A Fateful Trip Copyright 2011 by B. K. Dell
www.BKDell.com
Published by Patriot Books at Smashwords
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Cover art Copyright 2011 by B. K. Dell
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A Fateful Trip
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…
The first few notes grated on my nerves, even before my conscious mind could identify the cause of the irritation.
“Can you turn this garbage off?” I shouted to the man behind the counter. I told myself not to do it. It shouldn’t have been hard to predict what would happen.
“Did you just call Gilligan’s Island garbage?” Kristin asked.
See. Here it comes.
“Yes, I hate Gilligan’s Island, okay?”
“You hate Gilligan’s Island?” asked the man behind the counter.
“You hate Gilligan’s Island?” echoed Kristin.
I looked back and forth trying to decide to which one I should respond. I turned to the man behind the counter and said, “My tastes in TV shows shouldn’t concern you. Now can you please turn it off?”
“Other patrons are watching.”
I turned my head to examine the rows of empty booths in the small, desolate café. “What other patrons?”
He must have taken my comment as a critique of his establishment because he answered, “Well, you didn’t see my lunch rush earlier, pal.”
“I’m sure it was fearsome,” I said condescendingly.
“How could you hate Gilligan’s Island?” asked Kristin, trying to get back to the original question.
“Yeah, what kind of a Commie doesn’t like Gilligan’s Island?” the man chimed in again, uninvited.
“Can you just turn it off please? We are the only ones here.”
“Maybe I’m watching it.”
“Whatever happened to ‘the customer’s always right?’”
“You lost that privilege when you went bad-mouthing Gilligan’s Island.”
“What’s the big deal? It’s not like I insulted this swill you call coffee,” I snapped to the man.
“Hey, if you don’t like it, you can leave.”
“Oh, that’s rich, a café owner who likes his alone time. Great business model. Where can I invest?” I sassed as I stood up. “C’mon, Kristin, let’s let him watch his TV in peace.”
Kristin stood up too, but it was clear she had no intentions of walking out the door with me. Instead she grabbed me by the wrist and began to pull me toward a booth in the back – away from the TV and away from the owner. She did it with so much confidence and good-natured charm that it was hard for me to resist. She didn’t for a second take my empty threat of storming out seriously. As she pulled me away, she turned to him and said, “I think your coffee’s yummy.” I turned back to him and sneered, “Spoiler alert. I’ve seen this episode… They don’t make it off the island!”
He shot me a crude gesture.
When we reached our new booth, I felt confident the whole Gilligan’s Island debacle would be dropped, but Kristin pronounced one final word. She said, “For most people, Gilligan’s Island reminds them of a simpler time. Even just the theme song recalls something innocent and virginal in our hearts…and not just from our childhoods, but even a simpler time in our nation’s history.”
Okay, I pictured myself saying warmly, I can’t argue with that. But instead I grunted, “Innocent and virginal? Are you kidding me?”
“Aww, c’mon,” she protested. “Everyone has a memory of staying home sick from school and watching daytime TV all day. Those days were special, a break from routine. You got to see all the shows you didn’t have a chance to see since summer.”
“Not me. I never had that. There never was a time I was innocent.” I wore my pain like a merit badge, like it was the only thing in my whole worthless life that made me special. And I believed that it was. “I never had anyone to come and take my temperature, put their hand to my forehead, and force me to take my medicine. There were no special days for me.”
Translation: My childhood sucked; now I’m going to make you pay for it. Why you? Because you’re the only one foolish enough to come too close.
I could see the light in her eyes go dark. We sat in silence.
I tried to be cool, but the knot in my chest was getting tighter and the pain of my unhealed wounds compelled me like a sharp spur in the side. I spat with all my pent-up venom, “Fine, maybe you should just…run. You’re going to run anyway. You’re going to turn your back and leave me. You might as well do it expeditiously. Better for it to end here in this café all at once than through a dozen screened calls and unanswered emails, followed up with some drunk dialing and then a restraining order.”
She shook her head in disgust and got up to leave. I realized, just then, that by “a simpler time,” she must have meant a time before she knew guys like me existed, before she was sickly compelled to turn them into charity cases.
“Wait!” I yelled. She turned back to look at me. I laughed and said, “I was just kidding about the restraining order.”
She didn’t budge.
“I’m sorry. Please don’t go,” I implored. “Have a seat. Please…Please?”
She continued to stand there sizing me up, her eyes burning an angry hole in me. But she acquiesced and returned reluctantly to her side of the booth. I did my best to sound sincere and apologetic, though I could still hear the strain in my voice. “It’s just that I don’t like being reminded of my brother, okay? Gilligan’s Island reminds me of my older brother Stevie.”
“Is he on a deserted island?” she snapped, but then her own joke made her laugh. She was trying so hard to act tough, but blew it when she accidentally tickled herself. I can’t deny…it was cute.
“Maybe…” I said mournfully. “My brother’s lost at sea.”
Her hand shot to her mouth. “Oh, Andy, I’m sorry I-”
“I’m kidding!” I laughed.
“You’re horrible.”
“No, we know where he is,” I told her. “He just watches TV all day long.”
She laughed and said, “I have a brother like that.”
“I doubt it,” I scoffed. “Stevie watches TV all day. All day. Twenty-four hours a day.”
“He couldn’t possibly.”
“Well, every waking hour. But they have to leave it on at night in case he wakes up.”
“Who are they?”
“The nurses at Clear View.”
“Ah,” she said simply, although I could see her mind was searching. I’ve heard all kinds of strange guesses about Stevie’s condition. Is he autistic? Is he an idiot savant? To how many digits can he recite Pi? I’ve heard them all.
I thought I’d save her the trouble, so I said, “His brain is damaged.” The line was tired and worn from repetition. This is why I hated getting to know new people.
“How did his brain get damaged?” she asked.
“Never mind how,” I knew I was being rude. “Forget I brought it up.”
“You say Stevie is your older brother?” I was discovering that she wasn’t the type of girl to drop anything.
“He’s 26.”
“And you still call him Stevie?”
“Yeah, sure. I mean, there’s a chance he would, by now, prefer us to call him something like Stephen or Steve, but he hasn’t spoken since he was ten.”
“Oh, that’s awful.”
“Well, he speaks, but he doesn’t really communicate. You can’t have a conversation with him; he only repeats things that he has heard on television. He doesn’t answer questions or even acknowledge your existence, really. While sitting beside his bed, he won’t even look at you. He’ll only stare past you at the TV. You could tell him about your day and he’ll quote some product slogan. You could tell him, ‘The hospital is on fire! We have to leave,’ and he would respond with, ‘Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.’ I remember when I came to him and told him I was dropping out of med-school. All he said was, ‘It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken!’”
I had forgotten to take off my Copy ’n’ Go name tag before coming and when I mentioned med-school, I could’ve sworn I saw her eyes dart down to it. Embarrassed, I quickly removed it and shoved it in my back pocket.
“What happens if you turn the TV off?” she asked, pretending not to notice what I had just done.
“Don’t ask.”
Kristin’s eyes became very sad. She said softly, “It sounds like he really is on a deserted island.”
“No, I see him every day,” I said.
“Every day?”
“Well, yeah. Someone’s got to visit him, right. I go every day.”
I could see a slight change in the way she looked at me. My commitment to my brother was a clue that I wasn’t a self-focused jerk, after all. It somehow slipped through.
“I meant deserted inside his mind,” she said. “I mean, if there’s no meaningful interaction, right? It sounds like you don’t even exist to him.”
“Yeah, we once worried about that, but we think a part of him really can understand what we say to him. It wasn’t until I brought him the news that our adoptive father had died that he showed any recognition at all. It was a terrible day, obviously. I went straight to Stevie after I’d heard. I sat down beside his bed and told him what had happened. He didn’t move; he just sat there watching a Gilligan’s Island marathon.” I saw Kristin’s eyebrows tick up slightly. “I was so upset. It angered me that he could still watch television, unaffected, even after I delivered news like that. He appeared to care more about some stupid show. Frustrated, I shouted the news at him again and again, trying to provoke him to respond. ‘He’s dead,’ I yelled. ‘He’s gone!’ But Stevie showed no reaction. Finally, I broke down and began to cry. I climbed into his hospital bed beside him and wrapped my arm around him. I clung to him like he was all I had left, but he just continued to blithely watch TV. My whole world fell apart that day. I lay there beside him crying for what must have been 3 hours; I know because I heard the stupid theme song 6 times.” I gestured toward the TV.
She nodded slowly. Her face showed compassion, probably more than I deserved.
I continued, anxious to get to the good part, “Finally, after I pulled myself together and stood up, he turned to me – actually turned his head – and said, ‘We have only one chance to leave this place, but we’ll never make it until we find that peace.’” I smiled.
“Wow. That’s amazing.”
“That one line changed everything. To this day, it’s the only evidence I have that suggests he can hear me, understand me, that he’s even aware of me at all. It took a moment as significant as Dad’s death for him to try to make contact.”
“What do you think he meant?”
“I’m not sure. My father struggled so hard with his cancer and suffered so much, yet even in his final days we could see something wonderful return to his eyes – it was peace. My father had always had it before, but when it left his eyes, we thought it would never return. Maybe somehow through all of my brother’s suffering, Stevie was able to hang onto that same peace. Maybe he understands that at least.”
“How long has he been like this?”
“About 16 years. He went to physical rehab after...” I stopped. I thought I had gotten out of the habit of beginning sentences like that. What is it about this girl that makes me want to open up to her? “Just after,” I said bitterly. “Anyway, that’s when he got to know our adoptive father. Dad played such an important role in helping him. There seemed to be no limit to his encouragement and patience. We weren’t used to that kind of attention. He showed the two of us a whole new way to live. I...I know that Stevie could understand things then. Stevie loved Dad so much. I know he did. I just wish he could have met Dad when he was still...” I frowned and shook my head, unwilling to finish the sentence.
“Innocent and virginal?” she asked sweetly, but with a touch of feistiness.
“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of…not a vegetable.”
“Oh.”
I looked away. “Well, anyway, his body recovered but his mind never did. At first I was happy to hear him quoting TV, just to hear him using complete sentences again.”
“What about your adoptive mother? Is she in the picture?”
“Mom’s great. She’s a kind, gentle woman. But my mom never took center stage. She found her identity in our father – just like the rest of us. We were like three children huddled under a big umbrella. And the more it rained, the tighter we clung together.”
“And your dad was the umbrella?”
“Yes. It was my father’s idea to adopt older children. We were only in that state home for three months. Three months for an eight-year-old and a brain damaged ten-year-old! That’s amazing. He must have marched right in there and told them, give me your least wanted.”
“No, I’m sure that wasn’t it,” Kristin said graciously, thinking I was just being hard on myself.
“Actually, I think that’s exactly what happened. At least that’s how I always picture it – him walking up to a counter and saying, ‘you got a real hard case back there for me?...Better yet, make it two.’”
Kristin smiled.
“I can’t possibly guess his motive. He just gave, and gave, and gave.” I looked out the window as I trailed off in my own thoughts. In the background I could hear Thurston Howell the Third say something, but I couldn’t make out what it was and didn’t care. I turned back to Kristin and said, “There are two men to whom I completely owe my life, and if I lived a million years I could never repay. My late father is one of those two.”
***
“I met a girl,” I told my brother as he watched television. I headed straight to the hospital after I left the cafe. It was still the middle of the day, so Three’s Company was on. “Nothing will become of it though. Nothing works out for me. I tell you, you are lucky not to have to deal with women, they’re nothing but trouble.”
I could hear the canned laugh track from the television mocking me.
A thought hit my mind just then: did Stevie, at age ten, ever have a crush on anyone, a little girl in the neighborhood maybe? I bet he did. The idea brought me pleasure. I wonder if he still thinks about her. I wonder what she is doing now. She’s probably off married to some guy, starting a family, loving life, curled up under the covers with him…kissing him…whispering in his ear…laughing... Suddenly, the pleasure disappeared as fast as it came in, leaving only the usual resentment.
“I’m so tired,” I told him. “I’m tired of meeting people. I’m tired of hearing their stupid opinions. I’m tired of trying to get them to hear mine. They judge. Everyone judges – women especially. They judge you on everything... Although, she did listen to me, I guess... She was very patient…” I shook off the idea, then said more forcefully, “She’ll say I’m not good enough for her. Just you watch; she’ll say I’m not good enough. I bet she’s saying it right now. ‘I’m too good for Andy. He’s messed up. He’s jaded.’ Forget her! …Sure, I’ll call her ...She won’t call back. Why should she call me? She can see I’m broken, so why should she bother? And why should I? There’s nothing to be gained but more pain. You see, Stevie, it’s just all so hard. It’s just too hard.”
“Give me a break,” Stevie said. His monotone voice almost sounded robotic and his eyes did not move from the screen.
My heart raced. I leaned in closer to him. “Stevie, are you talking to me?”
“Break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar,” he added with no inflection.
I laughed at first, but then sunk my shoulders down low. I looked at his impassive face and brushed aside a wayward hair. Depleted, I said, “You keep watching TV, Stevie. You just keep on watching.” My voice was soft and sweet, like it was a prayer of some kind. I kissed his forehead gently.
***
The first few notes came blaring in as I drank my coffee. I cussed. I guess I should have been able to predict it. I had agreed to meet Kristin at the same place and the same time, so of course the same show was on. I yelled to the man behind the counter, “You’ve got a lot of nerve!”
The man behind the counter just shrugged.
Kristin hadn’t shown up yet and my mind began to convince itself that she wouldn’t. Desperate for some distraction, I found myself reluctantly and hypnotically watching Gilligan’s Island.
“Oh, this is a good one…” the man behind the counter told me when he caught me looking at the screen. His voice was friendly, like he wanted to start things over between us. “They’re trying to fix the radio because there’s a weather plane coming, but they can’t get it working because they are missing a piece.”
“Let me guess, it’s Gilligan’s fault,” I tried my best to sound like a decent fellow, but I am sure my usual sarcasm came through.
“No, actually a monkey took it,” the man said with a huge grin.
“Lovely,” I chuckled.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Kristin said as she flopped herself down. “Traffic was horrible.”
I quickly turned to her before she had a chance to see that I had been glued to the set. In a moment of vulnerability I said, “I didn’t think you would come.”
She deliberated over her next move for a second, then said, “I didn’t think I’d come either.”
“Oh,” I murmured.
When she ordered her coffee from the guy, I noticed that she had more of a connection with him than with me. When he left our table, her mannerisms returned to awkward. The conversation seemed impossible to start. I tried to think of something light to say, but it was difficult when I always felt so heavy. I went to the account where I keep my emergency charm, but it had been depleted long ago. The coffee between us cooled. In the awkward silence, we could hear the incessant yammering of her beloved castaways. I could feel her slipping away from me, but I had no idea how to prevent it from happening.
Apparently she had no patience for silence because she cleared her throat and asked, “So… how did Stevie’s brain get damaged and what happened with your real parents?”
She asked it boldly, like she had the right. I could see it in her eyes – I was some sort of puzzle that she was trying to crack. What gall!
“My real father died of cancer at age 64. My real mother cried and kissed the top of his casket. Those are my real parents,” I growled much harsher than I had intended.
“I know. I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “I mean, well, how did Stevie get that way?”
I knew what she was doing. She planned to never see me again, but she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life wondering – like a bad movie she wasn’t enjoying, but couldn’t bring herself to turn off.
“Why do you want to know so badly?” I challenged her.
“I don’t know. It guess it’s just tha-” she stopped abruptly. Her jaw dropped and her eyes showed real panic.
It took only the span of those few seconds to collapse my fragile world. It didn’t have to happen. The terrible blow almost slipped past my conscience undetected. If she hadn’t become dead silent, I would have never tried to discover why she stopped or what had happened. Instead, I rewound the tape in my brain. I looked up at the television and was able to string together the last sounds my ears had just heard. The Professor was talking to the Skipper, and in desperation had said, “We have only one chance to leave this place, but we’ll never make it until we find that piece.”
“I’m so sorry,” Kristin whispered.
My eyes went blurry. The muscles around my face went slack. I couldn’t believe it. It felt like the only supporting structure in my life was just demolished. My self-esteem was a sandcastle being heartlessly stomped to the ground. “It was gibberish,” I said weakly. “He never heard anything. All these years…he’s never heard anything at all.”
“Andy, wait…”
A burning resentment filled my heart and my fists reflexively balled up tight. “He is on a deserted island.” The last piece fell and I opened my fists to put my face in my hands. My voice sounded ghostly and weak when I said, “That means he never even met Dad…he never knew him.”
“We don’t know that.” I could see that she wanted to comfort me.
I couldn’t stand for another human being to be around me in that moment. I couldn’t stand being seen. Her eyes watching me produced an itchy burning on my skin. I straightened my spine and pulled my hands away from my face, but I couldn’t look at her. “Forget it,” I said blinking away tears and presenting a sweeping motion with my hand. “It’s no big deal.” I pretended to look at my watch casually, and without waiting for a response I said, “I’ve got to go. I forgot there’s somewhere else I have to be.”
Even as I turned away from her, I was pleading with myself to run back to her and collapse before her. No one’s buying your act, I said to myself. Don’t pretend to be so tough when you are really so fragile.
***
The next day I called her but she didn’t answer. So I tried again. No answer. It’s begun…the call screening. With each hour that passed, my attempts to resist calling her became harder and harder. I knew that hitting that talk button would only make me look desperate and pathetic. Which I was.
See? Do you see? This is how it always goes. This is how women are. They hurt you. They hurt you and they just don’t care.
She no longer represented this situation alone, but a deeper pattern in my life, one that I swore would never happen again, but did. Holding on to her meant breaking that pattern, losing her meant one more piece of incontrovertible data – you are broken…you are worthless.
That evening as the sun was going down, the rain began to pour. I had no umbrella as I walked to her doorstep. I tried to stop myself from what I was about to do. By the time I pushed her doorbell, I was already soaked. I was carrying a cheap bouquet of flowers which were drowning.
“You’re stalking me,” was the first thing she said from the dry side of the threshold.
“I’m sorry,” was all I said. It was a line I spent 20 minutes rehearsing. However, at home in front of the bathroom mirror, there was no rain falling.
“You’re sorry for stalking me?”
“I’m sorry for everything,” I insisted, my body starting to shiver. I presented the flowers as if they were my first piece of evidence – likely to clear me of all charges.
She grabbed the flowers unenthusiastically and said nothing.
“Listen, I can answer your questions now.”
“Not interested.”
“Great! So now you’re not curious,” I jeered.
She took another look at me, and then stepped aside and made a quick gesture for me to enter. “You said you were joking about the restraining order,” she snipped.
It must have been the rain that made me sympathetic; I can think of no other reason why she’d let me in. Once inside, she found me a towel and guided me to a tall barstool in her kitchen.
“The coffee’s still warm,” she said.
“Thank you,” I uttered as she poured me a cup.
There was silence between us as she cut the stems of the flowers and arranged them in a vase. It was amazing to see how much nicer they looked after receiving just a little bit of attention. She paused to take her first real look at them. She tried to deny it, but they worked some strange Svengali effect on her and suddenly the ice between us melted…or at least the first layer. She sat down across from me, on the other side of her kitchen counter. Not exactly close.
“I hated washing his stupid car,” I said finally, hoping she would know who I was talking about. “Even while scrubbing it, I worried that I might rub too hard and somehow damage his precious red paintjob. I felt such a raw disgust in the pit of my gut; I knew even at that young age that a child should not envy his father’s car. But I did; I envied the car. I resented it because my father loved it in a way that he never loved us. He treasured it and pampered it. Washing it was incredibly hard work, not just because I had to be so careful not to scratch it, but because the SOB would come and inspect every inch of it once we were done.
“Stevie and I had spent most of the morning carefully washing his car. The air was crisp that day, but the sun felt good on our faces. That must have been what prompted one of the few truly carefree moments of our youth. We started to laugh and play. I had hidden Stevie’s tank and he had only 30 seconds to find it or he would fail his mission and the whole world would explode. Stevie would always make up games like that. They’d always involve him playing the role as the hero trying to save the world. I guess we had pretty wild imaginations.”
Something occurred to me and as a side note I added, “My father did so much to try to rob us of our childhood, yet remarkably childhood always found a way to break back through.” I smiled.
“So anyway, I was counting down and Stevie was almost out of time. Five, four, three... My father must have heard us laughing, because he stepped out to see why we had stopped working. The second I saw him, I froze. Stevie was looking behind the bushes for his tank, but he could guess what it meant when he heard me stop so abruptly. We knew we’d get yelled at whenever my father showed up, even if we didn’t know what we could possibly be doing wrong. He always found something. This time it was the fact that I had left the hose out.” I rolled my eyes, bitterly. “I mean, I had just used it!” I snapped, still trying to fight the battles that I had once been unable to fight. “It wasn’t like I left it out overnight. I was going to put his precious hose up, I just hadn’t yet. I can still remember that perfect hose and the stupid cart with wheels that he kept it so perfectly wrapped around. It’s amazing how many sermons he’d given us about taking care of his things. So, foolishly I tried to plead my case, but he just started yelling. Then he reached out and shoved me for being obstinate.”