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“Can I ask you something, Cali?” Brooks asked, voice softer than I’d ever heard it, making my gaze lift, seeing a mix of confusion and pain on his handsome face.
“Okay…”
“You said he wrecked his car,” he said. “Is that how… was that how he died?”
Even just that word made my stomach clench.
“Yes.”
I’d been sitting at my desk at work when my phone kept vibrating in my drawer.
We weren’t supposed to use them at work, so I’d snuck off to the bathroom with it, answering the unfamiliar number. Where a woman calmly informed me that my brother had been in an accident. And that he hadn’t made it.
I guess I’d been in shock.
Because the next thing I knew, I was on the floor, and Sage was pushing the door open, slamming into my leg, and squeezing in with me, seeming to read on my face that something horrible had happened.
“Who?” she’d asked, seeming to know that only a death could knock a person’s legs out from under them.
“Clay.”
His name had sobbed out of me, but the tears refused to come. Not even as Sage held me and assured me that everything was going to be alright. As she drove me to the hospital. Then after, as she handed me one of her anxiety rescue pills, and sat with me until I passed out.
I was still painfully numb the next few days as I planned a funeral, as I informed his employer and the friend or two he had been close with.
Each day, I expected for the well of grief to open up, to pull me in, to drown me in it.
I loved my brother more than anything in the world. He’d been my everything.
I didn’t understand how it was possible that I’d been functioning, that I wasn’t curled up in bed sobbing my heart out.
“Fuck,” Brooks said, collapsing back against the wall, having the same issue with his legs that I’d had when I’d first gotten the news. “He didn’t suffer, did he?” Brooks asked, voice raw, and it raked its claws across me too.
“No. It was… instant. That’s what they told me.”
“That’s good,” Brooks said, speaking to himself. Then, “He was it, wasn’t he?”
“What?”
“He was the only family you had left,” Brooks said, his words a sucker punch to my aching heart.
“Yes.”
That was the reason I’d been hearing my clock.
It had started ticking about a year before. When my aunt had committed suicide after her son had passed away from a freak bout of severe pneumonia. Just a year after her husband had passed from complications from surgery.
The year before that, it had been our cousin.
Before that, our uncle.
My mother.
Father.
Grandparents.
Every single member of my family had died. Each of them well before their ‘time.’ No one in my family, as far back as I could find, had lived past sixty. Most barely made it to forty.
Clay had only been thirty-five.
The week after his funeral, that clock that had been a constant, irritating ticking had become so loud that it was impossible to ignore it anymore.
If family history had anything to say about it, my time left wasn’t long. And all I’d done was squander every single year I’d been alive.
I’d made a deal with myself one night alone in my apartment.
In Clay’s memory, I was going to stop wasting my time left here. I was going to do everything I’d been putting off for years. I was going to actually start living.
If I wasn’t going to make it to old age, at least I could enjoy every single moment I had left here.
Hence the trampoline park, the drag show, the club.
That was stuff I never would have done before Clay’s passing. I would have just kept on hanging in at night, rotting in bed while scrolling my phone endlessly, only really going out to get lunch or dinner with Sage or my brother.
“I have family albums and some personal items in boxes,” Brooks said. “Shit I figured you’d want to keep. If you’re not ready, I’m gonna throw some things in it. I will get you a key, so you can go through shit when you are ready.”
“Okay,” I said, head starting to spin.
It was too much.
Being here.
Smelling him.
Seeing the ghost of him all around.
“I… I can’t do this,” I declared, shooting up, and rushing toward the door before he could even say anything.
I was down the elevator, out the front door, and halfway down the block when Brooks caught up with me.
“Caliana, wait,” he called.
But I didn’t wait.
I kept walking, using my phone to try to find a ride-share nearby to get me out of here, out of my own mind. Maybe back to the club with Sage. To get lost in the music and the liquor. To be anywhere but in my memories.
“Cali, what the fuck?” he asked, grabbing my elbow, pulling me to a stop, then moving in front of me. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asked, squinting at me like he didn’t even recognize me anymore.
