Every Little Thing by Chad Pelley Page A

That feeling of sand in his throat.
    It was a strange thing to have thought, but he thought it immediately upon seeing his brother’s guitar: those strings would never be changed again; they’d sit there until they frayed into razors. There was a fish tank, and he wondered how the things weren’t dead yet, who’d been feeding them. How hard it must be for his mother or father to step into that room and keep something of Ryan’s alive. And how long would they leave those sheets on his bed. Those clothes in the closet. And how long until this room was a spare bedroom, not Ryan’s, or converted into a computer room or an exercise room or somewhere for his mother to sit and knit socks and sweaters. Long after the day they did convert it, an item of Ryan’s—a guitar pick or a note in his flippant handwriting—would fall out of nowhere, maybe the top shelf of a closet.
    He shut the bedroom door behind him as he left.
    Heading for the washroom, he walked passed his parents’ room, and the door was ajar. His mother had been lying on her side, her body kinked into a Z; her shoulder blades bucking like clipped wings flapping. She had a light blue pillow, but there was a wet, navy, perfect circle, the size of a CD, where her eye met the pillow.
    He went downstairs, asked his father if one of them shouldn’t be in there with her.
    â€œShe’s upset.”He pointed to the kitchen table, visible from the living room, and there was a smashed plate on the ground in four perfectly equal quarters. “She’d set a place for Ryan. About ten minutes before you walked in. Just…give her a minute.”
    Cohen cleaned up the broken dish. He grabbed two beers from the fridge and brought one to his father. “Are you sure one of us shouldn’t go in there?”
    â€œCohen, I can’t—I can’t deal with this myself ” he said, sitting up and taking the beer. “So what am I supposed to say to her? There, there? I’m not getting snappy with you. I just...”He shrugged his shoulders and took a swig of beer. “This is taking a toll.” His father’s eyes looked loose, soft; the flesh around them saggy. “She’s not making this any easier on me, placing blame. Throwing it around. And having to worry about her on top of it. Sounds selfish, doesn’t it? But it’s all my fault, she says, that I let you go out in that rickety old boat in the first place. Or that I owned that boat and taught you two to drive it. Or that I didn’t go after you sooner.”He clenched a jaw. A big swig of beer, and he’d hit the bottle off a tooth.
    â€œIt’s what people do, Dad, that’s all. They go over everything that went wrong until they’re buried under the weight of all the things that could have prevented what went wrong.”
    â€œIt’s not something you think through out loud. It’s indecent .”
    So Cohen stepped into her room. He sat on the corner of her bed, and it sank more than he’d expected. His toes pressed into the carpet, to keep him from sliding onto the floor. She stood up immediately, looked down at him. She was in a bathrobe, unshowered, a wreck of a woman: the hair on one side of her head grease-flattened into her scalp, and the hair on the other side frizzy and jumping away from her. She stood up, looked down at him. Her face went sour and she slapped him. It caught him on the ear and his ear was ringing. And instead of reacting, he closed his eyes and listened to the buzzing.
    â€œPeople wear life jackets ,Cohen. They wear life jackets so they don’t drown !”
    When he opened his eyes, she was leaning into her dresser, balancing on her knuckles. She was staring at herself in the mirror, perplexed, like some part of her was missing or something new added on.
    She wasn’t crying, but there were black icicles of mascara hanging down from her eyes. Too much of her breasts falling