“Okay.”
“It’s just getting together with other people whose family members have died unexpectedly. It helps her to be around people who get what she’s going through.” Wil turns away, toward the den, leaving me with the accusation.
“I didn’t mean anything by it, Wil.” I swallow.
He shakes his head like he’s trying to erase the last few seconds from his brain. “I know. Sorry,” he says, without turning around. “You want to get started?”
I grab a coffee and follow him into the wood-paneled den. A weak desk lamp is the only light. I drift for a while, around boxes of clothes and boots and tangles of electronic cords that lead to cell phones and a laptop and a defunct GPS. Against the wall, there are columns of taped boxes stacked as high as my chest. There are stacks of books on sailing and woodwork. There’s a caddy of soap and shampoo and there’s a blue razor with a slightly rusted blade. There is a single box of pictures, some upside down and backward, some with smudged dates and names on the back. There is a whole life here.
“It’s weird, right?” Wil’s features are pinched. “I never thought he had much stuff until I tried to pack it all.”
I nod but don’t look at Wil because he won’t want me to. I don’t say Wilson’s name. Instead, I busy my hands with the books piled on the floor, making the piles unnecessarily neat.
“Hey. This is kind of cool.” I page through a coffee-table book about Atlantic Beach. There are pictures of the beachfront properties in the fifties and images of the old downtown. Its lines are almost exactly the same, but the font on the signs and the skirt lengths are different. And the bricks in the street aren’t imprinted with peoples’ names and the dates when their pets died or their kids graduated from high school. I look up. “I meant to tell you, I saw Kylie Mitchell’s brick downtown the other day.”
“Poor orange Kylie.” Wil’s voice lightens a little.
“Hey, remember DAN & NATALIA 4EVER?” I turn around and try again.
“Who could forget Atlantic Beach’s very own computer software billionaire and his Russian mail-order bride? Although you’d think he’d be rich enough to spell forever the right way. Buy another brick, dude.” He shoves his hands in his back pockets and cocks his head to one side, and for a second, he is the Wil I have always known.
“Dan, you cheap, wife-ordering bastard.” I laugh loud enough that I snort, which makes Wil smile his lopsided grin. Without trying, I remember the way he used to smile in the split second before we would kiss. As if the two of us knew a joke no one in the world knew. The first time we slept together, he laughed as he was slipping my T-shirt over my head. Later he told me he’d laughed at the thought I can’t believe my best friend might actually sleep with me, which made me feel a little better.
I miss him and it hurts to be this close to him and not closer.
“What would your brick say?” Wil asks.
I tilt my head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, like, if you had a brick. And it could say whatever you wanted about your life so far and the kind of person you are. What would it say?” His face is suddenly blank, like it is when he’s on the water, watching a storm on the horizon line or sawing a teak board; getting it just right.
I cross my ankles and sink to the floor. “My brick?” I ask, sipping my coffee to buy time. It’s lukewarm and bitter. “Bridget Christine Hawking. Florida transplant. Unapologetic redhead. Excellent at mandated community service and pissing off my younger sibling and—”
“The real you, damn it,” he snaps.
I suck a few drops of coffee into my lungs and double over, coughing. After I catch my breath, Wil rakes his hands through his hair and says, “Sorry, Bridge. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about this a lot since my dad died.”
“Yeah. Okay,” I sputter. “Sure.”
“You could list the facts about him, all the things people think of when they hear his name, and it wouldn’t tell you a damn thing about the real Wilson Hines.” His fingers curl around the edge of the couch cushion.
“Okay, not facts.” I wish I knew what he meant about the real Wilson Hines. I wish I could ask. “So what would yours say? About the real Wil Hines?”
His head drops back, collides with the couch frame and makes a thud. “I’m nothing,” he says. His eyes flutter closed, shutting me out. “I’m the guy whose dad is dead.”
“That’s not true,” I protest.
“Hell it isn’t,” he says to the ceiling. “Tell me who I am now that he’s gone.”
I want to tell him that he is everything. That he has always been everything to me, and Wilson’s death won’t change that. “Wil,” I say carefully. “You’re more than that.”
He shakes his head slowly. “You have no idea what that night did to me. Who I am now.”
I tilt my head back, blink at the ceiling. It cuts me, every time he says something like that. “Have you talked to anybody about it? It might help, talking about what happened that night.” I close my eyes. “You could talk to me. I’m here.”
“Hasn’t felt like it.” Wil’s voice cuts from across the room, and my eyes snap open again.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it hasn’t felt like you’ve been here.” Wil’s features swim on the other side of the room. “Felt like you left me. Quit on us.”
“I quit trying to get back together because you asked me to, Wil. That’s not fair.” I stand up.
The door to the bedrooms opens, and I swipe my eyes with my T-shirt as Henney comes into the den, her lipstick the brightest shade in the room, her keys jangling. She’s wearing skinny jeans and a kind of dressy top and her hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail. She looks pretty, which is a thought I’ve never had before. She bends down to kiss Wil and then she’s gone again, leaving us alone in this sad, angry room.
“You know, I’m here now,” I say pointedly, picking up a pile of Wilson’s old T-shirts on the floor next to the couch. I take my time smoothing the wrinkles. Making sure the sleeves are even.
He doesn’t say anything.
“I’m here now,” I say again, louder this time. “You say I haven’t been there for you and that’s fair, but I’m here now, so you don’t have that excuse anymore. And you still won’t talk to me, and you won’t—God, Wil, would you at least open your eyes?”
He does, and the softness that was there has vanished beneath the surface.