All This Life

Like the phone call with the cop, Noah911 hung up then. He couldn’t cope with any more tar painted on his heart. And if he barely made it through that phone call, there was no way he could sit through the funeral. How could he pack for such an experience? How’s he supposed to pick out socks? How can he be expected to coordinate colors? There’s no way. To fill and zip this suitcase. To board a plane. To look his parents in the eyes. He’s never felt this style of guilt before but it’s like a hangover. Head aching. Clammy and sweaty. Nauseated. He can’t sleep and can’t go outside, even though he hates being in their apartment. It’s now like a tomb. Tracey is everywhere. Her smell. Her stuff. The uneaten grapefruit still sits by the couch, flies buzzing around it. The toast and teeth marks and hummus. The note: Make sure my sister eats this, okay?

Noah911 has hunkered down under that same blanket and watched the YouTube clip over and over. Oddly, it’s the only thing that temporarily conquers his symptoms. Noah911 can’t stop watching it, watching her. In each viewing, he pauses it right before anyone breaks from the pack and jumps. Pauses it right before the moment becomes something else. Pauses it so he can gaze at Tracey, his happy sister, moving along the walkway and playing the clarinet with friends, and there’s nothing wrong, just Tracey and her band doing the thing that makes them feel the most alive in the world.

Pressing pause: In that way he can stop time. He’s not interested in trading futures; he’s trying to prevent one.

Noah911 should be watching the video right now, god damn it, but the empty suitcase and the red-eye flight and their — his — parents won’t get out of the way.

What he needs is an excuse.

The easiest way to get out of this is a text. It’s so passive, so one-way, so devoid of confrontation. Empty of any opportunity to get talked into anything. Noah911 can type and send and the conversation is over. He talks, then no one talks. Delivering his news free from outside input. It’s a perfect method to disseminate bad news. Flake on a dinner reservation. Blow off a massage. Skip your kid sister’s funeral.

A few words and he’s free.

Noah911 still has the programming of an athlete. He sees competition in every direction he looks. It certainly helps him professionally and it helps when he picks up women, not interested in a relationship but securing a one-night stand is its own short-term futures contract. He takes, or had taken before all this, impeccable care of his body, eating all the right stuff, lifting weights, tons of cardio, 7 percent body fat. But somewhere along the way he forgot to take care of Tracey as she needed him to, which reminds him of his senior season on the lacrosse team. A skinny freshman had made varsity. Kid was so quick and elusive, a little water bug out there that no one could keep up with, but the coach knew that other teams would target him, try to outmuscle the kid, render his skills meaningless if he was always being knocked around. Coach asked Noah911 to protect him out there, to take a penalty if he needed to put some people on their asses to alert them that any cheap shots on the kid would be avenged. But being a midfielder kept Noah911 busy in all sorts of ways, and during a particularly contentious game, he forgot about the kid. Or he remembered, but the responsibility to protect him plummeted down his list of priorities, and some muscle-head on the opposing side checked the kid so ferociously that he rocketed to the grass, separating a shoulder, his head hitting the ground so hard he lost consciousness for a few seconds. His parents never let the kid step foot on the field again, and Noah911 carried the taste of that around for a few years, couldn’t shake it. He had been charged to act as the kid’s protector and couldn’t live up to the task. If it took him so long to get over something like that, Tracey’s death will smother him forever. He’ll replay it over and over, the things he could have done differently for her, the ways he could have been more involved, more accessible.

And if her death represented the end of the most important game of his life, then the funeral and seeing his parents were the post-game press conference, where Noah911 has to stand at a podium and answer for his terrible play. Reporters champing at the bit to skewer him, and the microphone isn’t big enough for Noah911 to hide behind. He cosigned the death of his sister through his slack protection, and he needed to be held accountable for that.

“Don’t you think Tracey deserved better?” someone will ask.

And Noah911 would break down crying. Right there at the podium. That would be his answer. That would have to do. Cameras going off, capturing him in this way, putting pictures of it in newspapers and online so everyone can see him for what he truly is: the brother who neglected his sister. Or worse: the brother who let her die.