Chapter 8
Ash
My house was quiet when I got home that afternoon.
It was always quiet. Somehow the cemetery seemed livelier than my actual home.
As an EMT, Dad usually worked evenings. He worked mornings, too, when he was allowed to pick up extra shifts.
Maa fought with him a lot about how often he was working.
I figured she mostly worried about Dad’s safety.
He was often traveling to crime scenes or sites of gun violence.
Maa preferred his jobs that dealt with smaller medical issues, not life-threatening situations.
Dad made it clear that his job wasn’t to pick and choose his assignment.
He only had one goal every day he went into work: to save lives, no matter what.
Maa said he was reckless. I thought he was brave.
But Maa was convinced Dad had become even more obsessed with saving lives after being unable to save Rian’s life.
He was the one who found my brother in his bedroom after he took his own life.
I didn’t blame Dad for struggling to cope.
I knew I’d be haunted by Rian’s ghost for the rest of my life.
Dad must’ve felt an even deeper pain than I did.
No parent was ever supposed to say goodbye first to their child.
No one in life was supposed to feel that type of weight.
Now my parents both carried that unwanted torch.
So I didn’t blame my father’s need to try to save people’s lives.
I understood him packing his days with tasks to avoid thinking about my brother.
If anything, I wished I could save lives, too.
Dad also worked on updating the basement when he wasn’t working long shifts.
It gave him something that he could control the outcome of, which seemed important to him.
Maa once told him that he should consider therapy, but Dad didn’t believe in that.
He said he was too busy to sit down with his own thoughts.
I felt the same about my own mind. I didn’t want to talk to a professional about my feelings. I just wanted to stop feeling everything. Maybe I got that characteristic from Dad.
Saving lives seemed to be a family business, seeing as how Maa was an ER nurse who worked night shifts for the most part. It was uncanny how both my parents’ professions were to save lives, yet they lost their son. I was sure that fact ate at them each day.
When Rian was alive, Maa worked during the day.
We’d almost always come home to her hot meals, too.
We had a mixture of cuisines when Maa cooked.
Her mother was from India, and her father was from Nigeria, and our meals showcased both cultures.
From our favorite Indian dishes like paneer butter masala and biryani to our favorite Nigerian dishes of jollof rice and ewa riro and dodo—beans and fried plantains.
I missed Maa’s samosas the most, but she didn’t make those anymore. They were Rian’s favorite.
The smell of spices used to fill the kitchen almost every single day, but now all I had was storage containers with meals and warming instructions that were prepped while I was gone.
I ate alone.
I studied alone.
I went to bed alone.
Maa usually came home from work while I headed out to school. She’d smile at me, but the smile was always weak and exhausted. Sometimes, her eyes looked empty. She’d remind me to eat something before going to school, and she’d head straight to bed.
Dad came home from work around the same time.
He’d make small talk with me about sports.
I used to play basketball at my old school, but I gave that up after Rian passed away.
I gave up a lot after losing him. There was a basketball hoop over our garage where we used to shoot baskets with one another.
We didn’t do that anymore, but Dad would still talk to me about basketball, and I’d reply like I cared, knowing neither one of us cared about sports anymore. It was just our way of carrying on.
I wished Maa and Dad carried on with each other, but they hardly talked to one another anymore.
If they did talk, they argued about stupid stuff that didn’t matter, like Dad’s obsession with the basement repairs.
Their back-and-forth bickering didn’t make sense to me.
I wished they would admit that they missed Rian instead of pretending that they were mad at each other.
My parents never fought before the incident.
The closest to an argument was one night when we played Uno and Dad laid down three Draw Four cards on Maa.
Then they kissed and made up and vowed to never play Uno against each other again because it brought out their dark sides.
I missed when their fights were about board games. Now, any words they exchanged felt cold and distant and out of character for the both of them. I preferred the silence over their fights. The fighting only reminded me how damaged we all were after Rian passed away.
I missed who my parents were before Death knocked at our door. I debated who it was harder to miss—those in the cemeteries or those who were still very much alive but felt so far away.
It was odd how school and home life felt so different from one another, but both felt like cages of some sort.
School was loud and vibrant, but I still felt so alone.
Home was quiet but still lonely. I only felt connected to the world either when I was at the cemetery with ghosts or when I crossed paths with Karla, who felt like a ghost.
I thought about her more than I should’ve.
It was very clear that she didn’t want anything to do with me.
I didn’t take that personally, because it seemed as if she didn’t want anything to do with anyone.
There were times when I tried my hardest to not think about her.
I’d lie in my bed, fiddling with the toy truck in my hands, and boom—Karla would pop into my head like popcorn in a hot, oiled pot.
I wanted to say that it was because we had something in common—our sadness—but our sadness didn’t mirror each other’s.
Karla seemed to be sad in a different kind of way than I was.
Where I missed my brother deeply, Karla seemed to miss herself.
Missing your former self probably felt like missing a dream you’d never rediscover.
I didn’t miss my former self. I was an all-star basketball player who had no problem making friends.
I was the homecoming king; I dated the girls that people expected me to date; I did all the things that made me fit in, but after Rian passed away, none of that mattered.
I didn’t want to be who I used to be. That version of me died the same day my brother did.
Plus, it was the popular kids in Rian’s grade who bullied him the most. I wasn’t a bully when I was popular, but I knew some of my old friends could sometimes be mean to people.
Kind of like Colton was to Karla. At the time, I was probably like Missy—just a bystander not sticking up for the ones being teased.
I didn’t want any part of those kinds of groups anymore.
I still had a hard time understanding why people bullied my brother.
He was amazing. Rian loved photography, and I loved his love for the craft.
Our grandfather used to be a photographer, and when Rian was five, he got his first camera.
He became engulfed in all things photography, and he talked about it all the time, too.
He was a slim guy with glasses and a vibrant vocabulary who was always talking at the speed of lightning whenever he was excited.
Unfortunately for him, his excitement made him get tongue-tied whenever he spoke, and he’d trip over his own words.
Kids found it easy to mock his stuttering and his knowledge.
They mocked him because he was intelligent, and passionate, and easily excited by the tiniest things.
Rian could find an overlooked flower in the smallest of cracks, photograph it, and speak about the flower as if it were the most important thing on earth.
He’d make a small flower feel like a field of dandelions.
He praised the little things most humans overlooked.
He saw color in every single strand of life, and people ridiculed him for that. They mocked his vibrant colors because their own lives were dull. But their bullying made him think his own world was black and white.
They stole his color.
They stole his light.
I wondered who Karla had been before she lost her way, and I wondered, if I had known her back then, whether I’d miss the person she used to be, too. I wondered when she’d lost her own color. I wondered if she’d lost it around the same time that I lost mine.
As I lay in bed, thinking about all the questions I wanted to ask Karla if she ever talked to me again, I heard the front door open. I sat up, then I walked out to find Maa hanging her coat in the front hallway.
“Maa, what are you doing home?”
She turned to face me, and she looked exhausted, as always. Her eyes were puffy, and she appeared weak. As her mouth parted to speak, she ended up falling into a sneezing fit. I hurried over to her and wrapped my arm around her body to keep her steady.
“I’m OK, Ashish. Just a little flu is all. I was sent home to rest,” she told me as I led her to her bedroom. She placed her hand against my shoulder as I led her, and a wave of comfort washed over me.
“Thank you, mera beta,” she whispered as I pulled back her bedsheets and sat her on the edge of the mattress.
I bent down and began to take off her shoes for her as she closed her eyes and took deep breaths.
“I’ll make you tea and get you water,” I said.
She didn’t reply. She was focused mainly on her breaths as I lay her down in bed.
I pulled the blanket over her, then headed to the kitchen.
As the tea brewed, I headed to the bathroom and got a wet cloth to rest over her forehead.
Dad used to do it for her whenever she got sick in the past. I also grabbed her favorite eye mask that she always used when she wanted the room to be darker.
I put everything on a tray once the tea was ready and brought it back to Maa’s room. I sat the tray down on her nightstand, then placed the warm cloth over her forehead.
“Thank you, Ashish,” she murmured. “You should be sleeping.”
“It’s all right. I’ll look after you.”
“I don’t need looking after. You’ll get sick if you stay around me too much.”
I shrugged as I placed the mask over her eyes. “I can handle it.”
Her breaths were heavy, and she sounded stuffed up. “Did you eat?”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
She took my hand in hers and patted it.
That little moment of comfort warmed up my whole body. I held her hand longer than I should’ve, but she didn’t try to remove it. She fell asleep not long after. I kept holding her hand.
I bet she wished it was Rian’s hand she was holding. He was good at taking care of others. Better than most. Rian would’ve made her tea better than I had. He would’ve done everything better than me, and Maa would’ve welcomed his help.
Sometimes, I felt as if Rian was her favorite son.
He was my favorite brother, too.
An hour or so passed. Maa was resting and seemed to be OK, even though she was somewhat pale in the face. I could’ve let her be and gone to bed, but I wanted to keep holding her hand. It seemed to be healing a sick part of my soul.
“Rian, did you eat?” she murmured, stirring a little in her dream.
My chest tightened.
“What was that, Maa?” I asked, my voice shaky.
She murmured some more and turned to her side, taking her hand along with her, making me drop my hold. “Love you, mera beta,” she muttered before falling into a deeper sleep.
I wondered which son she was speaking to in that very moment.
I covered her up a little more and then headed back to bed.
I lay in my darkened room, my chest rising and falling at a quickened pace as I went back to playing with the toy truck in my hand. Maa’s words, speaking to Rian, kept echoing in my head as I lay in the dark.
I felt stupid, and weak, and humiliated that I was jealous of a ghost and his relationship with our mother.
Sometimes it felt as if he still received more love from her than I ever would.
Sometimes, I wondered if my parents would’ve been so broken if it was me who died and not my brother.
They never treated me differently, but it was a weird fear that sometimes creeped into my mind.
When I needed to clear my head of the thoughts of my brother, I thought of the only thing recently that had been able to take my mind away from my own living nightmare.
I thought about Karla.
That helped.