by Jenny Lee
“I had a whole speech prepared that I wrote the night I found out that he died. It was pretty epic, if I do say so myself, but I’ve decided not to give that speech today. Because it was far too angry, because I am so incredibly pissed at my brother for letting his addiction get the better of him. It was far too self-pitying, because I’m even more incredibly sad about my brother being gone. And it was far too preachy about the perils of drugs. If you want more info about the opioid crisis you can read about it in The New York Times. But you don’t come to a funeral and talk about the tragedy of a life. You come to a funeral to talk about the beauty of it.
“The other reason I’m not giving that speech is because this morning I received a letter from Nicholas that he wrote to me before he died, and I’m going to share that letter now.…”
Dustin took a folded piece of paper out of his inner jacket pocket, unfolded it, and began to read:
“‘Dear Baby Brother AKA Dickweed, I am writing you this piece of snail-mail on a sheet of Holiday Inn’s finest stationery with a very cheap ballpoint pen that I stole from the front desk. I know that these days no one writes letters anymore because of email and texting, but you know I hate all that technology shit so I’m doing the retro thing and mailing this to you instead, though I don’t even know where to get a stamp or even how much they cost.
“‘Why do I have Holiday Inn stationery you ask? Good question, smartypants, you always were the genius of the family. Well, it’s because I’m using the last of the money I stole from you (sorry ’bout that, you know I’ll get it back to you, bro) to celebrate my one-month anniversary with my gf, Natalia. Yeah, the girl I met at rehab. She’s currently in the shower and I expect she’ll be enjoying it for a while because the water pressure at our place sucks ass.
“‘I have something very important to tell you. Remember that pancake breakfast we had in the Bronx when you came to see me? Well, I told you about Natalia, though back then I didn’t know if she’d call me, so I was playing it cool. And you told me about how a girl broke your heart. You were angry and hurt and told me that love was overrated and a waste of time, and I agreed and then tried to make you feel better by saying that any girl who didn’t see you for the great guy you are is obviously stupid and you’d be better off without her.
“‘Well, I’m writing to tell you I couldn’t have been more wrong that day. Love is not overrated or a waste of time. I think everyone says that when they’re not in love, never been in love, or were in love and it didn’t go their way. Why? Because a life with no love is, in my humble opinion, no life at all. I was a shitty kid and Mom and Dad deserved better than me, but thank god, like literally thank God for delivering you to them, because you’re the son that any parent would be so lucky to have. You’re like the son in a movie who’s wiser than his parents and smarter than all his stupid friends. We should write a movie together, bro! I got so many ideas …
“‘Anyway, I know I’ve been a fuckup and I want you to know your tuition money wasn’t a total waste, yeah, Dad told me what you did for me, spending your college savings to send my dumb ass to rehab again. It means a lot to me that you believed in me, and I love you for your optimism. Which brings me to my next point. I’m totally gonna get fucked up tonight, I’ve already got it on me. Sorry dude, but I need one last hurrah before I go on the straight and narrow forever. You see, I couldn’t remember my last time … the last time I used, and that seemed weird to me, and so I wanted to make it an event. I know this sounds like I’m rationalizing, and maybe I am. Remember what they say, never trust a junkie, but that’s my fucking story and I’m sticking to it.
“‘Here’s the plan. I’m gonna party with my girl in a hotel like a true pimp 4 realz, but before I do I’m gonna tell her, like I’m tellin’ you, that it’s my last time because I want to marry her and spend the rest of my dumbass dish-washing days with her forever. You’d totally dig her, man. She’s hot, sexy, funny as hell, and best of all she calls me on my shit, which you know I need. I love her. She’s made me a believer that there is something better out there for me than drugs. I can’t wait for you to meet her. She and I have some big plans, which include buying a junker and driving cross-country to see about a boy … and that boy is you. My kid brother. Because I love you and if I’ve learned anything at all about life from the movies, it’s that when you feel something big and know something bigger you share it with the world.
“‘Your brother forever, Nicholas.
“‘P.S. Oh yeah, start writing your wedding toast ’cause I’m pretty sure I’m gonna be the first of us to need one. Knock that best man speech out of the fucking park!
“‘P.P.S. Memberberry how I said I wasn’t feelin’ Kendrick Lamar? Natalia likes him, so I’m givin him another go. If that don’t prove my love than nuthin’ will.’”
Dustin folded the letter and put it back in his inner pocket, and when he looked out at the crowd he saw that people were crying but people were smiling, too.
“Well, that was all Nicholas had to say, and so that about sums it up. Nicholas, it was an honor to be your brother and I’m gonna miss you every day. Okay, Rabbi Kennison, take it away…”
XVI
True to her word, Anna had not texted Vronsky for over a week now. It wasn’t as difficult as it could have been because after Nicholas’s memorial service, Dustin’s family sat shivah for seven days, alternating between his mother’s and father’s apartments. Anna and Steven went on the first day and ended up going every day for all seven days. Their friend clearly needed their support, and truth be told, they both needed the time to reflect on their own screwed-up lives, too. Luckily there were no mirrors to reflect their sadness back to them, since it was a Jewish custom that when sitting shivah all the mirrors in the house had to be covered. The mirror was a means of accepting social importance through appearance, and during a time of mourning, such superficial thoughts were frowned upon, so all mirrors remained hidden to dissuade one from getting distracted with their own self-importance, when they were supposed to be using the time to reflect upon the loved one who had passed.
Dustin stayed mostly silent, but here and there he’d express his feelings out loud, alternating between deep sorrow over never seeing his brother again and anger. “It doesn’t make sense,” Dustin said. “You find a girl who you love and want to spend the rest of your life with, and that girl actually loves you back, then why do the most addictive drug on the planet again? Didn’t he think that maybe his last hurrah could be his literal last hurrah of his actual life? Fucking idiot.”
“He didn’t know,” Steven said gently. “He probably misjudged the amount he took, since he had been clean for a while. He made a mistake. People make mistakes.”
“And now he’s dead,” Dustin said. “Some mistake.”
“Have you heard from her?” Anna asked. “Nicholas’s girlfriend?”
“No,” Dustin replied. “We got her number from my brother’s phone but it’s no longer in service.”
“If she loved him, why wouldn’t she come to the funeral?” Steven asked. “Guilt?”
“It’s not her fault,” Anna said quickly. “It was an accident. Maybe she’s just afraid everyone blames her.”
“My mother does,” Dustin said. “She also blames my dad for not bringing him back. She’s also mad that we didn’t tell her about spending my college fund for Nicholas’s rehab, or the stolen car, or any of it. She pretty much hates everyone right now. She might be stuck in the Kübler-Ross ‘anger’ stage for a while.”
“Dustin, your mom will come around,” Anna said. “I mean, I know you lost your brother, too, but a parent losing a child is supposed to be the worst thing ever. But what do I know? I know nothing about anything.” Anna looked down at the floor.
Steven put his hand on his sister’s back and gave it a rub. “Everything is fucked,” he said. Steven and his mother had barely spoken in days, and he was at a loss with what to do about it. Luckily his father was on an extended business trip so
he wasn’t around to notice that his wife was no longer acknowledging either of her children. For Steven, the only saving grace about Dustin’s brother dying was that it gave him a chance to worry about someone else’s problems, troubles that were far bigger than his own.
Two days after Nicholas’s memorial, Steven appeared in Anna’s bedroom doorway. He told her he was going to pick up Lolly and head downtown to Dustin’s dad’s apartment for the second day of shivah, and that she she should come, too. When they were outside Lolly’s mom’s place, Anna wondered whether Kimmie would be coming along, but Lolly came down by herself. She was dressed in a simple black Prada dress, holding two foiled bundles.
“Hey guys,” she said as she got in the backseat. “I baked Dustin’s family some banana bread. One gluten-free and one regular.”
“That’s nice of you, Lolls,” Anna said. “Kimmie didn’t want to come?”
“She said she’ll come over when she’s ready,” Lolly told them. She had tried to explain to her younger sister that being a good friend to Dustin in his time of need was far more important than the stupid stuff that had transpired between her and Anna and Vronsky. But Kimmie said that wasn’t what it was about.
Lolly was just happy that Kimmie had stopped crying all the time and that her sister had returned looking much healthier, though at the same time she was worried that Kimmie seemed to have swung too far to the other side. Lolly’s mom had told her they needed to be nonjudgmental and simply offer their unconditional support until Kimmie settled down. According to her therapist, Kimmie was working through some tricky emotional issues, and her new look and attitude were part of the process.
Anna nodded but didn’t speak. She had been thinking about Dustin’s eulogy nonstop for two days. His brother’s letter about love being the meaning of life, and how he had finally learned this because of a girl who he randomly met in rehab, was just so mind-blowing. It was terribly tragic that Nicholas found the one thing he had been missing in his life but died right afterward. Anna couldn’t help but think that if things had gone differently for Vronsky during the timber race she could be the one in mourning. I found the love of my life but right now I’m choosing not to be with him. Why? What am I trying to prove? And to whom am I trying to prove it? I still love him; I wonder if he still loves me.
“Have you talked to your mom yet?” Lolly asked. Steven had come clean about what had happened on Valentine’s Day, as well as the reason he’d chosen to keep it from her. Lolly wasn’t happy he’d withheld the truth, but she understood why. It was a relief to know that it was his mother’s affair that was the cause of her boyfriend’s weirdness for the last month and a half and not something else. In a strange way Lolly felt as though everything that had happened with Steven’s mom benefitted her, though she’d never say this to him. They had had a very long talk about Steven’s feelings on cheating, exploring why he felt it was more wrong for his mother to do it than it was for his father. Lolly pointed out that it was a total double standard, which he fully admitted and was working hard to understand the root cause of his sexist thinking. He also admitted he would be devastated if he found out Lolly was with another guy behind his back and asked her, no begged her, to let him know if she was unhappy in the relationship or with him before she found herself tempted by another guy. Lolly didn’t tell him that she had literally never once found herself thirsty over another guy since she’d been with him, but she didn’t.
What was even more shocking to her than Steven’s mother’s affair was that Anna had cheated on Alexander with Vronsky. This revelation rocked Lolly’s world. When she watched Anna, beside herself with grief, run out onto the field after the horse accident like a lunatic, Anna’s face had shown such fear over Vronsky being hurt, it was like she was possessed. It was like those urban legends of adrenaline-fueled mothers lifting two-thousand-pound vehicles to save their children. Lolly had never seen Anna lose her cool before, and she found it wildly romantic. It wasn’t right what Anna did, cheating on Alexander behind his back, but Lolly understood Anna’s decision to wait until Alexander was better and back at college before she broke it off with him. Lolly knew if she was in a similar position, she might have done the same. Or would she?
Lolly found one day of sitting shivah to be plenty for her. Seeing Dustin’s mom barely holding herself together was too much for Lolly to take for four hours, let alone days on end, as Steven and Anna were doing. She could tell that Steven and Anna had both been in denial about their own troubled lives, and it struck her as sad that it had taken someone’s death for them to reflect upon themselves at all.
XVII
When Vronsky walked out of school, he was surprised to find his mother’s longtime chauffeur, Leonard, sitting on his Ducati parked in the back of his school.
“This is a sweet ride,” Leonard said, as Vronsky walked over to greet him. “How fast does she go?” Leonard had been his mother’s chauffeur since before Vronsky was born and so he felt like family. Vronsky was careful with his words around Leonard though, because he knew his mother paid for Leonard’s loyalty with the signature on his paychecks (she also had paid for Leonard’s children’s college educations).
“From what I hear, easily one-forty,” Vronsky answered with a grin. “But I’ve never gone over the speed limit, personally.”
Leonard laughed heartily and threw his leg over the seat and sat down on the bike. He then told Vronsky his mother wanted to see him, and he was to go to the Pierre Hotel for afternoon tea. Vronsky politely told his mother’s driver he had other plans and asked that Leonard send his apologies to his mother.
“No can do, Mr. Vronsky,” he said. “She’s not asking this time.”
“Fine,” Vronsky said casually, careful not to let his annoyance show. “I’ll go there right now.” He stepped toward his bike, but Leonard made no move to get off.
“You’re supposed to ride with me, or if you’ve got another helmet I’ll ride with you,” Leonard said. “Don’t fight it. You know how she can get.” Leonard carefully stepped off the bike.
Vronsky was pissed and was tempted to jump on his bike and tear out of the lot, the hell with Leonard and his mother. But he had seen how difficult his mother made his older brother’s life when he didn’t fall in line. After one semester of college, Kiril told his mother he was going to drop out, because he felt college was a waste of time. He woke up the next day to find his credit cards cut off and his bank account empty. He had lasted two days before calling his mother, asking her opinion on whether he should take macro- or microeconomics for his upcoming semester; she said macro, and Kiril got an A in the class as an apology.
In the backseat of his mother’s silver Mercedes Maybach, Vronsky kept silent. Normally he wouldn’t have held his mother’s bullying against Leonard because he knew the man was just doing his job, but he wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Vronsky had been waiting for his mother to drop the hammer for weeks now, surprised it had taken her this long to summon him. Ever since he became obsessed with Anna, he knew he had ignored every other area of his life. He had canceled on his mother half a dozen times in the last month alone, and each time he did it he expected a call from her, but none had come. Vronsky figured his mother was wrapped up in some personal drama, and considered himself lucky she was otherwise occupied.
It had been over a week since he had heard from Anna, and he was barely holding it together. Every day after school he rode the forty minutes to Staugas Farms in hopes of seeing her, but Anna had been a no-show all week. So instead he hung out with Murf. At first they drank beers and Vronsky sulked, but after two days of bitching and moaning, Murf put his friend to work. A new storage shed had just been built, and Vronsky helped Murf get it organized properly. Vronsky’s back was still bruised from the timber race fall, but his bruises were now yellow and green, versus the angry purple and red they had been. Murf taught Vronsky how to handle a power drill, patiently walking him through how to put together the first of the eight ten-by-ten industrial st
eel shelves that would line two walls of the unit. Vronsky found the monotonous work relaxing, though it didn’t free him from his constant roiling thoughts of Anna. The labor gave him something to do, and it would be a good way for him to get back in Mr. Staugas’s good graces after the whole timber race debacle.
What had happened arguably wasn’t his fault. It was the horse in second place, whose front hoof clipped the plank and caused it to fly in the air. Frou Frou misjudged the jump due to the flying plank and tumbled onto the fence, bringing the whole thing crashing down. Frou Frou’s fall caused a collision of the two horses behind him. Fortunately, Vronsky had been thrown off Frou Frou’s back before the horse landed on top of him and crushed every bone in his body. If he hadn’t been so lucky, he could have ended up like Frou Frou, thrashing on the ground with a broken back, shrieking and whinnying, his nostrils flaring, his eyes wild and black. The sight of that magnificent beast writhing in pain shook Vronsky to his core. He couldn’t shake the memory of the horse’s final minutes of life since it had happened, and he suspected the image would haunt him forever. He’d felt so helpless during the whole thing and refused to get himself checked out by the EMTs until he found out his horse’s fate. When Dr. Khurana, the large-animal vet on hand, arrived at the scene seconds after the fall, he took one look at the animal writhing on the ground and shook his head. It didn’t take a trained veterinarian to see that Frou Frou would never stand again.
Vronsky wanted to comfort the poor creature, but he couldn’t get close until after the doctor shot Frou Frou with the tranquilizer dart. Frou Frou’s shrieking stopped almost immediately, but his breathing remained loud and labored, and his eyes grew dull from the heavy sedative. Eventually Vronsky approached the giant beast and petted his muzzle while the vet administered the shot that would end his life. He hadn’t even known he was sobbing until Beatrice and Murf pulled him away from the dead animal and forced him to get checked out by the paramedics. They wanted to give Vronsky a shot for the pain from his most likely broken ribs, but he wouldn’t let them. Vronsky welcomed the pain as a punishment, because he was filled with the bitter taste of regret. Honestly, he had expected to win the whole damn thing, and his plan was to give Anna the silver cup that came with his victory. Murf had found him right before the race and told him Anna thought it was too dangerous, but if anything that only made him want to do it more. He was driven by the need to keep Anna looking at him with the same inestimable esteem she had of late. Not only was he in love with her, but he was also in love with the way her respect and admiration made him feel. She made him believe he could do anything, and since he had never been lacking in the confidence department, she now made him feel invincible. When he heard the sharp crack of the other horse’s hoof hitting the hurdle, he reacted immediately, pulling Frou Frou’s reins to the left. Vronsky asked himself over and over why he hadn’t just let Frou Frou’s experience guide the way instead of his own fear. If he had, would Frou Frou still be alive today?
