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Will hadn't left his bedroom since he'd gotten back. He had a dim awareness of the time having passed along normally outside of his door. Inside his room, though, he felt like the waking dead. He sat and smoked, smoked and thought, and tried to make himself get up. He told himself to put the damn journals back in the box, mail them back to her, go try to save at least one of his jobs, and leave this shit in the past where it belonged. Fourteen thousand dollars were all he had left to worry about. Fifteen he amended, thinking of the plane tickets Neil had charged for him. Six, maybe eight more months and he'd be done with all that turmoil his dad had left him. He could get up right now and be back on track soon enough. Fifteen thousand dollars and he'd be clear of forty-eight months of spooning food into his father's mouth while those goddamn angry eyes watched him. Fifteen thousand dollars and he'd have paid his penance for whatever had made his father hate him. Fifteen thousand dollars and he would have finally been heading back to Maryland. He forced himself up, propelled himself out of the room, and bullied himself into a shower and shave. But looking in the mirror, razor at his neck, what came into his head was that things hadn't stopped. Since he'd gotten back time had seemed like a weather report from another country - important to someone but nothing to do with him. But now he realized it had everything to do with him. If time hadn't stopped, then Maggie had gone on as well. Right now she was living her life as someone else's wife. The thought nearly wrecked him. His hands shook and his stomach heaved. The razor clattered to the sink and his hands moved to grip the cold ceramic sides of the sink, his vision swimming and body trying to hurl up food that wasn't there. Dry spasms trembled through him and he stared at the drain trying to make it focus into a single shape. Red spatters appeared, doubled shapes spreading into long fingers pointing to the black circle of drain. He dimly noted the sting in his neck and the niggling sensation of blood cutting a track through the shaving cream on the underside of his chin to drip in almost perfect rhythm with the faucet. He fought for control over his mutinous digestive system then wiped haphazardly at the foam and blood on his face, not caring about the blossoming stains he was leaving on the pale green towel. All that mattered now were the journals. For two days after arriving home, he'd been unable to open a single one. They'd been polar north to his compass and he felt them like a living presence. They seemed to hum and whisper and call to him. But when he got close, tried to pick one up, even thought about reading the secrets they might hold... then it felt like a malevolent force pushing him back. He'd smoked cigarette after cigarette trying to stare down the somehow accusing stack of them. But whatever force had held him back before was gone. He sorted through them for a moment to find the oldest date. Then, towel still wrapped around his waist, he sat down in the floor and started to read. Robert was starting to wake up to a few truths. The first hadn't been much of a surprise: Will was having a goddamn breakdown. Robert had told Will and Terry and anyone else who'd listen that working all those jobs would lead to that eventually. Will's withdrawal almost made sense even without trying to guess what had happened in Maryland. The second thing was a little trickier to suss out. The tip off was a message on the answering machine. The billing department of someplace called Carvey Medical had called for Will. Feeling like he was prying into something he shouldn't, Robert looked up the company on the internet. He wasn't sure what he'd expected to find but a high-priced extended care facility wasn't it. He skimmed over paragraphs extolling the virtues of what was apparently a well respected "nursing and rehabilitation environment" who couched every negative aspect in terms so impersonal that it was difficult to figure out they were talking about dying as comfortably as money could allow. He'd just decided they'd gotten the wrong Will Sheppard when he noticed the address for the place was Wichita Falls, Texas. Robert presented his new theory to Terry when he picked her up that evening. "Did you know that Will's dad had a stroke not long after we graduated?" he asked her when she got in the car. Robert rambled through his detective work - both proud of his investigative abilities and ashamed of prying into his friend's life. "So I think that's what he's been paying for with all these stupid jobs of his." He turned to his wife, interested in her take on the puzzle. But her face surprised him. "I don't care," she answered quietly, her jaw clenched in a way he'd seen a lot recently. He just gotten to the parking lot for the restaurant they'd been heading to. Robert let the silence in the car brew as he navigated into a space. Turning the car off, he was reluctant to look at his wife again. He could sense another revelation working its way to the surface and he didn't think he was going to like it. Terry flung her seat belt off, the fastener hitting the passenger window with a crack so loud he was sure the glass would shatter. It didn't but it had a second chance when Terry got out and slammed the door. The window still didn't break but the bubble of the third realization of the day did. There was only one thing Robert knew of that produced the kind of senseless anger he'd just seen displayed so well, one emotion that could transmute into such white-hot anger. Now Robert experienced that alchemy for himself. |
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