Wait for It

by Mariana Zapata

  “I love you too, poo-poo face,” he said as I made my way toward his door, thinking about his words and grinning even as a tiny piece of my heart broke off.

  “Tia, you can buy me socks if you want,” Louie added just as I made it to his door.

  Maybe if I’d been expecting it, his offer wouldn’t have felt like a battering ram to my sternum followed by a nuclear bomb being detonated where my heart used to exist.

  My legs went weak. Grief and something close to misery boxed in my throat, and with a strength I didn’t think I had in me, I turned to look at him without letting the tears burst like Niagara Falls out of my eyes and nodded. Goose bumps broke out over my arms. “I think your dad would like that. Goodnight, Lulu.”

  “Night, dudu,” he called out as I mostly closed the door behind me, biting my lip and swallowing, swallowing, swallowing hard.

  I pressed my back against the wall next to his door.

  Oh my God.

  Oh my God.

  My nose started burning. My eyes began watering, and I gasped for air, for strength, for anything that could get me through the pain slicing through everything that made me, me.

  How did it never get easier to know that life was unfair?

  How did it never hurt any less to know I would never see someone I loved again? Why did it have to be my brother? He hadn’t been perfect, but he’d been mine. He’d loved me even when I got on his nerves.

  Why?

  I hadn’t moved a single inch when I heard Josh peep up, “Aunt Di.”

  Fuck.

  “You’re ready for bed?” My voice sounded cracked and splintered even in my own ears as I made my way to his room.

  “Yeah,” he replied, the sounds of the bed creaking, confirming his statement.

  Wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand and then pulling up my shirt to dab at them, I did the same to my nose and took a deep, calming breath, which probably didn’t do anything because I was three seconds away from bawling. But I couldn’t put off seeing Josh before he fell asleep. It was one of the last few things he still let me get away with every so often.

  When I had myself about 10 percent under control, I forced a smile and stuck my head through the doorway. Sure enough, on the mattress was Josh and right alongside him was my third boy, Mac, with his head on his paws, one eye on me at the door. His tail swished right by Josh’s face.

  “What story did you tell Lou?” he asked immediately, like he knew it had killed me inside. He probably did know.

  “I told him the story about your dad and socks.”

  A small smile crossed his lips. “I know that one.”

  “You do?” I asked as I went around the edge of his bed to sit on the opposite side of where Mac was. I reached across to put one hand on the dog and another on Josh. If he already knew I was upset, there was no point in me hiding it.

  “Yeah. He told me about it.”

  I raised an eyebrow, slightly surprised.

  Josh lazily raised a shoulder, those brown eyes gazing right into my own. “I had to use one of his socks one day when we went to the park,” he explained, his ears turning pink.

  Those all too familiar tears stung the back of my eyes. He’d told Josh about it at least. Given him another memory I didn’t have to. “I’ve had to flip my underwear inside out a couple of times. No big deal. It happens.”

  He gave me a horrified look that immediately had me frowning. “Gross!”

  “What? I didn’t say it was gross you had to wipe your butt with a dirty sock!”

  “That’s different!” he claimed, gagging.

  “How is that different?” I asked, reminded of how many times I’d had this back and forth sort-of arguing with Rodrigo.

  He was still choking and gagging. “Because! You’re a girl!”

  That had me rolling my eyes. “Oh God. Shut up. It’s normal. It doesn’t make it gross because I’m a girl and you’re not. I’d rather be a girl than a boy.” I poked him. “Girls rule, boys drool.”

  He shook and shivered, still supposedly traumatized, and I only rolled my eyes more.

  “Go to bed.”

  “I am,” he played around.

  I grinned at him and he grinned right back. “I love you, J.”

  “Love you too.”

  I kissed his cheek and got a half-assed one in return. On the way out, I gave Mac a kiss and got a lick to my cheek that made me feel just a little better. Just a little. But not enough.

  Sometimes I felt like a traitor for how much I loved them. Like I shouldn’t, because they weren’t supposed to be mine to begin with. Like I shouldn’t think they made my life better when the only reason they were mine, lighting my life up, was because of something awful.

  My heart hurt. It ached. Throbbed. It was heavier than it’d been in a long time. Tears and some kind of shitty bodily fluids filled my nose and eyes and throat, and for a brief second, I thought about going into my closet to cry. That was the usual place I went to bawl my eyes out, ever since I’d been a kid. But the fact was, this house was old and my closet was too small. Just being inside with this weight made me claustrophobic. The kitchen, living room, dining room, and laundry wouldn’t work either.

  Before I knew it, I found myself outside, closing the front door behind me as I sucked in huge gulps of breath that battled my lingering headache for attention. Silent tears—the worst ones—poured out of my eyes as my throat seemed to swell to twice its size. I plopped down on the first step, the palm of my hand going toward my forehead instantly, and I curled into myself as if trying to keep this pain from flaring to power. My nose burned and it was hard to breathe, but the tears kept right on coming.

  Life was unfair and it always had been. It was nothing personal. I knew that. I’d seen that mentioned in the pamphlets I’d read on grief after Drigo died. But knowing all that didn’t help for shit.

  Grief never got any easier. I never missed my brother any less. Part of me accepted that nothing would ever fill the void his death had left in my life or the boys or my parents or even the Larsens.

  Snot poured out of my nostrils like it was on tap, and I didn’t make a single sound or bother cleaning myself up.

  He’d had two kids, a wife, a house, and a job he’d enjoyed. He’d only been thirty-two when he’d died. Thirty-two. In less than three years, I’d be thirty-two. I still felt like I had my entire life ahead of me. He had to have thought the same thing.

  But he hadn’t had years left. One minute he was there, and the next he wasn’t. Just like that.

  God, I missed his stupid jokes and his bossiness and stubbornness so much. I missed how much he gave me shit and never let me live anything down. He’d been more than my brother. More than my friend. More than the person who taught me to drive and helped me pay for cosmetology school. He’d taught me so much about everything. And the things he taught me the best came after he’d died.

  Only he could manage that.

  I would gladly go back to being a selfish, self-centered idiot with awful taste in men if I could only have him back.

  I missed him. So. Fucking. Much.

  “You all right?” a voice carried itself over, damn near scaring the shit out of me.

  Without wiping my face or nose, I looked up, confused and totally caught off guard that someone had walked up without me noticing. My chest was puffing in soundless whimpers and my throat constricted. Yet I shook my head at Dallas who was standing at the bottom of the steps leading up to my deck and told him the truth. “Not really.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.” His tone was so soft that it seemed to reach deeper than his concern and presence did. “I didn’t know somebody could cry and not make a noise.” The frown on his serious face deepened as his eyes scanned over me. That notch between his eyebrows was back again.

  My sniffle in response was watery and a total mess, and without realizing I was doing it, I had my bottom lip sucked into my mouth like that would help stop me from crying even more. It wasn’t really helpin
g when tears kept streaming down my eyes and cheeks, falling off my jaw no matter how much my brain told my tear ducts to quit it.

  “Your head still hurt?” he asked in that eggshell-like voice.

  I shrugged, wiping at the wet places on my skin. It did hurt, but it didn’t hurt worse than my heart right then.

  “Something happen with the boys?”

  I shook my head again, still too afraid to use words because I was sure I’d cry my eyes out in front of this man, and I didn’t really want that to happen.

  He glanced over his shoulder again, that big hand of his going to the back of his neck before he faced me again with a sigh. “If there’s something you wanna talk about…” He scrubbed at the side of his cheek, awkward or resigned or both or neither; I couldn’t blame him—I didn’t want to feel this way. Not now, not ever, and especially not with witnesses who had thought so badly of me in the beginning. “I can keep my mouth shut,” he finally got out, making me look up at him. A small smile crossed that hard face of his, so unexpected I didn’t know how to handle it.

  Tell him? This near complete stranger? I was supposed to say words and sentences to him that I couldn’t even share with my parents? How could I even begin to describe the worst thing that had ever happened to me? How did you explain that your brother died, and that the next thing you knew, your life was going up into flames, and you didn’t know how to put out the fire because the smoke from it was so thick you couldn’t see two feet in front of you?

  I wasn’t some closed-off person who didn’t know how to share her feelings, but this was different. Way different than having someone overhear me arguing with my mom. I could come back from her words. I was scared I’d never be able to come back from the Rodrigo-sized gap my brother had left me with.

  “I’m not… I’m not….” I couldn’t get the words out. They were jumbled and messy, and I couldn’t unscramble them in one breath. I wheezed. “I—I hate this. I’m not trying to get a pity party or attention or anything—”

  My neighbor dropped his head back, the long line of his lightly bearded throat bobbed. “I told you earlier, I know,” he was still talking low. “I thought we agreed to put it behind us?”

  I sniffled.

  Dallas sighed again as he dropped his chin, meeting my gaze with those hazel-green eyes. “You gotta stop crying,” my neighbor said in a gentle voice that broke the camel’s back.

  I wanted to tell him “okay,” but I couldn’t even manage to get that one single word out from how much I was hiccupping, unable to catch my breath.

  “I’m no snitch.”

  He wasn’t a snitch. My chest was puffing with those deadly, restrained, silent tears, and even though a gigantic part of me wanted to tell him I was fine, or at least that I would be fine, and explain it was no big deal, my big mouth went for it as my crying went straight to weeping—gasping breaths, shaking shoulders, a headache that went straight to pounding. “He wants me to give him socks.”

  There was a pause and a “What?” in that rumbled voice that got mostly buried beneath my tears and gasps.

  It probably didn’t even come out of my mouth correctly, but I answered, “Louie told me I could give him socks from now on.” I didn’t want to believe I was wailing, but it was probably pretty damn close to it.

  Through the tears blurring my eyes, Dallas’s lips parted and his face went pale. “You can’t… you can’t afford to buy him socks?”

  I put a hand over my heart like that would help the ache pounding away. “No. I can.” I wiped at my face as I hiccupped and noticed him closing his mouth. “I used to give my brother socks, and now Louie wants me to give him socks since I can’t… I can’t… give them to my brother anymore.”

  There was a pause and then, “This isn’t about the socks?”

  He didn’t even know. How could he know? It wasn’t about the fucking socks. At least not totally. It was about everything. About life and death, and white and black and gray. It was about having to be tough when you weren’t used to it. About having to grow when you’d thought you were done growing. In the back of my head, I knew what I’d said didn’t make any damn sense. But how could I explain? How could I begin to tell him that I had lost a part of myself with my brother’s death, and I was trying so hard to keep what I had left together with duct tape and paper clips?

  “I miss….” My throat hurt, and I swore my entire chest ached. I couldn’t get the words out. Or maybe I just didn’t want to. I rarely talked about Rodrigo to anyone except Van, but Van was different. She was my sister from another mister. With a cracked tone that could embarrass me later on, I blurted out what I could never say to my mom and dad, to this man who lived across the street from me. “My brother died, and I miss him so much.” My voice cracked; it felt like my soul did the same all over again. I rubbed my palm over my mouth, like it would erase the pain those words gave me. “I miss him so, so much.”

  “I’m sorry. I had no idea,” came Dallas’s soft reply.

  “It’s hard… hard for me to talk about.” I shrugged and rubbed my lips again, feeling this crushing weight of heartache and mourning.

  How could this hurt so much after so long still?

  For some reason, I kept on unloading in front of my neighbor. “I have to tell Louie stories because he doesn’t remember him well anymore. I’m pretty sure Josh doesn’t either. And they’re stuck with me. Me. He left them to me.” I rushed out before another half-gallon of tears streamed out of my eyes uncontrollably. I hadn’t believed it after Mandy, and I still couldn’t. They had chosen me, of all the people in the world. “What was he thinking? I don’t know what I’m doing. What if I fuck up more than I already have?”

  I didn’t take into consideration that he didn’t even know I had a brother, much less know anything about him. He wouldn’t understand why I missed him so much. How could he?

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered steadily. His gaze was zeroed in on me like he didn’t know what to do or say. His forehead was lined, his eyes pinched, his mouth slightly parted. He was stuck, and I mean, what was there to say or do? I was unloading on him and crying, and I didn’t even know his middle name.

  “I’m sorry.” I wiped at my face futilely again. “It’s been a long day and you’ve already been so much nicer than you needed to. I’m so sorry. This is Louie’s and his damn sock’s fault.”

  He seemed to study me, some emotion I couldn’t completely comprehend tightening the area around his eyes and the skin along his jaw. “The boys… both of them… are your brother’s?”

  I nodded, sniffling, not even slightly regretting getting all of that out.

  His expression only changed for a brief moment, too quick for me to really process it, and then he frowned. He opened his mouth wider and closed it. His hand went up to the back of his neck and he cupped it. Lines appeared at his forehead. He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, blinking before the words burst out of his mouth. “What the hell are you apologizing for? You’re upset and you miss your brother.”

  I was too shocked to even nod.

  In the blink of an eye, he was looking at me like I was crazy. “You’re still a kid raising two other kids, and you care enough to worry about what kind of people you’re raising them to be. None of that sounds unreasonable to me.”

  I tipped my face back and fanned at my eyes, trying my freaking hardest to get the crying under control. I gurgled some kind of noise that said I heard him.

  Minutes passed with the only sound between us being me making noises. I didn’t want to look at my neighbor, so I didn’t. Eventually, after however long it could have been, he sat on the second step, so close the side of his arm bumped into my lower leg. “How long has it been?”

  “Two years,” I croaked, still waving my hand back and forth. Crying usually made me feel better, but in this case, I wasn’t so sure if that was the case. “The longest two years of my life.”

  The breath of air he let out through his mouth had me eyeing him. He had
his chin tipped up. A car drove by. “I was Josh’s age, I guess, when my dad died, and I still miss him every day. You can get over a lot of shit in two years, but I don’t think anybody would argue that’s long enough to make losing your brother any more bearable,” he informed me in that cool voice that was almost sweet. “Anybody that tells you otherwise has never lost anything or anybody that mattered.”

  I’d never heard truer words spoken.

  “It isn’t long enough. Not even close to being long enough,” I agreed. “Are you ever just… okay with it? Is that what’s supposed to happen? Does it get easier?” I asked him, not expecting an answer and not getting one either. “I forget sometimes that I can’t call him and tell him something funny my mom said, or ask him to come and fix something stupid I did that I don’t want my dad finding out about.” How many times had I faced that reality? I hiccupped, missing him so much more by the second.

  My throat started hurting, and I wasn’t sure whether the liquid coming down over my lip was snot or tears. Frankly, I didn’t care. “I’m never going to get to see him again or mess with him again. He’s never going to shove my face into my birthday cake again or give me birthday licks. He was an asshole, but he was my asshole brother. And I want him back.” The tears started flooding out of me all over again, my chest knotting itself up.

  “Assholes or not, they’re still your family.”

  I couldn’t stop crying. “I know. I had him for twenty-seven years and the boys didn’t even get a dime of that with him. It’s not fair. I don’t want them to grow up with daddy issues, when I know my brother would have killed me so he’d have more time with them. And you know what? I would have been okay with that. If something happened to me, it would have been different.” I wiped at my face again. “This is so fucking unfair for Josh and Lou and my parents. It’s bullshit. It’s just fucking bullshit.”

  He turned to look at me over his shoulder, the yellow lights of the deck lighting up the side of his strong jaw and straight, long nose. “I’m not saying it isn’t bullshit. It is. I don’t know why somebody lives and somebody else dies, but it happens and nothing you do can change that. You can’t feel guilty for being here and him not. That isn’t the way it works.”