You Lost Me There (34 page)

“Seriously, I’m fucking tearing my skull apart out there, thinking about this shit,” Joel said, pacing in the kitchen. His bulk was full of energy, the opposite of drunk. “You know, the only time of day my mother was good for, my father was good for, was happy hour?”

“Joel, come on.”

“Hey, it’s in the blood, man, this is programming speaking. You’re the gene guy, am I wrong?”

“Yes and no,” I said. He stared at me, his eyes like knuckles. “A lot of it, introns, we’re clueless about. Ninety-five percent, some say.”

“What did you do, tell me that.”

“What did I do when?”

“After Sara. Your ‘coping mechanisms.’ The scientist’s guide to grief, or whatever.”

“I did nothing.”

“And that worked?”

“Not at all.”

“So then you end up on a sailboat.”

“Something I regret,” I said, “on top of everything else.”

He waited a second, but didn’t stop staring. “So you figured I’d be drinking.”

A statement, not a question. I said, “Can I get you some water?”

Joel was rattling his head. He couldn’t seem to stop grinding his teeth. He laughed under his breath, then went outside, plopped down in one of the chairs in the yard, and lit a cigarette. I sat down next to him and for some reason this propelled him up a second later, dragging the chair. He lifted it and slammed it against a tree, over and over, warping the frame, until he flung the poor thing ten feet out into the ocean.

We watched it bob in the water. There wasn’t any current to pull it away.

“You want to know what I’ve been doing, right?” He turned, flicking his cigarette butt in the water. “Fine, I took two tabs of Ecstasy. Happy now? This afternoon, off one of my cooks. How about that? Unbelievable rush. Nearly burned my head off. Then, an hour later, my sous-chef kicks me out. Of my own kitchen. At least I think he did. I mean, I was blissing out like I’ve never seen. But you know what? I drove over to Jill’s. Like, why not? Genius. See I had this incredible epiphany. I wanted to share how I’d become, like, one with the universe and shit. But by the time I get there, it’s gone. It’s transformed. And I’m going schizo. Like I was chopped in two, me the watcher and then me, you know, independent of that. Like my thoughts were disappearing down a black hole and I couldn’t catch them. I saw myself disappearing. Like, whatever I was, I wasn’t anymore, or what I was was being sucked out somewhere else, and I was left watching it get sucked away. Or whatever. So that was what I wanted to tell Jill about. I ring the bell. Next thing you know, Jill’s there and I’m telling her how I’ve gone crazy, I’m crying, and then she puts her hands up, so I’m quiet and she tells me, that’s it. I could save it. She didn’t care. This was the end, she’d call the police if need be, but I couldn’t come back, ever. Then she slammed the door in my face. I mean, now
that
I can fucking understand. So I mean, that’s exactly what I’m thinking now, you know? Just stop. Just stop. A nice, simple exit. Slam the door on this shit. I mean,
look at me
. What am I adding to the world right now? Fucking what, man?”

He was pacing around the yard in the dark. He saw my bucket of rocks, picked it up, started taking out the rocks and one by one throwing them far out into the water.

I took the bucket away and got Joel inside and gave him one of Betsy’s sleeping pills. He lay down in the cot and passed out with his boots on. I called Ken and asked him if he knew any support services. Turned out Cranberry had a weekly AA meeting falling on the following afternoon, held in his church of all places.

We went down together the next morning. I introduced Joel to Ken in the church driveway. Ken said he’d always been a fan of Joel’s way with scallops.

I looked at Joel. He nodded. “It’s going to be okay,” Ken said.

Ken called that afternoon, around the time the meeting would be getting out. “We were sorry we didn’t see your buddy this afternoon.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He said he was going to join you for lunch, then the two of you would be coming back together. Not true?”

I slammed down the phone. I called Joel’s cell and left a message. I called Blue Sea. I called Jill. There was a knock on the door and through the screen I saw Ken.

“I’m sorry, Victor. I shouldn’t have let him out of my sight.”

“He’s an adult. I’m sure it’s fine.”

“Can I help?”

We jumped in his golf cart.

“Just get me to the ferry.”

From Northeast Harbor, I didn’t know where to start. The island was full of bars and restaurants and gas stations selling beer. I drove home to change clothes and think. Weeks since I’d left, it was an odd sensation, driving down the road to my house. The woods looked oddly unrelated to any life I’d lived there before.

My answering machine had a single message.

“Victor, this is Joel. Look, I gotta run. You’re not going to see me anymore. I need to start over someplace. San Diego, Austin, just someplace warm. I know you’re the worrying type, so I thought I’d call, seriously you’ve done a lot for me. But anyway, it’s cool, I’ve done it before. I just can’t hang around here anymore, this island’s full of ghosts. I don’t know how you do it, but I can’t.”

Caller ID said the call originated from Cape Near.

Betsy’s car was in the driveway when I pulled in. The front door to the house had the screen door propped open by an old gardening bench. I found Joel out back, sitting in the lawn chair Betsy always favored, facing the woods. An army duffel lay fully stuffed in the grass.

“I’m bullshit,” he said after a second.

“Yeah, I know.”

He laughed. “I’ll tell you, you know the one story I like? About school? It was my thirteenth birthday. My parents neglected to visit, they didn’t call. No surprise, they’d shipped me away since I was seven. For presents I think I got some new shirts and a ten-dollar bill. But I remember the card my mother sent. I still have it, it’s in the safe-deposit box. On the front there’s this photograph of a little boy laughing, with his hands tucked down his pants. And on the inside she wrote, I can quote it, ‘By this point you’ve probably learned how to entertain yourself. Pleasure’s rare enough, you should grab it when you can. Love, Mom.’ Fucking, I was flabbergasted. It took me a second to figure it out. Not like the other guys were getting advice from their mothers, you know, pro-whacking off.

“I figured out later on, though,” he said, “when I wasn’t such a prick, that that card was a lot more who my mother was than some Oxford shirts.”

“Joel, you don’t have to go through this alone.”

“People say that.”

“Why don’t you come back to Cranberry? Regroup, get a fresh start.”

He turned and gazed at me. He looked exhausted, but also calmer than anytime recently. “Tell you what,” he said a minute later, staring down the lawn, “that grill out there, in season? You could wipe them out with a taco truck.”

We went out together that evening. I telephoned Lucy again and discussed recent progress. I was due back at the lab in two more weeks. Perhaps I’d commute by ferry, as Betsy had always envisioned. The ending, as of yet, was unwritten. Joel grilled salmon steaks for dinner and we split a bottle of mineral water. Joel watched the news, shouting at Tom Brokaw, then went to bed early while I sat in the living room and reread my genealogy entry, now a total of a hundred pages, making final adjustments and rewriting through the night, drinking coffee, until six in the morning, when I printed out a copy and left it on the table for Joel to review.

I went outside and tried the water. It was freezing. I went for a short swim anyway, toward Bar Harbor, where the lights were being absorbed by the sunrise. Then I went inside and added a postscript to Sara’s section. It wasn’t quite right for a book, but it would fit on an index card.

My deep gratitude to: Ann Baldwin, Crans Baldwin, Leslie Baldwin; Julie Bleha, Jessica Francis Kane, Woodwyn Koons, Chris Lee, Andrew Womack; Josh and Juliet Knowles; PJ Mark; Sean McDonald, Emily Bell, and everyone else at Riverhead; the scientists who allowed me to pick their brains and mangle their research; Mary Baldwin; and my wife, Rachel, for everything.