“Can you turn on the heat?” I asked quietly.
Nolan shifted in his seat, pulled his door shut, and turned the key still dangling in the ignition. The radio came blaring on before he silenced it with his fist, then followed that up with a hard punch to his dash, splitting open his knuckle. I reached into my purse and handed him a tissue, but he didn’t take it. Blood trickled down his hand and wrist as he announced that he was going to take off.
“You’re leaving?” I said, suddenly panicking, dreading going into my house, literally afraid of seeing Josie, knowing that we no longer had a brother. That it was just the two of us.
“I think I should,” he said. “Right?”
I shook my head, staring at the bag of donuts on the seat between us. “No. Please come in.”
“Are you sure? Shouldn’t it just be…family?” Nolan’s voice cracked as tears began to stream down his face.
“You are family,” I said. “Daniel would want you to come in.”
—
ALMOST EVERYONE DESCRIBES the immediate aftermath of death the same way—as a surreal blur, at least for those in the inner circle, in charge of the details. I watched people come and go—close friends, neighbors, and relatives, including some I barely knew. They dropped off food, offered condolences, cried. Mom and Dad picked out a coffin and a cemetery plot with the lady from the funeral home and planned Daniel’s service with John Simmons, our longtime pastor. Dad sat in his office and wrote the eulogy, a glass of whiskey on his desk.
Meanwhile, I can’t remember Nolan ever leaving, though he must have gone home to sleep and shower. At my parents’ request, he sat in the living room with Daniel’s computer, going through all of his contacts, emailing and calling his college and medical school friends, one by one. He even phoned Sophie, within hours of her plane landing, and I listened to his conversation, marveling at how he said all the right things, how much Daniel loved her, how special she was to him. He pored through our family photo albums, putting together a collage that would be displayed at the wake. And when there was nothing left to do, he simply sat with me in stunned silence, the forever of it all just starting to sink in.
It was hard to call him a comfort exactly, because nothing could console any of us at that point, but there was something about his presence that was reassuring. He was nothing like my brother, but he was still a strong and powerful connection to him, and I could see so clearly why Daniel had loved him.
—
ABOUT A WEEK after the funeral, and the day before I returned to Syracuse to finish my junior year of college, Nolan stopped by to say hello and, in his words, “check in on everyone.” Standing in our foyer, he glanced up the staircase as I told him my mom was already in bed with a migraine and my dad was at the office, working late.
“And Josie?” he asked. “Is she back at school?”
“Not yet. She leaves next week….I don’t know where she is tonight,” I said, thinking it was par for the course, before the accident and especially since. I wasn’t sure where she’d been going or who she’d been hanging out with, but I had barely seen her for days. We had yet to talk about that night, where she had been or how she’d found out, and I was starting to get the feeling we never would. That Daniel’s death was going to push us further apart than we already were.
Nolan shoved his hands in his pockets, looked at me for a few seconds, then asked if I wanted to get a bite to eat. Feeling both surprised and strangely flattered by the invitation, I said yes. For the next hour, we drove around Buckhead, trying to decide where to go, vetoing restaurant after restaurant before we finally settled on the OK Cafe, a brightly lit Southern comfort–food diner. Choosing a booth in the back, we ate barbecue and macaroni and cheese, drank sweet tea, and talked about everything but Daniel. Instead Nolan asked me questions—basic ones—as if he hadn’t known me my whole life, which in some ways I guess he hadn’t.
“Why’d you pick Syracuse?” he asked. “I’ve never known a single person from Atlanta to go to Syracuse. Except you.”
“Isn’t that a good enough reason?” I deadpanned.
“Seriously?” he said with a smile, both dimples firing.
“Yeah, actually. Kind of,” I said, smiling a little myself. “Plus they have a really good drama school.”
“Oh, that’s right,” he said. “You’re a theater girl. You were in a lot of plays at Pace, weren’t you?”
I nodded and said that was my thing—one of the reasons I had chosen to go to a different high school from my brother and sister.
“Daniel was proud of you.”
I stared down at my plate, trying not to cry, as Nolan distracted me with more rapid-fire questions. “So you want to be an actress?”
I nodded again.