EVERYONE HAS THEIR REASONS
The 7:12 from Queens Plaza was late pulling into Montauk, and it was nearly noon by the time he stepped onto the platform. The autumn sky was awash in clouds, a jaundiced sun struggling to emerge from a low bank of gauzy gray. Small children gawked at his string bean frame, hollowed eyes, and vampyric hue. He pulled the faux fur-lined hood of his enormous parka close as he shuffled along, anxiously cracking his bone-thin fingers as he considered what awaited him.
He evaluated his emotions as he walked the six miles along freshly paved shoulder alternating with yellowed November turf. Eyes peeled, determined to uncover something that would bring on the nostalgia, the self-hate, the waterworks. A few stone houses still held some degree of resonance, recognition managing to pierce through the fog of Xanax and whiskey-spiked Starbucks.
The lighthouse complex was festooned in Christmas paraphernalia. A massive wreath on the Federal-era tower; eaves, windows, and doorframe of the building below were outlined in ugly xanthous lights. He eyed the scene from the overflow lot, imagining himself to be standing in the exact spot she’d parked her old Toyota. For hours they’d lain naked in the split-leather back seat, oblivious to the world behind the reflective sunshades. Drinking malt liquor and snorting the last of the fentanyl he’d scored from his old band’s bassist, melting into one another as they nodded in and out of consciousness.
She’d awoken suddenly, insisting on getting some fresh air. He’d never known what had sparked her resolve. They’d discussed it obliquely dozens of times—a romantic, if pedestrian, embrace of the end, choosing to share in this mutual fate before they got old enough to resent each other and go their separate ways. But was it always to be that day, at that exact moment?
It was a mile and change to the bluffs, along the same path they’d taken after sliding on their clothes and downing a Red Bull. He envisioned the yawning abyss beneath the crashing waves, a vast grave full of the dissolved remains of men and women who’d set out to claim the American Dream and simply wound up dead. Those who’d survived the passage went on to destroy their bodies in quarries, oilfields, fish processing plants, sewing factories. Hard-nosed men and women so focused on building gentler lives for their young families that they’d had no time for the decadence and depression that had plagued his adult life.
Had any of them ever stood in this spot where she had stood? He saw her, waiting in silence while gazing blankly out to sea. One arm holding the other, tangled heliotrope hair blowing softly, the fly of her jeans unbuttoned. As if posing for a final photo.
At first, he didn’t think she’d heard him. For three years to the day, he’d fought against the notion that he wasn’t to blame. If he’d simply agreed there at the brink, he told himself, assured her that she wouldn’t have to go alone, she would have turned back. She’d gone over face-first. He imagined great tears streaming from the corners of her eyes as her slim, abandoned body rushed toward the waiting shallows.
The compulsion to belatedly reverse his decision tugged at the corner of his brain. He tried desperately to force himself into action, to undo the years of weekly therapy, to suppress the image of his mother’s sobbing face leaning over his broken form in the casket. The summoned monsters of his psyche heeded the call, bursting down the doors of the mental backrooms to which they’d been temporarily banished. You’re a fucking loser, they rasped. Coward. Parasite. Surviving off the compassion of sentimental boomers who don’t even know who you really are. Go on. He crept toward the edge. Better late than never.
#
He walked the hour and a half from the bluffs back to town in abject darkness. Pausing beside a familiar Tudor Revival exterior, deciding to enter after discovering $37 left in his checking account. The place was dead, and the hostess allowed him to sit wherever. He ran his hands under the square table in the eastern back corner, confirming his suspicions with his phone flashlight. The initials he’d once carved with a pocket knife were gone. It wasn’t the same table. But it was still the same corner, the same few square feet of space. Imprinted with presences collected over more than two decades of his life. A towheaded, sunburned boy, sipping Mountain Dew and wolfing down curly fries while a tall woman with a perm rubbed Aloe Vera gel into his neck. The same boy, a few years older, struggling not to cough after a beer-bellied man in a fishing vest had permitted him a first sip of bourbon. Now as a high school honors student, his arm draped around his little brother, before whom sat a massive chocolate cake. Smiling with pursed lips, looking straight ahead as the aging fat man struggled to locate the camera app on his new phone.
Out the window, Christmas lights had turned on all over town. He began absently scrolling, opening Facebook for the first time in months. His mother had tagged him in more than a dozen old photos. Most weren’t unexpected. Birthday parties, a Thanksgiving dinner with cousins he hadn’t seen in years. One he’d forgotten existed, taken at a Christmas Eve party her family had thrown four years ago. He and she sat, studied and aloof, on a loveseat, large glasses of mulled wine in their hands, while his father leaned in from the right side, a warm and genuine smile on his broad Irish face. His mother hadn’t tagged the page that her parents still operated as a memorial, respecting their wishes for zero contact. He scrutinized the photo for a long time, remembering how awful her parents had behaved that night, how they’d repeatedly downplayed her condition throughout their relationship, how they’d forbidden him and his “white trash” family from attending the funeral.
It was past midnight when he unlocked the door of the small Jamaica apartment. His mother had made up the air mattress in a corner of the living room, as she had every night since he’d moved back in. He shuffled down the hall to the bathroom for eye drops, past the dozens of framed photos of him and his little brother. He lingered for a moment by a bedroom door on the way back, waiting until he registered the quiet cursing of the prepubescent voice amidst the cacophony of Call of Duty gunfire. He crept softly back to bed. Before closing his eyes, he reopened Facebook. He thanked his mother for her thoughtfulness before asking her to please delete the photo.