Untitled Original WIP
Started this original story a few days ago; it's a work in progress, so it isn't finished yet.  That being said, feedback is still (one of) the greatest concepts ever invented by humankind.  I'd like to know what you guys think.

Untitled
Rating: PG-13
Summary: She hated that his death had made her start to doubt her love for him.

He’d called on a Saturday, in the middle of her evening shower. She’d heard the ringing from the bathroom but left it to the message, and that’s when she heard his voice. Quiet but professional. Somebody who’d been in the business for a long time. She appreciated that. She could tell the new recruits apart from the ones who had been there awhile – the new ones were fidgety, and nervous. Eager to please and always squinting to see where the line was. There’s such a thing as getting used to being surrounded by death, or at least, she thought there was. The ones who had been around the business enough learned how to distance themselves, how to do their job without getting stung or tangled in. She didn’t know how she knew, but somehow she just did: death was a messy business.

He left her his number, which she quickly wrote down on a notepad when she replayed the message. She gave him a call the next day and he told her he would meet her at the funeral, where he had a few things to discuss with her. She welcomed this. It was strange, but over the past few days she had been silently groping for a distraction to take to the funeral. She’d always had this thing with public grieving; it always made her clam up with discomfort. She’d been to a few but she remembered always feeling distraught by the numbness and hollowness she felt. Not sadness, or grief, or even loss. She always seemed to find herself standing there with her simple black dress, her heels sinking into the soft soil, feeling something very near to nothing at all.

She was afraid of that this time. It crept into the corners of her mind from time to time, when things got eerily still and quiet, and that’s when she would turn on the TV or leave the house and go for a walk.

It was easier to grieve in cacophony, without peering eyes, without the warmth of bodies nearby. She realized just a small while before that she was scared of expectations, especially ones they’d invisibly sketched on her. At the funeral, sobbing into their tissues and handkerchiefs, their eyes would glance over her and make brave assumptions about her character, and whether she ever really cared at all. Each time she willed herself to meet their eyes, but even in the funeral in her head, she watched herself as she only bore holes into the holy ground.

*

It was in the middle of the quarter when she’d gotten that call from her mother. She’d been in class and remembered resting in front of the big oak in the courtyard to listen to her messages afterwards. She’d heard the wheezing breath first, then the trembling tone of her mother’s voice. The words had swept through her ears, like a ghostly sheet getting carried away by the wind, before she could snatch them by the ankle and pin them down to make sense. Eventually she did. Eventually, after staring out into the bustling courtyard and swearing she could see him peeking through every neck or shoulder, like a wishful contradiction, she did.

That week she dropped off her last paper, packed up her things and headed home. The last time she’d been home was last Christmas, where she’d leisurely taken her time to see the sights along the way, but this time she found herself gripping the wheel and never once stopping. Everything was different. Blanker. Before, the sight of the open road thrilled her; it filled her to the brim with adventurousness and spontaneity. But this time she found herself looking out at the road – just a dust road flattened by decades of use – and wondering if she would ever reach the end.

*

On the day of the funeral, the sun was shining. It cast an elusive sheen on the mahogany coffin and the light breeze ruffled the flowers set up for display. She stayed by her family’s side and looked out at the crowd of solemn people – some she had never seen before, some she had. There were a few she recognized from her brother’s high school; boys that came over her house to drink up all their orange juice and watch TV and throw around a football. There was a redhead wearing a black hat with a tissue crumpled in her fist that she recognized from Adam’s prom pictures. When she was young, she’d walked into his room one day where he had their picture in a frame on his dresser. He looked up at her and said, pointing, “See her? She’s the first girl I ever loved. Pretty, huh?”

In the crowd, she could pick out the faces of mutual memories. She and her brother often went to their neighbor’s houses and went to fairs with the kids that lived around them. Tom Barnes, a boy one year older than her who had lived in the yellow house down the street and who had been her first kiss on one sleepy summer night, approached her family and gave them his condolences. As he shook her hand, his eyes softened, but he said nothing.

As the preacher talked and prayed, she kept her eyes on the smooth coffin. She picked the petals off the flowers in her mind. It’s funny, she kept thinking to herself, because you know everybody dies but you never see it coming to someone you love. Like her brother, Adam, who used to unlock the giant tire swing every summer by the brook for the whole town. From the time he was strong enough to sway them against the sky to the last day before he left for college in California, he’d been there by that tree, with brown rust in his palms from the chains.

And as honest as death was, nobody ever had the guts to rival it. As she listened to their speeches and the preacher who had been a family friend for over twenty years, none uttered a word relevant to how he died. She felt a little angry at this, which then shriveled into shame. She was at his funeral and she was angry at people for being merciful. Her eyes burned at this, angry that she was at her brother’s funeral and all she could feel was anger. Not pain. Not loss. Or sadness. Just a subtle, pulsating anger.

A part of her knew this was because she had a million questions and nobody would ever answer them. Untimely death made people close up, like clams, and bury painful secrets before throwing away the key.

When she glanced out in the slowly moving crowd, she spotted someone in the back. If there was anybody that could evoke more resurrected memories in her than her dead brother, it would be him, Elijah Baker. As the rest of her memories shifted, she only caught glimpses of him, like flashes of a moving picture through blinds, standing behind everybody else, forgotten.

It made sense her brother’s best friend would want to disappear at his funeral. She did, too.

*

The grass was prickly but warm underneath the soles of her feet. She hung her shoes from her fingers, which hung limply beside her, the heels dirty from the sinking soil. Everybody was gone, and the sun was slowly disappearing underneath the ocean by the coast, so she didn’t worry about offending anybody by walking barefoot across a cemetery.

She’d watched every person, huddled with someone they were familiar with, walk away towards the lot. Broken as they were at the funeral, they would magically re-piece themselves once they stepped out. There was a difference. There was always a difference. They had all headed to her parents’ house to eat and attempt to secretly bolster their spirits up with hors d’oeuvres and finger sandwiches, while she was here, pacing. Somewhere underneath this grass, and this soil, and the miles and miles between the cloudy afterlife and the living, Adam was pushing a tire swing by the brook somewhere. And where, she was guessing, it was always summer.

She wondered if the dead felt a sort of solidarity amongst themselves. She wondered if it made a difference where he was buried, or whether he was cremated or kept whole, or what outfit the workers at the mortuary dressed him up in. Every time she looked at the place he would lie in, forever, she only felt a trace of the stunning, paralyzing shock she’d first been hit with when she’d gotten that call. It was disturbing how much it was starting to settle, how easily and quickly – so much so that she became angry with herself and was eager to shake it off. She wanted it to settle. Just not now. Somehow she felt as if she was disrespecting him by accepting it so fast, like maybe she didn’t love him enough because she wasn’t still reeling from loss. She hated that his death had made her start to doubt her love for him.

“Still here?”

She turned around. In the middle of her silent battle, she felt a fluttering disturbance. She let her eyes settle on him and then looked away, wanting to focus and to resolve. “I thought everybody left.”

“I’m good at hiding,” he said, as he came closer to her. He was wearing a suit, his hands in his pockets. She remembered his hands were always in his pockets, even when they had been younger. The very first time she’d met him she’d just come home from school in the fifth grade, he’d had his hands in his pockets, muttering a thanks to her mom for the snacks.

“You should be at my parents’ house,” she said. She wondered why she hadn’t seen him lurking around like that, and why he hadn’t approached her until now.

“So should you.” He lifted his shoulders in a heavy shrug, taking a breath. “I needed a little more time. It’s hard to grieve when you’re surrounded by old classmates. It was like a sad reunion.”

They lapsed into silence after that. She tried to get back on her same train of thought until he’d come forward, but it had ebbed away, out of her reach.

“Why didn’t you say something?” she asked him, then. She looked up at him. “I heard from my parents that you turned them down.”

An ironic smile spread across his face, one that just barely touched his mouth. “What do you say about your best friend after he’s not around anymore to hear it?” he asked her. “I thought about it, for a long time, and I realized that I couldn’t say anything about him that nobody else could come up with. I wanted it to be special, almost impossibly special.” He licked his lips. “And that’s why I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do him justice, and it just seemed wrong, because I should’ve been able to.”

She nodded. “So that’s why you hid in the back.”

“Partly,” he quietly admitted. “Also because I’ve never been a front rower.”

It made sense in a way that came so naturally to her. She instantly remembered how he was, and now she couldn’t figure out whether she’d just tucked it away because she thought she was never going to need it again, or because she’d just simply forgotten.

“So.” He seemed so calm being so still beside her. “How long are you planning to stay here?”

“I’m waiting for someone. Said he wanted to talk to me about Adam’s will.”

His eyebrows hiked up his forehead, surprised. “Will? Adam wrote a will?”

She rubbed a small inch of black fabric between her fingers, where he couldn’t see. “I’m guessing so.”

“That’s. . . well. That doesn’t seem like him, at all.”

She looked at Elijah, wondering if he knew, but found herself saying it anyway. The words tasted wrong in her mouth, and the texture was all wrong – but she figured that was how it was supposed to be. “They found him a week later in his friend’s cabin in the woods, submerged underwater, lying in the tub. Adam planned things just as well as he did things spontaneously.”

“I heard about that,” he said lowly. “I didn’t believe it. . . at first. Couldn’t.” He paused, in thought and hesitation. “I remember I kept thinking to myself, ‘There has to be a better way for a good man to die.’ “

For a moment, she was catapulted back into her ten-year-old shoes, and her hair had gathered themselves back into perfectly parted braids again. She found herself thinking, ‘Why did they have to die at all?’ And then, suddenly, as abruptly as she’d been sucked back into the past, she was thrown back into the future, and that rolling, unsettling acceptance fell over her again like a thin light veil.

Before she could speak again, she saw a figure out of the corner of her eye. It was a man, carrying a folder, waving at her as he walked towards them. Elijah shifted his weight on his feet, preparing to leave.

“I guess I’ll head back now.”

She nodded, muttering an okay, before he turned to go and the man she’d talked to on the phone reached her, giving her a polite greeting.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “But your brother left something for you.” He rifled through his folder, ducking his head down. “Here it is.” He took out a single manila envelope, handing it to her. She held it in her hands, feeling the uneven lightness and heaviness bulging in the middle.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. We are very good on our promise of confidentiality, and your brother only wanted you to see it.”

After their brief meeting, a cordial goodbye and well-wish, he left her. She stared at the envelope and the delicately wrapped red string, hesitant and almost afraid to open it in case it was something so private it would change her – or worse: change her view of her brother – until she dropped her shoes to the ground, where it made a muffled thump. She unraveled it, curious while still feeling the sporadic beating in her chest, before she reached in.

*

That night, she drove. There was no definite direction, just a haphazard and nomadic spirit of things, until she found herself driving along a familiar strip of wood. She parked along the side, climbing out and working her way through the thin trees, trusting her feet to guide her until, finally, it led her there. The tire swing. Its chains were still rusted, even more so than before, and the ground underneath for several yards were compact and flattened by starting runs and landing steps.

She found herself reaching for the lock, shaking it so that the tire bounced, but then froze. She looked out at the trickling brook and could only faintly see the glinting copper of the pennies they’d thrown there every summer, wish after wish after wish. She was tempted to reach into her pocket and throw another one in, but as she tried to figure out what to wish for, nothing came to mind. Not that she believed it would actually come true; it was just that it was nice to have something to thank if it ever did.

After a few minutes, her fingers running along the ragged trenches in the tire, feeling the frays against the sides and in the rope, she headed back to her car. She drove again, but this time, she knew where she was going.

She ended up in front of a house she knew very well. It looked the same, plus a few alterations made by time. There was still that same bed of well-tended petunias and the daisy-yellow mailbox. There were rusted wind chimes hanging from the doorway and a tiny black heart that Elijah’s first girlfriend, Cindy Donaldson from his math class, had drawn by his window – or so Adam had told her when she’d asked him about it. But everything, of course, seemed smaller now. And it reeked with change even though this was the one house in all of town that stayed almost exactly the same.

She hesitated at first, as if she moved any closer she’d be swallowed up by her past. Every time she came to visit – which wasn’t very often at all – she always made sure to keep her distance from certain things, namely so she wouldn’t ever become swallowed up by her past. She had learned that when that happened to people, they were attacked with guilt for what they had made of themselves – that was how it was in small towns. Stay around long enough, and listen around close enough, they made you guilty for leaving and moving on somewhere else.

But she knocked. On his window, her knuckle hitting right where Cindy Donaldson had drawn her inconspicuous little heart. She wasn’t exactly sure whether he was staying with his parents while he was in town, so as she waited for a noise in response she heard the quiet fretting of her heart.

Then, finally, she saw a crinkle in the blinds. Moments later, she found the door opening.

“Hi,” she said, her throat a little dry. “I know it’s late. I’m sorry.”

He looked surprised to see her, still dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. “It’s okay, I was just catching up on some reading. My parents went out to buy some groceries, so. . .” He stepped aside, making room for her. “Come in.”

She walked in, only giving fleeting attention to the inside of his house. She didn’t have to give much of it to know that the only change since she’d last been here was that they’d gotten their carpet steamed.

“Everything okay?” he asked her, shutting the door.

“Yeah,” she said, feeling the heaviness in the pocket of her jacket and the note tucked in her jeans. “It’s just – something. Something you have to see.”

She reached inside her pocket, retrieving the key she’d found in the envelope, showing him.

“This is what he left me.”

He was confused. “Keys? To what?”

“I thought it was to the tire swing, but it’s not.” She watched his face, looking to see if there was any spark of remembrance or familiarity. She was hoping that maybe Adam had mentioned something to him about it. “I think it’s to his car.”

“His car? What would he—” He quieted down, before repeating himself, this time clearly. “What would he give you his car for?”

She knew why he would ask this. If she remembered correctly, her brother had still been using a beat-up ’91 Corrolla that he’d bought in San Francisco. It wasn’t exactly the sort of prized possession a normal person would leave behind, and as far as she had known, had never meant that much to him, sentiment-wise.

So she gave him the only answer she had: “To drive.”

*

She waited a few minutes for him to pack up his things, and headed back out to wait in her car when his parents, the always-polite Mr. and Mrs. Baker, came home from the grocery store. In the driver’s seat, she smoothed out the note, crumpled from being suffocated in the creases of her pant pocket, before laying it out on the dashboard, staring at it, haunted yet struck by her brother’s sloppy script. He’d torn out a sheet of notebook paper, writing an address and a message in blotty blue ink:

Take him with you.

It would’ve been understandable for her to say that at first when she’d read the note, she’d been confused as to who he could have been referring to. Adam had more friends than she could count and even remember by name – all who loved him so much equally. She could have even thought he’d meant her dad, who loved him so much he often took trips to see him in California. And as for the destination? It could have been anywhere, anywhere at all. Adam was both beloved and well-traveled, for a time he sent postcards to her from whatever place he managed to end up, even if it was some honky-tonk town that still flew Confederate flags. His messages were always very brief, but still thoughtful: Made it here on a half-tank of gas. Never try the fried possum, but the alligator meat could use a little more pepper and hot sauce. Be good, and read the latest Gjorben book.

Another time, from some little store in Michigan: Michigan girls are pretty, but talk like they eat cigars. There are moments that I miss you, especially when you tell me that a certain girl is no-good. I’ll tell you now, Carmen. Every girl is no-good – except for you.

But it only took her a split-second to know exactly what Adam had meant when he’d written what he did, so much so that no flicker of doubt flashed through her head. She tried not to think about it so much, because it would only make way for skepticism and questions that she knew she would never get answers to, so she cleared it all and instead focused on setting about to do the last thing he would ever ask her to do.

When she’d shown Elijah the note, he’d asked her how she could be so sure he’d been talking about him.

“The last time he wrote to me, he wrote to me asking me how you were,” she’d answered. Adam had assumed she’d know, but the matter of the fact was: she didn’t, and had never really tried.

It only shocked her a little that it didn’t take more than that, more evidence and reassurance and proof, to get him to come on such an ambiguous adventure. She guessed – with the little context she had – it was because he felt guilty. He’d loved Adam, about as much as you could love somebody that helped you to become who you were, and for some reason unbeknownst to her they’d lost touch. Just like that. Under hazy circumstances that had never really been revealed to her. Elijah had gone to college in Washington, while Adam had gone to California – they’d headed in two different directions, restless on town soil, leaving her behind for two years until it’d come time for her to have a valid excuse to escape, to make her own way down the beaten path. She’d gone many miles south, almost to the border of California. She’d just barely touched it, and it was enough to burn her.

Elijah came down the driveway, dumping his bag in her trunk, before getting in beside her. He glanced at Adam’s note, before turning to her. “Okay. Let’s go.”

** *

He packed haphazardly, throwing his clothes and amenities in his bag. He even brought along a book or two that he’d bought at the airport just in case, to read or to use as fire fodder. He shrugged on a jacket, slipped on his shoes, and headed out the door. As he walked down the hallway, the different stages of his childhood grinning at him as he passed, tempting him with their innocence and bliss to return to a place that no longer existed, his heart pounded in several new locations. He could feel a separate pulse right under the base of his throat, another in his chest, and another in his wrists and in his stomach. The smeared and familiar writing on the note flashed inside his mind with unending vigor: Take him with you.

Questions crushed any other pending thought in his brain. Him? Could Adam have really meant him? And take him where? Elijah was usually a man of hesitation; he’d been a boy of hesitation, too. That was why he’d been scared to death and yet so enamored with Adam’s approach on life: the way he always toed the line and never, not once, got caught. Adam, right from the moment he’d seen him at the tire swing in the fourth grade, had been like a living myth to him. He’d been his sole paradigm; possible to achieve, and real, unlike superheroes chasing through paper to reach a dead end at the back cover.

He tried to figure out what Adam meant – had been trying to, in fact, right from the moment he’d gotten that call about his death. Death was the light word, funnily, because the more accurate term of it had been “suicide.” Nobody ever used that word around the recently passed; it was disrespectful, full of negative connotation, and always distributed an invisible grain of blame on everybody that had every come across the person who committed it. But he said it. Suicide. He said it all the time in his mind. It was never “He died” but always “He killed himself.” Fuck, he’d tell himself, sometimes in repetition because somehow the real weight of the words never became tangible enough for him to breathe through the shock, he killed himself. He wished he could shred the word to pieces, into a billion tiny pieces, so that he could blow them all way, far away from where he was.

When he got to the living room, he heard talking in the kitchen. He walked over to his parents, where his mom and dad were sorting and putting away groceries.

“Eli,” his father said, putting oranges into the fruit bowl. He noticed his bag. “Going somewhere?”

“I’m taking a short trip.” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “With a friend.”

“Is that why Carmen’s here?” his mother asked, giving him a curious look.

“Yeah. That’s why she’s here.”

“Where are you going?” she asked. “Not somewhere too far, I hope.”

He shook his head. “No, not too far away. Look, I’ll call you when I get there, okay?” He gave his mother a quick kiss on the forehead. “We’ll be safe.”

She was in the car when he walked outside. Sticking his bag in the trunk right beside with hers, he climbed into the passenger seat. He noticed she’d taken the note out and had left it on the dashboard, like a reminder. In case they ever wanted to turn back, and in case they realized they had better things to do. In case they didn’t trust him anymore.

“We’ll stop at a motel or something on the way,” she said, backing out of his driveway. “Should be about a three-day drive if we don’t stop anywhere for too long.”

“I could drive if you get tired,” he said. “Just let me know.”

She nodded, only giving him a quick glimpse. Her long brown hair was down, unfettered by clips or barrettes. For a moment he remembered her with her impeccable braids. Back then, it was only in the summer she let her hair down, and free. He had always been slightly shocked at the beginning of summer to see her with her hair flowing. In the sticky summer heat, it always curled up, coiling on her cheek. It was. . . different. She looked different, older. Always older during the summer.

At the funeral, he’d been expecting to see her – but that didn’t mean he had been prepared for it. He’d looked for her in the sea of black hats and hair on arrival, not wanting to seem so obvious he was looking for someone, but when he finally saw her, he looked at her long enough until she met his gaze, where he then looked away, and was even a little grateful for the people who began to move, blocking their view. He saw glimpses of her face in between the moving crowd, trying to read her face, yet making sure she couldn’t read his.

He had played this game for as long as he could remember. Watching her, but never letting her catch him doing it. He’d gotten so good at it over the years that sometimes he hated himself for it.

It was this that made him despise himself. He asked himself this shameless question over and over again, and every time it made him feel worse than the last: how could he grieve over his best friend’s death when she was around? It was cruel that the two had to be paired this way, that they couldn’t in any way be separated, that every time he tried to scope his mind on his loss he got swept away by her, as if suddenly she’d become an overwhelming force with iron jaws. He couldn’t stand himself, standing there with the rest of the crying crowd. His reunion with his best friend in four years and it was sullied beyond repair because he was in love with his sister.

He left before it was finished. He went to his car, locking himself in and slumping in his seat, digging his palms into the sockets of his eyes. He felt safer there. The more distance, the better, the more the adolescent and immature pining became bearable. The more he could grieve appropriately, respectfully. The less he’d feel like an undeserving asshole.

He felt accountable for Adam’s death, or at least part of it, for no reason based on logic. He felt guilty because they had so willingly cut each other off. From being inseparable the very first summer they’d met, it was during their last winter together that they went their separate ways and never bothered to write or call or even wonder. He wondered if it would have changed things if he’d ever done any of the above. He had a feeling it wouldn’t have, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

An hour later he’d gotten out of his car, heading back to the cemetery. He dodged the headstones, counted the new bouquets and the old ones, and stopped in his tracks once he saw that there was one person who lingered far behind the rest.

The first thing he noticed was that she was barefoot. Her shoes hung from her hand beside her thigh, her black dress clinging to her body and casting an attractive silhouette. She was pacing, her face hard in thought, almost in repentance. He hesitated in taking another step. There she was again, stealing his focus and worsening his guilt.

He approached her, attempting to relax his body. But once he got near enough, he felt his long-buried boyhood excitement start up again, interrupting what little progress he should have made by now.

“Still here?”

She looked up at him, surprised. Up close, he studied her face without himself knowing so. The roundness of it was gone, replaced with a slender jaw and muted cheekbones. Her eyes stayed the same; a dark, murky brown that he’d once thought, long ago, was nothing special. Standing there, in front of her, he could feel himself splitting into two different people. One that would have passed by her every single day of his life without much struggle, and another that would have walked down the same street every day just for a chance to see her.

“I thought everybody left.” Her eyes left him as quickly as he’d caught their attention. He felt a flush of embarrassment, knowing that he’d interrupted her.

“I’m good at hiding.”

**** unfinished****