The Saddest Song

Chapter 2

Rainey

I must have fallen asleep during Caitlynn’s visit, or passed out from sheer exhaustion. I hadn’t slept much in the endless days since Garrett died. Either way, I awoke to the ring of my cell phone and answered it expecting to hear his voice. Max’s voice brought me back to reality. How many times over the past week had I temporarily forgotten through sleep or shock, only to be reminded again and again.

“Rainey, are you there?” Max whispered.

“Yeah, I’m here Max. What time is it?” My clock was blinking red, telling me someone must have unplugged it.

“2:30. Sorry, I thought maybe you couldn’t sleep either.”

“It’s okay, I can’t seem to sleep for very long without a nightmare waking me, so I can realize I’m living a nightmare in real life too.”

“It’s not getting any easier, is it Rainey?”

“No, it’s hell. He’s the lucky one Max. At least he isn’t suffering. You and I are the ones suffering. How are your parents?”

“It’s not pretty, that’s for sure. They keep watching me, worrying I will up and die on them too.”

Max was Garrett’s fraternal twin, but the two were nothing alike. Garrett was, as I’ve said before, the happy, outgoing, popular one. Max was like me, introverted, serious, and on the creative side. While Garrett was a football player and lived to be physically active, Max spent his time playing piano and guitar, and singing songs he wrote himself.

Those weren’t their only differences, they also looked nothing alike. If they HAD been identical, if Max had Garrett’s golden blonde hair, or his deep green eyes, I couldn’t have stood it. It would have torn my already broken, bleeding heart from my chest. But no, Max was just Max. Tall, like Garrett, but thin and lanky. His hair was longer and a rich, chocolate color, his eyes a tropical blue, nearly turquoise. Max had taken after their very pretty mother, while Garrett looked like their even more handsome dad. Caitlynn once said the twins were equally hot, it just depended on your type. Did you prefer an athletic, muscled football player or a long haired, sexy musician? I thought she was stereotyping them a bit, but I saw her point.

“What’s going to happen to us Max? How are we going to survive without him?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“We will survive because he’d want us to. He’d want us to go on, and he’d want us to live. Crying, hurting, suffering won’t bring him back. Nothing will.”

I wanted to tell Max it was my fault he was in that car, my fault he left the guys trip early. Twelve of the football players had gone to Arizona. They were staying at Jordan, the quarterback’s condo on the river. He had been there only four of the seven days they had planned to be gone when we got in the fight, a stupid fight about nothing important. I was missing him, angry that he chose to be with them when he could’ve stayed with me. I was jealous about the party I could hear going on in the background, girl’s laughter making me insecure. I had no reason to be, he never so much as looked at other girls. We’d been together since the middle of eighth grade, Christmas Eve to be exact. I had come home from dinner at my grandparent’s house and found a small wrapped present on my porch. Inside was a pretty silver necklace with a heart charm on it and a note from Garrett telling me everything he was too afraid to say in person. Since I’d been harboring a crush on him since the day we met, I was pretty excited. Excited is stating it mildly, I was jumping up and down and screaming if I remember it correctly. But I was composed and shaking when I called him that night. The rest is history and our senior year of high school was just about to start. Still, that night I was angry, and like I said, he couldn’t stand it when I was angry. So, he hitched a ride back home to San Diego, with Jordan’s older brother and two guys from his fraternity, all dead now just like Garrett.

“Can I come over there Max?”

“Now? It’s too late for you to be out, and my parents would freak out if they woke up and I was gone.”

“Okay, I’ll wait until daylight. Can I come then? I want to be with you and I need to see his room, maybe I’ll be able to feel him there. I can’t feel him, Max.”

“I get it, Rainey. I’m lying on his bed. Trust me, he’s not here.”

“I still want to come over.”

“Yeah, I want you to. You’re all I have left of him,” he said, his voice breaking.

“That’s how I feel about you. See you soon, Max.”

The call ended and I stared at my cell phone, wondering if I had the strength to listen to Garrett’s voice mails. I saved them, his text messages too. I wasn’t brave enough yet. I knew it wouldn’t be enough to simply hear his voice, I would want more. I would wait until I wasn’t raw. Maybe that day would come. Somehow, I doubted it.

I reset my alarm clock to the proper time and laid back down on my bed. I closed my eyes and tried to think of absolutely nothing. It must have worked, because it was light when I opened them again. I had made it through another night, and had to begin another day without Garrett. It had been less than two weeks since I had last seen him, but it felt like so much longer. Looking over at my clock, I was irritated to see it was again flashing red. I reached for my cell, and saw it was only 6:45. I took a long shower to pass the time until I could go see Max.

Before I left I took a look around my room. It was like a shrine to my relationship with Garrett. There were countless photos of us posing at school dances and smiling together on trips we had taken to San Francisco, Palm Springs, and Hawaii. I sat on the edge of my bed and was overwhelmed by the realization that there would be no more pictures. I would never again drive him crazy with my obsession for documenting our every move. The thought felt unreal and uncomfortable, so I shook it off. I absentmindedly reset my clock and then silently left my room, closing the door behind me.

Max

After I called Rainey I fell into a deep sleep for three hours. That was the longest stretch I’d slept since the accident, and the rest almost made me feel like myself again. I headed downstairs to wait for her. The house smelled stale, like wilted flowers. There were several huge floral arrangements dying around the living room. Seemed like a backwards tradition to send something that would wither and die to people who had just had a loved one do the same. Mom was sitting at her desk going through the sympathy cards that were piling up and didn’t notice me slip out the door. I decided to let her be since she wasn’t crying at the moment. Waiting on the front porch would give me some fresh air and also keep me from having to answer the door. For obvious reasons, doorbells would probably haunt me for quite awhile.

I sat down on the porch and watched a golf cart go by. We lived on a golf course that had six different housing developments scattered from one end to the other. My family lived near the 16th hole while Rainey’s lived near the 2nd. Our homes were about a mile apart. Garret and I had met Rainey right out here while we were playing basketball in the driveway. We heard her calling for her lost dog and Garrett volunteered us to help her find it. Of course he got to head one direction with her and I went the other way on my own. When I came back lugging the runaway beagle, she had trained her big eyes on Garrett in a worshipful way and didn’t seem to even notice I was the one who found it. And that is how we sort of met.

We saw her at school the next day and she blushed when she came over to thank us and introduce herself. She was so pretty that it was actually weird that we had not noticed her before. Garrett played it cool but suddenly her name came up a lot. By Christmas they were an item. I knew she would have been my sister in law someday. Garrett always planned out his whole life and Rainey became the center of it. I had never been one for planning ahead and now I knew for sure there was no point. Tomorrow may not happen anyway.