Page 21 of The Dearly Departed

"Bram," Leonard said gently, breaking through my thoughts, "if you can't do this, it's okay. I understand. I can handle it."

I didn't want to chicken out or be too sensitive. I didn't want to leave him to do this on his own. But, fuck, the thought of touching Travis’s tiny, cold body hurt, as if I'd known him throughout his short two years of life.

Shivers ran down my spine as I thought about Ike and the time we'd spent on the streets. What it might’ve been like to find my brother dead instead of my mother, small and frail and too innocent to have suffered such a fate.

God, why couldn't I get out of my fucking head? Neither of us had suffered from cancer. Neither of us had spent the majority of our lives in hospitals, attached to machines and pumped full of medicine that was supposed to help but didn't help enough.

But we had been babies on the streets, cold and hungry and alone, and we could've died. We could've been that small when someone laid us into the ground.

This isn't about me. Why am I making it about me?

Travis’s mother began to wail—keening, Leonard called it—and I squeezed my eyes shut.

No, it wasn't about me. It was about them.

Ike and I had survived our shitty beginning, and how the hell was that fair? We were shitheads; we were terrible. Travis McDonald hadn’t been a bad kid. He was too little and young to be anything but good. He was sweet and angelic. His parents adored him. They would've traded their own lives to save his while my own father had once sold my body to get a quick fix … and he’d done it happily.

The world was such a cruel place, and right now, it was more than I could process.

"I have to …" I blew out a breath and jabbed my thumb over my shoulder, unable to look at the little boy in his bed. "I have to get some air."

"That's okay, Bram," Leonard said, so understanding. "Go ahead."

"If you need help—"

"I know. Go on."

Without another word, I turned and left the room, closing the door behind me. Travis's parents were startled by the sudden intrusion. They gasped at the sight of me and looked down at my empty hands, as if expecting to see the body of their little boy in my arms. I lifted the side of my mouth in an awkward smile.

"Sorry," I muttered, although I wasn’t sure why I’d said it at all.

"Are you …" His father released a trembling breath. "A-are you finished?"

"Oh, um … no," I answered, dropping my gaze and sending it over my shoulder. "Leonard is handling it."

It. Their son wasn’t an it. He was a little boy who should’ve still been alive. I shouldn’t have had a reason to be here at all.

Travis's mother sniffled, wiping a tissue beneath her nose, then mustered a smile. "Are you his son?"

"He's my uncle," I answered without hesitation.

It was what Leonard had told us to say when people asked, and when he'd enrolled Ike and Shawn at school, he’d told them, "These are my nephews, who have come to stay with me."

"Ah," she said, nodding. "You look alike."

I nearly laughed because I couldn’t think of anything further from the truth. Leonard was short and stout with a head full of bright silvery-gray hair that had, at one point, been light blond while I was black-haired, lanky, and taller than most people I’d ever known.

But I didn’t laugh, and I didn’t correct her.

Instead, I just kept my mouth shut and smiled.

Of all the people I had ever known, I would’ve happily chosen to look like Leonard Llewellyn.

A silence fell over the short hallway outside Travis's bedroom, with his parents at one end and me at the other. The air was weighed down by unthinkable sadness and discomfort, the invisible string between us pulled taut somewhere in the center. I considered retreating and hiding inside the room with their dead son, but I remembered what Leonard had said.

Try.

But try how?