Bottom of the X

I reach for my phone in the morning dark, hate myself briefly for checking it first thing, then hold the bright screen in front of my face to unlock it. There’s a Facebook message from my first girlfriend. The girl I got kicked out of eighth grade for — the girl I wrote my first story for.

The little preview shows the beginning: Hey Drew, sorry to reach out like this, I just wanted to let you know…

I glance toward my sleeping wife and roll away, use my back to hide the glow. Our two-year-old wriggles, creaking the small mattress in his crib.

Hey Drew, sorry to reach out like this, I just wanted to let you know. Sam’s gone. Ali wanted me to tell you. She said you guys had been talking again recently. Will send more info when I have it.

Above it are the last messages we sent each other more than a decade ago — an attempt to reconnect that went nowhere. She met her now-husband not long after. They have three children. He’s a youth pastor.

I close her message and go to my last conversation with Sam, reread through it all for something I can’t name.

He asked me about the air-fried salmon I posted to my story, asked if I would write the narrative for a project he was working on, would I be interested in a Friendsgiving. I was busy with kids, busy with work, busy with not being ready.

There’s a patience and an earnestness to them I didn’t see before. It could be the knowledge that he’s dead, but the words are soft and kind, almost divine—a small wave from a distance, a gentle raising of the hand with a smile.

My last message to him was: Ok. Even still, he’d hearted it. It’s like he was trying to tell me he loved me every chance he could. I tap out I’m so sorry and send it, a prayer into the unread ether.

I text Loam — my best friend, my son’s godfather. He’s already on a bus back from Hidalgo. I tell him I’ll pick him up for the funeral.

I think about the number of lives we live in a decade, a year, a moment.

After we fought, harder than brothers, I hated Sam for so long it became part of me, a freckle on my shoulder that just is. The beds we lie in are filled with our former selves, the dead skin we shed each night. I’m not even the same group of cells anymore.

I tell my wife in the morning light.

“Remember my friend Sam?”

“The one who broke your teeth?”

“Yeah.”

A few days later, on the way to pick up Loam, I pass by the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, the high school we went to together. Sam started first, then Ali, and then Loam, who went by a different name then — another life.

Sam was the one who told me to apply for the creative writing program. He’d liked the story I’d written about a lighting technician for the Nutcracker who falls in love with the lead. My first girlfriend played Clara. It’s as bad as you think, but I got in.

We were the Katrina kids, parking next to piles of debris, busted for smoking weed by military police. The buildings around us spray-painted with an X to mark that they’d been searched — numbered quadrants for who searched it, when, and what they found.

The bottom of the X was for the number of bodies inside.

They’re all painted over now, layered by other lives.

Loam is quiet when he gets in the car, handing me a long, orange-yellow candle. It snapped in half in his bag on the bus from Mexico. Later, I’ll keep it on my mantle like an urn.

Loam tells me what he knows. Sam was killed by an eighteen-wheeler. Having stopped taking medication and relying solely on prayer, he did that thing he’d sometimes do where he disappeared, eyes wide and unblinking.

He stole his grandfather’s truck in the middle of the night, drove it from Florida until it ran out of gas in Tennessee, then got out and started walking.

At some point, he crossed or ran or leapt in front of the truck and was reduced to a headline: Florida Man Killed After Running On I-40 In Putnam County. Florida Man. God, he would have hated that, but laughed about it.

There wasn’t enough of Sam to bring home, so they’re not calling it a funeral, they’re calling it a celebration.

Sam’s celebration is in a church that was once a youth center called One-Eighty, where, on middle-school Wednesday nights, we’d play Tekken and eat microwaved ham and cheese Hot Pockets in exchange for standing during praise and worship and sitting quietly during the sermon. A pretty solid trade.

Even then, it was Sam and Ali. Ali with her Chinese takeout box as a purse that was filled with makeup, Wrigley’s spearmint gum, and Taco Bell sauce packets. She put the sauce on honeybuns, saying she wished she could bottle the smell of a Taco Bell and wear it like a perfume.

It’s funny the things you remember about a person. I shared a story I wrote in my creative writing class about being molested by a neighbor, and she said I’d held her hand in third grade after the same thing had happened to her. I don’t remember this at all. It’s painted over.

I sit next to Loam in the back of the chapel and peel away layers of years in my mind, match faces to shapes I remember.

There’s new paint and rows of royal blue fabric chairs filled with the butts of old pastors, principals, teachers, parents who didn’t allow me to come to birthday parties because my parents left the church. Through them, I see the phantoms of what was once there: controllers with wobbly joysticks, a basketball cage, worn bean bag chairs with duct tape patches.

Sam’s art lines the stage. Sketches, acrylic, woodwork, sculpture, portraits, landscapes, some of them incomplete, but each of them magnificent, like everything he did. His music plays softly in the background over a slideshow of photos: the wedding I wasn’t invited to, friends he made after me, family, the other lives he lived.

The music stops and Ali gets up and walks to the podium.

She stops halfway through the eulogy, leaves the stage like one of his unfinished paintings. I find her in the hallway. She hugs me. Her grief is heavy hanging from my neck.

I don’t remember what I tell her. Something about wishing we didn’t wait until someone died to see each other. Something about how long it’s been. Something everyone says.

I know what I don’t tell her.

I don’t tell her that the night Sam broke my teeth, our bellies full of stolen Southern Comfort, I’d told him he wasn’t good enough for her.

I don’t tell her that, years later, he told me I was right.

I don’t tell her that he told me he was sorry, that he wanted to be better.

I don’t tell her that I believed him, that I told him I loved him.

I don’t tell her that I was sorry. Sorry for the decades, the years, months, weeks, moments. Sorry for everything.

A few weeks later, I meet Loam and Ali at our old high school for another celebration of life. A few people say a few words about Sam.

A stillness fills the room when they’re done and Loam gets up to speak, pulling a note out of his pocket that he’d written on the bus ride from Hidalgo. He starts to talk about how he blames the people who chose prayer over the medicine Sam so badly needed. He falters.

I stand up and put my hand on his shoulder and talk about how Sam shaped me like the clay in the sculpture room — made me who I am. How I regret holding onto a hate so fragile. How the moment I got the message that he was gone I became a different person.

The school’s president talks about Sam being his first problem student.

He had challenged Sam to paint a self-portrait, which Sam did in one night, in defiance, delivering it the next day. He’d kept it in his office ever since — Sam looking down on him, forever reminding, reshaping.

He pulls down a sheet to reveal the portrait. An incredible thing. All red and black.

After the storm, the bodies at the bottom of the X were often found bloated and unrecognizable. Sometimes, they were forgotten. Sam stands with his hands in his pockets, pants splattered with paint, head slightly cocked, face serious.

Loam, Ali, and I take a picture next to it, Sam in the center and slightly above. All of us here, now, together.

from SHADELONGING: an apologia

A Leaf of Me

a u t o f o c u s