Goodbye Days Read online

  Down comes the wall and out pours the swirling, gray sea it contained. I put my head in my hands and rest my elbows on my knees. I press the heels of my hands over my eyes, and tears seep hot around the sides. I’m trembling. Jesmyn’s hand is on my shoulder. At least the ache in my throat is gone, as though it were an abscess full of tears that I lanced.

  “Blake was funny,” Nana Betsy says. “If you knew him, he made you laugh at some time or another.”

  Tears stream down my wrists and dampen my shirt cuffs. They dribble onto the blue carpet with white flecks. I think for a second about all the places I’ve made a small part of me. Now a tiny piece of this church holds my tears. Maybe after I’m dead, they can cut up the carpet and extract my DNA from my tears that have soaked into the carpet and resurrect me. Maybe that’s what the resurrection will be.

  “Think of him every time someone makes you laugh. Think of him every time you make someone laugh. Think of him every time you hear someone laugh.”

  I draw a deep breath that hitches and shudders as the air enters my lungs. It’s probably too loud, but I don’t care. I sat in the back for a reason. I don’t sense anyone turning to look at me, at least.

  “I can’t wait for the day that I see him again and throw my arms around him. Until then, I know he’ll be sitting at our Savior’s feet.” She pauses to compose herself before finishing. “And he’s probably making Jesus laugh too. Thank you all for coming. This would have meant a lot to Blake.”

  The funeral ends. I stand to serve as pallbearer. They didn’t ask me to be Mars’s or Eli’s pallbearer.

  Jesmyn reaches up and touches my hand. “Hey. Do you want a ride to the cemetery?”

  I nod, grateful, sagging into myself. Like I’ve awoken from one of those dreams where you cry and soak your pillow. Your grief is animal, formless, unhinged in the illogic of dreams. You wake up and don’t remember what you were crying about. Or you do, and you were crying because you’ve been offered a chance at redeeming yourself. So when you realize it was a dream, you keep crying because your shot at redemption is another thing you’ve lost. And you’re tired of losing things.

  I help carry Blake’s casket to the hearse. It weighs a thousand pounds. I had a science teacher ask us once: “What weighs more? A pound of feathers or a pound of lead?” Everyone said lead. But a few hundred pounds of best friend and casket don’t weigh the same as a few hundred pounds of lead or feathers. It weighs much more.

  It’s a short walk from the front of the church to the waiting hearse, but in the sultry afternoon heat, I’m soaked when I get to Jesmyn’s battered Nissan pickup.

  “Sorry, my AC doesn’t work,” she says, sweeping piano books off the passenger seat.

  “Don’t you die of heat every time you drive anywhere?”

  “That’s the best way you could phrase it?”

  “Don’t you suffer extreme discomfort but not literal death every time you drive anywhere?” I get in and roll down the window.

  We drive without speaking for most of the ride, the muggy air washing over our faces. My cheeks are gritty with dried salt.

  When we’re a few blocks from the cemetery, Jesmyn asks, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I lie. A few seconds pass. “No.”

  Sauce Crew.

  Every group of friends needs a name. We were Sauce Crew.

  Sophomore year. Close enough to the end of the school year that we’re in a perpetual state of giddiness. It’s a Friday night and we’ve just attended Nashville Arts’s production of Rent. It was great. But on a Friday night in spring—each of us surrounded by our three best friends—it could have been the worst train wreck of a steaming turd (work with me on the mixed metaphor) imaginable and we’d still have been euphoric.

  So we’re at McDonald’s stuffing our faces.

  “Okay,” Mars says through a mouthful of hamburger, apropos of nothing: “What if you had to classify every animal as either a dog or a cat?”

  Eli spews soda out his nose. We were already laughing at the question, and now we’re laughing at Eli mopping Mountain Dew off the Wolves in the Throne Room T-shirt he wore as if it were grafted to his chest.

  Blake is gasping for air. “What are you even talking about?”

  Mars reaches over to dip a french fry in my ketchup. “No, no, all right. Check it out. Raccoons are dogs. Possums are cats. Squirrels are—”

  “Hang on, hang on,” Eli says.

  “Dude, Mars,” Blake says, “raccoons are clearly cats. Possums are dogs.”

  “No, hang on,” Eli says. “Any animal you can’t train is a cat. You can’t train a raccoon. Cat. You can’t train a possum. Cat.”

  “Wait, how do you know you can’t train a possum?” Mars asks.

  “You can train a cat,” I say. “I’ve seen YouTube videos of cats using a toilet.”

  Now all three are howling, struggling to breathe. Blake is doubled over. “Please tell me when you ditch out on us to write, you’re sitting at home watching cats piss and shit into human toilets and pumping your fist—Yeah! Cat using human toilet!”

  “No, but I just come across them. Through life.”

  Tears stream down Mars’s face. “ ‘Through life.’ Blade said ‘through life.’ Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  Get it? Carver? Blade? Blake had come up with the nickname. It’s funny because I dress like a guy who wants to be a writer and whose older sister works at Anthropologie and helps dress him. Guys who meet this description don’t generally go by “Blade.”

  “Okay, guys. Ferrets. Ferrets are long cats,” Eli says.

  “I’ve seen a trained ferret, so you can definitely train a ferret,” Blake says.

  “To use a human toilet?” Mars asks.

  “I didn’t know there were ferret toilets,” Blake says.

  “If it’s true that you can train a ferret, then I take back what I said, because ferrets are definitely cats,” Eli says.

  “Okay, seals,” I say.

  “Mmmmm, cat,” Mars says, staring off thoughtfully.

  Eli looks incredulous. “Wait, what?”

  “You can for sure train a seal, bro,” Blake says.

  “No, hang on,” Eli says. “I think Mars is implicitly saying seals look like cats to him.”

  Mars pounds the table, rattling our trays. “They do. They have catfaces. Also they love fish. Cats love fish. Seals are watercats.”

  We’re getting dirty looks from other diners. We couldn’t care less. Remember? Young. Alive. Friday night in spring. A feast of junk food spread before us. Best friends. We feel like lords. Everything seems limitless.

  Blake stands and finishes his drink with a rattling slurp. “Gentlemen, I need to”—he makes air quotes—“urinate, as it were. If y’all will excuse me. When I return, I expect to have some resolution of the seal-cat issue.”

  Mars slaps me on the back. “Better go with him so you can film it.”

  “You don’t understand, man,” I say. “I’m only into cats that way.” Peals of laughter from Mars and Eli.

  We’re well into our discussion of whether grasshoppers, jellyfish, and snakes are dogs or cats when we realize it’s been a while since we’ve seen Blake.

  “Yo, fam, check it out.” Mars points at the children’s playground adjacent to the McDonald’s. Blake is pitching back and forth on one of those rocking horses mounted on a thick spring. He’s waving furiously at us, like a little kid, and whooping.

  “Look at that asshole,” Eli murmurs.

  “He shame,” Mars says.

  “Wait, what?” I ask. “He shame? That’s not a thing people say. You’re missing like three words in that sentence, including a linking verb.”

  “I’m making it a thing. Someone does something stupid? He shame. You do something stupid? You shame.”

  I shake my head. “That will never be a thing.”

  Eli gathers unopened packets of Blake’s chicken nugget sauce and hands a couple to Mars. “Come on, we gotta blast him.”


  I hurry to keep up as they dash outside.

  “Blade, you film,” Eli says. I also throw like a guy who wants to be a writer.

  Blake rocks, whooping, laughing maniacally, whipping around an invisible cowboy hat and waving at us.

  We grin and wave—Eli and Mars waving with one hand, handfuls of sauce packets behind their backs—watching him for a second while I film on my phone.

  “Okay,” Mars says under his breath, still grinning and waving furiously. “Count of three. One. Two. Three.”

  He and Eli stop waving and lunge forward, hurling sauce packets. Mars has a good arm. His dad used to force him to do all kinds of sports. Eli has this rangy athleticism. He’d have probably been a decent basketball player if he could put down his guitar long enough and if he weren’t so allergic to keeping his long, curly black hair out of his face. A teriyaki and a BBQ each score a direct hit on the horse’s head, causing them to burst open and spray Blake. His joyous whoops turn to cries of indignation. “Awwwww, no way, you assholes! Gross!”

  Mars and Eli high-five each other and then awkwardly high-five me. I suck at high fives. They collapse on the ground in hysterics, rolling around.

  Blake walks up, arms outstretched, dripping with sauce. Mars and Eli hurry to their feet. Blake starts chasing them in turn, trying to wipe sauce on them. He’s much too slow, even with them breathless from laughter. Finally he gives up and goes to the restroom. He returns, dabbing his shirt with a wet paper towel.

  “Y’all are so damn funny. The damn Sauce Crew.”

  “We should call ourselves that. Sauce Crew,” Eli says.

  “Sauce Crew,” I say somberly, extending my hand, palm down.

  “Sauce Crew,” Mars says in his terrible English accent and puts his hand on mine.

  “Ssssss­sssss­sauce Crewwwwwwwww,” Eli says, in a boxing announcer voice, and puts his hand on Mars’s.

  “Sauce—” Blake starts to put his hand on Eli’s but then playfully slaps him on the cheek and goes for Mars. They both giggle and dodge while trying to keep their hands together. “Sauce Crew,” Blake says, and puts his hand on top of Eli’s.

  “Saaaaa­aaaaa­aaauce Crew!” we shout in unison.

  “Did one of you donkey dicks film it at least? I want to put it on my YouTube,” Blake says.

  I watch them lower the third member of Sauce Crew into the ground.

  I am Sauce Crew now.

  It’s late afternoon when Jesmyn pulls up to my car, and the sun sifts through leaves, making them glow green. My head is pounding. I realize it’s not only because of the tension I’m carrying, but also because I’ve barely eaten all day.

  We sit there for a moment, the heat pressing down on us like a vise. After a day of ceremony, I can’t seem to even get out of the truck without some.

  I rest my arm on the windowsill. “Thanks. For sitting by me during the funeral and driving me to the cemetery. And standing with me at the cemetery. And then driving me here.” I pause. “Sorry if I’m forgetting anything.”

  “No problem.” Jesmyn’s voice sounds washed out.

  I reach for the door handle but stop. “I never asked how you’re doing.”

  She sighs and lays her head on her hands, which rest on the steering wheel. “Shitty. Like you.”

  “Yeah.”

  She wipes away tears. A few seconds of sniffling pass. Then the slow returning creep of guilt, taking the baton from grief and exhaustion. It resembles that moment when you’re hiking and you step into an icy creek. It takes a second for the frigid water to seep in and soak your socks. Maybe you’ve even managed to pull your foot out of the water already. But then there’s that wet chill spreading around your foot, and you know you’re going to be miserable for the rest of the day.

  I’ve allowed myself to assume, because of her kindness, that she doesn’t blame me. What if all her kindness has nothing to do with that and everything to do with trying to persuade herself not to hate me? I can see convincing yourself not to hate someone by investing kindness in them.

  I’m too spent. I have no energy for the truth; no place left to put it.

  “Anyway, thanks again.” I open the door.

  Jesmyn pulls out her phone. “Hey. I don’t have your number. School’s starting in a few weeks, and I need all the friends I can get there.” This sounds like an epiphany coming to her even as she says it.

  “Oh. Yeah. I guess I’m not super close with anyone there anymore either.”

  We exchange numbers. Maybe this was the ceremony I needed. Some tiny ray of hope.

  It’s dawning on me how lonely this school year will be. Sauce Crew was so tight. We were our own universe. No one alive is in the habit of thinking to call me on a Saturday night. But my bigger problem is Adair. She always wielded outsized social influence at NAA—way more than Eli ever did. Way, way more than me. If she never stops hating me, many people are going to follow her lead just to stay in her good graces.

  “Well,” Jesmyn says. “At least we’re done with funerals.”

  “That’s something, I guess.”

  “See you later?”

  “Yeah. Later.”

  Now comes the hard part. When we can’t lose ourselves in regimented programs for our grief. When we’re alone with ourselves.

  But the day’s not over for me yet. Nana Betsy invited me to stop by her house, where they were having a low-key potluck dinner to send the relatives from East Tennessee home with full bellies.

  I squint against the dazzling light while I rummage for my keys and consider how blithely bright the day is.

  The spinning world and the burning sun don’t care much whether we stay or we go. It’s nothing personal.

  “Hey, Lisa,” I say to one of the NAA a cappella members passing in the parking lot on the way to her car.

  “Oh. Hey.” She’s suddenly transfixed by her phone. She’s one of the people Adair was talking to before the funeral started. And as far as I know, she never bore me any special ill will before now. Yep. This school year is going to rule.

  I’m about to get into my car when I see a youngish bearded man in khakis, a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a loosened, skinny tie approaching.

  “Excuse me. Sorry, excuse me,” he calls, waving. “You Carver Briggs?”

  At least someone wants to talk to me. “Yeah.”

  The young man is carrying a notebook and a pen. He has what looks like a digital recorder in his shirt pocket.

  He extends his hand. “Darren Coughlin, with the Tennessean. I’ve been covering the accident from the beginning.”

  I shake his hand reluctantly. “Oh.” So you’re the one responsible for the article printed a few days ago, telling the world that this was a texting accident and making everyone point at me.

  “Hey, I’m really sorry about the circumstances. I’m working on a story about the accident, and Judge Edwards referred me to you. He said you might have some information about it? They were your friends?”

  I rub my forehead. This is literally one of the last things on Earth I want to be doing right now. “Can we do this another time? I don’t really want to talk.”

  “I get it, and I’m not trying to be insensitive, but the news doesn’t stop for grief, you know? I’d like to get your side before we go to press.”

  My side. I suck in a breath. “Um, yeah. Best friends.”

  He shakes his head. “So sorry, man. Do you know anything about what might have caused the accident?”

  “I thought you already had an idea.”

  “Well, seems like it was texting, but do you know who Thurgood—”

  “Mars.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We called him Mars.”

  “Okay, do you know who Mars was texting with?”

  My stomach folds around the jagged edges of the question. My sweat cools. Yes, as a matter of fact I do. “I—I’m not sure exactly. It might have been me.”

  Darren nods and scribbles notes. “Were
you texting him at around the time of the accident?”

  He might be trying not to come across as brusque and uncaring, but he is, and it’s making me jittery. “I—maybe?” My voice is diminishing.

  “Are you aware of any criminal investigation into the accident?”

  I shudder like a buzzing wasp just landed on my neck. “No. Why?”

  He shakes his head nonchalantly. “Curious.”

  “Have you heard anything?”

  “No, I’d just be surprised if there weren’t an investigation. Three teenagers, texting, you know.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  Darren keeps scribbling notes. He shrugs. “Probably not.”

  “I mean, a couple of cops talked to me right after and I told them that Mars and I were texting that afternoon. But they didn’t, like, arrest me.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know.” Darren clicks his pen.

  “Could you maybe not write that I might have been texting Mars?” I’m smart enough to know both how futile this request is and how bad it makes me sound, but I sometimes do dumb stuff.

  He looks up. “Man, I can’t—”

  I chew on a fingernail. He never finishes the sentence.

  Darren raises his pad again. “So, what time were you—”

  It suddenly occurs to me how little I have to gain by continuing this conversation, and how much I have to lose. “I gotta go. I gotta—”

  “Just a couple more questions.”

  “No, sorry, I have to be at Blake’s house. His grandma wanted me to come.” I sit down in my car and close the door. I have to roll down the window to breathe in the stifling heat.

  Darren rests his hand on the windowsill. “Look, Carver, I’m sorry to be doing this right now. I really am. But this is news. And the news doesn’t wait for people to mourn. So you can either tell me your side of the story or you can wait to read it in the paper. But either way.”

  “I don’t read the paper.” I turn the key in the ignition.

  He fishes a card from his shirt pocket and hands it to me through the window. “Anyway, man, here’s my card. Drop me a line if you remember something or if the police start asking questions.”