“Yeah. Maybe I should call up there and ask,” I said, causing my dad’s face to light up like I’d seen only a few times before.
“Hey,” he said to me as I walked out of the room, “be sure to ask them about their honors program, too. I bet you anything you’re eligible.”
I did not call U of A when I left the room. Instead I walked past the telephone, past the kitchen, down the hall, and into my bedroom, where Lucas Cader was asleep on the floor. I stepped over him and got into my bed. I pulled out my journal and opened it to the first blank page. I wrote down the conversation I’d just had with my dad, and then I closed the book and put it back under my mattress. Closing my eyes, I began to imagine walking around a large, crowded college campus. Everyone around me was smiling, introducing themselves to friends of friends, talking about the big game last night, wearing their newly purchased red and white sweatshirts. And I was right in the middle, everyone moving quickly around me, noises flooding my brain, not moving a muscle. My face was expressionless as the world spun around me as if I were the sun.
When I woke up, Lucas was doing jumping jacks in the middle of my bedroom. I sat up, looked at him, and waited for him to notice that I’d awakened. When he did, he simply looked down at me, smiled, and continued to jump up and down, flailing his arms and legs out with each hop.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked him.
“Getting my endorphins kicked in,” he said.
“Why?”
“’Cause we’re running the Woodpecker Relay tonight,” he said.
“The what?” I asked.
“The Woodpecker Relay, Cullen. Do you live under a rock?”
“I try to, yes,” I said.
“I signed you and me and Mena up to run in the race. It starts at four thirty, so you better get changed.”
“No. I’m not running in a stupid race!” I shouted.
“Cullen, I signed you up. You have to.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Come on. You know you’ll end up having fun and thank me later,” he said, still jumping into the air.
“No I won’t, because I’m not going!” I said, walking out of the room.
Lucas followed behind me down the hallway, his breathing heavy. I opened up the refrigerator to find it empty, and when I closed it, Lucas was standing on the other side of the door. He had that waiting-for-me-to-give-in-to-his-odd-request-and-just-go-with-the-flow sort of look on his face. I turned around and took a seat at the dining table. He sat down across from me, his breathing still heavy. He put both his elbows up on the table and leaned down to look directly at my face. He nodded his head slightly. His look was all confidence.
“Hell no,” I said.
“Cullen, don’t be crazy.”
“Lucas, just go to your damn relay and leave me the hell alone!” I shouted, standing up and walking into the living room, where my dad sat flipping through the channels.
“Mr. Sam, tell him that runnin’ the relay’ll be fun,” Lucas said to my dad.
“Cullen, the relay will be fun,” my dad said robotically.
“See, he wants you to do it. So let’s go.”
With that I stood up, my face only about two inches from Lucas Cader’s, and said the following in my lowest of voices:
“Lucas, I understand that you want to have fun. That you like to distract yourself from life by going and doing these ridiculous things and laughing the whole time while you do them. I know you want to pretend that everything’s okay by trying your best to act normal, but I don’t. I want to sit in this house and mope around and be sad and revel in the fact that my life is complete shit from here on out. So go get your girlfriend, go run your race, get the hell out of my house, and don’t come back until you’re ready to start acting like you didn’t forget that my little brother and your friend is still out there somewhere having God knows what done to him by God knows who.”
Lucas Cader walked quickly out the front door and my dad turned the television off, stood up, and left me in the middle of the living room. I dragged my feet all the way back to my bedroom and threw myself face-first onto my bed. I felt the hot air of my breath on my face. I smelled the cotton of my sheets. And I screamed just loud enough for the sound to be muffled, as if it hadn’t existed at all.
Dr. Webb says that losing a sibling is oftentimes much harder for a person than losing any other member of the family. “A sibling represents a person’s past, present, and future,” he says. “Spouses have each other, and even when one eventually dies, they have memories of a time when they existed before that other person and can more readily imagine a life without them. Likewise, parents may have other children to be concerned with—a future to protect for them. To lose a sibling is to lose the one person with whom one shares a lifelong bond that is meant to continue on into the future.” I understood this to mean that as a seventeen-year-old whose brother was most likely dead, I was acting like a complete ass-hat for a good reason. Not only had my brother disappeared, but—and bear with me here—a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from then on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.
Ten weeks to the day was all it took for my mom to officially move into Gabriel’s bedroom. The door stayed closed most of the time, and my dad and I stopped trying to get her to answer. She did eat about once a day, though, so at least we found comfort in the fact that she had some will to live. If, as Dr. Webb says, there are several stages to the grieving process, my mom was smack-dab in the middle of the bat-shit insane stage, barely able to speak without stammering, unable to sleep for more than an hour or so, obsessed with reading Gabriel’s collection of books and listening to his CDs. The day after she took over his room, she opened the door and pulled me in as I walked down the hallway. She sat me down on the bed. She was wearing pink-and-white-striped pajamas and no makeup.
“I want you to hear this song, Cullen. It’s amazing.”
She pressed play on his small stereo, and I waited to hear something. Nothing happened.
“Shit,” she said, sitting down Indian-style on the floor in front of the stereo.
“Here, Mom, let me—”
“No, stop. I can do this,” she interrupted, pressing two more buttons while half sticking out her tongue.
What played was the middle of a song I’d never heard before, and I closed my eyes, listening to every word.
Staring at the sun
Oh my own voice cannot save me now
Standing in the sea
It’s just one more breath and then down I go.
I looked at my mom, who moved her lips to the words, and I wondered how many times she’d sat there and listened to it that day. She swayed back and forth, her eyes looking up to the ceiling, one hand moving by her side, seeming to slowly swat away invisible flies. When the song ended, my mom pressed the stop button, let her arms fall to her sides, and looked at me as if I was supposed to say something.
“I liked it,” I said.
“I knew you would,” she said.
“Where does he find this stuff?” I asked her.
“I don’t know, but I love it,” she said, now rubbing one hand on the carpet.
“Are you gonna come outta here anytime soon?” I asked her.
“You really do look just like him, ya know?” she asked me, staring at my face.
“Mom, please,” I said.
“You do. When you were about six and five, people used to ask me if you were twins. You looked like twins.”
“You wanna go get some food or something?” I asked her, standing up.
“I want you to know that it’s gonna be okay, Cullen.”
“Mom.”
“School’ll start soon, and one day you’re gonna come home and Gabe’s gonna be sittin’ right here on the floor listening to this song.”
Ada Taylor agreed to meet me at the only coffee shop in town, which also doubled as a bookstore. We sat across from each other an
d awkwardly waited for the other to speak. Ada had a look on her face to suggest that she felt terribly bad about something. I felt as if I had the same look on my own face as I sipped my coffee and finally spoke.
“Ada, I’m a little confused,” I said.
“I know you are,” she said back.
“About what’s going on between you and Russell.”
“Right,” she said.
“And about you suddenly not returning my phone calls and never being home.”
She stared at me as if she either had nothing to say or no way to say it.
“Do you have anything at all to say here?” I asked.
“I need to take care of Russell. He needs me. I owe it to him,” she said.
“What does that mean? You owe it to him? You didn’t break his neck!” I started talking too loudly.
“It means that had Russell never met me, he probably would never have ended up down there in Florida drunk off his ass and wrecking his car. It’s my fault, any way you slice it. I never got a chance to take care of the last two, so I need to be there for him now.”
“And what about me, then?” I asked.
“What about you, Cullen?” she asked, sounding frustrated.
I waited in silence for her to apologize.
“Cullen, you’re just in love with the idea of us being together and the idea of this working. It’s not me, I promise.”
“It’s not you,” I repeated back, a blank look on my face.
“I’m sorry, Cullen. I really am. I know this sucks. But you’re better off anyway. And you’ll be fine. You needed me. Now someone else needs me.”
As she walked out the door, I took a sip of my coffee and stared over at the couple sitting to my right. They were looking at me in that we-just-heard-you-get-dumped sort of way, so I raised my coffee cup in their direction, as if to say “cheers,” and took another sip. I threw a dollar down on the table and walked out the door.
Lucas Cader came back three days after I’d asked him to leave. He hadn’t run in the relay, and the left side of his jaw was purple and swollen. He sat down beside me on the couch, nodded hello to my dad in the recliner beside him, and stared at the TV. My dad turned up the volume to block out the music coming from my brother’s room and, leaning up just enough to make eye contact with me, pointed to his jaw and then to Lucas.
“What happened?” I asked, a grin on my face.
“Nothing,” he said.
“No, really, what the hell happened to your face?”
“I said nothing. Just leave it alone,” he answered.
“Fine. Just walk into a person’s living room with a bruised-up face and give no one any explanation for it,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll tell you,” he said. My dad muted the television and sat up. Lucas cracked the smile of someone with only half a working face.
“So, I left here the other day after you told me to—”
“Sorry,” I interrupted.
“It’s fine. Anyway, I left here and went to pick up Mena. She was running late, so by the time we got to the park, all the runners were lined up and John Barling, of all people, was standing on the stage and holding a pistol in the air. He welcomed everyone and began to count. And at that very moment, when Mena took off for the runners’ line, I took off for the stage. I ran up the steps and ran across to Barling and then I just socked him right in the nose.”
“You did what?” I asked.
“Damn,” my dad said.
“I socked him hard, too, but he’s stronger than I thought, and before I could do anything else he swung and caught my mouth. That’s why I look like this.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Still hurts like a bitch too.” Lucas laughed.
“Why’d you do it?”
“To show you I haven’t forgotten what’s important, I guess,” he mumbled.
“Hell, Lucas, you could’ve just said so,” I replied.
The next morning I woke up before Lucas and tiptoed my way out of the room. I poured myself a bowl of cereal, Fruity Pebbles, because that’s what I had for about every meal that summer, which caused the roof of my mouth to be constantly coated in a sugary film. I sat down across from my dad at the table; he was slowly stirring his coffee and staring down at a crossword puzzle.
“I called the Office of Student Housing,” my dad said, never looking up.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Yeah. They said you just have to fill out some form and Lucas has to do the same and you guys will have yourselves a dorm room.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said.
Gabriel and I used to play this game we liked to call What If? where the object was to take turns creating the most absurd “what if?” scenarios. We had played a particularly good round of this game as we lay on the roof of our house just a couple of weeks before he went missing. Our original reason for lying on the roof was to view a widely publicized meteor shower. Gabriel wouldn’t let himself miss one of these, no matter the hour of night, as they only happened once every few years.
“What if humans began to evolve and sprout wings?” he said, never breaking his stare at the dark sky.
“What if I already have them and have been hiding them all these years?” I said back.
“What if I throw you off this roof for being a liar?” he said with a laugh.
“What if I used my secret wings to fly away?” I laughed back. “What if nonwinged humans started hunting winged humans for sport?” Gabriel asked.
“That would definitely happen in Lily,” I added.
“What if we drafted up some laws in anticipation of this evolutionary event?” Gabriel suggested.
“What if we called them ‘It’s Not Easy Being Winged: Rules and Guidelines for the Recently Able to Fly’?”
“Perfect.” Gabriel sighed.
In those days when it felt as if summer was dwindling away and my future refused to stop beckoning and harassing me at every turn, I started to find comfort in my own little game of What If? Most of these scenarios, naturally, centered on my brother. “What if,” I would ask myself while driving down the road or sitting on the couch or trying to fall asleep, “what if Gabriel were like the Lazarus woodpecker, and he popped up one day as if nothing had ever happened to him? What if this was all real—this stupid woodpecker thing? What if things really did come back to life in this awful place?” This always made me think about the time Gabriel told me why he would always have faith in mankind. He said:
“Cullen, people can’t give up on other people yet. We all get a second chance, you know? We get to start over like Noah after the flood. No matter how evil man gets, he always gets a second chance one way or another.”
Book Title #85: God Knows What.
When one is lying on the floor of his bedroom exactly ten weeks and three days after his brother has vanished off the face of the Earth, he begins to imagine quite a grandiose scene. The doorbell rings and his mother, in a black dress, opens it up to greet his aunt Julia and her husband, the doctor James Fouke, by her side. He doesn’t look dead at all, Cullen Witter thinks to himself, getting up from the floor and moving to the couch. The doorbell rings again as Julia and James move into the kitchen. He jumps up and beats his mother to the door, opening it to find a nicely groomed Lucas Cader, necktie and all, with Mena Prescott attached to his right arm. She is wearing a black dress as well, only hers has no straps and is much tighter fitting. He silently motions them to go into the living room, and as soon as he tries to shut the door, he sees someone else approaching. He waits there, holding the door open, until Ada Taylor walks through, kisses his cheek, and continues on into the house. He shuts the door, shaking his head with a smile, and walks slowly into the kitchen where he finds his parents, aunt, and uncle all raising champagne glasses into the air. Clink.
He walks into the living room but turns around as soon as the doorbell rings once again. The door opens before he can get to it and Oslo Fouke steps in, smiling, in a white button-down shir
t and black necktie. He smirks at his cousin, looks him up and down, and shakes his outstretched hand. Oslo steps to one side and walks into the living room, where he takes a seat beside Lucas and Mena on the couch. He asks Lucas about school. He comments on Mena’s dress. He does not look dead either as he asks Ada Taylor to dance and they begin to sway in the center of the room. From behind them, Cullen Witter sees someone walk down the hall. He tries to stand up on his tiptoes to see over his guests and as he does, Gabriel Witter comes walking into the room from the opposite side, turns his eyebrows up at his cousin, and walks right past Cullen, lightly patting his shoulder. He sees Gabriel’s mouth moving, but no sound comes out. He notices the same thing when anyone else tries to speak in his direction.
Alma Ember and her mother barge into the house with an odd familiarity and go directly into the dining room, where Cullen believes he hears the faintest sounds of laughter. He steps into the room, and instead of finding a four-chaired wooden table bought on sale at Lily’s only furniture store, he sees a long table with eight chairs on each side and one on each end. The table is covered in a white lace cloth and dotted by silver platters with lids, bowls of grapes, baskets of bread, and glasses of bubbling liquids. His parents are seated at either end of the table, and his aunt and uncle are right next to his mom on the left side. Alma and her mother take a seat next to them, and as Cullen tries to leave the room, his friends pour through the doorway and take their seats.
Just as Cullen surveys the room for a seat of his own, Russell Quitman stands before him, his friend Neil at his heels, and extends a hand. Cullen shakes it, noting this to be the first time, and motions them toward the table, staring down at Russell’s working legs as the two walk away. Neil turns back to wink at Cullen and makes an I’m-shooting-an-imaginary-yet-playful-gun-at-you hand gesture his way. Cullen stays by the door and waits only a few seconds before hearing someone else walking up the porch steps. John Barling, Shirley Dumas, and Fulton all file into the house and greet Cullen with handshakes and smiles. They make their way into the dining room as Cullen looks at them in confusion and shakes his head. He leaves the door open now and retreats to the dining room with all the others.
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