Forever, Interrupted(61)

“You don’t think Ben is with you?”

“He’s with me because I love him and I loved him and he lives in my memories. His memory is with me. But no, I don’t see how Ben is here. After Steven died, I thought maybe he was lying in bed next to me at night, watching me. Or maybe he was some omnipotent force looking over Ben and I, but it did no good. Because I just didn’t believe it. You know? Do you believe it? Or maybe what I should say is Can you believe it? I wish I could.”

I shake my head. “No, I don’t think he can hear me. I don’t think he’s watching me. It’s a nice idea. When my brain wanders, I sometimes think about what if he’s hearing everything I’m saying, what if he’s seeing everything I’m doing. But, it doesn’t really make me feel any better. Whenever I start to think about where he is now, I ultimately just focus on what his last moments were. Did he know they were his last moments? What if he’d never left the house? What if I’d never asked him to . . . ”

“To what?”

“He was doing me a favor when he died,” I tell her. “He was buying me Fruity Pebbles.” It feels like I’ve finally put down a barbell. Susan is quiet.

“Was that a confession?” she says.

“Hmm?”

“That doesn’t matter. You know that, right?”

No, I don’t know that. But I’m not sure how to say that, so I don’t say anything.

“You will do yourself a world of good the minute you realize that does not matter. You can play the scenario out a million times, whether he goes to get the cereal or he doesn’t,” she says. “I’m telling you, he’d still end up dying. It’s just the way the world works.”

I look at her, trying to figure out if she truly believes that. She can see my skepticism.

“I don’t know if that’s true,” she says. “But that is one thing we have to believe. Do you hear me? Learn how to believe that one.” She doesn’t let me speak. “Get the box,” she says. “We’re gonna start in the bathroom.”

We pack away his toothbrush and his hair gel. We pack his deodorant and his shampoo. It’s a small box of things that were only his. We shared so many of the things in here. Susan smells the shampoo and deodorant and then throws them in with the other things.

“When you are ready, this is a throwaway box, right?” Susan asks. “I mean, this is trash.”

I laugh. “Yeah, that will be trash.”

We move on to the kitchen and desk area, where most of Ben’s stuff is also trash. We fill boxes and boxes of crap. I wonder if some of these things are being put right back into the boxes they came here in. We make our way back into the living room, and Susan starts packing his books. She sees a collector’s set on one of the shelves.

“May I have this?” she says. “It took me months to convince him to read these books,” she said. “He wouldn’t believe me that young adult books can be great.”

I want them, but I want her to have them more. “Sure,” I say. “You should take anything you want. He’d want you to have his things,” I say. “He loved those books, by the way. He recommended them to anyone that would listen to him.”

She smiles and puts them by the door as she finishes packing the rest of his young adult collection into boxes. “Is this a sell or a keep box, by the way?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I answer. She nods. She continues putting books into boxes until she is too exasperated. “Jesus Christ, how many young adult books can one person read?” she says.

I laugh. “He read them a lot. I mean, like one a week sometimes. And he refused to get them from the library. Which was annoying because I work at the library, but he insisted upon going to the bookstore and buying them. I’d bring them home and he’d just let them sit and collect dust until I returned them.”

She laughs. “That’s my fault,” she says. “When he was a kid, my one luxury was buying books. I never wanted to go to the library.”

“What?” Sacrilege!

She laughs again, embarrassed. “You’re gonna be mad.”

“I am?”

“I hate the way they smell, library books.”

“You are killing me, Susan. Killing me.” I grab my chest and feign a heart attack. The way library books smell is the best smell in the world, other than the smell of the pillow I have trapped in a plastic bag.

“I know! I know! When Ben was a kid, he’d want to go to the library because they had board games and those chairs with the . . . what are they called? The chairs where they are like this big, soft ball . . . Oh, damn it, what is the word?”

“Beanbag chairs?”

“Yes! He used to love sitting in beanbag chairs, and I would make him go to the bookstore with me instead so I could buy books that didn’t smell musty. Totally my fault. I’m sorry.”

“You are forgiven,” I say, although I’m still hung up on the fact that she doesn’t like the smell of library books.





MAY


I got home and Ben was still in bed. He’d been staring at the ceiling for the past hour and a half. It took me forever to get to the rental place in that huge truck, and then I picked up his car that he left there and headed home, only to remember he wanted dinner. I picked up McDonald’s and made my way home.