Crossing the Bridge (33 page)

An hour and a half after that, I sat with the same man the reporter had spoken to, a copy of the police report between us. The report essentially listed details: approximate time of the accident, angle of impact, recovery efforts. Any speculation on the page seemed to be limited to estimating the speed of Chase’s car when it hit the curb, took off the top portion of the concrete embankment, and went into the river.

“I’m obviously not a professional at reading these things,” I said, “but I’m having a tough time understanding how this information leads you to the absolute conclusion that my brother intended to kill himself.”

“I never said ‘absolute,’ and that reporter is lying if he said I did. What I said was that the information in the report suggested that it was probable.”

I pointed down to the paper. “What are you seeing that I’m not seeing?”

The officer turned the page toward him for a moment and then turned it back to me, pointing to several places. “How fast he was going and the way
the skid marks veer off so sharply toward the lowest part of the embankment.”

“He was drunk.”

“That’s in the report also. But this trajectory is not consistent with someone losing control of his vehicle. It’s not even consistent with someone veering out of the way of a potential collision. He was going very, very fast and then suddenly made a direct line across the opposing lanes and off the bridge.”

I glanced down at the paper and then trained my eyes on the officer. “So you’re saying my brother committed suicide.”

“I didn’t know your brother, Mr. Penders.”

“
I
knew my brother. There is no chance he would have killed himself.”

“If you believe that, then that’s really all that’s important, isn’t it?”

But of course, it wasn’t. For ten years I’d been living with my grief, living with the loss of the Chase that was still to be, living with my sense of culpability in the accident. And now someone was attempting to alter the vision for me, to tell me that not only my perspective on this event, but the very understanding I had of my brother, was skewed. I had no idea what to do with this. My body physically rejected this new information. But as it was doing so, I found myself making subtle adjustments, allowing this speculation to present itself as a possibility.

And in so doing turn my world upside down.

I needed to talk to someone about this and it certainly couldn’t be my parents. I got in the car and headed for Lenox.

“Bro, it is all a pack of shit,” Chase said when he saw me walk into the bar.

Shanahan’s was on the other side of the bridge, frequented primarily by underage drinkers. I drove past it during my first trip back to Amber, a little more than a year after Chase died. By then, someone had converted it into a day spa after the cops finally busted the bar’s owners. But on this night, it was concussive music, unsmiling patrons, and a young man sitting at a table by himself, wielding his beer bottle like a gavel.

“What’s a pack of shit?” I said as I approached.

“It
all
is,” Chase said, slamming his bottle down and causing an eruption of beer to spatter the tabletop.

This was clearly not his first drink. Perhaps not even his first bar. The only obvious indication one ever had that Chase was drunk was the intensity in his eyes. While the expressions of most people glazed over as they became inebriated, Chase’s became fiercer, more laserlike. And his gaze was burning hotter tonight than I’d ever seen it before.

He’d called me an hour before and told me to meet him here. Shanahan’s meant that Iris wouldn’t be there and I assumed that at least a couple of his lacrosse teammates would be around.

“Why are you sitting here by yourself?” I said.

He pointed to a redheaded woman sitting at the bar. “Because Ms. Proud Nipples wouldn’t come to join me, if you can believe that.”

I looked over at the woman talking to the bartender and then cast a sideways glance at Chase. “Where are the Upchuck Brothers?”

“Last time I saw them they were drooling on each other and learning to count to three.”

“You’re done with your lacrosse posse?”

“I’m done with my posse. I’m done with lacrosse. Done.”

“It’ll be different in college.”

“Whatever you say, Bro. What are you drinking?”

I went to the bar to get a beer for me and another one for Chase. When I turned back toward our table, he was scanning the crowd and laughing, though I couldn’t see what he was laughing at. He took a huge pull from the bottle when I handed it to him.

“They’re infants,” he said.

“Who are?”

“The Upchuck Brothers, as you so aptly named them.”

“I could have told you that.”

“Mewling little babies.”

“Coulda told you that, too.”

He put his beer down and leaned toward me. “I guess some of us take longer to catch up, huh?” There was even more wattage in his stare tonight
than usual when he was wasted. I’d been noticing some changes since the late winter, but tonight seemed to mark a quantum jump.

“Vance couldn’t make it tonight.”

“Who’s Vance?”

“A really good friend of mine.”

“A really good friend who I’ve never met?”

“Your specific densities don’t match, Bro.”

“Am I heavier or lighter?”

“Not the point.” He looked off toward the crowd again and started bobbing his head to the omnipresent Nirvana song. I took a drink from my beer and watched the redhead hug and kiss a man who she’d obviously been waiting for.

“Where’s Iris tonight?” I asked.

His gaze snapped back toward me and he finished his beer before speaking. “Playing with her Barbie dolls, I think.”

“You mean she wasn’t up for an evening of sophisticated entertainment such as this?”

“Whatever. Get me another beer.”

“Your legs aren’t working?”

He threw both palms on the table and stood up, walking away, saying, “Asshole.” He took a few steps toward the bar and then turned back to me. “She isn’t everything you think she is, you know,” he said, leaning down toward me.

“What are you talking about?”

“You fucking idolize her. You think I don’t know that? She’s become the standard by which all women must be measured in your eyes.”

This observation stunned me and I tried to deflect it. “I think the woman you love is great. I highly
approve. Most brothers would see that as a good thing.”

He sat back down without getting his drink. “It would be a good thing if it were anywhere near the truth.”

“Maybe we should talk about this some other time.”

“This is a good time to talk about it.”

“What are we talking about? I’m a little lost on that point.”

“I want to shatter your illusions, Bro. Illusions are always a bad thing. Iris is about as far from perfection as a leper is from being a supermodel.”

“That explains why you’ve been dating her for nearly a year.”

“
Was
dating her for nearly a year.”

“You broke up with her again?”

He pulled back from his chair and moved quickly toward the bar. He came back with a beer for both of us, though the one I’d been drinking was less than half empty.

“She doesn’t know it yet.”

“Are you trying it out on me first?”

He laughed. “Yeah, that’s what I’m doing.”

“Do you want my advice?”

He took a long drink. “I don’t think so.”

“Sleep it off, Chase. Sleep it off for a couple of days if you have to. Sleep it off in a rubber room if you have to. You don’t want to split up with Iris.”

“Who are you, fucking Cupid? Iris is no different from everyone and everything on this planet, Bro. She’s weak, she’s deluded, and she’s seriously
screwed up. This is the way the machine works. When we’re young, we think we’re going somewhere, but we’re really on a huge conveyor belt being fed into the machine. It grinds us up and molds us into McPeople – except for the ones who just get exiled to Zombieville.”

“Do you hear anything that you’re saying?”

“Loud and clear, Bro. Louder and clearer all the time.”

He got up to go back to the bar, even though his own bottle still had beer in it. Something in his movements suggested to me for the first time that there might be something other than beer running through his system. I knew that Chase had played with drugs before. We’d even smoked pot together a couple of times. Now I wondered if he was experimenting with something new. I told myself to talk to him about it in the morning (or the afternoon, assuming he was going to need a little extra time to recover from this evening).

“She cheats,” he said behind me as he returned. I turned toward him quickly, but he continued to his seat.

“She cheated on you?”

“She cheats,” he said definitively.

“Are you telling me that she’s gotten involved with someone else?”

“I’m telling you that she cheats at the game.”

“What game?”

Chase leaned toward me. I now knew definitively that there was something in his eyes other than alcohol. “The game of life, Bro.”

“What did you do, listen to too many Jim Morrison
records today? Are you saying that Iris has another boyfriend?”

“Who the fuck knows? I’m done.”

“You’re just gonna walk away from Iris.”

“I’ve already walked away.”

“This makes sense to you?”

“Welcome to the machine, Bro.”

“What the hell is with you lately? Slurred rants, paranoid speeches, irrational accusations. Where have you gone?”

“I’m right here, Bro.”

“I don’t think so. Why’d you even call me to meet you here?”

“I thought we’d party like it’s 1999.”

“Well, I’m having a great time so far.”

“Then leave if you don’t like it.” He finished the beer in one of his bottles and slammed it on the table. “I don’t need you, either.”

I stood up to go. I wanted to hit him. “I hope you’re gonna get over whatever this shit is that you’re doing in the near future.”

He took a long drink on the next bottle and said to me, “I’m working on it.”

“Work faster,” I said as I turned away.

“Knew I could count on you, Bro,” he said, calling out into the thrashing guitars. I nearly turned heel and grabbed him by the shoulders, reminding him that he had always been able to count on me, that there had never been a single day when I wouldn’t have given him everything I had, and that I would never accept his trivializing this. But then I reminded myself how wasted he was and how disturbed he’d made me, and I knew nothing good would come of it.

On the drive home, I replayed the conversation in my head a dozen times, trying to figure out if there was substance in anything he’d said. It wasn’t the first time he’d been this obtuse, but it was the first time I hadn’t been able to smack him out of it. I rehearsed the talk I’d have with him the next afternoon, when I’d let him know that he’d gone too far.

That, too, had always worked in the past.

It was something like playing a game of telephone with myself. For two hours, I reran, in sequence, my conversation with the reporter, my conversation with the police officer, and the final one I had with Chase. Each time I did so, the dialogue would change subtly, filling in a line that I’d forgotten or chose now subconsciously to add to offer a better explanation.

No music, no muffins, and no coffee. Just two hours of insistent memory.

Why was I suddenly so willing to consider the possibility that Chase had killed himself? If it made any sense at all, why couldn’t I have at least conceived the thought before today? Did this explain everything or simply allow me to deflect some of my own sense of culpability?

And if it was in any way conceivable that Chase could have intended to kill himself that night,
how
was it conceivable? How could he possibly have been so close to a decision like that without my having any notion? And why would he ever think that a decision like that made sense when he could have gotten his frustrations out in any number of ways with me?

It was late afternoon when I arrived in Lenox. I drove directly to the Ensemble and offered no more than an impolite wave to the guy at the front desk and a half smile to Iris’ friend Melanie as I walked to Iris’ office. There were three people in there with her when I arrived. She looked up and her expression offered a combination of surprise and disappointment. I can only imagine what my own expression suggested.

“I have to talk to you,” I said.

“I’ll need a few minutes,” she said, nodding toward the others in the office.

“It would be really good if we could do this now.”

Her brow furrowed and, for a moment, I thought she was going to ask me to leave. But then she rose up from her desk and excused herself, telling the others to continue the meeting without her. She walked up to me and then past me and we went outside.