Falling for June: A Novel Page 4

I sat quiet for a minute, looking at him and wondering if he was serious or if he was messing with me. I was interested, of course. Who wouldn’t be? But then how could an old man who couldn’t even pay his mortgage come up with twenty grand? And what was I in a position to do for him to earn it? And in two weeks, no less. Plus, I worried if I heard him out it might be harder to turn him down, which I surely would have to do. But curiosity was killing me, and I just had to hear what the old dodger had cooked up.

  “Okay,” I finally said, “they might be small, but I’m all ears.”

  He kept quiet, eyeing me like a cunning old storybook wolf, silent and dangerous, just sitting for a full minute or so and not even saying anything.

  “Well, what is it?” I asked, swallowing the hook whole. “What’s the deal?”

  He leaned forward and rubbed his hands together, speaking conspiratorially. “I can’t tell you any details about the offer until you hear the whole story,” he said. “It’ll take a little time, but it will be worth your while, I promise.”

  I’d like to have been able to claim I had something better to do on my birthday than listen to an old man reminisce, but I didn’t. And besides, there wasn’t much I wouldn’t sit through for a chance to earn twenty thousand clams.

  “So, you’ll sit and listen,” he said, watching me as I mulled it over.

  “All right,” I said, after hesitating just long enough to get back a little hand. “But only if I can switch to a different chair. This one is swallowing me.”

  After I had dislodged myself from the chair and settled on the sofa to listen, the old man brought his hands together prayer-wise in a kind of satisfied and grateful gesture. Then he interlaced his fingers, closed his eyes, and inhaled one long, calming breath, as if deciding where exactly he should start. When he opened his eyes again, he began:

  “I suppose I should first tell you about how I met my wife. And I can’t tell you about her unless I tell you how I came to be standing on the roof, ready to jump. It’s a little embarrassing now, and I’d like to say I was young, but compared to you I was already an old man at the time. It all began in the winter of 1986 . . .”

  4

  HALLEY’S COMET WAS passing overhead somewhere, obscured by high clouds, the night David Hadley’s mother passed away. She had been too young to see it when it had last visited in 1910, so despite its having returned twice in her lifetime she had never set eyes on it and never would.

  And neither would he, David thought, standing at the care center window and not yet knowing that his mother had drawn her last breath on the bed behind him. She was seventy-eight years old. David was fifty-one. When he turned and saw her open mouth and blank stare, he did not call for help. Cancer had done what cancer does and there was no help to be had. He simply closed her eyes and sat beside the bed, holding her hand until the last bit of warmth had drained away, leaving her fingers cold in his.

  Well, he thought, I guess I’m next.

  And he really couldn’t wait to join her in that dreamless sleep. Besides his having just lost his mother, David’s life was a first-rate mess. He was divorced, exhausted, out of shape, and depressed. He had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, but he suspected, at least in his case anyway, that this was just a vague label they used instead of diagnosing him as a terminal loser. He had told the doctor as much—asking why he shouldn’t feel anxious when something terrible seemed always about to happen and usually did—but his doctor’s answer had been another prescription for Noveril, which David added to the others lying in his desk drawer, unfilled.

  David worked for a Seattle accounting firm in the newly constructed Columbia Seafirst Center. It was the tallest building on the West Coast, yet David’s seventh-floor cubicle had a view of nothing except the office bonus board, which showed him behind everyone else in billable hours each month. He liked to tell himself it was because he was thorough in his work; he knew it was because he hated his job. David spent his days auditing inventory reports for the firm’s industrial clients, pursuing numerical representations for various pieces and parts he would never see and didn’t care to understand through an incalculably large labyrinth of colorless spreadsheets. But there was no spreadsheet big enough to add up his regret, and after work, on nights when David did not visit his mother, he would stop into the state-run liquor store on his way home and buy a bottle of Southern Comfort.

  “You know it’s cheaper if you buy the fifth or the half gallon,” the clerk would almost always say as he rang up David’s usual pint and stuffed it into a paper sack. But David was an accountant and he knew this wasn’t true—because he’d drink however much he bought and be back for more tomorrow anyway. He wasn’t an alcoholic, though—no, he was a failure even at that—because he had quit before and he knew he could quit again at any time. It wasn’t his drinking that worried him, not at all. Rather, it was what he might do for relief instead of drinking once the booze stopped working.

  With the bottle tucked deep inside his coat, David would walk through the Seattle drizzle the rest of the way back to his apartment, looking down at the sidewalk and avoiding the eyes of passersby. Once home, he would settle into his chair and watch the rain slide like sadness down his window, sipping his SoCo straight from the bottle to slake his thirst for freedom from his own miserable thoughts, a welcome, albeit brief, relief.

  Sometimes he would turn on his small TV and watch Cheers or Miami Vice. Later, he might stumble outside to the all-night convenience store for a half gallon of ice cream and a pack of cigarettes. It was not uncommon in those sad and lonely days for him to wake the next morning on his sofa with the television still on and his naked chest covered in a sticky amalgamation of Southern Comfort, Breyers Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream, and Marlboro ashes. On especially depraved mornings, there might be a finger or two of melted ice cream left, and he would pick out the cigarette butts, tip the container to his mouth, and drink it for his breakfast.

  In addition to antidepressants, David’s doctor had been suggesting cardiovascular exercise for years, and he ignored this prescription just the same as the others. There was a gym across the street from his office, but the people inside always looked like hamsters in a cage to him. Plus, as he reminded himself each morning as he passed it by, there was no reason to put his humiliation on display. It was David’s mother who convinced him to finally take his doctor’s advice. “Please, Davy,” she had pleaded from her care center bed. “If you won’t do it for yourself, at least do it for me. I couldn’t go on without you.” He knew by then that at the rate her cancer was advancing he would outlive her even if he took up dodging city buses for exercise, and she knew it too, but he agreed anyway just to ease her mind.

  His doctor had suggested climbing stairs, and what better place to find them than the seventy-six-story Columbia Seafirst Center, where he worked? So while Halley’s Comet was still working its way around, and while David’s mother was still alive, David began dragging himself off his couch each morning, knowing that when the workday was over he would change in the office bathroom, ease into the stairwell, and begin his daily torture routine. His doctor was thrilled when he found out, of course. He even said it would help with David’s depression. And his doctor was right, but not in the way he thought.

  David had hoped the stairwell would be empty and he had not counted on the health-conscious employees descending from the lower floors on their way to the garage or out to catch buses in the street. But by the third week he had progressed to higher floors, where he discovered a wonderful solitude, having the entire stairwell there to himself—nothing but his own steps echoing off the concrete walls and his own thoughts echoing in his throbbing skull. The fact that he was getting progressively healthier brought him no peace and seemed rather like an accidental side effect of the promise he had made to his mother. Something did change however: he began to look forward to his workouts, if for no other reason than a subtle but growing for
m of sadism. He even began to relish his nightly drinking again, sometimes taking the clerk’s advice and swapping his usual pint for a fifth, simply for the extra bit of suffering the hangover added during his afternoon climbs. It was pure torture—and in his mind, he deserved it.

  The exceptions to this routine were the days he went to see his mother. It was reading to her in her bed—usually “Laughter, the Best Medicine” from Reader’s Digest or “Letters to the Editor” from the Sunday Seattle Times—that spared him on weekends when he might have otherwise had no stairs to climb and nothing at all to interrupt his sorry self-loathing and bingeing on ice cream and booze. But comets are always on the move, and so is cancer, and then his mother died, and with her died the last of his reasons to do anything at all, including climbing his stairs. Or so he thought.

  Much to his own surprise, just four days after he laid his mother next to his father in the family plot, David was back in the stairwell again. Maybe because he didn’t know what else to do, or perhaps because he had come to enjoy the company of his echoing steps and the hollow pounding of his tired heart, which seemed to beat like a drum calling him toward death. He often begged with every third or fourth step for his heart to give out, for the pain to be through. But the human heart is hearty, even when broken, and his was stronger than he knew.

  Despite his heart’s commitment to cling to life, David often thought about suicide. The idea had occasionally crossed his mind over the years. He had even written a suicide note once, a decade prior when his wife had filed for divorce. But that had been little more than a cry for help and a poor pass at punishing his wife for wanting a child so much she’d leave him for a man who could give her one, especially a man who had supposedly been his friend. But this time was different. The death of his mother and the absolute loneliness he felt afterward, along with the fact that he had no one left to even write a farewell note to, made the odds of his seriously attempting suicide much greater. And as the idea grew daily in his thoughts, so did a strange and dangerous ritual.

  Each day, around half past five or so, David would find himself standing on the top stairwell step of the Columbia Seafirst Center, drenched in sweat and wondering if today was the day that he would finally die. You see, he had begun checking the roof access door, hoping to find it open. Each time he lifted his tired foot onto that last step, he’d reach for the handle, close his eyes, and make a silent promise: if he ever found it unlocked, if the door ever actually opened, he would walk straight to the roof’s edge and jump off. It was a silent wish for freedom, a kind of personal and daily prayer for relief. And if nothing else, it was a coin toss to see if he really did want to die.

  When David was a young boy, before the accident that killed his father, every Friday evening they would all three pile into the front seat of his father’s pickup and go downtown to eat together at the local diner. “Life is too damn short to not splurge a little now and again,” his father would always say. And each time after dinner David would find himself torn between his two favorite desserts on the menu: baked chocolate pudding or the “world famous” Riley’s marshmallow pie. It was a tough decision for a boy with a sweet tooth, but other than once on his eighth birthday when his mother had allowed him to order both, he had to choose one.

  His father would haul out a quarter and toss it into the air, then catch it and slap it down on the worn yellow Formica tabletop, keeping it covered with his flattened hand. “Heads or tails for pudding, Son?” But the point was not to order the dessert that won the toss. The point was to find out which dessert he really wanted. “Because,” his father would tell him, “if you say tails for pudding and tails wins, you’ll always know by your first gut reaction if you really wanted pie.”

  And so it was now with suicide. Each time David reached the top stair, he’d put a hand on the roof access door lever and close his eyes, taking a deep breath and telling himself that if it opened he would jump. And each time it didn’t open he felt a surge of disappointment. The coin toss never lied. But because the door was always locked, he could not be entirely sure how he would feel were it to ever actually open onto the roof. Until the day that it did.

  A little over two and a half months after his mother’s passing, while his coworkers rushed home to huddle around their TVs and watch news coverage of the Chernobyl meltdown trickling in reluctantly from overseas, David was having his own meltdown in the stairwell he had come by then to haunt. His mind was racing faster than his heart, and not one thought was good. He felt panic taking over, the stairwell closing in, and his claustrophobia got so bad he stopped off on the fifty-fifth floor to puke in the bathroom. He hid for several minutes in the stall, just sitting on the toilet with his head down between his knees and chanting, “Enough, enough, enough.”

  When he finally got up from the toilet to leave, he caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror and stopped to look at the stranger he had become. His face drooped, more from hopelessness than from age. It was not an unhandsome face, but he could not see this at the time. Nor could he see that it was a thoughtful face, with features almost too delicate for a man. His face, the one that lived inside his mind and heavy heart, was the face of a thirteen-year-old boy.

  Prior to thirteen his features had not existed to him at all—other than as a means of seeing, smelling, hearing, and tasting the world, of course. But with puberty blossoming at thirteen, he began spending long mornings in front of the bathroom mirror, warring with pimples or hunting for the first signs of a whisker, and he came to know his face. And that was the face he expected now to see. That was the face he had been looking at in the truck’s rearview mirror when the other car came into their lane. That was the face he had been looking at when he should have been looking ahead at the road. That face became the face of a regret he could never outgrow, staring at it ever after with shame and silent judgment in countless subsequent mirrors, and hearing again and again his father’s final words: “You drive, Son. I’m tired.”

  He and his mother had taken over his father’s small antique business then, once David had recovered and his father was in the ground. His mother handled the sales and restorations, and young David handled the accounting. It was this tragedy, in fact, that had led him to his current career. Strange how little in life we actually choose for ourselves, David thought.

  And now, all these years later, standing in a bathroom on the fifty-fifth floor, David knew with equal conviction that he had gone terribly off track. He was certain he had taken a wrong turn somewhere, perhaps on that fateful day, but the tangled intersections of the past would yield no clue as to how he might right his course, and the relentless march of time offered him no hope of ever returning to start again. So here he was, standing in the mirror and looking at a stranger.

  These were just some of the thoughts rattling around in David Hadley’s tortured head as he looked in the mirror. They were still on his mind when he returned to the stairwell, and they grew in amplitude with each floor. When he reached the last step and grabbed for the handle of the roof-access door, his mind was an echo chamber of regret. But by this time David had come to expect that the door would be locked, and he no longer bothered making his silent promise. The result of neglecting this, of course, was that he had no idea how he really felt when the handle turned and the door swung open.

  It was a damp and dreary Seattle afternoon and all he could see outside the door was a wall of gray. It seemed like purgatory waiting. His heart pounded in his heaving chest, and he was suddenly aware that he was soaked with sweat. Is this a wake-up call or a gift? he wondered. He thought back to all those days when the door had been locked, and he remembered how disappointed he had felt each time. Then he thought about the stairs leading down, the walk home, the liquor store again, the empty apartment, the mindless TV. Finally, he thought about the stranger’s face in that mirror. “This is your chance,” he told himself. “You may never find this door open again.”

 
David lifted his foot and stepped across the threshold onto the roof. There was not nearly as much wind as he thought there should be at such a height, and he walked slowly and methodically, crossing the rooftop toward the edge. He had doubts, of course—who of even the most depressed among us wouldn’t?—but each step was a silent vote for following through. And although he had expected to feel nervous, his breathing and his heart rate actually calmed the closer to the edge he came. Then suddenly he was there, with a woozy head, wobbly knees, and a whirling stomach. There was a wide, foot-tall rail, a kind of bulkhead covered with metal flashing, and he sucked up his fear and stepped up onto it and looked straight down into the gray.

  A thick fog had rolled in from the sound, and only the tops of the highest buildings rose above it, piercing the fog and creating the impression of a disconnected ghost city floating on a cloud. But the city was not floating, and he knew that were he to lift his foot once more, just one easy step after all the others in his life that had been so hard, the ground would come rushing up through the fog to meet him, putting an end to his imponderably pathetic life. And in a mercifully short amount of time too, he thought. He guessed about six seconds. And because he was an accountant, he was close to being right.

  He closed his eyes and imagined he had already jumped:

  One one thousand—the roof falling away—two one thousand—accelerating fast—three one thousand—exhale your last breath—four one thousand—faster yet—five one thousand—fractions of a second left—six one thou— Cut to black!

  Then that would be it. No more seconds; no more regret. Just death. Just endless nothingness. Just the absence of living. Nothing to be fearful of at all, he thought. It was, after all, a state he’d existed in, or not existed in, for billions of years before he had been born. A little voice inside his head rose up from some dark and baleful place where it had been hiding his entire life, apparently waiting for just this kind of moment. “Here’s your answer at last,” it said. “Here’s the one thing at which you cannot fail. The one decision you cannot second-guess. Take the step, my man; accept the relief. I know you’re nervous. Don’t be. It’s easy. Trust me. Just lean forward and physics will take care of the rest.”