The Language of Silence (22 page)

Chapter Fifty

Brett:

I’m halfway to Officer Daniels’ house before I realize I never changed out of my pajamas. It’s nearly morning, so at least the outfit is not too out there.

My brother never spoke to me about Daniels, but he told Ed.
The night I found out he was gay, I never would have guessed Daniels was on the other side of this messy affair. The fact that Ed knew means my brother wanted someone to know about him. Which means Daniels was important to my brother. It will always hurt that my brother didn’t feel comfortable telling me, but I can’t stop living just because my brother decided to end his life.

I’m not going to Daniels’ house to seek answers. There are no answers. I’ll never find the answers I searched for. I’m going to Officer Daniels’ house to speak for my brother and say the things he couldn’t say.

I bang on the door until my knuckles are red and swollen. Daniels’ police car is in the driveway, which means he’s home.

It’s good to know he can sleep at night.

When Daniels appears at the door, I can see someone in the background.

Jenna Maples.

“Tell her she needs to leave,” I demand.

I’m not sure if it’s the sight of me in my turtle pajamas or the tone of my voice, but in five minutes
, Jenna is gone and I’m inside Daniels’ house.

The place where my brother spent so much time.

Daniels gets himself a cup of coffee and guzzles it. I start to suspect he just wants to keep his mouth full so he doesn’t have to speak. I sit on the arm of his couch. I’m tired of waiting. “Did you know my brother was going to kill himself?”

Daniels
chokes on his coffee. “Excuse me?”

“Did. You. Know?”
I say slowly.

“Look
, kid, I let you in here because I could tell you were upset, and I didn’t think your father would want you driving around when you’re like this. Your father is a pretty important man. Not someone I want to piss off.”

I clench my jaw and shake my head.
“Cut the crap. I know.”

Daniels pales slightly.
“You know what?”

“About what went on with you and my brother.”

The hand holding the cup of coffee starts to shake. Daniels turns his back to me and flings the contents of the cup into the sink with much more force than is necessary. He proceeds to chuck the cup into the sink. The sound makes me jump.

“I think you should leave,” says Daniels. His back is still facing me.

I push my legs to move so I’m standing in front of him. I grab his arm and force him to face me. “You’re sick. Really sick. What twenty-seven-year-old fools around with a teenager? Is it because you can’t get someone your own age? I mean, that’s how these things work, right? You suck at relationships, so you find some young, stupid kid to play? You wait till you find someone who is so inexperienced, so naive they believe all the crap that comes out of your mouth.”

“Shut up.”

“And of course they’ll want to please you. They think they’re special being chosen by someone so mature. They’ll do anything you want them to do. They’ll do all those dirty, little things you’re ashamed that you want to do. And they won’t talk about it because you told them it’s a secret. You told them—”

In a matter of seconds, Daniels has pushed me against the wall. His hand is clamped painfully over my mouth.

“I’m not gay,” he snarls.

It takes all my strength to push him o
ff of me. “I don’t care if you’re gay or not. I care that you’re a manipulative little pervert who hurt my brother.”

“I hurt your brother? Go home, Brett. G
o home and keep your mouth shut,” he snaps, shoving his finger in my face.

I could hear it
waiting between his words. A threat. A man desperate enough to keep his promise. A man who hates a part of himself so much that he’ll do anything to deny it exists. Even hurt people. Like my brother. My brother who loved him.

“No. I can’t stay quiet. Not anymore.”

Daniels springs to action in a matter of seconds. He pulls me roughly by the arm out of his house. The more I struggle, the tighter his grip becomes. We’re moving toward his police car. I wonder if I lie and say I won’t tell about him and my brother if he would let me go.

But I can’t lie.

Even to save myself.

He shoves me into the passenger seat. My hea
d hits the door on the way in, and the sting radiates down my spine. Daniels pushes a hand against my chest and holds me in the seat. He grabs a pair of handcuffs from his glove compartment and snaps one around my hand and one around one of the bars on the roof of the car that my brother always called the Oh Shit bars.

I know it’s pointless to pull against the bar, but I do it anyways.

I wonder how hard it would be to break my own wrist?

We’re driving
, and I know exactly where I’m going.

The place where my brother died.

It makes sense.

Daniels doesn’t talk to me the entire way. I only ask hi
m to let me go a few times. We’re both determined now.

Daniels slams on the breaks about a hundred feet from the
tree my brother smashed into. “You want to know what happened that night?” he grunts out between his clenched teeth.

I nod.
An odd calm has overtaken me. It’s almost serene.

“He called me. He told me to meet him right here. So, I did. I could never say no to your brother. Think what you will
, but I did care about him. I know the whole thing was fucked up…”

“It was fucked up,” I agree.

“When I got here, he was sitting in his car. I went to knock on his window so he would roll it down. He did. He handed me a bottle of vodka. I asked what the hell it was for. He told me to pour it over him when he was done. I thought he had finally lost it.”

Daniels’ car is in park, but his foot moves to the gas. He pushes it against the gas and the engine roars as if to echo the tension that fills the car.

“Guess what he did then?” Daniels asks.

The calm that s
ought answers has disappeared. I begin to pull frantically against the bar.

“He stepped on the gas. He didn’t say anything to me, just stepped on the gas.”
Daniels pulls his car into drive.

“Don’t,” I whisper.

“He let me watch as he rammed his car right against that tree. He just needed me to clean up the mess.”

“Please. Don’t.”

“So I did. I cleaned it all up. Sad thing? I thought I was a good person for doing it. But you don’t think I’m a good person, do you? You’re going to tell everyone, aren’t you?”

I am. If I survive, I am going to tell everyone. I’m going to tell everyone how this man took advantage of my brother. I should tell him I will keep my mouth shut, that I don’t want to end up on an episode of
20/20.

I just can’t.

I nod.

Daniels nods back. He presses h
is foot against the gas and we’re speeding toward our own deaths. But I don’t close my eyes. I have been closing my eyes for sixteen years.

Suddenly
, gravity pushes me forward, farther than is possible. I can hear the snap of my wrist as my body flies toward the windshield. I wait for the blood. I wait for the darkness.

But he stopped.

Daniels stopped just short of slamming his car into the tree. He’s crying into his hands. He doesn’t check to see if I’m alright. I don’t hesitate. I reach into his glove compartment and take out the key for the handcuffs. I free my broken wrist and hold it against my body. I use my good hand to handcuff Daniels to his steering wheel. I grab the keys from the ignition and get out of the car.

He doesn’t even notice I am gone.

And I walk.

I walk all the way to the police station.

I don’t use my cell phone.

I walk three miles in my turtle pajamas, holding my broken wrist.

Chapter Fifty-One

Ed:

Saying goodbye to my mother was rough, but she didn’t cry. I love her for that. She didn’t make me feel guilty. I apologized. I told her I was sorry I couldn’t stay. I just had to get out of here for a while. I told her I was sorry I was like my father.

She laughed. “You think you’re like your father? Hell, that’s an insult. You’re just like me, kid. You think I wasn’t a little messed up myself? We’re all some kind of messed up. When you accept that and get alright with who you are, you won’t want to run anymore. Some people are never alright with who they are. You can’t save them either. It’s a damn tragedy, but you ain’t one of those people, kid.”

I pray she’s right. I insisted that I wait for the bus alone.  I didn’t expect Brett to show up. But when does that girl ever fail to surprise me? She saunters up to me and flashes me one of those rare, genuine smiles. I can’t smile back. She’s wearing her turtle pajamas and her arm is in a sling.

“You thinking of leaving without saying goodbye?” she asks, raising her eyebrow. There are dark circles under her eyes. Her hair is wildly curly like she slept on wet hair. It’s the most beautiful disaster I have ever seen.

“What…what happened? Are you alright?” If she tells me no, I will stay. It won’t be good for either of us, but I will stay.

“Oh? This? Nothing. I’ll tell you about it one day,” she replies casually. Too casually. “So…you were really going without saying goodbye?” she asks, working hard to keep her voice light.

I clear my throat. “Thought we sort of did that last night.” I can feel my cheeks flush just at the thought of last night. I want to reach for her, but I can control myself.

“What? Did something happen last night?” she jokes.

God, I will miss her.

“Where you going, Ed?”

“Um…the bus is going to D.C.”

She shakes her head and takes a step closer to me. The bus station smells like piss and booze, but I can still faintly smell her perfume. “That’s not what I meant. Where you going?”

It’s another one of her deep, direct questions. One of the questions I always struggle to answer. I answer the best I can, knowing it might not be the answer she is looking for. “I don’t know.”

Brett grins. “Figured your answer would be something like that.”

“Are you sure you are okay?” I ask, pointing to her wrist.

She shrugs. “I mean
, I’m not great, but I’m better.”

“Good.”
  I rock back and forth on my heels, just staring at her. The girl who changed my world. And then I’m talking so fast, I can barely make sense of it myself. “I’m a jackass. The worst human being in the whole world.  I knew I wasn’t ready for you. For us. But I just wanted you so much. I don’t know how to be a boyfriend. I barely know how to live in my own skin. I’m messed up, but damn, that doesn’t excuse what I did to you. I should have left you alone.”

Brett laughs, running her undamaged hand through her wild hair. “I wouldn’t let you leave me alone. And you’re not a bad person. There’s no such thing. Just bad choices. Besides, neither of us
was ready for this. For us.”

“You don’t have to make excuses for me. What I did
—”

“What you did royally sucked, but you’ll have to live with that longer than me. We’re not some characters in a novel, Ed. We’re flawed. No more than Wendell is an evil place. It can get better too. I didn’t come to your room last night to prove some point. I came because I love you despite all the messy parts.”

My eyes burn with unshed tears at her words, and I feel like a bigger schmuck than I did before.

She holds out her hand. “Take care, Ed.”

It’s my turn to laugh. “We’re really going to shake hands?”

She smiles. Again. She pushes her hand toward me, and I shake it. Before she leaves, she turns to look at me. “I will miss you, Ed.”

“I’ll miss you too.”

It’s not a cinematic ending, but it’s the perfect ending for us.

Two Years Later

Brett:

“You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?”

My brother has been dead for two years. It’s my senior year, and I know I should be thinking about things like prom and graduation, but there are days, days like today, where he is all I can think about.

I snatch Donnie’s Starbucks from his hand and take a gulp. When my throat doesn’t feel like sand paper, I turn to him. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately.”

Donnie takes his coffee and takes a sip, sitting back in his plastic chair. He nudges his cafeteria tray my way. “Want a French toast stick?”

“I tell you I’m thinking about my dead brother, and you ask me if I want your breakfast?” I ask, throwing my napkin at his chest.

Donnie rolls his eyes. “You know I’m not good at this existential crap. Look, you’re ending your time here at Wendall High, so of course you have endings on the mind. All ends are the same. Finality. Questions. Emptiness. Don’t dwell on it.”

I nod and begin to nibble on the toast.

Easier said than done. I still don’t understand Tristan’s reasons for leaving. I’ll probably never understand. I have made my peace with that. I know it had to be more than some show of suffocation from feeling like he had to keep the secret of his sexuality. Because gay or straight, that wasn’t all he was.

I know it wasn’t just because he was heartbroken. I don’t wish such a thing on anyone, but having had my heart broken
, I learned one thing—you can live through it. Besides, Ed and I loved him. He was loved.

Donnie reaches forward and grabs my hand. He sighs, pulling me from my thoughts. “Look, so
mething in him didn’t want to fight. Life is hard. There are billions of people who have it much harder, but that’s little comfort to those who suffer from depression.”

“I had
no idea my brother was depressed,” I admitted. I loved the parts of my brother that he let me see. I just wish he’d felt brave enough to talk about the parts he felt needed to be hidden. “I will miss him every day of forever,” I say, giving Donnie’s hand a squeeze, “but I will never understand.”

Maybe his poem was invoking me to do what he could not
—fight back, live.

After my incident with Officer Daniels, people treated me a little like Ed. They pretended that I didn’t exist at all. It wasn’t so bad. They just wished I had left things alone. They loved having my brother to mourn, a symbol to rally behind. All they saw now was a dead gay kid.

How could a son of Wendall kill himself?

Unheard of. He had everything.

One day, I got suspended. Yes, me. I made my own t-shirt to wear to school. On the front of the t-shirt, I put a picture of my brother. Under his picture, the word Fag. On the back was the complete word history of the word—origin, definition, variations. I don’t know that anyone got it. But I did, and that’s all that really mattered. Fag was just a word. It wasn’t my brother.

He was so many things.

But that’s all any of them could talk about.

My dead gay brother.

When Donnie showed up at school the next day wearing the same shirt, we were both called into the office. We were told the shirts were offensive and were asked not to wear them again. We both wore them the very next day.

Suspended.

My father yelled. My mother tried to stand up for me. They fought all the time.

But then everything settled down. It would never go back to how it was before, but it settled. When I went to lunch the first day back from my suspension, I sat at the table where Ed sat. No one would sit next to me.

I didn’t mind.

It just felt different.

After the first day, things got a little bit easier.

Life got a little more manageable.

I could finally breathe.

Last week, I found the Christmas present I bought for Tristan
—the first edition copy of
The Fountainhead
. Donnie and I are reading it every day at lunch.

It’s a pretty good book.

Thanks for the suggestion, Tristan.