Imagine Me Gone (37 page)

“You know how to light a fire?” he asked.

“Yeah, so do you. You’ve done it a hundred times.”

“Have I?”

On the drive up I’d made a passing reference to some future point when it would be just the three of us, once Mom was gone, and he had looked at me in shock, as if the idea that he might survive her had never occurred to him. I nearly stopped the car to yell at him for being so out of it, for clinging to such a distorted view of reality, but I didn’t want to start things out that way and I held my tongue, as I did now.

The cabin hadn’t been renovated as far as I could tell, just well maintained. The dark wood floors were uneven but polished, the old floral-print furniture replaced with solid whites and tans. On the bookcases on either side of the fireplace were Mitchell family photographs: their two daughters at the ages we had been when we first came here, in bathing suits and life preservers, squinting in the sun, and later as teenagers and adults with boyfriends or husbands.

I told Michael to take the largest of the three eaved bedrooms upstairs, the one Mom and Dad had used, to give him the extra space, and I said he should go ahead and unpack his things, to settle in.

Over the last few weeks, Michael had agreed, reluctantly, to try what I’d suggested, but he drew the line at stopping the Klonopin, saying he would go off everything except that. Caleigh had encouraged him, which helped. So had my mother, who more than anyone else wanted for this to work but feared the difficulty of it for Michael. She had baked ginger cookies for our trip, and sent us off with apples and peanut butter and a bag of Michael’s favorite potato chips, which he finished off with a beer as I made us dinner.

The night before, Seth and I had got into our first serious argument. We’d been seeing each other for a year and a half and through all that time had remained polite with each other, careful not to offend or disturb. It seemed like mutual care, mostly, a desire to protect what we’d begun.

He had put up with my travel schedule, right through to the election’s dismal end. I’d been gone for weeks at a time and he hadn’t complained. And when he needed to work on projects over the weekends that I did make it back, I didn’t get after him about it. He even took in stride the news of my being furloughed by the magazine, hinting that we should talk about moving in together. And when my mother had called and told me about the real estate agent and the listing contract, and I said to Seth almost as soon as I hung up with her that Michael and I needed to go away, he said, Of course, I get it.

But when I was gathering my things in the apartment, getting ready to leave once more, and asked if he would do me a favor by booking me a ticket online for the train to Boston, he looked up from his computer, incredulous.

In a tone I’d never heard before, he said, “Do you have any memory at all how many times you said we’d take a trip together this week? After you were finally done. Does it even
matter
to you that you’re going to use practically your whole time off with Michael, and none of it with me?”

“You think I should just cancel,” I said. “After I arranged the place and persuaded him to do it?” He slammed his computer shut and walked into the bedroom. But I followed him, demanding an answer. “Is that really what you think? That I should just call Michael and tell him I decided to go on vacation with my boyfriend instead?”

“God forbid,” he said. “But don’t worry, I get it—no one has problems more important than yours. You’ve made that clear. And now you’re going up there into the woods, all Robert Bly, to save him all by yourself. You’re not as smart as you think you are.”

Later, in the bathroom, passing the toothpaste, we slunk back toward each other. After turning out the lights, without saying a word, he fucked me quite hard, both of us knowing it would be bad to part for this long without touching. In the morning I promised to call him.

As I had suspected, we got no cell reception at the cabin. But the Mitchells had a working landline, which is what my mother called us on after supper, saying she just wanted to make sure we’d arrived safely and that the heat worked. She spoke to Michael briefly and then wished us a good night’s sleep.

Along with the heap of books he’d stuffed in his messenger bag, Michael had brought a bunch of DVDs. We sat through two episodes of
24
together, a distraction I was glad for. He’d lost patience for anything slower than a Bruce Willis movie. It had to be action: car chases, galactic warfare, gangland slaughter. Luckily, next to the supermarket back on Route 1, I’d spotted a place that still rented videos, so I knew we wouldn’t run out.

Before going to bed I told him he should do what we had discussed. He went upstairs and returned with his toiletry bag to the living room couch, where he rummaged through it and removed the orange prescription bottles, lining them up on the coffee table in what seemed an act of determined resignation. He set down five in all, plus the jar of kratom tea.

For years he’d insisted, like a child, that eventually a doctor would prescribe a pill which would give him the same relief he’d experienced the first time he had taken a drug. We had chastised him for believing this, for demanding such a purely external fix, and yet all the while we had wished for exactly that, for our sake as much as for his. To make the problem simply go away. That fantasy was over. That cure didn’t exist. Every therapy, every drug, all the help we’d given—none of it had worked. So now there was no other choice. He had to be able to take care of himself. He had to get better. When my mother had called on that Sunday last month and told me she needed to sell the house, she had to have known that I wouldn’t let her do it. Telling me was as good as saying she wanted to be stopped. And so I had stopped her.

“It’s the right thing,” I said, picking up his bottles with both hands.

“I’m not sure,” he said, “I’m not sure.”

For the first couple of days the hardest part for either of us was the lack of Internet. I hadn’t been away from it that long in years. Nor had Michael. The absence of distraction left us irritable and bored. But that had been part of my idea for coming here, to disenthrall him from that constant, goading semi-stimulation which only fed his anxiety. To help bring him back to some kind of present.

After the countless hours I’d gorged on polling data and campaign gossip, scraping for angles in all that trash of information, I wanted to purge myself of it, too. Still, the first two evenings I couldn’t help walking up the road to the one spot where I got a signal and standing there, shivering, as the headlines loaded. Michael had brought his laptop, but without new messages or updates from his myriad listservs to constantly anticipate and check, he hardly bothered opening it.

On our third morning I woke more rested than I had in a long time. Michael hadn’t stirred yet. I dressed and went out into the yard, into the freezing air, and walked down the jetty to the dock from which we used to set out for the island.

Beyond the few boats still on their moorings, a bank of fog was moving in off the sea. I watched it slowly cover the spit of land at the mouth of the inlet, shrouding the fir trees and the granite shore, and then the whole end of the bay, covering the barnacled outcroppings where the cormorants landed and seals basked in summer, rolling slowly toward me over the water until I saw that it wasn’t fog but snow, the flakes tumbling thick and silent out of the encompassing cloud, and I remembered that was how it had been up here when we were kids, seeing weather approach from a distance, a thunderstorm on the horizon, rain sweeping toward us like a curtain across the water, and how it had thrilled me, that enormity and power, how oblivious it was of us. I had an inkling of that again now, of that state of being wide open to time, not as a thing to use or waste, but as a motion of its own, an invisible wholeness made apparent by the motion of the world.

By the time the snow reached me, I couldn’t see more than twenty yards, the rocks and the water and the boats all gone. When I went back into the cabin and saw my phone on the counter, I powered it off and stowed it in a kitchen drawer.

After breakfast with Michael, I made him walk the half mile with me to the general store. This became our routine, which he consented to more readily once he knew they sold doughnuts. In the afternoons we spent longer than necessary up on Route 1 restocking our food supplies and browsing every aisle of the video store, and in the evenings we watched one action movie after the next. Still, there were plenty of idle hours, and when Michael started having trouble sleeping, in what seemed the first sign of withdrawal, those hours began to gnaw at him.

“When is he going to stop that?” he asked me late one afternoon at the end of our first week, standing by the window in the dining room, peering over the embroidered half curtain.

All morning the lobsterman across the road had been chopping wood in his yard. He worked at a methodical pace, each gap long enough to make you think he was done. Until you heard another thwack of the ax, and the splintering of a log.

“When he’s through, I guess.”

“How old do you think he is?”

A loaded question, coming from Michael, who considered himself so ancient. He’d begun referring to these as “the winter years” of his life. Absurd on its face for a thirty-seven-year-old, droll, even, as a complaint about early middle age, though not the way he said it, with grim conviction.

As for the guy across the street, I’d noticed him a few times coming home in the late afternoons, and had watched him switch out the damaged lobster traps in the bed of his truck with replacements from the stack in the yard. He was some fisherman’s son, not the old man himself. Thirty, maybe, with a build you could see through his thermal work shirts, and a dirty-blond crew cut. In the absence of Seth and pornography, I’d closed my eyes the night before and imagined him bending me over the hood of his Ford.

“I don’t know, forty?” I said, for Michael’s sake.

“No, no. He’s not that old.”

“Thirty-eight?”

Michael shook his head dismissively. “I always imagined I was younger than men like him. The way you imagine you’re younger than your dentist. But I’m not anymore. He’s married to that woman who drives the Bronco. She could be in her late twenties. They live in that house. It’s amazing.”

“It’s a pretty ordinary house, actually.”

“I don’t mean the building. I mean he lives here in this polar vortex, surrounded by nothing but deer and a smattering of white people, and he’s found a sexually attractive woman to live with him year-round. I find that shocking.”

I couldn’t help but smile. His voice was back. The speed of it, the acumen. He hadn’t noticed it. But his halting forgetfulness was gone. He sounded almost like himself again. He even seemed to have more color in his face.

“I do give him credit for the bumper sticker, though,” he said. “‘They call it tourist season. So why can’t we shoot them?’ I like that. No doubt he spends his spare time lobbying for an expansion of the welfare state, as well he should. But I wish he’d put a stop to that manual labor. The sound is harrowing.”

He paced back into the living room, where I was reading an old copy of
Vanity Fair,
and scanned the room as if for intruders.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Wretched,” he said.

With no private clinic spa to help take the edge off, I started driving us to a gym I’d seen a little ways past the supermarket. It occupied a defunct car dealership, three walls of glass and a concrete backdrop enclosing a small field of secondhand Nautilus equipment. Up here in the off season it was as close as we were going to get to a regimen of something other than television.

Surveying the scene on our first visit—a woman in a terry-cloth tracksuit reading
US Weekly
on a StairMaster and a teen waif loitering by the free weights—Michael asked, “Where are all the muscle queens?”

Through music he had learned gay culture long before I had. The meaning of the Village People may have eluded me as a child, but it had never eluded him. I hadn’t delayed coming out to him from any fear of rejection. If anything, being gay improved me in his eyes, placing me at least one step off the throne of patriarchy that he himself had so effectively abdicated. I just hadn’t wanted to face the awkwardness of discussing sex with my brother.

Back then he had dressed so immaculately. All those English designer shirts of his, and the peg-legged trousers, and the dark suit jackets that hung so well on him, like a young Jeremy Irons done up to New Wave perfection. Once he returned from London, I’d never been able to keep up.

Now here he was on the treadmill in ancient gym shorts and a V-neck undershirt stained at the pits, straining under the weight he’d put on. He hadn’t complained about his weight to me. He’d just commented in a way he never had before about how thin I looked, and I sensed his embarrassment at having had one kind of body his whole life, worrying he was too thin, and then suddenly having another, heavy not with muscle but fat. There was a perversity to it. Watching him struggle on the machine seemed like watching myself age in a sickly fashion. But at least here we could burn off a few calories, and another hour of the otherwise empty days.

Michael, however, was resolute that the workouts did him no good.