Reckless Years Page 11

There’s a twenty-minute layover in Shannon before the plane is ready to take us back to New York. I take a seat in a small circular waiting area marked “Gate 18,” surrounded by about twenty other passengers. A stewardess in a tight-fitting navy-blue uniform crosses the waiting area and takes up her post next to the gate. She opens the doorway and I see down a long passageway. It’s dark, and I can’t see the end of it.

  It’s like something clamps itself around my heart.

  I think, You’re glad you’re never going to see Kieran again? Dublin is a state of mind? Are you high?

  I look down that passageway and I shudder at how it seems to have no end.

  The clamp around my heart tightens.

  Oh my God, it’s all been bullshit. Pearls? The meaning of life in the moment? The future doesn’t matter? The universe is filled with love? It’s like I was brainwashed by some horrible New Age cult. What happened to me? How could I have believed such crap? Me, who has always been so sensible.

  I realize that the minute I step onto that plane and it takes off into the air, Dublin will be over. It will be in the past. It already is the past.

  It’s as if something cold passes over me—it feels like a sidewise glimpse at death. What was I thinking? I can’t leave Dublin. I can’t leave Kieran. Going home will be like living without the sun after having learned what it’s like to bask in its warmth. Surely no one could expect that of a person.

  There’s a phone bank in the middle of the waiting area. I run to it. With fingers that are trembling, I punch in Kieran’s number. An automated Irish-accented voice says my call can’t go through. I dial again. It’s my credit card. I bang the receiver against the phone. I dial again. “Fucking work!” I cry.

  “We’re sorry,” says the Irish-accented voice. “This call cannot go through.”

  I empty my purse out on the floor. I’m searching for coins. But I have no coins. Only a ten-euro note.

  I stand up, turn to the room at large. “Does anyone have change?” I shout. People look up from their seats, startled. I’ve got the ten-euro note in the air over my head. Public spectacle is not my usual modus operandi, but I must speak to Kieran again or I will not walk down that passageway with no end.

  Not a person offers me anything. They just stare. I start jogging in a loop around the phone bank, crying out, while still trying to maintain some level of respectability, “Excuse me, excuse me, might you have change?”

  Finally, a lady in a pink sweater vest takes mercy on me and extends a handful of euros.

  I lunge at the phones again, praying. I dial. I hear ringing. Then, “Hullo?”

  I close my eyes. “Oh thank God,” I say.

  “Jesus,” Kieran says. “I’ve been trying to reach you at the hotel all morning, chick. I can’t stop thinking about you. My mind is reeling. I’m completely spun. Heather, I have to tell you . . .”

  “Yes, yes . . .”

  And the phone goes dead. Kieran’s voice is gone and instead there’s a dial tone buzzing in my ear. And now it won’t accept my euros. I try two, three times. I bang the receiver hard against the wall. I have tears streaming down my face.

  I dial again. Please, God, I’m thinking. Please.

  Finally, finally he answers, and it’s like my legs go out. I slide down to the floor, my back against the phone bank, the receiver clutched against my ear. Kieran is talking, and one by one, people are disappearing down the passageway to the plane.

  “Girl, I never thought I could feel anything again.”

  There are only three people left at the gate.

  “Kieran,” I cry. “I feel like I can’t go back to New York!”

  There is horrible crackling on the line.

  “I know, girl,” he says. I hear him as if from far away. “I know!”

  “I need you to tell me something, Kieran. Please. Even if it’s not true, I need you to say it. Tell me I’m going to see you again!”

  There is one person left in line. The stewardess is squinting at me.

  “I promise you will see me again,” Kieran says. “I’ll meet you on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. Will you do that, chick? Will you meet me on an island somewhere?”

  I am nodding, yes, yes, yes, and the tears are flowing down my face and into the collar of my jacket.

  There’s no one left at the gate. The stewardess’s squint has turned into a scowl.

  “We’ll find a way. We have to,” he says. “You’ll see, beautiful girl. It’s all going to work out for us.”

  Then, softly, “Good-bye, Kieran.”

  “Good-bye, beautiful girl.”

  When I hang up the phone, my heart is beating in wild, tremulous beats, but no longer with fear. Beautiful girl, beautiful girl. It echoes in my ears all the way to the gate. The stewardess snatches the ticket out of my hand, but what do I care? I run down the long corridor and onto the plane. Everyone is already in their seats. Everyone is staring at me, but what do I care? I have a huge smile on my face. God, or the Universe, or whatever, is in my chest again. It’s all going to be okay. Kieran has told me so.

  BOOK THREE

  CRASH

  Sunday, November 26, 2006

  Hello? Are you still out there? Reader. Whoever you are. Are you sick of me yet?

  It’s two thirty in the morning and I’m drunk. Can you tell? I don’t even like to drink. I never was a drinker before this whole thing started. And now here I am, the bottle of whiskey before me, not quite ladling it down my throat, but not that far off either.

  I’m listening to the Flaming Lips. I downloaded everything the minute I got home.

  I’m so confused. I feel like love and death, the beauty of this world and its horror, are pushed up so close to my face I can’t see clearly. I can’t breathe.

  Do you realize—that you have the most beautiful face. Do you realize—that everyone you know, someday, will die.

  Monday, November 27, 2006

  There’s a strangely festive air at the hospital.

  Seth and I go down the long hallways past whiteboards, nurses with stethoscopes around their necks, and patients slumped in wheelchairs against the wall. Everybody is gathered in a small private room. Every surface is covered with food—half-eaten roasted chickens and sides of green beans in plastic to-go containers from Fairway. A paper bag folded back with bagels inside. Boxes of coffee from Starbucks. I remember this from when Gabriel got shot. When tragedy strikes, what is there to do but offer food?

  Everybody is talking at the top of their voices. We can hear the din as we come around the corner.

  I remember all this from when Gabriel got shot too. All these people who love each other gathered together in a small place, no energy for grudges or faking it or trying to impress. Everybody stripped raw, pretenses left at the door. Everybody’s outer shell blasted off by the awe of the unspeakable happening. Everybody building a protective bubble of caring around the survivors. Yes, I’ve seen this before, I think. And you know what else? I’ve seen what happens when the awe wears off. When the unspeakable becomes just another fact to live with. I’ve seen what happens when all the friends and family go home. When people mutate into other versions of themselves. I find myself wanting to scream.

  Later

  I drive Seth back to Brooklyn from Valhalla, where everyone is going to be camped out for a while.

  He hasn’t been home in six months. He stepped off the Rock Star’s private plane and onto the tarmac at JFK, put on his sunglasses, grabbed his cell, and found seventeen frantic phone calls from Cecilia.

  The Seth before me does not even resemble the man I was with in Dublin three days ago. This man has skin that seems to have turned ashen and eyes that seem to have sunk into their sockets. They look as if they’re surrounded by freshly made bruises. His shoulders are slumped. Exhausted isn’t even the right word.

  “Seth, you need to get some sleep,” I say. He stares at me blankly, and it feels as if someone is hitting me in the chest with a sledgehammer. I think, I wou
ld do anything to spare him this.

  There’s something in my brother’s eyes I’ve never seen before. And suddenly I think, he knows now. He knows now just how badly the world will betray you. I have a flash of self-pity as I think, I’ve always known this. Now we’re even.

  Seth is looking around vaguely, like he’s seeing so many different things at once he can’t focus. This is trauma, I think—when your whole world changes from one second to the next, so fast that the change causes a fracture in your brain, just like a bad fall can cause a fracture to your bones. The fracture is the delineated mark between what your world was and what it is now. The fracture is your mind breaking because it can’t compute the disparity between the two worlds.

  Seth wants to pay for a car service to take me home. I let him so that he won’t feel I’ve gone too far out of my way, which I know he’d hate.

  In the car, I put my head onto my knees. I think, I feel it too. Even though I have no right to. My brain can’t compute how last week and this week could exist in the same universe.

  It’s Ben Green who’s been struck. Less than two weeks ago we sat across from each other and made plans to get together when I was back from Dublin. I was going to redeem myself by meeting his sons.

  All I have to offer are the facts: While Seth and Cecilia and I were all flying back from Dublin, the Greens were driving to their place upstate. Ben was at the wheel. A swerve to the right, a correction to the left. The tiniest of actions. Took a fraction of a second. And now? Now his wife is in a coma. And Eli, his three-year-old son, is dead.

  Tuesday, November 28, 2006

  Kieran, can I tell you just one thing? I don’t know who else to tell. When I first heard? When my brother said, in that horrible gentle voice that people use when they’re about to tell you something terrible, when I picked up my phone and he said, “I have some bad news,” you know what went through my mind? Nothing. I mean nobody. Josh Reed, my partner of thirteen years, never even entered my consciousness. It was Seth I was on the phone with so I knew he was safe. I had no instinctual pull to anybody. All I thought was, no, I’ve been so happy.

  Kieran, please don’t abandon me. I know it’s a terrible thing to do to someone, but you hold all light in your hands.

  I was at Katy and Mac’s house when my brother called. No, I wasn’t just at their house. I was dancing a jig at their house. I was dancing a jig right there on their living room rug, with the Pogues blasting and the morning sunshine streaming in the windows.

  I was telling them about Kieran and doing his accent. Katy kept saying, “Oh my God, Heather, you’re giving me the shivers.”

  I was telling them about going backstage with my brother and how nice to me Cecilia and he had been.

  I said, “Dublin is the best place in the world.”

  I’d taken Mac by the shoulders and said, “Your grandfather was wrong, dude. The Universe does give a shit, if you just open yourself to it.”

  And I won’t tell you my cell rang at that exact moment, because that would be a lie. But it was close enough. Close enough.

  I almost didn’t answer. But then I thought, what if it’s Kieran? And then I saw it was my brother. But then his voice was so gentle. And he said, “I have some bad news.” And I thought, no, no, no.

  Mac and Katy and I huddled together. They’ve known Ben and Marie as long as I have. Katy and I sat on the couch, so close our legs were touching. Mac sat on the coffee table in front of us. We wept. I imagined some ancient tribe while a powerful thunderstorm struck, the kind that ripped up crops and knocked over trees, that set the sky ablaze with lightning and made the earth seem to shake with thunder. They wouldn’t have known what thunder was or why lightning happened, or when it would end, or if it would end. They would have wondered if it was some kind of punishment, personal and pointed, a rebuke for having done something or for not having done something. Perhaps they’d pissed off the gods because they’d forgotten about them for five minutes. They would have prayed and tried to think of a way to appease these impossible-to-know-or-predict gods. And they would have been afraid because here was something they could never, ever understand. Because just five minutes ago, it had been sunny.

  As we sat there huddled together, I looked at Katy but not at Mac, even though it’s Mac I’ve known since before I was born. I felt if I looked into those eyes, which I know so well, the sight of the knowledge in them would break me. Mac is like me. He knows that the things everyone fears but think will never happen actually happen all the time.

  I thought, please, God. Please don’t have done this. I’ll do anything. But there’s no bargaining with the Universe. Its actions are irrevocable. And the very minute you let your guard down, the spring you decide not to sacrifice the goat or the virgin because the weather has been so beautiful surely it’s not necessary to spill all that blood—that’s the season the storm will come and wreck your crops and leave you starving.

  We sat there like that all day, shivering as if we were cold, getting steadily drunker, Katy weeping, Mac and I not looking at each other, and me thinking, Ben, Marie, Seth, Cecilia. If I could take you all back in time, I would. And you, Universe—I rage against you.

  Thursday, November 30, 2006

  I talked to Kieran on the phone last night and it was terrible. His accent is completely insurmountable international cell to cell. I so badly wanted to tell him about the accident and have him comfort me. But he was putting his kids to bed and his “ex-partner,” as he calls her, was coming up the stairs. He started whispering and then there was no chance whatsoever that I could understand him let alone be bathed in comfort. Today is Thursday. Last Thursday I was on the phone with him and we couldn’t stop laughing and he kept saying, “I’m spun, chick, completely spun.” He was texting me nonstop. I know he has his life to live. But could he really have forgotten me in a week? Did he get back together with his ex-wife?

  I know it’s a terrible thing to do to a person, but without you, Kieran, there is only darkness.

  Friday, December 1, 2006

  Ben’s younger son, Alex, is not yet one. He doesn’t talk, although he does gurgle a lot. I’m taking care of him now, because all the Greens and their closest friends are up at the hospital in Valhalla where Marie is still in a coma. Ben and Cecilia’s mom has brought Alex over to her apartment in the Lower East Side on Fourth Street between First and Second Avenues, and it’s there I go to take care of him. Everyone at the hospital cried and hugged me when I said I’d do this, which I found highly embarrassing. Being able to actually help, as opposed to just standing around helpless—they’re giving me a gift.

  Alex has soft red curls like his father and slightly bewildered blue eyes. I don’t know if this is due to the fact that last week he was breast-feeding and now he’s got a stranger handing him a bottle or if that’s how he’s always looked. We sit together in his grandmother’s living room, the walls filled with photographs. There’s a picture of a handsome man who looks like Cecilia, who I imagine is their father. He died when they were little. Had a heart attack one day, just like that. I bet they all thought they were inoculated from further tragedy. But the math starts all over again every day, doesn’t it?

  Everywhere there are pictures of Ben and Marie with Eli and Alex. They look so healthy and happy, like they could be in a commercial for yogurt or health insurance. There’s a picture of Ben and Marie at their wedding. She was already hugely pregnant with Eli. Her face is away from the camera, her head on Ben’s chest. Ben’s got his arms wrapped tightly around her, his head resting on the top of her head. It’s like they don’t know anyone else is there.

  I remember that wedding for my own reasons. I remember I was talking to some friend of theirs, an English guy, I have no idea now who it was. But I remember having this really easy, enjoyable conversation and thinking, this guy is so cute. This guy is so nice. I had the sense that it was him standing before me, not him and a dozen suitcases of psychological baggage he was lugging around. And it had hit
me, this is the kind of guy you’re supposed to marry. The nice guy. The guy without the suitcases. Josh? Josh is the guy you have an affair with and then never forget. But you don’t marry him.

  I sit on the floor with Alex while he takes alphabet blocks out of a big Trader Joe’s bag and puts them back in. He has a little Mexican rattle he likes to shake. Mostly, I dance around the living room with him on my hip while he coos and laughs and drools. When he’s tired, I give him a bottle and lie him down on his grandmother’s bed and sing to him until his breath becomes soft and even. I smooth the hair away from his forehead and watch him even after he’s fallen asleep.

  I didn’t know it would be so easy to love a baby.

  After Alex goes to bed for the night, I sit with Ben’s mom in her little, cramped kitchen. No one has been back to Ben and Marie’s apartment since the accident, so she has been buying things for Alex on an as-needed basis. The counters are piled high with boxes of Teddy Grahams and zwiebacks. All day long people come by to visit. They bring lasagnas and roast chickens and elbow noodle salad. I clean up all the coffee cups from all the visitors and tidy Alex’s toys.

  Ben’s mom cries a lot. She shakes when she cries. I don’t say anything to her, because really what is there to say. But I sit, and sometimes I hold her hand.

  I crawl home. Whiskey. Smoking.

  I don’t know where the sun beams end and the starlights begin and it’s all a mystery.

  I can’t stop listening to the Flaming Lips. I can’t stop hearing Wayne Coyne—I now know the singer was Wayne Coyne—saying, okay, turn to the person next to you, tell them you love them. Because at this moment you do. I close my eyes and try to will myself back a week and a day under the rain of confetti and shimmering balls ricocheting over my head.

  Oh, Kieran. I know you think we met for a reason, and you nearly had me believing the same thing. But we didn’t, you know. There’s no such thing as reason in this world. You and me meeting was as random as Ben’s accident. I think life is made up of millions of squiggling variables, all moving and pushing you along in a certain way until some accident, some random occurrence sends you flying onto some other path. Horrible accidents. Beautiful meetings. They’re collisions, is all. Random collisions in space.