Chapter Text
The day Langdon moved into his new apartment was the loneliest of his life. The last eleven months had held more bad days than good, but nothing cut him quite so deep as the first time he came home to that empty, echoing space.
Abby had offered to help him move. As a couple, they’d moved seven times in the last twelve years, into and out of shitty, roach-infested dumps in buildings with long, dark hallways and dim fluorescent track lights, duplexes and complexes in Milwaukee and Ann Arbor. The last move, into the four bedroom, two-point-five bathroom house in McCandless was supposed to be the last. Their “forever home,” in the words of their realtor, a peppy Korean woman named Barbara.
Barbara was a character. She wore too much perfume and chewed cinnamon guma and wore navy blazers and chunky statement necklaces. She showed them fifteen different houses in three different suburbs before they found the place in McCandless, and she said the words “forever home” so often that it had become a private joke for Dr. and Mrs. Langdon. In quiet moments, to punctuate a lull in the conversation, one of them would come out and say it, always in a pitchy imitation of Barbara, who was a very nice lady and probably didn’t deserve to be laughed at behind her back.
It wasn’t funny now. And if that three-word phrase—your forever home!—popped into his head while his soon-to-be-ex-wife was helping him load all of his stuff into the back of Uhaul, he would cry in front of her and then he would have to kill himself for real.
Langdon was probably depressed. He didn’t want to think about it. As he pulled into the parking lot at his new apartment complex, he tried very hard not to think about anything at all.
These were the moments that tested his sobriety the most, these itchy, in-between moments when there was nothing on the radio and no one in the passenger seat. Langdon had never been a social user, going to druggy parties with druggy people—he didn’t need to be fucked up to be around other people. Sure, he’d drank plenty in college, but that had more to do with the state of Wisconsin than any need to take the edge off socially. He only needed it now, in these solitary drowning moments when the silence got too loud.
Even as a kid, he’d always had a restless spirit. It was why he’d hated going to Mass, too much reverential silence. He couldn’t just sit still, he always needed something to occupy the fidgety thing inside his head. Before the benzos, he’d had a thousand ways to cope. In high school, he’d had baseball and track and stupid arguments with his sisters, Friday house parties and Saturday morning trail runs with the dogs. Sex and cigarettes became a regular part of his life in college, but he’d quit smoking when Abby threatened to dump him junior year.
All that time, music had been the only constant, the longest love affair of his life. He’d been the only boy in choir all through middle school, but he gave it up in favor of sports during freshman year of high school. Later on, in college, he’d always been the one DJing at house parties, and when he finished undergrad, he’d bought himself a bass guitar as a graduation gift, thinking for some reason that he was going to have time to learn to play in medical school.
Now, sitting in the van with everything he owned piled into the back, he did what he’d always done as a kid, jammed his earbuds into his ears, and started playing the Replacements at max volume.
It didn’t take very long to unload the van. He didn’t own very much. In the process of packing up his stuff, he’d come to the realization that almost everything in their house was theirs rather than his. The Crate & Barrel sofa, all the dishes in the kitchen cabinets, the vintage lithograph they’d bought on their honeymoon in Spain—these were relics of their marriage, articles which said a lot about their shared taste and about the life they’d once built together, but nothing at all about him.
He couldn’t take any of it with him. Taking pictures off the walls, boxing up any of the plates or cutlery, he would’ve felt like a thief ransacking their marital home, like some junkie breaking into a vacant warehouse to strip copper.
He didn’t want to feel that way any more, so he left it all behind. He took only the things that were indisputably his: his clothes, the stereo and his CD collection, the bass guitar, all the sci-fi paperbacks he’d never got around to reading. It had been a little humiliating to realize that the stuff he was moving into his new bachelors’ apartment wasn’t any different than the stuff he’d left in his childhood bedroom back in Bloomfield. He was thirty-six years old. Had he really changed so little in twenty years?
It was a question without an answer. Langdon had no idea who he was any more. Moreover, he was beginning to suspect that he never did.
He brought everything in in a dozen trips. His new apartment was on the third floor with a big picture window facing east and a scrap of a river view, if you craned your neck and looked past the parking lot and the jutting wing of the building. When the leasing agent showed him the unit, she hadn’t been able to stop commenting on it.
She trailed after him while he wandered from room to room and looked out at the view of the parking lot, chirping such a great view! and so much natural light! because there was nothing else positive to say about the place. It was eight hundred square feet, builder grade everything with can lights and those awful grey-toned vinyl floors with the fake wood grain. He hated everything about it, but Bitsy—that was the leasing agent’s name, Bitsy of all fucking things—had been going on and on and on about how much he was going to love waking up to that view and all that natural light. She said something about early mornings, and he said something about how that suited him fine, since his shifts at the hospital started early and her eyes had snapped immediately to his bare ring finger and he’d felt naked and disgusting. In the end, he said he’d take it just to end the conversation, and that was that. He signed the lease and sealed his fate.
It wasn’t Bitsy’s fault. If anything, it was her parents’ fault for giving her that stupid name and damning her to a life of inanity. She seemed nice-enough, though, just a few years out of college. This wasn’t her forever job, she’d go onto bigger and better things, or maybe she’d get stuck there and live out the rest of her life as a leasing agent in a shithole new construction apartment full of divorced losers, and then at her wake they’d all stand around and tell stories about how good she’d been at filling out rental agreements and remembering which keys went to which apartments. God bless Bitsy, they’d say. She was so good with the divorcees!
Alone in the apartment, keys dangling from his hands, Langdon missed Bitsy. Moving all his shit in had been a good distraction, but now he’d done it and his own thoughts had started creeping back in. The Replacements were no longer cutting it, and all the old familiar songs weren’t crowding out the nothing in his head the way he needed them too. Bitsy—or hell, even Barbara—could have saved him with their constant stream of meaningless chatter, but now he was alone and he had to figure out how to manage these things for himself.
He stared blankly around at the empty apartment and the piles of boxes stacked haphazardly against the far wall. If you killed yourself now, he thought, they could just take all your stuff straight to the dump. It’d be really convenient.
He decided to go for a run instead.
—
By the time he found his running shoes and dug a clean-enough shirt out of a duffel bag of dirty gym clothes, it was nearly seven o’clock and the sky was just beginning to darken. His new neighborhood was mostly flat, tucked in between the Alleghany and a sprawling Catholic cemetery.
Earbuds still firmly in place, Langdon started up his running playlist and set out down the narrow street at a jog, passing painted brick rowhouses and cars parked up on sidewalks. He turned left and then right at a series of t-intersections and eventually emerged onto a wider commercial street. Coming to a stop at a pedestrian intersection, he paused to stretch out his calves, looking around and trying to imagine his life in this new neighborhood, wondering which of the coffee shops and corner stores would become part of his routine. The walk signal came on and he continued along his way, his heart rate mounting as the street began to slope uphill and the neighborhood changed around him, the streets widening and becoming tree-lined and lovely as the houses increased in size and sprouted covered porches and oriel windows.
When he was seventeen, he turned down a full-ride track scholarship to Grand Valley. He was already an atheist by then—he hadn’t attended Mass regularly since he hit his second growth spurt and became physically too large to be forced into the back of the family car on Sunday mornings—but his father had hit the roof at the prospect of him attending a secular school.
His teen years had been punctuated by screaming arguments about his lousy attitude and Unitarian girlfriend, but the fight about college was the only time his dad actually threw him out of the house. He spent a couple hours crying on a park bench, and then he made his way to his oldest sister’s house. He spent a couple weeks there, but that was right after the twins were born, and it was clear that neither she nor her husband really wanted him around. He couldn’t get a good night’s sleep on a sofabed with two newborns screaming in the adjoining room, and when his grades started dropping, he’d had no choice but to move back home.
His mom was glad to have him back, but his father didn’t speak to him for another three weeks. No one ever mentioned Grand Valley again. There was no point. They all understood the unspoken conditions of his return; the question of college had been settled as soon as he’d walked back through that door.
In the end, Marquette had the right choice. He winced whenever he thought about the balance of his outstanding student loans, but he’d liked the Jesuits and his overnight orderly job at Ascension Hospital gave him an excuse to skip evening chapel. Marquette was where he’d met Abby, and he couldn’t have made it through med school without her. He even liked her parents, even though they were from Appleton and the first time he met them, Abby had started an argument about abortion over dinner and he’d spent the whole night with his hands clenched into fists and his stomach tied up in knots
As he crested the hill, he picked up the pace, runner’s high washing over him in waves. Exhilarated, he hurtled down the street, legs pumping, heart pounding, calves burning, sweat soaking his shirt. Everything hurt. He was overexerting himself. He was already exhausted from moving, and he knew he’d pay for his recklessness in the morning, but for the first time that day, his mind was quiet. All his guilt and everything he’d ever done wrong slipped out of focus, and the world shrank down to the length of his stride. For a moment, all that mattered was forward momentum and the propulsive rhythm of his feet striking the pavement. This was all the ritual he needed.
He turned another corner and started heading downhill, back toward home. The streets narrowed and the lawns shrunk; the houses got smaller and shabbier and crowded closer together on smaller lots. He passed an impound lot and a homeless encampment, and then he rounded another corner and found himself on a cycle path that ran parallel to the railroad tracks, set back from the street and houses by a strip of dying grass.
The gate was up and there was no train in sight, but if there had been, he would have jumped.
It hit him like a bullet between the shoulderblades. His blood turned to icewater in his veins and he broke stride, stumbling forward and almost falling before he caught himself and staggered upright. His high deserted him in an instant, driven away by dawning horror: this was what it felt like to have a plan.
It hadn’t been an impulse or an intrusive thought. It had been a cold and quiet certainty: if an opportunity to kill himself had presented itself to him at that moment, he would have taken it. No hesitation.
Dizzy, Langdon stood and stared at the tracks, his guts twisting. After a moment, he tore his eyes away and turned his back on the railroad tracks, hurrying away down a different street. His eyes stung, and he realized that he was on the verge of tears. He limped the last half-mile home, wincing with every step. It was a beautiful August evening and all the leaves were still green. There wasn’t even a hint of autumn in the balmy air, but he was shivering uncontrollably. When he finally rounded the corner and his building came back into view, he was so relieved he almost threw up.
As he hurried forward, his vision narrowed to a pinprick, which was why he didn’t see the car until it was almost on top of him.
In a weird sort of way, it was almost a relief. Ten minutes ago he’d been staring at the tracks and wishing for a train, but when the white Volvo came within inches of hitting him, pure animal instinct kicked in. He jumped out of the way just in time, diving into a patch of underwatered grass to avoid being broadsided by three thousand pounds of Swedish engineering. The driver braked hard and the car came to a screeching halt, mere inches from his skull.
The woman behind stared at him in open-mouthed horror, her dark eyes huge behind thick-rimmed glasses. In his rattled state, it took a moment for him to recognize her.
“Mel?”
“Oh my god, Langdon—” She threw the car into park and flung the driver’s side door open, scrambling out onto the asphalt. Her mouth was moving, but he couldn’t hear her over the pounding in his ears. She was reaching out for him, so he tried to sit up, but a wave of dizziness hit him, and then he was on the ground and she was kneeling over him. Her hair was in two braids instead of her usual tight ponytail, and a piece of it had come loose, falling down to frame her face. For some stupid reason—either leftover endorphins from his aborted run or the simple animal thrill of escaping certain death—he wanted to reach up and smooth it back into place.
His hearing faded back in. She was still talking.
“—so, so, so sorry, I didn’t see you!”
“You should check your mirrors,” he said.
Her face crumpled. “I know,” she said miserably. “I’m not a very good driver.”
He snorted. “Yeah. I noticed.”
She helped him to sit up and then watched nervously as he stretched out his limbs: arms and then legs, fingers and then toes. Nothing broken, no permanent damage, but he’d scraped his palms when he’d flung his hands out to break his fall. Mel took his hands in hers and brought them up close to her face, turning them over to examine the broken skin.
He should have pulled back, but he was still too shaken up from the events of the day, so he sat there passively, allowing her to give him a second once-over.
When she looked back up at him, her face was a mask of perfect contrition. “You’re hurt!”
“It could’ve been worse.”
“I have a first aid kit in my car,” she said. “It’s got everything. Alcohol wipes, bacitracin, band-aids. And juice! I’ve got juice, if you want juice. It’s for my sister, but—”
Some juice sounded really good, but Langdon found himself shaking his head. “It’s alright, I’ve got one upstairs.” Which was probably true, even if it was buried at the bottom of a suitcase underneath his funeral suit and a six-month supply of mismatched socks.
Mel’s brows knit together in confusion, and Langdon realized almost immediately that he’d made a mistake. As far as Mel—and everyone else on staff in the emergency room at PMTC—knew, he still lived with Abby and their kids at their place out in McCandless.
Shame bubbled up inside him, self-loathing following close behind. For a moment, he wanted very badly to lie to her. It had been a long and humiliating day and he’d wanted to die and then almost died. He wanted a shower. He wanted juice or a beer or something stronger. He wanted to lay facedown on the ground and wait for another car to come along and finish him off. More than anything else, wanted to exit the conversation without having to admit to her that his wife had finally gotten sick of his bullshit and filed for divorce.
Even as the impulse to lie wrapped its sticky fingers around his brainstem, he knew there was no point in it. If Mel was driving like a maniac through the parking lot of his building, she either lived there or knew someone who did, and he’d never be able to keep the ruse up if they ran into one another again. His sponsor and therapist was always going on and one about the importance of radical honesty in defeating shame, and they’d been right more often than they’d been wrong.
Swallowing hard, he put his mouth around a difficult truth. “I just moved in,” he said, avoiding eye contact. “Abby and I split up.”
Mel went very still. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
“Oh,” she said, and he glanced over, expecting to see contempt or pity written across her features.
She wasn’t scowling at him. Her expression was soft. She was still staring at him, leaning in. He was suddenly conscious of the fact that they were sitting side-by-side on a patch of dying grass in the parking lot where anyone might see them. The setting sun had turned her hair into red gold and that one wispy strand was still floating around her eyes, making her look soft and strange, not at all like herself. And Langdon was still hopped up on adrenaline, his heart still beating hard, and Mel was so close, close enough that he could see each individual lash framing her dark eyes. There was a mole on the left side of her neck that he’d never noticed before, just a little pinprick half-hidden by the curve of her jaw.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and her voice was gentle and sincere. “Was it because of—” she froze, and her eyes went wide, seeming to realize that the question she’d been about to ask was completely inappropriate.
Langdon laughed. What else could he do? “It wasn’t just because of the drugs,” he said, and he couldn’t help the bitterness that crept into his voice. “There were a lot of other problems in our marriage. Mostly me.”
“No.” Mel shook her head, and the insistence in her voice surprised him. “No way. It takes two people to make a relationship work, and two people to make it stop working. If there are problems, you have to communicate.”
He looked at her sidelong, considering. Before he could decide how to reply, another car came screaming around the corner and came to a stop behind Mel’s. The driver laid on the horn, and they both jumped. Mel jerked back as though scalded, her cheeks faintly pink.
“Sorry,” she muttered, and she dropped her gaze, scrambling to her feet so she could get back into the driver’s seat. “Sorry, sorry—”
She straightened her car out, leaving enough room for the other car to pass. The driver scowled at both Mel and Langdon, a look on their face like the two of them had arranged to stage a near-fatal accident for the express purpose of minorly inconveniencing them. Langdon’s hands were still too shaky to flip them off, which was probably for the best.
As Mel got the car turned around, the dizziness subsided enough that he was able to pull himself to his feet and stand unsupported. He could still feel her eyes on him, the weight of her concern. Not wanting to worry her, he arranged his face into a smile and waved her away. “I’m fine,” he called, and he tried very hard to seem like he was. “You go on your way—”
Another moment’s hesitation. There was earnest concern in her eyes, something almost unbearably kind. He wondered whether she thought that his shakiness was due to the almost-accident, or if she suspected that there was more to it. Her unbounded empathy was a source of constant surprise for him, something he admired and envied. Life would be easier if he were a little less himself and a little more like her.
After a short eternity, Mel drove off, waving as she did so. He returned the gesture, watching her until she was out of sight, and then turned back toward the building where his empty apartment and the boxed-up remnants of his married life awaited him.
As he limped back toward the door, his mind began turning in circles again. This time, though, he got stuck on a new thought, a new memory: Mel King, her concerned face inches from his own, that wisp of reddish-gold hair fallen soft in front of her eyes. If he’d reached up and brushed it back, what would she have done?
He shook his head. Just another entry in his growing list of unanswerable questions.