Chapter Nineteen - Tyler
“Hello, Mr. Morgan. Welcome back.”
She’s young. Pretty. Dark skin and dark hair. Her eyes are almost as black as Evan’s, but not quite. Nobody’s are that dark, but hers are close. She wears a flowy, billowy, formless dress. Not diaphanous exactly, but comfortable-looking. The fabric has a complicated floral pattern. Flowers that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before.
She goes to put a lei around my neck and that’s when I look down and see that I’m not wearing a shirt. Just white linen pants that look kind of like pajama bottoms. Which I have never owned and am not sure how they found their way onto my body.
But that feels secondary. Because what’s particularly noteworthy is not that I don’t have on a shirt. What’s particularly noteworthy is what else seems to be missing.
My scars.
She hands me a fruity-looking drink served in one of those resort-style, hourglass-looking drink glasses. The ones that start out as colored at the bottom and then get clear as they travel up the stem to the main part—the vessel, I guess.
I let her put on the lei and kiss me on both cheeks, then I stand there, holding the glass as the frosty rivulets of condensation slide down the side and over my hand, and I say, “I’m sorry, have I been here before? Where am I?”
She smiles and squints her eyes like she’s confused by the question. Then she tilts her head to the side, her smile widens, and she says again, “Welcome back.”
She bows slightly. I bow in return, sort of reflexively, and then she glides away.
I place the straw from the drink to my lips and sip, absently, as I look around to take in my surroundings. It’s tropical. Jungle-like. But there is also the evidence of a man-made footprint. There are two stone obelisks. Two giant pillars that lift well above where my eye can track, but instinctively, I have the sense that they are holding something up. They’re beautiful and ornamental, but simultaneously generate an aura of functionality.
And there’s water everywhere. Oceans of it in the distance. Pools of it in the foreground. Droplets of it on my glass. A waterfall behind me. A stream in front of me. And everywhere, lush, rich, textured landscape grows and flourishes freely.
I take another sip of my drink. Partially just because I’m holding it and partially because it’s motherfucking delicious. It tastes like all the fruits I like came together into one super-fruit and then instead of the mixture of flavors competing for dominance, they worked out some peace treaty to balance perfectly in what I can only describe as a flavor orgy. It’s like my mouth is being fucked blissfully into euphoria.
I gotta get this recipe.
I’m not the only one here. There are dozens of people wandering around. Maybe hundreds. Some look like me, a little dopey and confused, but sipping their drinks with an expression of “holy fuck, that’s good,” on their faces. Some look amused at the rest of us. Like they’ve been wherever we are for a while and they already know how fucking good the drinks are.
I don’t see Maddie.
Another dark-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty walks by me. He wears the same loose-fitting, billowy, not-quite-diaphanous dress thing as the other one. I call to stop him. “Hey, man, ’scuse me.” But he just keeps walking.
I trot after him, trying again. “Sir? ’Scuse me.” Again, he keeps going. I try one last time, shouting, “Hey, friend?”
And then he turns to see me. “Yes?”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to shout. I didn’t know if you could hear me.”
“Oh, that’s fine. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were talking to me.”
“Oh, I—”
A hand rises to cut me off. “Happens all the time.”
And then, for some reason I couldn’t explain if I had money riding on it, I understand why this beautiful creature didn’t stop.
Because they are not him. Or her.
They are not here. And they are not away.
They are everywhere. And they are nowhere.
They are all of us. And they are none of us.
And in their company... I feel safe.
“Cool. Well, still,” I offer. “My bad.”
“It’s all love,” they say. And I believe it on about three different levels.
“So, um, do you happen to know where my girlfriend Maddie is?” I ask.
The expression that comes back my way is one I’ve never seen before, so I can’t describe it. It’s not one of amusement, or kindness, or wisdom, or comfort, or patience.
It’s all of them at once.
“We don’t keep inventory. But those over there might be able to help you.”
And as I turn to look where they’re pointing, I discover that I have sharper reflexes than I ever knew. Because when my jaw goes slack and my grip loosens, allowing the glass to fall from my hand and go careening to the floor, I’m able to snatch it up before it hits the ground.
The group I see is standing knee deep in a wading pool, all gathered around a circular table that comes just below chest height, talking and laughing and sipping their own drinks. My heart starts beating fast. Just like it did when I was in my kitchen on Halloween night and Maddie asked me what my real name was. Unlike then, though, I don’t feel like I’m having a heart attack. It actually just feels like my heart is... growing somehow. I don’t know if that’s even anatomically possible, but it’s how it feels. It also feels like it’s going to burst through my chest and splatter the surroundings in my fucking arterial spray.
And as quickly as it feels like it started beating, it almost as quickly feels like it stops when the group, as one, looks over at me. They’re not laughing, but they are still smiling, and then they peel away from the table, en masse, to approach me.
Which is fine. Because I’m frozen. I can’t move. Just like I couldn’t move those couple times in Mexico. Just like I froze up then. But this isn’t anxiety or some kind of weird flashback. This is just... stillness. A stillness that I want to live in.
The members of the group fall into a single file line. A receiving line. They make their way across the pool to where I’m standing, and for the first time, I realize that I’m also standing about ankle deep in water. It’s cooling. Soothing. It definitely feels like water, but it feels like something else too. Something I can’t quite identify. If I had to put a word to it, though, I might call it... memory.
The first one to step to me and take my hand is Jeff.
“Hey, man,” he says.
“Uh... hey. Dude,” I manage to work out.
He takes a sip of his drink, and as he pulls it away from his mouth, he gestures with it to me and asks, “What’s yours?”
“Uh... not sure.”
“Yeah.” He nods. “It’s good though, right?” There’s a gleam in his eye. That same youthful, excited gleam he had when he told me that we’d be going to a strip club for his birthday. About ten percent more enthusiasm than is probably necessary over something like a fruity drink. Or maybe it’s exactly the right amount of enthusiasm. Either way, he raises his glass to me in a “cheers” motion, we clink them together, and he pats me on the shoulder and walks off, sipping happily.
I watch him go. I have things I want to ask him, things I want to say, but he disappears before I get a chance.
And then Pete approaches.
“Tyler,” he says, in his Pete way. He’s still wearing one of his aloha shirts, which looks totally at home in this new environment. “You shaved.”
Shaking my head a wee bit, I work out, “Hey, Pete.” We shake hands. His grip is stronger than I remembered. Then I ask, “Pete... What—?”
But he stops me. “Don’t ask questions you already know the answers to. Makes you sound like an asshole,” he says.
Fair enough.
Then he waves to someone to come join him. A woman approaches. A pretty, slightly round, kind-seeming but also no-nonsense-looking woman. Basically, the female version of Pete.
She steps up next to him, extends her hand, and I take it. “You’re Tyler?” she asks.
I nod as we shake. “You’re Carolina,” I offer as fact. She nods in kind.
“Pete tells me you’re pretty stupid,” she says, not joking.
“Um, yeah. I mean, I have been. Yeah. He ain’t wrong.”
She nods, thoughtfully. “No wonder you two get along so well.” She looks at him and smiles. He smiles back. Then he bends to her and they kiss.
I smile at them both. This is the only time I’ve ever seen Pete approaching anything that resembles sweet, and so I take the opportunity to ask him, “You, uh... You like me, Pete?”
Pete stops kissing his lady, lets his smile drop, and says, “Drink your fruity-ass drink and shut up, kid.” And as they walk off past me, they both stroke my shoulder.
I drop my head as they walk away and let out an enormous sigh. I bend down into a crouch, steeling myself for what’s coming next. Leaving my drink in the pool of water, I stand back up again, lift my head, and in the next moment, before any words can even be exchanged, I am lost inside a hug with my old friend.
I clasp my hand around the nape of Nadir’s neck and he grips the back of my head. We hold each other like that for what feels like a hundred years. And who knows? Maybe it is.
When I finally pull away from him, I almost start crying. Because he looks like him. Not the way he looked when I last saw him, but the way he looked in the moments just before that. Happy, and grinning, and joyous, and whole.
I take his face in my hands, my own head twisting back and forth, unable to grasp that this is really happening.
“Nadir...” It’s all I can say.
“Tyler. Tyler, my friend,” he responds.
There’s so, so, so much that I don’t know how to begin. So I decide to work backwards. “I’m, um... I’m getting your watch fixed.”
“It is your watch,” he tells me, laughing. “I gave it to you.”
“I know, but...” I run out of words. His smile widens.
“It is good to see you,” he says.
“Nadir, I’m so sorry. I—”
He puts his finger on my lip and shushes me. “Tyler, shhhh. Being sorry requires sorrow. And there is none of that now.”
“But—”
“There is no need for explaining. There is no need for regret. Because here...” He gestures all around us. My breath catches in my throat. “Here,” he says again, “it is always morning.”
And I can’t hold it anymore. I start to cry. And I begin stammering out, “But I didn’t do what I should have. Your family... The work you wanted to do... I didn’t...”
“My friend.” He takes me by the shoulders, “There is no past, so there is nothing you didn’t do. There is only now. And now you are doing exactly what it is that you should. All is as it should be, my dear, sweet Tyler. You are a good man. And that is enough. Please. Know this.”
I sniff back a couple of the tears and I hug him again. He hugs me back and laughs.
“There will be much time for us to know each other again. Much time. If you wish it so. Will you stay?”
I pull back out of the hug with him again. This is a question that I didn’t even know could be asked.
“Do I have a choice?”
He narrows his eyes in a gentle and thoughtful way and says, “Always.” Then he steps back and holds out his hand to the side, readying to slap his palm into mine in the same clasp of solidarity we used when we cemented our partnership all those years ago. I reach back and throw my hand into his, and we shake our unified fist.
“I am glad to see your face,” he says. “And whether soon or even sooner than that... I will see it again.” And then he releases my grip and begins to head off.
“Wait,” I say, stepping in front to stop him. “Where are you going?”
He grins. “I am happy to see you. But it is not me you are here for now.”
“What do you mean?”
Still grinning, he says, “I will see you the next time I see you.” He puts his hand over his heart and bows to me. “As Salaam Alaykum. My brother.”
And then he places his palm on the side of my face, pats me, and as he walks away, I turn to see him follow where the others went. Somewhere off into the sprawling jungle. Behind one of the waterfalls and out of sight.
It’s not him I am here for.
I take a massive breath and blow it out. Yep. Yep. I get it. I know.
I know.
And when I turn back around...
“’Sup, T?”
I draw all the strength I have and say...
“Hey, Scotty.”
Wow. He’s so grown. Strong. So much older than the last time I saw him. He still has the same red hair and freckles that made him look like some nineteen-fifties version of what they used to call an “all-American boy,” but it no longer makes him look boyish and cute. Instead, it comes across as rugged and resolved.
I saw pictures of him in those years after I left, but it’s not the same as seeing him now. In my memories of him, he’s always been little Scotty. The Scotty I knew from childhood. The Scotty I knew from high school. Not the man that Scotty became.
But the man is here now. Standing right the hell in front of me.
He saunters up and lands inches from my face. There’s a smirk of knowing confidence in his eyes. He tilts his neck to one side. Then the other. Then he squares off and looks dead into me.
“So,” he says. “You’re banging my sister?”
“Wha—? Scotty—it’s not—”
And then he starts laughing. “I’m fucking with you, bro!” He grabs me and pulls me into a bear hug. My arms dangle at my sides for a moment before I remember to raise them and hug him back.
“Dude,” he says, pulling back and grabbing my shoulders. “Look at you. You look so much better without that crazy beard. You never should’ve let that thing get so out of hand. You won’t do that again, right?”
“Probably not, but... Wait. How did you know about my beard?”
“I’ve been watching you, bud.”
“Whatayou—? You have?”
“Yeah. Of course I have. All the time.”
The very, very first thought I now have is Oh, God, does he mean like ALL the time?
“No, man,” he says, before I even have a chance to say anything. Which is weird. “No, I, like, turn the channel when you and Maddie...y’know. I watch hoops or whatever.”
“Scotty, I just... I...” And suddenly, I have a terrible feeling. “Is Maddie here now?”
“Maddie? Oh, no. No way. No, not her time yet.”
“Oh. OK. Good,” I say, dropping my head just a bit. Both in relief and in sadness.
“Hey.” He bends his head to find my eyes. “Dude, don’t be bummed. You don’t have to stay if you don’t wanna.”
That’s what Nadir said too. What does that mean?
“It means...” he starts. Which is, again, weird, because I didn’t ask the question aloud. “You don’t have to ask it aloud,” he says.
OK. Fine. I quit.
“It means,” he says again, “that you’re not done yet either. Not if you don’t want to be. It’s really no more complicated than that. Up to you.”
“Wait. Are you saying that I get to choose when I die?”
“Well, no. Not exactly. I mean at some point it’s just gonna happen, but for you, after everything I’ve done to get you and Maddie together? I would consider it a personal favor if you’d go and actually be with her.”
A cold chill runs through me because this all sounds startlingly familiar to the shit I heard when I died the last time. But there’s no danger of Scotty reading my thoughts at this moment, because there are none. Just a baffled, slack-jawed look on my face and an empty space in my skull where my brain used to be. I think. Or don’t. Whatever.
“Wait. What do you mean, after what you did to get me and Maddie together? I thought...” And then I remember what James Franco told me after the debacle with my apartment fire. He said, “People see me how they wanna.”
So I ask the suddenly obvious question. “Scotty? Are you God?”
“Um... Well. Yeah. I am.”
I’m glad I’m dead, because otherwise I would have a heart attack.
“And so are you,” he goes on. “And so is Nadir, and Pete, and Carolina, and Jeff, and those guys over there, and that chick with the hat, and they who welcomed you, and Maddie, and.... All of us, man. We all are.”
“What? What are you saying?”
“All of us. All the people and plants and animals and everything. That’s what God is, dude. We’re all accountable, each to the other. That’s God. So yeah, I mean... I’m God too.”
And I thought my mind was blown the last time.
“So James Franco isn’t here?”
He draws his chin back into his neck in seeming confusion. “James Franco? Why the fuck would James Franco be here?”
“I—He wouldn’t. No reason. You’re the one responsible for me and Maddie being together?”
“Well, kind of. I mean, you and Maddie are the ones actually responsible, but I did my best to make sure you got there. I mean... I dunno. Call it ‘guardian angel,’ call it ‘mortal protector,’ call it ‘good friend,’ call it whatever you want. I’ve just been trying to get you and Maddie together for a long time. Ever since I made the choice to cash in my own chips. But you made it really, really hard. So, all I’m saying is that now that you’ve finally hooked up, it would mean a lot to me, personally, if you’d just go back and do right by her. That’s it.”
I take a second. This should be an easy choice. Of course I want to go back and be with Maddie. Of course I do. And yet I have to ask, “What’s it like here?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is there really like no suffering and is it morning all the time like Nadir said, or...?”
He shrugs. “Up to you, man. That’s all just a reflection of you. But it seems like things must going OK right now because, I mean... You made this.” He gestures all around him. “Nice work.”
“What? I did? How did I?”
“Because you’re God, man. You can do anything. And you don’t have to be here to do it. You can make all of this on earth, if you want. I mean, maybe not the towering obelisks. There are probably building codes and stuff, but you get what I’m saying. There’s no point in waiting to find Heaven. It’s all already there. You just have to seize it.”
I just stare at him now, because what he’s saying seems...
Well, it seems...
Obvious.
“‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure,’” I mumble to myself.
“What? What is that?” he asks. “Oh, is that from that Nelson Mandela speech?”
“Yeah. But it wasn’t actually Mandela. It was Marianne Williamson.”
“No. Pretty sure it was Mandela.”
“Nope. It wasn’t. Maddie told me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh. I’ll have to ask Mandela why people think it was him.”
There’s a lot that I want to say, so I just launch in. “Scotty, I—”
“Stop,” he says, putting up his hand. “You don’t have to say it, man. You said everything at my grave. We’re good.” He takes me around the back of the neck and presses his forehead to mine. “We’re good.”
I just stand there for a moment, feeling the touch of my long-lost best friend one more time. Something I thought I’d never get again. And then, after an endless-seeming while, I say, “Can I ask you something?”
“Why did I want it to be you with Maddie?”
I nod. Our heads are still touching, so it causes both of our necks to move in unison.
“Because,” he says, “there’s no one else it could have been.” Then he slaps me on the shoulder and says, “Gotta go.”
“No. Wait! What? Why? Where are you going?”
“I’m not sure. But I’ll find out when I get there. Kind of how it works here.”
“I mean I’ll go back and all, especially if that’s what you want, because, I mean, it’s absolutely what I want, but... Can’t we just hang for a little while?”
His lips press together tightly, and he shakes his head. “Can’t, man. Gotta run. Besides, until you get back, I wanna keep eyes on Maddie. Know what I mean? I have a feeling she’s freaking out right now. Besides, it’s not really me you’re here for.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“I’ll see you again, man. OK? I will. Promise.” He smiles, turns, and also heads off in the direction that Jeff, Pete, Carolina, and Nadir went.
And quite suddenly I also now realize that everyone else is gone too. All the other people who were here who looked like me, all the people who were here who looked like them, everyone. I’m just standing alone, ankle-deep in water, looking out over a seemingly endless horizon at the most indescribably placid universe I’ve ever seen, with somehow quiet waterfalls cascading all around.
And then, out of nowhere, I hear the soft splash of feet moving through the water behind me.
And at the same time, I catch a whiff of cinnamon.
Turning slowly, I can already feel the pressure building behind my eyes. My breathing turns sharp and shallow and I feel like I might hyperventilate. As my shoulder shifts into the direction of the approaching footsteps, I can feel my body starting to vibrate with energy. And when I make it all the way around, I cannot continue standing.
My legs give out from under me slowly, muscle by muscle, like someone shutting off the lights in an office building floor by floor, and I fall to my knees in the pool, my shoulders beginning to shudder and my head to shake. And through the tears streaming down my cheeks like the waterfalls spilling around me, I see her.
Mom.
She’s wearing the same clothes she was wearing the day she collapsed in the kitchen. A soft, yellow sweater that beams like the sun and falls off one of her always tan shoulders. A pair of faded jeans that she has rolled up around her calves to keep them from getting them wet. A simple gold chain that I gave her for her birthday the year before. Bought with money that I had been saving for months, any time I could get my hands on some.
Her dark hair hangs down around her neck, and her eyes – my eyes – are as deep and blue as the oceans that surround us. She’s so beautiful. And it makes my heart hurt to realize this, because I almost forgot.
She is thirty-eight years old.
She comes to where I am kneeling down and stands over me. My chin is buried in my chest because I’m afraid to look up. I can’t stop crying. She rubs my hair, and I cry harder.
“Shhh. Shhh.” I hear her voice. Not in my memory, or in my imagining, but here, now, in my actual presence, for the first time in seventeen years. “Tyler... Tyler, honey. Look at me.”
She kneels down as well. I see her knees landing in front of mine and resting in the water. She takes my chin in her hands and raises my head upright so that she can see me. She smiles the smile of a mother who hates to see her child in pain but knows that the pain can be cleaned away by a mother’s loving touch.
She puts her palms on my tear-drenched cheeks and commences wiping the tears away, which just makes me cry more. I’m sniffling and sobbing, my shoulders heaving up and down, and she just keeps wiping my face and whispering, “Shhh. Shhh.”
After some moments of this, my tears begin to slow, and my breathing starts to level out. She’s still wiping my face and rubbing her hands across the front of my hair. The smile is still there, and when I reach up to place my hands over hers, I jolt at the sensation of touching her, and she laughs.
“Hey, buddy,” she says.
It’s weird to question something appearing as true, but humans do it all the time. We say, “Really?” Or, “No way!” Or, “Are you serious?” Almost as a reflex. It usually doesn’t mean that we don’t believe. It more means that we want to express astonishment. But right now, in this moment, when I say, “Mom?” It’s a real goddamn question.
“Yep,” she says with a shrug in her voice. “It’s me. Hi.”
I reach out and touch her face, carefully. I let my fingertips trace the contours of her cheeks and the shape of her nose. I let them spread across her forehead and gently close her eyelids. They land on her lips and her chin. And then...
She goes, “Boo!”
And I stumble backwards and land on my ass in the water.
She starts laughing, hard, and rushes over to me. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, baby,” she says, still laughing, “I know I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t resist.”
Yep. That’s my mom.
She helps me up to my feet, and we stand there just staring at each other. I forgot how tall she is. She’s the one I get my height from. But the last time I saw her, I only came up to about her chest. Now, I’m a good four or five inches above her.
“You got so big,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah. That happens.”
She smiles and says, “I guess it does.”
“I can’t believe you’re here,” I say.
“Why?” she asks.
“Because... Because I never thought I’d see you again.”
“Well, baby,” she says, reaching for my hands, “it’s what’s happening right now, so you may as well choose to believe it.” And she winks.
I look down at our interlocked fingers. “I’ve missed you,” I sigh out.
“Really?” she says. “Because it doesn’t feel like you’ve missed me at all.”
I snap my head up, mortified. “What? Why? Why do you say that?”
“Because you think about me all the time. I feel it. I’m always there. I haven’t gone anywhere.”
“But... But that’s not what I mean. I—”
She presses our hands together and says, “I know what you mean. I’m just talking about what is.” And she looks at me with her head tilted in a total Barbara Hudson Morgan way. “You get what I’m saying, right?”
I let out a breath and nod. “Yeah. I do.”
“I know you do. You’re smarter than you like to let on.” She smirks again, and I laugh.
“Am I?”
“You know you are. But I’m proud of you that you don’t go around showing off about it. You’ve got so many other gifts that if people knew you were smarter than them too, they’d really be annoyed with you.”
“You mean as opposed to the just regular level of annoyance I inspire now?”
“Exactly,” she says. And we both laugh.
When the laughter dies down, the gentle lapping of water all around us is all I can hear.
“It’s beautiful here,” I say.
She nods and looks around. “Yeah. You did a good job.”
“Is this really all me?”
“Yep,” she says, “it sure is.” Then, after a moment of continuing to listen to the water, “How’s Maddie?”
I can’t stop the smile from spreading. “She’s good,” I say over my dippy grin.
“Yeah?” she says, grinning too. “You love her, huh?”
“Like, more than I thought it was possible to ever love anything or anyone. Which is to say, at all. But, like, way more even than that.”
She chuckles. “Good.”
After another beat, I ask, “Mom?”
And instead of saying, “What?” she answers the question still in my head. “Because I felt about him the way you feel about Maddie, baby.”
“You did? Really? How?”
“Because. He wasn’t always the way he is. You remember.” The look on her face is a sad one, which makes me sad.
“Yeah. Yeah. I do.” This is painful and feels like it’s ruining the moment. I wish I hadn’t brought it up.
“No. It’s OK for you to wonder about it,” she says. “I’d be concerned if you didn’t.”
I nod and let out a huff or air.
“Hey,” she says. “Think about this: I loved your father more than anything or anyone. And he felt the same way about me. Honestly, babe, we were just like you and Maddie. Well... not just like. You guys have one hell of a story to tell your kids one day.” She winks. “But we felt exactly as strongly as you do. Now think about something happening to Maddie.”
“Mom...”
“I know, it’s gross, but do it.” She’s right. It is gross. But I do. “Now imagine what that would feel like.”
I take this in.
I get it. I get what she’s saying. If anything happened to Maddie now and she was taken from me, there’s no telling what I might do. Woe be to the earth, because Tyler Hudson Morgan would...
Wait. No. He wouldn’t. I mean, no, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t go on some rampage and just hurt myself and the world. Not anymore. Not again. Because that’s not what Maddie would want. That wouldn’t be kind. That wouldn’t be honoring her. That wouldn’t be honoring myself. I wouldn’t...
Her smile widens, and she says, “And that’s why you’re my favorite son.”
“But wait,” I say. “But Dad...”
“He doesn’t have the advantages you do, honey. Not here”—she points at my head—“and not here.” And she points at my heart. “You’re way ahead of him. And what you did earlier? The way you were with him? Thank you, babe. Thank you. He needs it.”
I shrug. I’m kicking myself for injecting this into our reunion when there’s so much else I’d rather be talking about.
“Your dad will get there. He will. Eventually. I don’t know if it helps you to know that, but it’s true.”
I shrug again. I totally feel thirteen again.
She takes my face in her hands once more. “Tyler, look at me.” I do. “I’m sorry that you had to go through what you went through. It killed me to watch it all happening. Well, not exactly killed, but you know...” I smile, in spite of myself. “And it may not make any sense to you now, but everything that has happened to you happened exactly as it was supposed to.”
“Really?”
She nods, gently.
“Well, that’s fucked up.”
“Fair enough. But there is another way to see it. And that’s that it just is. And what you do with what is is what makes you you.” She looks around again at our surroundings, “And baby, I’m so, so, so proud of who you’ve become.”
My shoulders don’t heave this time, and my breath doesn’t quicken, but tears begin falling again. “You are?”
“Cross my heart,” she says. And then adds, “I feel like I don’t have to say the second part.”
And just like that, Mom has me laughing again.
I don’t care what she says. I have missed her so much.
After I stop laughing, I take her hands in mine again.
“What now?”
“Sweetie...” Her shoulders rise and drop, and she lets out a sigh. “You know what now. She’s waiting.”
I look up at the sky, or whatever it is above us that seems bigger than sky. I look around at the water everywhere. The quiet, peaceful cataracts and the rippling, cresting waves. I notice the obelisks again and ask, “Do you know what those are holding up?”
She shakes her head. “Nope. But they look strong. Which is unsurprising.”
“Why?”
“Because you built them.”
And before another millisecond can pass, I have pulled us together and wrapped my mother in a hug. She hugs me back and strokes my head again.
“How can I bring you with me?” I ask, the sound of my voice muffled by her hair.
“The same way you keep me with you already,” she says, softly.
I sniff through my tears so that I can say, “I love you.”
She pulls back, looks me in the eyes – our eyes – and wraps her palms around my cheeks. “I love you, Tyler. More than you can ever know.”
I slowly let my crying stop and then ask, “How do...?”
“Lie down here,” she says, gesturing to the ankle-deep pool we’re in. I do. The water splashes and laps around my ears.
“Now what?” I ask.
She steps back, away from me, and the water starts running by my ears faster. Louder. The pool is getting higher, engulfing me. Carrying me like I’m being run backwards down a water flume of some kind.
Over the increasingly noisy sound of the rushing river, I shout, “I love you, Mom!”
“I love you too, honey!” she calls out. And then, “Oh! Hey! Be careful!”
I smirk at that, because that’s something she used to say when I was going off to do something dangerous. Which was all the time. And I offer the same response I used to give back then. “Come on, Mom. You know me. That’s not gonna happen.”
And she offers back the same retort she always used to give as well. “I know. But I have to say it anyway. I’m your mother!”
And then the current sweeps me away.
“One, two, three, four, five.” I hear the count happening quickly and feel something heavy pressing on me. Then I feel something. Lips. Touching my lips. Perfect lips. Soft, delicate, kissable lips with a precious little Cupid’s bow. Then again, I hear...
“One, two, three, four. Come on, you sorry son of a bitch!” And again, lips on my lips. And now I feel a pain in my chest. A weight. But a weight that feels like it’s being lifted. No. Not lifted. Ripped. Ripped right out from the center of me.
And now I can hear coughing. And as I hear the coughing, I start to realize that it might be me who’s doing it, because the sound seems to correspond with the searing pain I feel all through my ribcage and sternum. And now the coughing turns into gagging, and the gagging turns into something that sounds like vomiting, and then my eyes open and I can see a tiny geyser of water spurting up from my mouth.
And then a face enters my field of vision. Maddie’s face. The look in her eyes is one of terror and astonishment. And even though I hate that part for her, I love that it’s her I’m seeing. Because... because it’s all worth it. Everything. Every cost, every loss, every moment that isn’t absolutely perfect is made perfect just by virtue of her being.
And as I cough again, that pain is back, and I hear something that sounds like a crack. To be precise, it sounds like a bone cracking. To be even more precise, it sounds like a rib bone cracking. And to be very, very precise... It sounds like my rib bone cracking.
“Oh, shit!” I shout, as I roll over on my side onto the pool deck. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Logan’s lifeless body floating in the water, a bloom of red expanding out away from him. And glancing down the length of me, I see a ripped t-shirt, soaked in my blood, tied around the place in my leg where the bullet went in.
“Ty? Ty? Tyler! Talk to me!”
“Hey, babe,” I croak out. “Can you go back to the kissing stuff?”
“I wasn’t kissing you! I was giving you mouth-to-mouth!”
“Oh. OK. Maybe I don’t understand how kissing works.”
She swings herself behind me and puts my head in her lap. Her naked lap. Where I am now looking up at her naked breasts, and just like that, Chuckie shows up to say hi.
She does kind of a double-take as she gives me a once-over and sees what’s happening down below my waist. “Are you goddamn kidding me?” she says.
“I dunno, babe. It just happens. Cut me a break. I’m having a rough night.”
“Christ. Can you stand up?”
“Maybe? I dunno. Do you need, like, all of your bones to stand up and shit?”
“OK,” she says, rising up and laying my head gently down on the concrete. “Shit. I’m calling an ambulance. Stay here.”
“May wanna call the cops too,” I tell her as she’s running inside. Watching her ass from my contorted position here on the deck makes me almost forget that I’m pretty fucked up. Almost. Then the pain shoots through me again and I’m reminded with a quickness.
“Damn. The cops. Yeah,” she says. “What the hell will we say?”
“I dunno,” I moan, my face now squarely against the ground. “Let’s start with the truth and work our way backwards.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” she says, hopping from one foot to the next. “I don’t wanna leave you here.”
“It’s OK. I ain’t going nowhere.” And then I moan again as the pain from kind of everywhere makes itself known. So this is what real, actual pain feels like. Yeah. This blows.
She comes running back over. “No, no way. I’m not leaving you.”
“Babe,” I say, summoning as much composure as I can. Which is actually just exhaustion, but it looks the same, probably. “Babe, I’m fine. OK? I’m fine. I’ll be right here.”
And now her lips start trembling. She nods, but the tremulous lips and scrunched-up face let me know that she’s about to lose it. I work my way around to my back again, even though it hurts like a bitch, so that I can see her face. I take her hand and press it to my chest. My chest that is once again marked with the reminders of the life I’ve lived up to now. I don’t mind that they’re still here. They’re part of me. They’re part of everything I’ve been through. They’re part of making me who I am. And that person is lying here holding Maddie Clayton’s hand, so I must’ve done something right.
“Babe, listen. Grab the phone. I’m not going anywhere. OK? I will be here when you get back.”
She sniffs back her tears, squeezes my hand tightly and says, “You will?”
“Where am I gonna go?”
“I dunno. You went somewhere a few minutes ago. I thought you were...” She chokes off before she gets out the last word.
“No way. I’m right here. Hey... I go where you go.” I wink. Or blink. Not sure.
She sniffs one more time and says, “Promise?”
I think of all the things I could say. I could tell her that of course, I promise. I could tell her that I’ll do my best. I could tell her that she has no idea what I would do to make sure that we’re together for as long as possible. And even beyond that.
Yeah. I could say a lot of things.
But instead, I simply go with...
“Cross my heart.”
I feel like I don’t have to say the second part.