Gone, Gone, Gone(24)

I hear him pause in his scooping. “You okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

He exhales. “A kid killed himself on the phone with me tonight. I was talking him down, doing everything you’re supposed to do, and I hear the gunshot. And I keep saying his name—Taylor, Taylor—like, praying it went off in his hand . . .”

“Christ.”

“And it’s like . . . of all the things to hear right now. A gunshot.” He shakes his head.

I don’t know how he can think of the sniper when he just heard someone die, someone, an actual person, die, and how he can think that the shot he heard is reminiscent of the sniper, and not the other way around.

“How old was he?” I ask.

“Fifteen, sixteen.” He turns the coffeemaker on and starts fixing oatmeal. I feel like he’ll keep making something new as soon as he finishes what he’s cooking, and he’ll never sit down and eat, and that’s my brother, really. He says, “I’m sorry about Dad, at dinner.”

“It’s fine.”

“He’s not very sensitive of you, and I’m sorry. He just doesn’t understand you, you know?”

“I think I’m the one who’s supposed to talk about how misunderstood I am, and you’re supposed to come back at me with lots of elderly wisdom or something. Can I have a glass of milk?”

“May I.” He actually says that, and then he pours a glass for me. He overfills the glass, and milk spills onto the counter.

“Don’t cry,” I say, and he snickers a little. I wipe it up with a paper towel.

“Thanks,” he says.

“It’s my milk.” I take the glass. “Besides, the cats would be up here in a second if I hadn’t jumped on it.”

He says, “That’s where Dad’s issues come from. It’s not just the fact that he doesn’t know how to deal with anyone but elementary schoolers—though let’s not pretend that’s not an issue. He has no idea why you got all the animals and what to do with the fact that you essentially took over this house last year. Or let them take over the house, at least.”

“I don’t know what to say. I love them.”

“God, I know, Craig.”

“And it’s not like it matters because now they’re gone.” And I start shaking, and then here is Todd hugging me, and here I am crying again because I am apparently four, or however old he told me I was.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s okay. We’re going to find them.”

“Flamingo already died.”

“Who?”

“The bird.” I breathe hard. “Dead bird. Now what? How many other dead animals are out there? And Dad won’t let me go look for them . . .”

“Come on,” he says. He lets go of me and puts on his coat.

“What?”

“It’s not as if you have school to get ready for, yeah? And I don’t need sleep. I have Saturday nights off. Come on, let’s go look.”

When we’re looking around, calling and whistling and swinging our flashlights, Todd tells me about this girlfriend he had who used to leave letters in his locker folded up like frogs or swans. I don’t know why he thinks this story will make me feel better, but it does.

He doesn’t have a girlfriend now. He says he’s too busy.

“Is that how it works?” I say. “Is having a girlfriend or a boyfriend something like a job, like you need room in your schedule?”

“Well, no, Craig, but they call it a commitment for a reason. You don’t need to block out time in your day for a relationship, but you do need to have time to nurture it. Time to give a shit about someone else. And sometimes you don’t have room for another person.”

So I guess we have a capacity for things we can care about and then we reach it, and we’re screwed. That sounds like I’m judging Todd, but I’m not. I think that it’s a shame that he loves a few people so incredibly much that he’s used up all his love and he can’t spread it around, and that those people are me and Mom and Dad and people who call him on the brink of death who he loves with every bit of him for those five minutes, and the problem is that none of us give that much of a shit about him, because we don’t know how. Because I see him looking at me and caring so much and trying to connect to me and failing failing failing, and I don’t know how to help him, because I don’t know what I need from him. I don’t know what I need from anyone.

I’m so worried about him. And God, what if something happens to one of us? It would be like losing all your money in the stock market. That’s a horrible analogy, but it’s what I mean. It’s just that I think there are some good reasons to keep a foot on the ground. That’s all I’m saying.

Todd says, “And you’ve been in a relationship more recently than I have. You know how it is.”

“Not really,” I say, because I never had trouble making room for Cody. But Todd looks at me funny, so I say, “Yeah. I don’t know. It’s been a really long time. Sometimes I think I’m remembering it wrong. Like it wasn’t . . . how I thought it was.” I’ll decide that I’m pretending everything was so much easier and better and sweeter than it possibly could have been, in reality. Was he really that gorgeous? Were we really that molded together? And then I see a picture or I hear a song I heard with him and, yes, it was just as incredible, and he’s just as gone.