Page 116 of Between Hello and Goodbye

Part III

I’m trying to picture me without you but I can’t.—Fall OutBoy

Chapter Twenty

The early hours came and went, like snapshots.

When Faith and I arrived at dawn, we went straight to the house. Momi was there with her nurse, tears streaming down her cheeks. Chloe Barnes was there too. She’d just gotten Kaleo to bed, but I had to see him. He was awake and crying. He was asking me about his mom and dad. He was clinging to me like I’d go away too, and then he mercifully fell back to sleep.

Over the next few days, Nalani and my brother’s house was always full of people. Friends, clients from their business, guys from my fire station, police buddies, hospital friends. Paula, Chloe, and Momi, some faces I didn’t know. Arrangements needed to be made,Island Memoriesneeded to be handled, and Kaleo…

My heart was being held together by fraying threads and he was the only thing keeping them from snapping altogether. In his face, I saw eleven-year-old Morgan, standing in a burning trailer…

No fucking way…

I buried it. Buried it all, which was easier thanks to the numb shock that made everything seem dreamlike and unreal.

This is an emergency,I told myself.Deal with it.

I went into action, directing the arrangements and handling shit like I was on call.

But I hadn’t been.Not when it counted.

It had been raining steadily that day. The rainiest season on an island where it rained every day. It wasn’t even dark that afternoon, but the clouds were thick, they said. The roads were slick, they said. Right about the time I was telling Faith I loved her, Morgan was over-correcting to avoid hitting something in the road, or maybe taking a turn too fast. Or maybe he was driving carefully as usual. Because I was the one who drove like a maniac and he never did, yet it happened to him anyway. They slid, skidded, and then rolled down a muddy embankment. Given the damage to the car, it must’ve rolled three or four times, if not more. The car landed upside down. They were both killed instantly, they said. It must’ve been painless. That’s what they told me.

Other people had to tell me what happened because I wasn’t there.

I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there.

At some point—I don’t remember when or where—strong hands gripped my shoulders. Captain Reyes. “Hey. Talk to me, Ash. Don’t take this all on yourself.Don’t do it.”

I stared at him, perplexed that he didn’t understand the simplest truth. “Cap,” I said. “I have to keep moving or I’m going to die.”

He got out of my way, then.

Faith was there. Helping, managing, organizing. Crying. She was in that sequined evening dress for almost twenty-four hours before Paula, my nurse friend, brought her shorts and a T-shirt. One of Faith’s bosses—Terrance—had texted her. She’d won the Clio. Instead of celebrating her win with a glitzy party, Faith was in borrowed clothes, making phone calls to tell people my brother and his beautiful wife were dead when I didn’t have it in me to say it one more time. When she wasn’t working, she was sitting with Momi. I don’t think she left her side for longer than a few minutes at a time. Whenever our eyes met, she shot me furtive, agonized glances.

I always looked away. I couldn’t look at her because when I looked at her, I saw a future that no longer existed. Married to Faith, living in Seattle, visiting Morgan and Nalani at summer and Christmas time, having Kal come for a visit in the city to play with his cousins…

That was over. And very soon, the planning and the visits and the condolences and the people moving in and out we’re going to stop too. Life was going to get really quiet, and it was just going to be me and Kal. He was mine now, though I didn’t actually believe I was the right guy for the job. How could I trust myself when I failed Morgan so fucking badly?

I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there.

The memorial service to put Nalani and Morgan’s ashes in the ocean was coming up. Captain Gary and his wife Cindy organized a flotilla of boats because their one schooner couldn’t hold all the people who wanted to pay their respects.

I remember in college, reading a CS Lewis book that he’d written after he lost his wife. He said no one had told him how much grief felt like fear.

No one had told me, either.

A deep, dark dread filled me at the idea of going to that ceremony, to see the mourners’ tears and hear their cries and put my brother into the ocean…

No fucking way.

But I’d deal with that later. Until then, I had things to do. I didn’t sleep; I just kept doing, directing, controlling…

Control. What a farce. A cruel joke.

On the morning of the memorial service, Faith put on a long Hawaiian-style dress and a flower in her hair, and I wondered how it was possible to love someone so much and yet still have to tell them goodbye. But then again, that’s what I’d been forced to do with my brother. I hadn’t been ready to say goodbye. Not even close. But I didn’t have a choice.