both. I stare out the window and watch the houses getting bigger as we get closer to mine, the cars in the driveways getting nicer.

  “That’s it, over there.”

  She pulls over and rolls to a stop across the street and a few houses down, looking out her window, the back of her head to me.

  “It’s nice.”

  My parents are having some sort of a party. There are a bunch of cars in the driveway and in front of the house. All the lights are on inside, and I can hear noise from the pool out back.

  “Have you always lived here?”

  “All my life.” I wonder if she’s going to want to go inside, meet my parents. I wonder if I should invite her in. We sit quietly as she watches the house. Then I lean over and kiss the side of her neck. She stiffens and pulls back. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s all right,” I say, even though it’s not. I want her. I want to feel the way I did the first time with her. I want to feel like there’s a future. I want to feel something.

  She turns and looks me full in the face. “You know what I liked about you, Matt? You were my decision. My first real decision.”

  “Do you still like me?”

  Instead of answering, she asks me a different question.

  “If I were still me but I were your age, if we’d gone to high school together, do you think you would have liked me? Do you think we’d have been a couple?”

  I imagine it, imagine her, a pretty eighteen-year-old, not particularly interested in baseball, not headed to college. Would I have liked her? Would I have noticed her?

  “Sure,” I say. “Yeah, sure we would.”

  She looks at me for a long moment, then shakes her head and turns back toward my house. Her voice is low and quiet when she speaks. “That first night, I told you something. I told you that I liked it when you were honest.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I’m going to go home. By myself.”

  We sit for another few seconds, and then I get out of the car. I lean down and look at her through the open window. “Why did you want to come over here?”

  Sarah stares back at me, then shrugs. “I just wanted to know what world you came from. I wanted to know where you were when you weren’t with me.”

  She shifts into drive, and I step back as she pulls away from the curb. I watch her taillights as she turns the corner at the end of my street and disappears. Then I look at my house, across the street. The world I come from.

  I don’t want to go inside, but a white Lexus has my truck boxed in. I study the situation. It’s too close for me to get out, even if I drive over the lawn. I walk around the side of the house to the pool, the sound of the party louder now. There are a bunch of middle-aged people standing around, drinking and talking, all of them thick and pleasant, smiling and nodding along to whatever bullshit the person next to them is saying. No one’s in the water, of course. Please don’t ever let me be like these people, I think. Please let me die first.

  “Matt!”

  Dad’s spotted me.

  “What are you doing over there in the shadows? Come on over.”

  He’s standing with three other guys. I don’t recognize them.

  “Dad,” I say as I walk over, “I—”

  “Matt, this is Ken Murphy, Mark Sutter, and Christian Forrest.” All three nod and raise their glasses. “This is my son, Matt. Matt’s off to Bucknell next week.”

  “Your dad says you’re a hell of a ballplayer,” Ken—​or possibly Mark; I’ve already forgotten—​says.

  I shrug and nod, looking at the empty pool.

  “He is,” Dad says. “Second base. He—”

  “Who has the white Lexus?” I ask.

  All four of them stare at me.

  “The white Lexus,” I say again, looking up from the water and studying them. Two of the guys shake their heads. The third takes a drink from his glass and looks away.

  “Where’s Mom?” I ask.

  “In the house,” Dad says quietly.

  I turn without another word and make my way through the crowd, toward the patio door. There are more people inside. Mom is in the kitchen, drinking wine with Chris Thayer’s mother.
<
br />   “Hello, Matt!”

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Mrs. Thayer. Do you know—”

  “I was just talking about you,” Mrs. Thayer says. “How great you’ve been about taking Chris to PT. He’s going to miss you.”

  “What are his plans for the fall?” I ask.

  “Oh, he’s very excited, but it doesn’t surprise me that he hasn’t said anything. He can be so modest. If you asked, he’d tell you about it, though. He has an internship. He worked very hard to set it up. He actually deferred the start of classes until the spring because they wanted him full-time . . .”

  Mrs. Thayer goes on about Chris’s plans, but I look around the room and tune her out. I can’t imagine what kind of an internship Chris could do, and I’m happy that he can maybe take some classes, but the walls are closing in, and I need to get out of here.

  “It sounds great,” I tell Mrs. Thayer. “He’s going to do great.” I turn to Mom. “I need to go somewhere, and there’s a white Lexus boxing me in.”

  “Not mine,” Mrs. Thayer says with a smile. Mom scans the room. “The Penningtons have a Toyota, I think . . . No, I don’t think it’s anyone in here.”

  “All right.” I manage to nod to Mrs. Thayer, and then I go back outside.

  There’s a breeze, and I realize I’m sweating when it hits my face. Chris wasn’t being modest. I’m sure that, whatever he’s got set up, he’s embarrassed. He’s just one more broken person I’ll be leaving behind when I go. Like Sarah. Like Mrs. Maiden. Like Cole.

  It’s hard to breathe.

  “Does anyone here,” I shout, addressing everyone in the yard, “own a motherfucking white Lexus?”

  All conversation stops. The crowd goes completely still. Then a small man in a beige suit nervously raises his hand. “Do you need me to move it?”

  “Please.”

  My father grabs me by the arm and pulls me away, to the side of the house.

  “What was that?” he hisses. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  “I need to go out.”

  He holds his glass to his head as if he’s icing a headache. “Matt—”

  “Charlie? Matt?”

  Mom comes around the side of the house.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Matt’s having some sort of an episode and acting like an ass.”

  “Matt? How’s your sugar?”

  “Great, Mom. Perfect.”

  “Let’s do a finger prick so we can calibrate your sensor . . .” She reaches for the glucometer she still keeps on her belt after all these years.

  I think about offering her my middle finger for the blood sample but decide that would be too immature, even for me.

  “Hey, Mom, there’s something I’ve been thinking about. There’s something I need to ask you.”

  She waits, glucose meter in her hand.

  “Was I really so sick that day?”

  “What? What day are you talking about, Matt?”

  “Christ, the day! The only fucking day that’s ever mattered!”

  “Are you asking me about . . .” She trails off.

  “I’m asking you about the day Sam Keeley shot more than half my class.”

  They both stare at me, speechless.

  “I’m asking you whether I was really all that sick. Whether I really had to stay home that day.”

  “Matt,” she finally whispers, “your blood sugar . . . you were so young, and your sugar could be labile . . .”

  I shake my head and look out at the driveway, where the guy in the beige suit is climbing into the Lexus.

  “I could have gone that day. I could have gone to school.”

  “Thank God you didn’t—” Dad says.

  I cut him off. “Do you know what time Chris Thayer’s dad gets up?”

  “What?”

  “His mom, she works at night. Not tonight, obviously . . .”

  “We know what she does, Matt. She works at the hospital . . .”

  “Yeah, and his dad works for you, right?”

  “Well, I’m not his direct supervisor . . .”

  “So, do you know that, to, like, do whatever they have to do to get Chris ready in the morning, he has to get him up crazy early because she’s asleep? Do you know what kind of insane bills they have to pay?”

  “Did Chris tell you about this, Matt?”

  “Chris doesn’t talk to me about anything. I didn’t know that he had a goddamn internship. That’s the point; nobody knows. You think everything’s fine, that he’s this brave kid who’s going on with his life. And then you go inside his house, and . . . or Cole; do you know what it’s like inside Cole’s house? I think they still have his dad’s hospital bed in their living room, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Matt,” Mom says, “we know it’s hard. We know how hard it is for the Thayers. And Cole’s mother—”

  “Everyone wants to think it’s okay. They put out some black chairs at graduation and have a moment of silence, and then everyone moves on. Except that they don’t. No one ever gets to move on.”

  We stand still, in silence, staring at one another like strangers.

  “I’m going out. I may not come back tonight.”

  “And where exactly are you going to be?” Mom asks.

  “Cole’s.”

  “Not until—” She stops as Dad lays a hand on her arm.

  “Matt,” he says, “we just want—”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I am. Tell your friends I’m sorry.” I turn and walk to my truck. They watch me go, but they don’t try to stop me as I drive away.

  * * *

  I wake to the sound of a mother scolding her children just outside my window. My seat is reclined, and I have to crane my neck to look up. Sunlight is streaming in through the windows. The clock on the dashboard tells me it’s 11:02.

  I slowly raise my seat, wincing as I move. The mother is right outside my window; she’s parked there to share the shade, obviously thinking my car was empty, and now she turns from her efforts to apply sunblock to two writhing children and sees me. I look back at her and nod. She shakes her head in disapproval and turns away, shooing the children toward the beach.

  I tilt the rearview mirror so I can see myself. I’m unshaven, my eyes are bloodshot, and my hair is a mess. I try to run my fingers through it, give up, and look around. An empty bottle of vodka is on the floor on the passenger side. I stopped by Luther’s house after I left my parents. He’s always good for it, no questions asked. There are also three granola-bar wrappers and an empty bag of Skittles I’d been keeping in the glove box for an emergency. My sugar must have plunged at some point.

  How much did I drink? How long did I sit here, trying to work up the nerve to go for another swim?

  My mouth is dry, but I don’t have any water. The Snack Shack should be open now, but I was due at Finn’s an hour and a half ago, so I turn the car on and start driving. Finn is always understanding; he won’t mind. Even though I’m late, I keep to the speed limit, scanning the sides of the road and the rearview mirror, looking for a cruiser, feeling like a pussy. I want to blow into town at eighty miles an hour and tell Lucas and the rest of the police force to go fuck themselves.

  I pull into my space behind the store and slip in the back. It sounds quiet out front. It’s always quiet. Finn should accept that the Stop & Shop’s in town, sell for whatever he can get, and then get out. Go live on an island somewhere. He must be sixty, maybe sixty-five. I’m taking my apron down off the peg and looking forward to a drink of water when I hear his voice behind me.

  “What the hell is this?”

  I turn. Finn is standing in the doorway, a rolled-up news­paper in his hand. For a crazy moment, I think the old man is going to swat me with it.

  “Where have you been?” he asks.

  “I’m sorry Mr. Finn . . . I just, had a hard night.”

  “It’s past eleven o’clock, and you’re coming in here looking like this.”

  I look down. I’m in the same clothes I
had on when I was in yesterday afternoon, a drink stain on the front of my shirt. “I’m sorry . . . This is the first time this has happened.”

  “First and last time, Matt. I’m running a business here. I understand that with your family you might not need the money, but this is how I put bread on my table. I’ve been running back and forth between the register and stocking the shelves. We have produce that’s going to go bad back here.”

  That stings. I have the impulse to ask him exactly how many times he’s had to dash to the register this morning. I’m guessing probably two, for geriatric customers who would have waited all day to be rung up.

  “I’ll get to work right now.”

  “Not looking like that, you won’t. This store has an image to maintain. It’s what sets us apart from that box out on Route 21. I’m not going to have you here looking and smelling like you spent the night in a dumpster. You have a sick day. Your only one. Go home; come back tomorrow cleaned up and on time. I’ll call Cole; he wants extra hours.” Finn turns and leaves the stockroom.

  I hang the apron back up and go out to my truck. Five minutes later, I’m parking outside the Gerbers’ house.

  Mrs. Gerber answers the door. She looks flustered. “Matt, we weren’t expecting you.”

  “I got the day off from the store. I thought Paul might want to do something.”

  She looks me up and down. “That’s so sweet of you. I’m sure he would. He does. I’m just helping him out with something upstairs. He’s having a hard moment.”

  “I can wait.”

  She grimaces. “Well—”

  “Who’s there?” Mr. Gerber’s voice comes from deep within the house.

  She pauses. “It’s Matt Simpson, honey.”

  “Matt! Send that boy in here!”

  Mrs. Gerber sighs and steps to the side. I enter the house and make my way into the den. Mr. Gerber is sitting in the same chair he had been in when I arrived on that first morning, early in the summer. Same robe, too, though now it’s the middle of a workday rather than Saturday morning, and he has a day or possibly two days of beard on his face, and the newspaper sits to the side of his chair as he stares into the coffee cup on his lap. He fumbles to lower the feet on the recliner as I come in.