One Last Thing Before I Go

exercise in futility where Silver is concerned.
    “Rich,” she says, but she has nothing to say beyond that. Just his name, which rolls off her tongue like a confession. Rich looks at her, his eyes filled with a hurt she’s never seen, and she is floating out of her body, observing the whole circus her life has just become from a perch somewhere over her own shoulder. Just as he reaches the front door, he offers her a small, barely perceptible nod, acknowledging all the pain to come, all the things he knows she will tell him after the fact, somehow validating her even as he flees. And beneath the chaos of the moment, Denise becomes aware of a painful truth about herself: she is never as deeply in love with a man as she is in the moment he leaves her. It was true of Silver, and it’s true right now. It’s the kind of epiphany she’ll forget by morning, but right now, with a piercing clarity, she understands this flaw in herself, sees how she will always be doomed by it to some extent.
    She should go after him. She knows that. She is supposed to chase him, crying and begging, so that he can yell at her and say things that will cut her and scar her and leave her wailing on her knees while she watches his car speed off down the darkened street. She knows, without ever having been here before, that that’s how this is supposed to play out. But right now it’s taking every last bit of strength she has to simply exist. Any further exertion on her part, even as little as a sharp breath, and she’ll disintegrate like a thousand-year-old fossil.
    And then Valerie is standing beside her, holding her up. She must have started to collapse, although she didn’t notice.
    “Denise,” Valerie says.
    “I’m sorry,” Denise says.
    “Just tell me, what does this have to do with Jeremy?”
    Denise looks at her friend, at the faint lines starting to break through the Botox barrier of her forehead, at the overdone eyeliner and the makeup flaking out of her crows feet, and feels a wave of tenderness for her. We’re all doomed, she thinks. Eventually.
    And so she tells her.
    * * *
    This evening began with so much promise, Silver thinks. It was just two hours ago that he was sitting between Casey and Denise in the warm glow of his parents’ dining room, enveloped in the aromas of his childhood, feeling safe and loved and hopeful. And then, impossibly, he was making love to Denise, feeling her fingers slide down his spine the way they used to all those years ago, feeling her lips and legs opening for him, taking him back. And now, like he did all those years ago, Silver watches it all come undone. He watches Rich storm out, watches Casey’s expression fall, and then fall some more, watches Denise grow pale and collapse a little into Valerie. Valerie, for her part, looks like she desperately needs to sink her long painted nails into someone’s flesh, if she could only figure out what’s happening here and, more important, who to blame. Silver would like to get out of Dodge long before that happens. He would like to leave the country before he has to look at the next expression on Casey’s face, or see the recrimination and regret in Denise’s eyes. Everything I touch turns to shit, he thinks, not with self-pity, but with an almost scientific fascination at the truth of it.
    He looks up at Casey, who lets go of Jeremy’s hand and comes down the last two stairs to stand in front of him. He now sees the tears he couldn’t see when she was up on the landing, with Jeremy’s shadow falling over her.
    “What the fuck, Dad?” she whispers in a voice so low that only he can hear. There’s no anger in it, just a pained bewilderment that makes her seem like a little girl.
    “It’s going to be OK,” he tells her.
    She shakes her head and smiles bitterly, and now she doesn’t look like a little girl anymore, now she looks like every woman he’s ever known, shaking their heads in disbelief at what a fucking idiot he is, and at the fact that they ever might have thought otherwise. “Casey.”
    She shakes her head again, and shreds him with a baleful stare. “I didn’t think my life could be any more fucked up than it was,” she says. “And then I let you back into it.”
    He can’t look at her, can’t bear to see the hate that makes her older and uglier etched into her face, to know that he caused it. “I’m sorry,” he says.
    Casey couldn’t give a shit. She turns and heads for the door. Just before she steps