MELTDOWN
I’m speeding back to Mr. Cratcher’s house when I get a text from Mr. Coulter.
Nashville cops called. Tickets bought. Meet us at airport in thirty minutes.
I run into the house. “Elliot, Trey!”
They stir, but they don’t respond, which is good now that I’ve given it a little thought. I don’t know what waking them up would do. Mr. Coulter only bought three tickets, so if they woke up, they’d just freak out and probably keep me from getting to the airport on time. Besides, I don’t want to have to explain what I’ve done to Dez.
I go upstairs and run over to Mr. Cratcher’s computer where I left my overnight bag. I bend over to get it and accidentally put my hand on the keyboard. I must hit a keyboard shortcut, because Protools, which is minimized on the bottom of the screen, pops up to a “open file” screen. I go to close it, but I see a file called, “To The Knights of Vice.” I only ever open the files from their own folder on the desktop, never search in the program itself, so this is the first time I’ve seen this. I click on it. The screen opens to a song with five tracks. Each one named after a member of the Knights of Vice. The last track is called “Everyone.”
I un-mute the track called “Adam” and a line starts moving across the screen.
“Adam.”
Just the sound of his voice makes me feel hope.
“Today, you and Miss Coulter honored me with your company, and after you left, I felt led to leave you this message. I must warn you, it will be long-winded. When you are looking at the end of your life, everything you have aches to be shared more than before. This fact alone will give me the propensity to have more words than normal.”
He must have recorded this the day Dez and I came to record together. It also was the day he collapsed in his bathroom.
“It is not a typical adage to say that young love is true. Most cases of it are self-serving at best and purely physical at worst. However, you and Miss Coulter have a palpable connection. The same kind I felt with my dear Gabby. I say all this because your comments about why you are not dating put a deep fear in me. Therefore, since I am on my deathbed, I am making some last requests of you, which I expect you to honor.
“Adam, you and Miss Coulter are allowed to break up because you decide you are different people who do not work well as a couple. You are allowed to break up because one of you can’t see themselves marrying the other. In special cases, I’d even allow your breakup if you were simply being downright rotten to each other. However, I forbid you from breaking up because you assume addicts cannot purely love. Though that assumption is correct, it is not exclusive to addicts. The experience of an addict has its differences, all humans are both broken and holy, and we all have the opportunity to waste our lives looking for wholeness.
“In the search of something that makes sense, we make our lives incredibly complicated by expanding everything under the sun until it is more confusing than it actually is. Life can be much simpler if we just let the sun be the sun, the moon be the moon, the trees be the trees, because that’s simply what they are, what they were made to be. You’d be a fool if you looked at the sky and said it was a car. In the same way, you cannot say a human is perfect. You need to let humans be humans. Let the indefinable be indefinable.
“Adam, the thing about our sun is that, even though it is made of complex atoms and shares in our groan of un-wholeness, it is ever burning, casting light when it rises and when it sets. We are no different. We cannot be whole on earth, but we can be variables of broken and holy light. We might not be able to love wholly, but we can love truly if we face our pain together.
“Do not squirm through life believing you will only ever be an addict, I beg of you. You are only an addict if you believe yourself one. The addicts, I use this word cautiously, who find freedom are the ones who realize they were never addicts in the first place, just humans in dire need of rightness. Now, please distribute the other tracks accordingly to the Knights of Vice. This will be good practice for you, considering you must do so with my entire estate. Be sure to listen to the track titled ‘Everyone’ together. Tell Dez every day that she’s stronger than she thinks. Love her and the Knights of Vice as best as you can, and know that will be good enough. I must go. It’s been an honor to have blazed on this earth with you.”
I listen to it again. I almost listen to it a third time, but instead, I just mail the track to myself and run down the stairs with a frick-ton of hope.
I call Addy. It rings over and over, and just when I think I’ll have to leave a message, she picks up.
Of course she picks up.
My Addy.
“Adam?”
“Dez is in trouble. I think she’s going to kill herself. I’m flying to Nashville with her parents to find her.”
“Oh my God, can I do anything?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I should have never left her there,” she says. “I—”
“Addy, I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry for saying what I did. For arguing with you, for telling you that moving to Bothell did nothing.”
The thing is, Addy did everything. She showed me what it looked like to love by loving me in a way I couldn’t understand. She showed the answer to Mr. Cratcher’s question. She’s just as messed up by the divorce as I am, but she still chose to love me, everyone, in selfless ways. She was, and is, a variable of broken and holy light.
That’s what I am, Mr. Cratcher. That’s what we all are.
“You coming back here changed my life,” I say. “And that’s the truth. I want to be you when I grow up.”
“Papi,” she says, “you’re forgiven. I love you a lot. Now get off the phone and get to Dez. I’ll handle everything here.”
“I—I love you, too.”
I hang up the phone, and then drive 95 MPH down I-5 toward the girl I can love enough.
I park at the airport, and while running toward the gate with Mr. and Mrs. Coulter, I send Dez a text:
I’m coming. Please wait for me. Please, Dez.
—
When we land, Mr. Coulter calls the cops for an update, and they tell him there’s one cruiser out looking for her and that they’ll let him know if they find her. We catch a cab to the rental house. As soon as Mr. and Mrs. Coulter walk inside, they start calling her name.
“She won’t be in here,” I say, and they look at me like I’m a psychic.
“She refused to sleep in the house. She only ever slept in the Hamana on the patio.”
“Hamana?” Mr. Coulter asks.
“Banana plus hammock.”
We walk onto the patio. The hammock’s empty, and the big heater’s turned off. I run to her tent, but she’s not there either. We search the house just in case, but we don’t find anything.
“Where else would she be?” they ask, but I have no idea.
We drive over to Miss Hunt’s house, and even though we tell her Dez’s missing, she invites us over for dinner. In her defense, she said she’d make some phone calls first. We stop by Bridge Studios. The Ass is here, sitting behind a desk. He rubs his temples as if the sight of me alone is enough to bring on a migraine. He says he hasn’t seen “Mindy,” and he looks very thankful about it.
Outside of Bridge, I look up the “What Are You, Elias?” email and copy Mr. Crowell’s number onto the back of my hand with a pen from Mrs. Coulter’s purse. His phone rings twice, then he answers.
“Good evening, whom am I speaking with?” he asks.
“Mr. Crowell, it’s Adam Hawthorne. Dez’s friend?”
“How can I help you, Adam? Did you get the recording?”
“Yeah, I did, and I still haven’t recovered from it. Listen, I was wondering if you knew where Dez was? I think she’s in trouble.”
His voice goes from business casual to business formal. “When was the last time you talked with her?”
“Last night.”
“Was she showing signs of duress? What was the discussion like?”
“She sounded off. There was loud music in the background and people were talking around her.”
“Did she say anything?”
“Yeah, she said, ‘Check your email’ and ‘Oh, Adam. I’ve done it now.’ And she gave me the last line of a book.”
“What was the line?”
“‘Good-bye.’”
“Have you alerted local authorities?”
“Yes, and there’s a cruiser looking for her.”
“Come over to my house immediately. I’ll make some calls and get some more hands on this as soon as possible.”
“Okay, thank you so much, Mr. Crowell.”
“One last question: has she ever shown any suicidal tendencies?”
“Um, no. Well, I don’t know. She has a history of substance abuse, but she never abused it in a suicidal way. At least that I know of.”
“Did anything happen to her that would cause her to turn to abuse again?”
I swallow and close my eyes.
This is my fault. Our eruption.
“Yeah, me.”
—
We’ve been waiting at Mr. Crowell’s house for three hours when he finally walks into the living room with his cell phone pressed against his ear.
“Yes. Yes, great work. Okay, thank you.” He puts his phone in his pocket. “That was the current police chief. He said they found her in an alley behind a local nightclub, but she’s not conscious and her pulse is weak. He suspects she tried overdosing. They found traces of cocaine everywhere: on her clothes, under her fingernails. They’re rushing her to Nashville General.”
This is BS. God, this is BS.
Mrs. Coulter lays a hand over her heart. “Will she be okay?”
“There’s no way to know until they get her to the hospital. Come on, I’ll escort you.”
I can’t believe I left her. She was afraid of Percocets because of where they lead and instead of helping her, I left her. I pushed her past the gate. No, we both pushed her past the gate. I’m not going to give myself all the credit for this. We both erupted.
Somehow, all the chaos makes everything seem distant. Like, when I look out the back passenger window, I see nothing but Dez lying in the street calling for help. Noise? I hear nothing but dim echoes. Sirens. Talking. I hardly feel the seatbelt press into my chest as Mr. Crowell slams on the breaks when someone cuts him off.
The moment the Emergency Room glass doors slide open, every noise comes back. It’s too much for my senses to take and I feel like I’m going to snap. Beeping. Emergency room silence. Hurt. Fear. Love. Fear. Beeping. Each time another noise or person enters my senses, I feel like the next will send me into a psych ward–worthy meltdown.