Page 76 of Our Last Resort
Another blank space.
A couple of pages before that: “Went for a walk today. Tried to clear my head. Didn’t work. Nothing seems to work. I’m—what? Sad? Angry? Sure. Sometimes I wonder if I could try”
More empty pages, then, from this past Christmas: “Went to the diner. Samantha’s meat loaf. She’s kind. Something abouthaving to rely on other people’s kindness makes me feel…I don’t know. Something like shame. Like I’m broken and she’s just taking pity on me. Like if she knew, then she wouldn’t”
I skim through the rest of the notebook. All the entries seem to end the same way, in the middle of a sentence, interrupted by a thought he couldn’t put into words.
What aren’t you telling yourself, Gabriel?
And what aren’t you tellingme?
I drop the notebook back in the drawer.
Nothing in his armoire, nothing in his nightstand, nothing up his sleeves.
Where else?
Whereis it,Gabriel? The detail that will solve the mystery of your life for me?
It could be anything. A small belonging at the bottom of a pocket. A word scratched on the back of a receipt. Our lives are full of them, those tiny pieces of ourselves that we let slip.
I step inside the bathroom. Gabriel’s toiletry bag is zipped shut next to his sink. A stick of deodorant, a travel-size tube of toothpaste with fluoride, a comb. Condoms—an unflinching commitment to safe sex or an act of uncharacteristic optimism, I can’t quite decide. In small orange bottles, his migraine meds—the ones he takes to manage them in the long run, and the ones he takes when he starts getting symptoms. There’s a third bottle.
I listen for footsteps, for the clicking sound of our door unlocking. Nothing. I squint to read the label and do a quick search on my phone.
The internet tells me this particular medication is used to treat seasonal depression, adult depression, or to help people quit smoking.
Gabriel, to my knowledge, has never smoked. That’s my thing. It’s currently the middle of summer. That leaves only one candidate: the middle one. The obvious one.
It’s not a huge surprise. There was that period of six months, after we left Émile’s world, when Gabriel practically didn’t get out of bed. Well, we didn’t have beds, so, rather, there wasa period of six months when Gabriel scarcely crawled out of his sleeping bag. He couldn’t work. He barely spoke. I didn’t know what to call it at the time, but if that wasn’t depression, what was?
I put the pill bottle back in Gabriel’s toiletry bag and return to the other side of the suite. Gabriel left his laptop shut on his nightstand. I could try to guess his password, but he’s too smart for that. Back when we still kept in regular touch, he told me about apps that encrypt your passwords and save them. He even reminded me to update mine every few months. “You never know,” he wrote to me once. “It’s easier to prevent an incident than to try to fix it.”
So, not his laptop.
What’s left?
Nothing.
I’ve looked through his clothes, through his things, through his pills, and I’ve come up empty.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s not hiding anything. Maybe he lied to Harris for perfectly innocent reasons.
I straighten up our suite. It’s a habit. Gabriel has depression and I have this—this incessant need for order, this panicked part of myself that calms down when surfaces are clean and every item has found its spot. I pick up his shorts, fold them, and add them to the pile on his side of the armoire. I place his book on his nightstand, tuck a piece of hotel stationery in its pages as a bookmark.
It shouldn’t feel good, but it does. The world falling neatly under my control.
What else can I fix?
There’s my suitcase, nudged back into its corner this morning. I wiggle it so that it stands parallel to the wall. Next to it is Gabriel’s large travel backpack, a model with multiple compartments and a strap across the stomach. It’s the kind of item that never looks neat, no matter which position you stick it into. I try folding it in half, propping it up against my suitcase. Each time, it slides back onto the floor.
Damn it.
I grab it with both hands. It’s almost impossibly light, the materials thin and practical, the whole design optimized for easy movements, except for—
Through the nylon, I feel it: a small object, light but slightly sharp, solid, something Gabriel forgot to remove when we settled back into our suite hours ago. I open the backpack. Whatever the item is, I can’t find it: It’s lost in a maze of inside pockets, hidden behind a forest of zippers. The bag demands that I start again, that I keep one hand on the outside and feel my way through its insides with the other until my fingers meet on each side of the fabric. Between them is the item, which I pull out and stick under the desk lamp to better examine it and—
I drop it. Like it’s boiling hot, or like it’s pricked my fingers.
