Jackson was dressed in slacks that I knew he’d had since he was a kid because they were high-waters on him. He wore one of his brother’s black Led Zeppelin T-shirts and the wallet chain Brian had handed down to him a year before.
Leila looked like she had aged ten years. On the car ride home, she just kept mumbling, “It’s not natural.”
From the passenger seat, Jax said, “What’s not natural, Mom?”
“To bury a child.”
Later that night, Jax told me that Leila got high and drunk and said that she wished it had been him who’d drowned. We both knew it was coming. He didn’t cry like I thought he would. He said, “She’s pathetic, Em. I can’t hate her because I pity her too much.”
“You’re the smartest person I know, Jackson,” I told him, and it was true. The comment earned me one of his cute smiles. Even though he tried to act tough, I knew Leila had wounded him. I vowed never to hurt him in that way.
That week, I went home each night to my despondent father, who said little about Brian’s death except that the kid was a druggie. I thought that it was sad that my father judged Brian based on Leila’s actions. Beyond pot, Brian wasn’t a druggie at all. He was just a guy who’d lost his father young and grown up in a shit-hole town with an addict for a mother. Who knew what he could have become.
Jax and I weren’t surprised when the autopsy came back with the result that Brian had simply drowned. He was likely pulled under by the strong current created by a season of rainstorms.
No one knew what frame of mind Brian was in the night he died, or why on earth he would go swimming in the middle of the night, fully clothed, with his damn boots on. We just knew that he was gone forever, and things would never be the same for any of us.
4. Things I’ve Put Away
I was crying when Trevor came into my room in the middle of the night. He was groggy and squinting. “What’s wrong, Emi?”
I closed the book and pushed it to the side. “I’m just confused about some things.”
He flipped off the light and got into my bed. I scooted under the covers and let him spoon me.
“Talk to me,” he said gently. His voice was soothing next to my ear.
I buried my face in his arm. “On my thirteenth birthday, I found my neighbor dead, floating in the river behind my house.” Jeff was his real name and he was magical. In what felt like a single breath he was gone. His death affected Jase deeply, as well as myself.
Trevor paused for a moment, absorbing my words. “Oh Jesus, Emi. I’m so sorry. That must have been horrible for you. Is that why you never want to celebrate your birthday?”
I nodded in the darkness and told him the whole story. He just listened and held me tighter, his silence a comfort after all the fighting we’d been doing. It wasn’t long before I fell asleep in his arms.
Telling Trevor what happened didn’t heal me, but reliving that day did in some way. Jason’s insights in the book and his view of me, and what I was going through in that moment, gave me a sense of closure. His brother’s death had to have been much more traumatic for him, but he was still aware that I was experiencing the horror along with him. He was always so perceptive and compassionate.
Too bad I was so pissed off at him.
WHEN I WOKE up the next morning, Trevor was gone, but the memory of the night before lingered. I turned to his pillow to see he had left me a note. I had finally shared something from my past with him, something he’d been asking me to do for years. I wondered if the moment had meant as much to him as it did to me.
The note simply said he’d had to go to PT. Nothing else but an “xo, T” at the end.
I felt hollow, but that empty feeling was too much to confront. So I went back to the book.
From All the Roads Between
For a few years, I was the tallest kid in school, but by the summer going into ninth grade, everyone was catching up and passing me by, including Jax. His voice was changing, and he was getting hair on his face. He still acted like a five-year-old every now and then, but despite the fact that he was living with a junkie, had lost his brother a couple of years before, and had no father, Jax somehow managed to keep getting sweeter and sweeter.
I knew he was dealing with a lot, but he held it together and focused on his schoolwork. When Leila wasn’t working, she was comatose on the couch. When she’d clean up her act a little and go to work, there’d be an endless stream of sleazy men hanging around the house for days.
Jax and I spent more and more time in the shed. We both found things we could steal to make the place more habitable, like it was our own house.
“What have you been writing in that journal?” I asked. Jax was lying on the cot in the corner and scribbling notes in a black leather-bound notebook.
“I’m just outlining my novel.”
I was sitting in one of the wooden chairs with my arms wrapped around my legs, staring out the window at the swaying trees.
“The one about the ant family?”
“No, I ditched that. I’m writing about a boy and girl who become superheroes and save the world.”
“The Adventures of Jax and Em?”
“Something like that.”
“You want to go swim in the creek?” The water in the creek had settled down for the season, and one of Leila’s short-lived boyfriends had built a deck and rope swing for us. We had carved our names, along with Brian’s, in the wood. It was our memorial to him. Jackson would go down there alone a lot; I knew he was talking to his brother.