by Rebecca Rupp
I knew I’d never tell Isabelle how I felt about her now. It was too late, and it had always been too late or too early, or anyway just wrong. Somewhere in my past I’d picked a dandelion or something, and that was the Butterfly of Doom. Something had set me on the path to being the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, to losing Isabelle, to Isabelle going away.
Then Isabelle’s mother came to the door, looking tired, and said how lovely it had been for Isabelle and the twins to be friends with us this summer, but now it was really time for them all to come inside because they had an early start in the morning and they still had packing to do. Journey started to cry.
“I don’t want to go home,” Journey said. “I want to live here.”
“Don’t be silly,” Isabelle said.
Then she kissed Walter and she kissed me, and she hugged me hard.
“I’ll be in touch, darlings,” she said. “It’s been wonderful.”
And then she went inside and closed the door. Walter and I just stood there for a minute. Then we went down the Sowers porch steps and headed down the driveway toward the empty Sowers pedestals and the road.
“You all right, Danny?” Walter said.
“Sure,” I said.
Though I wasn’t.
“Look, Dan,” Walter said, “you knew she was never going to stay. She was only sort of playing with us, really. It wasn’t going to last.”
“Sure, I knew that,” I said.
But I hadn’t, I really hadn’t. I was that dumb.
I should have remembered that story from Greek mythology about what happens to boys with wings.
I should have remembered Miss Walker’s poem. Nothing gold can stay.
When I got home, my mom was up in her bedroom, lying down with the lights off, and my dad was in the living room, watching TV, a rerun of some cop show with lots of tire noise and gunfire. I went up to my room.
Back when I was little, Eli and I watched this old movie The Wizard of Oz. It starts out all in black and white on this little farm in the middle of nowhere in Kansas, and then a cyclone whirls in and takes Dorothy and her dog and her whole house to Oz. When she gets to Oz, it’s a magical kingdom where everything is suddenly in Technicolor, and there are witches and flying monkeys and the Emerald City. But all Dorothy wants is to get back to black-and-white Kansas again.
I thought that was nuts, and so did Eli. He said nobody who got out of Kansas ever voluntarily went back.
That’s how I felt, walking up the stairs that night to my room. Like for a whole summer I’d lived in this magical rainbow country, and now it was over. Now I was back home. There’s no place like home, I thought. Where Peter Reilly was going to make the rest of my life a living hell. Where Eli was gone and my mom was gone and my dad had always been gone and anyway thought I was dumb as a stump.
I hated them all. I even hated Jim and Emma, because they were happy and I wasn’t, and Walter, because he was going to have a successful brilliant life, and the twins, because they were too young to have any problems and didn’t have the sense to see how lucky they were. I stopped in the hall in front of Eli’s bedroom door. It was shut, like it always was, and the light was off inside. Downstairs a commercial came on, and I could hear my dad walking out to the kitchen to get a beer. No one was around to stop me, so I opened the door to Eli’s room and turned on the overhead light and went inside. Then I locked the door behind me. And then I started to take Eli’s stuff down.
I tore his posters and his brown paper down off the wall and crumpled them up and stuffed them in the wastebasket, and I tore all the sheets and blankets off the bed and threw them in the middle of the floor in a big pile. I dragged all his clothes out of the closet and yanked them off the hangers — shirts and pants and jackets and the gray suit he’d worn in his scholarship picture — and I dumped out all his bureau drawers. Then I started throwing stuff out of his desk. Papers he’d written and notebooks and pencils and pens. A bottle of ink smashed, and I threw a whole drawer after it. I threw his clock radio, and the plastic cover cracked across. I kicked at his bedside lamp, and it fell and smashed and little pieces of lightbulb skittered all over the floor.
I was crying and breathing in big sick gasps.
“Why did you have to do it?” I shouted at Eli’s empty room. “Why did you leave? Why does everybody leave?”
And I shoved at Eli’s bookcase, and the whole thing teetered and fell and books spilled out.
By then my parents were outside, pounding on Eli’s door, and my dad was shouting, “What the hell is going on in there? Daniel! Open this damn door!”
Eli’s room looked like a cyclone had hit it. My hand was bleeding where I’d cut it on something. I stood there a minute, catching my breath. Then I climbed across the mess of stuff and opened Eli’s door.
“What have you done?” my mom said, and her voice went all shaky and ragged. “What have you done?”
“I think you ought to see a doctor,” I said to my mom. “I think how you’re acting is crazy. I think you should see a psychiatrist.”
I was trying not to cry.
“Eli’s not here,” I said. “Eli’s not here anymore. But I am. I am!”
“Danny,” my dad said.
“You leave me alone,” I said. “Don’t talk to me anymore. Don’t talk to me ever again. Just leave me the hell alone.”
And I went into my own room and slammed the door. Outside I could hear my mom crying, but I didn’t care. I sat on my bed and thought about the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in my Book of the Dead. There’s a story that when Cortés first landed in Mexico, he burned all his ships so that he and his men would have no way to retreat.
I’d always thought that was a pretty shortsighted thing to do. Like Eli always said, it’s important to have a backup plan. But then I thought, No, Cortés was right.
Sometimes you have to destroy the past so that you’ll have to learn how to live in the new world.
I figured that after what I’d done to Eli’s room, I’d be lucky to ever see the light of day again, or maybe I’d only see it from the barred windows of some juvenile detention facility in Saskatchewan.
But the morning afterward, when I came downstairs, my mom was already there, doing stuff with frying pans. So instead of a baloney-and-mustard sandwich, like I usually made myself for breakfast, I had cinnamon French toast. She had big purple circles under her eyes, and her hands were a little shaky, but her hair was all combed, and she had this list she’d made with a lot of names and phone numbers on a pad. And she didn’t seem to blame me for going raving berserk.
“I’m so sorry, Danny,” she said. “I’m so very sorry.”
“I’m the one who should be sorry, not you,” I said. “I’m the one that made the mess.”
My mom shook her head.
“No, honey,” she said. “It wasn’t you.”
She put a pitcher of maple syrup on the table, next to my plate of French toast.
“I used to dream about him all the time,” she said. “About how he was when he was a little boy. I could see him just as clear. Then he just seemed to get further and further away, and I couldn’t let him go, Danny. I just couldn’t.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
My mom’s voice got a little stronger, and suddenly she sounded more like I remembered my mom.
“And last night I could hear him,” she said. “I swear, Danny, I could hear his voice. And you know what he said?”
“What?” I said.
My mom gave a sort of rueful little smile.
“He said, ‘Come on, Mom, get a grip.’”
That day she called a bunch of doctors and found one that could see her right away. She was diagnosed with prolonged grief disorder, which is sort of like post-traumatic stress syndrome for the bereaved. Then she got some pills, and a while after that she joined a survivors’ therapy group.
She must have talked to my dad too, because he never said one word to me about trashing Eli
’s room, which wasn’t like my dad. After I finished cleaning up, he helped me carry stuff downstairs, and we took Eli’s clothes to the church poor box, except for his Catamount football shirt and his lucky fishing hat, which I kept. My dad thinks that maybe he’ll make an office in that room, or maybe a den with a TV.
When that was all done, he took me over to Bev’s Caf for a milk shake, and he didn’t talk about my grades. Though you could tell he was pretty messed up about how to begin.
“Danny, we never meant . . .” he said, and then, “I wouldn’t want you to think . . .” and then I said, “What?”
And he said, “We love you just as much as we loved Eli, Dan. We always have. It’s just . . . after him going like that . . .”
And I said, “Yeah, I know.” Because I really did know.
“You know I was raised on a farm,” my dad said after he blew his nose. “It didn’t suit me, but my dad and his — well, you come from a long line of farmers. Looks like maybe it’s in your blood.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said.
Then we talked about the blue-potato farm and how in a couple of years I might like to go to the state agricultural college. Then Bev came over and said we looked like men who might like another round of milk shakes, and we said sure. It wasn’t a total father-son breakthrough, but it was a start.
“You still keep that dead book?” my dad asked as we walked out the door. “Or is that all done?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
There’s an -ology for practically anything anybody is interested in. If you don’t believe me, just ask Walter. Xenobiology is the study of aliens. Nidology is the study of birds’ nests. Fromology is the study of cheese.
Thanatology is the study of death.
What I thought about right off when I first heard that was ninjas, but with academic degrees. Death-expert ninjas who could leap thirty feet in the air and take people out with a shuriken, like in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There could be T-shirts, I thought. DON’T MESS WITH ME. I’M A THANATOLOGIST.
But it turns out that thanatology isn’t about making people die. It’s more about coping with it when they do. It’s about closure.
Here are what Walter says are the Five Stages of Coping with Death:
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
The Victorians, when somebody died, wore black clothes and weeping veils for a year. They blew their noses on black-bordered handkerchiefs and they wrote their letters on black-bordered stationery. They wore jewelry made of dead people’s hair. Isabelle thought that was creepy, especially the hair.
But Walter said it was a healthy transitional thing to do. “It helps people move from denial to acceptance,” Walter said.
He turned to me.
“You know, Dan. Like you’re doing with your Book of the Dead.”
“What?” I said.
“Well, what do you think that’s all about?” Walter said. “It’s a book of dead people, Danny. What do you think you’re doing that for?”
“It’s just a hobby,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” Walter said. “It’s a coping mechanism. It’s desensitization therapy.”
“You mean you think if I write enough about dead people, Eli being dead won’t bother me anymore?” I said. Kind of angry.
Walter shrugged up his bony shoulders.
“You’re coming to terms with it, Dan,” he said. “That’s a good thing. What you’re doing with that book, you’re finding closure.”
“That’s crap,” I said.
Even Walter doesn’t know everything, I thought.
But that was before I found Eli’s last words.
Walter and Isabelle and I once had a talk about famous last words.
“What would your last words be?” Isabelle said. “Pretend it’s your last chance to leave a message for posterity.”
She flopped back dramatically on the grass and raised one hand to her brow.
“There you are in your canopy bed, pale and wan, under a red velvet cover with gold tassels. Your loved ones are weeping all around you, and you — slowly — lift your head from the pillow for the very last time. What would you say?”
Walter said uncooperatively that in his opinion you should have delivered your message to posterity well before you flopped over on your red velvet deathbed.
“Napoleon’s last word was ‘Josephine,’” Isabelle said. “He died with the name of the woman he truly loved on his lips. ‘Josephine.’ I think that’s beautiful.”
I thought how my last word might be “Isabelle.”
Walter said, “Kit Carson’s last words were ‘I wish I had another bowl of chili.’”
Journey said, “When Jasper’s goldfish died, he wanted to freeze it in an ice-cube tray. But instead we put it in the trash compactor.”
Nobody wanted to talk about Jasper’s goldfish.
“All right, would you rather fade out gracefully?” said Isabelle. “Or would you rather ‘rage against the dying of the light’?”
Isabelle chose fading gracefully, Jasper and Journey picked rage, and Walter picked immortality, due to planning to have his brain circuitry copied into a computer. He says this technology will be available to everybody, possibly within the next fifty years.
I kind of sided with the twins there, because the thought of dying pisses me off. I mean, you spend a whole lifetime learning stuff and educating yourself and having ideas, and then it’s all gone — pfft! — just like that. What kind of sense does that make?
Then I thought how Eli probably didn’t have time for any last words. It’s not like running over a bomb gives you much time.
But it turned out he had last words after all. I found them when I cleaned up the rest of the wreck I’d made of his room.
Way in the back of his closet, he had a stash of these really hot magazines full of naked girls. There was some other stuff back there too, like a box of condoms and a pack of Camel cigarettes and some stuff in a plastic bag that looked like oregano but wasn’t. And next to all that was my old pink dragon, which did look sort of like an anteater, which goes to show that 3-D visual arts aren’t going to be my thing. Under the dragon was a letter in an envelope. DANNY, it said in Eli’s writing, which was really more like printing, but he could do it really fast. So I sat down on the floor of the closet and opened it.
Dear Danny,
If you find this, you must be snooping through these magazines, you little turd. At least I hope it’s you that finds this stuff and not Mom.
And I guess the thing is, if you’re reading this at all, I’m probably not around anymore.
I really believe I’ll make it through fine and that this time next year I’ll be back in the US of A. I hope you’ll never read this.
But if things don’t work out, I hope you’ll understand. Sometimes, when things go wrong, you just have to do the best you can to try to fix them. I’m not sure this war is right, Dan. But I don’t want people to die who don’t have to. You know how I felt when the towers went down. I wanted to be there, helping, and I wasn’t. Maybe I feel like this is my second chance.
Anyway, kid, just in case, here’s what I’d never tell you to your face: you’re the best little brother a guy could ever have. If I’m not around to watch you grow up, I’ll be really pissed.
I feel like I should give you all this advice, but now that I’m sitting here, I don’t know what the hell to say.
Read Catcher in the Rye. It’s a really good book.
Don’t let any of your dumb runt friends talk you into doing anything you don’t want to do.
Don’t ever buy a used car from Bernie Underwood.
If I’m out of the picture, get Jim Pilcher to take you out for that first beer when you turn twenty-one. He owes me big-time for that thing with the raccoon.
Shit. I’m no good at this.
The radio’s playing Sinatra. Some oldie about “All my bright tomorr
ows belong to you.” Hell, maybe it’s a sign. Well, if I don’t come back, they’re all yours, Dan, along with my lucky fishing hat.
I love you.
Eli
And suddenly I was crying like the little kid I’d never be again because I knew that Eli was dead, that this was the last I’d ever in this world hear from Eli.
Those were Eli’s last words.
I told Jim about Eli’s letter, but I couldn’t get Jim to tell me about the thing with the raccoon. He says he’ll save it until I’m twenty-one and we’ve had several legal beers.
“Hey, Dan, I’m no Eli,” he said. “But you need anything anytime, Emma and me, we’ll be right here.”
That felt pretty good to hear, and I told him so.
I told Emma about trashing Eli’s room.
“You think it’s going to get any better at home?” I said. “With me and my mom and dad?”
Emma was starting to get fat then with the baby, and she was drinking yogurt shakes with lots of calcium, so she made me a yogurt shake with calcium too. It was a little weird tasting but a whole lot better than those black-carrot things.
“I don’t know, Danny,” she said. “You want to know that, you need to ask somebody a lot smarter than me. But if I had to guess, I’d say your family’s been like the Secret Garden, all shut up and dead-looking for a long time. Maybe what you did, that’s what it took to get it growing again.”
Next to Walter, Emma might be the smartest person I know.
The first day of school, it felt kind of strange not to sit in the back seat of the bus, like I always had before. Peter Reilly was there, horsing around and punching people in the arm the way he does, but he didn’t even look at me. With Peter, once you’re gone, you’re gone. Just ask one of his ex–serious girlfriends.
Then the bus stopped at Cemetery Road, and Walter got on, lugging his funky old briefcase, and sat down next to me on the front seat, the one that’s as far out as you can possibly get.
“Hi, Dan,” Walter said, and he gave me that crookedy grin.
“Hi, Walter,” I said.
Emma and Jim had a girl baby in January, and they named her Rain. They got married in the spring, just before planting time, and I was the best man. Now they’re talking about baby number two.