One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  It was his face, though, that made me keep searching it to make sure this wasn’t someone impersonating Seth. He was trying to hide behind the once well-kept beard that now took over his jaw like a garden gone to seed. I was sure if he could have grown it around his eyes he would have, but they were very much uncovered. I could see the deep half-moons of sleeplessness and the sagging skin left behind by sobbing and the weary look that could only be brought on by ceaseless searching. I knew that look. I’d seen it in the mirror.

  “We can sit,” I said.

  “Do you have time?”

  “I do.”

  I sank into a chair and folded my arms on the table. Without Ms. Helen’s shim it rocked.

  “I’m sorry you’re having to work here,” Seth said.

  I felt my eyebrows rise. “I’m not. I’m enjoying it. When did you get back?”

  “A couple of hours ago. I just stopped by my folks’ house long enough to drop off my stuff.”

  “You haven’t seen them, then.”

  “No. I saw Evelyn.”

  “How did that go?”

  “It didn’t.” Seth shrugged. “I don’t have much hope for that relationship. She hated me before and she has even more reason to now.”

  My last conversation with Evelyn flashed through my mind but I tucked it away. Maybe another time. Right now, something was making me uneasy. Something was missing that was there the last time I talked to Seth. Something that was there in his letter and wasn’t here now.

  “Are you okay?” I said. “I mean, I don’t know, I guess I expected you to be—more healed? Does that sound right?”

  “I’m getting healed,” he said. His voice was wooden. “I’ve been clean for forty-two days. And not because I’ve been on lockdown. I haven’t been. I just don’t want it anymore.”

  “That’s good, right?” I knew I was bordering on forced-perky, but Seth seemed to be sinking right in front of me. Old habits like the Coax die hard.

  “They say I’ll have urges, go through cycles. Right now I just feel like nothing matters.”

  So not what I was expecting. At all.

  “I really thought I could come home and get my life back,” he said. “Or maybe even a life I never had. And then some . . .” He stopped and inhaled. “Somebody had to plaster this thing all over the news. Now I don’t have a job. I’m broke. Just walking from our place to here, three people did double takes when they saw me and then they looked away like I was some kind of pervert.”

  Seth stared at his hands on the tabletop, folded close to mine. I could see that he’d gone from nail biting to cuticle shredding. Had I not noticed it earlier, or was he just now short of breath?

  “Do you want some water?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Coffee?”

  “I have a headache.”

  That didn’t make any sense to me but I let it go. It apparently made less sense to him. He leaned back in the chair and scratched at his arms.

  “I can’t even imagine what it’s been like for you since it came out,” he said.

  “People have pretty much left me alone,” I said. “But you need to know that I kept it a secret until the article.”

  “It didn’t do us a lot of good, did it?”

  “Maybe it did for a while.” I spread my fingers. “Look, Seth, people will forget—”

  “Will you?” His eyes flared, and just as quickly the fire in them died. “I’m sorry. I’ve been up since three.”

  “You should go home and get some sleep. We can talk later.”

  “I can’t sleep. That’s the worst part. I was doing better with that until—that stupid article just turned everything to—”

  “Seth,” I said.

  My tone brought his face up from its slow sink to his belly button.

  “It’s done, okay? I don’t know who did it, and if I ever find out I will bring my full wrath down upon them. I’ll beat your mother to it.”

  “You talking about her threatening to hire a PI?”

  I pulled in my chin. “Threatening? I thought she did it.”

  “She was just trying to scare you. I told her to back off.”

  “Okay, so I don’t get revenge,” I said. “Maybe that’s better for everybody.”

  I tried to smile at him. He didn’t smile back.

  “But you can’t give up just because people know.”

  “I thought I could do it, you know, keep doing the inner work, keep fighting, even without the twenty-four-hour support I’ve been getting. But now?”

  He put his hands back up on the table and grabbed mine. His were cold and sweaty and desperate.

  “There is only one way I can do this and that’s if you trust that I can.”

  “What about God?” I said.

  “That’s a given, isn’t it?”

  “Is it? Because it sounds like you’re saying God is all well and good but if you don’t have my trust, forget about it.” I shook my head. “I told you before—this can’t be on me.”

  His head dropped. “It’s not, okay? It’s not. I’m sorry. But it would help, Tar, you know? If I know you trust me to keep fighting, I’ll know you love me.”

  I untangled my hands from his and squeezed them between my knees. “I never said I didn’t love you. But I don’t think love and trust automatically go together. Just because the thought of living without you still breaks my heart, that doesn’t mean I know you’re going to stay on this even when the whole world has just crashed down around you.”

  “Then you don’t believe in me.”

  “I don’t believe in the fake Seth,” I said, though where that came from I had no clue. “You were a fake self before because you were hiding all your pain and doing stuff that wasn’t you.”

  He was breathing even harder now, and I recognized it as the kind that holds back tears.

  “I have to get to work,” I said.

  “What’s it going to take for you to believe in me again?” he said.

  I stood and waited until he looked up at me with tortured eyes.

  “When you find out what’s true about you,” I said. “And it isn’t what was in that article.”

  I hurried up the ramp. When I turned to look, the corner doors were closing behind him, and my own breath turned ragged. Was I too hard on him? He was going home alone. Surely nobody would have left medication available. Should I call Paul?

  I might have, if I hadn’t heard Ned’s voice echoing through the vestibule of my mind: I did that—tried to reach out before my arms were strong enough.

  I continued my plod up the ramp, although what was true about me in that moment I couldn’t have said.

  There was no time to ponder that because when I reached for my apron the second time that afternoon, Ike came to me, face beet-colored, nostrils in dragonlike flares. He looked for all the world like Smaug.

  “I’m sorry I took so long,” I said.

  “Wendy just left,” he said. “No explanation, nothing. She just ran out of here like something was chasing her.” Ike hooked his hand on the back of his head. I expected to hear a sizzle. “I give you people time off whenever you need it. If an emergency comes up I cover for you, no problem. All I ask is for a little information, you know?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “I was considering her for a management shift too. But I don’t know if she can handle it.” It was the first time I ever saw someone gnash his teeth. “It’s that other job. It’s like she’s got a loan shark after her or something.”

  He looked at me so hard I wanted to back myself into the wall.

  “I don’t want to ask you to betray a confidence, but do you have any idea why she would just leave without saying anything?”

  “No,” I said. “We’re not that close.”

  “She doesn’t let anybody get close. She’s like a feral cat.” Ike shook his head. “Thanks for letting me vent. I’d like to help the kid, but I have to know what’s going on or I can’t.”

  “I�
�ll cover her work this shift,” I said.

  His face finally softened, as soft as Ike’s face ever got. “I know. I can always count on you.”

  He gave my arm a squeeze and went into the kitchen, already barking for more sandwiches. I stood there for a minute and closed my eyes tight. At first it was to shut out the automatic scenarios of me going after Wendy and pulling her out of the club on Montgomery and taking her home with me.

  And then it turned into a prayer. A spontaneous mixture of King James and Psalm 109 and Ned’s third-party conversations that somehow ended up sounding like a me I hadn’t heard before. A me crying into an empty space.

  I didn’t sleep much that night, for the first time in a while. Several times I went to the window seat and opened the shutters far enough to see if the light was on in Seth’s room. It never was, at least the times I looked, but the light in Paul’s study was on all night. Each of us was dealing with this in our own dim isolation. And now that seemed so wrong.

  Which was why I sat down with Ned the next morning after the service and told him about my conversation with Seth.

  “I know you want me to figure this out for myself,” I said, “but can you just tell me if I handled it okay?”

  I asked it even though I expected him to turn that into another question for me.

  What I didn’t expect was for him to go to the long window and stand with his back to me. His voice, when it came, had a faraway sound.

  “You said all the right things. I wish my wife had said that to me.”

  The salmon sofa began to swallow me.

  “Do you know how I have so much knowledge about porn addiction?”

  No, and please don’t tell me. Please don’t.

  Ned turned to me, though I could see in the set of his face that it was because he knew he should face me. Not because he wanted to. Still, inside I pleaded, Please don’t tell me.

  “I’ve been there. From age fifteen to twenty-five. Your age. Ten years of absolute misery.”

  I sank further.

  “That misery didn’t stop for three years after I got clean. Those were the years I spent mopping up the mess I made.”

  I floundered, flailed for someplace safe. “You were married,” I said.

  “Got married when I was twenty-one, right in the thick of it.”

  Ned returned to the sofa, but he seemed to think better of it and positioned himself on the edge of a high-backed sea-green chair opposite me. The divan stopped trying to swallow me, and I didn’t know which was worse—the threat to take me away or the lack of it.

  “I was a lot like Seth,” Ned went on. “I thought it would all be gone once I had her with me all the time. Truth be told, it got worse.” His gaze drifted to the bookcases behind me. “Hiding it from her was harder. I hurt her as much before she knew as I did after. I finally went to her and confessed it and told her I wanted to get help, but she just couldn’t get past it, and I didn’t blame her.” His brown-eyed gaze returned to me. “Never blamed her for a minute.”

  I tried to swallow and found out I couldn’t. My hand went to my throat before I could stop it.

  “I’m sorry, Tara,” Ned said. “I didn’t think we should go any further with this unless I told you.”

  That made sense. It did. I still couldn’t swallow.

  Ned rubbed both hands on his thighs. “I say I wish she’d told me she still loved me. I actually don’t know if that would have helped.” His head pulled forward, and his eyes deepened. “I had to take a chance revealing this to you because it’s why I know what you said to Seth is what he has to hear.”

  I found my voice and whispered, “Do you think so?”

  “He needs all the help he can get and that will get him through at times, but he won’t be healed unless he knows God is the only one he can absolutely trust to stick it out with him.”

  “Your wife left you, then?”

  “She did. I’ve never heard from her again.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I deserved it. And it might have been the best thing because I had to heal for me and for God. And, it turns out, for a lot of other people.” He tilted his head at me. “I’m not saying I had to go through that to end up being a priest, but God used it. That I know.”

  “You think God will ever use Seth?” I said.

  “Is that the point here?”

  “Again with the questions.”

  “Do you have an answer?”

  “You’re saying the point is whether God will use me.”

  “It is if you want to keep coming to me and talking.”

  He waited, his eyes giving me no indication which way he wanted me to go. But I already knew. I really did.

  “Then that is the point,” I said.

  I heard the soft catch in his breath.

  “But can I ask you something else?”

  “You can ask me anything,” he said.

  “Is there hope for Seth? Really?”

  Ned didn’t hesitate. “Yes. But you need to understand that even with a deep faith and a lot of support, it may be a year before he starts to heal into someone you recognize. Or into the real Seth.” He nodded, as if to himself. “Maybe that’s a better way to put it. And some of that is neurological, just like it is for an alcoholic or a drug addict. He has to detox his mind and allow his neurology to settle down. And deal with that abuse issue. That alone is huge.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I think I get that.”

  “And probably—and this is just what I know from working with a lot of guys and talking to other pastors that run programs—it will be two to five years before he’s ready for a relationship, judging from how far into it he was. Even if you were already married and decided to stay married, those years would be very fragile.”

  Ned stopped and I let that soak into me.

  “So I’m not lessening his chances by not marrying him,” I said.

  He was slower to answer this time. “No,” he said. “You’re not. But, Tara, that decision has as much to do with you as it does with him.”

  “I have to know what’s true about me,” I said.

  And since that wasn’t a question, he didn’t give me an answer. I knew it anyway.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I barely got across the square after talking to Ned when my phone rang. The screen read Spencer, Groate, and Grissom.

  Daddy had made it clear Randi wasn’t to contact me, but this wasn’t her personal number. So . . . what? She’d decided to press charges for defamation of Seth’s character after all? Poor Randi. I tried to laugh up at Sergeant Jasper. She really was losing it.

  The phone went into its second ring, and what I’d just thought nudged me like Gray’s elbow. Poor Randi. She actually was suffering, and really, weren’t we all? Didn’t Paul sit up all night in his study? Didn’t Seth look one bath short of a homeless person? Wasn’t Evelyn going to crack right down the middle if she had to spend one more day pretending not to care? Not just poor Randi. Poor all of us.

  The phone rang a fourth time. “This is Tara Faulkner,” I said into it.

  “Oh. Sorry.” I could hear some fumbling and bumping as if whoever answered had dropped the receiver in the process of retrieving it from its trip back onto the cradle.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Yes. Hello.” The voice was high-pitched and young and definitely not Randi’s. “This is Ms. Grissom’s assistant—Randi Grissom—the attorney?”

  First day on the job? I wanted to ask. Instead I said, “Yes?”

  “Um—”

  Speaking of poor somebody. “Did Ms. Grissom want to speak to me?” I said.

  “No. I mean, not about this.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “She might want to speak to you. She didn’t say she didn’t. But about this, no.”

  Okay, enough with trying to make things easier for this child.

  “Do you have a message for me?” I said.

  “Yes. I do.”

  “And it
is . . .?”

  “Yeah. So, Ms. Faulkner?”

  “Ye-e-s?”

  “You need to get your personal belongings out of the residence at 3 West Jones Street and then return the key to this office because that property is being sold.”

  There. She’d said it.

  I sank to the base of the monument.

  “Do you need for me to repeat any of that, ma’am?”

  “No,” I said. “Is that all?”

  “That’s all she said.”

  The pause that ensued must have been interminable to her, but I was beyond caring if she got through this conversation without getting fired. They were selling the townhouse. Even if Seth healed into some real self I could fall in love with again, we would have to start all over someplace else. I closed my eyes and saw only stark white.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, yeah . . . if you’ll just do that . . . When do you think you will . . . do that?”

  I stiffened a little. “Did Ms. Grissom give me a deadline?”

  “I don’t think so . . . let me see . . . no, no deadline.”

  “Then I’ll just do it as soon as I can.”

  “Okay, so what shall I tell her?”

  I let my shoulders relax. “Sweetie,” I said, “tell Ms. Grissom whatever is going to make her yell at you the least.”

  I hung up and started my march for home and pondered the fact that I had just called a secretary sweetie.

  Mama was in the kitchen when I completed my march through the back door. By then I was losing the battle to maintain my poor-Randi attitude. Mama pointed to a stool and I sat, and while she wiped the already spotless countertop, I vented. Ike had nothing on me.

  I finished with, “I guess it doesn’t matter how she does it; it’s still going to tick me off.”

  “And it’s still going to hurt,” Mama said. “You had so many dreams about that place.”

  “About our whole life,” I said. I shoved my hair out of my face and reached for a pad and pen on the snack bar. “I need to make a list—I don’t have that much stuff over there, but I need to know when I can use your car—if that’s okay—”