Chapter Thirty Four
THIRTY-FOUR
You start with the day after your fight, the first day you can remember that your brother ignored you.
You don’t tell them why; just that he’d gotten angry and now he wouldn’t engage with you in any meaningful way.
He avoided you in the hallway in the morning, and when you spoke, he listened with dull eyes.
Or he just walked past you, down the stairs, and outside to the garage where his bike hung upside down like a vampire.
You tell them about the biking. And how Sean had always launched himself into things with an all-consuming passion.
How most of his obsessions were at least a little risky or adrenaline fueled.
Diving, for example. And before that, when he was in junior high, half-pipe skating.
And before that: jumping off the garage to practice “being a stuntman.” By comparison, riding for miles on a fixed-gear bike seemed positively benign.
Like a hobby for old people after their knees were blown out.
At first, he mostly rode at night, but then he started adding mornings too.
Every day before the sun came up, you heard the vibrating drone of the garage door, and if you made it to your window quickly enough, you’d see Sean take off down the street, head down, legs cranking away at an inhuman speed.
And for a while, you told yourself this could be a good thing.
Maybe it wasn’t just a penance he’d given himself.
Maybe it was a way to quiet his mind, and once he achieved some peace, everything would eventually go back to normal.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, it all seemed to intensify.
You were so desperate for contact with him that you walked into his room sometimes when he wasn’t there, just to feel near him.
And that’s how you found the flyers for the bike races.
They weren’t anything official. These were street contests for bike messengers and crust punks.
No real rules. From what you could tell, the racers followed a series of checkpoints to a mystery finish line, downing beers along the way.
You’d found the latest poster on top of the dryer when you were doing your laundry.
The biggest race of the year. An all-day event that promised hundreds of riders.
You decided to do a little research. And after falling down a rabbit hole of racing forums and YouTube videos of people evading the cops and racing each other drunkenly through the streets, you knew you had an important choice to make:
Leave it alone or tell your parents.
You were pretty sure they wouldn’t want him doing this, and that they would probably do what was necessary to stop him.
There was just one problem. If you went to your parents, you would be ratting him out again.
The again part you didn’t share with your friends.
They didn’t need to know about your first betrayal.
They just needed to know this would be a stab in the back, and if you ever wanted Sean to forgive you, it wasn’t the way to go.
So, in the end, you didn’t mention it to your parents.
You didn’t tell anyone, in fact. What you did was wait for the day of the race to arrive. And when you saw him getting ready in the days ahead, making his own practice maps, and even chugging one of your dad’s Coors before heading out for a workout, you made plans to follow him.
If he was going to do this, then the least you could do was show up and see how it went.
In other words, you could be there for him.
And maybe if he saw your support, he would begin to thaw a bit.
You don’t say much about how badly you wanted his forgiveness.
How desperately you wanted him to talk to you again.
Instead, you just tell them about your brother.
About how he was the person who knew you best. The person you went to when you pissed your pants in day care and needed help getting rid of the evidence.
And how before you knew what a panic attack was, you told him you weren’t feeling right one day at the pool, and he sat you on a bench by the concession stand, bought you some Johnny Apple Treats, and made jokes about the lifeguards until your heart rate slowed.
Sean was the parent you loved the best. Only he wasn’t a parent.
He was an eighteen-year-old who was subject to mercurial moods, and he didn’t always make the best decisions in the best of conditions. So you decided to keep an eye on him.
It was cold and rainy on the day of the race.
You waited until you heard him open the garage before you got in the Corolla and followed him to an alley behind an abandoned Kmart in Minneapolis.
You weren’t sure what you were expecting, but the people gathered there were not elite athletes.
They were like his bike-shop friends, tattooed and wiry, many holding cans of cheap beer and cigarettes at eight o’clock in the morning.
They were largely unprotected against the freezing drizzle.
Sean rolled up on his bike, which looked a little too new compared to the well-worn frames of the other contestants.
He paid his entry fee. He received a T-shirt with an hourglass full of beer that read CLOCK’S TICKIN’ and a map to the first checkpoint.
He stood around for a while, mostly keeping to himself, jumping in place to stay warm.
It seemed like he was debating whether to stay.
You kept out of sight on a side street with a clear view of the alley.
And as the hour edged toward nine, you saw someone handing out beers.
Sean accepted one and looked at it closely, maybe wondering if he was really going to do this.
Then somebody blew a whistle and everyone began chugging.
At the sound of this shrill signal, something seemed to flip and Sean cracked his beer and tipped it skyward, Adam’s apple bobbing, until he had polished it off.
He was already a little behind at this point—his momentary indecision had cost him a few seconds—but as soon as he got his bike going, he was quick to make up ground, weaving between some of the slow starters.
You followed by car and tried not to get close enough for him to see you.
It helped that you could always pick out his shiny new bike among the other racers’ scraped-up models.
But mostly, you could barely stand to watch.
The race was mayhem. The rain picked up early on, and at each checkpoint there was another beer to shotgun.
And after each checkpoint, there were more wrecks.
People got less inhibited and skidded across the soaked asphalt.
Which seemed like it was all part of the fun.
Occasionally, another rider would stop to help a downed cyclist, but mostly people laughed even when competitors wiped out in the middle of a busy street.
You even saw one rider kick at another on a tight curve.
Yet, in spite of all this, Sean stayed upright.
He too laughed at the antics of his fellow racers, and the beer seemed to loosen him up a little bit.
He had a similar look on his face to the one he wore that day at the quarry, a kind of manic joy, grinning as he leaped, without warning, from a thirty-foot cliff.
As the race went along, he stayed close to a pack of five or so seasoned riders, who increasingly whooped at his efforts.
By this point, no one was trying to knock the others down.
It wasn’t a grudge match anymore. It was an endurance race.
Who among this final crew could down another beer and make it another mile?
At the second-to-last checkpoint, the group of other riders buddied up to Sean.
They slapped his back and seemed to be welcoming him to the fold.
But something had shifted in Sean. He smiled at them, but you recognized the look in his eyes from his diving days.
This was how he’d been at meets: stone-faced until it was over. And there was just one more stop to go.
He stood alone, and when the whistle blew for the last time, he downed his beer in what looked like one epic swallow.
The final checkpoint was near the university, and there was traffic from a football game that was about to start.
You were trying to follow, but you got stuck behind carful after carful of raucous frat boys, howling into the rain, while Sean and the others soared around the traffic, dipping in and out of bike lanes, medians, and sidewalks.
Finally, your visibility was so bad that you pulled your car over and hopped out, running on the sidewalk, trying to make it to the next intersection.
It was one of the biggest in town, the convergence of five streets, bars on all the corners.
A game-day hub, with partyers out on cold patios in ponchos, braving the rain to tailgate.
And from the moment you started moving, you had a nervous feeling about it.
Sean was leaning against a stoplight, still on his bike, one hand keeping him balanced.
The noise was deafening. Tables full of drinkers chanted fight songs.
Cars honked their horns and launched muddy waves from puddles.
And there was even a crew of drummers, pounding on white buckets in perfect synchronicity.
There wasn’t much farther to go. And maybe it was because he just wanted to get it over with.
Or maybe, and this is the part that still keeps you up at night, part of him wanted what would happen next.
But before the light turned green, Sean ran the red light and shot out into the intersection.
He was going fast. Faster than you had seen him go all day. His head was down. His hands gripped tight to the handlebars.
You yelled his name.
You screamed so loud, your throat would hurt for days after.
But he either couldn’t hear you or he didn’t care.
He was nearly past the intersection when the SUV rounded the corner.
Sean was low, and going so fast that he might have been a blur in the periphery.
A flash in the side mirror before he was suddenly right in front of the bumper.
There was no time for the SUV to stop.
There was a terrible noise.
You didn’t see the impact clearly; you only heard the awful thump and saw where Sean’s body ended up, which seemed an improbable distance from the crash.
And when you ran to him, his eyes were already glazed over, and there was blood coming out of his nose, mixing with speckles of rain. He was unconscious.
You said his name so many times.
You screamed for an ambulance.
It took so long for one to arrive, and you held his hand the entire time, saying only the word “sorry,” over and over again.
When the paramedics showed, you were still saying it, and they thought you were the driver who hit him. They told you to talk to the police, but you pleaded to ride with him. They waved you away and loaded him on a stretcher and put him in an ambulance. They took him to the hospital.
You don’t know what to tell your friends now, because what happened next is not even a story.
Just a series of fragmented moments. Crying on a sidewalk.
Calling your parents and making no sense on the phone.
Lying in the back seat of the Corolla. Replaying all the memories of the moment.
Wondering if you were hallucinating. Vomiting outside an e-cigarette shop.
Sitting in the waiting room of the hospital with your parents and already knowing what the words were going to be when the young doctor came out with the look on her face that said everything was about to be more horrible than you could possibly imagine.
You don’t know how to say this part, so instead you say:
“I know he was hit by a car. So I guess I know how he died. If that’s really what you were asking. And for a long time, I even thought I knew why. I had a lot of ideas about why, and they mostly involved me. But now…”
You finally manage to look at Diana.
“Now I’m not so sure.”