S A M
I was smiling, smiling, and running into their arms, and before I knew it, Tristan was hugging me, and picking me up, and saying he missed me. I didn't think he would say it, but he did.
"I missed you too," I said, and he smiled, and put me down, and next to him, Zoey opened her arms for me, and I walked right into it.
They were back from their trip. I had been counting the days, waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and finally, the wait was over. They were back.
They had been on a cruise somewhere and I had expected them to come back with cool tans, but they looked pale instead. Paler than usual even. Behind me, someone called my name. Whoever it was had been calling it for a while, but I didn't care. They were back!
"Sam!" Dad. It was dad. "Time to move, buddy."
I was confused. We had come to pick them up from the airport. We had just gotten here. Why the rush to leave? Where were we going next? Maybe dad had booked a table at some fancy restaurant. Maybe â
I woke up. I had been dreaming. Outside my window, the sun shone through the trees and sneaked into my room through the shutters. Tristan and Zoey hadn't gone on a cruise. It was only a dream. They had gone on a trip, yes, but it wasn't a cruise. I couldn't remember what it was. I got up.
I had kicked my blankets to the floor during the night, and my pillow was wet where my face had been. I touched my cheeks. Wet too. I looked at my bedside table. A postcard from somewhere along the coast read:
Thanks for letting me borrow your brother for a couple of weeks.
I will be forever thankful.
Love you.
Zoey.
Of course. I remembered now. They had gone on a trip down the coast. They had rented a van and everything. That was it. I remembered. They had come back early because Tristan hadn't been feeling too well. They had been back for a while now.
It hadn't been the first time Tristan's body decided it was done with a trip. Once, on a family cruise â that was where the idea of a cruise had come from, of course! â Tristan had started having nosebleeds out of nowhere. We would be having dinner and a drop of blood would fall on his soup, and then more, a lot more, or we would be in the pool, and suddenly the water around him would turn red with blood.
Dad had decided we better just go back home, cut the trip short. Linda had been upset. They had paid for the whole thing already and now we would have to get off the cruise somewhere and fly all the way back home. They had a big fight that day, dad and Linda. I knew they did, even though Tristan turned his music all the way up so I wouldn't hear them scream at each other in the room next door. I hadn't care if they fought or not. In fact, I had wanted them too. I didn't think Linda was being very nice about the whole thing, and if I had to listen to dad when I wasn't nice, then so did she.
So we came back, and Tristan was rushed to the hospital where I got to set up camp in his room, and things weren't so bad. In a few days, he was out again. That was just the way things were.
This time, he hadn't needed to be rushed to the hospital though. He had dropped Zoey off at her house and come home only to collapse on the couch where I had been watching cartoons. I remembered I asked him if he was sure he didn't need a doctor. I remembered he said he was just tired, that he had never been really good at road trips anyway. Once, him and Caitlyn drove for hours for some music festival, and he felt so sick, they had to stop so he could throw up. He said it only happened once on the way there, but Caitlyn later told me it was more, way more.
That night we had dinner at the big table in the dining room even though dinner had just been takeout food from some pizza place Tristan liked. When Linda asked him to pass her the salad, he did. When she said the food was a terrorist attack on the Italian cuisine, he just shrugged, and said he liked it. He could have asked her what she knew about Italian cuisine, or even terrorist attacks, but he didn't.
He waited at the table even after he had finished his food, which he never did, and then followed dad into the kitchen, and helped him load the dishwasher, which he also never did, because usually Linda would stand around with a glass of wine, talking about this and that, and Tristan would rather not hear her talk about anything at all.
But that night, Linda came to sit with me on the couch instead, and dad and Tristan were in the kitchen by themselves for a while, and when they finally came to join us, dad was crying, and pretending he wasn't, like he usually did. Tristan said we should all watch a movie, and we did, all of us on the couch, like the families on the comic books I read. Dad and Linda fell asleep halfway through, but Tristan didn't. He gave me back scratches without me even having to ask, and he kept doing it until I fell asleep too, and it had been nice. All of it. It had been a while ago too.
I walked out of my room now and towards his. The door was closed. It was always closed. I opened it. I knew I shouldn't because I could read and the sign on the door said keep out, but I walked in all the same.
The room looked like it always did except there was no mattress on the bed. I didn't understand. I closed my eyes and opened them again. Still no mattress. Maybe I was still dreaming. A dream inside a dream. I'd had those before.
I walked closer. The bedside table had a stain on it. It reminded of the morning after Tristan came back from the trip with Zoey. I had woken up to screams. Someone had been screaming.
"Richard!"
I hadn't realized right away that Richard was dad and dad was Richard and that the voice belonged to Tristan, but I had gotten up.
He had been screaming, "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"
Linda had been standing by the door of his room, her hand on her mouth. Dad was inside already, standing next to Tristan, who had been sitting right on the edge of his bed, covered in blood. He had woken up in a pool of his own blood. That was why the mattress was gone now. Because there had been too much blood on it.
Tristan had been having one of his nosebleeds. It was just the way things were.
"I think this is it," he had said to dad, crying. He had been crying. Tristan always thought that was it when he had one of his nosebleeds, but he never cried, so I had started crying too. He had seen me and screamed like he was always did, "Get him out of here!"
And so Linda had grabbed my arm and pushed me back into the hallway, and she had looked at me dead in the eyes and told me not to move.
"Don't move."
Her phone had been in her hand, which was shaking as she dialed 911. She had to dial it a couple of times because her finger had kept pressing on the wrong numbers, but someone had picked up almost right away when she finally managed. The only problem was Linda hadn't said a word.
I had moved then.
"Hello," I started. I hadn't been sure of what to say so I had just said it all. I gave them my full name, our address, how much blood was coming out of my brother's nose â a lot, like a lot, a lot â and that he had cancer. He'd had cancer ever since I remembered. Linda had snatched the phone from my hand then, but by then they had hung up. They were on the way already.
Inside the room, Tristan kept saying he didn't want to go. He thought he was fine with it before, but it turned out he wasn't. Not really. Not at all. He was saying please, again, and again, and again, but he stopped by the time the ambulance got there.
They had let dad go with them in the ambulance, but I had to go with Linda in the car, still in my pajamas, because there had been no time to change, no time at all. After we got to the hospital, we had to sit in the waiting room for hours. I had sat in that room before. That was just the way things were.
When a doctor had finally come, it had been to tell us he was sorry.
"I'm sorry," he had said. I had been standing next to dad, holding his hand in mine, looking down at my socks. There had been no time to get our shoes. The doctor went on, "There was nothing we could do."
I was still looking down at my feet, watching a small yellow puddle grow bigger and bigger and bigger and â
"I told you not to come into his room, Sammy," dad said now.
I opened my mouth, "I forgot."
I forgot he was dead.
"It's alright," dad said. "Come here."
His arms wrapped around me. I felt my face wet again, then my neck. My chest hurt.
"Let's go, I'll help you get dressed," dad said, closing the door to Tristan's room and then holding my hand in his. I walked close to him. I kept crying. My chest kept hurting. I had told dad about it before, about my chest pains, but dad said it was normal. He said he had them too.
Inside my room, dad fount my suit among the blankets I had kicked to the floor during the night. I had picked it out with him last night to wear it today. We were going to go visit Tristan's grave. It was the one-month anniversary of his death, but I had forgotten. I had forgotten he was even dead.
Dad helped me get dressed, even though I was old enough that I could dress myself just fine. I didn't mind. I was crying again. I cried while I ate my bowl of cereal too. Dad didn't say anything. He just stood behind me, his hand strong on my shoulder as he took small bites of an apple he couldn't finish in the end. I couldn't finish my cereal either. Dad said it was alright. Everything was alright, except us.
When we got to Tristan's grave, Zoey and Caitlyn were there, each of them holding flowers even though Tristan never liked flowers. Dad had said flowers were fine on the day we buried him, because his gravestone was more for us than it was for Tristan, because Tristan wasn't really there. He wasn't really anywhere.
I ran into Zoey's arms. I didn't know she would be here, but she was, and she was hugging me now, so tight, I thought we might become one and the same.
"You didn't have to come all this way," dad said behind me. Zoey was in college already. Somewhere hours away. She wasn't my babysitter anymore.
She let go of me, and said, "I wanted to."
I didn't let go of her. She started running her fingers through my hair. I looked up. She was wearing all black, a black sweater, black jeans, black shoes. She had lost weight. I looked at Caitlyn. She was wearing all black too, but then again, Caitlyn always did. I thought Tristan would have liked it that they were both here with us.
"How are you?" dad asked them, and they both shrugged.
Dad nodded like he understood, and said, "I miss him too."
And then a silence. It was suffocating.
"How's college going?" dad asked after a while. Zoey shrugged again. When I looked up at her again, she was crying. She looked like she had been crying for a while, like me, because her eyes were very red. She had her hand on her neck, like she couldn't breathe either.
"I think I forgot to pack a personality," she said, every word a hiccup.
Dad said he doubted that, and Caitlyn agreed, which made Zoey smile, but only for a little while. They put down their flowers. Dad did the same with the ones we had gotten from the flower shop on the way here. The lady had them ready before we even got in. When Caitlyn stood up again, I noticed the plastic wrap around her hand.
Zoey must have too because she pointed at it and asked if she had gotten a new tattoo. Caitlyn showed it to us. It was the number 10, right in the palm of her hand. I didn't understand. Caitlyn must have seen that no one did because she explained.
"Tristan never liked being asked how he was feeling. He hated it. So I used to trace the scale of pain on the palm of his hand. That way, he wouldn't have to listen to the question out loud. I thought I found a loophole. I knew I didn't, not really. He still hated it. But he always traced back the answer on the palm of my hand..."
She stopped to take a deep breathe, and then another one, and another one. Eventually, she said, "I hadn't asked him in a while actually. I stopped not long after he met you."
Zoey asked why, and Caitlyn said she didn't think he looked so much like he was in pain anymore, and Zoey said nothing. She just cried.
There was that silence again and then I asked Caitlyn, "So it's a 10 for you? That's how much it hurts?"
She looked at her hand again, "Yeah, it's a 10 for me."
I thought about it, and said, "Yeah, for me too."
After that, dad invited them for lunch at Tristan's favorite pizza place. They said yes. Zoey had taken a series of buses to get to the cemetery, and so had Caitlyn, so they came in the car with us. There was space for everyone because Linda wasn't here. She had gone to a week-long retreat. Usually when Linda did something like this, like not being around for something important, dad would get upset, but this time dad didn't care. I didn't either. I called her mom only for dad's sake.
On the line to the restaurant, while we were waiting to be seated, Zoey turned to us all and said she had gotten one too.
"A tattoo," she admitted, pulling her sweater up to show Tristan's name tattooed right over her ribs. "I needed somewhere to put him."
Dad said close to the heart was always good and Caitlyn said Tristan would have liked it.
"To be this close to you," she told her.
And Zoey said, "As close as skin."
Later, during lunch, dad invited the both of them for thanksgiving at our place in a few months. They could bring their families too.
"My mom doesn't really care for those things," Caitlyn said, "but I'll be there."
"And you?" I asked Zoey. I had taken the seat next to her. She would leave for college again in a few hours and I wanted desperately for her not to.
"We'll be there," she told me. "My mom's been asking me to meet you all for a while, so she'll be very happy with the invitation."
"Oh, that's great then," dad said.
Outside the restaurant, after dad had paid the bill and left a big tip, Zoey gave me her phone number. I had one of Tristan's old phones that I used for games and text messages to dad, but now I could text her too. I had used it to text Tristan when he was around too, but he had always been bad at replying. Zoey said I could text whenever I wanted, and she hoped she could too. I told her she could text me all she wanted.
Dad dropped her off at home so she could see her mom before going back to college. She hugged me really hard before leaving the car and told me she would see me at thanksgiving, but we would text until then.
Later that night I did text her.
I wrote:
Hello Zoe,
I know you're probably tired, but I just wanted to let you know something that I've been thinking about for a while. Dad doesn't think I should tell you this, because he wishes I hadn't seen it, but I'm happy I did. In the end, Tristan didn't really want to die. He always acted like he didn't care if he did, but in the end, he begged not to.
I spent so much time thinking he didn't want to be here with us, and I always thought he was the smartest person in the world, so when he said life was sh*t (dad doesn't want me writing the full word), I really did believe him. I thought all those people going around living their happy lives were idiots. I thought I was an idiot, because I was going around like that too, all happy. But I think the wort of all is that I thought I wasn't something in Tristan's life that made it less sh*tty, so much so that maybe he would want to stick around. I guess what I'm saying is, it's good to know that life is good, good enough that Tristan wanted in on it. He wanted to stay here with us.
I'm telling you this because when things get really bad for me, I think about this, and it helps a little, and I hope that it can help you too. Also, Dad says he's not hurting anymore. He won't ever hurt again, so that's good too. And if you believe in time travel, and you really think about it, if you were to travel into the past, he would still be alive then, so in a way, he will always be.
Anyway, thank you for giving me your phone number. Have a nice day of classes tomorrow. For what it's worth, I think you have a great personality. I don't think it's something you can forget to pack, like a sweater or something.
P.S. I started working on a new comic book idea. Tristan's in it. He has no superpowers. He's just alive. You're in it too of course. Also no powers. I didn't think you needed them. I'll show you when it's done.
T H EÂ E N D