Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
SAM
I step out of the elevator and into the hallway. I can never remember if it's a right or a left, so I go left and check a few door numbers to see if I'm going the correct way. I'm not. I turn around and start heading the other way.
My head has been in a fog all week in anticipation of this. I've been putting it off for over four months, and I finally feel ready for it. Not that I'll ever truly be ready, but I was not in the right head space to do it prior to now.
I fumble with the keys and try them in the lock, one by one, until I find the right one. The latch clicks, and I pause with my hand on the knob for a moment before opening the door. A smell hits me square in the face. I know I shouldn't have waited this long. I'm sure everything in the fridge is rotten, and if the garbage wasn't taken out, that would definitely explain the smell.
I step into Jacob's dark apartment, and the creek of the floor startles me. I don't know why, but I'm a little skittish being here. It feels eerie, like a time capsule from before he was gone. Everything that Jacob saw during his last days .
I look around for a light switch and flick it on. I've been paying the bills since it got passed to me, so I know the electricity still works.
The light flickers on, and I walk to the kitchen first, hoping to get rid of the smell so I can tolerate being here long enough to sort through his things. I put my sweatshirt over my nose and open the garbage.
Yep, that is definitely where the smell is coming from. I take it out and tie up the bag as quickly as I can, then take it down the hall and throw it in the garbage shoot. When I get back, I locate some Lysol spray and air freshener, spraying a generous amount of both in the garbage bin.
Next, I take an empty garbage bag and throw out everything in the fridge, repeating the Lysol and air freshener combo. After I finish, I open up a couple windows to get some fresh air in here.
Now that the smell is taken care of, I can move on to the fun part. Going through his things feels wrong, and I don't know what I'm going to find. Thankfully, Jacob has always been neat, so there aren't drawers and boxes full of junk.
I start with the closet because that seems the most straightforward. I promised Mom I would save some items for her, and Quinn laid claim to most of his shoes since they had the same size feet.
There's only one thing I want to keep for myself, so I look for that first. I sift through the section of sweatshirts hanging up and find it there—Jacob's high school football sweatshirt. I tried to steal this from him so many times, but he always noticed and stole it back. I don't know what it was about this particular sweatshirt that made me want it so bad. Probably just because, in high school, I idolized Jacob; I wanted to be just like him. I wonder if her ever knew that?
I slip it off the hanger and hug it to my chest, taking in the scent of it. Jacob's scent. I don't even realize I've been crying until I feel a tear fall down my cheek, then another. Soon, I can't control them; they keep falling, and my chest starts to tighten. I walk backwards until my shoulder blades hit the wall and slide down it till I'm on the floor.
I sob into his sweatshirt. My eyes burn, my throat feels like it's closing in, and my chest hurts from my quick, shallow breathing. I miss him, but I'm mostly angry that such a promising life got thrown away. And I can't shake the could haves and should haves from my mind.
"I'm so sorry, Jacob. I'm so sorry." My voice is muffled by the fabric, but it doesn't matter. There's no one there to hear me anyway.
After I allowed myself to have a good cry, I finished cleaning out the closet and started on his desk. The desk was harder to go through than I thought it would be. I had to stop and take a break to cool off.
I want to burn every textbook that ever caused Jacob distress, shred every assignment that he gave up sleep to finish, and tear apart every notebook full of information he didn't even care about but felt pressured to learn. In the end, I recycled what could be recycled and threw what couldn't.
After I go through all his school stuff, I move on to his personal effects. Medical information, student loan mail, banking information, and cards that he kept.
I glance through the cards to see if there's anything my mom may want to look at and notice a piece of loose leaf paper stuffed into an envelope that was way too small for the letter it contained .
My heart stops.
We never found a letter from Jacob, and at first, I hope that this is it, that maybe we can get some answers, even though we think we already know most of his reasons. I drop the cards and open up the unsealed envelope, pulling out the letter.
I suck in a big breath and brace myself for more tears when I realize it's not a letter that Jacob left for us; it's a letter that I wrote Jacob years ago. He kept it. I remember writing it when I was a freshman in college. Mom had sent me envelopes and stamps because she thought sending mail was still as big of a thing as it was when she was in college. I never used them until one day, I got bored and wrote a few letters to send, just for fun. I wrote one to my mom, one to Quinn, who was still living at home, and one to Jacob, who was off at a different college.
The letter isn't anything special. No grand secrets or exciting information were revealed. It was just a simple letter written on notebook paper, telling my brother how much I was enjoying my first year of college. I told him about the first party I went to, the first girl I hooked up with, and a lot of other firsts. At that age, Jacob and I didn't share many details of our lives with each other, so this was probably more than I told him in person in an entire year.
I'm surprised he kept it this long. It likely was just something he forgot existed in the back of his drawer, but he didn't throw it away after he read it like I assumed he would.
It took me a whole week to get through Jacob's apartment.
Quinn came over one day to help me move all the big items. We barely talked the whole time. We just moved the items and closed it up. He offered to help me sort through everything earlier, but I told him that I could handle it myself. In hindsight, I'm really glad I did because it allowed me to grieve him.
To truly grieve him.
The landlord is taking back the keys today and reimbursing me for the last couple of months of rent, likely out of pity. I told her she didn't need to do that, but when I arrived today, there was an envelope shoved in the door with a check written for two months’ worth of rent.
She told me that Jacob was always so kind to her seven-year-old daughter, who often comes to the building after school while she finishes up her work. In the envelope with the check is a drawing made by her daughter.
It's a picture of what I'm assuming is her and Jacob playing chess or maybe checkers; she's seven, so it's hard to tell. I put the picture in the box I'm taking to Mom's house; she would want to see that.
I take one more look around and make sure I didn't leave anything in the cabinets or closets. Once everything is checked over, I put the last few boxes on my dolly and lock up.
On my way out of the building, I drop the keys off in the main office with a note thanking the landlord for the check and head out.
I never found a letter from him. There likely isn't one, and that's okay. He doesn't owe us anything.