Aaron cracks up. “It’s like you know all my favorite things.”
This makes his dad smile. “C’mon. Jump in the shower. This time we’re gonna make it, okay?”
Aaron slowly stands. The blood rushes from his head again and he feels momentarily dizzy. “Deal,” he says.
And this time, unlike yesterday, they do make it out the door.
At the Time Warner Center, Aaron gets two Thomas Keller Oreos, which are as big as his hand and filled with white chocolate ganache instead of whatever they usually put in Oreos. When he’s scarfed those down, because it’s his day and it seems like he’s supposed to do unusual stuff, he makes his dad stop at a vendor for two dirty-water hot dogs, extra sauerkraut. They messily devour them on the way to the Bethesda Terrace in Central Park.
“Does Mom know?” Aaron asks as they stroll.
“I put in a few calls Friday and yesterday but haven’t heard back,” his dad says, dodging a young woman who walks like she’s in a speed-walking race despite wearing headphones and texting.
“Beautiful,” Aaron says.
“You know she never listens to messages.”
Aaron almost says, You know what might get her attention? Telling her that she almost lost her son to the Hudson River. But he doesn’t say it. The sun is out, he’s finally outside, and he doesn’t have the energy to fight.
Nice that your parents have that option, Tillie says in his head. Mine didn’t have a choice about whether or not they’d be told.
Aaron shudders. His dad doesn’t notice.
When they arrive at the Bethesda Fountain, with its gallant angel overlooking all the activity, there’s an impromptu concert going on. A busker stands in the center of a tan circle between the terrace and fountain, and he’s surrounded by a swarm of New Yorkers. He has a guitar, a harp, a couple wind instruments, and a drumbeat emanating from a keyboard.
They stop and listen. The guy records loops of each instrument, one at a time, so that the drumbeat is suddenly joined by a flute, and then the guitar broadens the sound, and a harp punctuates with a harmony, and finally his voice, like the voice of that Bethesda angel behind him—fluttering, diving down, lifting up. Aaron’s bathed in sound that shivers the peach fuzz hairs on his arms.
He looks at his dad, who is swaying to the music, as if in a trance, and Aaron is filled with palpable love and something that feels like grace, like for a second he sees his dad and he’s so damn happy he didn’t die four days ago, so damn relieved, and he wants to memorize his dad’s profile, that slight curve down in his nose, because it all seems so fleeting right now, so random, how another choice could have so altered this moment and every moment forever after. He could so easily not be right now. And what would that experience be like, to terminate being? Can you cease to exist and still know?
In a moment that overtakes him, he grasps his father from the side and hugs him, and his dad, as if he knows, as if he understands exactly why this music has led to this embrace, turns and suddenly there, on the Bethesda Terrace, a father and son hold on to each other for dear, precious life.
And all is good in the world.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, Aaron sees a guy maybe a year or two older than him glancing their way and whispering to his friend, who wears a Yankee hat, who laughs at whatever his friend whispers.
Aaron’s heart drops.
He doesn’t want it to. He needs it not to, but it’s as if he’s allowed himself to be seen, and now he’s been judged, as if this awful kid sees the terrible truth about Aaron and his dad that he can’t possibly know because he is Aaron, and his stomach falls into his groin and he lets go of his dad and looks away and all that beauty of that moment, gone, judged as stupid, corny, weak.
Averting his body from his dad, Aaron can feel the eyes of his father on him, and he wants to pull away. He wants to walk away. The world is so terrible and something so pure has been tarnished and he wants to cry out but can you even just imagine what the kid would say about that?
“Let’s just go,” Aaron says.
His dad, incredulous, says, “What? What happened?”
And Aaron won’t tell, ever. It’s all too embarrassing, being Aaron. So he just says, “I need to go. Now.”
On the walk home, Aaron’s mood drops to that all-too-familiar place where he feels no one can touch him, he is untouchable, unreachable, in an impenetrable vacuum.
His dad speaks softly to him. “I dealt with some depression when I was your age. A little older. Came home from college late freshman year and Nan took care of me for a while.”
Aaron doesn’t look at his dad. “I didn’t know that,” he says.
“I never told you. Didn’t want to burden you but, yeah.”
“Did you—”
Aaron can feel his dad shake his head without looking at him. “I sure thought about it, though. It felt like I’d been sad my whole life and it was never going to get any better. Depression does that. It changes your brain and makes you think things that aren’t true.”
Aaron thinks, What things? Maybe the stuff about my music? Like, that I suck?
“I’ve been worried forever that you’d have to go through it, too,” his dad says.
“Well,” Aaron says, monotone, “here we are.”
In the evening, back home and safely in bed, Aaron notices a pattern. Days start better, end worse.
His heart is hurting again and he’s not really sure why, or what constitutes a broken heart, because he hasn’t had his heart broken. He’s never been in love, or at least not with anyone who loved him back or knew that Aaron loved them.
None of this makes sense, he thinks as he lies in bed, staring at the ceiling. His dad is hanging out with him, sitting in the blue rocking chair across the room, reading a book of essays. This thing? It’s a sham, Aaron thinks. Dr. Laudner made him take a test and diagnosed him based on it. He could absolutely, one hundred percent have answered the questions differently, and then the diagnosis would have been different.
“Do you think maybe I’m faking?” Aaron says.
His dad looks up. His reading glasses make him look like an owl, a bit. “What?”
“Maybe I’m faking. Like maybe I just need to try harder to be normal, and I have these, like, dramatic tendencies, and I’m making the problem bigger than it is.”
His father puts his book down and takes off his glasses. “What are you talking about? You’re depressed, Aaron. You’ve been depressed for a while. Even you aren’t that good an actor. Why do you think you’re being dramatic?”
“I don’t know. I just. I don’t believe in this, maybe.”
“You don’t believe in how you’re feeling?”
“Well, what kind of god would allow a person to have a brain that undermines them, or even kills them? That doesn’t make sense.”
His dad leans forward. “I hear that. What’s the emotion? What are you feeling, Aaron?”
Aaron resists groaning. Sometimes his dad can’t help but bring his work home with him. “I don’t know. Sad. I mean, who wants to live in a world with a god that’s so mean? It’s so … disappointing.”
“Disappointing?”