It’s hard to know what to say. “He got away,” I tell her at last.
She gestures toward my soaked clothes. “The waterfall?”
“Yeah.”
“Jevin, you didn’t really jump off that overlook into the river.” Her tone makes it clear that it’s not really a question.
“I had to go after him, Charlene. He killed Emilio.”
“But you didn’t have to follow him off a hundred-foot cliff.” There’s sharp exasperation in her voice, making it clear that having this conversation right now is not going to lead anywhere productive, and all I do is end up agreeing with her.
“Right.”
After a moment I realize we’re both looking at Emilio’s body.
“They’ve sent for some of the Philippine National Police,” she tells me softly, “from Kabugao, but you know how far that is.”
“They won’t be here for, what, three, four hours?”
“At least. Do you have any idea why he did it? Why anyone would want to hurt Emilio?”
Charlene says “hurt” instead of “kill,” and I figure it’s just because actually putting into words the reality of what has happened would be too painful.
I shake my head. “No.”
She looks at my wounded arm again. “What happened out there, Jev?”
“It’s okay. I’m alright.”
She reaches out tenderly to unwrap my impromptu blood-drenched dressing. “Did he have a knife? What is…?”
I put my hand on hers to stop her. “It was a snake. One of the cobras. I had to pull it off—”
“What? You were bitten? We need to get you some antivenin right away and—”
“The snake didn’t have any venom,” I reassure her, but I’m not sure that’s exactly true, not based on the reaction my body had after that cobra bit me. Regardless, whatever caused that uncontrollable rush of anxiety, the effect has been fading and I’m feeling more like myself again. “I’ll be fine. Really.”
“Well, I at least need to bandage that up properly.” She takes my hand to lead me to the hut where we’re staying. “Come on.”
“Let me see him first.”
“I don’t want to go near him again, Jev. I can’t.”
People deal with death in different ways, and I sense that Charlene’s urgency to treat my arm is, at least partially, her way of trying to wrap her mind around the situation — she can’t do anything to help Emilio, but she can attend to my wound. It’s not much, but at least it’s something. And in times when things feel completely out of control, finding a way to manage at least one thing always seems to help, at least in a small way.
“I won’t be long. Just give me a minute.”
Her gaze shifts past me toward the dark fringe of the jungle. “Okay. I’ll meet you by the hut.”
“Right.”
Then without another word she heads off, and it’s just me in the graveyard with my friend’s corpse.
Jagged shadows birthed from the flicking torchlight shift erratically across each other, giving the cemetery a ghostly, surreal feel.
As I walk toward him, the gravity of what has happened hits me full force.
My friend Emilio is dead. He will never smile again, never laugh again, never dream or hope or love again. It’s over. Whatever he might have wanted to accomplish in this life will remain forever undone. His soul has escaped this vale of tears and slipped into eternity, and his body has been left behind for us to mourn and bury. Dust to dust. Life to death. Hope to grief.
I arrive at his corpse and stand for a moment looking down at the sheet covering his body. It strikes me that we cover the dead, we treat them with respect, not for their sake but for ours. We extend reverence to corpses in an attempt to affirm the value of our own lives and to mask the stark truth of our own mortality.
After all, if we just treated our dead like the skin-encased sacks of blood and bones and soon-to-be-rotten meat that they are, we would feel that — apart from the breath that separates us — we’re as finite and susceptible to the grim reaper as they were. And that’s just too terrifying a thought.
So we distract ourselves, divert our attention from all that, cover up the truth beneath the frantic, stifling busyness of our brief and worried days. If I were a devil trying to tempt people to squander their lives, I would simply keep them buried in urgency and obsessed with trivialities; otherwise they might just take the time to reflect on life and death and eternity and wake up to the things that matter most.
I kneel and gently pull back the sheet that’s covering Emilio’s face.
His eyes are closed, his lips blue, his face gray and clay-like. He’s lying far more still than a living person ever could, and this thing that I’m looking at barely reminds me of my friend at all.
People speak of their loved ones passing away, but in this case that’s not what happened at all. Emilio didn’t pass away, he was viciously murdered.
No, when you die of asphyxiation because your throat has swollen shut, you’re not just passing away, you’re dying a strangled, horrible death. And the man who did this to him managed to get away.
There isn’t always a silver lining or a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Eventually, bad things happen to all good people, and the dragon wins and death has her way. You can think all the positive, comforting thoughts in the world, extend so much love to others that it makes your heart ache and soar at the same time, but in the end everyone — everything — that has ever been born will pass from the world and end only in dust and rot and decay.
It’s only wishful thinking to say that love conquers all. It doesn’t. Death does. In the end, death even conquers love.
I feel the urge to touch Emilio’s face, and I reach out slowly, but in the end stop short.
And as I lower my hand to the ground, it happens.
It doesn’t surprise me, but still, it unsettles me and sends a terrible, oppressive chill winding down my spine.
I think of my family and what happened five hundred and two days ago when I stood on that shoreline and stared down at the three corpses, at the drowned bodies of my wife and our twin five-year-old boys, lying just as lifeless and still as Emilio does now.
Although I try to slide the memories aside, I know it won’t help.
Whenever I remember what happened on that dark day, the images root themselves inside of me all over again, and it takes hours, sometimes days, before they leave. I can feel that happening right now — the grim memories gripping me, memories of Rachel and Anthony and Andrew lined up in a macabre row at my feet.
At the time, we were living in New Jersey during a run of my show in Atlantic City. On a quiet Saturday morning Rachel put the boys in the minivan and drove to Heron Bay. She passed through the parking lot and then accelerated off the pier with our twins strapped in their car seats in the back.
A little over two hours later I watched as the divers pulled up their bodies.
In the ensuing weeks when the police and the insurance company investigators inspected the minivan, they didn’t find anything wrong with it. The truth, the heart-wrenching, terrible truth, became obvious and inescapable: Rachel did it on purpose.
There was no way she could have accidentally navigated through that parking lot, hit the pier at that angle, and guided the minivan all the way to the end where she drove off. No, it wasn’t an accident.
But why?
Why did she do it?
That question has haunted me ever since.
In the months following their deaths, I searched endlessly through my memories and through Rachel’s computer files, emails, text messages, and status updates looking for some clue as to why she took her life and took our boys with her. It was almost as if I thought that if I could find a reason, I might be able to accept it all more easily.