- N -

The Dog Bled For Three Days Before It Died

         I don't know what to say to him, Jackie thought.
         With Tristian in her room the place somehow gained a strange unfamiliarity. The lighting felt different, the corners didn't seem to meet, yet everything looked the same. Yet somehow it was fused with a subtle alien difference. It was her nervousness, she knew. The stress of the past few days, the sleepless nights, an emotional bareness she wasn't exactly used to, it was warping her world, turning it into a foreign place, one of those movies where you wake up and the whole world is just as you remember it except you pick up the paper and find that Kennedy is still President. Or that my brother is still alive. The thought ran burning through her mind, streaking by too fast to allow her to capture it, the heat of its passage bringing tears to her eyes.
         It wasn't Tristian, she told herself. But he wasn't helping. He was standing on the other side of the room, close to the closed door. It didn't seem inconceivable that he might at any second try to escape and not realizing the door was shut, run right into it. She had gotten him to unzip his jacket at least, unable to break past his insistence that he was comfortable. Jackie didn't exactly understand that. It was so warm in here.
         "So, um, Tristian," she said, shifting back a little on her bed so that her legs dangled over it, "how've you been? Everything going well?"
         "Decent, actually," he answered matter of factly, his face betraying nothing but utter politeness and quiet friendliness. If he had any sympathetic pity for her, he was hiding it well. She wasn't sure how to take that. Everyone else had been treating her like a wounded victim of the war, their words gentle, their ministrations all devoted to prompt and prolonged healing, and yet all of it was little more than smothering. Even Brown had began to lapse into the china doll treatment. It was all so frustrating, but not unexpected. Jackie had found herself dismayed to actually growing used to the behavior. And now Tristian was acting just how she thought she wanted people to act and she had no idea how to react to it. She had to remind herself not to be offended at his apparent lack of sensitivity.
         "Oh I'm glad to hear that," she told him, wondering how sincere she was. What she wouldn't give to be decent thanks and not feeling like she had swallowed crushed glass. "Thanks for sticking around for a few minutes. I really didn't expect to find you here, honestly. I was really surprised to just run into you like that."
         He gave the faintest hint of a smile, a gesture that seemed very much an indulgence. He was curbing himself around her, constantly checking his words and actions, until he was sure what was going on here. Everything about him, from his tone to his stance, reeked of defense. It was almost like he was afraid. Jackie wasn't sure what to make of that, of him.
         "I have a habit of popping up in places where I'm not expected," he replied, with just the barest sliver of internally directed cynicism coloring the statement. "I had just been talking to your mom, and was on my way out." He had wanted to talk to her outside. The fact that it was growing bitterly cold out didn't seem to faze him in the slightest. Eventually she had convinced him to come upstairs with her. He had followed at a discreet distance the entire way up, like he was ready to flee as soon as her attentions were directed elsewhere.
         But now he was here and she was here and she had no idea what to say.
         "Yeah, it was a surprise," mentally kicking herself for repeating the same inane thought, outloud, even. "I know you didn't know my brother that well, so, like I said, I didn't really expect . . ." she trailed off, quickly trying to derail her escalating spiral down into stupidity.
         "Your mom knew my parents back when I was in school," Tristian explained quickly. "I was just giving her something from them and we wound up chatting for a bit."
         "That was nice of you," Jackie told him, more sincerely this time. It had been nice, whatever his reasons really were. "She's been taking this pretty hard, as much as she tries to pretend otherwise." Glancing down at her randomly swinging feet, she added, "My dad's not really pretending, so I think my mom feels she has to be the one to put up the brave front." She looked up at Tristian, who was observing her with a curious expression. "I want to tell her that . . . you know, it's okay not to pretend, that nobody is expecting her to be all stiff upper lip and stuff, but . . ." she almost said look at me but stopped just in time. Shrugging uselessly, she managed to finish with, "She wouldn't listen anyway."
         "No, she probably wouldn't," Tristian agreed simply, neutrally.
         A silence crept in between them. It had been threatening ever since they both came up here, hanging on for longer and longer stays in the pauses between their answers, hovering just out of reach, too heavy to be blown away with a breath, but too light to be firmly grasp and flung away, a clump of dust nursing its grey babies under the bed.
         Tristian stood there unmoving. Jackie got the impression that he might remain there all day until she dismissed him. She wasn't sure if it was uncanny patience or unnatural stubbornness. She had no idea what to say to him. She barely even knew him, he hadn't been a friend of her brother's, if not for his rumored unorthodox lifestyle she would have barely even heard of him. Don had rarely even mentioned him, since he never had any real reason to. Their worlds were separate, dictated by the strange high school rules of division. Neither had ever experienced any desire to overcome that gap and both had lived their lives content enough with the apparent loss. Except now Donald was dead. And all she had were questions. Questions for God, if there really was one. Or perhaps the next best thing, if Brown and Brian and the others could be believed about Tristian.
         But nobody said anything now. The quiet thickened, began to crystallize. With no effort it could stagnate and become permanent and then what? Let Tristian excuse himself from the room and disappear, become as elusive as Brown had been, as her brother was now forever?
         No. It couldn't be that way. "I'm really sorry for what I said at the wake," she blurted suddenly, her body nearly throwing her forward with the effort. Somewhere distant she heard the sound of fragile glass breaking.
         Tristian blinked, obviously surprised. And at the same time, not surprised, maybe even relieved.
         "No, really I am," she continued, not caring if her words were ten words too many or she started crying or yelling or did things that under normal circumstances would have made her want to hide from embarrassment. Dammit, these weren't normal circumstances, that was the whole damn point! She was fidgety and irritated, unable to help feeling raw and exposed, her skin cut by the fine whips of the frigid winter air, her eyes burning, her throat dry and cracked. Even her voice was a shell of a ghost, her shouts now whispers, her whispers unheard. "And maybe you don't want to believe me or you think I just don't know what I'm talking about . . ."
         He shook his head. "You were upset," was all he said. From him it didn't seem like pity, merely a factual statement. "We say things we don't mean."
         "But I meant it then," she protested, wanting to leap off the bed and shake him, try to make him see. But what was he supposed to view? All that he had needed to know had been revealed already. It was like explaining the rules of the game to someone who had already won it. They didn't care. Or, more appropriately, didn't need to know. "I knew about your . . . about your life and I really . . . I still do, I had hoped you'd be able to answer all these stupid useless questions I had . . . but . . ." she folded her hands anxiously in her lap, staring at them like they were a knot she could untangle with just her mind. "But it was wrong of me to do it . . . to ask you the way I did, out in the open . . . I mean, it was wrong of me to ask you at all, but especially the way I did, in front of everyone . . . I . . ." she shook her head, still not looking at him, "I don't know how many ways I can say it was wrong." She could barely feel his presence anymore, if it had ever been there. Maybe he had slipped out, leaving her confession little more than a darkened soliloquy. At least the words were said. At least she had the chance. Taking a breath, she continued anyway. "And I know . . . that you don't want to blame me, or tell me that I'm right because . . . my brother just died and everyone thinks, oh, we'll cripple her, she'll turn into this zombie . . . but I just want you to know Tristian, I don't think it was right of me. I don't," she finished quietly, clasping her hands together tightly and taking another breath. In the stillness of her room, the little noise resounded cavernously.
         She didn't move for what felt like a long time, listening to the diminishing echoes of her own words, until she heard a brisk sound on the other side of the room. Someone was clearing their throat. Looking up, she saw that Tristian was still there. He hadn't moved, hadn't even changed his stance.
         Slowly, his words grinding as if under a great weight, he said, "I don't know how to answer you. I didn't then and I don't now. Did you expect me to be able to?" It wasn't so much a backhanded rebuke as an honest inquiry, tossed out by someone who was unable to comprehend someone actually possessing some faith in him, however misplaced or ill conceived.
         Jackie laughed, hearing her voice break at the edges. Immediately she stopped. "Tristian, I told you, I shouldn't have even asked you, it's not . . . nobody can answer me."
         "And yet everyone wants to know," he said flatly, tonelessly. His face twitched for a second and he turned sideways, seemingly admiring a poster on the wall. His hands were in his pockets and he looked braced against the wind, determined to wait for the bus outdoors no matter how steeply the temperature dropped. "All you did was voice the thoughts of everyone else in the room."
         His statement took her aback. Jackie wasn't sure what to make of his responses. They seemed to be having two simultaneously conversations that were only tangentially related. God, if she had only had the courage to ferret more information from Joe and Brian about Tristian. It was like speaking to a cloud. You had no idea what shape it would present to you next. "I . . . maybe I did but . . . that doesn't make it right," she tried to say. "You can't just demand something like that from somebody and expects . . . expects answers or results or . . . or anything."
         "My friends are hurting, Jackie," he said, and it was both blunt statement and helpless admission. His hand twitched at his hip and she thought she saw something swing gently at his belt. It must have been a trick of the light, though. "Your brother is dead . . ." and the offhanded way he said it nearly made her flinch, even as she realized how intricate the melancholy was woven into his words. He's dead, she thought and the house felt that much emptier. ". . . and all I can do is stand here and watch them become affected by it. One by one." Those last words were delivered in a near whisper, his lips barely moving. He shrugged again, the soft light seemingly creasing his face with a sadness more implied than revealed. "I didn't know your brother and so his death is a loss but it's different than what all of you are experiencing. I wasn't there for his brightest moments, his lowest days, I don't know his favorite song, whether he was a morning or a night person, the things that made him laugh the loudest, the people he hated the most as opposed to those he just disliked." Tristian smiled briefly at his last comment. That smile faded as he continued, "To me, a person has gone and that's enough to sadden me, but when I see my friends, when I see you and your family and then I can see that Donald Wintersfield is gone and nothing can bring him back."
         His words were infecting her vision, blurring her eyes. The dust flecks of his speech were stinging her face, stabbing at her mercilessly. Please stop, she begged, but his voice was oblivious, insistent and necessary. She had started this, triggered the seed in his mind, without realizing that Tristian was more conviction than man, that even if he didn't have access to miraculous things, it wouldn't change the way he was or the way he approached life. He was a black and white man in a world without color, unable to reconcile either facet, unable to stop trying for fear he'd fall just short of his goal.
         "They all want to know why," Tristian said gently, as if explaining a simple fact to someone only used to dealing in complex matters. If you burn down the forest you'll take the trees with it. Then at least the field is level, right? "You were just the one who asked."
         "That's not it, Tristian . . ." her voice was harsh, stripped raw by the smoke rising from her own grief. Her vision swelled, rippled, for a moment Tristian wavered and became three people, all identically impressionistic, before resolving back into one man again. "I didn't want you to do this. Not for me or for you . . . or, or, for anyone." Her face felt so warm, her jaw heavy and quivering, as if under great tension. Your brother is dead a harpy chanted gleefully. Five others joined it in perfect barber shop chorus. She tried to remember the last thing she had said to him and couldn't. It hadn't been goodbye. Linked coffins ran on a circular track in her head, chasing the engineer in a chase with no end. "I just wanted my brother back," she muttered weakly, feeling the bed releasing its support, the floor preparing to embrace her. No. No. She wouldn't faint. Not in front of him. "I wanted them to bring him back." Jackie wasn't even sure what she had actually said. Words were illogical things, suffused with the meaning we deem important enough to attach to them. Everything means something else. These differences might just spark a war. And the consonants grossly outnumber the vowels. And your brother is still dead.
         She couldn't see Tristian anymore. The whole room was a watery blackness, bordered by her own feverish fingers clutching at her pounding forehead. Last night she had dreamed that her brother was still alive. She didn't have time to hug him before a bloody syringe tied him to the railroad tracks. When it started drawing blood from his neck and the laughing train began backing over him, she had nearly bitten off her tongue to avoid waking up screaming. Jackie could feel the pulse of every vein and every vessel in her entire body, all swollen with too much blood, all threatening to burst free. His coffin was too small. She wondered how much of him was actually in there.
         "Jackie," Tristian's voice said very close to her ear, "would you like me to leave?" She hadn't heard him move. Maybe he was still on the other side of the room and all her senses were merely expanded. Soon she'd be able to hear the entire world. An whole world of lights, all blinking on and off on and off, living and dying, dying and living. What was her brother? No one special. Just a bulb in the midst of history's greatest brightness. What's one light? It doesn't diminish the glow any. But he was my brother.
         "Why?" was all she could ask, her voice taut and pinched. A sharp pain lanced into the center of her head. A stroke now might just be the perfect end to this week. "Please don't leave. Why would I want you to leave?"
         "Because the things I've said are bothering you. Because I'm reminding you of things that can't ever happen." His sigh was a breath of cool air on her aching forehead. "Because I can't tell you the things you want to know, or do the things that need to be done. All I'm doing is making a terrible time worse."
         "No, that's not it," Jackie said suddenly, raising her head to stare at him. He wasn't where she thought he'd be, nor as close as he seemed. His face displayed mild surprise at seeing her expression, and she wondered how disheveled her features must look now. At least you still have a face. And eyes to see by. And ears to-
         Oh God, stop. Please.
         "You, it's . . . it's not you, Tristian. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be acting this way but . . . but, God . . ." she wiped some wetness from her face, distantly wondering what it had come from. She tried to laugh and found that it hurt far too much. "It's not you," she said again.
         "You weren't acting like this at the wake," Tristian pointed out, nearly child-like in his direct logic. "Or when you were out with other friends." He didn't say how he knew that. Perhaps he was just guessing. They can do anything. A chill tried to embrace her. She shrugged it off.
         "They . . . those were friends and, and relatives and I didn't want to . . . to get upset in front of them . . ." Jackie attempted to explain, realizing that this was the first time she was even confronting the subject. "You're . . . you're practically a stranger, and so I don't feel any . . . pressure I guess to act a certain way." She rested her forehead against her palm, staring at Tristian through a headache inducing upward glance. "I don't know. I don't understand any of this."
         "Nobody expects you to," Tristian said simply. He had dropped in a lazy crouch, his knees splayed outward, his forearms resting comfortably on his legs. Again she thought she saw something dangling from his belt, but she couldn't penetrate the darkness inside his coat. "I've spent the last couple of days trying to understand it, and I'm starting to realize that maybe it's not possible."
         "Is that what they told you?" Jackie asked, curiosity getting the better of her. Trying to talk about something else would distract her from this grief, at least for a little bit. Except her brother's spirit was inside this house, nailed to the walls, stuffed in the cracks and the dents and the bumps, melded with the air, the sounds of screens door clattering and breakfast table chatter and petty fights and vicious arguments, his youthful shade opening a door and his teenaged ghost stepping through. It felt like she was standing still, when in reality he was the one who had stopped.
         "Who told you about them, Jackie?" Tristian asked, sounding slightly amused, although his face was deadly serious. "Brian?"
         "Mostly," she admitted, feeling a flash of unexplained embarrassment, like she had just been caught cheating on a test. "I don't even remember why he told me, I think he wanted to tell the story and there was no one he could really tell." Her eyes flickered over to him. "I hope you didn't swear them to secrecy."
         Tristian frowned neutrally and shrugged. "Fortunately, no. The most I could have asked was for them to be discreet. Either way, it's not like anybody is going to come and arrest me. Who would believe any of it? Any person silly enough to go spreading it around would probably be institutionalized for being delusional."
         "I believed it," Jackie noted almost accusingly.
         Tristian smiled. "Then you have an uncommon perceptiveness." She was going to make a face at him, but he looked down briefly and when he looked up again his smile was diminished slightly. "Since I know most of the story I'll spare you the tedium of retelling it but I imagine the main idea Brian wanted you to take away was Tristian has friends who can do . . . anything." That last bit was said in a slightly stoned, mostly awestruck tone of voice that somehow made her want to laugh outloud. Coming from such a serious face, the juxtaposition was fairly absurd.
         "Yeah, I guess I did take it that way," Jackie said, trying not to feel that some long held dream was being taken apart, bit by bit. Even when you glue all the fragments back together you find that something vital is missing. In this hollow heart there's no room for a soul. It's just too big to fit in this mortal shell. "I take it they can't," she stated, trying not to sound mournful. "Do anything, I mean."
         Tristian didn't answer at first. He took a deep breath and appeared to be carefully considering his words. "Ah, well . . . yes and no," he said slowly at last, not making eye contact. "The truth is, I don't know what they can do. Everyone has this impression that I've somehow conjured these genies that are now under my control and grant all my wishes." Still expertly balanced on the balls of his feet, he spread his arms, smiling ironically. "If that were true, don't you think my life would be a lot different?"
         "I don't you, you strike me as pretty humble," she told him, trying to grin and find that it still hurt. All the muscles on her face were stretched out of proportion, a plastic surgeon's knife wielded indiscriminately.
         "Once in a while," Tristian replied, shrugging offhandedly. "I wouldn't say that they don't . . . act in my interests, sometimes, when it suits them. But on the whole they're impossible to fathom, really. And trying to figure them out will just drive you up the wall. So I try not to." He laughed self consciously, as if caught not taking his own advice.
         Jackie had to laugh too. "That's funny, before Joe told me almost the exact same thing. About not trying to understand them, I mean."
         Tristian gave her a slight grin. "Joe's a good man to listen to. He's got more of a level head about these things than most of my friends do."
         "Yeah, he's been really good," Jackie agreed, not sure why she was telling Tristian this, not even sure why she was engaging in small talk with a man she barely knew. "I guess because he understands more than most people . . . what it's like, you know . . ." she trailed off, the wrenching reality looming ahead of her like a cold iron wall, a structure she could circle and circle around but never actually pass through. Not without great effort. An attempt that might have left her bruised and broken, staggered and reeling, but still ultimately successful. Maybe. Or maybe not. And it was that uncertainty that kept her circling, kept her unwilling to rush forward. It wasn't about fear. It was about the unknown. And that made her afraid.
         "Tristian, why?" she asked him piercingly, immediately wanting to pull the question away, already seeing him arranging his face into a taut lack of expression. Perhaps Tristian too had walls he refused to scale. "Joe's parents, my brother, people die and there's no reason, there's nothing but the rest of us standing behind trying to figure out what it all means." She felt like a five year old child trying to come to grips with the inescapable fact that there isn't any Santa Claus. It drains the magic from life, takes a pleasant unknown and replaces it with a mundanely frightening known quantity. Not unlike the day you realize that existence is finite. Nobody escapes. That's the rule. The deal we all sign. For better or for worse. Nobody gets out alive. They could carve it on humanity's headstone. Except there won't be anyone to read it. "Why does it happen? Why do we allow it to happen?"
         "Why says we allow it to happen?" Tristian asked quietly. "Seems to me like you and your family did all you could. Sometimes no matter how hard you try it's not enough." He was speaking a cold elegy for himself, not even realizing it. He rocked back on his heels, his face poised in thought, his hand absently tapping at his hip. "Sometimes the other person has to take responsibility and for whatever reason, they refuse to." He glanced down at the floor, biting his lip and taking a deep breath. "Everything has consequences, Jackie. If there's anything I've learned in the last year, it's that. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Your brother . . ." Tristian appeared to be choosing his words carefully and was finding the buffet too sparse for his liking, ". . . he reached a point, I think, where he had two choices. And both led down hard roads, except one wasn't as hard as the other, although it led to a darker place. And your brother, for whatever reason, took the road that he shouldn't have. Maybe . . . maybe he thought he could switch paths whenever he wanted, maybe by the time he realized it, it was too late or . . . he just didn't care."
         His words were rife with learned experience. The impact didn't strike her immediately. Feeling strangely restless she hopped off the bed, paced past an unmoving Tristian, wandered around her room with no apparent direction. "Don . . . Tristian, he killed himself . . ." her voice burned with the words, a volcano preferring to implode rather than erupt, "my brother used to enjoy things, he loved getting up early in the morning, staying up late, he hated sleeping, I think he felt he was missing something. It was the one thing we agreed on, although we never, we never really spoke about it . . ." you never will, voices intoned grimly. She tried to smile. Oh God it hurt. Why did you do this to us? Jackie paced to the window, next to the bed. It overlooked the front of the house. Gently pushing a curtain aside, the whitehot chill of the winter's day seared through, causing her to squint. It was dazzling. If there had been snow the world would have been awash in white. There was something timeless and pure about a fresh snowfall. She wished it was snowing now. This pain needed to be washed away. Cleansed, maybe. "To look at the world, every day, every new day, he loved that, I know he did. He was my brother and I knew him better than anyone." She was telling this to Tristian and she didn't know why. Last night her best friend had called her on the phone and Jackie had told her nothing, refused to exchange anything more than small talk. "And people tell me . . . they say he was depressed. They tell me he was desperate, that he had nowhere to turn and so he did the only thing that made sense to him." These weren't her words. These truths were not her history. These bastards who remake the world dwell in houses of mirrors and the reflections might as well be windows. Some days it's like you're blind. Other days you just don't want to see. "Some . . ." she moistened abrasively dry lips, "some people imply, they try to say that my parents caused it, by throwing him out, that it drove him to do what he did."
         "People talk," Tristian said. "They always do. They want the easy answers because it's better than asking the hard questions." There was a frowning weight to his words, he was trying to make them more than simple platitudes and wasn't exactly sure if he had succeeded. "But all we can do is ask. The only person who can answer the questions you and everyone have is your brother."
         "And you," Jackie said, closing her eyes. Don't let this daylight fade.
         "No. Not me," Tristian insisted. "I told you already-"
         "What were you talking to my parents about, Tristian?" she asked. All around her tiny clicks sounded, pieces falling into place finally. The way he had been talking, the vagueness of his words, as if he was trying to avoid spilling details that he wasn't supposed to know, it was starting to make sense. "Joe said he went to your house and one of your . . . friends was there." For a second she thought she heard Tristian faintly swear. Her equilibrium swam dizzily in the formless darkness behind her eyelids. She had no sense of the room anymore. Her brother and near and far and forever unreachable. His room was just down the hall. Nobody would ever sleep in there again. An exhibit dedicated to the disgraced fallen. We don't open these places to the public. There are some sights that you just don't need to see. "I don't know you that well, Tristian. Before this week, I'd never met you at all. But I have the feeling, I've gotten the sense, from you, from your friends, that if . . . someone, anyone, someone like me were to ask you . . . what I asked you, then you would do your best to answer their question." Jackie rested her head against the glass, the chill acting like a balm on her impending headache, numbing her brain, freezing out the world. "So tell me Tristian," and she couldn't resist a small smile, like she had just checkmated someone and found it was only because they thought they were playing checkers the whole time, "what exactly have you found out?"
         Tristian said nothing at first. There was a soft rustling that she assumed was him standing up, but she didn't dare look to confirm. Let him leave then, if this question was too hard. Let him leave if he wanted to keep it all to himself. Let him leave, if he had nothing to say. Jackie didn't know what she wanted to hear. If she even wanted to hear anything.
         But Jackie didn't hear the creak of her door being opened. Tristian didn't leave.
         "I . . ." he started to say and she tried not to tense up, tried to brace herself for words she wasn't ready for, "I haven't found anything that nobody else knew. That you didn't know." He was reigning his words in, she realized. He was keeping them penned in without even knowing why he was doing it. To spare her, perhaps. But it only meant she'd have to drag the words out of him answer by strung out answer, making it that much worse. Jackie was tempted to just drop the subject.
         She didn't. "Then Don . . . then he did . . . kill himself?" The words felt lopsided, jagged, too large for her small throat. We always hope. For whatever reason, we do. "You . . . talked to someone who . . ."
         "Sort of. As far as anyone can tell," Tristian told her. "I thought maybe . . . perhaps he had . . . fallen asleep on the tracks or . . . something else but, no . . . that's not what happened. They went there and . . . sat down and . . . waited-"
         "Stop," she whispered. It wasn't until she heard the crack of her own hushed voice in her ears that she even realized she had said anything. Her eyes were burning, stinging. Jackie pressed her lips tightly together. God damn you, Don, she thought harshly. I'll never hear a train the same damned way again. She wanted to regret the thought but couldn't.
         "I'm sorry," Tristian said quickly.
         "Don't be," she replied. Her heart felt two sizes too big for her chest. My brother is dead. Words don't make it true. Thoughts don't make it true. Only the truth makes it real. "I asked you. I'm doing it to myself."
         "But I'm not going to keep answering if this is bothering-" Tristian started to say with a fierce, surprising anger.
         "They were both there, right?" Jackie suddenly asked. Tristian fell silent. She pictured him standing absolutely still, trying to stare her down from behind, trying to end this through sheer force of will. If this were any other day, it might have worked. He was more stubborn than he appeared. It didn't matter now. She was beyond stubborn. "You said. They. Him and the girl. His girlfriend, I think. I never met her. They were dating while he still lived here, but I never met her. I don't know anything about her."
         "I don't either," Tristian answered slowly, but not as reluctantly. Perhaps he felt this was a safe subject. "I couldn't find out anything about her. I didn't try that hard though, and I don't plan on." That statement refused to budge.
         "It's okay," she told him. At this moment her brother was dead. Anyone else was secondary. Let her own family mourn her, if she had one. Let the dead be buried and then maybe she could care again. A sudden thought occurred to her and its rawness nearly chilled her, winter's naked strength catching her right in her most vulnerable point. "Tristian . . . do you think . . . were they both . . . on drugs?"
         Again the pause. This does not compute. "I do," he said tersely, his speech too clipped. "I'm pretty sure of it."
         "Oh God," she murmured, resting her head again on the unyielding pane. "I thought he was clean, Tristian. I know he wanted to be. He did." She felt her lips curl into a twisted thing. "She must have hooked him again. It had to be. On his own he would have been fine. It was when he met her."
         "You don't know that," Tristian said simply. His voice sounded closer, it almost surrounded her. But she didn't know where he was. Maybe it was one of those . . . things. Wasn't that how it started. When they had pretended to be him? Maybe the charade had never ended. Maybe there was no Tristian anymore.
         "It may have happened that way," Tristian said resolutely. This time he wasn't going to stop. She could tell that much from his voice. "But he may have gotten her on drugs as well. Maybe he never stopped and they met and it was the one thing they had in common."
         "I don't want to believe that," she said quietly.
         "Jackie your brother, Don, he wasn't . . . he wasn't above lying. An addict . . . he'll say anything to get what he wants. For whatever reason he may have convinced you he was clean, he may have convinced himself . . . people like that . . . they believe what they want to believe and for them, it . . . becomes true. But that doesn't mean it was." She could hear the shrug in his voice, almost feel the simmering frustration that he couldn't be more sure. He barely knew her brother and yet he wished he could have done more. Who are you, Tristian? Why do you do these things? "I know he was on drugs. You knew that too. If he stopped, if he ever stopped . . . nobody knows. Not for sure. The best we can do is speculate."
         "But I want to know, Tristian," she hissed, resisting the urge to slam her head up against the glass. That would bring only pain. That wasn't anything she needed more of. Not now. "Why did he keep doing it? To himself? To us? It doesn't make any sense."
         "No," he said. "It doesn't." She wasn't sure if he was admitting his own failings or just agreeing with her. It didn't matter.
         "Don wanted to quit, I know he did. I could hear it in his voice . . . what made him keep doing it? Why did he keep doing it to himself?" Her eyes were open and she was looking outside but she couldn't see any of it. The ghost of snow blindness to come. Black to white to whiter. All these spirits clouding our vision, begging for help. Where is my brother? Why isn't he here? "If he had stopped he would have been okay. I know he would have been . . ."
         "It wasn't just about the drugs-" Tristian said, sounding very close now.
         "Oh God," she said tautly, resting her elbows on the sill, her head in her hands, fingers scraping along her fevered forehead. "Everything . . . it was because of them, Mom and Dad kicking him out, his depression, God, I mean he could have . . . he might have been stoned out of his head, when he . . . when he did it, Tristian we don't even know, he may not have been in his right mind . . . God he could still be alive if . . . oh God . . ." her body wouldn't stop shaking. Why couldn't she stop shaking? She must be shouting. Her throat felt so raw and ragged. Why couldn't she hear herself?
         "Jackie, you have to-"
         "I just want my brother back, Tristian . . . I want it all back . . ." and this crushing loneliness moved in on her, pressing from all sides, a slideshow of reality, fastforwarding haphazardly through her life. Nothing is in sequence. Everything has consequences. Who said that? She could hear her voice, hesitant, evasive, trying to explain to her children who the other boy in the old pictures was, if it wasn't Daddy? Years later hearing a train and remembering. It's possible to time travel. All you need are memories strong enough to move you against the flow, to push you back where you don't belong. That's why it hurts so much. We're not meant to be there. She would grow old without Don now, all of them would, the family would forever be a threesome. Just like that. In that one second, everything changed. Squares collapsing into triangles. The geometry of relationships. Except you don't get something for nothing. Four sides can't become three without a loss. Without loss. Physics applies everywhere. The equations have to balance. In some place Einstein is crying, ashamed of what his own theories have wrought. He couldn't know. A week ago her brother was still alive. You don't see. You don't know. Already all she could hear was snatches of his voice, already fraying at the edges, already spiralling off into nothing, tendrils stretched to infinity. Please don't go. Come back, Don. Don't leave me. But he was already gone. There's no answer. There never will be. Her hands felt slick and wet. Jackie didn't know if she was crying or not. Her brother was dead. Who deemed that? Who decided that? Don wouldn't have wanted to die. Nobody did. But he was dead. And he had done it. To himself. He had done it. My brother is dead.
         I just want to blame someone. The thought came from nowhere, streaked across the muted skyline of her brain before returning to nothingness. Its intensity startled her. I just want someone to pay. Screaming, it ripped gashes in her brain. Fluid choked her voice, throttling all reason.
         "I . . ." she stammered, her voice bleeding into static, words dissolving away, like the air itself was turpentine, "all I want is . . ." But it was too much effort. She sagged against the window, the structure barely supporting her. Somewhere far away she heard herself sniff wetly. But she wasn't crying. Why would she? Everything was just fine. Of course it was. Everything was fine. How could it not be? My brother is dead. Don't pay any attention to gloomy thoughts like that, you hear? Everything's all right. You see that, don't you?
         Everything is just fine
         fine everything was just
         Oh God what am I going to-
         "It'll be okay," said a voice right in her ear. She jumped to hear the sound. His touch couldn't have had more of an impact. But he didn't touch her, just spoke. Jackie didn't even know how to describe it. It was Tristian but at the same time it wasn't. Faintly smoldering pain leaked into the edges of those words, but it was the core that mattered most, a calm reassurance that was so foreign all she could do to identify it was to go by snatches and strands of rumor. It was the voice of someone who hated every word he spoke but meant every syllable he said, and whose boundless optimism was reserved for everyone but himself.
         And Jackie realized it was exactly the tone, perhaps even the words, she had needed to hear ever since the time wrenching moment when she had first heard that her brother had died. Her friends couldn't do it. Her parents couldn't manage it. Nobody understood, not the way they had to. Tristian did. His voice spoke of places beyond this too small arc of our knowledge, of lessons carved out of a experience harder and more glittering than the most brilliant of diamonds. Chiseled out and brought back here, weighted with all the blood and effort that it took to secure it. Things change but things get better. That was the idea. And nobody understood. It wasn't that it would get better or that things one day would go back to normal. All those were promises that could never be sustained, always leading to disappointment, frustration, maybe despair, always anxiety. You can't wait for a change that will never come. You've been scarred already, brutally, irrevocably. All you can do is heal around the wounds and keep them from getting hurt again.
         All she ever wanted to hear was someone tell her that somehow, someday, everything would be all right again. Not great, not perfect, and not the same. Just okay. That's all she wanted. It was the best the world could do. She'd just have to settle for it.
         In that moment Jackie didn't know what she wanted to do most. Part of her wanted to just cry, to hold herself and weep, freely and uninhibited, and let all that was broken and scarred within her be washed away, to run onto her bed and soak into the sheets and be taken away. But that sort of catharsis never happened anymore. Still, the understated eloquence of the phrase nearly paralyzed her. Turning around, it occurred to Jackie that she could very much hug Tristian, or take his hand, or just smile, to somehow try to show him what his words, what his quiet support meant to her. It struck her that people like Tristian, they never knew the impact they had. In trying so hard to stay out of the way, to do some good without anyone noticing, that nobody did notice. And so it on, with everyone oblivious. Yet Tristian forged on anyway, quietly confidant even if someday one person was made better, then it might just be worth it.
         But someone had to tell them they were appreciated. That there was no reason to fight any longer, because the battle had been won long ago, and they had succeeded. There was no more reason to remain cloaked and shadowed on the sidelines, waiting for a moment that, even if it came they'd refuse to see, refuse to believe that the work was done.
         And it didn't have to be like that.
         That's what she would've gotten across to Tristian. Somehow.
         But Jackie didn't. She never got the chance.
         "Tristian . . ."
         Because when she did turn around, he was gone.
         "Tristian?"
         Her door was open, and he wasn't there. No trace at all.
         "Tristian?"          
         But Tristian had gone.