Plan B (28 page)

“Who is it?” I mumbled, taking the proffered telephone. “Hello?”

“Ben?” It was Sarah. Shit. Lindsey looked at me for a moment and then went into the kitchen.

“Hi,” I said.

“Who’s that?” Chuck asked intently.

I covered the mouthpiece with my hand and told him who it was. While he and Alison exchanged puzzled glances, Sarah said, “I was worried about you.”

“Why?”

“You called me, remember? From the hospital?”

“Oh. Yeah. How did you know where to find me?”

“You said you were in the mountains. This was the only place I could think of that you might be. I still had the number in my address book.”

“Oh. I shouldn’t have called you,” I said. “I was on some heavy medication.” Chuck and Alison exchanged glances and went into the kitchen to give me some privacy.

“I was worried,” Sarah said quietly.

“Yeah, well I’m fine,” I said quickly, needing like hell not to be on the phone with her.

“Fine,” she said testily, and I could tell I’d hurt her feelings.

“Look, Sarah,” I said, feeling rotten. “I hate like hell to be rude, but I can’t tie up the phone right now . . .”

“Yes,” she said, her voice now ice. “I certainly didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”

I decided that a response to the implication she’d floated would only prolong the discussion. “I know you didn’t,” I said.

“Well, do me a favor. If you ever get it into your head to give me another call like that, don’t.”

“Deal,” I said. I couldn’t believe I’d called her in the first place.
I’d never been a slave to good judgment, but this bordered on self-immolation. “I must have been really fried,” I muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“Okay,” I said and hung up. Only my battered condition prevented me from throwing the phone across the room. There were so many things bothering me about the call I didn’t know where to begin cataloging them. I didn’t want to be cruel to Sarah, and I didn’t want to hurt Lindsey either, and I’d apparently managed to do both by making one stupid, sentimental call from my hospital bed. Without warning my vision suddenly began to blur and I felt myself grow lightheaded. I lay back on the couch, my eyes at half mast, and felt the room begin to spin. My recent codeine dose was kicking in. I was divorced and that was bad, not because I still wanted to be married to Sarah, but because it was the first concrete sign that irrevocable things were starting to happen to me. Change was something I’d never dealt with gracefully, as evidenced by the fact that I’d even called Sarah to begin with. I probably meant to get off the couch right then and straighten things out with Lindsey, but the codeine was taking no prisoners and without any further preamble I fell into a dark, dreamless sleep.

As it turned out, I didn’t wake up until morning. At some point while I was asleep someone had thrown a blanket over me. I hoped it had been Lindsey, but I wouldn’t have bet my life savings on it. Actually, the way things had been going for me lately, I probably would have bet my life savings on it. The aroma of eggs and coffee came floating in from the kitchen, and I realized that I was starving. I took a quick roll call of my body parts and determined that all of them had shown up to work that day, although some more enthusiastically than others. I carefully rolled off the couch and hoisted myself into a standing position, taking a few seconds to dig my toes into the carpet and wiggle them around. For some reason I’d been finding the sensation of carpet between my toes oddly soothing since the accident. I walked toward the kitchen, the static electricity between my feet and the carpet crackling like a Rice Krispies commercial. I found Chuck and Alison glumly eating breakfast together.

“Hey,” I said, pulling up a chair.

“Good morning,” Alison said.

“How are you feeling?” Chuck asked, spreading some scrambled eggs onto toasted white bread. I waited until he was done and then grabbed the piece off his plate.

“Hungry,” I said, biting into the toast. “Needs salt.” I reached across Alison and grabbed the salt shaker.

“Everyone’s a critic,” Chuck said, grabbing another piece of toast off the plate in the center of the table.

“Where’s Lindsey?” I asked.

“Down by the lake,” Chuck said. “And if you ask me—”

“I’m not.”

“She looks none too pleased,” he finished.

I took another bite of toast and eggs and then pushed myself away from the table. “Here,” Chuck said, reaching into his pocket. “You’ll need it.” He pulled out my prescription bottle and cracked one of the pills in half. “Daytime rations,” he said, tossing me the fragment. I popped it into my mouth and washed it down with his orange juice. “I’ll see you guys later,” I said.

I was almost at the door when Alison softly said, “Ben.”

I turned to look at her. “Yeah.”

“Whatever the problem is, get it worked out now, because we have bigger things to worry about.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“He’s been gone two days, Ben,” she said, looking at me intently. “That’s two days and two nights.”

“I know.”

“No,” Alison said, her voice catching. “You don’t know. None of us knows. He could be hurt, he could be dead, we don’t know a goddamn thing.”

“Jack can take care of himself,” I said weakly.

“Yeah right,” she retorted. “If Jack could take care of himself we wouldn’t be here right now.”

“So what are you saying?” Chuck asked her. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” Alison said, running her finger introspectively around the rim of her juice glass. “I think it’s gone too far. Maybe we should speak to the police.”

“They’ll arrest us,” Chuck said. “Do you know what an arrest could do to my career? Or yours? You could be disbarred, and I’d lose my license.”

“We’re talking about Jack’s life!” Alison shouted at him, slamming her hand down on the table so hard that I saw bits of egg jump into the air. “How selfish can you be, Chuck?!”

“Hey!” Chuck shouted back. “I came here to help Jack, didn’t I? I got my goddamn nose busted trying to help my buddy Jack. But Jack didn’t want our help, and maybe it’s time you thought a little about that. Jack said fuck it and fuck us and took off. Right now he’s sitting in a hotel room somewhere stoned out of his gourd, picking his nose and laughing at us, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to piss my future away while that’s happening. You want to flush your career down the toilet over our junkie friend, you be my guest. You’ve been martyring yourself for Jack for years now, what’s one more sacrifice? But I came here to help a friend, not be destroyed by him!”

Alison just stared at Chuck, ignoring the tears as they descended from her unblinking eyes to the corners of her mouth, which hung open in anguished disbelief. I must have been staring at him, too, or maybe it was just too hard to look at the raw pain on Alison’s face, because Chuck suddenly turned to me and said, “What?! You know I’m right.”

We stared at each other for a moment. “As long as we all agree then,” I said quietly and retreated from the kitchen.

I found Lindsey sitting on a large rock that jutted out over the lake, her chin on her knees, digging out small pebbles from the crevices in the rock and tossing them into the water. She was wearing faded black jeans and a violet NYU sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail that disappeared into the crumpled hood of the sweatshirt. She didn’t turn around, but I knew she’d heard me come by the way she cocked her head.

“What’s all the shouting about?” she asked, her voice carefully neutral.

“Slight difference of opinion concerning the Jack situation.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” I continued, rambling nervously. “Alison thinks Jack’s lying dead in a ditch somewhere. She wants to call the cops.” Lindsey didn’t respond, but simply tossed another pebble into the lake. It hit the water with a soft, dignified
ploop
. When it became apparent that she intended to say nothing, I quickly continued. “Chuck thinks Alison has unresolved Jack issues that she needs to explore and is convinced Jack is holed up somewhere, stoned out of his gourd.”

Ploop . . . Ploop
.

“Chuck is very against calling the cops. He’s sure we’ll all be arrested.”
Ploop
. “What do I think? I think they’re both right and they’re both wrong and would you please just turn around and talk to me for a second?”

There was a final
ploop
and then Lindsey pulled a stray hair out of her mouth and turned to face me. “You know what your problem is, Ben?”

I briefly wondered at the way those seven words seemed to find their way into the mouth of every woman I’ve ever known. “No,” I said. “Well, yes actually. That is, which problem are you talking about?”

“You can’t accept the fact that life doesn’t come with the closure and symmetry of a movie. You hate the loose ends, the knowledge that there are things in life that get screwed up and will remain irrevocably screwed up.”

This sounded so much like what Sarah had said to me when we got divorced that for one paranoid instant I actually considered the possibility that the two had discussed it between themselves. “I don’t want Sarah back,” I said.

“I know you don’t,” Lindsey said with a tender smile. “I’m not worried about that. But you don’t want her to resent you or hate you either. And you can’t accept the fact that you left something behind, something messy. You want to keep going back to see if you can somehow clean it up, make it more tidy in your mind, but it isn’t going to happen.”

“I know that,” I said.

“And while you’re busy looking back,” she continued, “you’re not looking at what you have right here in front of you. I don’t know,” she exhaled slowly. “Maybe that’s why you write, so that you can give closure to everything, you know? Achieve resolution.”

“I know what I have here,” I said. “You know I’ve always been in love with you.”

“I do, but it’s not enough. I love you, but I’m looking forward, not back.” She leaned forward, pulling her knees to her chest. “You screwed up in the past. Well, shit happens. You learn what you can, you scrape it off your shoe and you move on. If you can’t do that, you’ll never get the chance to get it right.”

“I
was
heavily medicated,” I pointed out.

“Bullshit, Ben,” she said. “Divorce means you’ve been permanently changed, and that terrifies you. But without change there’s no future for you. For us. So I need you to start accepting things. To start looking forward.”

The good old days weren’t always good
, I thought to myself.
And
tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems
. I thought about that for a moment, then about the wisdom of looking to song lyrics for direction, and then I climbed onto the rock to sit with her, facing the lake. My fingers found a small pebble and I tossed it into the lake.
Ploop
. There was an answering
ploop
as Lindsey tossed a pebble, and in that way we sealed our pact. I leaned against her and she ran her lips over my forehead.

I noticed our breath as it formed and mingled in front of us, a faint white vapor in the cool morning air. It wasn’t cold yet, but the weather was turning. The lake was absolutely still under the gray sky, its current undetectable, as if it too was sensing the approach of yet another winter and was preparing to freeze. Suddenly I sat up straight and looked across the lake. “The geese are gone,” I said.

Lindsey smiled at me and gave my arm a squeeze. “They’ll be back,” she whispered. We sat there quietly for a while watching the lake, growing ever so slightly older together.