CHAPTER THREE #2
He wanted to talk about something.
"I need to talk to you about something," he said, immediately proving my point.
I turned to look out the window, hiding my smirk behind my hand. I'd only known the old guy for a little more than a year, and I could read him like a worn-out book I'd read a thousand times.
"What's up?"
"This job … it's a hard one," he said, his voice soft and somber. "I want you to be prepared before we go in there."
I turned to look at him, my brow furrowed. "A body is a body, man. How hard can it—"
"This one is a little kid. A boy, only a couple of years old. Practically a baby."
A weird, indescribable feeling pressed uncomfortably against my chest as I slumped back into my seat.
Of course, I knew babies and young kids weren't immune to death. My life had been wiped clean of most innocent illusions at a very young age. Still, the thought that there were kids out there, kids just like me, who were given the chance to live despite all the misfortune they’d been dealt, while others didn't get to live past the age of two seemed so …
"Life can be very unfair," Leonard said, reading my mind again. "This little guy had been battling cancer since he was six months old."
"That's so shitty," I muttered, shaking my head.
No kid deserved to die.
No kid deserved to suffer.
"Yes, it is," he agreed. "I know you feel uncomfortable with the families.
I understand that. Emotions make people feel all sorts of ways, and none of them are wrong.
But I think, sometimes, it helps to remember what they've been through. You know, empathize a little. In many cases, we are the first people in contact with them after such an unthinkable loss. The impression we make on them matters.”
Empathy. I could've snorted at the word. Nobody had ever shown me a bit of it throughout the years my brothers and I had spent walking an endless lap through and around the gates of Hell. Not until …
I swung my gaze toward Leonard, who always seemed to have a twinkle in his eye, even on the gloomiest of days.
This dude hadn't known a single thing about any of us. Didn’t know where we had come from, didn’t know the things we had done to get by. All he was aware of was that we needed help, that we needed empathy … and he had given it to us without batting an eye.
No questions asked.
And I guessed, when I thought of it like that, the least I could do was show a bit to the people we collected the dead from.
"I'll try," I said.
He turned to look at me, a melancholy smile spreading across his face. "It's all I'll ever ask of you, Bram. Just that you try."
***
It was the middle of the day, but with how dark it was outside, you'd never know it.
The sky was clustered with black clouds against a gray backdrop, and Leonard mentioned about six times since arriving at the house of little Travis McDonald that it looked like rain.
But it didn’t start to pour as we walked up the driveway to the front door.
Instead, the storm greeted us inside.
As it turned out, I could easily handle the bodies of dead old people. The ones who'd gotten to live full lives, who'd had a chance. But at first sight, Travis McDonald's tiny form choked me up.
He looked like he was simply sleeping, snuggled up in his bed, crowded with stuffed animals and Mickey Mouse blankets, and I could've convinced myself of that had it not been for the unnatural grayish hue to his skin.
"Are you okay?" Leonard asked quietly, stopping at Travis's bedside to pull out his rosary beads.
Leonard always said a prayer before preparing the bodies we removed. It was the respectful thing to do, he would tell me, and although I wasn't sure I believed much in the prayers he recited, I could agree that it was, at the very least, nice.
I stood by the door, startled by the little boy's body tucked in his bed.
"He's so small," I choked out in a whisper, finding no reason to lie.
"Yes," Leonard agreed with a soft, somber look in his eyes. "It's very, very sad."
From outside the door, I could hear the muffled cries coming from Travis's mother and father.
I turned my ear, listening as she wept. I was used to the tears, used to the sadness, but not like this.
Not for a little boy who'd never gotten a chance to run and play and go to school and live, and for a stupid, stupid, selfish moment, I thought about myself now at seventeen.
Have I ever played?
I wasn’t sure I ever had. Not really anyway. I could remember times with Anna—pushing her on the swings or running after her in a field—but that was to entertain her. It had been work.
It's too late for me to play now.
It's too late for Travis.
"Shit," I uttered beneath my breath.
"Bram," Leonard said gently, breaking through my thoughts, "if you can't do this, it's okay. I understand. I can handle it."
I didn't want to chicken out or be too sensitive. I didn't want to leave him to do this on his own. But, fuck, the thought of touching Travis’s tiny, cold body hurt, as if I'd known him throughout his short two years of life.
Shivers ran down my spine as I thought about Ike and the time we'd spent on the streets. What it might’ve been like to find my brother dead instead of my mother, small and frail and too innocent to have suffered such a fate.
God, why couldn't I get out of my fucking head? Neither of us had suffered from cancer. Neither of us had spent the majority of our lives in hospitals, attached to machines and pumped full of medicine that was supposed to help but didn't help enough.
But we had been babies on the streets, cold and hungry and alone, and we could've died. We could've been that small when someone laid us into the ground.
This isn't about me. Why am I making it about me?
Travis’s mother began to wail—keening, Leonard called it—and I squeezed my eyes shut.
No, it wasn't about me. It was about them.
Ike and I had survived our shitty beginning, and how the hell was that fair?
We were shitheads; we were terrible. Travis McDonald hadn’t been a bad kid.
He was too little and young to be anything but good.
He was sweet and angelic. His parents adored him.
They would've traded their own lives to save his while my own father had once sold my body to get a quick fix … and he’d done it happily.
The world was such a cruel place, and right now, it was more than I could process.
"I have to …" I blew out a breath and jabbed my thumb over my shoulder, unable to look at the little boy in his bed. "I have to get some air."
"That's okay, Bram," Leonard said, so understanding. "Go ahead."
"If you need help—"
"I know. Go on."
Without another word, I turned and left the room, closing the door behind me.
Travis's parents were startled by the sudden intrusion.
They gasped at the sight of me and looked down at my empty hands, as if expecting to see the body of their little boy in my arms. I lifted the side of my mouth in an awkward smile.
"Sorry," I muttered, although I wasn’t sure why I’d said it at all.
"Are you …" His father released a trembling breath. "A-are you finished?"
"Oh, um … no," I answered, dropping my gaze and sending it over my shoulder. "Leonard is handling it."
It. Their son wasn’t an it. He was a little boy who should’ve still been alive. I shouldn’t have had a reason to be here at all.
Travis's mother sniffled, wiping a tissue beneath her nose, then mustered a smile. "Are you his son?"
"He's my uncle," I answered without hesitation.
It was what Leonard had told us to say when people asked, and when he'd enrolled Ike and Shawn at school, he’d told them, "These are my nephews, who have come to stay with me."
"Ah," she said, nodding. "You look alike."
I nearly laughed because I couldn’t think of anything further from the truth. Leonard was short and stout with a head full of bright silvery-gray hair that had, at one point, been light blond while I was black-haired, lanky, and taller than most people I’d ever known.
But I didn’t laugh, and I didn’t correct her.
Instead, I just kept my mouth shut and smiled.
Of all the people I had ever known, I would’ve happily chosen to look like Leonard Llewellyn.
A silence fell over the short hallway outside Travis's bedroom, with his parents at one end and me at the other.
The air was weighed down by unthinkable sadness and discomfort, the invisible string between us pulled taut somewhere in the center.
I considered retreating and hiding inside the room with their dead son, but I remembered what Leonard had said.
Try.
But try how?
I cleared my throat and jammed my hands deep into my jeans pockets before saying, "I'm very sorry for your loss."
Travis's father nodded, blinking back his tears, as his mother gasped, wiping the tissue beneath her eyes.
"Th-thank you," she whispered, her voice quivering. "He fought so hard. His poor little body …"
"He couldn't take it anymore," his father agreed, his head still bobbing.
"I can only imagine," I replied, reciting the words I'd heard Leonard say many times before when talking to the families of lost loved ones.
"I just wish we’d had more time," his mother cried, her voice teetering on the edge of hysteria. "It's not fair."
"It's not," I agreed, dropping my gaze to the carpeted floor. "Honestly, I … I don't even know what to say. None of the BS I hear Uncle Leonard say feels right. This just sucks. It fucking sucks, and I … I'm just really sorry."
Travis's father's lips lifted into a smile despite the tremendous amount of pain I was sure he was in.
"You're right,” he replied. “It does fucking suck."