The Best of Us

eleven

OCTOBER. 2014.

THANKFULLY, ALL IT took for Bradley to come back to me was patience. Admittedly, that was not a virtue that I had to spare, but for him, I could make myself a saint.

Whether it was because Miles hadn't been around in the last week to unnerve him or because he was growing tired of manufacturing distance between us for whatever other reason made no difference to me as long as he wasn't responding to my closeness with discomfort or indifference.

A few days after Miles and Layla interrupted our lunch— the interruption by then a week and a half old– he gradually warmed up to me again, knocking his knee into mine and grinning when I threw my arm around his shoulder, laughing when I pulled him into me. Maybe he just needed space, Heaven said, but I didn't think so.

After I warned Layla not to bring him around us anymore, we hadn't seen Miles at all except in passing and Bradley had relaxed significantly so it was difficult to believe that something other than Miles's judgment was what had pulled him away from me. I didn't want to think about it any longer than I had to, especially not while I was spending time with him.

It was a cool, grey Wednesday afternoon in dreary suburbia where all of the shadows fell flat and lifeless and we, as we often did, were lounging and stretching out beside each other on his bed. The familiarity of his room was never lost on me; it was more familiar, dearer to me than my own bedroom where skeletons spilled out of the closet and ghosts lingered in the darker corners.

Until we had to leave for school or were summoned for dinner, his bedroom was a still, undisturbed universe, only tethered to the outside world when the door was opened and revealed his hallway on the other side.

The ceiling was tall enough to breathe without suffocation and low enough to feel as though it had made itself into a kind of shield from anything that might trouble us from the outside. The wallpaper was a calm sea-glass blue and the carpet was a plush beige; all of the furniture— the bed frame, the bedside tables, the desk, the closet, the bookshelf were all a sturdy white. His bed sheets were cool and snowy and he had an extra layer that was the same sea glass as the walls; the same sea glass as the curtains that pulled over the squared, white-framed windows. His bed and the bedside tables were slightly off-center, opposite the desk and the TV that was hung above it, to make room for his door and there was more open space on the right side of the room than the left.

Pressed against the right wall were his closet and his bookshelves, his books in no specific sequence or chronology, and braced against each other. Any of the loose spaces between them were filled up by old trinkets; a Rubik's cube, a snow globe from five years ago when he spent a portion of winter break in France, a small jar of change three-quarters full, some dice, a broken video game controller, a little wooden box that I had made for him in our freshman woodworking class, a grey and white bunny that his brother crocheted for him with their grandmother when they were kids (Bradley had crocheted Brandon a little bluebird that lived on the shelf above Brandon's desk). There was an old disposable, too, and about three others in the top drawer of his left bedside table, along with some tossed-in yo-yos and a twisted slinky, packs of playing cards, a portable chess set and a million other things.

All of his pictures, from his disposables and copied from older family albums, were tucked into three or four different scrapbooks that Layla bought for him on his fifteenth, most of them marked with dates. It was his wordless biography of learning to walk and his first day of nursery school and the day he got his oldest childhood teddy bear (he was no longer in possession of it; it lived on the desk in my bedroom, sometimes on my bed, sometimes in my arms).

There were the kindergarten days and learning to ride a bike and the day his family moved to our neighborhood, the summer before second grade. Summer trips to cabins and the beach and the park and winters in front of the gold-embellished Christmas tree or having snowball fights in the backyard. There were pictures we'd taken or that others had taken for us at house parties that we couldn't remember, bonfires, football games, playing chicken-fight in the pool and going on late-night walks, faces blurred under streetlights.