This is Not the End

by Chandler Baker

  I stare down my nose at him. My brother looks very small and frail. I wait, heart pounding, for the regret to seep in. Usually when Matt goes on his tirades I suffer an odd sort of double vision. I see the old Matt hovering behind those cold eyes like a ghost. The one before the accident, the one who used to sit on my bed at night and read me The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and make sandcastles with me in the morning.

  But I’ve never spoken to him this way. I’ve never allowed myself to form the words even in my head. But as I wait, I find nothing inside but hatred. He’s spent the five years since the accident tearing any bond we had apart and I’m done trying to figure out why.

  “Get your own damn soup,” I say, and leave my brother at the table to starve.

  When my mom gets back I tell her that I’m going to see Penny’s parents and Will’s mother alone, though the plan had been for us to go together. Matt doesn’t rat me out. But she takes one look at the full bowl of soup and must know. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t argue about me leaving her there, even though I sort of want her to. For once, I’d like her to look at her two children and choose me. But she looks too tired to argue, and besides, how many times has she met Penny’s and Will’s parents anyway—like, twice?

  I tell myself it’s better this way as I change into the appropriately selected all-black outfit she’s laid out on my bed, and get back into my car. Plus, I need to look for the first scavenger hunt clue, so it’s an added bonus that Mom won’t be getting in my way at Ms. Bryan’s house. I get a flutter in my stomach when I think about what the first clue might be.

  Will always knew the right thing to do in every situation. I am especially thankful for that part of my boyfriend, now that he may have left me the only bread crumbs back to him and to Penny.

  As I stand on Ms. Bryan’s doorstep, a pair of black flats blocking half the message on the doormat that reads no place like home, I feel nervous for the first time since Will first introduced me as his girlfriend. Ms. Bryan and Penny’s mom—Tessa—are best friends. They’re both like second mothers to me. In the past few years, I’ve probably spent more combined time at the Bryan and Hightower residences than my own home.

  I pull down the hem of my dress. It’s too long and it keeps bunching over my stomach. The fabric is wool, and since it’s ninety degrees out, the dress feels itchy on my skin, like tiny ant mouths are biting me. I use the fingers sticking out of my white cast to clack the brass knocker. Then I reach down and scratch my ankle through a thick pair of hose that seemed like a respectful gesture at the time but are now just turning me all sweaty.

  Ms. Bryan comes to the door in no time at all and I barely get my foot back to the ground without toppling over. She’s been expecting me.

  My whole body is numb. Will’s mother ushers me into their home through a tiled foyer and into the kitchen, where his older second cousin, Jeremy, stands at the counter holding strands of cooked spaghetti in his grubby fingers and dropping them into his mouth. Jeremy rents the basement downstairs. He’s okay, kind of a screwup, and his half of the family doesn’t get along with the Bryan half. At least that’s what Will told me. Having him there helps Ms. Bryan out with the mortgage, though, and, according to Will, it gets Jeremy off his own mother’s hands. Every family needs a black sheep and, although I suppose Jeremy is the Bryans’, I’ve always kind of liked him.

  “Jeremy!” Ms. Bryan scolds him, turning pink in the cheeks. Considering that her son is dead, I personally don’t think it matters what Jeremy does with spaghetti.

  Jeremy shrugs and slurps a noodle. “Hi, Lake,” he says, mouth full. I wave my giant white cast monstrosity and instantly feel guilty. I have a broken ulna, a fractured elbow, a rib contusion, and a colorful array of bruises, but at least my heart’s still beating.

  “How’s Matt doing?” he asks. My brother and Jeremy are the same age and used to be friends at the public high school I would have gone to if I hadn’t gone to St. Theresa’s instead. I don’t blame Jeremy for not keeping in touch. It’s not like they were best friends, more just guys who ate lunch together and occasionally watched weird movies that nobody else liked. Friendship with Matt now is tolerable only for those that also enjoy trying to pet a cactus or a rabid porcupine.

  “He’s…Matt,” I say, and Jeremy nods as if he knows exactly what I mean. Jeremy is twenty-two. Over the last few years, his recreational drug habit seems to have become less extracurricular and more of the main event.

  Ms. Bryan slips her hand into a pair of green oven mitts. “How are you doing, Lake?” Ms. Bryan is one of those people whose whole identity screams mom, from her haircut to her jeans to her biweekly cookie bake and ostensibly no first name. And this despite the fact that she has a full-time job as a paralegal. “Have you been getting any sleep?”

  I relax a little. I climb up onto one of the barstools like I’ve done so many times before and rest my elbows on the cool granite. It’s always been Ms. Bryan who’s been there to ask how my school day was. Sometimes with Tessa, Penny’s mom, while the two of them crowded into the kitchen sharing a wine spritzer and trying to get Penny and me interested in going to see the latest movie adaptation of their favorite sappy romance novel.

  “Yeah, some,” I say. “I’m still taking some pain medication. It makes me sleepy. But my parents don’t want me staying in bed all day.”

  “Smart.” She swirls a wooden spoon through a bubbling pot of meat sauce. I notice that the lines around Ms. Bryan’s eyelids are bright red, so I know she’s been crying. There’s no Mr. Bryan. Well, there is, but not one who Ms. Bryan can stand having in the same room for more than three minutes.

  I glance over at the four place settings around the table. Everything in the house is uncomfortably normal and doesn’t seem to fit with the reality that her son’s abdomen was recently crushed by an SUV.

  I can’t seem to stop thinking in such morbid terms. When I try to process the accident, I haven’t once been able to soothe myself with standard clichés such as My friends have passed away or My friends have gone to a better place. Instead, it’s the spreading pool of blood under Will’s back and the sickening angle of Penny’s leg that play over and over in my mind.

  “Does your arm still hurt, then?” Ms. Bryan asks me, removing the oven mitts to fill glasses of water. She motions for Jeremy to carry them to the table, and as she does, nods at my cast. “I broke my wrist when I was a little girl, rollerblading. I had to get pins in it. But, to be honest, it hurt nearly as much when I found out it was broken as it did when I actually broke it.” She smiles, close-lipped. “Probably not you, though. Will’s always bragging about how tough you are.”

  I force the corners of my mouth to curve upward. I don’t feel tough. It’s true, I’ve skateboarded down disastrously steep hills, surfed right up until the first bolt of lightning, and skated from behind the bumper of Penny’s Jeep. But I’ve never been as deeply afraid as I am now. Today, the fact that I nearly killed Ringo at the mere sight of a Lexus has confirmed the fear that I’ve felt slowly seeping in.

  “It could have been a lot worse,” I say. Which is true. There’s a pause and I know I’m supposed to say something to fill it. I’ve said the wrong thing. Stupid. “I’m sorry….It’s hard….” I wring my hands together. “What I mean to say is that I’m sorry about what happened.” I stare down at my depressing shoes. I want to say more about how I can fix this, but when I start, something inside me twists like a lock.

  “It’s only been a few days,” she says. “But it feels like so much more, you know? And also like nothing at all?” I follow her to the table as she carries a bowl full of spaghetti. She gestures to a chair, which I pull out while she goes back for the meat sauce and Parmesan. Jeremy is already plopped down with his elbows on the table. “Like today, I found a pair of his sneakers at the bottom of the stairs where he’d left them….” Her lips disappear into a thin line and she waves her hand as though the thought had been silly.

  I feel a knot form at the base of
my throat.

  Jeremy reaches over the table and grabs himself a slice of garlic bread and the pronged ladle for the spaghetti. “Can we please, like, press pause on all the sad stuff until after we eat? Full-time mourning works up an appetite.” The whites of his eyes are red and glassy, and I suspect that smoking pot works up an appetite too.

  “Is Tessa on her way?” I ask. “Is Simon coming too?” There are only four place settings, and apparently Jeremy’s joining us for dinner. The fact that Penny’s dad may be skipping out on dinner worries me. Is he too upset to leave the house? What could be so important that he can’t make it?

  It feels good to be back in the Bryan household, where it smells like Will and feels like home. I can already tell my parents were wrong to keep me from the Bryans at the hospital. Ms. Bryan would have wanted me there.

  She checks her watch, then looks down at her lap and takes extra care when neatly creasing her napkin there. When she looks up, her eyes are sparkling, but she’s put on a misshapen smile. “Actually, I’m not sure Tessa’s coming.” Her eyes flit to the door and then back to me. She seems nervous. “Please, help yourself.” She pushes the bowl toward me.

  Confused about the shift in mood, I dollop out a heap of spaghetti that I’m not at all hungry for, right as the front door swings open. From my spot at the table, I can see Mr. Bryan’s head poke inside. He sees me and waves. My pulse quickens as in walks the fourth place setting, which is not Simon Hightower and is definitely not Tessa.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he says. “Maddie’s going through this phase where she screams bloody murder any time Linda or I try to leave the house. The neighbors must think we’re ripping out her toenails.” He drops down into his seat at the table. “We’re even seeing a baby psychiatrist about it,” he says with a note of pride.

  My mouth has gone dry. I wrap my fingers around the cool glass of ice water and imagine the expression on my face, the same as a deer caught in headlights. An ambush.

  Mr. Bryan—Logan, as he likes us to call him—thumps Jeremy on the back as he takes a seat beside him and across from me. Will’s father is wearing a gray button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up haphazardly. I wonder if that’s because he’s only half in mourning, since Will is only half his family now. The other half, the one he made with his secretary, Linda, lives across town.

  His chair screeches as he pulls it closer to the table. He then lifts his finger to point out my cast resting on the table next to my plate. “Ouch, that’s got to hurt.” Will hated comparisons to his dad, but it’s tough to deny the same campaign-trail smile pulled out whenever they want to flash that Bryan charm. “You going to get your friends to sign that or are you too old for that kind of thing now?”

  My face feels tight, like the skin is pulling toward the center and the functioning of my lungs has reached a full stop.

  “She doesn’t have any friends, Logan,” says Jeremy, tearing into another slice of bread with his teeth. My mouth falls open, but no words come out.

  “Jeremy,” Ms. Bryan hisses. My best guess as to why Jeremy’s here now is that, one, Ms. Bryan didn’t want to risk being alone in a room with Logan and, two, the dinner table feels a tad less empty with a young male presence.

  I’m not angry, though, because Jeremy’s right. I’m completely friendless. And everyone is staring around the table at one another knowing that it’s true.

  “I—I’m so sorry for your loss,” I spit out too abruptly.

  Logan gets very still. “Thank you, Lake.” His voice gets gruff. “Thank you, I appreciate that. I know what you mean. But, the truth is, there’s no need to apologize for things that weren’t your fault, Lake. That Penny on the other hand—”

  My face flashes hot. “It wasn’t Penny’s fault.”

  Logan shakes his head and looks down at his fork. He has a handsome crop of salt-and-pepper hair. “That’s not what the accident report says.” How did he get his hands on the accident report and why hadn’t I seen it? Had I even been asked what had happened? I can’t remember.

  “Logan, don’t say that,” Ms. Bryan hisses. “That’s enough.” Ms. Bryan’s silverware clatters to her plate.

  “It wasn’t her fault,” I say more slowly this time.

  Logan’s jaw clenches. A vein protrudes from his forehead. “Aren’t I entitled to be upset, Jolene? Aren’t I ever allowed to be upset about anything? He was my son too.”

  I share a look with Jeremy.

  “I know he was your son too. That’s why you’re here,” Ms. Bryan shoots back.

  At this they both immediately drop eye contact with each other and switch to staring at me. I think, for a second, they’ve forgotten that I am in the room. That’s why he’s here: I turn the phrase over in my mind.

  “Smooth,” says Jeremy, shaking his head and making thatch marks with his fork in the red pasta sauce smeared over his plate.

  “Wait, where is Tessa?” I ask for the second time tonight. “Was she even invited?” I feel sick. I haven’t spoken to Penny’s family since the accident. My parents said I would see them here and that I needed to respect their space. Do they think I’m avoiding them?

  Ms. Bryan ignores my question. “I guess you know why you’re really here, then,” she says. I feel painfully idiotic, because in fact I didn’t realize why when I first arrived, but I do now. “I—we—wanted to talk to you about your birthday. It’s this month, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It is.”

  “Right. Well, we know you and Will loved each other very much and so we assume…but wanted to be sure that…”

  “I told Jolene that we shouldn’t assume anything,” Logan says. “So, excuse me for being so blunt, but we want to hear straight from you that you’re planning to use your resurrection on our son.”

  “No pressure,” Jeremy adds.

  Underneath my dress and my stupid, sticky hose, I’ve become a human sweat faucet. The best thing about black, I’m learning, is that it doesn’t show armpit stains. I cast about for something to say, something to make me feel less trapped. “But what about Maddie?”

  “Maddie’s a baby,” Logan says. “The idea of being without Will—well—for any amount of time—”

  “It’s unbearable,” Ms. Bryan finishes.

  They’re right. Maddie’s only an infant, so if they depended on her to use a resurrection choice on Will on her eighteenth birthday, then Will would miss almost seventeen years of his life. Once he was resurrected—if he were ever resurrected—I’d already be thirty-four years old while he would have stayed eighteen. Would I look different to him? Would I feel different?

  “And paying for one?” I ask. The question is distasteful and I flush to even suggest it. The buying and selling of resurrections is illegal. The commoditization of life was the grease atop the slippery slope on which our population currently found itself. After all, that was how the debates began. Was vitalis a right or a product? If left only to those who could afford it, then could we live with the demographic the lifeblood would inevitably create, with the powerful more powerful and plentiful and the poor left to dwindle and die? But there are ways, I’ve heard, if you know where to look and aren’t afraid to ask….

  I look at the Bryans with their current but sale-rack clothes, their mortgages, their used cars, and know they could never afford a resurrection on their own.

  “Even if we sold both houses…” Logan’s voice trails off.

  Ms. Bryan exhales loudly. “Sorry, we don’t mean to be insensitive. We know you’ve just been through a terrible trauma and your mom says you’re already seeing a therapist—we think that’s great, don’t we, Logan?—but I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  “Of course,” I respond on autopilot. My ears are ringing.

  “Then it’ll be Will.” Logan says this as a statement. There’s a certain authority that comes with devastatingly good looks, and he wields it like a movie star.

  Ms. Bryan isn’t even looking at me anymore. She’s cupped her hand ov
er her mouth and is staring out the window, which, in the darkened night, now reflects our images back to us. There are fresh tears brimming so close to the edge that I can’t believe they stay balanced there.

  Meanwhile, I knit my eyebrows. Heart pounding. “I…don’t know. I mean, I think so. I just—” The sight of Ms. Bryan sitting there shaking her head at nothing and of Logan’s eyes boring into me feels like a rope being wrapped around my neck. I should have let my mom come. She could have dealt with this. It was a mistake to come alone. Suddenly I feel like I can’t sit here a moment longer. I’m screaming at myself not to overpromise, not to promise anything. “I’m feeling a little sick, Ms. Bryan.” My voice sounds convincingly frail without even trying. “Can you excuse me for a second?”

  My thighs ram the underside of the table as I bolt out of my chair. The water in all four of the glasses sloshes onto the place mats. I take quick steps down the hall and, without looking back, climb the carpeted stairs to the second story, past the framed school pictures of Will.

  Upstairs, it’s graveyard quiet. My heart thuds against my chest. My ears are still buzzing and I stuff my fingers inside to try to make them stop. Through the floor, angry, muffled voices have begun to rise. I can’t make out the words, but I know they must be about me. I wait to hear the thudding weight of someone following me, but instead, I find myself completely and utterly alone.

  I massage my temples and stretch my neck, trying to shake loose the feeling of claustrophobia. How could Ms. Bryan have gone behind Tessa’s back like that? At the same time I know I’ve probably been naïve not to see it coming.

  The Bryans, they’re just desperate, I tell myself.