Every Little Thing (6 page)

She nodded, like she knew how to have this conversation. She nodded, like
Go on, you're not done yet
, and Cohen said, “I mean...it was a
pond
,not the fucking ocean. Who just…
drowns
? The life jackets. I mean,” he shook his head. “I bought the beer. We were in this piece of shit wobbly boat, and there I was, thinking it's funny he couldn't stand up straight.”

He looked at her like he was done, and she said nothing, and he said, “What if they do an autopsy? And I'm the guy who got his kid brother drunk and killed him? It's how it happens, you know. People hear the facts, and someone sounds like an asshole. It wasn't like that—”

“There isn't going to be an autopsy, okay? Or, I mean, there wasn't one. I mean, he...he's waking tomorrow night. They had no need to do an autopsy. Okay?” She kept saying
okay
until he acknowledged it with a nod of his head.

She sat at the picnic table but he didn't join her. He stayed where he was, staring out at the ocean. The palms of both hands on the ledge of the stone wall, arms straight as poles like he was pushing the wall.

“...and things like this are never anyone's fault,Cohen, even when it feels that way.”

A sardonic laugh, and he shook his head, like
I should've known you'd pull this shit
. But she countered, almost offended. “Do
not
shake your head at me. Unless you kicked him overboard and held his head under water, do not shake your head at me!” And he appreciated her sudden sternness. “I said, I can stay here or I can go. It's up to you. I won't be offended if you want me to leave, or if you want me to shut up about Ryan. I just...felt...compelled to come. To be decent. To say things that needed to be said, like
this really isn't your fault
. And get ready to shake your head again, but I know what you're going through because my mother recently passed away, too, you know.”

He kept staring at the sea, lulled into pacification by the sound of waves off land, over and over. Rocks rolling over each other, jostled by the sea.

“And now you're thinking,
It's not the same
, right?”

About ten seconds of silence, and he said, “It's not. I mean, I'm very sorry. About your mother. But.” He shrugged his shoulders, looked out at the sea again, the fog.

“Of course it's not the
same
same. With Mom it was slow and painful.” She looked down at the picnic table and drew little ovals onto it with her middle finger. “Cancer. There was less life in Mom's eyes every day, until her eyes were just these glass...
spheres
.”She waited a second, like maybe there was a better word. Globes. Balls.

“And then the weird smell, like she was literally rotting away. It was slow for me and fast for you. You weren't expecting it, whereas I was waiting for it, and feeling guilty for that. I mean, she was shitting herself in bed, and she stopped recognizing Dad and me. That's brutal too, okay? In its own, different way. And that's my last memories of her now. Bloated. Fragile. Kind of gross, really. She was something to take care of, not the woman I'd relied on my whole life. At least, for you, you'll think of Ryan with nothing but fond memories. No gross ones like I have in the bank.” She tapped her head with a finger, trying to act tough, but her glossy eyes gave her away.

She stopped talking for a second, to get back on track, or because it still hurt to talk about her own side of the story: the wounds still fresh and best kept under bandages, pulled back a little at a time. “You blame yourself for Ryan, right? So no, it's not the
same
same. You get to replay a thousand ways things could have gone differently, I'm sure, and I'm sure that's torture. It's all different, all of it. Of course it is. But from this moment on, it
is
the same. From the day
after
we lose someone, how we lost them doesn't matter. All that matters now is that they're gone, and there's absolutely no more interacting with that person. There's just the memories. And those memories will come pelting at you at random for a while, before you realize it can be beautiful to let them run through you.”

“
Beautiful?
”

She nodded her head, once. “Don't get me wrong. I feel Mom's absence, every day, like a brick in the face. Every day. You're going to find yourself shocked sometimes, that he's gone, because you're so used to him
being here
. You're going to find yourself in places where some primitive part of your brain will expect to see him. That's the worst. Their absence feeling so…
physical
.”

He couldn't think of anything to say, and he didn't want to.

“Listen,”she said. “You didn't shoot your brother in the head. And you need to stop acting like you did. Because, straight up, answer me, yes or no: did you push your brother off the boat? Did you hold his head under water? Or did you almost drown yourself, looking for him? Did you swim until your muscles starting snapping off your bones?”

She waited.

“Just answer that one question, and I'll shut up. Say yes or no, and we'll both get in our cars and drive home. Did you drown Ryan? Did you push him off the boat and hold his head under water, or did you spend
hours
in the water looking for him?”

Silence.

“Did you push him off the boat, Cohen?”

Cohen broke like a doll. His limbs and torso fell to the ground in five different pieces. His throat tightened. If he blinked, tears would have fallen out. So he didn't blink.

She came to him. Sat next to him. Put her hand on the side of his head to coax it onto her shoulder. “It's okay. All of it.” Neither of them were really sure what she meant.

“Thirsty? I brought a few bottles of water with me. I'm always thirsty. I'm thirsty right now. Or we can go home. But it's pretty up here, and I'd like to stay if you are staying.”

Absentmindedly, like a distressed kid, “I was listening to music before you knocked at the door.” He wiped an eye with the back of his finger, expecting tears there, and pointed to his Discman. “What kind of music do you like? Shitty music?”

She laughed and fetched his Discman for him. She pulled a mixed CD out of her purse, put it in, and handed it to him.

“Listen to at least half these songs before you judge me?”

He put his headphones on. He felt closer to her because he wasn't embarrassed to come undone in front of her. Felt close to her because he
could
cry in front of her, if he wanted to, but not even his own mother. Crying in front of his parents would've been an admission of guilt or a way of pulling them down even further into their own grieving process.

But Allie—and not knowing what she'd say or how she'd react to him crying, not knowing what books she'd brought, or how much she loved ducks, that unpredictability, her newness— was stirring some life into his world.

She walked over to the picnic table and cracked the spine of a yellow book. Plucked out a bookmark. She looked perfectly content to be there. Cohen shimmied over to the corner, where two walls met, and reclined into it. She took the cap off a bottle of water, took a sip. He watched her. She looked up, plucked another bottle out of her pumpkin-orange purse, and threw it towards him like a football, but she didn't say “here” until the bottle was in the air, and it thudded him in the chest before he could stick a hand out to catch it. He let out an almost-audible laugh, and Allie had her hands over her mouth, laughing out an apology, “So sorry!”

He smiled at her animated body. He was comfortable enough around her now to go back to the centre of the roof and just lay there, looking up at the stars, as he'd been doing before she came knocking at the door. He was squinting one eye, then the other, then the other. The stars looked like jewels on a black blanket. It started raining, lightly.

“When Ryan was a kid, he had all these crazy, almost poetic theories about things.”

From the base of his eyes, he saw her lay her book down to listen.

“He was a kid, I mean, there was eight years between us. One night, me and him and Dad were out back barbecuing chicken or something, and he just looked at us. He looked up at the stars, and then he looked at us, and he said, startled almost, like he'd just discovered it,
Stars are the twinkle of the moon, reflected off peoples' eyes, back up into the sky!
He said it like it was the truth, you know?”

She giggled, warmly, like she liked the idea of that. Or the way kids'minds could spin the world however they wanted. “That's beautiful. Really.”

Neither of them said anything for ten, fifteen seconds. They just looked at each other. “It's raining,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She walked towards him. Threw her sandals on the right side of him and lay down on the left. Only two or three feet between them: a formal yet casual distance. They both had their head back against the roof. Eyes full of stars. At the very base of his vision, he saw Allie's bare toes—painted pink—poking up to the sky like fleshy flowers.

He didn't move his head; he pushed his eyes as far left as they'd go, without making him dizzy. Her shirt was waterlogged. It clung to her, defining her breasts: a second outjutting where her nipples poked at her shirt. The cold, the rain.

There was a divot, where her black tank top, wet, had sunk into her belly button. There was skin exposed between her tank top and her skirt, and there was nothing in the world like her.

He took his eyes back up off her. She rolled over, facing him, and closed her eyes. “That was really cute, what your brother said, I mean. About the stars. And that you've always remembered it.”

They lay there on that shingled roof, two or three feet apart, and that distance was too much.

ALLIE SAT WITH him at the funeral service.

He was sitting in the very back of the church with four rows of empty pews between him and the nearest person. A smell of cedar or incense. A dead wasp at his feet. His father occasionally peered back at him, over his shoulder, with a look on his face somewhere between being perplexed and embarrassed.
What are you doing back there?

He heard the chunky church door creak open—a splash of light on his right shoe—and he looked over his shoulder to see Matt and Allie poking their heads in; mild looks of guilt on their faces for being a little late. Allie's eyes were two flies buzzing around until they found Cohen. She sat with him; her hand tapping his knee, twice, as a silent greeting. And then she let it rest there. Matt kept on walking, up the aisle.

Sitting in the back of the church made the priest's words sound distant, and that made them more surreal. He'd never been around that much of his family without Ryan being there too.

At the graveyard, Allie had put her hand on his back the very second his breathing changed. Just barely, her fingers, tracing the outline of his shoulder blade. He had a dry, tight throat, indicative of impending tears. But when the priest started talking about God's plan for young men like Ryan, it all turned to anger. He wanted to break the man's jaw to shut him up about it. Ryan had fucking
died
, at eighteen, and the priest was putting a positive spin on it, and he saw his grandmother nod her head, like yes there's a God, and yes, he saw it fit to hold Ryan's head under water while Ryan choked and gasped and panicked and died. And he pictured himself in Ryan's body, under water: his lungs exploding or his brain shorting out or his heart popping like a balloon, exactly like a balloon.

Allie leaned in, whispered into his ear. “Some people need to believe that. In something more, in divine reasons for things. In gods that have plans.”Her voice soft and warm enough on his ear to calm him.

THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, there were plans for supper at his parents' place, and he wanted Allie to come. He wanted to put something between him and his parents. A distraction. Something to fill the empty space of Ryan's seat or something to fill the silence, and Allie could have been that thing. But he never asked her to come. They ate lasagna, and there was too much quietness between the forced conversation: clicks of forks off teeth, knives against dishes. Gulps of wine or water. A comment about the weather, maybe. Three sets of eyes like empty glasses.

He'd let himself in. He'd come over a little earlier than they were expecting him, maybe, and he'd let himself in. His father was sitting on the couch—hands behind his head, elbows pointed left and right—staring at a TV that wasn't on. “Supper's in the oven,” he said. “Be another hour though. Beer in the fridge if you want one.”

Cohen pulled a sweater off, laid it on the couch, and headed for the washroom. It was like he'd caught his father off guard and his father needed a minute, so Cohen pretended he had to go to the washroom, to give him that minute. He walked passed Ryan's bedroom, and the door had been open, and he felt like it should've been closed. He stuck his head in, looked around. Why or what for, he didn't know. That feeling of sand in his throat.

It was a strange thing to have thought, but he thought it immediately upon seeing his brother's guitar: those strings would never be changed again; they'd sit there until they frayed into razors. There was a fish tank, and he wondered how the things weren't dead yet, who'd been feeding them. How hard it must be for his mother or father to step into that room and keep something of Ryan's alive. And how long would they leave those sheets on his bed. Those clothes in the closet. And how long until this room was a spare bedroom, not Ryan's, or converted into a computer room or an exercise room or somewhere for his mother to sit and knit socks and sweaters. Long after the day they did convert it, an item of Ryan's—a guitar pick or a note in his flippant handwriting—would fall out of nowhere, maybe the top shelf of a closet.

He shut the bedroom door behind him as he left.

Heading for the washroom, he walked passed his parents' room, and the door was ajar. His mother had been lying on her side, her body kinked into a Z; her shoulder blades bucking like clipped wings flapping. She had a light blue pillow, but there was a wet, navy, perfect circle, the size of a CD, where her eye met the pillow.