Boy Elliot

Chapter One

The School

My phone buzzes against my thigh. I kill it fast, fingers fumbling, and sweep my gaze across the room. The student doesn’t look up. His pen keeps moving, scratching through the silence with the quiet diligence of someone naïve to the adult world. Summer light pours through the windows and pools across his desk, indifferent and golden, the kind of light that belongs to a different life than the one tightening around my chest. I glance towards the phone screen. Two missed calls. My mother. My father. The floor begins to tilt as my mind races. Why would my parents call me at the same time? They haven’t communicated in years, two planets in separate orbits, kept apart by old gravity and even older wounds. For both of them to reach for a phone and dial my number within seconds of each other, something is broken. Something important has collapsed. Something that I now must know.

	My mind steers towards my grandparents immediately, the way a mind does when they’re desperately looking for a terrible answer. I tell myself it must be one of them. Their health has diminished in recent years. If anything happened, it would hollow me out and rip the voice from my throat and the liquid from my eyes, but it would make sense. We could persevere through that sort of grief; we have experience with it. 

 	I try to get in contact with them both. Nothing. The student's pen keeps scratching. The sun keeps pouring. My pulse is a fist against my ribs. I open my phone again; I don’t care anymore. Let the kid see; let him wonder. I find my sister's name within my contacts, Bell. She won’t dress it up to protect my feelings. She won’t make me guess. Of everyone in my family, she is the one who will simply tell me the truth and let it land where it lands. “Is everything ok at home?” I type. 
 	Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again. I count my own heartbeats as I can feel them rise in my throat. “Elliot passed away.”
 	Three words. Just three words, and the floor doesn’t tilt this time; it drops. My whole body drops with it, somewhere deep, dark, and without a bottom. The light in the room is still golden. The student is still writing. The world outside the window is moving through its ordinary Thursday, indifferent as the sun. No one knows that something has just been ripped from my chest and left a gaping hole that shall never be replaced. I sit very still. I breathe. Then I stop breathing. The three dots appear again on my screen. “Come to Nanny’s after work.”

 	I look up from my phone, and the student’s eyes are trained on me. I do not know for how long. A moment, perhaps. Maybe longer. He has the careful, measured eyes of someone accustomed to examinations, to being observed, to performing with composure under scrutiny. Now those eyes are turned on me, and I am the one being studied. I wonder what he sees. A teacher comes undone at his desk. A man staring into his phone as if it had grown fangs and bitten into him. I arrange my face into something that I hope vaguely resembles calm and nod to the page in front of me. Focus. He holds my gaze for a beat longer than is comfortable, the way the young sometimes do when they sense that something adult is happening just beyond the edge of their understanding. Then he looks back down at his paper. 

 	I let out a breath I have been holding for what feels like an age. Outside, the weather has turned. I did not notice it happening; I was too occupied with wreckage within my chest, but the sun is gone now, swallowed whole by clouds that have come in low, grey, and heavy, the colour of old iron, of river water in November. The light that falls through the windows is cold and colourless, and the yellow walls of the examination room, which had seemed almost cheerful not even an hour ago, now look sickly. Jaundiced. Wrong. The room feels smaller than it did. The ceiling is lower. The walls are not so much closing in as simply there. Present in a way that walls are not usually present. The way a room becomes a room again when something inside you has changed. 

 	I have sat in this room a hundred times. More. I know the crack that runs along the plaster above the second window, the way the radiator ticks in winter, and the particular quality of the silence that settles over students when a clock is running and the questions are harder than they expected. I know this room. Yet I do not recognize it. It is as though someone has taken a familiar painting and shifted one small thing within it, a shadow moved, a colour changed, just enough to make everything else just feel subtly, wrongly altered. 

 	Elliot passed away. Three words. Neat and small and utterly impossible. His name sits in my mind as a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples move outward with every memory I own. Elliot, at eleven years old, was playing Call of Duty in our nanny's house, his jaw clenched tight with focus and eyes bright with the particular fury of a boy who did not want to relinquish the controller when he lost. I remember at thirteen laughing so hard at Elliot’s story about how he pretended to have Tourette’s syndrome in class so he could shout curse words at the teacher. At fourteen, running away from the abandoned factory because there had been a creak in the rust that scared us. At nineteen, Elliot told me he had life figured out because he started a business in Grand Theft Auto V; now he’ll never get to play six. We were always laughing; he was funnier than most of the family would have known. 

 	Twenty-three years old. I have known men in their eighties lowered into the ground, and that grief, though real, though heavy, carried within it the quiet consolation of completion, a life lived. Seasons turned. The long arc of a story told is coming to its natural conclusion. There is a shape to that grief that the mind can hold, can fit around, and slowly learn to carry. There is no shape for this. Twenty-three is not a complete thing. It is a beginning barely begun, a first chapter, a boy still becoming the man he was going to be. He had ideas; I knew he had promising ideas. The particular restless kind that we, the young, carry like banners, not yet tested against the world, not yet worn soft by time. He had things he had not yet done, places he had not yet seen, and words he had not yet said to people who were now going to have to live without ever hearing them.

 	There must be a mistake. The thought comes, and I know it for what it is, the last reflex of a mind not yet willing to accept the shape of the world as it now crumbles. There must be a mistake. A misunderstanding. A name confused in the chaos of whatever tragedy has struck and reached into the world and taken something it had no right to take. Bell is wrong. She must be. I know she isn't, with the cold and terrible certainty of a man who has just felt the earth shift beneath his feet. The student’s pen scratches against his paper. The grey light presses at the windows. 

 	Elliot, my brother in every way that mattered, the boy I had grown up beside in Nanny's house, is gone. 

Chapter Two

The House

Kieran drives the way I would when wanting to escape awkwardness, fast. His eyes narrow with a focus on the road that is just slightly more than required. He is a good man, Kieran. A kind one. The sort who offers lifts without being asked and means it, who does not want anything back for offering them. I have known him long enough to recognize the particular set of his jaw when he is working to keep a conversation light, and he is working now. Working hard, filling the silence with the small, manageable currency of ordinary life. His upcoming gigs, the weather's sudden turn, and the match at the weekend that someone had won or lost. I couldn’t have told you which and couldn’t have told you the sport. 

	I answered when answers were required. Offered sounds that approximated interest. I watched the world pass beyond the glass and felt, with a distant and academic sort of curiosity, that I did not feel anything at all.
 
	This is the strange alchemy of shock, I suppose. The mind receives news too large to process and simply refuses. I file it away behind the inch-thick glass of the car window, behind the hum of the engine and Kieran’s careful talk, and continue to operate. The heart beats at its accustomed rhythm. My hands rest in my lap with no real urgency. The world outside looks exactly as it always has; the grey-red brick houses are drowned in the miserable Irish light that would make parades seem depressing. The amber traffic lights and the beep of horns invade my senses, and the ordinary Thursday afternoon goes on as ordinarily as possible, and some part of me has yet to catch up with events and is almost grateful for its ordinariness. For its insistence on continuing. If the world were not making a fuss, perhaps I need not make a fuss either. 

	I feel the guilt more than anything else. I am burdening him. The thought circles, as such thoughts do. He offered out of kindness, and now he’s trapped in a small car with a man who cannot offer him the dignity of proper sorrow. I was making him feel awkward in a way that ordinary grief would not have. Ordinary grief, he could have sat with. Ordinary grief has a texture, a temperature, something to press against. What I was offering was nothing but politeness or a blankness, a man-shaped absence of reaction, and I could see him glancing across intervals, the small, careful sidelong looks of someone checking on a structure they’re not sure is perfectly sound. 

	We pull up outside my late grandmother’s house. Elliot really loves this house; we were all reared in it. It is a deceptively large white house, the kind of house that has absorbed decades of family into its walls until it smells of them, of cat and old carpet and Sunday dinners made by a woman who is no longer here to make them. The black door, chipped at its edges where the paint has been lost to time, was closed, being the last barrier between an ordinary Thursday and the heartbreak that awaits. The curtains in the front windows were drawn. I had not expected that to affect me; it didn’t, not really, but I noticed it the way one notices a flag lowered to half-mast, the house itself in mourning, wearing it in the only language houses know. 

	I turn to Kieran. This is the moment I had been, without quite realizing it, rehearsing since we left the school parking lot. What does a man say at the goodbye during a tragic event? What register does the occasion demand? I had arrived at no satisfactory answer, and so I chose the one I know, the easy, deflective warmth of a man who does not wish to make others uncomfortable. “Thanks for the lift, Kieran. I’ll see you tomorrow.” 

	Tomorrow. Even as I said it, I was aware of its absurdity, and yet I could not stop myself. Could not stop the performance of it. There was something almost compulsive in the normalcy, as though if I kept insisting on tomorrow with enough conviction, it might remain as easy as it had been this morning. 

	He did not answer immediately. Kieran’s deep blue eyes were the clear and direct sort that tend to unsettle people who are not being entirely honest with others or sometimes themselves. He looked at me with them now, a long-measured look, and I felt the façade I was wearing, whatever careful arrangement of features I was wearing, was now suddenly insufficient. He held out his hand. Not a wave, not a see you later, but a deliberate offer, the old gesture. I took it. He exhaled, a slow breath through the nose, the sound a man makes when words are not adequate and he knows it. “If there is anything I can do,” he said. “Anything at all.” 

 	“Ah, no, I should be grand. Thanks anyway.” The words came out before I could examine them. I heard myself say it. I watched myself say it, almost, with the detached observation of a man watching a stranger. I should be grand. As though Elliot's death was a minor inconvenience. As though tomorrow was a certainty and not a concept I had temporarily lost the ability to believe in. As though the correct response to kindness was a simple dismissal and a door shut against it. 

 	I shut the car door harder than I had meant to. The sound of it, the sharp, definitive clap of a thing closed with an angry force, embarrassed me immediately, and the embarrassment sat on top of the shame that was already there, and I stood on the pavement for a moment with both of them pressing down, and I thought about the fact that I had not yet wept. Not in the examination room. Not in the car. Not now, standing outside the house where Elliot and my grandmother lived. Lived. The word repulses me. 

 	I remember with an uncomfortable clarity how I had not cried when Nanny died. I remember the funeral, the family, and the rough texture of collective grief I had stood inside without ever quite inhabiting it. Other people wept, and I had watched them weep and felt, instead of sorrow, a kind of numb bewilderment at my own absence of tears, followed by shame at the absence, followed by shame at the shame. The whole thing recursed inward until it was simply easier to feel nothing at all and call it strength. I am not strong. I know that now. I was a frightened boy. I still am. What is wrong with me? Not a question. An accusation directed at the weakness that lies within, the edge of the words worn smooth by repetition. 

 	I knocked on the old door three times. Deliberate. As though there existed some correct amount of force to announce oneself at a house of mourning, some precise knock that would signal I was present but not intrusive, that I understood the atmosphere and would not disturb it any more than my existence already did. The door opened with a groan of old hinges, as if the slab of wood were protesting my entrance. My mother stood in the frame. Her eyes were red-rimmed and wet, and she looked at me with an expression I could not entirely read. 

 	She guided me down the narrow hallway without speaking. The smell of the house invaded my nostrils. The specific olfactory grammar of this place is unchanged across all the years I have been coming here, unchanged even now. The house did not know. The smell did not know. It would persist, I thought distantly, long after everyone had finished grieving. 

 	The sitting room door was open. I stepped through it and was confronted by every member of my family arranged in a tableau that I had no idea how to enter. They looked up as one. The photographs of the grandchildren looked down from the grey floral wallpaper, our younger faces fixed permanently in their brass frames, unburdened by this day. My head went hot immediately, the warmth climbing up from the neck with the remorseless efficiency of a man who has been caught doing something he cannot explain. My hands dampened. My mind, which had managed the car journey, the door, and my mother's red eyes with something approaching functionality, now completely stalled.  

 	What does one say? What has ever been said in rooms like this that meant anything at all? Every formula available to me collapsed under examination. I’m sorry, as if I were at fault. I can’t believe it, as though belief were the relevant metric. He was a good man, though they did not know. They were all watching me, waiting for me to say something that would acknowledge what we were all here to grieve. 

 	"Hello," I blurted out. Raising my hand in a small wave. The wave of a man who just arrived at a semi-enjoyable social occasion. The wave of someone who has never experienced emotion and is approximating from descriptions. I let it die halfway through its arc, lowered my arm, and stood there in the small doorway, sweating quietly, and understood, with a depth of feeling that was almost comedic, that in all the catalogue of awkward moments I had survived in my life, I had never produced anything quite at this level. 

 	“Elliot’s still upstairs, if you want to see him.” My ma’s voice was little more than a whisper. She stood in the kitchen doorway, hands clasped so tightly together her knuckles had gone pale. Her eyes would not meet mine. Not this time; I wish they had. I remember how much I regretted seeing my nanny when she died. The day is stamped in my memory with too much detail. I hated it. The room had smelled faintly of old curtains and lavender. She looked peaceful; everyone said that. Peaceful, as though death were some gentle thing. As though the waxy stillness of her face and the strange weightless silence of her chest were peace. For months afterwards, whenever I closed my eyes, I saw her. Not the nanny who would cook us roast dinners. Not the nanny who offered us biscuits whenever we’d enter the kitchen. Instead, I saw the dead one. The empty shell lying in my nannies’ bed. I had regretted seeing her. Yet still, I had always believed I would have regretted not seeing her more. 

 	Now that same thought gnawed at me like a rat behind the walls. Maybe I would regret this too. Perhaps there is no escaping regret. Grief is nothing more than choosing what regret you would rather live with. I nodded to my ma once. She stepped aside. I turned toward the hallway and the staircase beyond. Behind me came the soft scrape of footsteps. My ma. The house felt different now. Smaller somehow. Quieter. As if the beating heart that kept it alive is slowly withering. 

 	Each step up the staircase seemed heavier than the last. Not physically. Reality itself settled upon my shoulders with every rise. A burden being loaded piece by piece. Halfway up, say, Nanny's stairlift. It had not moved in months. The beige seat was folded neatly against the wall. Dust clung to the armrests. It looked abandoned, forgotten, like a relic from a vanished age. I remembered the mechanical hum of it climbing these steps. Remembered waiting impatiently as she placed her tea and biscuits on the chair and sent them up, climbing up after them. The memory struck harder than I expected. I looked away.

 	The second-floor hallway stretched before me. As a child it had seemed enormous. A corridor fit for a castle. Now it looked narrow and ordinary. Strange how growing older robbed places of their magic but never their ghosts. Elliot’s room was the door on the right. I should have gone there immediately. Instead, I found myself drifting toward the large oak bookshelf standing against the far wall. Nanny’s bookshelf. The wood was dark with age; its shelves bowed slightly beneath decades of stories. Romance novels lined row after row, their spines cracked and faded from use. She had been an old romantic. The kind who believed love conquered all things. Wars. Distance. Time. Death. I wonder what she would think of that now. My fingers brushed along the spines. Elliot never cared much for romances. He likes stories about the end of the world. Supermutants and wastelands. Survivors trudging through ruined cities beneath black skies. Funny, he always liked media about death. I never thought death would take such an interest in him. The thought made my stomach twist. 

 	I turned back towards the stairs. My ma stood by Elliot’s door. Waiting. She had not touched the handle. The door remained shut. For a moment I stood there and stared at the weathered white door. My mind insisted on imagining what lay beyond. Elliot is sleeping in his bed with his head gently placed upon his blue pillow, hands folded neatly upon his chest. Waiting. The image felt both absurd and real all at once. As I approached, the copper-plated handle gleamed dully in the afternoon light. I reach towards it, and my hand stops mere inches away. I realise now that when the door opens, the possibility of all this being a fucked-up dream dies. As long as it remains closed, some foolish corner of my mind could pretend. Could invent miracles. Could whisper that there had been some mistake. Open the door, and reality would attack. Cold. Merciless. Final.

 	I wrap my fingers around the handle. My grip tightens. Nothing happened. I can’t do it. Not yet. The urge to turn away flooded through me. To go downstairs. To leave the house. To bury myself in distractions and silence and never speak of this day again. If I didn’t open the door, I wouldn’t feel any of it. Perhaps I could remain suspended in this moment forever. Neither before nor after. Neither hope nor grief. Just waiting. Waiting is its own kind of torture, though. 

 	I tried again. This time, the handle turned. The latch clicked. The sound seemed deafening. The door swung inward with a long wooden groan that echoed throughout the house. I pushed it open from the frame, keeping my body outside the room. As though distance could somehow protect me from what waited beyond. For several heartbeats, I did not enter. Standing there in the doorway, staring straight down to the very frame I am standing on, I am afraid that the moment I cross the threshold, I will leave one world behind and enter another. 

 	The moment I lifted my eyes, I knew I had made a mistake that could not be unmade. The smell reached me first. It came at me from the open room like a thing with intent, like a soldier charging at me with a bayonet. It drove the breath from me and the constructed peace from my mind in a single instant. I had built an image to prepare myself. I had spent the whole long climb of the stairs assembling it, Elliot composed, Elliot arranged, Elliot at rest. The smell tore through that image like a lance through silk, leaving nothing of it remaining. This was not rest. Not the quiet, dignified diminishment that I had seen on my nannie’s face. This was not what I had seen in films, not the clean, gentle dying that the living tell themselves about so they can bear to think of it. This was the raw truth of a body that had stopped, and the room had not been prepared for visitors, and no one had been able to make it otherwise. The room itself was wrong. 

 	I had known this room when it was clean. Not pristine, Elliot had never been a clean person; he was young and lived like it, but it was ordinary and lived-in, a space that held a person who was coming back to it. Now bottles lay scattered across the floor, dark plastic catching the dim light, and the air was thick and close, and the whole geography of the place had been overturned into something I did not recognise and did not want to. A room becomes a kind of portrait of the person who lives in it. This was a portrait of a final hour I had not been there to witness, rendered in objects, and I consumed it against my will. 

 	He was not in his bed. That was the detail that broke something in me, I think. Not the worst of it, but the one that arrived first and stayed. The image I had carried up the stairs had put him in his bed, and he was not there in reality. He was on the floor. His limbs were spread where they had fallen, with the particular helpless geometry of a body that has come to rest, however gravity decided. Someone, my ma perhaps, or my uncle who had found him, had laid his blue blanket over him, the same blanket I half remembered from years in this house, draped now across his body. I understood without being told that he was bare beneath. Someone had wanted to give him that much. That covering. That last small mercy of modesty, offered to a person past caring about it, by someone who could not bear to leave him uncovered. 

 	I looked at his face. I should not have. I knew it even as I did it, the way you know, falling, that the ground is coming. His face did not look peaceful. His eyes were open. Open and glassed and gone, the light behind them long since fled, fixed on nothing, on a point past the ceiling, on a great indifferent nothing that takes us all in the end. There was blood, dried, dark, and crusted. The bedsheets beside him had vomit on the top of them. What happened? The question rose up, huge and useless. What happened to you, and where was I, and why was I not here? I had been in a quiet examination room, watching a boy write under a summer sun, when this had happened, or had already happened. I had been turning off my phone so as not to disturb a stranger’s concentration. I had been alive and untroubled, and Elliot had been here, alone, ending, and I had not known. The not being able to know did nothing at all to soften the terrible conviction that I should have been here, that I would have done something, anything, that some better brother, some braver and more attentive man would have been here. The thought was not rational, I know that. Grief is not rational; it hands you guilt for crimes you did not commit and could not have prevented. 

 	His eyes remained open; I do not know why, but I expected them shut. Why did the paramedics not close them? The question grabbed me and would not let go, crowding out every other thought, consuming the whole of whatever capacity I had left for thinking. It was such a small thing. Such a small, ordinary courtesy. They close the eyes. That is what is done, what has always been done, since the first humans laid their first dead in the first ground; you close the eyes, you let them sleep, and you grant the living the mercy of a face that is not staring. Why had no one closed his eyes? Why had I been one to walk into this room and find it left undone, to receive this image whole and unsoftened, to be made a witness to a thing that should have been gentled before any brother saw it? There was no answer. There is never an answer to why these small cruelties exist. The world does not arrange itself for our protection. It had not arranged itself for Elliot. 

 	I took a step into the room. I would close them myself. That was the thought, the one decent, brave, brotherly thought I managed in all of this. I would cross the room and kneel beside him and close my brothers’ eyes with my own hand and grant him that last dignity that no one else had granted him. It was the right thing. It was the only thing. It was the single act left in the whole catalogue of love that I can still perform for him, and I took a step toward it. I took another, and the closer I came, the larger the fear grew, swelling up out of the floor of me, primal and overwhelming and entirely beyond the reach of reason. My hands would not. My legs would not. Some ancient part of me, older than courage, older than love, recoiled with a horror that had nothing to do with whether I loved him. I felt myself stop, and falter, and fail. 

 	I backed away. Out of the room I had not been able to enter, away from the brother I had not been able to touch, and I pulled the door closed between us, and his eyes stayed open in the dark on the other side of it, and I stood on the landing with my mother somewhere behind me and understood exactly what I was. 

 	A coward. 

 	I could not do him even that. The last small service. The closing of the eyes. The thing that any decent man would have done without thinking, and I had thought about it, and I had wanted to, and I had not been able, and I ran. I am a coward. I could not even do that much decency for my brother. 

 	My mother and I entered the sitting room together, and once more the family looked up at us. The same faces. The same turning of heads. But something had changed in me on the landing outside Elliot’s door; something had burned away, and I found I no longer cared what they saw when they looked at me, no longer felt the heat climb my neck, or the dampness gather in my palms. The capacity for embarrassment had been a luxury of a boy who had not yet seen what I had just seen. I had spent it. There was none left. 

 	I sat down by the furnace. It was the old gas fire set into the wall, the one that had warmed this room through every winter of my childhood, and it was burning now, though the day was not cold, because grief makes people do small, senseless comforting things, and someone had wanted the room warm. I sat close to it and stared into the middle distance with my eyes wide and unblinking and saw nothing in the room at all. 

 	I saw his eyes. I could not stop seeing his eyes. They had followed me down the stairs, those eyes, glassed and open and fixed on nothing, and they hung now in the air before me, superimposed over the faces of my living family like a thing painted on glass. Dead. That was the word my mind kept returning to, turning over and over, unable to make it mean anything and unable to let it go. They were just dead. Not sleeping. Not peaceful. Not gentled into the appearance of rest. Just dead, in the plainest and most terrible sense of the word, and if I had not closed them and no one had closed them, they would always remain open in my memory, long after they had been shut. 

 	The heat of the furnace flushed my cheeks. I let it. It was the only thing I could feel that I understood. Around me, the family had already begun to do what families always do. They were telling stories about him. I had never really cared for that. The instinct that gathers people in a room and sets them telling tales of the newly dead had always struck me as faintly absurd, even irritating, a performance of grief rather than the thing itself. As though a man could be summed up and put away in anecdotes. Even I believe it is not an appropriate response to a person ceasing to exist to trade fond memories by a gas fire. It annoys me with the particular irritability of a man whose every nerve has been stripped bare, who has just seen the truth of death laid out on a bedroom floor and finds the room’s gentle reminiscing obscene against it. They were telling stories about a smiling Elliot, a living Elliot, and I had just left the other one upstairs behind a closed door, and the two could not be reconciled, and the stories eroded the walls i had erected. 

 	Uncle Brent shifts in his seat. I dislike Brent; always have. He is a large man, large in the soft and self-satisfied way of a man who has never gone without and resents the suggestion that he ever might. He has a manner of filling a room that has nothing to do with his size and everything to do with his conviction that the room is his to fill. He had been making jokes. Small ones, low ones, the kind a certain sort of a man cannot help but make even in a house of mourning, because silence frightens him, and he would rather be laughing than feeling. How, watching him, how can he make jokes? How can he sit in this house with Elliot still upstairs and make jokes? I try not to say anything; I am good at that. I have made it a discipline. 

 	Then he sat up. In a way, men do when they are about to take the floor, with the small adjustment of posture that says attend to me; I am about to speak. The room turned toward him. He let it. When he had the silence, he spoke. “Since Elliot is adopted, we were thinking we’d ask his biological parents if they want to put him in their family grave.”

 	The words went into me like cold water. For a moment. I am not sure I even breathed. I sat there by the furnace with the heat on my face and the dead eyes hanging in the air before me, and I let the sentence arrange itself in my mind, letting its shape fully become clear, and as it did, I felt the blood rise in me, not the flush of the fire now but something hotter, something from much deeper down, a heat that started in my chest and climbed. 

 	The family that wanted nothing to do with him. That was the thing of it. That was the rot, the centre of what he had said. Elliot’s blood family, the ones that had given him up, who had been a wound for him for as long as I had known him, an absence he carried and seldom spoke of and never fully healed, those people were to be consulted now. Asked about their preference. Granted, at the very end, a say in the disposal of a boy they had wanted no part of in life. They had not been there for him when he cried about his relationship with his mother or him feeling unwanted. And now they were to be handed, gift-wrapped, the right to claim him in death, to take him from the family that had actually raised him, actually loved him, actually grieved him, and lay him in a grave among strangers who shared his blood and nothing else. 

	I know exactly why Brent was proposing this. It was not delicate. It was not some tender regard for biological ties. It was the plot in our family ground, the cost of it, and the cold arithmetic of a man who had looked at the death of a twenty-three-year-old boy and seen, somewhere in the back of his small, cold heart, an opportunity to save himself the expense. He would discard Elliot. He would hand him off to strangers and call it generosity. And he would save his pennies. 

	I am, by long habit, a watcher. A waiter. A man who keeps his peace because the peace is usually not worth the breaking, because most of what people say is wrong in ways too small to be worth the fight, because I learned from an older relative the cost of speaking is generally higher than the cost of enduring. I have sat through a hundred dinners holding my tongue. I have let a thousand small wrongnesses pass. I could not let this pass. It rose past the point where I could hold it, past discipline, past the long-trained instinct toward silence, and I heard my own voice come out of me low, hard, and shaking with something I did not entirely recognise. “Sorry, Brent. That’s bullshit. He’s our family. He deserves to be in our grave.”

	The room changed. I felt it change, felt the atmosphere shift the way air shifts before weather, a pressure dropping, and every person in the room suddenly going still. Brent’s face moved through several things in quick succession: surprise first, then something that wanted to be wounded, and the expression of a man who has been spoken to in a way he does not believe he has earned. Perhaps it was the words that I said; the quiet one had opened his mouth and made trouble. I watched them all recalibrate. I watched it happen in real time, around the warm and grieving room. They were looking at me the way they had always looked at me, the way I now understood they had perhaps always been going to look at me, regardless of what I did, as the child. As the boy who did not yet understand the world. As someone who had not earned a place in the conversation of adults and was now embarrassing himself by demanding one. Grief struck young. 

	They did not see a man who had just climbed the stairs, opened the door, and seen what waited on the other side. They saw a boy taking out his feelings of it. The worst of it was that I could not entirely convince myself they were wrong about all of it. I did not know the world the way they knew it. I had not learned yet to weigh a grave plot against grief. Perhaps that was their kind of wisdom that I lacked. If that was wisdom, I wanted no part of it. If becoming the sort of person who could say what Brent had said was the price of growing up, then I would stay a child, and gladly, and I would keep my brother in our ground if I had to dig it myself. 

 	The air in the sitting room had grown too heavy to breathe, so I left it. I have never been able to remain where I am not wanted, and I was not wanted there, not truly, not as a voice. Whatever I said would change nothing. The decision was not mine to make and never had been. It belonged to the elders, to the small assembly of aunts and uncles who had appointed themselves, somewhere across the years, the almighty council that ruled this family and brooked no challenge from below. I could rage at them or I could leave. Only one of those preserved any dignity, and I had little enough of that left after the landing. 

	I went into the kitchen. One of my uncles, I like Gary, Brent’s brother, stood at the counter with his head bowed in his hands. He did not hear me enter, or he did not acknowledge it if he did. His shoulders were heavily hanging, like a man who’s trying to grieve without making a sound. I stopped in the doorway and looked at him and found I had nothing to offer. What words exist for this? What could I say to him that the silence was not already saying better? There is a particular helplessness in standing before another person’s sorrow with empty hands, knowing that anything you say won’t be enough. 

	So I said nothing. I turned to leave him to it. I found my way blocked. Two officers stood in the hall, broad and still. I looked past their shoulders and saw why. The paramedics were bringing Elliot down. They were taking him away for the autopsy, for the cold examinations the law demands of the young who die without warning. They carried him down the stairs in a large black bag and placed him on a gurney. My brother was being taken. They wheeled him out the chipped black door into the grey afternoon, the black van waiting patiently. I felt tears rise then. Felt them gather hot behind my eyes and felt my throat close around them. I pushed them down into the deep black pit where I push everything. I don’t know why. I have asked myself since and found no answer that satisfies. There was no one to perform for, no composure left worth protecting. He was leaving the house we grew up in for the final time, and I was being given, at last, the grief I had been unable to reckon with all day, and I refused it. I held it back the way I always have, by some reflex older than choice, and I watched my brother carried out the door dry-eyed, and I hate myself for it and could not stop it. 

Chapter Three

Lost

We drove home in silence. My mother wept in the seat beside me the whole way, quietly. I had no comfort to give her. I had given everything I had to the long day already, and there was nothing left in me but the ringing emptiness that comes after. 

	When I climbed out of the car, my knees nearly went from under me. I had not known how weak they were until I asked them to bear my weight. The walk to my bedroom, a walk I have made ten thousand times without thought, stretched before me like one of the labours set upon Heracles, each step a trial demanded by some god who wished to see how much a man could carry before he shattered. I am not Heracles. I will crumble. 

	My room was pristine. I noticed the moment I entered, and the noticing was like a knife. Everything in its place. Everything ordered. The exact and terrible opposite of the room I had left behind in my nanny's house, with its scattered bottles and its ruin. I had kept my room clean. I had kept my room clean while I failed to keep my brother. I knew I failed him, now with a certainty that no argument could touch. My mother believed we had failed Elliot, and she was right, and I was proof of it. He was my brother in every way that the word means anything, and after our grandmother died, I had not checked on him. Not enough. Not nearly enough. I had meant to. Every day I had meant to. Tomorrow, I had told myself, the way I told Kieran I would see him tomorrow, the way I tell myself everything. Tomorrow I will call him. Tomorrow I will go round. Tomorrow had become next week, and next week had become a handful of visits over six months, and now there were no more tomorrows in which to put it right. 

	The only true mirror a man ever looks into is the eyes of a loved one who has died. I had looked into that mirror today, on the floor of that room, and I was afraid of what it showed me. Not a good brother. Not a strong man. A small, frightened fool who had let one of the most precious things in his life sit untended because he always believed there would be more time. I sat on the edge of my bed and opened my phone and searched, of all things, for songs. For the funeral. For a playlist. As though a man’s whole life could be gathered into a list of songs, as though I could measure out twenty-three years in three-minute pieces and call it tribute. Nothing was good enough. Nothing could be. How do you choose the music for a person? How do you reduce a person to a soundtrack? I tried, and I failed, and I gave up. The giving up was so familiar, so exactly the shape of every other surrender of my life, that I almost laughed at myself. Classic. Running away again. Putting down a thing too hard to carry. When will I ever be better than this?  

	I could not make myself do anything but remember. We used to break into abandoned places, Elliot and I. Empty buildings, forgotten lots, the bones of structures that the world had finished with. We would blare music into rooms that had not heard a sound in years and climb to the roofs and leap from too-high edges into whatever waited below, laughing, certain of our own immortality the way only the young can be. We had so much fun. We had so much fun. Those words seem so small now, obscene against what came after, but they are the truest words I have. We were happy in those wrecked, echoing places. 

	I don’t want to bury him. That is all I can think now. When he is in the ground, I will never get him back. There is no door I can open onto that. No second attempt is taken. I moved to the grey couch, the only thing I have of my grandmother, the only inheritance I got or wanted, and put my head into my hands and pressed the heels of them into my eyes and only then noticed the headache that had been building there for hours. His eyes were still behind mine. Still open. Still glassed. I am a man of faith. I have always believed in God, and in that moment, I found I did not care if he was in heaven. I wanted him here. 

	The questions came, the ones that had been circling me all day, waiting for the dark and quiet to close in. Did he suffer? Did he know what was happening to him? Did he know he was alone? The last one destroyed me. I broke. Whatever I was holding back since the examination room, since the car, since the doorway where I pushed down the tears for reasons I could not name gave way all at once. Ugly graceless sobbing of a man with no one watching and nothing left to protect. I climbed into bed and curled in upon myself like a child, knees to chest, and let it come. I am ashamed. I hate myself. I hate God for taking him, and I hate whatever else had taken him. Beneath all the hating, I only wanted, desperately, for him to know, needed it, with my whole shaking body, that he had never, not for one moment, been alone. 

	I curled tighter. The tears soaked into the sheets. I am afraid to sleep. Afraid of what I would see there. Afraid to face him in whatever country the dead keep because what if he hates me for not being there in his final hour, for the visits I put off? What if he blames me? So I lay in the dark and did not let sleep take me and cried. I wondered uselessly whether any of it had gone differently if I had only been a little more insistent. If only I had said "today" instead of "tomorrow," even once more than I did. 

	I did not sleep that night.

	I don’t sleep much anymore.