One Last Thing Before I Go

outside, she turns back to him. “If you’re going to die,” she says, fighting back tears, “I wish you’d just get on with it already.” And then she walks out, leaving him hotly eviscerated and vaguely suicidal.

CHAPTER 37
    “H ey, Silver? What the fuck?”
    Even before he opens his eyes, he wonders at how often people seem to say that to him. What the fuck? It feels like those three words have followed him throughout his adult life. They ought to be carved onto his tombstone, he thinks, a fitting epitaph for the encapsulation of a life that has, from most standpoints, made no sense at all.
    DREW SILVER
    1969–2014
    WHAT THE FUCK ?
    Yeah. That would pretty much sum it up.
    * * *
    “That would pretty much sum what up? What the hell are you babbling about?”
    He opens his eyes to find Jack and Oliver standing in front of him in their bathing suits, blocking out the sun. “Nothing,” he says.
    “You’re soaked,” Oliver tells him. “Did you sleep out here like that?”
    He feels the wetness of his clothes plastered against his skin, and he shivers. He vaguely remembers standing at the head of the pool late last night, thinking dark, lonely thoughts, but he has no recollection of jumping in, or climbing out afterward. Clearly, he did both.
    He shivers in his chair. Now that he’s awake, he’s freezing.
    “What the hell happened to you?” Jack says. He looks worried.
    “Rough night,” he says. He can feel his jaw trembling as his teeth chatter.
    “We have to get him out of those clothes,” Oliver says. He leans forward and begins unbuttoning Silver’s shirt.
    “What, right here?” Jack says.
    “Get his belt,” Oliver says.
    Silver looks down as the two men undress him. He is wearing the same dark pants and shirt that he put on to go to dinner at his parents’ house last night. He is wearing one loafer. He remembers buttoning the shirt Oliver is now pulling off of him, checking himself in the mirror. It was less than twelve hours ago. Feels like years. A lot can go wrong in twelve hours.
    “Get him in the hot tub,” Oliver says.
    Jack and Oliver help him up off the chair and walk him over to the hot tub in his underpants. He is shivering uncontrollably now, barely able to stand on his own. The water is so hot that for a moment it burns him, but as he settles into it, he can feel the heat entering his muscles and then his bones, can feel his body relaxing into it. Jack and Oliver take off their shirts and sit down in the hot tub on either side of him.
    “Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub,” Jack says.
    Silver smiles wanly.
    “You feeling any better?” Oliver says.
    “Getting there.”
    “There’s something in here!” Jack says, alarmed. He reaches down into the frothing bubbles and comes up with Silver’s loafer. “Yours?”
    “Yeah.”
    Jack tosses it onto the pool deck behind him. “So, what the hell happened to you?”
    Silver shakes his head. Even the idea of recounting last night is exhausting to him. He just wants to sit here and dissolve into the hot water until there’s nothing left of him. He closes his eyes and sees Denise, naked, looking up at him with desire. How does something like that happen and disappear so damn quickly? And why can’t the bad shit disappear just as fast? What . . . The . . . Fuck?
    “Shit,” Jack says.
    “What?”
    He points. “It’s the Fucking Coopers.”
    The Fucking Coopers: Courtney and Shaun Cooper and their fucking kid, Tyler. Through a series of events and misunderstandings that have never been fully explained, the Fucking Coopers thought the Versailles would be a fantastic place to start their young family. Courtney is beautiful in that way Midwesterners are, blond and cheerful, her face always lit up with a relaxed smile. Shaun has a full head of hair and an athlete’s physique. And Tyler, well, he looks like a Tyler. Courtney and Shaun look at each other when they talk, and when they lie on their lounge chairs watching Tyler play, she will often have her hand resting on his arm, and they are an oddity here, a freak show, and so effortlessly, casually in love that it’s borderline offensive. The Fucking Coopers.
    Courtney takes Tyler into the water, where he splashes around happily. Shaun pulls off his shirt, revealing an enviable six-pack, and starts filming them with his iPhone.
    “Good morning, guys,” he says as he moves past the hot tub.
    “Good morning,” Oliver says.
    “Fuck you,” Jack says under his breath,