“And why exactly am I flying back home? The last time I checked I already was home here in San Diego. Go Padres! I’ve got a lot going on, you know…”
“Yes, I know…California girls are like so much fun. Totally. But there’s been some trouble…I need you, Duck.”
And there it was—Duck: a teenage nickname that only Amy and one other person had ever used. A simple word, really, one syllable, a small white bird floating in a pond, but for Amy and me it carried its own definition. Duck—a quick and dirty way to drag me back into the past.
“Let’s see,” Amy said. “It might have been an accident but…okay, well…I swallowed some pills and some wine and some more pills and…well, they had to pump my stomach last night, which is really gross. They’re calling it attempted suicide…maybe they’re right.”
The pipes in the bathroom grew quiet as the shower switched off and Kelly cracked open the door, steam floating out in puffs and dissolving in the cool bedroom air. I squinted toward the television—CNN with the sound muted. Kelly must have turned it on before jumping in the shower. On the screen three guys in hazmat suits loitered outside a Wal-Mart parking lot.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“In the hospital—the psych ward, the cuckoo’s nest. They take your shoelaces, but you can keep your cell phone at the front desk and borrow it three times a day. They haven’t shaved my head yet or scheduled the lobotomy, but I have no idea when I’m going home.”
“What happened?”
“I had a bad day,” she said. “I’m always on edge. With the world we live in, how could I not be?”
I read the crawl across the bottom of the TV, something about a virus in Texas and reports of an earthquake in Chile. Everything was falling apart.
“Twenty years; it’s hard to believe, isn’t it, Duck?” Amy said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
It: that most promiscuous of pronouns, willing to replace everything from a spoon to a Lamborghini. But I knew what she meant.
“I still keep our promise,” Amy said. “You haven’t been around for years, but I still do it: I walk down to the beach with a vanilla ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles and a maraschino cherry—every fucking year.”
“You have a good heart.”
I couldn’t remember a time when Amy hadn’t been part of my life. I hoped she was exaggerating, that by psych ward she meant the pharmacy counter at CVS, by suicide she meant reading Sylvia Plath in the bathtub and writing gloomy free verse in her journal.
“You weren’t really trying to kill yourself, were you?”
“I don’t know. I kept the gun in the drawer, so there’s that…”
“You still have that goddamn gun?”
“Hey, it’s my Second Amendment right!”
“My shoulder disagrees.”
Once, when she and I briefly shared an apartment, I came home late one night and Amy, assuming I was an intruder, shot me in the left shoulder. The bullet had only grazed me, but it was hard to forget.
“Isn’t there a statute of limitations on your bringing that up?”
“It still hurts whenever it rains.”
“I thought it never rains in San Diego,” she said. “And for the six hundred and forty-seventh time, I’m sorry. When you get here tonight, I’ll kiss it and make it feel better, okay?”
“I’m three thousand miles away, Amy. I can’t be there tonight.”
“Look, I need you. I’m alone here.”
“What about that guy who’s thirty-seven times better than me?”
“Mark isn’t around anymore. We broke up last month.”
“Which shoulder did you shoot?” Immediately I felt like an asshole. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did, but so what?” She took a breath. “Look, I didn’t want to say anything because I know you won’t believe me, but …I think he’s back. It’s a big reason I’ve been so shaky.”
I kicked off the blankets and swung my legs over the side of the bed, checking the bathroom door to make sure Kelly couldn’t hear me.
“Amy, please…not again.”
“I’m serious, Duck. Someone’s been following me, creeping around the backyard, staring up at the window.”
“Amy…”
“Don’t ‘Amy’ me—I know what I saw. It was him.”
“It’s been twenty years. How would you even know what he looks like anymore?”
“I’d know,” she said, in her best shut-up-and-listen tone. “Just a few days, Duck, until Sarah’s birthday. Until I know for sure that it’s not him.”
After twenty years, it still came back to the two of them, him and her, Mr. Ronan and Sarah Carpenter.
“Things have been falling apart for a while, Duck,” Amy said. “I know I shouldn’t drink but…I’ve been freaking out about Ronan. Maybe I’m imagining it, but what if I’m not? And Sarah’s birthday …she would have been twenty-four. Twenty-four, Duck!” Her voice skipped, as if holding back tears. “It’s just…everything is shit. I didn’t want to face the beach alone this year, so I drank a bottle of wine, swallowed some Skittles and however the fuck many Ambien were left in the bottle, and crawled into bed. There was some vodka left so I drank that, too. When Jill came home, I was passed out, so she called the First Aid Squad.”
Jill was Amy’s sixteen-year-old daughter from her first marriage.
“The next thing I know I’m in an ambulance with a tube down my throat. So here I am…Room Number Nine on the loony bin floor.” She did that weird voice from The Beatles’ White Album. “Number nine, number nine…”
On CNN the weather map had storm clouds and lightning strikes all across the heartland, an angry red 110° hovering over Phoenix. There were floods in Kansas City and in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Back home in New Jersey—my old home—it was sunny and 75°, perfect weather.
“You don’t have to stay,” Amy said. “Come out for a few days until I’m discharged. Be here for Sarah. That’s all I’m asking.”
The bathroom door swung open and Kelly padded into the room wrapped in a plush green towel, beads of water dotting her legs and shoulders as she drew
