by Seth King
“Looking back, do you think he did it on purpose?” I asked. She shook her head, and it looked as empty as a cup of water in a cupboard. Because how did you even face a question? A question that basically meant “do you think we made him miserable enough to make him want to die?”
“We don’t think he…we don’t think it was suicide. It was so out of nowhere, you know? There were no big declarations, no arrangements. And there was no sign of a seizure. He just…died.” She pulled her eyes to me, with some effort. “But then again, we have no idea. He did take my grandma’s death pretty hard. But I wasn’t in the car with him. Nobody was...and also, my parents don’t know what I know, about was going on…with you…” She cleared her throat. “Did you see any signs that…that something like this would…come?”
I played with my straw. She had no idea how much I’d loved her brother, and I didn’t know how much I should give away about this. “No. Or, I mean, obviously his moods were…up and down. All the time. And he’d mentioned a few times how hard it was for him to be…alive,” I said, editing carefully, “and so I wouldn’t put it past him. But I can’t really imagine him doing it like this – no letters, no Facebook status, nothing. It makes no sense. But then again, I wouldn’t have known, anyway. We’d stopped….hanging out before then.”
“Oh. I see.” She sighed loudly. “When did you meet him?”
For some reason I didn’t want to talk about any of this with her. Our story was Nicky’s, and I wanted it to stay that way. So I just shrugged and then shook my head.
“Okay then. I guess I deserve that,” she said.
“Yeah. Yeah, you do.”
She did a double take, but I didn’t care. Something I’d learned in my time in bed was that you could choose what to be ashamed of. And I didn’t want to be ashamed of things I didn’t choose anymore. I didn’t choose to have a father who turned the other way and checked out of his own life while I grew up. I didn’t choose to wake up one summer day and fall in love with a dude. What was out of my hands would no longer be a burden on my back. And that decision felt final. Maybe we couldn’t decide to be free – but we could decide to be free of the world’s opinions of us. And perhaps that was the same thing. Maybe finding freedom didn’t mean being set free – maybe it meant setting yourself free. From your own dogma, from the ideas and expectations and fears that kept you down, from the hatred you felt for yourself. From everything.
And then I felt bad for her, total pity, because she didn’t know how to deal with Nicky any better than Nicky had. She didn’t disapprove of him personally, she was just trying to help him conceal something about himself that horrified them both – she was being a sister, helplessly.
“Why did you call me here?” I asked.
If her face had looked pained before, it looked excruciated now. “You know why.”
“Um…I’m not sure I do?”
“To say thank you,” she swallowed.
“For?”
She stared at me, her eyes shining with tears. “For freeing my brother,” she said, her voice cracking and breaking mid-sentence, and I still didn’t really get it. He didn’t feel free. He just felt dead. “Cole,” she said, and her eyes easily held onto mine in a way that told me she got whenever she wanted in this life. “Come on. He was more himself around you than any time I’d ever seen him. That night at Mellow Mushroom – God, I’ve never seen him happier, lighter. You gave Nicky his first-ever chance to be…Nicky.” Her eyes overflowed with the tears, and I looked away. “And I’d never seen him be Nicky before,” she sobbed, quietly so nobody would stare. “Never never never. He was nobody’s secret when he was with you, and I’ll never be able to repay you for that. You were a gift to him, in a weird little way. Don’t you know that? He needed you. You gave him honesty…”
I covered my face as the tears came. Nothing she could offer me would ever be enough. She was really, truly crying now, too, but she still couldn’t touch me, and it hurt like an ice bath. “He was in love with you,” she said, tears slopping in her shirt. “He really was. And I know you were, too. I saw it in your eyes. His, too. I could just…feel it that night, in the weirdest way. The air around you two just…exploded. It was the strangest, prettiest thing. Part of me is so sad I’ll never see it again…”
Shit. I looked up and stared out of the window as she tried to get herself together.
“So, I really do owe you an apology,” she said soon. “I was so wrong, in so many ways…”
Finally I cleared my throat. “I don’t know what to say. Thanks, I guess. But still, you’re only saying all this now. Why didn’t you tell me about this before? And maybe, you know, include me in his funeral?”
She shrugged in a pitiful way, her face twisted up like the roots of a tree. “Nicky kept his cards close. Everyone knew that. You…crossed my mind, but I had no idea how to reach you, how to find you – I didn’t even know your last name. All I had was that night, when you guys had all that…love in your eyes.”
This made sense, but I still wanted to shank her. Finally I met her eyes again, and they hit me like a bomb. She has Nicky’s eyes, I thought with a weird choking sound. I would never see Nickicito’s galaxy eyes again.
“Oh, God,” I sighed a minute later. “This is somehow so much worse than just a suicide. At least suicide victims’ families know they wanted to blow their brains out. Why does the knowing make it so much better?”
She exhaled. “I think because we want to know if we failed him, or if we could’ve helped. But we don’t even know that much. We don’t have anywhere to start from.”
“Who’s we?” I asked her.
“We as in, his family.” There it was again – her attitude. There was ownership in her tone, and it infuriated me. I couldn’t do this anymore.
“Yeah. I’ve gotta go, I’ve got stuff to do.”
She started collecting herself. “Oh, of course, of course.”
Then I turned to her. “But first…can you tell me how to find his grave?”
“Oh, Cole,” she gasped, her eyes glassy like a pond again.
“Yeah?”
“I’m just so sorry that you have to ask me that. That you have to say those words…his…his grave. I’m sorry for…everything.”
I sort of angled myself away a little. A rich, straight woman was telling me she was sorry that I was gay. As if she had any clue, any idea, any glimpse of what she was talking about. I didn’t know what to say, because she would never understand a drop of it. I despised her, but I thanked her nonetheless. I really did feel bad for her. “Thanks. And I mean, I’m sorry too,” I said. “You’re his sister. You’ve known him forever. You came from the same bones. This must be really awful for you.”
She bit her lip, her eyes small planets of horror. “You know what? It is, and it isn’t. Nicky was never happy – we all knew that. We didn’t really know why, but we knew. So I’d like to think that wherever he is right now, he’s…free. Flying. God knows he deserves it.”
I sort of smiled down at the table in a way I did not really understand. “Yeah. Me too.”
“Did he ever tell you about our uncle who lived next door to us?” she asked soon.
“Next door to you? You mean…the gay guy...”
“I’m guessing that’s a yes. Yeah, that was my uncle. And he was a lot like Nicky.”
I watched her.
“I’m not an idiot,” she said. “I know – or, knew – my brother better than anyone, and I’ve known about this forever. You have to understand that I’m not just some evil bitch. All I was trying to do was keep my family together. My dad hated my uncle and always made comments about how he deserved what he got, and every single time, Nicky would get this look on his face like he’d seen a mass grave or something…”
Her eyes wide, she sighed. “Sometimes I think Nicky saw this as a…death sentence. And I just wanted to help him through that.”
I didn’t know what to say. So much more was making sense now, even if the big
picture was still blurry. “Wow. I guess there’s a lot he never told me.”
“Yeah. And that’s also another thing.” She sat up. Something in her face changed, and she wouldn’t meet me in the eye anymore. I noticed she was fingering her crucifix bracelet, and that’s when I knew something bad was coming. “After today, I am going to have to block your number, and your Facebook, all that,” she told the floor. “I won’t ever be able to face this again. I need to forget you, and I hope you understand that. This situation was already really close to making me lose my mind, and your whole involvement is just…stress I don’t need to think about.” She closed her eyes. “I’m really sorry, and everything.”
For some reason I nodded. So this was why she’d rushed me here: she wanted to squeeze all the facts out of me she could and then dismiss me, discard me like her brother had. Oh well. Then I pretended my eyes were a phone screen, and tried to screen-shot her, this girl in front of me, exactly as I saw her. I wanted to remember her for everything she was, every detail of Nicky she still contained in her living, breathing body. Their noses were different, but she had his eyes, his hands, the elegant shape of his jaw. I would never see any of this again – outside of my dreams, of course.
Mercifully, her phone rang. “It’s my mom,” she said, motioning at her phone as she readied to answer it, and it sounded like an apology. “Hey, Mom. Yeah. I don’t know, probably six-ish. Where are you? Cool. Um, who am I with?”
She glanced at me, and I knew that this was it. Now or never. This was probably the last chance for his family to ever find out about me. But her eyes tracked away, and the past closed up. And I understood what it meant. It was time to say goodbye.
She finally looked at me, and for one moment, the purest, most desperate sorrow I had ever seen radiated from her eyes, so similar to my Nicky’s. And then she looked away. And that made it official: Nicky’s family would never know about me.
She spoke to the woman I both did and did not know, the woman I’d hoped would become my mother-in-law. “Oh. I’m just with Nicky’s…friend. It’s nothing. I’ll come by pretty soon.”
I walked out to my car and felt nothing at all. So much for closure, I thought. That meeting had accomplished nothing. I’d even half-expected Victoria to pause, take out some crumpled paper, and offer it to me. The tragicomic romance books about dead teens always had goodbye letters, tear-stained missives to tie up all the loose ends, soothing messages from beyond…
“Here,” she’d say in this book version of my life, battling tears with a smile. “He wrote this for you. We found it in his room. We love you so much, and you’re part of our family now. See you at Easter dinner. Also, here’s a photo of the funeral you never got to see…”
But this wasn’t a trendy book, this was my shitty little life. Shitty things happened all the time, and it was shitty, and that was it. There was no touching violin sound at the heartbreaking parts, there was no big satisfying ending where we’d run for each other in an airport terminal. Nicky was dead.
Just as I reached for my door handle, though, I heard someone running out to me.
“Cole, sorry, wait.”
I turned around, and there she was. In real life. “There’s something else.”
“Yeah?”
She stopped and smoothed her shirt. “I saw him right before it happened. A few nights before, I mean. He’d lost weight and stopped returning our calls, so I came down with Mom, and we found him living in a mess. Ugh, it was awful. There was rotten food on the stove, he was drunk on his couch…anyway, after Mom went to bed, I sat with him on the floor while he got even drunker. He was wearing this shirt, this really cute dark green thing, and he kept saying you bought it for him.”
I winced. “Okay? And?”
“…And I just want you to know I made sure he was buried in it. For you. He’ll wear that shirt forever.”
I shivered and inhaled. So this was my involvement in my great love’s funeral. A shirt.
“Anything else?” I asked, and she reached into her bag and took out an envelope. “What’s that?”
She frowned. And that was the first time I saw real, true guilt in her eyes. It was old guilt, washed away at full blast, but still, it was there.
“All I did was glance at it when I found it, but…I think it’s some kind of breakup letter he never gave you.”
20
I drove to the cemetery with the windows rolled down and the breakup note burning a hole in my pocket. I’d always hated these places, and today was no different. Cemeteries were like hospitals – nobody ever came here for a good reason. You came to either prepare for goodbye, or say it. Never anything else. And here it was. Goodbye.
And maybe first love was an inferno that would never be matched. That was probably the case. True love was a temporary promise, a song sung in an empty church in the woods, and I knew the world did not owe me another Nicky Flores, even on the off chance that it could ever again produce a magic that potent. The odds were that no one would ever burn up for me like that again, no soul would ever sift into mine and join it as one, and it was back to the grey, and I was on my own for good. But I wasn’t sad, because I was starting to realize that my love for Nicky would always be there. Shit, he’d been dead for four months and it hadn’t faded at all. Maybe true soul mates could never be separated by death – maybe one soul just lived inside the other until they could join again in a different world. For as long as I lived I would be able to close my eyes and take a breath and sail back to the brightest parts of my memory, where we’d be happy and young and free. In my dreamworld he would be nineteen and beautiful and beside me forever – I’d always have that, no matter where this place took me. In my mind, he would always be a city on fire – Nickicito was a moveable feast. Even despite all he’d put me through, he’d still given me one little masterpiece of a summer for me to carry in my pocket for the long haul. And now the possibilities of us – the castle in my mind where he’d somehow survived, where we existed together – would always be my favorite place to visit. He was my first, my best, my chaos, my destruction, and the funny thing was, looking back, I would do it all over again. I was so stupid. At least he’d found a temporary home in my eyes, though.
I parked my car. On the way to his grave – oh, God, his grave – I tripped a little on the edge of a bench, and I laughed a little. I just couldn’t win in this game of grace. Never could. And as the stone came into view, our final frame, I got the cruelest, clearest flashback out of nowhere. It was kind of raining, and we were coming back from that weekend in Savannah, from those few days when he’d finally opened himself to me. I was driving for a minute because he had a headache, and my hand was resting on his leg. I remember feeling not swept away by love or anything dramatic like that, but just feeling comfortable, totally comfortable, for probably the first time in my life. Nobody could gawk at us in there in that car, point and laugh at the freaks. Locked in that glass case of emotion, we were comfortable and at ease for maybe the first and last times ever. Even now, I could see my boy sleeping in the soft rainy sunlight beside me. I could feel how my throat wanted to close when I looked at him because he was too beautiful. I could smell the rain and the leather and the gasoline from the slick, shiny highway. And even though all the rest of it had fallen away, I was sure that moment would soar forever.
But it was built to fall apart, of course. When we got closer to Neptune Beach, the traffic thickened. Every time we passed a car that was tall enough to look into our windows, I’d flinch and take my hand away, too afraid to show my love to the world, or even to passing strangers. But that moment still remained the best of my life. I wish I would’ve known that nothing that perfect could last. And as I looked down at the stone marking his name and day of death, I prayed against hope that wherever he was, he understood. I’d like to think he did, at least. His sister had been kind of right: he did feel free, in a weird way. At the very least, he was out of here, and that was one small step in the right direction.
I stopped at his patch of Earth, which had been broken by shovels four months ago but had already partly filled in with grass and weeds. No flowers – they’d already rotted away. The world had already started forgetting him – I’d missed out on so many stages of grief. I couldn’t believe it was all already over. A little whimpery, chokey sound escaped from the back of my throat when I saw his name and realized I’d never hear his presidential voice again. And as I stood there I got this lurching feeling in my chest and suddenly, for the first time, I knew it – his death had been no accident. He’d chosen to leave this place. I could feel the smoldering loss of him, the departure of him, his white suicidal anger lingering everywhere, grabbing at me like manic little pixies. Maybe I was realizing it now, maybe I’d known since the first day – but he’d probably killed himself. He’d snapped and driven into the tree at full speed. Oh, Nicky.
I sighed and wiped tears from my neck. Here he was, the boy who’d been born and then died on two different February Twelfths, and loved me in between them.
“Hi, galaxy eyes.”
I saw that he’d been buried next to his beloved grandma, Roberta, and that gave me some solace. I knew he would’ve liked that. But then I noticed a word was missing from his headstone. “Nicholas Jose Flores,” it said. “Beloved son, brother and grandson.” So I took my pen, bent down, and wrote the words (and boyfriend) on the slick marble under the inscription. You couldn’t really read it, and it would soon fade away, but I didn’t care. I didn’t blame his family for not writing it – they’d never known a thing about us, of course – but that didn’t mean I couldn’t do a little editing of my own.
I blew my nose as my throat tickled with tears that were begging to rise to my eyes. What do you even say to the dead love of your life? To the boy you’d hoped to turn to dust with? It was the strangest concept to wrap my head around: Nicky didn’t exist anymore. What made people talk to dead people, anyway? I had no idea, and yet here I was…
