crack theories & social anxiety

He manages it, though, just like he always does; turns on heel to head back into the throng of the airport, makes good on his plan to lose his melancholy in overpriced Johnny Walker. His flight home is not for several hours - he’d left wiggle room in case of delays. Always a back up plan, and then another. But they’d landed at LAX right on schedule, and David reckons that means at least a $200 bar tab before he’s airborne again. 

It ends up just shy, at $198 with tip, and he’s one of the last on the plane, easily ignoring the grumblings of the couple who have to get up and let him to his window seat. 

He likes the view, from a plane. Likes looking at the earth from this high up; a view that makes the weight of the world seem small for a pocket of time. From up here one can imagine that mafias and psychopaths and rapists and deadbeat parents are monsters of fiction. 

It’s beautiful, from up here. 

Sometimes David thinks that it can be beautiful from down there, with two feet on the ground, but today is not one of those times. He thinks about burn marks and blue eyes, he thinks about blood and rackets, he thinks about patches of raw scalp and scars and broken bones. He tries to close his eyes, but he sees Seth on the back of his eyelids, and others too, names he can’t bear to think right now.

Instead, he flags down the flight attendant about it, ordering two small bottles, and then again, and then again, until the attendant finally rolls his eyes and hands him ten at once. David toasts the clouds with a heavy heart and doesn’t try to sleep. 

There’s a changeover at Dulles, and then a short hop to Upstate Regional, and David is decidedly on the far left of sober when the plane lands on his home turf. He’d driven them there, just him and Jean, not quite 24 hours ago, leaving his truck in the short term parking. 

It’s dusk out, now, the sun pushing pale orange and lavender across the sky when David walks steadily out of the terminal, digging his keys out of his pocket with his head down. He pulls up short, though, something finally putting a hitch in his step, when he arrives to find Abby sitting on his tailgate with her legs hanging down and her hands wrapped around the edge. 

David’s raw heart aches, to look at her. It’s like staring into the sun. “How are you here?” he says, gruff, voice rusty with disuse and airplane. He looks around reflexively for her car. 

“Betsy,” Abby says, hopping down, holding out her hands for him. Which wasn't what he was asking. Which he knows she knows.

“I can’t,” he says. Not here, he means. Abby doesn’t fight him, just nods and drops one hand, keeping the other out for David to place the keys in. 

She drives them to her home in silence. She doesn’t ask, and David doesn’t protest. She’s too good for him. Doesn’t mean he’s going to turn this down, when the hope of it right now is the only thing keeping him stitched together. 

“Come on, old man,” she says when they’ve parked. There’s no other cars besides Abby’s, and David lets out a sigh that turns into a groan as he crawls down from the passenger side of his own truck. He’s not that old, damnit, but he played hard on the court and off it in his younger years and that shit takes a toll on a body, particularly after back to back trans-continental flights. 

Abby shoves him towards the master bathroom once they’re inside, and David’s throat does something complicated to see a clean pair of his own sweats folded up on top of the closed toilet seat. He obediently showers off the travel and the whiskey, and while being clean and wrapped in soft clothes doesn’t manage to put an actual dent in the weight on his shoulders, he does feel steadier.

He finds Abby perched at the far end of her couch, some serial drama reruns on the television and a robust sandwich sliced in half on the coffee table. 

“Thank you,” he says, and lowers himself beside her with a sigh. She’s left a bottle on the table too, half full of a good single malt, even though he knows she disapproves of this tactic. He leaves it, eats half the sandwich, and doesn’t resist when Abby winds a free hand in his hair and tugs. 

“How are you?” she asks him again, once David is sprawled long on the couch, his head resting comfortably on her soft thighs.

Abby cards her fingers over and over through his hair and David finally lets his eyes fall closed. He watches the back of Jean’s head, his stance rigid, as he rides that escalator down and out of sight over and over and over again.