Page 63 of It Happened on a Sunday
“When we first got together, he stopped a lot of his not-so-savory habits. We were happy, and—for a while, anyway—he didn’t seem to need all that anymore. But then our careers started keeping us apart more and more and he started doing all that crap again.
“He always told me I didn’t understand, and he was right. I just wanted to be with him, but he…he wanted to be with everyoneand be at everythingand go to every kickback in L.A. One with the universe, he used to say.”
“One with the universe?” Sly looks skeptical. “How exactly does one go about doingthat?”
“Pretty much as you’d expect,” I answer. “A lot of alcohol, a lot of meditation, a lot of extreme sports and mind-expanding drugs. And, as it turns out, a lot of sex with a lot of people who weren’t me.”
His eyes go wide. “Ouch.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” I tell him. Becauseouchbarely scratches the surface.
The trail gets wider, affording more room, but I keep my hand in Sly’s anyway. I like the way his fingers feel laced with mine and how he rubs his index finger gently along the length of mine in a way that feels both familiar and brand new.
The small, gentle touch grounds me in the here and now, and I smile gratefully at him. The story so far has been a literal walk inthe park, but that’s all about to change.
We pass a bench, and I think about sitting down for this part, but I’d never get it all out. Something about being able to admit something while moving keeps me walking forward, even though a part of me can’t help being dragged back to a past I’ve been running from for five long years.
I want to say it’s the tourist flip-flops combined with the rocky trails making me so uncomfortable, but I know better. Besides, the pinpricks of pain from the rocks that keep wedging themselves between my feet and the cheap rubber shoes is the only thing keeping me focused.
“I knew about most of it. Not the sex, obviously—I found out about that when my manager told me about a rumor she’d run down as fact. But I knew about the rest. The meditation, I encouraged, at least until it led to a whole bunch of experimentation with mushrooms and ayahuasca and jimsonweed and—later on—a bunch of other stuff he had horrible reactions to. The excessive drinking, I discouraged forsomany reasons, including the fact that I had lost the last man I loved in a drunk driving accident that had nearly killed me as well.”
“Hayden?” Sly asks quietly. His face is blank, his voice lacking its usual warmth and inflection. I don’t know if that’s because he’s judging Jarrod or because he’s judging me.
Either way, it makes me wary because Sly is a lot of things—light, laughter, kindness, warmth—but he’s never, ever blank. Seeing him like that now makes me wonder if I’ve already done what I set out to do.
If I’ve already driven him away.
The thought makes me hurt in a way I promised myself I never would again. Part of me wants to stop right here, to run away and forget this—forget Sly—ever happened.
But I’m not a runner, and it’s too late to stop now anyway.
“Yeah. He—” I break off, because now isn’t the time to get sidetracked by that story. One disaster at a time—that’s my motto. “Anyway, I knew there was a problem even before I found out about the other people. Toward the end, every time I came home, he would be acting stranger and stranger.”
“Stranger how?” There’s a watchful look in Sly’s eyes now, and I tell myself it’s okay, he’s not judging me. Then again, he doesn’t have to, because even after all these years, I still judge myself.
Every time I think about those days, I wonder if there was something else I could have done, something else I could have said, that might have actually gotten through to Jarrod. I’ve been through years of therapy, but I still hate myself for never figuring out how to suppo—
I cut myself off before I can go there, repeating the mantra my therapist has told me a million times.
Jarrod’s death is not my fault. I did not come into this world to carry him through it.
And it’s true. I exhale. I did everything I could for Jarrod. The choices he made were his own.
“He went from taking careless risks to being flat-out reckless. Free soloing dangerous cliffs without a rope. Jumping out of planes and then waiting almost too long before opening his parachute. And the drugs… It started with tropical vacations and ‘sacred ceremonies,’ but before long he was a regular user of too many to name. He claimed they helped him write, but they also made him unpredictable and scary.
“We’d be having dinner and I’d only figure out he took something when he started hallucinating. His hallucinations were almost never of the chill, mind-expanding kind he was chasing. They were terrifying and violent, and more than one trip ended with me newly injured.”
“He hurt you?” Sly’s face is still blank, but now there’s a tension to him I can’t miss. “How?”
“It was never on purpose. It’s not like he would get mad and hit me or something. When he wasn’t high, he was one of the most gentle men I’ve ever met. That’s why it was so hard to leave, because most of the time when he hurt me, he thought he was keeping me safe.
“One time, he thought someone had come to kidnap me. He threw me to the ground to try to save me and accidentally slammed my head into the kitchen counter on the way down. I passed out, then woke up bleeding profusely several minutes later while Jarrod watched, doing nothing to help.”
“He didwhat?” The blankness disappears, and in its place is a simmering fury that has Sly’s jaw clenching and his eyes turning a molten chocolate brown. “Are you fucking serious?And nobody intervened?That’s horrific.”
I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help being warmed by his anger. Of all the emotions the people around Jarrod felt while this was going on, none of them was anger—at least not on my behalf. To be fair to them, even I wasn’t angry then. I was devastated, terrified, and desperately lonely. The anger didn’t come until later—and by then, it was too late.
“He wrote a bestselling song about the experience. ‘Your Love Rains Down On Me.’”
