Help! I'm Alive, page 11
In Jay’s room, she starts with the closet, folding all of his clothes into boxes labeled accordingly. She tries not to think about it, to not pay attention to his things, to not think about the journal, to not think about him, not in a solid way at least. Thinking about him like a person makes things hard, so she prefers to think of him only as an idea, an example, a simile. She reminds herself that movers and cleaners are efficient because they’re detached; they don’t assign memories to things so they can simply categorize. She tries to do the same, dumping the contents of his dresser drawers into boxes and quickly folding and sorting them so that when Lisa is ready to donate she can go through them just as quickly. After she finishes with his clothes, she untacks the posters, boxes up his tae kwon do medals and trophies and clears the dusty bookshelves. He has stacks of old National Geographic magazines and a collection of secondhand books with cracked spines and yellowed pages. She sits cross-legged on the dingy carpet and thumbs through his leather-bound collected works of Shakespeare, the dog-eared copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and tries to imagine him reading them. The National Geographics, all old library copies, have pictures and even whole pages torn out, and she wonders if he was using them for some art project. She remembers that he’d always been artistic. Jay loved to doodle and he and Ash spent one summer making comic strips. She wishes she’d kept some of them, but of course it’s hard to know what’s important in the moment, what evidence of daily life will be rendered meaningful when the time comes.
She places them all in a box and seals them with tape before taking a moment to survey. With everything packed and the walls stripped of personality, the room feels decidedly abandoned. She’s disappointed. She expected to find something, some clue, another journal or a letter, offering some insight into what made Jay different from any other boy. The longer she looked through his things, the more normal he seemed, the more tragic it all is or was. The only thing left on the wall is a photo of Jay and his mother at his grade school graduation. She remembers that day and how excited Ash and Jay were to be heading to high school that fall. She stares at the photo, thinking of all the plans they made, and leaves the picture hanging there.
She sits at the desk and takes his journal out of her purse. She planned on putting it in one of the boxes for Lisa to find in due time. She imagined a year would go by before she was ready to go through them and by then maybe it would be easier to read. But now, as she rereads it, she knows that time won’t make it any easier. How can you accept that your child was not who you imagined him to be? That the light you felt for them was matched by some darkness, some shadow life? If only he had left her a note or a letter, something just for her that could be of comfort. She examines his penmanship, the curve and line of each letter, the erratic spacing, the fragmented thoughts. Pen in hand, she turns his journal to a new page and begins to write his final entry.
April 2
Dear Mom,
I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you.
Dear Mom,
If you’re reading this, it means I’m gone. Please don’t think that you could have or should have done something. This is on me.
Dear Mom,
By the time you read this, I’ll be gone. There’s no way I can explain it to you that will make sense. I’m sorry.
Pavan drops the pen. She can’t find the right words, his words, and the failure, the forgery, makes her jittery, as if electricity is running through her looking for an outlet. She opens her purse and from the inside pouch takes out his remaining joint. Her hands shake and fumble as she lights it. She inhales until the swell and current of emotion subside. She puts the journal back in her bag and reaches for her phone, mindlessly scrolling. She sits on his bed and types Jacob McAlister into Facebook. His profile pic is him looking straight into the camera, tongue sticking out, hand in the air in a peace gesture. She scrolls down. His wall is full of condolences. His posts, all boarding and parkour videos, him and his friends skating and scaling walls. His Instagram account is more of the same — parkour, thrill-seeking, dangerous locations. As she scans through, seeing what he liked, who he was, she realizes how strange it is that even though he’s gone, his digital self still exists in a cloud, all bits and particles and uploads and downloads. It seems depressing to her that online lives go on. Every year his friends will get a reminder that it’s his birthday, memory notifications of past events and friends of friends will see him listed as “people you may know.” She puts the joint out on the mattress frame and lies down on top of the covers. They smell stale, in need of a wash, like gym clothes left in a bag. She wonders if that’s how Jay smelled and if Lisa sleeps here just to be close to him.
She stares at the cracked ceiling, mapping the water damage, connecting the stains like landscapes until her eyes feel heavy with sadness and sleep. She dreams that she’s moving boxes into a U-Haul, and each box is heavier than the next. She grabs a dolly and stacks them in the truck but each time she returns to the truck with more boxes, the others have fallen open, the contents of clothing and collectables spilling out. She panics and tries to stuff them back in but can’t. Suddenly the truck is a boat and the boxes fall off the deck one by one and sink. She jumps in after them, thrashing about, but can’t save anything. She wakes to the sound of Lisa’s voice calling her name with an upturned concern.
Pavan sits up, confused and embarrassed. Lisa is standing in front of her, holding the cat.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I must have fallen asleep. I finished packing and then I . . .” Pavan glances at her watch. “I’m so sorry. I guess . . .” She pauses, aware of the skunky odor in the air and how it all must look. She closes her eyes for a second and tries to regain her composure. “I should go.” She gets up and reaches for her purse but drops it open-mouthed onto the floor. “Shit, I’m sorry.” Pavan kneels down to pick up the contents, stuffing the journal back in her bag before Lisa notices it.
Once in her car, she locks the door and exhales in short breaths. It’s all she can manage. Her chest is tight, her pulse racing and the more she tries to talk herself down, the dizzier she feels. A numbness sets in and she presses her head against the side window. “It’s okay,” she tells herself. “Just breathe. You’re okay.” She closes her eyes and focuses on her breath, counting it in and out. She opens her eyes and locks in on the children playing on the jungle gym in the park across the street. She watches as two boys race to the swings and propel themselves into the air, heads thrown back, legs pumping, higher and higher they go, until finally they can go no more and their legs go limp and they free fall.
Day 65
Anik fills his backpack with ten textbooks and slings it over his shoulder.
He steps on the treadmill and starts to walk, keeping pace with the hiking program that changes elevation and speed every few minutes. After ten minutes his legs feel heavy and his breath labors. He keeps pace and pushes on, knowing that his body will adjust; the first two kilometers are always the hardest. He’s walked fifteen kilometers, in three sets of five treks, every other day for two weeks. On alternate days he uses the stair climber and does high-intensity interval training with lunges, squats and sit-ups, a routine he found on YouTube that’s meant to build core strength. He’s ordered his travel backpack and hiking boots online and has ransacked the shed, locating Peter’s camping and outdoor supplies from his tree-planting days. Peter worked in the camps all summer to pay for his university tuition and said that digging in the dirt, planting trees he wouldn’t see grow, was metaphoric, life-changing even. Anik didn’t understand at the time, but now he can see that the dredging and sowing was all a spiritual excavation, a karmic act of giving and unearthing.
He used to love to dig in the dirt; he planted the magnolia tree out front and for a time tended to a vegetable garden with Peter and Ash. They planted tomatoes, zucchinis, carrots and spinach in raised beds in the corner of the backyard. Anik watered them daily and watched closely for signs of life, measuring growth with his wooden ruler. When critters started nibbling at the leafy greens, they made a scarecrow, repurposing some of their dollar-store Halloween decorations. They named the scarecrow Oz and even pretended the critters that they were trying to keep away were the flying monkeys. Despite their best efforts, Oz did not deter whatever was feasting in their garden and within a few weeks the bounty was decimated, trampled through and eaten. It was likely a deer. Though they weren’t native to the area, a few had been spotted roaming around. One had even made it on the front page of the local paper when it attempted to cross a busy intersection during rush hour, motorists and pedestrians alike helping it to safe passage. Peter and Pavan dismantled the raised bed and built Ash a wooden playhouse that still sits in the corner of the yard, with wisteria, groundcover and bleeding hearts lining its perimeter.
When Anik opens the basement blinds, he sees the yard at eye level, and imagines that he too must look like something growing in the garden. His head aboveground and his body rooted below, tucked into the foundation of the house, buried in thick cement. Even now, from the treadmill he can see Peter, spreading a thin layer of seed and fertilizer on the grass. Peter, like most of the neighborhood dads, is obsessed with lawncare and reads countless blogs on how to have a golf-green lawn. The clerks at Home Depot know him by name and he always stops and chats with them, asking for advice, coming home with some new spray or mulch. In the years since the vegetable garden, he’s built the playhouse, a trellis for the wisteria, a fire pit and even a pergola. Anik, seventeen at the time, helped him with the pergola. He liked the smell of the pressure-treated lumber and even the chemical scent of the stain, but what he loved most was seeing the project complete. They spent that first summer eating outside under the pergola, barbecue dinners and badminton in the backyard. Ash was only twelve at the time, and even though he hadn’t hit his growth spurt, he seemed to have escaped the awkward phase of adolescence. Unlike Anik, who couldn’t swing a bat or throw a baseball, Ash was good at all sports, including badminton. He and Peter counted how many times they could rally the birdie, and Anik just sat out and watched from beneath the pergola. The following year Pavan planted honeysuckle and trained it along the beams, creating a fragrant canopy for hummingbirds. While the other two played some sport, she and Anik sat beneath and watched the birds hover and drink from the trumpeted flowers. They could sit in silence together like that for what he remembered as hours, only it wasn’t that long at all. His focus on a bird, suspended midair, its wings beating too fast to see, put him into a reverie. He hopes that his pilgrimage will take him to this place of contemplation. It’s not about finding himself. It’s about finding something more.
Sometimes he wishes he could be like his peers and settle into his Insta twenties, but he isn’t satisfied with cheap drinks, expensive lattes, snowflake sentiment and trigger warnings. He doesn’t understand when adults say that their twenties were the best time of their lives. There has to be something better than pretending you’re something you aren’t. He knows that Jay must have felt the same way and at times that’s a comfort to him; at others, that shared isolation is frightening.
He presses stop on the treadmill and dismounts, wiping the sweat from his brow as he crashes on the couch. Exhausted, he closes his eyes to the sounds of the suburbs — crows cawing, cars starting, a distant lawnmower and somewhere a chainsaw hacking. Sounds of busyness, efficiency, productivity. The sound of living on a conveyor belt, rolling on, every stage and station bringing something new to spoil what was good at the start. Ash, in his early teenage angst, tried to explain the futility of progress and perfectionism during the family’s annual “what we are thankful for” Thanksgiving Day ritual. “Michael Jackson is a perfect example. He was the king of pop before he started to mess with his face. All that plastic surgery made him ugly. He should have appreciated what he had. Instead he messed it up.”
Anik, having never been a fan of MJ, could only partly agree with his brother. “So what you’re saying is things go from bad to worse?” He laughed at his own pun and stood up, attempting to moonwalk around the table.
“But seriously,” Ash said, “I’m saying, we should be grateful for what we have and stop trying to change it into something we think it should be.”
There was a collective aww followed by laughter, followed by “Pass the gravy” and it was another good wholesome Thanksgiving. Anik had a nice childhood, he had everything a boy could want, and yet he went on wanting.
As he watches Peter tending to the grass, Anik thinks that it’s the wanting that is his downfall. It’s not a pursuit of perfection or success but a pursuit of truth. Perhaps knowing something would fill up the empty space of wanting something.
Day 69
It’s seven a.m. and Winona hasn’t slept since she saw Jay’s posts.
She tried to hack his account to delete them, to stop him from haunting her feeds but she can’t figure out his passwords and so there he is commenting from the afterlife, wishing her a happy birthday and posting throwback pics. People from school have been screenshotting the posts, adding them to their stories with ghost stickers and exclamation points. Every year he spammed her, going to great lengths to get the timing just right, writing and scheduling posts in advance, so he could be there to watch her reaction unfold. Mostly she acted annoyed but he knew that secretly she liked that he remembered. She hadn’t celebrated her birthday since her mom died. Though her dad tried to keep up the ritual of birthday cake for breakfast and breakfast for dinner, it wasn’t the same as when her mom did it. Her mom filled the kitchen with streamers and sat her down at the table like she was royalty. She played music and they’d dance around the kitchen, making up their own lyrics to popular songs. Her dad was usually there, camera in hand, recording it for posterity but never really participating.
Her tenth birthday was only a few weeks after the funeral and her dad tried, but it was obvious that he was trying. Trying to celebrate and trying to forget at the same time. When she turned thirteen she told him that she was too old for dumb birthday parties. She mocked his attempts to plan a slumber party and returned the gifts he bought her for cash. She was mean about it on purpose. She can still see his face, how he had to look away when she said, “You’re the worst dad ever. I wish you had died instead of Mom.”
“I wish that too. Every day,” he said.
After that, he surrendered, giving her cash or over-the-top guilt gifts. She got what she wanted; nothing would replace her birthday memories with her mom. The bright white kitchen, the glare of morning sun, time so slow that she could see particles of dust float in the rays. It couldn’t possibly have been how she remembered it. Jay thought she was being dumb for not celebrating. He never bought into what she said she wanted and saw through her lies. Ever since he died she’s all tangled up in them. Unsure. A mess, and here he is, still counseling.
“Chill. It’s your birthday.”
She repeats this to herself when she’s at school, when people point and whisper, when randoms say “Happy birthday” with mock cheer. She keeps her head up.
Ash walks toward her. “Hey, birthday girl!” She expects him to keep walking but he stops right in front of her. “You doing okay?”
She nods, aware of the double takes and head-craning around them, people wondering.
Ash doesn’t seem to notice or care and keeps talking. “I saw the Snaps.”
“Yeah.”
“Intense.”
“Obviously.”
“I didn’t think you’d be at school today.”
“Can’t keep missing. My dad’s on high alert since the thing at group.”
“Does that mean you can’t skip?”
“I probably shouldn’t.”
“Too bad. I was thinking we could go do something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why you being so nice to me?”
“Am I not supposed to be?” He backs up and makes some awkward face, an on-purpose this is my weird face look. “Just thought it’s your birthday and all.”
* * *
They head out and walk down the street toward the 7-Eleven, where they load up on sour keys, gummy bears and Slurpees. Sugar-high, they cross the field and sit down on the skate park bleachers and toss gummies into their mouths.
“Have you ever skated before?” she asks.
“Nah, not my thing.”
“Brian,” she yells and stands up to get his attention. He skates over. She introduces them. He was a friend of Jay’s. “Can I borrow your board?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says, looking up at her and then at his scuffed-up Chucks.
“Come on, just for a quick one.” She smiles the way other girls do when they want something.
“Alright.” He hands her the board. “Just a few minutes.”
Ash watches as she pushes off, gathering speed and skimming the bowl. After a few turns around the course, she pops back up and over the rim, handing the board back to Brian who high-fives her before pushing off.
