by Callie Hart
“You should have gone after him,” I snarl, pushing past him out of the bedroom.
He follows me, bare feet thumping against the floorboards. “Ha! Yeah, right. I make questionable decisions all the time, but I’m not that stupid, darlin’. I don’t have life insurance and chasing after a category five hurricane does not sound like a good time to me.”
God, I could throat punch him. “You should have called me, then. Told me what he was doing. I would have come.” My cell phone’s already in my hand. I’m already pulling up Alex’s contact info on the screen. A second later, I’m hitting the green call button.
“Sorry, but again…I wouldn’t bother.” Zander gestures to something on the floor. I stoop down and pick up…oh, that’s just fucking great. It’s his cell phone. Smashed beyond recognition, the metal warped and flattened.
“What the hell happened?” I look up at Zander, expecting a reasonable explanation for this, but then I see just how ridiculous he looks and realize I’m not going to get anything sensible out of him. “Urgh, never mind.”
Where the hell would he have gone? Did he run out of booze? Maybe he went out to grab some more. But no…Zander said he threw up in his guitar case. He couldn’t have been feeling well. More alcohol was probably the last thing he wanted. So then what? I stand by the front door, pressing my fingers against my brow, trying to think. “It’s his brother’s fucking funeral this morning, Zander. I can’t believe you’d let him do this. Not today.”
The music stops, the song that was playing coming to an end, and for one second a complete, consuming silence floods the empty spaces inside the apartment. It feels alive and angry.
“What did you just say?”
I give Zander a withering sidelong look, surprised when I see his expression. He looks stunned. I’ve seen him arrogant. I’ve seen him amused. I’ve seen him annoyed. But I’ve never seen him like this. The swagger is gone, and suddenly he doesn’t look like a member of a potentially very dangerous motorcycle club. He looks like the seventeen-year-old high school student that he is. “What do you mean, it’s his brother’s funeral today?”
Oh, this just gets better and better. “He didn’t tell you? Of course he didn’t tell you.” Makes perfect sense, really. Alex has been so shut down, getting him to speak to me has been a labor of love. Alex’s friendship with Zander is clearly complicated, but I can see it for what it is—a love/hate relationship. It didn’t even cross my mind that Alex would have kept this from him, though. Sliding my phone back into my pocket, I sigh, the weight on my shoulders far heavier than it was a moment ago. Telling this story isn’t something I relish.
“Ben and the woman who was fostering him, they were in a car accident. They…neither of them made it.” I keep it as simple as possible. I can’t talk about Jackie’s perforated lungs. How she drowned in her own blood. I can’t talk about Ben’s brain bleed, or how he slipped away from this world without anyone sitting on the backseat beside him, holding his hand.
Zander’s face is ashen. “That isn’t funny, sweetheart.”
“You think I’m joking? Christ, what kind of person would joke about something like that?”
“Tell me you’re fucking with me,” he persists. “That’s why he destroyed himself last night? That…” Shaking his head, Zander slumps back against the wall behind him, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Ben died?”
I sympathize with him. It doesn’t feel real to me, either. I still can’t wrap my head around any of this. “Zander, you gotta think. Did he say anything about where he was going? Anything that might tell us where he is. I don’t think he’s in his right mind. I’m really fucking worried.”
When Zander drops his hands, his eyes are red and bloodshot. He clears his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, um…” Frowning, he shrugs. “He said something about going to see his mom. He stormed out of here without a jacket. He said he wouldn’t need it. He took the Scout.”
“He rode the bike?” I look around, surveying the chaos and destruction that is Alex’s apartment, trying to mentally add up how many units of alcohol are still churning around his system. I throw my hands up in the air, turning toward the door, then turning right back again. “He’s fucking dead,” I whisper. “He’s probably driven head-on into a Mack truck and now he’s fucking dead, too.”
Tense, and with a face whiter than a sheet, Zander shoves away from the wall. “No need to get melodramatic, Parisi. If we’re lucky, he might have just paralyzed himself from the waist down. You said the funeral’s this morning?”
I nod, fighting the urge to dash into the kitchen and throw up in the sink; I could have done without the thought that Alex might ironically share the same fate as Cillian Dupris. “Yeah. In twenty minutes.”
“Then that’s where we’re going. He wouldn’t miss Ben’s funeral. Come on, I’m coming over there with you,” he says, shaking his head. “Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t believe this is even fucking happening.”
4
SILVER
The driver doesn’t say a word about Zander’s robe, or the fact that the jeans he quickly put on are shredded beyond all functionality. His lips remain sealed in a tight, disapproving line as he drives us to the church. Greenwood Presbyterian is on the outskirts of Raleigh, set high on the side of a hill that overlooks town. It was the very first structure erected here, before the quaint stores on Main Street were built, or the warehouses and factories, owned by the Weaving family for generations, began to monopolize Raleigh’s modest skyline. The four families who founded Raleigh decided that the town’s people would need God more than anything else, and so they made a house of worship their first priority.
When we pull up outside the church, Zander and I bolt from the Town Car, hurrying inside the building. The large solid wood doors crash open, startling the figure dressed in white, standing in front of the lectern in the church’s apse. My legs nearly go out from underneath me when I see the small, half-sized coffin at the head of the pews, festooned with sunflowers.
Zander grabs my hand, pulling me behind him up the aisle, head sweeping from left to right. “He isn’t here.”
“Mr. Moretti?” the priest calls from the apse. “Welcome. I took the liberty of—”
“Nope. Not Alex,” Zander replies. “He hasn’t been here?”
Closer now, I see that the priest is ancient, in his late seventies, his bald head freckled with age spots. His eyes are clouded by cataracts and watery, giving him the look of a man permanently on the brink of tears. He shakes his head. “You’re the first to arrive this morning, I’m afraid,” he says.
“Fuck.” Zander claps a hand over his mouth. “Fuck, sorry, father. I didn’t mean to—damnit, I’m just going to stop talking. You take over,” he says, pushing me forward.
“I’m sorry, Father. We’ve kind of lost Alessandro. Is there any way the service can be held for a while? Just an hour, while we look for him?”
The priest’s face crumples into a maze of deep lines—a mourning mask, a face that has creased in sympathy too many times to count. “I’m so sorry, my dear. If it were any other day of the week, I would of course say yes. Today’s Saturday, though, and New Year’s Eve to boot. We have two weddings this afternoon. The first guests arrive in an hour. If Benjamin is to have a religious service, then I’m afraid we really must start now.”
“I can’t be here without him. I can’t…” Shit, it wouldn’t be right to sit here through Ben’s funeral service without Alex. Selfishly, I don’t think I can make it through the service without him. I’m not…I don’t feel that strong.
“If you don’t stay, then Ben’s not going to have anyone here with him. No one that he knows,” Zander says, his voice pitchy and uneven. He’s battling with his emotions, though he’s doing a stellar job. His cracked voice is the only sign that he’s struggling. And he’s just said the one thing that will enable me to get through an entire funeral service for a little boy on my own: Ben won’t have anyone here with him.
&n
bsp; It’s been eating me alive, the fact that he was alone when he died. There’s nothing I can do about that now, but I can stay at the church and be here for this. I can stay with him so that he’s not alone for this part of his final journey.
“Okay, you go then,” I say to Zander. “Go. Find him. Bring him to the cemetery as quickly as you can. He can’t do this. He needs to say goodbye or he’s never gonna heal.” Even if Zander can find Alex and he does get him to the cemetery in time for Ben’s interment, saying goodbye isn’t going to be enough. I know that. Alex can say goodbye to his brother a thousand times over, every morning and every night until his lips are chapped and bleeding from the repetition, but it won’t help him heal. Only time will do that, and I have no idea how many weeks, or months, or years will be enough to accomplish that. Still, he has to be there. He’s going to hate himself for the rest of his life if he doesn’t show up for this.
5
ALEX
They used to play stupid games back at Denney. There was little to do besides work out, watch the same family game shows on repeat, and pretend to study in the library, so to appease the mind-numbing boredom, my fellow inmates bombarded one another with a litany of pointless questions. ‘Would You Rather’ was a favorite. Would you rather get your dick sucked by a Kardashian or fuck Taylor Swift in the ass? Win the lottery and die at fifty or live ’til you’re a hundred but be broke as fuck? During one of the last rounds of ‘Would You Rather’ I played before I walked out of Denney, Harrison Ash asked me would I rather be deaf or blind?
At the time, I’d thought it was an easy one. A no brainer. I’d told him I’d rather go blind. For months, I’d been dying to play my guitar, my fingers itching to fly up and down the neck of the instrument I’d had to leave in Gary Quincy’s garage. All I’d had to stare at were bland grey walls and the ugly-as-fuck faces of the other dumb bastards I’d been locked away with. I’d forgotten that there was beauty in the world. It seemed that without music I’d lost a piece of my soul, and the concept of losing it forever was pure fucking torture to me.
Amazing how quickly a mind can change when the world starts falling apart. Sitting in a pew of Raleigh’s Holy Trinity Catholic Church, the depth of the silence that cloaks the darkened alcoves and recessed confessional roars. The pressure of it butts up against my eardrums, a smothering quality to it…and I can’t help but feel relieved.
No one asking me if there’s anything they can do.
I dunno. How ’bout you bring my dead kid brother back to life?
No one giving me stupid fucking advice on how to navigate the hazardous terrain of grief and loss, and how this too shall fucking pass.
You don’t think I’ve been here before? You don’t think I’ve sat down and dined on the same bitter food as the Grim Reaper himself? We’re best fucking friends, asshole.
No one asking me if I’m okay.
No, of course I am not fucking okay. What the fuck is wrong with you? On what planet would I actually be fucking okay?
If I’m deaf to the endless questions and the sickening pity in their voices, then I don’t have to keep my temper at bay. I don’t have to force myself to swallow my angry responses down, where they burn at the back of my throat like acid-filled blisters.
I’ve gone so long with people pretending I don’t exist, that now they’re all wracked with sympathy and guilt, going out of their way to check in on me, I don’t know how to handle their attention. I don’t want it. I don’t fucking need it. I need for all of this to go away, to have never fucking happened in the first place. I need…god, more than anything, I just need Silver.
A stab of guilt pinches in my chest. I should be with her right now. She would have already gone to the apartment, looking for me, but I just couldn’t be there. If I’d stayed, she would have talked me off the ledge. Those beautiful blue eyes of hers would have met mine and I would have gone with her, if only to stem her hurt during the ordeal of yet another goddamn funeral. I had to get out of there before I could see her dressed in her mourning clothes and my own sense of duty kicked in.
I could not fucking sit in a pew at the front of a depressingly empty Presbyterian church, staring numbly at a coffin, knowing that Ben’s lifeless, cold body was inside it. It would have taken my very last energy reserves along with what little remains of my will to live to make it through a service like that, and I need both to ensure I don’t throw myself in Lake Cushman tomorrow morning.
How simple would it be to let the clear glacial water flood me, fill me up, and drag me down into the darkness? Seems like such a logical solution to the problem that I’m currently faced with. I’m hurting. I’m suffering beyond any measure I’ve previously experienced. If I sank below the still, mirrored surface of the lake and let the patient waters take me, then it would be done with. No more pain. No more suffering.
Except…
Suicide’s never going to be an option for me. Not while Silver draws breath. I know what it is to be left behind, tossed and turned in the wake after someone you love punches their ticket on that one-way journey. It’s a fate worse than death to exist in a world where the person you love decided it was better to die than stay behind and love you back. It isn’t that simple. It’s never that simple. But that’s how it fucking feels.
My mother was haunted by her ghosts. In the last two or three years before she died, she never knew a moment’s peace. The black dog was always crouched over her, baring its teeth, refusing to let her up even for a second. And through it all, she tried. She woke up every morning and made herself get out of bed, and she tried. Most days, she failed. She was angry. She was manic. She hallucinated, and she kicked and screamed. Exhaustion drove her to put the muzzle of that gun in her mouth, and despair made her pull the trigger. It took a long time for me to accept that what she did that day didn’t mean that she didn’t love me enough. It was just that the pain and the endless, bottomless agony of being alive was too big for her to overcome in the end.
If I took myself out, eventually Silver would come to the same realization. Before that, she’d know the same brilliant, blinding kind of pain that I felt as a six-year-old boy, and I could never fucking do that to her. Ironically, I’d die before I ever put her through something like that.
A trickle of incense hits the back of my nose, bringing me back into myself—I’ve been so absent for days now that I’m always kind of shocked when I snap out of my reveries and realize that I’ve somehow found my way across Raleigh, or, in this instance, to Holy Trinity. A Catholic church, because my mother was Catholic. That’s how Ben and I were raised. Ben should have been brought here for his funeral service, but I wasn’t thinking straight when the funeral home informed me that Jackie’s will stated all services should be conducted as per her Presbyterian faith. I should have demanded the arrangements be changed. Jackie had no right to include Ben in her will in the first place, but it had already taken everything I had to make sure Ben was buried here instead of back in Bellingham.
Holy Trinity is soaked in the same rich, velveteen sublimity that all Catholic churches share. A humble reverence that’s momentarily calmed the restless void in my chest. People mistake the healing atmosphere inside buildings like this for the presence of God all the time. It’s awe-inspiring, to feel the soul salved simply by walking inside a specific building and sitting quietly for a while. That’s the thing, though. Madness grips people’s lives at every fucking turn. Kids; bills; work; financial stress; the expectations and hopes of others. Everywhere they turn, there’s so much noise and chatter and fucking insanity that the first moment they get to sit in the silent dark and breathe, they’re bound to feel like they’re communing with the sublime.
That’s why I came here, after all. Because this is a good place to think.
Eterno riposo, concedere a loro, o Signore, e lasciare che perpetua risplenda ad essi la luce. Maggio le anime dei fedeli defunti attraverso il ricordo di Dio, riposa in pace, Amen.
The words aren’t welcome. I hav
en’t searched them out, but they push to the surface of my memory anyway, shoving aside my other thoughts. I remember the susurrus of her voice, catching on the consonants and vowels, creating a melody out of the prayer every All Souls’ Day in November. I knew Thanksgiving was only a few weeks away when my mother decked our apartment out with chrysanthemums, set three extra places at the table, and lay out food for people I’d never met before. Nor would I, since they were all dead. My grandparents were long gone by the time I was born. So was my uncle, her half-brother, who managed to fall from the third-floor balcony of a hotel room in Rome when he was drunk and landed on his head.
She’d cook every single Italian recipe she could remember from her childhood, and then she’d wrap me up in my thickest winter jacket, and we’d go knocking on our neighbor’s doors, offering them dolci dei morti—the sweets of the dead. She’d told me that the small white biscuits were supposed to sweeten the bitterness of death, and that in Italy, children would knock on doors for them along with other candies and treats in return for a prayer for the dead.
Eterno riposo, concedere a loro, o Signore, e lasciare che perpetua risplenda ad essi la luce. Maggio le anime dei fedeli defunti attraverso il ricordo di Dio, riposa in pace, Amen.
All Souls’ Day is long behind us now, but my mother’s voice chants her prayers regardless. The door to the church groans, and a rush of cold air makes my arms break out in goosebumps. Someone’s just come in. Part of me is irritated that the silence is going to be marred by someone else’s presence. Then again, I’m glad I’m not alone anymore. Another second of solitude and I might never have resurfaced again…
“Thought I might find you here,” a gruff voice says behind me. Not the voice of a priest, that’s for sure. Far too whiskey-soaked. The hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention, an alertness returning to me that’s been gone ever since I answered that stupid fucking door to Maeve.