Forever & Always Read online

  "It's beautiful."

  "It's a duck, Mom." I was supposed to act normal, I knew. Protest, argue like always, act like a petulant teenager.

  "It's...a beautiful duck." She smiled, teasing me with her eyes and her voice. "Quack."

  "Quack." I sniffled, a laugh and cry at once. Mom was the only one who could get me to laugh, to be funny when I was always so serious like Dad.

  "Quack, Aidan. Quack."

  Dad frowned at both of us. "Quack?"

  I nodded, as if he'd gotten it. "Quack."

  Mom laughed, but it turned into a cough, weak and faint. Dad was confused. Mom's hand slid off Dad's head, slumped to his shoulder, and her finger wrapped around my pinky. "I love you, Caden Connor Monroe. Always draw. Art is beautiful. You're beautiful."

  I shook my head, hearing the goodbye buried beneath her words. "No, Mom. No. You're beautiful. You're art."

  She smiled at me, squeezed my pinky with her index finger, and I squeezed back. Her gaze shifted from me to Dad. She slid her hand from between his paws, and lifted her palm to his face. It was a herculean effort.

  She didn't say anything to him, not one word, but I heard it all. It was a poem, the look she gave him. I knew then that I would someday draw that expression in her eyes, and it would be the greatest piece of art I would ever make. But I couldn't do it then. I wasn't capable.

  I had Ever's letter in my back pocket, curved and wrinkled from being sat on, a notebook in my hands and a pencil behind my right ear. I felt a sensation of disembodiment. I wasn't me; I wasn't there at all, I was just a point of consciousness without a body, without clothes, without sadness or sorrow, watching my mother's loving gaze lock on my father's desperate wet eyes and fade, fade.

  "Jan."

  Her eyes went still and vacant, nothing there, not her, not life, not sadness. Her last words were silent, meant for my father. For her husband. I watched as Dad realized she was gone. His shoulders trembled, heavy with muscle yet so frail, so fragile.

  And then, like a sudden explosion, he shot up, the chair clanging backward to the floor, and he crossed the room in two long strides, and his fist rocketed out, smashed into the wood of the door post. The door frame crumpled, the wood splintered, the plaster crumbled and cracked, and then he fell against the frame and held on, skin broken and bleeding.

  A nurse looked on from the hallway, and she did nothing for a long moment, time like a plateau in the silence.

  It wasn't silent, though. We were in a hospital. The monitor blared a monotone signal song of death, a voice echoed incomprehensibly off the walls, and people came and went, oblivious.

  I stood where I was, beside the bed. I couldn't move. Dad was on the floor, a proud, strong man weeping in a ball on the floor. That was what uprooted me: Dad, there on the floor. He didn't belong there. I moved to kneel beside him, wrapped two hands around his thick arm and lifted. I felt like a little boy tugging on his bulk. I wasn't, though. I burrowed underneath his chest, set my back to his front, and lifted, bodily heaving him off the floor. He clung to me, weeping silently. I held him up, and he stared past me at Mom, at the corpse that had been her.

  I dragged him away. He stumbled beside me, mumbling something I couldn't understand. Someone called my name, Dad's name, but we both ignored the voice.

  I found Dad's truck, way in the back of the massive parking garage on the third floor. He was shuffling beside me, as if emptied somehow of his vitality. He always hooked his keys to his belt loop by a thick black carabiner clip, and I unhooked them. I unlocked the doors and had to wrestle Dad into the passenger seat. He slumped against the window, forehead to the glass, staring unseeing.

  I climbed into the driver's seat, adjusted the seat and the steering wheel and the mirrors. I'd driven for the first time when I was twelve, on Gramps's ranch, and whenever I was there I'd get to drive by myself. I didn't have a permit or a license, but I didn't care right then. I backed out of the parking spot, slowly and carefully, and navigated out of the garage, out of the hospital campus, onto the main road. I knew the way home, and I drove us there as carefully as I could.

  I was numb, felt nothing. Empty.

  Dad never said a word, never even moved. Sometimes I wasn't even sure he was breathing, but then the glass would fog from his breath and I would have to look away to drive.

  I got us home, helped Dad out and up to his bedroom. He stopped in the doorway, staring at the bed, made carefully, comforter folded back from the plump white pillows. He shook his head, the first sign of life since the hospital. He slewed around, stumped down the stairs slowly, heavily. I followed him, unsure what to do. He went into the kitchen, stood in front of the refrigerator, opened the cupboard above it, and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels, full to an inch beneath the neck. He twisted the top off and drank from the bottle, three long glugging pulls. I watched, emotionless. It was expected, some part of me thought. This is what you did when your wife died.

  But what was I supposed to do when my mom died?

  I took the bottle from him, and he met my eyes. His vacant stare flickered slightly, and I saw some sign of himself, some warring decision, and then he went vacant and distant again, and he released the bottle into my grip.

  The whiskey burned my throat, my chest, my stomach. I coughed, hacked, and sputtered. And then drank again, and a third time. By the third time, my gut was roiling, heaving, and heavy. My head spun, and I gave the bottle back to him.

  He stumbled past me, into his study. He had a futon in there, and he'd slept there a couple times when he and Mom had had an argument. He fell onto it, whiskey sloshing onto his hand. He drank from the bottle again, then leaned his head back and closed his eyes. I watched a tear fall.

  "Jan." It was a sob, and that was when I closed the door.

  Such grief was too private to witness.

  I was dizzy, drunk for the first time in my life. I went up to my room and sat at my desk. There was only one person I wanted to talk to.

  Evr,

  shes gone. Watched her die just now. It was just this quiet slipping away. she quacked at me. I showed her the sketch of the duck I did at Interlochen. You remember? I showed her that sketch, and she quacked at me. Like a duck. she told me she loved me.

  I still have the letter you sent me in my pocket. Its unopened. I havent read it yet. I might be a little drunk. Is that okay? I didn't know what else to do. Its too much. Too too too much. What the fuck am I supposed to do?

  I drove my dad home. From the hospital. I just left her there. But shes not there, is she. Mom is gone. The body in the bed is just meat. But we still just left her there. What happens next? Dad is gone too. Not dead, but just broken. I don't know if he'll ever be fixed. I think he needed Mom too much to live without her, and now he's just meat too. So what about me?

  In the last letter I read, from last week, you talked about your dad getting you a darkroom for your photography, but I realized after I'd sent the letter back that I didn't know you were into photography too. Is that new? I know you paint and want to sculpt but I don't remember ever talking about photography. That was just a random thought in my head.

  I'm afraid. Will I always be alone? I'm only fifteen. Maybe Dad will just fade away, just stop being alive. Can I stop being alive too? I don't know what to do next. Its like this huge wave has been cresting for weeks and just now broke and Im drowning. I saw a movie about someone surfing once, and they got rolled by a wave and the wave kept rolling and rolling and they got sucked under and spun so they couldn't ever find the air or find the surface and thats what I feel like, rolled and rolled under this huge wave that won't let me up and I can't breathe.

  I think this is where art is supposed to save me. I'm supposed to become this amazing artist because I'm going through tragedy, and that's what births all the great art, right, is going through something awful and having art to express it with, but I'm not sure I have that inside me. I feel like even art is being sucked under. I drew one of Mom's last moments, though. Dad, be
side her. Waiting. Knowing.

  Why didn't they tell me? Why did they act like nothing was wrong until it was too late? I feel like I got robbed of goodbye. I would have

  I don't know what I would have done. Spent more time with her. Loved her better. Now there's just nothing.

  Just me, and I don't know what to do.

  Sorry for the awful letter.

  Cade

  Spinning walls and tilting ceiling met my gaze. The words I'd written blurred on the page, twisted and contorted. I knew it was unfair, but some part of me, the part responsible for caring about...life, maturity, others, anything...that part was beyond my grip. I shouldn't send this to Ever, but I was going to anyway. I needed these feelings, the things I'd put on the page, to be out there, outside of me. Being able to write letters to someone who couldn't judge me, who would write back and seem sympathetic and friendly, it helped me be me, helped me feel okay.

  Now, nothing was okay, and sending this letter to Ever seemed necessary. It would make me okay.

  I found the stamps where they always were, in the kitchen, in the junk drawer with scissors and a Phillips screwdriver and a crescent wrench and some tape and mismatched keys on a plastic American flag keychain. There were six stamps left. I had a flash of memory, vivid and hitting me like a hammer, of Mom, just a few weeks ago, digging through this drawer, looking for something--an Allen wrench to fix a wobbly side table, I think--and saying we needed more stamps, that she'd get more next time she went to the post office. Only, that never happened. She got too sick to go to the post office, got too sick to even leave her bed, and that was when Dad took her to the hospital for good. For the end.

  And now there were only six stamps left.

  I'd never bought stamps before. What would I do when they were gone? I'd have to buy more somehow. What if Dad just stopped living? What if he totally gave up and I was left to fend for myself? I was a teenage boy. I was fifteen. I didn't know how to cook. I didn't know how to do laundry or earn money. I needed parents.

  What I had was six stamps left. A single row of pastel Benjamin Franklins, one after another. Sweat broke out on my face, and I stumbled to the side, dropping my letter on the floor. My stomach protested as I lurched again, stamps in my fist. I regained my balance, clutching the counter with my empty hand, staring at the small white rectangle face down on the tile. I had to lean over very carefully to pick up the envelope.

  The initial rush of the alcohol had seemed euphoric and heady, but now it was changing inside me. Drunk was no longer so much fun. I just felt sick, and my emotions were rampant and raging through me without any filters to control them.

  It felt like it should be midnight. Death should only happen at night, in the darkness and the shadows. But it was still light outside. I took one careful step after another out of the kitchen, through the living room with the gray microfiber sectional Mom had been so proud of and the sixty-inch flat-screen Dad loved so much and out the front door. The heavy glass storm door slammed back closed before I was through, bashing me in the shoulder and sending me stumbling to the side. I caught myself on the railing of the front porch and stood waiting for the evening world to stop spinning.

  It was the golden moment of sundown. The sun was behind the trees and the buildings, but brilliantly shining amber, sending spears of light scattering across the street and the siding and brick and through car windows and house windows and all over everything. It was like a cosmic balloon full of golden light had been popped somewhere beyond the sky and the luminous contents were spilling around me, bathing me with sundeath glory.

  I wasn't sure that metaphor made any sense, even as it passed through my head, but it sounded poetic.

  A robin's egg-blue Toyota Prius slipped quietly down my street, a lance of golden light slicing across the hood and then the roof, and then the little car was gone, rounding a corner onto Garfield Avenue. The passage of the Prius seemed significant, somehow. Like it meant something in some way I was simply too drunk to comprehend.

  I blinked, glanced down at the letter in my hand. I realized I hadn't addressed it. I swore out loud, stumbled around in a full circle before I managed to find the front door. Only instead of going through it, I fell backward into the porch swing, an aged bench with spotted silver chain links that creaked when the swing moved. Oh, god. Oh, god. The swing swept me off my feet, and now I was swinging backward and forward, backward and forward, swinging, sunlight moving and shifting.

  The letter. I still had my shading pencil behind my ear. I pinched it between deliberate fingers, set the envelope on the wide, smooth-worn armrest, and wrote my return address in small, shaky, and neat letters. Then, in the center, I wrote her name. EVER ELIOT. That was good. Each letter was perfectly formed, neat and angular. Her street name and number floated through my head, and I focused all my attention on making the pencil do my bidding. 17889 Crabtree Road, Bloomfield Hills. I couldn't remember the zip code, for some reason. I racked my brain, but it wouldn't come. 48073? No, that was Royal Oak. Why did I know the zip code for Royal Oak, but not for Ever in Bloomfield Hills, when I wrote it on her letters every week?

  Aha! I lifted my left hip and clumsily fished her letter from my back pocket. 48301, that was it.

  I penciled in the zip code and made my way down the three steps to the sidewalk, holding on to the railing and measuring each motion with extreme care. At the bottom of the steps, I fixed my gaze on the mailbox at the end of the driveway; it suddenly looked to be a mile away. I resolved to make it to the mailbox and back without embarrassing myself. It wasn't far, was it? Only twenty feet or so. But when the street and sidewalk and grass were tipping and bucking the way they were, twenty feet might have been a thousand. I left the safety of the railing and took a step, feeling like an astronaut moving away from the protective shelter of a spaceship on a faraway planet. I focused on the mailbox, not counting steps, and trying to act completely normal. Did I look as messed up as I was? I felt like I had a blazing neon sign plastered on my forehead, announcing to the world that I was drunker than anyone had ever been in the history of drunkenness.

  I made it to the mailbox after an eternity of carefully placing one foot precisely in front of the other. I opened the black metal front, slid the letter in, closed it, and lifted the red flag. Wait, had I put a stamp on it? I opened the box again and peered blearily at the letter. Yes, old Ben with his idiotic little smirk stared up at me, slightly cockeyed on the envelope.

  Now to make it back. No problem at all.

  Except for that huge canyon of a crack at the edge of the driveway. When did that get there? And why was it suddenly such a massive problem? It grabbed my toe and sent me sprawling in the grass. Green blades tickled my toes, my cheek, my palms. Even lying down, things spun.

  This was not fun.

  Mom was still gone, and being drunk didn't help. Well...maybe it did, just a little. The pain was distant. It didn't feel like pain--it felt like something I knew about, like knowing I had a test to take in a few months. It would happen, and it would suck, but I didn't have to think about it right now.

  I had to get up. I couldn't stay here on the grass. That would raise suspicion if anyone saw me. People didn't go around lying on their front lawns at six in the evening--or ever, for that matter.

  Ever. Ever.

  Ever.

  I wondered what her latest letter said. Time to get up. I could do it, easy peasy. I climbed to my feet, brushed off my knees and the seat of my jeans. The letter wasn't in my back pocket anymore; where was it? I spun in stumbling circles, scanning the ground. Nothing. Where was it? Panic shot through me. I couldn't lose that letter. It was important. Ever's words to me were important. They were written for me. Meant for me. No one else. It meant she thought about me. That maybe she cared about me.

  My gaze landed on the porch, up three steps. There it was, beneath the porch swing. Relief. Up the steps, maybe possibly using both hands on the railing to haul myself up. I landed on the swing, which again swept my
feet out from beneath me and swung me in the golden light. I ended up not quite lying down, not quite sitting up.

  Finally in possession of the precious letter, and a seat, I held the envelope in both hands and stared at it. The letters of my name and the numbers of my street address faded and blurred and doubled.

  I was too drunk to read the damn letter. I fumbled it back into my pocket and tried to calm the dizziness in my skull. I hated this, hated being drunk.

  Why did Dad think this would help anything?

  I was suddenly exhausted, my eyes heavy and hot. My stomach roiled and twisted, and the swing drifted. The golden haze of sunset was gone, leaving behind an orange-pink fading into gray. I watched the leaves of a tree shake in the breeze, and watched the gray become thicker and darker, and then heaviness overtook me and my head lolled back on the swing.

  I woke up sick and disoriented. All was silent and dark around me, blackest night unbroken except by a distant streetlight, the one way down by Eisenhower. None of the houses had porch lights on, no cars passed, there were no stars and no moon. Only darkness, and the sound of my breathing.

  Vomit surged in my throat, rising without warning to hit my teeth. I lurched off the swing to lean over the railing and empty my stomach in a hot, acidic flood into Mom's azaleas. Again and again my stomach revolted, eventually leaving me limp against the cold wood, heaving in deep breaths and hoping it was over. I had nothing left to throw up, but still my stomach coiled into knots.

  I waited until nothing else came up, and then went inside. Ever's letter was crumpled now. I smoothed it against my thigh, considered opening it and reading it right there in the dim foyer. Not yet. Dad's study was on my right, the door closed. I opened it, peered in. He was on the floor, face down, the bottle under his armpit, empty. His eyes were closed, loud snores coming from him. At least he was alive. I should do something for him. Help him somehow.

  I knelt beside him, tugged the empty bottle free, and set it aside. He didn't twitch or respond in any way, just kept snoring.