His brother sent him one final message. It came when Joel was in flight, somewhere over the Mason-Dixon line. It came when he was somewhere between the past and the rest of his life, again. It came in a dream.
Yet when Joel awoke a few minutes later he could already feel its memory—like all the other memories of all the other dreams—slipping away from him. By the time his plane broke through the clouds and empty Manhattan thrust itself up before his window like some glimpse of a dubious future, Joel found that the dream had all but faded.
By the time he touched down all he could remember was this:
The sound of insects whirring in late afternoon. The expectant hush of an empty highway. The aubergine sky and the swell of hot light, an afternoon in autumn finally slipping into dusk.
They were at the football field, Dylan and Joel, alone. Dylan tottered along beside his brother, the top of his wobbly helmet barely coming to Joel’s waist, the fingers of one small gloved hand clutched tight in Joel’s palm. Dylan was speaking. Joel, for the first time in his life, was listening.
When they reached the fifty-yard line, Dylan stopped. He turned up his head to ask, “Are you going to stay for the game?”
Joel took in the empty stands, the empty road, the empty Flats in the distance that bore him, now, no ill will. “If they’ll let me.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Dylan slipped his hand free. He pointed to the stands. Joel started across the field.
“I texted you Sunday night because I thought I could learn to be like you,” Dylan yelled.
Joel couldn’t bring himself to turn back. Be like him? A solitary man so broken he’d thought he deserved every minute of pain he’d ever received?
“I wouldn’t wish myself on anyone,” Joel said.
“You’ve always played yourself short, you know.”
Joel sat in the front row of the rusted stands. He looked across the pitch, hoping to catch some glimpse of Kimbra Lott or KT Staler or T-Bay Baskin or any other member of the idle dead. But there was no one. Only an empty cascade of bleachers charged with all the promise of youth and time and the thin, irresistible potential for glory.
“Did you really hate football?” Joel shouted to his brother.
“Nobody ever taught me how to ask for help.”
Before Joel could think how to answer this, Dylan bent low on the line, his back rigid, his helmet up. Joel broke off. There was only so much you could say, he realized, even to the dead.
The sun finally faded. The spindly field lights came on, one by one, each a little storm of hope and halogen thundering to life over his brother’s head.
“Out here I can still be everything I always wanted me to be,” Dylan shouted, his voice echoing against the empty metal and the flat horizon. He clapped his hands for the snap. “And I love it.”
Joel heard the smack of a rubber ball striking a leather glove and awoke in his seat with a start. He reached out to touch his useless arm and froze: a warm breath was stirring the hairs on the back of his neck.
It was enough.
Joel was adequate. He was loved.
For a moment—for a breath of a moment—he wasn’t alone.