What if he had done it? What if he had?
“Claudia?”
Claudia blinked back a well of tears and squared her shoulders with renewed focus. “You were saying?”
“People in distress,” Valerie began, “sometimes surprise us with their behavior. Do things we wouldn’t expect them to do. Has your brother seemed.” She closed her eyes for long stretches as she spoke and chose her words so mindfully, with such unhurried care, that her sentences sounded snapped in half by silence. “In distress?”
“Ever?” Claudia asked. The word flashed like a blade.
“Recently.”
Two months ago, her brother had given up the one-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint he shared with two other actors and moved three hours north, into a converted toolshed belonging to the assistant director of a ragtag regional theater company. He was thirty-nine years old and brought home $325 a week. Owed MasterCard over $9,000. Owed his sister and mother twice that, easily. Shied from sexual relationships that lasted longer than a hangover. And now had been found, fractured and bruised and drunk, at the bottom of a ravine. He was, in many ways, the definition of distress. Claudia shook her head.
“Has he ever mentioned.” Silence. “Harming himself?”
Did chasing a high on a daily basis count as harming himself? “Not seriously.”
With this, Valerie’s professionally soothing smile disappeared. She turned pink, as if the lightness of the remark embarrassed her. “What your brother did.” Ends of that sentence hung like fruit on a tree. She puzzled over which to choose. “Is very serious.”
“We don’t know what my brother did.”
Technically, this was true. The small search party that left the theater parking lot shortly after midnight — when the sleuthing stage manager found Benji’s helmet at the brink of the woods — had stumbled upon him in a state of drifting consciousness. He knew his name, recognized the few stalwart and morbidly curious castmates whom the director had rallied to scour the grounds, could correctly (although, owing to his severely bitten tongue, almost incomprehensibly) name the day of the week and the current president, but shed no light on how he ended up thirty feet below the peculiarly broken bridge.
Not that anyone asked. The paramedics who towed Benji up the steep wooded slope on a bright-orange backboard, the woman named Cat who called Claudia with the news, this psychiatric social worker who’d picked up his file for the first time an hour ago, all of these people had already solved the mystery of her brother’s fall by insisting that it wasn’t one. Even the police, who were days away from collecting an official statement, seemed to be sniffing around for form’s sake. Only Claudia resisted the race from premise to conclusion. Only she chose to believe that her fucked-up brother wasn’t quite that fucked up.
“Has he mentioned suicide?” Valerie pressed, crossing her thick ankles and leaning into the question.
“He’s been living in a toolshed. It would be odd if he didn’t mention suicide.”
Claudia went on to explain, and Valerie went on to write down, why Benji’s occasional threats to throw himself in front of the L train or jump from the Williamsburg Bridge were not the serious cries for help one might mistake them for. They weren’t flares shot into troubled psychological skies. They weren’t even jokes. In asking the fastest route to the Verrazano-Narrows or hiking his leg teasingly over the rail of Claudia’s fire escape, what was he doing but opening a release valve, letting go the disappointments of a botched audition or a date that ended disappointingly with a forced hug on the doorstep or a collection letter from an angry creditor? Yes, her brother mentioned suicide. But he was an actor. He could be melodramatic, hyperbolic, hypochondriacal, histrionic, selfish, and self-centered. Sometimes all at once. But he told Claudia everything. And Claudia, who took heart in knowing the dark of Benji’s darkest corners, could say with certainty that his selfishness didn’t extend to doing himself in.
She meant to make a simple point, but the more she talked, the more trouble she had making it. She mentioned one bridge or another no less than five times, which even a lukewarm Freudian would have found significant. It was only a matter of time, she seemed to be saying, before the man dove off of something.
And maybe he had. Claudia had been resisting the thought of it since the phone rang at five thirty that morning, summoning her. She’d thrown a wall up against the idea, a wall as big and fortified as any that stood in the world and bore her name. Yet here she was, trying to convince herself that Benji had not, could not, would not.
“Is your brother being treated for depression?”
“Not anymore.”
“But he was?”
“He was.”
“His blood alcohol content was 0.20 when he came in.”
“Drunk isn’t suicidal.”
“Would you say he has a drinking problem?”
“Last night he did.”
“Would you say last night was unique?”
“Falling into a gorge in a suit of armor? Yes, that’s unique.”
“It sounds like he may have been—”
Claudia did all she could to keep her hands from reeling in the hampered word.
“Self-medicating,” Valerie eventually offered.
Claudia frowned. A sculptor of conventional beauties would never have paired a nose that slender with such a surprisingly wide mouth, but the components of her face, together, gave stunning proof that the whole was more than the sum of its parts. Her dark eyes were particularly expressive and could no more hide her annoyance with Valerie’s prying questions than her fear of failing her brother by mishandling them.
“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job,” Claudia began in a tone that registered her desire to do exactly that, “but shouldn’t we speak with Benji before diagnosing him?” She clung to the idea of her brother speaking for himself like an inner tube on a stormy sea: soon, he would tell them how absurd they were.
“Absolutely,” Valerie said. “This,” she stressed, indicating the mess of pages on which she’d been scribbling, “isn’t diagnostic. But it sometimes helps. In cases like this. To talk with the family. Before meeting the patient.”
Claudia crossed her leg and let her attention wander to the heel of her boot. She was being rude, but then she had never mastered (or ever really applied herself to) the art of sparing another’s feelings when her own were hurt.
Her mind sought some momentary relief, a distraction, any distraction — the spot (was it blood?) on her sole; a pearly mole on the side of Valerie’s neck; even Nick, whom she hadn’t seen in over twenty years but who still roused her memory (and her ardor) whenever she touched foot on home soil — but she couldn’t get away from the thought of it. Her brother falling through the dark. What if Benji had jumped? What if the darkness she presumed she’d charted was merely the surface of a much deeper, much darker abyss? What if those few Valium all those years ago were a prelude she’d passed off as adolescent attention grabbing and every subsequent allusion to suicide a sign she’d misread, a danger she’d prematurely dismissed? Then again, what if she was right? What if her brother hadn’t jumped but had somehow, unintentionally, fallen off the bridge? It meant that Benji’s binges had stumbled from the asinine and essentially harmless into the realm of real self-destruction. No matter how she sliced it, the problem looked unmanageably large.
She put her foot back on the floor and once again apologized for her wandering mind. “It’s early,” she offered, as if the hour of the day proved more difficult than the situation at hand. Had it been up to her when her phone trilled at just after five thirty, she would have thrown the thing under the dresser and burrowed deeper into the sheets. Thank goodness for Oliver. Oliver, who, after ten years of marriage, remained gentle, considerate, generally more interested in people and the reasons they might have for calling at such an hour. He answered on the third ring and said, “Babe. Babe. Something bad.”