Chapter Eighteen
“Good night, ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye and see you next time.”
—Indonesian greeting
I couldn’t get to sleep that night. The silence from my phone was just too loud.
I finally drifted off at, like, one, two a.m. When my phone started ringing and ringing, I was disoriented.
It took me a minute to realize—Maurice’s ringtone.
I’d given him the song we’d heard in his truck that night, “Fast Car.” So I kept hearing it—the line about having a fast car, and a ticket to anywhere.
Why, for the love of God, was Maurice calling me at…five-thirty in the morning?
“Mo, what?” I groaned into the phone.
“Margaret?”
His voice. His voice, okay? It was something awful. It was something beyond awful, I could tell.
He started to sob.
Oh my God. “What, Mo? What?”
“Mars. It’s…”
“Mars what, Mo? Mars what?” I could feel hysteria rising.
“He’s dead. He died. Last night.”
“What? What are you saying?”
“Mars died last night, Margaret,” he said again.
“What do you mean? He couldn’t have died. I just saw him. Two days ago. This can’t be.”
“It is. He’s gone, Margaret.”
“No, Mo. No.” I let out a wail, a horrible wail.
“It’s true, honey.”
The shock was…immense, hard to penetrate, but Maurice meant it, he did, this was what had happened. I started sobbing now. My body didn’t even belong to me. It was doing grief on its own. “This just can’t be. What happened? No, Mo. No. Please. I need to talk to him. I need to call him right now.”
“Honey, honey, you can’t call him.” Maurice’s voice was high and strained.
This was making no sense. This was not possible.
It just wasn’t. And then I had an awful thought.
I mean, how did it happen? How? Please don’t let it be my fault, I begged.
“Did he…? Did he…?” I sobbed. I didn’t think you would ever do something like that.
You believed in the spirit, in the soul, in humanity, I don’t know.
It didn’t seem like those two things could go together.
I couldn’t say the word. That word, it was too horrible.
But, please, if you did this because of me…
“No, Margaret.” Maurice knew what I was asking. “It was his heart.”
“What? His heart?”
“His heart. Last night—”
“He’s seventeen! It can’t be his heart. His heart is fine. His heart is so good. This can’t be.” I was wailing. My mom was pushing open my door.
“Margaret?”
I waved my hand at her. Not now, not now.
“They think…it was something he had. Always. A heart issue.”
“Maurice, no. No. Where is he? I just need to…” Talk to you. See you. We needed to sort this out.
But I couldn’t talk to you or see you. This was the thing that would just not get through to my brain. It was impossible to believe. You were speeding away from me at thirty-eight thousand miles per hour, faster, even. I couldn’t fathom it. It couldn’t be true, but you were gone.