“You don’t believe that Ben is . . . ”
“All around us?” she says in a half-mocking way. She shakes her head. “No, I don’t. I wish I did. It would make things a lot easier for me. But no, either he’s gone-gone, his soul having disappeared into the ether, or if he’s been transported somewhere else, if his heart and mind are reincarnated or just somewhere else, I don’t think he’d still be here on earth as himself. I don’t see . . . it just seems like something people tell victims’ families, you know? ‘Hey, it’s okay. Ben is always with you.’ ”
“You don’t think Ben is with you?”
“He’s with me because I love him and I loved him and he lives in my memories. His memory is with me. But no, I don’t see how Ben is here. After Steven died, I thought maybe he was lying in bed next to me at night, watching me. Or maybe he was some omnipotent force looking over Ben and I, but it did no good. Because I just didn’t believe it. You know? Do you believe it? Or maybe what I should say is Can you believe it? I wish I could.”
I shake my head. “No, I don’t think he can hear me. I don’t think he’s watching me. It’s a nice idea. When my brain wanders, I sometimes think about what if he’s hearing everything I’m saying, what if he’s seeing everything I’m doing. But, it doesn’t really make me feel any better. Whenever I start to think about where he is now, I ultimately just focus on what his last moments were. Did he know they were his last moments? What if he’d never left the house? What if I’d never asked him to . . . ”
“To what?”
“He was doing me a favor when he died,” I tell her. “He was buying me Fruity Pebbles.” It feels like I’ve finally put down a barbell. Susan is quiet.
“Was that a confession?” she says.
“Hmm?”
“That doesn’t matter. You know that, right?”
No, I don’t know that. But I’m not sure how to say that, so I don’t say anything.
“You will do yourself a world of good the minute you realize that does not matter. You can play the scenario out a million times, whether he goes to get the cereal or he doesn’t,” she says. “I’m telling you, he’d still end up dying. It’s just the way the world works.”
I look at her, trying to figure out if she truly believes that. She can see my skepticism.
“I don’t know if that’s true,” she says. “But that is one thing we have to believe. Do you hear me? Learn how to believe that one.” She doesn’t let me speak. “Get the box,” she says. “We’re gonna start in the bathroom.”
We pack away his toothbrush and his hair gel. We pack his deodorant and his shampoo. It’s a small box of things that were only his. We shared so many of the things in here. Susan smells the shampoo and deodorant and then throws them in with the other things.
“When you are ready, this is a throwaway box, right?” Susan asks. “I mean, this is trash.”
I laugh. “Yeah, that will be trash.”
We move on to the kitchen and desk area, where most of Ben’s stuff is also trash. We fill boxes and boxes of crap. I wonder if some of these things are being put right back into the boxes they came here in. We make our way back into the living room, and Susan starts packing his books. She sees a collector’s set on one of the shelves.
“May I have this?” she says. “It took me months to convince him to read these books,” she said. “He wouldn’t believe me that young adult books can be great.”
I want them, but I want her to have them more. “Sure,” I say. “You should take anything you want. He’d want you to have his things,” I say. “He loved those books, by the way. He recommended them to anyone that would listen to him.”