After Noah Died

He doesn't look at me. He doesn't look at anything but the white speckled tile. The fingers on his right hand pick viciously at the fabric of his sleeve held captive between the fingers on his left. I try to speak his name, but it comes out as nothing more than gibberish, and he doesn't take his sullen eyes from the floor to look at me. He doesn't even move, and I know that he couldn't have heard me. The silence was just too deafening, and he was too caught up in thought.

I bite harder into the soft flesh between my teeth. My lips are raw, and I know they'll start bleeding soon if I don't stop, but that doesn't matter much to me, so I keep at it. I'm picking at the fragile surface of my nails, if you could even call them that. By now they are all so mangled and short it's a wonder my finger tips aren't bleeding, and it's at that second that I begin to taste metallic in my mouth, and for some reason, this makes me smile. Maybe it's a sign of my own masochism, or maybe I'm just going insane. Either one would be a safe bet.

A man dressed in deep gray slacks and a smoothly contrasting white coat enters through the two wooden doors to my left, and I feel every hair on my body stand on end, but he doesn't look my way, and he doesn't speak the name that I'm dying for him to speak. Instead, he calls for the family of Neil Tyler’s. It's close, but he is not Neil. His name is Noah. As an elderly woman stands and introduces herself as the wife of this Neil character, I realize that he must be old. Noah is not old. Noah is young, too young to be going through this.

"It's been hours!" Owen shrieks. It comes out awkward, and I almost think he must be crying, but as he looks up, I can tell that he's not.

I sigh in to the alcove that I've created with my hands, and it comes out as a sort of halfway echo. I begin to rub, rub at my too-cold skin, rub at the warm tip of my brightened nose, rub at my own bloodshot eyes. It's crazy, but I think maybe if I rub hard enough, all of this might disappear. So I claw. I drag the scraggly remains of my nails down my sickly pale cheeks, but I can't get deep enough. I can't reach whatever it is my subconscious mind wants me to reach, and I think that maybe I'm trying to dig into my soul, my memories, anything and everything that holds any recollection of him. I just want to forget, but that's impossible when every time I close my eyes, I see him, and every time I open them, I see these walls; these damn white walls that surround me and Owen and every other pathetic person in this miserable place, and I realize that it's impossible. Forgetting is impossible, and I'm selfish for even wanting to in the first place. So, instead of forgetting, I do the next best thing. I remember.

The tears fall from my caramel eyes, and I don't even will them to stop. I want this. I want to feel them leaking warm down my lifeless cheeks, and I want to see the dark spots they leave in my jeans, and I just want it all so much that I begin to cry harder. My face is a filthy mess of different fluids, and my breaths are coming in fast puffs, but I don't stop. As if I could.

I feel a warm arm wrap around my doubled-over frame, but I don't look up, and I know that he doesn’t expect me to. I just cry, and he holds me like the friend that he is. It should be the other way around. Noah is his brother, and I'm simply the friend, but I can't stop. He understands. I know he does, because he tightens his grip around me.

"Shh," He whispers, just loud enough for me to hear. "Don't cry. You know how mad he'll be if he finds out."

I smile, because he's right. Noah would be furious if he knew that I was crying over him. I could practically feel his gray eyes on me now; his long, slender fingers prodding me in the side. He knows how ticklish I am.

I remember the day I first met Noah. It was a Sunday, and I had been invited over to his house by his brother, Owen. He was the new kid where I worked, and in between shifts of bagging miscellaneous items and stocking the shelves, we became fast friends.

I walked up the winding sidewalk to the front door. The color reminded me of partially coagulated blood. As I knocked, I put on my best "happy face," and then waited. It took only a second for the door to open, a short boy around the age of fourteen stood on the other side. He smiled at me and ushered me inside, which I found odd. He hadn't even asked my name or anything yet.

"Owen saw you coming up the walk and told me to let you in." He answered in response to my confused expression.

I nodded in his direction, but my eyes weren't on him. They wandered around the room with growing curiosity. It wasn’t the granite floor or flat screen television or even the fluorescent yellow sofa that caught my attention. It was the way that everything from the ceiling to the floor seemed to glisten with such pristine cleanliness that it was almost blinding.

My thoughts were interrupted as the door to my left opened and in walked the aforementioned Owen.

"Lucas, dude, hey." He smiled, pulling me in for one of those awkward man-hugs.

"Hey, Owen," I smiled up at him.

He brushed one strand of burgundy hair from his eyes, before laying a hand on the boy next to me's shoulder.

"Lucas, this is Noah, my little brother. Noah, this is Lucas, a friend from work."

I nodded my head, unsure of what else I was supposed to do. Owen ushered us from the room and to a flight of hard wood stairs. We walked up the steps, our foot falls creating small booms that radiated throughout the room and bounced off the walls. By the time we reached the landing at the top of the stairs, I was out of breath, but I tried to conceal my panting.

"This is my room." Owen announced, swinging his arm towards the door to his left in a sort of proud manor. It stood out in a hue of deep purple, but the part that caught my attention most was the over-sized red and white flag tacked horizontally to it’s surface.

"You're from Canada?" I asked, turning around to face Owen.

"Ontario," Noah answered for him, clearly proud of his home town.

I nodded in his direction, before following Owen through the now open door. Noah, of course, stayed right on our tails. I sat on the edge of the quilt- covered bed and traced each imprinted shape with the tip of my finger, liking the way the seams felt against my skin.
"Did your grandma make this or something?" I asked, looking back up at the brothers.

"No," Owen laughed slightly "Noah did."

I eyed the small, copper-haired boy. He shifted under my gaze, switching from foot to foot, eyeing me from under thick lashes. I took in his pale, almost sickly complexion, his cherry-red lips, and those big, gray eyes. Everything about him screamed “defenseless” and I hated it.

"So," I started, pulling my attention away from the boy, "What do you want to do?"

I directed the question at Owen, but Noah answered instead. Of course.

"Battleship!" He squealed like a prepubescent teenager. Well, he really wasn't far from one.

"Go get it." Owen laughed at his brother, before taking a seat on the bed next to me.

"Who invited him?" I grumbled once Noah had left the room. Owen surprised me with his answer.

"My brother is always invited." He growled, eyes growing far too serious.

I put my hands up in defense.

"Dude, I didn't mean anything by it. I was just saying, he's kind of weird--" I tried, but Owen cut me off.

"He's unique. So what? He's his own person, and he doesn't care what people like you think."

"Look, Owen, I didn't mean to offend you--"

"Well, you did." He sighed, cutting me off again.

After that, we sat in silence, neither of us mature enough to swallow our pride and apologize. I counted the seconds that went by. I was at one hundred and fifty seven by the time Noah returned from wherever he went; a large, rectangular box gripped tightly in his hands.

As Owen got up to help his brother put together the pieces, he lowly hissed something at me that sealed my assumption that they were close.

"Stay or go, I don't care, but don't you ever insult Noah around me again."

That memory is so fresh in my mind. I can still feel the spark of fear that ran through my body as that sentence spilled from his lips. That was the only time I was ever truly afraid of Owen, and the last time I ever insulted Noah. I never had any cause to.

After ten minutes of Battleship with Noah, I was hooked. There was just an aura around the boy that drew me in and trapped me. I understood in an instant why Owen loved his brother so much. He was addicting, like the purest cocaine. For two years, I was stuck to him. For two years, I melted in those happy gray eyes. He quickly became my best friend, far exceeding the friendship that Owen and I shared. I loved him like Owen loved him, and when he let me in on the secret behind his older brothers protectiveness, I wasn't at all prepared.

I frown at the memory, not wanting to think about that at a time like this, but what else was I supposed to think about?

Looking around, I notice Caryn, Owen and Noah's mother, sitting next to me with a steaming cup of coffee in her hands. Whether the beverage is there more for comfort or to quench her thirst I am unsure, but the white of her knuckles and the grip of which she holds it suggests the former. Her eyes are puffy and red, much like my own, and her face is pasty white. She looks frail, and I can’t help but feel sympathetic towards her. Sure, I’m losing a friend, but she’s losing a son.

I rest my hand on her shoulder, a sad attempt at consoling her. I was never good at comforting people. Her eyes meet mine, and I notice for the first time just how much they resemble Noah’s, but his were never filled with this much anguish. My heart aches for her, for Noah, for Owen. My heart aches for the sake of aching. I can feel the tears welling up in my eyes again, but I hold them back. I won't let them fall, not when I am the last person who should be crying.

As the large wooden doors open again, I don’t even bother to look up. It’s not worth getting my hopes up for, but as the doctors deep voice meets my ears, I feel a chill of fear run through me.

"Noah Anthony." He calls in to the nearly vacant waiting room. I am out of my chair and on the other side of the room before my mind can even comprehend what’s happening. Noah's family is right beside me.

"Are you the family of Noah Anthony?" He asks once we all arrive, clumped together in a semicircle around the man. We nod in unison, none of us brave enough to speak at the moment.

"We did all we could.”

The words pour from his creased lips and spill onto the floor around my feet. They climb up my legs, and they’re freezing. My heart swells in my chest and beats against my ribcage, desperately trying to do something, anything to stop the continuously growing waves of overlapping and interconnecting words from reaching any higher.

“His body was just too weak.”

But all attempts have failed, and I can feel my chest grow tight as the swells pass my abdomen and, millimeter by millimeter, creep until they’ve staked their claim on my shoulders and everything set beneath them. I’m shaking to the point where every breath I take is a struggle.

“I’m sorry.”

And then it really is. The words spill over my pale, trembling lips and delve into the pit of my stomach and venture down my air way, filling every last crevice of my lungs. I cough words into words. I claw at every jagged little vowel in my reach, but it’s not enough, and it doesn’t make a single difference.

Every sound is a murmur until all noise is shut out completely. My vision goes from bad to worse, until I can’t even make out my own frantic hand in front of my face. My insides swell with the weight of the words until they burst and I can no longer move to even attempt to free myself any longer. There is no pain, no blood, no happy gray eyes. It’s sort of masochistic, but in an odd way I kind of like it; the feeling of nothing, because that’s exactly what there is now. When Noah departed, he took the world with him. There was absolutely nothing left after Noah died.