Another Life

by Robert Haller

  “I don’t think I should be the one to do that,” I said.

  She nodded. “Well, I think you’re right about that, Ben.”

  Someone from the kitchen called out to her with a question about breakfast, and Ms. Swanson got up and left me there, sitting at the table in bewilderment. This didn’t make any sense. How could she act like this? After a minute, I got up and followed Ms. Swanson into the kitchen, where she was talking to one of the cooks about when breakfast should be served. When she noticed me, she turned around and smiled sadly at me again. “It’s our secret, Ben,” she said. “Bottle it up tight.”

  I slumped out of the dining hall, stepped outside, and blinked into the already glaring sun. Nobody else was up yet, and I didn’t know where to go or what to do.

  PAUL

  When Paul woke up in the inn at Lake George on Friday morning, the first thing he saw was the note. It sat on the nightstand, directly in his line of vision. He stared at it for a long time, making no move to get up and read it. As long as he didn’t, it could say any number of things: That she had stepped out into the hall for a moment to take a call from her kids and hadn’t wanted to wake him. That she was downstairs in the lobby, asking the front desk for suggestions for breakfast. As long as he didn’t read it, the note could say anything.

  It was a full five minutes before he got up, naked and sweating, and stood over the table. Without actually touching the paper, he read April’s small, neat handwriting:

  Paul,

  This probably isn’t the right way to do this, but I think you’d agree our relationship has been pretty unconventional to begin with. I want you to know that none of it was your fault, but I don’t think we can take this thing much further, so we should end it now, for both our sakes. I hope you can understand that.

  We’ll still have to see each other. This will be hard, but let’s not make it any harder than it needs to be.

  I’m sorry. I hope you understand.

  April

  P.S. Forget what I said about DeShawn last night. I think you should give him guitar lessons.

  P.P.S. You need to be out of the room by eleven o’clock.

  Paul had to resist the urge to take the thing and rip it into as many pieces as he could. He had to resist the urge to find a match and set it on fire, letting the flames spread across the room. He sat there on the end of the bed, his heart pounding. He ran his hands through his hair. It was becoming harder and harder to breathe. He got out of the bed, and only after rushing over to his overnight bag and ransacking it did he realize he’d forgotten to bring any of his pills.

  The fact that marijuana was illegal had never really occurred to him until this moment, when he desperately needed some and had no idea where to get it. In high school, he’d never even had to pay for it, and in the city, it was easier to find than a good slice of pizza. But here, in this stupid tourist town, where he knew no one, at ten in the morning, for the first time in his life, Paul couldn’t just walk out and score a bag of weed, and he didn’t have time to mess around. Alcohol would have to do.

  When he approached the front desk, the clerk did her absolute professional best not to acknowledge Paul’s disheveled appearance, his breath, which must still smell of stale beer, his bloodshot eyes.

  “May I help you, sir?”

  “Yeah, can you tell me where the nearest liquor store is?”

  Coming out of the liquor store with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in a brown paper bag, he squinted at an ugly yellow sun. He looked around him. The parking lot was empty, but even if someone had been there, he wasn’t sure that would have stopped him from unscrewing the cap and taking a drink even before he got in the church truck.

  He put the bottle in the cup holder between the front seats, where it rattled as he sped down the empty street. He forced himself not to take another drink until he was well out of the town and making his way up a winding mountain road, leading him deep into thick woods. Nothing on either side but trees and the occasional giant boulder. With one hand on the steering wheel, he rounded a sharp curve and took a quick swig from the bottle. He glanced at the clock. 11:25. He had to get there as soon as possible so he could talk to her alone, before everyone else arrived. What time had she left? And how had she been able to leave the room without waking him? He was an insomniac, for Christ’s sake! How the hell had she not woken him?

  “Fuck you, April,” he said out loud, flying around another hairpin turn. Every second, he expected to see a sign for the campsite, around the next bend, but all he got were trees and more trees. Cursing under his breath, he pressed down harder on the gas. Spread out on the empty passenger seat beside him were the directions he had scrawled down, showing the route from the town to the campsite, but reading them while driving this curvy, narrow road wasn’t easy. And his head was pounding, and he couldn’t think.

  Her handwriting had been so neat. Nothing misspelled, and all the i’s dotted.

  “Please, God,” he muttered at eleven forty. “Please, please, God.”

  A side road appeared on his left. He screeched to a halt, checked his map, then made the turn. It was a dirt road filled with potholes and seemed to go on forever. After five minutes, he second-guessed himself and made a U-turn. Then, a mile or so back up the main road, he checked the map again, realized the side road had been right along, and, cursing a blue streak, turned back around.

  It wasn’t until five of noon, driving up the dirt road only a few minutes past where he had turned around, that Paul saw the big wooden sign for Camp Lone Eagle. He sped down one final dirt road and pulled into a loose gravel lot that was completely empty except for one silver Honda. Trees surrounded the lot on three sides, and on the fourth, a large grassy field spread out. Paul could see behind it a collection of wooden buildings. But in the field, standing with her arms crossed around her chest, there she stood, completely put together, completely normal, as if by magic.

  He heard the bang of the truck door as he slammed it behind him. He heard the gravel crunch under his feet as he strode across the lot, and the cicadas droning in the summer haze. But all he saw was her face, drawing steadily nearer as he walked, and her expression—not nervous, exactly, but tense, prepared, ready for his onslaught. She must have expected this.

  When he reached her in the field, he stopped short. For a moment, she looked as though she was about to speak, but then she closed her mouth and waited.

  “You didn’t have to leave me like that,” he said at last.

  April cleared her throat. “I thought it might be easier.”

  “For you, maybe.”

  “I’m sorry, then.”

  Paul swallowed. “April, I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

  Her voice was quiet. “What I said in my note was—”

  “What? In this?” He pulled the piece of paper from his pocket and brandished it at her. “That ‘none of it was my fault’? That ‘we shouldn’t make it any harder than it needs to be’? What the fuck is that, April?”

  She stared at him, then looked down at the ground, as if embarrassed for him.

  But Paul couldn’t stop himself. “I think we should talk about this,” he said. “We need to talk about it. We can make it work if we talk about it.” He could hear the desperation in his voice, and even to him it sounded weak and flailing.

  “This is what I didn’t want to happen,” she said quietly. “This is why I wrote the note and left.”

  He wanted to reach out and grab her by the shoulders, but then what? “How can you be like this?” he heard himself almost shouting. “Do you know how hard this is for me?”

  “Oh, and it’s easy for me?” April snapped. She looked up at him with hard eyes.

  Before he could think of a response, he heard the sound of the vans pulling into the gravel lot behind him. He didn’t turn around. He kept his eyes on April. The next moment, there
were the sounds of doors sliding open and the voices and laughter of kids as they piled out of the vans. “April,” he said.

  “Please, Paul,” she said, looking back down at the ground. “I’m trying to save you.”

  The first activity of the trip, after everything had been unpacked and all the kids were assigned to their cabins, was a group hike. Everyone was required to go, April told all the campers, when they had gathered at the big fire pit in front of the rec hall, “unless you have a legitimate excuse. And no,” she said with a wry grin, “‘I don’t feel like it’ doesn’t qualify.”

  How about, “You broke my heart, April”? Does that qualify? Is that excuse legitimate enough for you?

  Standing there in the middle of the circle, with all the kids and team leaders gathered around her, she looked so put together, so there, it didn’t seem possible that she’d slept with him last night, that she wasn’t the always-perfect, always-virtuous VBS leader everyone thought her to be.

  Paul, who never tried to come off as virtuous, had found an aluminum water bottle to put his whiskey in, and he took quick, furtive sips every time the kids laughed or cheered. He liked to think he understood women. He thought of himself as especially intuitive to female emotion—maybe too much so for his own good. Usually, when girls were angry or upset with him, he knew exactly why, and usually, he knew what words to say, what things to do, to make things right—even when he couldn’t swallow his pride enough to actually say those words or do those things. More often than not, he feigned ignorance, acting like your typical clueless guy. “I seriously don’t understand why you’re upset.” It was just easier that way. But with April, Paul’s cluelessness was genuine. He didn’t know what, exactly, was wrong, or what to do to fix it, although he was pretty sure drinking whiskey only somewhat covertly in front of a bunch of children probably wasn’t a good start.

  “This trip is always the highlight of our summer,” April told the campers. “And we’re going to have a lot of fun as long as we follow the rules and respect each other.”

  He remembered staggering out of the bar at two last night. April was laughing and clinging to his neck, their earlier argument forgotten. They stumbled their way back to the hotel, their bodies so close together they might as well have been fused.

  “Remember that we’re in the wild, so we should never be going anywhere alone. Use the buddy system. And I don’t want to see anyone away from the campsite after dark without a counselor.”

  Back at the hotel, they had made the sort of stupid love you made when you were too drunk to do it properly. So they did it stoned, slow, and gorgeous. He remembered saying her name over and over as he kissed her face, her neck, her breasts. He remembered her teeth sinking into his right shoulder when she came.

  “We’re going to have a fun and safe trip this weekend, okay, gang?” April said, putting her hands together. “Jon, can you lead us in a prayer?”

  It wasn’t technically a mountain, and it was less than five miles, but Paul’s stomach was a mess of cheap liquor and runny scrambled eggs. He brought up the rear, and twice he had to retreat off the trail, into the trees. The first time was a false alarm, but the second, he vomited all over the moss and dead leaves.

  A year ago, on a long weekend, Paul and Sasha had decided to go on a camping trip in the Catskills. Sasha’s father had loaded them up with camping supplies—a top-of-the-line tent and backpacking equipment—and given Paul specific instructions on everything. The night before they were to head out, they’d gotten wasted at a friend’s party in Williamsburg. The next morning, painfully hungover, Sasha had still been determined to make the trip, so she drove her parents’ Jeep out of the city while Paul dozed in the passenger seat. Stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge, they’d played My Bloody Valentine and fed each other Advils from behind dark sunglasses. At the campsite, they were too tired and hungover to figure out how to set up the tent. The humidity had been horrible, the mosquitoes even worse. It hadn’t taken much effort for Paul to convince Sasha to ditch the idea, go get a hotel for the weekend, and never tell anyone. They had taken some pictures of themselves by the lake before they left, and a few in the woods for good measure, before packing up their belongings to retreat into an air-conditioned room and make love on two-hundred-thread-count sheets.

  On the rocky summit, which, though only a hilltop, still afforded a decent view of the Adirondacks, Paul noted glumly his bottle’s decrease in weight. Around him, kids rested together in clumps or goofed off near the precipice until a counselor shouted at them to stop. He could see April, standing by herself, apart from the group and as far away from him as possible.

  “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

  Paul looked away from April to see Jon Newman standing beside him, looking out at the mountains stretching to the north in rolling tiers of green.

  “What is?” Paul asked absently.

  Jon held his hand out before them. “This! I mean, tell me there’s no Creator, right?”

  Paul took a long drink from his bottle and wiped his mouth. “They’re just trees, man,” he said.

  Paul got through the rest of Friday and well into Saturday in a half-drunk haze and discovered he could do everything expected of him—helping clean up and tear down for meals, supervising kids, setting up the stage for the worship rally—just as well drunk as sober. By Saturday night, though, he had exhausted his supply. And as the rally started up, the kids jumping up and down in unison as Jon led the band in a familiar up-tempo number, Paul sat at his makeshift sound booth at the back of the dining hall like someone slowly waking from a bad dream to find reality even worse.

  Ever since he began working at New Life, Paul had done his best to keep the whole worship thing at arm’s length, but tonight, he couldn’t help feeling a little bit drawn in by these kids and their misguided attempts to attain inner peace. The jumping up and down, the outstretched hands, the falling on the floor and weeping—tonight, it was almost moving. Even the lyrics to the songs, displayed by the projector in the front of the room, got to Paul. Their unaffected simplicity, their complete refusal to make any attempt at originality, was oddly affecting. Jesus, I need you, Jesus, I love you, Jesus, please come and save me from myself. All he had to do was substitute April for Jesus, and the songs made a lot of sense.

  Halfway through the rally, the real April came out of her office in the back of the hall and sat on a bench in the back of the room, not far from him. Paul stiffened. For the past day and a half, she had gone out of her way to avoid him, and he had done his best to steer clear of her, but now she was sitting only a few feet away from him, staring in front of her with a sad but calm look on her face. She could have sat somewhere else; there were plenty of other places.

  It was during the altar call, when Jon asked the kids if anyone had a word from the Lord, that April got up suddenly and walked out the front door. Paul counted to sixty before following.

  Outside, the night air was warm and smelled of pine resin. Crickets chirped over the muffled keyboard tones and singing voices from inside. He saw her standing a few yards away, near the edge of the woods, arms crossed, looking out into the trees. She was wearing khaki shorts and a blue zip-up windbreaker. When she heard his footsteps, she turned and looked at him, then turned back to the woods. Paul approached her slowly.

  “This is the part where, if I had any, I’d offer you a cigarette,” he said when he reached her.

  “And the part where I’d accept,” said April, “if I hadn’t quit almost twenty years ago.”

  Paul smiled and put his hands in his pockets. They stood side by side, looking out into the dark wall of pines.

  April began to laugh softly. “You know, my daughter called somebody a bitch today, in front of everyone.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I heard something about that.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s gotten into her.”


  “She’s probably just going through something.”

  April nodded and shivered. “Yeah.”

  He moved to touch her, and she drew back, as if his hand were hot iron. “Don’t, Paul.”

  “Because someone might see us?”

  “That’s one of too many reasons.”

  “April, please, you have to at least tell me why.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long time. Paul heard the wind stirring the top branches of the trees. Then, just when he thought she wasn’t going to answer at all, she said, “You know, I was thinking about your question the other night, when you asked me whether we would have been together if we’d met another way, in different times or circumstances. And it got me thinking that if we had met in another life and gotten together, then somewhere along the way, in that life, we would be thinking the same thing, only the other way around: wondering what our lives would have been like if we hadn’t gotten together, or hadn’t met at all, if we’d met somebody else instead. And this might be really basic, teenager-smoking-pot-for-the-first-time talk, but it got me thinking, no matter what choices you make, no matter what you do, part of you will always be wondering what would have happened if you had made a different choice, done things differently. So in the end, it’s probably best just not to dwell on it.”

  Paul waited a moment, then said, “Are you sure that’s not just an elaborate excuse to justify the way you feel? I mean, if you’re unhappy with your life, if you feel empty, don’t you have the right to try and change things?”

  She looked at him and smiled. “Do you feel empty, Paul?”

  And he could say it with all sincerity, without a hint of irony, like the lyrics in those worship songs: “Without you, yes, I feel empty.”

  Paul didn’t know how he had expected April to take these words, but he hadn’t thought she’d find them funny. A smile spread across her face, and she looked up toward the tops of the trees, shook her head, and began to laugh. Paul felt a momentary flash of anger, but her laughter wasn’t cruel or even condescending. It sounded genuine, as if he had told her a very funny joke. He thought about what he had just said, and then he, too, gave a nervous laugh.