The Debt (25 page)

On the Monday before final exams, I waited in a conference room with my attorney at the county courthouse. Scott was set to stand trial after the New Year, and the closer it got to the holidays, the more I thought about him sitting in jail and what it must have been like to detox in a prison cell. I didn’t want to feel sorry for him, but a nagging sense of culpability had eaten at me since the break-in.

“You’re certain this is what you want?” my attorney asked. He slid the stapled sheets of paper in front of me. “Look it over again. This is your last chance to change your mind.”

Simon was right; I couldn’t take responsibility for Scott’s actions. But I would shoulder the blame for my part. Truth was, I should have helped him sooner. Looking back on all the petty bullshit between us—missing rehearsals and flaking on the band—that was a poor excuse for turning my back on a friend when he didn’t have the will or wherewithal to help himself. Because if my circumstances had been different, I might have ended up like him somewhere along the way: angry, hopeless, and looking for anything to numb the pain of waking up and taking the next breath every day.

It didn’t matter why Scott got hooked. Hell, maybe it was a fucking accident that spiraled out of his control. I didn’t care about the why. Just that he be given a second chance to live a better life. I had gotten that when I needed it most, and it made all the difference.

“The prosecutor has already agreed to the terms,” my attorney said, scrolling through e-mails on his phone. “And I’m confident the judge will sign off on it as long as Scott consents to be remanded into his parents’ custody.”

A pair of thick wooden double doors creaked and groaned. Escorted between a uniformed officer and a public defender in a cheap gray suit, Scott shuffled in wearing orange hospital scrubs and slip-on shoes. His hands cuffed at his stomach and chained to the shackles at his ankles. He jingled with every short step scuffed across the shiny floor. Those jingles, his little old-man steps, they laughed at him. Set deep inside his pale, gaunt face, his sallow eyes held profane humiliation. It hurt to look at him.

“Scott...”

I had come to tell him I was dropping the charges. To meet face-to-face and say that I could forgive him as long as he took this opportunity to start over. My attorney had worked it out with the court that Scott could avoid more jail time if he checked into rehab and stayed clean. I’d foot the bill. But seeing him hunched over the table, a broken shell of his former self, I knew that facing me in his condition only deepened his shame. Because it wasn’t Scott who had threatened me or broken into my house. It wasn’t the kid I’d known since high school who had pulled a gun on me at the bar. That person was a chemical creation that died of the DTs weeks ago. In front of me was the leftovers, and they didn’t owe me anything.

So I left. My attorney stuck around to put the deal in writing and I got on with my life, leaving Scott in peace to do the same.

“Should we get you fit for a mouth guard?” I asked.

Punky gnawed on her bottom lip in agitation. She locked the back door and gave it a tug but released the handle without repeating the process.

“Or just have your mouth wired shut?”

“Fuck off,” she snapped, huffing her way through the living room to the alarm keypad in the foyer. “You wouldn’t last a week without a blow job.”

I wouldn’t last three days. Fucking sue me. After I’d made it past the pain and exhaustion post-surgery, I was a right cranky prick until Punky declared me well enough for a good lay.

Hadley had kept to her word and started seeing a therapist about her OCD. She wasn’t two weeks in before she bit my head off after I made the terrible mistake of praising her for her progress. She hated the adulation. Gold stars for achievement were not the way to motivate Punky, as I discovered. Rather than being encouraging, she found “attagirl” condescending, as if we were placating her. If there was one thing she hated, it was being treated like a child. So, she got no pats on the back from me, just a swift kick in the ass to tell her she’d done well. It seemed to work out and kept heavy objects from flying at my head.

As she locked the front door, her hand lingered with the key in the dead bolt. I waited a moment to see if she’d let go on her own. Hadley appeared frozen in place, warring with her instincts.

“Go ahead, Punky. By all means, take your time. We’ve got all day.”

She growled under her breath and kicked the front door, turning to flip me off. “Shithead.”

“I know.” I kissed her temple as she slid into my car. “Love you, too, sweetheart.”

We were on our way to campus for the showcase that was the final exam for my Jazz Composition class. My fingers played over the steering wheel, revising bars of music in my head. It wasn’t unheard of that I would rewrite an original work as I performed it for an audience.

“You look nervous,” Hadley said.

My speed was excessive as we cruised toward the highway. The barbell in my tongue flicked between my teeth and I gripped the stick shift too tightly.

“I’m fine.”

“Liar.”

“I’m not nervous.” So I was half a liar.

Truthfully, it wasn’t the performance with my jazz ensemble that had me white-knuckling the steering wheel. Music was second nature. Getting the notes on paper had been the difficult part. Playing? I could do that in my sleep.

“The bulging vein in your head says otherwise.”

“That’s my Pestering Punky vein. It responds to how irritating you are.”

“Whatever. You can’t live without me.”

“You got me there.”

An hour later we were in the dressing room behind the stage of the campus music hall. My ensemble was up next, the musicians already waiting in the wings while I fucked with the bow tie on my tux and fingered the box hidden in my jacket pocket.

“I think you are nervous.” Punky straightened my tie and smoothed her hands over the shoulders of my jacket, picking lint off the fabric. “You’re stalling.”

“I don’t stall.” Though I could barely breathe and my vision was going a bit sideways.

Punky had always set me on edge, off kilter. She had a way of tilting the ground under my feet to send me sliding, struggling to stay upright. But in this moment, I had never felt so sure in my footing.

“We could run away,” she teased, sliding her hands down the front of my shirt. Hadley stared up at me, adventure and mischief in her eyes.

I pushed her hair behind her ear, running my fingertips along her neck. “Would you like that?”

“Hmm. Maybe. Screw our way across the country. Make love to me in every Springfield. Kick up trouble from one coast to the other. You could play guitar on street corners for tips and I would draw caricatures in the park. Happily-ever-after.”

“There’s no such thing. Endings are the saddest part.”

“Okay, if you want to get all existential about it.”

There was a knock at the door, followed by the stage manager’s two-minute warning.

“Hadley.” I wrapped my arms around her back, skimming my fingers along the skin above the top of her pants. “I know we said we were done apologizing, but I want to tell you I’m sorry.”

“Josh—”

“I’m sorry for not trusting you. For not telling you the truth back then and trusting that you’d love me anyway. I should have had more faith in us, because every day, from the start, you’ve been there. You’ve always been kind, and loyal, and found the goodness in me when I didn’t see it myself. You make me want to try harder. You make me a better man. Above all, you make me whole. I love you, and I’m forever grateful to know you. And as long as I live, I’ll never stop trying to deserve you.”

“Here.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper that she placed in my hand.

“Not to be a dick, but I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

“I’ve been saving this,” she said. “Read it.”

Hadley kissed me, a sweet, gentle touch of her lips to mine.

“Break a leg. I know you’ll be brilliant.” Then she darted off.

The letter, addressed to me, was dated on the morning I went into surgery.

I was eleven years old the first time I played for a paying audience. It had baffled me why anyone would spend money to watch one short, scrawny kid sit at a piano and recite someone else’s work. Getting all dressed up to listen to me plunk at the keys. At home, dressed in my pajamas and strawberry jam still stuck in the corners of my lips, I had played for fun. To me, it had felt like paying to sit in a convention hall and watch someone else play video games. But then, that was a thing, too.

When I was old enough to start penning my own compositions, it began to make sense. As a child, I had never been good at making friends. Reading notations on a page and replicating the music was easy—the instructions were right there in black and white. Basic human interaction, though, wasn’t a natural process for me. Until I learned to create music. Through that act of creativity, I could express the thoughts I was incapable of speaking aloud. And it didn’t matter if the audience understood my meaning, because they were participating. It was an exchange of ideas. Upon the platform of music that I provided, they wrote their own stories. They interpreted their own emotions and imagined what untold narrative existed within the notes. In that way, we made a connection, and I didn’t have to leave the relative safety of the pool of light that encircled the piano.

Since I started performing with the band at the Nest, I’d gotten better about my proximity to my audience. I had learned to feed off their energy rather than fear it. But for me, there was no comparison to the quiet anticipation and rapt attention that I could command when I broke the well-mannered silence as my fingers hit the keys. On an empty stage, above an audience hidden behind a black veil with bright while lights staring back at me, it was like drifting in space. Free.

The small audience of classmates, friends, and families offered polite applause as I crossed the stage to the piano. Professor Monroe announced my name while I took my seat on the bench and flexed my fingers, preparing my muscles. Upstage, my jazz ensemble filed in and took their places.

The song began like a nursery rhyme: simple, sweet. There was a melodic quality that felt familiar, like something from childhood. It reminded me of my mother and how she’d taught me to play. The hours spent learning the basic progression of notes that told stories of fairy tales and adventures.

As my fingers moved over the keys, the tune matured. The upright bass came in beneath the melody, then the saxophone and trumpet. A slow, gentle, gradual growth. The drums tumbled in, soft at first, becoming more excited as the rhythm sped. It was a tightly focused chaos. Sonic near-anarchy bellowed from the stage, filling the acoustically designed auditorium with frenetic energy.

Behind us, the curtain opened. Revealed was a ten-piece orchestra of horns and strings and woodwinds. The chaos coalesced into harnessed harmony. Full, rich, vigorous tones vibrated the floor beneath my feet. The hair on the back of my neck stood tall. My hands danced across the keys, pulling my body to sway, chasing the lower chords and charging after the high, exuberant sopranos.

I poured everything into that performance. My years of frustration and fear, elation and pleasure, and the hope that I might have once more found myself in the one passion that had transformed my life. The piece wasn’t strictly jazz, not that I thought Professor Monroe would mind, but it was a reflection of me: a little off kilter and a bit too aggressive.

It only recently made sense to me that, despite my past, no one was stopping me from choosing the life I wanted to lead. For so long I had imagined all these tethers leashing me to an existence that was only about what I wouldn’t do and couldn’t have. Chains that bound me to destructive self-pity. That man had abused me, and though I had escaped his grasp more than a decade ago, I hadn’t let myself free of his influence. Carmen had given me all she had for the brief time we shared, but I hadn’t used any of it in any meaningful way.

Starting right away, I wanted my life to be about meaning, purpose. I promised myself that no matter my scars, no matter the work still left to accomplish, I wouldn’t be a passive participant. The path before me wasn’t entirely clear, but at least I had a direction, and I wouldn’t have to walk it alone.

The symphony played on as I stood from the piano and left the stage, descending the stairs into the audience. Hadley sat beside my father in the front row. Her eyes met mine, wet with tears and growing more terrified with every deliberate step I took toward her.

This wasn’t the plan. Hadley hated attention and would surely bludgeon me later for drawing her into the spotlight. I had intended to wait until after dinner to take her to the beach for a whole romantic scene under the moonlight. But fuck if I couldn’t stop myself.

At her feet, I sank to one knee. The speech I had prepared evaporated. Every painstakingly revised line I’d spent weeks writing escaped me. Because when I saw the excited anticipation overwhelm her face, I couldn’t think about anything else. This woman was the best part of me, and I didn’t want to take another breath without her.

“I hate you so much right now,” she whispered, her lips trembling.

I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my mother’s engagement ring to slip onto Hadley’s finger. “I can’t promise you a happy ending,” I said, leaning forward with her hand clasped in mine to speak at her ear, “but I can offer you a happy beginning. Marry me, Punky.”

She grabbed me by the lapels and stood, dragging me to my feet. “Took you long enough.”