Plan B (22 page)

“That, my friend, is a very good question,” I said.

“Well,” he said, grabbing the ball from me and dribbling in for a lay-up. “What’s the answer?”

“It’s not that simple,” I said.

“Oh.” He put up another lay-up.

“Don’t you belong inside?” I asked.

He looked toward the house, and for the first time I could truly see the grief in his eyes. Taz seemed to sense the boy’s desolation, and bounded onto the driveway, reluctant to leave his side. “I don’t feel like going in there right now,” Jeremy said, rolling the ball between his fingers.

“I don’t blame you,” I said. “From what they said at the funeral, it sounds like your dad was a great guy.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry I never met him,” I said.

“That’s a cool shirt,” Jeremy said.

I was wearing a collector’s edition
Star Wars
T-shirt with an artist’s rendition of the characters all superimposed on a larger, translucent portrait of Darth Vader’s face. “Do you like
Star Wars?”
I asked him.

“Yeah. We have all three movies on tape. The new versions.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Did you like
The Phantom Menace?”
he asked me.

I paused before answering. There was no question that I’d been terribly disappointed by the movie, which I thought felt like an
overblown cartoon and contained none of the magic of the first three. But if the film had somehow done for Jeremy what
Star Wars
had done for me at that age, I didn’t want to ruin it for him. “It’s hard for me to get used to all of the new characters,” I said weakly. “What did you think?”

“I liked it,” he said with a shrug. “But I liked the first three better.”

There was hope after all.

“I was around your age when
Star Wars
came out,” I told him. “It became my favorite movie of all time.”

“My dad, too.”

“Hey,” I said. “Hang out here a second, okay?”

“Yeah.”

I ran into the house and came back out a minute later with the Darth Vader mask.

“Cool,” Jeremy said, turning it over in his hands. I was pleased to note that he held the rubberized plastic up to his nose for a good sniff. He pulled it on over his head and made some harsh breathing noises. “Darth Vader,” he said, trying to make his voice sound low and menacing. I felt a pang, maybe sympathy for the kid, or maybe because I missed being him. A fat raindrop fell on the crown of the mask and disappeared under the front ridge just above the black, styrene eyes. When he took off the mask, his hair crackled with static electricity, the thinnest strands floating up around his head like a blond halo.

“You can keep the mask,” I said.

He looked at me. “Really?”

“You bet.”

“Thanks a lot,” he said, and he meant it. “This is great.”

There was the sound of a door slamming from behind him, and his mother stepped out onto the deck. “Jeremy,” she called. “Come on in now, sweetie, okay? It’s going to pour.”

Taz shook himself into a standing position and looked questioningly over at Jeremy. I looked across the front yard to Ruthie, feeling suddenly sheepish about standing outside with Jeremy, about the basketball, the mask, and my T-shirt. She was in mourning, and I was an overgrown child. I waved awkwardly and she waved back, the small, delicate gesture of someone not quite certain the world around them is made of the same things it was yesterday.

“I gotta go,” Jeremy said.

“Go ahead,” I told him. “I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah.” He turned to go, and then turned back to me again. “You sure about the mask?” he said.

“Positive,” I said. “It’s not so smart for a man my age to have too many toys. It makes people uncomfortable.”

He smiled at me, a sincere expression that seemed to contain more understanding than it should have. “Thanks, Ben,” he said, and headed back up to his mother.

“Hey, Jeremy,” I said, softly so that she wouldn’t hear.

“Yeah?”

“May the force be with you.”

There’s something about the rain in the country that I find viscerally satisfying. The rain in the Catskills doesn’t screw around. It comes down harder and more violently than in the city, with little concrete infrastructure to absorb its wrath. The trees hiss under the deluge, and it’s as if you’re hearing the collective sighs of all the leaves slaking their thirst, interrupted only by the thunder, which reverberates powerfully across the sky and rattles the windows. You’re one with the trees and the grass, part of a living tapestry, unlike in the city where you’re insulated and separated. Lindsey and I brought two chairs out onto the porch and sat there quietly, watching the rain and looking for lightning bolts over the lake. It was the first quiet time we’d shared since our ill-fated walk through town two days before.

“I’m sorry about our argument the other day,” she said, putting her hand on my arm. “I overreacted.”

“God, that seems like a long time ago,” I said. “It was my fault. Don’t worry about it.”

“You’ve been distant to me ever since.”

“I don’t mean to be.”

We sat there for a few moments and then she reached for my hand and I watched our fingers combine. I felt myself tremble slightly and realized that, despite the last few days’ distractions, I’d still been seriously depressed about what she’d said and how it had left us. I opened my mouth to say something else, but then willed myself to stay silent, to hold onto her hand, listen to the rain, and be in the moment. And I was.

An hour or so later the clouds broke and the sky reasserted itself. I brought Lindsey down to the lake to see the geese. The sun was disappearing behind the trees, causing reflective glints on the dripping leaves and bleeding crimson streaks into the low clouds on the horizon. The still, dark water of the lake reflected the sunset perfectly. We sat on the bench, my right knee against her left, watching the geese go about the business of finishing off the day. Some continued to hunt for food, their posteriors pointed comically at the sky as they submerged their heads. Most of them, though, were selecting spots on the shore to turn in for the night. They would swim up to the shore and then, with a thrashing of their wings, leap up onto the land. The whooshing sound the geese’s wings made was like a concentrated blast of wind, powerful and elemental.

“It’s such a simple existence,” Lindsey marveled. “They wake up with the sun, and they go to bed with the sun.”

“And in between, all they do is swim, eat, and rest,” I said.

“Not exactly a complicated lifestyle.”

“You sound envious.”

“I am.”

“Are you worried?” I asked her. “About the whole thing with Jack, now that it has gone public?”

She thought about it for a minute. “Not really. I guess I just
feel like it would be so absurd for us to end up in jail, you know? Who would waste their time putting us in jail?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I can’t believe Jack would ever voluntarily press charges . . .”

“Oh, quit worrying about it,” she said, leaning into me. “It’s just too beautiful here to be thinking about all of that.”

“How do you think Alison’s doing?” I asked.

“She seems all right. I think being up here is good for her. And, this is going to sound awful but, I think that the funeral wasn’t such a bad thing for Alison, you know? It took her mind off Jack for a while.”

“Poor kid. He doesn’t deserve this.”

“Jack?”

“Jeremy.” I told her about my earlier talk with him.

“I always loved the way you liked kids so much,” she said. “You know, I’m thinking of getting back into teaching.”

“Really?” I looked at her. “That’s great.”

“Well actually, I’m done thinking about it. I’ve already decided.”

“I’m glad,” I said. “You love teaching.”

“I guess I also want to be a shepherd,” she said, smiling so that the lines of her cheeks formed perfect parentheses around her mouth.

We got up and began strolling at a leisurely pace along the side of the lake, taking care not to frighten any of the dozing geese. I kept sneaking glances at her profile, watching the way the cherry gloss of her lips rested so perfectly against her clean white teeth when she opened her mouth to breathe in the cool air.

“I cried the night of your wedding,” she said suddenly, not breaking her stride.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re going to make me say something like that twice?”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“It’s bad form to tell a married man you’re not over him,” she said with a sardonic grin.

“Even when you know he’ll never be over you?”

She stopped and turned to face me. “What would you have done, Ben? Really.”

Her face had a rosy blush from the cold air, and as I looked at her, framed by the trees and water behind her, I knew that I would always be in love with her. It was a force coursing through my veins with the whooshing sound of geese’s wings. “I would have done the same thing I did,” I said. “I would have put all my energy into loving someone that wasn’t you. I would have tried in vain, every day, to not think about you, and what could have been. What should have been. I would have tried to convince myself that there’s no such thing as true love, except for the love you yourself make work, even though I knew better. I would have driven Sarah away by poorly pretending it was okay with me that she wasn’t you, like I did, and we would have ended in a quick divorce, like we did.”

“You got divorced because of me?”

“Well, you disguised as a whole bunch of other reasons. The bottom line is I never had any business marrying anyone who wasn’t you.”

She smiled sadly. “That’s exactly what I thought when I heard you were getting married.”

“Well, after you left . . .”

Lindsey looked down at her shoes as we continued to walk. “I . have this problem,” she said. “I instinctively mistrust any situation that seems to be working out too easily. I have no idea where I got it from, but I think it had a lot to do with why we broke up. Something in me just rebelled at the idea that it could really be
that easy to find the right person. It’s like I’m a film critic watching the movie of my life, and if the plot’s too simple, the film’s not believable.” She laughed quietly, almost to herself. “And when you brought it up a few days ago, it was the same thing. I was so filled with regret, so sure we were over forever, and then suddenly, against all odds, here we are six years later with a second chance. It just seemed to have worked out too easily to be true.”

“Come on,” I said to her, turning to face her. “You have to think about the right kind of movies. Complex plots may be important for Oliver Stone or Quentin Tarantino, but the romantic comedies are never too complicated. If this were a Rob Reiner film with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, the critics would be saying that it’s been way too complicated already.”

“I know,” she said, and I saw with surprise that she was close to tears. “I’m sorry. For everything.”

“Look, you did what you had to do. I never held it against you.

“No,” she pushed at the corner of her eyes with her index fingers. “You just let it wreck your marriage.”

“Hey, it was all part of the plan.”

“Oh yeah? Where’d it get you?”

“Right here,” I said. “To this exact minute. My whole life, my divorce, my insomnia, Jack’s drug problem, it’s all been leading me right here, to this lake, to this minute with you.”

We just stood there looking at each other, and the planet spun around a little bit more. It was as if we’d entered a daydream and forced it into focus. I felt the force of what I’d just said mingle with the power of the mountains around us, giving the air an electrical charge. “This is one of those moments in life,” I told her. “When you know you’re having one of those moments in life.”

“I love you, Ben,” she said, laughing as the tears came. “I really
do.” Although I hadn’t been conscious of either one of us moving, we seemed to have suddenly gotten much closer to each other.

I was going to tell her I loved her too, but before I could she was in my arms and was kissing me so hard and deep that I almost fell over. She already knew it anyway. When Lindsey kissed you she really took you in, her tongue pulling, her soft, full lips pressing, consuming. This was not, I think, something you could learn. When we ended that first kiss, my knees were trembling, like I’d just run a race. I was quivering.

I caught my breath and said, “Does this mean you’re my girl-friend?”

We came up the stairs to find Chuck sprawled out on the floor outside Jack’s door in boxer shorts and a
Blue Angel
T-shirt, reading the paper out loud. The floor surrounding him was covered with discarded sections of the paper, a box of Entenmann’s Pop ’Ems, and a bottle of Bushmills. “Hey guys,” he said, bestowing an avuncular smile of inebriated benevolence on us as we ascended. “Welcome to the program.”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m keeping Jack company,” Chuck said, indicating the locked door with an exaggerated gesture. “We’ve been talking all day.” There were little balls of gray carpet caught in the stubble on his cheek.

“Has he answered you?” Lindsey asked.

“Not as such,” Chuck admitted, taking a generous swig of the Bushmills. “He’s my imaginary friend. But I was alone here all day while you were out gallivanting around—”