He looks off a moment, then smiles, really smiles, not a polite grin but a happy smile. I haven’t seen that expression on his face in ages.
“Exercise,” he says. “I’m not going to have much strength, but I’ll exercise myself to exhaustion.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Go for long walks. And I’ll go for long rides in the car. Read books. I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”
“It’s going to be really hard,” I tell him. “The hardest thing you’ve ever done.”
He nods, turns back to the window. “I know,” he says. “Just. . hang in there with me, okay?”
83
Shauna
Monday, July 29
I peek my head into the bathroom. My bathroom, my condo, two blocks away from Jason’s town house. A thousand square feet in all, one bedroom, one bathroom, a decent kitchen, and a great room with a spectacular view of the high-rises in the commercial district to the south. The condo of a successful single woman.
For Jason, it must feel like prison. We made a decision that he should leave his house and stay with me during this interval of time. Change everything, completely alter the landscape, remove any associations that enabled his problem.
“Hey,” I say.
The toilet is in mid-flush. You can hear everything from everywhere in this place, so it wasn’t hard to hear the guttural sounds from his throat, his stomach lurching, his dry retching, the gasps of breath in between. Jason looks better in the sense that he seems more lucid, more self-aware. He looks worse by any other criterion. He hasn’t slept more than two hours at a time, always waking with a cry of some sort, ready for the fix that isn’t going to come. His eyes are dark and cloudy. His skin has a greenish pallor, the permanent look of someone who’s about to vomit. He moves fluidly at times, with a halting, hesitant gait at others. Every six-hour interval between pills is its own adventure, from contentment to discomfort to agony. But he has stayed true to his plan to exercise his way out of this, to let the adrenaline be his drug. He’s speed-walked outside (I never thought the day would come that Jason, jock extraordinaire and marathon enthusiast, would do any exercise that included the word walk) and jogged on my fold-up treadmill inside the apartment. Not wanting to completely trash his knee all over again, he’s gone to aerobics, too. He has hit the indoor pool in my condo building no less than five times in the three nights he’s been here. He does push-ups and sit-ups and leg lifts on the floor, anything he can do to tire himself out and churn the adrenaline. He has little energy and no stamina, and what little reserve he does possess, after months without exercise, is easily spent. That’s the point, to continually tire himself out and occupy himself with the physical exertion.
Realizing that all of this exercise is just making him drop more weight-not that this is his primary concern-he’s tried to eat. He does the cooking, anything to keep himself occupied, but he hasn’t held down a single meal yet. In between the episodes of vomiting, I’ve seen him double over in pain from the cramps, mostly in the abdomen and thighs. Not that he realizes I’ve seen it. He tries to hide it from me, the pain, the struggle. That’s as much a sign as any that Jason is back, the heroically stoic routine. So instead of saying, Shauna, my legs are cramping so much I’m going to scream, he just asks for a hot bath-the preferred short-term remedy for cramps. I’ve drawn more hot baths in the last few days than I’ve taken all year.
Sitting on the bathroom tile, his back against the vanity, wearing only boxers, he raises his tired eyes to mine. “Sorry for the sound effects,” he says.
“Don’t ever say you’re sorry,” I tell him. Then, my eyebrows raised, I say, “The Candyman is here.”
He shakes his head out of his funk. “Six hours already?”
“Six hours already. Your OxyContin, sir.” A sentence I was pretty sure I’d never utter in my lifetime. I hold out my hand.
He shakes his head, waves me off. “No. I’m going to hold out.”
“That’s noble of you,” I say. “But let’s stick with our program. You’ve done great.”
“No. No. One more hour.” He unfolds himself and stands up, facing me.
(I must make this statement: As terrible as I feel for this man, as much as his every moan and quiet grimace turns something sour inside me, I do have eyes, and they work pretty well. Jason was always a cut, muscular guy at six-three, two hundred twenty pounds, a real battleship. Thirty pounds lighter? Six-three, one ninety? His face is drawn, his eyes sunken, an unhealthy color to his skin. All of that, yes. But his body? He looks like he stepped out of an underwear ad for Calvin Klein. I couldn’t pinch fat on him with a pair of tweezers. His stomach is a sheet of thin skin raked over rock. His chest and shoulders are a tad smaller than at his fighting weight, but they are more pronounced, every tiny muscle rippling with his every movement. He’s like something Michelangelo carved out of stone.)
“What?” he says to me.
“Nothing,” I say. “Can I get you anything?”
“A loaded pistol?” he suggests.
His cell phone rings. He switched from a buzzer to ringtones, so if Lightner calls with news, he won’t miss the call. Lightner has been given his own ringtone, the theme song from Dragnet (DUNNN-duh-DUN-dun. . DUNNN-duh-DUN-dun-DUNNNNN).
But Lightner hasn’t called yet. Guess who has?
Twenty times, I think it was, on Friday alone, just to his cell phone. Saturday? Forty-seven calls. Forty-seven. Sunday? I lost track, but we think it was sixty-two or sixty-three times she called him.
And today-well, today isn’t over yet. There’s still two hours left in Monday, but we’re closing in on sixty phone calls again.
Jason always looks at me when the phone rings, as if I have any input. I always say the same thing: It’s your decision. Answer it if you want. I’m not going to tell him how to handle this. Look, Alexa was bad news, poison, the worst possible person for Jason at the worst possible time. But I’ve had my heart broken, too. It sucks. It just sucks. Some of us handle it differently. I don’t enjoy witnessing her suffering.
But I’m not focused on her. It’s Jason who has my complete attention. Anything that will set back his recovery is bad; anything that doesn’t, I’m agnostic. A simple test, in theory. So if he can interact with her, help talk her down, so to speak, I’m all for it. What I’m not for? Alexa sucking him back into that life, because I’ll bet it was a mighty comfortable one, full of guilt-free sex and drugs. (Who knows, maybe they played rock and roll to go for the trifecta.)
So he’s answered a few of her calls-one on Friday afternoon, one last night, and one this afternoon, his comments to her clipped, succinct. I need to be alone to get through this. I can’t see you or talk to you. I’m really sorry, but I’m not changing my mind. Some version of that, with my moving as far away from the phone as I can, knowing that on the other end of that call, a stricken woman was pleading with him to take her back.
Oh, yeah, it sucks, no way around it.
And that’s just the phone calls. Saturday, the e-mails started, too, beginning with something basic, the Why won’t you call me back? variety, then something safe but heartfelt (I’m trying not to push you, complete with smiley-face emoticon, but also This is very hard for me), followed in the early morning hours of Sunday with something a little more disturbing (Maybe we can just wipe the slate clean, and This is killing me, and If you keep ignoring me, I don’t know what I’ll do).
Yesterday afternoon, as Jason was cooking dinner and actually hopping in place to calm himself, he pulled up an e-mail she sent called “A lesson” that complained that Jason hadn’t given her an adequate explanation (he had, I thought), that he lied to her and used her (he didn’t; it was the other way around, actually), and ended with this: You’d probably like it if I died, wouldn’t you? Well, just say the word, Jason, and I’ll do it. I’m dead anyway.