Elin Hilderbrand - Here’s to Us

Hayes was in bed, snoring. The duffel, which had been agape that afternoon, was now zipped up tight. If Belinda opened it, she knew what she would find: more packets, needles, rubber tubing, a spoon, a lighter. She wouldn’t go through Hayes’s things while he slept. But she did want to talk to him.

She sat on the edge of his bed and shook him awake. He opened his eyes and saw her and most likely thought he was the one having a bad dream. He tried to sit up. Belinda put a hand on his arm to reassure him, and a finger to her lips. The last thing Belinda wanted was Laurel rushing in and finding Belinda in Hayes’s bedroom again.

“Hayes,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Now?” he said. His voice was froggy. “In the middle of the night? What the hell for?” He scooted his body toward the wall, away from Belinda.

She held up the packet. “I found this on the floor when I came in here earlier,” she said. She shook it. “This is heroin, yes?”

Hayes reached up to grab it, but Belinda snatched it away. “Answer the question, Hayes. Is it heroin?”

“It’s mine,” Hayes said. “Give it to me.”

“Hayes,” Belinda said. “Is it heroin?”

Hayes let his arm fall to the bed. “Yes.”

Belinda nodded. She felt pleased with the admission. He had said it was his. There was no denial.

“How often are you using?” she asked.

“It’s none of your business,” Hayes said. “Now give me that, and get out of my room, please.”

“It is my business,” Belinda said. “You’re my stepson. I care about you, and I don’t want to see you doing this to yourself.”

Hayes grabbed the packet out of Belinda’s hand. “You know nothing about it,” he said. “You know nothing about my life. You know nothing about me.”

“I’ve known you for nearly thirty years, Hayes,” Belinda said.

“Get out, please,” Hayes said.

“I could just tell your mother,” Belinda said.

“Why would you burden her with this?” Hayes said. “She has enough to worry about.”

“If it were my child, I’d want to know,” Belinda said.

“Yeah, well, I’m not your child. Angie is a good kid. You got lucky.”

“I won’t tell Laurel,” Belinda said. “But you have to. She knows people who deal with this in the city, I’m sure. Treatment facilities, programs, methadone clinics…”

“My mother has enough on her plate,” Hayes said. “Anyway, it’s not as bad as you think. It’s a casual habit.”

“A casual heroin habit,” Belinda said. “I see. I assume the reason you look like you went fifteen rounds with Floyd Mayweather is because you went out looking for drugs?”

Hayes rolled away from her to face the window, the packet clenched in his hand. “Good night, Belinda,” he said.

“Tell your mother before the end of the day tomorrow, or I will,” Belinda said. “She loves you.” With that, Belinda stood up. “We all love you, Hayes.”

We all love you, Hayes.

He closed his eyes. Sleep was right there, like an ocean. All he had to do was jump in.

Tell your mother. His mother would be disappointed. No, delete that. She would be destroyed. She had only one child, Hayes, her golden boy. Laurel had been nineteen when Hayes was born, twenty-eight when Deacon left. Deacon’s life had become very populated-with Belinda first, then Angie, then Scarlett and Ellery, and always Buck-but Laurel had just been Laurel. She had dated here and there, and she threw herself into her career, but somehow she’d always made Hayes feel as though her first job, above and beyond everything else, was being his mother.

Belinda had him backed into a corner. She was going to tell Laurel if he didn’t. But maybe she was bluffing? She was a pretty good actress.

Hayes had heard that coming off heroin was a living hell, that you got violently sick, you vomited and wet yourself, you went into painful convulsions, you experienced jonesing like you’d never known. Grown men cried, screamed, begged, and groveled for a hit. Hayes didn’t think he could do it. He was smart, and he was sophisticated-but he wasn’t strong. Quitting heroin was apparently like climbing a greased pole-impossible to find purchase, with a chance to slip every second. And when you slipped, it was like falling into a hole with no bottom.

The heroin had been an accident, a trip-up, something Hayes had meant to try once, as a cultural experience. The opium pipe had been offered to him in a three-hundred-year-old teak house in a deep green valley in a part of China that few Westerners saw. That weekend had been so foreign as to be surreal, as if Hayes were a character in a storybook. He had been trying to abide by local custom-when one was offered the opium pipe, one smoked. Hayes had never imagined it would lead him directly to a street habit back in New York.

There was no way Hayes could describe how tremendous a feeling the high was. It was better than sex, better than a cold beer after a long day at the beach, better than a promotion at work with a huge pay raise, better than caviar on blini with a dollop of sour cream, better than love. Heroin equaled euphoria, a cloud walk, a feeling of superhuman power and complete peace at the same time. He couldn’t give it up.

How had he gotten this way? He was addicted. How had he allowed this to happen? He had meant to be careful, but he had not been careful. Belinda, with her hard, cold eyes like pieces of blue flint, had discovered him. Would he be paranoid to think that Belinda had been out to get him ever since he was a child? She had wanted Hayes to love her; he remembered the deals and the bribes. She had taken Hayes onto the set of The Truman Show to meet Jim Carrey; she had let Hayes and his high school girlfriend, Shauna, stay in the house in L.A. without any supervision; she had handed over the keys to Deacon’s Porsche whenever he asked. But Hayes had never bought into the whole Belinda worship, and she was painfully aware of this and probably hated him a little. She had started off this weekend by mentioning Naomi Watts, whom Hayes had bumped into while he was high as a kite.

Hayes had messed up so badly! He should have married Whitney Jo. He should have taken a job with a different magazine, one that required less travel; he should be a father by now. But the idea of a sedentary life-of daily routine, home ownership, a mortgage, a wedding ring, holiday dinners, a lawn sprinkler, bagging leaves and trips to the dump with the recycling; of back-to-school nights and entire Saturday afternoons spent at the soccer field-was suffocating. He might as well wrap a dry-cleaning bag over his head.

At the end, with Whitney Jo dropping hint after hint, leaving magazines in the bathroom open to De Beers ads, complaining that she had been a bridesmaid seven times in twelve months, Hayes had gotten queasy. He couldn’t do it. He was a traveler; he suffered from wanderlust and a bad case of Fear of Missing Out. He liked airport security, a stiff vodka and tonic in the VIP lounge; he enjoyed harmless flirting with flight attendants; and he loved the thrill of visiting a place he’d never been before. Kathmandu, Marrakech, Dakar, Dubai, Sydney, Tahiti, Vienna, Shanghai. Check in, check out: that was the life he had cultivated. Having no home was his home.

And now Belinda was threatening to bring it all down. He tried to picture himself at rehab. He tried to imagine himself entering a methadone clinic. No, he couldn’t do it. He didn’t want to talk to a counselor or sit in a circle of other addicts and confide the ways he’d been wronged growing up. He hadn’t been abused or ignored. He had been nurtured and loved-even by Belinda. Threatening to tell Laurel but allowing time for him to do it himself was Belinda showing him love. She cared about him.

His mother. Tell his mother? He couldn’t.

But maybe Hayes wasn’t as bad off as he thought. He had been surviving just fine on the Percocet alone-plus a bump around noon. Nearly twelve hours earlier. Although now, after the interaction with Belinda, he wasn’t going to lie-he could use a hit, a full hit, not a baby half hit like he’d been limiting himself to since he’d gotten here.

He clenched the packet and went to his duffel bag for his spoon and his needle. He was shaking a little as he cooked the heroin, as he drew it up into the needle, as he grabbed the rubber tubing in his teeth until his vein popped. As he shot.

Ahhhhhhhhh.

She and Buck did the dishes together. They bagged up the leftover salad and wrapped a heel of baguette and covered the butter. Laurel picked up the empty can of Skinny4Life that was by the sink.

“Here’s the answer to one mystery,” she said.

Buck was elbow deep in sudsy water at the sink. “He invested a hundred thousand dollars in that stuff.”

“She probably got a lifetime supply,” Laurel said, pitching the can in the trash.

“I can’t believe Deacon was such a sucker,” Buck said.

“He knew he was going to lose the house,” Laurel said. “I’m sure he was grasping at straws. Then he came up here to say good-bye to it.”

“I’m sure he knew when he went out that night and ended up at the strip club,” Buck said. “He wanted to drive that girl to Nantucket. That was the act of a desperate man.”

“I wonder what he was thinking about at the end,” Laurel said. “He was supposed to go fishing with JP the next morning, so maybe he was thinking about that-casting a line, feeling a tug, getting that rush you get when there’s a fish on.” She started to blubber. Of everyone in the house, only Laurel had known Deacon as a child. He had never believed himself worthy of any of the good things that had come his way-starting with Laurel. He used to say to her, You are the first good thing that ever happened to me. God, she hadn’t thought of that in years and years. When they were in high school, he used to squeeze her hard when he walked her to her door, as if he was afraid she would disappear overnight. So… when he found out he was going to lose the Nantucket house, he might have seen it as his fears finally coming true. He was going to lose the thing he loved the most.

“The ashes come tomorrow,” she said, wiping her eyes. What remained of Deacon Thorpe would fit in a shoe box. The chef and the swearer and the incredible kisser and the proud, loving father were now chunks and silt that they would throw in the water. It was inconceivable. It was wrong. And yet, everyone died. Laurel herself-with all her thoughts and feelings and all her love and compassion-would someday cease to be, and once she was gone, she would never be back. Never was a long, long time.

She dried the dishes that Buck had set in the drainer, then replaced them in the cabinet. Existential thinking terrified her. She preferred to believe that she would have another thirty or forty years in relative good health, with some meaningful companionship.

She threw down her dish towel and hugged Buck around the middle from behind as he hosed the scraps out of the sink.

“Would you take me upstairs and make love to me?” she asked.

He shut off the faucet. “What did you say?”

Laurel laughed, embarrassed at herself. “Never mind,” she said.

“No, I’m sorry. The water was running, and I didn’t hear you.” He took her by the chin. “What did you say?”

She could retract her statement now, or amend it, but it felt as if she were being spurred on by some invisible force. “I asked you to take me upstairs and make love to me,” she said.

“You did?”

She bit her lower lip. Should she explain that she was all of a sudden very afraid to die?

No need to explain to Buck. He took her hand and led her up the stairs, and it felt natural and meant to be, as though it would be the first time of many, many times, thirty or forty years’ worth.

There was a knock on her bedroom door. Her eyes flew open. Sunlight filtered into the room through the bottom of the window shade; it was morning. Joel lay splayed across the bed, buck naked. Angie hastened to cover him up with a sheet and the meager chenille blanket. The last thing she wanted was Ellery marching in and seeing Joel in Angie’s bed. Angie scrambled to put on shorts and a T-shirt. She opened the door. Laurel was standing there in her bathrobe, her hair mussed, her eyes at half mast behind a pair of glasses that Angie had never seen her wear.

“Sorry to bother you, sweetie,” Laurel said. “But JP is downstairs? He said you two had plans this morning?”

Angie gasped. “What time is it?”