After a while, I heard him get up and follow me. He brought a coffee mug of water with him and I took it wordlessly, drank it all in one clean gulp.
* * *
—
BILLY NEVER KNEW when the worries would start.
Sometimes he’d make it a few hours, he said, maybe into early evening. Other times they would hit him before he even left the house, as he was making breakfast, or stepping out of the shower. A particularly crushing set of worry hit him once as he was squeezing toothpaste, and he became so overwhelmed he put the brush down untouched. When he came home after work and saw the brush still sitting there, the toothpaste dull and crusty, the crushing feeling intensified. It was never a question of if the worries would hit, but when.
There were no limitations to the worries. Billy’s brain, the thing that had done him so right in high school, was now working overtime to dissect every thought that flitted through his head, until he could barely take a step without having a minor panic attack.
Of course, every worry eventually circled back to the baby and me. Example: He’d be mowing lawns and sweating and he’d start worrying about global warming, which would lead him to thoughts about the melting of Arctic Ocean ice and the death of polar bears—my face starting to peek into the forefront of his thoughts, my growing bump. He would try and switch his thoughts to something more pleasant, like Popsicles, but then Popsicles would make him think again of sweating, of global warming—what if it eventually became so hot that every drop of water sprayed out of every sprinkler just evaporated and then, lawn by lawn, entire cities started drying out until there was no grass, just patches of dirt, and no job for Billy to do, no way for him to earn money, and if he didn’t have any money, he couldn’t buy Popsicles, and what type of childhood could someone have if they didn’t know the taste of cold, artificial cherry, orange, grape? One of his favorite books he read as a kid featured a baby polar bear, and even if he was able to afford that book, how could he tell his son that all the polar bears in the world were dead?
Billy was at work one morning when he got stuck on a string of particularly toxic thoughts. He felt so on the verge of a breakdown that he found Semi at the water cooler—Semi, whom he considered to be a guiding hand, a big brother—and told him all of his Popsicle, polar-bear worries.
Semi pulled out a joint and offered it to him. Billy said he didn’t smoke, and then Semi suggested that, well, if he didn’t smoke, why not take one of Semi’s extra guns? It sounded like what Billy was really worried about was his ability to provide for his kid and baby mama. Whenever Semi was a little stressed about money, he and his cousins would rob a convenience store or find some yuppie at an ATM to scare the shit out of. After work, Semi took Billy to his car and wrapped a handgun in a T-shirt, slipped it into Billy’s backpack before he could say anything else.
The first few days, Billy couldn’t even look at the gun. He kept it in his backpack and put it in the corner of his closet, bought a different backpack to take to work. He got through the days the same way he’d gotten through all the days before them—minute by minute, trying to keep his mind on the task ahead of him, sweating. Then, on the sixth day after being given the gun, he was home alone and lying in bed and thinking about pens, how approximately one hundred people a year died from chewing on their pen caps and choking. He began cataloguing everyday items that could pose a danger to his son, all the shit he’d have to throw away in our room before the due date. The sheets beneath him grew wet and he started wondering if it was possible to sweat to death. He vaguely remembered reading about a medieval sickness called the “sweating sickness,” which killed people within twenty-four hours—what would happen to me and the baby if he was dead? Billy jumped out of bed and ran to the closet, zipped open his backpack, desperate, willing to try anything to get his brain to stop.
He didn’t have to hold the gun long to know that he would never be able to rob anyone. No matter how desperate he got, it made him nauseous to imagine pointing the gun at another person, much less pull the trigger. An image that made him even more ill—his son visiting him in jail, pressing his hand against plexiglass.
But that day, Billy found something else that was helpful.
Holding the gun made him feel calm. The gun was sleek and black and heavier than he thought it would be, felt so solid in his hand. He stopped entertaining the idea that he would do anything with it and started just holding it and staring at himself in the mirror. The person looking back at him in the mirror was someone he trusted, a person that stood tall and didn’t spend his waking hours in his mind, a man of action, a man that never started sentences with “Could I” or “Would I,” because he knew in his heart that, yes, he could, and, yes, he would. This man was someone that didn’t cry in the shower every morning or feel the need to pinch the inside of his thighs or dig his nails into his palms because he was so scared that he would never be able to make the love of his life and his unborn child happy.
* * *
—
WE WERE LYING down on the bed. When Billy started talking, he’d been facing me. I don’t know who did it first or at what point, but by the time Billy stopped talking, we were both on our backs, side by side, not touching, eyes glued to the ceiling. It helped not to have to look at each other.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“Why are you home from work now? Your shift isn’t over until 8:00 p.m.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Billy sat up. I tried to avoid eye contact with him, but he wouldn’t let me, hovered over me. “It has everything to do with everything—you never talk to me anymore, so how could I possibly feel comfortable talking about anything with you? What chance would I have of actually getting through to you?”
“What do you mean, you never have a chance to talk to me? We see each other all the time.” I patted the bed. “We live together.”
“Yeah, exactly. And that’s about it.” He was off the bed now, pacing, scratching the side of his neck, like he always did when he was nervous. “We see each other all the time, but we never talk. The little we do is about nothing; I mention the baby, our baby, and you turn to stone.” Billy stopped pacing and looked away from me to a point above my head, a blank wall—my room had no decorations. “I’m so lonely.”
He said it so softly, so genuinely, and for a moment, I remembered him on that first day we hung out—how rapidly he ate scoop after scoop of ice cream, the crumbs of the cone falling into his lap, the napkins he ripped in halves, quarters, flakes of paper snow, how everything he said made me want to rip my heart into halves, quarters, throw the tiny pieces on top of his napkins.
He looked back at me and then I was the one that wanted to look away. “Sometimes I’ll stand in front of that mirror talking to myself. I’ll tell myself stories about my day, or stories from my past, my future, things I dream about, that I can only see when I close my eyes. When I get tired of talking about myself, I’ll pick up something to read out loud. Books, newspaper articles, receipts, ingredients on the backs of snack foods—did you know on Goldfish bags in addition to all the chemicals and shit, it says ‘Made with smiles’?” Billy himself smiled for a second at that, but then seemed to remember who he was talking to. “Basically, I say everything that I should be saying to you.”