All We Have Left (16 page)

“Yes,” he says. “That. I wasn’t really, you know—”

“Crying?”

“Man, stop it. Yes, okay, maybe I was. I just thought you were going to make fun of me or something, and then when you accused me of looking at you, I was, like,
really
?”

“I wasn’t though,” I say.

“You weren’t what?”

“Going to make fun of you,” I say. “My father says that ‘tears are prayers too. They travel to Allah when we can’t speak.’”

He opens his mouth to say something else, but we hear a clicking sound, and then static, before a real, live human voice says over the intercom, “There’s been an explosion.”

When I get home that evening from the Peace Center, still feeling raw and unsettled, my mother is waiting.

The apartment is dim, and I can hear the fall of rain on the leaves outside the cracked kitchen window and the gush of the gutters.

And my mother sits at the counter, not moving, not texting, not doing anything but waiting.

Usually she’s such a whirlwind of energy, always talking, but only about what’s happening tomorrow, what happened today, what’s happening
right-freaking-now.
There’s not a lot of conversation about anything important. It’s like she lives her life only half-tuned to a radio station so that she doesn’t have to listen to the lyrics.

“What’s up, Mom?” I say, a little unnerved.

She looks at me, not speaking.

After I was arrested and taken to the hospital to get my ankle X-rayed (no break, just a bad sprain), they took me to jail, where I was fingerprinted and put into a holding cell. I couldn’t seem to stop crying when my mom arrived with a lawyer to bail me out. The look on her face was indescribable. All she kept asking on the way home was “Why? Jesse,
why
?”

I couldn’t answer. I had no answer. I didn’t know why.

My father had refused to come with my mom to get me out of jail.

“Unbelievable,” is all he said to me the next night when the local news flashed a video of the side of the Peace Center. A group of people were on ladders, busily scrubbing at my fading words with brushes and buckets of soapy water. Even then, I wondered what Nick would think. I hadn’t spoken to him since I arrived home except for the one text he sent me:

Did you talk

I didn’t reply.

He found out soon enough when the police arrived to pick him up.

“What, Mom?” I ask, because she still hasn’t said anything.

Her face wrenches, like she’s trying not to cry, and she stares at me so searchingly that I fight the irrational urge to close my eyes so she can’t vacuum out my brain.

“It’s our fault,” she says. “What you did. We should have realized it would affect you.” She sighs. “Travis was my baby boy, but when your father first stopped talking about him, right after it happened, I let him. I thought:
This is how he copes. This is how he gets through it.
And when his sadness turned to rage, I thought:
Give him time.
He’ll come back to me
. Because he wasn’t always like this, Jesse. I remember him the way he used to be—funny, brave, smart—and it makes me so sad that the man I fell in love with is gone. All I can say in his defense is that losing a child is the worst pain a parent can experience, and losing Travis the way we did … it changed your father. It changed both of us.”

She presses her lips together.

“Jesse, I know I haven’t been here for you the way I should have been, and all I can say is I’m sorry. Sometimes it hurts so much to look at you.”

I swallow hard, because this feels like a sharp, burning knife slicing into my heart. I’ve always known deep inside that somehow I caused my parents pain, that somehow it was easier for my mother to run, and my father to drink, than to have to deal with me.

“Sometimes it seems pointless to have anniversaries to remember something I remember every single day.” She gazes over my shoulder at the rain streaming down outside the window.

She shakes her head and turns back to me. “The city is planning a memorial service for the fifteenth anniversary of
9/11. They’ve always done something small to remember the date, but the new town council has decided to do something bigger this year. They want to do something special for Travis, and they want us to come and speak about him.”

“I’m sure Dad thought that was a spectacularly wonderful idea,” I say, my voice bitter.

She smiles slightly, because we both understand Dad, whether we want to or not.

“Actually, we got into a pretty spectacular fight about it. I can’t do it anymore, Jesse. I see what your father has done to you—I mean, look what you did! I still … can’t believe it.” Her voice drops. “I used to tell myself that he wasn’t affecting you, the things he said, especially when you had friends like Emi and Teeny. It was like you were standing up to him in your own quiet way, befriending people you knew he wouldn’t like. But now I see you
were
being affected. I’ve let him do this to you all these years, and I can’t stand by any longer. I’m leaving.
We’re
leaving. I’ve prayed about it, and we’re going to stay at Mary’s apartment until something changes. Until everything changes. Until he’s back to the way he used to be. I refuse to live with him like this. And I don’t want you to either.”

“You’re leaving Dad?” I ask, and my voice sounds young and small because
I can’t believe this is happening.

“Yes.” She stands, and adjusts her skirt, a quick, determined movement. “We agreed that I would tell you. I moved my things out today. I think you should stay tonight and say
good-bye to him, but it’s up to you. If you want to come with me now, I’ll help you pack.”

“I …” My thoughts swirl, chaotic and hot, a fire burning out of control. “But I don’t
want
to leave.” Even as I say the words I’m surprised to hear them.

But it’s true. My home is the only place I feel safe. I’m caught in a tornado filled with the jagged pieces of my life, and I need a place to hunker down. I can’t lose that right now.

She stares at me in surprise. “You want—” She clears her throat. “You want to stay with your father?”

“It’s not like that. I’m not choosing Dad,” I say. “I’m not choosing either one of you. I just don’t want to leave. Not now, I just … can’t.”

“I see,” she says quietly, gazing down at her hands, which look like mine, except they are clean with neatly cut nails, whereas mine are chewed and raggedy. “I wish you would come with me, Jesse. What’s going on between me and your father—that doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

I nod numbly, but I don’t believe her.

“I thought you were going with your mother” is all Dad says when he comes home later.

“I’m staying here,” I say.

He stops as he reaches into the fridge, just sort of freezes as if time skipped a moment or two, leaving him hanging out in space. Then he nods, and shuts the refrigerator door without getting anything, and sits in his recliner. He
turns on the TV and flips past the nightly news to a fishing show.

I wait, but he doesn’t say anything else. I go into my room and do pull-ups on the doorsill until my arms burn. I haven’t been climbing since the last time I was on the waterfall with Adam.

Adam.

I try not to think about the way he looked at me when he saw me today in the Peace Center.

Adam is Muslim.

I squash the expression on his face deep, deep down and do more pull-ups until my arms are wobbly and I stop thinking about Adam.

But other thoughts bang around inside my head. I’d pretty much stopped thinking about everything after I got arrested. I was too busy concentrating on surviving school, avoiding the coldness in my friends’ eyes, and escaping the flurry of whispers behind my back every time I walked down the halls.

Now my parents are separating. As much as I don’t want to think about that either, they are splitting up because of what happened to Travis, my mother’s baby boy, the laughing kid playing in the leaves and building a snowman.

Why was Travis there? Did everyone know and just not want to tell me? But, no, I’d heard Mom on the phone.
She
didn’t know. Did Dad? Did Hank?

My brother’s death is like this black hole that we rotate around and around, knowing that if we’re not careful we
could fall into it ourselves. And I don’t know a damn thing about Travis except what they put in the paper every year, and how can that be anywhere
close
to the real story of who my brother really was?

All I know about him is that he died on 9/11.

That one thing has eclipsed everything else that he was. In some ways, it made his life bigger than it ever would have been otherwise. He only lived eighteen years, but how many ordinary eighteen-year-olds have their names etched in bronze at a memorial where thousands of people come to mourn every year? Not that I’ve gone to the memorial or museum where the old World Trade Center used to stand. My father has adamantly refused to go, and I wasn’t sure how he would react if he found out I went.

Why was Travis there? How did he die?

How did he die?

Suddenly, it seems to me that the answer to that question will answer why my family is falling apart. We’re not falling to the ground in an instant like the towers did, but it’s like the most important parts of us are coming apart, the foundation just crumbling away beneath us.

I Skype Hank, but he doesn’t pick up. No big surprise there; he’s almost never home. He’s in Somalia, working for a relief organization, and he loves it there. He says it’s uncomplicated and visceral.

After a few minutes, I call again, and this time my three-year-old nephew’s face flickers into view.

“Jesse!” he crows delightedly when he sees me, his face breaking into a wide, happy smile.

“Joshua!” I say. “How are you?”

Deka, Hank’s wife, smiles at me over Joshua’s shoulder. She’s slim and graceful in a long pink dress, her dark hair braided in hundreds of tiny braids.

“Jesse, it is so nice to see you,” she says in her gently accented English. “I hope that you and your parents are doing well.”

“Hi, Deka,” I say. “Yes, we’re fine.” This is easier than the truth.

I have never met my nephew and sister-in-law in person. Hank went to work in Africa six months out of college, and never really came back. He visited for holidays for a while, but after that last big blowout with Dad on Christmas day when I was thirteen, he never came home again. That was the day he told Dad he was thinking about relinquishing his US citizenship because he couldn’t stomach what America was doing in the Middle East. As far as I know, it’s the last time Dad and Hank ever spoke.

“Jesse, your brother will be sorry he missed you,” Deka is saying. “I do not know when he will be returning. He is out delivering tarpaulins and mosquito netting to the camps, but I will tell him you called. May I give him a message?”

I hesitate. I don’t really have a message, I have a plea.

Tell me about Travis and Dad. Tell me why Travis was in the towers that day. Tell me why everything is broken, and while you’re at it, can you please, please tell me how to fix it?

“Uh, yeah,” I say. “Can you tell him I need to know about Travis? Everything’s FUBAR. He’ll understand.”