The World Without Us

by Robin Stevenson

  Vicky and I walk up to Jeremy’s ward together. “I’ll just pop my head in and say hi,” she tells me. “Then I’ll leave so you two can talk.”

  “Okay.” The hallway smells like antiseptic. My hands are sweaty and my heart is fluttering like it did the time Jeremy and I sat in his kitchen and each drank six cappuccinos in a row. It was one of the very few times we hung out at his house. His mother had this coffee maker that frothed the milk and everything.

  “Mel?”

  “What?”

  “You look tense.” Vicky stops walking, puts her hand under my chin and lifts my face toward her. “Are you all right?”

  I blink back tears. “Just, you know. This is weird.”

  She pulls me in for a hug, and I feel like a little kid.

  Jeremy is awake, propped up on his pillows into a half-sitting position. He doesn’t have the IV bag hooked to his arm anymore, and he’s wearing a gray hoodie over his hospital gown. His eyes are clear and focused, and he smiles when he sees us. “Hey, Mel. Vicky! Hi.”

  “Hi,” I say.

  Vicky crosses the room. “I’m going to give you a very, very careful hug,” she says and puts one arm around him lightly. “There. How are you feeling, Jeremy?”

  I’m glad she’s here, breaking the ice. Otherwise I might just stand here like an idiot, not knowing what to say.

  “Um, embarrassed, mostly,” he says. “Otherwise, not too bad, as long as I don’t cough or sneeze or laugh. Or move. Or, you know, breathe.”

  Vicky smiles. “Good. Well, I’m going to head down and get a coffee. Let you two talk. Mel?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t make him laugh.”

  I can’t imagine it, but I force a smile and wave bye as she leaves.

  “Here, come sit down,” Jeremy says.

  I sit down in the beige chair and pull it closer, wincing as it makes a screeching noise on the tile floor. “So. Um, you look better than you did yesterday.”

  “Yeah. I’m pretty sore, but it sounds like I’m going to be sticking around after all.” He shakes his head. “All kind of hard to take in, you know?”

  I nod, unable to speak.

  “Hey, are you crying? What is it, Mel? I’m okay. Don’t.” He reaches a hand toward me, and I take it in both of mine. “Talk to me.”

  “I just…” I try to hold back the tears, but my voice wobbles all over the place. “I thought you were dead, Jeremy. I couldn’t believe you did it.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, Mel.” He looks right at me, his eyes serious. “I didn’t think about how it would affect you.”

  Because I was supposed to jump with you. I rub my fingertips lightly against the back of his hand. “I still can’t believe it. That you jumped.”

  “I wasn’t sure I was going to. Not right up to the last minute.”

  “I should’ve stopped you,” I say.

  He shakes his head.

  I’m scared to ask, but I have to know. “Could I have talked you out of it? I mean, if I’d begged you not to do it, would you have listened?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” He shrugs. “Maybe I wouldn’t have done it, like, right then. But I’d probably have done it the next day or the next week.”

  I pull one hand away from Jeremy’s to wipe my eyes. “But I didn’t even try to stop you. I mean, that’s what everyone thinks. That I was up there with you because I was trying to stop you. That’s what I told them. Because, you know, I couldn’t tell them…”

  “I know. It’s cool, Mel. Quit beating yourself up.”

  “But it was my idea, Jeremy. I mean, the bridge thing. I was the one who actually suggested it.”

  “Were you? I don’t remember how that started. It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about it before.” He squeezes my hand. “If it helps, I think this was something I had to do.”

  “That’s crazy. No one has to jump off a bridge.”

  “No, I’m serious. I think I needed to do that. I mean, I feel better now than I’ve felt in a long time. Happier.”

  And he looks it, too. He’s got this smile on his face…It’s not like I haven’t seen him smile before, but this isn’t his usual mocking grin. It’s weirdly peaceful and un-Jeremy-like in its sincerity. “So jumping off the bridge made you happy? That makes no sense at all.”

  “I think I had to face death, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know.” I stare at him. “Jeremy, it was a total fluke that you survived.”

  “I don’t think so,” he says. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Of course it was! You know the stats on that bridge.” My voice is rising, and I have to force myself to take a breath and talk softly. “There must be dozens of deaths for every survivor.”

  “Exactly,” Jeremy says. His voice is triumphant, like he’s just proved a point. “The odds were against me surviving, but I did.”

  “But you could just as easily have died. So to say you had to do it makes no sense at all.” I feel like I am talking to a wall, like he’s not really hearing me.

  “I just think I survived for a reason,” he says.

  I remember what he said before, about trying to fall straight. “You mean because you realized you’d made a mistake? Because you decided you wanted to live?”

  “More than that,” he says. “I don’t know. But Mel, when I was in the water and everything hurt and I saw that boat coming for me…the lights on the water…I was in absolute agony, but somehow I knew everything was going to be okay. Better. Different.” He squeezes my hand. “I don’t have all the answers, but what I do know is that I was given a second chance. And now I have to figure out what to do with it.”

  It is all so Oprah-esque. So un-Jeremy. But I squeeze back, feel the bones of his hand, the smooth bumps of his knuckles. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” I whisper. I can’t take my eyes off his face: the dark hair, the high sharp cheekbones, the ridiculously thick dark eyelashes. Nothing has changed and everything has changed. I feel like there are a million miles between us.

  Back home, I help Bill make dinner while Vicky talks on the phone to her friend Hanna, another volunteer from her prison group. “We do what we can,” Vicky is saying. “We can’t control the outcome, Hanna.”

  The outcome, presumably, being that eventually pretty much everyone on death row gets executed. Vicky spends an awful lot of her time supporting the other volunteers. Trying to help them see that what they do is worthwhile. That it makes a difference.

  “Mel, can you make the sauce?” Bill slides the cookbook across the counter to me. You can tell which recipes we always use because the pages are all stained. Peanut sauce is a staple; it even makes broccoli taste good. I pull peanut butter and soy sauce out of the cupboard and rummage in the fridge in hopes of finding cilantro.

  “Vicky said you saw Jeremy today.” He reaches past me and picks up a jar of crushed garlic. “How is he? Spirits, I mean, not ribs?”

  “Good,” I say, finding the cilantro—past its prime but salvageable. “Weirdly good though.”

  “How so?”

  I pinch off the stems and rinse the green leaves, picking off the slimy bits. “Like, he thinks it happened for a reason. I mean, that he survived for a reason.”

  Bill nodded. “Trying to make sense of it.”

  “Yeah, but…” I shrug, exasperated. “It’s not like there’s some master plan here.”

  “My atheist daughter,” Bill says. “You’ve always been a skeptic. Never even bought into the Santa Claus thing.”

  “Come on,” I say. “You don’t think someone reached down and said, ‘Oh look, someone jumping off a bridge. I think I’ll save this one.’”

  “Nope. You know I don’t.” He laughs. “Skepticism runs in the family.”

  “Well then.” I start chopping the cilantro with unnecessary vigor.

  “But it doesn’t much matter what we think.” Bill leans back against the counter, watching me with a thoughtful expression. “Maybe it’s helpful for him to believe tha
t.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “It just seems like a cop-out, you know?”

  “How so?”

  “Like, two days ago, life sucked so much he wanted to die. And now, it’s like all his problems are gone and he’s happier than he’s been since I’ve known him.” I look up at him. “You know? It doesn’t make sense.”

  He nods. “Life sometimes doesn’t.”

  “Then shouldn’t we just, I don’t know, accept that? Not go making stuff up to make ourselves feel better?”

  “Hmm.” Bill shakes his head. “Why so angry, Mel?”

  “I’m not angry!” I realize I’m almost shouting and try to lower my voice. “Well, maybe I am. I don’t know. Maybe I’m angry that my best friend jumped off a f…freaking bridge.”

  “You can call it a fucking bridge if you want,” he says. “Not like I haven’t heard it before. Actually, it’s not like I haven’t said it before.”

  I slap the knife down on the chopping board. “I’m not hungry,” I say. “I’m going up to my room.”

  Bill just nods. “Do what you need to do.”

  I stomp upstairs, hating him for being so reasonable. I want to scream at someone, but getting mad at my father is useless. It just ends up making me feel worse. It makes me think about Jeremy and his father and the disastrous afternoon in Jacksonville and how it was the final straw that sent us driving to the bridge that same night.

  Like everything else, it was my fault.

  Execution Day

  After Jeremy told me about his father that day at the beach, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. It just seemed impossible to me that his father wouldn’t want to see him. I mean, he’d lost Lucas. Jeremy was all he had. And yet it had been almost a year since Jeremy had seen his father. They hadn’t even spoken.

  It made no sense at all.

  And then there was Ramon, whose execution was coming up fast. Unless there was a last-minute miracle, he’d be given a lethal injection and that would be it: life over. Mom had told me that his daughter had come up from Miami to visit again, knowing this would be the last time she saw him alive. She wasn’t planning to come for the execution. She didn’t want to watch that, and I couldn’t blame her.

  Mom hadn’t met Ramon; her advocacy was more arm’s length—petitions, the website, letter writing, meetings with politicians. Her friend Hanna had formed a close friendship with Ramon, though, visiting as often as she could. Hanna had told me that Ramon’s greatest regret was that he wouldn’t get to see his daughter grow up.

  And Jeremy’s dad, who had that opportunity, was just throwing it away.

  It made me furious, and I couldn’t let it go.

  After school on Tuesday, Jeremy and I hung out at the park near my house. We were sitting on the high wooden platform of the old playground equipment—faded blue-and-red plastic slide, rusting monkey bars and a five-foot-high climbing wall. I debated rolling a cigarette and then remembered I had given Jeremy my tobacco and was supposed to have quit. I didn’t think I was addicted, exactly, but I missed the ritual of it, the feel of the thin paper and loose tobacco compressing between my fingertips.

  Jeremy stretched out on his back and put his head on my lap. We still weren’t exactly going out—we hadn’t even kissed yet—but we seemed to be heading in that direction. Maybe. I wanted to be with him all the time, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to risk the friendship by trying to turn it into something more. I pushed the thought away. “Jer?”

  “Mmm.”

  “I was thinking about what you said. About your dad.” I could feel his spine stiffen. “Maybe he’s scared to make the first move, you know?”

  He raised his eyebrows, and I felt my cheeks heat up. I wished I’d used some other expression. “I mean, maybe he thinks you’re angry with him.”

  “Yeah, well, he’d be right.”

  “I know—I mean, you have a right to be. But maybe he’s waiting for you to get in touch with him.”

  Jeremy sat up. “You think I should make the first move, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “You sure it’s my dad you’re talking about here?”

  “What?” My face was on fire. “Yeah, of course. What else?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not like I haven’t thought about it. You know, on and off. I know where he’s living and all that. He’s got an apartment in Jacksonville.”

  “You think you might call him?” I was still feeling flustered about what we hadn’t said. Had he been flirting with me?

  Jeremy made a face. “Too weird. What would I say?”

  “I don’t know. ‘Hi, Dad, it’s Jeremy’?”

  “Yeah, but then what?” He folded his arms across his chest. “I mean, he says hi and maybe ‘it’s been a while’ or something obvious like that. And then? I just imagine this long awkward silence.”

  I grimaced. “Yeah, it’d be hard to just pick up like nothing happened. I mean, you can’t exactly ignore his not talking to you for a year.”

  “He’s not much of a talker anyway,” Jeremy said. “I mean, even when he was around. Before Lucas died. We weren’t ever close like you and Bill, you know?”

  “Yeah.” Jeremy was tall and lanky and dark-haired like his mom; Lucas had been fair-haired and athletic. I wondered if he’d looked like their dad, whom I pictured as a military kind of guy, short hair and muscular build, with a tough-guy attitude.

  “If I was going to do anything, I’d probably go up to Jacksonville and try and see him in person,” Jeremy said.

  “I’d go with you,” I said. “Actually…”

  “What?”

  “Vicky’s going up on Friday. To protest at the jail. There’s an execution scheduled.” I bit my lip, pushing aside a mental image of Ramon and his daughter. “Florida State Prison’s not far from Jacksonville. I bet we could get a ride with her. I mean, if you want.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

  “Come on. What have you got to lose?”

  Jeremy didn’t say anything for a long minute. Finally, he looked at me, his dark eyes shining. “Maybe I don’t want to find out.”

  By the time Friday came, Jeremy had decided to come to Jacksonville with Vicky and me. The trip there was fun: we were skipping school, the sky was blue, Vicky had the tunes playing, and Jeremy came prepared with snacks.

  “Gotta have road-trip food,” he said, sliding into the backseat with a duffel bag. “I stopped at the Winn-Dixie.”

  “Whatcha got?” I asked, suddenly hungry even though I’d only just had breakfast.

  He unzipped the bag and pushed it forward, wedging it between the two front seats. “Licorice allsorts, pretzels, Doritos, chili-lime peanuts…”

  Vicky started to laugh. “We’re driving to Jacksonville, not California.”

  “Chocolate?” I asked hopefully.

  Jeremy passed me an Aero bar. “So, the execution is today, huh? Have you met the guy, Vicky?”

  “No.” She glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “Honestly, I’d find it too hard to do this work if I got to know the prisoners. My friend Hanna is going to have a rough time, I think. She keeps saying what a good guy Ramon is.”

  “Mmm. Will she be there?”

  “Not watching, but yeah, outside with us. Well, with me.” She took a sip of the coffee in her travel mug. “You guys are going to do your own thing, right? Head in to Jacksonville, do some shopping or whatever?”

  I waited to see what Jeremy was going to say. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he told her the whole story—people often did with Vicky. He just shrugged though. “Yeah, we’ll check out the scene at the prison with you and then we’ll head downtown.”

  “You’re welcome to take the car,” Vicky said. “Just make sure you come back for me. Or call. If you want to take the car and go home sooner, I can probably get a ride with Hanna. She drove up yesterday so she could see Ramon.”


  “What time is…I mean, will they announce when they’ve done it? Executed him?” I fumbled with my words.

  “Scheduled for six thirty.”

  “I guess he’ll have his last meal?” Jeremy asked.

  “Cheeseburger, fries, onion rings, coleslaw, chocolate cake and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.”

  I stared at her. “And you know this how?”

  “Twitter,” she said. “Believe it or not.”

  Shortly before noon, we arrived at the prison, parked and walked to a big grassy area outside, where a number of people were gathered. There was a group of maybe ten people sitting near a table with photographs of a young black man—Michael Daniels, one of the two men that Ramon had killed. His family and friends, I figured, waiting to hear that Ramon was finally dead. Some had lawn chairs and coolers—I guessed it made sense if you were going to be there all day, but it seemed weird. “Execution-day picnic,” Jeremy muttered in my ear.

  I looked at the group. One person caught my eye—a frail-looking black woman in a wheelchair. She looked about sixty, her hair gray and tightly scraped back off a thin face. I wondered if she was Michael’s mother and if she’d been waiting sixteen years for the day her son’s murderer would be killed. I wondered how she felt about it, and whether she ever thought of Ramon as a person, and if she knew he had a daughter. I wondered how she’d feel at the end of the day, going home after the execution. Killing Ramon wasn’t going to bring her son back.

  Standing a respectful distance away was a group of death-penalty protesters, many of whom I recognized from various events over the years: Vicky’s friend Pam, who did the website stuff; Hanna, dressed in black, her long red hair tied back in a ponytail; Pete and Gary, a gay couple who, I knew from Vicky, were trying to adopt a brother and sister currently in foster care; and a bearded college professor whose name I’d forgotten. A woman I didn’t recognize was carrying a poster—Gainesville Citizens Against the Death Penalty—and smoking a cigarette. There were some younger people too, university students, probably, many of them holding protest signs: REPEAL THE DEATH PENALTY! TWO WRONGS DON’T MAKE A RIGHT. KILLING IS ALWAYS WRONG.