Every Moment After Read online

  I stare at a pile of National Geographics. There’s a thin layer of dust on them, visible in the morning light. I reach out and doodle a pattern with my finger.

  “Cole?”

  “Yeah, Mom.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “I know, baby. You should get some sleep. We both should.”

  Sleep is the least of it. You should get some sleep, sure. You should also take the goddamned antidepressants the doctor prescribed you. The real doctor, not the quack who does “bodywork” with you three times a week and isn’t covered by insurance. Not the “doctors” who write the books that tell you to “experience your grief.”

  “I will, Ma. I might just write for a little while. And then I will.”

  She smiles at me (a sad, worried smile) and clears her uneaten plate. I wait until she’s gone upstairs and I hear her bedroom door close, and then I get up from the table and go into the living room. I take a pencil and pad of paper from the shelf and sit.

  Dad had cancer of the pancreas, and then, after he died, Mom got a diagnosis too: Complex Bereavement. It basically means she can’t get over what happened, not just the fact that he died, but how fast he went and how much pain there was at the end. Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that no one knew just what to say to her. That’s why she keeps reading those ridiculous self-help books. Mom and Dad are both biologists—​he was a biologist, I should say—​and atheists, and all their friends were atheists too. Which is fine, but it’s not very good for dying. Dad was buried under a tombstone without a cross but with a quotation by Charles Darwin. It was a good one. I can’t remember exactly how it goes, though, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to go back and check.

  The room is too quiet, just the sound of cicadas in the too-tall grass outside and the hum of the mini-fridge in the corner of the room, still doing its job. I put the pad down and go over and open it, thinking of Matt and his crazy deal with Eddie. I wish we didn’t have to work with the guy, but here’s the thing: there are very few ways to get hold of a hot-air balloon in central New Jersey. Almost none, if you have limited funds and no flying experience. And Eddie is Eddie Deangelo, as in Deangelo Outdoor Adventures. As in crazy rides at carnivals that you generally couldn’t pay me to go on. As in hot-air balloons. As in the central feature of my plan to win Viola’s heart.

  There’s not much inside the refrigerator. I don’t know anything about drugs, so I’m not even sure what Eddie would be interested in. There are some bottles, but they’re mostly empty, and some pills that someone stuck in here, but not that many of them. There’s also some weed in a plastic bag, about the size of a softball. Altogether, I don’t think it’s enough. I doubt that Eddie will think it’s worth what we’re asking him to do for us.

  I close the fridge, pissed at Matt. He’s the one who pushed for me to come up with a plan. Insisted, really. He’s the one who offered to finance it, who said that money wasn’t an issue, who told me that for once he was going to use his parents’ cash for something that he actually wanted to use it for. And now we’re making drug deals with Eddie Deangelo, and we can’t even hold up our end of the bargain.

  I grab my boots and very quietly let myself out of the house, through the back door and into the overgrown yard. There’s a pond back here, tucked away at the edge of the trees. Dad and I used to sit and watch it when I was a little kid. He’d explain how it was a world in itself, how all the organisms—​plants, animals, little things we couldn’t even see—​had adapted to live there, and how if conditions changed, if the water changed or the amount of sunlight it was getting, then they would adapt all over again, around and around forever, changing and adapting. That’s what I’m waiting for now, for Mom to adapt to these new conditions, to Dad not being here, and if he still were, I’d ask him how long it usually takes for something to adapt and what happens if it can’t, though I’m pretty sure I know the answer to that last one.

  I haven’t been to the pond all spring. It’s all grown over with algae, cloudy where it used to be clear. I can’t see anything moving. When I was a kid, I used to imagine that the frogs and little fish thought it was the whole universe, that they thought their pond was all there was and they couldn’t even imagine anything else. They had no idea that it was just one little spot in the corner of a little yard on the edge of a little town.

  I shouldn’t be angry at Matt. If it weren’t for him, I’d be doing nothing; I would have said goodbye to Viola this morning and I’d have no plan to ever see her again, and I can’t even imagine what kind of state I’d be in. He’ll come up with something. I’ll get some sleep, wait for him to get off from Finn’s, and then we’ll see.

  And then it hits me, all at once. The waiting. Waiting for Matt. Waiting for Mom. Waiting for Viola. Waiting for inspiration. Waiting for things to change. That’s what Matt was telling me when he told me I had to make a plan. He was telling me that everyone is leaving; he’s going to Bucknell to play ball and Viola’s going out to California, and I have to stop waiting.

  I’m sick of waiting.

  I kick a rock into the pond and watch the ripples part the algae. Then I turn and go back into the house.

  The first thing I get is the book. I have no idea where wrapping paper is, don’t even know if we have any, and I’m not sure how you wrap a present anyway. I cut up an old grocery bag and wrap it sort of like I used to do with my school books, except instead of wrapping the covers, I go all the way around, and after I’ve tried three times, it looks basically like a gift. I take the graduation card I bought and, after thinking for a few minutes, decide on simplicity: For Viola, from Cole. Happy graduation.

  It’s dead quiet upstairs. I go looking for the prescriptions. They’re easy to find, in an envelope held to the refrigerator door by a magnet, tucked under a Chinese food menu. I take them out, study them, do five minutes of online research, and find a black ballpoint pen. A series of 5’s need to be gently nudged into 6 ’s or else they’ll be out of date. Even then, it’ll be at the pharmacist’s discretion whether or not to fill them. I work as carefully as I can, study the results, and then stuff them in my pocket. I leave Mom a note on the off chance that she gets up before this evening, and I head to Dad’s car, his green station wagon with the nearly bald tires. I get in, pop it into neutral so the engine doesn’t wake Mom, let it roll down the driveway almost to the street, and then fire it up (to the degree that you can fire up an old Volvo).

  Fifteen minutes later, I’m parked on Main Street in Wynnewood, two towns over. Wynnewood is a lot like East Ridge but busier and more crowded, and they have direct bus lines into New York. People don’t know everyone else the way they do in my town. I get out of the car and go into the pharmacy, wandering through the smell of medicine and cheap plastic, looking at bottles of sunblock and disposable razors, finally arriving at the back of the store. The pharmacist is standing at the counter and talking with a very old woman with a walker. I linger at the end of an aisle where I can see them, and I try to look busy.

  The woman seems to be hard of hearing, because the pharmacist is speaking slowly and loudly, trying to get her to understand that two medicines can’t be taken together. He goes over it three times, until I have a complete understanding of the way in which the first drug can lower her blood pressure too much for her to take the second drug. I’m not sure that she gets it, but she finally nods, and he stops talking. He drops the bottles into a white paper bag, swipes her card, and she very, very slowly moves away from the counter. No one else is there. I realize that I’ve been standing in front of an adult diaper display for the last couple of minutes, and I make my way over to the counter.

  I’m making certain assumptions about this guy, all of which I’m hoping to be correct. He wears the sleeves on his white coat rolled up almost to his elbows, and you can see tattoos on both forearms. He’s got thick plastic hipster glasses. I step up and pull the folded prescriptions from my pocke
t.

  “I’d like to fill these, please.”

  He takes them and leans low over the counter, pushing his glasses up on his nose with his left hand, rapidly twirling a pen from one finger to another with the right. He shuffles through them, flipping each one over as he scans it, and then looks up at me.

  “These are for you?”

  “For my father. He can’t come in.”

  “Have you been here before?”

  “Yeah, I think he’s filled things here.”

  He scans me up and down. “I need to see an ID.” I fumble with my wallet and produce my license. He takes it. “We generally won’t fill prescriptions like these unless the patient is present. Or if it’s for a child.”

  “He can’t come in; he’s too sick.”

  “They won’t fill these at the prescribing doctor’s hospital?”

  “I don’t know—​my mom just gave me these and asked me to fill them. I don’t know what the story is with the doctor.” It occurs to me for the first time that he might call the doctor to clarify the story, which would obviously lead to him learning that the patient in question doesn’t need pain management because he’s been dead for months. “I mean, my mom called the doctor and all. He told her just to fill it at, you know, a regular pharmacy.”

  “What doctor is it again?”

  It’s a test. This is an easy one, though. I went to a lot of appointments with my dad, and my parents talked about the oncologist all the time. He was a short, Jewish man, old enough to be my father’s father, and he shuffled when he walked like he was making his way over a sheet of ice. “Dr. Myers. Robert Myers.”

  The pharmacist nods. “I can fill most of these today. One of them is out of date, and I can’t give you two of them on the same day, so you’ll have to come back for one. Can you wait for the rest?”

  I tell him I can, and instead of waiting in the sad little sitting area by the counter, I buy a Coke at the front of the store and go stand on the sidewalk. I carry a notebook for moments like this so I can write down observations and stray lines that come to me. Some of my best poems have started this way, when something just hits me out of the blue. Nothing’s happening now, though, because I’m starting to get nervous. The guy seemed more uptight than I thought he would be. I guess he should be, right? These are heavy-duty meds. I watch the cars go by on Main Street and wonder what will happen if he figures it out. Is there something in the computer system that should flag it if a patient is deceased? Some sort of a public record? Something with the government or the insurance company?

  The insurance. I feel like a complete moron. Who did I expect was going to pay for the pills? The pharmacist will try to use his account, and it will come up as closed.

  I’m starting to sweat, and I look up and down the street as though I already expect police officers to be closing in on me. Should I just leave? But the guy has the prescriptions, he could call the house, and with my luck, it would be one of the few times my mom picks up the phone. He could call the cops. I need to go inside and make up some sort of excuse. What am I going to say? “I’m sorry, sir, but I forgot that my father actually passed away several months ago and so I won’t need those medications after all.”

  I throw the mostly full bottle of soda into a trashcan and go back into the store. This time I don’t make any pretense of browsing, I just go straight back to the pharmacy counter. The only thing my brain is coming up with is the truth: I can tell the guy the truth and hope he feels sorry for me and just throws the prescriptions away and tells me to go home. How old can he be, anyway? Maybe in his midtwenties? He has to understand. I’ll tell him that I’m not planning to use the pills or sell them (barter, yes, but that’s not strictly selling). I’ll tell him that I’m in love and I’m short on cash and trying to set something up, and that I wasn’t thinking clearly and that I’m sorry.

  The pharmacist has a white paper bag like the one he gave the old woman, and he’s tapping on his computer and looking annoyed. I stand by the register and wait for him to say something.

  “There’s something up with your dad’s insurance.”

  “Really?”

  “I see he’s filled these meds here before and they’ve been covered, but I’m getting an error message here.”

  “Oh.”

  He gives the top of his monitor a final tap and turns to me. “These insurance companies are sons of bitches, you know? They shut down their systems just to slow the outflow on their payables. Know what I mean?”

  “I think so . . .”

  “And I’ll tell you something else.” He glances around to make sure no one else is nearby. “This place is no better. Let me tell you something, okay? They want us to tell people that we can’t completely fill their prescriptions and that they have to come back to get the rest another day, regardless of whether or not that’s true. Know why?”

  I shake my head.

  “They want you to come into the store an extra time. If you come in twice to get your meds, you’re twice as likely to pick up gum or a magazine or some crap by the register. See?”

  I nod and furrow my brow in a look of what I hope is knowing disapproval of corporate depravity. The pharmacist’s name tag says Kiernan. He leans back and looks at me in satisfaction, maybe feeling that he’s shocked me or that he’s done his part to spread the word about his employer. I don’t know what to say. I just want to get out of here in a way that minimizes the chances of a felony charge.

  “Here’s what I can do,” he says. “I can let you take the generics, and I can run them through the system later. Your dad still has his insurance, right?”

  I nod, feeling terrible.

  “So, I can’t let you take the brand names, but three of these are generics and you can take ’em and I’ll run them later. Chances are the payment system will miraculously be fixed and come back up in an hour or so. These three should get him through, you know? They’re potent. Then you just have to come back for the rest.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “all right. Thank you.”

  He takes a few bottles out of the bag and sets them aside, then hands the rest to me. I give him the twenty-dollar copay.

  “Do one thing for me,” he says. “When you come back in, don’t buy a goddamned thing, all right?”

  I smile and nod, thank him again, and get out of the store as quickly as I can. I’m never going back, and I’m going to have to think about what to do if Kiernan calls the house when the insurance doesn’t work. Hopefully he’ll just decide that we’re being permanently screwed by the company and he’ll forget about it, though I have a feeling that he’s going to be in trouble for letting me walk off with these pills. I can’t think about that right now, though. I need these, and even with them, I’m going to need more, given how empty most of the bottles in the fridge are. I’m going to need a lot more.

  I leave Wynnewood behind and drive back to East Ridge. I’m almost home, lost in my thoughts, when I realize I’m going in the wrong direction. I make a U-turn and drive over to one of the newer developments on the west side of town. The houses are huge here, and the trees are puny little saplings they put in after they bulldozed everything down. Totally weird and out of proportion, but everyone wants to live here anyway. It’s hard to figure out the streets, since everything looks sort of alike. They’re named for presidents: Grant Avenue, Reagan Circle, and I turn onto Wilson Street and approach Viola’s house.

  I’ve been here once before. It was in April. AP English, and I’d managed to get myself into her group for our spring project. I don’t know if she ever noticed that, but I did it a lot. We were in the same lab group in chemistry, the same study group in history. Anyway, this particular project was on The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, and the other three kids in our group were complete-and-total morons. We didn’t get anything done until the weekend before it was due, and I could tell that it drove Viola crazy. She got A’s in everything. She always did the extra credit. She retook a chemistry test to try for a higher grade afte
r she got a ninety-seven on it the first time. She would have done the Eliot project alone if we weren’t partly being graded on teamwork.

  So the five of us met at her house to get it done at the last minute. It was a rainy spring day, and it was slow going; the other people in the group hadn’t even read the text—​or if they did, they hadn’t understood it—​so Viola and I did most of the work. I mean, basically she did the project and I helped out, while the others screwed around and did just enough that we could honestly say it was a group effort. She was pissed the whole time, snapping at people and blowing her hair out of her eyes in a way that meant she was annoyed but that I absolutely loved.

  By the end of the afternoon, I figured she hated us all, including me, but when I was packing up to leave, she leaned over and squeezed my arm and whispered, a secret just between the two of us, “Holy fucking Christ, Cole, do I love Eliot.”

  The combination of that smiling whisper and her English accent would have been enough for me to fall in love with her right then and there, if I hadn’t been in love with her already.

  I’ve replayed it a million times in my mind. I’m replaying it now as I glance over at the package sitting on the passenger seat beside me. Which is a mistake, because when I look up, there’s a dog directly in front of my car. Not just any dog. Viola’s dog. A bulldog named Winston. Viola calls him Winnie, and she clearly adores him.

  I pull the wheel hard to the right and try to accelerate past Winston and into their driveway, except that instead of getting out of my way, the idiot darts toward me, and I have to pull the wheel harder and drive straight, and I mean straight, into the Grey family’s nicely painted mailbox.

  It’s no match for a Volvo. The post breaks like a toothpick, and the whole thing goes down. I get out of the car to survey the damage, and I see that in addition to the ruined mailbox, I’ve torn up the grass around it.

  Winnie darts around, yapping and growling. We immediately hated each other the first time we met. He growled at me and nipped at my legs, and I laughed and told Viola and her mom that it was no big deal while fantasizing about punting him out the window.