Death Becomes You

My brother took Annie's death hard. He went to therapy two days a week every week after we got out of the hospital, but it didn't seem to help. A year passed us by, but he only got worse. Not even the new English exchange student that every boy already deemed gorgeous in his class drew a reaction from him.

Curiosity over took all of my senses. I wanted to know everything about the man in the trench coat with the stormy eyes. He made me feel safe, and I knew that he wouldn’t harm Annie or let anything bad happen to her. Once—when my brother was desperate for answers, desperate for condolence—I brought up the man to him, to tell him that Annie was somehow in a better place. Chandler hated me for it.

"Stop! Just stop, Lane! There is no man like that.” Chandler always yelled at me now, which he never did before. His eyes didn’t match his words or his tone. Anger was the farthest emotion from his mind when he yelled while something hidden deep in his pale green eyes that made me thing he didn’t believe there was no man. I asked him once how he knew the man didn't exist, but he just shook his head and walked away. My brother was gone, and the boy with his face hated me. It left me feeling distraught and hurt.

The pain got even worse for him, for me, when our mother was diagnosed three years after the accident. She took chemo or radiation for a year, but it made her so sick, too sick to comfort her son in his time of grief. The cancer began to spread too fast for chemo or radiation; she started to refuse the treatments. She said that she’d rather spend the time she had left with her family and not in some disinfected hospital trying to buy more time. We just made her as comfortable as possible. She cried every night with stomach pains, and food had no taste to her. She stopped eating and sleeping. The television was always on, always way too loud.

Dad had to keep working. Someone had to pay the bills. Chandler couldn't handle the stress. He couldn’t take Mom’s crying. We couldn't afford a live-in nurse. I sat with her every day for months in hospice. They finally let her come home with the care of a hospice nurse. I still took care of her. Chandler stayed locked in his room, rarely coming out for food. Dad worked late every day, sometimes coming in after I’d already gone to bed.

A week after that, I saw him, the stormy eyed man from Bugsy’s shooting and Annie’s accident. He wore the same trench coat and the same storm filled eyes, but the similarities ended there. Instead of pale skin with wide eyes fitted into a round face and a long, regal nose, he had slanted eyes and olive skin offset by an angular face and wide nose.

He watched me while I studied him. Our breaths came in the same rhythmic sequence. In...1...2...3...Out...1...2...3... "She's in a lot of pain," I whispered while keeping my gaze locked on him.

He averted his eyes and touched her hand. "I know," he replied without opening his mouth. His eyes lingered over her face. I reached for her other hand. It was cold, so cold, and I noticed her lips slowly turning blue. I took a sharp breath between our breathing sequences and noticed a different scent on the air. It was sharp, slightly sour, and turned my stomach.

"Are you here because she's dying?” I asked the question curiously, but as soon as the words left my lips I felt the desperate weight of sadness that comes with loss. Tears brimmed in my eyes, but I wouldn’t let them fall; instead, I pushed the tears away. I waited patiently for his answer, but it didn’t come right away.

After that long moment of silence, I chanced a look at his face, at his eyes. He simply nodded before turning his eyes toward mine, holding them in his strong gaze, and stated, "you cannot save this one.” His lips moved around the words. The action seemed harsh and uncomfortable, but I saw lightning flash in his eyes. I shivered while those sharp, shocking eyes held me in their fierce electricity. His words touched a part of me that I’d been keeping secret since the accident. I saved my brother from his fate, from this man, and that must be why my brother hated me so much.

"How much longer does she have?” I turned my face away from his eyes. Time passed slowly as I waited for an answer, but I realized when I looked back to where he stood, I wasn't going to get an answer.

The smell left and her lips returned to their normal pale pink. Her body didn’t seem to tremble with the spasms of pain she had before. She slipped peacefully into sleep, and it was the first time she looked alright in a long time.

“That’s alright,” I whispered to the room, “I can wait for an answer.”