by K. Z. Snow
Rider and I gaped at him.
Tim pitched his phone at Rider, and Rider did a juggling catch before it bounced off his chest. “What the fuck, man?”
Tim strode up to him, face quivering, eyes wet. “Someone we both know mistakenly sent me an e-mail obviously meant for you.”
I leaned in to see it as Rider gazed at the screen.
Hey Gorgeous! God I miss you, Rider. Seeing you tonight made me realize how much. I miss your kisses and your groans. I miss the feel of your beautiful hair between my fingers and your beautiful body beneath my hands and your beautiful face against my lips. I miss “that other” beautiful part of you too. Baby, there’s nothing wrong with our relationship. Neither of us is a child. We can go on having our fun. I told you I’ll be leaving my hub soon, and whoever you’re dating doesn’t have to know about us. We’ve been very discreet. Please, I can’t wait to touch you and look into your eyes again.
Love, Your Biggest Fan xoxoxoxo
“Fuck,” Rider said, barely audibly.
The sender was nanonfire. She clearly hadn’t accepted Rider’s rejection. I’d more or less gathered that from the way she’d been ogling him at the dance—like she’d been craving Maine lobster and he was a two-pound tail. Aside from thinking Doesn’t she have any pride? I wondered why Tim was wigging out over the message. Did he, too, have something going on with Rider?
It was certainly within the realm of possibility that Tim was gay. He’d never been keen on scoring a girlfriend. When I considered this, along with Nancee’s dance performance for Rider and her ardent e-mail, I thought my guts would spill out of my mouth. Who didn’t want him?
But Rider gave Tim a befuddled look. He seemed just as confused by Tim’s reaction as I was. Nothing was going on between them.
“Why? Why?” Tim bunched the front of Rider’s sweatshirt in his fists and tried to shake him. He was crying. He was nearly hysterical. I’d never seen him that way—I doubt anybody had—and it both bewildered and scared the hell out of me.
“Hey,” I said, gripping Tim’s shoulders, pulling him away from Rider. “What’s going on? Just calm down and talk. Talk to us, man.”
He jerked free of my hold without acknowledging me and kept staring furiously into Rider’s face. “We had plans! We were going to wait until I graduated and then get away from here and start a life together. We were going to get married as soon as I turned eighteen and her divorce was final. Now she wants you? You don’t know what love is! I’m the one who loves her! I’m the one who wants to build a future with her!”
Rider muttered, “Holy shit.”
At that point, the situation became clear. I’m pretty sure my jaw dropped.
With remarkable speed and composure, Rider deleted the message, handed me the phone, grasped Tim’s wrists, and forced his arms down. “I didn’t know,” he said, his voice firm but full of regret. “How could I? She never said anything about you.”
“That’s supposed to make it better?” Tim swiped an arm over his wet face. “You could get anybody! I’ve always wondered why you never bothered trying. Now I have the answer. You had your sights set on her. And you didn’t want or need anybody else once you got her.”
“That’s not true. I swear. She’s the one who put the make on me. She’s the one who won’t let it go.”
Choking out one ragged sob after another, Tim began to squirm. Before Rider could explain how he’d tried to get rid of Nancee and why, Tim freed one arm, staggered backward, and slapped him with such lightning speed, I didn’t even see it coming. “No wonder you looked so goddamned slick tonight! It wasn’t Faith you were trying to impress.”
I knew right then and there I needed to stay out of this. It was between Rider and Tim, and so intensely personal I shouldn’t have even been in the room. But my feet seemed glued to the floor.
“Listen to me!” Rider shouted, his cheek blazing and eyes blazing, a fallen hank of hair slicing across his face like a scar. He pushed Tim onto the bed and, straddling him, held him down. “I’m not seeing her anymore. Okay? You can have your dream back. But if you think a woman who doesn’t give a shit about her current husband is going to give a shit about her future husband—or about any of her fuck buddies, for that matter—you better think again, bro. She’s gonna keep fooling around with boys as long as she can get away with it and her looks hold up. She’ll probably get knocked up by some boy, if she hasn’t been already. Seducing young guys is obviously a sickness with her.”
Tim raised his head and spat in Rider’s face. Stunned, Rider let his guard down just long enough for Tim to buck him off and sprint out of the room as he snatched his phone from my hand. Rider bolted off the bed, and we both swung into the hallway.
“Tim!” Rider called out. “Stop!”
He didn’t stop. He barely even paused as he whipped the phone through his open door. Carlton apparently wasn’t there, so he couldn’t be of any help. He must not have returned from the dance yet.
“Maybe Tim needs to be alone for a while,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“No, he doesn’t.” Concern lined Rider’s face.
Suddenly, a sick apprehension filled me. I snatched up my jacket and Rider’s coat. Thank God our gloves were in the pockets because I somehow knew we’d end up outdoors.
We both took off down the hallway. Tim had already fled into the stairwell. A few guys peered out of their rooms, but now that the ruckus had died down, they seemed to lose interest in what was going on and indifferently withdrew.
The outside air, when it hit us, seemed a split second away from freezing solid. It was colder than Nancee Anderson’s heart. I could make out Tim’s form ahead of us, charging down the sloping, snow-covered lawn, pinwheeling his arms to keep from falling. Rider and I slid and stumbled after him, occasionally grasping at each other to keep our balance.
Tim didn’t stop when he reached the bay. He kept running. The snow provided traction on the ice.
“Where the hell is he going?” Rider said in frustration. “He can’t run all the way to fucking Egg Harbor. It’s got to be at least fifteen miles away.”
Across the largest bay on Lake Michigan. I knew where Tim was going. Across the largest freshwater estuary in the world. I knew. Across acres of fish easily caught in the winter by people sitting in shanties or on buckets in front of… Fear shot through me like a bolt of electricity. “Tim!” I screeched. “Stop!” …holes in the ice.
I lost my footing and fell on my ass. Rider helped me up. “We have to hurry,” I huffed out.
Tim was well past the primitive hockey rink when he paused for a second or two. Moongleam glanced off his pale gold hair. I thought, irrelevantly, how handsome he’d looked at the dance. Then his slender body, a long smudge in the darkness, shot straight up off the ice by a foot, came back down, and abruptly… vanished. The splash hit my ears right afterward.
“Oh no. Oh Jesus. Tim!” I skidded up to the oversized fishing hole and barked out a warning to Rider. “Be careful. It’s hard enough to see in the daytime.”
“Did he—?”
“Yes.”
I stepped between two of the reflective posts and stretched out on my belly. Rider did the same on the other side of the hole. We thrust our arms past floating shards of ice and into the water as far as they would go. The cold was so shocking, my breath caught. I remembered swimming in a quarry when I was nine, how that first plunge into the crystal water had made my ribcage contract around my heart.
Rider made guttural sounds of discomfort. Although the polyurethane shell of my jacket protected my arm at first, my hand felt crushed by the cold, as if it were sandwiched between two blocks of ice. The pain was almost unbearable. Then the water began to creep up my sleeve.
Rider withdrew his arm from the water. Cursing, he shook it and quickly thrust his bare hand into his armpit. I kept reaching through the liquid blackness, hoping to find Tim. Soon, my hand felt numb. I also had to pull it out.
“I t
hink I might’ve touched him,” I said through chattering teeth. “My hand brushed against something solid.” I rolled onto my side and shoved my useless hand down my pants. If my crotch couldn’t warm it, nothing could.
Rider immediately reached into the hole. He grimaced. After maybe ten seconds of swirling his arm around, he went still. “I got him. I got him.”
Grunting, he tried to maneuver Tim toward the hole. I wriggled over to Rider’s side. When a blot appeared near the surface, I grabbed for it too. My fist closed over a sopping wad of fabric—Tim’s cable-knit sweater.
“I think we have his upper body,” Rider said.
We pulled, but Tim’s head became lodged under the ice. I scuttled back to the other side of the hole and eased Tim toward me while Rider hung on to him. As soon as his head appeared, we half lifted and half dragged him out of the bay.
He was limp and unconscious.
After getting Tim’s arms over our shoulders, we held them there and cinched him around the waist. His head hung forward, chin resting on chest. Moving as fast as possible, we walked him to shore. Except Tim wasn’t walking. His legs dragged behind him, shoes plowing toes-down through the snow.
Two backlit figures hurried along the shoreline—Brody and Carlton. They rushed onto the ice and lifted Tim’s legs.
Carlton’s frantic eyes shifted from Tim’s face to mine. “Jesus, what happened?”
I was too preoccupied to answer.
Brody looked at Rider. “Mastodon said you and Tim were yelling at each other and then you and Jake started chasing him down the hall.”
Mastodon was Mick Mastonkowski, a 350-pound guy on our floor with big teeth and shaggy hair who could sing opera like freakin’ Pavarotti. His voice suddenly soared through my mind, some aria he liked from the final act of Madame Butterfly.
We finally got Tim on land. I’d never been so grateful for all those truckloads of sand that had been dumped there and in the shallows. If we’d had to negotiate icy rocks, I’m not sure we would’ve made it. I was freezing and exhausted and ached all over, and Rider surely felt the same.
“Who’s got a phone? Anybody got their phone?” I asked breathlessly.
Brody pulled his cell out of his pants pocket.
“Call 9-1-1. Tell them a male Ben Raphael student, age sixteen, fell into the bay. We got him out but he’s not conscious.”
“Is he breathing? They’ll probably want to know that too.”
I held my palm in front of Tim’s nose. “It’s hard to tell, but I don’t think so.”
Rider pulled off his coat and spread it over the snow. He and I laid Tim on his back. We couldn’t waste time carrying him to the dorm.
“Take off your coats,” Rider said as he peeled off Tim’s drenched sweater. I quickly draped my down jacket over Tim’s torso. Rider pulled his gloves out of his coat pockets and put them on. I wrestled mine onto Tim’s hands. Rider told Brody and Carlton to put one of their jackets under Tim’s head and the other over his legs.
Rider began chest compressions. I tried to tuck one side of my jacket under Tim’s body. Carlton knelt down and did the same on the other side. I think he was crying. Distantly, I heard Brody’s quaking voice. He was trying to describe to the dispatcher where exactly on the academy’s frontage we were. Carlton jogged back through the snow toward the dorms to tell somebody, anybody what had happened.
I wrapped my arms around myself. Shit, it was cold, but at least it wasn’t the kind of ball-cracking cold we’d had recently.
“Come on come on come on,” I kept muttering as I sat on my haunches and rocked.
Rider worked silently, diligently. I rolled my head back and stared at the rash of stars. They looked like a veil of ice crystals over a depthless black chasm.
Infinity. Eternity.
You can’t have him, I thought, and tears began to roll down my cheeks. He’s too young. He’s too good. Leave him here.
The stars seemed slowly to descend upon the shore, pushed by the monstrous engine of the universe. The night behind them got darker. Or was it the vast shadow of my terror? Oh Christ, I was becoming delusional. Even as that thought struck me, I was convinced the blackness was lowering, lowering, hungry for Tim’s spirit. I could almost hear the frosty star-beads tinkling in welcome.
Rider put an ear to Tim’s chest. “Damn it,” he said hoarsely. He tilted Tim’s head back, lifted his chin, pinched his nose shut. He sealed his mouth over Tim’s and breathed into it.
At some incalculable distance, a coyote howled beneath the merciless bright eye of the moon.
Chapter Ten
TIMOTHY WALTER Burnett was officially pronounced dead at 1:38 a.m. in some sterile emergency room. I was certain he’d passed through the veil much earlier. His death was ruled accidental, although Rider and I knew better. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to say it when we were questioned after being taken to the infirmary. We were physically and emotionally wrung out and suffering from hypothermia. An RN tended to us.
We learned those few spare facts of our friend’s death by overhearing several people conversing in low voices in the anteroom. We also learned he’d cracked his head on the edge of the ice as he went down. Whether or not an autopsy was performed would be up to Tim’s parents, but nobody seemed to think one was necessary. There’d been no foul play, no mysterious circumstances.
As soon as the people were gone, I asked Rider, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” A clotted whisper.
I could tell he didn’t feel like talking.
After fifteen minutes or so, I removed the heat packs from beneath my thermal bed covering. I was getting too warm.
The skeletal shadows of branches swayed against the infirmary’s white walls. They seemed to be moving in time to Mastodon’s singing. He wasn’t there, of course, but I heard him nonetheless. I watched and listened, hoping my mind would be hypnotized into blankness….
Strange noises woke me out of a deep sleep. I lifted my head off the crisp pillowcase. A flood of recollection, like a body-wide cramp, immobilized me for a minute, and I dropped my head back down.
The noises didn’t stop. They were coming from Rider’s bed.
I lunged over to him, slipped in beside him. If there were cameras in the room, fuck ’em. Rider was crying. And Rider never cried.
“It’ll be all right,” I whispered, stroking his hair. “I’m here. You’re not alone.”
“I couldn’t save him,” he hitched out.
“That’s not your fault. You did your best. You did everything you could.”
“No. I didn’t.” Gripping the front of my hospital gown, he turned into my chest and tried to muffle his sobs.
“Yes you did, Rider.” My heart was breaking into a million pieces. I held him tighter and tried to soothe him. “Shh. Shh. We’ll get through this. I’m not going to leave your side.”
His grip tightened. “I… I couldn’t save Erin either. The… the old man was right.”
My forehead crimped. “What?” I had no idea what he was talking about.
“When I was ten and she was eight. She waded into a… a kind of pond or swamp to see a beaver dam. But she… she stepped on something, a submerged log or rock or something, and… she slipped and hit her head on the dam and went down. I waded in after her but I was… afraid to go under the… the water.”
“Was Erin your sister?” I asked gently.
I felt Rider nod against my chest.
He’d once told me he had only one full sibling, a sister who’d had a fatal accident when she was young. He hadn’t offered any details. The two of them had been best friends. He’d only mentioned her briefly, but I could tell he still missed her.
“The old man kept screaming at me. ‘She’d still be alive if you weren’t such a fucking sissy!’” Rider’s choking sobs broke out afresh. “And he… th-threw me into the b-bathroom and cut off all my h-hair. Shaved me right down to the scalp. Didn’t c-care if he cut me. And he kept bellowing at me. ‘I won’t have
a goddamned sissy in my house! You’re jeopardizing everyone’s safety!’”
My throat clogged. “Oh God, Rider.” I kissed his beautiful hair again and again and stroked his quaking back. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
The nurse on duty must’ve heard us, because she poked her head through the door. “Is everything all right in here?”
“Leave us alone,” I said. And, miraculously, she withdrew. It must’ve been the sound of my voice—although damned if I can remember how it sounded.
Rider had pulled away from me, but he was hardly composed. I grabbed some tissues from the box on his nightstand and tenderly wiped his face.
He suddenly grasped my hand. “I should’ve gone in after her, but I was afraid to. You know what I’m saying? Tonight I was afraid again.”
I froze for a horrified second as understanding hit me. “God, no. No! Then you’d be dead too. What good would that have done?” Leaning over him, I kept petting his hair, kept kissing his salty face. “You did exactly the right thing. You have to believe that. Tim could’ve been dead, or nearly so, by the time he was underwater.”
Finally, as I rocked him, his sobs dwindled to whimpers. “I love you, Jake,” he whispered.
I squeezed the tears from my eyes. “I love you too, Rider. I love you so much.”
BY SUNDAY afternoon, after we’d been released and could talk to each other in private, could mourn together and get angry together, we absorbed the truth of what had happened. And we said the word.
Suicide.
Tim had been running directly toward the fishing hole. I had no doubt he’d jumped straight up before disappearing into the water, as if to ensure he’d break through whatever scrim of ice had formed. Even though nobody else witnessed his plunge, questions were bound to arise about why he was on the bay and how he’d managed to accidentally fall into a hole that was so well marked.