Love Show (23 page)

I didn't work up the nerve to Google Scott Diamond until
midnight on Saturday. That's when most people worked up the nerve to say what
they wanted. Midnight. Weekend. Have a few drinks. Say something stupid.
Something that you mean.

I couldn't look down on that. If I
had a little more nerve, I'd have called Jack and asked him how dare he tell me
to go away just when I had gotten used to having him around, just as he started
being the first person I told everything to.

I chewed my fingernails looking at
the search results.

Scott Diamond's Son Recites
Father's Last Words

I clicked on the link with
trembling fingers, biting my lip. It wasn't Jack, but Alex. The video was a few
years old, taken when Alex was at West Point.

I closed my eyes. I did not hit
play. I stared at the frozen image for a long time.

Finally, I shut the screen of my
computer and pushed it away.

I got up and walked away from it.

I could either research Scott
Diamond or I could tell Riley I couldn't do it. And I had a feeling if I
couldn't handle this, it wouldn't say much for my prospects in Syria. I knew
I'd have to be tougher.

I turned my head, looking back at
the computer, and gnawed on my lip. I walked to it and opened the screen and
began to work.

Scott James Diamond was born in
1961 in Chicago, IL. He attended the University of Illinois, got a graduate
degree in journalism from NYU, and took a mailroom job with the
Chicago
Tribune
.

He met Julie Rowland in 1983,
married her in 1985. She gave birth to his son, Alexander, in 1986, and his son
Jack in 1992.

He spent three years in Bosnia, and
was hospitalized when shrapnel in his leg became infected.

He was the co-recipient of the
Pulitzer Prize with Robert Riley in 1994.

He spent time in the First Gulf War,
co-authored a book, and was named the Chief of the Moroccan News Bureau. He
returned to the Metropolitan desk at
The New York Times
in 1999.

After the terrorist attacks on
September 11
^th
, he and Riley were asked to cover the war in
Afghanistan. He agreed. In January of 2002, he went to a café to meet with a
source.

Riley had a stomach bug from
drinking the water so Scott Diamond went alone.

He didn't come back. Not that
afternoon. Not that night.

The last time most people saw him
would be in the photographs they released. He looked levelly into a camera,
with serious but unpanicked eyes, holding a newspaper with the day's date.

The last time a very small handful
of people would see him would be in the VHS tape sent to the Kabul hotel room
where Riley had holed up, refusing to leave.

They slit his throat, cut off his
head, and the camera went black.

I took notes on all of this. That
was what they taught you. The way to make sense of things was to take detailed
notes and to construct a narrative, identifying causes and effects, the
repercussions and the warnings.

They didn't kill Scott Diamond.
They slaughtered him. Like an animal.

I twitched. I took more notes. It
made less sense.

The more I learned, the less sense
it made. Not what had happened. I knew what had happened. I understand the timeline.
I recognized the reasons the men who murdered Jack's father gave for their
awful crime.

But I couldn't get to a place in my
head where I could understand it. I couldn’t understand the violence or the
terror or the brutality or the basic tragedy of a kid's father dying like that.
I knew exactly what had occurred and I also knew it was too horrible to ever
fully understand.

I closed my laptop and my notes and
walked away from them. I could tell you what happened to Scott Diamond. But it
would never be the full story. It would never be the story of what happened to
Jack Diamond’s dad.

The first nice day came at the end of March. The first real
day of spring. When you knew winter had just about ended.

It would be cold again—maybe once
or twice—but when the temperature soared to the high sixties, you knew it would
never again be as cold as it had been.

I had barely noticed March until
that warm day. When it became clear that Jack wasn't going to come back to me,
that Jack didn't want to be friends, I buried myself in work like I used to.

There was something relaxing about
it, about checking every box, mitigating some barely-there anxiety.

I hated the Scott Diamond assignment,
selfishly, but I did it. I did it slowly, writing down the details,
highlighting the key elements in play from the moment of his abduction to his
ultimate death.

I could only take so much at one
time.

And I knew that was because of
Jack, and I knew that it was a good thing to learn how to do. To write about
something awful happening to a person who meant more to you than the average
person did.

I never met Scott Diamond but I
knew his son.

It was, if nothing else, an
exercise in empathy.

I was up early—the first nice day—and
I didn't see anyone walking across campus to the newspaper office. I liked the
quiet in the office, too.  Starting a pot of bitterly strong coffee, I began to
think about the positions we needed to fill next year.

I thought Juliet could be a good Editor-in-Chief.
But she said she didn't know if she wanted the job. She had smiled and shrugged
when I suggested it. "I don't know, Hadley. It looks like a ton of
work."

When I'd gotten a few things into
shape, I turned to my homework. I had started working in my newspaper office
around the time when I started being worried that I'd run into Jack on campus.

I put on my headphones to listen to
Arabic conversations spoken at a quick clip, while answering a series of
challenging questions about their contextual meaning. It was the sort of work
that took a lot of focus—so much that you couldn't think of anything but the
noise and what it all meant.

Andrew popped his head and waved,
letting me know he was here. I smiled, waved back, and kept working.

When I looked up again, it was
dark. I pulled off my headphones and sighed. I flipped my phone over to see I'd
missed four calls while it was on silent.

That was weird.

I unlocked the phone and scrolled
to my missed calls.

Jack.

Jack.

Jack.

Jack.

The phone, still on silent, lit up
with his name again.

I swallowed. I picked up the phone.

"Come on, come on, pick
up," he muttered frantically.

"Hey," I said. They were
having a party. Or something. It sounded like a thousand people were chattering
behind him.

"Hadley?"

“Jack? What do you want?” I asked
quietly. “Is everything okay?”

“Come to the house.”

“I don't think that's a good
idea," I said.

“Come on, Hads,” he begged. “I
gotta see you.”

"Hey, have you had dinner—”
Andrew trailed off when he saw I was on the phone.

"Hadley?" Jack said.

"I have to go.”

"Why? Just come here," he
said.

“I can't.”

“Please. Come on. I've got to talk
to you.”

I wavered. Andrew was watching me.
“Jack, I've got to go.” I hung up and put the phone away.

“Everything okay?” Andrew asked.

"Great."

"Was that Jack?"

I cast a wary eye at him. I didn't
like the idea of people knowing anything about it. I nodded, though.

"You're better off,"
Andrew said. He smiled. "Everyone thought you'd lost your mind. You
know?"

I looked at him. "No, I didn't
know."

"Come on?" he laughed.
"Jack Diamond?" He smiled. "Number one cause of breakups at
Northwestern?"

"I've never heard that,"
I said. And I hadn't. If Jack had a history of sleeping around, he'd kept it
quiet. And so had his friends. Though it made sense: handsome and tall and
popular and that goddamn smile.

"You want to order
dinner?"

"Sure," I said.

"Chinese?"

I nodded and he left my office.

The phone rang again. I silenced it
with a flick of my finger and bowed my head. I tried to focus on fixing an
awkward split infinitive in the third sentence of Scott Fleischer’s article on
vending machine robberies.

But, of course, all I could see was
Jack’s face. And in the buzzing silence of the room, all I could hear was the
drunken slur to his words.
I gotta see you
.

When the phone lit up with his name
again, I simply turned it off. I couldn’t do anymore work, but I waited an
appropriate period of time, before I slipped my stuff into my bag and went to
find Andrew.

"Do you mind if I bail on
Chinese?" I asked. "I've been here all day. Can't focus anymore."

"Yeah." He grinned.
"No worries. I'll see you tomorrow, right?"

"Right."

I turned my phone back on. Ten
missed calls, three new voicemails. It had only been half an hour. I stopped in
the parking lot, staring at my phone, wondering if I should call him, wondering
if I should just go over there and see him.

When my phone rang again, I
answered it.

“Hadley,” he said tightly. “Pick
up, god fucking…”

“It’s Hadley.”

“Oh.” I heard him take a sharp
breath. “Look, is there any way, any way at
all
, that you could come
over here, Hadley?” His voice was ragged with emotion. It sounded like he was
crying.

“Why?” I asked.

“I just... I really want to see
you,” he whispered. His voice broke. “I need…I need you.”

“You’re drunk and you think I’m
available,” I told him. Maybe if I was a bitch, he could just hate me. That
would be easier for both of us. “It’s not fun anymore. Remember?”

“I don’t want to have fun,” he said
fiercely. “I want to see you.”

I bit my lip. It was impossible to
get him back now. It was impossible to tell him I was fun when he'd already
told me that I hurt him. It was impossible to drive home and sleep, because he
still sounded hurt.

"Okay," I said.
"Okay, I'll come."

He exhaled. "Thank you."

I hung up the phone and drove to
the house.

There was loud music playing
downstairs and red plastic cups lining the railing of the porch.

It was the prettiest girls and the
coolest boys.  The closer I got, the more inadequate I felt. In my jeans and
Hanes t-shirt, with my backpack firmly on my shoulders, I stepped through the
open door, looking around for him.

Maybe upstairs.

I didn't want to venture into the
kitchen, or through the throng of people spilling out of the living room and
into a narrow hallway. So I hoped he'd be in his room.

I walked up the stairs, squeezing
past a pin-thin Asian girl with a flower behind one ear and a redheaded
sophomore boy making out aggressively by the bannister.

Jack sat against the wall in his
room, watching the news on mute.

Handsome Jack, with an open bottle
of whiskey, and a self-loathing smile on his face.

“Hi,” he whispered like a little
kid, when I opened the door and stood there.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I closed the
door. He didn’t say anything. The bass beat of the speakers shuddered through
the room. The painfully neat room, with so many books in it. And with Jack
sitting against a wall, drunk, glassy-eyed, impossibly sad.

He laughed. "I'd blame it on
you if I could." He shook his head. “I’m all fucked up again.”

“You're not fucked up."

“Are we still friends?” he asked.

I swallowed. "I don't know.
Would you like to be?"

Jack shrugged. "I don't know.
I thought I'd be over it by now. But I'm not."

"Over what? Me?"

He laughed. "Yeah, you."
He lifted the bottle to his lip. "I miss you. It's weird."

"It's not weird," I said.
"I miss you, too."

He smiled. "Stupid, right? We
go to the same school and you live down the road." He leaned back.
"I'm sorry I told you I loved you. I shouldn't have said anything."

I looked at him. "I'm sorry I
can't be who you want." I exhaled.

"You're exactly who I
want."

"Well, what you want
then," I said. "I can't be the girl who follows you. I can’t not go
to Syria. And you can't just be whatever it was that you were to me." I
bit my lip.

He closed his eyes and slumped
further down. "Maybe I could be.”

I walked over to him and sat down
next to him against the wall. I tried to think of something comforting to say.
"David says my spine is misaligned."

He laughed.

"He says that's the root of
all of my problems."

"Don't be nice to me,"
Jack said softly.

I was quiet. "You said you
wanted to talk."

"I lied. I wanted to see
you," he said. He exhaled. "I don't want you to be nice to me."

"Well, I'm not going to be
mean to you. Especially not when you're looking like that."

He gave me a look.

"Being mean to you right now would
be like kicking a puppy."

"Because I'm adorable,"
he said.

"Because you're drunk and
sad."

He rolled his eyes. "That's
just my personality."

"Drunk and sad?"

He laughed and I did, too, and it
was funny and horribly painful and deeply aching all at once. Like the laughter
echoed and because of that you knew you were hollow.

He reached for my waist and kissed
me. No matter how drunk he was, no matter how sober and stupid I was, he could
still kiss me like it was what he was born to do.

I was left breathless and
senseless, and whispering: “We cannot do this. Jack, we
cannot
,
cannot
do this.”

“I can’t stop thinking about you.”

“I’m still going to Syria. I can’t
give that up. I just can’t.”

“Will you tell me something?”

“Yeah."

"What was with the rules? Seriously?"
he asked.

I shrugged. "I don't know. My
way of not turning into my mother." I bit my lip. "She just never got
it together after my dad left. She kept looking to fall in love with someone.
And she was always at their whims, you know? I don't want that. And maybe the
rules were overkill. But, the one that I absolutely can't break is the one that
you want me to, right? I mean, I'm going to Syria in May. You can't deal with
that. But I can't not go."

He was quiet.

It wasn't fair for me to have this
conversation with him when he was drunk. But I asked. I wanted to know. "I
mean, if we tried again and if we gave up all the other rules and I still went
to Syria. Do you think that could ever work?"

He bit his lip. He shook his head.
"No."

I closed my eyes. Well, at least I
knew now.

I bit my lip.

The rejection still stung.

"It's not that dangerous. The
chances of me dying..."

"It's not rational," he
said. "I still wake up in the middle of the night panicking about my
dad." He looked at me. "And he's been dead for a decade. Nothing
worse can happen to him. Nothing. And I still can't sleep sometimes thinking
he's somehow still suffering." He cleared his throat. "And Alex is in
Afghanistan and..." He took a breath. "No, I can't. And I can't ask
you to give it up. I know you'd say no if I did. But I wouldn't want you to say
yes."

He took a long sip from his bottle.
He met my eyes. He closed them.

"This sucks," he said. He
was wasted.

"Yeah," I agreed. He
dropped his head to my shoulder, and I felt him nod off to sleep. I shook him
gently, helped him get to his feet, and stumble into his bed.

I moved the whiskey bottle to the
other side of the room and filled a glass of water and put it next to his bed.

I looked down at him, breathing
quietly, his thick-lashed eyes closed. I smoothed his hair back off of his
forehead. I pressed a light kissed to the top of his head, turned off the
lights, and walked away.