The Tyler my mother saw, the one I saw, the one the police saw . . . they were like puzzle pieces that didn’t fit together. Like a bad collage. Or an exquisite corpse. The surrealists invented those, a hundred years ago. They’d fold up a piece of paper, and each artist would draw part of a body—one the head, one the torso, and one the legs—without showing the others what they’d done. But because they were surrealists, they might draw a hand for a head, or a machine for a chest, or fish fins for legs. And when they opened the paper, they’d find this bizarre Frankenstein creature, assembled from parts that didn’t belong.
That’s what was happening to Tyler. Everyone thought they had a piece of him, but when you tried to put the pieces together, you didn’t get a whole person anymore.
I retreated slowly, leaving Tyler’s room. I knew I couldn’t bring him back, but I wished I could make him whole again. I wished I could make all those different pieces tell the same story. I went down the hall to my own room and threw myself onto the bed, shoving aside the bag of clothes I’d brought back from the funeral home. It hit the floor with a loud thunk.
I leaned over to see what had made the noise—and then I remembered. The book Nathan had given me. The one Tyler had been carrying around with him for months.
I snatched up the bag and dug through until I found it. The cover, which had been worn when Nathan gave it to me, was now ripped nearly in half. I held the two pieces together and read the title. Disasters in the Sun: The True History of John Wilkes Booth in Seven Objects.
A little jolt of shock ran through me. “Seven Objects?” Sure, I preferred my own game of Three Things, but the similarity felt too strong to ignore.
On the cover, a brooding, surly-faced man showed off his curly hair and Civil War mustache. I flipped the book over and read.
In this revelatory new survey, acclaimed historian Dr. David Brightman journeys through the life of the most reviled man in American history. Using seven objects that once belonged to Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth—including a letter written in code, a sumptuous theatrical costume, and the infamous derringer pistol Booth used to kill the president—Brightman delves deep into the heart and mind of a killer. His groundbreaking approach promises to forever transform our understanding of a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century history.
Standard-issue academic gobbledygook. My dad wrote books like this—about a different time period, but the same general idea. I flipped it open. The pages were flagged with brightly colored Post-it notes, highlighted in neon pink and yellow, and marked with scrawled handwriting that I recognized immediately as Tyler’s. “Lincoln as both hero and villain,” one note said. “JWB rocking the ladies,” read another.
It looked like the work of a history grad student. Or a deeply obsessive weirdo.
Neither of those descriptions fit the Tyler I knew. I closed the book and studied the photograph of Booth on the cover.
I thought I knew all of Tyler’s secrets. He wasn’t shy about sharing gross locker-room stories or embarrassing facts about his ex-girlfriends. And in return, he’d listened to all my complaints about teachers and my thoughts about art. I’d even, in a moment of weakness, confessed my ill-fated crush on his best friend, Bobby Drake.
But apparently Nathan—a guy I’d never even met—knew things about Tyler that I did not. And Nathan had brought me food, which meant he knew where we lived. Why had Tyler never mentioned him?
I closed the book again and studied it. The True History of John Wilkes Booth in Seven Objects. If this Brightman person could uncover the history of a long-dead killer by going through the stuff he left behind, then surely I could use Tyler’s things to figure out what had been happening with him over the last few months, and how he had ended up in that abandoned building.
After all, I was really good with objects.
Armed with the book, I returned to Tyler’s room. I stood in the doorway and assessed it for a moment. Where to begin? His laptop seemed the obvious choice. When it booted up, I tried to get into his email, but I couldn’t figure out the password. The more times I guessed wrong, the tighter the knot in my stomach became. I tried names of sports teams and ex-girlfriends. I even tried hacker bait like “password” and “12345” before giving up completely and going to his browser history.
It was full of John Wilkes Booth. Pages and pages about Booth’s childhood and his famous family and the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln.
And then there were guns. So many pages about guns, especially ones from the Civil War and the late 1800s. He’d read stories about replica guns and gun auctions, watched videos about loading them and firing them.
I closed the laptop and rubbed at my arms, trying to chase away the chill spreading through my body. What the hell was all this? I’d never thought of Tyler as a gun lover. But then, I’d never thought of him as a heroin user, either.
Restless, I walked over to Tyler’s dresser and flipped through his shoe box full of ticket stubs and band stickers. Most of the bands I’d never heard of, but I found a ticket from last fall’s Mountain Goats show at the Black Cat on Fourteenth Street. As I held the ticket in my hand, I could almost see Tyler leaning on the kitchen table, begging Mom and Dad to let him go, blathering on and on about the genius of John Darnielle, until they finally looked at each other with a smile that said, “We were always going to say yes, but we liked watching you fight for it.” Tyler’s face had broken open with the biggest grin I’d ever seen. He’d let out a whoop, kissed my mother on top of her head, and physically lifted my father off the ground.
The memory warmed me. But then I thought: Did he buy drugs after the show? Did he skip it altogether to go shoot up with his friends? Or did all that come later?
I shoved the ticket stub into my pocket, where my hand brushed against my scissors. They were my constant companion: a pair of little gold embroidery shears shaped like a stork. The blades were his beak, the handles his feathers and feet. The scissors even had a leather sheath that prevented embarrassing injuries. As I looked at all the things Tyler had left behind, I pulled out the shears and turned them over in my hand. Why the hell not? I thought. Tyler was gone. Mom had said it herself. Whatever had made these things special was gone with him. And like Mom said, nothing would bring him back.
I started with his clothes, dragging T-shirts and pants out of his dresser drawers and cutting out pieces that spoke to me—the collisions of color, the interesting textures. Everything I didn’t want, I threw on the floor. I liked the contrast of my mess against Mom’s orderly vacuum tracks, so I knocked down the ticket stubs too. In the closet, I dug around for Tyler’s favorite coat, slicing off a big black button and tucking it safely into my pocket. I found a braided lanyard hanging on the back of the closet door, a gift I’d made for him during my one miserable summer at Girl Scout camp. When I touched it, I could almost smell bug repellent and cherry lip gloss, could almost hear the camp songs echoing in my ears. I cut the lanyard in half.
He’d left a glass bowl on one of the shelves, filled with coins and safety pins and other odds and ends. I plucked a metal ball from the bowl. It was about the size of a marble and pitted like a tiny moon. What was it? I couldn’t cut it, but I rolled it around in my hand and decided to keep it, too.
When I was through with the closet, I turned to Tyler’s bed. He still used the quilt my grandmother had made him, piecing together clothes he’d loved as a kid. I was starting to feel a little dizzy, and I rested one hand on the quilt. I had a sudden mental image of Tyler and me jumping on this very bed, eight and six years old, shrieking at the tops of our lungs. I sank down onto the carpet, breathing heavily. No way was I cutting up the quilt.
This was all too much. My chest heaved; my head spun. Tyler, Tyler, Tyler. His name sang through my mind. He was gone, but he was here, hiding inside every object he’d left behind, reflected in a hundred secret mirrors where no one but me would think to look for him.
What about under the bed? I thought. Did Mom clean under the b
ed? I leaned over to look. Plenty of stuff still there. Game cases, hangers, a dirty plate—I tossed them over my shoulder and out into the room. Then my hand closed around Tyler’s keys. He’d spent a frantic half hour searching for them on the night that he disappeared. He hadn’t found them; he’d been forced to take the spare set. I sat up, thinking, Oh, good. He’ll need these.
And then I remembered: no. He wouldn’t.
And then I started to cry.
My head was pounding, like I’d spent too long upside down. Yellow lights blinked at the edges of my vision, and a bitter smell burned my nose—something harsh, like melting plastic. Just as I realized that something might really be wrong with me, I saw a flash of what looked like Tyler standing in the doorway of his room. But as I slumped to the floor, it was my father’s arms that closed around me.
CHAPTER 3
“I STILL THINK WE SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN THE CT scan.” My mother’s voice filtered through the darkness that surrounded me.
“The doctors said it wasn’t necessary,” Dad replied, “and Megan didn’t want it. She wanted to come home.”
I forced one eye open. In the days since my collapse, every sound and sliver of light had driven needles through my brain, but for the moment, my head seemed clear. From my position on the bed, I could barely make out my parents, standing in the doorway of my darkened bedroom. I tried not to move or even breathe, for fear I’d trigger the headache again. No pleasure could be sweeter than this absence of pain.
“They said it was probably a migraine,” my father said. “From all the stress.”
“She’s never had a migraine before.”
“Exactly. If it happens again, then maybe we have something to worry about.”
“Robert, if anything were to happen to her . . .” My mother trailed off, the silence stretching out between them. She leaned back against the doorframe. “I went to that bereavement group this afternoon. The one Detective Johnson suggested? The one for parents.”
“So soon? Are you sure?”
“I had to try something. I can’t sit around, never leaving the house.”
My father turned away from her at that, but she kept talking.
“Everyone sat in a circle, and the first woman who spoke, her son was killed by a drunk driver. ‘He was a good kid,’ the woman said. ‘He wasn’t in a gang; he wasn’t using drugs. He didn’t deserve to die.’” Mom paused. “And I thought, The police are saying my son might have overdosed. Would that mean he did deserve to die? I stood up and walked out.” Her voice quaked. “I don’t think I can do this.”
My father tried to wrap his arms around her, but she shrugged him off and disappeared down the hall. He stood frozen for a moment, his hands still outstretched. Then he followed her.
I forced myself to sit up, and the pain arrowed through my head again. Our family needed Tyler. He smoothed over the rough edges and generally made things all right. He would never have put Mom and Dad through all this pain and confusion. Not on purpose. Not if he could help it. So what had happened?
Tears threatened, burning my nose and the back of my throat. I recalled the moment, scissor sharp in my memory, when Detective Johnson had first told us Tyler was dead. It had seemed impossible that everything could change so completely in an instant, and I’d felt my mind skid into reverse, as though I could step back in time just five seconds and undo what she’d said. But the past is the past. Five seconds ago feels so close, but it might as well be five years or five centuries ago. Yesterday is already history.
But tomorrow is a blank page. I still had more of Tyler’s objects to examine, more truths to uncover. If I couldn’t change the past, maybe I could force it to make sense.
Three days later, I walked into school for the first time since Tyler died—and for the first time ever by myself. In the two years I’d been going to Westside, Tyler had driven me to school every single day, and pushing open those doors without him left me feeling small and vulnerable and abandoned. I came to an abrupt stop in the front hall, where the school’s name was blazoned in big letters above the photographs in our alumni hall of fame. These astronauts and elected officials, famous scientists and wealthy entrepreneurs reminded us every day of what Westside High School expected us to achieve. A few months back, someone had painted over the first S in Westside, and even though a fresh S had been installed in days, Tyler still joked about it every morning.
“It’s that time again,” he’d say.
“What time is it?” I’d be forced to reply.
“Time to take a walk on the Wet Side.”
A stupid inside joke. I hadn’t given it a second’s thought until now, when I stood in the school hallway holding the slack end of a gag that would never be funny again. How was I supposed to navigate my life when even the most ordinary things had the power to take me right back to the way I had felt the moment I lost him?
I reached up to rub the talisman I wore around my neck: the black button I’d cut off Tyler’s coat. I’d lacquered the back of it with a triple coat of Frankly Scarlet nail polish I’d taken from my mother’s bathroom, creating the backdrop for a mini collage. On a hill made of cut-up ticket stubs, under a sky dotted with flower-petal clouds, a tiny figure set off on a journey. I’d sealed the collage with glue and strung the button on a thin black cord. Now I clutched it in my hand and tried to remember what I wanted to do first. Get Tyler’s locker combination from the main office. Then check his locker for more objects. Then, I guess, complete the pointless ritual of going to class?
When I emerged from the main office, I learned the unpleasant truth: I had become some sort of celebrity. All eyes followed me. Boys steered clear, but girls who hadn’t spoken to me since middle school found it necessary to grab my arm or pat my hand, sometimes nodding sympathetically, sometimes bursting into tears.
Even worse than the girls I hardly knew were the ones I knew for sure didn’t like me. Like Emma Herndon, Tyler’s most recent ex-girlfriend. I crossed back past the main doors just in time to see her outside, stepping from a big black town car. As always, her clothes were crisp and unwrinkled, and her hair was aggressively perfect, like she’d walked out of a shampoo ad. I’d seen her on television with her senator father as often as I’d seen her at our house. But today, even from where I stood, her face looked red and splotchy, and her hands were shaking. I stood frozen, watching her.
The driver leaped out and ran around to help her. Barely older than me, he looked like a kid playing dress-up in his navy suit, his skin pale as paste against his tousled dark hair. He fidgeted with his striped tie as he held open Emma’s door. She waved him off and hurried instead into the arms of two sympathetic friends. As they walked into the building, the driver followed them.
She stopped and turned to him. “I’m fine, Matty,” she said, clearly not fine.
“Well, I’ll be here after school to pick you up.”
“Hailey can give me a ride.”
“Sorry, senator’s orders,” he said. “And you know what that means.”
She blanched, and I remembered what Tyler always used to call Emma’s father: the Tyrant. But making sure your grieving kid got home from school safely didn’t sound so terrible to me. “Whatever,” she said. She walked away from the driver—and straight toward me.
I tried to avoid her by ducking behind a group of guys from the baseball team, all of whom were wearing black armbands with Tyler’s jersey number on them. But every head swiveled as I went by, and Emma spotted me.
“Oh my god, Brown!” she called out, rushing over. She rested her forehead on my shoulder, and after a moment, her whole body shook with sobs. This was awkward, to say the least, because my own eyes were bone dry. When she’d dated Tyler, she’d barely spoken to me, but it was hard to resent her now, when she seemed genuinely destroyed. Instead of obeying my natural instinct to smack her hands away, I tried to follow Tyler’s most important piece of advice for fitting in at Westside: “Go along to get along.” I leaned into her perfumed hug
and squeezed back when she held my hand.
“Everything feels wrong without him,” she said.
I couldn’t muster a response, but she didn’t seem to require much input from me. I just nodded and nodded until her pit crew whisked her away.
As I rounded the corner by Tyler’s locker, grief prevented me from getting too close. Literally. Other people’s grief. An elaborate memorial had built up in the hallway, starting at Tyler’s locker and spilling out across the floor. Notes and balloons. Flowers. A cross. Even an American flag. It was like walking headfirst into a wall of mourning. I closed my eyes and concentrated on pulling air into my lungs.
It’s a piece of art, I told myself, rubbing Tyler’s button. Like a kitschy postmodern assemblage. I pushed my way through to the locker. It’s accidental, crowdsourced sculpture, I repeated to myself, but still, my hands shook.
I cleared off Tyler’s locker so I could open it, tucking a few pieces of paper—notes and drawings—into the pockets of the art journal I kept in my bag. Raw materials, I thought. For later.
As I spun the dial on the lock, the overpowering smell of flowers made my stomach turn, and I felt another headache coming on. The lights overhead seemed to get brighter and brighter, and I struggled to see Tyler’s locker combination on the little slip of paper the vice principal had given me. Just as I opened the door, a group of guys pushed past me to get to their lockers.
One of them was Tyler.
Suddenly I was plunged into darkness. I pressed myself closer to the locker, desperate for something solid to hold on to. Had the power gone out? My head swam and my heart galloped in my chest. Had that really been Tyler, or was I imagining things?
Through the darkness, I began to see flashes of light, dim at first, as though I were looking through a pane of glass painted an oily copper green. On the other side of the glass, the flashes illuminated Tyler.
The Hidden Memory of Objects Page 3
