by Ash Parsons
The captain organizes a search of the yacht, above and below decks, crew areas and engine room, while we wait for the dinghy to return.
The search of the boat is efficient and thorough. Joshua is not there.
* * *
• • •
The dinghy returns; there is no sign of Joshua. No sign of anyone. No sign of anything other than swells and chop.
“Is that a real camera?” Artie asks, voice sharp as she points to a tinted opaque bubble above the deck.
Then we’re all walking, following Artie, who’s following the captain to the bridge and the electronics wall behind it. There are only a few cameras on the yacht, mostly on the decks and in the engine room and kitchen. Motion activated and for security and liability purposes only, he assures us, as he pulls the footage up on the computer.
We watch time race backward. All of us rewinding though the nightmare of our activity in the dawn, now day.
He rewinds back to near dark and stillness.
I see myself on the screen, sobbing, moving with rapid abruptness backward from the deck as I am rewound, rewound, until I disappear and the deck is empty.
The towel and the shirt rest over the phone, a still picture waiting for the hands that will pick them up, put them back the way they were.
A blip as the motion sensor is activated, and he’s there. A head in the water, receding. Then rewinding closer. Then swimming, then floating. Rewound onto the ladder, rewound onto the deck.
What was he thinking?
My ears are ringing, and I don’t remember gripping the chair back in front of me, but I am, curling into myself, into this injury. A sob clawing its way up to my mouth, ripping hook-sawed breaths from my lungs.
My voice whispers his name. My voice comes before my tears, in slow motion, in a moment of time reversal, time stoppage, time restart-rewind—why is this moment so long? This moment a held breath, burning in my chest like an arrested scream.
Then the tears are there, and I can’t see past them, can’t register anything other than the shocked noises of the others around me, sounds of grief and disbelief as we try to watch, as the yacht’s captain rewinds to before—
Then he hits Play.
And the horrible moment enacts itself again. A tragic time capsule of a moment before it was too late.
For just an instant, the screen is blank. Then a blip, and a time stamp appears on the lower corner, 4:15 A.M. Then a head, Joshua’s passing close beneath the camera and triggering its motion sensor. We watch on the screen as he climbs down the steps to the aft deck.
He stands, staring out into the water for what feels like a long time.
Then he disappears for a moment and returns with a towel. He shakes the towel open and drops it on the bench.
On the screen in front of us, Joshua bends and carefully places his cell phone on the bench. Then he stands and pulls his shirt over his head.
Beside me, I hear Speed murmur a denial, like he could speak to this image of someone we love, could make him stop. Could make him understand the danger.
Could make him turn back.
Then Joshua looks away from the ocean, looks back at the boat. Maybe he heard something.
After holding still for a moment, he smiles.
It’s a strange, indecipherable smile. It changes as you watch. First it’s the open smile of a kid sneaking out at night. The smile of climbing into my bedroom window while trying to be quiet, and failing utterly.
The smile from Marchant. Eager.
That smile I haven’t seen in so long; it lights up my heart in pain and love, sending spears into my belly and my chest. Into every limb.
But then it changes, and the smile becomes sad. A smile like falling. Like a weight, like sorrowful knowledge.
Joshua turns his back on me, on the camera, and faces the open ocean.
Then he walks to the deck edge. He pulls the ladder out and places it in the water, taking a moment to make sure it is connected to the boat deck correctly, so he’ll have a way back.
Back onto the boat. Does he plan to return?
Then he turns and climbs down it halfway. He sits on the deck. His shoulders heave with deep breaths twice as his head falls forward a moment.
Is the water cold?
His arms tuck in, like mine do now as I watch him, a cradling of self.
Then quickly, without looking back, he pushes away from the deck into the Pacific water.
I can imagine him whooping, or gasping. Or laughing, or crying—all are possible after that smile.
He paddles in the water, visible for a moment. He floats on his back, and I can’t see his feet. I think he has them tucked into a rung of the ladder so he won’t float away.
Then he sits up in the water, head and shoulders just visible. He swims back and forth, doing a lap parallel to the aft deck.
Then he turns and swims out, away from the deck lights, into the night-black water.
Away from the boat. Away from even the dive buoy, a blinking light to the left of the boat. Striking out with assured strokes, Joshua swims away as if he knows where he’s going. What he’s doing.
The back of Joshua’s head is just visible for one final moment. And then it can’t be seen at all.
He disappears behind the drawn curtain of the night.
The pain is startling; it’s physical, deep in my body like I can feel my heart snapping, a wet, rupturing break. Then every sob claws its way out of the pieces, talons of self-annihilating grief, and I’m lost to it.
A crew member next to me curses and murmurs a prayer.
Then they’re searching again, back in the small boat. Other crew members are donning scuba gear.
Speed’s voice breaks through my haze.
“He would have left a note.” His tone says what his words stop short of saying. What none of us has voiced aloud. If he had planned on killing himself.
Artie steps close to him. Her manicured hands alight on either side of his face, pulling him down to look down at her. Making him listen.
“We’ll find him.”
The fear in her eyes says we won’t.
Speed yanks his head away. He takes two steps back and then turns, racing away from us. From this moment.
There is an ongoing jabber of incomprehensible voices, giving orders or sobbing, looking at tide and current charts, trying to determine a direction for our desperate search.
I hear their voices, Artie’s and Santiago’s. The words fall into my ears like a malediction.
Why, we should have, we didn’t, why—
It’s a litany now, a last-list prayer, confession: What should I have done? What should any of us have done? To protect him, even from himself?
The curse of the knowledge, this time-stuck moment of hell. This is hell. This moment is hell—and it’s real, and it’s here on earth, and if hell has layers, this is the center of it.
Speed walks back into the crowded room, dragging his feet like he can barely keep himself upright. He weeps, his face a mask of anguish.
Joshua’s notebook is in his hand.
He holds it out to me.
I take it. Remember Joshua scrawling in it, time after time. Racing hand to keep up with racing thoughts.
I open it, flipping backward from the end, blank pages fluttering by. Until I see Joshua’s handwriting scrawling out in uneven lines:
Orpheus’s Last Lyric
No path, can’t see the way
End of days, everyone pays
I’d say good-bye, I’d say good-bye
A moving target the final verse
No longer fighting—this isn’t a curse
Don’t be angry, this isn’t sad—
All it takes is all I had.
No path, can’t see the way
Just more reasons
Everyone pays
Can’t get away, can’t get free
Can’t see another possibility
Go home, go home
Sweet one, go home.
I’d say good-bye, I’d say good-bye
Forget that you knew me
Or remember you did—
If you were looking, I never hid.
Forget that you knew me
Or run far away
Perhaps we’ll meet again—
Someday.
I am—
Not singing but howling—
Not waving but drowning—
Not flying but falling—
Not going home—
Just going away.
I’d say good-bye
I’d say good-bye
Good-bye before I change you
Good-bye before I hurt you
Good-bye before we met
Good-bye always good-bye—
Easier than Forget
“No, no, no.” My voice sounds like a breath, chanting a prayer against what I know. What I feared.
13
CAPSIZED
Hours pass. The Pacific sun bright and warm, the ocean sparkling, winking. A perfect day, and I can’t wake from this nightmare.
The divers and the crew in the dinghy return, with no sign of Joshua.
The Coast Guard joined the search effort a while ago. The ship’s captain is talking about currents and statistics, how easy it is to become disoriented in the water. How easy to misjudge and become tired. To get a cramp, to panic, and to submerge.
Artie nods, absorbing the words. She looks at me.
“We have to let them know,” she says.
Ty and Livie.
A sob that sounds like a cough chokes out of Speed. I’m clinging to him, our hands squeezing pinch-tight in an urge to come awake. Come awake.
Speed fights the words out. A forlorn hope. “But. Isn’t it too soon? There’s still a chance . . .”
At that, Artie breaks down. Something I’ve never seen, never before this moment. Even when she had pneumonia during tour and didn’t miss a day, and dealing with the aftermath of Dallas. She didn’t stop.
Now she stops. Stops talking, stops trying to control, to spin, to manage. Crumples to the sofa, sobbing. It’s disorienting, and drives the spike of loss deeper into my bones.
Eventually, Artie speaks the words again as I think them.
“We have to call Livie.”
Speed makes a noise, but he brings my phone over to the couch. He perches behind us, touching our shoulders.
“I can talk to her,” Artie says as I stare at the number without hitting Send.
“It’ll take both of us,” I say.
“What time is it in Georgia?” Speed asks.
“It’s the morning,” Artie says.
“It doesn’t matter what time it is.” I push the button.
It rings.
“Hello?” Tyler’s young man’s voice cracks on the lo?
“Ty . . . ” My voice is flat, carefully neutral. “Is Livie with you?”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
Maybe my voice isn’t as smooth as I thought.
“Get Livie,” I say, and the tremble is there.
“Mom!” Tyler yells, and I can hear him running, doors opening, and then I hear Livie’s voice call, “What?”
I hear the large-room hiss as Tyler puts me on speaker.
“It’s Rox,” Ty says, and his use of my childhood nickname, the one from Joshua, wrings the sob from my throat.
“Is everything all right?” Livie says.
The words spill out of me like poison filling a clear reservoir.
“I’m so sorry. There’s been an accident. Or maybe not an accident. We don’t know.” Then I lose the words, my voice frozen.
Artie takes a deep breath and reaches for my phone. “Livie, it’s me. Joshua seems to have gone swimming in the middle of the night. He never came back. We have the Coast Guard searching for his b—for him. It’s not looking good.”
Ty sobs a choking cry for his big brother. Livie is less sentimental. She almost sounds angry.
“What do you mean, ‘not looking good’? Where the hell is he?”
“We don’t know,” Artie says. “It’s been hours with no sign.”
“That’s not possible.” Livie is not ready for this news. None of us is.
“Livie . . .” Artie says. “I’m sorry. We’re all just so . . .”
And then it sinks in across the miles. A howl pierces the air. Livie.
Artie murmurs comfort, then takes control.
“I’ll have travel arrangements made. I’ll send an assistant to help you with packing, with anything you need. Should I have Dr. Matt send a prescription?”
I want to scream at her, but the urge is split inside me, separate from how we are united now, facing this horror. This loss.
We’re crying, we’re planning, we’re trying to handle it.
Artie speaks the words, becomes the captain of our capsized world. Artie will arrange everything.
Then she’s done talking and the phone is back in my hand. I crawl back onto the sofa, pull Speed with me.
We huddle under a blanket together, holding each other like little kids pretending the world cannot see us. The phone is clamped to my ear.
I’m off speakerphone. It’s just me and Tyler.
Crying with each other, long distance made hideously close.
And then I’m off the phone and Speed is holding me, both of us crying without words. In my mind, I hear Joshua, can’t stop hearing Joshua.
I’m sorry for everything.
Anger lashes through me. I can’t believe he would kill himself. But if he didn’t—
Then it was as if he knew something might happen. A pervading sense of doom that he lived with, couldn’t shake. Ever since Dallas, maybe even before that. Ever since he couldn’t be anyone other than Joshua Blackbird.
But the towel. He meant to come back. Didn’t he? He wouldn’t do that to us. He wouldn’t do that to me.
He loved me too much to hurt me like that.
Was he scared? When he started to flounder? When he got a cramp or when he realized he had gone too far?
When he realized he was drowning?
My mind has become the security footage, playing back and playing back. The moment when Joshua sat at the top of the ladder. When he went into the water. When he floated on his back, feet hooked in the ladder.
When he swam away from the light.
14
ALTERNATE UNIVERSE
Twelve hours later, the Coast Guard officially changed their mission from “search and rescue” to “recovery.” Joshua Blackbird was presumed dead.
Then he was declared dead.
Time warped, stretching and shrinking, not for a moment feeling real. Days passed in a surreal blur.
There was a good-bye, a memorial service at a cemetery, even though we had nothing to bury. There was a stone, a plaque would arrive later. All of it happened there in LA. The loss was everywhere, and so were the reporters. The television stations, the journalists, and bloggers. Birdies across the globe held vigils—an outpouring of loss.
How can you pour out your loss?
If I could pour out loss, I would. I would allow it to gather and spill, like grains of sand, always more, an ocean of it, corrupted sediment that wrenches up and out, continuously.
In LA we moved carefully around each other. Livie was all red eyes and dazed wandering through the mansion. Tears and talk of heaven.
Ty would hover on the edge of a room if I was in it, waiting for me to see him before he came in. Surprising me every time with his new height, even as he slouched. With his young man�
��s broadening shoulders.
Even though he’s only a year younger than me, I still can’t help thinking of him as Joshua’s pesky kid brother.
We all look older now, I guess. Carrying the weight of loss in our faces and bodies.
But under Ty’s grief I could still see the sun-bleached ease of his life before Joshua Blackbird. Another boy from Marchant.
That helped me talk to him, late nights in the mansion kitchen, when we couldn’t escape our loss, even in sleep, because he was not like his brother in so many ways.
Ty was certain, completely certain, that Joshua’s death was accidental. Our late-night conversations were a tiny echo of the wider world, where debate raged online, on Twitter, on Tumblr, and on gossip sites and shows.
Was it suicide? In that column put the seeming farewell of “Orpheus’s Last Lyric.” Add the numerous reported struggles. The breakdowns. The stalker attack. The pressure. The fame. The largesse with his money—was he trying to send a signal? His father’s death. A family history of depression.
Was it an accident? In that column add the towel. The careful placement of his shirt over his phone. Both resting as if Joshua meant to pick them up again. Meant to climb out of the water and dry off. Add to that the happy kid’s smile, anticipating a swim. Add everything he had, everyone who loved him. A sold-out tour, the world his for the asking.
Add to either column his other depressive or obscure lyrics before they were reworked by other writers into more marketable Joshua Blackbird songs. In one column, these lyrics showed a pattern of depression; in the other, the growth of an artist learning his aesthetic. Which made “Orpheus’s Last Lyric” part of a larger shift of work, not a singular farewell.
Tyler’s voice remained calm, even as he heard my doubts. Even as he heard the damning arguments that showed Joshua’s death could have been suicide.
He is still steadfast in his certainty that it was an accident. I want to believe that with everything that is in me. I want to believe it with every breath.
I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night, every night, wondering what I didn’t do that I could have. That I should have.