Good Man

All I want is your understanding
As in the small act of affection
Why is this my life?
Is almost everybody's question
And I've tried, everything but suicide
But it's crossed my mind



The sound of expensive sandals echoed along a hardwood floor as Tre sat in the downstairs office of his home nursing a stiff drinking which he was sloshing around in its glass.

His solemn blue eyes contemplated the amber liquid the same way Buddhists contemplated enlightenment.

There was such a rhythmic motion to what he was doing that he became so lost in his thoughts that the noise of his wife approaching the room was but a distant distraction he was not coerced by.

He licked his lips, both the upper and lower in one fluid flick of his tongue and dipped his head as his shoulders hunched as if carrying a heavy load...or just the metaphorical burden of his grief he kept private.

The question had been raised several times in the last month? The question everyone had been asking themselves.

How do I go on?

Tre was unsure. He and Billie Joe had discussed it briefly in the days following Mike's funeral, but nothing more had been said other than only time will tell.

Fuck time.

The general consensus was that Green Day would not go on without Mike. They would call it quits. They were the Three Musketeers or nothing at all, so to speak. No one could ever replace Mike and no one ever would. He was one of a kind, one in a million, and there would never be another one like him.

It was what Tre was trying to cope with. Not just the end of his career in Green Day, the band and way of life that had been the best and worst thing to him for twenty years, but he was trying to cope with the end of one of the best things in his life. And, how he wanted to cry. To sob and breakdown. To blubber like an infant child and reach out desperately for a loving embrace to reassure him that everything would be okay.

But the tears never came, and he couldn't understand why. He was utterly and unabashedly grief stricken; depressed, even. He had every right and every opportunity to shed his tears, but still none came.

God, how he wanted to cry.

"Frank?"

He blinked at the sound of his name being uttered, then slowly turned in his brown, leather chair.

Giselle had entered into the office and flicked on the overhead light and smiled at him. "Has this become your Fortress of Solitude?"

Tre smirked and shrugged. "I'm surprised you know your Superman references. I didn't know doctors had spare time for movie trivia."

Stepping closer, she clapped her hands together and gave a shrug of her own. "You'd be surprised just how much I know. I am a bottomless pit of both useful and useless knowledge."

Tre swiveled around more in the chair to face his woman. "I suppose so," he replied. "Thanks to you I learn something new everyday. Like today, I now know that a synapse is a gap between two nerve cells, across which impulses are conducted through the agency of a neurotransmitter."

"You read one of my medical journals didn't you? Because I don't recall giving you the definition of a synapse." Giselle looked at her husband knowingly. "So I didn't actually teach you anything new today."

"On the contrary. By you having these medical journals at my disposal, and because I'm a very idle person, I flipped through the pages at random and learned that new medical word. And now, I have to use it in a sentence sometime today."

Giselle grinned. "Good luck on that."

Tre grinned right back as he held his glass of bourbon in both hands between his knees as he eyed the car keys in his wife's right hand. "Where ya headed? D'ya get paged by work?"

Giselle shook her head. "Uh, no...actually, it's about Caroline," she admitted. "I know you all think you're helping her by giving her space, but she's my sister and I can't sit back and let her wallow like this. It's nothing healthy for her to hide and bottle it all up. Talking about it, no matter how painful it is, is the only way for her to properly grieve. Trust me, I know. I'm a doctor."

"But, Zelle, she was very ada---"

"I don't care, Frank," Giselle cut her husband off, holding up her hand to him. "I'm going over to my sister's house to check on her. It's been three fucking days and I won't leave her alone one more minute."

Tre wasn't gonna argue with his wife. Everyone, including Billie Joe and him, were against Caroline's wishes but were too nervous to do otherwise out of fear that it would send her off the edge.

The drummer nodded. "Alright."

"I wasn't looking for your blessing to go, if that's what you're thinking. I was just letting you know what I was going to do anyway."

"I don't doubt that," Tre smiled slightly.

Giselle moved back a little toward the doorway, but then stopped to gesture to her husband.

"What?" he questioned when he took note of her hesitance.

"You gonna come with me?"

"And have Caroline castrate me for showing up and not leaving her alone?" He saw the look on Giselle's face and stood up. "Sure, I'll come." He brought the glass of bourbon to his lips and chugged the remains as he set the glass down on the desk and walked up to his wife. "I'm buzzed. You're driving," he commented, pointing at her.

"Was planning on it."

The pair smiled at each other as Giselle flicked off the overhead light and Tre reached out and slapped his wife's ass. Her giggle that followed was something Tre wasn't going to take for granted anytime soon.

If there was anything he'd learned from the tragic event of a month earlier, it was make the best of every moment with his loved ones.



The Wrights were laughing about something when their car pulled into the driveway of the Pritchard residence. Hopping out of the vehicle as the engine settled down from being turned off, the couple looked up at the oddly foreboding impression the house before them gave off. It was like walking up to The Addams Family's mansion that had suddenly been airlifted to the Berkeley Hills and remodeled in the typical Californian stucco design, but still the same spooky house.

As if on the same wavelength about the feel of the house, Giselle began to hum the theme song to The Addams Family.

Tre looked at her and she gave him a shrug.

"What?"

"Nothing," he replied with a smirk appearing on his lips as they came upon the front door. "I was just humming the same thing, but in my head."

Giselle mirrored his expression and fumbled for the right key to put into the lock. Turning it, she opened the door and stepped inside with her husband in tow.

"Care?" she called out but got no response. Her set of keys jingling at her side, she moved to look into the living room where she spotted her sister right away.

Lying on her side on the floor, Caroline was as naked as the day she was born, her right arm bent downward under her body and her left arm bent upward on which she was resting her head on. Her face into the carpet, there was no way to see if her eyes were open or not.

"Care!" Giselle cried out in fear as her keys fell from her hands and clattered to the front hall floor and she scrambled to her sister's side. She turned Caroline over onto her back and pressed two fingers to her neck to check for a pulse just as Tre came up to his wife's side.

"Oh, fuck. Care? What'd you do?"

Giselle eyed the empty Tylenol bottle and the empty bottle of Jack Daniels nearby and nearly shit herself. "Oh God...Care..." Panic rushing through her, she eyed Tre who followed the gaze to the empty bottles.

"Fuck me," he muttered. "What do we do?"

"Call an ambulance. I'll get a blanket to cover her up."

"Fuck the ambulance, Zelle. By the time it gets here she could be dead," Tre bit out as fear overwhelmed him. "She's not...is she?"

Giselle shook her head. "No. She has a pulse, but it's faint."

"We should take her to the hospital. I don't think she'd want anyone to know."

"Anyone to know?" Giselle repeated exasperatedly. "Frank, Caroline overdosed on Tylenol and Jack Daniels and she's naked. I think she knew someone would find her and people would know anyway."

"You said it yourself; she's not dead. And while she's alive I don't want her to go through this embarrassment any further than she needs to and will when she gets the help she needs. Can't you...can't you pump her stomach for her?"

"I can, but she needs to get to the hospital anyway, Frank. I don't know how long she's been like this and just how much alcohol and pills she swallowed. The hospital can do more than I can by myself."

Tre and Giselle stressfully stared at each other, resulting in him agreeing with her, but only to meet her halfway.

"We'll take her to the hospital. Get the car started," he ordered.

Nodding, Giselle stood up faster than she could blink as she grabbed for her car keys and snatched an afghan off the couch and threw it to Tre as he draped it over Caroline's unconscious form and then wrapped it securely around her. In one swift hoisting gesture, Tre bent at the knees and lifted his sister-in-law and ex-girlfriend up into his arms.

"Find her purse. She'll probably have her insurance cards and whatnot we might need for the hospital there," he added while hurrying out into the front hall.

He walked slowly; Caroline's body like dead weight in his arms from her being temporarily out of commission.

Giselle ran around the living room and darted into the kitchen briefly in search of the purse but didn't find it. "Fuck it!" she shouted to her husband. "We'll call Billie and Adrienne on the way to the hospital and have them look for it, then meet us there. We can't waste time right now."

Following her husband outside, she locked the front door behind them and then held the back passenger side door to their SUV open for Tre as he slid into the backseat with Caroline, propping her up against him and almost cradling her like a baby.

Running around to the other side, she jumped into the driver's seat and started the vehicle up and in no time at all she was speeding off the property and out onto the open road.

Behind her, Tre smoothed Caroline's hair back off her face and checked her pulse for himself was satisfied to know it was still there. He bent his head down and pressed his lips to her temple, whispering against her ear, "Don't leave..."



It was like organized chaos the way the doctors in the emergency room orchestrated around Caroline like the team of experts they were, with Giselle moving in an out between their busy bodies to inform them on what she and Tre had found and how they found her sister.

"Th-there was an empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor along with an empty bottle of Tylenol. I don't know if she drank all the Jack and swallowed all the pills or only half. I don't know how much were in the bottles to begin with...I just know that she took too much..."

"Dr. Wright, you need to leave this room and wait outside. We'll do everything we can for your sister but we can't if you're hovering over us. Let us do our job," instructed Dr. Timothy Delaney; one of the ER doctors Giselle spoke with quite often when she worked.

He placed his hands on the blue-eyed psychiatrist and backed her up a few feet so that she bumped into the swinging doors. Nodding, she turned around despite her desire to stay and walked soberly out into the hallway where Tre was standing with his arms folded, peering through the door's round windows.

"Is she gonna be okay?"

"They're putting a tube down her throat right now to begin pumping her stomach," Giselle spoke to her husband. She shook her head and pressed her lips firmly together as she fought back the tears she wanted to cry. "What'll I do if she dies, Frank?"

"She's not gonna," he insisted. "She's Caroline. She's resilient. Strong and stubborn."

"On the outside, yeah. But you and no one else will ever know her like I do. We told each other everything growing up. We were each other's best friend. There were no secrets. I know her hopes, dreams and fears just as she knows all of mine." Giselle turned slightly and began to pace a little along the hallway, her arms mimicking her husband's and folding across her chest. "She was strong on the outside all the time because that was her front. It was how she got by when she was scared. She got angry and quiet. She avoided confrontation and when she was thrust into conflict she buckled and stuttered, and I was always there. I was her backbone."

Tre watched his wife ramble away, ready to pull her into an embrace at any given moment.

"People, now, think she's this hardass, speaks-her-mind frontwoman of a popular rock band; the wife of a famous punk rock bassist and hot mama of two young kids," Giselle continued. "I was her backbone growing up. I was the one who told her she was capable to playing in the big time. I was the one who told her to stay behind in Buffalo and not follow me and our parents to Raleigh so she could stay behind with her band and work toward her goal. I wanted her to know she didn't have to depend on anyone, that she could be her own person and not be scared."

Shaking her head more adamantly, the 31-year-old woman glanced back through the emergency room window and felt her heart constrict at the sight of about three doctors and nurses working on her sister.

"I thought she would always be fine. But then she latched onto you, which led her heart to Mike. And with him, she acquired a foundation that let her have her own backbone while having the support she still needed. But her foundation was destroyed and now she's crumbling down. Her backbone is broken and I just wish I had continued to be that backbone for her all along..."

"Are you trying to say Caroline will always need you, or are you saying you'll always need Caroline to need you?"

"I dunno." Giselle shrugged. "Both, I guess." Backing up against the wall, she sank down to the floor and bent her knees up to her chest as she ran her hands through her thick, curly hair. "Fuck, I still gotta call my mom and dad..."

"I'll call them if you want."

"No, it's better if I told them what's going on..."

Leaning her head back and rolling her gaze up toward her soon-to-be forty-year-old husband, Giselle sighed and frowned. "This is not my best day ever."

"Ditto."

Tre was preparing to sink down against the wall beside his wife when they both heard two sets of footsteps echoing and nervous voices calling out.

Billie Joe and Adrienne rounded the corner and looked upon the younger married couple with concerned eyes and questions rolling off their tongues quicker than the speed of light.

"Is Caroline okay? What happened? Where is she? What did she take? How did you find her? How long was she out for?"

That was the bombardment of questions that were asked of Tre and Giselle, as the drummer helped his wife up to her feet to greet their friends.

"We got here not that long ago," Tre informed. "How the fuck'd you two get here so damn quick?"

"We live a street behind Mike's house, you dumbshit," Billie Joe remarked, somewhat jokingly.

"And Care always keeps her purse on top of her bedroom dresser," Adrienne added, looking between the younger man and his wife. "Is she gonna be okay?"

"How is it Adrienne knows where Care keeps her purse and I don't? What kind of sister have I become? I'm losing touch with her..." Giselle muttered, panic mildly infiltrating her voice. "God, I suck at sistering."

"Babe..." Tre trailed. "It's okay. You didn't do anything. This is not your fault." Looking between his wife and two friends, he gestured to the direction of the waiting room. "There's nothing we can do but wait and pray for Caroline, so let's sit down and do just that, okay?"

The three nodded at him and found seats in the waiting room, trying to make small talk while interlacing what they knew and didn't know about what happened to Caroline.

It was another ten or fifteen minutes of monotonous banter before Dr. Delaney approached them and they each stood up with expectant glances; fearing the worst news possible.

That Caroline hadn't made it.

"Is Caroline okay? How is she?" Giselle demanded to know right away.

Delaney held up his right hand to shush her, then nodded assuringly. "Caroline is stable. We were able to pump her stomach and she's conscious right now. We're having her moved to a private room, but we would like to keep her here in the hospital for a few more days for further evaluations."

"Psychiatric? Because of the suicide attempt?" Giselle pestered.

"Yes, but your expertise won't be needed. Conflict of interest and all."

Nodding her head, the curly haired woman understood perfectly. "No, no, I completely agree. But she's physically okay, though?"

Dr. Delaney nodded. "Yes, physically she's doing well. But she lost the baby."

Stunned silence washed over the two couples as they stared blankly at the learned man.

"What? What baby? Caroline was pregnant? Oh god..." Adrienne muttered in disbelief and sadness.

Billie Joe seemed to be at quite a loss for words. He just sat there staring at the doctor as if keeping silent and wide-eyed would put everything into perspective and explain what had all transpired.

"Yes, Caroline was about two months along..."

"Can we see her?" Tre pestered.

"I can't believe she was pregnant this whole time and didn't say anything," Adrienne muttered, looking at her husband's profile and speaking to him despite the fact that he seemed to be lost in a daydream.

"She hasn't said much of anything to anyone in more than a month," Billie Joe muttered back; his blank expression unchanging. "Why is this such a surprise?" he added sadly.

"Well, she's being situated as we speak, so it'd be best to give her a few minutes, but I'm sure a few visitors right now might help..." Dr. Delaney replied, following up to Tre's question.



Caroline sat upright in her hospital bed, her hands crossed over her stomach as she stared out the window to her left.

The sky was white from the overcast weather of oncoming rain clouds. Her room was cold and sterile, her hospital gown was pale and uncomfortable, and her heart was as hollow as a world after a nuclear winter.

She blinked a few times; watching as rain drops eventually began to pelt against the glass of the window. She heard the noises and hums that perforated into her ears, without actually listening.

When the door opened and four pairs of feet stepped into the room, echoing against the linoleum floor, Caroline looked up to take in the sight of her sister and good friends.

"Hey," Giselle spoke first, reaching her sister's side and placing a hand on top of Caroline's. "You gave us a huge scare."

"Sorry," the widow mumbled.

"How're you feeling?" Tre inquired, adding to the greetings.

Caroline's bloodshot eyes loitered over to him for a few moments as she shrugged. "Like I had my stomach pumped."

The four frowned and stared back at Caroline as Billie Joe moved to sit on the right side of the bed, leaning forward slightly with concerned, green eyes.

"Why'd you do it, Care? Why would you try to kill yourself?" he pleaded to know. "How could you contemplate leaving your kids behind so soon after losing their father? They couldn't bare it and neither can we, if we lost you..."

"Why didn't you tell us about the baby?" Adrienne asked abruptly.

With questions thrown at her from each direction, Caroline looked down at her lap and swallowed back a lump in her throat.

"I wasn't trying to kill myself...I just..." she trailed momentarily. "I just can't look at my kids with them wondering where their daddy is." Pausing, she looked up, finding her eyes set upon Billie Joe's. "How can I look at another one?"

The rhetorical question struck the other to the core and were a bit stunned as to how to reply.

"How could I have brought another child into the world, only to be fatherless? I just couldn't think of it...of it's face looking at me as it grew up, asking me questions and making me relive the pain I want to forget..."

The others still didn't have a response. Well, they did, but they just couldn't bring themselves to either berate or comfort Caroline in what she'd done to herself and her unborn child which was now lost to the world.

"I was two months along and I never saw myself of aborting a baby. I just...put it to sleep." Caroline's face strickened as she heard what she'd said. "God, help me...am I gonna go to hell for this?"

What could any one of them say to a thing like that?

"God forgives those who ask for forgiveness," Billie Joe spoke rather spiritually. "You're grieving and cannot be completely held accountable for the things you do, no matter how sober or incapacitated you are. You're hurting, you feel lost and you're looking for a scapegoat for these feelings. Your unborn child became that scapegoat."

Tears began to fall steadily down Caroline's face without much warning.

"I killed my last connection to Mike," she sobbed. "I deserve to go to hell..."

Frowning, Billie Joe leaned forward and embraced her, placing a kiss upon her forehead, then her temple. "You deserve the best, Caroline. We'll all make sure of that."

Hiccuping, Caroline leaned her face into the crook of Billie Joe's shoulder as the other three encircled her and let her know they were there for her, no matter what.