really did look like a lumberjack when he wore that, especially when his long hair went up under his dirty cap.
I hugged myself with heavy arms. Every so often I would look at my mother who had lifted her cigarette several times but was unable to inhale. The quiet and silence were so heavy it filled my ears. All we'd had since he disappeared was silence, and whatever interrupted the silence, Mom on the phone with the police, calling her friends at different parts of the island to see if they had seen him, knowing they would answer in the negative. All that was over.
After an incredibly long time sitting at opposite ends of the dining table, staring at each other, at the shiny wooden surface, smoking one cigarette after another, I rose and hugged my mother and went into the living room. I pulled down two of the oldest photo albums I could find and began flipping through. After a while my mother came in and sat next to me and placed a hand on my knee. Her hand was tiny, light and papery thin.
A string of photos of Tristan and my father, the infernal shotgun in between them, both smiling, my father's arm around my brother, Tristan's brown eyes open and easy, my father's grey ones distant, as always.
I flipped the pages.
My mother's voice was a croak. “I hated when he would do that.” In one photo Tristan wore a denim jacket and had no shirt on underneath. His tongue stuck out and he held his hand up with both his pinkie finger and index finger sticking up.
“He was so excited. He went camping and saw Metallica at The Gorge, remember?”
There was a string of even earlier photos where he held his middle finger up in every picture, affecting a bored or hostile pose. But in every one his eyes were bright, laughing at his own posturing. The first time the tears came was through my laughter at this younger version of my brother, still a teenager, still full of hope, no failures yet.
In the days that followed, I stayed on the island with my mother. We were busy planning the service, busy making each other crazy, busy rearranging his stuff, busy making phone calls, busy not sleeping. Busy was better than the alternative. We set the service for a week's time, had Tristan cremated, as was family tradition and his wish. The funeral home offered a service where you could get a little necklace with some of the ashes inside. Mother and I both ordered one of these, tiny infinity shapes in pewter.
One morning we sat at one end of Mom's dining table with her laptop open in front of us. I wrote up the obituary and she dragged me through an entire day rewriting it. If that wasn't bad enough, we had to alter each version to fit the individual newspapers we sent it to.
“It just has to be right Vivi, he was my boy…” She stared at me as if I could bring him back, as if I could take away the sense that everything we did on his behalf was not good enough, was not big enough, would not impress enough people.
At one point late in the afternoon, when the deadline for sending one of the obituaries to make the paper was only a half hour away, I said, “Mom. If we don't ever send these, nobody is going to come to the funeral.”
She balled her fists, spread her fingers out and balled them up again. I knew that feeling, the need to break every single thing in sight. Overwhelming frustration. Nothing was working. Nothing was right. What I was quickly coming to understand was that nothing would ever be right, so why bother? She wanted the obituaries posted in the Seattle Times and the Whidbey Examiner , plus the Missoulian , which she decided on at the last minute. “We want as many people to know as possible right? Doesn't…didn't he still have friends from college living there?”
“He had friends everywhere, Mom.” I regretted the tired tone, but it was starting to look like we should just send the announcement to every paper within a five-hundred-mile radius. I wanted to curl up and sleep for a month. Instead I nodded and looked
I hugged myself with heavy arms. Every so often I would look at my mother who had lifted her cigarette several times but was unable to inhale. The quiet and silence were so heavy it filled my ears. All we'd had since he disappeared was silence, and whatever interrupted the silence, Mom on the phone with the police, calling her friends at different parts of the island to see if they had seen him, knowing they would answer in the negative. All that was over.
After an incredibly long time sitting at opposite ends of the dining table, staring at each other, at the shiny wooden surface, smoking one cigarette after another, I rose and hugged my mother and went into the living room. I pulled down two of the oldest photo albums I could find and began flipping through. After a while my mother came in and sat next to me and placed a hand on my knee. Her hand was tiny, light and papery thin.
A string of photos of Tristan and my father, the infernal shotgun in between them, both smiling, my father's arm around my brother, Tristan's brown eyes open and easy, my father's grey ones distant, as always.
I flipped the pages.
My mother's voice was a croak. “I hated when he would do that.” In one photo Tristan wore a denim jacket and had no shirt on underneath. His tongue stuck out and he held his hand up with both his pinkie finger and index finger sticking up.
“He was so excited. He went camping and saw Metallica at The Gorge, remember?”
There was a string of even earlier photos where he held his middle finger up in every picture, affecting a bored or hostile pose. But in every one his eyes were bright, laughing at his own posturing. The first time the tears came was through my laughter at this younger version of my brother, still a teenager, still full of hope, no failures yet.
In the days that followed, I stayed on the island with my mother. We were busy planning the service, busy making each other crazy, busy rearranging his stuff, busy making phone calls, busy not sleeping. Busy was better than the alternative. We set the service for a week's time, had Tristan cremated, as was family tradition and his wish. The funeral home offered a service where you could get a little necklace with some of the ashes inside. Mother and I both ordered one of these, tiny infinity shapes in pewter.
One morning we sat at one end of Mom's dining table with her laptop open in front of us. I wrote up the obituary and she dragged me through an entire day rewriting it. If that wasn't bad enough, we had to alter each version to fit the individual newspapers we sent it to.
“It just has to be right Vivi, he was my boy…” She stared at me as if I could bring him back, as if I could take away the sense that everything we did on his behalf was not good enough, was not big enough, would not impress enough people.
At one point late in the afternoon, when the deadline for sending one of the obituaries to make the paper was only a half hour away, I said, “Mom. If we don't ever send these, nobody is going to come to the funeral.”
She balled her fists, spread her fingers out and balled them up again. I knew that feeling, the need to break every single thing in sight. Overwhelming frustration. Nothing was working. Nothing was right. What I was quickly coming to understand was that nothing would ever be right, so why bother? She wanted the obituaries posted in the Seattle Times and the Whidbey Examiner , plus the Missoulian , which she decided on at the last minute. “We want as many people to know as possible right? Doesn't…didn't he still have friends from college living there?”
“He had friends everywhere, Mom.” I regretted the tired tone, but it was starting to look like we should just send the announcement to every paper within a five-hundred-mile radius. I wanted to curl up and sleep for a month. Instead I nodded and looked
Similar Books
