“See you later,” I say.
“You really are a coward, aren’t you?”
I don’t answer. I just flee down the steps, from my house, from her. Then it’s a mad dash on the bike, pedaling furiously, pushing the air from my lungs until I can only focus on that pain and nothing else. I’m angry at Olivia, even though I know it’s petty, because I was trying and I was making it. I was almost there. But it’s fine. It’s done now.
* * *
• • •
I can’t wait to see Max. To forget everything else. I bike up a little hill in the park and set up there, out of sight of the road, and wait, and fix the blanket and adjust the spread and change the song, and wait. And wait.
I check my phone and sit down again, watching as another definitely-not-Max’s-car drives by. It’s 9:15, which isn’t that bad. We agreed on 8:30. The sun is kind of, well, setting. It’s forging stained glass behind the hills to the east and the forecast was right; it’s perfect out here. I sigh. No big deal. It wasn’t about the sunset. She’ll be here soon. I’ve had about a third of a bottle of wine to calm my nerves and I’m starting to feel a little tingly. I should stop.
I check my messages, which are rapidly becoming a tragic monologue.
Jonah: All set! Just up on the first hill with the oak on it. See you soon
Jonah: It’s really nice out. You close? Thought I saw a red car
Jonah: Max? I hope everything is okay!
The last one was from five minutes ago. I cringe as I read them, but it turns out that sitting on a hill by yourself is great for introspection, which was the exact opposite of my plan.
I keep thinking about Olivia. I should have said something. I should have given her a hug. I should have done literally anything but run away. I’ll make it up to her tomorrow. Maybe I can do something nice for her. I don’t think she set up her bitcoin-mining operation yet . . . maybe I can help with that? Yeah. That should make up for not being there as she plants a tree for our dead mother and where is Max! I check the road and try a call and there’s no answer and I just fight the urge to text her again.
I’m worried that something is wrong . . . but I’m also wondering if this was just another addition to my growing list of missteps. I said I wasn’t going to pretend things were normal and now here I am planning a picnic. And maybe Max agreed to come at first because she didn’t want to hurt my feelings, but has now changed her mind. Maybe she doesn’t know how to tell me that I am being a complete idiot again. Maybe she’s wondering if I am, in general, a complete, irredeemable idiot. And this pinot grigio I “borrowed” from Kate’s wine fridge seems to be tipping the scales, because the latter argument is making a lot of sense.
I try to stop the snowball. Dr. Syme always says I need to validate my negative thoughts with evidence . . . otherwise they’re almost certainly just anxious thoughts. Better yet, counter them with evidence to the contrary. For example: Max told me that I make the bad times a little better.
Of course, I also helped create the bad times by pushing her into finding Winter Robbins and promising her a happy ending on several different occasions, which probably made Arlo’s sudden passing even worse. Oh my god . . . I really am pushy. I shouted I like you at her. I held her to a stupid deal about going out. I asked her to put on her formal dress on a random day after work when she clearly didn’t want to. And now because I am trying to avoid a mental breakdown on an anniversary she doesn’t even know about, I have invited her to an in-person picnic when she just lost someone to COVID and okay, yeah, we have a snowball. I am the worst.
I try another call to apologize. No answer. I consider a text but I really want to talk. Maybe I should just come out and explain . . . But the thought of actually talking about Mom today of all days seems beyond me. Another twenty minutes go by in the failing light. Maybe one more try?
I fight that urge for a long time. Like a bottle and a half of pinot amount of time. And now the sun is down and I am sitting on a blanket in the dark, repeatedly lighting and blowing out a candle feeling . . . drunk. Yeah. We’ll call it what it is. I’m drunk, I’m alone, and the wine has spoken.
Max bailed out on our date. And, to be honest, I don’t blame her. But . . . now what?
I check my cell phone: 10:45. It feels like my stomach is trapped in a slowly tightening vise. It feels like I really am a complete idiot, sitting on a blanket that is a little too small, a little too coarse, with my now-empty bottles of wine and a charcuterie board for two. It feels like I am sitting on a hill, and that today is, of course, the anniversary of my mom’s death, and that I am all alone in the darkness to think about what I did.
I don’t know if I can go home right now. I don’t know if I can stay here. I sit in limbo, trying to decide what to do, teetering on the edge of that deep dark hole without a bottom.
And then my phone buzzes, and I scoop it up instantly.
It’s not Max.
chapter twenty-three
MAX
I cease to exist. Just like that, there’s a blank spot in the tape. The line goes dead. I’m canceled. Gone to the world.
Peace out.
And here I stay. In this place where I don’t exist for either seconds or minutes or hours or eons and think the empty thoughts of nothing in particular from which I have no plans to escape, no plans at all really, this until my consciousness is punctured by a persistent, annoying buzz. Coming from somewhere underneath me. Pardon the interruption.
There’s a wet puddle of drool by my cheek. Exhaustion sticks to my bones. My head feels as though it’s been stuffed with sofa cushions. Actually, the sound is coming from inside the couch and I squint and dig around in the seams, coming up with two quarters, a lot of cat hair, and eventually my cell phone.
“Hello?” My voice is groggy. I’m trying to process where I am and why I’m sleeping on the sofa, but I’m not doing it very quickly.
“Are you with Jonah?” comes a loud, brusque voice. I have to hold the phone away from my ear.
“What time is it?” I rub the heel of my hand into my eye socket and groan. The questions are coming out in the wrong order. Take two. “Who is this?”
“Olivia Stephens. And it’s eleven thirty.”
“P.M.?”
“Yes, P.M. Obviously.”
Is it obvious?
“I’m looking for Jonah,” she says impatiently. “Can you put him on?”
“Jonah? I’m not with—Oh. Hold on.” I frantically scroll through my phone to our text message chain where I’d been intending to type out a message and had gotten as far as So— It sits there unsent.
In my defense, I did have a few important things on my mind, which are all crashing in on me at the moment and suddenly the phrase a rude awakening makes a whole lot more sense.
“As a reminder, telephones are a medium that require verbal communication,” Olivia says.
“Right. Sorry. It’s just that . . . No, I haven’t seen him at all.”
“But you two were supposed to be engaged in some highly gag-inducing lovey-dovey stuff.” There’s an accusatory note to her statement, and under normal circumstances I would argue her semantics, but truthfully, we did probably have a bit of lovey-dovey stuff planned.
That, however, was over three hours ago.
I download the evening for her in as neat and tidy a package as I can manage, from the time I returned from work to the time the ambulance took my mother away, not just for efficiency’s sake but so that reciting the details doesn’t present an opportunity for fear to reach in through the cracks and seize me. Don’t look down, my mom used to tell me on the jungle gym. So I don’t.
“And he has no idea?”
“I don’t see how he would.” I cringe to think about Jonah waiting for me at our agreed-upon meeting spot. Alone. On a hill. But Jonah will understand. He’ll know I had a good reason. That I
wouldn’t just stand him up. “I’ll try calling him. Hang on. It’ll only take a minute.”
It takes even less than that. Thirty seconds for Jonah’s phone to quit ringing and switch over to voice mail. So I try it twice. “No luck,” I report back to her. “But I’m sure he’s fine.”
“I’m not,” she says. “Max, I think Jonah might be in real trouble.”
Okay, so I’m glad she can’t see me rolling my eyes. “I’ve seen Jonah wear a braided belt. How much trouble can he really get into?”
There’s a person-chewing-the-inside-of-their-lip-till-it-bleeds energy coming across loud and clear. “I should go,” she says. “I need to look for him. Will you call me back on this number if you hear anything?”
I know I’m a little slow with processing things right now, but I’m starting to realize that she’s serious. She’s actually worried about Jonah.
“Wait—” I stop her before she can hit end on our call. “You can’t go.”
“I’ve always found the idea of legal adulthood to be at best arbitrary and at worst offensive, but in point of fact, I can.”
I catch about 3 percent of the words coming out of her mouth. “Jonah said you have some kind of condition. That you have to be extra careful,” I explain as if this is brand-new information to her. Why do I get the sense that feeling like an idiot around Olivia is sort of par for the course?
“Crohn’s. The gift that keeps on giving. But as the great Greek physician Hippocrates once said, ‘Desperate times call for desperate measures.’ ”
“Let me go. I’ll go instead.”
“You’ve got your own family to deal with,” she says with a gentleness I imagine is out of character.
“Yeah. But I can’t do anything from here.” No visitors allowed at the hospital. Therefore, somewhere my mom is in a hospital room without me. “Listen, I’m used to being out and about for work. And besides, it’ll give me something to do besides sit here and worry.”
Olivia sighs. “Max, do you know what day it is?”
“Wednesday, I think.”
“No. I mean yes. But what I mean is, today is the anniversary of our mother’s death.”
My stomach clumps, an uncomfortable mass of regret taking shape there. “I swear, Olivia. I had no idea.”
“Yes, well.” She clears her throat like a professor in a lecture hall. “It gets worse,” she says. “Much.”
Five minutes and I’m back in my car.
“So,” Olivia says, her face appearing on the screen and—god—if I squint and the lighting’s just right, she really looks like Jonah. Their eyes are the same shape. “It’s like the Amazing Race only instead of a million dollars, the grand prize is a somewhat bougie, anxiety-riddled teenage boy.”
I have my foot on the brake, hand on the gearshift. “Lucky for me, I like somewhat bougie, anxiety-riddled teenage boys.”
“I’m going to pretend that wasn’t actually kind of adorable.”
“That makes two of us,” I agree. FaceTime had seemed like a suitable, albeit possibly expensive compromise for her not coming, though now that we’re in it, I’m feeling like we’re at the start of a bad buddy cop movie. “One problem, though. Aren’t there clues on Amazing Race?”
At some point, and I legitimately do not know when, Olivia changed into a Lycra unitard and neon sweatbands. It’s a lot of spandex. “Okay, so perhaps less Amazing Race and more Nate the Great,” she says.
“I’m sorry, who?”
“Famed child detective. Keep up.”
I’m not sure I like where this is going.
“We need a Theory,” she says.
“Okay. Well. I think we need to try to be in Jonah’s head.”
“That sounds like the absolute worst Airbnb I could imagine.”
“So the question is,” I say, ignoring her, “where would Jonah go?”
“Ah, my trusty crime dog, Sludge.” Literally, what? “But that means we’re assuming that he ever left.”
“You don’t think . . . you don’t think he’d still be there?” I say. “That would be—”
“Pathetic?” Not the word I was thinking. “Good work, Max, now you’re in his head.”
And with that, we’re off. Olivia disables her camera just for while we’re moving—“Safety first!”—but somehow manages to be a very involved back-seat driver from clear across county lines, wanting to know if I’ve come to a complete stop and if I’m going the speed limit and also when I am going to get there. It might be impressive if it weren’t quickly driving me insane.
“Do you mind?” I say as I’m pulling into the place where Jonah and I were meant to meet tonight. I park and turn my camera back on. “One button,” I warn her. “That’s all it takes.”
She frowns and I think I detect something like respect in her expression. After all, she’s not the only one who can be salty.
“I’m unhooking you from the dash,” I tell her as though I’m walking her through a potentially painful medical procedure. “Now I’m getting out of the car. Now I’m looking around. I don’t see his bike. All right.” I bend down and tighten the laces on my shoes. “Climbing now. Here I go.” Up the small hill I begin to climb, the grass damp and knotty beneath my soles. I peer into the phone. “Are you okay? Why are you breathing so heavy?” She’s making a show of puffing her cheeks in and out.
“Vicarious cardio,” she says. “My preferred form of exercise.”
But as I near the top, my heart is already on the descent. Looking around, it’s pretty obvious: Jonah’s not here. And I’m realizing now how I really thought that he might be, that it’d be that easy. “Dammit.” I sink down into the grass. “Where could he be?” I’m trying not to feel like this is my fault, trying harder not to worry. Not yet. I rest my chin on my knee and listen to the breeze through the palm trees. The twinkle of the sleepy city lights when my knuckle knocks against something hard. I pick up a candle, the wick blackened. I touch the wax in the center of the crater. It’s not warm, but it’s still soft and my finger leaves an indent. “He was definitely here,” I tell her. It would have been a nice spot—Jonah was right. “Olivia,” I say. “You said it gets worse.” Even though the punctuation’s all wrong, the question hangs in the air.
“I’m not sure that it’s my place to tell you.” Olivia sits down, nestling into position on a giant fuzzy rug that’s bigger than my whole room.
“She was your mother too.”
There’s a long pause and I worry that maybe I’ve said something wrong.
“Thank you.” Her fingers go to the necklace at the hollow of her throat.
“And also,” I continue, thankful that the whole FaceTime thing makes it less awkward not to make eye contact if we don’t want to. “It might help. I mean, two heads are better than one.”
“Fair enough,” she says. “In that case, I’ll tell you on the way to the soccer field.”
“Oh! Good idea,” I say, frustrated for not thinking of it myself.
* * *
• • •
By the time we return to my car, we’ve worked up a mild sweat, albeit Olivia’s vicariously. She doesn’t like the sound of the air-conditioning and since it hardly works anyway, I reluctantly concede. I focus on what’s important, which is getting to Jonah before it’s too late. Too late for what, I don’t know, but something tells me that whatever Olivia’s about to say will convince me that he is in dire need of finding.
“I should probably mention that my dad’s a lawyer,” she begins at a place I’m sure can’t be the beginning. “He’s always involved us in his work and treated us like grown-ups. We often talked legal theories at the dinner table. Eggshell skull, positivism, and the one that stuck with Jonah, sine qua non.”
“At the risk of sounding dumb, what’s that?”
“It’s a fancy word for saying ‘but-for causati
on.’ One thing wouldn’t have happened but for another thing happening. Are you following?”
“I’m with you.”
“Okay, so I will preface this by saying that I don’t believe my mother’s death is Jonah’s fault.” A chill works its way up the length of my spine. “Jonah was getting ready to take the PSATs. He was in the school parking lot when he had his first full-blown, balls-to-the-wall panic attack. Seriously, I think he truly thought he was dying. Didn’t know which way was up. He did what any kid would do. He texted his mom.”
My heart tugs. Because, truth be told, I would very much like to be able to text my mom right now.
“No one can blame him for that. She rushed over to him immediately, which is exactly the sort of thing our mother would do. Drop everything to help us. But she was texting him, ran a red light, and the next thing any of us knew, she was dead. Jonah believes that he is responsible because but for his call, she wouldn’t be dead.”
I stare out at the dark soccer field at which I’ve arrived and already I know in my bones that Jonah’s not here. “And Jonah wouldn’t be missing right now,” I say, “but for the fact that I didn’t show up for him.”
* * *
• • •
She says nothing. As much as we’d like, there’s no use arguing with logic.
“School parking lot,” I say. “That’s where he was when he sent the text, right?”
“Bingo. Yes.” Olivia claps. “Let’s go. And step on it.”
Surprisingly, I think we make a pretty good team. The school’s a two-minute drive. And still, no dice. Each time we show up somewhere, the two of us try harder and less successfully to stave off the panic setting into our voices. We try the beach. Olivia even checks the roof of their house. Until eventually, we’re out of ideas. I sit in the darkness of my car, the crash of an inky ocean like a slow roll of thunder in the distance.
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