Now I am radioactive.
Maybe we would have reached the end of our road anyway, even without the accident. I read somewhere that you change friends every seven years, and we’d passed that milestone years ago. We were on borrowed time. We spent our seven years on preschool, ballet classes, soccer teams, birthday parties. Our mothers were friends, so we were friends, too. Little kids don’t ask whether they have anything in common. That comes later.
And I don’t blame Amy, or her vapid sidekicks, or the girls I played soccer with, or any of the others who avoid me now. Because I get it. I’ve been marked by this tragedy and the sight of me reminds them that life ends. Whether it’s a heart attack or old age or an overdose or a car hitting a tree, there’s an end in store for each of us.
It freaks them out.
I know, too, that Amy has her own reasons to hate me for what happened.
Hence my mission: to pay my penance, to get back to normal, back to before. So when they see me, it’s not death they see, or the shadow of the boy who always used to be next to me. It’s proof that life can be reconstructed, that the tree on River Road can be just a tree again, that the sun-bleached flowers can be swept away and forgotten.
I am convincing myself of this as Amy and Zoey and Fiona walk out the swooshing doors. They pause outside, and for a second I think Amy will walk back in and say something to me. Even something angry would be better than the silence we’ve shared for the last four months. Then I see that they have stopped to check out a boy who is walking toward them from across the street. Amy simply gapes at him, but Zoey and Fiona compose themselves in photo formation, hips turned and chins tucked down, as if he might take a mental picture of them as he passes. But he strides past them without a glance and displaces their footsteps with his own as he enters Common Grounds.
There are a few colleges in towns nearby, and sometimes professors decide they want to live a little farther away from where they work. When I see him for the first time, I think maybe that is his story—the son of a professor, or a university student—because he looks thoughtful and very sure of himself, and because he is carrying a thick book, one arm curled protectively around it. He doesn’t balk at the swoosh of the doors (no more ding) or hesitate as he walks to the counter. He doesn’t squint at the chalkboard menu over my head. He just looks me straight in the eye and orders an iced chai with whole milk, as if everything could be so simple.
His voice is deep and soothing. He sounds as if he will read audiobooks someday. Or meditation podcasts.
I notice his voice, and I notice these things, too: his hair, which is curly and dark and flops into place when he pushes his fingers through it; his fingers, which are long and would have been praised effusively by my piano teacher; his eyes, which are chocolate brown.
In short, everything he has in common with—
Everything that reminds me of—
I almost knock Cranky Andy to the floor as I sprint down the back hall, where I gasp for air and wait for the vise in my chest to release my heart.
So much for normal.
I hide in the employee bathroom for an unmeasured amount of time. It feels good to be in a small space. I take comfort in the damp concrete walls, the rust on the metal door, the frayed-edge posters that have faded over the years, as if the effort to brighten up the room has exhausted their colors. The last things I need are sunshine and rainbows. I like things worn and weary these days.
Then Cranky Andy bangs on the door. Back to reality.
I occupy myself with filling little boxes with sweetener packets, carefully lining up their corners. Blue, pink, yellow. The colors of baby clothes. Meant to soothe you and make you forget that the packets are full of chemicals.
The boy is still here, sitting in a far corner, one hand curled around his cup. He glances at me for a few seconds and then goes back to reading his book, flipping the pages, a pile of rustling leaves. I load my tray with the sweeteners and deliver a box to each table, and when I am close enough to peek over his shoulder, I see that he is looking at a page of photographs bound into the middle of the book. The captions are too small for me to read without completely invading his personal space, and also I might accidentally find out what he smells like and if it’s anything like—
The last box of packets slides off my tray and onto the floor, scattering its contents. I duck down to gather them up again, crush them in my hand, and throw the ruined collection back onto the tray. He turns his head just enough for me to see his profile and then stills like a portrait.
“You okay?” he asks quietly.
“I’m fine,” I tell him. I should leave it at that—I’ve already displayed enough buffoonery—but curiosity gets the upper hand. And it feels good to test myself, make myself talk to someone who, even up close, resembles my brother. Not well enough to play him in a dramatic reenactment, maybe, but more than the average guy on the street. “What are you reading?”
He turns toward his table and looks down, as if he’s forgotten what book he’s holding. His hair curls around his ear like leaves on a vine. “A biography.” He puts his finger in between the pages to mark his place, and closes the book so I can see the cover. A man with dark hair and hooded eyes is staring at us, his arms extended to show the handcuffs linking his wrists. The Secret Life of Houdini.
“The magician?” I ask.
“Among other things.”
The book is rippled, worn at the corners. “How many times have you read it?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He looks up at me as he pulls his finger out of the book.
“You’ll lose your place,” I tell him.
He shrugs. “I’ll find it again.” Then he says, “I lied to you.”
“What?”
“I know exactly how many times I’ve read it. See?” He flips the front cover open and shows me the marks, four straight vertical lines with a fifth diagonal slash across them. Three sets of them, plus two extra verticals.
“Seventeen?”
“I’m a creature of habit. Why sugarcoat it?” He grins. “It’s been a while, though. We just moved here and I found this when I was putting my stuff away.”
Sugarcoat would be a great band name, I think. I will try and remember to tell Mel this later. Emboldened by this thought, I step closer. “Do you read anything else?”
“Other biographies, mostly. It’s interesting to see what a person’s life adds up to. Don’t you think?”
Remembering is practically all I do these days. It’s such a relief that he can’t see it written all over me that I almost laugh out loud. “I guess. But does a person have to be dead before you can do the math?”
He smiles, and it looks almost sad. “I like to know how the story ends.”
The door swooshes then and more people walk in, and Cranky Andy bangs two milk steamers together to get my attention.
“Gotta go,” I say lamely.
The boy nods, a single motion. “I’m Chase,” he says.
I roll the name around, fitting it to him like a limb grafted to a tree. I should offer my name in return, but I don’t like to say it anymore. The sound of it scrapes at my heart. It reminds me of my brother, the way our names were always spoken together as if they were one long sound.
“You should try one,” Chase says, lifting the book as if he’s toasting me with it. “There are some amazing stories out there.”
I nod. There are stories everywhere, I think.
When he finally gathers his belongings and exits the automatic doors, he looks back at me—one second, two seconds, he turns away at three—and I envy his ability to look at another person like that, without wondering if he’s breaking some unwritten rule. I wonder if I could read the story of someone else’s life and forgive their faults so easily.
But I can’t devote myself to nostalgia for people I never knew.
I have my own memories to deal with.
I live in limbo, between before and after. Before the accident, and after. And ther
e’s a sizable gap in the middle. Try as I might to ignore this, to act like I didn’t lose a whole chunk of my personal timeline four months ago, I haven’t really climbed out of the chasm yet. I’m still in between. Before is over, and after is going to happen whether I like it or not.
Before the accident, I saw the usual things in the usual way. My eyes communicated with my brain and there was no misunderstanding. Now, after, my heart keeps throwing itself into the conversation. Everything is scratched, tinged with a wash of blackened light. Nothing is clear. It is, I imagine, how a blind person would feel if someone snuck into their apartment and moved everything around. There is a lot of bumping into things. There is a lot of confusion and frustration and temptation to give up and sit down in one place for however much time is left.
The world is misaligned, uneasy in its balance.
But I have gotten very good at pretending otherwise.
At home, for instance, I can walk through the front door like I used to and I can act like the door is just a door, even though it looks (as everything does) a little bit wrong. A little crooked. Too sharp around its edges. I can keep my face perfectly still so that no one knows how much everything reminds me of—
Because I stop myself, you see? I don’t let his name in.
I don’t let myself remember how he always slammed the door too hard, how my mother called to him sharply and he had her laughing seconds later. How he got away with leaving his football gear and his backpack and everything else in a pile because none of us could stay mad at him.
I don’t think of it.
After the accident, everyone was really nice. Too nice. People I barely knew came up to me in the drugstore and hugged me, clutched me too tight and whispered things like “Oh, you poor thing.” Beyond that, they didn’t really know what to say, which became apparent when I tried to go back for the last two weeks of school. Every time I walked down a hallway, the herd of bodies parted like the Red Sea around me. Amy avoided me—she’d duck into a bathroom or down a hallway when she saw me coming—and Zoey and Fiona were only too glad to follow her. I tried to make a joke out of it but no one laughed at my jokes anymore. Except in that nervous way that doesn’t sound as much like happiness as it sounds like concern that someone in the room is unstable and might suddenly do something really inappropriate. And then, to everyone’s relief, Principal Hunter sent me home again and got my teachers to delay my exams. So I could recover. Whatever that meant.
Everyone could see I was different. Of course I was, because what kind of person would I be if my brother died and I stayed exactly the same? But they still don’t know what the real change is, that I can’t make the words come out right, that I can’t feel anything the way I used to. That my heart is twisted, a knot I can’t unravel.
I keep hoping the rituals will fix me.
I call them rituals even though they’re not religious and they don’t involve voodoo dolls or magic spells—I like to think of them as things that are important to do, important in a way that’s beyond my just wanting to do them. So, every day, usually after school, I spend five minutes looking at his high school yearbook. Not the pictures. The index. The list of numbers that signify which pages his pictures are on. I have it memorized by now, but I like seeing the digits printed on the page, always the same, preserved. I cover his name with my fingertip and stare at the numbers: 8, 11, 19, 33, 34, 35, 42, 56, 58, and 73. Senior picture, track picture, student government, photography club, newspaper. Candids in the cafeteria, the chem lab, the parking lot, the library. Best eyes. Best smile. Most likely to succeed.
Fat chance of that now.
But that’s the kind of thing I’m not supposed to say. The joke that isn’t funny.
Mom and Dad don’t know about the rituals. They don’t know much about what I do these days. I don’t think this was ever their intention, this distance. It’s more like a habit that formed over the summer. Right after the accident, there was a frenzy of attention and smothering care—my mother took me everywhere she went, either because she was afraid to let me out of her sight or because she was scared to be alone, and she chattered nonstop about meaningless stuff. But after a few weeks, the mania wore off and she settled into a quiet numbness. She withdrew and my dad did, too, and now we orbit each other like planets. Same solar system, different paths. Different rates of motion.
After the yearbook, I lie down on my bed and close my eyes and feel around for a memory, something with lots of details. Pick an image, bring it into focus until I can see it projected on my eyelids like a movie on a screen. I have my favorites. Swimming in the lake at the cabin when I was five. The day the geese chased us after we ran out of bread and he carried me on his back until we were safe. The first time I beat him at Mario Kart. The dinner we made for Mom and Dad’s anniversary. Me and him in the kitchen, arguing about whether or not the chicken was done.
“Just cut it open,” I told him.
“No way,” he said, and then added, in a terrible French accent, “Eet will ruin zee presentation.”
I go over it again and again, the cooking part. Not the dinner itself. I don’t need to remember Mom and Dad. They’re still here.
Sort of.
The remembering can take a long time or not, depending on how clearly I can get the picture to focus. I stay there until it’s very sharp. It takes work, sometimes. Sometimes I can’t remember exactly what he said after I said something, or what the tomato sauce smelled like after we put the anchovies in, or how it felt when he swung me up onto his back and hooked his arms around my legs. But I can usually get it. That’s the point. To make sure it’s still there.
I do this with one good memory, and then I find a bad one, because I know he wasn’t perfect and I want to be accurate. A fight we had. A bruise he gave me. The time he ripped my teddy bear’s arm off because he was mad at me.
Two weeks before the accident, when I saw him kissing Amy behind the gym.
I try to avoid that one, but sometimes it pops up unannounced, and then I have to let it in. And it carries a potency that few other memories have, because it’s one of the only things we argued about that never got to be okay. How he hadn’t told me. How I was the last one to know. We ran out of time to make it okay. And Amy clearly doesn’t want to discuss it.
After I’m done with the remembering, I go to my closet and take out the green flannel shirt I stole from his room. It still smells like him. But barely. I can’t decide if it would be cheating to buy a new can of his deodorant and spray some on the shirt.
That’s the problem with the rituals: There’s no one else to tell me how to do them, whether I can make new rules or not. No one to tell me whether they’re working. Because sometimes I’m really not sure.
It seems like he’s fading anyway.
sunday 9/21
My parents have already left for church when I wake up. Everyone has their Sunday traditions. Brunch, football games, farmers’ markets, bike rides, hiking, meditation, cleaning the house, washing the car, washing the dog. Ours used to be the early service at St. Anne’s—me trying not to giggle as my brother drew muppety pictures of Father Paul on his leaflet—followed by bagels and hot chocolate at Roundabouts, and then the guys would spend the afternoon watching whatever sport was in season while Mom crafted things in her fabric sanctuary upstairs, and I would wander between them, checking scores and occasionally getting to hot-glue-gun something. It was completely boring. It was perfect.
I hated having to get up early for church. But I loved the windows, especially on sunny mornings, when all of the saints were lit up in crayon colors. They looked so bright and flawless that I was shocked when my grandmother gave me a copy of The Lives of the Saints and I learned about their grisly deaths. I shared it with my brother, the two of us poring over the gruesome pictures and choosing the best stories. My favorite was Lucy, patron saint of the blind. She was tortured, her eyes plucked out, her body covered in boiling oil and set on fire. And when even that didn’t finish her off,
they stabbed her through the heart with a sword. In her portrait, she was blond and pretty, her eyes downcast and bleeding elegantly, and she held a plate with her disembodied eyeballs on it.
Now I can’t stand church, the dusty scent of the air, the shadows, the sunbeams that slice across the pews. I haven’t been inside since the funeral. My parents have stopped asking if I want to go, which is a relief, but the silence when I’m home alone is like the ocean. It used to be soothing, and now it threatens to drown me.
I try to fill it with noise: the television, popcorn in the microwave, the sounds of my own feet walking across every creaky spot on the floor. Today it almost works, until this last method brings me to a loose floorboard that makes a particularly loud creak. In front of my brother’s room, when I’m standing outside his door.
I’ve been in his room since the accident. I took a few of his things for myself, for the rituals. I even sat down on his bed once to see if it made anything happen inside of me. It didn’t.
But now—maybe the rituals are finally working, or maybe it’s just that I’ve worn a hole in myself somewhere and something is leaking out like a toxic gas—the sight of his door, closed like a tomb, makes me want to scream and scream until every corner of the house is filled with my voice.
I clap my hands over my mouth and run into my room. Grab my phone. Call Mel.
She sounds groggy and far away when she answers. “Whaddayawant?”
“I…”
I don’t know. To not be alone. To feel something good for a change. I grab at an answer that will keep her on the phone. “Coffee.”
Mel grunts.
“And I need to pick up my schedule at work.”
This fact has just occurred to me, but it’s true. Or true enough. And I tell myself that the relief that floods my body is all thanks to this, a simple reason to leave the house. I won’t admit, at least not to the point of allowing the words to fully form in my brain, that it might have something to do with seeing a boy who looks a bit like my brother.
Some of the Parts Page 2