Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [3]
The ease of the women’s reunion was depressing him, and the vodka seemed to have lost its power. He’d hit that point where he couldn’t get any more loaded, no matter how hard he tried, his veins already coursing at their alcoholic capacity. He shot a halfhearted goodbye smile toward the bartender, then turned and elbowed through the girlfriends.
After he’d walked a few blocks, he saw cars up ahead, flashing by. In the spaces between the cars were intermittent glints of silvery light. He took a few more steps before it hit him. Lake Shore Drive, or LSD as he used to call it in high school, liking how saying that made him sound as if he might know a thing or two about illicit drugs. He had nearly reached Lake Shore Drive, which meant he was almost to Lake Michigan.
“Hey, buddy.” The voice startled him so much he flinched. Spinning around, he saw a man crumpled on the sidewalk, against the side of a brownstone. Dan’s first instinct was that the man was hurt and needed help, but in the next instant he saw the stuffed garbage bag at the man’s side and his multiple layers of clothing, and realized he was homeless.
“Spare a couple bucks?” the man said, his voice a rough croak. “Gotta get some food.”
“Yeah, sure.” Dan extracted a ten-dollar bill from the few he had left and crumpled the rest in his pocket. He tossed the bill toward the man, but it caught a breeze, twisting and lilting in the air like a snowflake until the man snatched it.
“Thanks, bud.” The man gave Dan a nod. “Appreciate it.”
Dan stood a moment longer, looking at the man. He used to wonder how anyone could be homeless, how someone could shift from a house and a profession to a life on the street. But now he understood better. In fact, it was a possibility that occasionally loomed in his own future, because sometimes he just didn’t care anymore. At those times, he could imagine letting it all go—his sales job, his apartment, his child-support payments—until he was fired, evicted and strapped with a restraining order. What scared him was that oftentimes that possibility appealed to him, because he saw it as a way to let go of the constraints in his life, and maybe that would allow him to let go of the secret, too. A secret that had somehow grown larger and larger over the years, when, in fact, some days he wondered whether it really needed to be hidden at all.
He turned away from the man and kept moving toward the lake. He’d avoided lakes his whole adult life, especially this one. It reminded him too much of the old days. But he felt its pull now, the water’s tug. He kept walking. When he reached the poorly lit tunnel that would take him under LSD and to the lake, he hesitated, waiting for the alcohol to clear his head.
But the fear he expected didn’t come. He took that as a good sign, and descended into the tunnel.
1
The short letter, a note really, arrived at my apartment on a Thursday. It was one of those random, end-of-April days in Manhattan when the temperature shot to eighty degrees, sending everyone to Central Park or the cafés that had rushed to set up their outdoor tables. A boisterous, electric feeling was in the air. I called Maddy from my cell phone as I walked home from the subway, and we decided to go for wine and dinner at Bryant Park Grill, a rooftop restaurant where Maddy knew the maître d’.
In the terminally slow elevator on the way to my apartment, I glanced at my mail. There was nothing interesting at first, just a bill and a few obvious pieces of junk, but I stopped when I came to the flat, business-size envelope with no return address. The envelope looked as if it had been printed on a personal