Page 132 of Goodbye Days

“So I still have a ways to go, huh?”

“This isn’t the end of a journey but the beginning. You’re now where most people who lose a loved one or loved ones start. You’ve done the work to properly understand and contextualize your place in this tragedy, but there’s more healing to come. You’ve beaten the infection in the wound, so now it can heal.”

“I hope I feel completely right again someday.”

Dr. Mendez’s eyes, though teary red, twinkle. “You won’t. And yet you will. I’ll remember Ruben’s smile, or I’ll smell a cologne that reminds me of him—like a lot of teenage boys, he always wore too much. And when those memories hit me, I feel that ache. So will you. But your life will be full enough, big enough to absorb it, and you’ll go on.”

A few moments pass.

“Can I tell you something?” I ask.

“Of course.”

I tell him I’m going to do a goodbye day with my parents someday soon. More of a hello day, actually. So they can hear my story. So I can offer them all of myself that I put behind walls for no good reason.

I tell him I believe we are stories of breath and blood and memory and that some things never finally end.

I tell him I hope, after we’re gone, there’s a day when a great wind fills our stories with life again and they rise from sleep; and that I write the best story I can—one that echoes in the void of the eternities at least for a time.

I tell him I hope I see my friends again someday.

I tell him I hope.

Though two of Adair’s dance buddies flank her as we pass in the leaf-strewn parking lot, still I stop for a moment and open myself to her. Offer myself, more like. I have nothing to tell her; I just want to give her the chance to say what she needs to say. It’s not enough that you took my brother; you also took my parents’ marriage. It’s not enough that he’s dead; I have to see you hanging out with his girlfriend. It’s not enough that you never went to prison; I also have to see you every day.

I can receive it now, I think. Whether it was the therapy, the medication, or both, I haven’t had a panic attack in a long time. I can absorb whatever she has for me and survive. Whatever comfort, whatever peace it’ll bring her, I want her to have it. I try to tell her this with my face.

But she looks past me, somehow staring me down without ever looking in my direction. Her gray eyes are as hard and hot as a fever. One from which you never become wholly well. One that takes part of you and never gives it back. One you don’t survive completely.

If nothing else, I understand.

Jesmyn stops playing abruptly, stands, and whoops, startling me.

“What?” I set down my laptop with my almost-completed college admission essay and slide out from under the piano to see her springing up and down, shouting.

She’s incandescent. She grabs my hands. “I finally saw the blue! The right blue!”

I join her jumping and yelling.

When we settle down and catch our breath, I say, “You’re done practicing for today. Pumpkin spice milkshake time.”

We take our milkshakes to Centennial Park and drink them while we sit on the tailgate of Jesmyn’s truck, listening to Dearly through the open cab windows, talking and laughing. We wrap Jesmyn’s stargazing blanket around ourselves against the chill of the dimming autumn twilight—purple like a healing bruise—watching what leaves still cling to the trees fall spiraling to the ground, one by one.

I’m standing in line at Target, buying a Coke, when I remember, once, Sauce Crew was talking about how funny it would be if you congratulated people not on having babies but on having had sex. You had a baby? Nice! You had sex! Congrats on having had so much cool sex! People at church and work and stuff would say this to you.

I start laughing right there in line, laughing like I did then.

Like I did so many times.

Some days—the good ones—this is how they visit me.

Georgia’s voice is sunny as she answers the door. “Hey!” I hear her talking with someone. “Carver!” she calls.

It’s late-ish and it’s supposed to snow, so I’m not expecting anyone. I put down my book and head for the door.

“So how long is UT on Christmas break?” Jesmyn asks Georgia as I turn the corner.

“I’m off until the first week of January,” Georgia says.