The Regrets Read online

  I could still feel the dark passage the stone had traveled, my mouth and esophagus corroded by coal-colored emptiness. It was as if the stone had bored a hole through me, which I would always be aware of and would never be able to fill.

  The next morning, when I came downstairs for breakfast, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table in her nightgown; in front of her sat a half-eaten bowl of cornflakes and a wineglass, drained but for the red dot at the bottom.

  “Mom,” I said.

  She made a startled flinching motion, then said, “Tommy! Sweetie! You scared me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry, precious.” She smiled tightly. “Come here for a minute.”

  I did as I was told; I walked over to her side. She reached out and embraced me, drawing me in hard and fast, as if to snatch me out of the path of something or someone else. Of course, I couldn’t help but compare this stiff, desperate hug with the lush embrace of the angel. My mother’s skin smelled stale, her breath acidic.

  I stood straight and slack-armed, enduring the embrace, actively trying not to squirm. Finally, she released me, leaning back while still holding me at the elbows so that my arms were pinned to my sides.

  “Listen,” she said. “Something very sad happened yesterday. Billy Phillips—you know Billy Phillips. That little boy, down the street, in the—” She gestured limply around her body.

  “The wheelchair?”

  “Yes.” My mother hadn’t forgotten the word; she simply considered it indecent to speak aloud of misfortune (or sex, for that matter) and angled whenever possible for others to do it for her. When it was necessary to speak these words, she did so in a whisper. “You know,” she’d say, “he has cancer,” or “she got pregnant.” To this day, as far as I know, she still has never fully voiced a wide range of words, from “suicide” to “wig.” (I experience a wave of pain and remorse now whenever I imagine her speaking—or not speaking—of my death. Its stain must have spread so evenly through her life by now that I wonder if any language has been left untouched; will she speak exclusively in a whisper for the rest of her life?)

  She looked away, out the window. She seemed nervous to meet my gaze. I knew what was coming, but I didn’t want to say it. “What happened, Ma?” I asked. “To Billy Phillips.”

  “He…well. You know how ill he has always been—he has that disease, what’s it called? With the water in the lungs, or on the brain—”

  “But what happened?”

  “Well, you know, there can sometimes be complications with things like that, you see, and—”

  “He died,” I said. “Didn’t he.” The word tasted sour in my mouth. My heart was pounding.

  She closed her eyes. I could tell she was holding back tears. For all her flaws, April was an empathetic person. It was why she was so beloved at church, and also why—I often think—she drank so much: she couldn’t stand pain, her own or anyone else’s. She opened her eyes again and fixed them on me. “I just want you to know,” she said, reaching out to clutch my hand, “how much I love you, sweetheart, and how much—”

  I turned and ran, twisting out of her grip. I ran right outside, letting the screen door bang behind me, and leapt over the hedge into Therese’s yard. I didn’t stop running until I’d reached the cool silence of her tree house. There, I tried to cry, but nothing came.

  I couldn’t have felt guiltier if I had murdered Billy Phillips myself. Why hadn’t I told the angel my real name? Why had I selfishly persisted, claiming an embrace that had clearly been meant for some other boy—that might, for all I knew, have saved his life?

  Racked with the world-darkening guilt only a child can feel, certain that the black stone I’d swallowed was some kind of magic anti-mortality pill, I developed what Therese would later refer to as my Barely Disguised Death Wish. Not that I ever spilled my guts about the angel—that was the one secret I kept from even her. The single fault line in our friendship had always been her absolute refusal to countenance anything even remotely supernatural or religious. (Adele and Tim had once half-heartedly taken her to the Unitarian church, in an effort to keep up Oak Ridge appearances; it was Therese herself who called bullshit on the endeavor, with a tight, Gallic shake of the head, saying simply, “I don’t see the point.”) I couldn’t risk her disbelief; she was all that I had.

  I believed that I deserved to die. I also believed that I probably wouldn’t, not easily, not in the way other people did, now that I’d been brushed by the angel’s wing and swallowed her dark medicine. I began to test the waters. I leapt off higher tree limbs than I’d dared to before; I held my breath underwater till my lungs nearly burst; I rode my bike at reckless speeds, ignoring red lights, through the streets of Oak Ridge.

  Nothing ever happened. Except that, more and more frequently, I thought of the angel, and began to feel other emotions mixed in with the longing and guilt. Was it really fair to punish a nine-year-old boy, a boy who’d spent his whole short life protecting his parents and averting disaster, for accepting a bit of pleasure and solace?

  I even began to doubt my initial explanation—that I, in delaying the angel, had been responsible for Billy Phillips’s death. What if she had come not to save Billy but to kill him? What if that, death, was the purpose of the black stone—but it hadn’t worked on me, because I hadn’t been ready?

  If so, perhaps I’d been nothing more than a brief snag in the angel’s workday; perhaps our meeting—which had utterly changed me, in ways too deep for me to fully fathom—had been nothing but a mild inconvenience for her.

  Over time, this explanation started to make more and more sense. I can’t say why, except that sometimes, when a certain dark feeling arose within me, I thought I felt the black stone—or its echo, its ghost—pulsing within my body, and a sentence would resound in my head, as clearly as if I’d spoken it aloud: I want to die.

  Yes, I decided, the angel had given me the black stone, the death medicine, but it hadn’t worked—I’d been too strong, too young, too thoroughly alive. So she would come back someday, when I was in danger as Billy Phillips had been, when I finally hovered just this side of death.

  So how far did I have to go? What did I have to do to see her again? How could I invite the chance to receive her embrace, to gain the release I desired? I imagined this hypothetical embrace as different from the one I’d enjoyed before: rougher somehow, more equal, a kind of struggle. I’d yell at her and she’d yell at me and then some kind of loosening would happen and it would all make sense. As I imagined this, I felt the stirrings of my first real erections.

  One day, when I was eleven, I skateboarded directly into oncoming traffic and awoke trussed up in the hospital, with eighty stitches and seven broken bones. I hadn’t intended to kill myself, not exactly. But I hadn’t not intended to kill myself either. It was like an experiment in whether my will to live was stronger than this other will—to prod at the edges of life, to take the angel up on her game of hide-and-seek. Whether the humanness in me was stronger than this otherness also inside of me, this nonhumanness, whatever it was the black stone had given me.

  I had faintly expected that the Will to Live would rise up in me, with Nietzschean glory, at the very last second—like a hidden superpower, the kind that animates an ordinary mom who can suddenly hoist a truck off her child trapped beneath. I thought that probably there was something inside me, some blind thrusting fist of über-vitality, that would surge up just in time to swat away the pale mothlike voice I’d lived with since the angel’s visit, whispering the same brief fluttery phrase over and over into my ear: What if?

  But nothing happened. I rolled my skateboard into the street, saw the car coming, calmly thought I guess I’m really doing this, and the next thing I knew, I was supine on a hospital bed, delivered into a totalizing bright-white pain—with no new answers, only a stronger sense of what my questions would cost me. The first sight that confronted me was my mother’s pale face, mottled with tears. The first thing I felt was disappoin
tment that she wasn’t the angel.

  During my recovery, I had a lot of time to think. For days I lay in my hospital bed and stared up at the swirling blades of the ceiling fan. Then I picked up a pencil (miraculously, my dominant left hand had escaped the accident uncompromised). Pictures poured out of me: angels, then devils, then disturbingly detailed dreamscapes, full of skulls and severed limbs spouting blood like fire hoses. I drew, from memory, a pair of lovely dark female eyes, and from those eyes sprouted maggots and worms and the charred skeletons of children. I overheard the whispered conversations in the hall: my parents’ hissed accusations of the doctors, then of each other. Something was wrong with me that had not been wrong before. I was sullen and withdrawn. I barely spoke. I showed no interest in anything aside from my horrifying scribbles.

  I was more than happy to accept the little pink antidepressants the doctor eventually prescribed. By the time I reached young adulthood, I’d ceased my search for the angel. Instead I looked for human women. They were easy to find. I’d been gifted with open boyish features, but I cultivated a hard look. I worked the lost-boy thing. Girls loved to look at my scar-mapped body, running their fingers down the raised white lines as if to erase them. I loved, and came to require, their looking. Unsurprisingly, I found I had a thing for brunettes. Most of the time I could ignore the white moth that continued to hover around my shoulders, whispering its two-word question. I ignored it most capably when I had a woman to plunge into.

  Because of the What if? I developed a habit of standing too close to the edges of things, always. I liked the reactions I got when I perched on a balcony railing and calmly lit a cigarette. Some girl would clutch her face and say “You’re making me nervous!” and I’d take a drag of my cigarette and say something casually philosophical about fear. Later the same night, kissing her, I’d murmur, “Thanks for getting me off the balcony,” and she’d soften further into me, yielding up her deep center, and I’d feel so genuinely grateful that it was as if I’d been telling the truth all along.

  Eventually, of course, gratitude would yield to selfishness, the illusion would yield to the real girl, her riddle would yield to the angel’s, and that milky void would open up again; I’d ride across the Brooklyn Bridge at two in the morning, alone again, and think What if?

  Those were the nights, usually, that I ended up at Therese’s, drunk. Sometimes we passed out on her couch together watching some old movie; sometimes she had a date but let me in anyway, gave me a piece of cake and a stern talking-to before sending me home sobered up; sometimes I looked into her strikingly beautiful face, so familiar to me that I often forgot its beauty, and thought, What is wrong with me? Why am I not in love with this woman? If there’s such a thing as an angel, a practical angel, then wasn’t she all the angel I’d ever get?

  * * *

  Our last night was one of those nights. I’d driven my motorcycle—one of my dad’s positive legacies; he’d bought the old thing and helped me fix it up—to her place, flopped down on her couch, opened my arms, and said, “Come here, baby, come to Mama.”

  In theory, I was comforting her that night—she’d just been dumped by a bi-curious surgery resident (“Fucking straight women, man. Will I never learn?”). I’d been in one of my dark moods all day, the moods that settled onto my body like medieval armor—a heavy helmet on the brain, a steel girdle constricting the gut. By the time I got to Therese’s, I had to pretend a bright competence I didn’t feel. I had to be the more intact of the two of us, at least temporarily. I’d brought a pint of ice cream and a bottle of bourbon, and we’d rigged up our favorite movie, The Birdcage, and settled ourselves on the lumpy couch, and I’d picked up her busted guitar and made up an impromptu song about the surgeon, Emily, and what a whiny bullshitter she was and how she might have been a brain specialist but Dr. Therese was a pussy specialist and her medicine was orgasms and now her office was open for business and there was no insurance she didn’t accept…You get the picture. Therese laughed so hard she snorted, and then she said something about how Dr. Emily hadn’t been that good in bed anyway, she’d been “afraid of my asshole.” Then I got this very graphic image of Therese’s ass, and redheaded Emily’s nose deep in its crevice, and I couldn’t help it, that woke my shit up—which meant, good news, that my body was coming out of its depression-armor funk, but, bad news, that I’d have to battle with it for the rest of the night, because Therese was nestling into me, head against my shoulder, soft cheek against my sleeve, and I could already feel myself unspooling.

  As always, it was a kindness that did it in the end: Therese reaching up to wipe a dribble of ice cream off my chin. In my agitated state I mistook this tender maternal/fraternal gesture for a tender erotic gesture, and I leaned down, bringing my face close to hers, and our eyes snagged each other’s, fierce gaze to fierce gaze, and she didn’t pull away, and I leaned in to kiss her.

  But before my lips could touch hers, she was shoving my chest away with her hand and laughing. She pulled back and folded her arms. “Dude,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I’m gay. I’m pretty sure we were just talking about that.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, briefly placing a hand over my mouth as if to remove the evidence. “I’m sorry. I just thought—”

  “I honestly thought you were leaning in to pick something out of my teeth. That’s why I didn’t turn away.”

  “Oh.”

  “Poor baby,” she teased, patting the side of my face. “You’re not getting laid tonight.” She sighed. “Neither of us is.”

  “No, it’s okay. The moment’s passed, anyway.” I laughed. “Sometimes I just see you from a certain angle, you know, the way other people see you, and I forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “That it doesn’t work. When we try. Remember last time?”

  We paused, remembering the last time we’d tried to hook up—about a year before—and shook our heads. That time, our strenuous attempts to maintain simultaneous arousal had increased to such a brutal pitch of futility that finally I’d flopped back down on her bed and sighed and said, “I feel like I’m at the fucking Alamo,” and we’d both burst out laughing.

  “It would be a lot easier if it did work,” said Therese. She leaned back against the cushions and sighed. “If I were genuinely bisexual and you were—I don’t know. If you didn’t have your particular brand of damage. For which I feel partly responsible.”

  “How so?”

  “I mean that sometimes I worry that I’ve stunted you. That you’re like one of those baby monkeys in those experiments—you know, where they take away the mother monkey and replace it with a doll made of, like, wire and burlap. We’ve spent so much time together that your instincts about other women are all screwed up. I mean, both of ours, but especially yours.”

  “My damage isn’t your fault, T. I promise.”

  She shrugged. “Well, what now, then? Want to finish the movie?”

  “I kind of want to get out. Now I’m restless.”

  “Get out and do what?”

  “I don’t know. Go for a drive. Maybe go find some greasy food somewhere?”

  “I know this Indian place that’s open twenty-four hours.”

  “You’re going to fart all night.”

  “I know, but who cares? No one will hear me.”

  “Right! That’s the best part of being single. Farting with impunity.”

  So that’s where we were going, on an errand of heartbroken sustenance. I didn’t think—I still don’t think—that I was too drunk to drive. I don’t know what happened. All I know is that, briefly, I felt okay, deeply okay—roaring up the BQE, on a perfect midsummer night, with Therese behind me, her arms around my waist; this was the way our bodies best fit together, traveling comrades facing the same direction—buddies, partners as sexless as superheroes, a single interlocking unit, off on a mission. When we rounded that bend at Brooklyn Heights, the whole city skyline roared up into view and it gets me every time, that view: its arrogant vert
ical glory, its star-obliterating blaze.

  Awe is dangerous. It is the last feeling I remember having before sky and earth traded places and we were flying in a bad way, and then it was all slam and scuff and scream and my last thought was I have made a terrible mistake: some error of attention, too much paid to the wrong thing.

  * * *

  Do not harass, molest, haunt, terrorize, seduce, influence, or befriend any individuals from your former life (this goes for their spouses and children as well). Do not seek out traces of your own past existence, or evidence of how you might have been mourned. Remember: that life no longer exists.

  I managed to exert enough self-discipline to keep myself away from computers. Any day I could have walked into the public library, Googled myself, read my own obituary and Therese’s, trawled social media for evidence of my friends and family—how their lives had continued, how they might or might not have publicly mourned my absence. There were faces I longed to see, facts I longed to know. But I feared this knowledge as much as I desired it. Plus, it seemed like a bad idea to intentionally disobey the Office’s orders.

  Yet I couldn’t avoid seeing acquaintances. I ran into them all the time. This was the neighborhood I’d lived in for almost a decade. In the last five years, its trickle of gentrification had surged and crested. It now sported, in addition to the fancy coffeehouse, a locavore restaurant, a loose-leaf tea boutique, and an artfully gritty bar serving IPAs and whiskey sours to the creatively tattooed. Even the West African place, after serving turbaned locals for years, had adjusted its message: GOAT HEAD STEW! read the placard outside. IMPRESS YOUR FRIENDS! My first day back, in a typically futile self-mocking/self-loathing move, I’d hit up the American Apparel on Atlantic: the tight-fitting jeans, the striped boatneck T-shirt, the faded blazer for when it got cool (I bought three of each so that I’d only have to do laundry once a week). I assumed that if I wore a uniform, I’d trick myself into feeling like a slightly different person, one I might take less seriously. I’d never been so grateful for fashion, its silliness and camouflage.