by Jenny Hayes
Some fall days are so pretty that they hurt. Trees busting loose with everything they have, giving one last whoop before winter knocks them out. New swarms of colors everywhere you look: scarlet flame, amber gold, burnt peaches and cream. Crisp and blue and endless sky. The beauty of everything making you just feel happy to be alive.
Or not. Sometimes even a day like that can’t make you forget your own personal drama. Like the gorgeous fall day when I had finally decided that once I got home, I was going to call Luke and break up with him.
I knew he wouldn’t see it coming. Luke took my affection for granted, never thinking anymore to tend to it, or even make sure it was still there. All our days were pretty much the same, and I think in the beginning I’d liked how stable and constant things felt with him. Now it just felt stale. When we hung out we mostly just worked on homework side by side, or I’d read on the couch while he played games on his roommate’s Atari. Maybe we’d rent a video, if we could find something we both wanted to watch. Even sex was a memorized routine. We hardly ever went out anymore, not even for a cheap dinner; we’d bring home takeout, or I’d make grilled cheese sandwiches, cursing the grubby habits of twenty-year-old boys. Luke always blamed the mess on his roommates, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t any better. I wouldn’t miss that kitchen, that’s for sure.
The driveway was empty when I got home, so I went through the front door instead of around back. Misty meowed at me as I passed through the kitchen. I gave her a quick pet and looked through the mail on the counter before going downstairs to my room. Living at home wasn’t my first choice, but my parents talked me into it since I was going to college right here in Seattle. Not having to worry about rent, I could focus on school, or so the theory went. They claimed the basement was practically like its own apartment and I’d have lots of privacy. We all knew that wasn’t true, but we did a decent job of pretending.
My answering machine’s orange light blinked, and I pressed the play button. There was a moment of emptiness, then a deep breath. I thought it was a wrong number, or a crank call. Then I heard Luke’s voice, “Janelle. It’s Billy, he’s….”
The air tightened around me.
“He’s dead. They found him.” There was a long, hollow pause, and then a sob. “Fuck! I…I don’t know. Call me when you get this.”
I slumped onto my bed.
#
Billy was Luke’s brother. He was a few years older, around twenty-five, and had moved up to Seattle a few years before Luke, making good on his longtime vow to get the hell out of Aberdeen the minute he graduated high school. When Luke got into the University of Washington in the fall of ’82, he moved into Billy’s studio apartment. The walk-in closet became Luke’s room, filled almost completely by a saggy twin mattress and a small shelf. A year later I started college and met Luke in English 27B, and one day I went home with him after class. To study, we said. Within minutes we were tearing our clothes off.
We never really talked about it, but soon we were a couple, spending most of our time at Luke’s apartment. Billy worked at the pizza place around the corner, and after his shift he’d usually move to the bar and switch to drinking mode, or head to a show or a party, so we didn’t see him that often. Every once in a while he’d come home after his shift with a box of unwanted slices that had gotten burned or grown cold on the counter. We’d chow down, and Billy would dig through his stash of records and CDs, smiling his wild dimpled grin while selecting just the right songs to play for us, waiting for our reactions. I enjoyed the music, and I tried to respond enthusiastically, although the nuances that mattered so much to him—a particular guitar tone, the way a singer yelped or growled—were pretty much lost on me.
At some point Billy always jumped up and pointed at one of the concert flyers he’d pinned onto the walls, telling us some wild story about what had happened at the show. He’d get on a roll and launch into one tale after another, full of fights and drunken stunts and jealous girlfriends and always laughter. All these bands and bars and people I’d never heard of. A whole world right around us that I’d never even known was there. I wanted to listen to those stories forever, but at some point I always got too tired and crawled off to the closet, sinking into sleep while bits of conversation swirled around my head. Luke would join me once Billy was ready to hit the sack. Usually that wasn’t until it was getting light outside.
#
Most days, if I didn’t meet up with Luke at school, I got to the apartment around four in the afternoon when Luke would already be home. But one day I showed up early and it was just Billy, killing time before his shift started. I said I’d go wait for Luke in the café across the street, but he laughed and invited me in. He started to offer me a beer before remembering they were out, so I drank a glass of water while he asked about my classes. I was surprised that he actually seemed interested. “I was gonna study literature,” he told me. “Or art. But I got derailed.” It seemed like all that meant was getting caught up with drinking and parties and shows. There were a couple of bands he’d played in soon after moving here, but they’d all self-destructed for one reason or another. Then he sold his bass to pay rent one month, back before he got the pizza job.
After that day, I kind of liked coming over when Billy was the only one home. We’d tell each other about places we’d been to, or things we wanted to do, or goofy stunts our friends had pulled—even after an hour I’d feel like we were just getting started. But then Luke would come home and those conversations would end, subsumed by brotherly banter until it was time for Billy to head to work.
One afternoon when I was alone with Billy, he asked if he could draw my picture. He set a chair next to the kitchen window and stood behind it, motioning me over. I sat down, expecting him to walk back out in front of me, but he didn’t move.
A shock ran through me. I braced myself, preparing for him to touch or kiss or strangle me—anything seemed possible. But a few seconds passed, and then he walked away and took a seat at the table. He started to draw, glancing up at me occasionally. Mostly he concentrated on his hand on the paper, occasionally pausing to take a hit off a wrinkled joint.
I kept still, thinking how silly I was to have had that moment of panic. But was that even what it was? I felt other things bubble up inside me, things I didn’t want to acknowledge. Disappointment that nothing had happened. A longing for an instant that would have changed things in some unknowable way.
After about ten minutes Billy tore the page out, held it up, and nodded. “Came out pretty good,” he said. I looked at the picture and didn’t know what to say. It was rough, and strange, and sort of beautiful. But it looked nothing like me. Long whirling hair, a face made of strange angles, eyes full of water and light. I thanked him and tucked the picture into my backpack.
That was about a year ago, just before Luke started wanting to spend more time away from the apartment. He told me Billy was having these strange outbursts and it was beginning to freak him out. I let Luke spend the night a couple of times, although I worried that my mom would come downstairs and bust us. Then Billy lost his job. A couple days later they had a fight and Luke decided it was time to move in with some friends.
The last we heard, Billy was more or less homeless, couch-surfing with friends and partying pretty hard. Luke had given Billy his new phone number, but they hadn’t talked in months. One time Luke’s roommate told us he thought he saw Billy spare-changing on the Ave. He said the guy looked strung out, and he couldn’t tell for sure if it was him. Luke and I went out looking. I worried about what kind of shape we might find him in, and wondered what we’d do if it was bad. But he wasn’t there.
#
I went over to Luke’s house right after hearing his message about Billy. Luke’s voice was shaky as he told me what had happened. A cop had found Billy wrapped in a blanket in a little nook under the freeway. He shouted at him to move along, but when there was no response he gave him a shove and realized the body was cold. There were track marks on his arms and they were pretty sure he’d OD’d a day or two earlier. His wallet was empty, but they found an ID in his pocket with his Aberdeen address. They were able to track his parents down from that.
Luke and I held each other, and I said I’d spend the night. Which felt strange: a few hours earlier I thought we were done with that. But I wasn’t about to dump him the day his brother turned up dead. For a second my mind flipped through the calendar, thinking about when it might be okay again, but I made myself forget about that for now.
I phoned my house and told my mom what had happened. In a deliberately casual voice, I added that I’d be home in the morning. My parents weren’t wild about the idea of me spending the night at Luke’s, but they’d never actually said I couldn’t. Mostly we used the family’s standard approach for anything potentially touchy: we just didn’t talk about it. The only time in recent history when my parents had broken the mold and insisted on getting involved in my life was in my junior year of high school, when I’d more or less stopped eating and my grades had plummeted. Usually if I was having a problem I didn’t volunteer any information, and they seemed happy enough to just assume everything was just fine. But I guess this time it was too obvious something was wrong to go that route.
I remember my mom one night, standing in the doorway to my room—just a normal bedroom down the hall from theirs, before the basement got fixed up—stammering about the psychologist appointment she’d made for me and pleading with me to go. I agreed, mainly to get her off my back. What I told the doctor, and eventually my parents, was that Alex, my boyfriend of six months, had dumped me. This was true, but there was a lot more to it than that. My friend Donna had slept with him behind my back. Then—out of guilt, or boredom, or wanting to feel superior, or all of the above—they launched a smear campaign against me. Awful stories made the rounds: I blew the whole football team, I snorted speed in the girls’ bathroom with the janitor. It was stupid shit that anyone who knew me should’ve seen right through, but as I soon learned, they didn’t. My parents had no idea that I’d been ostracized by almost everyone at school.
I saw my shrink all summer, and started to get back up to a normal weight. And by the time school started up again, no one cared about last year’s rumors. Donna and Alex had broken up and were more invested in spreading dirt about each other. I kept myself busy poring over glossy brochures for colleges in faraway places and filling out applications. I only included UW to appease my parents, who were campaigning for me to stay in town where they could keep an eye on me. Meanwhile, I was determined to get as far away as possible. But as it turned out, my hometown school was the only place that let me in.
So I moved into the basement. My dad fixed it up with its own fridge and hotplate and a separate entrance in the back. I used that door whenever my parents were home, in an attempt to maintain the illusion of independent living. My parents were relieved that I was eating and had found a nice boy to date. Things were fine, school was good, I seemed okay, so they never pressed for more info. Although once in a while I could hear my mom creep down the stairs at night, listening to see if I was there.
#
I went out to get burritos and bought a six-pack at the store that was famous for never carding. We ate on the couch with Luke’s roommates, staring at some horrible action movie, then took the rest of the beer into the bedroom. Luke had been quiet all night and I figured he might want to get drunk, but he only had a few more sips before falling into a heavy sleep. I stayed awake and finished my second beer, looking out the window. Just one little piece of sky was visible, up over the roofs of the neighboring buildings. The clouds had snuck in somehow. I couldn’t find one star.
I thought about Luke’s parents. I’d met them a few times, on visits to Aberdeen or when they’d come up to Seattle to take their sons out for a nice steak dinner. I couldn’t picture their dad looking sad: he was always so jovial, making the cheesiest puns and saying how nice I looked each time he saw me. He was a tall man, and Luke said he’d never hidden his disappointment that neither of his sons topped six feet. Of course, they’d failed to meet his expectations in other ways too, like running off to the city instead of settling near home and taking a steady job. But he only spoke of the obvious, unavoidable failure of height. A joke, but still bearing the implication that they hadn’t tried hard enough to grow into the right kind of men.
It was easier for me to picture their mother. Even when she smiled, her face remained in tightened folds. Of course she’d be distraught, but I imagined her maintaining a controlled presentation, displaying her grief only in the most appropriate way. I’d heard her proclaim more than once that people were responsible for their own actions: failures to cope with life were written off as laziness or personal flaws. I wondered if that belief was supposed to protect her from any blame about how Billy had turned out.
Then there was Lisa, the sister in between Luke and Billy. She’d gotten married the summer after high school and already had two kids. Now she was getting divorced and living with some new dude. Another Aberdeen local who worked at the mill, drank shitty beer, watched sports with his buddies and went out hunting once in a while. The normal stuff, if you’re from there.
Billy and Luke had gotten away from that. But now Billy was gone. If he’d stayed in Aberdeen, like his parents had wanted, would he still be alive? I knew it was impossible to know. But I don’t think he could have done that anyway. Staying in that place would have been its own kind of death.
#
The morning was wet with rain. I kissed Luke and walked to the bus stop so I could shower and change at home before my ten o’clock class. Trees shook in the wind, their limp yellow leaves barely clinging to black branches. I saw a Slurpee cup in a puddle near my feet and kicked it to the gutter. It bobbed along in a little stream before catching in a drainage grate.
The bus came and took me home. I showered and changed, but I couldn’t make myself put my boots on.
Once I heard my parents leave, I went upstairs and made myself tea and a piece of toast. I let Misty snuggle in my lap while I watched daytime talk shows. Around noon I heated up some leftover lasagna. I thought about calling someone to get the assignment for the class I’d missed, but I decided it could wait. I didn’t want to think about homework, or Billy, or Luke. I didn’t want to think about anything.
#
Billy hated religion almost as much as he’d hated his hometown, but his funeral services were in an Aberdeen church. Luke borrowed his roommate’s car, a beat-up gold Buick with a rattling trunk, and we drove down there in the morning. I stood with Luke and his parents as relatives and old neighbors trickled in, offering hugs and consolations. Some of Billy’s Seattle friends showed up and took seats at the back of the pews. They were all dressed in mourning black, though I figured it was probably stuff they wore all the time: leather jackets, vintage dresses, cardigans, clunky boots. I tried to match the faces to Billy’s tales about the music scene, but I had no idea who was who. Luke didn’t seem to know any of them either.
A white-haired pastor stepped up to the podium, next to a poster-sized blow-up of Billy’s senior portrait. He started to speak, but I barely heard him. I was fixated on the picture of 18-year-old Billy in his awful blue tuxedo, hair parted down the middle and winged in curly feathers to the side. He was smiling, but there was an unmissable bit of fuck-you in his eyes, which made me happy before it made me even more sad. I stared at the picture’s eyes, thinking maybe, if I concentrated hard enough I could send him a message. I didn’t know what the message would be, but I wanted to send it anyway.
After a while my mind wandered back to Billy’s friends, sitting twenty rows behind us. I thought maybe I’d go talk to them after the service ended. But when I looked around, they were gone. Probably eager to get the hell out of Aberdeen and back to Seattle as fast as they could.
I didn’t blame them. That town always gave me the creeps. You could tell it had seen better days when the logging industry was booming, but I couldn’t imagine it had ever been nice. I always felt bad bagging on Luke’s hometown, but he never had anything good to say about it either.
We made our way out of the church and got into the Buick to drive to the reception. I watched through the rain-smeared window as we passed abandoned restaurants, decaying storefronts, tiny houses with scrabbly lawns. The people on the streets seemed normal from a distance, but up close they were strange zombies, hiding awful secrets behind scowls. I wanted to say something to Luke about how bleak everything looked, but it didn’t seem like he felt like talking. I put my hand on his knee instead.
Luke parked around the corner from the Eagles Lodge, where the reception was being held, and we went inside. It was still early in October, but they’d already decorated for Halloween: tombstones, ghosts, and grinning skeletons surrounded the mourners, like death was a campy joke, not a young man in his coffin. “I hate funerals,” people kept saying, shaking their heads and grimacing.
An uncle stepped up to the stage and asked people to take a seat in the rows of folding chairs. He thanked everyone for coming and invited them to come up and share memories of Billy. Right away, their cousin got onstage, shaking so vehemently I thought someone would surely go help steady him. But Lisa started laughing, and then Luke, and I realized it was a reference to some old corny movie they’d all watched a hundred times. It felt wrong to me. Billy was dead, and they’re cracking jokes? But Billy had loved that movie too. He’d probably be laughing more than anyone.
I imagined how Billy’s Seattle friends would mourn him. Get drunk off their asses. Pour a beer out on the ground for their dead friend. Wonder who’d be next.
Here, people told little stories about what a nice boy he was. A girl recounted how he’d found her lost pet turtle. Some guy talked about a backyard fort they’d made. His third grade teacher held up his drawing of a fish that she’d held onto all these years.
It was all happy talk, all polite. And I was getting agitated, waiting for someone to talk about the other stuff. Because Billy’s problems didn’t come out of nowhere. Luke had told me how sometimes Billy’s eyes would get all crazy back when they were kids. In high school there were talks with the school counselors, questions about whether everything was right with him. And then he was pushed out into the world, expected to do okay. But who taught him how? Who taught him anything about how to survive? In Aberdeen you were supposed to toe the line, follow the rules. Work in a factory, mow the lawn, drink too much on the weekends and complain about your bossy wife. Buy an ugly house, have a couple of kids, wonder what the hell it was all for. Billy didn’t want that. Neither did Luke. Who would?
No one talked about the circumstances of how he’d died. No one mentioned any attempts to help him. And no one talked about how they’d failed. Billy didn’t deserve this, I thought. And no one was saying he did. But they weren’t saying much else, either.
The speeches ended and people milled around the tables, filling plates from casseroles and crockpots. I told Luke I wanted to get some air. He followed me out and we held each other, leaning against the building’s mottled wall.
“I miss him so much,” Luke whispered. He’d always looked up to Billy, following him to Seattle, excited to have his big brother take him under his wing. It had been hard for Luke to admit that Billy hadn’t really figured out anything. The idolized version of his older brother had vanished a long time ago. Now the real one was gone too.
Luke buried his face in my hair and pulled me closer. I clutched his coat and leaned against his shoulder. Across the street I could see a cluster of sad trees, the gray sky casting them in hideous colors: dank rust, olive green, vomit yellow. It felt like everything beautiful had been drained out of the world.
#
Luke and I stayed together until April. Things felt better again somehow, like maybe there was a reason we were meant to be together after all. But as we settled back into our ordinary lives, my unsettled feelings returned, until eventually I couldn’t ignore them any longer. I worried about how Luke would take it, but it was fine. I think by then he knew it was going nowhere too. And maybe it was better that it happened in springtime, making our separation less an ending, more a fresh start for us both.
I didn’t know then that I would leave college that summer, that I’d pack a suitcase and take a train across the country. Not even understanding why, just knowing I had to go.
It’s been years since I’ve seen Luke. I didn’t keep any of his notes or presents. But I still have the picture Billy drew me, taped up on my window. People comment on how strange it is, and no one ever guesses it’s my portrait. But when I look at it, I see myself. Not the physical me, but the one inside.
Sometimes late at night, when thoughts and memories are spinning through my mind, I let myself imagine that Billy was the one I met first. I dream that I could have seen things in him that no one else did, the way he saw what’s in that picture. That if I could have shown them to him, he might still be alive.
Or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Maybe that was all the life Billy got to have, and no one could do anything to change that.
I wish I had the answer. But I know that it’s impossible to know.
Jenny Hayes lives in Seattle and is an MFA candidate in the low-residency program at U.C. Riverside Palm Desert. Her fiction has appeared in New Flash Fiction Review, Litro NY, Eclectica, Spartan, and elsewhere, and her chapbook “Dear Rosie AKA Ro-Ho-Zee AKA Rosarita Refried Beans,” featuring an illustrated story about junior high and David Bowie, is available from alice blue books.