Forever & Always: The Ever Trilogy (Book 1) (6 page)

Your always friend,

Caden

P.S. I tried something besides “sincerely” because that sounds stupid, too. But I’m not sure if what I put is more stupid.

P.P.S. Is there a difference between saying “photo” and “picture”?
 

I thought about signing it again, but didn’t. Before I could chicken out, I folded the letter carefully and put it in an envelope, stuck a stamp to it, and put it in the mailbox. I was home, and Dad was at the hospital. He always made me come home and do my homework before coming to the hospital. Something about “normalcy.”
 

Like any such thing existed anymore.

Sometimes I would just sit at my desk with a pen and paper, like I was going to write a letter to Ever, but I didn’t write it and I wouldn’t, I knew I wouldn’t, because I was delaying. Not going to the hospital. That’s what I was doing. I was avoiding going, pretending like I was going to write a letter, when all I was doing was making an excuse not to have to see Mom dying. I knew I should see her, because she’d be gone soon and I wouldn’t have a mother anymore, but I just…I didn’t
want
to see her. I wanted for her either to be suddenly miraculously fine, or just…to die. To not suffer anymore. I didn’t want her to die. Of course not. But that’s what it felt like, deep inside me. I never said so, not to anyone, not even to Ever, but it was there inside me, and it was horrible.
 

So I sat, and tried to just not feel anything. I wasn’t even drawing anymore. What was the point?

After putting the envelope in the mailbox, I sat on the front porch and delayed the walk to the bus stop a mile from our house, where the bus would pick me up and take me to the hospital where Mom was a skeleton in a bed, her insides being eaten by some invisible little creature bent on stealing my parents from me.
 

The distant mumble of the mailman’s strange mailman car/van/truck thing echoed off the overhanging oak branches and 1950s brick house walls. Rumble…stop…rumble…stop, closer and closer. I knew he had a letter for me from Ever. I could feel it. I’d started to get a strange buzz in my stomach when the mailman had a letter for me from Ever. It wasn’t anything magical or weird. I just…knew.
 

Finally the mail truck stopped in front of my house, and Jim the mailman poked his salt-and-pepper head out of the open doorway and reached into the mailbox and took my letter, rifled through a stack on his lap and stuffed bills and junk mail and circular ads into the mailbox, and then he held a white envelope in his gnarled fingers and pointed it at me, brown eyes twinkling, winking. I hopped down the three steps from porch to sidewalk and jogged over and took the envelope from him.

“Every week, Caden. You and this girl, one letter every week.” His voice cracked a lot, deep as an abandoned mineshaft, broken by decades of cigarette smoke and gruff from yelling in Vietnam, I think. He was missing two fingers on his left hand, and if he wore a short-sleeved uniform shirt in the summer, you could see the shiny twisted skin where he’d been injured somehow. He limped when he had to set a box on the porch.
 

I nodded. “Yes, sir. One letter a week.”

“You sweet on the girl?”

I shrugged. “We’re pen pals. Friends.”

Jim grinned with one side of his mouth. “Ah. You are. She’s pretty, ain’t she? Got long legs and soft hands, don’t she?”

I hated these conversations adults always wanted to have with me whenever Ever came up. I shrugged and backed away from him. “I guess. She is pretty, yeah. Listen, though, I gotta—”

“Letters ain’t no substitute for the real thing.”

“We’re just pen pals.”

He nodded, gnawing thoughtfully on the inside of his mouth. “Gotcha.” He waved. “See ya ’round, Cade.”

“See ya, Jim.” I held the letter balanced on my palm for a moment, watching Jim rumble away, then carried the letter, the sketchpad, and the pencil case to the bus stop, and waited for the bus. Ever’s letter was on top of the sketchpad, between the smooth cover of the notebook and my palm. I would open it later, read it later.
 

Without conscious volition, the sketchpad opened, my fingers flipped pages to a blank white rectangle, and then a pencil, the dark outlining one, began moving over the page. The back of a mail truck appeared, a hand reaching for a mailbox. Details appeared, filled in. The truck itself became blurred, smudged and smeared, out of focus, while the hand and forearm gained clarity and sharpness and detail. The cords of the forearm, the gnarled knuckles, the fine graying hairs on the back of the hand and fingers, disguised shapes of letters clutched in the fingers.
 

A guttural diesel bellowing announced the arrival of the bus, and I boarded, paying the fare and finding a seat near the middle against the window. The bus resumed forward motion with reckless speed, and I watched the road flit and blur, holding the notebook open to my drawing of Jim’s arm.

My heart was a stone in my chest, my stomach a knot pulled tight.
 

I had to walk half a mile from the bus stop to the hospital, and my feet dragged. I pushed through the doors, passed the reception desk to the elevators. As the doors whooshed open, I had trouble swallowing. Whenever I blinked, my eyes felt heavy and hard and damp.
 

By the time I got to room 405, I couldn’t breathe. Dad was in the chair beside Mom’s bed, where he always was. He was bent over her, face to her knees, one of her hands clutched in both of his. Her palm rested against the back of his skull. Her index finger twitched.
 

I stopped in the doorway, watching a private moment. I was intruding, I knew I was, but I couldn’t look away.
 

“Don’t go, Jan.” I heard Dad’s voice, but it wasn’t even a whisper—it was broken shards of sound ripped from his throat, sorrow made word.
 

I drew them. It was automatic. I sketched Dad, his huge broad back hunched over, the bed and the thin bumps of Mom’s skeleton and skin beneath the blanket, her shoulders and neck tilted against the bed back, her hand on his head, one finger slightly curled against his shaved scruff. I stood there in the doorway and drew the same scene over and over and over. Neither of them saw me, and that was okay with me.
 

I lost count of how many times I drew them there, until my pencil went dull and a nurse nudged me aside with a cold hand on my forearm.
 

Then Dad sat up and turned around and saw me. His face contorted, twisted, his private grief morphing into the concern of a father.
 

“Don’t…don’t cry, Cade.” Mom’s voice, thin as a single strand of hair.
 

I hadn’t realized I was, but then I looked down and saw that the page I’d been drawing on was dotted with droplet-rounds of wetness, and my face was wet, and the lines of my sketch were wrong, distorted and angular and just…wrong.
 

“Why?” I wasn’t sure what I was asking, or of whom.

Dad only shook his head, and Mom couldn’t even do that.
 

“Show me something…you drew,” Mom asked me.

I flipped through the sketches of them, past hands and eyes and doodles of nothing and a bird on a branch and a winter tree like roots in reverse or an anatomical diagram of arteries or bronchioles. I found the duck I’d drawn at Interlochen, the best one, the final one, and I gently tore it out. She was too weak to take it, so I tucked it into her hand, into her fingers, pinching her thumb and forefinger around the middle at the edge. She gazed at it for a long time, like it was fancy piece of art at the Louvre.
 

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s a duck, Mom.” I was supposed to act normal, I knew. Protest, argue like always, act like a petulant teenager.

“It’s…a beautiful duck.” She smiled, teasing me with her eyes and her voice. “Quack.”

“Quack.” I sniffled, a laugh and cry at once. Mom was the only one who could get me to laugh, to be funny when I was always so serious like Dad.
 

“
Quack
, Aidan. Quack.”

Dad frowned at both of us. “Quack?”

I nodded, as if he’d gotten it. “Quack.”

Mom laughed, but it turned into a cough, weak and faint. Dad was confused. Mom’s hand slid off Dad’s head, slumped to his shoulder, and her finger wrapped around my pinky. “I love you, Caden Connor Monroe. Always draw. Art is beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

I shook my head, hearing the goodbye buried beneath her words. “No, Mom. No. You’re beautiful. You’re art.”

She smiled at me, squeezed my pinky with her index finger, and I squeezed back. Her gaze shifted from me to Dad. She slid her hand from between his paws, and lifted her palm to his face. It was a herculean effort.
 

She didn’t say anything to him, not one word, but I heard it all. It was a poem, the look she gave him. I knew then that I would someday draw that expression in her eyes, and it would be the greatest piece of art I would ever make. But I couldn’t do it then. I wasn’t capable.
 

I had Ever’s letter in my back pocket, curved and wrinkled from being sat on, a notebook in my hands and a pencil behind my right ear. I felt a sensation of disembodiment. I wasn’t me; I wasn’t there at all, I was just a point of consciousness without a body, without clothes, without sadness or sorrow, watching my mother’s loving gaze lock on my father’s desperate wet eyes and fade, fade.
 

“Jan.”
 

Her eyes went still and vacant, nothing there, not her, not life, not sadness. Her last words were silent, meant for my father. For her husband. I watched as Dad realized she was gone. His shoulders trembled, heavy with muscle yet so frail, so fragile.
 

And then, like a sudden explosion, he shot up, the chair clanging backward to the floor, and he crossed the room in two long strides, and his fist rocketed out, smashed into the wood of the door post. The door frame crumpled, the wood splintered, the plaster crumbled and cracked, and then he fell against the frame and held on, skin broken and bleeding.

A nurse looked on from the hallway, and she did nothing for a long moment, time like a plateau in the silence.
 

It wasn’t silent, though. We were in a hospital. The monitor blared a monotone signal song of death, a voice echoed incomprehensibly off the walls, and people came and went, oblivious.

I stood where I was, beside the bed. I couldn’t move. Dad was on the floor, a proud, strong man weeping in a ball on the floor. That was what uprooted me: Dad, there on the floor. He didn’t belong there. I moved to kneel beside him, wrapped two hands around his thick arm and lifted. I felt like a little boy tugging on his bulk. I wasn’t, though. I burrowed underneath his chest, set my back to his front, and lifted, bodily heaving him off the floor. He clung to me, weeping silently. I held him up, and he stared past me at Mom, at the corpse that had been her.

I dragged him away. He stumbled beside me, mumbling something I couldn’t understand. Someone called my name, Dad’s name, but we both ignored the voice.
 

I found Dad’s truck, way in the back of the massive parking garage on the third floor. He was shuffling beside me, as if emptied somehow of his vitality. He always hooked his keys to his belt loop by a thick black carabiner clip, and I unhooked them. I unlocked the doors and had to wrestle Dad into the passenger seat. He slumped against the window, forehead to the glass, staring unseeing.

I climbed into the driver’s seat, adjusted the seat and the steering wheel and the mirrors. I’d driven for the first time when I was twelve, on Gramps’s ranch, and whenever I was there I’d get to drive by myself. I didn’t have a permit or a license, but I didn’t care right then. I backed out of the parking spot, slowly and carefully, and navigated out of the garage, out of the hospital campus, onto the main road. I knew the way home, and I drove us there as carefully as I could.

I was numb, felt nothing. Empty.
 

Dad never said a word, never even moved. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure he was breathing, but then the glass would fog from his breath and I would have to look away to drive.
 

 
I got us home, helped Dad out and up to his bedroom. He stopped in the doorway, staring at the bed, made carefully, comforter folded back from the plump white pillows. He shook his head, the first sign of life since the hospital. He slewed around, stumped down the stairs slowly, heavily. I followed him, unsure what to do. He went into the kitchen, stood in front of the refrigerator, opened the cupboard above it, and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels, full to an inch beneath the neck. He twisted the top off and drank from the bottle, three long glugging pulls. I watched, emotionless. It was expected, some part of me thought. This is what you did when your wife died.

But what was I supposed to do when my mom died?

I took the bottle from him, and he met my eyes. His vacant stare flickered slightly, and I saw some sign of himself, some warring decision, and then he went vacant and distant again, and he released the bottle into my grip.

The whiskey burned my throat, my chest, my stomach. I coughed, hacked, and sputtered. And then drank again, and a third time. By the third time, my gut was roiling, heaving, and heavy. My head spun, and I gave the bottle back to him.
 

He stumbled past me, into his study. He had a futon in there, and he’d slept there a couple times when he and Mom had had an argument. He fell onto it, whiskey sloshing onto his hand. He drank from the bottle again, then leaned his head back and closed his eyes. I watched a tear fall.

“Jan.” It was a sob, and that was when I closed the door.
 

Such grief was too private to witness.
 

I was dizzy, drunk for the first time in my life. I went up to my room and sat at my desk. There was only one person I wanted to talk to.

Evr,

shes gone. Watched her die just now. It was just this quiet slipping away. she quacked at me. I showed her the sketch of the duck I did at Interlochen. You remember? I showed her that sketch, and she quacked at me. Like a duck. she told me she loved me.