I stared up at him in the darkness. “Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t want you to think that Mirabeau is the whole world, like our numbnut friends do. I don’t want you to waste the chance you got.”
“I’ll come home if I want. I’ll live here if I want.” I stood and the wind surged, making me feel unsteady. Trey seemed an indistinct figure in the night. “Why are you being so shitty to me?” I hollered.
“Because you’re gonna do all the things in life I wish I could. Because you’re the brother I never had.”
Lightning split the sky and I saw the Trey standing before me was not the Trey of our careless eighteenth summer, drinking beer with me on the next-to-the-last night before I left for college. He was the Trey that had died, his face gaunt and drawn and bearded in the momentary white light.
“Then help me! Tell me who killed Clevey! Tell me who killed you!”
“Killed me?” he asked.
“Yes! You’re dead! Who killed you?” I screamed into the wind.
He collapsed against me and my hands felt the warmth of his life’s blood. His voice creaked like a coffin’s lid. “You are. You’re killing me, Jordy.”
A cry caught in my throat as I wrenched up in bed. I slapped the palm of my hand over my mouth and bit my fingers. Nightmare’s sweat adhered the sheets to my body and I kicked them away. They felt like shrouds.
I staggered to the window. Another storm swept over Mirabeau, headed for the Gulf, and the glass felt cool against my palms. What was happening to me? Why did I feel like this world was the dream and those memories with Trey were the reality? I shut my eyes and took a long, sobering breath.
I shrugged into my terrycloth robe and sat again on the bed, listening to the quiet of my house. Many nights Mama was restless in the wandering way Alzheimer’s patients sometimes are, but tonight she was still. I heard the remote ticking of the grandfather clock downstairs, like a colossal heart. Apparently I hadn’t called out; the house’s silence pushed oppressively on my ears.
I hungered for a comfort food. I didn’t want to stay in my bed; it was nothing but a trap full of memories. I remembered all the pies downstairs. My sweet tooth pulsed and I tiptoed down to the kitchen. I turned on all the lights; I didn’t like the dark anymore.
The pies looked tempting: pecan, peach, buttermilk, and apple, but I didn’t want a slice. Only two images from my dream could make me smile; Marcia Tatum and Dr Pepper floats. Marcia had been my senior-year girlfriend, a buxom, funny, sly-eyed brunette, and she’d served up the best Dr Pepper floats in the world at the old Sit-a-Spell Cafe. Trey had kidded me plenty that I’d had more Dr Pepper floats after school than any other boy in Mirabeau history. He’d follow me to the cafe and chatter at me and Marcia as she made my favorite fountain concoction while I watched her with vast-eyed devotion.
He loved to tease.
I pulled a gallon of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream from the freezer.
Give him an extra scoop now, Marcia, Trey would say, eyeing Marcia’s own scoops under her bright pink uniform.
I found an icy cold can of sugary, original Dr Pepper in the back of the fridge and popped the top.
Don’t you be skimpy with that Dr Pepper, Marcia. Jordy needs all the sweetness he can get. Don’t you, Jordy?
I pulled the ice-cream scooper out of a drawer and rinsed it with hot water. I found a thick, tall glass in the cabinet and set it on the counter.
Marcia, sugar, you ought to give Jordy a large float but charge him for a small one. Don’t you care none about this poor boy?
Dragging the scooper across the pristine plain of ice cream, I pared free a globe of white sweetness. I jiggled it above the glass and the scoop fell in, leaving a creamy smear along the side. Again, another scoop. A small one to top it. Then the Dr Pepper, the fizz of its pouring the only sound I heard as it frothed above the ice cream. The can felt like a deadweight in my hand.
Ah, that’s his favorite there, Miss Marcia. He likes those floats even better than he likes you or me.
“Jordan?” Candace, standing nearby, watched me.
“I’m making a Dr Pepper float,” I announced, and my voice broke. Candace looked sort of blurry.
“I can see that, honey.” Her voice was cottony soft. “You okay? You’ve spilled it everywhere.”
I glanced down at the kitchen counter; the soda can was empty and my glass sat in a puddle of bubbling brown.
I looked back up at Candace and I could see her heart breaking. “He’s dead.” I heard my voice. “He’s really, really dead. Trey is dead. God!” A sob escaped from me, like air long trapped underwater then bursting to the surface. I felt her arms close around me.
I didn’t want to cry. No, not in front of her. I didn’t want her to see me that way. I put my fingers over my face and they were wet and sticky with Dr Pepper.
“Why? Why?”
“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know why he died,” she murmured into my chest.
“Not him dying! Why did he leave us?” I buried my face against her disarrayed hair. “He left me. I was like his brother and he left me. He left Sister and Mark and Mama and Daddy and his own father, but why did he leave me?” I pulled in a badly needed breath. “We were as close as brothers. What could have happened that he couldn’t tell me? If he was going to run away from here, why didn’t he come to Boston? I would have helped him, no matter what the trouble was. Didn’t he know that? What did I do wrong? Why’d anyone want to kill him? Why? Why?”
I was conscious of her taking me to the sink, washing the soda from my hands and my face, toweling me dry. She led me back upstairs to my room and laid me on my bed. She held me in her arms and I talked, I babbled like a mute just given speech, telling her all the idiocies and kindnesses that Trey and I had done in our reckless, vanished youths, our time when we thought we were immortal. It didn’t make, I’m sure, for a cohesive monologue. But she laughed at all the funny stories, and she smiled sadly at our tragedies. She stroked my hair and kissed my face and gave me all the strength in her heart. I took it like the precious gift it was. I never loved her more in my life. I told her so and she kissed me gently.
I felt her fingers lightly brushing my hair. “You know what?” she whispered. “I think you loved him very much. I think he loved you, too. And it’s okay to say that, and it’s okay to be sad. It’s normal.”
“You sound like one of them therapists on TV,” I rasped, sticking my face in my pillow.
“I don’t care what I sound like. I’m just glad you’re grieving,” she said. I opened one eye at her.
She ran a finger inside the cup of my ear. “I’m serious. I was about sick of watching you pretend that Trey Slocum’s death hadn’t affected you in the least. It wasn’t natural, not to someone that cares as much as you do. I was about ready to kick your butt if you didn’t start acting like a human being.”
I watched the translucent blue vein in her wrist as it moved barely above my face. “I was mad at him for so long. I didn’t know how not to be mad at him.” I closed the one eye I’d opened. “Now I can’t tell him I’m sorry. He can’t tell me if he’s sorry for what he did.”
“I’m starting to wish I’d known Trey Slocum. He must’ve had some virtues thrown in with the vices.”
I wished she had, too. I felt exhausted, as though I’d run a marathon with a weight on my back. I pulled her to me, feeling a sudden, intoxicating need for her. Candace responded, her lips seeking mine, her fingers tangling in my hair. My hands framed her face like a precious treasure.
The phone rang, shattering the three a.m. silence. I jerked in surprise. Candace rolled over, grabbed the receiver, murmured a quick “Hello, Poteet residence,” and listened.
“Oh, my God. Oh, no.” Her face crumpled with shock as she handed me the phone. “It’s the police station. Junebug’s been shot.”
11
Ice water in your face is a sobering slap.
I’d had two friends die by violence-and I’d tried wrapping myself in denial like it was one of my grandmother’s quilts, a cocoon against the sharp pain of loss. I’d stumbled along, hardly like myself, numbed and slack-jawed, ruminating at a snail’s pace.