The Temptation of Adam: A Novel by Dave Connis (33)

GREATER THAN

Home doesn’t feel like home. Home feels like Nashville and I hate them both. I don’t want to go to my room. I don’t want to eat. All I want to do is not exist.

Addy went into her room when we got home and slammed the door in my face.

I don’t care.

I’m surfing channels with my pillow behind my back, comforter draped over my legs, when dad comes through the kitchen archway. His jaw tenses firm with concern as he sits next to me. He keeps opening his mouth like he’s going to speak but can’t find the strength yet.

He sighs. “Have you talked to your sister yet?”

I scoff. “No.”

“You’re starting school soon. Don’t you think—”

“No.”

He rubs his temples. “Alright, well I need to tell you this. It can’t wait any longer.”

He pauses. I expect him to go on another rant about how I can’t turn to porn, and how fighting addiction can help you feel whole again, but I’ve never felt whole, even when I tried. It’s impossible. If you can’t ever truly love someone, or yourself, then how can you feel whole? When a puzzle is missing a piece, you can’t say it’s finished.

Dad takes a deep breath. “So, I called your mom after our second Addiction Fighters meeting.”

He’s called her every Saturday for the last year. This isn’t news.

“I told her I was done calling.”

That = news.

“I said I was going to stop trying to get her back. I finally said good-bye.”

At least Addiction Fighters worked for one of us; my dad has finally decided to kick Nicholas Sparks in his romantic bucket’a’bull balls.

“Right before you left for Nashville, she called me and we decided to meet to get some closure. So, while you were in Nashville, I went to Portland.”

I know where this is going. I stand up and walk into the kitchen, looking for the keys to my car.

Dad blocks the door. “Adam, you can’t run away from this. You can’t run away from life anymore. I’m not going to let you.”

I remember when I said that about Addy, when I wanted that for her and Trey. When I said it to Dez.

“Just say what you’re going to say so I can leave.”

“Adam …”

“Dad, just say it.”

His face tightens. “I promised myself I wouldn’t try to get her to come back, and I didn’t. I stuck to my guns. However, we hashed out a lot of things and discovered a lot of miscommunication and hurt we never worked through. Anyway, it was a really good few days, and she’s going to move back to Seattle. She’s not going to live with us, but we’re going to try again.”

So fighting to be a better person worked for everyone else but me? Elliot, Trey, Addy, dad, everyone else got better. Everyone else moved forward and I’m still here. Just like before. Just like when The Woman left.

I scoff. “How long do you think that will last before she gets bored with you and decides the dick next door’s more entertaining?”

“Wow. How did that trip ruin you so much?” he asks. “You were growing, Adam. I shouldn’t have let you go. What am I supposed to do with you? How do I even help you right now? You know what? You’re grounded.”

“From what? What do I have that you can possibly ground me from?”

“This house.”

“Oh, so you’re kicking me out?”

“You’re using this place to hide. Get out. Come back tomorrow night.”

“Where do you want me to stay? Should I just freeze to death in my car to make it easier for everyone?”

“Maybe,” he says, stepping up to me, looking me dead in the eye. “Or call one of your friends and ask for refuge from your dad.”

I go upstairs, pack an overnight bag, and walk out the door. I get in Genevieve, turn on NPR, and drive. It’s not until I’m halfway there that I realize I’m driving to Mr. Cratcher’s house. I pull into his driveway, but I don’t turn off the car. I just sit there for an hour, listening to NPR’s strange late night mix of bad rock and classical music and doing everything I can to forget how I feel about Dez Coulter, Trey, Elliot, Addy, my dad, Mr. Cratcher. All the people I let in.

I want everyone who can hurt me gone.

I throw Genevieve into reverse and head toward Overlake Hospital.

—

“Is Mr. Cratcher still in room 322?” I ask the nurse sitting behind a giant circular nurse’s station.

“Yes, but visiting hours are over. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

I pretend like I’m walking toward the elevator, but I slide into a nook with two vending machines pressed against the back wall and wait. It’s a long and silent ten minutes before the nurse is called somewhere by a patient, but when she is, I sneak out of the alcove, around the desk, and down the hallway until I reach room 322.

I walk in. He’s still there. Alive by breathing, not by life.

I pull up a chair to the side of his bed. “We’re done. Dez and I are done. It was only a matter of time, I guess. Out of all the things you warned me about, I wish you would have told me we were doomed from the start.”

I think about him and Gabby. They weren’t doomed. Was it because she wasn’t addicted to anything? Was it because she didn’t have a vice? How is it that Trey, a sex addict, can have a normal relationship with my sister? One that’s helped him get stronger instead of worse?

“How did you and Gabby do it? How did you not just mess each other up? God, please just wake up and tell me.”

I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling. “I can’t stop thinking about her. I can’t stop thinking we could have done something different. What if I could’ve beat porn? What if she could’ve beat … everything? So many questions and …” I pause. Try to figure out what I’m feeling. What I’m thinking. “I wasn’t going to ask any questions when I got back, but I can’t stop. I have more and more each day. I feel like I’m going to explode.”

Then I realize something about Mr. Cratcher. He changed the album so often because he wanted to forget the pain that came with it. That’s why he worked on it for forty years. He didn’t want to face the pain.

“You chose to face it in the end,” I say. “You knew you were dying and you didn’t want to leave the album unfinished or that hurt unresolved. Every day we worked on it, you hurt. That’s why you lied about having the album. That’s why you redid tracks an ungodly amount of times. That’s why you spent so long picking microphones. You were fighting to let it go. You wanted to face your last unexplored hurt head on, and you had me there because you didn’t want to face it alone.”

I am Mr. Cratcher.

I am Mark.

I am Dez.

I am Trey.

I am my dad.

I am Elliot.

I am Addy.

I am my mom.

I cry. I hurt. I really, really hurt.

I can’t face this alone.

—

I drive back to Mr. Cratcher’s house at two-thirty in the morning. I still have the key I “stole” from under his flower planter. I walk inside and see Trey and Elliot asleep on the living room floor and couch, just like I knew they would be.

Neither of them wanted to be alone, either.

I stand above them, petrified. I haven’t apologized to them for being an ass. I haven’t even tried talking to them.

“Adam?” Trey asks.

And just like that, I start bawling. He rushes over to me and hugs me, like I never pushed him away. Elliot doesn’t touch me, but I feel him there. He even says so after a little while. I let myself feel the failure of the road trip, my disappointment in myself, the hurt of my mom leaving me without a word and Addy following her. I let every hurt I’ve pushed away in an attempt to be safe roll through me. And, though it sucks, I don’t feel alone and that’s not nothing. When my tears calm down, I tell the guys the truth about me. That I repeatedly asked girls for sex at my school. That I’ve always wanted to be whole. They don’t do anything but listen, and after I finish, they just hug me. And I realize something.

I need these guys, and they need me. A person’s hurt can’t be divvied up, but it can be experienced together, and maybe that’s what I need to survive.

—

When Trey and Elliot fall asleep, I walk up to Mr. Cratcher’s study. It’s the first time I’ve been in here since Dez and I last worked on the album. I plug my phone into a charger on the top of his desk, sit down, and check all the drawers to distract myself from thinking for a minute. One drawer is filled with office supplies. Another’s packed with worn black spines of composition notebooks. The rest are filled with cords and recording equipment I’d do better eating than trying to figure out what they do.

Above the computer, the speckled corner of a notebook sticks out behind a pair of black studio monitors. The notebook he closed the morning I caught him sleeping. I slide a bible off of it, then pull it off the shelf and open it to the most recently filled page.

How could he believe that being human equals being an addict? If that were the case, wouldn’t Addiction Fighters have to take place in a baseball stadium? If we’re all addicts, how have there been successful marriages?

As I lean back in his chair, I realize Mr. Cratcher asked me “what are you?” not just to be mystical and drive me insane. He asked the question because it mattered. He knew that if I couldn’t answer it, I might spend a lifetime believing I’m something I wasn’t and that I’d never know what I’m truly capable of.

—

It’s four in the morning when my phone rings. I snap up in my chair and swivel toward my phone.

“Hello?”

“Check your email.”

“Dez?”

There’s loud music in the background. Her voice is washed out in all the noise.

I hear a bunch of ruffling, and then someone say, “Here.”

“Dez?”

“Oh, Adam,” she says, pain between every letter and space. She doesn’t sound like herself. “I’ve done it.”

I stand like it will help me hear her better.

“Dez, what are you talking about?”

“I can finally use this one.”

“You aren’t making sense. What’s going on?”

Someone laughs. More ruffling.

“Alasdair Grey, From Lanark: A Life in Four Books.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The last line.”

Click.

I call her over and over. And for every button I press to get Dez back, there’s an unanswered ring that’s greater than.