“You do help.” She wipes the tears off her red cheeks. “You helped him. You were so brave—”
“Brave? I’m not brave. As soon as I saw that man I should have been, I don’t know, so fueled with homicidal rage that I did something. But I just stood there, crying. It was Charlie who actually did something, and I’m not even sure he likes Julian.”
We go back to silence, until again, Emerald breaks it. “Everyone watches you, and you don’t even know it. You just…It’s like you come into a room and you’re glowing or something.”
I laugh, but it’s not a happy sound. “Yeah, glowing is my superpower.”
“And when you smile…my grandmother calls them big-soul smiles. She says some people have souls so big that they spread out, touching everyone they pass.” Emerald wipes her wet face again. “There are different ways to help people, Adam. There are different ways to do good.”
I don’t know if it’s the fear or the sadness or all the pure emotion from the last month, but I’m embarrassingly close to crying, so I respond the way I normally would. “Are you going to start singing that what makes me beautiful is that I don’t know I’m beautiful? Because I don’t think I can take that.”
“You are.” Her voice is more tender than I’ve ever heard it, and I can only stare at her, no longer in the mood to joke. “Beautiful.” And her fingers touch my face, carefully, like I’m something that might break.
JULIAN’S TYPING AWAY on the desktop computer in the living room while I’m watching TV and texting Emerald. All of a sudden he leaps up and stares at the television—some show on the Travel Channel.
“Can I borrow your laptop?” he asks, which is weird, since he’s already using a computer.
“Uh, yeah, I guess.” He grabs it off the coffee table and bolts from the room. A few minutes later I hear the sound of breaking glass.
I head into Julian’s room to find one of the framed photos of Mittens smashed against the wall. I step over the pieces and try for a joke. “I told you we could redecorate.”
Julian’s either ignoring me or doesn’t hear me. Sitting in the center of his bed, body thrumming with tension and face furrowed with intense concentration, he leans over an open spiral notebook. His fingers run along the page, tracing the words like they’re Braille.
“Julian?”
Getting more agitated, he thrusts his finger into the paper.
“Julian.”
He keeps stabbing the page, starts whispering something to himself. I cross the room and grab his wrist. He goes still and looks up at me with eyes that are too huge for his face. I let him go, then sit on the end of the bed.
“Why didn’t she write titles?” he asks, looking back down at the notebook.
“What?”
“Titles. None of them have titles. I was always sure they meant something.”
I give a closer look to the neat round letters on the page.
1. ALMA, COLORADO
2. BRIAN HEAD, UTAH
3. VILLAGE OF TAOS SKI VALLEY, NEW MEXICO
“Who wrote this?”
“My mom. This whole notebook is full of lists. I always knew these cities, these lists, had to be important. She wouldn’t write them unless they were important. But you just have to guess at what they mean, you know?”
I nod, but I don’t know. I don’t know at all the pain of trying to know and understand someone after they’ve gone.
“I finally get what this one means.” He points to my laptop on the nightstand. A webpage is opened to a list of U.S. cities with highest elevation. “It looks like they’re all probably explainable. The movies are just Best Picture winners. The songs are number-one songs from different years.”
“So…that’s good, that you figured it out?”
“Good?” Such a venomous expression on Julian’s face is unnerving. “They’re just facts she recorded. They don’t tell me anything about her. She wrote all these lists, but they don’t mean anything!”
Suddenly and violently, he starts ripping the pages out of the notebook.
“Nothing means anything! People just go. They don’t finish.” He grabs the loose sheets, wildly tearing them into shreds. “We don’t die after we complete some mission, we just die.” He yanks the green cardboard away from the silver spiral till that’s all that’s left. “Do you know how I know?”
I shake my head.
“Because if they could have chosen, they wouldn’t have left me. I know them. They weren’t finished with me!”
He folds in on himself like a closing shutter. Surrounded by torn bits of paper, he begins to sob. It’s horrible to watch when you can’t do anything to fix it.
He goes abruptly silent, like someone turned off his voice, and he picks up one of the torn pieces with two fingers. “Oh no.”
He starts to cry again, bending till his face is pressed into the mattress.
He shoots back up and kneels, wrapping his arms around his stomach.