Submit (Songs of Submission #3)(16)

When he was killed, I thought I’d go insane. I felt unmoored, unsafe, orphaned. I found myself pulling the car over and checking directions to places I’d been to a hundred times. I called Darren twice as often, just to hear the voice of someone who loved me. I didn’t want to go outside if I could avoid it. The only thing that saved me, besides Darren and Gabby, was music. Dad had taught me piano. He approved of my pursuits. So when I played, especially when I played in front of people, I felt safe again. As the years passed, I found other ways to feel secure and loved, and grief slipped away so slowly I didn’t notice when it became a dull ache of memory brought on by some corner of the house or Dad’s mandarin tree in the backyard.

Grief had been hiding, ready for the next time. So when Darren and I listened to the lady cop tell us that Gabby had been found, drowned, two miles north of the Santa Monica Pier, I listened, but I was too busy trying to keep the bucket of grief from tipping. Darren needed me, and if I fell into a cacophony of emotion, I wasn’t going to be there for him.

We stood by a plexi-glass window, watching a sheet-covered gurney get wheeled into the adjacent room. I felt that bucket of sorrow tip and empty, dropping its contents from my throat to my heart. It sloshed around when I moved, and I thought I would be emptying it with a teaspoon.

I didn’t know what Darren was feeling, initially. He identified his sister, who looked bloated and blue, then turned to leave. He collapsed into my arms, weeping. I did my best to hold him up, but the lady cop with the inky curly hair had to help me get him to her desk.

Lady Cop brought us water and a box of tissues. “Was she on any medication?”

“Marplan,” Darren whispered.

“Did she mix it with alcohol?”

He grabbed my hand. “We should have gotten her. We shouldn’t have trusted Theo. Fuck. Of all people.”

I wasn’t buying it. “She was drinking, sure, but I thought she drowned,” I said to Lady Cop.

“Technically, yes. But what happens is people overdo, and because their judgment is compromised, they go for a swim. Their breath is shallower, and their coordination is poor, so they succumb.” She paused in a way that felt practiced and professional. “I’m sorry.”

We signed some papers. They wanted to know where to send the body. I gave the name of the funeral home my dad went to because I had no room in my brain for anything else, and Darren was too emotionally brutalized to make any kind of decision. I didn’t know how we were going to walk out of there, but we did, slowly, because the farther away we got from the police station, the farther behind we left Gabby. We stopped dead in the parking lot, holding hands, immovable.

“I don’t think I can go home,” he said.

“You can stay with me.”

“No.”

“What about Adam?”

Darren just stared into the distance, his face a blank. I didn’t know what to do next. He had no family except Gabby. I was it, and I had no idea how to help him. His gaze fixed on something, and I followed it. Theo closed the door on his Impala and came toward us, his gait a little crooked. I squeezed Darren’s hand tighter.

“Let’s just go,” I said. “Don’t try and deal with anything today.” I pulled him toward the Honda. “Please.”

He looked down at me, big blue eyes lined with webs of red.

“We have so much to do,” I said. “I need you. Please.”

He blinked as if some of what I said got through.

Theo was getting closer, waving and trotting as if he thought he might miss us. I pulled Darren away and tried to shoot Theo a warning look. I wasn’t a praying person, but I prayed there would be no fights. No accusatory words. No defenses. No excuses. I shoved Darren into the passenger side just as Theo reached us.

“Lassie...” he said.

“Back up, Theo.” I strode to my side of the car.

“I have feelings about it too. I stopped her from jumping off the Ferris wheel.”

“I’ll let you know when we have the funeral if you have the balls to come,” I said as I opened the door.

“You’re the one who betrayed her. You did that scratch track without her.”

I slammed the door before Darren could hear another word.

“I’m going to kill him,” Darren said.

“Not today.”

I knew that I had a limited time to figure it all out. I felt the thoughts I didn’t want to have push against the defensive wall that kept me functioning. I needed that wall. It was the percussion section, keeping the beat, organizing the symphony of reactions and decisions that needed to happen. Without it, the whole piece was going to shit.

I pulled out of the parking lot. Theo got small in my rearview. “We need to make arrangements,” I said. “Are you up for it, or am I driving you home?”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Do you have money?”

He shook his head. “There was a life insurance policy. For both of us. In case. I checked it when she tried the last time.”

“Okay. Let’s take care of it. Then, I don’t know.” I took his hand at the red light. “Let’s just keep our shit together until the sun goes down.”

“Then what?”

“We fall apart.”

We made it home before sunset. The funeral home had dealt with worse, and we did what the grieved often did. We dumped everything in their lap and let them tell us what we had to do. Darren signed the forms to allow them to retrieve the body. We let them arrange a cremation. There would be no big funeral, no open casket, just a thing at my house. I didn’t know what you called such a thing, but the funeral director seemed to know and nodded, letting it slide.