I’m on the train from New York City. In the window my face won’t let me go, it hovers above windswept towns as the Amtrak slashes past lots stacked with shelled cars and farm tractors shot through with rust, backyards and their repeating piles of rotted firewood, the oily mounds gone mushy, pushed through the crisscross of chain-link fences, then hardened in place. Past warehouse after warehouse graffitied, then painted white, then graffitied again, the windows smashed out for so long glass no longer litters the ground below, windows you can look through, and glimpse, beyond the empty dark inside, the sky, where a wall used to be. And there, just beyond Bridgeport, sits the one boarded house in the middle of a parking lot the size of two footballs fields, the yellow lines running right up to the battered porch.
The train barrels past them all, these towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included. The light on the Connecticut River is the brightest thing in the afternoon’s overcast. I’m on this train ’cause I’m going back to Hartford.
I take out my phone. And a barrage of texts floods the screen, just like I expected.
u hear abt trev?
check fb
it’s about Trevor pick up
fuck this si horrifc call me if u want
I just saw. damn
i’ll call ashley to make sure
just lmk ur good
the wakes on sunday
its trev this time? I knew it
For no reason, I text him: Trevor I’m sorry come back, then turn off the phone, terrified he’d answer.
It’s already night by the time I get off at Hartford’s Union Station. I stand in the greasy parking lot as people hurry through the drizzle into waiting taxis. It’s been five years and three months since Trevor and I first met, since the barn, the Patriots game through radio static, the army helmet on the dusty floor. I wait alone under an awning for the bus that will take me across the river, to the town that holds everything Trevor except Trevor himself.
I did not tell anyone I was coming. I was in the Italian American Lit class at a city college in Brooklyn when I saw, on my phone, a Facebook update from Trevor’s account, posted by his old man. Trevor had passed away the night before. I’m broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two.
I picked up my bag and left the class. The professor, discussing a passage from Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, stopped, looked at me, waiting for an explanation. When I gave none she continued, her voice trailing behind me as I fled the building. I walked all the way uptown, along the East Side, following the 6 train up to Grand Central.
Into—yes, that’s more like it. As in, Now I’m broken into.
The bus’s lights make it feel like a dentist’s office gliding through the wet streets. A woman behind me coughs fitfully between bursts of Haitian-inflected French. There’s a man next to her—husband, brother?—who rarely speaks save for the occasional “Uh-huh” or “Bien, bien.” On the highway, the October trees blur by, branches raking purple sky. In between them, the lampposts of soundless towns hang in fog. We cross a bridge and a roadside gas station leaves a neon throb in my head.
When the dark in the bus returns, I look down at my lap and hear his voice. You should stay. I glance up and see the fabric peeling from the top of his truck, the yellow foam spilling out at the tear, and I’m back in the passenger seat. It’s mid-August and we’re parked outside the Town Line Diner in Wethersfield. The air around us dark red, or perhaps that’s how all evenings, rendered in my memory of him, appear. Bludgeoned.
“You should stay,” he says, gazing out across the lot, his face smeared with motor oil from his shift at the Pennzoil in Hebron. But we both know I’m leaving. I’m going to New York, to college. The whole point of us meeting was to say goodbye, or rather, just to be side by side, a farewell of presence, of proximity, the way men are supposed to do.
We were to go to the diner for waffles, “for old times’ sake,” he said, but when we get there, neither of us moves. Inside the diner, a trucker sits alone over a plate of eggs. On the other side, a middle-aged couple is tucked into a booth, laughing, their arms animated over their oversized sandwiches. A single waitress hovers between the two tables. When the rain starts, the glass warps them, so that only their shades, colors, like impressionist paintings, remain.
“Don’t be scared,” his voice says. He stares at the people glowing in the diner. The tenderness in his tone holds me to the seat, the washed-out town. “You’re smart,” he says. “You’re gonna kill it in New York.” His voice sounds unfinished. And that’s when I realize he’s high. That’s when I see the bruises along his upper arms, the veins bulged and blackened where the needles foraged.
“Okay,” I say as the waitress gets up to warm up the trucker’s coffee. “Okay, Trevor,” as if agreeing to a task.
“They’re old as fuck and they’re still trying.” He almost laughs.
“Who?” I turn to him.
“That married couple. They’re still trying to be happy.” He is slurring, eyes grey as sink water. “It’s raining like hell and they out there eating soggy Reubens trying to get it right.” He spits into the empty cup and lets out a short, exhausted chuckle. “I bet they’ve been eating the same sandwiches forever.”
I smile, for no reason.
He falls back in the seat, lets his head roll to one side, and eases out a come-on grin. He starts to fumble the buckle over his Levi’s.
“Come on, Trev. You’re blazed. Let’s not, okay?”
“I used to hate it when you call me Trev.” He drops his hands, they lie in his lap like unearthed roots. “You think I’m fucked up?”
“No,” I mumble, turning away. I press my forehead against the window, where my reflection hovers above the parking lot, the rain falling through it. “I think you’re just you.”
I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d see him, his neck scar lit blue by the diner’s neon marquee. To see that little comma again, to put my mouth there, let my shadow widen the scar until, at last, there was no scar to be seen at all, just a vast and equal dark sealed by my lips. A comma superimposed by a period the mouth so naturally makes. Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?
“Hello,” he says, without turning his head. We had decided, shortly after we met, because our friends were already dying from overdoses, to never tell each other goodbye or good night.
“Hello, Trevor,” I say into the back of my wrist, keeping it in. The engine jolts, stutters up, behind me the woman coughs. I’m back inside the bus again, staring at the blue mesh seat in front of me.
I get off on Main St. and immediately head toward Trevor’s house. I move as if I’m late to myself, as if I’m catching up. But Trevor is no longer a destination.
Realizing, too late, that it’s useless to show up unannounced at a dead boy’s house to be greeted only by his grief-fucked father, I keep walking. I reach the corner of Harris and Magnolia, where I turn, out of habit or possession, into the park, cross the three baseball fields, the earth rising up musty and fresh beneath my boots. Rain in my hair, down my face, shirt collar. I hurry toward the street on the other side of the park, follow it down to the cul-de-sac, where the house sits, so grey the rain almost claims it, rubbing its edges into weather.
At the front steps, I take the keys from my bag and jostle the door open. It’s nearly midnight. The house sends over me a sheet of warmth, mixed with the sweet musk of old clothes. Everything quiet. The living room TV hums on mute, its blue washes over the empty couch, a half-eaten bag of peanuts on the seat. I shut off the TV, walk up the stairs, turn toward the room. The door’s ajar, revealing the glow of a clamshell night-light. I push it open. You’re lying, not on your bed, but on the floor, on a mat made of folded blankets. Your work at the nail salon has left your back so badly strained the bed has gotten too soft to hold your joints in place through a night’s sleep.
I crawl next to you on the mat. Rain, collected in my hair, falls and blotches your white sheets. I lie down, facing the bed, my back to your back. You startle awake.
“What? What are you doing? My god, you’re wet . . . your clothes, Little Dog . . . what? What’s going on?” You sit up, pull my face to you. “What happened to you?” I shake my head, smile stupidly.
You search me for answers, for cuts, feeling my pockets, under my shirt.
Slowly, you lie down on your side. The space between us thin and cold as a windowpane. I turn away—even if what I want most is to tell you everything.
It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.
There’s a word Trevor once told me about, one he learned from Buford, who served in the navy in Hawaii during the Korean War: kipuka. The piece of land that’s spared after a lava flow runs down the slope of a hill—an island formed from what survives the smallest apocalypse. Before the lava descended, scorching the moss along the hill, that piece of land was insignificant, just another scrap in an endless mass of green. Only by enduring does it earn its name. Lying on the mat with you, I cannot help but want us to be our own kipuka, our own aftermath, visible. But I know better.
You place a sticky hand on my neck: lavender lotion. Rain drums the gutters along the house. “What is it, Little Dog? You can tell me. Come on, you’re making me scared.”
“I hate him, Ma,” I whisper in English, knowing the words seal you off from me. “I hate him. I hate him.” And I start to cry.
“Please, I don’t know what you’re saying. What is that?”
I reach back, clutching two of your fingers, and press my face into the dark slot under the bed. On the far end, near the wall, too far for anyone to reach, beside an empty water bottle, a single sock crumpled and filmed with dust. Hello.