Page 95 of One Step Too Far

“Miguel once passed out witnessing another guy’s nose bleed on the basketball court. No way I’m trusting him with a knife.”

“Miggy’s going to faint?”

“Notice he’s prepared everything in advance.”

Miggy nods. “Normally, we’d make Josh do this. Tim would assist. I’d already be hiding behind a bush while Neil supplied the wiseass comments.”

“Working on it,” Neil calls out from the stream.

“That’s why you turned away when you first saw Neil’s head wound,” I fill in the blanks.

“Note I was the first to grab one of the front poles of the travois. All the better to ignore the gore.”

“Remember the swimming hole?” Scott comments now. “We’d heard about it from others. Hot summer night after Ultimate Frisbee, we decided to check it out. Tim jumped in first, and the rest of us followed.”

“I’m already going to vomit,” Miggy moans.

“An old rusty pipe was sticking straight out near one of the rocks. Tim smacked it with his arm swimming to the surface. Tore open this nice long gash all the way down his right triceps.”

“Stop,” Miggy warns.

Scott’s grinning now. The good old days. A perfect distraction from the not-so-great here and now. “We drove like bats out of hell to the ER, Josh and me sitting in the back, holding a wrapped T-shirt around the wound to staunch the bleeding. Except every time we hit a bump, Tim would shout obscenities and more blood would spray out. Within minutes, Miggy is vomiting out the passenger’s window and Neil, poor Neil...”

“ ‘Not my car!’ ” Neil intones readily from the stream. “Why did I have to be the one to drive? I threatened to burn it afterwards. My first brand-new car, too. A BMW X3, black on black. Drove that off the lot feeling like The Man. Then, months later with these goons... Probably should’ve torched it.”

“Josh went in with Tim while he got stitched up,” Scott relates. “I called Tim’s parents. And two weeks later, we hit the swimming hole again. This time with much less bodily harm.”

“How old were you guys?”

“Twenty-six, twenty-seven. Old enough to know better, young enough not to care.”

Scott smiles and I catch it now, the bittersweet edge on even his carefree memories. For the longest time, I couldn’t think of Paul at all. I couldn’t say his name or I was back there, on the sticky floor of the liquor store, and he was smiling apologetically as the blood poured from his stomach and I screamed and screamed.

In the beginning the awful memories block out everything, a total eclipse of happiness. But, bit by bit, the good times sneak through again, and the pain becomes less a feral beast and more a wise companion. I don’t know if that’s peace, but it is progress.

“We would’ve worked it out,” Scott murmurs now, as if reading my mind. “We were all assholes. We’d all done stupid things. We would’ve fought a bit more, forgiven a lot more, then got on with it. Twelve years of friendship... You don’t just give up on that.”

“He would’ve married the woman who’s now your wife.”

“Yeah. And I would’ve lived with it. I was infatuated back then, captivated by the idea of Latisha. I didn’t truly know her, so I couldn’t really love her, not the way I do now. We became real to each other only in the past few years. We fell in love only in the past few years. I understand the difference.” He’s speaking more to Miggy and Neil now than to me. I let him have his speech. I let the three of them feel this joint memory, probably one of their first moments of solidarity since Tim’s disappearance.

Why do I do what I do? Because at the end of the day, the people left behind matter as much as the ones who are missing. We mourn the ones we’ve lost, but we agonize over the pieces of ourselves they took with them. The identities we’ll never have again. The emotions we’re certain we’ll never feel again. The sense of our own selves, becoming undone and disappearing just as completely and suddenly as those who vanished.

Now I present Scott with a bolstering smile.

“You’re a very considerate man,” I assure him.

“I like to think—”

I stab him in the chest.

And Miggy drops like a rock. While from the stream, Neil starts laughing.

CHAPTER 33

We’ve laughed, cried, and done everything short of weaving friendship bracelets by the time we hear approaching footsteps. We immediately hunker down behind the enormous felled pine. Miggy has his gun out, pointing straight up. The Charlie’s Angels pose strikes me as hysterically funny, and I have to duck even lower, my shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.

Maybe it’s low blood sugar or sleep deprivation or sheer terror, but we’ve all gone a little batty.

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