My therapist, Dr. Kennedy, once told me, “That’s what makes them best friendships.”
As usual, Evan is saving a seat for me on the bus, and I slide in. Another year down. Ten years. No one said anything. No one ever says anything. Nothing online. Nothing in the Sunday edition of the Lowe County Times—“the Loco”—that Mom still has delivered every week.
Memory holes are efficient.
“One more week,” Evan groans. “If we didn’t have all that snow, we’d be out by now.”
“It’s just a week.”
“A week out of our young lives,” he says. “We’ll never get this week back.”
“Your parents can buy you another week.”
He splutters laughter. Evan’s laughter, even when surprised and uncontrolled, is musical and clear, unlike my own, which is rare and snorty and mucus-y.
Rich people can afford anything, even better laughter.
“Even Richard and Myra can’t buy time,” he tells me. “I bet they’d try, though.”
Richard Danforth is a hunter. A “gentleman hunter,” Evan’s mom says. He owns expensive rifles and shotguns, stocks inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl. Titanium triggers and blued steel barrels that he polishes twice a season. He’s NRA. He votes Republican. “For financial reasons.”
Myra Danforth is patrician and WASP-y, with an immaculate coif of frosty blond hair that comes just to her chin and breasts that she holds high and enhanced. “Fortieth birthday present,” Evan muttered to me once. I’ve never seen her smile—the closest I’ve ever witnessed is a slight upturn of one corner of her mouth. I don’t know if she’s extra-reserved in my presence or if she’s just incapable of smiling. Botox or genetics or disposition—who knows?
She’s not a MILF. Because I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near her, even though I admit I’ve fantasized about her more than once. There’s a difference between what you’ll do in your mind and what you’ll actually do for real.
I think of those perfectly sculpted breasts and I realize Evan’s wrong—rich people can buy time. Or a decent replica. They can stall it, put it off, freeze it, while the rest of us just lurch along with our snorty laughs into our inevitable futures.
“You should come over today,” Evan is saying while I’m silently judging his family. “Downloaded the demo for Stark Weather this morning.”
“I have some stuff I have to do,” I tell him.
“Like what?”
I invent an excuse—something about a dentist appointment—and he drops it. A few seconds later, I happen to catch his reflection in the bus window as he drops his eyelids and grimaces. He’s my best friend, so I’ve seen this before, and I know what it is—silent recrimination. He’s making the connection. Shooting games. Me. Guns. He’s figured it out, and he’s angry at himself for not thinking it through beforehand.
Not his fault, though. It’s not as though I wear a sign saying, I killed my sister with a gun, so don’t ask me to play your super-realistic first-person shooter. No one else needs to feel bad about what happened. Only one person.
I wish there were a way to assuage him, a way to tell him, It’s all right. You don’t have to step around the rusty nails and broken glass of my past. Don’t beat yourself up. But the only way to do that would be to acknowledge it in the first place, to say it happened, and I can’t do that. When I try to talk about it, everything goes haywire. In Dr. Kennedy’s office, I was okay, for some reason. He made it okay. But otherwise…
But Evan is my best friend, so I do what I can, which is give him a way out.
“Besides, you know me—I’m no good at the new games.”
“That’s true,” he says with a small grin.
But for the rest of the ride to school, Evan sits in silence, kicking himself. I, too, sit in silence, letting him.
I’m no good at the new games because I rarely play them.
I like old things.
Old books.
Old movies.
Old TV shows.
It’s not that life seemed simpler “back then.” It’s that it was more complicated. When no one had a cellphone, it was harder to get in touch with people. You called a phone number, and you might get the person you wanted to talk to… or her dad. Or mom. Or brother. And without the Internet, simple questions could mean a trip to the library, hours in the stacks.
Life was more complicated, but it was quieter, I bet. Slower. And the distractions were not the ephemeral flash of an Instagram as it scrolled by or the blurt of a tweet. No endless chattering of Facebook status updates and Snapchats and notifications pushed to your tablet, your computer, your phone, your watch.
The distractions then were card catalogs and dust and the smell of old paper and ink. The distractions were deep.
I wonder what it would be like to go back in time, to live as long ago as the 1980s, or even further back.
To know what was to come.
On the way home that day, I stare out the bus window. Evan has been dropped off already, and I am alone in my seat as the bus wends its way slowly toward my bus stop. I catch sight of a large truck—a moving van, I realize—parked in the driveway of a house that has been on the market for so many months that I assumed it would never sell. Two dark-skinned men—one in a dress shirt and a tie fluttering in the breeze, one in blue coveralls—argue, gesturing angrily at each other, at the house, at the van. On the porch, a slender figure in black watches, and I think I notice something, but then we’re farther down the road and whatever I thought I noticed is gone.
Mom is still at work when I get home, so I go to what had been my sister’s room, the nursery. I only go in when Mom isn’t home.
In movies and on TV, when someone’s child dies, they almost always show the room preserved, frozen in time. In English class, I learned that this sort of thing is supposed to be symbolic, that the room’s unchanging appearance reflects the inability of the parents to move on, the rigid, frozen horror and pain that cannot thaw.
This is why I’ve come to the conclusion that symbolism is bullshit. Because my sister’s room is not preserved, but no one has moved on. We’re all still stuck in place.
The room serves now as storage. There are boxes and bags of things here, most of them belonging to my father, things my mother won’t throw out. Not out of sentiment—out of spite. “I won’t do his dirty work for him,” she said once. “His things will rot in there before I lift a finger to get rid of them.”