Irreversible

by Chris Lynch

  It might have been some form of dignity I was trying to achieve then, stiffening my back to straighten me up in my child’s chair, in my child’s hidey-hole in our dirty safe basement. I kind of already knew the absurdity of it, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t still bullheaded enough to hold the pose until my sister relieved me of duty.

  “Oh, please, Keir,” she said with a sigh.

  I slumped forward at her word, clipped, a stringless marionette.

  I looked hard at the floor between my feet, with my head between my knees. So much cellar dirt I couldn’t tell, and I couldn’t remember, if this was unpaved earth under me or just accumulated filth.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me, Keir?”

  It took me a very long time to say the word “No” and a very short time to stuff “Thereisnothingtotell” right up behind it.

  “Right,” she said. “Okay, then. This is what you should know. When Gigi left you . . .”

  The sound of her name, here, now, in this air, sliced like a ceremonial sword bisecting my heart, pouring my blood out everywhere.

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  “I am absolutely listening.”

  “Well, she ran into Grace going out for her run. She was crying, and confused, and didn’t know which way to go, and when Grace tried to bring her inside the apartment, she refused to come in. She said someone was coming for her, and she would be fine and she just walked, fast, then abruptly stopped where our road forked, and just stood there, weeping. Like you’re doing now. Do you want to say something to me now, Keir?”

  I shook my head definitively no, and stared at the floor becoming mud beneath me.

  “Grace took care of her. Brought her over for coffee and to pull herself together in the bathroom and to kill some of the waiting time. And they talked, of course, quite a bit. And Grace stayed with her, walked with her down to the bus shelter after a while to wait with her there, and to listen. Mr. Boudakian finally pulled up in a big Lexus, stopped and sat without even looking at her. Never even got out. Carl did, though. Just couldn’t wait, apparently. He didn’t look at her either, just bolted in the direction of . . . well, you know where he went.”

  Did I ever know where he went.

  That was where Fran left off telling me any more specifics.

  “Now,” she said, the softness in her tone starting to sound like effort, “are you sure there is nothing you want to talk about?”

  Big silence filled the cramped basement space while I struggled to build sentences and sense, for her as well as myself. Then, “Remember that thing you said about me?”

  “Which one? I’m sure I said a lot, way more than I meant. It was not my intention to hurt you. I know how easily wounded you are, and I don’t want to contribute any more of that to what you have to cope with already. But sometimes somebody has to say something.”

  “You said that I make things up to be the way I want them to be. I don’t remember a lot of other stuff if you did say it. I remember that one really clearly. That doesn’t sound like a heat-of-battle, blurting sort of thing to say.”

  “No. It doesn’t. It wasn’t.”

  “Do you really think I do that?”

  “Oh. Oh, now. Aw, Keir, look at you. You’ve gotten into a state already just by asking the question, never mind my answer.”

  Fran was always my middle way. She was the baby bear measure in my life, not too hot, not too cold when it came to telling me things that needed telling. There were maybe people too eager to lay on the sugarcoating, and maybe one or two who were overly vinegar-happy. Fran was always trying to balance all that for me whenever she could.

  “ ‘Never mind my answer’ sounds like the real answer to me, Fran. Coming from you. Thanks.”

  The silence came back, filled up all the empty places between and around us, and we came to something like an understanding. A partial, temporary, insufficient understanding but one that would have to stand for now.

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and left me there.

  to minimize risk

  It was when I made the inevitable trip down the hallway that changes were obviously in motion. Ray had finally used up all his available sick time, though his only real sickness was ever me, and he was reluctantly back at work. In a somewhat parallel move, I forced myself to confront the weight bench and free weights that I had set up in the girls’ room as soon as they had both vacated the premises.

  It was the shock of the lonesomeness that spurred me into motion to begin with. I had no idea it was going to hit me like it did, but that first day with Ray gone and me left only with myself for company blindsided me. I wasn’t up for more than a half hour before I found the silence and the relentless presence of all that nothingness unbearable. I started pacing the house from one room to the next and back again, just to find something, just to escape something else. I started talking gibberish to fill the joint up with nonsense that might help displace the dread that was filling the atmosphere rapidly, like some poisonous gas leakage out of nowhere.

  A closed door was just an invitation to even more harrowing places, so I passed the girls’ bedroom door on three or four circuits of the house before the thought of the weights and the physicality and the old life and football normalcy came to me and I burst through the door as if the whole of the Baltimore Ravens defense was waiting in there to brutalize me.

  They weren’t. And it was with a kind of joy and relief that I slung myself down onto the weight bench and got right to work building myself back up to the man I was going to need to be to face the bigger, angrier, most unforgiving world that was waiting for me to come and play.

  God, was I unready for it. That was clear enough when the bar carrying the weights came crashing down to my chest with only the feeblest resistance from my arms. The sound of life escaping from my lungs was as scary as the silence it had disturbed. But that was one of the simple beauties of brutal physical necessity. It doesn’t matter what was frightening you just seconds before, because you have to throw all body and soul into getting out from under the thing that would crush you otherwise.

  I grunted and growled, straining completely against the force of the weights. I lifted them off my chest, then noisily up the next couple of inches before stalling out and watching my arms shake with the effort of shifting the load farther up to the hooks that would rescue me. I nearly screamed with the extra surge of strength I needed to find to get the weights moving again, and it seemed to take twenty more sweaty, trembling minutes for the load to travel the final half a foot to the point where I could just barely urge them, shout them, will them over the edge of the hooks, where they clanked to rest directly above my skull.

  I was occupied now, for sure. The sight of my chest rising and falling dramatically was a morbid fascination that I watched as if somebody or something else was attached to it. I had trouble believing that this was the result of one measly rep of a weight I had surely bench-pressed before at some time in a distant other lifetime, or else why would they be sitting there waiting for my return?

  I was weak. I was soft and breathless well beyond what I ever would have figured.

  I tried to keep it in perspective despite the alarming deterioration I had suffered since the last time I laid my body down on that bench. How long had it been? Too long, sure, but no layoff, no setback, no breakdown had ever caused me this much regression before. Maybe I was hurt more than I realized.

  “It was just the time,” I assured myself as I went through the indignity of loosening the cuffs on each end of the bar to reduce the weight to something I could manage. “Time away from the workout got me to this state, and time back at it will put me right again. And then some.”

  I was talking a good game, at any rate. And that was critical, always the first step to rising to any challenge. Psych yourself up properly and all things are possible. Talk a good game, and your good game will follow.

  By the time I realized I was no longer alone, I’d become a barkin
g, grunting, smack-talking madman. I was brought all the way back, to better days, high school days, workout days and game days. When the team was winning more than losing, when I was as fit as a Doberman and when I became so aware of being liked. And so aware that I liked being liked.

  When Ray stepped into the doorway of the girls’ room/weight room, he brought me back from the two places I was visiting, two better places. Through the sweat and the strain I had managed to reach back, to my pinnacle self of senior year. And for the brief moment before the interruption, I had just about hit the sweet spot of exertion exhaustion, the zone where I could briefly escape being any version of myself at all.

  “Didn’t Mary tell you not to mess with her weights?” he joked as I swung up and sat on the bench to look at him. I got a bit of the dizzies as I did it, and looked down at my feet to let it pass. A few seconds later I could turn to him and see properly.

  Aw, hell. Despite his attempt at light humor, he wore the sad sideways mixed emotional smile I was never happy to see.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he said, plainly trying to reconfigure his face into something more acceptable.

  “Was going back to work really that bad, Ray?”

  Sad sideways smile popped back into place. “It sort of was, but only because I’d got kind of used to hanging around here with you.”

  “Oh, you missed me?” I chirped.

  “Shut up,” he said, showing me a large, completely unmenacing fist.

  “Don’t try it, big man,” I said, holding up two of my own. “I’ve been working out. The big comeback is under way, and it just might include kicking your ass.”

  “Hah,” he said, which was refreshing, since the thought was indeed so laughable. “But you do look good there, boy. You surely are on your way, huh?”

  There was a relentless sadness haunting this small conversation, and I couldn’t stand it but I couldn’t talk it away, either.

  It was the on your way thing. This was my first healthy step forward. Forward, to reentering life, getting strong and independent. And to getting back on schedule to move out and leave my old man finally alone in the house. This was going to be one long See ya later, alligator, before I left him to this house’s wicked deep silence.

  “I am still a long way from on my way, I can tell you,” I said as I stood and nudged him along out the door. “If you saw me a little while ago, you would have been worried that I would never get out of here, I was so weak and pathetic. So don’t even think your job is done, old man.” I gave him one final great shove, which made him rumble out a genuine, thrilled roll of laughter. “Now go make my dinner. That’s just weird, you hanging around watching me lift. Go on.”

  He was still chuckling away when I closed the door between us. I poured myself into one last painful session, to try to regain some of what I had lost since last season. And to try to put some distance between myself and the man with the sad sideways smile.

  I was drenched in a whole new coating of sweat when Ray came back through the door some time later. I could see him behind me as I did dumbbell curls in front of the three-panel mirror on top of the vanity. I kept curling to reach the end of my set.

  “What?” I groaned.

  He aimed a cell phone at me. “Mary says why don’t you answer your phone,” Ray said.

  I finished my last set of biceps curls, let the weights fall with a thump to the floor.

  “Well, if I ever dreamed Mary would call me, I’d carry the thing with me every place I went.”

  I took the phone from Ray, who pulled it back to grab my attention. “Try to be nice to your sister. We’re all on the same team here, remember.”

  “I’ll try to remember, Ray.”

  “Good, and knock off the workout now, and get a shower. Dinner’s in fifteen.”

  “Okay,” I said, shoving him again, to hear him laughing again. “Hey, Mary, what’s up?” I said flatly.

  She matched my flatness and added a chill that came like a frozen mist through the phone.

  “Well, Keir, it seems you have gotten out of it, out of the mess you made. Got out of it like you always do.”

  “What are you talking about, Mary? And stop with that voice, it’s creeping me out.”

  “She’s not pursuing it,” she said in exactly that voice. “Gigi. She wanted to. Still wants to. And she has her evidence. But it’s her family. The shame of it all, of her being with you and then taking that situation into account, and all that went on up there, into public? It was too much. She’s not even home now, because they sent her traveling around South America or something to get her away from the whole thing. So well done, you. You managed to humiliate a whole family into backing down from doing the right thing.”

  I dropped almost involuntarily back to a sitting position on the weight bench. I squeezed my throbbing and dehydrated forehead with my free hand.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Grace. Gigi and Grace talk now. And so Grace came to us with this. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be shared with you or not, but there it is.”

  Grace. Right, Grace. Grace was Fran and Mary’s roommate, the only one home when Gigi and I came all that way to see the girls and share our graduation night with them. They had lied and said they couldn’t make it to the ceremony, and I was still good enough to bring the ceremony all the way out to them over three hours away. But they were out, which they were not supposed to be, leaving us with only Grace.

  It was Grace who tolerated us for several uncomfortable, uncelebratory minutes in the doorway of the sisterless on-campus apartment. It was Grace who told us Fran would be back in an hour. We went for a walk, and came back to an even more awkward meeting with Fran. So we left, Gigi and I, and spent the night together in an unoccupied campus apartment nearby.

  And it was Grace who was heading out for an early run just when Gigi Boudakian was running away from me the next morning.

  Gigi Boudakian should never have been running away from me.

  Fran and Mary should have been there when we showed up. Goddamn it, they should have been at my graduation. None of us should have been at Norfolk University and that apartment and then that other apartment, and none of us would have been there if Fran and Mary had done the right thing and just come home for my graduation.

  How different would things be then?

  Grace was there the whole time, though. Grace the Graceless, guarding the door. Grace the witness. Grace almighty, who rushes to judgment.

  “It was a misunderstanding,” I said quietly.

  “Yes, well, just so you know, Grace thinks she understands pretty well, and she is no fan of yours whatsoever. I wouldn’t recommend you coming here, to be honest. You are free now to go wherever you like otherwise.”

  “To tell you the truth, Mary, I had no intention of coming to your place again anytime soon, so don’t worry about it.”

  She held her chilly silence for a few uncomfortable seconds before finally getting to it.

  “I didn’t mean my place, Keir. I meant you probably shouldn’t come here.”

  Oh. Oh no. At least now it made some sense, Mary calling me. This was her mission all along.

  But, no. Jesus, this was my dream, my place, my life game plan just about to come together the way I had envisioned it for so long. Norfolk was the only place I ever seriously considered going.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong!” I bellowed into the phone, holding it out in front of me so I could face her somehow as I did it.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Ray called, rushing into the bedroom. “What are you doing, yelling like a wild man? And what are you doing, not even in the shower? Dinner’s ready. I told you . . .”

  I was still staring at the phone. I didn’t bother bringing it up to my ear because I knew she would be long gone. I continued to stare at the thing and to hold it at arm’s length.

  She did not have the right, or the power, to tell me where I could not go. Especially si
nce I had not done anything wrong. Especially not my place, that I worked and planned so long for, so hard. Especially not there, nobody had the right.

  She ruined my sleep, that was one thing Mary accomplished with her hateful phone call. I might have been lying on an outcropping of a stony hillside for all the peace I got. The mattress felt hard and jaggedy, causing me to turn and shift over and over again, and each time I did, I was jolted with the feeling that I was rolling over the side of that ledge and headed for a crash hundreds of feet below me.

  “She is not right,” I said to myself as I got up at the first sign of light. I wanted to run. I had begun the strength training and had the aching muscles to prove it, and now it was time to work in the cardiovascular stuff. Legs and lungs, upper body and core, I was going to be ready when the time came to show my stuff to the new team, at the new school, in my new life at Norfolk.

  I would be the complete package. Hard and fast and lean and untouchable.

  This was the Plan, goddamn it. The Plan was right and I had done nothing wrong.

  I stretched extra carefully before even leaving the bedroom. But there was no avoiding the strain and almost audible squeal of my rusty hamstrings, calves, Achilles tendons. Fair enough. This came with the territory, and it was territory I was ready to reclaim.

  I squinted at the surprising brightness of the morning as I stepped out onto the porch for the first time since the day my father brought me home to heal. I should have been out before this and felt a little ashamed of myself for hiding. There was no reason for it. I was careful to pull the door shut quietly behind me so Ray could enjoy his last twenty minutes of sleep before getting up for work.

  The sun was uncommonly strong for this early, and I was holding my face up to it, absorbing it with half-closed eyes as I started down the front stairs.