Drowning

He twiddles with the gold band on his left-hand ring finger as he stares into his empty glass, twisting the engagement ring round and round without thinking about it. He can feel the alcohol start to seep through his mind, distorting his thoughts. He wants it to move faster and let him forget. Alcohol is the only way.

“Refill, Dan?” the bartender asks.

Without thinking, he affirms it. The bartender slams down another glass of beer and leaves him alone again.

His reflection in the dark, rain-beaten window catches his attention. He looks terrible. Several days’ worth of black stubble covers his jawbone and cheeks, and his hair is rumpled. He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, and sips his beer. He feels old.

Suddenly a voice rings in his head, Leah’s voice the day his brother died. He’d been drinking then, too, bottle after bottle of beer.

“Please, Dan, put the bottle down,” she’d begged.

“It’s not a bottle,” he murmurs into his glass.

“Please. You can get through this.”

He shakes his head.

“I can’t,” he says, “not without you.”

Someone claps him on the shoulder. Putting his glasses back on, he looks up. It’s a paunchy man he recognizes from some of the countless parties he’s been to. The name evades him.

“Dan?” the man says. “I heard what happened to Leah, Dan. I’m real sorry. She was a good kid.”

His throat constricts. He nods but says nothing. The man pats Dan’s shoulder awkwardly and meanders off to play pool.

Dan hunches over the bar and covers his face with his hands, guitar hands, Leah called them. She said hers were piano hands.

I heard what happened to Leah. He gulps down half his beer in sudden desperation. His fault. If he hadn’t gotten drunk at that last party—if she hadn’t driven to pick him up—

He remembers sitting at a table in a dimly-lit basement, long after everyone else had driven home or staggered upstairs to crash for the night, while one of his more sober friends stood over him, repeatedly asking, “Do you want me to call a cab?”

“I called Leah,” Dan said. “She’s coming.”

Over and over and over again, for three hours, he assured everyone who asked that he had a ride. Until the call came from one of Leah’s friends, he never doubted that she would be there.

“Leah’s in the hospital!” The voice on the phone sounded tinny, distant, frightened. “She’s asking for you.”

In that moment his world collapsed, spinning out of control with far more resolve than it had ever done when he’d gotten wasted.

He stared at the receiver dumbly for a moment before asking in a hoarse voice, “What happened?”

Given his inebriated condition, the hospital staff were reluctant to let him in to see her, but they finally admitted him anyway.

Bruises and blood covered Leah’s face, but she smiled when she saw him. Dan fell to his knees beside her and gripped her hands. He tried to smile back at her. He couldn’t.

“Leah,” he said. His voice barely came out. He coughed and tried again. “Leah,” he said, “I love you. God, I love you, Leah. You know that, right?”

She closed her eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, and he guzzles down the rest of his beer. He can’t get that picture out of his head, the image of Leah dying in the hospital bed. The beer isn’t helping tonight. His every thought leads back to Leah.

He remembers the way she would stand outside during thunderstorms and laugh as torrents of rain drenched her ginger hair, the way her hazel eyes brightened when she’d been crying, the way she would take his hands and make him dance with her anywhere the impulse seized her, the way she seemed to be biting back a smile whenever he was upset by something trivial. He remembers coming home from wild parties at three in the morning, sick with drinking, and how she’d suddenly be kneeling next to him, rubbing his back and singing softly to him as he puked into the downstairs toilet. He still doesn’t understand why she did that for him. What she saw in him.

He asked her, once. She was sitting at her piano, tinkering with some chords, and he sat cross-legged on the floor with his guitar in his lap. He strummed notes at random, but his mind was on his most recent hangover. Looking up at Leah, he asked, “Why are you with me?”

She looked surprised for a moment, but then she smiled.

“Because,” she said, “I love you.”

And she went to the kitchen to make lunch.

“’Nother refill?” the bartender grunts.

Dan nods wearily. He stares into the new glass and sees his reflection gazing back at him from the amber liquid.

“Why?” he asks. “Why did you love me?”

He keeps staring into his glass, but it gives him no answer. He sighs and drinks again. Something inside him hurts. His lungs, maybe. Like he can’t get enough air, no matter how deeply he breathes.

“What happened?” he whispers. “What happened, Leah?”

This time he doesn’t look to his beer for answers. He knows what happened.

Only two blocks from the party, on her way to pick him up, she’d been hit by a drunk driver—another guest from the same party, on his way home for the night. Dan went crazy waiting for a cab to come for him, though it arrived within ten minutes of his frenzied call. The cabbie, already speeding, couldn’t drive fast enough, and Dan cursed him up one side and down the other before realizing that Leah never would have done it. He spent the rest of the cab ride alternating between guilt for shouting at his driver and anxiety for Leah. By way of apology, he gave the cabbie ten dollars over what he owed for the ride before sprinting into the hospital and forgetting about everything except his injured fiancée.

He knows what happened. His fault.

“Oh my God,” he whispers. He cradles his head in his hands as tears slide down his face. He’s ashamed of them, but he can’t stop them. The feeling in his lungs is bigger now, overwhelming. He has no lungs, only a swollen heart that feels like it’s about to burst. Frantically he empties his glass, tries to drown the feeling with alcohol. The bartender leaves him another beer without asking if he’d like one. Dan swallows half of it, but it’s not enough tonight, it’s not enough. Nothing is enough. He throws a wad of bills on the counter and escapes the bar, stumbling out in the streets, in the rain, hardly knowing where he’s headed.

The rain soaks his shirt and runs down his back in cold rivulets. Three blocks from the bar, a wave of nausea sweeps over him. He stops on a bridge and leans over the side to puke, but nothing comes up. He stands there alone, bent over the guard rail and heaving, staring into the river. The water shines yellow in the light of the streetlamp beside him and ripples as raindrops break its surface. It captivates him, the river. It flows out to the lake undisturbed, steady and strong, no matter what happens. He stares at it for another minute, open-mouthed, his eyes vacant, and then, before he realizes what he’s doing, he climbs onto the guard rail, one hand grasping the streetlamp for support.

It’s not that he wants to jump. He just wants to feel the way the river must feel, careless and free. Peaceful. He wants to flow onward and not think and not worry about the fact that he’s downed eleven beers tonight and they haven’t made him forget yet. His foot slips. He clings tighter to the streetlamp, but in another moment some part of him has decided. He lets go.

In the moment before he hits the water, he sees Leah smiling at him.