Plan B (18 page)

The next morning I awakened at what we used to refer to in college as the butt crack of dawn, disentangled myself from the sleeping forms of Lindsey and Alison, and, pulling on a jacket from the hall closet, took a walk down to the lake. Behind Alison’s Beamer, there was a new looking Taurus in the driveway painted an electric blue that screamed rental. Chuck was already at the lake, sitting on a wooden bench beside the Schollings’s dock and smoking a cigarette.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m just lost in thought,” Chuck said.

“I can see where that might be unfamiliar territory.”

“Ha.”

“When did you get back?”

“Around two or so.”

“We didn’t hear you come in.”

“I know. I peeked in on you guys.” He gave me a conspiratorial grin, blowing out a funnel of gray-white smoke. “Not bad, dude. Two of them at once, eh? You’re a wild man.”

“Your nose looks much better,” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied, rubbing it absently. “I had it set. Guy I know in ortho did it.”

“It’s a shame. I kind of liked the way it hid your face.”

“Nice.”

The sun was just coming up on the far side of the lake, a hazy, nebulous orb casting an orange hue on the surrounding blue. The mist rose lazily off the lake, seeming to muffle all sounds save the occasional belch of a bullfrog. I wondered where frogs went in the winter. Did they hibernate? Did they die?

Just then we heard a loud, whooshing sound from above and looked up to see a gaggle of geese coming in for a landing. There were about fifteen of them. In unison they circled the lake, flying across to the far side, and then came gliding down onto the lake, their webbed feet extended before them like landing gear. Within seconds, the once-still lake was bustling with activity. Chuck and I watched in wonder.

“That was pretty amazing,” Chuck said, stubbing out his cigarette. “I feel like we should hear some British guy’s voice-over telling us about the migration cycle of the speckled goose.”

I smiled. “I guess for us, nature is just another thing you see on television.”

We heard a door slam behind us, not from the Schollings’s house but from the one next door, and turned around to see a young boy around eight-years old walking down toward the lake with a large golden retriever following at his heels. He looked skinny in his red and black flannel shirt and blue jeans, with dirty
blond hair that had been recently cut. He hesitated when he saw us, but then snapped a leash on the dog and continued to come in our direction.

“Hi,” he said, approaching our bench.

“Hello,” I said, and Chuck waved.

“Are you staying at the Schollings’s?”

“We’re friend’s of Alison’s,” I said. “I’m Ben and this is Chuck.”

“Oh,” he said, scratching the back of his dog’s head.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jeremy,” the boy answered. His dog came forward to sniff us, and I gave it a friendly scratching on its chest. “That’s Taz,” he informed me.

“Taz?”

“Yeah. Like the Tasmanian Devil. You know, the cartoon?”

“Sure,” I said. Taz, it seemed, was a sucker for chest-scratching, and sat himself right down in front of me to get as much as he could, his eyes closed in pleasure. “Did you name him?”

“No, my father did.” At the mention of his father, his eyes shot to the ground for a moment, and then came back up uneasily. “I came down to see the geese,” he said. “They come every year at this time.”

“Is that right?” Chuck said.

“Yeah. They’re Canadian Geese, on their way to Florida. They stop here for about a week or so, and then they go. They also stop here on their way back in the spring.”

“That’s pretty cool,” I said.

“What happened to your nose?” he asked Chuck.

“I got hit by a friend,” Chuck said.

“You?” he asked me.

“Not this time,” I said. “We all take turns hitting him.”

“It looks like it’s broken,” Jeremy said. “You should go see a doctor.”

“I see one every time I look in the mirror,” Chuck said.

“Which is usually quite often,” I added.

“You’re a doctor?” Jeremy asked, skeptically.

“Sure am.”

“Do you ever take care of people who have conas.”

“What are conas?” Chuck asked.

“It’s when you sleep and you can’t wake up for a long time,” the boy said earnestly. I noticed that his eyes were a startling blue, and that his left one sometimes winked shut and open again involuntarily.

“That’s a coma,” Chuck said. “C-O-M-A, coma. What do you know about comas?”

“My father has one,” Jeremy said.

“Really,” I said. “That’s too bad.”

“Yeah,” he said, automatically. “He got hit by a truck while he was jogging. He’s been asleep for almost three months now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Chuck said.

“He never knew what hit him,” Jeremy said, clearly repeating something he’d heard said before.

The back door of Jeremy’s house swung open again, and a girl of about twelve came out onto the deck. “Jeremy, what are you doing?” she called to him.

“That’s Melody,” he informed us. “She thinks she’s the boss now, because my dad’s not around.”

“Jeremy!” she called again.

“I’m just walking Taz,” he called back to her.

“You have to come in for breakfast,” Melody persisted.

“I’ll be there soon.”

“Mom says now.”

He rolled his eyes with disgust, and gave Taz a slight pull with the leash. “I gotta go,” he said.

“Sisters,” I said with a sympathetic smile.

“You have any?”

“Uh, no,” I admitted.

“You’re lucky,” Jeremy said, then turned to face Chuck. “Do you think you could help my dad?”

Chuck’s eyes met mine for an instant. “I’m sure his doctor’s doing everything he can,” Chuck said. “Besides, I’m a pretty young doctor. I bet your dad’s doctor is older than me, and much more experienced.”

“I guess,” the kid said, turning to go back up to his house.

“Hey, Jeremy,” I called to him.

“Yeah.”

“See you around.”

“Yeah,” he said, pulling Taz closer to him as they headed up the hill. “See you around.”

“That poor kid,” Alison said later, when I told her about our encounter with Jeremy over breakfast. “I had no idea. I didn’t hear. We’ve known the Millers for years. I used to baby-sit Melody, when she was, like, two years old. My dad and Peter used to fish together.” No one had felt like cooking, so we were eating Cheerios and milk, which I would undoubtedly suffer for later. Another symptom of my having turned thirty was a sudden increase in what had always been a very mild lactose intolerance.

“It doesn’t sound good,” Chuck said, gulping down some juice. “If he’s been in a coma for three months, the statistics are not in his favor.”

“I should go over and see Ruthie,” Alison said. “She must be going through hell.” She got up, threw on a sweater, and headed
for the door. “Don’t forget to give Jack breakfast,” she called behind her.

When Chuck and I brought Jack his breakfast, we found him sitting up in his bed, still wrapped in his blanket. Because he didn’t appear to be ready to make a leap for the door, I held it open a minute to talk to him.

“How’s it going, Jack?”

“Okay,” he said, without really looking me in the eye. “You guys going to let me out today?” He was bathed in a sheen of sweat, with little droplets forming on the bridge of his nose and at the corner of his eyes. His eyes were bloodshot, their lids rubbed raw.

I looked at Chuck. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“Jack, the first thing you’d do is go score some coke. It isn’t even out of your bloodstream yet,” Chuck said.

“I need something, man,” Jack said. “Can’t you give me anything? I don’t feel good.”

“You’re going through withdrawal,” Chuck said. “You’ll feel much worse by tonight.”

“Nice bedside manner, Chuck,” I said sarcastically.

“You know,” Jack said, shivering slightly under his blanket, which he pulled more tightly around him as he sat up. “You’re doing some pretty serious damage to my livelihood right now.”

“We’re more concerned with your life right now,” I said. “Try to get some sleep.” I started to close the door.

“Ben,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“You can’t keep me here much longer.”

“I know, Jack,” I said. “But I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t try.”

He was quiet for the rest of the day. I found it kind of eerie, picturing him just sitting in that bed, shivering, the blankets
wrapped around him like an Arab, but Chuck said he was most likely sleeping. “His body is shutting itself down,” he explained. “Coming off coke is an exhausting ordeal. Once the source of your strength is gone, the abuse you’ve been inflicting on yourself catches up with you. Some people sleep for weeks.”

Later that afternoon I stepped out onto the Schollings’s front lawn to get some fresh air. I saw Jeremy Miller shooting hoops in the Schollings’s driveway and walked over to join him. I judged from the knapsack by the side of the court that he’d just returned from school. “How’s it going?” I said, grabbing a rebound and dribbling out to take my own shot. Swish.

“Okay,” said Jeremy, grabbing the ball and tossing it back to me for my courtesy shot. I noticed he was wearing a
Blue Angel
T-shirt that showed the movie poster, Jack on a motorcycle with a building exploding in the background. My next shot hit the back of the rim, but still managed to bounce in. “Friendly rim,” Jeremy said by rote.

“You a big Jack Shaw fan?” I asked, taking a jumper that hit the front of the rim and landed in Jeremy’s hands without a bounce. He dribbled it through his legs and back out to the foul line. He shot it the way little kids do, bringing the ball up from his belly and pushing it with both hands as he jumped. Swish.

“Yeah,” he said, in answer to my question.
“Blue Angel
’s my favorite movie of all time.”

“Did you see
Decoy?”

“Yeah, that was good, but I liked
Blue Angel
better. You know, Alison’s friends with him.” He shot again, same motion, same result.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Are you also his friend?”

“Yeah,” I said, tossing him the ball.

“That must be so cool,” Jeremy said wistfully.

I thought of Jack sitting up on Alison’s sofa bed, sweating in his blankets between puking jags. “Real cool,” I said.

He shot the ball, which hit the left side of the rim and bounced out of my reach. I was about to chase it when Jeremy said, “They’re going to pull the plug on my dad tonight.” I stopped in my tracks and dumbly watched the ball bounce off the driveway and onto the Schollings’s lawn, where it rolled to a lazy stop. The reason kids can shock you so often is that they haven’t learned to segue yet. They just blurt out whatever is on their minds.

“Really?” I said dumbly.

“Yeah. My mom says it’s a good thing because if he woke up now he wouldn’t be the same anyway. He had in his will that they shouldn’t keep him alive with machines.”

“I guess he knew what he was doing,” I said, wondering what must have been going through this guy’s head when he put that stipulation into his will. Probably anything but the fact that it would become applicable so soon.

“Yeah,” said Jeremy. “I’m kind of glad.” He stated it like a confession. “I pretty much knew he wasn’t coming back, and I’ve been sad for a long time. Everyone in my family’s been. It’s getting harder to be sad now, you know? Do you think that’s a bad thing?”

“No,” I said, considering it. “I think that all people, if they’re well balanced, healthy people, feel a need to mourn and then move on. You and your family have been stuck mourning for so long, and because the hospital was keeping your dad alive, you couldn’t move on, you know?” He stared intently at me as I spoke, and somewhere in his eyes I saw that I was giving him affirmation that he desperately needed.

“My mother told me and Melody to write a letter to my dad, and she would read them to him before they pulled the plug,” he said. “She didn’t think we should be there. Just her.”

“I think that’s a really nice idea,” I said.

“Yeah. I just hope Melody doesn’t go all crazy. She can be a real drama queen.”

“I’ll bet.”

We stood there in the fading light of the day, looking at our Nikes while we considered life and death. I looked at Jeremy and felt an overwhelming sense of warmth and admiration for this little boy carrying around so much grief and stress, stubbornly refusing to let it paralyze him, as I was sure it would me. “You’re a trooper, Jeremy,” I said. “You’re going to be all right.”

“I know,” he said simply. “I just hope my mom is.”

“You’ll help her through it,” I said. “You’ll all help each other.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “You want to play one-on-one?”

That night, our third up at the lake house, Jack’s disappearance made the evening news. A somber Tom Brokaw said the last time Jack was seen was by his agent after they’d checked into the Plaza Hotel in New York three days earlier. “Authorities will not speculate at this time as to whether Shaw has been the victim of foul play,” Brokaw remarked, as the scene shifted to a press conference set up at the Fiftieth Precinct, where the Chief of Police was making a statement. “This afternoon at twelve-thirty, Jack Shaw was
reported missing. At this time, we have no reason to think any foul play was involved. All I can say at this time is that his people are concerned and we are looking into the matter.”