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THE SUNDAY PAPER SUBSEQUENT to Jamie's death reported the following:
...Jamie Hill, son of Patrick and Ellen Hill, passed tragically on the 31st of September at the young age of 8. There is a meal train being put together by Carol Hopkins, in which neighbors can prepare food for the grieving relatives to be delivered daily. The Hill family has asked for privacy in this trying time, though Jamie's funeral will open to all and held on the 4th of October...
It was a brief article, hidden in the bottom left corner of the newspaper. It was also small, and inconsequential, and concise, and all the things that Jamie Hill was not. When Father saw it, he cried silently into the crook of his arm. When Mother saw it, she broke one of their expensive wine glasses and did not clean it up. Its shards littered the kitchen floor for a long while; like tears, hardened into something sharp and dangerous, refracting stolen light.
Jess didn't read it at all. For the weeks after Jamie died, she locked herself in her bedroom and did not come out. She didn't cry or break wine glasses. She just sat in her room without a word, leaving only when her parents were asleep or out on errands.
The funeral came and went, and despite her parents' pleading, she did not move. For three entire weeks, Jess's room remained a coffin of her own making. If Jamie had to die, then so would she. She would turn herself into a ghost, pale and silent and drifting, floating in another time. A time when things were better.
Her coffin was pried open on the 22nd of October by the sound of a scraping screwdriver. The sound of Father, eyes still heavy with pain, taking her door right off the hinges. He set it off to the side and stood in the empty frame. For a long moment, they just stared at each other wordlessly. Jess, cocooned in her blankets, room looking as though a hurricane had swept through it, and her father, arms slack at his sides, clad in a work uniform that had gone dusty with misuse.
Both of them, monuments to the other's grief.
"It's time to get up and back to work. No more sulking," he said, and he almost sounded sorry for it. Almost sounded like he was begging for her to tell him she wouldn't. That they could sit in their sorrow for the rest of their lives. That there could be no meaningful work without him to come home to. No world worth living in without his smile.
But she would not beg.
That morning, the entire neighborhood woke to her screaming. She thrashed and sobbed as her parents put her in her school clothes, flailed and shouted as they did back her hair, and thrashed and wailed as they dragged her to the car.
She did not stop until she was buckled into the backseat. Then she was silent again, as though it had never happened. The stillness of the air after a storm. Of some violent catastrophe.
The walls of her elementary school were soft with their pity as Mother walked her down to the office. (Later that morning, Ellen Hill would weep against her steering wheel and curse at the sky, demanding answers from a silent god.) All her classmates were the same; crushed under the weight of someone else's grief, under the weight of empty words. The teachers were just as bad, if not worse. Throughout the day, they pulled her aside, told her they were sorry, that she could take it easy, how terrible and awful and hard it had to be, to lose a brother that way. The guilt of it all was almost too much to bear.
Later, she would look back on the day with fogginess. It seemed to her like a dream. Maybe she hadn't walked down to the elementary wing and sat by Jamie's classroom door for three hours after school let out. Maybe Mr. Pinoche hadn't found her there, sobbing and curled in on herself, still wordless. Maybe she hadn't wept as he hoisted her up, as he helped her to the office, apologizing all the way, as he called Mother, then Father. Maybe the doctor's office had been a joke, a cruel one, but a joke all the same. And all the therapy sessions after that, too. Maybe she would go home and Jamie would be waiting for her there, on the doorstep, at the dining room table, in his bed, playing with blocks.
