“Catatonic? I don’t know what the hell catatonic means. He’s just sitting there. Staring straight ahead. Like he’s just gone, you know?”
“In the middle of the street?”
“Yeah. Not in the middle of the lane, though – in the very middle…on the double lines.”
“On a bridge.”
“Yes. A bridge. And, no, I don’t know what bridge.”
“Well, I think you should just call the police. Let them take care of it.”
“I’m going to go talk to him.”
“Just call the police, Ray…”
Ray sets the cell phone on the passenger seat, reaches for the door handle, then hesitates. Rain is sheeting down the window. He hears his wife’s voice on the cell phone.
“Ray?”
He whips the door open and steps out of the panel van into the downpour.
“Shit, that’s cold rain…”
He runs around the back, checks the road for oncoming cars. It is Sunday and the back roads are always empty on Sunday night. He jogs over to the man. He is sitting with his arms around his knees and is staring straight ahead, eyelids opening and closing in concert with the rain.
“Hey, buddy. You okay?”
No response.
“You need to get out of the road.”
Still no response.
“Look, I don’t know what your problem is, but you need to get out of the road. And this rain.”
Ray shakes the man’s shoulder. He bobs back to his default posture.
“Are you stoned? Drunk? Deaf? What’s your problem, man?”
Ray shivers, swears, runs back to the van and climbs inside.
“Ray? Are you still there?”
He picks up the cell phone. “Maria?”
“Who else would it be?”
“He won’t move. He won’t answer. I think he might be sick. Or high.”
“Just call the damn police and come home, Ray.”
“I can’t call and then leave. They’ll know my cell phone number. They’ll know it’s me. If I leave I’ll get in trouble.”
“Then call, wait for the police, and then come home. I need to get out of the house. The kids are driving me crazy.”
“I’m going to try again,” says Ray.
“Why won’t you call the police?”
Ray doesn’t answer.
“You’ve been drinking, haven’t you,” says Maria.
“We finished the job.”
“Have you been drinking or not?”
“We finished the job and went out for a couple of beers like we always do.”
“You finished the job?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you get paid?”
“Yes. Cash.”
Ray sees a light in his rear view mirror. It gets brighter, divides into two lights. He fumbles for a switch in front of him, drops the cell phone, clicks the lights on and off rapidly. The approaching vehicle slows, but does not stop, narrowly missing the man in the street.
“Ray?”
He picks up the phone. “I’ve got to get this guy out of the street. He almost got run over.”
“It’s not your problem, Ray. Just leave him alone…”
Ray clicks off the cell phone and tosses it onto the seat. He steps back into the rain, walks around to the back of the van and opens the double doors. He reaches inside and drags out the smallest canvas tarp – the eight by eight one. It is spattered with off-white paint that goes by a hundred other names except for off-white.
He slams the door and runs over to the man, covering him with the tarp.
“You got a name?”
The man says nothing. He is shivering. His fists are clenched tight.
“Well, my name’s Ray, and I’m going to help you.”
* * *
“Holly, have you seen my blue dress shirt?”
She quickly closes the laptop and sets it on the bedside table.
“You asked me to iron it,” she says.
He walks out of the closet.
“I know. I put it on the list. But I’m looking and it’s not here. I need it for work tomorrow.” He is glaring at her computer.
“Then it’s probably in the laundry room.”
“Is it so hard to bring the clothes back upstairs when you’re done with them?”
“No, it’s not so hard.” She bites her tongue figuratively, and nearly literally. “I’m sorry. I’ll go get them…”
“Forget it. I’ll do it.” He starts out of the room, then stops, eyes drawn to the trash can next to the door. He reaches into it, pulls something out.
“What’s this?”
“What’s what?”
He holds up a necklace – a silver chain with a small pendant.
“That?”
“This,” he says.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s obviously not nothing. This isn’t something I bought for you, is it?”
“No. I found it,” she says.
“It’s one of those friendship pendants,” he says.
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?” He is reading the sentiment. “ ‘Love Always…’ ”
“I mean, it probably is. A friendship pendant.” She chokes on the words that press hard against her good judgment. She doesn’t have to say a thing. Not one thing.
“So where did you find it? Do you think it’s Samantha’s? Do you think some boy gave this to her? It better not be Samantha’s. She’s only 14…”
“It’s not Sam’s. I found it in a parking lot while I was out shopping.”
He studies it, traces the jagged edge of the broken heart with his index finger. She shudders as if suddenly cold.
“Well, it’s obviously a piece of crap. Not worth a thing. I guess the poor sap who has the other piece wasn’t worth much either.” He tosses it back into the trash can and walks out the door and down the steps to the laundry room, each footfall an exclamation point to match those written on the list he’d given her that morning.
“Please clean and iron my work shirts!!!”
He is not a bad man. She will not define him by these moments. That would be another loss. She has lost enough already.
She whispers to the necklace as she passes by on her way to the laundry room.
David…I hope you’re okay.
* * *
“Do you need me to call someone?” Ray asks, kneeling next to the man.
The man turns his face up to the sky. The rain pummels him, but he seems unfazed.
“Look, I’d call the police, but I had a few beers and I don’t want to risk anything, you know?” Ray stands up, wrapping his arms around himself, his light jacket proving to be a poor insulator against the surprisingly cold autumn storm. “I can take you somewhere if you want.”
Still no response.
“Shit.” Ray starts back toward the van. “I’m getting my coat. It’s too damn cold out here.” He opens the back doors, shuffles through a pile of tarps and painting supplies, then pulls out a winter coat he didn’t expect to use for a few more weeks. He struggles to slide one soggy arm into the sleeve, then turns back to the street. The man is leaning over the edge of the bridge.
Ray races to him, one arm in the coat, one out. He grabs the man and pulls him back toward the street and they fall together face-down into a stream of runoff with river-strong current. Ray pulls the man up from the water.
“What the fuck are you doin’, man? You coulda killed yourself!”
The man leans forward, his face in his hands. He seems to be crying but it is hard to tell in the rain.
“Hey…it’s okay. It’s okay.” Ray realizes he has his arm around the man. He stands, helps the man to his feet. Through the blur of the rain and under the dim light of a single street lamp, Ray sees that the man’s forehead is bleeding. “I gotta get you somewhere. Like to a hospital.”
They hobble toward the van. Ray opens the passenger-side door and helps the man inside. He does not resist.
Ray climbs into his seat and looks outside. For a moment, he is confused. There seems to be another man sitting in the road. Then he realizes it is just the tarp, whipped into a tent by the wind. He considers going back for it, then pulls the door closed and starts the engine.
“It’s just a tarp,” he says. But he knows he’s going to hear about it from his wife. It wasn’t a cheap tarp.
“David,” says the man.
“What?”
“My name is David,” he says.
* * *
It wasn’t quite the dramatic moment David re-imagined it to be in the long years that followed. He still pictures the pendant falling in slow motion, buffeted by the rain, glittering in the moonlight all the way to the river below. Then he sees it sinking unhurriedly beneath the surface until it finally disappears from view.
That’s not how it happened.
Ray grabbed David just as he had opened his clenched hands. The necklace hit the railing, then caught there on a rusty bolt, swinging in the breeze for a month until a man with far more ache that David had known – and David had known a lot – happened upon it quite by chance when he climbed over the railing one Monday, around midnight. The pendant’s reflection is what caught this man’s eye. But the hope of a matching pendant out there somewhere is what saved his life.
Maybe it wasn’t by chance after all.
