Page 33 of The Bright Lands

Because there was a memory he couldn’t escape. Because that rainy night after the game, when he had texted Dylan,Don’t worry, I’m getting you out of this shit hole, his brother had begun to type a response he’d never finished. Joel remembered those three little dots on his screen filling and emptying, filling and emptying. Remembered the fear that had roiled his gut at the sight of them. That fear returned to him now, even though—he thought—the worst had already happened.

A door opened and Mr. Ortiz, the town’s mortician, stepped soundlessly into the little lobby, followed by Mayfield and Clark. The mortician gave Joel a well-practiced, sympathetic nod and ushered him toward another, more discreet door, half-hidden by a fern.

The back of the funeral home had a chill that settled fast into the bones. A line of humming fluorescent lights ran above a cavernous room lined with pumps and tubes. A dozen wigs in every shade of brown. A grinning Bison bobblehead perched atop a refrigerator.

A table draped by a white sheet.

A shape under the sheet about six feet long.

Mr. Ortiz asked Joel to attest to being Dylan’s brother, made him sign here and here and here.

They approached the body.

“In the city you would do this on a TV monitor in the other room,” said Mr. Ortiz, one hand poised over the sheet, sounding suddenly as if he’d lost his nerve. “We would understand if you’d rather wait until he might be moved.”

Joel shook his head, and the mortician folded down a portion of the sheet.

His brother had died afraid. Dylan’s mouth was locked open in a gasp. Dull brown bruises covered both sides of his face. One blow had ripped open the skin above the left eye. Another had turned his temple into a single wide scab. Joel noticed there was no blood on the face. Where it wasn’t bruised the skin was a marbled white.

Two red bricks were positioned to either side of the head. The sheet had been folded back to rest on Dylan’s chin. “Why did you stop the sheet there?” Joel asked.

The mortician shot a quick, panicked glance at the deputies. Mayfield said, “The boy was in the water for a while, son.”

Joel didn’t move. He pointed at the bricks. “Why is his head like this?”

Mayfield let out a long sigh.

Clark said, “Don’t do this to yourself, Joel.”

“Fold it down.”

“Joel—”

“Fold it down.”

Mayfield gave Mr. Ortiz a little nod of assent. The sheet sighed as it was raised.

A wide wound to the neck exposing a dull mass of private flesh. Fibers of muscle, the severed cords of the vein and the artery. A dark cavity at the core, which even the whining lights above couldn’t penetrate.

Joel stared at the wound until the logic of his mind threatened to break down. He saw a hole that refused to be seen. He heard the whispers of dreams, the whisper of a voice hissing through static and doors:

imissedyou.

Joel noted every detail one final time. He nodded to Mr. Ortiz, to the police. He thanked them in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.

Joel returned home to the silence of a house in grief. He brought inside the first of many flowers deposited on the porch. The lights all off inside, the tactless sun beaming through the open windows.

Joel could feel his mother asleep down the hall—he had loaded her down with enough Xanax and Ambien to knock out a horse. Darren stepped out from the kitchen.

“You were always good to him,” Darren said. “You always took care of him.”

Joel didn’t have the words to answer this.

“It was good of you to send him that money. I know it meant so much to him.”

“Money?”

“That two thousand you sent him, back over the summer, to get him some savings started. I saw him counting it in his room but I never told nothing to Paulette about it, of course. He said the two of you wanted to keep it private.” Darren caught himself, teetered on the edge of tears. “I took him to the bank to open his account and put in two thousand of my own money. Though I don’t guess he’ll be needing it now.”