“It’s good to see you too, Rick.”
I’m afraid to look around at anything else besides him. I’m afraid of the memories I’ll see. I don’t know if I was prepared for this.
Rick Sawyer takes a step back from me, puts his hands in his pockets. “Sheila’s upstairs taking a nap.” He pauses. “Ethan’s here”—he looks around us, a little bewildered—“he’s…leaving soon, I think?”
I don’t ask him why he or Sheila aren’t going, but I have been wondering why it’s not a family trip. It seems like it should be, but I guess it’s none of my business.
I make the mistake right then of turning my head, and that’s when I see it.
The urn.
The pewter urn with a simple gold cross on the front, sitting on the fireplace mantel. The urn holding what’s left of my old best friend. I start to feel dizzy, my throat begins to close up, and I don’t want to get like this right now. This family has endured enough tears, they don’t need any more from me.
I quickly move my gaze away, but it lands on something equally terrible. A framed photograph hanging on the living room wall. In it is Everett, Ethan, and me, the three of us on our bikes in the front yard, an action shot of us getting ready to ride off. We look as if we had no idea someone was taking a picture of us.
Ev and I must have been twelve. Ethan about ten. We were getting ready to ride off in our usual order. Everett first, me after, and Ethan tagging along behind. I forgot what a chubby kid Ethan used to be. A chubby kid with a cherub face, always huffing and puffing alongside Everett and me, wanting to do everything that we did. Everett telling him to get lost, calling him a barf bucket or a fart face. And Ethan would whine, indignant, swear he was going to tell, but he kept following us, kept tagging along, determined to be a part of whatever we were up to.
Ethan annoyed the piss out of Everett, but I liked having him around. I don’t have any siblings, so it seemed endearing to me. He was always looking at me with those gray, sad-puppy eyes when Ev would pick on him, making me feel bad. I liked Ethan’s silly humor and the way he’d talk my ear off. I didn’t mind him the way Everett did. I felt sorry for Ethan sometimes, when Ev would call him names or when he had a bad day at schoolbecause there were bullies. I thought he was a good kid. He just needed someone to listen to him.
But one summer, Ethan lost all that baby fat and grew up. His chubby cherub face morphed into an angelic Grecian prince face, framed with that Sawyer chocolaty-brown hair. He grew it out kind of long in high school. I remember Jenna Murphy running her fingers through it and grabbing his hand in the halls and feeling something I didn’t want to admit back then—jealousy.
It’s altogether strange and wonderful and heartbreaking to see the three of us together like that. Innocent kids, with no idea of what the future holds, just being kids, just living for that afternoon that I don’t even remember now.
Rick Sawyer says something to me, I’m not sure what, but I’m vaguely aware of him going into another room.
It’s just as well because I can’t stop the tears. They trickle down my face as I move closer to the photo, as I’m unable to separate the sadness from the joy. One of those carefree kids is now in the fucking urn. As I stare at that photographed moment, as Everett Sawyer steered his bike toward the street, in that moment captured so long ago, I can’t stop thinking about how Everett didn’t know his life would be cut so short. I can’t stop thinking about how Everett didn’t know he’d be speeding down a snowy road, on his way home for Christmas—probably just as oblivious and happy as he was in that photograph—and would have the accident that would take his life.
And then it hits me hard that Everett Sawyer, the one in the photograph, and the one inside that urn, didn’t know who I really was. I never told him the truth about me. I never said the words to him.
I was too much of a fucking coward.
There’s a creak behind me. A floorboard depressing with a footstep.
I wipe my face on my sleeve and turn around. I turn around and see Ethan Sawyer standing right behind me.
4
Ethan
November 6, 1992
Likes:
-Donkey Kong
-Pizza Hut supreme pizza on thin crust
-those smooth round river rocks
-cold rainy days
-woodsmoke
-root beer floats
-Wayne’s World
-sleeping in on Sundays
