by JJ Strong
So on Friday afternoon—two days before Cullen and I made the drive south—I met Father Joe during my free period, the last period of the day, and interrogated him about the Infinite Space.
“Are you saying that’s God or something?” I asked him.
“What’s God? The infinite space?”
“Yeah.”
“How so?”
I knew he would turn the line of questioning back on me, yet I couldn’t help but pursue it. Before I drove south with Cullen, I needed to know.
“Well,” I said. “I’ve been thinking that, like, even though there’s this infinite space between people, you can still feel connected to them, right?”
He nodded.
“Like you can never be another person, obviously. And so you can never really get as close to someone as they are to themselves. But you can get pretty close.”
“Like with whom?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Who are you close to like that?”
My face went flush. “I don’t know.”
“Your parents?”
“Sure, I don’t know. “
“Your sister?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Who else?”
Another unpleasant pause. My throat so tight. Please don’t say it, I thought. Don’t say his name.
But I knew he would.
“Amir.”
A silent minute passed. Passed slowly, painfully. Father Joe wheeled his chair around, popped open the CD player, flipped through a book of CDs, picked a new one, and pressed Play while these big tears dropped out of my eyes. No sobs or bawling or anything like that. Just the tears—like spilled water falling off the side of a table. The music played loud at first, but he lowered the volume to almost nothing. It was a light, plucky guitar—classical, I guessed, no singing. A harmless, calming background melody.
He spun the chair back around. “So what about the infinite space?”
“It’s just that . . .” I wiped my eyes and sniffled. Why was it impossible to cry without feeling like a five-year-old boy? “You can reach out to people, and they can reach back to you, but you can never cross the space, right? That’s what you said, anyway. So God must be the space. He’s like this . . . conduit, or whatever, that transmits the signals between us. He lets us get closer to each other than we can manage by ourselves.”
“You know what the key part of that is?”
“What?”
“You said, ‘You reach out to people, and they reach back.”
“Okay?”
“It takes two people to do the reaching. You can’t just sit back and wait for it.”
I wiped my eyes again and tried to think about this, knowing, as with a lot of what Father Joe laid on me, it would take days, maybe weeks—years, even—before I could apply it to all the parts of my life he wanted me to.
“Okay, now get ready,” he said, leaning forward with his elbows on the desk. “I’m about to launch into a lot of grown-up priesty stuff. And you’re not going to like it. We gotta take our vitamins. Okay?”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“You reached out to Amir, and he reached back to you. And it was great. I mean, it’s the greatest thing in the world, isn’t it? To have a true friend? To love someone like that who loves you back? And I think the God-as-transmitter idea is a hell of an idea. A hell of an idea, Ray. But it’s just an idea. And that’s all God is. He’s an idea. A map, let’s say. But a map’s pretty useless if you don’t use it. Amir’s gone now. I’m so sorry for that. I can’t even begin to put into words how sorry that makes me. But he left you something.”
He was right about the vitamins thing. This was too much, and I sat there gripping the arms of my chair, trying to resist the moment’s effect.
“Do you know what he left you?”
“The map,” I said.
He nodded.
“Suicide . . .” he said. This was the first—the only—time we’d ever addressed my outburst at the mass. The word seemed so offensive when he said. Violent. “Suicide is the exact opposite of everything we’re talking about here.”
I fiddled with my hands and didn’t say anything.
“It can happen again, Ray. That connection. Maybe it already has. Maybe it’s happening right now. Isn’t it worth sticking around for that?”
* * *
And so two days later, I found myself no longer wanting to die, but lying, nevertheless, in my Box of Eternal Suffering and Darkness, the emergency string dangling beside me, tickling my ear.
But I wasn’t going to pull it.
I wasn’t going to die either, though. Because I’d also realized something about Cullen during my time as a ghost. Something I needed him to see for himself—the very reason I’d climbed into the casket. Cullen, unlike me, was a natural reacher. He’d reached out across the Infinite Space to Amir, and to Bri, and, of course, to me.
Bri wasn’t going to kill herself. I saw that when I finally calmed myself as much as it was possible to calm myself in that death trap. It was all too perfect. The signs. The pamphlet. The not-so-subtle hints Cullen had dropped. I wasn’t buying it. He was doing all this because what happened to Amir was devouring him from the inside out, just like it was doing to me. Here he was trying to make me save myself, but it was too late. I was going to make him do it.
The dirt had long ago stopped falling. But for the thump-thump-thump of my pulse and the whooshing of blood in my head, the silence was almost as total as the darkness. The cold had been replaced by the heat from my body and breath. The casket pinned my arms against my sides, and it seemed to shrink with each passing second. A weightless feeling rolled like fog through my head, and I realized I was taking shorter and shorter breaths.
Whether he liked it or not, Cullen was one of the good guys.
Any minute now he’d understand.
Any minute now he’d dig me out.
Brielle
HE PROMISED HE’D CALL as soon as it was over. He gave me his cell phone so we didn’t have to deal with the possibility of Dad answering the house phone. Everything would be okay. I didn’t have to worry. I didn’t need to come looking for them.
Too nervous to stand still, I walked to the center of town, one hand wrapped around Cullen’s cell phone in my pocket. Families and hungover people in their twenties ate at the diner. The ice cream store was just opening for the day. I passed the music store, where a bunch of middle school kids paraded out, shouting, laughing, chewing gum, comparing purchases, one boy ripping the plastic off a CD case and popping the CD in his Discman. I walked to the end of the block, then turned around. The phone wasn’t ringing. Please, I thought. Please ring. This time, for lack of anywhere better to go, I entered the music store.
A girl at the counter nodded a hello at me, and I nodded back. I paced the aisles, peeking at the genres and band names. The clerk—she was maybe ten years older than me—stepped out from behind her perch and came toward me. I stopped and immediately flipped through a batch of CDs, hoping to keep her away.
“Can I help you find something?” She had a tattoo of a star on her wrist and a silver nose ring.
“I’m fine,” I said. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to buy music.
The phone was not ringing.
“You like country?”
“Huh?”
The girl nodded at the cases I was so intent on pretending to study instead of talking to her. I looked at the names: Garth Brooks, Willie Nelson, Keith Urban.
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know.”
I flipped open Cullen’s phone and stared at the screen like it held some grave message that required my immediate attention. The girl drifted back toward her counter. I took one more lap around the store, eyes fixed on the screen. The problem with having Cullen’s cell phone, of
course, was that there was no way for me to reach him. I was almost to the door of the store before I realized Cullen had, of course, planned it this way, for that very purpose.
“I like your hair.”
I paused before stepping outside. The girl smiled at me. The eyebrow ring was hard to forget because it had swelled and bruised after the piercing, and I had to ice it for two days. But I kept forgetting about my hair, which I’d dyed on my own, after school, without Cullen, in the upstairs bathroom. The box had featured a smiling girl with a brilliant purple head of hair—the kind of violet you find in a cartoon rainbow. But I was afraid of using too much dye, and so the half dose I had used, combined with my already dark brown shade, had resulted in a wine-colored tint.
The girl pointed to her head. “I did a sapphire thing once, but it washed out a while back.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“You in a rush?” she said.
“I’m waiting for a call. Sorry . . .” I took one step out the door.
“Here, wait.” She stepped out from behind the counter. “You like sad music?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I wanted to run out of the store, but I didn’t have anywhere to run to, so I let her take me over to a pair of headphones that were hooked up to a CD player mounted on the wall. I opened and shut and reopened the phone. I checked the ring volume, barely listening to the girl, who was saying, “This is a couple years old, but I’ve been playing this for everybody I know. I just can’t get enough of it.”
She planted the headphones on my head and pressed play. The music faded in, and I was instantly dropped into a dream. Everything else faded away. The cell phone and Cullen and Ray and Mom and Dad and Katie Kinney and even this music store girl . . . they didn’t exist. There was only the music and myself. The singer sang with such soft, hollow sorrow. His voice was almost a whisper. The guitar was slow, quiet, and the whole song moved through me like it was melting in my bones. I closed my eyes, and it seemed like, if I’d wanted to, I could have reached out and touched the surface of time with my fingertips. There weren’t many lyrics—it was mostly just a refrain sung over and over, each syllable moving one note higher up the scale:
“Everything means nothing to me.
“Everything means nothing to me.
“Everything means nothing to me.
“Everything means nothing to me.”
It was like the music knew me. Like it had somehow existed inside me before this guy ever sang it. This was all I ever wanted—something for myself.
I thought about Ray and felt a shiver of panic.
“So?” she said.
I nodded, unable to talk.
She reached into the rack, dug out the CD, and held it out for me to take.
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t have any money.”
“Gotcha. No worries. Come back when you do.”
I told her I would, thanked her, and rushed to the door. I suddenly knew what I had to do and felt a violent panic that I hadn’t done it right from the start. I never even thought to look at the singer’s name. But at least now I knew where to look.
I ran home, hand clutching the phone, which still wasn’t ringing. I stepped into the kitchen, distraught, looking for Dad, but found Mom instead. She was on the floor, in the fetal position, hugging her knees. For a blinding, panicked instant, I thought she must have collapsed, was maybe even dead, but then understood that she wouldn’t be positioned like that if she hadn’t put herself that way.
“Mom?” I bent to her. A band of sunlight cut through the kitchen window, shining on her face and eyes, which she’d shielded with her hair. The sun lit the red of her hair so that it seemed to sparkle. I loved and hated that hair. It always made me believe in impossible things.
“Mom?”
I nudged her shoulder. She stirred awake. Looked at me. Blinked. Pushed the hair from her face.
“Hi, honey,” she whispered.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
She looked around, trying to hide her surprise. “Oh.”
“You’re on the floor.”
“Yes.” She pushed herself up to a sitting position. “I wanted . . . I was making tea.”
“Yeah?”
She leaned against a cabinet door and sighed.
“And then what?”
“Huh?”
“You wanted tea. How did you end up on the floor?”
“Oh, I was waiting for the water,” she said. “I’m fine, honey. I was just . . . a little tired. Needed a rest.”
I checked the stove to make sure she hadn’t left a flame on. Mom sighed again, rubbing a fist into her eye. She wore an old T-shirt and sweatpants. I felt her forehead and neck, but she didn’t seem to have a fever. Her hands felt, as they’d always felt for as long as I could remember, very cold.
She closed her eyes. I held her hand and suddenly saw my mother, and myself, and my family more plainly than I ever had before. I admitted something to myself that I’d been trying to ignore for a long time.
“Here, Mom.” I put a hand under her arm and lifted her up. “Let’s go upstairs, okay?”
I helped her up the stairs and put her to bed, drawing the blinds in her room, folding layers of blankets over her. I did all this gently, but also quickly, my mind still on Ray. As I was about to hurry out of the room, Mom grabbed my hand.
“Brielle,” she whispered. “Your eyebrow.”
“Oh.”
She’d seen it before. I was sure of it because I remembered so clearly her not saying anything about it the first time, after that night Dad found me in Cullen’s basement and I’d had to sit at the kitchen table and suffer another one of his lectures, while Mom sat next to him, staring into a mug of coffee, unable to participate, incapable of comforting, encouraging, punishing, or scorning.
“Who’d you do that for?” she mumbled.
Maybe I misheard her. I don’t know. Maybe she said, “What’d you do that for?” Maybe “Why?” Either one of those questions would have made more sense than “Who?” But it was dark, the covers were drawn up to her chin, she was deeply fatigued, and I was in a rush. What I heard was “Who?” And when I heard it, I felt so dumb for not having known the answer to that question sooner.
“You,” I told her.
* * *
I sprinted through the house and found Dad in the garage, cleaning out two childhoods’ worth of balls, bats, skateboards, scooters, and whatever else we’d accumulated in this storage room over the years.
“Do you want this?” he said when I opened the door. He held up a toy stroller in which I used to push my dolls and stuffed animals around the driveway.
“Dad.”
He let the stroller down, catching the distress in my voice.
“It’s Ray,” I said. “I think he’s about to do something really stupid.”
* * *
Cullen told me where it was going to happen. He even showed me on a map the exact spot in the woods where they planned to hike to and start digging. So Dad and I drove to Jockey Hollow and parked near the cabins that Cullen and I had sneaked into that day I’d skipped practice. We jogged past the cabins, down a wood-chip trail, following Cullen’s map off the trail and into the middle of the woods. We peered through the trees. We shouted for Ray. For Cullen. Nobody was there.
“God, they could be anywhere,” Dad said. “We should split up.”
“No,” I said.
“They have to be somewhere.”
“No, Dad. They’re not.”
“What do you mean? Cullen told you—”
“He lied.”
“He—”
“He lied. I should have known. Of course he did.”
I said this last part mostly to myself, but it didn’t matter because Dad wasn’t listening anyway. He’d already ta
ken out his phone and was dialing the police.
Cullen
HONESTLY, I DIDN’T THINK HE’D LAST more than one minute in that box. And so even though I went into it intending to pile the dirt loosely atop the coffin, allowing for a minimal-effort excavation, I started thinking that the more I played up the illusion, the more quickly he’d bail. I got carried away. I found myself tossing in more and more dirt, occasionally wheeling a shovelful above my head and slamming it down, hoping to send horrifying reverberations through the earth that would rouse, once and for all, Ray’s ultra-depressed soul.
Unquestionably, he would want to live. No reasonable person could withstand this kind of terror. Leaping off a building, shooting yourself in the temple, swallowing a fistful of pills—all that stuff was different. Just one step. Simple as batting an eyelid. But this thing with Ray was a deliberate, drawn-out piece of sustained, bone-drilling horror. Every single person who ever lived—no matter how screwed up in the head they may or may not be—would pull that string. Nobody could lie there and let this gruesome nightmare be their last moment on earth.
By the time I looked up from my business with the dirt and the shovel, realizing that Ray wasn’t flinching, I found the coffin pretty decently buried. Much, much too decently buried.
And the bell was not ringing.
How long could a person live without oxygen? When did brain damage become part of the equation? Had he underestimated how long he could last? Passed out within moments before he could ring for help? Before he could even hear the dirt piling up? Before he could see I wasn’t bullshitting him?
“Pass the test, Ray,” I muttered.
My voice sounded strange in the silent woods. If Cullen talks in the forest and Ray is too buried-alive-in-the-freaking-ground to hear it, does anybody give two shits?
A cold, moonless forest in the middle of nowhere. The air misty and wet. A vapor had hovered above the pond before the sun blinked out for good a few hours earlier. If I picked up that shovel, he’d always need digging out. If not by me, then by someone else who came along. He’d always be latching on to whomever, always in search of his One True Savior. Your classic teach-a-man-to-fish scenario.
