Wearing My Smile | ✔

Monday, April 9th, 2007

Three days after your funeral.

There were several flowers, postcards, notes tapped on your old locker at school. I stared at them for a long time before leaving them as they were. People, students and teachers alike, sent apologetic glances my way. Penny walked around with me more often than not, not saying anything, and I appreciated her silent presence more than anything because talking exhausted me right down to my soul.

A teacher I recognized as one who used to yell at you for fighting came to me with guilt so clearly plastered on his face. I knew what he was thinking even when he didn't speak because the thoughts had been plaguing me too. I told him, “It wasn't your fault, sir. You only wanted the best for him. He'd known the whole time.”

He looked tiny bit surprised before all of his emotions were wiped clean, hidden under a blank mask. His tone was tinted with regret when he gripped my shoulder firmly and said, “I'm terribly sorry for your loss, Rumon.”

He didn't say you were a good boy, that you'd been a good student or any bullshit adults liked to tell you. I knew he wouldn't tell the things he didn't believe and I knew no one else there had known that side of you. Only I had. Me. Not for the first time, Sam, I felt so alone in the world where nobody seemed to know you, but I accepted his sympathy as it was.

My sessions with my therapist hadn't been going well and she looked almost concerned. I had been coming every day but I barely talked. Mostly she asked things and I'd be playing with the things in her office. She was patient about it. Somehow it reminded me of myself when I was with you, Sam, but I'd never tell her that. I'd never tell anyone that.

“Do you think Sam was a toxic friend, Rumon?”

My hand gripping her tiny dog statue until my fingers white, I bristled at my seat, but I said calmly, “Never.”

“Even though from your stories in our other sessions he seemed to be absent when you needed him?”

“That's bullshit, Doc. He was always where I needed him to be.” And I said to myself, easy, easy. I couldn't recognize myself on those days. I can control myself better now, Sam, but those first weeks after your death I almost couldn't recognize myself. I had been bitter, vicious, angry, and hateful. I would look back now and think, who was this person?

“Even when he was too deep inside his head?”

I gritted my teeth. “I didn't need him to do anything. I just needed him to be there. It was enough.”

She studied me from across the table and sometimes I disliked it when she did. But I felt my body relaxing, back to the numbness I came to be familiar with in the few minutes of silence, until she said, “No one here is trying to blame Sam for anything, Roo.”

“It's because everyone talks as if they know him when they fucking don't!” I shouted angrily. “None of them knows him, not like I do—” My voice caught at the end of the sentence.

“How does that make you feel?”

I didn't say anything. I didn't even look at her.

“Angry? Sad?”

I still didn't say anything.

“Lonely?”

I tensed.

She noticed. Of course, she did. “Loyalty, Rumon, is a very wonderful trait and I'm going to say this because it seems to me that you often forget, you are a great young man and anyone who has your loyalty is a lucky person.”

I knew what she was trying to say, so I didn't say anything.

“How's your sleep? Still with the same nightmares?”

I didn't tell her the usual nightmares didn't come as much as the sound of your gunshot. It was hard for me to sleep. I barely slept for three hours a night. Sometimes I woke up in a place I didn't know, my body was covered in cold sweat and I couldn't quite breathe as I should. Sometimes I saw things which were not there. Sometimes I saw you in clean T-shirt and jeans under the mango tree. Sometimes I saw you in my living room covered in blood. Sometimes I found myself running to your house thinking I needed to stop you from shooting yourself, forgetting that you already had.

I didn't tell her any of it. I said instead, “Some.”

“Do you think you'll be free next Tuesday?”

I felt a pang of remorse then, and a little bit of disappointment toward myself because that would only mean another session I had to attend in silence. To be completely honest with you, Sam, at the time it was hard for me to think that the sessions had been working at all. I had been attending regularly for almost three years at that point, but not much had changed. Usually, it didn't matter if it did or didn't. Mostly, I just wanted to talk about the forest fire to someone else other than you because I knew you hated it.

“It's off the record,” she added, and I had to look up to figure out what she actually meant, but she was just giving me that soft smile. “I just want to show you something.”

I still wasn't sure. It must have been written all over my face because next she said, “My father died in a car accident when I was sixteen.” I blinked at her in surprise. “It was snowing and the road was slippery so his car swerved down a cliff. He didn't make it.”

“I...I'm sorry about your loss.”

Her smile turned sad. “Me too. I was lonely in my grief, especially when deep down I knew it was suicide.”

I couldn't hear anything other than the harsh breathing coming out of my nose.

Her bright smile was back in the next second. “Next Tuesday. Please come around 6 pm.”