Page 2 of Goodbye Days

We sit quietly for a moment while she surveys the crowd. “I recognize a lot of these people from the other two.”

I lift my head slightly. “Some go to NAA. You still planning on going?”

“Of course. You didn’t think I was going there because of Eli, did you?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know. No.”

“Two girls from NAA got into Juilliard’s piano program last year. That’s a huge percentage. That’s why I decided to go even before I met Eli.”

“I’m glad you’re coming still. I didn’t mean anything.”

“It’s cool. Anyway, this seems like a weird thing to talk about right now.”

“Everything seems weird to talk about right now.”

“Yeah.”

At the front of the room, Nana Betsy shambles, weeping, toward Blake’s cedar casket to run her hand along its smoothness once more before the funeral starts. I did that before sitting down. The smell of the cedar. Sharp and clean. It didn’t smell like something that should be buried under the dirt. It was closed. You don’t let people see how someone looks after something like the Accident. So perched atop the casket lid on a wooden stand there’s a photo of Blake. He purposely made it ridiculous. It’s a department-store portrait; Olan Mills or Sears studio or something. He’s wearing a thrift-store sweater from the 1980s and pleated khaki pants. He’s holding a huge, grouchy-looking Persian cat. He didn’t own a cat. He literally borrowed one for the photo. Pure Blake. A genuine and radiant grin covers his round face. His eyes are closed as if he blinked. He thought photos where people were blinking were hilarious.

I couldn’t help but smile when I saw it. Even under the circumstances. All Blake had to do was walk into a room and I started preemptively laughing.

“How come you’re not here with your parents?” Jesmyn asks, drawing me out of my memory.

“They’re in Italy for their twenty-fifth anniversary. They tried to come home, but they had trouble getting tickets and my dad had to deal with a lost passport. They’re coming home tomorrow.”

“That sucks.”

“Why aren’t you sitting with Eli’s parents?”

Jesmyn crosses her legs and picks a piece of lint off her black dress. “I was. But Adair was giving me a supercrusty vibe. And then I saw you sitting here looking really lonely.”

“Maybe this is how I always look.”

She brushes a lock of her reddish-black hair from her face. I smell her shampoo. “Imagine my embarrassment if I came over here to show you kindness and you didn’t need it.”

“Adair won’t be happy with you showing me kindness.”

“Yeah, well. I guess life is about risk.”

I rub my eyes. My exhaustion is beginning to set in. I haven’t slept more than a few hours in the last three days. I turn to Jesmyn. “Have you talked to Eli’s parents or Adair much since the accident?” I realize, even as I ask, that I have no idea where Jesmyn herself stands on the whole blame thing. Lack of sleep has lowered my inhibitions such that I’m asking questions that might lead to answers I’m unready to hear.

She opens her mouth to answer when the service begins. We bow our heads as Blake’s pastor prays and then offers words of comfort from the gospels. It reminds me more of Mars’s huge funeral at New Bethel AME Church than Eli’s small private service at Connelly Brothers’ Funeral Home. Eli’s parents are atheists, and it was the first funeral I’d ever been to that didn’t once mention God. Seventeen years old and the breadth of my funerary experience probably rivals that of people twice my age.

Six members of Nashville Arts’s a cappella choir perform a requiem. They did this at Mars’s and Eli’s funerals too. Tears streak Jesmyn’s face like an atlas of rivers. She holds a wadded-up tissue and dabs her eyes and nose, staring straight ahead. I don’t understand why I’m not crying. I should be. Maybe it’s like how it’s sometimes too cold to snow.

One of Blake’s uncles reads First Thessalonians 4:14–17 in his thick East Tennessee accent. His large hands tremble. His voice wavers. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

A fly lands on the pew in front of me and rubs its back legs together. This fly is alive and Blake is dead. The world brims with pulsing, humming life. Except for in the wooden box at the front of the room. There everything lies still. And what caused this stillness was the most banal, routine activity on my part. Texting my friends. The human equivalent of a fly’s rubbing its back legs together. It’s just something we do. It’s not supposed to kill your three best friends.

Nana Betsy limps to the pulpit to deliver the eulogy. She has bad knees. She takes a long while to gather herself before speaking. Her hands are empty, as though she planned to say whatever was in her heart. The look on her face says that there’s too much to choose from.

I try not to breathe too much or too loudly in the silence. My mouth is dry and I have a headache forming at the base of my skull. My throat aches as if I have something caught in it. The precarious wall I’ve built—that we all build to protect others from enduring the spectacle of our grief—is beginning to crumble.

Nana Betsy clears her throat and speaks. “Blake’s life wasn’t always easy. But he lived joyously. He loved his family. He loved his friends. And he was loved by them.”

Down comes the wall and out pours the swirling, gray sea it contained. I put my head in my hands and rest my elbows on my knees. I press the heels of my hands over my eyes, and tears seep hot around the sides. I’m trembling. Jesmyn’s hand is on my shoulder. At least the ache in my throat is gone, as though it were an abscess full of tears that I lanced.

“Blake was funny,” Nana Betsy says. “If you knew him, he made you laugh at some time or another.”