Plan B: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  “Guy talk,” Chuck said, heading for the door. He turned and gave me a meaningful look at the door. “I’ll see you downstairs in a few minutes?”

  “Sure,” I said, pushing my wet hair out of my face.

  “So,” Lindsey said after he’d gone. “What happened out there with you two? You guys looked really beat up when you got back.”

  “We had a pretty intense argument about what to do now that Jack’s gone AWOL.”

  “You want to give me the highlights?”

  “Nah,” I said, grabbing another towel for my shoulders. “I have a feeling we’re going to have the whole argument again anyway.”

  When I came downstairs ten minutes later, Alison and Lindsey were eating the soup we’d brought them in the kitchen and Chuck was watching a rerun of Magnum P.I. in the living room. “You know what always bugged me?” he said. “Tom Selleck was considered the hottest guy in the early eighties. Magnum was a hugely popular show. And yet, they could never get a single decent-looking female to guest star. Every time he gets involved with someone, she’s a dog.”

  “Standards were different then,” I said, joining him on the couch.

  “Bullshit. Charlie’s Angels came before Magnum and they were all hot. But this show is demoralizing. If a good-looking guy who drives a Ferrari isn’t getting any, what hope is there for anyone else?”

  Chuck always employed the Socratic method of viewing television shows. He didn’t seem able to enjoy himself without his pointless commentary. How come whenever there was a band in a sitcom episode, they could never make it look like they were really playing? Were we really supposed to believe the cops on 21 Jump Street could pass as high school students? Didn’t you ever want to see Alex and Mallory get it on on Family Ties? How the hell did Mulder and Scully justify their travel expenses? At first it was annoying, but after a while I learned to tune him out.

  The women finished eating and joined us in the living room. “I think we should split up and go look some more,” Alison said. Chuck snapped off the television and looked at me expectantly, as if it were somehow my responsibility to start this discussion, but I didn’t want any part of it. Alison looked completely strung out, and not in the mood for conversation. Better to spend a few more hours of futile searching before we grappled with the ramifications of Jack’s disappearance. It would give us all time to think about the situation, and our own places in it. I tried to signal that to Chuck with a look, but it was a bit too much for my eyes to convey alone, so I made a small gesture with my hand and shook my head slightly and Alison picked up on it immediately. “What?” she asked, looking at me.

  “Nothing,” I said with a frown. “I just . . . nothing.”

  “What?” she repeated impatiently.

  “Nothing,” I said again, getting up from the couch in order to more effectively ignore the exasperated look I got from Chuck. “Let’s look now. We’ll talk later.” I took Alison’s keys from her. “You and Lindsey stay here, in case he calls. Chuck and I will split up and look some more.”

  Chuck followed me out onto the porch shaking his head in disgust. It was still pouring, and the occasional clap of thunder could be heard in the distance. “What the hell was that?” he asked. “You said we’d talk about it.”

  “You were free to chime in at any time,” I said.

  “Come on, Ben. You know if it came from me she’d go apeshit.”

  “Let’s just give it a few more hours,” I said, looking at my watch. “We’ll meet back here at three and by then maybe Alison will have had some time to think about things.”

  “You’re just putting off the inevitable,” he said with a frown, fishing his car keys out of his jeans.

  “That’s what I do,” I said, pressing the button on Alison’s key chain. The Beamer beeped twice and flashed its headlights. “I may even be the best in my field.”

  “I’ll see you at three,” Chuck said darkly as we stepped into the rain.

  “Hey, think positive,” I said. “We might actually find him. Or he might come back on his own.”

  “Yeah,” Chuck muttered, pulling up the hood of his anorak and stepping off the porch. “That’ll happen.”

  Chuck took the Taurus and drove north up 57. I drove the Beamer south, away from Carmelina. I knew Alison had driven this route earlier, but there was just nowhere else to look. Who knew? Maybe I’d find Jack strolling along the blacktop in the rain, waiting for a ride. The rain pelted a smattering rhythm on the sunroof in a minor key that harmonized perfectly with the Counting Crows disc playing on the car stereo. Opaque blotches of water formed on the windshield, refracting the beams of oncoming cars. Not a great day to be outside. Jack had left without anything. Alison’s examination of his room showed that he’d taken only his wallet, not bothering with his shoes, or even his shirt for that matter, and according to Alison, no clothing was missing from the house. As far as we could tell, Jack was out in the rain with nothing but the pants of the hospital scrubs he’d been sleeping in. I was still fairly certain that he couldn’t have gotten very far. His only means of transportation would have been hitchhiking, and few drivers would be inclined to pick up a half-naked, fully soaked stranger.

  A flash of lightning illuminated the dense gray and black clouds that covered the sky, and off to my left I saw the actual bolt over a tree-topped mountain peak. The storm was shifting into high gear. As I rounded the next bend, I saw a back-up of four cars, unable to continue because of a felled tree that was blocking the road. “Where are you, Jack?” I said out loud, turning the car around and heading back toward the house.

  The suddenness with which the deer appeared in front of me was shocking. It didn’t wander onto the road from the forest as much as it simply materialized in the center. I fruitlessly stomped on the car’s waterlogged brakes and then there was a sickening, crunching impact—felt more than heard—which instantly evoked the soft-hard nature of the animal as it became one with the car. My hands grasped the wheel as I shouted an electrified denial, the brake pedal vibrating furiously under my toes, the high-pitched scream of hydroplaning wheels giving voice to the mute animal as we careened off the blacktop and into the mud-filled gully that separated the road from the forest. The force of our momentum lifted the deer onto the hood of the Beamer, its wet back pressed against the windshield so that all I could see were the perfect zigzag patterns of its sand-colored coat until the airbag exploded into my face as we hit the far side of the gully.

  The first thing I became aware of as my senses gradually returned from the gray mist of semiconsciousness was that the Counting Crows were still singing, oblivious to the collision. But the music had separated. Somewhere to my left was the acoustic guitar, strumming methodically, while the piano notes floated above my head. The drums were beating off to the right, and Adam Duritz’s disembodied, whining voice was coming from somewhere behind me. The bass seemed to be coming from inside my belly. Heard with such utter clarity, it wasn’t music anymore, but disconnected sounds that made no sense. My face was still numb from the impact of the airbag, but I could feel a hot tingle beginning in my cheeks, growing incrementally with every passing second. My hands still clutched the steering wheel in a death grip, the muscles of my arms locked into place. The rest of me hadn’t checked in yet. I unclenched my right hand from the wheel with difficulty, that simple motion sending the nerves in my arm and shoulder into an agonized frenzy, and punched off the stereo. Suddenly, silence was everywhere.

  Gradually, as if someone was turning a volume knob, the sound of the rain hitting the roof of the car got louder and louder, ushering me back to reality. I fumbled for the door, feeling the spray of rain on my face as it swung open. I experienced one truly terrifying moment when I found myself unable to rise up from the seat, but then realized that I was straining against my seat belt, and I managed to undo the clasp and climb out of the car. I walked around to the front of the car on wobbly legs, taking in the crushed grille, the twisted green metal that had once been the fron
t of the hood. Twenty feet away was the deer, lying in a mangled heap that rendered only its legs recognizable. “Where are you, Jack?” I muttered nonsensically as I approached the deer, my shoes sinking heavily into the mud. Its head was twisted completely around on its neck, the ears still standing up, its freckled snout pointing skyward. There was surprisingly little blood, but the deer’s crushed body, like the music in the car, no longer made any sense. As I stood over the dead animal a few drops of blood appeared on its long neck, only to be washed away by the driving rain. A few more drops reappeared and vanished before I realized that the deer wasn’t bleeding, I was. I held my hand against my nostrils and it came away bloody. Suddenly, the deer’s body began to vibrate as I watched with horror, scared that it wasn’t dead yet, but as with the blood, my perspective was off. The deer wasn’t vibrating, I was. The last remnants of strength left my legs and I sat down hard into a puddle. I was aware of a great, elemental sadness that seemed to have been growing in me for years like air constantly being breathed in and never breathed out. The rain poured over me, cold needles invading me at every point on my body, and I felt myself dissolving.

  I don’t remember who arrived first, the ambulance or Lindsey and Chuck, who’d grown alarmed when they couldn’t reach me on the Beamer’s cell phone, but later Chuck told me that when they found me I was crying like a baby.

  I awoke in an empty hospital room, blissfully numb from morphine and thinking about Sarah. I looked down at my body, covered from the waist down by a thin white blanket, as if it were an inanimate object, just another part of the bed. It had nothing to do with me. Sarah didn’t know that I was hurt. That seemed wrong. I was floating above the bed, couldn’t feel the sheets under me, the soft pressure of the mattress against my back. Where are you, Jack? I thought. There was a fresh bouquet of flowers on the end table. Birds of paradise, carnations, tulips, and baby’s breath. A splash of color in the otherwise sterile room. I floated above the flowers and could see the petals stretching outward, blooming in fast motion. Sarah didn’t know I was hurt. She was my wife. Not anymore. Still, it seemed wrong.

  I leaned over and lifted the telephone from the end table. After a few misses, I managed to dial Sarah’s number. “Hi,” I said when she picked up the phone. “It’s Ben.”

  “Ben?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a pause. “What’s wrong?”

  “I was in a car accident,” I said.

  “Oh my god! What happened? Are you okay?”

  “I guess. I just thought you should know.”

  “Where are you?” Sarah asked urgently. “Do you need me to come?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Some hospital.”

  “Which hospital, Ben? Where are you?”

  “I don’t know. In the mountains.”

  “The mountains? What are you talking about?”

  “I killed a deer,” I said, and felt a great wave of sadness wash over me as the recollection took hold. My eyes were starting to feel very heavy. “I have to go now.”

  “Wait a minute, Ben. Is there a doctor there? Is anyone else there?”

  “No.” I was suddenly feeling very tired. It was beginning to dawn on me that I shouldn’t have called Sarah. “I have to go.”

  “Don’t hang up!” she shouted. “Tell me where you are.”

  “I shouldn’t have called you,” I said. “I have to go.” I hung up the phone and closed my eyes. This is your brain on drugs, I thought as I nodded off.

  A little while later I opened my eyes to find Lindsey sitting in a chair by the side of the bed. “Hey, Benny,” she said softly, running her hand lightly across my forehead. “You’re okay. You had an accident, but you’re okay.” I could tell she’d been crying.

  “What time is it?” When I spoke, I could feel a stiffness in my cheeks, as if they were made out of some particularly dense putty.

  “It’s around five. You’ve been out for a few hours.”

  “I killed a deer,” I said, and felt my eyes fill with tears.

  “I know, sweetie,” she said, leaning over in her chair to gently press her forehead against mine as she rubbed my temples. “I know.” She rubbed her cheek against mine, as I cried into the softness of her neck. I couldn’t remember the last time I had cried and it felt strange, like an old childhood T-shirt that shouldn’t have fit anymore but somehow did. Lindsey held me, quietly rocking back and forth until I was done, which wasn’t too long since I discovered crying was hell on my bruised ribs. After I had stopped she handed me a tissue to blow my nose, and it was only as I pressed it to my face and yelped in pain that I realized how swollen it was.

  “Does my face look bad?” I asked her.

  “Define bad,” she said with a light grin. She rummaged through her bag and came up with a make-up mirror. I held it in front of me and observed the purple bruises under both of my eyes. My nose was a reddish brown, and blown up to twice its normal size. I looked like a Muppet.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “That airbag did quite a number on you,” Lindsey said sympathetically, standing up to stretch her legs. I wondered how long she’d been sitting there. She walked over to the flowers and began rearranging them as she spoke. “Chuck and Alison went downstairs to get some coffee. They’ll be up in a minute. You should have seen Chuck. He was giving the ambulance guys all these instructions. He rode with you in the ambulance, do you remember?” I didn’t. “Anyway, he walked into the emergency room like he owned the place, telling everybody what to do.”

  “Go Chuck,” I said softly, feeling myself inexplicably begin to withdraw again.

  “He was like one of those guys on ER, you know?” Lindsey continued. “Start a Lidocane drip, give me a chest film, a G.I. series, fifty ccs of this or that.” She giggled. “The doctors down there were ready to kill him. They had to kick him out of the emergency room, but he did manage to negotiate this private room for you.”

  “Was I conscious?”

  “You were in and out, and then they gave you something that just put you out for good.” She turned around and sat back down. Somewhere outside a car alarm was blaring. “You gave us a real scare, you know?”

  “I’m sorry.” For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to speak more than a few short words at a time.

  “When we drove up and I saw the car, and I saw you on the ground like that—” her voice broke and a tear rolled out of her left eye and down the side of her cheek before she could catch it with her finger. I watched the tear and felt a sense of guilty pleasure that she was crying for me, that I was enough of a presence inside her to send out that liquid signal. That I belonged to her. “We just found ourselves,” she whispered, but the thought went unfinished as Chuck and Alison came into the room carrying Styrofoam cups.

  “You’re up!” Alison exclaimed, coming over to give me a kiss. “How are you feeling?”

  “Lousy,” I said.

  “You look it,” Chuck said brightly, expertly thumbing through the charts clipped to the end of my bed, “You were very lucky,” he said, looking up at me. I found myself studying the bruise that remained on his face, although it wasn’t much more than a faded yellow smear by now. “No broken ribs, no internal injuries or bleeding. Just the bruises on your face.”

  “My body,” I said, trying to wiggle my shoulders. “Its sore.”

  “You probably strained all your muscles at the moment of impact.

  I saw the deer’s back as it hit my windshield, its matted fur crushed against the glass. I closed my eyes and leaned back into my pillows, exhausted and depressed.

  “We’ll leave you alone for a while,” Alison said. “Let you get some rest.”

  I woke up a little later feeling a bit better, but still inexplicably sad and unwilling to speak. I knew I was upset about killing the deer, but the sadness in me transcended that. It was as if the jarring nature of the accident combined with my recent reunion with Lindsey had stripped me of all the emotional buffers I’d come to rely up
on over the last few years. The effect was that I was experiencing the past year of loneliness and despair all at once. I was like something knocked loose off its foundations, weak and somehow smaller, reduced by my experiences. This was not something I could even begin to articulate, but Lindsey, who stayed in her seat by the side of my bed humming quietly, her hand resting gently on my hip, seemed to understand that I just needed some time to absorb everything and come out of it on my own.

  By evening I had pretty much regained my equilibrium. Alison and Chuck had gone home, to be there in case Jack called or showed up. Lindsey sat Indian style at the foot of the bed, my legs on either side of her, massaging my feet through the blanket as we talked. Outside, the onslaught of the rain continued, the water streaming down the window in jagged rivulets, like brushstrokes on our reflection. I studied our reflection of us in the window, watching how every time the evening sky was brightened by lightning we became translucent, ghosts floating in the rain-filled sky. I imagined credits scrolling up the window, as if we were the last scene in a movie.

  A weary-looking nurse carrying a tray entered the room briskly, her rubber souls squeaking on the waxed linoleum. She threw a disapproving glance at Lindsey perched on the bed and then dropped a paper cup with some pills on my end table. “That’s to get you through the night,” she said in a surprisingly soft voice. “The doctor says you can check out first thing in the morning.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She flipped off the light switch and turned to face Lindsey. “Your friend needs his rest and visiting hours are over. I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave.”

  “Okay,” Lindsey said pleasantly, hopping off the bed. She bent over me and kissed me lightly, once on the forehead and twice on the lips. “Feel good, Benny,” and then, brushing back my hair with her fingers, “I love you.”