Chapter 52 #2
I close my eyes and see Havi in my room. My Tony Hawk poster in the background behind him. His hand curled around his upper arm, rubbing the spot I connected with when I shoved him away from me.
I see his face. Horrified. Hurt. His eyes wide and rapidly welling as betrayal was drawn all over his features.
I see his face and hear my words. Loud. Angry. Ugly. “Why can’t you get it through your head that I don’t want you?”
I remember how I felt when I said them. Raw and removed from everything that wasn’t rage. Removed from everything but the heat that pulsed in my temples and the fury that took command of my body.
Months of being backed into a corner erupted out of me.
Tears spilled down Havi’s face fast and hard. So many tears. Liquid tracks that ran down his cheeks and made me angrier. He crumpled, shoulders shaking, and looked at me with more than pain, more than hurt. Accusation.
It made me angrier than I already was.
“Asshole,” he cried. “You have no idea how much you’re hurting me.”
I saw him like that—my best friend, tear-stained and in pain, and I said it. I said the worst thing I’ve ever said to anyone.
I did the worst thing I’ve ever done.
I looked straight into his pain, into his splintering heart, and said the words that ended our friendship.
I turn to Connor and look into his face.
His beautiful face. His kind, unforgettable face.
I stamp it into my memory, then I look away.
“Havi got it then. He finally got that I didn’t want him, and it hurt him as much as I thought it would…
More, it hurt him more than I thought it would.
He told me so. He said, ‘You have no idea how much you’re hurting me,’ And I…
” My insides tighten and my lungs spasm.
I breathe in and out at the same time. “I saw him like that, sad and upset, and I said—” My lungs scream.
There’s no air. Not in my body, and not around me.
“I said, ‘Good. Now maybe you’ll stop.’”
I screw my eyes closed as tightly as I can, but still, pain and regret, and regret, and regret roar out of them. Onto my cheeks. Onto my chin. Onto the photograph I hold in my hands and onto the cold concrete slab I’m sitting on.
Part of me is here with Connor, but the rest of me is there. Across the intersection, in my room with my Tony Hawk poster, watching as Havi turned and walked out.
The way he moved was different from the way he usually moved. Usually, there was a kind of grace to his movements, a fluidity, almost. It was absent, replaced with high, jerky steps and an uncoordinated sway of his arms.
I watched as he walked away, making no effort to stop him.
My door slammed so hard that a piece of plaster fell from the ceiling.
The front door slammed too, almost as hard, but the sound was farther away from me, so it was a little less jarring.
I heard the familiar crash of a skateboard dropping onto the driveway.
The scrape of small wheels gathering speed.
The predictable, hollow clunk as they rolled over joins in the sidewalk.
A sickening screech of tires.
“There was a girl…a car,” I say, nausea spinning regret into something swollen and sick. “A girl driving a car. She was seventeen, and she was an inexperienced driver, and Havi, Havi was blind from what I said. He must have been because…he didn’t slow down or check for traffic at the intersection.”
Alarm widens Connor’s eyes. “Oh my God! Did she hit him? Was he okay?”
I thumb the fold at the top of the photograph, nausea and regret cooling and crystallizing into a terrible, endless ache. Havi’s image glints under the streetlight from the motion, and for a second, it looks like his hair is moving. Like it’s blowing in the wind.
Dread reaches into me and shakes me violently. My hands. My lungs. My voice.
“S-she broke his leg in two places and cracked his pelvis.”
I stop talking, and the pain I’ve been holding at bay for months gathers and meets in the middle of me, exploding in my chest. I inhale with difficulty. An unsteady breath. A wheeze on the way in. A long, mournful wail on the way out.
I almost drop the photograph from how badly I’m shaking.
I reach for the fold at the top of the photograph in my hand, starting, stopping, and then starting again. My fingers aren’t my own. They’re thick and cumbersome, made of jelly and guilt.
At last I do it.
I unfold the photograph, the program, and show it to Connor.
There’s a soft, punched sound as he reads it.
In loving memory of Havi Robert Aldman
Beloved son, brother, and friend
“He would have been okay.” Infinite, infinite guilt rings me out, twisting my organs and leaving me gasping in pain.
“He should’ve been okay. He should have needed a couple of pins in his leg, and m-maybe he wouldn’t have been able to ride a skateboard like he used to, but he should have been fi…
but…but…” I splutter and words spill out on top of each other.
“She was driving really fast, the girl, she was speeding, and he flew…” My chest spasms again and again, strangling me as tears run down my face.
“H-he landed here.” I put my hand out and hold it, shaking, above the curb to my left.
A sense of revulsion, of horror, works its way through me and makes it almost impossible for me to put my hand down.
It takes several seconds, and two more attempts, but at last, I lay my hand on the edge of the curb right beside me, curling my hand on the edge, and squeezing it as hard as I can. “He hit his head here.”
There was a mark here, a stain, for a while. I look for it now, even though the light isn’t good, and I know Caroline brought a bucket of water and ammonia out here, and scrubbed it clean a few days after his funeral.
A catastrophic, irreversible brain injury, they called it. The man who said it had good posture, very upright and formal, and I remember noticing that. He was in his forties or fifties, and he said it like it was a normal occurrence. Like it was something that happened and made sense.
“Oh my God,” says Connor, closing the space between us and putting an arm around me. My soul wants to sag against him. Into him. I want to let go and lean in. I want to let Connor hold me and love me. I want that more than anything, but I know that’s not how this is going to play out.
I pull away gently, every inch of space I buy amplifying the searing pain ripping through my rib cage. “I don’t think you want to do that, Connor.”
A line forms between his brows, and he freezes, waiting a beat and then removing his hand from my shoulder. “Why don’t I want to do it?”
I can’t look at him, but I also can’t not look at him. I love him. I love him more than I’ve ever loved anyone. I love him in ways I didn’t expect. Ways I didn’t see coming. Ways I’m not sure are wrong or right. “Because that’s not all that’s in the tin.”
I unfold the bottom of the program, fingers numb, face numb too.
My heart breaks all over again.
October 23, 2002 – January 8, 2025
It takes Connor the longest time to make sense of what I’m showing him. To understand what happened. What those dates mean.
The first day of one life, and the last day of another.
A birthday, and a dying day.
Who I am, and who Havi is to Connor.
“January eighth,” he says, blinking hard. “January eighth, but, but…that’s the day I got my new hear—”
“I heard the crash from my room.” My voice is quiet and lifeless, and the rest of me feels the same.
The numbness in my hands and face slowly spreads to the rest of my body, and things I’ve used all my energy, all my power, to hold at bay slam into me.
I want to lie down. I want to curl up, call my mom, and ask her to come and get me.
I don’t want to have this conversation, and I don’t want this to be the version of reality I live in.
I look up at Connor and see concern and confusion etched into the lines around his eyes, and I’m reminded, yet again, that he doesn’t deserve this.
He doesn’t deserve to be lied to. He deserves to know what happened.
He deserves to know everything, and even though telling him will mean that after all this time, I finally have to face it myself, I need to tell him.
“I never moved that fast in my life. I got here as fast as I could.”
I close my eyes, and the sight of Havi, ghostly pale and sleeping on the side of the street, assaults me. His eyes closed, peaceful. His hand stretched out, the rose tattoo no longer as vivid or bright as it was when he got it. Faded and comfortable under his skin.
No.
Not sleeping.
For a long time, when this scene burst into my consciousness, I told myself he was sleeping.
But he wasn’t. Not really. He looked like he was, but there was an inky red halo around his head.
“The paramedics got here fast.” Fast, slow, a lifetime, I don’t know which.
“I rode with him to the hospital, and they did all the things to him. You know, all the things you see on TV.”
I scrape my fingers through my hair, digging my nails into my scalp as I travel back to that night. I see it all. I hear everything. I feel it all as if it’s still happening.
Machines beeping and the deafening screech of a siren. An urgency in the paramedic who was working on him that gradually faded. A team of medical professionals waiting for Havi when we got to the hospital, masks, coats, and gloves. Someone saying, “DOA?”
They said it like it was a question, which made sense as there was no way Havi could be dead.
“When we got to the hospital, someone put me in a small room with beige chairs and told me to wait there.” They had metal arms, the chairs, and they were fixed to the wall with steel bolts.
“I waited there until Havi’s mom and his sisters arrived, um, and then this upright man came and said lots of things to us. Things like, I’m sorry, and…he’s gone.”
Things that made no sense at all.