Sorry for Your Loss

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “Yes. She told me everything.”

  “Good.”

  “Come here, dear. Let me look at you.”

  Pup crossed the faded blue Oriental rug to meet her where she stood. She reached up and brushed her fingers along the cut on his forehead. “Are you all right? Did you put some Neosporin on it?”

  “I’ll be fine, Mom.”

  “Dad and I are headed over to the hospital to meet the rest of your sisters.” She picked away a piece of his hair that had stuck to his face with dried blood. “Do you want to come?”

  “No, Mom.” He shook his head. “I’m really tired. I think I might just go upstairs and lie down.”

  “Okay.” Her eyes grew momentarily brighter, the only outward sign that he’d hurt her feelings. “Can I bring you anything?”

  “No, thanks. I just want to sleep.”

  He climbed the stairs slowly, like an old man. He was too tired to even remember to give the seventh-stair angel the finger.

  When he got to his room, he yanked the shades down and slept sweatily through the afternoon. He was awoken at one point by the sound of the key twisting in the front door lock, followed by the murmuring of conversation. He could make out the voices of his parents, at least two of his sisters, and some nieces and nephews—Adrienne and Charlie and maybe Tara, and the joyful babbling of eleven-month-old Chloe. Pup usually loved seeing his nieces and nephews, but right now the thought of dealing with all of them overwhelmed him. He rolled over, pulled a pillow over his head, and went back to sleep.

  Later still, the voices had dwindled to just two—his mom and his dad—and he smelled hot dogs cooking on the grill in the yard, and also possibly the little yellow onions that his dad grew in the garden and liked to cook in aluminum foil drizzled with olive oil. His stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten anything since the breakfast Sal had made for him hours ago. But even the promise of hot dogs with grilled onions and, most likely, homemade potato salad, could not flush Pup out of his room. Every time he thought of Luke in that place, the smell that had come off him as they had grappled over his keys, the yellow film over his unbrushed teeth, the cracked lips, the suffering in his eyes, Pup felt sick. He just didn’t know how he would handle it if his family started asking him a million questions, or worse, if they didn’t ask him anything at all.

  It was only after he heard the slow creak of his mother’s footsteps up the stairs; after he felt her silently listening outside his door, knuckles poised but unable to bring herself to actually knock; after the slow retreat of her steps back down the stairs again; only after he heard the click of the television and the muted excitement of the appraisers on Antiques Roadshow, after the house grew quiet and enough time had passed that he knew his parents would both be asleep on the couch, that he tiptoed downstairs. With a pang of sadness, the first thing he saw on the kitchen counter was the plastic-wrapped plate containing two hot dogs with grilled onions and potato salad that his mother had made up for him. In the stillness of the house that always seemed to be speaking to him in a volume just below what he was capable of hearing, Pup stood on the moonlit kitchen tiles and ate his dinner cold. When he was finished, he brushed the crumbs into the sink, washed his plate, and, closing the screen door very softly behind him, went outside to shoot free throws.

  He’d just finished his warm-up and was getting ready to start his drills at the post when he saw the figure shambling down the alley, hands deep in pockets, shrouded in a hoodie despite the warm night.

  “Hey.” His face was freshly shaven, and without the black beard it looked pale and tender, like if you poked it with your finger it might leave a lasting indentation. “Annemarie told me I’d probably find you out here.”

  “Well.” Pup dribbled the ball once, twice, visualized the rim. “Here I am.”

  “I have a court date in a couple weeks. Annemarie’s going to try to get my charge downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor. We’ll see. Either way, it’s not good.”

  “You looking for an apology or something?” Pup released the ball into the air. It banked off the backboard and Luke caught it.

  “I’m not looking for an apology.”

  “Well, then why are you here?”

  “To talk to you about something.”

  “About what? Give me the ball.”

  “No.” Luke leaned against the garage and slid down to sitting, holding the ball in his lap. “Just sit with me for a second.”

  “Why? Why should I listen to anything you have to say?”

  “You shouldn’t. But I need you to listen anyway.” Luke swallowed, and the tender, scraped skin of his neck moved up and down. “Please.”

  Pup sighed. He sat down next to his brother.

  “I have to tell you something that I never told anyone before.”

  “I already know. Carrie told me. You’ve only been pretending to go to law school.”

  “Yes. I have. But it’s not that.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s about Patrick.”

  Pup flicked his eyes in Luke’s direction, but his brother was staring at the asphalt.

  “I was the last person to ever talk to him.”

  Pup blinked. “When? The day he—the last day?”

  “Yes. He called me that morning. He said he felt like crap. Headache, body ache, stiff neck, puking. I said, ‘Well, were you out last night?’ And he said yeah, he’d been at a party for his fraternity. And I said . . .” Luke paused to swallow again, as if there was too much saliva welling in his throat. “I said, ‘Well, idiot, you’re hungover. Go get some Taco Bell and call me later.’ And he said, ‘No, Luke, like I feel really crappy.’ And I said, ‘How much did you drink?’ He said one beer. He asked, ‘Could I be hungover from one beer?’ And I started laughing. I said—” Luke leaned his head down and pressed it against the cool nubs of the basketball. He closed his eyes and breathed into the rubber. “I said, ‘Well, Pat, what can I say? You’re a fuckin’ lightweight.’” He looked up at Pup, his blue eyes hollowed out by the darker blue bags that hung beneath them. “I told him to go to the gas station, buy a Vitaminwater, take a couple aspirin, and go take a nap. So that’s what he did. He took my advice. And then—a few hours after I hung up with him—that’s when Rinard called Mom, saying they couldn’t wake him up. But by that time it was already too late. And if I had just listened—if I hadn’t been such a dick, if I hadn’t brushed him off—he’d still be—he’d still be—” Luke couldn’t go on. His pressed his face into the curve of the basketball.

  Pup sat frozen beside him. He remembered when Jack Rinard had called the house. He’d been sitting at the kitchen table doing his Spanish homework, conjugating verbs. His mother had answered the phone, listened for a moment, then buckled against the counter, dropping the kitchen sponge she’d been holding. He could still remember the wet sound it made when it hit the floor. Sitting there with his pencil hovering over his Spanish workbook, Pup could feel a dark charge in the air, even though she didn’t say anything, even though he couldn’t hear what was being said on the other end of the line. Then she ordered Jack to call an ambulance, to let her know as soon as it arrived. “Don’t leave him,” she said. “Not even for one second. Don’t let them tell you that you can’t ride in the ambulance.” Her voice was calm, capable, full of authority, but as soon as she hung up, she turned to Pup and her face melted into a puddle of terror.

  “Pat’s sick,” she said. Then, she said it again. “Pat’s sick.” Before he had a chance to ask what she meant by that vague word, sick, which could describe anything from a case of the sniffles to stage-four cancer, she had grabbed her car keys off the counter and was running wildly through the house looking for Pup’s dad, who was out in the garden, weeding as usual. When she finally found him, Pup witnessed but could not hear their conversation through the window, his mother waving her hands frantically, his father nearly keeling over in the grass, and then they were running through the yard to the garage, his mom without a jacket despite the October
chill, his dad still wearing his gardening kneepads. Pup looked down at his workbook. He was still holding his pencil. Looking back on it now, he realized that he knew, even then, how it would end. The words on the page blurred in front of him. Perder was the word he was trying to conjugate. Pierdo. Pierdes. Perdemos. I lose. You lose. We lose.

  “So now you know,” Luke murmured into the basketball, “that I’m the reason why he’s dead. If I’d told him to go to the infirmary. Or urgent care. . . . If I’d gone downstairs and asked Mom what she thought. . . . If I’d acted even a little bit less like the hotshot asshole older brother I’ve always been, he’d still be alive. He’d be twenty-three years old. He’d be out here with us right now, shooting free throws with his terrible Joakim Noah form, and we’d be making fun of him for it, and somehow he’d still be beating us. But instead he’s dead, because I killed him.”

  “Luke,” Pup whispered. “You didn’t kill Patrick. He just died. It was an infection. It—it happens to people, sometimes. Even young people. They get sick and they die.”

  “It does not just happen. Do you know one other person who died when they were twenty years old? Do you?”

  “Izzy’s brother,” said Pup. “Teddy. He didn’t even make it to twenty. He was only eight.”

  “That’s different. That poor kid had some horrible kind of incurable cancer. What Patrick had wasn’t like that. They could have cured him, if they’d had enough time. And maybe they would have, if it wasn’t for me.” He was trembling all over, despite his hoodie and the eighty-degree night. “He should have called you that morning instead of me. If he had called you, he’d still be here. What you did last night—tracking me down, calling the cops on me—you think I hate you? You saved my life, Pup. You saved me. Because that’s what brothers do. That’s what strangers do. But not me.” He shook his head slowly. “Not me. My brother was calling me for help. My brother was dying. And what did I do? I told him to sack up and take an aspirin.” He was crying so hard now that snot leaked from his nose and he didn’t bother to wipe it away. “And I love you, Pup. I love you so much. I love you so much and I’m so sorry because now you hate me, but I’m glad you hate me, because I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve anything. Not family, not success, definitely not love. I gave up my right to all those things the minute I hung up on Pat that day and let him die.”

  “No,” Pup said softly. “No. No. No. No.” This was the one argument he would not let Luke win. As he repeated that one word again and again, until it became a chant, a hushing soothing sound, a lullaby, he was remembering Patrick’s advice when he’d been training to make the freshman team at Lincoln. You don’t have to be the best, Patrick had said, flipping him the ball as they ran through their hundredth shell drill of the morning. You just have to be the most tenacious. You just have to outlast them. “No,” Pup said again. He would outlast Luke’s words with his chant, his refusal, his no. And it worked. At last, Luke gave up. He collapsed against Pup’s shoulder, his ragged breathing evening, and the basketball fell from his hands and rolled away down the alley.

  Color:

  one of the most dominant elements; it is created by light

  36

  THE WEEK AFTER LUKE RETURNED to them, Pup’s mother did something unprecedented: she moved Sunday dinner to a Tuesday night. It was the eve of the Fourth of July, and while Carrie and Pup’s older sisters busied themselves chopping tomatoes and slicing watermelon in the kitchen, Pup and Declan wandered the backyard, supervising the younger nieces and nephews as they threw Snaps at each other’s feet on the concrete path leading to the garage. Jeanine and Mary had made an executive decision that it was too hot for Bolognese and had made a trip to Costco for crates of frozen hamburger patties and giant bags of corn chips. Inside, Noreen’s husband, Dan, sweated before the stove, slowly stirring a large pot of honey-baked beans, while Mike and Frank, two more of Pup’s brothers-in-law, dragged two huge coolers out to the deck. They filled up the coolers with ice and drinks—but nothing stronger than pop, bottled water, and juice boxes for the kids. Pup’s mother, who was usually the sole cook for their weekly family parties, sat idly on the deck, her eyes hidden by a pair of prescription sunglasses, her slinged arm tucked into her body, and watched her grandchildren play. His father, seated next to her, was quiet too. He didn’t speak to anybody, except to occasionally remind the children not to trample his vegetables. They both seemed preoccupied, nervous, as their eyes drifted again and again to the alley gate, waiting for the arrival of their invited guest.

  This wasn’t an intervention, because Luke was already in rehab. Thirty days of inpatient treatment, followed by another month of outpatient, followed by enrollment in an aftercare recovery program. He’d been there for six days now, and nobody knew how it was going because Luke wasn’t allowed to speak to anybody on the outside. All they knew was that he was still there, that he hadn’t checked himself out or snuck away in the middle of the night, and, lacking any other kind of information, they had all decided to take this as a good sign.

  So, no, it wasn’t an intervention. But it wasn’t a normal family dinner, either, and not just because they’d changed the menu and moved it to a Tuesday and Carrie was there but Luke wasn’t. Once the counselor at the hospital had heard Luke’s story, she’d suggested family therapy as an important piece of his recovery. Pup’s parents had immediately refused. “I don’t want some stranger coming into our home, poking around in our lives,” his mother had said. His father had agreed with her, and so had Jeanine and Matthew. And that probably would have been the end of it, if it hadn’t been for Pup’s idea.

  “What if,” he’d suggested tentatively, the morning after Luke shared his awful secret, “it wasn’t a stranger?”

  And that was how Mrs. Barrera ended up as the special invited guest to their Sunday-dinner-on-a-Tuesday, balancing a paper plate on her knees and accepting offers of more baked beans, more fruit salad, another pickle, a Sprite?

  That first session of family therapy was not as painful as Pup had imagined it would be. While the dusk settled over the neighborhood and the younger nieces and nephews ran around in the yard, waving their sparklers and trailing glitter in the darkening air, the older family members—Pup and his sisters and their spouses and Carrie and even Declan and his fourteen-year-old sister, Clare, sat in a circle of lawn chairs on the deck and talked about what they could do for Luke once he was out in the world again, how to help him cope, how to help him avoid the temptation of alcohol, which, Mrs. Barrera warned them grimly, would be everywhere. It was a painful and long-overdue conversation, and it was a good thing Mrs. Barrera had brought a “listening stick”—an old broom handle that she’d hot-glue-gunned all over with sequins—so that Jeanine and Matthew couldn’t commandeer the conversation.

  After that, spurred on by some gentle prodding by Mrs. Barrera, they talked about Patrick. They talked about his death, for a little while. But then, for much longer, they talked about his life. They unearthed their memories, they aired out their love for him. They cried a lot. They laughed a lot more. The sun finally sank completely and as soon as true darkness settled over the neighborhood, the booms and pops and fizzes of the alley fireworks began, the air thickening with sulfur and grill char. Smoke filled the dark sky. Above the rooftops, the people who just couldn’t wait one more day began blowing off their grand finale fireworks. Red and silver and blue showers, low, rumbling booms, crackling fountains of light arced across the sky like man-made stars.

  It was late before that first session of family therapy ended, before they took turns hugging Mrs. Barrera goodbye and, one by one, Pup’s older sisters gathered up their children and pushed their strollers or drove their minivans back to their own corners of Flanland. His parents, as usual, fell asleep five minutes into Antiques Roadshow. He switched the television off and covered their legs with the lightweight blanket folded over the back of the rocking chair. Then he went up to bed.

  On the seventh step, Pup lifted his arm, out of rot
e habit, to flip off the fat angel in its frame, but before he had a chance to extend his middle finger, he froze.

  The angel was gone.

  Someone—his mother, his father, he didn’t know—had taken it down. In its place was Patrick’s high school graduation photo. He’d switched out his Cubs hat for a stiff black mortarboard, perched at a jaunty angle on his head, and he was smiling hugely, completely unselfconscious of his crooked front tooth. His eyebrows were black and thick and almost touching above his wide blue eyes, which looked eagerly into a future he must have believed—had every right to believe—would last many years, decades, half a century or more.

  Pup stepped back. He looked at his brother’s face. Then he leaned his forehead against the glass, living eyes gazing into pixelated eyes, a one-way stare, living breath fogging the plate between them. He’d once feared that his memory was fading, that the day would come when he could no longer remember Patrick the way he wanted to. But he had fought against the fading, and he would keep fighting. They all had, and they all would, all of the Flanagans, all in their own private way. The years would spool onward, but as Pup stood before Patrick on the seventh step, he swore to do whatever he could to shorten the distance between the linear measurement of those lengthening years and the feeling of them, a feeling that didn’t move in lines at all, but in waves, sometimes moving forward toward healing, toward happiness, but other times drawing back upon itself so that the ache felt fresh as ever. What could he do but keep swimming?

  37

  THE FIRST THING PUP NOTICED about the green room was that it was not actually green. It was a long, narrow space with yellow walls and a white tile floor. On one end was a table lined with trays of cookies and sandwich wraps and fruit salad turning into mush where kids lined up to fill their paper plates. On the other was a row of folding chairs that remained empty because everyone was too nervous to sit. For the first time in his life, Pup couldn’t eat. He strode the length of the room and back again, grabbing at his stranglingly tight Chicago Cubs tie and listening to the low murmur on the other side of the wall grow louder as the crowd began to fill up the auditorium.