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I was balancing the champagne, the bowl of fresh pasta I had just topped off with truffles and butter, and my iPod speaker. The blanket was already laid out on the sand – the ‘table’ set, the candles lit, re-creating that night from twenty years ago.
Our wedding night.
No fancy party or trip. Just us, for a change. Both of our kids were away. The truth was, we rarely even celebrated our anniversary, not since our daughter, Sophie, was born a year later on the very same day. August 28. But this year she was already at Penn and our sixteen-year-old, Max, was at fall lacrosse camp before school began.
We were at our beach house in Amagansett, basically just a cozy cape house nestled into the Hampton dunes.
‘Yow, sand crab!’ I yelped, hopping onto a foot and almost pitching the tray.
‘You drop that bowl, mister, and you can forget about whatever you have in mind for later!’ Kathy jumped up, taking the pasta from me and setting it on the blanket, where she had laid out a hand-printed menu, bamboo placemats, fluted champagne glasses, and candles. There were even little name cards.
I looked closer and noticed that they were from Annette’s, up in Vermont, where we’d had our wedding.
The very same name cards – with the same little blue ribbons – but this time they were inscribed with the words: ‘To my wonderful husband. For 20 beautiful years.’
I have to admit, my heart crumbled just a little on that one. ‘Nice touch.’
‘Thought you’d enjoy that one. Sophie did the lettering. Not to mention letting us have the day.’
‘Remind me later to thank her,’ I said. I sat down and started to pour out some champagne. ‘Wait – almost forgot!’ I connected the speaker to my iPod and pushed the play arrow. ‘My contribution!’
Bob Seger’s ‘We’ve Got Tonight’ spread over the beach. It wasn’t really ‘our song’; it was played a lot back then when we started getting cozy with each other back at college. I was never the big romantic or anything. Kathy always said she had a thirty-second window to hold my hand before I would let go.
‘So happy anniversary,’ I said. I leaned in close to kiss her.
‘Say it first,’ she said, keeping me at bay.
‘Say what?’
‘You know damn well what . . .’ She lifted her champagne glass with a determined glimmer in her eye. ‘Not like you said it back then . . . like you really mean it this time.’
‘You mean how you were the one I wanted to honor and take care of for the rest of our lives . . .?’
‘Yeah, right!’ She chortled. ‘If only you had said it like that.’
What I’d said, or kind of barked at her back then, going eighty on the New York Thruway – kind of a running joke all these years – after being nudged and pressed to set a wedding date, holding off until I’d finished my residency and hooked up with a job, then further delaying until Kathy was done with hers, was something a bit more like: ‘Okay, how about Labor Day? Does that work for you?’
‘Does that work . . .?’ Kathy blinked back, either in disbelief or shock at having received about the lamest proposal ever. ‘Yeah, it kinda works . . .’ She shrugged.
I think I drove on for another exit before I turned and noticed her pleased and satisfied smile.
‘Well, it seems to have . . .’ I wrapped my champagne glass around hers, looking in her eyes. ‘Worked. We’re still here!’
The truth was, I’d come from a family of revolving divorces. My father, five – all with beautiful, younger women. My mom, three. None of the marriages ever lasted more than a couple of years. In my family, whenever someone popped the question, it was more like code for saying that they wanted to split up.
‘So then say it,’ Kathy said. Her gaze turned serious. ‘For real this time.’
It was clear this wasn’t her usual horsing around. And the truth was, I’d always promised I’d make it up to her if we lasted twenty years.
So I put down my glass and pushed onto a knee. I took her hands in mine, in the way I had denied her those years before, and I fixed on those beautiful eyes and said, in a voice as true as I’d ever spoken: ‘If I had the chance to do it all over again – a hundred times, in a hundred different universes – I would. Each and every time. I’d spend my life with you all over again.’
Kathy gave me a look – not far from the one in the car twenty years ago – one that I thought at any second might turn into, Oh, pleeze, Jay, gimme a break.
Until I saw her little smile. ‘Well you have,’ she said, touching her glass against mine. ‘Taken care of me, Jay. All of us.’
I winked at her. ‘Now, can we eat?’
I think we both knew we would stay together from the first time we met. We were undergrads back at Cornell, and I had long, curly brown hair in those days and broad shoulders. Played midfield on the lacrosse team. We even went to the Final Four my junior year. Kathy was in veterinary science. I still kept my hair kind of long, but I’d added tortoiseshell glasses now, along with a slightly thicker waist. These days, it took a hundred sit-ups and a half hour on the treadmill every couple of days to keep me in some kind of shape.
‘Yes.’ She started to spoon out the salad. ‘Now we can eat.’
My cell phone suddenly sounded.
I groaned. I hadn’t even realized I’d had it on me. Habit, I guess. After twenty years of being on call, the ring of the phone intruding on a potential Cialis moment was the ultimate deflating sound.
Kathy sighed. ‘Probably the kids. You know how they like to bust a good mood.’
I looked at the screen. It wasn’t the kids at all. ‘It’s Charlie.’
My brother. Eight years older. He and his wife, both bipolar, each with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, lived in California as wards of the state, along with Evan, their twenty-one-year-old son. We helped out with their rent, pitched in financially when they got in over their heads. Which was often. They always seemed to need something. A call from them was rarely good news.
Kathy exhaled at me. ‘It’s our anniversary, Jay . . .’ My first thought was to let it go to voice mail, but I picked up.
‘Hi, Charlie . . .’ I answered, some irritation coming through.
It wasn’t him. It was Gabriella, his wife. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Jay . . .,’ she began, like she always began, in her gravelly, deep-throated voice and still-heavy Colombian accent. ‘Something terrible has happened here, Jay.’ Her voice was shaky and distressed. ‘Evan is dead.’
‘Dead?’ My eyes immediately shot wide, finding Kathy’s. Evan was their only child. He had always been troubled; he’d been diagnosed as bipolar as well. Out of school. Not working. In and out of trouble with the law. But dead? ‘How?’
‘He jumped off the rock. In Morro Bay.’ Then she choked back a sob, any attempt at control completely unraveling. ‘Evan is gone, Jay. He killed himself. My son is no more.’
Chapter 3
I turned to Kathy, the bottom falling out of my stomach. ‘Evan’s dead.’
She looked back at me, tears forming immediately. ‘Oh my God, Jay, how . . .?’
‘He killed himself. He jumped off a cliff.’
Like everything with Charlie and Gabriella – every monthly call on how they were, how Evan was doing, every veiled plea for money or to be bailed out – it spun your head.
Just a week ago we’d gotten a call that Evan was improving. That he was back on his meds. He was even thinking about going back to school. I brought my nephew’s cherub-like face to mind, freckles dotting his cheekbones. That smug Don’t worry, I got it all figured out smirk he always wore.
‘Oh, Gabby, I’m so sorry. I thought he was doing well.’
‘Well, you know we haven’t been telling you everything, Jay. It’s not so easy to have to talk about your son that way.’
‘I know,’ I said, bludgeoned. ‘I know.’
I was a surgeon. I dealt with life and death every day. But when it’s someone close to you, your own . . . everything changed. They’d never had jobs or money. Or even friends that I knew. They lived on welfare, totally under the radar. Evan was their only hope. The only thing good in their own failed lives.
Now that was gone . . .
When he was younger, my nephew had shown a lot of promise. His early report cards were always A’s. He was kind of a basketball whiz, his room lined with trophies. I remembered how brightly Charlie and Gabby spoke of him back then.
‘How’s Charlie holding up?’ I asked. ‘Let me talk with him.’ Kathy inched closer and took my hand. I shook my head grimly.
‘Your brother cannot come to the phone,’ Gabriella said. ‘He’s a mess, Jay. He can’t stop crying. He’s blaming himself for the whole thing. He can’t even speak.’
Blame . . . My brother’s life was a monument to blame. I could think of a million reasons he might be feeling that.
Charlie was my half brother, from my dad’s first marriage. Eight years older than me; I barely knew him growing up. He was raised in Miami, in the sixties, brilliant in many ways – a math whiz, early into quantum physics and Eastern religions – but just as wild. My dad’s marriage to his mother had only lasted a year and a half, then he made his way up to New York; started his business, a women’s apparel firm; and married my mom. He barely even acknowledged he already had a son.
Charlie was smoking pot by the time most kids were hiding beers. Then he went upward from there: speed, mushrooms, LSD. He grew his hair out, totaled his Corvette. A ranked junior in tennis, he flung his racquet into the stands at the state high school championships and never went back. He always had this dream of becoming a big-time rock star. And he even produced a record once, in LA – the only real accomplishment in his life.
Then there were a lot of dark years . . .
First, when he was twenty-three, it was the Hartford House of the Living, where he spent three months after the cops picked him up on the streets raving that he was Jesus Christ.
Then the street scene in New Orleans, with this ragged band of drugged-out bikers and felons known as the STPs – the Stinky Toilet People – who slept on the floors in abandoned buildings whacked out of their minds. Charlie once told me that you could wake up with a knife stuck in your chest if you simply rolled up against one of their girlfriends wrong.
And finally that commune up near Big Sur, where I’d heard about this cult of stoned-out musicians and drifters, several of whom were later convicted for a string of horrible murders, though Charlie always claimed he was only hanging around there for the chicks and the drugs.
For years, he bounced in and out of hospitals and jails. Schizophrenic and bipolar, he’d been on lithium for thirty years, not to mention his own private pharmacy of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. He always battled with our father, right up to the day he died.
Ultimately, he did settle down. He met Gabriella in a recovery clinic back in Miami. Together, they moved out west and lived this quiet, codependent life in a coastal California town, granted disability by the state, just enough to squeak by.
They had Evan, and they tried their best to raise him. We always pitched in, anteing up for a car when theirs broke down or paying off their debts. Charlie once said to me, ‘You know how ashamed it makes me, Jay, to have to take money from my little brother just to get by.’
But of course they always took it. We were all that kept them from living under a bridge somewhere.
Now Evan . . .
My nephew’s life was a perfect storm of things that had gone wrong. Mental instability. No money. Violence and fighting in the house. At first, everything seemed on the right track; then it all changed. Scrapes at school became brushes with the law. He started taking drugs – speed, ecstasy, OxyContin. He and my brother began to clash – just as Charlie and our father used to clash – furniture tossed, punches thrown, the police called. Evan’s behavior grew increasingly erratic and withdrawn. He started hearing voices. He was placed on a daily diet of the same pills his father took – lithium, Klonopin, Thorazine – but he always seemed to be more off them than on. Finally he dropped out of school, got himself fired from a series of menial jobs. I tried my best to get him private counseling, to lure him away from their house. Once, I even begged him to come live with us and go to a junior college back east. But Charlie and Gabby never seemed prepared to let him go.
Only months ago, they’d told us that Evan had turned around. They’d said he was back on his meds, being helpful around the house. Even thinking of going back to college. Then only last week they’d left a message: He’d been taken away. He was in a state hospital. They were talking about finding him some kind of a halfway facility where they could place him under supervision. Force him to stay on his meds. We thought this was good. For the first time in years, we thought maybe there was a reason to hope.
Now this . . .
‘Your brother needs you, Jay,’ Gabriella said. She choked back a sob. ‘I’m afraid for what he might do. You know we don’t have anywhere else to turn.’
They had no money. No jobs to focus on. No friends to help soften the pain. All they ever had was this kid. And now he was gone.
I gave her over to Kathy, who tried to comfort her, but what was there to say? In a couple of minutes she put down the phone.
‘I have to go out there,’ I said.
She nodded.
I scrolled through my commitments for the following week – mostly things I could pass off on my partners, other than a procedure I had to perform on Friday on the teenage daughter of a friend.
‘I’ll go Monday. I’ll only stay a couple of days.’
Kathy shook her head. ‘You can’t wait until Monday, Jay. These people need you. You’re all they have.’ She took my hand in hers. ‘You have to go tomorrow, Jay.’
My gaze drifted to the meal spread out on the blanket, now cold. The glasses of champagne. Our little celebration. It all seemed pointless now.
I realized I hadn’t seen my brother in more than five years.
‘I’ll go with you, you know,’ Kathy said, moving next to me. ‘I will.’
‘Thanks.’ I smiled and drew her next to me. ‘But this is something I ought to do alone.’
‘You’re a good brother, Jay.’
She handed me my glass. Then she took hers and we touched them lightly together. ‘Here’s to Evan,’ Kathy said.
‘To Evan.’
We took a sip and sat, knees up, watching the waves against the shore. Then she leaned over and re-pressed the play button on the iPod.
‘Like the man says . . .’ She put down her drink. ‘We’ve still got tonight.’
Chapter 4
The three-hour drive up the California coast on 101 to Charlie’s the following day gave my mind time to wander to some old things.
It went to my brother as a long-haired eighteen-year-old who had just dropped out of college, his conversation rocketing back and forth between complex string theory, Timothy Leary, and how the Beatles’ Abbey Road was the new gospel, in what I knew now, but not back then, was one of his uncontrolled, manic rants.
It went to how he had once visited me at Cornell – after he was released from the psychiatric home in Hartford – and how we took a weekend trip to Montreal. I recalled how we had trolled for girls along Sherbrooke Street, near McGill, and how Charlie had ended up screwing our waitress back in the hotel room after he’d convinced her he had taught Eric Clapton all he knew, and air-played her the opening riff from Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, while I pounded the pillow over my head in the other bed, alone.
My brother could charm the birds out of the trees.
It’s easy, Charlie always said, with that sly, mischievous grin. If you ask every chick you run into if they wanna screw, now and then one of them says yes! Even when you look like me!
Eventually, winding through the wooded canyons around Lompoc, my thoughts roamed here:
To the last time he had any kind of relationship with our dad.
It was maybe twenty years ago, Charlie’s last chance at a real life before he permanently gave up.
Somehow, he had persuaded my father to dispose of his design samples by sending them down to Miami, where Charlie had set up a rack in a women’s hair salon near his mother’s dance studio, selling them as one-of-a-kind creations.
It was only a wobbly metal rack in the rear of this cheesy salon, crammed with colorful velour and cotton cashmere sets – my dad’s particular genius. But to Charlie, it might as well have been the epicenter of the apparel world. He held court, shuttling back and forth between hair stations, his own hair bound neatly into a ponytail and dressed as cleanly as I’d ever seen him, the blue-haired women eating out of his hand. He’d mesmerize them with stories about his famous father in the rag trade, the glamorous women he screwed while in LA, celebrity rockers he did coke with, lurid tales of his years on the road, all the while pushing oil stocks on the Canadian stock exchange.
He was turning dozens of sample sets each week at fifty to sixty bucks a pop. Real money in his pocket for the first time in his life. Living in a decent place on Biscayne Bay with Gabby and his infant son. He had an exuberance I’d never seen before – a twinkling in his eyes.
For the first time he was making it – in the real world.
