The Half Life of Molly Pierce (6 page)

“No,” he says. “Not about this. This is mine.”

“Jesus, I’m not a conquest.”

“But I—”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s over. It doesn’t matter.”

“It should,” he says and you can see him regret it immediately.

He should regret it immediately.

He’s a child and he’s an asshole and there are a million things I could say to him, but I don’t say anything.

I turn and walk away.

He says my name once, choking, pleading, and I don’t turn around. I say, “Don’t follow me, Lyle,” and I leave the warehouse. I walk past his motorcycle and I get in my car and I drop my phone underneath the seat, but I don’t bend down to pick it up because it’s better if I can’t answer him. If he calls me, I don’t want to answer him.

I look up at the warehouse and for a second I can see him in one of the windows, but then he’s gone, he’s backed away, and in some corner of my mind I realize he’s going to follow me. He loves me and I don’t love him and he thinks he can change my mind. He thinks you can convince someone to love you.

I drive too fast. I want to get away from here; I need to get back to school. I don’t know why I came at all. I shouldn’t have come. I should have learned by now that Lyle isn’t Lyle anymore. He’s not my friend. He’s something else. When someone falls in love with you like that, he stops being your friend. He stops caring about your friendship and he only cares about wanting you to love him back.

I’m on Water Street when I feel myself slipping. Receding, fading.

I look in the rearview mirror. There I am. I look just like Molly. I am Molly. My name is Molly. Molly’s family is my family. Molly’s life is my life. Molly’s mistakes are my mistakes.

Only she doesn’t have to live with them.

I do.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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S
ayer finds me on a bench outside the funeral parlor. It’s cold. I’m cold. My teeth are chattering and he has to pull me up. My legs are stiff. He promises coffee inside. It’s not the best coffee, he says, but it’s hot. Just come inside. We’re almost done. We don’t have to go to the burial. I will take you home. You can go to sleep early. Are you tired? You look tired. Just come and have some coffee and then I will bring you home.

He leads me into a little sitting room that is empty of any dead people, any closed coffins. He gets me a cup of coffee and then he disappears somewhere.

The coffee’s effect is almost instantaneous. I feel life returning to my veins, blood speeding up, my heart pumping gratefully. My fingers are slowly thawing out. It’s been a warm October so far. When did it get so cold?

I drink the whole thing and then I get up and stretch and find a garbage can. It’s filled halfway with identical paper cups. The last dregs of greasy, bitter coffee. I drop mine in with the others and watch it settle. What I saw outside, what I remembered or what I dreamed up or what I fabricated, it’s begging to be considered. It’s right there inside my veins and it’s crawling under my skin and it’s looking for a way to come up to the surface. But I don’t want it to. I mean, I don’t want to think about it. Not right now. Because I don’t know what it means and I don’t know if it’s the truth and I don’t know anything. I feel like I don’t know anything anymore. I feel like I’m going crazy.

When Sayer comes back into the room, he puts his hand on my hip but then he pulls his hand away and I think how every time he pulls his hand away from me I want to grab it back. He’s ready to drive me home now, but I don’t what to go home. I don’t want Lyle put into the ground without me there because he was my friend. I knew him. Somehow, I knew him. I loved him. I loved him like he was my best friend and that wasn’t enough for him but that’s not my fault. You can’t decide how much you love people. It just happens. If you have to think about it, then it’s not really real.

“I want to go to the cemetery.”

“You don’t have to,” he says.

“Was he my friend, Sayer? Can you tell me if he was my friend?”

There’s a long sort of quiet that stretches out over us, and as much as I am confused—as much as I am scared and as much as my body is humming with a careful, waiting energy—I feel okay as long as Sayer looks at me. As long as his breathing wraps around my body, as long as I am held in his sway, cloaked in his quiet: I am okay. I don’t know why I am okay but I am okay.

“He was your friend,” he says finally.

“But why don’t I remember?”

“Maybe you’re starting to.”

“And you?”

“Me?”

“Do I know you, too?”

He smiles. I don’t know what kind of smile it is. It’s not a smile of happiness or a smile of understanding. Maybe it’s more like a grimace.

“No. We’ve never met,” he says.

And I don’t know if I believe him, but what can I say? I can’t say anything. I don’t remember.

At the cemetery it is only me and Sayer and the pallbearers who’ve come from the funeral parlor to lower Lyle’s body into the ground. Sayer parks his car and we walk behind their truck as they drive slowly through the graves. The day has turned even colder and my breath comes out in puffs of gray. Sayer walks one or two paces to my left. For whatever reason, I feel like this is some sort of decision. A decision to keep his distance from me, maybe, or a decision to at least be aware of every inch between us.

This is my fifth funeral, my fifth burial. When my grandparents died, I was sad but it was an inevitable sadness, an obligatory grief. I walked through graves like these graves; all cemeteries look the same. I clung to my mother’s dress as they lowered her mother into the ground but that was only because she was crying, my mother, and I felt her sadness like an extension of my own sadness. I felt her loss more palpably than my own loss. When her father died, it was the same, but when my paternal grandparents were put into the ground, a week apart, I stood back from my parents and was terrified by the grief of my father. I had never seen him cry. And when his father died, I thought he might never stop. I thought once those gates were open, they would never close again. They could never be closed again. How could they, when he was so sad? When his eyes were so red? When his throat was so choked?

With Lyle it is different. But it is confusing. It doesn’t make sense; it’s cloudy and incomplete. I still have no idea what I saw, what those memories mean and whether they are real or completely made up or some mixture of truth and lies, but at least one thing is clear to me now. I knew Lyle. In some way, I knew him. I know that I loved him, but I know also that at least some part of me resented him. Where that resentment comes from, I don’t know, but I can’t deny that I feel it now. I can’t deny that it’s bubbled to the surface, that it’s clawing around for an explanation.

But I feel like I should be devastated. Or that I am devastated, and I just can’t work out the reason why. But it’s there, at least, and when we reach his grave and there is the big empty hole they will put his casket into, I am crying. I am sobbing. I am fading.

I only lose a little while. Fifteen minutes, twenty. The hole is half filled up with dirt and I can’t see anything left of Lyle’s casket. Sayer is looking at me worriedly. Or expectantly. Or with concern. I don’t know. I hope I haven’t done anything to give myself away, said anything strange, or just stared unseeing into the sky while maybe Sayer tried to talk to me but got no answer. But if I can fool my whole family, my best friends, then I can fool a stranger.

“Headache,” I mumble, pressing my fingers against my temples. This might explain any outward weirdness, at least, and it has the distinct advantage of being the truth. I can feel the dull throb starting low in the back of my throat, working its way steadily upward. There is a metallic taste in my mouth and my tongue is slippery and I realize I must have bitten it at some point. I’m still crying and the tears are thick on my cheeks.

But this isn’t fair. Lyle wasn’t my brother, he was Sayer’s, and I am hogging all of his sadness. I take a step back, a physical step, and after a few more minutes the pallbearers have finished covering the hole and they leave without saying anything. I don’t know what they would have said, anyway, but they’re gone and it’s just Sayer and me and Sayer has dropped to his knees in front of the grave.

I let him stay there, shoulders heaving, and I read Lyle’s gravestone a million times to keep myself from fading out again. Sometimes it works like this. If I feel it threatening, pulling the edges of my consciousness, I can repress it. Keep my mind busy, keep myself occupied. Stay here.

Lyle Finnius Avery. March 16, 1996—October 15, 2013. Beloved Son & Brother. Even as I am quiet, even as I watch Sayer grieve, I am remembering.

The drive to the warehouse. The text message from Lyle asking me to meet him. My response,
I’m at school
. His answer,
It’s important
.

But isn’t everything with Lyle important? Or—wasn’t it?

That was part of his charm, and part of the reason I was almost constantly annoyed with him. Everything was always so important. Any thought that occurred to him, any emotion he felt took precedence over whatever somebody else might be feeling. He had room for compassion, for understanding, of course, but at his most basic level he would always think of himself first. He would always have trouble understanding how to relate to people because it was in his nature to keep them at arm’s length. To dismiss them.

That’s the reason he couldn’t understand why I didn’t love him.

He was so used to it.

So attractive and so dark and so interesting, I really think I was the first girl who wanted to keep him as a friend. He was a brother to me, my adopted family. But I never wanted more. Never even considered it. That would be too easy, too expected. He meant more to me than that.

I remember this now.

I step forward and put my hand on Sayer’s shoulder. He’s stopped crying, and a few times he shakes his head like he has no idea what he is supposed to do now. I wonder what happened to his parents, why none of his family came to the burial. I wonder why Lyle’s pallbearers were strangers. I wonder why Sayer didn’t help lower his brother into the ground. And I wonder how close they really were. I can sense a tension between them, but surely that has dissipated in death. Sibling rivalry can only go so far.

Sayer’s shoulder is warm. I spread my fingers and he lifts his arm and puts his hand on top of mine.

“Now everyone’s dead,” he says.

Of course, there’s nothing you can say to this, and so I squeeze his shoulder and he squeezes my hand in return and I wonder how true that is. Does he have no one left now? No cousins? No grandparents? What about those people sitting next to him in the funeral parlor? How close is he to them? Will he live with them now? I don’t even know how old Sayer is. He might have graduated high school; he looks like he could be old enough. Maybe he already lives on his own. Maybe he lived with Lyle. Could he have been Lyle’s guardian? Was he old enough? Would Lyle’s death have implications reaching far beyond the usual mourning? Was Sayer free now? Had Lyle always held him back from a normal life?

I’m reaching, maybe.

When I don’t know what to do, I reach.

Sayer stands up. He looks so similar to Lyle, but he’s different. They’re different in every way. Sayer said we never met before but even in the short time I’ve known him, I know he’s different from the only memory I have of Lyle. His eyes are kinder. They are less sharp and accusing, a darker green. His skin less pale. His hair cut shorter. He is taller. Less gangly. Warmer.

Where with Lyle you are always kept on the outside, worming your way closer through dirt and mud and sticks and rocks, with Sayer you are as close as you can stand. You are on top of him; you are within him. He wraps himself around your body; he uses you as a core. You become his center. You are a part of him, and he makes you feel like the better part. I feel like the better part of him and I don’t think I’ve ever felt like the better part of anything. That’s just how he is. He puts people before him. Pushes you forward, if he has to, but he never lets you sink into the shadows.

“I’ll drive you home,” he says.

He drives me home.

I spend the car ride looking out the window, trying not to furrow my brow so much, trying to convince myself that this is okay, that I am okay, that it is time for me to go home now. Sayer seems equally intent on not saying anything; we could be in two separate cars for all the silence. Once or twice he sniffs or clears his throat, and I look over at him quickly and there are tears that never really stop. I wonder how long he’ll be sad. I wonder if his sadness will last forever, stretching on like an ocean. Drowning everyone he cares about. Drowning people he doesn’t even know. He won’t be able to control it. Oceans ebb and flow as they wish. They cover everything. They make everything blue.

At my house he parks on the street and he gets out of the car and I know I’m supposed to wait for him to come around and open my door for me. And when he does, I take his hand and I practically throw myself into his arms and then I remember he was supposed to explain everything to me. He was supposed to tell me how I knew his brother, why I don’t remember anything, why Lyle died trying to catch up to me.

It’s like he can hear my thoughts. He pulls away from me and says, “I’d like to see you again.”

“Tuesday?” I say. “Wednesday?”

Every day. All of the days. Today, tomorrow.

“Tuesday, sure,” he says. “I’ll call you.”

“Are you okay? I mean, are you going to be okay?”

“I’ll be okay,” he says. “My brother and I weren’t close.”

“But he was your brother.”

“He was my brother, yes. But he was not the easiest person to know.”

“Did I know that?” I say. I wish I hadn’t said it but sometimes I can’t stop myself.

“You knew that,” he says.

He puts a hand on the side of my face and he leans in and kisses my forehead. I think, why am I still standing? My legs have surely given out; my muscles have withered and dried up and disappeared. And people without muscles can’t stand. They can only sink into the pavement. They can only collapse and lie helpless on the grass.