I moved in that weekend, and I realized, settling in that first night on my mattress on the floor, looking out over the empty brick courtyard with its Lululemon and artisanal gelato, that I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life. No girlfriend to know where I was. No roommate to stand in my doorway asking me to go out. Didn’t Lee Harvey Oswald have an apartment like this? I came home at the end of each day (for rent I was organizing files at Frank’s firm, sitting at the desk of a recently fired paralegal) and took the elevator to the ninth floor, where I’d lock my apartment door and proceed to make and break elaborate rules about when it was OK to start looking at porn and drinking.
I’d long since given in to both porn and drinking, and to the empty seasick feeling that came afterward, on the night when Sally wrote to me again.
From: <Sally Pell>
To: <Adam Sanecki>
Date: Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 8:58 PM
Subject: old friend
Dear Adam,
I’ve been thinking about you since we ran into each other last month, and I keep thinking of things I should have said. In person I’m too polite, so I’m just going to be as honest as I can.
Adam, we’re desperate. I’m not a writer like Richard, so I can’t tell you how awful these past few months have been (and they’ve been even worse for Richard than for me). I don’t know how much you know about what’s going on, but we’re losing Thomas, and if there’s anything we can do to get him back, you can bet we’re going to do it.
So I’m writing to ask a favor. (“Favor” doesn’t sound right, but oh well.) I’m asking you to care. I know this must sound like some nagging teacher, and I’m sorry. But I know that for everyone there are people on the outside and there are people on the inside, and what I’m asking you to do, I guess, is to move Thomas in.
I don’t know whether this means coming to see us or writing him a letter or even (God help me) going to look for him. But the first step is just to want to help him. I think you might be able to get through to him in a way that we can’t anymore. I know it’s all ancient history and probably very silly to you, but I think you still mean an awful lot to him. He never had another friend like you. I think he might still say you’re his best friend, even now.
I’m rambling now. What I really want to make sure you know is just that your old friend, skinny Thomas Pell, is drowning. We all are, and we’re reaching out to you for help. Let me know if you’re willing to lend a hand.
Sally
Certain emails I read and then slam my laptop shut, as if I might be able to keep whatever news is in them from leaking out into my life. This was one of those, but none of my tricks—not shutting the computer, not even opening a new bottle of Cutty Sark—seemed to be working: the leak had already started. We’re reaching out to you for help. A very bad idea, was all I could think. Your old friend is drowning. Well, so was I.
Remembering the accident, after spending a serious chunk of my life avoiding thinking about it, I’ve found myself wondering: So how did the guilt not kill me? How did I manage to go to class or apply to college or to worry about girls or to do anything, really, other than pay secret visits to Mira Batra’s grave and weep?
And the only answer I can give myself, which might not make particular sense, is that I think it did wreck my life, but maybe only in the way that the collapse of an underground water-pipe system would wreck the life of a city. Which is to say: thoroughly but also, for a while at least, invisibly. So yes, I was back at school just a month after the accident, asking my history teacher smart-ass questions, playing with the new pitch speedometer the PE department had bought, and looking, to anyone who cared, like just the same ordinary, obnoxious fifteen-year-old I’d been on the last day of school the June before. But I was also having my first panic attacks (I woke up one night drenched and freezing, and when I was finally able to walk I went and took a Valium from my mom’s medicine cabinet). For the first time in my life I was forgetting to eat. And sometimes in class, when I didn’t even know I was feeling especially nervous, I’d look down and see that my leg was shaking, and the only thing I could do to control it was to press down on my thigh as hard as I could with the corner of a book. So, all was not OK.
One thing that was visibly different, once we were back at school, was that I couldn’t be friends with Thomas anymore. I usually hate it when people say that they “couldn’t” do things like that (“I just couldn’t tell him,” “I just couldn’t leave the store without it”), but in this case I mean it physically: to keep going over to his house, talking to his parents, lying on the floor in his room, would have been like forcing myself to eat a human finger. I couldn’t do it. I needed our fates, whatever they were, to be untangled.