The Last Time We Say Goodbye Part 35

I shrug one shoulder. "I'm not a book critic or anything, but I like your poems, Damian. Although I wouldn't give you a cup full of pity and pain to drown yourself in. I'm all out of pity."

I stand up and go to the window. Outside, the sun is setting over the cornfields, a marvelous haze of fire orange and royal purple. I watch a vee of large birds-sandhill cranes, I think-riding the air.

Migrating home.

There is so much inside me in that moment, I feel like I'll burst. So much I understand now that I didn't yesterday. So much to say.

"Lex?" Damian asks from behind me. "What are you going to do now?"

I turn. "Actually, do you mind if I borrow a pen?"

31 March I need to tell you about that night. I know you already know the details. You were there. But I need you to see it from my perspective, so you will understand why I did what I did.

That night we had dinner at the Imperial Palace. You had lemon chicken, like you always do, and I ordered kung pao chicken. Over dinner we were talking about MIT and Harvard and Beaker maybe going to Wellesley and how we had at least 70 days left before we heard anything, and how hard it was to wait. March felt like eons away, that night.

After dinner you took me to the natural history museum at UNL. It was closed for the night, but because your sister works there, she let us in. I knew you were planning something spectacular by the look on Sarah's face, the way she kept smiling at me. You left me in the elephant hall, staring at the giant fossilized bones of prehistoric mammoths and camels and rhinos that used to roam the gra.s.sy plains that once stretched across the middle of the country hundreds of thousands of years ago, while you and Sarah disappeared for a while to set things up.

Then you came and got me. You blindfolded me, but I could tell you were leading me to the planetarium. How many shows had we seen there, Steven, really? You sat me down on a soft blanket. I could smell candle wax and your aftershave. There was music playing-Mozart, I think; you'll have to tell me sometime, what, exactly it was-a soft serenade of piano and violin.

You took off the blindfold.

We were sitting on a red plaid blanket, like we were having a picnic in the woods, with two short white candles burning in the center, and a bottle of sparkling cider in a bucket of ice, and two plastic champagne gla.s.ses. On the planetarium ceiling, thousands of tiny blue lights shone down on us: not stars or constellations, but particles.

"It's from the show on dark matter," you said.

I craned my neck to gaze up. "I thought dark matter was invisible."

You leaned back and put your arm around me, pulling me to your chest, and I relaxed into the heat of your body.

"It is invisible," you said. "Well, theoretically, it is. Scientists have never been able to prove that dark matter exists, you know."

I did know.

"We can only truly conceive of the fact that it's there because of the way the galaxies behave as they move through the universe, and how the light will always bend around it." You shifted your body closer to mine. You looked down at my lips. I knew you were going to kiss me. Your breath, which smelled like lemons, bathed my face. You looked into my eyes.

"Anyway," you murmured. "It's pretty."

You kissed me. I curled my hand around the back of your head, your hair soft under my fingers, and kissed you back. Blue lights spun over our heads. You kissed the corner of my mouth. My cheek. My ear.

I smiled. "So. This is romantic."

"Yes. I wanted to be romantic." You laced your fingers with mine. "It's December twentieth," you announced.

"Yes?"

You tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. "On June twentieth, six months ago today, we started this little experiment. In a bookstore, which was not the most romantic place, but the best I could do at the moment. I didn't think I'd be able to get you in here back then. And on June twentieth, I kissed you for the very first time."

"It was a good kiss."

"Spectacular," you remembered.

"So happy six months," I said.

"Happy six months. Which is precisely 183 days." You consulted your watch. "Which is 4,392 hours. Which is 263,520 minutes. Which have been some of the best minutes of my life. So far."

G.o.d, you were s.e.xy.

Irresistible.

I pulled your head down to kiss you again, but my phone suddenly buzzed.

I took it out and looked at it.

It was a text.

I never told you who it was from. I never said, "It's my brother." I never told you what it said.

All this time, and I've never told anyone.

But I'll tell you now.

It said, Hey sis can you talk?

This is the part where reality unravels for me, the part where I turned the phone off, and slid it away from me, and we went back to kissing.

But there's an alternate version of what happened that night. There always will be, for me. In the alternate version of reality I get the text and I tell you, "Hold that thought," and I kiss you quick, once, on the mouth, but then I get up and take the phone to the hallway and I call Ty. In that reality-which I know isn't a reality but a fantasy, wishful thinking, a prayer that goes unanswered-Ty tells me what I need to know. That he is sad. That he's stuck in the present. He can't get perspective. He's lost the future.

Then I tell him that he's strong enough to get through the sadness.

I tell him I don't want to go through this messed-up world without him, and I tell him that I need him.

I tell him Mom needs him.

I tell him even Dad needs him-he may not see that right now, but he will see it, sometime.

I tell him that in 5 more days it will be Christmas, and I remind him that Christmas is his favorite holiday, and we'll wake up early and bounce up and down on Mom's bed like we did when we were little, and we'll belt out "Silver Bells" as we scurry downstairs to the Christmas tree and unwrap our presents, and I got him something good this year, and doesn't he want to find out what it is?

I tell him that we have a minimum of 63 Christmases left to share with each other, and I don't want to miss even one of those. Not one.

I tell him I love him.

And me telling him those things is enough to slay his demons.

And he lives through the night.

He lives.

But instead, I turned my phone off, and I kissed you. We stretched out under the dark matter, that invisible, improvable stuff that binds the universe, and I looked up at you, all framed in blue lights, and I said that I loved you.

Your eyes flashed with surprise. You didn't expect me to say it. You thought I didn't believe in love.

But you didn't hesitate to answer.

"I love you, too," you said. "So much."

"It's impractical, how much," I whispered.

You nodded. "Totally impractical."

We drank the cider and talked about dark matter and talked about how we are all made of the stuff of stars, that wonderful quote from Carl Sagan. We are each part of the universe.

Then somehow the conversation shifted to the subject of sandhill cranes.

How every year, in March if the weather holds, 80% of the world's population of sandhill cranes pa.s.s through this one part of Nebraska, millions of birds all at once, and how it's supposed to be this incredible sight to behold, and how we'd both lived in Nebraska for our entire lives and we'd never seen the cranes. We would go, we decided. Before we went off to Ma.s.sachusetts or wherever fate was going to take us, we would go see the sandhill cranes. Together.

We kissed then, and time bent around us. Time went away.

But somewhere in those missing seconds, my brother was walking into the dark coc.o.o.n of the garage with Dad's old hunting rifle and a bullet I must have overlooked.

To ruin everything, I think sometimes.

To die.

We only came back to ourselves when Sarah burst into the planetarium, and I knew the second I saw the look on her face that something was terribly, terribly wrong, and that something involved me.

I remember she said, "She's right here," before she handed me her phone.

I remember it was my dad's voice I heard then, sharp, like I was in trouble for something, like he was grounding me. "It's Ty," the sharp voice said.

I don't remember what else.

I was looking at you. He was telling me. My hand started to shake-not tremble, not waver, but shake, violently, like I was having a seizure. I couldn't control it.

You reached up and put your hand on mine. You held me steady.

After I hung up, you guided me down the hall toward the parking lot. You put my coat around my shoulders. You knelt beside me when I suddenly veered off and bent and vomited my kung pao chicken onto the snowy sidewalk next to the giant mammoth statue in front of the museum. You helped me stand up. You smoothed the hair away from my face. You reached over me to buckle my seat belt, once you got me in the car.

There were Christmas lights all along the way to the mortuary, red and green and white, strung through the trees.

The whole time, your eyes were wide and incredulous, like this couldn't really be happening.

At the mortuary, you waited in the hall while the funeral director took me and Mom and Dad into her office and played us a recording. Ty had called 911, seconds before he pulled the trigger. It took me a few days to piece together why he would do this, but it was a kindness, I've concluded, so Mom or I wouldn't come home and find him when we opened the garage.

We listened to his voice and confirmed that it was Ty.

He said, "There's a dead person in the garage in the green house on the corner of Nickols and Second Street. He killed himself."

That was it. He hung up. It was 12 minutes before the ambulance got there, they told us, but he was already gone.

He didn't sound scared, in the recording. He didn't sound sad. He was perfectly matter-of-fact about it.

They took us into a back room, where Ty's body was lying on a steel table with a sheet covering him up to his neck. We stood for a minute in a tight semicircle just looking at him-Dad in his suit and tie, then me, then Mom in her scrubs-the last time we were truly a family together.

Then Mom stepped forward and laid shaking hands on Ty's chest, like maybe she could wake him, and when he didn't stir, she tipped her head back and a sound came out of her that was sheer pain-a mix of howl and wail that didn't even sound like her voice anymore, that didn't sound exactly human. I'm sure you heard it, from where you were.

Dad put his hand over his mouth and closed his eyes and stumbled back to a chair against the wall.

The sound kept coming out of Mom, and it was unbearable in the way it filled my ears and my head and solidified everything.

My brother was dead.

Mom's knees gave out. I caught her before she hit the floor and dragged her to the chair next to Dad's, and she stopped howling and cried in breathless, ragged bursts.

There was nowhere for me to sit next to them. All I could do was stand and stare at Ty.

He looked like he was made of wax. One of his eyes was coming open. He had beautiful eyelashes-thick and dark and curved just right-and between the seam of lashes there was a sliver of pale gray, like dirty snow. His lips were almost black. This was before you saw him, before the makeup and the formal clothes and the stiff folded hands. There was a smear of blood on his neck, disappearing under the sheet. I was struck with the urge to pull back the sheet and see the wound that killed him, something that would explain this terrible mystery of him being this empty thing when I'd just seen him twelve hours earlier, at the breakfast table, and he was fine.

I would have looked, but Mom and Dad were there. I backed away and stood by Mom and held her hand and cried with her until we both ran dry.

I can't cry anymore. I think that part of myself is broken.

When it came time to leave, Mom didn't want to go. She would have stayed with Ty all night, all day, until we buried him. But they made her go back into Jane's office to sign some papers and talk about the next steps in the process of losing her child.

You were still waiting in the hall. You stood up when I opened the door. Your eyes said you believed it now.

That's when I remembered the text.

I took the phone out of my pocket and checked, and it was still there.

Hey sis can you talk?

Ice washed over me. Dread. Numbness. I shoved the phone back into my pocket. I looked up at you. I thought, This is your fault.

If you hadn't kissed me.

If you hadn't distracted me.

If I hadn't been so tangled up in the emotions I felt for you, the impractical emotions, I would have answered the text.

I would have stopped this.

I didn't stop this.

And I thought again, It's your fault.

I thought, I wish time travel was a viable option. If I could make a time machine, I would go back to that moment, and I would answer that text.

I'd save him.