Meet Me Here (8 page)

River Road is long, cutting across four counties and eventually getting swallowed by Highway 10 before they both spill into the interstate. The bridge, an old metal structure that crosses the river, soon to be the Specialist Jake Bennett Bridge, sits exactly in the middle of the county. I’ve known this place since birth, but every turn feels like a surprise as I try to get to Jake.

“Any idea what he wants?” Mallory says, her voice still noticeably tentative. “Does he go out to the bridge a lot? That’s a pretty long walk from your house.”

She rubs her wrist as she talks, both feet on the dashboard. Trying so hard to be casual. The truth is, I have
no idea what Jake does when I’m not around. This phone call was the most animated he’s been in months. If he’s not watching a movie or eating, he’s in a mobile catatonic state. Moving only enough to remind you that he still exists.

I fantasize about miracles, that he’s been magically healed in the past two hours. That we’ll arrive at the bridge and he’ll be there, grinning like he did in his yearbook pictures. The guy jokingly voted Most Likely to Be Arrested. The football star. He never seemed to stop smiling, even when everybody else was worried about college or SAT scores. Jake was mythic to everyone.

The bridge comes into view first, then Jake. He sidearms a rock, and it skips across the water as I park the truck. The backpack sits open at his feet.

Dad never liked to fish but wanted us around the water as kids. So we’d get in the truck and drive to the river on weekends. He’d send us out to find the perfect stones, flat and smooth, and we’d throw them until our arms ached and the sun died behind us. We’d go to Mountain View Barbeque and have hamburgers, fries, milk shakes, never returning before dark. Half the time Dad would catch hell because Mom had dinner on the table and we were already busting at the seams.

When Mallory and I get out of the truck, Jake zips up the backpack and puts it on his shoulder.

“Thanks for coming,” he says.

“Yeah. Of course.”

Jake and I never had the kind of relationship where I’d go into his room and tell him about girls or what was going on in my life. Dad was never the sort to share his feelings, and he didn’t want us doing it either. I didn’t understand it, but it never really mattered, I guess. It wasn’t until I was over at a friend’s house and saw the way they were with each other that I knew we were different. In another world, maybe I’d come to this bridge all red faced and embarrassed and confess to Jake how I stupidly kissed my best friend.

“Good to see you again, Jake,” Mallory says from behind me. Jake nods at the dark water, otherwise motionless. I don’t know what he wants or if he’ll even talk with Mallory around, so I motion her back to the truck. Mallory hesitates, then walks away. When she’s leaning against the truck, I turn to Jake, but he is still facing the river.

“Is Mom freaking out?” I ask.

“Mom’s always freaking out,” he says.

“True,” I admit. I try to read his face, his body. Searching
for any indication that he might do something dangerous to himself. He’s had the same pair of pants on for three days, and Dad has been itching to tell him to shave for longer than that. His gray army T-shirt is covered in stains and hangs from his shoulders. More than anything, he seems smaller. Not in size. Just in everything else. He sets the backpack on the ground again and scratches his face, his other hand still cupping the rocks.

I stare back at the river for a few seconds before I say, “So why are we here?”

“I haven’t gotten you ready,” he says. “That’s on me. And we need to change that before you go tomorrow.”

“Get me ready? Jake, c’mon.” I touch his shoulder, and he shakes his head, more a twitch than a denial. “I’m ready. I’ve done the PT. I can do one hundred push-ups now—probably more than you.”

It’s a weak joke, and I surprise myself by letting it fly. Of course he ignores it.

“I’m not talking about push-ups. Listen to me,” he says. “Everything you do follows you. And you need to know about it before you go. Every action has a reaction. Every good or bad thing you do has a way to fix it.”

It sounds like a mash-up of something he learned in
science and a greeting card. It’s so bankrupt of sense, of meaning.

“I fucked up,” he says. “And I need to fix it. For both of us.”

He takes a step toward the bridge, and my body seizes. I reach a hand toward him. “Maybe we should go home and talk to Mom and Dad.”

This would normally make him laugh, and I can’t believe I’m even saying it. But I don’t know what else to do. How to make him stop being so vague.

Jake reaches back and throws another rock high into the air. The moon catches it, a flash against the sky, before it drops into the water. Something goes cold inside me.

“What was that?”

He cocks his arm again, but before he can throw anything, I grab him by the shirt. There’s a medal in his hand, a simple brown star dangling from a red, white, and blue ribbon.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Let go of me.”

He tries to wrestle free, and for the first time in my life I stop him. For the first time I’m stronger than he is. I put him against the railing, and the medal he was holding
falls to the ground. As soon as it happens, Jakes stops struggling. He goes limp in my arms.

“Jake, what are you doing?”

“I’m doing this for you. Don’t you get it? First the medals and then—” He motions to the backpack.

“Jake, man. I don’t understand.
What
are you doing for me?”

He’s fading in front of me, and I can’t let that happen now. I want to slap him, the way Dad did to one of his army buddies who passed out on our porch one night. Right in the face.

“Where are the other medals?”

“They’re gone,” he says.

I look out into the river, impossibly black and who knows how deep. I let go of him and walk in circles, trying to think. Should I call Mom and Dad? Maybe they would finally take him to the hospital; maybe this will finally force them to see who Jake has become. But then I would be stuck, too. There’s no way they’d let me walk out of the emergency room or psychiatric ward—wherever they put him—and go to the recruiter’s office alone.

Mallory yells just as I see Jake’s arm move. The last medal arcs against the sky like it has wings.

Jake doesn’t move as I sprint toward the bridge, as I jump off the side and drop twenty feet into the river. I expect it to be cold. Instead, the warm water swallows me. I sink until my legs disappear into the wet mud at the bottom. Almost immediately a sharp pain travels up my right leg. When I pull up, it feels like I’ve lost my entire leg. But I still try to swim, to move, to catch even the smallest flicker in the dark water.

I dive down five more times before I finally listen to Mallory and get out of the river. My calf pulses blood, the cut long and deep. When Mallory sees it, her breath catches. Jake doesn’t move.

“Oh, God,” she says, bending over as I limp toward Jake. “What were you thinking?”

I ignore Mallory and shove Jake with both hands, nearly falling.

“What the hell?” He doesn’t answer, but I keep at him. I’m pushing him, trying to force him to react, to do something, even if it means taking a punch. I want to know he’s alive, even a little bit.

Only when I go for the backpack does he come to life, jumping backward and holding it away from me like it might explode. Mallory is shouting, too, trying to get my attention. When she grabs me, I reluctantly face her.

“Thomas, you need to go to the hospital.”

“I’m fine,” I say, turning back to Jake. I want to know why he threw the medals off the bridge. Why he can’t just tell me what’s wrong, what’s happening inside his head. I want to know why he cares more about some damn backpack than what just happened.

She steps back in front of me and points to my leg. “You’re bleeding.”

I try to step around Mallory, but my leg buckles. She tries to look me in the eyes, but I’m so pissed at Jake I can’t focus on anything else. “Hey,
hey
,” she says. “You need stitches. And a tetanus shot. We’re going to the hospital.”

“What the hell is he doing?” I ask, finally looking her in the eyes. This softens her face, her words.

She turns and looks at Jake. “I don’t know. But we have to take care of you first. We’ll take him with us, and then . . .” Her voice trails off.

“I shouldn’t even care,” I say.

“Of course you should,” she says. “He’s your brother.”

A lot of good that’s done so far because I can’t shake the feeling that if I had taken even the smallest of actions to help him, we wouldn’t be standing here right now. But what can I do? Even the simplest moves he makes can’t be anticipated. It’s like living with a bomb that could go off in a hundred different ways.

Mallory looks down at my leg.

“But really, that cut. It’s deep.”

“I’m not leaving here without him,” I say. Jake is back near the edge of the bridge, hands on the railing and chin dropped to his chest. He looks like a fighter resting in his corner between rounds.

“Wait here,” she says. I object, try to follow her, but the first step I take sends a shiver of pain up my leg that nearly brings me to the ground. She walks over to Jake, puts a hand on his shoulder. I can’t hear what she’s saying; but he eventually nods, and Mallory walks back to me.

“Okay, let’s go,” she says. “I’m driving.”

“Is he coming?”

“Yeah, he’s coming, but I told him he has to sit in the bed because of your leg.”

“Wait.” I hobble after her. “What did you say to him?”

She pauses but doesn’t turn around as she says, “I told him you needed him.”

The hospital is only a few miles away, and the emergency room is packed with every malady one would expect after midnight. In the corner a man holds a blood-soaked rag over his left eye. A woman cradles a toddler in her arms. Two seats away from me a man dutifully presses an ice pack against his wrist, purple and bulbous. Jake stands against the far wall, naturally camouflaged with the infirm.

Mallory examines my leg from every position she can manage in the seat next to me.

“It’s fine,” I say.

She doesn’t believe me, but that doesn’t matter. My real concern is Jake. Every time he shifts against the wall, mostly trying to get a better view of the infomercial that’s playing silently above him on the mounted television, I move forward in my seat like a sprinter at the starting line. Ready to chase him down the hallway, pain be damned. Mallory puts her hand on my shoulder, gently pushing me back into the chair.

“He’s okay,” she says. And then, as if she realizes that’s
not exactly right, she adds, “He’s not going anywhere. All right?”

We sit this way until a tired-looking woman in blue scrubs comes through the large double doors and calls my name. Jake keeps leaning against the wall, oblivious. I wait a second, and Mallory pointedly says his name, but nothing. When the nurse calls for me again, I raise my hand and struggle to my feet.

The pain has become biblical now that the adrenaline is gone, but I try not to let the nurse or Mallory see how much it hurts as we walk to the room. I need to get out of here and figure out what I’m going to do with Jake. However, as soon as I’m on the gurney, my head drops onto the shallow hospital pillow, and any fight I had left disappears. My body collapses.

It doesn’t stop the nurse, who sticks a thermometer in my mouth and wraps a blood pressure cuff around my arm. As it expands, she watches the dial, not saying anything until the air releases.

“So what happened?”

“I cut my leg,” I say. She nods, ignoring the blood that’s dripping onto the paper sheet.

“And how did you do that?”

“I jumped off a bridge. Into a river.”

She looks up from her notes. I open my mouth to explain, but she’s already tapping something into the small laptop, shaking her head. When she finishes, she hands Mallory a large piece of gauze.

“Hold this against his leg. And try to keep him from jumping off anything else until the doctor gets here.”

Mallory presses the gauze gently against my leg, and I shift my focus to the wall, trying not to worry about Jake. Generic posters of men and women with equally generic diseases stare back at me. On the opposite wall, a kitten hangs from the high branch of a tree. Any other time we would have had a field day with these.

Mallory lifts the gauze cautiously and frowns. The pain is constant, pulsing like a heartbeat in my calf. Even the smallest movement sends iron rods up my leg. When she puts the gauze back on, I wince.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s just a leg,” I say, trying.

“You’ve got two,” she responds.

But it’s flat, an effort where there was none before. Something is missing. Or maybe something has been added: that idiotic kiss, Jake. Now she’s burdened, too.
My brother’s inability to function in a spectacular way has bound us together in a new way, a connection I wish we never had to share.

A doctor comes into the room: a confident woman with a big smile and hair tied back in a ponytail. She looks at my leg and frowns.

“Please tell me jumping off bridges isn’t some new graduation night challenge,” she says, “because I don’t want to do stitches all night.”

“It’s not. I was—”

“He was trying to help his brother,” Mallory says, not looking at me.

“Well, that seems noble. I guess I’ll give you the stitches.” She smiles, taps the bed. “Okay, back in a sec.”

Mallory considers my leg again once the doctor has left and says, “Real talk? That’s going to be a badass scar.”

“I’m going to tell people I got attacked by a puma,” I say weakly.

“That’s definitely sexier than saying you got it jumping off a bridge. Or at least less redneck.”

I try to play. I really do. But all I can think about is getting off this table. About getting Jake in my truck and—I have no idea what. But doing something.

“I was kidding about the redneck thing,” she says.

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m worried about Jake.” I say. The paper sheet crinkles beneath my body as I shift my weight. “Do you mind going out there to check on him for me?”

She hesitates but then nods. “Yeah, I can do that.”

“You don’t have to baby-sit him or anything.”

“Don’t you think he’s fine? I mean, I’m happy to go out there and look, but he’s twenty-two years old. And your leg—I think you need somebody back here with you.”

I close my eyes. I don’t want to yell at Mallory or further ruin whatever we had tonight. But he could be a hundred years old, and it wouldn’t matter. My leg could be in a bucket of ice on the counter, and it wouldn’t matter. That’s not the point. My words are sharp.

“If you want to help me, go out there and check on him. Please.”

She pulls away, her eyes, her body, every word that’s been spoken between us tonight. I regret the way I said it, but she saw him on the bridge, throwing his medals into the river. She has to realize that even something as simple as sitting in a waiting room is enough to warrant concern. He could walk away, could disappear in a puff of smoke. When I don’t say anything else, she stands up without a
word and walks out of the room.

When the doctor comes in to stitch up my leg, Mallory still isn’t back. I’ve pissed her off, but I can’t focus on whether she’s mad at me or not, only on Jake. The doctor hums as she works, not saying much beyond the occasional direction to rotate my leg left or right. As the minutes pass, each one turning painfully and slow around the clock above the door, I convince myself that something’s wrong. When a nurse comes into the room and I jump, the doctor tells me to keep still, that she’s almost done. But I barely hear her. I have to get out of this room. I have to find Jake and Mallory.

When the doctor’s finished, the same nurse comes back and tells me about pain—“nothing ibuprofen can’t fix”—and then gives me the pills. I nod and nod and nod, until she hands me a piece of paper and helps me off the bed.

The first step is a killer, and I yelp. But by the time the nurse turns, ready to catch me, I’m already walking as quickly as I can manage.

I push through the heavy doors to the waiting room and don’t see either Jake or Mallory. For a moment my heart stops racing, and I take a deep breath. They’re outside, I tell myself. They’re walking the halls. Jake is being
charming, and Mallory is making it seem like she wasn’t sent out to baby-sit him.

I’m halfway across the waiting room when Mallory comes rushing in. I don’t need to see her face to know I was kidding myself. She opens her mouth, but I hold up my hand. I already know.