Eventually I go out onto the lanai and look out at the ocean for a little while. I text Paige and my mom to let them know how I’m doing. And then I decide to clean the place up, though I stay away from Seth’s room—it scares me to think of what might be in there. After an hour I’ve run out of things to do, and I go into the living room and sift through the DVDs stacked in and around the small entertainment center. Running my fingers over the titles, I eventually come to a section of jewel cases that have no labels on the spine and one by one I pull them out and read the Sharpie text scribbled across the front.
They’re all BASE jumping DVDs.
I shove them back down into a neat stack, along with those thoughts in my head that suddenly started screaming again.
Then I come to a small section of documentaries and stuff that originally aired on the History and Discovery and National Geographic channels. One in particular catches my attention—Journey to the Center.
When I first look at the plastic cover, something heartbreaking washes over me, something familiar—a great wall of rock climbs two thousand feet into the sky in a deep tunnel-like formation, blanketed by lush green that crawls the stone, gripping and tearing its way to the top, where beams of bright sunlight pierce the shadows cast by the scaling rock above. And at the top, three figures hang from a cable that stretches from one side to the other.
The image is the same as the giant painting of Luke’s that I saw on the wall at the community center, with just a few differences—the men on the cable the most noticeable. It’s also the same image as the one I saw Luke working on the night I came back here, and as many of the other paintings in that room just down the hall. Different angles. Different lighting. Different weather. Many differences, but all of them of the same thing, the place I privately called the Bottom of the World.
My heart sinks into my stomach.
It all becomes clear to me in an instant—I think all along most of it was there, digging through my subconscious, but I haven’t truly seen the full picture until now: the paintings of this fateful place where his brother died; how he fell back into their darkness and their colors and their power the moment I left him and went back to Oahu; Kendra telling me, Since you came here he’s changed. He’s happier … He’s just better around you, and Alicia telling me, Ever since you came around, he seems a lot happier … Instead of getting better, he just seemed to be getting worse up until recently, and I hate to see Luke falling back into that dark place once you’re gone.
That strange, unfamiliar, dark feeling I had before finally has a name—punishing bereavement—and those questions finally have devastating answers:
Is Luke latching on to me for the right reasons?
No.
Have I become something he needs for all the wrong reasons? Yes.
A deep, burrowing pain, like a fist in my chest, drills its way into the depths of my heart. I know it’s true, that Luke may care deeply for me; he may want to love me unlike he’s ever loved anyone—but not more than his brother. Because he hasn’t made peace with his brother’s death; he hasn’t forgiven himself, and until he can, Luke will live in darkness.
Tears stream in rivulets from my eyes, but I’m too lost in the truth and this moment to gather the strength to wipe them away.
I feel like I should be disappointed, that I should feel somewhat betrayed, or even used, but I don’t. There’s no room in my heart for that right now because of the sorrow I feel for how lost to the world Luke really is, and because I know I’m not the answer to his pain. I want to be. I want nothing more than to be, but I know that I can’t be.
Will Luke’s guilt ultimately kill him?
Finally I reach up and wipe the tears, my chest shuddering with a million more.
I flip the DVD case over to look on the back. And I read. And the more I read, the more broken my heart becomes. China. Tian Keng, the Heavenly Pit. The place where Landon died.
The place where Luke died.