It was dark and raining and clichéd all over when I knocked on Abe’s door. When he answered, I expected a gaunt, ravaged face, having not seen a fresh picture since I heard his bad news. Inwardly, I braced for a flood of grief.
Upon seeing a healthy, handsome Abraham Zelinsky, my face must have shown an expression of shock. His, however, was a blank slate to find me standing on his rainy stoop.
“You don’t look sick,” I said, foolishly expecting a laugh. He simply blinked at me in my cold, dampening shirt. Nervously, I wicked the rain from my face, while seriously questioning my visit. Yet, who was I to refuse the plea of a worried wife?
Abe held the door open just enough to reveal his head. Forcing a smile, he asked, “You stopped by the hospital?”
“I arrived at the end of visiting hours. Congratulations, by the way. He’s a good looking baby.”
Abe nodded his head with great mechanical effort. “You’re coming in?”
“I drove a long way to stand in the rain,” I said.
He opened the door to permit my entry. The small, neatly furnished front room was dark, illuminated by a single lamp. Abe motioned for me to sit. Before I did, I let out a wounded cry. On the coat rack, hung a satin Cleveland Guardians baseball jacket.
“A Guardians jacket? Really?” I asked, pointing at the disgrace.
Finally, Abe let out a genuine laugh. “Since we moved here, yeah. When in Rome.”
I sat unsteadily in an armchair. A decade earlier, we had been Yankees fans. The brain tumor had corrupted his common sense.
“Actually, I don’t watch baseball anymore,” said Abe, lowering onto the sofa. “The games are too long. Boring.”
The wattage of the room’s only burning lamp was low. Peering through the gloom taxed my eyes. Contrary to my expectations, his appearance was unchanged since our last encounter. I still envied his effortless physique, his movie-star jawline, his excellent hair. As a kid, he could have starred on the Mickey Mouse Club, if not for becoming an addict early.
“I’m impressed that you made the trip,” he said. As an afterthought, he added, “Thanks.”
I had spent miles rehearsing a speech that now stumbled out gracelessly. “I missed you, my friend,” I began. “Thanks to sobriety, my life is so full that I lose contact with people who move away. And then you went to Hawaii! But believe me, you come to mind often, always fondly. My affection for you never wavered.”
I paused to let him echo my sentiment, to repeat back similar things. He remained silent. “When I heard you were in Ohio, I meant to visit, but life got so busy,” I explained. “When I heard about the cancer, I felt reluctant to intrude. Do you understand?”
Abe offered a patronizing wink. “Could have called any time,” he said. “My phone number never changed.”
“Neither did mine,” I replied, too sharply.
For an awkward moment, silence spread, interrupted only by the patter of rain on the windows and a hungry gale prowling beyond the door. I cleared my throat. “I donated to your GoFundMe,” I added. “And when Beth told me that not only was your wife pregnant, but that she had delivered, I couldn’t postpone any longer.”
“Glad you came.” Abe cocked his head to scrutinize my soul. “So, Maria sent you to check on me?”
“She did,” I admitted, feeling like a betrayal of her trust.
“What reason did she give?” he asked.
“She said that you have isolated since she got pregnant. No AA meetings, no connections to friends. And lately, you’ve fixated on your death. Which, I can understand, but man—you beat cancer once. You can again.” I rested my elbows on my knees to lean forward like a high school basketball coach. “Did you really tell her that you don’t have the will to fight this latest… challenge?”
“Brain tumor,” he clarified and tapped his temple. “For the record, I’m not suicidal,” he said, as calm as a lamb.
“Of course not,” I said. “But Maria said that you fled the hospital when the baby was born. She said that you apologized for—” I choked on this: “For having to die. And when you told her goodbye, it sounded like goodbye goodbye.”
Abe seemed to mull over his words, where to begin, whether to speak at all. “Listen, there’s no way to explain myself that makes sense,” he said.
“Try me,” I said.
His scowl transported me back to a moment on my front porch. I had promised that even a junkie like him could live a sober life, one day at a time. The same skepticism faced me now.
“I’ve heard your fifth step,” I said. “You exposed all your skeletons to me. I never judged you.”
Abe went to the window. Through it, he watched the battering wind shake a silver maple. The dark rain slashed horizontally. I dreaded the long drive home.
“I’ve always trusted you,” he said, still watching the tree. A soft glow of streetlight outlined his face. “That’s the truth. Even after all this time.”
“So tell me what’s going on,” I implored, sliding to the edge of my chair.
He turned to face me, but his eyes were lost in his blackened silhouette. The room seemed to hold its breath. “I knew you were coming tonight,” he admitted. “Two days ago, I had a vision of your arrival—of this very conversation.”
I must have looked incredulous. He nodded solemnly. “Knowing you wouldn’t believe me, I made proof.”
He led me into the kitchen, where he clicked on the overhead fixture. The light scalded my eyes after the previous gloom. In my mind, I remembered Maria’s concern—I think he’s going to kill himself—and questioned the efficacy of my visit so far. Maybe I was the wrong man for the job after all.
From the freezer, Abe retrieved a sandwich-sized Tupperware container that he dropped on the counter. Bang. He peeled back the red, rubber lid to reveal a block of ice inside. Suspended in the ice was a Ziploc bag that held a folded, white paper.
Wordlessly, Abe lifted the Tupperware and smashed its ice down into the metal sink. The crash startled me. I watched him pull the plastic baggie from the broken ice. Turning, he handed over the Ziploc.
While my confused hands fumbled to open the bag, he talked. “The past month, visions have plagued me. Life is torture when you know what’s coming.”
Pausing from my task, I said in jest, “So you’re a mystic now?”
He looked from my face to the baggie in my hand and nodded for me to proceed, saying, “I told Maria when her water would break because a vision had shown it to me.”
And he said, “This week, I called to warn my mother about the front steps. But she had already fallen.”
From the bag, I unfolded the note, which nearly fell from my hand. Shaking, I read the words aloud: “Remember the money tree?”
It was a secret I’d confessed only to Abe.
When my dad remarried, my addiction was bone-deep. The happy couple did not invite me to the wedding. While they were honeymooning, I broke into their house to ransack their money tree. At the wedding reception, well-wishers had adorned this plastic tree with envelopes of fives, tens, twenties, and fifties. In his hurry to leave, my dad left the money in the envelopes.
My dealer got it all.
To freeze this note on ice was his proof of prediction. Still, I challenged him. “Beth didn’t call and warn you I was on the way? It wouldn’t take so long to freeze that ice.”
Abe’s shoulders sagged. “You don’t believe me.” We returned to the living room, which was even darker after exposure to the kitchen’s fluorescents. We reclaimed our seats. I raised my hand in surrender.
“You know I’m not one for the God thing,” I said. It was true: when our recovery literature mentioned God, I envisioned a universal spirit that vivified the world, absent of any human characteristics. An omnipresent force with no special interest in individual lives. “If you’re having visions, man, maybe the tumor is affecting your memory and confusing the order of things. Like, you heard about your mom falling, then called her, but in your memory, the call came first. Make sense?”
He pointed at the note, still in my hand, to ask, “But that?”
I shook my head.
Abe sighed. His eyes emptied of all light. “The visions came first, like they wanted my attention. Then, the real message came like a voice in my ear, but silently. Does it make sense?”
I said, “And the message was?”
He faced the window, beyond which the raging storm threatened to take branches. “I was meant to die many times. I even died twice in the E.R. Somehow, I’ve survived despite the odds.”
I recalled his drugging stories. At least once the hospital had zapped his heart with electric paddles.
When we last spoke, Abe phoned from a rehab in Hawaii. The only cure that worked for him—not NA meetings, or step work, or my sponsorship—was long-term residence at a rehabilitation facility on a Pacific island. Whatever they did to him had stuck for many years. To know that he was sober had given me such a sense of relief. As a guest in his living room, I worried for my friend all over again.
He continued: “My survival has often defied the will of the universe. This time, it offered a trade. I can live in exchange for my baby’s life. But I begged to be taken instead. Hence, the brain tumor.”
Skeptical, I asked, “What does being taken look like?”
“That was not revealed to me.”
“Okay, I’ll play along,” I said. “When do you expect God to take you?”
“Any time now. Tonight. Tomorrow. Sometime soon.” With that, Abe stood and patted his hands together. “It feels like we’ve talked for an hour. Coffee?”
I said sure. He shuffled into the kitchen and, soon, a rich aroma permeated the house. I heard clinking as Abe took down ceramic mugs from the cupboard.
Often I have pondered the experience of his parents. How heartbreaking it must be to prepare for your child’s death by overdose and have his addiction drag on for years. Then, by a miracle, after countless interventions and attempts at sobriety, something sticks. The boy will live after all.
Then, another cruel twist: cancer. And yet, after an aggressive treatment of chemotherapy and radiation, it goes into remission. All is clear until headaches raise a new concern. Scans reveal a brain tumor.
What a brutal rollercoaster.
“Do you take cream?” he called.
Before I could answer, I heard a gasp. A booming thud came from the kitchen. I leaped from the armchair toward the kitchen doorway. As I moved toward that bright rectangle of light, I had a silly thought: I imagined myself entering the gates of Heaven.
Silly, yes, because I never believed such a place existed.
Peering through the doorway, I saw his feet first. His toes pointed skyward in their socks. Another step revealed his body, flat on the tile. His mouth hung slack and breathless.
While looking at him, my bones froze. I had the sudden realization that something shared the room with us. A heavy presence. Dark. My memory sketches this nebulous figure as a shifting charcoal cloud, all smudgy, a poorly rendered human shape with red ember eyes.
Purely imagination, of course.
Fear kept my eyes from the corner of the room, where the presence dwelled. Whatever had visited Abe remained there in the nook between the refrigerator and the wall. I could not look but felt its cold gaze crawl over my skin from head to floor. It was deciding my fate.
I drew a gulp of icy air and fled. Frantically, I ran to my truck and raced the whole way home without stopping, except to refill the gas tank.
I skipped Abe’s funeral. For years, I had no contact with Maria. Then, one evening, when I was signing my latest novel at a midwestern bookstore, Maria attended. She waited in the line to be my last patron. Abstaining from a hug, Maria exuded no warmth during this unexpected encounter. She was changed. Bitter. Over the span of two presidential terms, Maria had gone from a pretty, hopeful young mother to an age-lined woman with her hair tied in a gray bun.
While Maria spoke, I remained guarded, seated behind a flimsy folding table, beside a short stack of my books. My minor success as an author over the intervening years did not impress her. Specifically, she had come only to ask what happened on my last night with Abe. The official report cited death by natural causes. But what, she wanted to know, were those causes?
I withheld most of the details from the preceding story. Instead, I fabricated a tale, as is my wont as a professional. In my fable, Abe looked green around the gills but spoke glowingly about becoming a father and his dreams of his family’s future; he expressed his delight about eventually playing baseball with his son. In fact, I claimed those were his final words when I left him—still alive—that night.
Maria’s piercing eyes were scarab black. They doubted every word, and she was finished with my story before I finished its telling. She adjusted the strap of her handbag and indicated that she was leaving, but first shared one last, haunting detail. It’s one I shall never forget.
“The medical report states that Abraham died at 10:15 pm. Do you know what else happened then?” she asked. “Our baby had a seizure. At 10:15. In that exact moment, I almost lost my baby and my husband. The child pulled through. The father did not. Isn’t that odd?”
She said no goodbye, merely walked away. I, too, needed to leave. A familiar chill had settled upon me, one that seems to follow me from place to place, with growing intensity as years pass. That night, leaving the bookstore, I desperately needed to find a brightly lit, busy place. An all-night diner, perhaps. A 24-hour shopping center. Anyplace with lots of light, lots of people, and no dark corners.
[Image Credit : Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash]
by 
0 Comments