Wearing My Smile | ✔

Saturday, January 29th, 2005

It was when we bid each other goodbye after your first performance that I should have noticed. How you slurred your words a little. How you laughed a little too loud. How you constantly smiled over nothing as if you were content. How subdued the drive back was. The faint tint of flush. The sparkle in your eyes. It should have been obvious, but I didn't know what I had been looking so I didn't notice. You were filled with liquid of courage, walking into your dark house in the middle of the night with violin case slung around your shoulders.

The happiness eclipsed everything else, blurring my rational thoughts. There were things I could have done better. I could have told you about the dream. I could have reminded you to give the violin to me so I could keep it safe. I could have told you to just stay overnight at my place. I could have noticed earlier that you had had alcohol in your system. I could have done a lot of things I hadn't done.

My therapist had told me that I should write down these events, these regrets on paper. As closure, she'd said, so you could move on. But I'm writing this down and I keep picturing in my mind the way you lay in the hospital, the way you had crumbled in your room then, months later, in that physical therapy room. The way you had punched those boys, the way you had wheezed when you wanted to cry but tears wouldn't come so you turned into anger because it was familiar.

I feel the unfairness of this, of writing everything down so I will be able to close this chapter, never open it again, and start over someplace new. The ridiculousness of it, because if there was anyone around here who needs a start over, it would be you, Sam, but then you were nowhere around here anymore to start over anything. She told me that as though I could forget you like you were a bad chapter when you were a whole book of my life, embedded so deeply into my memory that I could not recall what it was like to spend a day without your blond hair glinting under the sun.

There is this gap between the time before and after your death, like the time after never feels quite real. I've seen the scene of your last day over and over in my mind. Some nights I'd wake up to the sound of gunshot. Some nights I'd wake up standing in my living room, my arms outreached as if trying to grab someone. Some others I'd wake up thinking if only I'd stopped you from going home that night, maybe none of this would happen.

But the fact is I let you home with soft smile on my face, a quick kiss on your lips, my fingers in your hair. I watched as you walked back into your house before I finally got in mine and went to my room to rest. The fact is everything had happened and there is nothing I can do to change it.

At first, there was a loud crash, then a series of yelling, then your scream. This was what woke me from my two-hour sleep, Sam. Your scream. Because even when your father had beaten you up years before, you had never screamed. Not once.

I ran to my front door, a metal baseball bat in my hands, my heart was thundering inside my chest so hard I felt sick. From my front porch I could see the lights in your house were on. There was yelling again and another crashing. I couldn't hear your long scream anymore and it scared me more than anything, Sam, because of what it would imply.

My father was far away in another country and Luce was rarely ever home nowadays as she was basically living with her boyfriend at that point. There was no one to stop me, Sam, to grab me by my shoulders and tell me to think, Roo, think, don't do something reckless.

Without thinking, I jogged barefoot to your place, past the tree, past your neglected front yard, onto your front porch with its jagged and bent railing from the beating you had received years ago. I opened the front door.

I wasn't thinking, Sam, I wasn't. There was a rush of blood in my eyes, so loud I couldn't quite process what I was hearing or seeing. Everything was in a slow motion. I saw the monster stomped his foot violently, repeatedly down the floor, as though throwing tantrums. Your mother with her arms around his raised right arm, the crash that happened when he pushed her away. Their mouths were moving. Maybe they were yelling, but I couldn't hear what they were saying. Still, the monster stomped on the floor, his boots made everything inside the house rattle.