Lily and the Octopus(66)

It’s clear now, the source of her distraction—she never responds to me when she senses red ball is near. My insides settle and I watch her play as life ambles toward normalcy. It is the perfect moment, a perfect marriage of stillness and life, of beauty and harmony, of aloneness and togetherness. Red ball glides smoothly across the deck of Fishful Thinking and Lily chases it with ease and I’ve never felt more calm.

But it doesn’t last.

Out of the corner of my eye I see fire in the sky, like a comet, coming toward us with increasing velocity.

“What the . . .” I manage, as the comet grows nearer.

A second red ball lands on the deck with a wallop and bounces high above us. Lily turns to watch it rebound, confused as to what to do. She looks at the one red ball already trapped under her paw, and then back at the other as it settles near the rear of the ship.

I catch Lily’s look of confusion just before the third and fourth red balls hit. A shadow falls over the boat, and we both look at the sky as hundreds of red balls blot out the sun. They rain down upon us with increasing ferocity, making a deafening racket. Lily is frozen, terrified, as am I. She might have once dreamed of something like this, but the reality of it is horrifying.

We scramble for the cover of the deckhouse, but the red balls come too fast and I quickly lose Lily in a heap of rubber. I claw and scrape to get to her, to unearth her from the sea of red, but the balls pile up too fast. The ones that hit the water do so with a horrible splash and kick ocean spray into my face. I desperately wipe the salt from my eyes as the balls multiply around my chest and there’s a tightness and I can’t breathe and the last thing I remember is screaming “Lily!” and then everything goes dark.





3 P.M.


Trent’s hand is on my shoulder and I look at him and there is no pain, just the presence of my friend, and for one brief second I feel okay until everything comes rushing back and it’s like someone has their hands around my heart and is squeezing.

“You were screaming,” he says.

“I was?” I was.

“Yeah.”

The TV is still on and Trent has started watching Friday Night Lights, a favorite of mine that I’ve been trying to get him to watch for years since he’s from Texas and loves football. I’m from Maine and I hate football, and I still love the show. We watch together silently. The show is so good, the drugs are still doing their thing, and part of me is transported to west Texas—but only a small part. There is too much pain anchoring me to Trent’s couch.

At the end of the first episode, when quarterback Jason Street goes down, Coach Taylor gives the first of his trademark speeches. Something about life being so very fragile. Something about us all being vulnerable. Something about how, at some point in our lives, we will fall. “We will all fall.”

I’ve never played football or any kind of team sport. I’ve never sat through a coach’s halftime pep talk. I’ve never been in the room with someone rallying the troops to turn the tide of the fight. But hearing Coach Taylor speak, I prop myself up on my elbows. I am forty-two. This is the halftime of my life, and my team is losing. I’ve never been more in need of this speech.

He continues about how what we have can be taken from us. Even what we have that is special. And when it is taken, we will be tested.

I’m captivated by this speech, and even though I’ve heard it before, even though I own it on Blu-ray, I’m also hearing it for the very first time. It is in this pain that we are tested. Since I am in this pain, the pain of having what is special taken from me, I look inside myself and I don’t like what I see: a man who is broken and alone. I think of all the time Lily and I spent together, just the two of us—the talks about boys, the Monopoly, the movies, the pizza nights—and I wonder how much of it was real. Dogs don’t eat pizza; dogs don’t play Monopoly. I know this on some level, but everything feels so true. How much of it was an elaborate construct to mask my own loneliness? How much of it was built to convince myself the attempts I made at real life—therapy, dating—were not just that: attempts?

Somewhere, sometime, I stopped really living. I stopped really trying. And I don’t understand why. I had done all the right things. I had Lily. I had Jeffrey. I had a family.

And then I didn’t.

I don’t understand how my life got so empty, or why the octopus came, or why everyone eventually goes away.





4 P.M.


Trent orders pizza, and when it comes I try to eat, but the first bite makes me retch and I think I’m going to throw up but I overcome it and manage to keep it down. The red peppers and tomatoes and olives and cheese mix with the bile that rises in my throat and everything tastes awful. And yet I keep eating. Every bite delivers a stomach pain so sharp that for one glorious nanosecond it overcomes the one in my heart. There are three empty Pacifico bottles in front of me on the coffee table, which I don’t remember drinking. I look over at Trent and I can tell he’s happy that I’m eating. I guess the idea of someone overdosing on booze and pills on his couch (if one could overdose on a Valium, two shots of vodka, and three Pacificos) is not one he relishes.

“Good pizza?” he asks.

I raise a slice to him like I’m offering a toast.

Why didn’t I run? Why didn’t I scoop Lily up in that blanket and take her home? If I had we would be there now, together. It’s the question I can’t get out of my head. Why? Didn’t? I? Run?