On The Precipice

CHAPTER ONE-2

"The watch Gram gave you?"

"The same."

She moved around the coffee table and sat beside me on the couch, partially facing me. "But you’re all right? They didn’t cut you, did they?"

I shook my head. "No physical damage."

She stood, went to the wall and flipped the switch that sent light into that overhead wheel of faux flames, and sat down again.

"Did you tell the police?"

I looked at her. "Why? What on earth good would that do?"

"Nathan, snap out of it. The watch might be in a pawn shop right now. Your wallet, or what’s left of it, might be in a trash bin very near where this happened. And dealing with your phone might be more trouble for them than it’s worth, so it could be in the same bin." She got up again and fetched her cell phone.

"I understand they took your phone, but you probably walked right past a police station on your way home." I knew she was dialing nine-one-one.

I started to shake my head, but her attention went to the conversation she was having on the phone. When she hung up, she was all business. She took away my glass and the bottle I’d brought to the couch with me. She made a mug of coffee on the Keurig in the kitchen and brought it to me.

"Drink this. They’ll be here in a few minutes. What bank was your credit card from?"

I told her, and she searched on her phone for a contact number. She dialed and handed the phone to me. I had just finished reporting the theft and was beginning to be able to focus on things when the police arrived, a man and a woman.

I don’t remember much of the conversation. After they left, Nina surprised the hell out of me. She hugged me.

Over the Thai dinner that Nina had brought home in the bags, she apologized more than once as though the attack had been her fault. She had, in fact, been the one to suggest that I see how a recovery clinic operated, given my intended career in addiction recovery, after I had added an advanced degree to my undergraduate psychology education.

"I’m so sorry I sent you over there, Nathan. I just thought it would be a good idea for you to see how a clinic like that works. Honestly, in all the time I’ve lived in New York I’ve never felt threatened by anyone like that. Nothing like this has ever happened to me, or to Luc."

"I hope it never does. Seriously. It’s—it makes you feel useless. I keep thinking I should have fought back."

"No, you should not! A knife, Nathan? No. You did the right thing."

I took what reassurance I could from Nina’s comments. It wasn’t enough, though, to take away that helpless feeling, that worthless feeling.

Since Neil had died, in the spring of my freshman year at college, I’d worked hard at reinventing myself. I mean, I was no wimp before, but picking up Neil’s mountaineering baton had meant that I’d gained a lot of muscle, a lot of strength, and a lot of self-confidence. I’d scaled mountains alone that most people wouldn’t hike with help. I’d braved the death-defying Crawler’s Ledge on the Kalalau Trail on Kaua’i, helping to save another hiker who had fallen over the edge. And afterward, on that plane? Flying to San Francisco? When the cabin pressure had plunged and those masks had dropped on their snake-like tubing all over the cabin, I’d helped other people. Like the little girl next to me, whose panicked mother had two other children to take care of in the row behind me. Like the people who—for reasons I can’t fathom—didn’t put their masks on and dropped like flies in the aisle. I hadn’t hesitated. I’d held my breath and helped get some of those people back into their seats and masked before returning to the mask I’d left, so that I could save their lives.

The one glass of scotch, which I’d ordered at the hotel after that, had been celebratory. The scotch I’d drunk tonight had been to escape.

I was not like that. I didn’t try to escape difficult things, dangerous things. Maybe my inaction had been sensible, but—s**t. Why hadn’t I at least tried to defend myself?

And then there was the career I wanted, the career that would put me in direct contact with people who were addicted to things like opioid pills and heroin and crack and fentanyl. People who frequented clinics like the one I’d visited earlier today. And, very probably, people like the two guys who’d jumped me.

I was going to have to develop a very different kind of balls from the ones that made it possible for me to rescue fallen hikers or save unconscious airplane passengers.

Nina had been right. The very next afternoon, while I was hanging around that sterile loft, trying to distract myself by using my laptop to explore graduate programs, Nina called from her office. The police had called her to say they had found my watch, and my wallet, with only the cash missing from it. The phone didn’t show up. And the police couldn’t return the watch or the wallet until they’d finished processing them, which I took to mean fingerprinting, maybe lifting touch DNA, whatever.

Some of the funk that had settled over me after the attack lifted. But only some of it. Because when I considered going out to get a new phone, I came to a frozen stop inside the main door of Nina’s building, unable to step out onto the sidewalk. I stood there, staring through the metal grating embedded in the glass door, at the action on the street outside. Cars drove by, and trucks. The occasional pedestrian passed along the sidewalk. At one point, a teenager—no doubt deaf to the world because of music pumping through his earbuds—happened to glance at me. Maybe it was my profound stillness that affected him, maybe the blank look on my face, but his whole body shrank suddenly, and he nearly tripped as he took a frantic step sideways.

I let out a barking laugh. And I was just about to open the door and brave the world when I realized that I couldn’t get a new phone. Not today. I had no cash, no credit card, no way to prove who I was so I couldn’t even write a check. The sudden return of this profound helplessness, this overwhelming sense of inadequacy, brought impotent tears to my eyes. I turned around and headed back up to Nina’s loft.

I was curled into a ball on the spare-room bed, feeling profoundly sorry for myself, when I heard the door to the loft open. I glanced at the clock beside the bed: four o’clock. Wait; four o’clock? Nina had been early last night, arriving at seven. I knew work was crazy busy at the fashion magazine where she worked, as everyone was preparing for Fashion Week. So what was she doing home at this hour?

"Nathan?"

I uncurled slowly. "In here."

By the time Nina came into my room I had managed to sit up. She was all smiles.

"Present!" she announced as she tossed a bag onto the bed. It was a white plastic bag with the silver Apple logo on it.

My eyes went wide and I grabbed it. A phone! Nina had bought me a new phone!

I nearly tore the box open, which is pretty impossible; Apple sends its technical offspring into the world packaged in seriously hard cardboard, pure white.

"I got you the same color you had before. Hope that was okay."

I nodded, my eyes glued to the device. "Perfect." I glanced up at my sister. "Thank you."

"They need to hear from you about replacing the number on it with the number you had before, if you still want it. Now I have to get back to work. Not sure what time I’ll be home, and I’ll probably have dinner in the office. But now you can order yourself something, right?"

I grinned at her. "Right."

"And you can busy yourself setting that thing up."

"Thanks, Nina. Really."

"Have fun!"

And she was gone.

A new phone. Nina had taken time out of her frenetic day to go out and buy me a phone. Or maybe she had an assistant who could do that for her. It didn’t matter. She had done it. My eyes watered for the second time that day, this time for a good reason.

It did take me a little effort to get my old phone number assigned to the new phone, but I managed to get the thing set up and restored with data from my laptop by the time my order of tacos with extra guacamole and an order of flan arrived. I sat at the dining table and streamed a Simpsons rerun on my computer while I ate. I had almost finished my flan when I heard a key turning in the door. My assumption—that it was Nina returning home a little sooner than expected—was confounded by what sounded like luggage being wheeled in. My last spoonful of flan was frozen in the air halfway to my face as I watched a man walk into the living room.

I knew from a photo Nina had shown me that this was Luc. Luc Beaumont, fashion photographer and world traveler, moderately tall and slender, dark brown hair cut in stylish waves. His shirt, tucked into medium grey slacks, was an artful blend of stripes and accents in hues of blue ranging from dark to nearly white. Draped over his luggage was a jacket in a slightly lighter grey than the slacks.

Instantly I felt like a cliché, the kid brother shoving take-out Mexican food into his face while watching cartoons on a computer screen. My jeans and red-dirt T-shirt with the pale brown stylized gecko on the front, which I’d bought in Hanalei, were not doing nearly enough to sustain the feelings of existentialism and self-confidence I’d brought home with me after the death-defying hike I’d undertaken on the island of Kaua’i in July.

I set the spoon down.

Luc flicked on the switch for that huge circle of bulbs overhead and then glanced at me, not in alarm, but appearing puzzled over who I was and what I was doing at his dining table. I got off my chair and moved toward him.

"Luc?" I walked with my right hand held out, doing my best to appear confident and deferential at the same time. He extended his hand, and as we shook I added, "I’m Nathan. Nina’s brother."

He reclaimed his hand and waved it over his head as if to acknowledge a recovered memory. "Of course. Of course. She said." His accent was not heavy but it was definitely French. "Forgive me while I…."

I stepped aside so he could pull his luggage past me and toward the bedroom he shared with Nina.

As I swallowed the last of my flan and hurried to get the table cleared off and the detritus of my meal dealt with and out of sight, I tried to remember when Nina had said Luc would return. Wasn’t he, like, ten days ahead of schedule, something like that? It was August twenty-third, and he wasn’t due back until Monday, September second. New York Fashion Week started on the sixth, and Nina was sure Luc wouldn’t want me hanging around (she didn’t put it like that) while both of them were gearing up for that event, so I’d agreed on that time for a visit with my college roommate and best friend El Speed (Larry Speed) and his new bride Ellie, in Orono, Maine, where they were enrolled in graduate programs.

I had been researching graduate programs for myself, taking a gap year for now, for about the last three weeks, and I had some good candidates. I wanted a psychology program where I could specialize in addiction treatment and recovery, and these days—what with the opioid crisis being what it was—a lot of institutions were offering some very tempting programs. So I was having a hard time deciding on my top choices. One of them, no doubt, would be the University of Maine, in Orono. El Speed and Ellie had both encouraged me to apply there, and I would, but I couldn’t apply to just one program.