And then it became harder to summon him, to smell his smell, to feel him lifting me up. My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really—which meant I guess that he was still living, too.
People always talk like there’s a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn’t, at least not for me. I remember what I’ve imagined and imagine what I remember.
—
I finally texted Davis just after noon: We need to talk. Can you come over to my house today?
He replied, Nobody’s here to look after Noah. Can you come over here?
I need to talk to you alone, I wrote. I wanted Davis to have the choice whether or not to tell his brother.
I can be there at five thirty.
Thanks. See you then.
—
The day moved agonizingly slowly. I tried reading, texting Daisy, and watching TV, but nothing would make the time speed up. I wasn’t sure whether life would be better frozen in this moment, or on the other side of the moment that was coming.
By four forty-five, I was reading in the living room while Mom paid bills. “Davis is coming over in a little bit,” I told her.
“Okay. I’ve got a couple errands to run. You need anything at the grocery store?”
I shook my head.
“You feeling anxious?”
“Is there any way we can make a deal where I tell you when I have a mental health concern instead of you asking?”
“It’s impossible for me not to worry, baby.”
“I know, but it’s also impossible not to feel the weight of that worry like a boulder on my chest.”
“I’ll try.”
“Thanks, Mom. I love you.”
“I love you, too. So much.”
—
I scrolled through my endless TV options, none of them particularly compelling, until I heard Davis’s knock—soft and unsteady—on the door.
“Hey,” I said, and hugged him.
“Hey,” he said. I motioned to the couch for him to sit down. “How’ve you been?”
“Listen,” I said. “Davis, your dad. I know where the jogger’s mouth is. It’s the mouth of Pogue’s Run, where the company had that unfinished project.”
He winced, then nodded. “You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. “I think he might be down there. Daisy and I were there last night, and . . .”
“Did you see him?”
I shook my head. “No. But the run’s mouth, the jogger’s mouth. It makes sense.”
“It’s just a note from his phone, though. You think he’s just been down there this whole time? Hiding in a sewer?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But . . . well, I don’t know.”
“But?”
“I don’t want to worry you, but there was a bad smell. A really bad smell down there.”
“That could’ve been anything,” he said. But I could see the fear on his face.
“I know, yeah, totally, it could be anything.”
“I never thought . . . I never let myself think—” And then his voice caught. The cry that finally came out of him felt like the sky ripping open. He sort of fell into me, and I held him on the couch. Felt his rib cage heave. It wasn’t only Noah who missed his father. “Oh God, he’s dead, isn’t he?”
“You don’t know that,” I said. But he kind of did. There was a reason there had been no trail and no communication: He’d been gone all along.
He lay down and I lay down with him, the two of us barely fitting on the musty couch. He kept saying what do I do, what do I do, his head on my shoulder. I wondered whether it was a mistake to tell him. What do I do? He asked it again and again, pleading.
“You keep going,” I told him. “You’ve got seven years. No matter what actually happened, he’ll be legally alive for seven years, and you’ll have the house and everything. That’s a long time to build a new life, Davis. Seven years ago, you and I hadn’t even met, you know?”
“We’ve got nobody now,” he mumbled. I wished I could tell him that he had me, that he could count on me, but he couldn’t.
“You have your brother,” I said.
That made him split open again, and we cuddled together for a long time, until Mom came home with the groceries. Davis and I both jumped to a seating position, even though we hadn’t been doing anything.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Mom said.
“I was just headed out,” Davis said.
“You don’t have to,” Mom and I said simultaneously.
“I kinda do,” he said. He leaned over and hugged me with one arm. “Thank you,” he whispered, although I wasn’t sure I’d done him any favors.
Davis stopped at the doorway for a second, looked back at Mom and me in what must have seemed to him like domestic bliss. I thought he might say something, but he just waved, shyly and awkwardly, and disappeared out the front door.
—
It was a quiet night in the Holmes household. Could’ve been any night, really. I worked on a paper about the Civil War for history class. Outside, the day—which had never been particularly bright—dissolved into darkness. I told Mom I was going to sleep, changed into pajamas, brushed my teeth, changed the Band-Aid over the scab on my fingertip, crawled into bed, and texted Davis. Hi.
When he didn’t reply, I wrote Daisy. Talked to Davis.
Her: How’d it go?
Me: Not great.
Her: Want me to come over?
Me: Yeah.
Her: On my way.
—
An hour later, Daisy and I were lying next to each other on my bed, computers on our stomachs. I was reading the new Ayala story. Every time I giggled at something, she’d say, “What’s funny?” and I’d tell her. After I finished it, we just lay there, in bed together, staring up at the ceiling.
“Well,” Daisy said after a while, “it all worked out in the end.”
“How’s that?”
“Our heroes got rich and nobody got hurt.”
“Everyone got hurt,” I pointed out.
“What I mean is that no one got injured.”
“I lacerated my liver!”
“Oh, right. I forgot about that. At least no one died.”
“Harold died! And possibly Pickett!”
“Holmesy, I am trying to have a happy ending here. Stop screwing it up for me.”
“I’m so Ayala,” I answered.
“So Ayala.”
“The problem with happy endings,” I said, “is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.”
Daisy laughed. “As always, Aza ‘And Then Eventually You Die’ Holmes is here to remind you of how the story really ends, with the extinction of our species.”
I laughed. “Well, that is the only real ending, though.”
“No, it’s not, Holmesy. You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don’t choose what’s in the picture, but you decide on the frame.”
—
Davis never wrote me back, not even after I texted him a few days later. But he did update his blog.
“And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.”
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
I get that nothing lasts. But why do I have to miss everybody so much?
TWENTY-FOUR
A MONTH LATER, just after Christmas vacation ended, I got up early and poured a couple bowls of cereal for Mom and me. I was eating in front of the TV when she walked in, still wearing pajamas, flustered. “Late late late,” she said. “Hit snooze too many times.”
“I made you breakfast,” I told her, and when she joined me on the couch, she said, “Cheerios aren’t something you make.” I laughed as she took a few bites, then ran off to get dressed. Always a flurry of movement, my mother.
When I turned back to the TV, a red breaking news band was scrolling across the bottom of the screen. I saw a reporter standing in front of the gates of the Pickett compound. I fumbled for the remote and unmuted the TV.