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Jordan: Even on the Darkest Night
Evan: the Stars Around Us Burn...
December 23 • 1:45 PM
The first time I truly hate my brother is the moment we put him in the ground. I curse him with frozen breath as the cold dirt sticks under my black painted nails and slides from my fingers. The earth hits the top of the smooth mahogany coffin like machine gun fire, each speck blowing tiny, irreparable bullet holes through my exposed heart while all of our family and friends watch.
Tears cling to my mascara-free lashes as the grey sky turns them to frozen memories I can’t shake.
I look at no one, especially Jeremy, whose honey colored gaze hasn't left me once today.
I speak to no one as I step from the hole in the rain-slicked ground to my stoic father and despairing mother who put their arms around me like they're afraid I'll run.
I want to run—run and run and never turn back, feel the burn in my chest and lungs taking over my emotions, the fire consuming me from the inside. I’ve never felt more than I do right now, and I’m cracking apart.
I thought I knew what pain was. I’d felt the burn of a torn muscle, the sting of cut flesh, the empty desperation of unrequited love. That’s what I thought pain was.
Physical pain is nothing compared to burying my best friend. The confused anguish flooding me is more than I ever thought one body could tolerate. I’m suffocating, choking. I shove the pieces of my emotions in a box, clamp it with a vice, and slowly, slowly, wind the handle. The splintered boards surrounding my hole-filled heart begin to close and seal.
As I watch the dirt cover my brother’s coffin I decide to throw my flaming box of shattered emotions in to be buried underground with him.
Merry Christmas, big brother.
PART ONE
Jonathan: Sat, December 17 9:42pm
i no u love her, dude. u don't have to lie.
Jeremy: Sat, December 17 9:42pm
I never lied. I’ve never denied it.
You made it very clear you'd
crush my balls if I touched her.
Jonathan: Sat, December 17 9:43pm
lol, yeah i did. but i take it back.
i always thought u'd be the worst thing 4 her.
that she deserved better than u...
Jeremy: Sat, December 17 9:43pm
Why the sudden heart to heart?
I don't really want to talk about this...
Jonathan: Sat, December 17 9:43pm
no one will ever be good enough for her.
even u. at least i trust u to take care of her.
Jeremy: Sat, December 17 9:46pm
What are you saying?
Jonathan: Sat, December 17 9:46pm
do u love her?
Jonathan: Sat, December 17 9:53pm
dude, answer me. no bullshit
Jeremy: Sat, December 17 9:54pm
Yeah, man. I love her.
Jonathan: Sat, December 17 9:54pm
for real?
Jeremy: Sat, December 17 9:54pm
For real.
Jonathan: Sat, December 17 9:57pm
then take care of her, k?
Jonathan: Sat, December 17 10:00pm
promise me u'll take care of her...
Jeremy: Sat, December 17 10:01pm
Seriously?
Jonathan: Sat, December 17 10:01pm
promise me.
Jeremy: Sat, December 17 10:03pm
okay. Shit. I promise...
June 12 • 12:15 PM
My hands tighten around the smooth leather of the steering wheel of the old Camaro, and I let my head fall against the headrest. After months of sitting idle in our backyard, the car still holds his heavy scent of cologne, car grease, and a hint of cigarette smoke. My brother loved to work on this car as much as I love to build furniture. Often we’d work side by side, me carving, him tinkering. Sawdust and grease and bright sunny days...
I come here to sit in the silence of his absence, running his promises through my head.
“You and me, and the open road.” His grin was as wide as all the trouble he ever got into. “We’re gunna do it, Nik. It’ll be epic.”
Pinching my eyes closed is the only way to stop the flood of broken memories.
A door slams in the distance, and I flinch, hands sliding from the steering wheel of my brother’s car to the pile of papers in my lap—sheets of various sizes, covered in notes.
Newspaper clippings. My obsession.
“Nicole?” Mom’s voice filters like sunshine through the open window, and my heart thuds heavy in my chest. I scramble to shove the papers together, cramming them in the glove box. Her reflection appears in the side mirror, her arms tightened around her stomach, her hair down around her shoulders, head tilted in that what on earth are you doing way.
My hands tremble. I can’t get caught with these stories again.
“Just a second,” I call out as one slip of paper falls to the passenger side floor. I slam the glove box closed and quickly shove the stray paper under the seat.
“We have to get going, sweetie. You’ll be late for your appointment.” She’s right outside the window, and I swing the door open to meet her.
Something small falls from my lap, and Mom beats me to it. Her light eyebrows furrow as she shakes the lighter in the air.
“Where did you get this from?” She teeters on the line between concern and frustration, a tone I know well. “You know you can’t have lighters.”
“I know.”
Mom sighs the same sigh of resignation she always does when I refuse to talk and slips the lighter in her pocket. “Do you have any more of these hidden?”
“No,” I lie. I have them all over.
“Well, let’s get going, okay? We can’t be late this time. Dr. LaSalle is very busy, and I have to pay whether you show up or not.”
The accusation in her voice is obvious, and it always brings up two distinct feelings: annoyance that I have to sit with a psychiatrist and talk about things that aren’t a big deal anyway, and guilt that my parents are paying for someone to help me and I ditch more often than I show.
“We’re leaving in five minutes, okay?” Mom smiles and pats my cheek before disappearing into the house.
I sink into the driver’s seat of the Camaro and fish around for the spare paper I shoved under the seat. My fingers touch the rough edges, but it’s not one paper. It’s two.
One is mine. One is not.
I shove mine in the glove box and read the other again and again; each time my breathing quickens and my eyes blur with tears.
His. His writing. His...
Life List
My fingers curl around the paper, tangling my heart in the faint blue lines.
1:30 PM
“Nicole?” A voice breaks through my hazy thoughts. “Are you even listening?”
Mom pulls at my shoulders as I slide my butt back in the uncomfortable, but beautifully carved, hardback chair positioned exactly in the middle of Dr. LaSalle’s office. You’d think a psychiatrist would have more comfortable chairs and not put his patients on display directly in the center of the room. I'm probably the least messed up person he sees, and I feel a panicky paranoia swallowing me with them both staring at me.
I shake my head, trying to get the image of Jon’s handwriting out of my head. Who only has two things on a Life List? He couldn’t even find a third thing. Nothing but the ink smudges of a tapping pen.
The box I keep the pieces of my heart in bends and warps at the idea my brother didn’t feel he had anything in life. His sadness mixes with my own, and I shake it off like sawdust in my hair.
LaSalle sits on the other side of a desk I can tell is made out of real wood and not that pressed board crap. The magnificent desk is solid oak with a lacquer finish. He waxes it. Well, he probably doesn’t. By his three-hundred-an-hour business suit and take-more-of-these-pills Rolex, he doesn’t do anything but sit there and push a pen around on a pad of paper. I also don’t understand how doctors have the worst signatures ever. Rushed. Scribbled half-heartedly without fully paying attention. I hate this guy, his stupid signature, and his smug, self-important rat-face.
“I asked how this new prescription was helping your moods and if you noticed any interference with your migraine medication,” LaSalle says, placing his hands together on his desk and leaning forward. “Are you feeling a little more stable? A little more even?”
I glance away, hiding behind a curtain of hair. The smell of sawdust lingers from my morning of carving a coffee tabletop, and fills me with a sense of earthy calm—not happiness, or ease, or any of that. The scent of sawdust returns me to the familiar emptiness I’ve lived in for the last five months. Everything else is pushed outside of me, which is my calm.
“Mostly it makes me thirsty.” I grab a thick strand of yellow hair and pull it across my face, inhaling my wood shop and wishing I was there building something and not here being broken down by the stares of people who act like they know me better than I do.
Weekly visits are mandatory, but I skipped the last two, hoping I could ditch the whole last month of appointments unnoticed. But I did get noticed, and Mom decided to chaperon me, keeping me under her broken stare.
Mom’s a great mom and she loves me—both my parents do—and we aren’t some fall-apart-in-anguish type family you read about in books or see in movies. We’re solid. Dad's gone for work a lot, but when he’s around he clears his schedule to hang out. I swear he only wants to be sure I don’t start getting tattoos and smoking crack—or being alone in my bedroom with a boy, which to him might be worse than tattoos and crack—but he always makes time for me.
“How are you doing with the newspaper stories?” This is the question LaSalle always asks. The reason I’m in here.
“What do you mean how am I doing?” My confidence deflates, along with my shoulders.
“Are you still obsessed with stories of organ donations?”
“I’m not obsessed.” I think of all the papers shoved in Jon’s glove box. Maybe I’m a little obsessed.
“Are you still trying to find the recipients of Jonathan’s organs?” LaSalle leans over his desk, as if being closer to me will make it easier to tell if I’m lying.
“I find the stories interesting,” I avoid answering directly, making an effort to keep my body relaxed. Six of Jon’s organs had been donated, and I tried for weeks to convince Mom and Dad to try to find out where they went. Mom cried, and Dad said it was up to Mom. That’s when I took research into my own hands. I searched every publicly documented donation in North America—essays and brochures and newspaper clippings... searching for clues, desperately trying to find Jon somewhere out there. Any sign of him.
“That’s understandable, Nicole, but with everything else happening with you right now, I see this combination of behaviors as unhealthy. These actions might be holding back your healing.”
“Combination of behaviors?” I lean forward this time, challenging him, and he slumps his heavy frame in his chair.
“The isolation, the newspaper stories...the burning?” LaSalle taps his pen on the desk, and I cringe. He has to be denting the wood. There’s not a glass or plastic sheet protecting the grain. “Are you still burning your furniture, too?”
I shake my head, letting my hair fall in a curtain to shield my face. Mom nudges me, and I slink into my chair, pushing away my hair.
“Nicole. I caught you with a lighter today. How are you supposed to get through this if you lie?” Mom’s hard stare flickers with the sadness I know she tries to bury for my sake. She hates when I lie, but it’s not so much that I don’t want to tell the truth. It’s that I don’t want to talk at all. I want to build and burn. I want to collect my stories. I want to survive the rest of this school year and get to summer. I want to imagine my brother driving his beloved car down the East Coast to my dad’s childhood home in Morehead City, North Carolina. Me and my brother.
That’s what I want.
But now there’s only me.
“Yes, I’m still burning.” I sigh and cross my arms in front of my chest, shielding my hole-filled heart from the winds of LaSalle’s concern.
Burning is what we affectionately call my need to burn everything I create. I’m not technically a pyro or anything, but a few months ago I spent a hundred hours hand carving a chair from pine before dousing the wood in gasoline and lighting a match to it in the middle of my driveway. Apparently it’s illegal to burn things without a permit in city limits, or so the police told my parents after the neighbors complained.
I didn’t burn a chair; I burned what that chair represented. No one seems to get that.
LaSalle’s eyes narrow, and Mom rubs circles on her temples.
“Nicole...” he starts, and this intense feeling of irritation tries to crack through my feelings-barrier. I jump to my feet and run my hands up and down my bare thighs.
“I’m better, okay? It’s only been a couple more times.” I tug at my long sleeves, covering my hands with my bright yellow shirt, and re-cross my arms. I’m lying, and I can tell by the doc’s pursed lips he knows. “I made them. I can do whatever I want with them.” I teeter on the edge of anger, the box around my heart warping and splitting...pushing against me, but I fight. No feeling. Tighten the vice. For a moment, I decide I’m going to burn the other chairs as soon as I get home, but I tuck the thought away with the rest.
“I understand how you might feel that way, Nicole. But your lack of respect for your parents’ wishes, your belongings, and now your creations, has us worried it might leak to your person.” He scans my outfit before he continues, judging my ripped shorts, my v-cut shirt, my unlaced boots, tongues flopping out. “I was only asking. We don’t have to talk if you feel uncomfortable.”
I press the heels of my hands against my temples. The psychobabble pushes me further into myself, closer to the anger I try to stay away from. I know all his tricks. He uses my name to humanize me, to make me an individual. He legitimizes my feelings. He gives me options. Choices. He pretends I have a say in what happens to me. But if I had a say, Jon would be alive, his organs all where they should be, and I wouldn’t be standing here.
I’d have my life back. I’d be getting ready to leave for the summer to the town my dad grew up in before he moved to Canada to be with my Mom. Jon would be telling me I wasn’t allowed, under any circumstances, to leave the house in the new bikini I bought. I’d be begging him to stop texting his secret girlfriends and help me cut down all my clothes to the one suitcase I’m allowed on the airplane. He’d be fighting with my parents to let us drive the coast like we always wanted.
That’s where I’d be if I had what I wanted.
“Nicole?” This time it’s my mom’s voice.
“Oh my God, stop saying my name. I heard you. I hear you.”
Irritation rakes through me, and I leave the room before I explode.
2:45 PM
Mom sighs for the twelfth time—I started officially counting after three—as we turn into our driveway, and I know she wants to say something. I’m not currently open to listening.
She pulls the car up close to the garage, which is like my shining haven of quiet, whispering for me to get out and go build something.
Mom puts the gear in park rather forcefully. She turns to me, but I pretend I don’t see her while reaching into the backseat for my stuff.
A soft touch freezes me in place. Mom’s warm hand on my arm sends chills through me. Hot and cold crash together, making me lukewarm. Love and hate cancel each other out, leaving nothing but indifference.
“Your father and I have been talking about cancelling the trip to Morehead this summer.”
The chills turn to ice. “You can’t do that.” The tone of my voice is pure desperation. They can’t cancel. I’ve been waiting to get out of here. Eager to escape.
“We don’t know if this is a good idea. It might be too soon. Your father has a few business trips planned... a big trip to Philadelphia right when we’re supposed to be leaving.” Mom’s eyes shine with a layer of sadness, and I see beneath the surface. Whatever’s happening inside her is jumbled and messy, but I know very clearly my Dad’s trips have nothing to do with this.
“Dad’s always on business trips.” I lean forward, clutching her arm. She stares out the window behind me.
This can’t be happening. First Jon steals away any hope of our trip then Mom rips the beach out from under me altogether. I may have been born in Canada, but I live for the warm sand, cool water, and burning sun of the South.
“I don’t know if I can do this alone.”
“Do what alone?”
She sighs deeply yet again.
“We found your papers, Nicole.” It’s a straight statement, tensing my whole body. Fear pins me against the seat. “In Jon’s car. We know you haven’t stopped.”
“What?” I understand her, but I have no other response. Everything feels delayed, vibrating like the echo of grinding steel in a metal shop.
“The papers with all those donor stories. The ones you’re hoping to be about Jonathan.”
“How could you?” I start, and Mom holds her hand out to silence me.
“I was cleaning the car to take photos of it. Don’t look at me like that. We’ve told you, Nicole. A hundred times. This is not healthy.”
I blink a couple times. “You’re selling Jon’s car?” There are too many negative reactions, all vying for my attention right now, that I’m frozen.
“Eventually, yes.” Mom watches me with shoulders pulled in and tense.
“Because of the stories?” I suddenly feel the weight of punishment press down on me.
“Because it can’t sit in the yard forever, Nicole,” she snaps and pinches her nose. “I don’t understand what you’re searching for. We decided finding out who these people are isn’t what this family needs to heal.”
No, you decided.
“And you’ve gone behind our backs. All this acting out is exhausting. I don’t think the summer house is a good idea,” she continues.
“No. Mom, please. I’ll get rid of them. No more acting out.” I clutch her hand, ready to beg. “I’m sorry. Please don’t cancel.”
A tear slides down Mom’s cheek as she sucks in a deep breath.
“You promise?”
I nod.
“You’ll get rid of all of them? You’ll put this nonsense out of your mind? Stop skipping meetings?”
I nod vigorously, and after a few moments she pulls me in for a hug.
“We want to help you, sweetheart. We want what’s best for you, for our family.” Her breath hitches when she speaks, because family isn’t the right word. Not without Jon.
I close my eyes and let myself relax in her arms. “I know, Mom.”
But I also know I’m not giving up my search.
How could she ever know what I need to heal?