I hopped off the fence, turned, and looked at him pointedly, but I had no words. He got down too. We were face-to-face. I felt crushed, and Jackson looked tormented. I started crying again. “Don’t, Jax. Don’t do that.”
He started to cry again too, and then he hugged me and buried his head in my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “He’s gone. I can’t believe he’s gone.”
That moment was followed by days of grieving. Jax and his mom sat inside of that dark, dank house, now further tainted with loss and tragedy. When the investigation was over and foul play was ruled out, Leila had Brian cremated. We all went into town for a short service at the funeral home. The cause of death was never once mentioned.
We sat in the front row while a stranger spoke from notes that Leila had written about Brian, detailing his musical achievements and how kindhearted he was. His girlfriend, who we later found out was a street kid, sobbed in the row behind us. Other than that, there were only a few people he worked with and went to high school with in attendance. The whole event made Brian seem so insignificant. I wondered how long it would take for the dirt road to end Jax or me. How long it would be before any chance at a legacy would be robbed from us.
Jackson was dressed in slacks that I knew he’d had since he was a kid because they were high-waters on him. He wore one of his brother’s black Led Zeppelin T-shirts and the wallet chain Brian had handed down to him a year before.
Leila looked like she had aged ten years. On the car ride home, she just kept mumbling, “It’s not natural.”
From the passenger seat, Jax said, “What’s not natural, Mom?”
“To bury a child.”
Later that night, Jax told me that Leila got high and drunk and said that she wished it had been him who’d drowned. We both knew it was coming. He didn’t cry like I thought he would. He said, “She’s pathetic, Em. I can’t hate her because I pity her too much.”
“You’re the smartest person I know, Jackson,” I told him, and it was true. The comment earned me one of his cute smiles. Even though he tried to act tough, I knew Leila had wounded him. I vowed never to hurt him in that way.
That week, I went home each night to my despondent father, who said little about Brian’s death except that the kid was a druggie. I thought that it was sad that my father judged Brian based on Leila’s actions. Beyond pot, Brian wasn’t a druggie at all. He was just a guy who’d lost his father young and grown up in a shit-hole town with an addict for a mother. Who knew what he could have become.
Jax and I weren’t surprised when the autopsy came back with the result that Brian had simply drowned. He was likely pulled under by the strong current created by a season of rainstorms.
No one knew what frame of mind Brian was in the night he died, or why on earth he would go swimming in the middle of the night, fully clothed, with his damn boots on. We just knew that he was gone forever, and things would never be the same for any of us.
4. Things I’ve Put Away
I was crying when Trevor came into my room in the middle of the night. He was groggy and squinting. “What’s wrong, Emi?”
I closed the book and pushed it to the side. “I’m just confused about some things.”
He flipped off the light and got into my bed. I scooted under the covers and let him spoon me.
“Talk to me,” he said gently. His voice was soothing next to my ear.
I buried my face in his arm. “On my thirteenth birthday, I found my neighbor dead, floating in the river behind my house.” Jeff was his real name and he was magical. In what felt like a single breath he was gone. His death affected Jase deeply, as well as myself.
Trevor paused for a moment, absorbing my words. “Oh Jesus, Emi. I’m so sorry. That must have been horrible for you. Is that why you never want to celebrate your birthday?”
I nodded in the darkness and told him the whole story. He just listened and held me tighter, his silence a comfort after all the fighting we’d been doing. It wasn’t long before I fell asleep in his arms.
Telling Trevor what happened didn’t heal me, but reliving that day did in some way. Jason’s insights in the book and his view of me, and what I was going through in that moment, gave me a sense of closure. His brother’s death had to have been much more traumatic for him, but he was still aware that I was experiencing the horror along with him. He was always so perceptive and compassionate.
Too bad I was so pissed off at him.
WHEN I WOKE up the next morning, Trevor was gone, but the memory of the night before lingered. I turned to his pillow to see he had left me a note. I had finally shared something from my past with him, something he’d been asking me to do for years. I wondered if the moment had meant as much to him as it did to me.
The note simply said he’d had to go to PT. Nothing else but an “xo, T” at the end.
I felt hollow, but that empty feeling was too much to confront. So I went back to the book.