All the Lasting Things (3 page)

Living by a clock that had little to do with daylight or other people’s watches, Henry grabbed a bushel basket and, despite the protests of a teenaged employee whose lanky frame and protuberant Adam’s apple did not escape the writer’s critical eye, started down a tractor-rutted track into the orchard.

Benji blanched. “Dad,” he pleaded, “we’re not supposed to. They’re closing.”

“If Ichabod Crane wants us,” Henry Fisher said, “he can come get us.”

Evelyn offered a few words of encouragement to her mortally embarrassed daughter, but Claudia refused to lift or reach or do anything that would either please her mother or raise the knee-length sweater she’d put on as extra protection against a foreign and untrustworthy pad. The basket the women carried—for, though practically paralyzed by her body’s pubescent treachery, Claudia reminded everyone that now, officially, she was a woman—rattled with a few sad apples, moodily picked from the ground, while the men’s overflowed with Cortlands, Empires, and Ginger Golds.

Benji scurried in his maroon Roos onto the lowest branches, stripped them like a starving child, and dropped the bounty into his father’s waiting arms. Only when a tobacco-voiced farmer, trailed by Ichabod’s emboldened form, appeared to discuss insurance liability and, worse, call Henry
friend
did Henry relent. Every man had his limits, and false fraternity marked Henry’s. He put down his basket and waved the farmer away. Father and son carried the brimming harvest together, straddling a puddley, tire-scored ditch. It was one of the few uncomplicatedly pleasant memories of Henry that Benji could summon for George Simonson. And more than once during those $150 sessions that Benji could no longer afford did he return to that final moment, when, passing under a tree silhouetted against the inky sky, he noticed the day’s last apple, almost Edenic in perfection, waiting, it seemed, for Benji to pick it. Which he did, sitting atop his father’s shoulders, and promptly, greedily, bit into.

Why, thirty-one years later, Benji found himself back on those thick, powerful shoulders, wanting the apple that hung above him, was a mystery to him. He hated his father. Or claimed to. And it wasn’t an apple that now caught his eye. It was a pinecone. But the desire persisted. The desire won. Benji wasn’t sauced enough or stupid enough or, as he was currently dressed, flexible enough to climb onto the three-inch-wide railing and stretch to his most harrowing limits. But his veins surged with the dangerous conviction of his own ingenuity. A brief search of the nearby ground turned up a long, tapering branch that, in concert with the suit of armor, looked something like a pronged lance he intended to use to pull in his prize. But lashing the branches together soon seemed as likely as Cat McCarthy falling into him with that slow, soft kiss. He reevaluated. If he wedged his feet between the damp black balusters and stood on the bottom rail, he’d gain another five, maybe six inches and get the height and leverage he needed to knock his prize free with one hand and catch it with the other.

He blinked against the spinning world, waiting until he felt adequately focused, then sliced the lance through the air. He missed. Swung again like a one-armed man attacking a birthday piñata. And missed. He missed and missed and missed and hit too high and sent nothing but a shower of pine needles raining down and then missed again. Leaning out as far as he dared, he ignored the burn that threatened to unhinge his shoulder. His stomach muscles strained with the added weight lashed to his torso, but he steadied himself with a long, stabilizing breath that would have made Hamlet proud and swung his stick through the air.

The branches connected with a dry thwack. The pinecone let go. A thrill of attainment, a little nightbird of joy, soared for a split second through Benji’s heart. After that, it became clear that his calculations, compromised by his blood alcohol level and a more general lack of spatial intelligence, were hopelessly off. The pinecone missed his hand by a good two feet and dropped, regardless of his desire, without ceremony, into the waiting maw of the pitch-black ravine. Benji let his lance drop, waiting for the soft sound of its landing far below. He stepped off the railing and, though he knew himself to be alone, looked searchingly into the darkness around him.

How different he might have felt had somebody been there, not the applauding audience he usually imagined as the world’s only worthwhile comfort but a single interested person to ask him his trouble. He waited. Like Hardy’s Jude, the reckless dreamer and college dropout to whom Henry often compared him, Benji waited for someone to come, but nobody did. Nobody did, because nobody does. Not that another person would have known what to make of Benji’s trouble.

Benji stepped back onto the railing. Slowly, he raised his arms from his sides. He looked, he imagined, like Kate Winslet on the prow of the
Titanic
, if Kate Winslet had been dressed for the Thirty Years War, although his stance indicated not an embrace of the world but a challenge to it.
Fuck everybody. Fuck everything.
He leaned against the wooden rail with the full force of his weight, daring the universe to deliver its final insult, daring the banister to break. When it didn’t, Benji laughed, a spark of amusement that his quickening breath soon beat into a hot, angry flame.
I can’t even do this right
. He brought the mad laughter to a stop with a loud, growling scream.
Fuuuuuck!
The sound, a better purgative than puking, made a violent tear in the quiet of the woods. No one heard it. No one heard the word, or the faint echo of it whispering back through the trees, or—there it was: finally, at last—the splintering rail exploding with a crack so sudden, so extreme, the wood seemed to be voicing some argument it had stifled for far too long. No one heard any of it, including the sound of a man, too stunned to call, falling headlong into the dark.

Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane. Jane: I walk with the others, calling her name through spruces and pines and skeleton trees sleeved with snow. I call until my boots freeze. I call until I can’t feel my hands. I call until there’s no voice left to call with. I call until I taste pennies in the back of my throat. I call when the sun sets and call again when the sun rises. I call with freezing fists of white jabbing from my mouth to batter the air. I call because nothing is right in the world, because nothing will ever be right again. I call because calling is all that’s left. I call after the others go home.

2.

C
laudia followed the social worker out of the emergency room. They took the quickest route, braving the gauntlet of wheelchairs and gurneys and beeping, hissing machines, where the challenge for Claudia was finding someplace safe to look. Her eyes were drawn to the tableaux happening on the other side of the dividing curtains—the moaners, the bleeders, the hopelessly bored—and she struggled to keep her attention on the backs of the social worker’s shoes.

They walked briskly along, past the buzzing hive of the nurses’ station, past radiology, through one set of automatic doors after another, until they came to a lounge at the end of a long, antiseptic hall.

The room was stifling, filled with pressed-wood furniture and the milky-gray light that seeped between crooked blind slats. Crumpled, mostly coverless magazines littered a scuffed coffee table, and the smell of institutional gravy, wafting in from a nearby food cart, clotted the air. The social worker, whose name tag read “Valerie Emerson, CSW,” pulled together two chairs and, with a small, placid smile, sat down.

“Now,” she said, once Claudia had parked her roll-along bag and settled in beside her, “why impossible?” She folded her large, mannish hands on the stacked folders she held on her lap and looked at Claudia expectantly.

“It’s just not something my brother would do.”

Valerie, whose Peter Pan–collared blouse and lightweight gray cardigan suggested to Claudia a modern-day nun, looked unconvinced. She tucked an auburn wave behind her ear and patiently, as if she didn’t have twenty other cases jockeying for attention, began to explain how jumping into a dry streambed seemed to be exactly what Benji had done.

What if he had done it? What if he had?

“Claudia?”

Claudia blinked back a well of tears and squared her shoulders with renewed focus. “You were saying?”

“People in distress,” Valerie began, “sometimes surprise us with their behavior. Do things we wouldn’t expect them to do. Has your brother seemed.” She closed her eyes for long stretches as she spoke and chose her words so mindfully, with such unhurried care, that her sentences sounded snapped in half by silence. “In distress?”

“Ever?” Claudia asked. The word flashed like a blade.

“Recently.”

Two months ago, her brother had given up the one-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint he shared with two other actors and moved three hours north, into a converted toolshed belonging to the assistant director of a ragtag regional theater company. He was thirty-nine years old and brought home $325 a week. Owed MasterCard over $9,000. Owed his sister and mother twice that, easily. Shied from sexual relationships that lasted longer than a hangover. And now had been found, fractured and bruised and drunk, at the bottom of a ravine. He was, in many ways, the definition of distress. Claudia shook her head.

“Has he ever mentioned.” Silence. “Harming himself?”

Did chasing a high on a daily basis count as harming himself? “Not seriously.”

With this, Valerie’s professionally soothing smile disappeared. She turned pink, as if the lightness of the remark embarrassed her. “What your brother did.” Ends of that sentence hung like fruit on a tree. She puzzled over which to choose. “Is
very
serious.”

“We don’t know what my brother did.”

Technically, this was true. The small search party that left the theater parking lot shortly after midnight—when the sleuthing stage manager found Benji’s helmet at the brink of the woods—had stumbled upon him in a state of drifting consciousness. He knew his name, recognized the few stalwart and morbidly curious castmates whom the director had rallied to scour the grounds, could correctly (although, owing to his severely bitten tongue, almost incomprehensibly) name the day of the week and the current president, but shed no light on how he ended up thirty feet below the peculiarly broken bridge.

Not that anyone asked. The paramedics who towed Benji up the steep wooded slope on a bright-orange backboard, the woman named Cat who called Claudia with the news, this psychiatric social worker who’d picked up his file for the first time an hour ago, all of these people had already solved the mystery of her brother’s fall by insisting that it wasn’t one. Even the police, who were days away from collecting an official statement, seemed to be sniffing around for form’s sake. Only Claudia resisted the race from premise to conclusion. Only she chose to believe that her fucked-up brother wasn’t quite that fucked up.

“Has he mentioned suicide?” Valerie pressed, crossing her thick ankles and leaning into the question.

“He’s been living in a toolshed. It would be odd if he didn’t mention suicide.”

Claudia went on to explain, and Valerie went on to write down, why Benji’s occasional threats to throw himself in front of the L train or jump from the Williamsburg Bridge were not the serious cries for help one might mistake them for. They weren’t flares shot into troubled psychological skies. They weren’t even jokes. In asking the fastest route to the Verrazano-Narrows or hiking his leg teasingly over the rail of Claudia’s fire escape, what was he doing but opening a release valve, letting go the disappointments of a botched audition or a date that ended disappointingly with a forced hug on the doorstep or a collection letter from an angry creditor? Yes, her brother mentioned suicide. But he was an actor. He could be melodramatic, hyperbolic, hypochondriacal, histrionic, selfish, and self-centered. Sometimes all at once. But he told Claudia everything. And Claudia, who took heart in knowing the dark of Benji’s darkest corners, could say with certainty that his selfishness didn’t extend to doing himself in.

She meant to make a simple point, but the more she talked, the more trouble she had making it. She mentioned one bridge or another no less than five times, which even a lukewarm Freudian would have found significant. It was only a matter of time, she seemed to be saying, before the man dove off of something.

And maybe he had. Claudia had been resisting the thought of it since the phone rang at five thirty that morning, summoning her. She’d thrown a wall up against the idea, a wall as big and fortified as any that stood in the world and bore her name. Yet here she was, trying to convince herself that Benji had not, could not, would not.

“Is your brother being treated for depression?”

“Not anymore.”

“But he was?”

“He was.”

“His blood alcohol content was 0.20 when he came in.”

“Drunk isn’t suicidal.”

“Would you say he has a drinking problem?”

“Last night he did.”

“Would you say last night was unique?”

“Falling into a gorge in a suit of armor? Yes, that’s unique.”

“It sounds like he may have been—”

Claudia did all she could to keep her hands from reeling in the hampered word.

“Self-medicating,” Valerie eventually offered.

Claudia frowned. A sculptor of conventional beauties would never have paired a nose that slender with such a surprisingly wide mouth, but the components of her face, together, gave stunning proof that the whole was more than the sum of its parts. Her dark eyes were particularly expressive and could no more hide her annoyance with Valerie’s prying questions than her fear of failing her brother by mishandling them.

“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job,” Claudia began in a tone that registered her desire to do exactly that, “but shouldn’t we speak with Benji before diagnosing him?” She clung to the idea of her brother speaking for himself like an inner tube on a stormy sea: soon, he would tell them how absurd they were.

“Absolutely,” Valerie said. “This,” she stressed, indicating the mess of pages on which she’d been scribbling, “isn’t diagnostic. But it sometimes helps. In cases like this. To talk with the family. Before meeting the patient.”

Claudia crossed her leg and let her attention wander to the heel of her boot. She was being rude, but then she had never mastered (or ever really applied herself to) the art of sparing another’s feelings when her own were hurt.

Her mind sought some momentary relief, a distraction, any distraction—the spot (was it blood?) on her sole; a pearly mole on the side of Valerie’s neck; even Nick, whom she hadn’t seen in over twenty years but who still roused her memory (and her ardor) whenever she touched foot on home soil—but she couldn’t get away from the thought of it. Her brother falling through the dark. What if Benji had jumped? What if the darkness she presumed she’d charted was merely the surface of a much deeper, much darker abyss? What if those few Valium all those years ago were a prelude she’d passed off as adolescent attention grabbing and every subsequent allusion to suicide a sign she’d misread, a danger she’d prematurely dismissed? Then again, what if she was right? What if her brother hadn’t jumped but had somehow, unintentionally, fallen off the bridge? It meant that Benji’s binges had stumbled from the asinine and essentially harmless into the realm of real self-destruction. No matter how she sliced it, the problem looked unmanageably large.

She put her foot back on the floor and once again apologized for her wandering mind. “It’s early,” she offered, as if the hour of the day proved more difficult than the situation at hand. Had it been up to her when her phone trilled at just after five thirty, she would have thrown the thing under the dresser and burrowed deeper into the sheets. Thank goodness for Oliver. Oliver, who, after ten years of marriage, remained gentle, considerate, generally more interested in people and the reasons they might have for calling at such an hour. He answered on the third ring and said, “Babe. Babe. Something bad.”

To her credit, Claudia was in a cab bound for the Port Authority before Benji’s ambulance reached the emergency room. At just over three hours, the bus ride proved more reliable than US Air’s perpetually delayed shuttle, more responsible than dangerously chasing her panic along busy, northbound highways, though it put her in cramped, unwelcome proximity to men and women who felt comfortable eating Styrofoam cartons of Chinese food more or less on a stranger’s lap any time of day or night. Passengers on this morning’s bus had been few and far between (and, mercifully, not very hungry), but the experience nevertheless whittled away at Claudia’s nerves. She called the hospital no less than six times during her three-hour ride. She’d had her fill of Valerie’s dowdy sincerity and the room’s niggling aesthetic assaults—she saw the framed still life of pumpkins and autumn leaves that looked like something her mother might paint, and in the murky black mirror of a television mounted overhead, she saw it again. Her patience and generosity were at an end. She loved her brother as much as she loved anyone, but couldn’t help feeling a venomous, terrible, toe-curling anger at the inconvenience that, one way or another, he’d caused.

“If you wanted to jump to your death,” she said, immediately doubling back on her apology to Valerie and taking up the offensive, “you’d find something higher than thirty feet. You don’t necessarily die at thirty feet. You break your neck. You spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair, dribbling onto a bib.” This put Claudia in the absurd position of arguing that Benji’s injuries, serious as they were, weren’t quite serious enough.

“We’re lucky neither of those things happened,” Valerie said. “Benji didn’t die. And the doctors are hopeful that he didn’t sustain any permanent injuries. They haven’t found any internal bleeding, which is what they were afraid of.” She fished these sentences up whole from the deep, her need for deliberation suddenly gone, as if all her voice required to find its pace was a bit of genuine nonsense to drive away. “In my experience, most suicides want to send a message more than they want to die.”

Claudia widened her eyes against another sting of tears. “A message.”

“Maybe this is Benji’s way of asking for help.”

“There’s no need for smoke signals,” Claudia said with a short, bitter laugh. “My brother’s never had a problem asking for help.” She felt a momentary urge to shame him, to parrot the list of delusions and offenses that Henry had no trouble rattling off but that she, Claudia, usually did her brother the favor of swallowing. The things she could have said, if the words hadn’t caught in her throat. He’d taken her money. He’d refused her advice. He’d quit more jobs in a year than she had in her entire life, all in the name of a dream from which everyone, everyone except Benji himself, had woken long ago. He was a disappointment. Why not say it? A failure. She sat frozen. The realization that she was about to be shattered by a sob, that tears would fall the minute she opened her mouth, struck her dumb. She didn’t breathe. Valerie, slow in speech but apparently not in understanding, brought the interview to a charitable end. She shuffled her papers away, handed Claudia her card, and left with more courtesy than Claudia expected from a woman who, thanks to her, had gotten nowhere.

Evelyn no longer woke to the sounds, but in anticipation of them. A box of Christmas ornaments crashed to the floor or he left the bathroom faucet to run or hollered for a dog that drowned in 1986. These were the bells that called Evelyn Fisher into the ring. She heard her husband rise and, now that they no longer slept in the same bed, shuffle into the tiny bathroom that connected their rooms.