by Dave Connis
I’m coming. Please wait for me. Please, Dez.
—
When we land, Mr. Coulter calls the cops for an update, and they tell him there’s one cruiser out looking for her and that they’ll let him know if they find her. We catch a cab to the rental house. As soon as Mr. and Mrs. Coulter walk inside, they start calling her name.
“She won’t be in here,” I say, and they look at me like I’m a psychic.
“She refused to sleep in the house. She only ever slept in the Hamana on the patio.”
“Hamana?” Mr. Coulter asks.
“Banana plus hammock.”
We walk onto the patio. The hammock’s empty, and the big heater’s turned off. I run to her tent, but she’s not there either. We search the house just in case, but we don’t find anything.
“Where else would she be?” they ask, but I have no idea.
We drive over to Miss Hunt’s house, and even though we tell her Dez’s missing, she invites us over for dinner. In her defense, she said she’d make some phone calls first. We stop by Bridge Studios. The Ass is here, sitting behind a desk. He rubs his temples as if the sight of me alone is enough to bring on a migraine. He says he hasn’t seen “Mindy,” and he looks very thankful about it.
Outside of Bridge, I look up the “What Are You, Elias?” email and copy Mr. Crowell’s number onto the back of my hand with a pen from Mrs. Coulter’s purse. His phone rings twice, then he answers.
“Good evening, whom am I speaking with?” he asks.
“Mr. Crowell, it’s Adam Hawthorne. Dez’s friend?”
“How can I help you, Adam? Did you get the recording?”
“Yeah, I did, and I still haven’t recovered from it. Listen, I was wondering if you knew where Dez was? I think she’s in trouble.”
His voice goes from business casual to business formal. “When was the last time you talked with her?”
“Last night.”
“Was she showing signs of duress? What was the discussion like?”
“She sounded off. There was loud music in the background and people were talking around her.”
“Did she say anything?”
“Yeah, she said, ‘Check your email’ and ‘Oh, Adam. I’ve done it now.’ And she gave me the last line of a book.”
“What was the line?”
“‘Good-bye.’”
“Have you alerted local authorities?”
“Yes, and there’s a cruiser looking for her.”
“Come over to my house immediately. I’ll make some calls and get some more hands on this as soon as possible.”
“Okay, thank you so much, Mr. Crowell.”
“One last question: has she ever shown any suicidal tendencies?”
“Um, no. Well, I don’t know. She has a history of substance abuse, but she never abused it in a suicidal way. At least that I know of.”
“Did anything happen to her that would cause her to turn to abuse again?”
I swallow and close my eyes.
This is my fault. Our eruption.
“Yeah, me.”
—
We’ve been waiting at Mr. Crowell’s house for three hours when he finally walks into the living room with his cell phone pressed against his ear.
“Yes. Yes, great work. Okay, thank you.” He puts his phone in his pocket. “That was the current police chief. He said they found her in an alley behind a local nightclub, but she’s not conscious and her pulse is weak. He suspects she tried overdosing. They found traces of cocaine everywhere: on her clothes, under her fingernails. They’re rushing her to Nashville General.”
This is BS. God, this is BS.
Mrs. Coulter lays a hand over her heart. “Will she be okay?”
“There’s no way to know until they get her to the hospital. Come on, I’ll escort you.”
I can’t believe I left her. She was afraid of Percocets because of where they lead and instead of helping her, I left her. I pushed her past the gate. No, we both pushed her past the gate. I’m not going to give myself all the credit for this. We both erupted.
Somehow, all the chaos makes everything seem distant. Like, when I look out the back passenger window, I see nothing but Dez lying in the street calling for help. Noise? I hear nothing but dim echoes. Sirens. Talking. I hardly feel the seatbelt press into my chest as Mr. Crowell slams on the breaks when someone cuts him off.
The moment the Emergency Room glass doors slide open, every noise comes back. It’s too much for my senses to take and I feel like I’m going to snap. Beeping. Emergency room silence. Hurt. Fear. Love. Fear. Beeping. Each time another noise or person enters my senses, I feel like the next will send me into a psych ward–worthy meltdown.
NOT AFRAID OF LETTING GO
In her room, I grab a chair and pick a spot by her bed. I refuse to move. I’ve left her once, and it was the worst decision I’ve ever made. I’m not going to do it again.
“Sir, visiting hours are over.”
“That’s nice. I’ll let everyone know.”
“Sir, you have to leave.”
“No.”
In the end, I’m pretty sure Mr. Coulter paid the nurse to let me stay.
The next three days are a mixture of blur and random detail. I know my phone’s rung at least fifty times. I know that Christmas comes and goes in the most non-Christmas fashion, which isn’t a surprise. Christmas isn’t really for people lying in hospital beds after almost dying of a mixture of stolen pills, cocaine, and alcohol.
I don’t know if the phone calls decrease, and I’m not sure if I’ve let go of her hand since I’ve sat down. I don’t know if I’ve eaten, and I’m not sure if I’ve gone to the bathroom. What I do know is that Dez Coulter is beautiful, and I’ve felt her burn rippling up my shoulders. And even though Ray Bradbury didn’t mean it this way, I know it’s a pleasure to burn with her. I tell her that, whether she’s listening or not.
I don’t know what day it is when I finally see life in Dez Coulter, my normal girlfriend, but it comes when her fingers slide between mine.
“I love you,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
She lifts her arm and the small plastic tube of the IV pulls taught. She tugs on my shirt and pulls my head onto her pillow.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice scratchy and slurred. “If you’ll have me, it’d be a pleasure to burn with you.”
“Yes, please,” I say.
She makes her fingers into a greater than sign and places them against my chest and just like that she’s asleep again.
Three months later…
I’m on the shore next to the bridge of Deception Pass. The same place I stood when my family came here for their final vacation before the explosion of hearts.
This isn’t a dream. I am here.
The sand is really beneath my toes. The water is definitely navy blue. Not black. The sky is sapphire blue, deep and thick with brilliance. A golden sun sets against the arches and crags of the various islands dotting the Puget Sound. I feel spring on the air. There’s no darkness here. Just beauty.
“It’s pretty,” Addy says.
“Really pretty,” Dad says.
“Brings back so many memories,” my mom says, her voice breaking.
I swallow. I don’t look at her, but I don’t hate her.
“Thanks for suggesting this, Adam,” Mom says. “Coming here for our first … family hangout is such beautiful symmetry.”
“I know,” I say, staring down the water.
“Come on,” Addy says. “Let’s head back before it gets dark. I feel the summoning of ice cream, somewhere.”
The sound of sand crunching under feet surrounds me as my family walks back toward the tree line, but I stand staring at the water.
This is the point where deception meets reality.
The point where I choose what I believe about myself.
My body shivers with the fear of being alone, but I came to Deception Pass for this moment. There are no formu
las here. There won’t be, after this. There’s nothing philosophical. There’s only me and that Gollum-like voice telling me that I should walk toward the dark because it’s safer. Telling me that being alone is better.
But I came here to swallow the dark.
I came to Deception Pass to turn around.
I swivel on my heel.
Leaving the water behind me.
My family has stopped a few feet ahead.
They wait for me.
Addy holds out her hand and motions for me. “Come on!”
I run to them.
—
The next day, I tighten my tie again and again. Eventually I realize nothing ever feels good enough for a funeral. I wipe the tears from eyes and look at my friends sitting beside me in their various states. Even though she’s crying, Addy sits strong and present. Holding my hand like she always has. Trey’s been crying since we hit I-5, and he’s still going. Elliot’s part-emo, so I feel like he’s been sulking on the edge of tears since we met. All in all, we may now be the Knights of Vice Versa, but we’re the same amount of mess as the Knights of Vice.
The Knights of Vice Versa is what Mr. Cratcher called us in his “Everyone” recording. He said, “Once you know what you are, you are no longer a human who struggles with addiction, but a human who struggles with being human. Therefore, I knight you all as new beings. You are now the Knights of Vice Versa.”
I keep looking over my shoulder at the church doors, expecting Dez to come through them, but it’s impossible. The minister stands and calls us all to order while my mind tries to concoct what complaints Dez would have about the cheesy photomontage playing against the wall via projector.
The church goes silent as “What Are You, Elias?” starts playing. I look at the doors again. I remind myself, again, she’s not coming.
The doors creak as they swing open. A group of people—including my dad—walk down the aisle with the coffin.
Dad glances at me as he walks past. He wanted me to be a pallbearer, but I said no. It might be unfair, but right now I feel like I’m carrying enough weight without carrying death itself.
The pallbearers place the coffin at the front of the church and scatter to seats reserved for them on the front row. The minister looks at me and nods. I stand, but right before I step out of the pew, the church doors swing open and Dez runs down the aisle in black fur-lined boots, a yellow dress with white polka dots, and a black cardigan. In other words, she’s as beautiful as beautiful can get.
The entire church is watching her, but she doesn’t care. She stops by me, and we kiss for the first time since she went to rehab almost three months ago.
“You were going to take my speech, you ass. I’ve worked on it for hours,” she whispers.
“You told me yesterday they weren’t going to let you out,” I say.
She puts a finger on my lips. “Shhh, you think too much.”
I laugh. Only Dez would break out of rehab to go a funeral.
She walks up to where the minister’s standing and lays a crumpled piece of paper on the podium. The minister gives me a “what’s going on?” look.
Dez clears her throat and begins. “I’ve never found it necessary to read the stuff between the first and the last lines of books.”
I chuckle along with the other Knights of Vice Versa.
“The reason for this is: I’ve never wanted to commit to working through boringness of everything that isn’t the first and last line. However, being fresh from rehab—and by fresh, I mean being an escapee—I’ve been discovering that the middle’s where all the life happens, and I’ve spent my tiny and pitiful seventeen years of life running from it. I had the stupid idea that if I ignored stuff that looked middle-ish—doing well in school, being okay with having money, having close friends, living day-to-day, working through hurt—I could live in the epic-ness of first and last sentences.” She turns to us, the Knights of Vice Versa. “Turns out, this idea really just made me turn things that should be normal into epic things.”
She takes a break, then a breath, and continues.
“Most of you know Mr. Cratcher was a mystic, but the one question he asked my friends and I the most was as simple and normal as it could get: ‘What are you?’ When he first asked me, I was sure I was only an addict, but I was only seeing myself in terms of a first and last line. To me, there wasn’t a middle, but to Mr. Cratcher, the middle was everything. The middle meant we were human.
“Mr. Cratcher’s question pushed me past my epic-ness obsession. He forced me to consider the middle, and my immediate observation was: the middle hurt like hell.”
The Knights of Vice Versa laugh again, and this time a few people around us let out chuckle.
“However, in the middle, I found what I’d been looking for among the first and last lines: hope. I think if I told Mr. Cratcher that right now, he’d still think I was missing the point. He’d probably say something like, ‘You can’t have true life without living every part of it. The first, the middle, and the last are all equal parts beautiful, chaotic, and painful.’ And if I disagreed with him, he’d repeat himself. And if I disagreed with him again, he’d repeat himself.”
Finally, a hearty laugh flows through everyone. The why-is-this-girl-wearing-a-yellow-polka-dot-dress-to-a-funeral-and-talking-up-front awkwardness is defeated.
“I had the horrid pleasure of going on a miserable road trip with a group of addict friends. We went looking for a part of Mr. Cratcher’s past, but we ended up finding the pain of our own. For me, the hardest part about the trip was the way everyone who’d known Mr. Cratcher talked about him like he’d changed their lives. I couldn’t see how that was possible because I was certain life was fixed, that we are only as good as our first and last lines. I kept asking myself how could this one man change so many lives simply by being in them? More importantly, how could lives change?
“This next sentence will be taking advantage of a lot of untold backstory, but when I was lying nearly dead in a Nashville hospital, I realized that if change weren’t possible, racial segregation wouldn’t have been declared illegal. If change weren’t possible, my friends wouldn’t be turning into damn good men. If change weren’t possible, love wouldn’t have been a reason that made me want to stay alive.”
She looks at me. I catch her blue eyes, and all I want to tell her is that I love her.
Just a normal “I love you.”
“Mr. Cratcher’s last words to me were in a message he’d left on a computer. He said, ‘Your wholeness doesn’t define your ability to love,’ and that, to me, is one of the best last lines I’ve ever heard. With it, Mr. Cratcher invited me to be human. He invited me to change. He invited me to live in the middle, and I can never repay him for it. I can only be a holy and broken hallelujah, just as he was to me, and I’m sure if he was here, he’d tell me that’d be enough.”
She walks down the stairs and squeezes between Elliot and me. I grab her hand and hold it, and this time, I’m not afraid of letting go.
HOW WE BLAZE
A sea of black swirls around me, but my eyes follow a blur of yellow polka dots. Dez runs up to me and throws her arms around me. Three months of nothing add up to now, and I hug her as tight as I can. I can hear her crying in my ear.
“I love you,” I say.
“I love you, too.” She pulls away and wipes a tear from her eye.
“So rehab is working, apparently?”
“It’s amazing the things you can do when you aren’t always half a human.”
At the hospital, she spilled the true story of Dez Coulter. She’d been taking Percocet all along. She’d been drugged from the moment I met her.
“You look like a real Dez,” Addy says over my shoulder. She lets go of Trey’s hand, walks up to her, and they hug almost as tight as we did. Dez really does look like a real Dez. That girl I saw the night we walked down the Brentwood cul-de-sac. The one who hoped and dreamed and talked about a future. This girl in front of me wearing a yello
w polka dot dress is her. She’s someone I’d hoped for. Someone we’re all capable of being.
Trey puts an arm over my shoulder and whispers, “Dude, Dez Coulter is hot.”
I smile. “Yeah, she really is. Wait. Trey, you’re dating my sister.”
“I know! Isn’t that awesome?”
“You are so confusing,” I say.
“Tell me about it,” Elliot adds, walking around the hug fest that is Addy and Dez. My two everythings.
Finally Addy and Dez split apart, but Dez is still crying. She comes over to me and buries her head in my neck.
“Do you think they’re gonna make you stay longer because you broke out?” Elliot asks.
“I don’t know. I’m just ready to be out.”
“Are they coming for you? Are you like, a wanted chica now?” Trey asks. “Because that’d be pretty cool.”
She sighs. “I don’t know. I want to talk about something else besides my escaping from a rehab clinic. It’s too first and last line. What were you guys going to do after the funeral?”
“Get some to-go milkshakes from Pritchett’s and work on the album,” I say. “We’re working on ‘When We Reach the City.’”
“My favorite,” Addy adds.
Dez nods. “Well, I’d rather be captured recording an album than at a funeral. That’ll look pretty weird to the white coats. Also, I thought of new name for the album while I was in the slammer. I think it sums up Mr. Cratcher’s life better than Hounds of Eden.”
“What is it?” Elliot asks.
“Looking for Eden.”
We’re all silent for a few seconds, thinking through the name. We spent so much time looking for his album, Hounds of Eden, only to decide in the end that, even if it was in a box out in the garage, it didn’t matter. We were going to remake the album without it, together, which is what I think he wanted me to do ever since he brought me into that studio. I thought he was recording the album for himself, but I realize now that he was simply facing the story of his life at the end of his days it so he could pass it onto me. All those times he tried to get me to write a song or said, “I don’t think that’ll be my decision,” he wanted me to make the album mine. I didn’t.