One Last Thing Before I Go (19 page)

CHAPTER 4
8

S
ad Todd wears black goggles, orange earplugs, a red bathing suit, and blue flippers as he swims his laps. He does this every morning, fifty laps across the Versailles pool, before it gets busy and laps become impossible. Despite his colorful getup, he swims with a power and grace that belies his wallflower demeanor.

Jack, Oliver, and Silver sit out by the pool wordlessly watching Sad Todd swim, the sun just emerging hot and bright from behind the building. They have the pool deck to themselves for the time being, and Sad Todd is like a pendulum, putting them into a trance.

“So, I have cancer,” Oliver announces.

Jack and Silver turn to face Oliver.

“Fuck,” Jack says.

“What kind?” Silver says.

“The colon kind.”

“They can cure that, can’t they?” Jack.

“They’re guardedly optimistic.”

“When did you find out?” Silver.

“About six weeks ago.”

“What?!” Jack.

Oliver looks over at Silver and smiles. “You kind of stole my thunder.”

“I’m sorry, man.”

“You’ve had cancer for two months and you’re only telling us now?” Jack says, irate.

“I’ve been having chemo treatments. I wanted to see how it played out.”

“And how has it played out?”

“The tumor has shrunk significantly. Now they want to operate.”

Jack sits back in his chair, disgusted. “Shit! You guys are going to die and leave me alone in this shithole, is that it? Is that the fucking plan?”

Oliver laughs. “That’s not the fucking plan.”

“So what is the plan?” Silver says.

They all watch as Sad Todd executes a shockingly flawless freestyle flip at the far wall of the pool, cutting smoothly through the water on his way back across. We were all other people before this, Silver thinks.

“I’d like to see my kids,” Oliver says. “Before the surgery.”

Silver and Jack trade a look. Oliver never discusses his children with them.

“Where are they?” Silver says.

“My daughters all live out west. But my son is in Jersey.”

Jack nods and gets to his feet. “OK. I’ll drive.”

Oliver looks up at him. “What, right now?”

Jack looks down at both of them as he pulls on his shirt. “Damn straight, right now. Between the two of you, someone could drop dead at any minute. I don’t even feel safe hanging out with you anymore. It’s like a fucking bad-luck convention.” He heads for the building. “Meet you in the lobby in twenty.”

Oliver and Silver watch him walk away. “Deep down,” Oliver says, “he means every word.”

Silver laughs. Oliver laughs along with him. In the pool, Sad Todd flips over and turns, just like the world.

* * *

Oliver’s son, Tobey, lives in Long Branch, on the Jersey Shore. It will take them around two and a half hours to get there. It’s a perfect day for a drive in Jack’s convertible—the sky is cloudless and the recent rain has drained the air of its leaden humidity—and despite the somber nature of their mission, they can’t help but treat this as a road trip. Casey comes along for the ride, sitting in the back with Silver, her face turned up to the sun, eyes closed, listening to music on her phone. Silver sits back, his knees braced against the back of Jack’s seat, enjoying the wind coming in waves over Jack’s windshield to lightly brush against his face.

When they arrive in Long Branch, windblown and dusty, Oliver can’t find the house. They drive around for a while, up and down quiet residential streets filled with large, laid-back-looking homes, while Oliver tries to get his bearings. Jack offers to put the address into GPS, but Oliver is adamant that he can find the place, and seems unwilling to have to resort to satellites, as if that would be too much confirmation of this decade-long estrangement. But he finally gives in, pulling up the address from his phone, his faced etched with frustration.

Two right turns later, they pull up in front of a large, comfortable-looking house with an L-shaped addition and the shoreline visible about a quarter of a mile behind the backyard. It’s an idyllic house, almost fake in its relaxed perfection. Oliver whistles, impressed.

“Restored Georgian, five bedrooms, three and a half baths, newly renovated, ocean views. That’s some serious real estate.”

“What does your son do?” Silver asks.

“He writes children’s books.”

“He must be good at it.”

Oliver gazes out from the car, sinking down in his seat. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“You are sick,” Jack says. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Nevertheless,” Oliver says. Then he cracks open his door and pukes onto the sidewalk.

“Seriously, Oliver?” Jack says, looking away.

Casey leans forward to rub Oliver’s back, a gesture that strikes Silver as particularly generous considering she barely knows him, and he feels a warm lump form in his throat.

“We shouldn’t have come,” Oliver says, pulling himself back into a sitting position, wiping his mouth on a loose napkin from the floor. “I think we should go.”

Casey looks over at Silver, her eyes imploring him to intervene.

“You can’t be serious,” Jack says.

“I’m sorry,” Oliver says, still looking a bit green. “This was a mistake.”

“Bullshit!” Silver says loudly.

Jack and Oliver both turn around to look at Silver, unaccustomed to such vocal certainty from him.

“This is not a mistake. The mistakes were already made, years ago. We all made them. And we’ve been paying for them ever since. But there’s only so long we can keep paying. I don’t know what happened between you and your son. But whatever you did to him, it can’t be any worse than what I did to Casey—”

“I slept with his fiancée.”

That silences Silver for a moment. It silences them all, even those of them who were already silent.

“Shit, Oliver,” Jack says. “Silver had a perfectly good pep talk going there, and you had to go and fuck it up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My point still stands,” Silver says. “You can’t let your mistakes define you. You’ve paid for it long enough. No kid should be without his father. And if your son continues to make that choice, then that’s his tragedy. But it’s your job, as his father, to let him make that choice. You can’t make it for him.”

Oliver looks at Silver for a long moment, then back at the house.

“He’ll probably just tell me to get the hell off his property.”

“And if he does, you can go home knowing you tried.”

Oliver nods slowly, then opens his car door again.

“Good luck,” Casey says.

They all watch as Oliver heads up the long, curved walk to the house.

“He’s had cancer for six weeks and he didn’t tell us. Can you believe that?” Jack says, shaking his head. “What the hell is wrong with him?”

“The same thing that’s wrong with all of you,” Casey says, watching Oliver ring the doorbell.

“And what’s that?” Jack says, turning to look at her, but Casey remains quiet, unwilling to explain what it is she meant.

* * *

The front door is opened by a tall, thin woman in exercise clothing. A small boy stands beside her. Oliver is momentarily thrown by the sight of the boy. The woman says something to him, but Oliver can’t take his eyes off his grandson. He says something to the boy. The boy responds, and Oliver nods somberly.

The woman looks briefly past him to where Jack, Silver, and Casey are sitting in the car. The three of them smile and wave self-consciously. She waves back—a positive sign?—then disappears back into the house, leaving Oliver to stand there with his grandson. A moment later they are joined by a stocky man in khaki shorts and a T-shirt. This is Tobey. There is no way to miss the family resemblance, down to the same pattern of baldness. Father and son stand there for a moment, each taking the full measure of the other. Like his wife, Tobey looks past Oliver to the car, and the three of them wave again. Tobey doesn’t wave back. Then Jack throws the car into gear and pulls away from the curb, tires squealing. Silver and Casey are thrown back against their seats.

“Jack!” Silver shouts. “What the hell?!”

Jack shouts over the roar of his accelerating engine as he steers them out of the neighborhood. “His son would have to be a real prick to kick him out if he doesn’t have a ride.”

Silver has to concede that maybe he has a point.

* * *

Jack finds the beach, and manages to scare up some blankets from his trunk. Silver buys some sandwiches and sodas from the concession, and they eat lunch while they watch the pounding surf. The beach is crowded for a weekday. People are starting to sense the end of summer, still a few weeks away. He looks at Casey pulling her hair into a loose ponytail as she turns her face into the wind, and feels all the usual deep pangs of love and regret. It would have been so easy, he thinks, to do things like this; take her on drives, to the beach, to a movie. Anything. It’s not like he was busy traveling the world. He was right here, and nowhere to be found.

He lies down on his back and closes his eyes, trying to shake off the self-loathing that has suddenly descended upon him.

“Don’t die,” Jack says.

“I’ll do my best.”

* * *

Later, Silver and Casey walk barefoot along the waterline with the sun at their backs. Casey throws bits of bread up to the low-flying gulls, who snatch it out of the air as they bank and swerve.

“I slept with Jeremy again,” she says.

He looks at her, at the way she’s looking straight ahead, focused intently on his reaction without ever looking at him. It’s a strange thing to tell him, but these are strange times between them, and something about the crashing surf seems to blunt the edges of their conversation, making everything feel a bit safer than usual.

“It was that night at his party, before you and Mom showed up. I went there to tell him about the baby, and I ended up sleeping with him.”

“I figured,” he says, remembering what she looked like coming down the stairs with Jeremy that night. “Why do you think you did?”

He worries that he sounds too much like a shrink, but the way she considers the question tells him he was right to ask it. “I guess I just wanted to feel like a regular teenager again, you know? I wanted to feel how it would have felt if I hadn’t gotten pregnant, if we’d kept fooling around for a little bit, you know, a summer fling, my first sexual relationship.”

“I can understand that.”

“Yeah, because, as far summer flings go, I screwed this one up pretty badly.”

“There’ll be plenty of others.”

“Plenty? You think I’m quite the whore, don’t you?”

“You know what I mean.”

She smiles. “You think Oliver’s son will forgive him?” she says.

“I don’t know. Not everyone is as forgiving as you.”

“True.”

“Thank you,” Silver says. “For never giving up on me.”

“Oh, I gave up on you,” she says, taking his hand. “I just don’t have any follow-through.”

He smiles and they head down the beach at the leisurely pace of two people who have nothing to do and no particular destination in mind.

* * *

When they come to pick up Oliver, he is sitting on the front porch next to Tobey, with his grandson on his lap. Another boy, a few years older, sits on Oliver’s other side.

“This looks promising,” Jack says.

They watch as Oliver stands up, reluctantly putting his grandson down. He turns to Tobey and they exchange a few strained words and shake hands. Then Oliver reaches out and tentatively touches his son’s shoulder. It’s an awkward, almost lame gesture, and it makes Silver cringe inwardly in empathy. He knows the broken love that forces the need for contact like that.

Oliver crouches down to hug each of his grandsons. The younger one pulls back and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Even in the car they can hear the kid’s sweet, high-pitched voice as he says, “Good-bye, Grandpa.”

Oliver gets back into the car, and Jack pulls away. “So,” Jack says. “How did it go?”

“He didn’t throw me out,” Oliver says.

“Baby steps.”

Oliver nods, then turns to look out the window as suburbia gives way to strip malls and traffic lights, and then the Garden State Parkway. Everyone is quiet, relaxing into the noisy wind stream of the convertible as Jack pilots it down the highway, and the occasional slight tremor in Oliver’s shoulders is the only indication that he is silently weeping against the car window.

* * *

They are driving out of a rest stop just north of Newark when Jack asks Oliver if his son is going to come in for the surgery.

“He doesn’t know about that,” Oliver says.

Jack looks over at Oliver, incredulous. “You didn’t think to mention that you’re having surgery?”

“It didn’t come up.”

“How about the cancer? Did that come up?”

“I didn’t want to manipulate him.”

Jack brakes hard enough that they all lurch forward in their seats. Then he turns in his seat to face them, oblivious to the fact that he is parked in the middle of the entrance ramp. “I just want to go on record as saying that the two of you are handling your respective illnesses with a degree of ineptitude that is staggering. This one can’t be bothered to have the operation that will save his life, and this one keeps his cancer a secret from his friends and family. I mean, Jesus Christ!”

Behind them, a car honks, then swerves angrily around them. Jack stands up in his seat to yell an angry fuck-you at the driver.

“Take it easy, Jack,” Silver says.

“Fuck you, Silver,” Jack says angrily. “Fuck you and your torn aorta and your little emotional monologues that make everyone feel uncomfortable.”

“Jack . . .” Oliver says as another car honks and swerves around them.

“And fuck you too, Oliver,” Jack says, gathering steam. “Fuck you and your secret-ass cancer and your old-man platitudes. You’re fifty-six, for God’s sake. Get over yourself.” He stares back and forth at both of them, and then sits down, staring forward grimly. “I’ve got an ex-wife who wishes I was dead, and an eight-year-old bastard kid that has been raised to think I’m the antichrist,” he says. “I don’t have a family. You’re my goddamn family. And believe me, I know how pathetic that is, but that’s where I’m at. And I am sick and tired of you both acting all casual about dying. Death is the least casual thing there is. And if you two leave me alone out here because you couldn’t be bothered to take care of yourselves like normal people, I will make a point of visiting your goddamn graves on a weekly basis just to piss on them.”