I only realized that Frankie was there when she knelt in front of me, her face tear-streaked and full of sympathy. She and Jared had been tight, and it alarmed me that she was so worried for me, because it made me realize that she was so right to be worried. I didn’t have a clue how to handle this.
“You think it could be true?” I asked her, my own voice startling me with how it broke on the words. “You think Dean is pulling some shitty prank on us?”
She shook her head, black trails running, and running, and running down her face, her makeup in ruins. She didn’t even wipe it off, as though she hadn’t noticed. “No, Tristan. Cory saw him firsthand, and you know he wouldn’t joke about something like this. Look at him. It’s destroyed him too.”
I couldn’t. I couldn’t look at anyone. I looked down at my hands, my shame almost as strong as my sense of denial. I knew that as soon as the first one caught up to the second, I’d be in for it. “This is my fault,” I sobbed.
Frankie threw her arms around me, sobbing with me.
In the background somewhere, I heard my mother shout a loud agreement. She’d always instilled a sense of responsibility in me, to look after Jared, and I felt it like a stab to the heart. He’d been my little brother, and it had been my job, my duty, to watch over him, and while I’d been lost in my own depression, he’d slipped away, without me there to stop him, without me there to even hold his hand at the end.
That train of thought was pure masochism, and as I followed it, the denial left me, and the pain came, and I broke with it. I knew, absolutely, that I could die from this pain, that I could very well kill myself just to escape it.
I did the only thing I could in the face of utter despair. I reached out for a lifeline.
“Does Danika know?” I asked, pulling back.
Frankie shook her head, sniffling. “I haven’t called her yet.”
“Will you call her now? Will you tell Danika that I need her?” My voice broke again on the words. “She won’t take my calls.”
She patted my shoulder, standing. “Of course I will. I’ll go outside to make the call. It’s too loud in here.”
I grabbed her hand before she could move away. “Do you know if she’s listened to my messages?”
She squeezed my hand. “I don’t think she has. She told me a week ago that her phone has been buried in a drawer. I’ll have to call Bev to get ahold of her.”
I nodded. “Will you tell her to listen to them, if she gets a chance?”
“I will. I’ll be right back, k?”
I just nodded, looking down at my hands, watching my tears smack against them, surprised that I could actually hear them hitting my knuckles over the sound of my mom howling.
Frankie returned quickly, looking even more upset than before. “Bev said she’d tell her, but she’d taken the boys to run errands, and didn’t have her phone, so she isn’t sure how long that’ll take. She said that, as soon as she returns, Jerry will bring her over.”
I tried to be okay with that, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t cope with this for one more second without her, let alone some indefinite period of time.
I got up, then sat again, feeling totally lost. Dark thoughts circled through my head, thoughts of guilt, and agony, and self-destruction.
I found my phone, and just stared at it for sixty-three minutes, while I waited in purgatory, counting every minute, because every minute felt like an hour.
When sixty-three minutes had come and gone, I knew I couldn’t wait another. I got up, threw my phone on the couch, and burst out the front door.
It was pouring rain outside, which I’d somehow failed to notice before. I didn’t care now, breaking into a run, running from anything and everything, intending to run until I literally dropped.
DANIKA
I knew that something was terribly wrong the second I stepped in the front door. The look of caring sympathy on Bev’s face would haunt me.
It’s strange the things that haunted you for years and years after a tragedy. The look on Bev’s face when she braced to tell me the news, the tears in Jerry’s eyes, a man who I’d never seen cry, the way the boys didn’t say a word, as though clued into what was going on as soon as they saw their mother’s face.
Some of it you’d expect; the last time I’d hugged Jared, the last time I’d seen him smile, the last time he’d called me for some silly reason, or for no reason at all. Those were a sweet sort of haunting though.
The bitter haunting came in the form of finding missed calls from Jared weeks later, calls that I’d missed because I’d been so wrapped up in my own problems, my own dysfunctions. The idea that I could have spoken to him again before he passed gave me the most acute sense of loss, because I’d thrown away something precious. There was even one precious message from him that I could never find the heart to erase. In fact, I kept that phone in a drawer by my bed, years after I’d upgraded, because I couldn’t bear to let the sound of his voice be erased.
Hand in hand with the haunting, came regret.
As Jerry drove me to Leticia’s house, I started listening to Tristan’s messages, as he’d asked Frankie to ask me to do. As I listened, and realized that, while I’d been wrapped up in convincing myself that he could never give me what I needed, he’d been ready to give it to me, if I’d only bothered to listen.
I felt such regret then, because there was some chance, some strange persistent idea in my head, that if Tristan and I had made up faster, Jared might still be alive. He may have been with us, instead off somewhere without us, being reckless, getting hurt. Losing his life.
That regret taught me a lot about guilt, about how it supersedes all logic, and how it never really goes away, even with time.
All of the what ifs could destroy me, if I let them. That made me think of Tristan, and how, if I was feeling this unendurable, overwhelming pain at the loss of Jared, I couldn’t even imagine what he must be going through.
I couldn’t get to him fast enough. The idea that he was going through this without me, that he’d asked for me, and I hadn’t already been there to hold him, quite simply tore me apart.
We pulled up to the curb just as he was tearing away from the house. I was out of the car, sprinting after him, before the car had come to a complete stop.
I screamed his name, but he didn’t hear me, or at least he didn’t stop. My flip-flops fell off, and my feet pounded bare against the sidewalk, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to let him be alone, not while I still had breath left in me.
I chased him in the pouring rain until I my lungs were on fire, a sense of desperation in every footfall that pounded hard against the wet pavement.
I screamed his name until my voice was hoarse, and I was too breathless to call out. But there was no way for me to catch him. He was too fast, and showed no signs of tiring, and so I found the breath to scream some more.
What finally slowed him was reaching a cul-de-sac, with nowhere else to go. There he paused for long enough for me to catch him with a wild, desperate hug from behind.
He stiffened, then turned, falling to his knees, his face buried in my stomach. He was as out of breath as I was, but that didn’t stop his helpless sobs.
I gripped him tight against me, and his arms wrapped around me. We didn’t speak for a long time, just clutched each other, and cried like the world was ending, because a sweet, irreplaceable part of it had.
When he finally spoke, his voice almost too soft to catch, it broke my heart all over again.
“I told you that I needed you. But now I need you to survive. Forever. I won’t live through this without you, and I’m selfish for telling you that, but it’s the truth. You’re my rock, Danika. I can’t ever lose you, or I’ll follow Jared, I know I will.”
The rain was pounding against us, soaking through our clothes, running down our faces, mixing with our tears. I barely noticed.
I bent down, crushing his face into me until I’d reached his ear. “You have me. I’m yours, and I’m not going anywhere, not ever again.”
“I’m sorry. I was an ass. It was pure stubborn pride and jealousy that made me go off on you like that.”
“Jealousy?”
“Yes. Jealousy. So much of it that I have dreams about pounding what’s his name and skinny jean’s into the dirt. I hated that you had a word for this. A word made cheap by using it on other men, and then throwing it in my face, like that should convince me to say it back. I don’t have a word for this, because I’ve never felt this before. But I do love you. I just wish there was a way to explain to you that love is just the start of it, because it’s turned into so much more for me.”
It was the most bittersweet moment, a moment of finding something so perfect, right in the shadow of losing someone so precious.
EPILOGUE
I spoke at the funeral. Tristan and his mother were in no shape for it, and it didn’t feel right not to have someone represent the family.
“Jared was just one month from turning twenty-two when he left us,” I began. “Such a short life, but in that short time, he made such an impact on so many people.”
Tristan had his head in his hands. He was still, but I knew he was crying.
I tried to keep it together as I continued, but my throat was so scratchy that I felt I might choke with unshed tears.
“I want you all to look to each side of you. Study those sitting beside you. I don’t even have to ask, I can simply tell you with utter conviction that every person you are looking at adored Jared Vega. That is his legacy. Our love for him. He was the best of us, torn from us much, much too soon, but everyone who knew him had a life touched by his beautiful soul. Where there is love there is forever, and Jared will live forever in our hearts.”
Leticia was sobbing loudly, and I had to take a few deep breaths to continue with any semblance of composure.
“Beloved brother, beloved friend, beloved son, you have left us far too soon, but our love for you cannot be measured in seconds, or minutes, or hours. It cannot be measured in years, or decades, or centuries. It is beyond the hands of time now. This love I feel for you can never die, will never fade, and cannot tarnish. It has become bigger than this life.”
I had to stop and take three deep breaths as I heard the quiet sound of Tristan weeping brokenly into his hands.
I held up the black rubber wristband I had clutched in my hand. “You were all handed one of these on your way in. I want you to hold it in your hand, and study it. If you knew Jared, you know that he’s had his arms covered in these for years. Since before he was fourteen, even before it was trendy, he sported at least one on each wrist. None of us will look at this little band again without thinking of him.”
“Nothing could make us forget this sweet son, this loyal brother, this understanding friend, but let this also be our reminder of him. Often I will wear this on my wrist, or hold it in my hand and remember how he made me laugh, how I loved his smile, how he brought joy to all in his path.”
I concluded by reciting Away by James Whitcomb Riley.
“I cannot say and I will not say