As it turned out, I didn’t wake up until morning. At some point while I was asleep someone had thrown a blanket over me. I hoped it had been Lindsey, but I wouldn’t have bet my life savings on it. Actually, the way things had been going for me lately, I probably would have bet my life savings on it. The aroma of eggs and coffee came floating in from the kitchen, and I realized that I was starving. I took a quick roll call of my body parts and determined that all of them had shown up to work that day, although some more enthusiastically than others. I carefully rolled off the couch and hoisted myself into a standing position, taking a few seconds to dig my toes into the carpet and wiggle them around. For some reason I’d been finding the sensation of carpet between my toes oddly soothing since the accident. I walked toward the kitchen, the static electricity between my feet and the carpet crackling like a Rice Krispies commercial. I found Chuck and Alison glumly eating breakfast together.
“Hey,” I said, pulling up a chair.
“Good morning,” Alison said.
“How are you feeling?” Chuck asked, spreading some scrambled eggs onto toasted white bread. I waited until he was done and then grabbed the piece off his plate.
“Hungry,” I said, biting into the toast. “Needs salt.” I reached across Alison and grabbed the salt shaker.
“Everyone’s a critic,” Chuck said, grabbing another piece of toast off the plate in the center of the table.
“Where’s Lindsey?” I asked.
“Down by the lake,” Chuck said. “And if you ask me—”
“I’m not.”
“She looks none too pleased,” he finished.
I took another bite of toast and eggs and then pushed myself away from the table. “Here,” Chuck said, reaching into his pocket. “You’ll need it.” He pulled out my prescription bottle and cracked one of the pills in half. “Daytime rations,” he said, tossing me the fragment. I popped it into my mouth and washed it down with his orange juice. “I’ll see you guys later,” I said.
I was almost at the door when Alison softly said, “Ben.”
I turned to look at her. “Yeah.”
“Whatever the problem is, get it worked out now, because we have bigger things to worry about.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“He’s been gone two days, Ben,” she said, looking at me intently. “That’s two days and two nights.”
“I know.”
“No,” Alison said, her voice catching. “You don’t know. None of us knows. He could be hurt, he could be dead, we don’t know a goddamn thing.”
“Jack can take care of himself,” I said weakly.
“Yeah right,” she retorted. “If Jack could take care of himself we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“So what are you saying?” Chuck asked her. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” Alison said, running her finger introspectively around the rim of her juice glass. “I think it’s gone too far. Maybe we should speak to the police.”
“They’ll arrest us,” Chuck said. “Do you know what an arrest could do to my career? Or yours? You could be disbarred, and I’d lose my license.”
“We’re talking about Jack’s life!” Alison shouted at him, slamming her hand down on the table so hard that I saw bits of egg jump into the air. “How selfish can you be, Chuck?!”
“Hey!” Chuck shouted back. “I came here to help Jack, didn’t I? I got my goddamn nose busted trying to help my buddy Jack. But Jack didn’t want our help, and maybe it’s time you thought a little about that. Jack said fuck it and fuck us and took off. Right now he’s sitting in a hotel room somewhere stoned out of his gourd, picking his nose and laughing at us, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to piss my future away while that’s happening. You want to flush your career down the toilet over our junkie friend, you be my guest. You’ve been martyring yourself for Jack for years now, what’s one more sacrifice? But I came here to help a friend, not be destroyed by him!”
Alison just stared at Chuck, ignoring the tears as they descended from her unblinking eyes to the corners of her mouth, which hung open in anguished disbelief. I must have been staring at him, too, or maybe it was just too hard to look at the raw pain on Alison’s face, because Chuck suddenly turned to me and said, “What?! You know I’m right.”
We stared at each other for a moment. “As long as we all agree then,” I said quietly and retreated from the kitchen.
I found Lindsey sitting on a large rock that jutted out over the lake, her chin on her knees, digging out small pebbles from the crevices in the rock and tossing them into the water. She was wearing faded black jeans and a violet NYU sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail that disappeared into the crumpled hood of the sweatshirt. She didn’t turn around, but I knew she’d heard me come by the way she cocked her head.
“What’s all the shouting about?” she asked, her voice carefully neutral.
“Slight difference of opinion concerning the Jack situation.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” I continued, rambling nervously. “Alison thinks Jack’s lying dead in a ditch somewhere. She wants to call the cops.” Lindsey didn’t respond, but simply tossed another pebble into the lake. It hit the water with a soft, dignified ploop. When it became apparent that she intended to say nothing, I quickly continued. “Chuck thinks Alison has unresolved Jack issues that she needs to explore and is convinced Jack is holed up somewhere, stoned out of his gourd.”
Ploop . . . Ploop.
“Chuck is very against calling the cops. He’s sure we’ll all be arrested.” Ploop. “What do I think? I think they’re both right and they’re both wrong and would you please just turn around and talk to me for a second?”
There was a final ploop and then Lindsey pulled a stray hair out of her mouth and turned to face me. “You know what your problem is, Ben?”
I briefly wondered at the way those seven words seemed to find their way into the mouth of every woman I’ve ever known. “No,” I said. “Well, yes actually. That is, which problem are you talking about?”
“You can’t accept the fact that life doesn’t come with the closure and symmetry of a movie. You hate the loose ends, the knowledge that there are things in life that get screwed up and will remain irrevocably screwed up.”
This sounded so much like what Sarah had said to me when we got divorced that for one paranoid instant I actually considered the possibility that the two had discussed it between themselves. “I don’t want Sarah back,” I said.
“I know you don’t,” Lindsey said with a tender smile. “I’m not worried about that. But you don’t want her to resent you or hate you either. And you can’t accept the fact that you left something behind, something messy. You want to keep going back to see if you can somehow clean it up, make it more tidy in your mind, but it isn’t going to happen.”
“I know that,” I said.
“And while you’re busy looking back,” she continued, “you’re not looking at what you have right here in front of you. I don’t know,” she exhaled slowly. “Maybe that’s why you write, so that you can give closure to everything, you know? Achieve resolution.”
“I know what I have here,” I said. “You know I’ve always been in love with you.”
“I do, but it’s not enough. I love you, but I’m looking forward, not back.” She leaned forward, pulling her knees to her chest. “You screwed up in the past. Well, shit happens. You learn what you can, you scrape it off your shoe and you move on. If you can’t do that, you’ll never get the chance to get it right.”
“I was heavily medicated,” I pointed out.
“Bullshit, Ben,” she said. “Divorce means you’ve been permanently changed, and that terrifies you. But without change there’s no future for you. For us. So I need you to start accepting things. To start looking forward.”
The good old days weren’t always good, I thought to myself. And tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems. I thought about that for a momen
t, then about the wisdom of looking to song lyrics for direction, and then I climbed onto the rock to sit with her, facing the lake. My fingers found a small pebble and I tossed it into the lake. Ploop. There was an answering ploop as Lindsey tossed a pebble, and in that way we sealed our pact. I leaned against her and she ran her lips over my forehead.
I noticed our breath as it formed and mingled in front of us, a faint white vapor in the cool morning air. It wasn’t cold yet, but the weather was turning. The lake was absolutely still under the gray sky, its current undetectable, as if it too was sensing the approach of yet another winter and was preparing to freeze. Suddenly I sat up straight and looked across the lake. “The geese are gone,” I said.
Lindsey smiled at me and gave my arm a squeeze. “They’ll be back,” she whispered. We sat there quietly for a while watching the lake, growing ever so slightly older together.
We were still sitting on the rock a while later when Chuck came storming down, with Alison trailing him angrily. They were still going at it fiercely. “I can’t believe you’re bailing on us,” Alison said, hurrying to keep up with him.
“I’m not the one bailing,” Chuck yelled over his shoulder. “Jack’s the one who cut out.” He strode purposefully over to us and said, “We have to talk.”
“We can’t just leave,” Alison protested. “We have to do something.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” Chuck retorted.
Alison’s face was flushed with anger as she approached us. “Is that what you all think?” she asked, slightly out of breath from following Chuck down to the lake. “You think we should just go home?”
Chuck gave me an intense look, and I knew I couldn’t leave him hanging. “He’s gone, Alison,” I said slowly. “Wherever he might be, it’s out of our hands now. He didn’t want our help before. Even if we could find him, what makes you think he wants it now?”
“What are you talking about?” Alison said. “He needs us.” She looked at Lindsey and me, her eyes accusing and pleading at the same time.
“I think we need to lay out the options, Alison,” Lindsey said softly. “I mean, none of us is thinking very clearly right now.”
“My thinking is perfectly clear,” Chuck said, raising his voice. “And I don’t need to decide this on committee. I’m going home. Jack’s gone. He’s either found his way to a phone and called Seward to come get him, or he got high, or. . .” his voice trailed off.
“Or what?” Alison said, daring him.
“Or he’s dead,” Lindsey said, letting Chuck off the hook.
“I called the local hospital this morning,” Chuck said. “No one’s been admitted since last night, and there have been no DOAs either. Beyond that, I don’t see what else any of us can do.”
“We can talk to the police,” Alison said. “Once we tell them what happened, they’ll help us look for him.”
“Who? That jerk-off deputy? Yeah, I can see where he might be a big help.”
“We can speak to the sheriff or the State Police.”
Chuck made a face. “Great! Screw your life up some more over Jack. It’s like some sick joke already! But I’m not going to join you. I was set to leave two days ago, but then Ben got hurt so I stuck around. For him, not for Jack. I’ve taken off a week during a crucial surgery rotation. If I miss anymore, I can’t fulfill my requirement and I’ll have to wait until spring to start it over again. I’ll lose at least six months, and for what? It’s one thing to stick your neck out for someone when it might actually do them some good. But now we’re just hurting ourselves pointlessly. Ben could have been killed, for Christ’s sake.” He stopped and looked over at me before turning back to Alison. “Jack also damn near burned the house down with all of us in it, in case you’ve forgotten. And at no point through any of that did I think about quitting because I still thought we could help him. But now the police are sniffing around, and I think that’s our cue to get the hell out of here. . . . Jack walked out of his own free will, and that’s it. It’s time to let him take responsibility for his actions. We’re done here, Alison. It was a noble effort and it didn’t work. It was over the minute he walked out that door, and you’re the only one who doesn’t know it.”
Alison was looking straight at him now, her eyes narrowed into contemptuous slits. “So go home, Chuck. Take care of yourself. That’s what you’re best at anyway.” Her invective was almost verbatim what Luke said to Han Solo just before the Rebellion’s attack on the Death Star, but I didn’t see any advantage to pointing that out just then.
“You deluded bitch,” Chuck said softly.
“Chuck!” Lindsey shouted in surprise.
“No!” he yelled back. “We’re all tiptoeing around her, and I’m not going to do it anymore! I care about you, Alison. I know you don’t think that’s true, but it is. And that’s why I’m telling you this. You don’t love Jack, you’re addicted to him. Or to being a martyr for him, I don’t know, but it’s not healthy. You can’t even see the damage this is doing to you. To all of us.”
“Don’t you dare try to tell me how I feel!” Alison spat at him. “What the hell do you know about it? You’ve never loved anyone but yourself.”
He started to say something, shook his head and then waved his hand in a dismissive gesture as he turned away and headed back toward the house. “Fuck it,” he said. “I’m out of here.”
I stood up, panic churning in my stomach. Something was happening between all of us, bending under all the tension and hostility and I had an ominous feeling that when it snapped it would shatter irreparably. The lines were being drawn, and the sides we fell on would divide us permanently. “Chuck!” I called to him. “Wait a minute.” He frowned, but he stopped where he was.
“Let him go,” Alison said. “He’s made his priorities clear.”
“Alison,” I said turning to her, trying to keep my voice low and steady. “That’s not fair. He came for better reasons than the rest of us.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Alison said, still staring at Chuck, who was standing stock still on the lawn.
“It was harder for him to come than any of us. He had the most to lose, and unlike the rest of us, he had nothing else to gain.”
Alison turned to face me, her expression a question. “Look,” I said. “It’s no secret that things haven’t been so great for me lately. The divorce, my job, et cetera. This was a welcome break for me. Also, I also knew Lindsey would be here.”
“I understand,” Alison said bitterly. “So now you’re together, you both got what you want, and Jack doesn’t matter anymore. Is that it?”
“Jesus Christ!” Lindsey said, smacking the rock in frustration. “No one is saying that. Will you grow up already?”
“Please, Alison,” I said. “The point is, unlike Lindsey and me, Chuck has a major career going, and he had put it at risk because he had a friend who needed help. He came out here to help Jack, and to help us. End of sentence. No other reason. So if you want to argue about whether or not we should call it quits you can argue, but be fair about it. Jack goes postal and tries to burn the house down, and you get pissed at Lindsey for using her stun gun. Chuck brings up the possibility of going home and you bite his head off. We’re your friends, Alison. Don’t push us away.”
“I’ll tell you something else,” Lindsey said, getting up and walking over to face Alison, who was now standing on the far side of the rock. “I came here for you too, more than for Jack. Because you’re my closest friend and I love you. You’ve always been there for me and I can’t stand—” She swallowed hard and continued. “I can’t stand to watch you get hurt over and over again by him.” She punctuated her sentence with a stiff nod and turned away, wiping a tear out of the corner of her eye.
“When we set out to do this we said that there was a risk that we would lose him,” I said to Alison as Lindsey sat back down at the edge of the rock. “But now it feels like we’re losing you, too.”
Alison turned around and looked out o
ver the lake, her arms wrapped across her chest, hands hugging her shoulders. I could see her back contracting and expanding as she breathed deeply. Chuck took a few halting steps forward to the foot of the rock, sensing a change in the atmosphere. “I had another reason, too,” Alison finally said. “For coming up here, I mean. I told myself it was all to help Jack, but that’s not completely true. I guess I thought that if I was the one who helped him, if I pulled him through, he’d see how much I loved him, and he’d realize how much he loved me. I just—I don’t know. . . . I’ve spent the last ten years holding out for someone who doesn’t even want me. Life’s moving ahead without me, and half the time I don’t even realize it’s happening. It’s like every so often I look at the calender and I’m shocked to see that years have gone by and I’m still in the same spot. It’s lost time, and I have no idea where it went. And I look up one day and I’m thirty years old and no closer to having a husband and a family than I was when I was in college.” She sighed, absently digging her toe into a crevice of the rock. She dislodged a small pebble and kicked it into the lake. I listened for the ploop.
“I don’t know,” she continued, staring into the concentric ripples her pebble had created in the water. “I just know I was supposed to be somewhere else by now. And I guess I thought if I could get him up here, away from all the craziness in his life, we’d have a chance. It was stupid and selfish, but I did it anyway.” She turned to face us, her eyes downcast. “It’s insane, really. I’m like a stalker, like Kathy Bates in Misery or something. I kidnapped Jack to make him love me. I brought you all into it under the guise of saving him from himself, when I was thinking about myself as much as him. And now if he’s hurt, or sick or worse, it’s my fault. Because I was stupid enough to think I could change him, to make him what I wanted him to be so that my life could get to where it was supposed to be by now.”
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