Crossing the Bridge (25 page)

He never did tell me what came between them and I never asked again.

Since Iris was coming to Amber to visit her mother, I didn’t drive up to Lenox the next week. However, we did keep our Wednesday “date.” I picked her up midmorning and we went to the beach at Beacon Lake. In that summer ten years earlier, Chase, Iris, and I spent a fair amount of time on this beach, splashing in the water, burying each other in the sand, and drinking illicit margaritas from a thermos. I hadn’t been back since Chase died and couldn’t get there now without directions.

Iris was considerably more organized this time around than we had been a decade before, packing lunch in a cooler (no margaritas as far as I could tell) and bringing a huge beach blanket (not an heirloom) from her mother’s house along with an umbrella. She set this up methodically while I watched, certain that any attempt to help would make a negative contribution. When she pulled off her T-shirt and shorts to reveal the royal blue bikini underneath, I remembered another convention of those summer days past: the forays Chase and Iris would take into the woods to make love while I lay in the sun. Iris’ skin was lightly tanned and her body was as lithe as I remembered it from all those years ago. I’d seen her this
undressed several times before on this very beach, but was somehow a little unprepared for it this time. She sat down on the blanket and I felt a moment’s self-consciousness about removing my own shirt and shorts before sitting next to her.

There were a few dozen other people on the beach with us. A child poured buckets of water onto his mother’s feet. A group of kids kicked a red rubber ball around in the sand. A man in a dress shirt and pants talked on a cell phone. Two teenagers lay very close together, kissing. A few swimmers bounced around in the lake.

“Are you still a madman in the water?” Iris said. “I’d just like to know before I decide whether or not to go in with you.”

“I was never a madman. Chase was the madman and he coerced me into acting like him.”

“That’s not what he told me. The first time we all came here together, if I remember correctly, you were out of control. Afterward, Chase said those exact words to me: ‘my brother’s a madman in the water.’”

I recalled the time clearly. It was after Iris and I had our first “moment” together and I was still feeling awkward about it. Seeing her nearly naked on the beach that day was a little more than I could handle and I remember being more animated than usual in an attempt to cover this up. Chase and I had always wrestled in the water and I took this to an extreme this time, relentlessly attempting to dunk his head.

“It’s a bad rap. He brought out the lunatic in me. Trust me, you’re safe.”

Iris knocked her knee against mine. “Too bad,” she said.

She lay back on the blanket and, after a short while, I did the same.

“He loved doing that stuff with you,” she said. “At first it seemed kind of sophomoric to me in that dumbass male-bonding-jock kind of way. But then I figured out that there was something very intimate about this physical stuff between the two of you. Intimate and necessary.”

“That’s an interesting way of looking at it. I always thought he was just proving that he was stronger than me.”

Iris turned her face in my direction. “I think he was actually buzzed about the fact that you were nearly as strong as he was. He didn’t get a lot of that kind of competition.”

“I assumed he was just going easy on me. I mean, he had a thirty pound advantage.”

“‘Thirty pounds of muscle,’ let’s remember,” she said, quoting one of Chase’s favorite proclamations.

“How could I forget?”

“You were the better singer, though.”

“Something that has served me well in my later life.”

She propped herself up on one arm. “No, really. Do you remember that time the two of you serenaded me by the campfire to ‘Hey Jude’? He was only okay, but you were really, really good.”

“I think your memory is playing tricks on you.”

“Yeah, right. My memory is absolutely photographic from that time. You should sing more often.”

“I sing all the time.”

“I mean without the stereo blasting.”

“Yeah, maybe for my next career.”

“Don’t mock.” She lay back down on the blanket. “That was a great summer, wasn’t it?”

“Most of it, anyway.”

“Yeah, most of it.”

Lying here on this beach brought Chase very much onto the blanket with us. I’m not sure what Iris’ intentions were in suggesting we come here, if she had any at all, but we hadn’t made a habit of visiting old haunts. The effect on both of us was obvious. This was and would always be Chase’s place.

And now that I’d redirected the conversation, however inadvertently, toward the part of that summer that wasn’t “great,” I felt that I needed to say more. I’d told a grand total of two people about the role I’d played the night Chase died. One was the therapist I’d seen very briefly a few years ago. The other was Gillian at the point at which I thought we were becoming serious. Since Iris and I had begun our new relationship, I’d wondered on and off whether I should tell her. The thoughts had receded lately, but now that we were here and now that the subject was out there, it seemed essential.

I sat up and glanced from the teenaged lovers to two boys splashing each other in the lake.

“There’s a good chance you’re going to hate me more for this,” I said. I could hear Iris turning on the blanket, but I didn’t look at her. “I could have saved Chase.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was with him that night. I met him at Shanahan’s after he’d already been there awhile. He was in a weird mood – weirdest I’d ever seen him in. And he got me pissed off and we argued. It was just another
one of those arguments we sometimes had, but he was really wasted and I should have been paying more attention.”

Iris was sitting up next to me now. “I don’t understand.”

“He was wrecked. I should have known that it wouldn’t be safe for him to drive, that he was in real danger. I should have just told him to shut up and gotten him into my car. But what I did instead was just yell at him and walk out. I should have known that he was in no condition.”

I looked over at her. I knew I was going to start crying if I said anything else, so I just stopped. She put a hand on my shoulder and I could see that she seemed ready to cry as well. I found her touch reassuring. When I’d started, I’d half expected her to pack up her things and walk out on me.

“Do you want to know why he was so drunk?” she asked.

I just kept looking at her. The question didn’t seem to need a response. She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them.

“That afternoon, I’d told Chase that I was pregnant. He freaked. I think it just stunned him that he could have done something that wrong. It was as though he didn’t understand that there was always some level of risk.”

She released her legs and dug a hole with her toe in the sand. I was having a little trouble breathing.

“Things got a lot worse when I told him that I wanted to keep the baby.”

“How could you do that?”

“You mean between being eighteen and going to
Holyoke in the fall and all of that? He wondered the same thing. At least I assume he was wondering those things while he was screaming them at me. I just knew I could do it and I knew that he could do it with me. Do you really think your brother would have botched it if he put his mind to it?”

“I’m not sure he was ever tested at that level.”

“Of course he wasn’t. But there’s no chance he couldn’t have pulled it off. If he wanted to. I knew that nearly as much as I knew that I couldn’t go through with an abortion and I certainly couldn’t have the baby and then give it up. I’ve always known what I was doing, Hugh. This wasn’t impetuousness on my part. I knew I could handle it, even if it meant transferring to MCS.”

“Chase obviously didn’t agree.”

“It was the worst argument we ever had. He wasn’t just upset. He was furious. As though my pregnancy was an affront to him. He couldn’t sit down and the muscles in his neck were bulging. I’d never seen him like that before. I think he thought that if he got angry enough he could make me change my mind or make the whole thing go away or something. But I wouldn’t give in. I wouldn’t even say that I was willing to consider it. When he left the house that day, I wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Obviously, he decided to drink it away.”

She hugged her legs again and rested her chin on her knees.

“He wouldn’t have been in the condition you saw him in if I hadn’t made him get that way in the first place. The irony is that I had a miscarriage in September. That was one hell of a first semester at school.”

I had no idea what to say. I was stunned and saddened and confounded all at the same time. I put my hand on her shoulder and she turned from me and lay down on her stomach. As though to reassure me that she wasn’t moving away from me, she reached her hand out for mine. I held it, though I didn’t lie down next to her.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She squeezed my hand. “You couldn’t have known what was going to happen to him. He’d driven drunk any number of times before. He was good at it.”

“He was very drunk.”

“He’d been very drunk before. There was no way you could have anticipated it.”

“I’m not sure. It seems so inevitable to me now.”

“I know what you’re saying. Don’t you think I’ve told myself ten thousand times that I should have handled that last conversation with him differently? The way he looked when he left, I should have known that anything could happen. I should have run out after him and told him that we both needed to take a little time with it. It could have changed everything. It
would
have changed everything.”

“It was your baby.”

“It was
our
baby.”

I lay down on my back. “My God, Chase was going to be a father,” I said. I looked toward Iris. Our faces were perhaps a foot apart from each other. I was close enough to see the tears forming in her eyes and the first one roll across the bridge of her nose. I reached out and touched her calf with my foot and she touched her forehead against mine.

“Now you know more about me than you ever wanted to know,” she said.

“Not possible,” I said. But even though I said it, I wondered if it was true. Even up to the point when I started speaking, I wasn’t sure that I would ever tell Iris about my involvement with Chase on that night. And yet she had responded by sharing a secret that was so much more revealing. And now that we’d done this, it seemed inconceivable to me that we could possibly go back to being “running buddies” again. And I simply didn’t know if I was ready for that.

“I’m gonna go take a dip in the water,” I said. “Want to join me?”

“Go ahead. Maybe I’ll come in a couple of minutes.”

Eventually she did and we spent the next couple of hours pretending that everything was as it had been.

I know Iris knew that it wasn’t, and I knew that she understood me well enough to know that I knew it as well.

I spent much of the next morning down in the basement putting my latent woodworking skills to practical use. After my drinks conversation with Tyler and after discussing it with my father (the only time I’d brought up the subject of the store with him during his convalescence), I’d decided to make some of the changes we discussed. Among them was
replacing the chipped white Formica display cases in the front of the store. In a flash of inspiration, I started to build the new ones myself. I’d made a couple of false starts before some of the old techniques came back to me and this morning I was cutting, sanding, planing, and hammering fluidly.

All the while thinking about Iris and the conversation we’d had the day before. She’d been pregnant with my brother’s child. This revelation led me, however foolishly, to think a little differently about her romance with Chase. I’m not sure why. Was it that it made the sex between them more serious? That certainly couldn’t be the case since the pregnancy was accidental, not to mention that the notion of some sex being more serious than other sex among committed couples was somewhat silly in the first place. Was it that the accidental pregnancy suggested a level of urgency to their passion – I need to have you right now regardless of the consequences – that elevated their physical connection? Maybe. Was it that Iris’ determination to keep the baby was confirmation of her desire to have a permanent relationship with Chase? In some sense, I’d known that all along.