IF WE’RE ASLEEP, WE WON’T FEEL THE TRAIN AS MUCH
The log rolls out from under me. I fall into the water of the Puget Sound. I don’t move. One second, I watch the sun as it lowers to hide behind the Deception Pass Bridge into the water, the next there is no sun and I’m sinking upwards. Up is just as dark as down. Dark is below and beside. Every inch dark as the next.
It’s cold, but I don’t care.
The darkness is here, but I don’t care.
I am alone, but I don’t care.
—
It’s two days later, and we’re no closer than we were when we started. Trey set up an interview with retired Nashville police chief Mason Crowell, but the soonest he could meet was tomorrow at lunch. You’d think a retired guy would have all the time in the world, but I guess that’s a stupid assumption.
I’ve been making a lot of those lately.
I’ve been spending every moment I can next to Dez. Now that I know it’s only a matter of time before we erupt, I don’t want to waste a second with her. She’s noticed something is off. This morning she asked if something was wrong. I just told her I looked at porn a few nights ago—wasn’t a lie. Her response was to kiss me and tell me to keep fighting, which I found incredibly ironic.
This is all a bucket’a’bull. Even Nicholas Sparks couldn’t make this up. Actually, he probably has, and that makes me feel worse.
Addy pulls me aside after lunch while the other KOV members chill on the porch.
“What’s going on, Papi?” she says, her face tight with seriousness.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Buuuull. Remember, you promised to be honest with me.”
Again, ironic, considering the amount of secrets she’s kept from me that I’ve found out by accident: quitting her job, liking Trey.
“Dez and I are …” I sigh. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like it can last.”
“Sure it can,” she says.
I turn toward the porch. “It isn’t that simple, Addy.”
She grabs my wrist and pulls me back. “Hey, look at me.”
I do.
“You will not let the divorce affect this. You and Dez are great together.”
It’s not the divorce. It’s the porn. It’s always been the damn porn.
“I know,” I say.
“Take it from someone who’s already let the divorce kill one relationship. It’s no fun, and it’s useless. You and Dez aren’t our parents.”
“It isn’t about the divorce.”
Addy crosses her arms. “Then what is it about?”
“Addiction.”
She rolls her eyes, but she wouldn’t if she understood how it felt to be controlled by something. “Papi, don’t let Dez’s knack for turning small things into giant things affect you. You two just need to date. Be young. You two act like you’re thirty the way you talk about all this.”
“How? How do I ‘just date’ when I’m so messed up?”
She opens her mouth to answer, but one doesn’t come out.
“It’s not a switch, Addy.”
“Yeah, but neither is the rest of life,” she says. “You can’t just let one thing about yourself ruin everything else. That’s the biggest part of healing. Moving on despite the hurt.”
“I don’t know how,” I snap. “I don’t know how to do that.”
Addy’s silent. The girl who quit her job for me is crushed under my weight. New guilt pours into my veins. I want porn.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m messed up. There’s no changing that.”
Addy hugs me. “I’m not trying to demean how intense addiction is or what you’re feeling, but you’re not that special, Adam. We all have our messes. You’re not alone in that.”
I know she won’t let me walk away in a bad place, so I just let her have the final word.
—
Elliot invents a game with Mexican Coke bottle caps that’s kind of like a combination of Mancala and marbles. We play it for most of the day instead of going anywhere. It’s not like we have anything better to do. We’re going to see a movie later tonight, so none of us want to drive out to Nashville yet, and going to the police station would be a waste of time considering we have a meeting with the police chief who was at the crime scene.
After dinner, I pull Dez out of the Hamana and we take a walk around the cul-de-sac. I hold onto her hand tightly, knowing, someday, I’ll have to let go. We pass a house that looks similar to ours, the same rustic barn wood steps and thick log patio railings, and see an older woman standing on her porch watching the sun.
“Beautiful!” she yells. We respond with a simultaneous “yeah!” as she walks back into her house.
We head back to the mansion, gather the Knights of Vice, and head out to see the new Cohen Brothers movie. Afterward, we wander around Nashville, and then drive out to The Loving Pie Company. This time we sit in the living room instead of the bedroom.
We get home at two in the morning. Everyone else heads out to the porch to go to bed, but I don’t. Instead, I grab the phone off the counter and go up to bathroom. The weird thing is: I don’t watch anything. I’m not even thinking of watching anything. I just stare at the blank screen. An hour later, I make my way downstairs.
Tonight, instead of deciding whether or not to sleep with Dez, I feel a different desire. I peel back the fabric, climb in behind her, and pull her as close as possible.
I just want to be together.
“It’s about time,” she says.
I kiss her on the neck. She grabs my hand and pushes her back into my chest. With the holiest of sighs, she falls asleep and, after an hour or so of shoulder reconfiguration, so do I.
—
In the middle of the night, I feel her get out of the hammock. I’m in a sleep daze that makes everything seem like a dream. She comes back a few minutes later.
“You okay?” I ask her.
“Yeah, I’m in a sweaty dandelion.”
I’m pretty sure that’s not what she said. I force my eyes open. “What.”
“Bathroom, Adam. Bathroom.”
I smile and lay my cheek against her back when she crawls back in.
“I built a catapult,” I say. Wait. No. That can’t be what I said.
She pulls my hand over her waist. “I love you, too.”
—
As I stare at Mason Crowell, I note two things:
1. I didn’t expect him to be black.
2. For being a retired police chief, he doesn’t look very old.
Mason Crowell’s looks ≠ age.
Mason Crowell’s looks = sculpted and ripped black guy.
He wears a baseball cap declaring his obsession/affiliation with the Tennessee Titans, and I’m pretty sure I see a Tennessee Titans “T” inked onto his arm when he takes his jacket off.
“So, what do you kids want to know?”
“Well, uh,” Trey says, “we want to just ask you a few questions about the Elias Harper murder.”
His face stiffens. He’s probably never wanted to talk about this, especially to a bunch of kids.
“You said you were doing a report on police racism.”
I look at Addy. She makes an “oh boy” face: gritted teeth, wide eyes.
“Well, it’s kind of based around the Harper murder,” Trey says. Something tells me Mr. Crowell would stand up and leave if we weren’t in his house.
Dez notices Mr. Crowell’s distrust and explains everything from the beginning. She talks about how being murdered because you’re a different shade of human is like killing a celebrity because they’re a different kind of human. It’s a clever analogy that grabs Mr. Crowell, and instead of listening because he has no choice, he listens because he wants to. A few minutes later, she gets him to relax enough and she explains what we’re looking for, and why we’re looking for it. She gives the information we’ve already gathered in such detail it’s like she has it stored away on an Excel spreadsheet in her brain.
After she’s finished, he walks over to his counter and pours leftover coffee into a blender with a scoop of protein powder, milk, and ice and then blends it for a few seconds. “I’ve never discussed the details of this murder with anyone,” he says, pouring the smoothie into a pint glass.
We cast each other some disappointed looks, but Addy just nods like she’s sure something good is coming.
“Mostly because there were never any details to discuss. Racism was obvious during that time. There were probably hundreds of people targeting Elias, Colin, and Gabby. Just like there were hundreds of people targeting me for being Nashville’s first black police chief.” He sits at the table and, though the guy is jacked, he sits like he’s weak. It’s like he’s Samson, and this conversation is his Delilah.
“The precinct kept none of the evidence, I’m sorry. Do you have any other questions?”
My head is filled with overlapping curses. When I run out of swear words, I start combining them.
“Do you think Colin Cratcher killed Elias?” Elliot asks.
“No. No, I don’t. I’m sure he didn’t.”
“Why?”
“The same reason the jury was sure.” Mr. Crowell takes a giant sip of his caffeinated muscle juice.
“What reason?” Dez asks.
“The song played in the courtroom. He called it evidence. It was called ‘What Are You, Elias?’ It was Colin’s response to the people threatening Elias and Gabby. The three of them had sung on the track together. Colin broke down as soon as the song came on.”
“A song cleared him?” I ask, incredulous.
“No. Technically, the song wasn’t evidence at all. Colin was the evidence. He couldn’t make it a minute without looking back at Gabby for assurance. The man was a wreck.”
“But he was high, right?” Dez asks. “He didn’t remember that night.”
Mr. Crowell shakes his head. “Yes, but it wasn’t Colin. Everyone in that courtroom knew that at the end.”
I don’t feel like making eye contact with anyone. To make eye contact would mean taking on more disappointment.
“You know,” Mr. Crowell says. “I may have a copy of that song. I’ve done my best to forget that day, but I have a blurry memory of Colin giving me a demo after the trial.”
“Isn’t that something you should remember?” Dez snaps.
He casts her a cold look, and her sharpness wilts. “No, that day reminded me that, though I was a professional agent against injustice, I couldn’t end it. I may have been the one with jurisdiction and a gun, but it takes a world to win a battle against anything worth fighting. That was the toughest case of my life. Through my entire career, my day was good if I didn’t have to deal with another case like that.” He sighs, rolls his neck, and then glances at the clock hanging above the kitchen sink. “I need to go. If you give me a few days to deal with my feelings on this matter, I’ll look around to see if I have a copy of Colin’s song.”
—
“That meeting wasn’t nothing, guys,” Trey says as we pull into our cul-de-sac. “He may have a song for us. We can’t just be disappointed. We did this for adventure, remember? To be together. To fight our addictions with those moments. Wallowing is dangerous for us.”
Addy pulls onto the highway and nods. “Yeah, Abuela is right. If you guys can’t enjoy this trip for other reasons, we better leave. Having four depressed addicts in one house will be a disaster I won’t be able to contain.”
They’re right. The decline of Adam Hawthorne is happening, and I don’t know how to stop it. If I can’t figure it out soon, I might go all the way back to the beginning when I was okay with not caring and not asking questions. It sounds so … normal.
That night, we play more of Elliot’s bottle cap game, which we’re now calling Capola, while pretending to be happy. When it’s time to go to bed, I don’t get into my mattress. I stay with Dez in the Hamana. We don’t talk at all, which is when I know we both feel the rumble of our expiration date barreling toward us. Instead of trying to figure out a way to break out of the rope holding us onto the tracks, we hold hands and sleep.
Maybe if we’re asleep, we won’t feel the train as much.