Every Moment After

by Joseph Moldover

Matt is shaking badly now. His entire body is secreting a thick, unhealthy sweat. His breathing is even more rapid than before. I open the bottle and hold it to his mouth, trying to pour a small amount inside, but he doesn’t respond. A stronger breeze is coming in from the water, and it reaches us in the bottom of the boat. Matt’s shaking intensifies. I stretch out beside him and get him to turn, trying to shield him from the wind. I coax his mouth open and pour more juice inside, and this time Matt takes some of it in.

  I continue on, just like that, sheltering Matt with my body, pouring small amounts of juice into his mouth, feeling his heart hammering and listening to him breathe. There are moments when he whimpers, but he doesn’t open his eyes. I don’t know what happens if you can’t get someone out of shock, but in time he stops shaking, and his breathing becomes more regular. Most of the bottle is gone. Now I have to get him warm.

  I climb back out and retrieve a wool blanket my father left rolled up in the back of the station wagon, and I spread it over him. I shine the light from my phone on his face; Matt’s color is coming back, though he seems to have a bunch of bruises, and his nose looks damaged. I finger my own split lip and trot back over to his pile of clothes in the sand, picking up his cell and checking the app. Sixty-eight and rising. Good.

  I climb up to the bow of the boat and perch there, looking out over the lake, which is now illuminated by the unobstructed moon. There are too many things to think about, so I don’t think about anything. Minutes pass by.

  “Cole.”

  I look down. He’s pushed himself up onto one arm and is looking around.

  “You’re an idiot,” I tell him.

  He nods. I slide back down into the boat and onto the seat in the center. Neither one of us says anything more. He’s looking down, and his wet hair is plastered to his face, falling over his eyes. He doesn’t brush it away, and it’s irritating me as I stare at him, waiting for him to say something. Without thinking, I reach out to swipe at it. It’s only when my fingers brush his face that I realize the water on it is warm and he is crying.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is low and raspy.

  “No worries. I was feeling like going for a row.”

  He shakes his head. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there with you. I’m sorry I wasn’t with Andy.”

  “I’m not sorry,” I say. “That was the luckiest thing about that day. It was the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to me. That you weren’t there. That I didn’t lose both of you.”

  “That was the luckiest thing?”

  “That was the luckiest thing.”

  It was.

  “What the hell were you doing out here?” I ask him.

  “I wanted to know.”

  “Know what? If you could swim it? You already swam it!”

  “I wanted to know if I was meant to live.”

  “Well, you’re alive.”

  “I’m alive because you saved me.”

  “Maybe I was meant to save you. Maybe we were meant to save each other.”

  He looks at me for the first time, but he doesn’t say anything. He looks down at the empty bottle of juice in the bottom of the boat.

  “Cole?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m buck-fucking naked.”

  “You are.” We look at each other. We both laugh.

  I tell him it’s time to go home, and he agrees. But still, we sit in the boat for a little while longer.

  Twenty

  — Matt —

  I figured she’d want to meet at her house, or maybe out at the lake. She didn’t. And now we’re sitting in the diner, cups of coffee in front of us, and I’m imagining a dozen pairs of eyes on me.

  This must be what Cole feels like. It doesn’t feel good.

  Kathy listens to our orders without writing them down. She looks at Sarah for just a moment too long, and then she walks away. I study the Senate bill hanging over the saltshaker.

  “You leave tomorrow?” she finally asks.

  I look at her and nod. She’s not wearing any makeup. I didn’t realize that she always was when I was with her, but I can see it in its absence. She’s dressed for work; this is her lunch break. She has the white ribbon in her hair. She smiles.

  “You must be excited.”

  “I am.”

  “Does the season start right away?”

  “Yeah, first practice is in a few days.”

  I’ll be starting the season on the disabled list, but I’ll be playing soon. I’ve taken the meds for the last three days running, and they help. My arm is still weak, but the team has a trainer who’s going to work with me. I’ll be throwing soon.

  “What about you?” I ask. I imagine her, here, alone in her father’s empty house. She smiles.

  “Well, if a guy like you can make it to college, I might be able to get there too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You should. You really should. I mean, you wouldn’t have to go, like, full-time. I know someone who went to Rutgers part-time—”

  She shakes her head. “Not here. I’m leaving New Jersey. I was thinking of the University of Nebraska.”

  “Oh.”

  She peels the wrapper off a straw and twists it around her fingers. “You’ll miss me when you come home to visit.”

  “I guess I will.”

  “You were hoping you could drop in from time to time, hmm?”

  “No. That wasn’t what I was thinking.”

  Kathy brings our food and sets it down, but neither one of us eats. Sarah looks at the nearest posting. “What do you think of that?” she asks.

  I look at it. It’s a newer one. High-capacity clips. “I don’t know.”

  “Dad hated that stuff. The gun-control people. We never came in here to eat.”

  “I think . . . I think it’d have to help, wouldn’t it? The thing in Texas, that office complex—”

  “How many people? Eight?”

  “Eight for now, but they say it might wind up being nine or ten.”

  She nods. “It would have to help.”

  I study the bill. “Who writes this stuff?” I ask. “Who can even read it?”

  “Lawyers.”

  “Yeah. My dad’s a lawyer.”

  “You could go to law school,” she says.

  “I guess.” I remember what the chief said, about winding up at Dad’s firm.

  “You could do something about this.” She nods toward the failed bill. I wonder what the vote was. I wonder if it was close.

  “You think I’d make a good lawyer?” I ask.

  “I think you’d make a good senator.” She takes a bite of her sandwich. I wait for her to finish chewing and laugh, but she doesn’t. “What about me?” she finally asks. “What do you think I should do?”

  “I think you should be a teacher.” I hadn’t thought about it, but as I say it, I know it’s right.

  “You think? A teacher?”

  “A teacher,” I say. “Ms. Jessup, fifth-grade teacher.”

  “I like younger kids. Ms. Jessup, first-grade teacher.”

  “That’s better,” I agree.

  We eat in silence for a few minutes. I know that this is the last time we’ll ever see each other. When her plate is clear, she pushes it to one side, reaches across the table, and takes my hand.

  “When I think of you,” she says, “I’ll think of you on a baseball field, diving for the ball. I’ll think of you in a college classroom, studying to be a lawyer.”

  I nod. I don’t know what to say.

  “How will you think of me?” she asks. “How will you remember me?”

  I look out the window and see movement reflected behind me, my best and oldest friend wearing a baseball cap, sitting on a stool at the counter, swiveling halfway toward us and then pausing and turning back to his food. His back is straight. He’s listening. I wish I could pause time and ask him what I should say. I wish I had his mind for making images out of words. I’d like to tell her somet
hing that she can remember, that she can take with her to Nebraska, that she’ll have when she walks into a classroom as a teacher for the first time, because I know she’ll be so scared.

  There is an image in my mind, but I don’t know if I have the words.

  I turn back to Sarah, and I tell her. Probably not as well as he could, but the best I can.

  She smiles.

  Twenty-One

  — Cole —

  This is the first morning to hint at autumn. Everything is still green, and the day will turn hot later, but at this moment, there’s a chill promising that summer is eventually going to end.

  Matt is leaving today. I pull up to his house in my scraped and dented car. My bruises are beginning to fade, and I can walk without limping now. It looks like he’s almost done packing; his dad’s truck is stuffed.

  I’m not the only one here. A van is pulled up to the curb, and as I walk up the driveway, Chris Thayer comes out the side door of the house and rolls toward me. I haven’t seen him since graduation.

  “How are you, Cole?” he asks.

  “I’m good, Chris. How are you doing?”

  “Good.” He stops next to me. “Just came to say goodbye.”

  “Yeah. Me too.” I hesitate. “What are you doing this fall?” I finally ask, afraid that the answer is nothing, although I thought I heard he had some sort of job.

  “Internship,” he replies. “Declanell Industries.” He looks at my blank face. “They’re a pretty big company. They’re actually one of the biggest biomed firms on the East Coast.”

  “Oh. What are you—”

  “Engineering, dude. Biomedical engineering. I’m putting in a half year at DI, and then I’m going to Princeton.”

  “You’re going to Princeton? That’s . . . amazing, Chris. That’s amazing. I didn’t know you were doing that.”

  He looks embarrassed. “Well, I didn’t talk about it much.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just . . . I don’t want to be a poster boy, you know? The kid who triumphs in spite of his disability. That’s what it was like, being class president. I don’t like everyone watching me all the time. I mean, people already stare at me, but I don’t need to symbolize something.”

  “Yeah, I get that. I know something about being a poster boy.”

  “I guess you do. Any words of wisdom for when all eyes turn to you?”

  I don’t have any of my own, but I remember a little kid on the night of his holiday concert, terrified to go onstage. I remember his best friend, holding his hand and whispering in his ear. “You don’t have to do it all at once,” I tell Chris. “You just have to get through one breath at a time. One moment at a time.”

  “Decent advice.”

  “Also, screw all of ’em.”

  He laughs. “I like that better. What about you? What are you going to do?”

  “I’m working at Finn’s, taking a couple of online classes, and then I’m also heading to school in the spring.”

  “Cool.”

  Matt emerges from the house carrying a plastic container, and he shoves it into the back.

  “Anything I can do to help?” I ask.

  “Perfect timing,” he says, slamming the tailgate with effort against the overflowing baggage. He grins at me. He’s been busy packing, and I haven’t seen him since the diner.

  Matt asked me to come to breakfast with them. I didn’t know what to expect, but I told him I would because he seemed so nervous. He’d been with this woman all summer, but something about sitting down with her in public freaked him out, and he wanted me there. He’d told me the story of how his face got banged up, and I asked if he was afraid of the cop, but he shook his head. “I just don’t know what to say,” he told me. “I’m scared I’m not going to know what to say.”

  I wore one of his old baseball caps and got there early. I sat at the counter, nursing a cup of coffee and a plate of pancakes. I noticed that being exposed like that didn’t bother me quite the way it used to. When they came in, he steered her to the booth right behind me, where I could hear every word they said.

  He did well. When she asked him her question, at the end, I almost had to turn and look. I wanted to jump into the booth next to him and take my best shot at it. But I didn’t have to; he did a good job on his own.

  “I’m going to remember you on the beach at nighttime,” he told her. “I’m going to remember you looking up at the stars. I’m going to remember you looking lonely but not afraid.”

  Pretty good.

  Maybe he would make a good senator. I can see it. I’d probably vote for him.

  Matt’s mother comes out of the house. She’s crying. Chris’s mom is with her, an arm around her shoulder, and they’re followed by Matt’s dad. He’s going to drive Matt out to Bucknell and then bring the truck back. He looks sad but calm. He’s a good guy. When Dad was first diagnosed, Mr. Simpson came out to the house and spent a whole weekend with him and Mom, figuring out everything with the insurance, making sure it would all be covered, and when anything came up with any of the treatments, they called him and he made the problem go away. Mom told Matt the story a few days ago, when he came over for dinner, the first time he’d been over in a long time. We ate, and then we sat in the living room, bed and mini-fridge gone, and Mom told him all about what his dad had done for us.

  It’s weird to say goodbye in front of people. Matt shakes Chris’s hand and then gives me his car keys. “Promise me,” he says, “first time it snows, drive the truck instead of your wagon.”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, the Volvo’s built like a tank, but you get no traction.”

  “Yeah, I know. Thanks.”

  “You remember how you skidded across the school lot last winter?”

  “I missed Mr. Kelly’s BMW by an inch.”

  “I was rooting for you to at least nick it.”

  “I know you were.”

  I pause, searching for something to say, and in the space of that moment, Matt grabs me in a bear hug and lifts me off my feet. “Cole,” he says into my ear, “I love you.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Me too.”

  He looks at me and laughs. “I’ll see you at Thanksgiving,” he says, and then he goes and hugs his mother and gets into the passenger side of the truck. His dad gives his mom a hug and a kiss, gives me a big wink, gets in on the driver’s side, and backs them out of the driveway. I see my friend through the glass, looking out at me, looking at the home he is leaving, and I wave to him and make myself smile, and then he is gone.

  I leave the Simpsons’ house behind and drive toward the center of town. It’s the unofficial end: the last day of the last summer that we’ll all be children. It’s Independence Day. Some people, like Viola, have already left. I have a ticket out to Berkeley for the first weekend in October. I’m not trying to make it a surprise; I asked her if she wanted me to come out, and she said she did. Who knows what will happen? For now, it’s enough that the ticket is sitting there in my desk, a date on the calendar to look forward to. A possibility. Something to show up for.

  I pass the street where Sarah Jessup lives, and I step on the brakes and lean over the empty passenger seat, peering down toward her house. There’s a FOR SALE sign hanging there. I speed back up again.

  Most people leave, in one way or another. Some people leave home. Some people’s bodies fail them, and they sleep under the ground in the cemetery on the edge of town, in a spot where the field full of gravestones gives way to forest, where the light of the sun strikes my father’s name at dawn but where the shade falls at midday, when I sometimes sit with him now. His favorite quotation is inscribed below his name. It’s from Charles Darwin, and it reads: A MAN WHO DARES TO WASTE ONE HOUR OF TIME HAS NOT DISCOVERED THE VALUE OF LIFE.

  Someday, when I publish my first book, I plan to dedicate it to my father and to place that quote below his name so that they can live on next to each other somewhere besides on a tombstone.

  I reach the center
of town and pass Finn’s Grocery, already open for business. My mother’s boyfriend is out front hanging a sign, his white hair tied back. I honk and slow down and he turns, sees me, and waves. I wave back and drive on.

  Most people leave, but there are a few who never will. I come out the other side of the downtown, turn, and stop in front of the Gerbers’ house. There’s a carnival today at the fairground, and Paul wants to go. It’s going to be the last one of the year. I think we’re mainly going for the food, although his mother also told me that he likes some of the rides, the merry-go-round and the Ferris wheel. I’ll take him, and I’ll go on with him as many times as he wants.

  I turn the car off and get out. It’s quiet here, for the most part. There’s no one else in sight.

  And then there is. A little boy in one of the front yards across the street. He bolts across the lawn wearing nothing but shorts and a pair of swim goggles. He grabs a coiled hose and turns it on, and when he straightens up, he notices me for the first time, watching him from beside my car. He might be five years old, or maybe six. He has bright red hair sticking out in all directions, and pale skin, and he’s smiling like whatever he’s up to with the hose is the best idea in the world.

  We stare at each other for a moment, and then he turns and continues on about his business. He drags the hose toward the backyard and disappears around the side of the house, and seconds later I hear the screams and squeals of other children.

  For a moment, I can believe that the sounds are coming from the other direction, that they are the echoes of three young boys, best friends who love one another more than anything, playing and tumbling and wrestling on a late-summer morning many years ago. But the house behind me is silent.

  I turn, and I go inside.

  Twenty-Two

  — Matt —

  You never have to pay to get into New Jersey, only to get out. It’s an observation that Dad never gets tired of making, but this time, I laugh along.

  We’re fourth in line in the only toll lane for the Phillipsburg Bridge. Most highways don’t even have these lanes anymore, I don’t think, but this old bridge does, and Dad seems to love it. He has a roll of tokens in the cup holder and patiently waits to pull up to the little basket where he can throw one in and turn the light green, while cars stream through the transponder lanes on each side.