Falling for June: A Novel (4 page)

“Holding on, sir?” I asked, repeating him. “How do you mean?”

He looked up at me and I saw that there was sadness in his eyes. I remember thinking at the time that it seemed like a deep and unreachable sadness, something altogether too heavy to be caused by losing just a home, even if it was the Center of the Universe. I wouldn’t find out until much later that day what his sadness was really about.

“Sir, are you okay?” I finally asked.

His head jerked slightly at my question, as if he had been jolted out of a trance. The melancholy seemed to drain from his eyes, replaced by confusion. It almost felt as if he’d forgotten that I was there and was surprised to see me, and I wondered if maybe he didn’t have a touch of dementia. He fished a hearing aid from his pocket and screwed it into his ear.

“Should we move the chairs closer?” he asked. “I’m afraid I might be talking too quietly again.”

“No, you’re talking fine,” I answered. Then I gestured to my own ears to make a joke and ease the tension. “I just have small ears is all.”

“Your ears look fine to me,” he replied.

But he was just being nice. I know because I really do have small ears. They run in my family.

“But I will say you do have large hands,” he offered. “That’s my wife’s two-handed mug—she made it herself from Spanish clay—but it nearly disappears in your mitt.”

I looked at the mug in my hand, really for the first time. It was glazed this beautiful deep blue that you could kind of see the brushstrokes in. Then, probably because I was looking at her mug, I was reminded of something he had written about his wife in his letter.

“This is probably none of my business,” I said. “And I don’t mean to pry. But you mentioned in your letter that your wife jumped off of a building . . .”

I said it kind of gently because I was aware it might be a
touchy matter, but I was not at all prepared for him to laugh.

“I’m sorry,” I said, opening the file in my lap to consult his letter. “I must have read your letter wrong. The handwriting was . . . well, I just must have read it wrong.”

His laugh slowly worked its way into a nasty cough and he leaned forward in his chair, struggling to breathe. I attempted to rise to help him somehow, but I had my tea mug in one hand and the file open in my lap—plus, I had sunk so low into that damn chair cushion that I could hardly get out to save my own life. Fortunately, he held up his hand to halt me, anyway, taking deep, gulping breaths and waving me off.

“Sit,” he said. “I’m fine. Just give me a moment.”

I watched him with concern. It was quiet for a minute, the both of us just looking at one another and breathing. When he had finally caught his breath, he sighed and said, “Now, what were we talking about?” I didn’t answer right away. There was no way I was going to bring up his wife again. But then he must have remembered on his own because he said, “Oh, yes, June. My wonderful wife. She did jump off of a building all right. That’s how I met her. But that was nearly thirty years ago.”

Now I was really confused, and once again, I opened the file in my lap. Did he just say thirty years ago? Then how had they both signed on to a loan in 2005? But then I remembered the wheelchair ramp, and I looked around at the uncluttered hallways, the wheel-worn hardwood floors. I panicked a little, thinking maybe his wife was crippled from the fall but was still around, that maybe she was there somewhere, in one of the bedrooms or something. That would really make my job harder. I was trying to think of a gentle way to ask him her whereabouts, but he beat me to it with his own rather personal question.

“Do you get paid commission, Elliot?”

I had been asked this before, so I gave him my customary answer. “I get a base salary.” I usually left it at that too, but then
he raised one bushy eyebrow and looked at me kind of quizzically, so I added, “And I get commission, yes.”

“How much commission?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, sir, but that’s kind of a confidential matter.”

“So says the man from the bank with my financial obituary in his lap. And one who just asked me about my wife jumping off of a building too.”

I remember thinking right then that he was a sharp old dodger, and he sure did turn out to be. I warned myself to be on my game with him when it came time to negotiate. But for some reason I kind of liked him. Plus, I think I might have been in a good mood too—on account of being so far away from the city, and the fresh air, and it being my birthday and all. I decided to answer his question.

“I earn about fifteen hundred for each deal,” I finally said. “Sometimes more if it doesn’t cost us too much to get the homeowner to leave.”

He nodded. “Thank you. I appreciate your honesty, Elliot.” And he did seem to genuinely appreciate it, but of course he hit me right away with another personal question. “And what will you do with mine, if you don’t mind my asking? Assuming I agree to leave.”

“Your commission?” I said, knowing full well that’s what he meant, but asking it anyway to buy myself a minute. I briefly considered making up some worthy cause for the funds but decided instead to just tell the truth. It was usually easier. “Add it to my savings, most likely,” I said.

“And what are you saving for?”

I felt like the meeting was heading in the wrong direction, like our roles were reversed or something. Wasn’t I supposed to be asking the questions? Then again, it was nice to have someone taking an interest in my plans.

“I’m saving a down payment for a condo in Miami.”

He laughed so hard I worried he might start coughing again, but he didn’t. “Why of all the places on God’s green earth would you want to live in Miami?” he asked.

It was a silly question, so I gave it a silly answer.

“Because it’s the Sunshine State.”

“Filled with crowded beaches,” he shot back. “And too much sunshine.”

Now I was kind of getting irritated, I’ll admit it.

“You can’t have too much sunshine,” I said.

“Sure you can,” he retorted right away, obviously disagreeing with me just because he hated Florida for some reason. Then he doubled down. “The sun is nothing but a weapon without clouds and trees to shade you from it.”

“If that’s how you feel, I guess,” I said.

“I’m missing a chunk of my nose to prove it.”

“That aside, you’d feel differently if you grew up in Belfair, where I did. I don’t think I knew what the sun was until I left town at nineteen.”

“Well, forget about the sun for a minute then,” he said. “What about the bugs and humidity? They’ve got alligators down there too. And snakes that swallow dogs. And brain-eating amoebas. I’ve seen it all myself on cable news.”

“Cable news. Geez. I’ll tell you what, if you keep crapping on my dream, maybe I’ll send your friend Wolf Blitzer down here to deal with your delinquent loan himself, instead of me, Mr. Hadley.”

As soon as I mentioned the delinquent loan, he straightened a little in his chair and the twinkle sort of disappeared from his eyes. Suddenly everything seemed more formal between us than when I had first arrived even. Looking back, it really wasn’t fair of me to change the subject off of Florida by bringing up his loan. It was a cheap trick and I knew it. Sometimes I could be a jerk.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was out of line.”

“No,” he said somberly, “I’d rather get it out of the way.”

“Okay, let me just cut to the chase, Mr. Hadley. Peel it off like a Band-Aid, if I can. The bank will let me offer you up to three months’ worth of mortgage payments in cash, and no recourse if the property is sold for a loss. And all you have to do is sign a deed in lieu of foreclosure and move out within the month. How does that sound?”

He nodded, as if it was about what he had been expecting.

“Is that the deal you offer everyone?” he asked.

I had been on hundreds of sits, and this was always the part where they tried to get a little more money. Usually I started lower and held out longer, but as I’ve said, I kind of liked this old guy.

“For you, I’ll make it four months’ worth of payments,” I offered. “But that’s the best I can do. The absolute best. It really is.”

“That’s not—”

“Actually, for you, I’ll sweeten it a little on my own,” I said, cutting him off. I couldn’t stand to let him beg. I just couldn’t. “As I said I get a flat commission of fifteen hundred. I’ll kick you back a thousand of it, since we’re being so personal and all. That should at least help with the moving expenses, yes?”

“What I wanted to ask you,” he said, once I finally allowed him to get a word in, “is how much do you need to get that condo you’re saving for in Miami?”

“Miami? I thought you said I’d be foolish to move there.”

“I never said that. There never was a fool who followed his dream, even if it does lead him somewhere as silly as a swamp. How much do you need?”

He was hard to peg, this old dodger. One moment he looked almost senile, kind of lost in his own thoughts, and then the next he’d have a keen twinkle in his old watery eye, as if he were leading me along the whole time. But how could you not
like someone with a wooden rooster in his living room and a song and dance to go with it? I decided to answer his question.

“All told, I need about twenty thousand more dollars. And at the rate I’m saving I’ll be able to buy in six to nine months.”

He put his reading glasses back on, pulled his notebook and pen out again, and wrote something down.

“What are you writing in there?” I asked.

He grinned at me over his glasses. “You have your file; I have mine.” Then he took the glasses off and tucked them away along with the notebook, back in his big sweater pocket, before swelling up in his chair. It’s hard to explain what I mean exactly, but he inhaled a deep breath and straightened his back and about twenty years seemed to drop off of him. He smiled like he was about to solve the winning question on
Jeopardy!
. “Elliot, my new friend,” he said, “I’d like to make you a proposition.”

“A proposition?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

This was not the first time a homeowner had attempted to lay some outlandish scheme on me to save their property, but I decided to humor him and play along.

“Okay, sure. I’m listening.”

“What if I offered you a deal that would net you the twenty thousand you need to get your place in Miami in just a couple of weeks?”

“Twenty thousand’s a lot of money.”

“Yes it is,” he replied.

“Two weeks, you said?”

“Give or take.”

“What would I have to do to earn it?”

He shrugged, rather coyly, but in a masculine way. “Nothing illegal.”

“That’s fairly vague for someone who used to be an accountant,” I said.

I swear I saw him smile, but I couldn’t tell whether it was because of the accountant comment or because he knew I was taking the bait.

“So, you would be interested, then, I assume,” he said.

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

H
ALLEY’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 form 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.”