NOT AFRAID OF LETTING GO
In her room, I grab a chair and pick a spot by her bed. I refuse to move. I’ve left her once, and it was the worst decision I’ve ever made. I’m not going to do it again.
“Sir, visiting hours are over.”
“That’s nice. I’ll let everyone know.”
“Sir, you have to leave.”
“No.”
In the end, I’m pretty sure Mr. Coulter paid the nurse to let me stay.
The next three days are a mixture of blur and random detail. I know my phone’s rung at least fifty times. I know that Christmas comes and goes in the most non-Christmas fashion, which isn’t a surprise. Christmas isn’t really for people lying in hospital beds after almost dying of a mixture of stolen pills, cocaine, and alcohol.
I don’t know if the phone calls decrease, and I’m not sure if I’ve let go of her hand since I’ve sat down. I don’t know if I’ve eaten, and I’m not sure if I’ve gone to the bathroom. What I do know is that Dez Coulter is beautiful, and I’ve felt her burn rippling up my shoulders. And even though Ray Bradbury didn’t mean it this way, I know it’s a pleasure to burn with her. I tell her that, whether she’s listening or not.
I don’t know what day it is when I finally see life in Dez Coulter, my normal girlfriend, but it comes when her fingers slide between mine.
“I love you,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
She lifts her arm and the small plastic tube of the IV pulls taught. She tugs on my shirt and pulls my head onto her pillow.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice scratchy and slurred. “If you’ll have me, it’d be a pleasure to burn with you.”
“Yes, please,” I say.
She makes her fingers into a greater than sign and places them against my chest and just like that she’s asleep again.
Three months later…
I’m on the shore next to the bridge of Deception Pass. The same place I stood when my family came here for their final vacation before the explosion of hearts.
This isn’t a dream. I am here.
The sand is really beneath my toes. The water is definitely navy blue. Not black. The sky is sapphire blue, deep and thick with brilliance. A golden sun sets against the arches and crags of the various islands dotting the Puget Sound. I feel spring on the air. There’s no darkness here. Just beauty.
“It’s pretty,” Addy says.
“Really pretty,” Dad says.
“Brings back so many memories,” my mom says, her voice breaking.
I swallow. I don’t look at her, but I don’t hate her.
“Thanks for suggesting this, Adam,” Mom says. “Coming here for our first … family hangout is such beautiful symmetry.”
“I know,” I say, staring down the water.
“Come on,” Addy says. “Let’s head back before it gets dark. I feel the summoning of ice cream, somewhere.”
The sound of sand crunching under feet surrounds me as my family walks back toward the tree line, but I stand staring at the water.
This is the point where deception meets reality.
The point where I choose what I believe about myself.
My body shivers with the fear of being alone, but I came to Deception Pass for this moment. There are no formulas here. There won’t be, after this. There’s nothing philosophical. There’s only me and that Gollum-like voice telling me that I should walk toward the dark because it’s safer. Telling me that being alone is better.
But I came here to swallow the dark.
I came to Deception Pass to turn around.
I swivel on my heel.
Leaving the water behind me.
My family has stopped a few feet ahead.
They wait for me.
Addy holds out her hand and motions for me. “Come on!”
I run to them.
—
The next day, I tighten my tie again and again. Eventually I realize nothing ever feels good enough for a funeral. I wipe the tears from eyes and look at my friends sitting beside me in their various states. Even though she’s crying, Addy sits strong and present. Holding my hand like she always has. Trey’s been crying since we hit I-5, and he’s still going. Elliot’s part-emo, so I feel like he’s been sulking on the edge of tears since we met. All in all, we may now be the Knights of Vice Versa, but we’re the same amount of mess as the Knights of Vice.
The Knights of Vice Versa is what Mr. Cratcher called us in his “Everyone” recording. He said, “Once you know what you are, you are no longer a human who struggles with addiction, but a human who struggles with being human. Therefore, I knight you all as new beings. You are now the Knights of Vice Versa.”
I keep looking over my shoulder at the church doors, expecting Dez to come through them, but it’s impossible. The minister stands and calls us all to order while my mind tries to concoct what complaints Dez would have about the cheesy photomontage playing against the wall via projector.
The church goes silent as “What Are You, Elias?” starts playing. I look at the doors again. I remind myself, again, she’s not coming.
The doors creak as they swing open. A group of people—including my dad—walk down the aisle with the coffin.
Dad glances at me as he walks past. He wanted me to be a pallbearer, but I said no. It might be unfair, but right now I feel like I’m carrying enough weight without carrying death itself.
The pallbearers place the coffin at the front of the church and scatter to seats reserved for them on the front row. The minister looks at me and nods. I stand, but right before I step out of the pew, the church doors swing open and Dez runs down the aisle in black fur-lined boots, a yellow dress with white polka dots, and a black cardigan. In other words, she’s as beautiful as beautiful can get.
The entire church is watching her, but she doesn’t care. She stops by me, and we kiss for the first time since she went to rehab almost three months ago.
“You were going to take my speech, you ass. I’ve worked on it for hours,” she whispers.
“You told me yesterday they weren’t going to let you out,” I say.
She puts a finger on my lips. “Shhh, you think too much.”
I laugh. Only Dez would break out of rehab to go a funeral.
She walks up to where the minister’s standing and lays a crumpled piece of paper on the podium. The minister gives me a “what’s going on?” look.
Dez clears her throat and begins. “I’ve never found it necessary to read the stuff between the first and the last lines of books.”
I chuckle along with the other Knights of Vice Versa.
“The reason for this is: I’ve never wanted to commit to working through boringness of everything that isn’t the first and last line. However, being fresh from rehab—and by fresh, I mean being an escapee—I’ve been discovering that the middle’s where all the life happens, and I’ve spent my tiny and pitiful seventeen years of life running from it. I had the stupid idea that if I ignored stuff that looked middle-ish—doing well in school, being okay with having money, having close friends, living day-to-day, working through hurt—I could live in the epic-ness of first and last sentences.” She turns to us, the Knights of Vice Versa. “Turns out, this idea really just made me turn things that should be normal into epic things.”
She takes a break, then a breath, and continues.
“Most of you know Mr. Cratcher was a mystic, but the one question he asked my friends and I the most was as simple and normal as it could get: ‘What are you?’ When he first asked me, I was sure I was only an addict, but I was only seeing myself in terms of a first and last line. To me, there wasn’t a middle, but to Mr. Cratcher, the middle was everything. The middle meant we were human.
“Mr. Cratcher’s question pushed me past my epic-ness obsession. He forced me to consider the middle, and my immediate observation was: the middle hurt like hell.”
The Knights of Vice Versa laugh again, and this time a few people around us let out chuckle.
“However, in the middle, I found what I’d been looking for among the first and last lines: hope. I think if I told Mr. Cratcher that right now, he’d still think I was missing the point. He’d probably say something like, ‘You can’t have true life without living every part of it. The first, the middle, and the last are all equal parts beautiful, chaotic, and painful.’ And if I disagreed with him, he’d repeat himself. And if I disagreed with him again, he’d repeat himself.”
Finally, a hearty laugh flows through everyone. The why-is-this-girl-wearing-a-yellow-polka-dot-dress-to-a-funeral-and-talking-up-front awkwardness is defeated.
“I had the horrid pleasure of going on a miserable road trip with a group of addict friends. We went looking for a part of Mr. Cratcher’s past, but we ended up finding the pain of our own. For me, the hardest part about the trip was the way everyone who’d known Mr. Cratcher talked about him like he’d changed their lives. I couldn’t see how that was possible because I was certain life was fixed, that we are only as good as our first and last lines. I kept asking myself how could this one man change so many lives simply by being in them? More importantly, how could lives change?
“This next sentence will be taking advantage of a lot of untold backstory, but when I was lying nearly dead in a Nashville hospital, I realized that if change weren’t possible, racial segregation wouldn’t have been declared illegal. If change weren’t possible, my friends wouldn’t be turning into damn good men. If change weren’t possible, love wouldn’t have been a reason that made me want to stay alive.”
She looks at me. I catch her blue eyes, and all I want to tell her is that I love her.
Just a normal “I love you.”
“Mr. Cratcher’s last words to me were in a message he’d left on a computer. He said, ‘Your wholeness doesn’t define your ability to love,’ and that, to me, is one of the best last lines I’ve ever heard. With it, Mr. Cratcher invited me to be human. He invited me to change. He invited me to live in the middle, and I can never repay him for it. I can only be a holy and broken hallelujah, just as he was to me, and I’m sure if he was here, he’d tell me that’d be enough.”
She walks down the stairs and squeezes between Elliot and me. I grab her hand and hold it, and this time, I’m not afraid of letting go.