Page 37 of Holiday Star
“Just a soda water with a slice of lime for me.”
I’m taken aback. For some reason, I assumed he drank alcohol, but now that I think about it, we’ve never had any in all the days we’ve lived together.
I wave the bartender down and give him Caleb’s order, with a beer for me. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Caleb raise his hand, as if to scratch his forehead, the gesture obscuring his face. He’s good at hiding in plain sight. He must have done it many times before.
“I’m sorry,” I say awkwardly after the bartender walks away. “Do you not drink?”
“I used to drink, but I liked it a little too much.” He pauses, as if weighing how much to tell me, then continues. “I get…obsessive about some things. Once I start, I can’t stop. Drinking is like that for me. That’s one reason why I said no when Jenny asked me to come here tonight.” In a soft voice, he admits, “I haven’t had a drink in five months now.”
“Was it hard? Stopping?” I can’t imagine the strength it must take. To quit cold turkey. I admire his discipline.
“Some days are harder than others.”
“How’d you do it? Did you join Alcoholics Anonymous or something?” I don’t intend to drill him, but I’m curious.
“Nah. I mean, I was never totally out of control, but I was heading in that direction. If I didn’t quit, I worried what my life would be like ten years from now.” He tilts his head, gazing down at me.
I frown, thinking of all the alcoholics I’ve seen in the hospital. How they lie, break their promises. They swear they’ll stop and then end up right back in the ER, drunk again with their failing livers, organs shutting down. Of course, I only see the worst cases. The ones where the damage is irreparable.
Remembering what Jenny had mentioned the day before Caleb arrived, I ask, “Was that how you wrecked your car?”
He jerks back like I’ve slapped him.
“Jenny told me about it. I’m sorry. She had read an article,” I say hastily, fearful he will think I’ve been researching him. I haven’t Googled him once, even though recently I’ve been tempted. In the end, I resist because I don’t want to learn about him through some biased media piece. That won’t give me a clear picture, to view him through someone else’s lens. I want to know Caleb through my own observations, with my own eyes, my own heart.
My explanation seems to calm him. He’s silent for a minute. It’s hard for me to be patient, but I wait to see if he’ll answer.
He runs a hand through his hair. “No, I wasn’t drunk the night that I crashed. I was about a month sober at that point and hadn’t been drinking at all. It had been raining, and the road was slick. The car in front of me took the turn too fast and went out of control. It was fishtailing all over the place.” He shakes his head, lost in the memory. “I couldn’t get away from it. Our cars were nose to tail, bumping into each other.”
The bartender stops by to drop off our drinks. Caleb is silent, ducking his head and waiting for the man to leave before he resumes. “We were on Pacific Coast Highway, on the cliffs high above the ocean. In the daytime, the view from there is gorgeous. You can see blue water stretching all the way to the horizon. But at night, there aren’t any lights and it’s black all around.”
Caleb’s eyes are vacant, looking at a time in the past. I move closer to his warmth, suddenly chilled.
“On that stretch of road, with the car in front of me swerving, I had three choices. Drive off the cliff to my left, fall into the ocean, and probably die. Hit the car in front of me and probably kill us both. Or I could drive into the rocky cliff on my right, have my car explode, and probably die.”
I’m breathless, waiting to hear what happened. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t want to kill anyone, so I couldn’t crash into the car in front of me. I didn’t like the thought of drowning, so I couldn’t go left. I chose the cliff on my right. Figured an explosion would be a quick death at least.”
He meets my eyes, and, even though his words are calm, there’s a residual terror in them, a trapped scream, left over from that night. “You have to understand. This was all going through my head in a split second. But it was that weird thing, where time slows down. Like you always read about—it really happened to me. I had time to think about which direction to turn. I thought about all the mistakes I’ve made in my life. The dreams I’ve never realized.”
I’m completely sucked into his story, immersed in that moment with him. The crowded bar around me fades and instead I’m on a rain-swept road. Two lanes twist endlessly before and behind me, high above the crashing waves. I can hear the squeal of tires on wet pavement. The thump of windshield wipers. The wrench of metal as his car collides with the mountain.
He could have died, I realize. Heshouldhave died, given how bad that crash had been. The thought of him hurt and bleeding on the ground, his light lost forever, is unbearable. To think of a world without Caleb.
“What happened?” My voice rasps, tears threatening.
“My car hit the cliff. It was like when a bird flies into a window. One minute I was in motion and the next I just…stopped. There was a loud crash. All of my windows shattered at once. The airbag deployed and hit my face. It broke my nose and gave me two black eyes, but I wouldn’t know that until later. I didn’t mind, though. A broken nose is a lot better than being dead. It took the emergency crew three hours to cut through my car and get me out. They shut down the entire highway. Traffic backed all the way up to Malibu.”
My eyes are wide with horror. “What about the other car?”
“They almost died, too. When I went right, they went left. Ended up with their front wheels hanging off the cliff. Just a few more inches and they would have plunged into the sea. I met up with them later, after we got released from the hospital. Nice couple in their fifties, vacationing from the Midwest. They thanked me for not rear-ending them, pushing them over the edge.” His eyes slice over to me and then away. “It’s embarrassing, but we cried together. It was like we had been through a collective trauma. One that only we could understand.”
It all makes sense to me now. How moody Caleb has been. How he’s changed his life so dramatically. Near-death experiences tend to do that to people. They make you reevaluate your priorities. Another piece of his puzzle.
Caleb straightens. “Anyway, one of the ambulance drivers took a picture of my car and then sold that photo to the tabloids. They splashed the image all over their front covers. Everyone assumed I was drunk because, frankly, I drank a lot in the months before I decided to stop.” He shrugs and looks at me over the top of his soda water, waiting to see my reaction.
Surprising both of us, I throw my arms around his neck and squeeze tight. Rising up on my toes, I whisper in his ear, “I’m so happy you’re alive.”
