The Summer That Melted Everything(92)

After Fedelia left, I found a pile of tissues beneath her pillow. Never once did she cry in front of us. She knew it would do us no good. We needed her to be the strong one. She could say Grand’s name without breaking into a million pieces, and she taught us how to do it one letter at a time. She could walk by his room and not get dented. We tried her walk. We dented less and less. Our faces got drier and drier, and we went from tissues to sleeves, to brief wiping on the backs of our hands before one day finding there was nothing to be wiped, at least not on the outside.

Sal had mourned with the rest of us. He seemed to drink a lot of water during those days as if to replenish what he lost by eye. He thought it was his fault. Grand’s death had made Sal’s ears sensitive to those accusations. He was finally listening to the people who said everything bad was him. That whole summer of great undoing, of great unrest. This made him unhinged. Loose. As if you turned his nose slightly to the right, you would unscrew the last piece holding him together and all at once he would collapse into a pile of broken bones and broken heart.

“Do you want me to leave, Fielding?” he asked one night, sitting on the floor of our bedroom, leaning back against the wall. The room dark, his voice more of the same. “I’ll leave if you want me to.”

I eased down and found his side, leaned into it. “I already lost one brother. How can you ask if I’d wanna lose another?”

Losing Grand turned me into the passed-by. Blue skies, they pass me by. Good days, they pass me by. Talk and joy pass me by. The reasons people laugh, the reasons they smile, pass me by. Whoosh, whoosh, passing me by.

When I had Grand, I loved forever. Now forever frightens me. Must it last so very long?

I can’t spell me without him. I mean that. His full name, Grandfather, takes out every letter of my own except for two Is and an L. Who am I with those things? I’m not who I once was. I am simply the teeny-tiny remains of him, this Fielding who had a brother and in that had everything.

I thought it’d get better, losing a brother. That’s what they say, isn’t it? All those books I’ve gotten, those meetings I’ve gone to. They all say it gets better. How can it get better for a brother like me who threw out ignorance too late?

Sometimes I throw out my apologies. I go to the store and I get a pack of baseballs. White. Red stitching. I use a red marker to match. I write, I’m sorry. And then I throw. I’ve thrown them everywhere. Down alleys. Off the side of the road. In fields, in parks, in other people’s yards. I throw. And then I wait. I wait to see if an eighteen-year-old god will appear and pick up the ball and come walking with it toward me, saying, It’s all right. I forgive you, little man.

That never happens. It never will. Forever is here, and it’s nothing but hurt over and over again.

The night before his funeral, I dreamed of him. It was a transparent dream, like I was looking at him through jars. A bit seedy too, like the jars once held strawberry jam.

He was wearing tennis shoes that instead of having solid rubber bottoms, had lotion bottles affixed. Every step he took squeezed some of that lotion out.

When I asked him why, he said, “To soften the scar.”

“What scar?” I asked.

“Why, my scar.” He turned and I saw his left arm was gone. It was then I realized we were standing on it. Either we’d shrunk or his arm had enlarged, either way his suicide gash had scarred and it made for a squishy, pink road beneath us.

He jumped up and down, high in the air like the scar had the springs of a trampoline. The lotion shot out from the bottles and onto the scar as he said, “Maybe if I soften the scar enough, it’ll just go away, then God won’t have proof I done somethin’ bad. Won’t you help me soften the scar? Make it go away, little man?”

“How?”

He pointed behind me. I turned and saw a vending machine full of the lotion tennis shoes. I went to the machine and with a deposit of my blood, got a pair of the shoes out. I slipped them on and started walking. Grand was ahead of me. By the time I caught up to him, I tried to stay by his side but the walk was full of turnstiles and there wasn’t one with room for the both of us.

Our lotion shoes started flattening. We were running out of lotion. We tried to go back to the vending machine but the turnstiles wouldn’t turn the opposite way. There would be no going back.

“What’ll we do now, Grand?” Even in dreams, voices tremble.

He looked at me and I wished he wasn’t crying.

“покаяться, little man.”

Upon waking, I couldn’t get to the Russian dictionary fast enough to look that word up and its meaning:

Repent.

We had Grand’s funeral at the house, holding it in Russia, which was the living room and large enough to allow space for the great grow of mourners. Neither Elohim nor his followers attended.

His onetime follower Yellch was there. He didn’t cry, but his eyes were red and swatted as eyes tend to be at the end of wet work. In his squeezing hand was the end of a tissue. So many ends. He was like an end himself. Quiet. Still. Tired and trying to bend back to the beginning to fix a different end. One where his onetime savior and best friend didn’t end up in a coffin.

A coffin that wasn’t your usual. It was a decision Mom made when she was unable to sit still and found herself dusting and polishing the grandfather clock. She removed its pendulum and clockworks to make room for Grand’s body. The clock didn’t look that different from a coffin. Both wood, both long and square. The only unsettling thing was how Grand’s face showed through the glass where the clock’s dial once did.