Without wiping my face or nose, I looked up, confused and totally caught off guard that someone had walked up without me noticing. My chest was puffing in soundless whimpers and my throat constricted. Yet I shook my head at Dallas who was standing at the bottom of the steps leading up to my deck and told him the truth. “Not really.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” His tone was so soft that it seemed to reach deeper than his concern and presence did. “I didn’t know somebody could cry and not make a noise.” The frown on his serious face deepened as his eyes scanned over me. That notch between his eyebrows was back again.
My sniffle in response was watery and a total mess, and without realizing I was doing it, I had my bottom lip sucked into my mouth like that would help stop me from crying even more. It wasn’t really helping when tears kept streaming down my eyes and cheeks, falling off my jaw no matter how much my brain told my tear ducts to quit it.
“Your head still hurt?” he asked in that eggshell-like voice.
I shrugged, wiping at the wet places on my skin. It did hurt, but it didn’t hurt worse than my heart right then.
“Something happen with the boys?”
I shook my head again, still too afraid to use words because I was sure I’d cry my eyes out in front of this man, and I didn’t really want that to happen.
He glanced over his shoulder again, that big hand of his going to the back of his neck before he faced me again with a sigh. “If there’s something you wanna talk about…” He scrubbed at the side of his cheek, awkward or resigned or both or neither; I couldn’t blame him—I didn’t want to feel this way. Not now, not ever, and especially not with witnesses who had thought so badly of me in the beginning. “I can keep my mouth shut,” he finally got out, making me look up at him. A small smile crossed that hard face of his, so unexpected I didn’t know how to handle it.
Tell him? This near complete stranger? I was supposed to say words and sentences to him that I couldn’t even share with my parents? How could I even begin to describe the worst thing that had ever happened to me? How did you explain that your brother died, and that the next thing you knew, your life was going up into flames, and you didn’t know how to put out the fire because the smoke from it was so thick you couldn’t see two feet in front of you?
I wasn’t some closed-off person who didn’t know how to share her feelings, but this was different. Way different than having someone overhear me arguing with my mom. I could come back from her words. I was scared I’d never be able to come back from the Rodrigo-sized gap my brother had left me with.
“I’m not… I’m not….” I couldn’t get the words out. They were jumbled and messy, and I couldn’t unscramble them in one breath. I wheezed. “I—I hate this. I’m not trying to get a pity party or attention or anything—”
My neighbor dropped his head back, the long line of his lightly bearded throat bobbed. “I told you earlier, I know,” he was still talking low. “I thought we agreed to put it behind us?”
I sniffled.
Dallas sighed again as he dropped his chin, meeting my gaze with those hazel-green eyes. “You gotta stop crying,” my neighbor said in a gentle voice that broke the camel’s back.
I wanted to tell him “okay,” but I couldn’t even manage to get that one single word out from how much I was hiccupping, unable to catch my breath.
“I’m no snitch.”
He wasn’t a snitch. My chest was puffing with those deadly, restrained, silent tears, and even though a gigantic part of me wanted to tell him I was fine, or at least that I would be fine, and explain it was no big deal, my big mouth went for it as my crying went straight to weeping—gasping breaths, shaking shoulders, a headache that went straight to pounding. “He wants me to give him socks.”
There was a pause and a “What?” in that rumbled voice that got mostly buried beneath my tears and gasps.
It probably didn’t even come out of my mouth correctly, but I answered, “Louie told me I could give him socks from now on.” I didn’t want to believe I was wailing, but it was probably pretty damn close to it.
Through the tears blurring my eyes, Dallas’s lips parted and his face went pale. “You can’t… you can’t afford to buy him socks?”
I put a hand over my heart like that would help the ache pounding away. “No. I can.” I wiped at my face as I hiccupped and noticed him closing his mouth. “I used to give my brother socks, and now Louie wants me to give him socks since I can’t… I can’t… give them to my brother anymore.”
There was a pause and then, “This isn’t about the socks?”
He didn’t even know. How could he know? It wasn’t about the fucking socks. At least not totally. It was about everything. About life and death, and white and black and gray. It was about having to be tough when you weren’t used to it. About having to grow when you’d thought you were done growing. In the back of my head, I knew what I’d said didn’t make any damn sense. But how could I explain? How could I begin to tell him that I had lost a part of myself with my brother’s death, and I was trying so hard to keep what I had left together with duct tape and paper clips?
“I miss….” My throat hurt, and I swore my entire chest ached. I couldn’t get the words out. Or maybe I just didn’t want to. I rarely talked about Rodrigo to anyone except Van, but Van was different. She was my sister from another mister. With a cracked tone that could embarrass me later on, I blurted out what I could never say to my mom and dad, to this man who lived across the street from me. “My brother died, and I miss him so much.” My voice cracked; it felt like my soul did the same all over again. I rubbed my palm over my mouth, like it would erase the pain those words gave me. “I miss him so, so much.”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea,” came Dallas’s soft reply.
“It’s hard… hard for me to talk about.” I shrugged and rubbed my lips again, feeling this crushing weight of heartache and mourning.
How could this hurt so much after so long still?
For some reason, I kept on unloading in front of my neighbor. “I have to tell Louie stories because he doesn’t remember him well anymore. I’m pretty sure Josh doesn’t either. And they’re stuck with me. Me. He left them to me.” I rushed out before another half-gallon of tears streamed out of my eyes uncontrollably. I hadn’t believed it after Mandy, and I still couldn’t. They had chosen me, of all the people in the world. “What was he thinking? I don’t know what I’m doing. What if I fuck up more than I already have?”
I didn’t take into consideration that he didn’t even know I had a brother, much less know anything about him. He wouldn’t understand why I missed him so much. How could he?
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered steadily. His gaze was zeroed in on me like he didn’t know what to do or say. His forehead was lined, his eyes pinched, his mouth slightly parted. He was stuck, and I mean, what was there to say or do? I was unloading on him and crying, and I didn’t even know his middle name.