Saving Beck

  I opened his fridge.

  It was empty but for beer, water, and ketchup. Kit lived on takeout.

  I took a bottle of water and offered one to Angel. She shook her head.

  “My hands are still too cold.”

  I led her to the couch and offered her a blanket.

  “You can wait here and get warm.”

  She didn’t ask questions. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, giving in to the crash. She’d sleep for days if I let her.

  I found the coats in the closet in Kit’s extra bedroom, along with a backpack. I knew he wouldn’t mind, or at least that’s what I told myself, so I chose two older, warm winter parkas and a blanket. I rolled it up and shoved it in the backpack next to two pairs of work gloves.

  I felt a twinge of guilt. Kit used to be my friend, a true friend. Honestly, I knew he’d give me these things if I asked. But at the same time, after what he did, it almost seemed like poetic justice to steal them.

  Fuck him.

  On my way back to the living room, I stopped in the dining room. In the buffet by the table, I knew there were rolled-up quarters in the top drawer. Kit tossed all of his change in a big jar, and then when he got bored, he rolled them up while he watched TV. He’d done it as long as I’d known him.

  I was right. There were about ten rolls of quarters. I took four.

  Forty dollars.

  I woke Angel and handed her one of the coats. It was Kit’s and he was giant, so it drowned Angel, the hem falling past her knees. But that was okay. That meant that her legs were protected from the cold. The gloves swallowed up her hands, but again, they’d keep her warm.

  I folded the blanket and tried to put everything back exactly as we had found it, leaving no trace that we’d ever been here at all.

  Outside, our footsteps in the snow were the only evidence of our existence. Hopefully, new snowfall would cover even those, and Kit would never know.

  “Thanks for the coat,” Angel told me, her voice gruff. She didn’t like to show emotion. I added that to the list of things I knew about her.

  “You’re welcome,” I told her. “I knew Kit would have something.”

  “What kind of name is Kit?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “I think his real name is Christopher,” I answered. “But he’s always gone by Kit. He’s practically my uncle.”

  I was pissed at him, but that didn’t change what he used to be to me.

  Angel’s attention was drawn away from me, though, by a whimper nearby.

  A little dog, a mangy little thing, shaggy and small, sat in the snow a few feet away, his eyes sad.

  Angel sucked in a breath and darted toward it, scooping it up in her arms.

  “Oh my gosh, little guy. You’re so cold.” She shoved it inside her coat until I could only see its eyes peering out. Long eyebrows shagged down over them. “You poor thing. Did someone abandon you?”

  I recognized the look in Angel’s eye, and I was already shaking my head.

  “We can’t keep him, Angel. We can’t afford to feed him.”

  Her head snapped up. “Does he look like he’s getting fed as it is?” she demanded, and she had a point. He was ragged and skinny. “I’m keeping him.”

  Her arms tightened protectively and I knew that dog was coming with us.

  “Okay.”

  “Damn straight.”

  We trudged through the snow and she cuddled the dog and at the next McDonald’s we came to, we bought it a hamburger. She fed the dog inside her coat. I could see him licking her fingers.

  “What are you going to name it?” I asked as we made our way toward the station.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. He’ll tell me what his name is sooner or later.”

  “The dog will tell you?”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  twenty-five

  BECK

  SOMETHING WASN’T RIGHT.

  Usually H gave you a warm tranquil high, a feeling of euphoria so engulfing that it felt like you were wrapped in a soft blanket, lying in front of a crackling fire while it was snowing outside.

  Tonight we’d smoked it instead of injecting, and something wasn’t right.

  I felt like a caged tiger, ready to climb out of my skin, and I paced paced paced through the warehouse, one step two steps three. My veins throbbed and I felt all of them and I had millions of them and they were intertwined and they all itched.

  “Where did you get this shit?” I muttered to Angel. She sat by our little bonfire, and her eyes were glassy. She was scratching at her arms, her long fingernails leaving red streaks, but she didn’t stop. The dog was sitting at her feet and she scratched at it too.

  “From the guy,” Angel answered, and her voice was thick. “The guy.”

  Her vague answer annoyed me. In fact it sent rage coursing through my veins, and that wasn’t right it wasn’t right it wasn’t right. I didn’t usually get mad like this. But I was furious now, I was a raging bull, and I wanted to tear someone’s head off.

  I saw red. Every shade of it, every hue. Everything was tinted with it, and I wanted to burn the world down.

  “Fuck you, Angel,” I growled, and I banged out the door, hitting my shoulder on the board, but I didn’t care and I didn’t feel it. I knew enough to get away, because I wanted to hurt her, but I knew that I really didn’t.

  The winter air hit me in the face and took my breath away, but it still felt good. It felt like it was cleaning my lungs out and was filling them up and I was a balloon and I might float away.

  But I shouldn’t.

  So I tied myself to the ground.

  I bobbed in the wind, and I was lost I was lost. The stars twirled together and they were in my eyes and the light was bright.

  The reds were endless, tinting everything, outlining the world.

  I collapsed onto a park bench in a place I didn’t know. I looked around and there were trees and a merry-go-round and it was rusty and red because of course it was red. Everything was.

  My head fell back and thunked against the metal bench and I stared at the night, my eyes wide open, because I could see now, I could finally see.

  Everything made sense.

  Everything was clear.

  I was all alone in this world. Everything else was an illusion.

  My knuckles clenched and they hurt but they were insignificant.

  I pulled out my phone because I understood life, I understood everything, and I had to share that. I had to share it before I forgot it or I slipped away.

  I dialed at numbers, memorized numbers, and my mom answered on the second ring, and she knew me immediately because of course she did.

  “Honey,” she blurted. “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I understand everything,” I told her. My voice was slurred, but she’d know what I was saying. She knew me. “I get it. Nothing matters. That’s the point. None of us matter. You don’t, I don’t. It’s all a sham. It’s a fucking scheme.”

  I was agitated, getting more so by the minute, and she was confused.

  “I don’t understand,” she said slowly. “Just come home. We’ll talk about it when you get here.”

  I laughed because she was trying to trick me because everyone was trying to trick me because the world was a scam. Did they think I didn’t know that?

  “Nice try,” I told her. “I’m never coming home. Don’t you understand? I’m going to be a fucking star in the sky. And you can’t find me. No one can.”

  “You’re not a star,” she said, and she sounded scared. “You’re a man. We’ve got to get you some help. Please.”

  “That’s a lie,” I insisted, and I was shouting. “That’s a fucking lie. I’m not an addict; I just know the truth. You need to find the truth, Mom.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw people standing in the shadows, and they moved and reached for me with long pointy fingers, and I startled, glaring at them.

  “Get away,” I shouted
at them.

  “Beck, what’s wrong?” my mom asked quickly. “Who is with you?”

  “They’re trying to get me, but they can’t,” I told her. The people backed up now, until they were just black blurs swirled into circles where their faces should be.

  “Beck,” she said, pleading now. “Please. Tell me where you are.”

  “You just want to put me away,” I told her. “I know that now. You don’t want me around because I’m a problem. I’m difficult. Well, guess what? I won’t bother you again. You won’t ever see me again. Forget that I exist. I’m going to forget about you.”

  She cried out but I hung up. And I threw my phone into the trash can so hard it shattered into a billion pieces.

  “Fuck you,” I told it. I was telling the world.

  I didn’t have a phone now. I couldn’t be tracked; I couldn’t be caught.

  I’d be a star. Or I’d be the moon.

  I awoke on the bench, and Angel sat on the other end, watching me. She had the shattered remains of my phone in her lap.

  It was daylight now, and my hands were curled into my lap. They throbbed, both of them, and they were covered in scrapes and blood. What happened to them?

  “How did I get here?”

  My voice tasted like rust and I cleared my throat.

  Angel shrugged. “I think our stuff was laced with meth.”

  That woke me up. “Meth? How do you know?”

  “Because when I came down, I puked my guts out, and I always do that with meth. Plus, you were pissed as fuck, dude. That’s what dope does.”

  “I’ve never done meth,” I told her honestly. “And I don’t remember much, but I don’t think I liked how I felt last night. I don’t want to do it again.”

  “You don’t right now,” she amended. “But you will.”

  I ignored that. I didn’t need another addiction.

  “You were shouting at shadow people,” she added. “That’s what meth does. It makes you paranoid. It makes you see people who aren’t there.”

  I did remember that.

  “I thought they were here to get me,” I told her.

  She nodded. “Yeah. I know.”

  There was a whimper and the dog’s head poked out of her coat. “This is Winston Churchill,” she told me.

  “You named the dog after an old prime minister?”

  She glared. “You got a problem with that?”

  “No, no problem. Nice to meet you, Winston.”

  She was satisfied, and the dog whimpered some more, and my head pounded.

  I was crashing now, and so was Angel, so we went back to the warehouse and slept for what felt like days.

  Maybe it was.

  twenty-six

  NATALIE

  MERCY HOSPITAL

  11:16 A.M.

  “THERE’S A HUGE GROUP OF football players in the waiting room,” Sam tells me as she comes back in the room. She’d washed her face and called to check on the kids. “There must be thirty of them. I can’t believe they’re here. Beck was gone for two months.”

  I glance at my sister. “They treat each other like they’re brothers. I’m not surprised. So many of them called me to check on him when he was . . . gone. They’ve been worried.”

  “Not Tray, though,” Sam says grimly.

  “No. It’d be a bit hard for him, since he’s in jail.” From what I’d heard, the court had been lenient since it was his first drug dealing charge . . . only given him a few months.

  “Do you hear that, Beck?” Elin whispers to Beck. “Your friends are here. Your real friends. They want you to get better.”

  “Elin, honey.” I turn to her. “Would you go give them an update? Let them know that it’s going to be hours until we know anything more. Tell them we appreciate that they came, but that they can go home. They don’t have to sit here.”

  She nods and leaves. I look at the clock.

  In thirteen hours, we will reach the twenty-four-hour mark since Beck collapsed on my porch. Thirteen hours is so short, so few, so little.

  I swallow hard.

  Sam stares at the door where Elin had just walked out.

  “What if he wakes up and doesn’t want her here?” Sam asks hesitantly.

  I think about all of the pictures I have at home of Beck and Elin, Elin and Beck, and that’s just not possible.

  “I know my kid,” I finally answer. “He loves her. He wants her here. I’d bet my life on it.”

  Sam lets that go, and we sit in silence again.

  “I hate hospitals,” she says. “Ever since Matt . . .”

  Her voice drifts off, and she shakes her head.

  “So if it’s bad for me, it must be a nightmare for you,” she decides. “What can I do?”

  “You’re doing it,” I tell her. “You’re here. I’m not alone.”

  She has no idea how much that means to me.

  “You’ve never been alone,” she answers. “You might’ve felt like it, but you weren’t. I’m always here for you, Nat.”

  “I know.”

  And I do. She’s been with me the entire time. She’s who held me up at the funeral, the blackest of all my black days. She’d held my hand tightly as they’d lowered my husband into the ground.

  “It smells the same in here. Jesus.” Sam stands up abruptly and sprays a couple spritzes of her perfume. “What the fuck is that, anyway? Sterility? Misery?”

  I have to crack a stiff smile at that. I’ve been thinking the same thing for hours.

  “Iodine and fear, I think.”

  She rolls her eyes. “I wish I could open a window. Beck could use some fresh air.”

  I look at my son, and he’s so unchanged. So still, so pale. I bend and hug him, pulling him against me.

  “Fight,” I instruct him. “Just fight, Beck.”

  I release him, and he falls limply back to the bed.

  I squeeze my eyes closed because it’s hard to see. He’s an empty shell.

  “Everyone wanted to be you and Matt,” Sam tells me, and I know she’s trying to distract me. I look over at her, and she’s got a faraway look on her face, a dreamy gaze. “Back in college. Always, actually.”

  “Well, I’m sure they don’t now.” My answer is bitter and jaded, and Sam flinches. “I’m sorry,” I add. “I didn’t mean that.”

  But I did. Life sucks sometimes.

  “Look, you didn’t deserve this. Matt didn’t either. He was in the prime of his life, and he’d worked so hard at the firm.”

  “Yeah. He was so focused on making partner,” I say, and when I think about it, all of the hours and hours wasted at work, working toward a goal that would be meaningless in the end, it makes me sad. And pissed. Does nothing matter in the long run?

  “He was a role model for everyone who knew him,” Sam reminds me. “He came from nothing, from a terrible family, and he had no money, and he worked hard to make himself who he became. He was an inspiration.”

  God, that hurts my heart.

  The word was. It’s so much different than is.

  “Yeah.”

  I yank my purse off the floor and root through it and finally come up with my prize. The bottle of Matt’s cologne. I take off the lid and sniff at it, closing my eyes as memories overtake me.

  Matt holding me. Matt laughing with me. Matt teasing me.

  Matt.

  “You’re still carrying that around?” Sam lifts an eyebrow and there’s the faintest hint of disapproval in her voice. She thinks I’m making things harder on myself by clinging to these things. I ignore her. She has no idea.

  “Don’t judge. You can just go home to smell Vinny. I can’t.”

  Properly chastised, my sister looks away. “Well, he stinks half the time, so I don’t want to.”

  But she knows what I mean, and she lets it go.

  “Does Vinny need any suits?” I ask her, and she looks at me before she laughs.

  “At the restaurant? Whatever for?”

  I shrug. “I don’t kn
ow. Matt’s are still in the closet and they’re expensive. I don’t want to just throw them away. Vinny could have them altered, if he wanted. For weddings, or . . . funerals.”

  I don’t think the unthinkable.

  That he might need one for Beck’s.

  Jesus.

  A tear slips down my cheek and it’s hot and wet.

  Sam reaches over to wipe it away and then pulls me to her chest, holding me tight.

  * * *

  I STARED LISTLESSLY OUT the kitchen windows, a cup of coffee in my hands.

  Through the glass, blades of grass pushed through patches of snow in stubborn indignation, desperately trying to linger in a life that had moved beyond it.

  I couldn’t help but see a metaphor there, even if it did make my heart stutter.

  “It’s time, Nat,” I said aloud, and I wasn’t talking about waking for the day. I was talking about reawakening for life. At times, it felt like my husband had been gone two years or ten years, and at times, it felt like two minutes. But it was time for me to stop clinging to a life that no longer contained Matt. The sadness, the grief, the trying to hold on . . . it had cost me my son. He left because I couldn’t handle it.

  I had to handle it.

  After I took the kids out to the bus, I came inside with purpose, my shoulders back.

  With an empty box in my arms, I took several deep breaths before I gathered the nerve to go in.

  One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three.

  I stepped inside my master bath.

  Matt’s bathrobe hung on a hook by the shower. It was waiting for him to use it, to drape it over his damp body. I closed my eyes and envisioned him wearing it, as he had so many other times. The white terry cloth skimmed his muscular shoulders, and I felt woozy at the thought. He’d never wear it again.

  I slowly took it off the hook, folded it neatly, and put it in the box.

  I gathered Matt’s soap and bath gel and tossed them into the box too. My fingers slid along the cool glass bottle of his cologne, and I sprayed it once into the air, sniffing at it. I’d never liked this particular scent, but Matt did. It was oceanic, salty and brisk, and he’d loved it. And now I loved it too because it smelled like him, and this bottle was all I had left.