Always You

by Roxie Noir

  A brief pause. I’m shaking with fury, my mind swirling, a deep thunderstorm.

  How could they do this? How could they fucking do this?

  “I’ll have the morgue call you later to arrange the details,” he says, his voice all forced calm. “We’re very sorry for your loss.”

  I just drop the phone on the ground and walk away, feeling like there’s a layer between me and the world, like I’m walking through water, blind and dumb.

  Eli’s not dead. He can’t be dead. He’s Eli. He can be a lot of things but he can’t be fucking dead.

  I’m not going anywhere. There’s no destination, besides someone else, besides through a door, besides away from people who’ll fucking look at me.

  I shove a door open. Broom closet, too small. I shove another one. Women’s bathroom.

  One more. Couch, table, lamp, looks familiar.

  I slam the door behind me.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Darcy

  Jesus, this is fucking endless. Now nearly everyone on the ground is shouting at the moron in the rafters, trying to explain that he just needs to stick something to the light, but he won’t. He’s convinced that something is loose.

  Poor Gavin’s still trying to explain that the light fixture resonates at the exact same frequency as Trent’s guitar, and sticking something to it will change that, but he may as well be explaining calculus to a wombat.

  I lean back in my chair and turn to Joan.

  “Is there any reason we can’t go?” I ask.

  She’s got her chin propped up on one fist, leaning on her drum kit.

  “Is there?” she asks. “Would they even notice?”

  “They might not,” I say. “I bet we could go grab a drink at the bar, come back in half an hour, and Gavin would still be here arguing.”

  “That’s not what I’m bloody saying,” Gavin shouts. “Look, every piece of metal is going to be slightly different, okay? And...”

  “Let’s do it,” Joan says, and whirls around on her stool. I lift the bass strap over my head and stand from my chair — sorry, my throne — and we’re just about to head off-stage when there’s a crash.

  We stop. We look at each other.

  There’s another crash, this one louder, and a tremor goes through the floor. Gavin turns and looks at us.

  “The fuck was that?”

  Joan and I are both looking around, but there’s nothing obvious, just a bunch of sound guys staring at us.

  Was that Trent? He’s been on the phone for a while now...

  “Where’s Trent?” Gavin asks, echoing my thoughts.

  “I’ll go find him,” I say, and head off stage, a bad feeling deep in my gut.

  It had to be Eli, calling from prison. Trent’s mom never calls him, he only calls her, and there’s no one else he’d interrupt sound check for.

  And it’s not like his talks with Eli ever go well. The last time he threw a phone at the wall, so Christ only knows what that dumb, useless asshole has done to piss Trent off this time.

  I round a corner. There’s another loud thump, and I think it’s coming from our dressing room. My stomach’s in knots, and when I reach the door, I don’t even hesitate.

  Trent looks up at me from the floor, a flat, rock-hard expression on his face I’ve never seen before. He’s sitting against the overturned couch, his elbows on his knees. The table’s on its side and the floor lamp is overturned, the room half-dark.

  “What happened?” I ask. My heart feels encased in stone because everything about this scene screams bad, very bad.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Trent,” I say, and he finally looks up at me. Flat, no expression.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, taking a step into the room, even though my senses all flood with danger.

  This isn’t something I know, despite years of friendship. This is new and it seems ugly, feels fraught. Even his eyes seem dead, distant.

  “Eli’s dead,” he finally says.

  Oh shit.

  Oh shit.

  I don’t know what to do, what to say. I don’t even know what face to make, but before I even know it I’m on the floor next to Trent, kneeling, and I grab him and pull him against me, holding his head to my chest. He doesn’t resist, just lets me, slowly wrapping his thick arms around my waist.

  “I’m sorry,” I finally whisper, because I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to say that even though I know it’s fucking futile. I know Trent loved Eli, even if Eli was a fuckup and even if I don’t understand why, but he did.

  He doesn’t respond. I pull him closer, and he lets me. After a minute Gavin and Joan show up at the door, take in the scene, look at me with questions.

  “His brother died,” I say.

  Joan gasps, her hands going to her mouth. Gavin’s mouth falls open, and they both freeze for a moment.

  Then Gavin walks over and sits on the other side of Trent and puts his arm around him, and Joan sits next to me and takes Trent’s hand. I don’t think she knows the story, though Gavin does.

  “Trent, I’m so sorry,” Joan says. “I can’t imagine.”

  Thank God someone knows what to say.

  “Thanks,” he whispers, the first thing he’s said since I came in.

  The four of us just sit there. An hour passes, my spine twisted into a pretzel, but we don’t move.

  And I think: at least we’ve got them.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Trent

  We play the show that night anyway. There’s no reason not to. It’s not like I can get on a plane before the morning and I don’t even know what the fuck I’m flying back to. I know fuck-all about what to do when someone dies and I know fuck-all about how to bury my little brother, so for the next couple of hours I just want to do what I fucking know how to.

  It’s probably the worst show we’ve ever played. I’m barely there, playing mechanically. Every time I look up I’m surprised to see where we are, mentally a thousand miles away.

  Gavin, Darcy, and Joan keep looking over at me every thirty seconds like I’m made of glass or some shit. The entire time I just wish they’d fucking stop. I wish I were invisible, because I don’t want to be here, in front of a few thousand people, trying to pretend that I’m having a good time.

  I don’t want to be anywhere.

  We play one encore, and going back on stage is like pulling teeth. The audience can tell that we’re having an off-night, and I can tell that they can tell, but I don’t care. Afterward I leave my guitar on the stage, walk off, and leave the theater through the alley in the back. The door closes behind me and I lean against the cool brick wall between a dumpster and a stack of pallets four feet high, an oily puddle in the middle of the pockmarked asphalt.

  It’s as close as I can get to nowhere, at least for now.

  My brain keeps spinning and stopping, spinning and stopping. Like a turntable with a broken motor, a wheel with a slipping gear. I’ll replay the last time we spoke, the night he called me and wanted money, the time before that, hearing his flat voice, and then my mind will go blank.

  The last time I saw him, buying him peanut M&Ms from the vending machine, sitting across the wobbly table from him in that white cinderblock room. Mom, next to me, asking for the third time how much longer he was going to be there, then blankness.

  I have to tell Mom. I’ll have to tell her thirteen times, a broken fucking record. I’ll have to get him buried or maybe cremated, I’ll have to figure out where and how, I’ll have to pick a fucking coffin and hire someone to say something nice at the service...

  Then blank.

  I don’t know how long I stand there. I think it’s a long fucking time, but it’s quiet and it’s dark and even though it smells like hot garbage, I can’t stand the thought of being anywhere else.

  After a while I shove myself off the wall. I walk to the street at the end of the alleyway, out onto the one-in-the-morning sidewalk filled with the muted splashes of flickering streetlights and dr
unk people weaving their way home. A taxi goes by, slowly, and without knowing what I’m doing I flag it down.

  “Where to?” the driver asks.

  I stare at him like he’s speaking Russian. My brain refuses to process it for a long time, and once it does, I’ve got no idea where I want to go. Just somewhere else, but I know I can’t fucking drive around Boston in the back of a cab for the rest of the night.

  “Hey. Buddy. You back there?”

  No.

  “Marriott,” I finally say.

  “You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

  “The closest one.”

  He shrugs and starts the meter. I’m just guessing that the closest one is where we’re staying, but it seems like a good guess.

  While we on stage, I got a voicemail from a number I don’t know, but it’s got a 661 area code and I know where that is.

  “This message is for Eli Ryder’s next of kin,” a woman’s voice says. “I’m calling with information on the process that the California Correctional System uses for deceased inmates...”

  I remember Eli, the first time he got out of prison, standing outside the gates at eight in the morning. Street clothes and a plastic bag in his hand, age twenty, still young enough to fidget. We hugged when I pulled up, quick and hard and perfunctory, but we were still doing that then.

  I remember my eyes stung because they were burning the fields in the valley, and because I hadn’t slept since I got off work at two that morning.

  The voicemail finishes. I barely heard a fucking word, so I hit play again, hold it up to my ear.

  “This is for Eli Ryder’s next of kin...”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Darcy

  I knock on Trent’s door softly, hoping he’s in there because if he’s not I’ve got no clue where to find him.

  No answer. I knock again, a little louder.

  Maybe he’s just asleep, not somewhere else, I tell myself. People sleep when bad things happen, right?

  I knock one more time, then turn away. He’s not there, and my stomach tightens, wondering where he went in a strange city at two in the morning—

  But then the door opens. Trent gives me a glance up and down, then nods, steps back, gestures me in.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” he says, his voice full of gravel.

  I almost ask are you okay or how are you doing or what’s up but those are all idiotic and trite and I bite my tongue rather than ask something stupid. He’s not okay, he’s doing bad, his brother’s dead, and I fucking know all that.

  “Any more news?” I finally ask, once the silence gets too heavy.

  He slumps onto a couch, across from the room’s queen bed.

  “The prison morgue called,” he says, and he sounds like I’m talking to him from miles away. “They want to know where to send the... where to send him, what my plans are for him, who else they need to notify. All that.”

  I sit gingerly on the bed opposite him. I’ve never done anything like this. I’ve never even had a grandparent or a distant uncle die, because that would require having either grandparents or uncles.

  “Can I help?” I ask. “Do you want me to...”

  I have no clue what needs to be done.

  “...Call funeral homes or something?” I hazard.

  “It’s eleven on the west coast,” he says, still looking at the curtains over the window like he can see through them. “I don’t think you’re gonna get an answer.”

  “Well, tomorrow,” I say. “Are they going to bury him at the prison, or can they send him to Low Valley, or...”

  “They?”

  “Whoever’s in charge of it.”

  Trent gives me a weird look, a little hesitant, a little put off. I think I said something wrong but I can’t pinpoint it.

  “That’s me. I’m in charge of it. Eli goes where I say.”

  I look down at my hands. I’d somehow assumed this would all be done by someone else, somewhere else, and it wouldn’t all fall on Trent but I have no idea why I thought that because I don’t know how either death or family work.

  The one person I know who died was Allen, the roadie who was with Gavin and Liam, and I have no idea what happened to his body. I guess someone took care of it.

  “Right,” I say, like I knew that and had forgotten.

  “There’s nothing to do right now,” he says, his voice hollow again. He’s looking back at the window. “Go get some sleep, Darce. I’ll see you in the morning. Thanks for stopping by.”

  It’s a dismissal, clear as day. I can’t help but be disappointed, because we’ve spent every night since that first one together.

  But I know why, and I know shit happens, and I know it’s not about me. So I stand up. I give him a quick kiss, and I tell him he can wake me up if he needs me, I don’t care, and then I leave.

  Back in my own room, in my oddly empty bed, I lie awake for a long time before I finally fall into a restless sleep, ready to wake up the moment my phone rings.

  It doesn’t ring all night. Sometime around sunrise I fall asleep properly and only wake up when it’s almost noon.

  Trent hasn’t called or texted, though Gavin and Joan both have, asking if I have any updates. I guess they haven’t heard from Trent either. I throw on some clothes, grab two coffees and a couple pastries from the hotel lobby breakfast, come back upstairs and knock on his door with my elbow.

  He’s on the phone when he answers the door, listening to someone on the other end. He doesn’t smile, just nods and turns, so I follow him in.

  I don’t think he’s slept. There are circles under his eyes, he’s wearing a white undershirt, and his room has that closed-in scent of insomnia and stress, random things scattered on the floor.

  But at least no furniture is upside down. At least his phone’s not smashed. Everything could always be worse.

  “You’re not listening,” he says. “I don’t want him there. He’s not going into Green Willows and I don’t fucking care how many spots my mother pre-paid for there.”

  He pauses, listening. I put the coffees on the table and sit, sipping one myself.

  “How far is Brookside Meadow from the Sunset Acres home? You know what, forget it, it doesn’t matter. Brookside is fine.”

  Silence.

  “First thing tomorrow,” he says. “North Delano said they’d call you and arrange for... delivery.”

  Another long silence. I sip coffee and look at the curtains, wondering if I should open them or turn on the air conditioning, anything to make this room a little better.

  “Thanks,” Trent says.

  He hangs up his phone, tosses it onto the bed, and sits on it himself. It’s still made but slightly rumpled, like he’s laid on it but hasn’t gotten in. I hand him his coffee and he takes it without drinking.

  “Fucking Eli,” he says. “I can’t believe he’s dead and still a useless pain in my ass.”

  Trent looks at the curtain-covered window, and I look at my coffee, not sure how to answer that.

  “The prison won’t release his body to a funeral home without someone to authorize it in person, otherwise they slap him in a pine box and bury him in some potter’s field they’ve got outside Fresno. And I can’t find a funeral home that’ll tell me shit about what to do until they’ve got confirmation that a body’s coming in, and the second I mention that he’s coming from a prison they all clam the fuck up and can’t wait to get off the phone with me.”

  He takes a long, angry pull from his coffee, still glaring at the window.

  “Not to mention I’ve got to buy him a burial plot, and it’s confusing the shit out of the cemetery because when my dad died, my mom bought four plots at once, like she thought we could all be together again or some shit. And like fucking hell am I burying him next to our father.”

  There’s a pretty obvious solution, I think.

  “It’s all a fucking mess,” he says, his jaw tightening. “I thought at least Eli’s fuck ups were contained i
f he was in prison, but apparently fucking not. Apparently he’s managed to put snarls in my life even when he got himself killed.”

  Another angry drink.

  “Have I mentioned that part yet? Stabbed twenty-something times with a fucking sharpened toothbrush. You’ve gotta be a pretty bad asshole to get that kind of attention in prison, but that’s what Eli was, a fucking useless idiot.”

  He stands up, stalks to the window, throws the curtain open.

  “We’re probably all fucking better off,” he says, his voice sharp and bitter. “Guess he’s done fucking up now.”

  I take a deep breath and get ready to state the obvious.

  “So let the prison bury him outside Fresno,” I say.

  Trent turns, slowly, and looks at me like I’m an alien.

  “What?”

  “You wouldn’t have to deal with all this,” I point out, heart pounding, but I keep my voice calm. “You wouldn’t have to call funeral homes and schedule a transfer, you wouldn’t have to fly to California and give the go-ahead. You wouldn’t have to go at all, just let them bury him where they want and be done with it. You don’t even have to reschedule any tour dates.”

  Trent keeps staring at me, his gaze so intense my skin starts crawling.

  “Eli’s my brother.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t fucking put him in some prison graveyard.”

  I glance at my coffee again, even as Trent’s eyes bore into me. I fucking hate seeing him like this, and I hate that his terrible brother — his brother who killed someone — is the one making him such a wreck.

  “He was in prison,” I point out.

  “I’m not doing that to my little brother.”

  “He’s dead, he won’t even know.”

  “That’s not the point,” Trent says, and now he looks disgusted. “I’m not just— I can’t—”

  He paces away from the window, takes a couple steps to the bed, turns back.