Page 43 of What You Left Me

Dear Marty or Spitty,

It is Marty and Spitty. We are 9 years old. This is what you do if one of us dies. We will haunt you if you do not do this! You have to do this to who is dead, Marty or Spitty!

1. Make sure I am dead. Please look at my body and really make sure I’m not sleeping.

2. You can have all my good stuff if I’m dead. Give away all my other stuff so my family isn’t sad.

3. Tell my family to stop crying and be nice.

4. Give them my note.

REMBER!REMBEMBER!REMEMEBER! THE DEAD ONE WILL HAUNT YOU IF YOU DO NOT DO THIS.

Sinserly,

Martin Frederick McGee

Spencer Alan Kuspits Junior

• • •

Everything happens for a reason.Brooke got that tattooed on her ankle the day after her eighteenth birthday. I sat with her in this divey parlor in the city, owned by her cousin’s friend’s uncle or something, and waited as she picked out the type of writing she wanted. It looked like it was going to be a bust. She blew through two books of fonts without any luck, and she didn’t want the tattoo guy making something up. She looked off into space, holding her head up so tears wouldn’t fall, and she saw this random picture fixed to the ceiling that said something likePersistence Overcomes Resistancein weird, scraggly cursive.

“See? Everything happens for a reason!” she screamed as she pointed to the picture.

The tattoo guy grabbed a ladder, took the picture down, stared at it for a while for reference, made a draft on paper, and then went to work outliningEverything Happens for a Reasonon Brooke’s skin. All ten of his knuckles were inked with the wordsTRUTHandKARMA, which seemed to be pretty perfect for the occasion.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked.

“Yes,” Brooke said. Her grip on my hand got so tight I thought she might actually break bone, and the guy hadn’t even started tattooing. My hand was numb by the time he did. I distracted myself from the possibility of permanently losing feeling in my fingers by staring at the needle making a million little pulses into Brooke’s ankle, the sentence she chose getting covered up in black smudge, then wiped clean, another word popping out to be read for all of eternity.

We stopped at her favorite ice cream spot afterward. She was licking the edges of her Rainbow Cone to keep it from dripping onto her hands when I asked, “Why’d you get the tattoo?”

She’d been so secretive about the whole thing earlier it felt like I’d set off a bomb if I asked then, but her mood had since taken a complete 180, so I figured it was safe.

She told me that when she was twelve, her brother died not far from where we were parked. He was outside trying to fix a broken spoke on her bike when a car spun out and crushed him.

She came to our school the next year, and all of her brother’s stuff got thrown away in the move, so she couldn’t find anything that he’d written on to use as a reference for her tattoo. She was ready to give up on the whole idea when she saw the handwriting in the picture on the ceiling. It was exactly like she remembered her brother’s.

“I guess I don’t get it,” I said. “His death was an accident.”

She put her ice cream cone in the drink holder and shook her head as she wiped multicolored drips off her shirt. “Yeah.”

“But the tattoo,” I started. I didn’t know how to continue. None of it made sense to me. How is there a reason for a fluke like that?

“Exactly,” she said. “He lived for a reason. A million of them, of course, but one was to always look out for me. He died for a reason. To teach me to never take a single second for granted. Now I have a permanent reminder of that.”

I wanted to understand, but I just didn’t. There was a reason for his life, but no reason for the way he died. He was a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I remember thinking if that happened to me, and my brother got killed while trying to fix a goddamn bike, the last thing I’d want on my body was something that said there was supposed to be a reason for that.

If I accept the permanent ink on Brooke’s skin, this mantra so many people seem to chant whenever things go wrong—that everything happens for a reason, that I was meant to get into a car crash, to be here now—shouldn’t I be able to see what the reason is?

When I was in Brooke’s dream, I tried speaking honestly. Owning the truth of what we were to each other. That wasn’t the trick, either.

So what is?

• • •

I pass the first page around and read the second.