The Last Time We Say Goodbye
Page 86

I took it out and looked at it.
It was a text.
I never told you who it was from. I never said, “It’s my brother.” I never told you what it said.
All this time, and I’ve never told anyone.
But I’ll tell you now.
It said, Hey sis can you talk?
This is the part where reality unravels for me, the part where I turned the phone off, and slid it away from me, and we went back to kissing.
But there’s an alternate version of what happened that night. There always will be, for me. In the alternate version of reality I get the text and I tell you, “Hold that thought,” and I kiss you quick, once, on the mouth, but then I get up and take the phone to the hallway and I call Ty. In that reality—which I know isn’t a reality but a fantasy, wishful thinking, a prayer that goes unanswered—Ty tells me what I need to know. That he is sad. That he’s stuck in the present. He can’t get perspective. He’s lost the future.
Then I tell him that he’s strong enough to get through the sadness.
I tell him I don’t want to go through this messed-up world without him, and I tell him that I need him.
I tell him Mom needs him.
I tell him even Dad needs him—he may not see that right now, but he will see it, sometime.
I tell him that in 5 more days it will be Christmas, and I remind him that Christmas is his favorite holiday, and we’ll wake up early and bounce up and down on Mom’s bed like we did when we were little, and we’ll belt out “Silver Bells” as we scurry downstairs to the Christmas tree and unwrap our presents, and I got him something good this year, and doesn’t he want to find out what it is?
I tell him that we have a minimum of 63 Christmases left to share with each other, and I don’t want to miss even one of those. Not one.
I tell him I love him.
And me telling him those things is enough to slay his demons.
And he lives through the night.
He lives.
But instead, I turned my phone off, and I kissed you. We stretched out under the dark matter, that invisible, improvable stuff that binds the universe, and I looked up at you, all framed in blue lights, and I said that I loved you.
Your eyes flashed with surprise. You didn’t expect me to say it. You thought I didn’t believe in love.
But you didn’t hesitate to answer.
“I love you, too,” you said. “So much.”
“It’s impractical, how much,” I whispered.
You nodded. “Totally impractical.”
We drank the cider and talked about dark matter and talked about how we are all made of the stuff of stars, that wonderful quote from Carl Sagan. We are each part of the universe.
Then somehow the conversation shifted to the subject of sandhill cranes.
How every year, in March if the weather holds, 80% of the world’s population of sandhill cranes pass through this one part of Nebraska, millions of birds all at once, and how it’s supposed to be this incredible sight to behold, and how we’d both lived in Nebraska for our entire lives and we’d never seen the cranes. We would go, we decided. Before we went off to Massachusetts or wherever fate was going to take us, we would go see the sandhill cranes. Together.
We kissed then, and time bent around us. Time went away.
But somewhere in those missing seconds, my brother was walking into the dark cocoon of the garage with Dad’s old hunting rifle and a bullet I must have overlooked.
To ruin everything, I think sometimes.
To die.
We only came back to ourselves when Sarah burst into the planetarium, and I knew the second I saw the look on her face that something was terribly, terribly wrong, and that something involved me.
I remember she said, “She’s right here,” before she handed me her phone.
I remember it was my dad’s voice I heard then, sharp, like I was in trouble for something, like he was grounding me. “It’s Ty,” the sharp voice said.
I don’t remember what else.
I was looking at you. He was telling me. My hand started to shake—not tremble, not waver, but shake, violently, like I was having a seizure. I couldn’t control it.
You reached up and put your hand on mine. You held me steady.
After I hung up, you guided me down the hall toward the parking lot. You put my coat around my shoulders. You knelt beside me when I suddenly veered off and bent and vomited my kung pao chicken onto the snowy sidewalk next to the giant mammoth statue in front of the museum. You helped me stand up. You smoothed the hair away from my face. You reached over me to buckle my seat belt, once you got me in the car.
There were Christmas lights all along the way to the mortuary, red and green and white, strung through the trees.
The whole time, your eyes were wide and incredulous, like this couldn’t really be happening.
At the mortuary, you waited in the hall while the funeral director took me and Mom and Dad into her office and played us a recording. Ty had called 911, seconds before he pulled the trigger. It took me a few days to piece together why he would do this, but it was a kindness, I’ve concluded, so Mom or I wouldn’t come home and find him when we opened the garage.
We listened to his voice and confirmed that it was Ty.
He said, “There’s a dead person in the garage in the green house on the corner of Nickols and Second Street. He killed himself.”
That was it. He hung up. It was 12 minutes before the ambulance got there, they told us, but he was already gone.
He didn’t sound scared, in the recording. He didn’t sound sad. He was perfectly matter-of-fact about it.