I try not to scrutinize our family"s financial situation, because if I do, it becomes abundantly clear how my parents" divorce was the key contributor to all our current cash-flow troubles, and there"s nothing I can do with that information but be mad about it. But I pay attention to numbers. I know that Ty"s death cost $10,995: the casket alone was $2,300, plus all the funeral home fees (embalming, body storage, a cost to rent the mortuary s.p.a.ce for the wake, etc., which added up to around $3,895), plus what they charged for the body retrieval and cleanup ($400), plus the flowers ($200), plus the grave s.p.a.ce at Wyuka ($1,300) and the cost to dig the grave ($1,000), and finally the headstone, which was an even $2,000.
Mom is a registered nurse, but she"s been on the job for less than a year, so she makes $20.25 an hour. She had a life insurance policy on both Ty and me, but because Ty"s death was a suicide, the insurance company declared that his policy was void. Dad pitched in for half the cost, of course, but he"s not rolling in cash, either. See divorce lawyers and court fees and the money he had to fork over for Mom"s nursing school after he left.
In other words, we"re broke.
See Lexie drive a clunker.
"I don"t really need a car," I tell Mom now. "When I"m at MIT next year I"ll take the subway. Cambridge has excellent public transportation, which is safer, statistically speaking, than driving a car."
She smiles sadly and pats my hair. I don"t know if she believes that I"ll get into MIT, but she"ll act like she does. She"ll indulge me. "Good. Then it will be one less thing to worry about," she says. "Now let"s go figure out what we"re going to do with the Lemon. Then we can get dinner."
Ironically, the Lemon starts right up for me when we go back for it. Without a hitch or a sputter or anything. She just purrs to life.
"Wouldn"t start, huh?" Mom says from her vantage point in the next parking s.p.a.ce over. "Are you sure that"s what happened?" She gives me a look like maybe this whole charade with Steven giving me a ride home may have been a ruse on my part. To spend time with Steven. Because of course I still must like Steven. Because he"s such an upstanding young man.
Maybe Mom doesn"t understand breakups.
"I swear. The car likes to mess with me," I say. "She"s temperamental."
Mom nods knowingly and then moves on to the dinner plan.
"How about the Imperial Palace?" she suggests. "You love that place."
"Meh." I shrug. "It"s only marginally good."
She accepts what I say at face value. "All right. We can do better than marginally good, I think."
"How about the Spaghetti Works? We haven"t been there in forever." Because it"s too expensive. Not ridiculously expensive, but too expensive for us. "I heard they have a six-dollar spaghetti special. All you can eat."
"Spaghetti sounds wonderful," she says. "I could use a gla.s.s of red wine about now."
TIME Pa.s.sES. THAT"S THE RULE. No matter what happens, no matter how much it might feel like everything in your life has frozen around one particular moment, time marches on. After my brother died, time pa.s.sed slowly, with me trudging through all the obligatory activities that I was still expected to do: cla.s.s, eating, sleeping, brushing my teeth, drying my hair, pretending like I gave a c.r.a.p. Either that or time disappeared: I found myself on the other side of Christmas without remembering more than an ambiguous pine-scented blur. A calculus final, gone. Whole conversations that I don"t have any memory of.
Now, suddenly, I find that it"s March 3. A big day. A day I was waiting for: the first possible day that I could have expected to hear anything from MIT. After school I go to the mailbox, and there, tucked in the shadows, big and beautiful, is a fat envelope.
I"ve been trying not to think about MIT too much, to refrain from obsessing like some people do or get my hopes unrealistically high-there are other schools, after all, other perfectly decent inst.i.tutions of higher learning. But MIT is the inst.i.tution. And somewhere deep inside me, I expected this. I hoped for it, anyway. I dreamed.
I don"t bother going inside. I tear the letter open and read it standing next to the mailbox.
Dear Alexis, On behalf of the Admissions Committee, it is my pleasure to offer you admission to MIT. You stood out as one of the most talented and promising students in the most compet.i.tive applicant pool in the history of the Inst.i.tute. Your commitment to personal excellence and principled goals has convinced us that you will both contribute to our community and thrive within our academic environment. We think that you and MIT are a great match.
I swallow down the hard lump in my throat and scan past the details: I have until May 2 to let them know whether I accept their offer, they invite me to attend something called Campus Preview Weekend in April to get a sense of what life on campus would be like, an MIT student will be calling me in the coming weeks, and they urge me to look over the details of my financial aid package. I flip forward and my breath catches-more than forty-three thousand dollars in scholarships.
I read on: And now for the requisite fine print-I must remind you that this offer of admission is contingent upon your completing the school year with flying colors. Have fun for the rest of your senior year, but please keep your grades up!
I hope you"ll agree with us that MIT is the perfect place to prepare for your future. As a member of our community, you"ll join builders, scholars, entrepreneurs, and humanitarians. Together, you will all make a difference in a world that desperately needs you.
Many congratulations, and once again, welcome to MIT! Now stop reading this and go celebrate.
This is happening.
This is what I"ve wanted from the time I knew what college was about: to get out of Nebraska, to study math with the country"s best instructors, to bounce my ideas off the sharpest minds. To become someone of consequence. I don"t want to be rich or famous, but I want to contribute something significant to the history of human thought.
The Riggs theorem.
That"s my immortality, my idea of heaven. Something people will remember me for after I die.
As I walk back to the house I"m surprised by how, with this letter finally in my hands, I"m not that excited. Not the kind of excited I thought I"d be.
I"m going to MIT. Okay. Yes. This is what I wanted. Yes. This is, without a doubt, the most awesome thing ever to happen to me. Yes. Yes.
But that will mean leaving Mom all alone in this house.
I sit down on the living room couch and read the letter again. I force myself to imagine it: me standing at a blackboard at MIT, going all Will Hunting on some problem, me curled up on a twin bed in a tiny-but-mine dorm room, reading about quantum mechanics, me strolling along some tree-lined sidewalk, chatting with the other students, a stack of heavy books under my arm.
It"s nice, thinking about the future as something that won"t entirely suck.
But things are different now than they were when I filled out my college applications.
March 5. I haven"t told my parents. Not Dave, when we had our session yesterday. Not my friends. I don"t know how to slip it into the conversation at school. I guess it should be as simple as Guess what? I got into MIT. Hooray-hooray! But whenever that pause happens, when I could make the announcement, I choke.
If I tell people, they"re all going to watch me for my super-elated reaction. And I"m not Beaker; I"m no great actress. I"m happy I got into MIT, I am. But I don"t know if I can do happy at this stage in my life. Not in public. Not at the level they"re all going to expect.
Still, I bring the acceptance letter with me, tucked in with the Ashley letter in the front pocket of my five-subject notebook, and every now and then I open the notebook and stare at the envelope and think of all the promises collected in this one place, all the hope.
Maybe that"s it, what"s holding me back from telling people-the hope.
I"m not used to hope anymore.
It"s hardest to hold the MIT news inside me during calculus. We"re learning how to find volumes of rotations using integrations, and Steven is up at the board writing out these gorgeous equations, his handwriting so much neater than mine and so much more careful, which is why Miss Mahoney called him up there, so he could show us the answer the way a painter might create a still-life that looks like: "So," Miss Mahoney says when he"s nearly finished. "Let"s say Steven is a gla.s.sblower, crafting a vase. He could use this method to understand the different shapes he"s making and the amount of water the vase would hold."
"Yeah, Steven," El snickers. "You"re a gla.s.sblower."
He grins and shrugs one shoulder. "It"s a job."
"What kind of vase are we talking about, here?" pipes up Beaker. "What color of gla.s.s? I"ve always been fond of blue gla.s.s. Can you do a blue gla.s.s vase for us, Steven?"
"All righty," he says, and turns back to the board. "Blue gla.s.s coming up."
The cla.s.s laughs, and we understand it"s a tad lame, but I"ve always appreciated the way Miss Mahoney tries to give us real-world applications for the things we learn, so it"s not just math in a box. She wants us to see the beauty in the equations, how absolutely cool it all is, but she also wants it to be real for us. It never fails to amaze me, in these moments, that the numbers explain something tangible and true about life. The numbers make sense of things. They make order of a disordered world.
I want to say thank you to Miss Mahoney. For giving me that. For trying to make it fun and not just "neat," unnecessary knowledge.
I want to say, Hey, Miss Mahoney, I got into MIT.
Then I want to tell Beaker. And El. After all the daydreaming we did. MIT is a real place, and I am going there. I"m going there.
I want to tell Steven.
But I can"t find the words.
Words were never really my forte.
WHEN I GET HOME I FIND MOM"S CAR in the driveway. That"s twice now that she"s been home when she"s supposed to be working. I go inside and call for her, but she doesn"t answer. Some part of me goes into panic mode, and I run to her bedroom, holding my breath until I can confirm that she"s not sprawled across the bed with her arm trailing off the mattress, a spilled bottle of pills scattered on the carpet.
Where did I get that image, I wonder, the go-to scene of fatal overdose that you always see in movies? Why did my mind go straight to the worst possibility?
Because it happened, I answer myself. The worst possibility already happened once. It could happen again.
"Mom?" I yell.
There"s no answer. I check Mom"s bathroom, Dad"s office, and the kitchen without success, which gets the adrenaline flowing again.
She could be out with a friend, I reason. Then I come across her purse on the kitchen counter, her phone inside it. Her coat is slung across a kitchen stool. Everything here but nothing in its proper place.
"Mom!" I scream. "Mom!"
I stand still for a minute, holding my breath, listening. Then I hear it.
Music. Very faint music.
Coming from downstairs.
I find Mom in Ty"s room. Led Zeppelin is pouring out of Ty"s clock radio: "Stairway to Heaven," a song that he and Patrick and Damian used to play on a constant loop back in middle school, again and again and again until Mom and I could have sung the lyrics in our sleep. Mom is standing with her back to me, hands pressed to a Kevin-Durant-making-a-slam-dunk poster on the far wall.
My heart sinks. She"s taking down his room.
It was going to happen at some point, I suppose.
"Hi," I rasp. "I was looking everywhere for you. Did you hear me calling?"
She shakes her head. Her small shoulders are trembling. She"s crying again.
"Are you okay?" I ask.
"I"ve been better." She takes a deep breath and then smooths the poster down, pinning a corner with a gold thumbtack.
She"s putting it back up, I realize. Not taking it down.
I scan the room and spot a large cardboard box near the bed that contains more of Ty"s stuff: his basketball jersey, a mason jar of fifty-cent pieces he collected from the tooth fairy, a tie he wore to church sometimes, a belt, his baseball cards.
"There"s a lady who"s sure all that glitters is gold, and she"s buying a stairway to heaven," intones Robert Plant.
The smell of Ty"s cologne is so heavy it makes me want to cough.
"Mom, what"s going on?" I ask.
She wipes at her face. Then she reaches and turns down the music.
"I called in sick." She goes to the box and removes another poster-The Hangover Part II-and goes about realigning it in its former place on the wall. "Could you help me?"
I unfreeze my feet and hold the paper up for her as she carefully guides the tacks back into their original holes.
"Redecorating?" I venture.
"Gayle was here. She brought that." Mom indicates the box. "She thought . . . it was time . . . for me to pack up . . ." She bends her head, gasps for air as the tears drop into the carpet. "Tyler"s things. She said it would help me . . . move on."
I bite my lip to keep from bursting out with furious words for Gayle. How dare she, I think. How dare she come here and decide what"s best for everyone?
"Gayle wants me to sell the house," Mom continues. "She wants me to move to Lincoln, closer to the hospital so it"s not so much trouble to drive in to work. She says I should get a smaller place, since Tyler"s gone and you"re going off to school and it will only be me. She also wants me to take a new job that"s come up in the neonatal intensive-care unit-work with the babies instead of having to deal with all the people who keep dying on me in the surgical wing."
"Sounds like Gayle has it all figured out." I sit on the edge of Ty"s bed.
Mom reaches into her pocket for a crumpled-up tissue. She blows her nose and goes back to the box, where she takes out an old catcher"s mitt, from when Ty was in Little League.
"Where did this go?" she whispers. Her eyes dart around the room. "I can"t remember."
"Top right corner of the bookshelf," I answer automatically.
She nods. "That"s right. Of course. You always had such a perfect memory. A photographic memory."
She makes no move to return the glove to its place. She stands there holding it, rubbing her fingers along its smooth leather surface.
"I volunteered to coach T-ball that one year, do you remember?"
I remember.
"I got this book called Coaching Tee Ball: The Baffled Parent"s Guide. I didn"t know anything about baseball."
"You learned."
"Tyler was mortified to see me standing up there in front of everybody with that book."
"He got over it."
She stares at the mitt. "I tried," she says after a minute.
"I know."
"No, I mean, I tried to do what Gayle said. I tried to take it all down, put it away. I even thought about calling his friends and asking them if they would want some of it. But . . ." She takes a shuddering breath. "I can"t. I can"t let go."
She starts crying for real now, in big, gasping sobs. I jump up to hold her.
"I can"t," she cries against my shoulder. "I can"t."
The hole opens up in my chest and I cling to her, and it"s as if the pain pa.s.ses back and forth between us, until she goes limp in my arms.
I guide her to sit down on the bed.