Imagine Me Gone (38 page)

“No,” he said flatly, when I asked him on the way back from one of our outings if he didn’t feel just a bit more relaxed.

“Okay,” I said. “But what is true is that you’re taking one pill, not six. And you’re not drinking the tea. The fact is, you’re better than when we got here. You’re more alive.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. Everything’s shaky.”

“Sure it is. You’re waking up.”

“You know it’s not that simple. It doesn’t change my situation.”

“You don’t have to think about that right now. We’re stepping out of that for a while. Things’ll look different when your mind’s clearer. Which is why I think you should come off the Klonopin, too.”

“I can’t do that,” he said.

“Yes you can.”

“It’s not what we agreed.”

“It’s what you want, though. When it comes down to it, right? You’ve said so yourself.”

“Coming off that’s what put me in the hospital.”

“You were alone then. You’re not now.”

We were doing the right thing. He just needed to take off the last bandage. Like Celia said, the sedatives had walled his feelings in. And the higher the walls got, the more he feared what they protected him from.

But I didn’t press the idea further right then. I needed to let it settle. I waited, instead, until we were eating supper that evening.

“It would take months,” he said.

“I get that it’s frightening—the idea of not having that particular drug anymore.”

“It’s not the idea, it’s the chemistry.”

When we’d arrived, he wouldn’t have been able to even consider this. But here he was, considering it.

“Are you better now than the day you first took it?”

“Of course not,” he said. His face was rigid with apprehension. But there was a pleading in his eyes. “You really think I could do it?”

“Yes. I think you can.”

I’d bought us ice cream for dessert. We ate it in front of
The Bourne Identity.
In the final sequence, Matt Damon hunted snipers in the woods and fields around the country house where he’d fled with the woman from
Run Lola Run.
The Mitchells had installed a flat-screen television with excellent speakers, and the crack of the rifle as Damon shot his attackers satisfied us both. Michael even smiled.

The next morning he asked if we should get rid of the booze in the house. He was afraid that he would resort to it if he tried coming off his last medication.

Without answering, I emptied the fridge of the beer and wine we had brought with us and poured each bottle down the kitchen sink as he watched. I rinsed them and took them out to the bins, and then I found a cardboard box and loaded the Mitchells’ own liquor cabinet into it, and brought that to the sink as well. I was about to start pouring their bottles down the drain when it occurred to me it would probably be several hundred dollars’ worth of alcohol to replace. Michael was still at the kitchen table, watching me.

“I’ll take care of the rest of this,” I said. “You should go listen to some music. You haven’t been doing much of that.”

I waited until I heard him open his laptop, followed by the tinny sound of synthesizers coming from his headset. Then I carried the box of bottles out to the shed and set it down behind the folded lawn chairs.

“We’re clear,” I said when I came back in. “You can give me the pills.”

“You know I take them for a reason,” he said. “I’m not an addict. It’s not like I was fine before.”

“I know.”

“It’s an illness,” he said. “I’m not malingering.”

“I never said you were.”

“Dr. Bennet said he thinks I’d qualify for disability. He said he doesn’t support it for most of his patients, but that he would for me—that my condition is that severe.”

“That’s what you want? To make it permanent like that? To get a subsidy for it? If you wanted that, why come this far? If it’s all insulin for the diabetic, why even agree to come up here?”

“You told me I had to.”

“No. I offered. And you agreed.”

“You don’t want Mom to sell the house. You think she should stop supporting me.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But do you really think I don’t want to help you? You always say talking about the anxiety takes the edge off, and that’s why you’re on the phone with Caleigh so much. Well, I’m here. You don’t need a phone, you can talk as much as you need to. I’m not going anywhere.”

He was trying his best to believe me.

My mother had promised to refrain from calling too often, but when the phone rang just then I knew it would be her.

“It’s
very
cold up there,” she said. “And you’re getting another four inches of snow tonight.”

Wherever I went, she knew more about the weather than I did.

“I’m mailing you some cranberry bread today, and I’m going to put in some cranberry sauce as well. I know you said you weren’t doing a whole Thanksgiving dinner, but just in case. You might change your mind. How much longer do you think you’ll be?”

She wanted me to assure her that Michael was all right. Whatever the content of her questions that was their purpose. I told her, as I had from the beginning, that I didn’t know how much time it would take, but that she could go ahead and send her package.

Michael stayed on the line with her longer, describing his fitful sleep and his morning nausea, but telling her not to worry. He’d been freer of her at nineteen, living in Britain, than ever since. Sharing every step of this with her wasn’t going to help, but I couldn’t control them both.

Before Michael went to bed that night, I gave him three-quarters of his usual evening dose of Klonopin, which was two pills. I knew this drug was different. To come off it too quickly could be dangerous. It would take time. But we didn’t have months to work with, which meant we just had to do the best that we could.

“It’s all right if you need to wake me up,” I said. “Just knock on my door.”

He swallowed the tablet and a half in front of me and held his hand flat against his sternum, as if monitoring his breath.

I half expected him to revolt right away and demand the pills back, but his sleep didn’t worsen that night, or the next few nights, through the end of our second week in the cabin, and so he agreed reluctantly to my suggestion that we cut back his morning dose, too. I kept the medicine bottle in my room and doled the tablets out to him like a nurse.

Usually when I traveled, Seth and I spoke every evening, but I had called him only twice thus far, which had pissed him off. Given how we’d parted, though, he wasn’t going to offer me the satisfaction of showing it. The third time I called him, the night before he flew to Denver for Thanksgiving, he was as remote as ever, asking me civil questions and listening to my civil replies. And yet even this much contact with him made me bristle. I’d sequestered Michael and myself for a reason. It’s how it had to be.

“I just need time,” I said. “It won’t last forever.”

“You’re the one who called,” he said.

“I want to go away with you, and I want to meet your family. But I have to do this first.”

“I know.”

I couldn’t blame him for his flat tone, or his disappointment. I asked dutifully about his week and who else would be coming for the holiday, but when our conversation petered out neither of us tried to revive it.

That night I heard Michael get up to use the bathroom several times, and when I went myself, the light was on under his door. He had to have heard me, to have known I was awake, but he didn’t call out and I didn’t knock. The next morning he was in a panic. He’d barely slept, and said his heart was beating like a jackrabbit’s.

“You need to give me the pills,” he said.

I didn’t shout at him, I didn’t tell him he was being irrational, I just said that the beginning would be the toughest, mentally, and that if he didn’t sleep at night he could take as many naps during the day as he needed. He wasn’t listening to me, though. He was too far inside himself. I handed him his coat and told him to come with me out of the cabin right away, before breakfast, knowing the cold would at least distract him.

It was on that walk that I noticed I didn’t have to slow down anymore for him to keep up. I was the one trying to keep up with him.

The general store hadn’t changed. It was a barn of a place, drafty, with high ceilings and creaking floors, built out onto the pier. Nearby was the dock where we used to tie our boat up to buy gas and supplies before setting out for the island, and opposite that a jetty where the lobstermen kept their skiffs. What had disappeared was the diner and fish fry next door, replaced by a pricier restaurant advertising “the Real Maine Experience,” closed till spring.

I got us coffee and doughnuts and suggested we eat them at the counter. The longer we were out, the better. When we finished I convinced him to walk with me past the harbor to the other end of the village, and from there we went out the lane to the point, with its war memorial and the plaque to fishermen lost at sea. On the unprotected side of this spit of land the tide had washed the snow off the rocks, leaving visible clumps of gray-green seaweed.

Standing in the wind, looking out across the frigid water, I thought, This is absurd, our being up here alone in the cold. It’s romantic nonsense. I’m probably about to lose my job. I need to be back in the city, hustling. And if I’m unemployed, how long will it take before I lose the apartment? Then what? Force a move with Seth before it’s right? What good would all this be if it left me that far in a hole?

“We had a picnic here,” Michael said. “Do you remember? Kelsey killed a lamed seagull. She finished it off. Strange. This is the first place up here I even recognize.”

“She killed a seagull?”

“Well, Dad wrung its neck when she was through with it, but I think it was fairly dead. Celia objected on procedural grounds—that we hadn’t taken it to a vet. It was definitely right here. It’s vivid as all get-out, actually. Like it was a minute ago. I can almost hear it. Maybe this is what it’s like taking hallucinogens.”

“No, that’s different.”

“You’ve taken them?”

“In high school.”

He nodded slowly, as if to say, That makes sense, though it still seemed to surprise him. That he had been oblivious to this episode in my social life.

“I guess we didn’t talk much then, while I was away.”

He said it as if it had never occurred to him before. It was a simple enough statement, an obvious fact, and yet I found myself, without warning, close to tears. I’d always wanted to hear from him. To know what he was doing in London, or just to hear him talk. But whenever he called it was to speak to Mom or Dad about school or money, and we didn’t say more than hello. He sent cassettes in the mail a few times, but the only words that came with them were the track listings and Post-it notes warning
This will slay you!
or
Beware!

“You liked it there, didn’t you?” I said, as we crossed back over the empty parking lot toward the village.

“I did. I fell in love with a woman named Angie. That was the beginning. It’s odd, but when I say that, I can smell the perfume she wore. I can smell it in my head.”

I smiled to myself. When had I ever taken a stroll with Michael and heard him reminisce? The veil between himself and the past was lifting.

At half his usual dose his sleep got worse. By the end of our third week he couldn’t concentrate long enough to make it past the first few scenes of a movie, or even to pick out a DVD in the first place. He became fixated on the sound of the guy across the street chopping wood, asking me every few minutes, “Why does he go so slowly?”

But the bursts of memory kept coming. He had always said he had difficulty picturing our father, or much of his childhood at all. But now, along with his monologues about how he couldn’t go through with our plan, how he would never be able to do his real work again, how he had failed and had no prospects, there were these fragments of the years gone by, which descended out of nowhere. They were questions, mostly.

“Mom and Dad never drank much, did they?” he asked, as if suddenly recalling a detail of an otherwise elusive dream.

They were just single moments at first. He asked if it was true that I had broken my arm falling out of a tree in the garden in Oxfordshire, and I said, Of course, amazed each time that he could have forgotten such familiar stories.

“And I drove with you and Dad to the doctor, right?”

“Yes.”

“At the octagonal house—Dad, he told us stories.”

“Yes” was all I could think to keep saying.

By the time I had lowered him to a quarter ration, his body began to ache. His muscles were seizing up from the loss of the drug’s relaxant effects. I bought him Tylenol and a heating pad at the drugstore. And when he had a particular spot that was killing him, I kneaded his back with my knuckles through his hoodie, which he kept on no matter how far I turned up the heat.

I was working a kink in his shoulder blade as he stood braced against the frame of the kitchen door when he said, “You let the snake into my room, didn’t you?”