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Sixteen: Broken Mirrors

No response came from Tim's hotel room when Jake knocked on the door.

Knowing Tim, the man could easily have gone back to sleep after Suzan had left the room, so Jake knocked again, more forcefully than the first time. He didn't really expect an answer, except maybe for, "Go away," or, "Leave me alone," but no matter how hard he strained his ears, he couldn't hear any signs of life from the other side of the door.

Jake lifted his fist to knock a third time, but was brought up short when a middle aged woman two doors down asked, "Looking for your friend?" while backing out of a room, pulling a sweeper and a cart of cleaning supplies behind her. She spoke with a thick Spanish accent, but her English was surprisingly fluent.

"Yeah," Jake said with a nod. "Did you see him go somewhere?"

The maid nodded as well, though she kept a carefully neutral mask over her expression. "He left about five, ten minutes ago. He went to the elevator a little while after his lady friend left. After that, I don't know." She watched him expectantly, seeming to be waiting for his reaction. She had likely noticed the bruises on Suzan's arm and face.

Jake just thanked her and walked as quickly as he dared toward the elevator, trying not to look like he was in a hurry. Tim was probably just headed to a bar to get plastered.

Once in the elevator, though, Jake hesitated with his finger over the first floor's button. He had no real fear that Tim might try to hurt Suzan, at least not yet. Despite his tenuous mental state, Marc was with Suzan, and even if he wasn't, Tim wouldn't try anything openly hostile while Suzan had so many of her friends around her, no matter how outdated the man's opinions about women were. Most likely, Jake's first assumption was right, and Tim was at that moment trying to drink himself into a stupor.

Just in case he was wrong, though, Jake pressed the button for the tenth floor.

The hotel's highest story looked much the same as the one in which Jake and his family were staying, at least in its hallways. There were fewer doors interrupting the long walls, their spacing suggesting that large luxury suites waited beyond them, but Jake only took enough time to make sure that all the doors were closed as he made his way to the stairwell at one end of the hotel.

His footsteps rang out as he climbed the metal service stairs leading to the hotel's roof. The metal door at the top of the stairwell was locked, unsurprisingly, a small black key card reader like the ones on the hotel's guest rooms sitting above the door's handle.

Jake stared at the electronic lock for a moment, feeling foolish, but eventually he fished his key card out of his shorts' pocket and dipped it in and out of the scanner. His eyebrows lifted when the lock's little red light turned green. He hadn't expected guests to be given access to the hotel's roof.

Once he was back out in the oppressive Caribbean heat, Jake's heart skipped a beat. Tim was standing with his back to Jake at the edge of the building, his feet planted on the knee high slab of concrete that acted as the roof's railing while he stared out over the ocean.

"You come to stop me?" Tim asked without turning away from the ledge. "Took you long enough. I've been standing here for twenty minutes, and no one's so much as looked up."

As quickly as Jake had arrived, Tim couldn't have been on the roof for more than ten minutes, but he wasn't about to correct the man. Gritting his teeth, he walked as casually as he could toward Tim's back, letting the stairwell door swing shut behind him. "I'm not here to stop you," Jake said. "Go ahead."

Tim whipped his head around at that, his footing wavering dangerously on the concrete lip. "What did you say?"

Jake knew that he would never be able to forgive himself if the other man took him at his word and actually did leap to his death, but he couldn't back down now that he had begun. "It sounds like you were just waiting for an audience," he said with a semblance of calm, coming to a stop beside Tim's legs. Jake looked up grimly at the other man's incredulous expression. "I'm here now. I'm giving you attention. So go ahead and jump." He put more than a little contempt into his words, a tone he'd never taken with Tim before. It wasn't difficult.

Tim stared down at him with his mouth agape, his face reddening with shocked anger. Then he snorted a laugh, and the amount of contempt he forced into his own voice would have been almost comical under different circumstances. It made him sound like a cartoon villain. "And here I thought you were different. You're not, are you, Jake? You're just like all the others, a stuck up, back stabbing hypocrite. What kind of friend would come all the way up here just to watch me kill myself? You might as well push me off yourself."

Jake let the insults roll off his shoulders, turning his gaze to the distant line where the sky met the darker blue sea. They were empty, random words that Tim used simply because he knew they could cause pain, but without any meaning behind them, they were powerless.

Tim didn't yet know just how hypocritical Jake had really been all these years.

"You're right, Tim," Jake began calmly, though his pulse was racing for more than one reason. "I'm not your friend. I never have been. The only reason I didn't move Crystal and the kids out of that cesspit of a trailer park was to make sure you never hurt Brandon or Suzan beyond the occasional bruise."

"I knew it!" Tim exclaimed victoriously, drawing himself up to his full height to give himself as much of an imaginary advantage as he could. "All this time, you've been after my wife!"

Jake just kept talking through the other man's outburst without raising his voice, letting Tim listen to whatever words he chose not to shout over. "If you were waiting for someone to come up here and tell you they care whether you live or die, I could go find Suzan at the beach and bring her back. It would break her heart to believe that you killed yourself just because she told you she's filing for divorce."

"How long have you been sleeping with her, Jake? What do you think Crystal will do when I tell her? What will little Marc and Julia say?"

"She won't need to see you kill yourself for you to break her heart, though," Jake went on. "I'm betting you left a suicide note back in your room that will tell her a bunch of lies about how she's driven you so far past the point of grief that you just couldn't go on living."

"How many other guys is she cheating on me with? I always knew she was a lying little whore. She's been messing around with everyone in the neighborhood while I'm hard at work, hasn't she?"

"It probably says so many hurtful things that Suzan will kill herself, too. It wouldn't take much. I know she's tried to commit suicide more than once since I've known the two of you."

"How many, Jake?"

Jake glared up at the fuming man. "Tell me I'm wrong."

Tim didn't tell him that he was wrong. Instead, he seemed to deflate, seeing that none of his insults or accusations had any impact on Jake. Shoulders slumping, he peered down over the building's edge at the narrow stretch of sand between the hotel and the ocean. "You can't know what it's like," he said, his voice treading dangerously close to a whine, "having all this guilt bottled up inside. I know I haven't been a good husband. I've been a sorry excuse for a dad, too." When he looked at Jake again, very convincing tears were pooling in his eyes. "Do you know what it feels like to have your son break about twenty international laws just to run away from you? He's eighteen. He could have just told me what he thinks of me and moved out, but I have the kid so scared of me, he had to disappear off the whole grid just to get away from me. You can't know what that's like," he repeated.

Jake said nothing, just gritting his teeth and balling his hands into fists at his sides. It would have been easy to feel sorry for Tim with the man so openly admitting his shame, but the change had come over him so suddenly that Jake knew it was entirely superficial.

"I know I'm a monster," Tim went on, staring down at the ground again. "Suzan was right to ask for a divorce. I deserve this."

"Yes," Jake agreed, "you do."

Tim craned his neck to look at Jake once more, a hint of his previous incredulous disbelief worming its way back over his features. "What?"

"For the hell you've put your wife and kid through, you deserve to die a thousand times over."

Tim's eyes widened farther. "I'm pouring my heart out here, about to jump to my death, and you're telling me that I deserve it?" He seemed to have forgotten that he was the first of them to condemn himself.

"You deserve it even more for trying to prey on my emotions and trick me into feeling sorry for you. You're fishing for comfort and sympathy from the wrong pond, Tim."

"Have you gone as crazy as your kid?"

"The only thing that surprises me about all this is that you had the guts to come up here without a single beer. It took me six or seven before I decided to kill myself."

"Wait, what? Are you saying you tried to kill yourself once?"

Jake took a deep breath, his heart hammering with enough force to rattle his ribcage. He was about to jump off his own precipice. "No, Tim. I didn't try to kill myself. I succeeded."

Tim stared at Jake wordlessly for a long moment, likely trying to come up with any interpretation of Jake's claim that made sense. "You are crazy," he finally said.

Watching a small boat make its lazy way east through the ocean several miles from shore, Jake went on as if Tim hadn't said anything. "I never told you about my first wife."

"You were married before Crystal?"

Jake nodded. "I had another kid, too."

"And this has something to do with you trying to commit suicide?" Tim asked, putting slightly more emphasis on the word "trying." He continued as Jake nodded again. "Who all knows about this? Crystal? The kids?" The question wasn't asked with a tone of concern, or even of innocent curiosity. It was asked in the manner of someone fishing for information that he could later use to his advantage.

Luckily, Jake had expected as much. "Crystal knows. Marc and Julia don't, yet, but Crystal's going to tell them while they're out today. You won't be able to use this to blackmail me, Tim."

"Hey!" Tim half yelled indignantly, his temper rising again. "It was just a simple question! You've got no right to go accusing me of something like that. You actually think I'd try to use your first marriage against you somehow?"

Jake just leveled a steady stare at the other man. "How much of Suzan's private life did you threaten to reveal to her family in order to keep her in line? How many of her embarrassing, but otherwise harmless little secrets did you find a way to exploit to control her?"

Tim didn't answer, but blood rushed to his face and made it a deeper shade of red. Whether the blush was from anger or shame, Jake couldn't tell, but it didn't really matter. Likely it was from a combination of both.

Jake returned his attention to the distant sail boat. "It was twenty-seven years ago," he began.

"So what," Tim cut in, "you're going to reminisce about your past to me now? What if I'm not in the mood for story time?"

"Shut up and listen," Jake snapped. He tried to stay in control of his own temper, but he couldn't keep a tinge of anger out of his voice. "And get off that ledge, you idiot. You can kill yourself after I'm done."

To his surprise, Tim actually did as he was told, stepping down to the roof's safety after a brief hesitation. "Fine. What's so important about your first wife, then?"

Jake took another deep, calming breath. Watching the sail boat's slow progress helped to smooth out his frayed nerves. "We got married right after high school, because I wanted her to be mine forever, and she thought she could change me into the Prince Charming she always imagined was hiding under my surface. We moved away from our hometown, because I knew her family would talk some sense into her and convince her to leave me if we stayed near them, and she believed me when I assured her that we'd go back and visit her folks whenever she felt like it."

He glanced at Tim out of the corner of his eye, hating himself for the truth of what he was about to say. "I was the kind of husband you are, better in some ways, worse in others. You've kept Suzan under your thumb all these years mostly by making threats, only hitting her when you were drunk and had a bad day, or when she did something you didn't like."

Tim opened his mouth to protest, but Jake shot him a glare harsh enough to make his jaws shut with an audible click. "Save it, Tim."

Jake's fingernails were biting into his palms almost hard enough to draw blood, he was clenching his fists so tight. "I didn't bother with threats. I reminded Vanessa to be terrified of me every night."

"Vanessa, huh?"

Jake clenched his teeth together, struggling with his self-control. A familiar rage rose inside him, making his blood pound in his ears, an echo of the old, paranoid jealousy he would feel whenever another man so much as said her name. As he had done every time that jealousy arose over the past twenty-seven years, he strangled it within himself until it subsided. "Yes," he said, "Vanessa.

"One night I beat her bloody, and the next morning, she just wasn't there. She had driven off in my truck without leaving so much as a note. I rented a car and drove to every last place I could think of that she might have gone. None of her old friends had seen her since she moved away with me. Neither had her parents, or so they said, but by the way her dad drove me off his porch with a shotgun, I think that's where she went.

"It wasn't until I got back home that I found the used pregnancy test in the bathroom trash." He paused as the distant sail boat began a lazy turn seaward, letting himself feel the brunt of his old turmoil of emotions for the first time in years. He still didn't even know if his first child was a son or a daughter.

"And?" Tim asked impatiently.

"And so I waited for two weeks, thinking she had to come back eventually since I had all of her things. She never did, though. I drove by her parents' house a few times, and even stayed parked in the street one night like I was on some possessive kind of stake out, but I drove off when I heard police sirens on the next street over, thinking her parents had noticed my rental car and called the cops on me.

"After those two weeks, I woke up one morning and my truck was parked in my driveway. An envelope was in its glove box with a divorce notice."

"She didn't even have the guts to tell you to your face, huh?" Tim said, and the words were so close to an echo of the thoughts that had raged through Jake's head all those years ago that Jake felt like he was telling his story to a younger version of himself.

"She had more guts than anyone I've ever known, other than Crystal," Jake said quietly.

"If you say so," Tim scoffed, but Jake ignored him. If Tim agreed with Jake about Vanessa's strength, after all, he would have to admit to himself how much courage Suzan had shown when she'd confronted him earlier.

Jake just took a deep breath and continued. "At first after finding that envelope, I was furious. I went inside and started throwing things around my house, lamps, clocks, video tapes, anything I could get my hands on. After I trashed the place, I drank every beer I had in the fridge. Then I started thinking about everything I'd lost, everything I'd thrown away, and worse, what could have happened if Vanessa hadn't left me. I could have gotten drunk while she was pregnant and started hitting her until she miscarried. If I hadn't found that pregnancy test, I could have killed my own kid without knowing I even had one.

"So I took the pistol I kept in my nightstand, went into my bathroom, sat on the toilet and stared at my reflection for a really long time. I don't know how long I sat there. I guess I was just trying to find a way to talk myself out of it, but facts were facts. It was like you told me when you were pretending to feel sorry for yourself: I deserved it."

"Pretending!" Tim began to protest, but now that Jake had come to the heart of the matter, he couldn't make himself slow down for the other man's interruptions.

"After an hour or two of staring at myself in the mirror, maybe longer, I stuck the pistol's barrel in my mouth. I wasn't showboating or trying to make a point to anyone; I hadn't even left a suicide note. I just wanted to stop thinking about the kind of scum I was for hurting Vanessa so much. No matter how much I hated myself, though, I couldn't make myself pull the trigger.

"That's when an angel came to me." Jake paused, and for a moment the ocean breeze ruffling tropical trees' leaves below them was the only noise on the rooftop.

"An angel came to you," Tim finally repeated condescendingly.

"Yes, Tim, an angel came to me. In my bath tub." Jake knew exactly how ridiculous that sounded, and he knew that Tim might very well dismiss the entire story as fiction based on such an unlikely claim, but he couldn't bring himself to leave out such an important detail of his suicide.

"An angel came to you in your bath tub," Tim repeated again.

"You don't have to believe it if you don't want to. There are times when I'm not sure if I even do; I'd had seven beers on top of a whole lot of stress, so maybe it was all a weird hallucination. But yeah, an angel just appeared, out of nowhere, in my bath tub. He was wearing a white, hooded robe that covered his entire body, and light was shining out of his hood so that I couldn't see his face."

Tim folded his arms across his chest, clearly only humoring Jake. "So your angel was a 'he,' then?"

Jake stared the other man unwaveringly in the face. "His voice sounded like a 'he,' yes."

"So I guess this angel told you to put your gun away and not to paint your brains all over the wall?"

A tiny grin pulled at the corners of Jake's mouth. "No," he said. "For the longest time, we just looked at each other, him all still and shining as bright as if I was looking straight at the sun, me with the pistol in my mouth and wondering if one of my neighbors was playing some kind of weird trick on me. Then he just asked, 'What are you waiting for?' stared at me for another few seconds, and disappeared."

Another brief silence passed between them before Tim started laughing. "Some guardian angel that was! More like the angel of death."

"Maybe he was," Jake replied somberly. Goodness knew he'd considered the possibility more than once over the years since it had happened. Until he'd met Crystal, not a day had gone by without him wondering exactly what the angel had been, or what it had really been trying to ask him. Not a day had gone by without him wondering if he'd made the right decision.

"Either way," he continued, giving himself a little shake, "the question got me thinking: What was I waiting for? Other than Vanessa, I didn't have anything worth living for. I hated my job, had been disinherited by my family, and was so far in debt that I could have sold my house, gotten a second job, and still would have been making payments to the bank for another fifteen years. That, and I could expect to start paying child support in another nine months. So what was stopping me from pulling that trigger?"

Jake shrugged and began answering his own question. "Maybe I was just afraid of what would be waiting for me on the other side. I've never been very religious, but my parents were Christians, and you know where they say you go if you commit suicide. Of course, by my estimation, I was already in a living hell. Despite everything, though, a part of me still wanted to live. I wasn't chewing on the end of a pistol because I wanted to die, not really. I just wanted to kill the parts of myself that had hurt Vanessa so much, the ugly, stupid, monstrous side of me that had made me make a wreak of my own house when I found the divorce notice that morning.

"I looked at the mirror on my bathroom wall and realized what an idiot I looked like with a gun stuck in my mouth. Then it occurred to me that it was the monster in me that was holding the pistol, and only the part of me that wanted to live was about to get shot. That seemed a little backwards to me, and it made me madder than I can ever remember feeling, a different kind of anger than the kind that made me throw lamps and lash out at my wife.

"So I took the gun out of my mouth and took a long, hard look at my reflection. All I could see in it was the bully I had been in school, the gambler that lost every dollar I'd ever earned, the hopeless, lazy drunk, and the abusive husband. That was the monster, staring back at me. That was the monster. So I took the pistol and did what I should have done years before then, before I'd ever met Vanessa and had a chance to hurt her.

"I shot the damned mirror."

Neither of them said anything for a long while. Jake couldn't think of anything else to say, and Tim, hopefully, was absorbed in the gravity and significance of what Jake had just told him.

It shouldn't have been surprising that Tim still needed the details explained to him. "You shot the mirror," he repeated slowly, sounding like he didn't realize that Jake had finished his story.

"Yes, Tim, I shot the mirror," Jake said irritably. "My suicide was a success in the only way that a suicide can be: I killed the parts of myself that I hated, and left the rest of myself to pick up the pieces."

"So what, then? You just lived happily ever after?"

Jake let out a snort of a laugh. "I don't think I'd call it that. I sold my house, got a second job, and worked fifteen years to get out of debt." He smiled wryly at that. "I never gambled again, though, and I never had another drop of alcohol. I didn't plan to ever date again, either, until I met Crystal. That's when my happily ever after really began."

"Now hold on just a second," Tim said, planting a hand on his hip and tilting his head suspiciously. "You drink as much beer as anyone I know. More than most. You love beer so much that you always just about bite my head off any time I reach for your can instead of my own."

Jake's grin grew across his face, and he couldn't help but feel pleased that Tim still hadn't figured that part out. "That's because I didn't want you to know that I just had soda in my can, or juice or water. I haven't had a single beer since that night."

Tim's jaw dropped. "Are you serious?" He seemed less able to believe such a claim than when Jake had told him about the angel in his bath tub.

Jake shrugged a shoulder dismissively. "There were nights after Vanessa left that I couldn't stand being alone in the apartment I was renting, so I would go to a local sports bar to watch whatever game was playing at the time. It didn't take long for me to feel just as alone at the bar as I was at home, though, being the only sober man there. No one ever had a problem with me drinking soda instead of beer, but they seemed to keep me at arms' length, all the same. Maybe that was all in my head, but once I started asking the bartender to pour my drinks in empty beer bottles, I felt a lot more comfortable. That habit stuck."

He stared at the distant sail boat, now only a white speck among the ocean's blue waves, until he lost sight of it behind a large swell. Remarkably, Tim stood in silence beside him, all of his sarcastic retorts apparently spent. "All right, then," Jake finally said.

"All right?" Tim echoed, and Jake nodded.

"That's my big secret. I'm done telling my story, so you can go ahead and kill yourself now."

Tim laughed halfheartedly. "Yeah. Right."

Pulling his wallet out of his denim shorts' pocket, Jake shook his head without smiling. "I'm not joking, Tim. You came up here to kill yourself, so that's exactly what you're going to do, even if the part of you that still wants to live decided to turn it into a show for my benefit." Opening his wallet, Jake fished a triangular shard of a mirror broken twenty-seven years ago out of a fold meant to hold credit cards and, after only a moment of reluctance, held it out to Tim. "If you're going to go and kill yourself, though, you might as well do it right."

Tim frowned down at the broken piece of mirror as if it was a coiled rattlesnake, but eventually reached out and took it from Jake's hand. If Jake hadn't known the man as well as he did, he would have said that Tim was holding the mirror reverently, like it was some kind of holy artifact.

"What should I do after..." Tim began as Jake turned back toward the stairwell door. He wasn't able to bring himself to finish the sentence.

Jake didn't look back as he made his way to the stairs. "That's up to you, Tim." He hesitated with his hand on the door's handle and added, "As long as you leave Suzan and Brandon alone. I'd tell you that you've completely lost them, but you never really had them in the first place. It's just taken them both this long to realize that."

He did spare a glance back at Tim as the stairwell door was closing behind him. The other man was glaring down at the reflection he held in his hand with a sincere intensity that Jake had never seen from him.

The door closed. Jake began walking down the stairs, past the tenth floor and all the way to the fifth. He didn't feel like using the elevator.

He tried to think of anything he could have done differently, anything else he should have said, but in the end, it was Tim's life to live. Regardless of his own experience, there was nothing Jake could say or do that could force Tim to make the right decisions.

All he knew was that he felt indescribably lighter walking down those stairs. He hadn't known until that moment just how heavy that broken piece of mirror had been.

I shot the damned mirror.