Chapter Thirty Seven
THIRTY-SEVEN
You’re not asleep.
But you’re not necessarily awake.
You’re in some kind of head-wound fever dream.
And in that state, a memory of Sean returns and you let it.
It’s from a few summers ago during a late-July heat wave.
Each day, you and Sean did nothing but sit next to an old window air conditioner, trying to think of anything to pass the time until the sun went down.
There were board games, card games, and epic rounds of “would you rather?” But one day, despite the heat, you were conscripted to help your dad clear the storage space over the garage. And that’s when you found the books.
When you opened the box in the sweltering garage and saw the words Choose Your Own Adventure, you immediately knew it was something from your father’s childhood in the eighties.
You could tell by the mildewed smell of the brittle, yellowed pages.
Your dad wasn’t the most revealing guy, and finding artifacts from his youth always felt like unearthing a chunk of his personality you’d never get to know otherwise.
There was something almost thrilling about it.
The first thing you noticed about the books were the titles.
Because they were amazing. The Cave of Time.
Vampire Express. Tattoo of Death. The covers were just as good.
Pulpy scenes of kids outrunning spaceships, rafting through the , and karate-kicking cyborgs off cliffs.
You and Sean spent an entire week of summer vacation devouring them all in order.
You loved them.
Both of you.
The interactive nature. The high-octane plots, and the second-person narration that put you right in the story as an active participant. You read every single one of them to your dad’s bewilderment, but only Sean became obsessed with figuring out how they worked.
When he was done reading, he spent entire afternoons mapping out all the options in each book and trying to find a key that would allow him to cheat death. There was one book called Journey Under the Sea that particularly vexed him because he kept dying no matter what decisions he made.
“Dammit!” he’d shout from your carpeted floor. “Not again!”
Each read-through brought a new torture.
In one he’d be eaten by a shark. Then killed by pressure in his submarine.
Drowned in a sea cave. Eventually he mapped out every single ending, and then came the moment you’re remembering now, a night when you were about to get in bed and Sean burst in with a stricken look on his face, gripping the book.
“I’ve done the whole thing!” he said. “Every page. Every option. Twice! And over seventy-five percent of these choices end in disaster! Can you believe that? What kind of sadist writes these things?! It’s an outrage!”
“Sean…,” you said. “I think it might be time to put the books back in the garage.”
You expected a laugh, but he didn’t seem to hear you. He just produced a piece of notebook paper with some wild diagram he had drawn.
“Forty-two endings, and thirty-two of them leave you completely screwed!”
He stood in the doorway, simmering. Then his rage kind of faded, morphing into something quieter.
“What’s the point even?”
You wanted to make fun of him, how upset he was getting about this one hokey book about deep-sea exploration from 1988, but in the face of his very real disappointment, it was suddenly hard to joke around. He seemed personally offended, like this book was an affront to his most deeply held beliefs.
“Maybe they’re just trying to make them challenging,” you said.
He opened the paperback and flipped through it idly. Then he tossed it on the bed.
“Maybe,” he said.
He walked over and sat down next to you. The air conditioner was chugging away in the window, and the manufactured breeze tousled his hair.
“But what if it’s true?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, what if you really make a couple of bad decisions, things that seem so small and insignificant at the time, and then there you are … in the sea cave forever? Do you ever worry about that?”
You didn’t know what to tell him but the truth.
“I guess not…,” you said.
At the time, he was still diving, and his life seemed so perfect to you.
He had made varsity as a freshman. He had a string of teammates and pretty, sporty girls with ponytails dropping by the house just to joke around with him.
And your parents seemed to let him come and go as he pleased.
You couldn’t imagine what kind of decision he might be talking about. But still, he seemed genuinely worried.
He looked down at the cover of the book.
A submarine propelling itself through the dark water, and in the background, lurking, a menacing shark.
In one part of the drawing, the main character was safe in his submersible.
In another, he was spinning around in some kind of whirlpool, the shark bearing down on him.
“They don’t all end in failure, right?” you said. “There’s still that twenty-five percent.”
You took the book and tossed it across the room.
His eyes followed it, clearly unnerved by its absence.
And you wonder now, if you hadn’t tried to cheer him up that night, if, instead, you’d been willing to listen, would he have told you more?
Would he have told you about what was really going on with him?
But, at the time, after you’d thrown the book, you watched something shift in his expression, a sudden desire to let you know everything was okay. Even if it wasn’t.
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re right.”
And then he rolled over on his back and let the cold air blow across his face.
You can still see him there so clearly, even now in your head.
His face tensed for a moment before finally relaxing and going slack.
And you wish now that you had lain down next to him.
Maybe fallen asleep the way you did when you were kids when a bad storm would send you running to the same bed, even after you were too old to be bunking together.
Back then, just knowing the other was there beside you was enough.
It would still be enough.