WHO WE ARE ✸ Sturniolos

III. About my Brother Nick

TW:  Death, drunk driving, funerals.  Stay safe! x

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"Let me tell you about my brother Nick."

Chris swallowed, his collar itching. For a moment he looked down at the melting paper in his shaking hands. It was crinkled and his handwriting looked like shit. It took a few tries for him to find his voice.

"Nick loves colours. Nick loves to paint, even though he says he's no good at it. Nick loves summertime, and being outside, and ladybugs. Nick loves the world. Sometimes I think he loves the world more than the world could ever love him back."

He had so much more to say than that. Nick loved seashells. Nick loved long showers and scented candles; he loved the way air smelled when it was about to rain; he loved to always walk on the side of the pavement closest to the road. Nick loved braiding Madi's hair and he loved getting a rise out of Matt. And he loved Chris.

"For our eleventh birthday, Matt got a pair of rollerblades. I got a skateboard. Mom kept asking Nick over and over what he wanted, but he only ever said one thing: a photo album."

He found himself smiling.

"Not a full one. He wanted an empty photo album, one he could fill up himself over time. He didn't even have a camera — didn't ask for one, either. Then, for Mother's day when we were sixteen, Nick gave it back."

Chris could picture it now so clearly. Nick hadn't let him or Matt so much as touch it before it was done, but on Mother's Day morning the three of them gathered at the kitchen counter gluing hearts and letters onto the leather front cover. It had to have been at least one hundred pages long, all filled with animated pictures — both posed and candid — of their family over five years.

Their Mom had cried before even opening it. Then she had asked for the tissue box at the first page.

Chris' eyes fluttered. He took a long breath, one that reminded him he was alive.

"Let me tell you about my brother Nick."

"When I was in tenth grade, Ms. Derby gave us a book to read for English class. The Kite Runner. She gave us the whole month to read it and, at the end of the semester, we'd be tested on it."

"Me being me, that Sunday night before the test I still hadn't read it."

Chris found himself somewhere deep inside his mind, blocking out the sounds of light chuckles from the external world. He felt so lucky that this memory was his and he could keep it for as long as he lived: a story of him.

"I was so nervous about failing the test the next day that I couldn't sleep, and of course that got on Nick's nerves."

His throat burned. No matter how many times he coughed or swallowed, the fire raged on. Some hidden anger, a call from within telling him this couldn't be over yet.

". . . So he asked me, What's wrong?"

He remembered it so well. Matt had been asleep beside him, drowning beneath the duvet, and Chris had been tossing and turning all night like a dancing flame.

Nick sat at their desk finishing some music homework that wasn't due for another week or so, when he turned around all of a sudden and huffed.

"What's wrong?" He had finally boiled over, pen clutched in his fist like a weapon. And it would be if Chris didn't stop sighing and shuffling around every two seconds. "You're gonna wake up Matt if you keep doing that."

Chris had sat upright and rubbed a hand over his face. He visualised the golden light from the lampshade crossing one half of Nick's face, the crease in his brow, the reflection of himself in his brother's glasses.

"I told him that I hadn't read the book, that I just couldn't get it. I mean, I tried. I did."

Chris' voice faltered. I tried. I did.

"But Nick said to me, Don't worry about it. He told me to go to sleep and wake up as if tomorrow was the first day of my life."

He cleared his throat before looking back down to the paper. Biting his lip, Chris folded it back up and placed it down, hands instead gripping the ends of the mahogany pulpit.

"When I got up the next morning and we got on the school bus, Nick sat down next to me and gave me the book."

Nick never sat next to him. It had always been Matt, because like a good big brother Nick knew that Matt didn't like change.

"On the way to school he told me everything that happened in The Kite Runner. He had stayed up all night reading it for me. I got an A on that test."

Chris choked. The air was suddenly torturously hot. He felt a hand grasp his shoulder and it felt like the weight of the entire world. Squeezing his eyes shut, he searched for his words. For Nick.

"That's just how Nick is. He didn't need to do that, but he did, because he loved me."

And I love him, he wanted to say, but the words couldn't get past the thick lump in his throat.

Chris opened his eyes and met the crowd lined in the pews, wrapped in black and white. All their eyes glistened red. His mother was crying in the front row; Justin was rubbing her back.

He had never seen so many tired faces. They looked more dead than Nick did.

He had to hold a hand to his chest in case his heart leapt out from beneath his ribs. In case it soared down to the casket and buried itself in there next to his big brother.

Matt was clinging to his side. He looked sick. Only Chris knew he had been.

He was covered in orchids. Chris remembered screaming at whatever cruel funeral planner had placed them on the coffin because Nick didn't like orchids, he liked lilies. He remembered Matt holding him back and sobbing into his spine. He remembered thinking that Nick would have told him it was no big deal, to breathe and forgive.

"Let me tell you about my brother Nick."

"Nick is right over there," he whispered. "He's right over there but I can't talk to him anymore. I can't touch him. I can't ask him to help me do my homework anymore."

Because someone had taken him away. Someone who must have known that drinking and driving shouldn't mix, but someone who thought Fuck it, why not? Chris Sturniolo had one hundred reasons why not. One laid at his feet and was going to be sent into the ground for eternity in ten minutes.

But he remembered. He breathed. He forgave.

He wondered if Nick was smiling.