“My chemo was cancelled,” he says. “Something went wrong with the hospital’s IT and all their routine appointments were called off for the day.”
Suddenly I remember the nurse who glued my head together. The gentle nurse complaining about the cyberattack and how all non-emergency treatments had been abandoned. And then that conversation with Mike in which he never actually said he’d been hooked up:“Yeah, today was all kinds of mad…I’ll tell you all about it later. Might make you smile or maybe burst a vessel.”And then Carol saying something about Mike not being as far on with his treatment as he should be, because the last cycle had to be rescheduled?
“After I spoke to you, I took Becks for a walk,” he says, getting slowly to his feet. “We’d spent half the day in the chemo suite waiting for nothing. It was draining, you know? You build yourself up to face it and then some lonely little dweeb in a basement sends out a virus and you’re back to square one. Waiting. Dreading. So we got home late and I just needed a bit of space away from my folks. The looks, the sympathy, the tiptoeing around me…it was like I couldn’t breathe.”
I can see him pulling on his hoodie, taking Becks’s leash from the hook by the door…
Carol asks if he’d like some company, Big Mike tells him to remember his gloves. Then the driveway, and Becks straining at his collar. Mike takes them on a winding tour through the woods, Becks snuffling out their path, Mike crunching slowly behind. The fresh air feels good against his skin, raw and real, not like the clinical, filtered air of the hospital. The dog keeps up a frantic pace, never tiring, and that suits Mike just fine. He has a million thoughts racing around in his head – concern for his best friend, anger at the video someone posted of Dylan and El, frustration that he isn’t another step along his road, and always the constant fear that that road might not be as long as everyone has promised.
He’s tiring. His heart is full. He thinks back to the conversation with Dylan. He’s not fooled by his best friend’s upbeat vibe. He knows the McKees and doesn’t believe that their acceptance of Dylan’s relationship with Ellis will stand the test of time. He starts to stumble over the uneven forest floor and decides to take Becks off the leash. Let the mutt run free. Lost in his fears, he doesn’t realize how far they’ve traipsed through the wood nor how close they are to the lake road.
Before he can call him back, Becks explodes through the trees.
A white blur, a dashing comet on the road.
He reaches the treeline just in time to see a car swerve across the tarmac. He stands frozen. All he can do is watch as the Nissan tumbles, smashing and reshaping itself as it hurtles down the incline towards Hunter’s Lake. He knows the car. He wants to move. He can’t. A frightened, whimpering Becks dashes back and twines around his legs, glimmering upturned eyes full of guilt. It takes a small nip at his fingertips for Mike to come round.
He starts to run.
“You know the rest,” he says.
“No,” I tell him quietly. “I don’t.”
“Are you going to make me say it?”
“I think you need to. For both of us.”
“I got you out. I dragged you out of there and I tried to go back. I did, Dylan. I tried. But I couldn’t.” It’s then that he breaks, roaring, slamming his palms against his chest. “Because I’m weak and I’m tired and I’m fucked! I wasn’t strong enough to save him.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I shout back at him. “I’d have understood.”
“No. No, you wouldn’t. Not then. Because you want to know the truth, Dylan? If El had been in the passenger seat and I’d saved him first, I wouldhave found the strength from somewhere to getyouout. I’d have killed myself trying anyway. But honestly? I didn’t love him as much as I love you. I couldn’t find that last bit of strength and courage and I wasn’t willing to die for him. I just wasn’t. And I knew that you would never forgive me for leaving him.” He takes a breath, then plunges on. “And I thought maybe it’d be worse even than that.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, not wanting to know, but needing to.
“Maybe you’d think I left him on purpose. Because he came along at the time I needed you most and he took you from me.”
“Is that really what you felt?”
“No, Dylan. But it might have been whatyouthought, if you knew I hadn’t saved him. And I just couldn’t bear you thinking something like that.”
He reaches into his coat and brings out your leather-bound journal.
“When I heard the sirens, I crawled back into the woods. I could hardly stand at that point, but I managed it. And then I saw this, caught in the bushes. I took it on impulse, something I could give you later to remember Ellis by. But then afterwards, I couldn’t think how to do it without you getting suspicious. And then we had that moment after the funeral, in the memorial garden. I could see it in your eyes, Dylan. You wouldn’t ever let it rest. You had to find these people who you held responsible for El’s death.”
He passes a hand over his face and casts a look at the starless sky. “I could feel this hatred coming off you. For your rescuer. For me. I was scared, Dylan. I couldn’t lose you. Not now, when I need you most.”
“So you decided to use the journal to implicate other people. I thought the journal-sender was a friend trying to help me, but you used those pages to keep me guessing. And you what? Just pretended to see that mysterious person in the garden?”
He nods. “It all sounds so calculated, like it was some big plan, but it wasn’t, I swear. All through this insane week, it was just me desperately improvising, clutching at any possibility to keep you from the truth. Me getting more scared and more stupid and more desperate every time you came close. At first, I tried to talk you out of the whole thing. Even tried to play up the idea of the survivor’s guilt theory. But straight away I could see you’d never buy that. ‘I’m not letting this go, Mike. I won’t ever stop.’ That’s what you said. And so I used the journal. It made me sick, doing it, and with every page I sent, I hated myself more and more.” He covers his face with his hands. “God, Dylan, I didn’t know what to do.”
“But you’d read the journal. You must have guessed from that last drawing that something bad had happened to El. Why didn’t you send that page first?”
“I didn’t know what it meant. Didn’t even know if it represented anything real. But it was the most powerful image in the book and I just…I felt the darkness in it, Dylan. I didn’t want to show you that darkness unless I had to.” He shakes his head. “But then last night, what you said about us all being responsible. It’s true. All of us, in our own way, are responsible. We rejected El or wished he was different or wanted to make him in our image. And that isn’t me trying to get out of my responsibility. Me and Denman, we hurt him most. But last night you said again that you had to know. That it was killing you. And, Dylan, it was. I could see it. If there was some truth you could get out of that last picture, I didn’t have the right to keep it from you. So I sent the page. Jesus, I’m so fucking stupid!”
“But you always knew.” I nod. “When you said at Hinchcliffes that it wasn’t me that caused Ellis to go off the rails at Christmas. You’d read the journal. You guessed something must have happened to him.”
I get up from the swing and approach him. He flinches at my touch.
