Wearing My Smile | ✔

Monday, April 2nd, 2007

This part of the book is filled with the things you don't know, Sam, so I will tell you. I will tell you everything.

The day you did it, the day I'd called for an ambulance, your mother had been away, going to your father's family house for the weekend she hadn't yet come back. Apparently, you'd known about this. That was why you chose that day specifically, or at least, that was what I concluded from your words and a few pages of crumpled note I'd found in your bedroom later on. You were careful, you'd said. I wasn't supposed to be there, you'd said. It seemed as if it was a form of mercy, even though I could not understand why you would give them any.

Sitting on the waiting room of the hospital, staring at nothing, my eyes dry, with bloodied hands and clothes, the doctor told me the time of your death was 1.12 am. Luce and my father were there sitting beside me with Luce still sobbing violently into her hands and my father's arm around her shoulders.

The sound of gunshot had woken them up and with dread settling in their stomach, they ran across even before the ambulance came. They found me crouching right beside you on the floor, eerily still, unmoving with bloodied towels in my hands. I didn't respond when they'd called my name. I had no words left in me. Later they told me there was nothing in my face, as if I was no longer there.

Your parents arrived at around 3 am. Your mother saw me and crumpled down the floor. She bawled and wailed like a wounded animal, refusing to be held by your father as she wept. She was inconsolable. Your father looked stricken for the first time I'd ever seen him. There was anger there, but mostly just guilt. So much guilt, he left for the restroom not ten minutes in, leaving your mother on the floor. She was still crying and I hated that she was, hated that your parents knew how to grief only when it was too fucking late.

They didn't know that every time I closed my eyes, the scene played again in my mind. I jumped over and over again in my seat when I heard a gunshot exploded, my father had to calm me down before I got another panic attacks. So, no, they didn't get to grief over you. They didn't get to fucking grief when they knew nothing about suffering.

After a while, my father and Luce held her up. A nurse came to calm her down. I felt nothing but disgust at the whole thing. What was she even doing here when she was never there your whole life?

The doctor came out from the room and he informed your mother about your death. Her bawl was wretched and I was already so sick of it so I quietly walked out the hospital building and around the parking lot.

I stood at one part of the lot and thought, this was where I cried the last time you were hospitalized, when your left arm wouldn't move as it used to ever again. Another point and thought, this was where my father's car had parked when we were twelve and you were too beaten up to keep your eyes open. Another point and thought, this was where Luce had parked, driving illegally at fifteen because our mother's condition had gotten worse, crying the whole time.

Deaths. Always deaths in this hospital and it was as if I had to watch it over and over again, Sam, the way I'd failed to keep the people I loved safe. I wondered if you'd even known that I was real before you shot yourself.

Later, when I came back inside, I found my father speaking softly to your parents. Your mother had stopped crying. She looked like a wreck; blond hair a shade darker than yours matted to her scalp, on her cheeks were tracks of tears. Your father's arm was around her shoulders. His expression was severe, but he replied just as quietly, listening intently to whatever my father had said, as if he gave the slightest fuck.

I walked up to them and spat, “He wouldn't want his funeral to be full of people. He'd want it small and private.”

A sharp breath intake from your parents, but it was my father who said almost disapprovingly, “Rumon.”

“He told me that once, years ago. He made me promise to tell you.” And I hated that you did.

With a brittle voice, your mother asked, “Why would Sammy talk about funerals?”

I looked at her, at her blue eyes which didn't match with yours because you had your father's eyes. How gaunt she looked, sharp edges around her jaws and cheekbones, sunken eyes, perpetual exhaustion which never seemed to end. She called you 'Sammy'. I wondered then if she had ever called you that right to your face because I remembered when you'd told me once that they used to call you that. Your voice had suggested that they never did anymore.

Since I was mean, I wanted to tell her, “Because he had wanted to die for a long time.” And I knew it to be true. I was just too blind to see.

But I didn't say anything else. I left the hospital building without looking back, unwilling to listen to her crying anymore.