Sorry for Your Loss

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “But what is it?” Pup picked up the glass and held it up to the moonlight.

  “It’s one of Patrick’s protein shakes!”

  Pup was so surprised he nearly dropped the glass. It had been over two years since he’d heard Luke so much as speak Patrick’s name.

  “I found a big jar of his protein powder, and I looked at the bottom and it wasn’t expired so I figured—what the hell? And I made one. It’s absolutely terrible. Taste it?”

  Pup took the glass from his older brother, closed his eyes, and took a sip. He thought, for a wild, hopeful moment, that the taste of the protein shake would somehow bring back the feeling of Patrick, the way a smell from childhood can sometimes conjure a memory so strong it was like being immersed in the past. But all he could experience now was a chalky mixture of metallic-tasting chocolate. He leaned over the ledge and spit it into his mother’s peony bushes.

  “My reaction exactly,” Luke laughed. “Now I understand why he never stuck to his ‘fitness goals.’ You remember those?”

  Of course Pup remembered. Luke had found the list in the boys’ sock drawer when Patrick was home from college for winter break. They had teased Pat about it mercilessly.

  “One. Eat clean,” Luke said, counting off on his fingers. “Two. Do butt clenches during Cellular Bio lecture.” Pup smiled, remembering. God, how they had tortured Pat when they found his fitness goals, and the best part was, Pat didn’t care. He had laughed along with them. He was the rare type of person who was so good-natured he was nearly impossible to embarrass, an essential survival trait when you’re growing up with a brother like Luke. “Three. Expand calf circumference. Four. Go to Zumba.”

  That one was the one that always killed them: picturing their tall, goofy brother trying to shake his hips at a Zumba class.

  “Did he ever actually go to Zumba?” Pup asked.

  “I don’t know,” Luke said, “but I really hope so.”

  “And I really hope that someone, somewhere, has a video.”

  “The thing with Pat,” Luke went on, “was that he could Zumba and lift and drink protein shakes all day, and he’d never be able to bulk up his skinny ass. He was like mom’s side of the family. Me, I’m stocky, like dad’s side. But you’re like Pat. And the older you get, the more you’re like him. Sometimes I look at you in a certain light or whatever and I almost think . . .” He didn’t finish his thought.

  Pup held his bottle to his lips and pretended to drink. He held it there until the sudden pain faded and the sting went out of his eyes.

  “The only difference,” Luke said, “is that he was taller than you. Dude was six foot six, and somehow he still managed to suck at basketball.”

  “He didn’t suck at basketball.”

  “Okay, he didn’t suck. But he wasn’t as good as me. And he should have been, because he was so much taller than me. Tallest ever in our family.”

  “Hey, who knows?” Pup laughed. “I might still claim that title. I could still keep growing. I’m only sixteen, remember?”

  Before Pup knew what was happening, Luke had tackled him.

  “You better not,” he panted, his hot beer breath an inch from Pup’s face. “Don’t you dare grow taller than Pat. What, you think you’re better than Pat?”

  “I was joking,” Pup said, squirming in vain against Luke’s vise grip on his shoulders. “And I can’t even help it if I—”

  Luke relaxed his grip and rolled away. “Nobody was better than Pat,” he said softly. “Nobody.”

  Then he began to cry.

  Pup didn’t know what to do. It was not an exaggeration to say that he had never seen Luke cry. Not even once: not as a child, not as an adult, not at the hospital or the funeral, not during any of the awful weeks that followed when tuna casseroles and trays of Rice Krispies treats were piling up on the front stoop from well-meaning neighbors, not when their mother stopped coloring her hair and a gray line grew and grew from the top of her head until all the red was gone, not even late at night when he thought no one could hear, like Pup himself did, muffled into the pillow across the room of their shared attic.

  “It’s okay,” Pup said uncertainly, reaching around to pat Luke on the back. “Everything will be okay.”

  “Just stay out here with me,” Luke begged, his voice almost unrecognizable, muffled by the fabric of Pup’s T-shirt. “Please. Just stay with me for a little while.”

  Pup had to be up in three hours to make it to Albion Beach by sunrise, or he would probably fail art. But what else could he do? He stayed.

  3

  PUP WOKE UP SHIVERING and covered with a fine mist of dew. Beside him, Luke was curled up in a snoring ball, his arm thrown around Pup’s waist, most likely a habit of sleeping next to Carrie for all those years. Pup gently lifted away the arm, which was dead weight, and rolled out from beneath his brother. Luke didn’t even stir. It was still dark, but the sky had a translucent, purple quality, and as soon as Pup saw it, he didn’t need to look at his phone to know that he was already late.

  “Shit!” He bolted upright, knocking over the full beer he’d pretended to drink the night before, which fizzed in a widening puddle, creeping closer to Luke’s sleeping head. Pup stood up, his knees cracking, and crawled back through the window into the bedroom. He changed into the first semiclean T-shirt he could find, raked a toothbrush over his teeth, and ran back to the bedroom to grab the 35mm film camera he’d borrowed from his art teacher, Mr. Hughes. Just as he was about to make a run for it downstairs, he caught sight of his brother through the frame of the crescent-shaped window, curled up in the dawning light. The image stopped him in his tracks. Even in sleep, Luke didn’t look peaceful; his eyes and mouth were screwed tightly shut, his fists were balled, his whole body seemed tense, ready to defend itself. His arm reached out, wrapping around a girlfriend who was no longer there, as if his body retained the memory of love even if his waking mind denied it. The light above him was spreading from deep purple to goldish pink.

  Pup squatted before the windowsill, squared Luke in the frame, and pressed down on the shutter release. Then he ran down the stairs, grabbed the keys to his dad’s Buick, and slipped out the door into the dawn.

  By the time Pup arrived at Albion Beach it was 6:27 a.m. The sun was already hanging brilliantly over the rippling lake, and, as he sprinted across the sand, the four members of the Lincoln High School photography club were already packing up their equipment.

  “You missed it,” Maya Ulrich said without turning around.

  “Crap.” Pup panted, resting his hands on his knees.

  “I knew you’d be late. Kim, you owe me two bucks.”

  Kim Strickland, a girl Pup knew from the hallways of Lincoln by her silver-dyed hair, black, smudgy makeup, and a septum piercing that he couldn’t look at without wincing in imagined pain, glared at him, then dug into the pocket of her ripped jeans and slapped two bills into Maya’s hand.

  “Remind me why you’re here again?”

  “My final project.” Pup untwisted his camera strap from around his neck. “For Studio Art. Mr. Hughes told me I could tag along with you guys and maybe, you know, pick up some techniques.”

  “Well, honestly, I think it’s rude.” Maya placed her camera carefully back in its pink pouch that was monogrammed with her initials. “I mean, we did you a favor letting you come on our shoot. And you show up an hour late?”

  “Oh, relax, Maya,” said Abby Tesfay, brushing the sand from her knees as she got to her feet. Pup remembered Abby from his freshman year English class. She’d been transferred out to the smart kids’ class at the end of the first semester. He smiled at her gratefully, but she ignored him.

  “I am relaxed,” Maya retorted, reaching up to tighten her thick, lustrous ponytail. “All I’m saying is, it’s just kind of annoying that Mr. Hughes asked me to invite some guy who’s failing art to come shoot with us. I mean, who fails art?”

  “Mr. Hughes isn’t exactly an easy grader,” Abby pointed out. “He gave
me a C once because I very slightly overexposed an image, even though the composition and everything else was on point.”

  “That’s different. You’re in AP. The standards are super high.” She turned to Pup. “You’re in Studio One. You guys literally make ceramic bowls and draw flower vases with pastel crayons.”

  “We didn’t make bowls. We made coasters,” Pup said.

  “Whatever. I’m out of here. I need my coffee.” She looped her camera case around her shoulder and huffed away toward the boardwalk with Kim hurrying along behind.

  “I really am sorry,” Pup said, turning to Abby. “I just overslept.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” She folded her tripod under her arm. “This is a photography club. Just a fun thing to do outside of school. Those two act like we’re photojournalists on the front line of a war or something.”

  “Yeah,” Pup agreed. “Honors program kids are such dicks.”

  “I’m an honors program kid,” Abby said. “Please don’t overgeneralize.”

  “Sorry.” Pup felt the heat rush to his cheeks.

  “You can still get some good shots in this light,” she said. “Try using a wide-angle lens, and shoot the sun off-center. See that walkway there?” She pointed to her left, at a circle of sandstone columns beneath which two empty benches looked out at the water. “If you silhouette those columns in your shot, you’ll give your viewer something for their eye to latch on to, make the composition more interesting. Make sense?”

  “Yeah.” Pup smiled at her. “Thank you. Really.”

  “See? Not all honors kids are dicks.” She gave him a little wave, then ran off to catch up with Maya and Kim.

  Alone on the beach now, Pup turned his attention to the scenery. The late-spring air was cool and damp, but with the promise of heat later; the fog had already burned off and the sun was so strong on the water that when he looked out toward the horizon his vision filled with black spots. He played around with the controls on the camera, taking some shots of the trees and the sky, the water and the sand, trying to follow Abby’s advice and shooting off-center with the sandstone columns on one end of the frame. But, even with her help, it all felt sort of pointless. After all, how many millions of people—people who were actual professional photographers—had already taken pictures of Lake Michigan before him? What was unique about Pup’s perspective? The guidelines for the final project, on which his passing or failing depended, were one sentence long: Create a piece of art that represents your personal aesthetic, using any medium of expression you choose.

  The problem was, Pup didn’t have a personal aesthetic. He had only signed up for Studio Art because he thought it would be easy, and Intro to Guitar was already full. As for his medium of expression, that had actually been chosen for him, by Mr. Hughes, who had called Pup up to his desk earlier in the week for a conference regarding his terrible grade.

  “Pup, when I review your work over the course of the last year,” Mr. Hughes had said, opening a large manila folder to glare at the stack of garbage that comprised Pup’s Studio One portfolio, “a few things are clear to me. One, you can’t draw. Two, you can’t paint. Three, you can’t sculpt, hew, chisel, stitch, craft, smudge, or cut with a scissors in a straight line.”

  He’d gotten up then, and unlocked the tall metal cabinet that stood behind his desk. He reached inside and dug out a loaner camera attached to a frayed strap and stamped all over in big letters: PROPERTY OF ALHS.

  “Photography is the last remaining mode of artistic expression practiced in Studio One that you have left to attempt,” he concluded, “and I certainly hope it works out, because despite what people may say about me, I really don’t enjoy giving Fs.”

  “And despite what people may say about me,” Pup had replied, “I really don’t enjoy getting Fs.”

  Mr. Hughes leafed one last time through the various pieces in Pup’s portfolio—a smudged, incoherent charcoal self-portrait, a disastrously sloppy needlepoint sailboat, a runny watercolor painting of what was supposed to be a dog but that Mr. Hughes had mistaken for a turtle.

  “There’s nothing I would love more than to be proven wrong about you,” he had said, handing Pup the camera. “So I guess you better get snapping.”

  Feeling overwhelmed now by his usual sense of dejection when it came to his schoolwork, Pup sat down on a stone bench at the edge of the path that led to the water. The sun was warm on his back and the waves moved in their ceaseless, rhythmic push and pull. Pup leaned his head back and was just beginning to doze off when he was suddenly jerking awake again as a memory that he hadn’t known was there dislodged itself from his mind.

  He had been to this beach once before.

  He was very young, maybe four years old, so his memory was not anything but shards of images and feelings. He was there with his brothers and Annemarie, who’d been left in charge of the boys for the day. Luke would have been thirteen, Pat, eleven. But Annemarie and her friend Andi (whatever happened to Andi? Pup now wondered) had wandered off into the circle of sandstone columns to discuss some teenage-girl thing in private, leaving Luke in charge of the two younger boys. Pup, while playing in the surf, had stepped on the sharp edge of a rock, or a bottle, or a shell, he couldn’t remember, and cut open his foot. He’d crumpled to the sand, howling. Luke had come running over and lifted Pup into his arms. He carried Pup to the bench where right this moment he was now sitting, and Patrick had knelt down and examined the wound. Pup could see it clearly: Patrick’s dark head bowed over Pup’s injury, the white, puckered bottoms of his feet and the blood seeping out and mixing with the sand and water. Pat had declared that the wound could become infected if something wasn’t done immediately. He took Pup’s little foot into his hands and said, “This works with rattlesnake venom,” and then he sucked the blood out of the cut. Pup could remember it so clearly—the feeling of his older brother’s lips on the bottom of his foot, the tickling pain, the feeling of relief as Pat had sat back on his heels, spit into the sand, and said, “You’re cured,” while Luke fell on the sand laughing with delight at the absolutely disgusting thing Pat had just done.

  Pup kicked off his shoes, peeled off his socks, and lifted his right foot to his lap. His adult-size foot was plank-like now, practically as long and thin as a child’s ski, and sure enough there it was, on the sole of his foot just below the big toe, a thin white scar, shaped like a fishhook. Pup ran his finger over it. It was about an inch long and very faint, nothing more than a razor-thin ridging of white on white, located on a part of his body that he never had cause to look at. He dropped his foot back into the sand and sat back, satisfied. The scar was physical proof that there were still things in his own memory that he had yet to mine; so many ways of bringing Pat back if he could only trigger them in the right way.

  4

  WHEN PUP GOT HOME, his father was still fast asleep on the couch, while Luke, he assumed, was curled up on the roof ledge sleeping off his hangover. His mother sat at her usual place at the kitchen table, drinking her coffee and penciling carefully in one of her adult coloring books.

  “Hi, honey,” she said, glancing up at him in surprise as he walked through the back door. “You’re up early.”

  “Hey, Mom.” Pup drifted over to the fridge. He found some orange juice and poured himself a glass. “I had a school thing. Photography club.”

  “How wonderful! I didn’t know you liked photography.”

  Pup sipped his juice. There was no point in telling his mom about his failing art grade. Why add to her stress? Besides, one of the perks of having aging parents was that they didn’t annoy him about school. It wasn’t that Ted and Judy Flanagan didn’t care about their youngest son’s grades or his future. It was that neither one of them owned a smartphone. They had one joint email account—set up for them by Annemarie—that could go months without being checked. While his friends’ parents got text and email updates for every tardy or detention or plummeting chemistry grade, Pup enjoyed almost complete immunity. If everybo
dy else’s parents were helicopter parents, hovering around their children and managing their every activity, Pup’s parents were more like space-shuttle parents: watching over him, sure, but from a very far distance, and living, for the most part, on a different planet.

  “Do you want some breakfast?” His mom closed her coloring book. “I was just about to make some scrambled eggs.”

  “Sure, Mom. Thanks.”

  She got up and began rummaging around the cabinets looking for a skillet, while Pup handed her the carton of eggs from the fridge.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said. “Have you talked to Luke lately?”

  “Luke? Of course I have. He’s my son, isn’t he?” She cracked an egg into a bowl and tossed the shell in the trash.

  “Well, does he seem . . . okay to you?”

  “Does he seem okay?” She cracked another egg. “Well, he’s Luke. So, has he been a little Lukier than normal lately? Well, now that you mention it, I suppose maybe he has.” She whirled around suddenly, the shell crushed into her palm. “Why? Is something wrong?”

  “No!” Pup handed her the butter. Okay, so she definitely didn’t know that Luke and Carrie had broken up. Which meant that none of his oldest sisters knew, either, because Jeanine and Mary and Elizabeth and Noreen were basically a single entity of prying older sisterhood, and anything they knew, Pup’s mother would soon know too. “He’s totally fine.”

  “Well, then, why did you ask?”

  “I was just making conversation, Mom. Calm down.”

  “Fine,” she said, whisking the eggs with a vigorous arm. “So, how was the party last night?”

  “What party?”

  “Noreen told me you were going to a party.” She dropped a pat of butter into the hot pan and began swirling it around with the edge of her knife. “With that girl Izzy you’ve been seeing.”

  “I’m not ‘seeing’ her,” Pup said, slumping down into the nearest kitchen chair. “And she didn’t have a party. She just had people over.”