All the Lasting Things (5 page)

“Mom, no. No. Not until we know what’s happening. You’re better off there, with Daddy.”

“Sandra can stay with your father.”

“There’s nothing for you to do. There’s nothing for
me
to do. I’m sitting here. The doctors are still with him.”

“But what
happened
?” Evelyn pressed Claudia on the how, the why, the where, and Claudia, never dropping her mask of calm, answered with maddening composure. “Saratoga!” Evelyn cried. “What is he doing in Saratoga?”

“A play.”

“He never told me he was doing a play! As if I wouldn’t have gone to—”

“Well, now’s not the time to get upset about that.” Evelyn hushed, chastened. “Mom? Are you there?”

“What do you mean they won’t say it’s an accident?” Evelyn heard Claudia take a breath, a deep, shuddering breath, as if she were going underwater for a long time.

“They think he may have jumped.”

Evelyn put a hand to her heart. “Who thinks that?”

“I’m telling you what they told me.”

“Who is they?”

“The people who found him. The police. Everybody.” The tremor in Claudia’s voice, comforting.

“Why would they say that? He wouldn’t do that. He would never do that.”

More silence.

“I talked to him last week,” Evelyn insisted.

“So did I.”

“Why would they say he jumped?”

“I know as much as you do, Mom.”

Evelyn shook her head vigorously, as if she could loosen the idea of her son choosing to plummet to his death and send it flying out of her head. “Your brother’s not unstable.” Then, tuned to the possibility of some waspish response, “Not unstable like
that
.”

“There is precedence,” Claudia said softly.

The word
precedence
irked Evelyn, as if they were arraigning Benji in a court of law. “What? The pills? I wish you wouldn’t bring that up. It was twenty-five years ago. And he did that for attention. He barely took enough to put himself to sleep.”

“I don’t want to believe it either, but who’s to say he’s not looking for attention now. We’re talking about Benji.”

“That’s how you talk about your brother? At a time like—?” Evelyn’s voice crumbled under the weight of the sentence. She put her hand against the wall, as if she, too, might fall, and cried.

“I don’t know what to think. But the more I think about it—I wouldn’t exactly say Benji is happy.”

Happy?
Evelyn thought.
Who is?

“Mom,” Claudia began, but confusion and sadness and a sickening tide of outrage had doused Evelyn’s circuits. She shut down. Hung up the phone. Cried until Sandra came, when she insisted she needed to be alone, climbed the stairs to her bedroom, and cried some more. She was no longer a religious woman, but even when she had been, in her casual, noncommittal way, it never would have occurred to her to bring beads into it. Still, she clutched her hands and moved her fingers as if worrying an invisible rosary.
He wouldn’t do that,
she repeated.
No, no, never. He would never do that.
Again and again, like a prayer. Until it no longer sounded true.

I know what they’re going to say before I open the door. They’re going to say they found her. They’re going to say she’s dead. That’s what men in uniforms with faces like that come to say. Sir, do you know a Jane Mueller? I’m sorry to have to say this, sir. But Ms. Mueller. I invite them in. Evelyn offers to make coffee like the church deacons have come for a visit. I don’t blame her: some part of her, some part she may not even recognize, must feel like serving cake. When the cops say no thank you, ma’am, she picks up Claudia and the baby, hugging them tight, and carries them into the other room. They ask me the questions they need to ask. How long has it been since you’ve seen her? Two years. Almost two years. Were you married? No. One gunshot wound, they say, apparently self-inflicted. Does that surprise you? they ask. No. Was it her gun? It was mine. Did you know she’d taken your gun? Isn’t that in your report? It is, sir. Wouldn’t you know if someone had taken your gun? They listen to what I say, but listen closer to what I don’t. Maybe there, in the silence somewhere, is my hand in it. Do they expect me to cry? I could tell them I’ve cried all I can. I could tell them about the way the world works, but I suspect they of all people already know. A man can cry himself to dust if he lets himself. And then the dust carries on.

3.

Y
ou’re one lucky guy.
The chattier nurses reminded him of this on a regular basis, prompted to point out the small daily wonders of life to a man who had so recently tried bringing his own to an end. He’d nearly bitten off the tip of his tongue, had fractured an elbow, broken a leg, and sustained a serious scrape along his left cheek, but these were no worse than the damages done by people falling from stepladders or tripping down stairs. His roommate, a retired, emphysemic schoolteacher recuperating unsociably on the opposite side of the partition, had done as much when he spilled a bucket of patching tar and tumbled off his son’s roof. The more the nurses warmed to Benji, the more they looked to fate or karma or good, blind luck to explain the miracle of his relatively minor injuries. Zelda, the night nurse who woke him at two each morning with the benediction of Percocet, asked the name of his guardian angel, but the real reason he’d been spared the cracked pelvis and pierced organs everyone expected to find had a more earthly origin.

The doctor who reminded him of this was a young black man named Malek with a perfectly bald head, a square face, and an overall stiffness that would have served him well in saluting. Accusingly, he’d asked if Benji knew the best defense in a car accident. “Better than a seat belt. Better than an air bag. Give up? Being drunk. It never fails. Drunk driver runs into Mom in her minivan. Who walks away? Not Mom. She sees it coming. She tenses up. That’s when bones break. But the drunk guy, he’s relaxed. He’s a rag doll. Did you ever try to break a rag doll? You know where he ends up? Sitting on the curb scratching his head. Give the jerk a Band-Aid and call it a night.”

But once this sour exchange was over, Benji’s prospects turned unexpectedly sweet. He clearly saw that the drunken state in which he’d been found might easily be read as the final flourish of a desperate man, and there were perks to being a desperate man, undeniable and welcome perks that, perkless as his life had been lately, he had no intention of surrendering so soon. His perceived psychological trauma required a longer stay at St. Anthony’s than anything he’d done to his body, but even these slight physical impairments lay beyond the psych ward’s parameters of care. His immobilized elbow and leg pardoned him from a frightful stay on the fifth floor, where his imagination, fed by visions of Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, furnished a frightening cast of cuckoo characters, loud and volatile and charismatically crazy. Instead, the nurses assigned him to a comfortable room among the generally infirm where they served up an adjustable bed, cable television, and a steady supply of pills that would have been murder to procure from Seth. Excepting his wheezing and annoyingly tight-lipped roommate, he might have been in an indulgent, if not terribly well-appointed, hotel.

Of course, Benji could have corrected them by now. Whatever happened on the bridge lacked the unambiguous intent of Madame Bovary gobbling up her arsenic or Inspector Javert flinging himself into the Seine. Benji’s recklessness may have bordered on a death wish, but he knew he’d been enjoying the fruits of a lie, as if he’d been feasting on a basket of sympathy and concern addressed to someone with a much more serious illness. Even with his tongue stitched and swollen, he could have scribbled on the pad his nurses provided him and told Claudia or his tearful and tiptoeing mother or the nice doughy social worker who looked in on him every other morning that they had it all wrong. But he’d spent two weeks tucked in a warm nest of communal misunderstanding, and, corrupt as it may have been, that, for the moment, was where he wanted to stay.

Which isn’t to say Benji didn’t feel guilty. How could he not? But whatever guilt his deceit stirred up, his store of ancient resentments quickly helped to settle. There were his father’s magniloquent speeches about the virtues of holding a job, a
real
job, a job that, unlike pet or apartment sitting, required the payment of taxes. The wan, worn admonition to “leave Benji alone” that counted as his mother’s primary defense, the eye-rolling impatience with which Claudia dismissed his career: he resented these things almost as much as he resented the career itself.
A Hamster for Hannah
, for God’s sake!

He took the D-list movies and bit roles in crappy regional reps in stride, with the sort of self-mocking humor common to men whose failures may in fact be their greatest success, but he hated the substantial scripts that passed him by. His greatest achievement (or at least the one with the most gravitas)—the miniseries in which he played Rimbaud’s brother—had had its plug pulled and sat collecting dust in some cryptlike vault under PBS, never to be seen. He hated the agents and directors who failed to see in him what he occasionally saw in himself. He hated the audiences who’d never heard of him or, worse, treating him like a trained monkey they happened upon in their favorite restaurants, bullied him into putting down his salad fork and saying the only four words they thought he knew—
That’s what
you
think!
The more slights Benji counted, the more forgivable, even justified, his lie seemed. To right a cosmic imbalance didn’t necessarily square with committing a great wrong.

Besides, his distress brought out Claudia’s kinder side, and he liked Claudia’s kinder side. The hospital allowed him, like the rest of the patients under psychiatric care, two one-hour visits of no more than two people per day, and he sank more comfortably into his stiff, pancake-thin pillows knowing that Claudia would be one of them. She brought him frozen fruit bars and thick, cold smoothies, the only forms of nourishment his poor tongue could take, and refreshed with tabloid and fashion industry trash the pile of mindless magazines that grew to teetering heights on his nightstand. And though she, too, wasn’t above urging him to take a job waiting tables or giving him a hard time for the few hundred dollars he borrowed here or there, she would quietly make sure that his uninsured fingers never touched a bill.

That all this eventually had to end came as no surprise to Benji. Who knew better than a childhood star the proverbial fate of all good things?

“We have a problem,” Claudia said, stepping into the room with a look that told him somehow, overnight, the honeyed spring that so satisfyingly flowed his way had run dry. No more magazines. No more smoothies. “They’re not willing to release you on your own.” She pushed a high-backed vinyl chair closer to the bed but stayed standing behind it, the coming pronouncements apparently wanting the severity of a podium, even a makeshift one. “I spoke with Dr. Malek. Agreeing to see a therapist isn’t enough. He’s not convinced you’re not a danger to yourself. He wants you supervised.”

The day before, the same Dr. Malek had dangled the promise of freedom like a hypnotist’s charm, so to have the spell broken now, with such callous sibling economy, brought an angry flush to Benji’s face. He reached for the pad he used to keep up his side of the conversation and wrote,
Supervised?!

“That’s what he said.”

Benji grimaced. Of course, the only thing better than being in the hospital would be getting out of it, and he’d been looking forward to doing just that. He considered this unexpected twist in the road, trying to figure the best way around it.
I’ll stay w/u,
he wrote.

“And do what?” Claudia asked impatiently. “Wander off to find the next bridge?” She sat down in the chair as if suddenly very tired. “He’s right. We can’t let you hobble on back to the toolshed like nothing happened. Things don’t snap back to normal like that. I don’t know why I thought they would.”

He hadn’t planned beyond the toolshed—she had him there—but the thought of prolonging their afternoons together, of milking every last drop of Claudia’s kindness, brought the curl of a selfish smile to his lips. To spend the day drifting in the shallows of reality TV, sipping berry blasts on his sister’s calfskin couch: an unemployed actor could find worse ways to recuperate.

“Damn it, Benji.” She covered her eyes with her hands and rocked forward, elbows on knees. He watched a shudder move along her back and grinned against the pain in his mouth. He was such a problem, wasn’t he? What trouble would he get into next? He was ready to have a good laugh with her. Even if he ended up being the punch line, he’d laugh his way onto that calfskin couch.

But then the sniffling began, and he realized that his sister wasn’t laughing. He dropped his pad in his lap, helpless to help her, miserable to see how thoroughly he’d cracked her shell. Her sadness, maybe because she so rarely showed it, demolished him. “Caw-da,” he said, his tongue moving like a speared fish. She didn’t look up for a long minute, not until she wiped the last tears away. Rarely did she give anyone the privilege of seeing her cry, and now she looked embarrassed, flushed red beyond her breakdown and angry for having succumbed to it.

“You’re such an asshole,” she said, her voice still shaky but unwilling to yield. “Why are you doing this to us? I know this isn’t about us, but fuck you, Benji, this is about us too. It’s about Mom and Dad. It’s about me. You were going to leave me alone. With
them
. What were you thinking?”

Benji hung his head and answered as best he could, “E oth oo soopid hings. Ow.”

Claudia gave him an exasperated look: she didn’t speak Bitten Tongue.

We both do stupid things,
he wrote
.

Claudia looked doubtful.

We pick each other up. It’s what we do.

“I’ve never done anything this stupid,” she said.

His pen was poised to write
Nick!
Forget writing
Hello?! Baby!
The name of her ex-boyfriend would have been enough of a reprimand, but he put his pen down and sighed.

She looked from her brother’s eyes into her own hands, as if their emptiness might comfort her in ways he could not.

“How could you do it?” He couldn’t count the number of times she’d come back to that question. And still he had no answer for it. “I spend every second I’m not here worrying about you. Wondering if you’re ever going to be okay. How any of us can ever trust you again. And I spend every second here wanting to strangle you. I do, Benji. I’m sick about it, and I hate you for it.” She ruminated over her cup of coffee, sipped at it as though it imparted bitter wisdom. “You didn’t end up on that bridge alone. I know that. I helped you get there. Or I didn’t stop you from getting there. I wasn’t enough to stop you, which amounts to the same thing.”

It had nothing to do w/u,
Benji wrote.

“I wasn’t opening a discussion.” Claudia shifted in her seat, wiped her eyes one last time. Everything about her now said
business
. “I didn’t help you then, but I’m helping you now,” she said, reaching into her trendy bag and producing a colorful trifold brochure with two smiling octogenarians on the front, their heads touching tenderly under a flowering tree. “Treadwell Acres.” She tossed it on his lap.

Benji gave it the once-over, flipped to a new page in his pad, and drew a big
?
.

“Dr. Malek gave it to me,” she explained. “It’s one of the best rehab facilities around. They have a fantastic mental health unit.” She mustered a hopeful but hollow smile, as if presenting a child with a secondhand toy she meant to pass off as new. Benji responded with a dubious look and began bouncing his pen along the thin and pulpy page.
I can stay w/u.
He placed a dot under each word as if leading Claudia through a sing-along.

“You can’t stay with me.” Claudia broke the news a bit too cheerfully, Benji thought. “I’m sorry, Benj, but you can’t. I start teaching next week and haven’t read half the books on my syllabus. I’m behind on the Selkirk place. I don’t have time to babysit.”

Benji didn’t like to sulk, but he wasn’t above it either.
I don’t need a babysitter!

“Your doctor disagrees. So does your social worker. So does your therapist. So do I.”

Treadwell Acres?! I’m not 80,
he scribbled, then drew a series of mad lines under and through each word until the message looked thoroughly redacted.

Claudia opened the brochure to show him another picture, this of a freckled young woman staring out a sunny window with a stock photography glaze of hope in her eyes. “Look. Not everyone is eighty.”

It failed to make him feel better.
I’ll find someplace,
he wrote, flashing his notepad with a petulant shrug.

“Where?” Claudia asked. “Where will you find?”

To be fair to Claudia, most of Benji’s friends
were
poorly equipped to play Florence Nightingale. They spent their days hiking from one audition to the next and their nights telemarketing or tending bar or offering certified (but not necessarily chaste) massage, which left little time for developing a bedside manner. His nursiest friend, a straitlaced chorus boy currently making his way across Washington state as a flying monkey in the traveling company of
Wicked
, could no sooner swoop down and tend to him than his former roommate, who’d sublet Benji’s room to a couple of cater waiters with dreams of becoming Alvin Ailey dancers, could offer him his old bed.

Rhonda & Jim,
he wrote defiantly, desperate to prove his sister wrong and satisfied that he’d found two of the most decent, responsible, bulletproof people either of them knew.

“Rhonda?” Claudia’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Who has thyroid cancer?”

He caught a brief, stinging glimpse of his own narcissism—what kind of friend forgets a friend’s thyroid cancer?—but his mind refused to pause. He suggested Thom and Guyang and several strategically unnamed “good friends” he claimed Claudia didn’t know, but she shot each of them down with marksman’s skill. Thom lived in a sixth-floor walk-up. Guyang already had a baby. And friends she’d never heard of? How good could they possibly be?

“There’s nothing wrong with Treadwell,” said Claudia, resolute.

Benji uttered as emphatic a “No!” as his throbbing tongue would allow. It was a howl more than a word and spurred his roommate to raise the volume on his TV to an unneighborly pitch. “I wava say ear,” Benji cried in pain, his Sharpie shaking as he translated,
I’d rather stay here!