by Susan Soares
Robert Lee Carter
February 12, 2001-April 6, 2012
Son, brother, and incredible kid
I walked the rest of the way home. As I clutched the letter in my hand, I sobbed gently. The deflated balloon dragged behind me for the next mile until I reached my house. With its weight amounting to mere ounces, it felt like I was pulling a cement block.
****
“Maybe you could buy another balloon and bring it back to the cemetery and let it go.” Zoe was sitting on the end of my bed handing me yet another tissue.
Zoe and I became best friends in the third grade. She sat down near me during lunch and took a thermos out of her lunch bag. My eyes widened as I watched her eat some excessively long noodles.
“Ew, worms!” Justin Crumble yelled from a few seats over. Suddenly, the entire lunch table where we sat began to giggle and point at her. I’ll never forget how she shot me this maniacal smile before she said, “What? You don’t eat worms? Man, you don’t know what you’re missing!” Then she shoved a way too large portion of the crazy noodles into her mouth. She let them dangle from her lips as she spun her head from side to side so they looked like they were alive and wiggling. The laughter quieted, and most of the kids went back to their previous chitchat.
“I’m Marissa,” I said to her.
“I’m Zoe. Oh, and just so you know, these aren’t worms. It’s lo mein noodles. You wanna try?” She held out a fork full for me. I cautiously took a bite, and was in love — with the noodles and with Zoe.
“Oh Zoe,” I paused to blow my nose. “I can’t just get another balloon. It’s not that… simple.” I blew again, and this time my nose sounded like a trumpet.
I could tell by Zoe’s facial expression that she was frantically trying to come up with a plan to make it better. Zoe was always trying to make it better. She hates when curveballs are thrown at her — or at me.
“What if I got the new balloon and I went with you? That way you wouldn’t have to, you know, step into the cemetery.”
My hands started to shake a little when she said that last word. “I already did.”
“You WHAT?”
Her voice was so loud I threw my hand over her mouth to quiet her.
“Shhh, I don’t want Gram to come up here.”
She removed my hand and gave me an apologetic nod. Keeping her voice even, she asked again. “You what?” She leaned her body into me. “Rissa, you haven’t like stepped in there since… forever.”
I felt the heat behind my eyes again as Zoe’s face started to blur from my tears. “I had to see the grave. I wanted to know who the balloon was for. Who the note was for. That way maybe I could… I could—”
“Marissa, you could what?”
I had to look away from her. “I could return it.”
In her most dramatic fashion, Zoe threw herself backward on my bed and landed on my fluffy pink pillow. “I can’t believe you just said what you said.” She kept her gaze on the ceiling.
I knew why she couldn’t believe it. Typically, I never did things outside the box. My comfort zone was insanely comfortable to me. My plain wardrobe of T-shirts and jeans and my minimally decorated room were evidence of my efforts to fit into a “normal” mode. That’s why I loved Zoe so much. She was everything I wasn’t. I most certainly didn’t bring letters intended for Heaven back to the family that lost them. Who did that? But I had to. There was no way around it. My gut was on fire with the thought of this family. The woman, the guy, the young boy. That young boy who wrote this letter. Maybe to his brother? Whoever he was to him, he deserved to have that letter back so he could give it a proper send off. So he could get it to where it belonged.
Zoe was staring intently at my ceiling. “Are you ever going to take those plastic stars down?” She wrinkled her nose.
“My mom put them up.” I felt a twinge in my heart.
Zoe sat up again. “Right, sorry.”
She cast me a sympathetic grin.
Zoe was probably the only person who knew everything about me. She saw firsthand how devastated I was after my mom died. It was weeks before I left the house. There was no one I could talk to — not even her. She would come over and sit on my bed and ramble on and on about meaningless things that were going on at school, and I would sit on my bed and listen. When I would break down crying in the middle of one of her stories, she would just lean my head against her shoulder, letting me cry for as long as I needed to. On my first day back to school, she walked me to and from all of my classes to make sure I was okay. Our friendship strengthened as she supported me, and she never pushed me to talk about my feelings or anything; she was always just there for me. I loved her for that.
“So anyway, the letter,” Zoe said. “What do think you’re going to do? I mean, just find this family somehow, knock on their door, and be like, ‘Hi, here’s your letter for Heaven! Don’t ask how I got it.’ And the person on the other side will say, ‘Oh great, thanks so much! Come back again if you ever want to intrude on our lives again!’ I mean, come on Marissa, I just don’t feel like you’ve thought this through.”
She was right; I hadn’t thought about what the confrontation at the door might seem like. But I didn’t care. I knew if I had lost a letter I would want it back. Something inside me couldn’t let this kid think his letter safely traveled off to the heavens when it was actually sitting in my bedroom. Along with the torn balloon. I crushed the shiny foil between my hands. “I don’t care,” I said softly enough that I felt I had to repeat it. “I don’t care.”
Zoe positioned herself so she was facing me directly. Her brown eyes peered at me. They twinkled in the corners the same as they always did right before she was going to say something that would surprise me. She blew the section of black bangs that had fallen into her eyes out of her way, and then she took in a deep breath. “Then I’m going to help you. What was the name on the grave?”
“Bobby Carter.” My heart skipped at least two beats when his name fell from my lips.
The color in Zoe’s face began to drain, “Oh!” Her hands flew over her mouth.
“What?” Now the twinkle in her eyes was almost glowing. I was afraid of what she would say next.
She closed her eyes briefly, and then spoke. “I know him.”
Chapter Three
I knew I had heard her but wasn’t sure my brain processed the words correctly. There was no way she actually just said that. Was there?
“What do you mean you know him?” I asked.
Zoe pulled her shoulder-length black hair into a high ponytail. “I don’t like ‘know him,’ but I think I know him. I mean, I know his story. You know?”
Again, I could hear her speaking, but I wasn’t following. “Can you please explain yourself in English? Clearly this time.”
She bounced off my bed and went to my desk, grabbing my laptop. “Okay,” she said, returning to sit close to me, and opened up the laptop. “Put your password in, and I’ll show you.”
Without hesitation, I typed in my password, which was kind of stupid because she could’ve done it herself. Best friends — no secrets. Then I proceeded to watch her open up the Internet and type in the search bar: BOBBY CARTER ACCIDENT MOUNT VIEW NEW HAMPSHIRE. Half a second later, we were staring at several links that matched our search criteria. I started to feel itchy all over as she clicked open a blog post about the incident, and I read along as she read out loud.
Young boy dies after dirt bike, car accident
Mount View, New Hampshire — On Monday April 6, 2012, eleven-year-old Robert (Bobby) Carter was pronounced dead after sustaining injuries from a motorcycle accident. Bobby had been riding dirt bikes with some family and friends. The group took some trails found in the wooded area bordered by Country and Wilton Streets. This is a well-known area for off-roaders and dirt bikers to ride. There is a street, Kramer Street, that the bikes will cross to access the other wooded area. Kramer Street hardly sees any traffic as it is a dead end and there are no houses on the surrounding
areas. According to reports, Bobby crossed Kramer without stopping to look and was unaware of a car heading at him from the west side. He was struck and propelled off the bike. Even with a helmet, he suffered serious head wounds, as well as a punctured lung. After two days at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston, MA, Bobby passed away. Memorial information can be found below. Bobby’s mother and two brothers would like to ask everyone to please email [email protected] for information about donations.
I had finished reading a minute before Zoe did. My hands and feet felt numb, and I was having trouble swallowing. Tears streaked down my face. Zoe handed me a tissue and took one for herself.
“How did you hear about this?” I asked while trying to clean my face off.
“He went to the same school as Zack.” She paused for a moment. “I remember he came home from school, and he looked all, like, weird. So I grabbed his backpack from him and threatened to pour paint all over his books — you know to mess with him, normal sister stuff — and he didn’t even flinch. That’s when he told me about the principal making the announcement to everyone. They had an assembly about it.” She had a far-off look in her eyes. “I’ve never seen Zacky look so sad.”
The sound of the knock on my bedroom door made us both jump. I closed the laptop and shoved the limp balloon and envelope under my pillow. “Come in.”
Gram opened the door slowly. “Marissa… oh, hi Zoe, how are you?”
“Good. How are you?”
My grandmother stretched her back out a bit. “Oh, I’m getting along, I suppose. Rissa, I came to ask if you want chicken or fish for dinner.” Neither, I thought to myself.
“Would it be okay if we ordered a pizza?” I asked.
“Oh yum, I’ll pitch in a few bucks.” Zoe said.
My grandmother tucked a few silver loose strands that had fallen out of her braid behind her ears. “Pizza?” Her hands went to her hips. “I can’t tell you the last time I ate pizza. Probably only when Rose would request it.” Immediately, her eyes got glassy, the way they always did at the mere mention of my mother’s name. She shook her body as if to erase the memory that was haunting her before she said, “One cheese and one pepperoni sound good to you girls?”
“Perfect,” we said in unison. Gram gave me a little wink before exiting my room.
“So, what now?” I pulled the envelope out from under my pillow.
Zoe got up off my bed. “Now, I’m going to go downstairs to make sure your grandmother orders the pizza from Pizza Express and not Pizza Pronto. I hate their sauce.” She made a disgusted face and headed out of my room.
After she closed the door, I looked at the envelope again. I traced the lettering with my index finger. The crayon felt bumpy and the letters weren’t perfectly formed, but I could feel the love running through them. My thoughts drifted, and I wondered if the other family members that were out riding with him that day were his brothers. How incredibly horrible it would be to see your brother get hit by a car and thrown across the road. I wondered how many times the family had already been to the grave. Early April was just about a month ago. Maybe that was the first time the little boy had been there. On the day of my mom’s funeral Marc didn’t want to go, and Gram had to practically disown him before he begrudgingly came along. He was so angry. I guess he still is. If he ever calls me back maybe I’ll be able to find out.
“Okay, everything’s good.” Zoe said upon return.
I grabbed my pink blanket with the white stars and wrapped it around my legs. “Everything is not good.”
Zoe sat down at my desk. “Right, I know. I mean the pizza. The pizza will be awesome. Now you, we need to work on. So okay, let me think.” She picked a pencil up off my desk and started gnawing on the end of it. “Oh wait! How old was the guy you saw at the cemetery?”
“The older one looked like our age. Seventeen, eighteen, I don’t know maybe a little older. Why?”
She stopped chewing the eraser. “If the boy who got killed went to Zack’s middle school, maybe that guy who’s our age goes to our school. There isn’t any other high school near us. We live in the middle of nowhere.”
Her arms thrust up as if to indicate we were nowhere. Sadly, she was right. Our town was in what most people would refer to as “the boonies.” We boasted sixteen hundred residents. In that type of town you would think everyone knows everyone else’s business, right? That’s pretty much right. But because we are a small town surrounded by small towns, there are a whole bunch of kids that go to the regional high school, three towns away. So we get bused in as far out as about fifteen miles away, making the high school we attend quite large. Now that I finally had my license (third time’s the charm), I loved being able to drive myself instead of sitting in that stinky bus with the other kids from our town, all of us annoyed at our living arrangements.
“Wait,” I began, “how could he go to our school? We would’ve heard about something this major.”
Zoe contemplated that for a minute while picking at her fuchsia nail polish. “Not necessarily. I mean, what if he’s a senior? And it’s not like it happened to someone in our school. It happened to his brother. Hey, wait a second. Where’s your sophomore yearbook?”
I rolled my eyes as I thought of the photo from last year. It was horrible, and I looked like a deer caught in headlights. My smile was all crooked, and the stupid photographer forced herself on me and tried to comb out my wavy hair. Comb plus wavy hair equals frizz! “It’s in the second desk drawer.”
I watched her toss out some papers and a box of paperclips as she dug to find the book. “Aha, here it is!” She moved from the desk chair to beside me on the bed. “Okay, now let’s just look at last year’s sophomore class to see if we can find him. Carter, Carter, Carter, last name Carter.” She scanned through the “C” names.
“I’m telling you he’s not in our class. We would recognize the last name.”
She waved her hand at me. “Yeah, yeah, shush. Nothing there. Let’s check the juniors. Okay, Carter, Carter, Car-” her voice broke off. “Is this him?”
She pointed to a photo of a guy with dark, wavy hair. His eyes seemed to pierce through me. “I… I think so.” I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. Even though I only saw him briefly, and it was from the side, I knew in my heart that was him.
“Wow, for real?” Zoe sounded impressed with herself. “His name is Brandon, and so he’d be a senior this year. Wow. That’s crazy. We found him. Now you can, you know.” She cocked her head to the side.
“I can what?”
“Marissa!” She rolled her eyes. “You can give him the letter.”
The letter. Its envelope crinkled as I pressed it against my chest. I thought about what Zoe had said earlier. ‘Hi, here’s your letter for Heaven! Don’t ask how I got it.’ How could I just track down this Brandon guy at school, pull out the letter his little brother wrote to his deceased brother, and have it be casual?
This situation was going to require careful planning. Because of that, I asked Zoe if she wouldn’t mind taking a drive to the store to get us some sodas. There was no need for her to know that there was already a full six-pack of soda in the fridge. I just needed a few minutes alone. I lay back on my pillow and stared at the plastic stars on my ceiling. They were so old that they barely glowed in the dark anymore. I was nine years old when my mom first put them up, and at that time I had big dreams of being an astronomer. That was before I knew everything that went into it. Math and I didn’t get along. All I wanted was a job where I could sit and stare at the stars and wonder who or what inhabited them.
When I was young, my mom would tell me the story of the night fellows — a group of beings that lived on the brightest star in the universe. Their purpose was to light all the other stars from their power plant. They were only a group of three, but they were all-powerful because they were filled with light and love. There was no star they couldn’t light up because of the power of their love. She would say that’s how the three of us
were, Mom, Marc, and I. We had enough love between the three of us to light up the entire night sky. And I believed her. I believed we could get through anything together. As long as we stuck together, we could solve any problem and conquer any obstacle. Years later I tried to believe that when she got cancer. Even when Marc took off, I still tried to believe. But now it was just me and Gram. The all-powerful vessel of love we had together had now sunk.
****
Later at dinner, I wiped some sauce from the corner of my mouth. The pepperoni pizza tasted amazing. Even Gram seemed to enjoy it. I had an English paper to write, and Zoe had to get home to watch Zack while her mom went to work at her second job.
“So what do you think you’re gonna do?” she asked me as we walked outside to her car.
I shrugged. “I don’t know”
“I’ll do some more brainstorming, and we’ll come up with something tomorrow at school. Okay?” She gave me a quick hug and popped into her car.
She beeped her horn as I waved goodbye. Even though the sky wasn’t pitch-black yet, I could make out the North Star. I wrapped my arms around myself and wondered if my mom was there now, helping light up the night sky with her love.
Chapter Four
I packed my backpack for school. Lunch. Homework. Water bottle. The letter, which I had put inside a plastic baggie, making it look like a piece of evidence or something. But I wanted to make sure that if anything spilled in my backpack, the letter would be safe. How I was going to get it to Brandon, I still wasn’t sure. Somehow, I was hoping Zoe was going to help with that.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Zoe said.
I slammed my locker shut (it never closes if you shut it gently) and saw her big brown eyes gleaming at me.
“What?” I asked. We walked down the hall toward our English class.
