One Last Thing Before I Go

their kisses . . . Their kisses are long and wet and deep, and go on forever. They kiss like they’re going to consume you, every single time. You can get lost in those kisses—you can die and be reborn in those kisses. I don’t know why that goes away, but it does. . . .”
    He looks up to find Casey, Jack, and Oliver staring at him. “What?”
    “That was, um . . . comprehensive,” Casey says.
    “You asked.”
    “I did.”
    “Can I change my answer?” Jack says, and they all crack up, for no real reason he can think of, but still, the world feels just this side of OK for a moment.
    * * *
    Later in the pool, something happens. He’s floating on his back, looking up at the sky, when there’s a flash of light, and then everything goes dark. He is suddenly sinking, feels the water flooding his nose and mouth and then the roughness of the pool bottom, scraping his lower back. He is drowning in darkness and unable to move. This is how it ends, he thinks. Strangely, he is not panicked, just a little bit sad. He tells himself to pay attention. If this is death, it will only come once, and he doesn’t want to miss anything. Like he did when he was alive.
    Then there are fingers digging into his forearms, hands pressed painfully into his armpits, and then he’s shivering in the air, being rolled on hard, gristly pavement. Flashes of color, and then moving shapes. It’s like being born, he thinks. He hears Jack’s voice: “Come on, Silver! Wake the fuck up,” and then Casey’s face comes into view, hovering above him, close enough that he can see the thin trickles of water catching the sunlight as they run down her face. “Dad!” she shouts. “Can you hear me?”
    He nods, and coughs up a lungful of chlorinated water. He has a vague sense of an assembled crowd, and he is suddenly self-conscious of his flabby gut, hanging out there for all to see.
    “I’m OK,” he says, rolling over and trying to sit up. He feels a pair of hands behind him, steadying him in place.
    “Go slow.” He hears Oliver’s voice in his ear.
    He sits up slowly and looks at Casey, who is fighting back tears. “What the hell happened?” she says.
    “I don’t know.”
    “You just went under.”
    “I didn’t mean to.”
    “Are you sure?”
    She looks a little bit off to him, like he can’t tell how far away she is. He looks around the pool area, at the men standing around, the college girls, all staring at him. It’s like he’s seeing them all at a strange angle. In the distance he hears a siren, and by the time the ambulance shows up, he’s figured out that he’s gone blind in his left eye.

CHAPTER 30
    “Y ou’re going to die,” Rich tells him. He is standing over Silver, moving his penlight across his eyes.
    “Tell me something I don’t know.”
    Rich retracts the light and looks at him. “What you have is something called amaurosis fugax.”
    “You see? Now, that I didn’t know.”
    Casey, sitting cross-legged at the foot of his bed, grins and shakes her head at him.
    “A small clot breaks off and lodges itself in the ocular vessels. It will probably break down on its own. You’re already responding to light.”
    He closes his right eye and sees a burst of light colors in his left.
    “So it will get back to normal.”
    “Maybe. Maybe not.”
    Denise comes into the room, looking slightly breathless, like she ran up from the parking lot. They all look at her, and her face goes red. She looks young and shy, and Silver gets that funny feeling in his chest.
    “You look pretty.”
    “Shut up, Silver,” she says, but her heart’s not in it, and he’s wondering if maybe she’s been thinking about that hug too. “Are you OK?” she says.
    “I get by.” It’s an old, not-funny joke from the earliest days of their marriage, and he can see it register in her quick, uncertain smile.
    Rich stands back, suddenly the interloper in his own hospital, in this family, and the part of Silver that isn’t, on some petty level, gloating actually feels sorry for him. You would think that in his dying days he’d be a bigger person than that. You’d be wrong.
    “Hi,” Rich says to her. He leans forward and kisses her cheek, which looks awkward and wrong because he’s wearing his doctor’s coat, because there’s clearly some tension between them, and because she was Silver’s first.
    “She was mine first,” he says.
    “Oh, shit, Silver!” Casey says. “Not this again.”
    “I know she was,” Rich says.