One Last Thing Before I Go

where I’m going. Away from you.”
    Silver nods and gets up from the table, grabbing the bottle of kiddush wine. “I’ll come with.”
    * * *
    They walk a few blocks in silence, over to the pond behind the Livingston Avenue cul de sac. It’s a cool night, the smell of honeysuckle and cut grass wafting across the pond, taking Silver back in time. When they were kids, they would fish out of the pond, pulling in small bass, bream, and the occasional catfish. Silver always had to bait Chuck’s rod because Chuck couldn’t handle running his hook through live worms. They would sit up on one of the large flat boulders that ringed the pond, and they would invariably end up discussing what Silver came to think of as the three S’s:
Star Wars
, sports, and sex. When the pond froze over they would skate on it, and some of the older kids would play broom hockey, but after Solomon Corey fell through the ice and drowned, no one ever skated on the pond again.
    Solomon had been a year ahead of Silver in school—a tall, impossibly skinny kid who walked with the jerky stride of a marionette, and his death had weighed heavily on Silver for a while, the impossibility of someone he knew simply being gone. Silver was twelve, and death was a concept that had dwelled at the periphery of his consciousness for many years, but now it had infiltrated his world, and for a while, everything felt unreal. He would lie in bed at night and try to intuit the thoughts that must have flashed through Solomon’s head as the icy pond water filled his lungs. Did the reality of his dying occur to him? Or did he pass out figuring he’d wake up in his bed the next morning, same as always?
    “You remember Solomon Corey?” he asks Chuck.
    “Yeah,” Chuck says, tossing a pebble into the pond. They both fall silent for a moment, watching the ripples radiate outward and fade. “I used to think he was still down there. It never occurred to me that they’d have pulled him out.”
    They are sitting on one of the flat rocks, passing the kiddush wine between them. There are very few occasions where kiddush wine tastes good, but Silver is pleased to discover that this is one of them.
    “He was the first person I knew who died.”
    Chuck nods and takes a long swig of the bottle, cringing as it goes down. “Wow, that’s some bad wine.”
    “I kind of like it.”
    “So,” Chuck says. “What’s the plan here? I mean, why are you doing this?”
    “It’s hard to explain.”
    Chuck passes him the bottle. “I think you should try.”
    Silver takes another drink, savoring the wine, the taste of both his childhood and God. He sits back on the rock and looks up at the sky. The pond is one of the darkest spots in the neighborhood, and you can see a greater array of stars than usual.
    “They can go in and fix me,” Silver says, “but when I wake up, I won’t be any better. For the last bunch of years, ever since Denise and I got divorced, I’ve been treating my life as this pit stop, just kind of regrouping before I move on. But it’s been seven years, and I never moved on. I haven’t done anything. I just . . . stopped. And now they want to save my life, but if it’s just to go back to the life I’ve been living, well, I’ve been there for about as long as I can stand.”
    Chuck nods sadly, absorbing it, and Silver looks away, suddenly unable to maintain eye contact with his little brother.
    “But I think that’s a good thing,” Chuck says. “You’ve taken stock. You know you need to make a change. So have the operation, and then start making changes.”
    “Don’t you think if I was able to make some changes, I would have already?”
    “Things are different now.”
    Silver shakes his head. “I’m not. I’m the same fuck-up I always was. And I honestly don’t see that changing.” He thinks about it for a moment. “When I think about having that operation, I think about waking up in a bed, with no one there waiting for me. No one to take me home.”
    “We’ll all be there.”
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    Chuck smiles sadly. “I know. I know what you meant.”
    They sit in silence for a while, tossing pebbles into the pond, listening for the splash as the dark water swallows them. Out in the darkness, a frog’s plaintive croak reverberates over the water.
    “I could help you, you know,” Chuck says. “We could come up with a plan, set some goals; a better job, more time with Casey.”
    “You want to be my life