46

Brett had been pronounced dead on arrival.

He hadn’t been snorting cocaine at all. The packet they’d given him had contained pure heroin.

That night Melanie had wanted to be dead too. Several of them had offered to stay with her, but all she wanted, she’d said, was to be taken back to the motel.

That night Melanie sat on the roughly upholstered armchair in the motel room for a long time. She stared at Brett’s guitar. She stared at his Hawaiian print shirt, hanging on the back of a chair.

Her whole life had simply emptied out.

Her spirit kept welling up in her, struggling to get to Brett, to touch him again, to hold him.

But he wasn’t there.

Brett was a dead body lying in the basement of a hospital.

And Melanie’s body was buckling under her sobs.

The tears drained away, though, and when they did there were just the walls of this motel room, and outside, the universe, vast and utterly empty.

Melanie would try to pull herself together, and then she would think, Why? For what?

Without him, what could her own life be but a long wait for her own death, just waiting. Alone.

He had been her reason for living. Without him there was no reason for anything, no meaning, no purpose. Nothing, just misery. And you could only be truly miserable having truly known, once, happiness.

Brett had said that he wanted to be cremated. His family got the body, though, and they had him buried. Had they been married, Melanie could have had his wish carried out. Yet at his funeral, where she sat a stranger to everyone, Melanie knew that it didn’t matter now what they did to him. He was already so far, far away.

The dead vanished into thin air. Life was only a rumor, a whisper, an aching that would pass. There was barely a breath of substance to it. A day was a few hours, a year a few days, a lifetime no time at all.

Standing before Brett’s flower-covered grave, alone, after the rest of them had gone, Melanie said—out loud—because she was no longer sure even of her own existence, “I loved you so. I really did….

“And I was going to write you a song.”