Under The Covers

by Baker, Max Q.

  They let me have one or two stolen minutes before I heard someone quietly say, "It's time." And then I felt the sheet being pulled over her head, making her death feel final and equally impossible to comprehend.

  ***

  There was nothing else any of us could do, and Mags' parents wouldn't return until morning. But none of us could leave. We were too stunned. And she was here. We had to stick together. Somehow that group atmosphere helped, since we were all going through the same thing. And we were there for her, and each other.

  I had arrived too late. In a way, we all had arrived too late, since none of us got to see her alive again after the accident.

  Bo and I didn't talk. I think we were overwhelmed with guilt and grief. If my phone hadn't been on mute, Bo and I might have been out on a date (that we might not admit was a date), and I would have felt even worse right now. Ryan was comforting her, thinking she needed his arms around her, his hands in her hair. Maybe she did. Death does funny things with your head; really messes you up and makes you reevaluate your priorities.

  I started to feel suffocated. I excused myself and went looking for a coffee vending machine. I would have asked if anybody wanted anything, except then someone might have come with me, or I might have had to carry a mess of shit that I didn’t want to, and come back right away.

  And I wanted to be alone, to call Robby and let him know what had happened.

  Standing by the glass that stared out at the ambulance entrance to the Emergency Room, I called his cellphone, but there was no answer. It had been one of those nights. Since I really wanted to tell him about Mags, I decided to call his house.

  His mother answered. I figured if he weren't home, I could tell her to have him call me as soon as possible. I could tell her that something had happened to one of our friends. I could say that it was very important. But before I had a chance to say much at all, his Ma told me "Robby went out. With that trampy girl a yours. Mags."

  For the second time that night, I died. I am not sure if my hair literally stood on end, but it sure as hell felt that way as a dark chill ran down my spine. "Have you heard from him since?" I asked, too afraid to tell her what had happened. I didn't want to make her sick with worry when I had no information at all about Robby. I stared through the window at the ambulances pulling around front.

  "No," she said.

  I stuck with my original plan. "Have him call me as soon as you hear from him. It's extremely important. Something happened to one of our friends."

  I could hear the shock in her voice. "Is everyone ok?"

  "Not really, but that's what I'm trying to find out," I answered, honestly. "Just have him call me, if he can." I know I shouldn't have added the 'if he can' part, but I was scared now, and she didn't understand the underlying meaning of what I was saying.

  I hung up, certain that God was punishing me way out of proportion for my sins.

  I ran back to the others asking if anyone had heard anything about Robby. I quickly told them his Ma had said he had gone out with Mags.

  That same ashen, grief-stricken look of panicked terror spread from face to face. No one had any information. Bo grabbed my arm and clutched it so tight that she dug her nails into my flesh and drew blood. I didn't care. That was the least I deserved.

  We ran to the Emergency Room and checked with the ER and Admitting staff to see if anyone else had been brought in with Mags. "No," they said.

  While we did that, Ryan called the police to see if he had been taken somewhere else. He had not. Ryan suggested maybe he had been thrown from the car and they hadn't found his body. We all froze, hearing that suggestion. But Ryan shook his head. The police were telling him no.

  Chris was banging his head against a wall, unable to deal with anything else.

  Amane sat on a chair, her feet pulled up on the cushion, her arms folded around her knees. She was curled into a ball, her face buried from sight.

  [ The Morning After ]

  It was a long sleepless night for all of us, and it wasn't until morning that we found out what had happened. Those of us who had school or work that Monday called in sick.

  Robby had been picked up by the cops, walking the street, stoned out of his mind on beer. He had been pissed off and stumbling drunk. He was thrown in the tank for public intoxication. His Ma got the call in the middle of the night, but she was so mad at him, she didn't pick him up until morning. She wanted him to suffer and have some time to think about what he had done.

  And she certainly wasn't about to admit to me that he was in detox.

  Of course, she didn't know that our best friend had died and that we were all worried sick about Robby.

  As soon as the first ray of sun poked over the horizon, I called her again. She still wasn’t talking, but I told her about Mags. That changed everything. She felt terrible. She opened up and told me where he was.

  ***

  When she got to the jail, normally, she would have laid into him for being taken into custody, but after hearing about Mags, she let it go. There was a time and a place for everything, and sometimes God dealt out punishments far worse than parents.

  As for the rest of us, everyone wanted to know what had happened.

  We agreed to meet for breakfast at a greasy diner, squeezing into a round corner booth. Every one of us looked like shit, and Robby was too hung over to eat. He had gotten his heaves over with at the station, but still had no appetite. Even the smell of vittles made him green. We waited. No one wanted to rush him, but we had to know. We were looking for any information that helped us fill in those last few missing hours with Mags.

  He didn't look anyone in the eye. His fingers tore the corner of the paper placemat in front of him, picking at it with his dirty cracked fingernails as if it were a horizontal beer label, shredding it a bit at a time.

  "She called me up and said that W2, Way, had blown her off," he began.

  I grimaced, but it was true. I thought that was a little harsh to share so bluntly under the circumstances. I whispered, “My phone was on mute. It was an accident.” By then, they all knew that, though.

  Robby continued. "She asked if I wanted to go party." He shrugged. "I said, 'Sure, what the hell?'" He looked up at me. "I wasn't trying to go behind your back, none. It wasn't like that."

  My eyes stared into my black coffee, fascinated by the ripples as I tipped the dirty, smelly porcelain mug. I nodded in silence. Even if he had been going behind my back, I didn’t have the right to say a damned thing about it.

  He continued. "She picked me up, and my Ma was as thrilled as ever to see her, asking why she didn't put some clothes on? The usual shit. We went into town and did some bar hopping and played some pool. She kept looking around like she was on the prowl for something, and it wasn't me. I'm not even sure why she called me. Maybe she didn't want to be alone. She made some weird comment about no one understanding her. She was all fired-up that you cut her off on the phone. Said you had had some stupid fight. We drank some more, and I was starting to get lit.”

  The longer I listened, the more I felt the dig of accusation, and guilt.

  Robby kept going, staring at that torn placemat. "Then she found some guy she knew and disappeared with him. I sat there alone like some fool that didn’t have the sense God gave a Billy goat. Drinking my beer, watching some sports team I didn't care about on TV. When she came back, she showed me a bag of pills she had scored, some roofies. Said it was time to 'serious party.' Said this stuff would blow our minds, and we wouldn't care about anybody or anything ever again.” Robby guiltily glanced up to see if we were buying his story.

  Everyone was silent. Watching. Listening. Waiting.

  Robby stared back at the tabletop and continued. “I was kinda pissed at her for leaving me there for so long, and honestly, I was wondering what she had been doing with the guy for so long. It doesn’t take thirty minutes to buy some drugs. I was kind of mad, since she was seeing Way, and I thought, well, you know. I shrugged her off, said I did
n't want no pills. That made her mad. Tried to talk me into it. Got bent out of shape even more when I shook my head. 'I'm good with my beer,' I said. That's when she told me to fuck off. She was going to take them all herself, find a real man who wasn't afraid to party hard. I think she was high before she even picked me up at my mom's. She was just acting weird. All wired and fidgety, really short tempered. Weirder than usual. I took a swig of my beer, and kept a straight face. Just said, 'Whatever,' and kept looking at the TV on the wall. It had already kept me company for half an hour. I was good with it. She told me to fuck off again, and said that I could walk home, and then she took off. That was it.”

  After a thoughtful glance out the window, he continued, “I thought about calling someone, but honestly, I was feeling really weird about the whole night. I just wanted to get lost in my beer and be by myself. Guess I got trashed and started wandering the streets, swearing about the whole thing to random strangers, punching and knocking over trashcans, and shit. I don't know what her problem was, but, I have to wonder if she did this on purpose. The car thing." He looked worse than all of us as he finished.

  The others were freshly losing the fight to hold back tears.

  None of us would ever know how much of his story was true, or how much he had left out. But it was more than any of us had known, and it helped to explain some of those last few hours and put the whole thing in context.

  I asked, "What did that guy look like? The one who gave her the pills?" Like Robby, I wondered what they had been doing while they disappeared for 30 minutes. It didn’t feel right to me. Something didn’t fit into place. I growled, "I'd like to find him and beat the living shit out of him."

  Sympathetic heads nodded around me.

  Robby tore some more long thin strips from his placement. He shook his head. "He was too far away, and it was too dark. I'd already had too much to drink."

  "Someone killed her," I said. It was true.

  Chris nodded solemnly.

  On the other hand, I felt like I had killed her. Why did she need to get so messed up? Bo was pretty quiet too. Had she talked to Mags about yesterday afternoon, like her email had hinted she might? Had she tried to do the right thing and admit that she had feelings for me?

  For months, I had thought of myself more as a distraction for Mags than anything else, but Bo had said she never normally hung with the same guy for more than one or two dates. Mags and I had been together for over half a year. And when Mags and I had fought in the car, she used the L-Word. Love. She had said we were dating and thought I knew. Maybe that's what she meant when she told Robby that no one understood her. She meant me.

  But Mags seemed to be looking for something more, something deeper, and didn't know how to act. She thought she was already giving me as much of herself as she could. She was trying so damn hard to reach out and meet me halfway, and all the while, I kept slipping away. Through her fingers. The harder she tried to hold on.

  Cast aside for Bo. By Ryan. And then me.

  When she talked about being broken, she was describing herself. She did that a lot, but I didn’t realize any of it till a long time later. She was trying to be something she wasn’t, wanting what she couldn’t have, and hoping everything would magically change along the way.

  Mags and I had been more alike than I had known. But for different reasons.

  I waited in silence, then with an air of accusation, I commented, "She left me a voicemail from her car."

  Robby froze. His hands stopped moving. I sensed his eyes go wide. "What did it say?" he asked, nervously.

  "Nothing." It was true, but I wanted to appear deliberately evasive. There were storm clouds brewing under my surface.

  Bo whispered, "We all killed her."

  Amane complained, being overly literal, "She did this to herself. We didn't give her those drugs. We didn't make her take them. We didn’t drive her car under the influence. Normally we protected her from that."

  Chris knew that better than anyone. He frequently drove her home. He looked like a clock that was being wound too tight, ready to snap.

  Amane continued to argue, "She was out of control, and we didn't try to stop her. I don't mean just last night. I mean in general. We all knew she was drinking too much, and using, but ... what did we do to try to stop that?"

  Ryan tried to mediate. "We didn't do enough to prevent this or help her, but the decisions she made were her own. There was something going on there that none of us realized; something worse than we saw on the surface."

  Chris was having a difficult time processing his anger and sorrow. He picked up a dull stainless steel knife and started pressing his finger along the edge. “Mags was strong,” he said. “Someone had to break her. Who had the strength to do that?”

  Bo and I remained silent. Guilt clouding our thoughts. How I wished Chris could have made one of his usual senseless remarks instead.

  Robby fidgeted and looked out the window. “I’m telling you, this guy …”

  Suddenly, Chris stared at Robby’s neck, noticing what looked like cuts from a razor blade. “Or did somebody put up a fight?”

  Robby felt his neck, and looked scared. “No! It’s not what it looks like. I’m involved with some girl who likes to cut me.” He stared at Amane, wondering if she knew about Rayne.

  Chris nodded strangely. “Interesting.”

  [ A Funeral ]

  The funeral did little to bring closure for any of us.

  The cemetery was filled with Spanish moss hanging from the expanse of ancient towering trees and carefully landscaped grounds. It was beautiful, serene, and eerie. With the ancient trees and the weathered granite statues, you could almost imagine the ghosts of children and civil war veterans walking unseen among the living.

  We - meaning Bo, Ryan, Amane, Chris, and myself - were all together while the minister stood before the raised coffin to say a few words. Co-workers, and miscellaneous acquaintances from different walks of her life also attended.

  Mags' parents were there too. Her mother couldn't stop crying. Her father had the cold chiseled jaw of a well-trained military officer who had seen his share of death and sorrow.

  Bo's mother stood behind them, feeling their pain very deeply. It was hard for a parent to imagine another parent losing her child. It was one of a parent’s greatest fears. It was too close to home.

  Bo couldn’t stop crying. And the rest of us were having a hard time keeping it together. No one expected us to, but it's one of those things. You try to keep a strong face until you hear certain words that remind you death is permanent. And once one person loses it, it's hard for anyone to keep it together. And then you wonder why you were trying at all, since you hurt so damned much inside.

  But the funeral wasn't without incident. Robby had chosen not to join us, but then just as the minister had begun to speak, we saw his big brown van, the Beast, pull up and park along a dirt service road a few hundred feet away. The van was facing us, with the engine running. It had an amped and antagonistic attitude, the way it was idling. We could see Robby sitting behind the wheel, staring. It almost looked like he was drinking a beer, the way his hand was moving, but he was too far away to be sure with the sun reflecting off the glass.

  A crushed can flew out the window of the van. That confirmed the first theory. He was there, and he was drunk.

  He seemed to grab another beer.

  And while the minister was trying to read a prayer, and help us to send Mags to her eternal peace and help us come to terms with our loss, Robby turned on his van's stereo. He gradually cranked it up as loud as he could, to make sure he had our attention.

  It was "The Harold Song" of Kesha. Mags had loved Kesha, so I knew a mess of her songs pretty well by then.

  At first, we all took turns looking at him wondering what the hell he was doing. Then we took turns giving him head gestures; and hand gestures telling him to cut it off. When that didn’t work, we began waving our arms above our heads; and finally rude gestures for him to s
top being so inconsiderate.

  But he ignored us.

  The adults were getting pretty mad too, and someone from the funeral home was speaking into a wireless radio, to contact security.

  Before the police got close enough, Robby threw the van into gear and peeled out of there, chewing up the grass. His behavior was disturbing. We didn't know if he was trying to give her a tribute; or if he was making an accusation, or a confession. The lyrics had an accusatory feel.

  Maybe he was just drunk, guilty, and crazy.

  With the 90 second distraction removed, the minister apologized for Robby and finished the prayer.

  We threw our roses on her coffin before it was lowered into the ground.

  Even her father broke down, as the coffin sank into the earth.

  We each said a prayer and our silent farewells. I lingered longer, realizing I had so many unresolved feelings and angers. I wanted to throw myself into the hole with her, to beg her forgiveness for every one of my shortcomings and mistakes.

  I knew that Mags and I had had a complicated relationship that - on the surface - appeared to be nothing but superficial. And I knew that I had never given my heart to her, since I could never stop loving Bo. But somewhere inside, we had a friendship. She intrigued me with her moments of intelligence and insight; amused me with her antics; loved me the best she could; and trusted something about me so deeply that she gave me something of herself that she had never given to anyone else.

  And it all fell apart with that fight in the car, the night before her death.