Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

The Mitchells’ cabin overlooked an inlet at the bottom of St. George a half mile past Port Clyde, the last village on the peninsula. My brother couldn’t believe I remembered how to get there without a map: right at the Baptist church, then out the little road that hugged the shoreline, dipping alongside a rocky beach and rising again onto higher ground, where the houses thinned out.

It wasn’t the blue I remembered, but a light gray with white trim. The rest appeared more or less as I’d pictured it: the sloping yard, snow-covered now, the mound of boulders by the path, the aluminum gangplank that led down to the little dock, the flagpole and the blueberry bushes.

Across the street, farther up the slope from the water, stood a white Cape with a stack of lobster traps in the yard. There were a few more houses up ahead in the distance before the road vanished into the woods.

In the quickly fading light we carried the groceries we’d bought on the way up into the kitchen along with our luggage. Michael stood in the middle of the room, holding his messenger bag to his chest, while I went looking for the valves to turn on the water and gas. When I returned he hadn’t moved, as if we were here on an errand, to drop a few things off, and would be getting back into the car. Asking him if he’d mind putting the food in the fridge seemed to break the spell, and he unpacked the bags while I carried wood in from the shed.

“You know how to light a fire?” he asked.

“Yeah, so do you. You’ve done it a hundred times.”

“Have I?”

On the drive up I’d made a passing reference to some future point when it would be just the three of us, once Mom was gone, and he had looked at me in shock, as if the idea that he might survive her had never occurred to him. I nearly stopped the car to yell at him for being so out of it, for clinging to such a distorted view of reality, but I didn’t want to start things out that way and I held my tongue, as I did now.

The cabin hadn’t been renovated as far as I could tell, just well maintained. The dark wood floors were uneven but polished, the old floral-print furniture replaced with solid whites and tans. On the bookcases on either side of the fireplace were Mitchell family photographs: their two daughters at the ages we had been when we first came here, in bathing suits and life preservers, squinting in the sun, and later as teenagers and adults with boyfriends or husbands.

I told Michael to take the largest of the three eaved bedrooms upstairs, the one Mom and Dad had used, to give him the extra space, and I said he should go ahead and unpack his things, to settle in.

Over the last few weeks, Michael had agreed, reluctantly, to try what I’d suggested, but he drew the line at stopping the Klonopin, saying he would go off everything except that. Caleigh had encouraged him, which helped. So had my mother, who more than anyone else wanted for this to work but feared the difficulty of it for Michael. She had baked ginger cookies for our trip, and sent us off with apples and peanut butter and a bag of Michael’s favorite potato chips, which he finished off with a beer as I made us dinner.

The night before, Seth and I had got into our first serious argument. We’d been seeing each other for a year and a half and through all that time had remained polite with each other, careful not to offend or disturb. It seemed like mutual care, mostly, a desire to protect what we’d begun.

He had put up with my travel schedule, right through to the election’s dismal end. I’d been gone for weeks at a time and he hadn’t complained. And when he needed to work on projects over the weekends that I did make it back, I didn’t get after him about it. He even took in stride the news of my being furloughed by the magazine, hinting that we should talk about moving in together. And when my mother had called and told me about the real estate agent and the listing contract, and I said to Seth almost as soon as I hung up with her that Michael and I needed to go away, he said, Of course, I get it.

But when I was gathering my things in the apartment, getting ready to leave once more, and asked if he would do me a favor by booking me a ticket online for the train to Boston, he looked up from his computer, incredulous.

In a tone I’d never heard before, he said, “Do you have any memory at all how many times you said we’d take a trip together this week? After you were finally done. Does it even matter to you that you’re going to use practically your whole time off with Michael, and none of it with me?”

“You think I should just cancel,” I said. “After I arranged the place and persuaded him to do it?” He slammed his computer shut and walked into the bedroom. But I followed him, demanding an answer. “Is that really what you think? That I should just call Michael and tell him I decided to go on vacation with my boyfriend instead?”

“God forbid,” he said. “But don’t worry, I get it — no one has problems more important than yours. You’ve made that clear. And now you’re going up there into the woods, all Robert Bly, to save him all by yourself. You’re not as smart as you think you are.”

Later, in the bathroom, passing the toothpaste, we slunk back toward each other. After turning out the lights, without saying a word, he fucked me quite hard, both of us knowing it would be bad to part for this long without touching. In the morning I promised to call him.

As I had suspected, we got no cell reception at the cabin. But the Mitchells had a working landline, which is what my mother called us on after supper, saying she just wanted to make sure we’d arrived safely and that the heat worked. She spoke to Michael briefly and then wished us a good night’s sleep.

Along with the heap of books he’d stuffed in his messenger bag, Michael had brought a bunch of DVDs. We sat through two episodes of 24 together, a distraction I was glad for. He’d lost patience for anything slower than a Bruce Willis movie. It had to be action: car chases, galactic warfare, gangland slaughter. Luckily, next to the supermarket back on Route 1, I’d spotted a place that still rented videos, so I knew we wouldn’t run out.

Before going to bed I told him he should do what we had discussed. He went upstairs and returned with his toiletry bag to the living room couch, where he rummaged through it and removed the orange prescription bottles, lining them up on the coffee table in what seemed an act of determined resignation. He set down five in all, plus the jar of kratom tea.

For years he’d insisted, like a child, that eventually a doctor would prescribe a pill which would give him the same relief he’d experienced the first time he had taken a drug. We had chastised him for believing this, for demanding such a purely external fix, and yet all the while we had wished for exactly that, for our sake as much as for his. To make the problem simply go away. That fantasy was over. That cure didn’t exist. Every therapy, every drug, all the help we’d given — none of it had worked. So now there was no other choice. He had to be able to take care of himself. He had to get better. When my mother had called on that Sunday last month and told me she needed to sell the house, she had to have known that I wouldn’t let her do it. Telling me was as good as saying she wanted to be stopped. And so I had stopped her.

“It’s the right thing,” I said, picking up his bottles with both hands.

“I’m not sure,” he said, “I’m not sure.”

For the first couple of days the hardest part for either of us was the lack of Internet. I hadn’t been away from it that long in years. Nor had Michael. The absence of distraction left us irritable and bored. But that had been part of my idea for coming here, to disenthrall him from that constant, goading semi-stimulation which only fed his anxiety. To help bring him back to some kind of present.