This Close to Okay(34)

Some nights, Emmett, in his clogs and kitchen whites, knocked back a strong IPA underneath the lake lamplight, listening to Christine talk about her life. The dopey, rich ex-boyfriend she was glad to be rid of. Her ignorant, racist family. The ones who had never left that town, didn’t want to leave that town, would never leave that town.

Christine flirted and complimented Emmett’s food, asking for more. Emmett happily obliged. Wood-fired pizzas with basil and shrimp. Coconut fried chicken. Fish and chips. Pan-fried rainbow trout. Pasta bianco with extra pepper. Steak au poivre. Christine loved pepper on everything. Emmett couldn’t see or think about pepper without conjuring Christine, the pepper pinprick beauty mark on her left eyelid, her scrunched nose when her food was too spicy. They’d fallen in love at the lake restaurant.

*



His mom reassured him that she had nothing against Christine and her brothers; their family wasn’t their fault. And for as long as Emmett could remember, Robert had always told his son—as part of his routine Dad Speeches—that if you didn’t want the bad shit in life to win every time, you had to keep your eye out for a bright thing. “Sounds like Christine is your bright thing,” his dad had said to him after Emmett gushed about her. “You and your mom have always been my bright things,” his dad frequently reminded him.

*



“How did you learn to cook like this?” Christine asked, laughing on their first date alone. Before summer blurred gold into autumn, Emmett had asked Christine if she wanted to do something, just the two of them. They’d smoked a bowl and, like always, ended up in the kitchen.

“What? Girl, you know this is my family’s restaurant,” he said. He’d made her a full plate of mac and white cheese with freshly ground pepper clicked over it. She sat there, lake-tan and pretty, her hair tied back with yellow velvet.

“Duh. I know. But how’d you learn to cook like this?” she said, taking a big drink of water, pointing her fork at him. The restaurant was empty, the lights low. It was nearly 1:00 a.m., and they had walk-and-talk plans to get coffee at the twenty-four-hour diner afterward.

“Because I like you. A lot. That’s why it tastes so good,” he said, in a purposely sexy, deep voice. And as soon as the words left his mouth, the power went out. Christine squealed and giggled wildly, her shiny sounds echoing off the hanging army of copper and stainless steel.

“It tastes even better with the lights out,” she said. He heard her fork tip-tap the plate. His adrenaline flashed, being alone, together like that. Terrified of the strong feelings he had for her. She moved toward him through the black, kissed his mouth for the first time. He could hear the sirens of his heart on high alert, blinded by this bright thing, even in the dark.

*



Tallie gasped.

“You’re okay?” Emmett asked her, sitting up.

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine. It just scared me. Candles! I’ll get my new candles,” she said. Emmett saw the shadow of Tallie drift past him on the couch, into the kitchen.

He’d loved cooking in her kitchen. He’d missed being in a kitchen. He was thinking about being with Christine in the kitchen, being with Brenna in the kitchen. Kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen. An obsessive, dizzying carousel of memories. He needed fresh air. He got up and opened Tallie’s front door, closed it behind him. Leaned over the side of the porch, and the rain wrapped around him, wetting him quickly. Had it really been raining for this many days? What day was it?

Paranoia. He knew what was happening, although there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it. The intense awareness made it worse. Like always, he felt both numb and as if he had hypersensitive antennae out, touching everything. Every negative emotion powered up inside him until he was fully charged. Sadness and anger fighting for room and the persistence of Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” beating, beating inside of him. He was wet from rain? Sweat? Tears? His imagination? He got cold and hot at the same time, his body unable to properly regulate its temperature. It’d started after Christine and Brenna were gone. He’d read it was perfectly normal, but that didn’t stop it from sending him into a panic when it happened. The suffocating feeling of doom, the vision of his body going from bloody and hot to stone, cold as tombs.

Emmett had left his backpack inside with Tallie, next to the couch, but he couldn’t bring himself to go in there. He was paralyzed on that edge in the rain, like that edge was the bridge. He’d jump. It was time to jump. He’d fought and fought and fought to no avail. A couple of signs weren’t enough to fix him. Maybe they were just coincidences anyway. Remember, nothing matters. Fuck it—

“Joel?”

Tallie called him by the wrong name. He couldn’t move. He was only cold now. Shaking. It was brighter outside than he’d imagined it would be.

(The slurred orange light of the streetlamps still glowing, reflecting off the leaves stuck like stickers to the sidewalk, the street—the wet glass windows of the cars lining it. Four cars: two four-doors, two sports cars. A yellow fire hydrant with blue caps. Rainwater running over the gutters. Rainwater sweeping to the sewers. One sharp bark from a dog.)

“The streetlamps are on,” he said to himself, wondering if he’d hallucinated the power going out. Had he heard the letters PTSD with a question mark on the end? Had he hallucinated that, too? Had any of it happened? Hadn’t he faked taking his meds, stopped going to the support groups?