So Shelly

by Ty Roth

  “Don’t you live next door?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, looking away and watching a boat-sized Cadillac, riding low, cruise by with speakers blasting some rap song. “But it’s surprising how far away next door can be.”

  “I know that better than most,” I said, watching the Caddy continue down the street.

  Shelly said, “I’ve tried to text him, call him, Facebook him, but he won’t respond. I kind of avoided him after all the shit of last fall. I’ve probably hurt his feelings.”

  “It isn’t you, Shelly. It’s Gordon. That’s just how he is. You should know that by now.”

  “I do. I finally do,” she insisted. “But I need to talk to him. I have a favor to ask him. Could you maybe pass that on to him at school?”

  “Well,” I began. “Since you … um … left, Gordon doesn’t come around the Beacon much. During swim season, we talked once, but I haven’t talked to him since. But I’m sure I can catch him in the hall sometime.”

  “I’d really appreciate it if you could do it soon,” she said. “Oh! Here.” She reached into a back pocket of her jean shorts and held out a copy of her R.E.M. mix. “I made one for you. Keep it. I’m going to want to listen to it with you someday.”

  I absentmindedly started to open the case, but she stopped me with her hands. “Not now, John. Listen to it later. You’ll know when,” she added cryptically.

  “Okay.” I laughed at her earnestness. “You can trust me; I’ll take good care of it.”

  Then, weirdly, she placed her hands on my shoulders, sprung to her tiptoes, and kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks for everything, John. Don’t forget to tell Gordon that I really need to see him. Okay?”

  “Sure,” I said, still a little stunned by the kiss.

  Shelly backed off the porch, down the steps, and into the MINI Cooper, with the baby car seat in the back, that she’d borrowed from Claire. It’s ironic, now, thinking of the manner in which she would return to that same driveway on the day of her wake.

  I stood in the doorway for several minutes, trying to make sense of what had taken place, but soon I resumed my life, after throwing Shelly’s disc onto the top of my dresser.

  Tom’s debilitation made it impossible for him to work, so I took a dishwashing job at Tom’s old restaurant and planned to increase my hours once school let out in a few weeks.

  A few months earlier, the counselors at Trinity had gotten nosy and contacted Erie County Social Services. It was probably my smelly clothes that had tipped them off, or the weight I’d lost because the only real meals I’d eaten in months were school lunches. The social worker assigned to our case helped us to apply for every kind of government aid imaginable. It was humiliating, and my father was probably doing somersaults in his grave, but the aid was instrumental in providing for Tom’s doctors, medicines, therapy, and the increasing number of apparatuses required to keep him even marginally mobile or able to sit or stand upright.

  With the Shelly-Gordon drama out of my life, I was better able to concentrate at school and to return my grades to normal, without sacrificing the time I still needed to devote to my writing and Web page updates. Although my readership had plateaued, and the only advertiser I had attracted was for a vanity publishing company out of Cleveland, my writing was improving, thanks to the feedback from my readers and from an online writers group I had joined.

  19

  Shelly’s father didn’t set a course for the marina as Gordon had suggested he would. Instead, he idled his boat and mirrored our path through the woods from the water. His cherry-red cigarette boat was visible through occasional breaks in the trees. Tired, hungry, emotionally spent, scratched by branches and brambles, I stopped.

  “Gordon, wait. I need a break.”

  “What you need is to start working out. We haven’t gone a hundred yards.”

  “Just give me a minute to rest and catch my breath,” I said, panting, and I bent over with my hands braced heavily against my knees.

  He looked out toward the lake, where, scanning the woods with binoculars pressed to his eyes, Shelly’s father bobbed in his boat.

  “We need to get to this beach up ahead and spread these ashes,” Gordon said. “You know, I didn’t think she had the balls to go through with it,” he said as he commenced blazing the trail.

  “Go through with what?” I asked, sincerely clueless.

  “This!” He stopped and nodded toward the urn upraised in his hands, then spun slowly around, indicating the entire island.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, as a really bad feeling began to gurgle up from the well of my ignored gut feelings.

  “Killing herself.”

  “You mean … I thought you said …”

  “Yeah, I knew about it. She told me her plan.”

  “Wait … What? ‘Killing herself’? You knew about it? And you didn’t do anything to stop her!” I was incredulous. I was an accomplice. I was the one who’d passed on Shelly’s message of needing to speak with him. This was the result.

  “What’d you want me to do, Keats? Sit with her twenty-four/seven?”

  “Gee, I don’t know, talk her out of it, maybe? Christ, at least tell somebody!”

  “She made me promise not to. Her father would have put her in a nuthouse, which would have killed her anyway. Besides, I didn’t think she was serious. You know how she was.”

  “Oh, that explains it. She made you promise not to. What? Did you pinkie swear?”

  “Look. It’s what she wanted. Who was I to tell her what to do with her life anyway? If she was so unhappy that dying seemed a relief, then why should I deny her that? We have no choice in when or to what asshole parents we come into this world. At least, shouldn’t we be able to decide for ourselves when to leave it?”

  “You were supposed to be her friend, you selfish prick!” I shouted as I gave him the most ineffectual shove in the history of chivalry.

  “I’m selfish?” He’d grabbed my arm at the wrist and twisted until I was bent over again and, this time, in excruciating pain. “You think I should have convinced her to go on living miserably so that your feelings wouldn’t be hurt? Don’t give me that bullshit about the selfishness of suicide. What’s selfish is insisting that she continue in her misery so you won’t have to feel sad or guilty.”

  “Guilty? Why should I feel guilty?”

  “She told me about the poetry books, dude. What’d you think she was doing? Organizing for a garage sale?”

  He released me from the submission hold and sent me reeling, as if on drunken legs, until I stumbled off the path and fell onto the razor-sharp leaves of the now pissed-off plant growing in the sandy soil. The boom box catapulted from my hand.

  “I … I didn’t think …,” I said, still planted on my ass.

  “Yeah, that’s right. You didn’t think. Because, just maybe, deep down you knew what she was doing too, and you didn’t want to interfere either, because in that deep-down place you understood that it was what she wanted. So keep your self-righteous bullshit to yourself. I don’t need it.”

  Gordon tore off down the path, leaving me scrambling on my hands and knees, patting the brush in search of the boom box batteries, which had flown from their compartment when I’d fallen.

  “Gordon, wait,” I said, but he ignored my call.

  When I burst into the small cove with the sand beach, where Neolin had kissed Shelly last August and where she had chosen forever to mingle her atoms with those of the universe, I saw the cigarette boat anchored just offshore, and Gordon standing frozen at the gunpoint of Shelly’s father’s double-barrel. Mr. Shelley’s blue canvas boating sneakers were soaked, as were his pants up to his knees.

  “Who are you?” her old man asked me.

  “Nobody. A friend of your daughter’s.”

  I glanced at Gordon for, I don’t know, direction? Reassurance? But he just stared coldly past the gun barrel into Shelly’s father’s eyes.

  “How’d you know where to find us?” Gord
on asked.

  “When I got home from the wake, my stepdaughter Frances met me on her way to wherever it is she goes. ‘Here,’ she says, ‘that girl,’ meaning Shelly, ‘asked me to give this to you.’ And she hands me a disc.”

  “What kind of disc?” Gordon asked.

  “A DVD. It was Shelly. She talks a bit about you, but most of it’s personal.” He looked directly at Gordon. “Family stuff. And she tells about this here.” He pointed with the gun barrel at the urn. “Her final wishes. I guess she thought I might forgive you if I knew it was what she wanted.”

  “I’m not the one who needs forgiveness,” Gordon said.

  “Are you sure about that?” Shelly’s father replied.

  I jumped in front of the urn, as if willing to take a bullet. “You can’t have her,” I said.

  “Don’t want her. If this is what she wants, I can at least give her that.”

  “Then why’d you track us down?” Gordon asked as he brushed me aside.

  “I’m afraid she may have shared a copy of that disc with you. If you do have one …” He paused. “What’s on that disc …” He paused again. “I can’t take the chance of anybody else seeing it. So, why don’t you hand it over. Then you can go and do whatever she asked you to.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “Well, son, I know—and I mean know—things about you too. Not just rumors, but things that could ruin that all-American boy image you use to sell so many books.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Gordon said.

  “Oh, no? I’ve lived next door to you for a lot of years. I may not be the smartest man in the world, but I do pay attention, and over the years that mama of yours, on more than one occasion, talked a blue streak while sharing a nip or two over the fence, so to speak. Where should I start? The nanny? Your cousin? The fag roommate? That stripper girl? The secretary? Claire? Or maybe, your sister?”

  The litany of his indiscretions did nothing to shame Gordon, nor do I think he really gave a shit who knew about them. But Gordon’s innate business sense recognized the damage that could be done to his marketability.

  “So, all you want is the disc?”

  “That’s it. Give it to me, and I’ll be on my way.”

  Gordon hesitated, as if he were actually considering his options. “All right,” he said. “Give the man his disc, Keats.”

  I looked at him in confusion. I didn’t have it; he did, but the suggestion drew Shelly’s father’s attention to me while Gordon extracted the disc from his back pocket and removed from the case Shelly’s R.E.M. mix CD, which he quickly tucked down the front of his pants.

  “Oh, shit. Here it is,” Gordon said, holding out the DVD inside the case toward Shelly’s father, who snatched it from Gordon’s hand.

  Mr. Shelley didn’t look happy or victorious—just sad and, maybe, a little relieved.

  “Now, if you boys follow me out and give me a shove into deeper water, I’ll leave you alone.” Of course, his request for help came at the convincing end of a shotgun.

  Once at the steering console, Shelly’s father pressed the button to automatically withdraw the anchor from its bite in the mucky bottom. Shoeless and with pants rolled over our knees, we pushed from the bow until the boat had enough draw to start its massive engines. At their roar, we backed away, turned, and waded to the beach.

  “What do you think he’ll do when he realizes he has a copy of Harold and Maude?” I asked Gordon.

  “Beats me. He’ll probably drop it in the middle of the lake anyway. I can’t believe that whatever is on the disc Shelly gave him is something he wants to see again.”

  “You mean, you don’t have one?”

  “Nope. Shelly didn’t give me any discs. But you know that abortion you told me about earlier?”

  He waited for me to make the unspeakable link.

  “No!”

  “He’s got to be the one,” Gordon said, “but you can’t tell anyone.”

  “Can’t tell anyone! You’ve got to be kidding me! Why do you want to protect him?” Still disbelieving, I stammered, “But—but how do you know? Did Shelly tell you?”

  “Not exactly, but I’m pretty good at math. You can believe me or not. Suit yourself, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. Shelly must have talked about it on that disc she left him.”

  “How about Brandon Sullivan? There were a lot of rumors last year.”

  “Nope. Not according to Shelly.”

  “Okay. Still,” I said, “why do you want to keep his secret? He should be in jail!”

  “Think about it, Keats. Who’s it going to help by revealing it? Shelly? I don’t think so. And if that was what she wanted, she could have done it herself. Besides, he’s right about my reputation. If even half of the shit I’ve done got out to my fans, I’d be done. Now let’s finish this. I’m hungry, I need a shower, and”—he glanced at his watch—“I graduate in exactly six hours.”

  I wanted to throw up.

  “Is this the spot?” I asked.

  “You mean where they found her body? Yeah, this is it.”

  “How did she …”

  “Do it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Keats, have you ever been attracted to and repulsed by the same thing? Kind of like watching a horror film through your fingers?”

  I couldn’t believe an ironist like Gordon could say such a thing with a straight face.

  “Shelly was that way with drowning. I mean, obviously, the idea scared the hell out of her, but she also thought it would be a romantic way to die.”

  “There’s nothing romantic about dying,” I said.

  “Well, Keats, that’s where you lack vision. Considering your little death fetish, I’d expect you to have more appreciation for the aesthetic of this sort of thing. Don’t look so surprised. Shelly told me. Your mistake is that you’ve concluded life is short, so you treat it as if it’s precious, like a pretty little princess. Bullshit! Everyone’s life is short. Quit feeling sorry for yourself. Fuck it. Treat it like a cheap hooker. Ask crazy shit from it, and you’ll get more out of life than you could have ever wanted, imagined, or deserved. We all die young, Keats. It’s time you stop feeling sorry for yourself and worrying about everyone else.”

  “That might be true for you, Gordon, but—”

  He interrupted my defense. “She waited for the right day. A rough day. Almost exactly a year from when she’d first sailed to North Bass. Winds out of the east kicking up four-to-six-footers. Ariel was an old boat, barely seaworthy, really. When she got offshore here, I’ll bet she punched a hole somehow in the bottom with a sledgehammer or something heavy like that, which she then probably hugged to her chest as the boat filled and sank. Just imagine it. That’s a righteous death. Beats the shit out of old age.”

  “How’d she manage to come ashore right here? Right where she wanted to?”

  “For once, I’d like to think, Shelly caught a break.”

  “But the Coast Guard ruled it an accident.”

  “Yeah, but give me a break. They haven’t even bothered to search for and salvage the boat. Seems to me that everyone’s happy, including Shelly.”

  “But, how can you know? I mean, for sure? Maybe she changed her mind, and her drowning was an accident. You can’t know for sure.” I was grasping for any port in a storm of rising emotions. If he wanted, if for one moment he could have stopped being Gordon, he could have provided that safe harbor.

  Instead, he said, “Easy. When they found her, she wasn’t wearing a life jacket. Dude, Shelly never went out on the water in a boat without a life jacket.”

  For a moment, trying to imagine her final minutes, I looked out over the surface of the water, until Gordon interrupted my musing.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  We trudged up the beach to where I had set the boom box. Gordon handed me the disc to insert into the player while he picked up Shelly and removed the stopper from the urn.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  �
��Press play.”

  We waited for the opening measures of “Shiny Happy People,” but we’d forgotten about the extra track that had bumped every other one back.

  It was Shelly’s voice that burst from the speakers. “Hey, guys. I threw in Harold and Maude. Watch it sometime; it kind of sums it all up, you know? Maude and I, we kind of share a soul. I just happened to feel eighty at eighteen. Anyway, I want to thank you guys for bringing me here. Isn’t it beautiful? Romantic? It’s a good place to end, don’t you think? With any luck, I’m sitting in the light somewhere, talking in rhymes.”

  Silence from the speakers. Gordon stared at me, perplexed.

  Finally, Gordon said, “That made a lot of sense.”

  “She got that a lot,” I said. After a few moments, the violins began to play and, for one last time, R.E.M. lifted Shelly’s lingering soul.

  “Hold out your hands,” Gordon said with the urn positioned to pour.

  “What?” I instinctively pulled my hands back behind me.

  “C’mon. It’s what she said she wanted. It’s just Shelly. Now. While the song’s playing.” Gordon’s urgency and my memories of Shelly compelled my cupped hands forward, which Gordon filled to brimming.

  When he had a handful of his own, we threw Shelly into the air, and she alighted softly on the sands and in the water. Somehow, perhaps giddy from exhaustion, we found ourselves laughing and singing and dancing like the biggest dorks in the world as we continued to empty the urn, one handful at a time.

  When the song ended, we washed our hands in the lake.

  “There’s one more thing,” Gordon said as he took out his wallet and removed a slip of paper. It was inscribed with what Gordon informed me were Maude’s final words to Harold, and the words were written in what I could tell was Shelly’s handwriting: “Go and love some more,” it read.

  Gordon rolled the note into a scroll and stuffed it inside the urn. He then secured the stopper back into its mouth as tightly as he could before gently setting the urn into the water at our feet. Slowly, the lapping of the waves drew the urn out into the lake.

  That’s when it hit me. “This is it,” I said.