She turned the doorknob and pushed. The door fell on its broken hinge and caught on the carpet. “Dill?” Lydia pushed a couple of times before she figured out that she needed to lift the door by the knob while pushing.
She looked around in the gloom. A bit of light crept in around the edges of the closed blinds, illuminating the shape in the bed. Dill lay shirtless and still, his back to the door. Lydia could see every bone in his back. He looked so small. Lydia’s heart rate slowed a bit when she saw him breathe.
“Dill?” She slowly approached, catching herself as she almost tripped on one of Dill’s boots. She sat on a corner of the bed beside him, reached out, and gingerly touched his shoulder. He felt warm. That was good.
“What,” Dill said. His voice was stony and lackluster.
“I was worried about you. I am worried about you. You okay?”
Dill kept staring at the opposite wall. “Never better.”
Lydia forced a laugh. “Ask a dumb question, right?”
“Yeah.”
Lydia looked around the room as her eyes adjusted to the dark. Dill’s few clothes—the ones she had helped pick out—lay strewn on the floor and hanging from half-open dresser drawers. A layer of wadded-up balls of paper, maybe torn from one of Dill’s songwriting notebooks, covered the floor. His guitar leaned haphazardly in the corner, one of the strings broken and dangling.
Step one: get Dill to leave this room, because it’s making me want to kill myself and I’m only moderately depressed.
Lydia touched his shoulder again and shook him slightly. “Hey. Hey. Let’s go somewhere. Doesn’t have to be school. Let’s ditch and go watch trains or go to the Column or something.”
“No.”
“Let’s go on a road trip somewhere. Where do you wanna go? Nashville? Atlanta? Let’s go to Memphis and go see Graceland.”
“No.”
“Okay, you suggest something.”
“Lay here.”
“That’s kind of a bummer of a party.”
“Yeah, probably.”
This isn’t going anywhere. Lydia rested her hand on Dill’s shoulder while she considered her next move.
“I saw Travis’s mom last night,” Dill said.
“How’s she holding up?”
“Not good. She was leaving.”
“Like…leaving leaving?”
“Yeah.”
“But not with Travis’s gross dad.”
“Nope.”
“Wow. Good for her. Did she say where she was going?”
“Nope. And I didn’t ask. I sent Travis’s staff with her.”
“Good.”
Another long silence while the house creaked and popped around them.
“I miss Travis too, Dill. Every day.”
“It’s not just about Travis.”
“I know.”
Dill rolled onto his back and stared up at Lydia. “Stay,” he said softly.
“Okay, but I seriously think you’ll feel better if you get out of bed and let me take you somewhere.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean stay. Please.”
She felt a fist grip her stomach as she understood. “Dill. I—”
“You’re going to say you can’t. But that’s not true. You can. You just won’t.”
Not this. Not now. You promised. I mean, you didn’t promise exactly this. But it was inherent in the promise. She looked him in the eyes. They were glassy and vacant. “I won’t. I won’t because I can’t.”
“You can do anything you want. You could stay.”
“Dill, please don’t. This is not fair. I’m not staying. You leave. Leave like me. Leave like Travis’s mom.”
“I—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You can’t. But that’s crap. You can. You just won’t.”
“I can’t. I can’t even get out of bed.”
“Come with me. Come to New York. You can sleep on my couch. We’ll find you a job. I’ll hassle you about the Bible and give you guilt trips to make you feel at home.”
“No.” His voice had a bleak resolve to it.
“I’m not going to give up on you.”
Dill rolled back onto his side. She grabbed his arm and gently tried to turn him back toward her. “Dill—”
He threw off her hand. “Just go,” he whispered. “I want to be alone.”
“You don’t need to be alone right now.”
“The hell I don’t. I might as well get used to it. GO.” Dill had never been so sharp with her before.
“No.” She tried not to sound as frightened and helpless as she felt.
“Go!” he shouted. “Leave me alone!”
She stood, grabbed his arm, and spun him onto his back. She tried to will her voice not to quaver, but was mostly unsuccessful. She jabbed her index finger into his bare chest. “Okay. You know what? You’re being shitty. You’re being unfair and it sucks. And if you think I’m going to just let you drown and not try to do anything about it, you’re dead wrong. So I’m going to let you wallow today, because sometimes people need to wallow, but believe me: I’m going to hold you to the promise you made me. And we’re going to fix that broken string on your guitar. Got it?”
“Fine. Just go.”
“You know how bad you hurt right now? I would feel that times a hundred—times a million if anything happened to you.”
Dill didn’t answer. He turned back on his side. Lydia stared down at him, pitching around for one last thing to say. Something that could fix everything. The perfect joke. The witty rejoinder. The insightful quip. And for once her mind was barren.
She turned and walked out. She stood for a second in the living room, clenching and unclenching her fists. Taking deep breaths, trying not to cry.
As she closed Dill’s front door behind her, it felt like rolling a stone over the entrance of a tomb.
She lay on her bed in complete, leaden exhaustion. School was shitty. Everything was shitty. She was about to put on her favorite music for calming herself down—Dill’s videos—when she remembered that all was not yet well there.
Lydia knew Dill hated texting because it was so cumbersome on his ancient flip phone. But she texted him anyway because the sound of his gray voice hurt her heart. I’ve had the worst day and I need to know right now that at least you’re ok or I’m going to scream and break things.
A few seconds later. I’m ok I guess.
But he wasn’t okay. Despite everything, the darkness encroached. Day by day, the poison spread, strangling him.
Sleeping didn’t help. It never left him feeling rested. He had dreams of serpents. Visions of handling them, allowing them to twist around his arms and neck. Of wearing their skins and skulls and fangs; unkempt, bearded, and reeking of decay; a derelict hull. Of passing Lydia, home from college, on the street, where he stared at her with dead eyes but with no words between them.
Travis came to him in dreams, and they would make plans to live in a house together and have desks side by side and then he would wake up and for several seconds, he couldn’t tell whether it had been a dream. He dreamed that Lydia announced she was staying and not abandoning him after all. And he’d wake up and he was a day closer to losing the only thing he had left.
Lydia looked at him with eyes that said she knew he was slipping away, disappearing before her like fog in the morning sun. And there was nothing she could do about it. And so he spent a lot of time alone. He wouldn’t return Lydia’s calls. Being around her—aware that the seconds were ticking away to her leaving too—made things worse. When they were together, she would take him to watch trains, but he couldn’t bear their life and energy. He had no space for it.
His mom tried to reach him through scripture, by reminding him of Jesus’s travails. It didn’t work. And she didn’t have the time to do much anyway.
Everything seemed muted and colorless. Every sound reached his ears as though through a thick wool blanket. He had no music in him. On the few occasions when he would sit to write, he ended up with a blank page in front of him. His fingers couldn’t form chords on his guitar strings. His voice left him. Lydia would show him the mounting likes and views of his videos in an effort to break through, but it never worked.
Food had no flavor. All he could taste was the pervasive and consuming despair, like soot on his tongue. He stopped going to appointments with the grief counselor.