Feelings that make you numb

I remember I used to adore the PEI shore. 

Our parents used to take us to the Panmure Island Beach every year.

The Panmure Island Beach was a quick walk from our summer home. The sand was a burning golden blanket, and the water was a warm, murky green. I miss our summers down the shore, digging for sand crabs in the frothy surf, chasing the ice cream truck down the hot pavement, and spending hours boiling in the water, forgetting to reapply sunscreen, and emerging at the end of every day burnt bright red and untouchably tender. 

After you died, though, it was unthinkable to return.

After you died, the beach became nothing, nothing like any of that. The sand is large and prickly and granular and sticks uncomfortably to the bottom of my feet, and the cold, translucent water rinses up over pebbles. If I stay in too long, I start going numb. The colors are gray and bone and a muted medley of sea glass; the only gold you come across at the beach are the purebreds trotting around the dog parks or at beaches that allow them to frolic in the surf.

That’s what I see now, too, visiting your grave five years later, only the coast is rockier, and the sea seems angrier, slapping against the sides of cliffs. The sun sinks down into the watery horizon too quickly to put on much more of a show than a couple of brilliant tangerine ribbons, and then we’re left with a sliver of moonlight and the occasional lighthouse sweeping its thin beam back and forth over the water.

The earth is dry and cracked and the grass matted and yellow, and it crunches under me when I sit. I run my hands over the face of your headstone, tracing the words with my fingertips.

Mom is curled up in a ball with a bouquet of flowers clutched to her chest, her coat pulled over her like a blanket. Her head lies next to your name, Johnny, engraved in the headstone. I try to close my eyes, to listen to you, but the streetlight is too bright and the sound of Mom crying beside me is too distracting.

I can’t talk to you.

I haven’t been able to for the past five years.

When Mom stops crying we walk to our hotel in silence. She goes to bed, and I decide to go for a walk in the cold twilight. Most of the tourists will return tomorrow night, milking Thanksgiving break for all it’s worth. I’m glad for every moment of solitude. The sun is just gone by the time I reach the lake, with wisps of icy blue lining the horizon, the final remains of daylight. The dirt crunches under my sneakers, not frozen, but just on the cusp. My breath floats out in clouds. I pause at the place where we found Megan and look down into the water. You would think there would be some marker, but there isn’t. It would be unsightly. It’s just water over water, next to water. I only know it because of the thornbush I decimated trying to rescue you from unknown horrors. Unknown at the time. Now we know. I take my coat off and tuck it under the bushes. It’s a windless night, and the lake is smooth as polished stone. Stars scatter over the surface like snowflakes. I take off one shoe and sock and dip my foot in up to the ankle. 

It’s so cold, the pain is paralyzing, hypnotic. I kick off my other shoe. As I do, I think about the past.

I’ve done bad things.

Maybe worse than you have. 

And I’ve always been able to begin again, like I did when Mom made us move. It’s like Dad used to say: Everyone has secrets.

 And truths are things you make, not things that happen. 

Like when I created your alibi when the body of Megan, your girlfriend, was found. And when I created Megan’s brother’s alibi when you were killed. 

There are so many truths in tragedy.

One truth that is indisputable is that the football game ended at ten, and the only reason it is indisputable is because so many people agree. A truth is only a truth because people say it, and continue to say it. Our car was parked close to the school, but I asked you to walk me to my bike, which I’d left at the playground, because that was the plan. Rob, Megan’s brother, and his friend Hayden were going to beat the crap out of you. It was fair. After Rob had shown me some evidence of your wrongdoing in his truck. And I realized I had one chance to redeem myself. Rob agreed immediately. He and Hayden would wear ski masks, and I would run for help so it wouldn’t look like a setup. No weapons. No one would ever know. It was the perfect plan. Of course you offered me a ride with your friends and I insisted that we walk because it was a nice night. Because that was the plan. The march across the dark and deserted parking lot, away from the field where people were laughing and celebrating, was endless. You put your arm around me and ruffled my hair and called me kiddo, and my stomach tightened slowly until it was the size of a bullet. When we reached the playground, I stood by my bike and waited. 

But only for a moment. 

Because as you and I stood there in the dark, someone shouted, “Move, kid!” and headlights suddenly beamed at us from the side of the playground. 

Rob’s truck shot out from the darkness and smashed into you, and my world exploded into infinite microscopic pieces. I tried to scream, tried to look for you, but Hayden tossed my bike into the truck bed and grabbed me, and then we were skidding down the street. I shook violently on his lap, unable to pry my gaze away from the sharp beams of the headlights as they swung over the dirt roads, the back roads, crunching twigs and bark and maybe bones. Rob spoke calm and low and dangerously. “Listen to me. You came straight to Megan’s to help her mom make cookies. You came straight to Megan’s to help her mom make cookies. You came straight to Megan’s to help her mom make cookies.” 

A truth is only a truth because people say it, and continue to say it. 

I’d left the game right at the end and rode my bike to Megan’s house to help her mom make chocolate chip cookies, Megan’s favorite. Her brother, Rob, and his friend Hayden were there, eating pizza and playing Dungeons & Dragons. They were about six hours into a ten-hour campaign when I arrived. A half hour later I got the call that stopped my world on its axis for the second time. You were dead, had been killed by a hit-and-run. 

I inhale the cold of the lake. It sends shivers sprinting up and down my spine, and I shake a bit. I wade in knee deep, the cold scraping my skin raw. A cloud passes over the moon, and the water seems to deepen. You never find closure for that sort of thing, murder, even if it wasn’t what you intended. It settles into you and absorbs through your skin and worms its way in until it’s in your marrow, deep in your bones. It moves when you move, it’s still when you are still, but never, for a single, solitary instant, does it sleep. 

After a moment or two, I don’t feel cold anymore. I take a deep breath, prepare for a long submersion, and plunge into oblivion.