He turned me into a combo deal? What am I, a side of French fries to Dominic’s burger?
I stalk across the room, eyes adhered to the two names, side by side, that have never and will never belong together.
Maddie & Dom
Me and Mr. Responsible Asshole.
My mother and grandmother got separate messages. The twins got their own envelopes. Even Dom’s wife warranted her own individual letter. And sure, I know Josh was friends with Rosaline, too, but come on.
They’re the married couple.
I’m his goddamn sister.
My fingers brush the stiff envelope as I go to snatch the offending missive. But I miss.
I miss because Dom holds it out of my reach. Easy for him to do when he has a good foot on me.
“If you ever want to use your testicles for anything other than reminiscing about the good old days when they weren’t smashed by my fist, you will give me my envelope.” I hiss the threat, and despite the indignity, I jump and make a futile grab, missing once again by a large margin. My toe-pinching grief heels don’t help.
“It’s mine, too.” Dom keeps it high above my head. “I want to know what he wrote before you run off with it.”
“I wasn’t going to run off with it.”
I was totally going to run off with it.
“Liar,” he mutters, but lowers his arm.
“Takes one to know one,” I return, that bitchy zombie virus pumping strong through my veins. I snatch the letter from his hands but stay put. Mainly because something in Dom’s intense stare conveys he’ll grab me if I try to escape.
“This is a joke!” My grandmother’s shout distracts me, and I glance over to find her face flushed, drink forgotten on a side table. “One of Josh’s strange jokes I don’t get.” Florence has a single folded piece of paper in her hand. She flips it back and forth, as if searching for something. “All it says is”—she holds it up, her mouth twisted in a haughty grimace—“Thanks for the years of therapy.”
Oh my god. For a brief, shining moment of awe, I find a way to love my brother more than ever before. Of course Josh Sanderson would have the ghostly nerve to hold a grudge into the grave.
“I never paid for therapy,” she huffs, oblivious. “What I did pay for is clothes, and food, and housing for that arrogant boy. He had money from all those pictures. Where is the check? Where is the money I’m owed?” She glares at Dom, as if he’s guarding the treasure chest of Josh’s wealth.
What you’re owed is exactly what he gave you, I want to shout in her face. But years of living in the cold shadow of Florence’s disdain trained me to keep my opinions to myself.
“He had medical bills,” Rosaline snaps, never cowed by my judgmental grandmother. “Did you only come here for a payout? If so, you can leave.” Dom’s wife points to the door while her other hand presses her unopened letter against her chest, acknowledging the precious nature of the correspondence.
Florence sputters, and if I weren’t such a petty person, I’d applaud Rosaline.
But I refuse to clap, holding a grudge almost as well as my brother. Whether or not she meant to screw me out of my teenage dream, Rosaline will always be the girl that Dom chose over me. And even if I only hate him now—no longer pining for a taken man—I can’t seem to move on from my resentment toward her.
It’s not that I hate Rosaline, exactly.
What I hate is who I am, and always was, around her. All through my younger years, I watched as Rosaline formed a tight friendship with Josh and Dom—before romance with the latter was even a consideration. And with the talented, charming girl as a constant presence in our lives, my mother—when she was around—often compared the two of us. Rosaline became a form of measurement that Cecilia used to emphasize the many ways I was lacking. Wasn’t long before I internalized her comments and became an even worse version of myself. A greedy, jealous gremlin of a person who could never hope to measure up to Rosaline’s beauty and poise and ability to flip off my grandmother. When I’m next to her, I might as well be two inches tall and built of childish insecurities.
So I avoid her, too.
“I never—” Florence starts.
“Maybe,” Mrs. Perry speaks over my grandmother, using a more diplomatic tone than her daughter-in-law, “we should all take our notes from Josh and open them in our own time. And then—after this sad day reserved for grieving—you can ask Dom clarifying questions about Josh’s will.” Her voice hardens on that final sentence as she stares at my grandmother, then flicks her eyes to my mother.
The warning clear.
You two might not care for and defend your children, but Mrs. Perry sure as hell will.
My mom gives a short nod and tucks her letter into a designer purse, probably concerned the contents are as dismissive as Aunt Florence’s. I watch as she pulls on her grieving-mother expression—a small, trembling smile meant to convey strength through devastation—the moment before she strolls out the door into the throngs of her adoring followers. Florence scoops up her martini glass and struts after her, making no effort to clear the scowl from her face.
Good riddance.
“Do you want to wait?” Dom’s deep voice recaptures my attention and takes another shivering trip over my nerve endings. I clench my jaw as I force away the reaction.
“I can’t.”
Josh is in this envelope.
Besides, waiting means putting up with more Dom.
“How about we give you two the room?” Emilia comes to the rescue again, spreading her arms wide almost like a hug, and uses the gesture to guide the twins and Rosaline toward the door. Everyone goes willingly, and even though I don’t want to, I watch Rosaline leave.
Her shoulders bow with obvious grief, but that isn’t the odd part. What I find strange is how she doesn’t say a single word of comfort to Dom before she goes. Not even a glance over her shoulder.
Are the two of them fighting?
I shake my head and snort in self-disgust. Back in my hometown for a week and I’m already falling into my old habits. Namely, creepily observing Dom and Rosaline’s relationship.
The two of them started dating in high school, and because of the massive crush I had on my brother’s best friend, I became self-destructively fascinated with the girl who had Dom’s heart. As if knowing every nuance of their relationship would somehow make him want me.
I thought I got over the habit when I left for college, but here I am, yet again trying to work out the meaning behind their interactions.
Stop it, you weirdo. There are more important things.
Like the letter in my hands.
“Do you want to read—”
“Yes,” I cut Dom off. “I will read my letter.” And do my best to pretend Josh left these words for me, and only me.
With twitchy fingers, I carefully tear along the edge of the seal, finding comfort in the pressure needed to break through the sturdier paper of this legal envelope. The thing is hardy, equipped to hold a large letter. Maybe more.
More of Josh.
I see a slip of white and tug that out first, finding a handwritten note from my brother on a nice piece of parchment with a tiny compass emblem at the top. Josh would go fancy for his last words. He was always the type to buy a beautiful journal and use it, while I would purchase one, carefully arrange it on my shelf, and wait for the day when I had something special to write down in the pages. Something worthy of the exterior.
Those days never seemed to come.
Josh knew how to take advantage of beautiful things while he had the time.
“What does it say?” Dom asks, the tension in his voice shoving me out of my memory of my brother where, for a brief breath, my mind was relaxed enough to forget he’s gone.
But now the fact blares like oncoming headlights in a pitch-black night, blinding me and setting off a pounding headache.
Gritting my teeth, I breathe through my nose until my aggravation dims to a manageable level.
“Dear Maddie,” I read, “my beloved sister, and Mr. Responsible Asshole—”
“That’s not what it says.” The man leans closer, over my shoulder as if he’s going to bypass me entirely.
“I’m the one reading.” I turn away from him, pressing the letter against my chest and glaring into a set of brown eyes that are too soft for the hard man behind them.
“If you don’t read it right, I’m gonna take it from you.”
And because he can follow through on that threat, I stop editing the letter and decide to read it as my brother wrote it.
“Fine.” I clear my throat and begin again.
Dear Maddie, my beloved sister, and Dom, my best friend,
I’m not ready to say goodbye.
My voice catches, grief a tripping hazard for my words. But I swallow and carry on.
I think that if I had died fifty years from now, I still would have felt like there were adventures left for me in the world. But time is running out. I’m writing to you from a bed I can’t leave anymore. Still, the urge stays with me. To get up and go and see more. To see everything.
Once again, I pause and breathe and try not to drown in hatred at the unfairness of the world. That a man like my brother, who wanted to live so badly, didn’t get even half the life that most do. I continue.
I’m not ready to say goodbye, but I know I have to. I have to say it to the world, and I have to say it to you two. But I don’t have to say it yet.
My eyes snap up to the door, as if Josh will step through and smile and tell me he’s not gone. Not yet. We don’t have to say goodbye today.
The door stays closed.
“Maddie…” Dom moves closer, his broad body looming over mine, and I don’t know if he’s about to snatch the letter from me, annoyed that I’m reading too slow.
Panicked at the thought, I press on.
This isn’t a goodbye letter. There’s one in here. Sorry, there has to be. But it’s not this one. This is the starting point. I want you two to do something for me, and luckily, since I’m dead, you can’t argue.
I glare at the paper while feeling a tingle of warmth at Josh’s familiar morbid humor.
I didn’t see everything I wanted to, so you two will have to take some adventures for me. But don’t worry, I’ll come with you. In fact, I insist on accompanying you. If you would be so kind, Magpie.
The nickname threatens to break me, but I keep going.
Pack up my ashes and spread a handful in the states I’ve listed at the end of this letter. The ones I never visited. Take me to the places I missed. There is an envelope for each one. Dom, make sure Maddie gets where she needs to go. Some of the places are more exerting than walking to the closest coffee shop. I made good money off my pictures, and I willed most of it to you both. It’s yours to use how you want, but I hope you spend some to travel where I never did. Have fun for me. Please do this. It’s the last…
I stumble over that word, the shock of it a punch straight to the heart.
It’s the last thing I’m asking of you. Also, very important: wait until you get to the destinations to open the envelopes.
Love, Josh
PS: I think this quality time together will be good for you both. Don’t hate me.
Beneath his signature is the list he promised. With growing dread, I count.
One…two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight.
Eight.
My brother wants his ashes spread in eight different states.
He wants me to spread his ashes in eight different states with Dominic Perry.
“He—” Dom starts, but I don’t stay to hear him finish.
I sprint out the door.
“Maddie!” His bellow follows me as I weave through strangers dressed in black, my eyes desperately seeking an exit. I need out. I need air.
I need my brother.
I hate my brother.
The words of his letter cycle through my mind as I desperately search for another meaning. How could this be his final ask? Didn’t he realize losing him would be hard enough? Now he’s demanding I spend however long touring the country with the man I most want to avoid?
And Josh doesn’t even have the decency to be here to argue with!
The large envelope crinkles in my grasping fingers as I shoulder my way into the bright midday sun, the mild winter weather refusing to match the dark clouds in my mind and soul.
Even free of the stifling building, I have the urge to keep moving. To escape until I’m far enough to pretend those words I read were fiction. My laptop bag slaps the back of my legs as I stumble through a jog in my heels.
The funeral home’s door bursts open behind me.
“Maddie! Don’t run away from me!”
But that’s what I’ve been doing since I was nineteen years old, and I see no reason to stop now. My eyes catch on an open gate and my feet propel me forward faster despite the pain in my toes.
Go go go, my brain shouts. Go as far as you can and never look back!
“Don’t follow me!” If only Dom would leave me alone, then maybe I could forget all this heartache.
“Don’t make me chase you through a graveyard.” The command of his voice and the pound of his footsteps urge me faster.
“I could never make you do anything!”
I sprint away from Dom, dodging between stone slabs with the names of people who might exist in the same realm that my brother does. They’ve all left behind people like me. Did any of them set impossible tasks for their loved ones?
The breath in my lungs burns, struggling to leave and struggling to return. The wheezing turns high-pitched, a siren of warning that I’ve pushed myself too far and am about to face the consequences. I stumble to a stop next to a particularly large headstone and brace my hands on my knees as the air labors from my throat.
I shouldn’t have run.
I hate when Dom is right.
“Maddie?” The man looms over me once again. He’s good at that. Looming. Hopefully his massive form and judgmental eyes aren’t the last things I see before I pass out. “Damn it. Where is your inhaler?”
I pat my bag, attempting to find the little container of medication. A strong hand brushes mine aside and sneaks into the side pocket, as if he knows exactly where I keep the device. Dom tugs it out, checks the mouthpiece for obstructions, then presses the inhaler into my palm.
While my mind goes into desperate survival mode at the loss of oxygen, I shake the device, then try to remember to time my inhale with the puff of my medicine, so the drugs make their way into my lungs. Best practice involves using a spacer—a tube-like attachment—with the inhaler, but the thing is so bulky that I never bother to carry it with me. Not when I usually go months without a flare-up. Sounding like an inner tube with a leak, I squeak through a few more breaths, roughly guessing when another minute has passed, then spray a second round that’ll hopefully make it the rest of the way into my lungs to calm the damn things down and open passageways that don’t want to comply.
When I was a kid, my asthma attacks would pop up all the time. I think the only reason Florence took me to get my prescriptions filled was so she’d stop getting calls from the school nurse that I was on my way to the hospital.
As I’ve grown, things have gotten better, and I’ll go long stretches without an incident.
But the combination of grief, anger, and running was too much for my sensitive airways to handle.
As the minutes tick past slowly, breathing becomes less of a strain. At some point, I realize I’m sitting on a bench, and I wonder if I made this move or if the man standing in front of me, blocking out the sun with his broad shoulders, guided me here.
That would be a very Dom thing to do.
“Did you”—I wince and wheeze, working around the tightness in my throat—“call an ambulance?”
“No.” He kneels in front of me, staring into my face. “I’ve seen enough of your attacks to know when to drive you to the hospital.”
“When I turn blue,” I offer. That was the joke Josh would say.
When you look like a smurf, we know things are bad.
Dom’s lips tighten, and I remind myself to keep my eyes far away from his mouth.
“Do you want to go to the hospital?” he asks.
I shake my head.
No. Hell no.
Last time I was in the hospital I was holding Josh’s hand, his skin cold and chapped as his body tried to conserve energy to survive.
Dom nods, but he stays crouched on his haunches in front of me.
I scowl. “Stop staring at me. I’ll be fine in a minute.” Probably. At least I can talk now, with only a few gasps at the end of each sentence.
Dom’s eyes narrow, but he straightens and paces away from me. My brief hope that he’s on his way out, leaving me alone to my misery, evaporates when I watch him bend over to pick up something in the grass.
The envelope.
In my frantic attempts to breathe, I must have dropped it. He spreads the opening, then tips it over. A cascade of smaller envelopes slides into his large palm. Dom shuffles through them, and my fingers curl against my stiff skirt, wanting to snatch them away.
“Eight,” he says.
“One for each state.” Just like Josh said in his letter.
That damn letter.
Dom slips them back into the large envelope, then turns to face me.
“How are you doing?”
The second time he’s asked that today. At least now it’s to do with my physical well-being. “I can breathe. So, better than a few minutes ago.” I’m still lightheaded, and every part of me inside and out feels raw.
But I’m alive, so there’s that.
“Look,” he says, “I know you don’t want to do this—”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
“This was Josh’s last wish.”
If I had the strength to get up and shove him, I would. “You don’t need to tell me that. And I don’t need you to make an argument on his behalf. I loved him more than you ever could have. Of course I’m gonna do this bullshit task. He’s gone. It’s all I have of him, isn’t it?”
The berating costs me, and after a string of coughs, I take another puff of my inhaler.
Dom strides up to me, his stare holding mine, emotions flickering to life in his eyes, then disappearing faster than I can interpret them even if I wanted to try.
“We’re doing this?” he asks once my breathing evens out again.
“Yes.” I grind my teeth before forcing out, “We’re doing this.”
Dom passes me the envelope, and I hug the piece of my brother to my chest because it’s the only comfort I can accept. As he retracts his hand, I spy a flash on his wrist.
A watch. Josh’s watch.
Did my brother will him that, too? Or was it a gift before the end?
During the final few days in the hospital, my brother had people with him almost every moment. For months I’d tried to visit so it was just him and me, but there came a time when I had to share my brother, most often with his two best friends.
Does Rosaline have another important piece of Josh, too?
Maybe if I hadn’t spent so much effort trying to ignore her and Dom, I would know.
Dom’s eyes raise to the sky, squinting at the sun as if he just realized it was daytime.
“Alright. We need to make a plan.”
Planning with Dom. Traveling with Dom. Saying goodbye to my brother over, and over, and over, all in front of this man who showed me early on in life he’s perfectly fine emotionally devastating me.
Once again, I reach for my inhaler.