Clearly Now, the Rain (16 page)

The momentum with Jack was strange, huge but not yet fast, like the first rotation of a boulder at the top of a slope. She spooked, of course, and tried to downplay it, but I was almost giddy with her failure to do so. When Mona decided to take another man for a spin and I ran to Serala's bed, I was caring for my ego, sure, but I was also testing Serala—both motivations unconscious at the time; I was merely doing what was normal between us by then. When she turned me down, my shame and moderately injured pride were nothing compared to the conviction that came down with her hand on my chest that May night: what she had found was real.

Of course it was also a liability because Jack was less scrupulous than even she was about the substances he used to push the long sadness of his life out of his veins, mainly because he'd been instructed and even encouraged to do so since he was small. But there comes a juncture in every treatment when risky methods are called for and, from where I was standing, it seemed as if Jack vanquished Serala's symptoms in a few short months of feverish—if junkie—love.

Twenty

Leaving Wilmington damn near broke my heart, as I belatedly realized I'd come to love the city almost like a person—and to love several people who would remain there. I drove south slowly, trying to soul-search but really just delaying the inevitable arrival at Mona's door. Between Florida and Montana, I made up and changed my mind a dozen times about going to her. She was begging at this point, terrified that her fling was going to cost her my love.

Between Houston and Grand Junction, Colorado, Mona leaves me forty-three voice mails in one day. That should have been clue enough about the nature of this relationship, but at the time it just felt like more evidence that I didn't have a choice. When I arrive, trying to keep the equilibrium I've cultivated on the highways, I find I can't. As the June Montana sun is cut by the Venetians and the dogs worry at the foot of the bed, stirring up cyclones of dust motes, I swallow half a bottle of wine and let the demons out.

If you really think that you can put me on hold, fuck someone else, and then bid me to come back, you're fuckin' tripping, Mona
, I manage to say before I fall to tears—more at my cowardly inability to walk away than anything else.

But we had it out with enough fury and then enough tenderness to make me believe we'd turned a corner—after four years of roller coaster straight-aways. I allowed myself to settle back into us, reapplying myself to the exhausting task of
making it work
. As if it we were a problematic but possibly timeless novel. After failing to leave Mona as many times as I had, a belief had wired into my brain: I couldn't do it. It was absolutely suffocating to think of never getting free of her, so I told myself the palliative, cowardly lie that eventually
she'd
be the one to end it.

There was no Sprint coverage in Missoula so my cell didn't even have a chance to ring the next day.

I was sleeping hard, my head packed beneath two pillows. Then I walked the bucolic neighborhoods of Missoula sipping coffee, feeling out the place I was to call home in the autumn. Serala left me two messages that morning. She was fucked up in a way that I'd never heard: desperate, quiet sobs, scared, not stoic at all then.
Jack's had kidney failure,
she said,
he's really bad
.

When I called I got his brother, because Serala was in with Jack. I told him I'd pray, instinctively, as if I had a rosary on hand. He said he'd like that, and so I did my best with my breathing and my silence.

When she called back the next day he was brain-dead. That's what she said, her voice breaking, loud and then a whisper over just those few syllables:
Jack is brain-dead
. They were going to do some more tests to make sure, but if the results came back as expected, they'd pull the plug in the morning. With Jack in that state Serala had time to talk—before she split with Jack's brothers and best friend, Thomas, to erase all hope, to start the bitter celebration. She spoke in a flat monotone mostly, but with weepy breaks, too. The story was:

They go camping—in any other context this would make me laugh. I like to picture it. They drive deep into some Connecticut forest and start hiking. Jack seems as if under a spell out there, full of pep and chatter, and Serala finds herself able to follow, a six-pack and a bottle in her hands, for hours and hours. They find their spot, the perfect spot, and make it home for the night (I imagine her making beds in the tent, folding over the corners of the sleeping bags for easy access). They talk, and drink, and laugh, and there are no pills, no junk, nothing, aside from maybe a skinny joint or two and that booze. They make love and Serala sleeps, for hours, and they descend the next day as euphoric as they climbed and, in some kind of celebration, kill the first of two bottles of Maker's Mark by the time they roll back into Boston. They go out for sushi— counterbalancing, I suppose, the grittiness of nature—and drink sake, and laugh, and it's then that he tells her: it has been the best night of his life.

But then they are bound for the hospital to visit Jack's rapidly dying father, where Jack accepts a crack rock from his youngest brother instead of money he is owed. Jack and Serala smoke it together, a searing, bright burn right through the filmstrip of the day, erasing all that might have been right. Back at her place they find that the cycle has begun, and they score and start shooting. When he begins to complain about back pain, Serala tries to rub it out, assuming the strain of a long hike has shifted a disc or pulled a muscle. But when he exclaims, suddenly, waking from a nod,
When the fuck is the ambulance coming?
she calls one and starts flushing whatever junk is left. In the ambulance he is lucid and quiet, clutching her hand, I imagine. In the hospital, he seems all right and is even working on one of those
New York Times
crosswords with her; some of the sweetness from the best night reenters his face. But the toxicology screen is taking a while and Serala steps from the room to go walk Knox, and the pain gets worse, and he screams, and so they shoot him with Demerol, and he falls into respiratory arrest.

If she had been right there, she wouldn't have let them do it, but she was away, momentarily, believing by then that he'd be fine and she didn't have to tell them about the junk. She couldn't imagine that this night, in an ER with doctors everywhere, he would go. She'd told me of the several nights when Jack shot too much and she found herself kneeling over him on the hardwood floor, rescue breathing—breathing for him—as she'd learned as an EMT on the interstates years before. She said it was too ironic—these were the only moments when she felt almost incapable of staying awake: when his life had depended on it. As if sleep were a siren song. But she always had saved him.

That day, Mona and I stroll by the Clark Fork River with Kaya, and her dog, Kasko, and Louis's dog, Sasha, which Mona has kidnapped with the promise of a better life in Missoula than Seattle. I'm learning that the Montana skies are as big as they say. I am looking at them and they're almost pure blue, tiny braids of cloud here and there, like strands of hair floating on the breeze. I feel sort of consoled by how puny we are. The river is flowing with gusto, up to the brim with snowmelt, and people are sparse along the banks because school has been out a few days already. Kaya is happy to be back with her pack. Mona and I are holding hands, and I wonder if the relative peace I can access here, now, while Serala is hurting so fucking bad, is wrong.

And then Sasha struggles up the steep, overgrown bank of the river. In her square jaws, she is clutching a spinal column twice her own length. A slick membrane of skin still sheathes half of it. I cannot begin to guess at why this sends me reeling into an almost nauseous panic.

Later that day we are up in the canyon above the town, getting the dogs good and tuckered out before I catch a flight to Serala's side. Sasha is lagging behind, sniffing at the breeze quizzically, despite my hollering. I look back after a moment and she is rolling like dogs do to cover themselves in the canine perfumes of shit and rot. I dash back, give her a little kick, and she jumps up—revealing an entire leg of a deer. The hoof is still attached and all the fur intact; the top of the leg is raw and bloody, as if someone has just ripped it off a passing doe. The way this frightens and baffles me is out of proportion to reason. Surely there is an explanation for these gruesome finds—hunters, or bobcats, or something. But that wouldn't soothe me; I know with certainty that Sasha leads me to these things for a reason. Maybe she is showing me—and dogs, after all, are capable of such things—what is happening inside of Serala: violence, rending apart.

When I land at JFK, I see her first. She is all blurry with whisky and old tears. The carousel is churning bags out and she watches it like it's a movie. Knox is leashed to her wrist, doing those nervous little high steps around her, just like the day we broke her out of the pound in San Diego. When I hug Serala I can feel all the bones, feel the broken sips of air she takes, like each breath is partly sob. But her eyes are dry, just bruised and puffed, and she is paler than I've ever seen. She looks like shit. I don't speak until we get to the car and, because I want to clear it out of my throat before the wild driving, I say:

God, I'm so fucking sorry, love.

I think I can get it out and stay tough, be a rock for her to cling to right from go, but it breaks halfway out of my mouth. I swallow and hold onto her neck for a while. She points out the Jack Daniel's on the floorboard, twists the volume knob, lights a smoke, and wheels out to the road.

At the entrance to the turnpike she files into the cash lane accidentally and then swings right into the E-Z Pass line, nosing in front of a white Cadillac that is still a few feet back. But the driver doesn't like it and he rolls forward, making a point of keeping his head out the window as his car passes, just centimeters from our fender.

You better watch where the fuck you coming from,
he says, in the nasal tones of an old Jersey Italian.

I look at Serala and she has a steady wildness in her eyes, a rage I haven't seen before. He is still hanging his head out, alternating his gaze from the inch between the two fenders to her face, challenging her, and I suddenly know she is going to mash the pedal and cave in his door. I put a hand on her arm and lean out the window and tell him there's
no problem,
tell him to
be cool,
and he is. And Serala starts breathing again, and thanks me, and reaches for the bottle instead.

Her place is packed with Boston kids, coworkers and Jack's surrogate little brothers. They sound exceedingly young to me, and I realize Serala scarcely knows them. Three blunts are circling around, and there is a bottle within reach wherever you stand or sit. Lucinda Williams is doing her cool blue wailing on the box, and there is the skyline, bright like a fistful of stars has been hurled at the city, and so I shake hands, nod, and accept a joint and open a beer like I'm arriving at a party, and I guess I am. And Jack's best friend comes through the door.

The last time I'd seen Thomas was eight years back, when he was a dreadlocked traveling kid, killing springtime at the parties of Sage Hill. Serala has kept me posted over the years on his travels, his fights with drugs and the law. And she's made sure that I know how much he means to her and how hard he's tried, all cleaned up, to get her and Jack to do the same. Thomas is a hell of a lot bigger than I recall. His hair is short and his arms are thick. A fresh tattoo of an angel stands raised on one forearm. He has the half-cracked look of drunken grief, and he hugs me hard, like a brother, me almost disappearing in his arms. I realize in that moment that although I don't have any claim to a friendship with Thomas, except by proxy, that he sees an ally in me—someone else who works at the task of keeping her above ground. He thanks me and thanks me for coming, and I am reminded of just how well Serala represents me in my absence. I try to think of what to say, but I can't imagine what words could mean to someone who just lost their best friend.

Around every corner, behind every bottle of wine, through the thick smoke of blunts and Pall Malls, a tripwire of grief might be stretched. But there are other moments, too, other surprises—even some fun. I remember rolling out to the Jersey Shore in the massive truck that Thomas' girl has rented to drive us around in. The windows are down, cigarettes fired, Serala's hair snapping like it always has on the freeways, Springsteen on the box and up fucking loud. We've finally made it to the Jersey Shore after many plans had imploded over the years. She and I slip away to walk Knox on the boardwalk, against the fierce wind that seems to blow so hard from the north that it still carries a bite of spring. She shivers in her loose skin.

Samar arrives one day to comfort us with her songs, her steady presence, her courage in the face of pain. I remember her and Serala disappearing into the bedroom. Serala just stands up, as if instinct calls, takes Samar's hand, and walks away, the bedroom door clicking shut gently. I hope that they won't come out until morning, maybe that embrace will be enough to carry Serala to sleep. They can exchange their toughness for the reverse, for the tenderness that rules them both on the safe side of walls. But soon Serala emerges to kneel by the stereo, playing one sad song after another: PJ Harvey, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith, Lucinda, the Pretenders, Alison Krauss, Neil Young. I wake at the crack of a pink dawn to walk Samar to the ferry, then find Thomas in bed with a Budweiser, staring at the molding that he and Jack put up along the ceiling a week earlier. One shiny tear stands on his cheekbone.

And through all of it, Serala mostly refuses words. The one sentence I recall vividly comes as I am leaving. The street is washed in New York's extreme June sun; the rays are splintering off every piece of glass and metal like pinwheels scattered. She holds me tightly, her face against my chest as the Cuban driver leans on his town car, looks at his watch pointedly, and sighs. I am dredging myself for something right to say, something loving that will not come off as simple pressure to
keep on keepin' on
. She lifts her face and puts me at arm's length. Then she looks me in the eye and says it:
The whole time I was with him, I never thought about dying.

I flew home to Seattle for the summer. I was semi-diligent about calling Serala, but she wasn't often up for talking much. She was still just boycotting language. And I knew she was busy with work and, more, with Jack's family.

In the meantime she wrote me emails with titles like “New York is flooding, slowly, as I type.” She never said much except for things about the sky or what Thomas was up to. But it was enough to allow me to keep tabs; she didn't want me to worry more. And finally she told me she was coming to visit.