Radio Interlude 3-

"19 year old Zac Hanson died at 2:45 last night, never have regained consciousness after last Tuesday's fatal accident."

Letter 9-

Zac-

I was praying last night when the phone rang. I really can't remember the last time I had done that—gotten down on my knees and appealed to some higher being—but in all likelihood I had been begging for a training bra or something equally meaningless. But I guess it's all meaningless now, huh?

Actually, you know something? I do remember. It was the last time I was at bible camp, the last time I escaped the stifling reality of this world to immerse myself in a mystical haven that didn't belong to me. I would go to service every day; I would sing along to "The Trees of the Field." I would clap, going about a pantomime. Those words may have glorified a righteous God, but they weren't mine. They never have been, but lying in bed last night I found myself silently repeating long ago memorized stanzas. "Our Father, who art in heaven," I would calmly begin, carefully forming each syllable in my mind, "hallowed be thy name." Here I would, for some reason, always speed up, maybe somehow hoping the faster I went, the more desperate I would sound to whomever may have been listening, and the more likely you would be to live. By the time "deliver us from evil," flowed into my mind, the unavoidable closure to this empty ritual, I could barely keep up with my own thoughts.

I have a rosary, given to my by my godparents when I was baptized. It has always nested within a cloudy soft bed of cotton in a tiny wood box on my mother's dresser, but tonight I had crept into her room, shocked by the dark cold air and the slick chill of the hardwood floor at my feet, and I took it. The white beads were hard against my skin, biting at my flesh as I lay, clutching the strand in one hand, frantically incanting the words I had memorized as a child, hoping whatever magic they possessed would be enough. I'm still not sure how it's supposed to work; even in my desperation a rosary seemed nothing more to me than a thin string, studded with plasticy smooth pearls of alternating size. I wished it could be like Chemistry, though, like an equation. Five hundred Our Fathers + 75 Hail Marys + 30 Acts of Contractions = one saved best friend. But I know it's not… I knew it wasn't, even as I frantically rattled through the lines of ancient poetry.

I knew why the phone rang, of course. Calls at 4 am are few and far between, and when they have come I've never known them to bring good news. It would have been nice to have slept through it, but these past nights have been far too heavily populated with bogeymen and demons to allow me rest. I couldn't bring myself to answer the phone, even though I was desperate for the painful jangling noise of it ringing to end. Instead of moving to lift the hand piece, I had just curled up as tightly as I could, tangled in my sheets, trying to make myself smaller, more forgettable, hoping that time would loose track of me and leave me in a blissful limbo, stopping the on-rushing might of fate, and life, and death.

My room seemed a strange and foreign place right then, dangerous with unfulfilled potential. It was laced with such dreamy ghosts, such wispy shadows that stretched empty, black arms out to embrace me, that I clenched my eyes tight until they stung. When my mother finally came, opening my door just wide enough to slip through, trailed by a flat square of lemony yellow florescent light, it felt like I had somehow slipped back in time to Tuesday morning. The radio should have been on, and I should have been getting ready for work, hopefully ignorant of what was to be begun by her words, still doubting the truth in what I had heard on the radio. But now there's no doubt.

I whispered to myself that maybe you had woken up, that maybe you wanted me, that maybe Diana had called for me to come to help your family celebrate your return to our world. But I couldn't see that, didn't have the power to imagine it, and because of this I knew that it couldn't be true.

"Baby?" She sat on my bed with a soft squeak, the mattress lisping a little with her weight and sending me slipping towards her. "Are you awake?" She barely whispered her words, more like breathed them, and I labored to keep my breath regular and even. I was terrified that she would just say it, just say what I knew had happened, and I wouldn't be able to bear it. Fighting the tears that were building, I lay perfect still, employing for a more vital cause years of practice at pretending to sleep when I didn't want to get up to go to school or church. Her hand brushed against my forehead, soft and cool, and she had pressed a gentle kiss on my cheek before standing. She smelled like Victoria's Secret Exotic bouquet body lotion and her nightly cup of tea, just like she always did, but she felt more like one of those invisible ghosts than my mother as I watched, peeking out beneath my eyelids, her slender form stand hesitantly and walk back out of my room, pausing to straighten one of the stuffed animals resting on my computer desk. "She'll have to know soon enough, won't she?" My mother asked the little bear that had caught her attention, settling it back against the wall and sighing.

I lay awake for the next four hours, convincing myself that nothing had happened, that I would be jolted from sleep with a start as you flung yourself on my bed, pulling back my covers and tickling me, demanding attention as you always had. My shades weren't quite drawn and I watched, unmoving, the slow progression of sunlight creeping along my bare floor, climbing up my walls, diffusing itself throughout my room, bathing the world in both its light and its heat.

Who am I kidding? Huh? Myself, obviously, because no one will ever read this so I don't need to pretend. No happy face to put forward, no family or friends not to worry. I want to swear, swear like no human has ever sworn before, send colorful obscenities skittering skyward, my Hallmark card to the bastard that took you away.

It's been quite awhile since my mom broke news to me that I already knew. It was morning then, and just a few moments ago I saw a school bus from my window, tens of gleeful children, reflected torrents of motion, riding on their way home after school.

"I'm so sorry sweetie," had been all she'd said, defeat and betrayal thick and mournful in her voice. It was everything I'd been fearing for so long, summed up in four little words that could have meant anything. She could have been apologizing for yelling at me about school, or for having accidentally recorded over one of my tapes of My So Called Life, or for using the last of the shampoo. Instead the words mean that I'm going to live a lifetime without you: that I'm going to have to sit through thirty or forty boring Christmas eves without you to bully me into caroling, that there will be first days of summer, hot and slow, that I will see without you. That someday I won't be able to remember how your hair smelled, like lemons and stardust. That I'm not going to get to go to your college graduation with a bullhorn and embarrass the hell out of you with Taylor and Isaac. That you're never going to sit next to me in a movie again, pegging jujubes at me and humming under your breath during what you called "the stupid love scenes." I'm never going to be able to call you up at midnight for no good reason and demand you take me to Dairy Queen. I'll have to go to Angie's wedding without you to support me through the horror of wearing fuchsia taffeta and heels. Maybe someday I'll even get married, and you won't be there, either.

I've been listening to one of my mom's old Sarah McLachlin CDs over and over again, registering each song as it begins and then loosing myself in reflection, zoning out and finding myself surprised several minutes later to realize another track smoothing the rough air around me. One song, though, always catches my attention. "Oh god, the man I love is leaving. Won't you take him when he comes to your door?" Each time I hear these words I begin to cry again, helpless against them, even the tenth or twentieth times I've heard them today. I remember when the CD first came out hearing about the inspiration for the song; Sarah—as my mom and I have always called her, like an old friend—had seen a documentary on TV about a man who was dying of cancer, and after it had ended, she had written from the point of view of his wife: "Hold on to yourself for this is going to hurt like hell." Sarah was so right. I don't understand how she knew, though, how she could say just what I feel without watching the world collapse through my eyes. "My love, you know that you're my best friend. You know I'd do anything for you. My love, let nothing come between us, my love for you is strong and true. Am I in heaven here or am I … at the crossroads I am standing." You're gone, forever, to heaven I hope. Or maybe you're just over, maybe just finished, maybe just totally ceasing to exist when your heart finally stopped beating. That's the scariest, I think, the possibility that there is nothing else. Even hell is something; it's proof that we last, that we're stronger than this feeble flesh that supports us during our time on this Earth.

The CD has cycled through, and the song is back again. "So now you're sleeping peaceful, I lie awake and pray, you'll be strong tomorrow and we'll see another day. We'll praise it, the love, the light, that brings a smile across your face. Oh God if you're out there won't you hear me? I know that we've never talked before…" How many people had been begging God, just as I had, last night? How many thousands of mother's sons and true loves had lain dying? Why hadn't I been heard? How could they be more important than you? How could anyone be more important than you? You who would have changed the world, you who had the power to make it a better place with nothing more than a simple smile or the touch of a hand. You who lived to make other people happy, to have fun and sing songs and read fairytales to blessed children? All you needed was the one thing that your God decided to deprive you of—more time.

-Lydia

Letter 10-

Zac-

Your mom's picture is on the front page of Tulsa World today. It's even in color, a cost-induced rarity in the paper, and she looks beautiful in it, beautiful and broken at once. Early afternoon light showers around her perfectly straight figure, making her seem to glow from within, changing her long hair into the delicately drawn almond-shaped shadow of a renaissance halo. The caption beneath the picture seems almost redundant, simply reading "a mother's grief." One would think that there nothing is in the world but that, the loss of one for whom you would have given your life, that could twist such normally strong features into a mask of sadness, that could leave once twinkling brown eyes so black and filled with pain.

I know that assumption isn't quite right, of course, because I saw the picture being taken, and I know that what is slowly destroying your mother is not just what happened to you. She had tried to be so proud, so brave and unshaken, but I can remember the way her fists had shaken a little as she stopped in front of the explosion of flashes from journalists' cameras, pausing in her long stride just long enough for them to capture an unblurred picture.

I wasn't really sure why I got up this morning. I had nothing to do with my day, nothing to do with my life. School would start tomorrow without me, and the semester could drag to an end without me for all I care. There's no point to it, anyway, not when I know that everything could end in a heartbeat. I had lain in my bed, unmoving, staring at nothing in particular and listening to the empty silence of the house. My mother was at work, after having come into my room several hours before she left. I hadn't moved, or even acknowledged her presence except to roll away from her as she sat on the corner of my bed, presenting her with my back. She had placed a gentle hand on the nape of my neck, rubbing softly at knotted muscles and sighing. "I have to go," she whispered, mostly to herself because I'm sure we both knew that she would get no response from me. "I wish I could stay with you, sweetie." I hate to cry in front of other people, and my mother is no exception. Maybe it scares me so much because I feel like a baby, out of control and completely without power, and especially right now that's the last thing I want.

I remember focusing all of my attention on my hands, on the swirling lines of my fingerprints, on the way my dark skin contrasted against the white of my sheets, and keeping quiet to keep the tears from coming. The distant roar of a neighbor's lawnmower and the faint buzz of traffic on the freeway filled the room as she waited for me to say something.

"You'll be alright… please tell me you'll be okay…" My mother had pleaded after a few minutes, and I felt so bad for scaring her. I think she thought that I would hurt myself somehow, do something permanent that would end the ever-constricting pain in my chest, but I can honestly say that the thought never crossed my mind until I heard the fear of it in her voice. I didn't want her to have to worry about me, but I couldn't say anything; my vocal cords were stinging and strained, burning with the need to speak yet frozen with inability. "Lydie?" I nodded my head, each fraction of an inch it moved costing me what felt like years of my life.

I stayed in bed for a long time after she left, the linens in bumpy disarray around me, not wanting to leave the shelter of my room or turn on the radio or TV and hear something about you. That's still my greatest fear, I think, that I will have to hear the horrible, ugly words about you that I don't want to believe coming from another human being. Finally, though, the aching of sore muscles overruled my better judgement and I slowly levered myself into a sitting position. I had worn your orange tee-shirt to bed last night, the one I've been accidentally-on-purpose forgetting to return to you ever since you left it here at the beginning of summer break. For a long time I had half unconsciously kept it hidden in the back of one of my drawers, taking it out every so often to breathe in that special Zac smell that wafted from it, a mixture of your soap and sweat and a hint of the Tide your mother washes with. I guess I've kept it too long, because it's finally lost the last vestiges of your odor, but it will always remind me of you.  I can imagine no comfort like wrapping myself up in a piece of you, in hiding myself in something that is familiar with the feel of your skin and the sound of your laugh.

These letters to you were scattered across the back seat of my car, remnants from the day I drove home still shaking from my run-in with Taylor at the hospital, and I was beginning to feel like I needed them. I wanted to hold the little stack in my hands, estimating the weight of my worst nightmare, and I wanted to add another to their number. So I went outside.

You know that's normally not such a big deal around here. My neighborhood is quiet and the people here are friendly, but nice enough to tactfully not notice you when you really want to be left alone. So even though there was the possibility that someone would be walking by or sunbathing on their front lawn or something, I didn't worry about having to talk to them. I thought I would just dash out to where my old Escort sat waiting in the driveway, nab the letters, and return to the shelter of my room.

I was halfway there, padding across the weathered pavement of our drive in my bare feet, when I realized something was wrong. There were a bunch of people at the spot where my lawn met the road, all of them lined up on the very edge of our property, facing the house. Two of them were speaking into video cameras, clutching over-sized microphones in their hands, and I could hear some of their words. "19 year old Lydia Redwing, girlfriend of Zac Hanson, was the last to see him alive that fateful night," one of them rattled off with route precision, looking like some sort of refugee from the planet Barbie. The other reporters had 35 millimeter cameras and little flip-top lined pads like the kind I use to take notes at events I’m covering for the school newspaper. They noticed me at the same time that I noticed them, and as one they scuttled forward, blinding me with bright flashes and pushing microphones in my face.

What I did then was dumb, in retrospect, but I just needed to get away. They scared me with their noise and their insistence, with the way they shouted my name in attempts to get me to look at their cameras, with the way wouldn't stay still and wouldn't stop stepped closer even as I backed away from them.

"Lydia! What were Zac's last words?"

"Do you think he knew something was going to happen to him?"

"Have you heard anything from the police about his cause of death?"

"How do you feel, Lydia?"

Their words came rapid fire, sharp and painful. I couldn't say anything, but instead just stared as I flinched away from them. They had obviously given up on staying off our lawn, and the group of them began to surround me, a writhing mass of demons that I couldn't have summoned in my worst dreams.

"Please…" I think I managed to whisper, pressing myself against the side of my car, paralyzed with pain and sadness and indignity. How could they have done that? How could they have waited outside of my house like that, how could they have invaded my privacy, especially now?

"Is it true that Zac was leaving to study abroad in France?"

"When will his funeral be?"

The words all blurred together, whistling through my mind, reminding me of an angry winter storm howling against my window. There was so much motion around me: 10 of them, 15 of them, all vying for my undivided attention, their questions growing more and more horrible every second.

"Do you believe someone murdered him?"

"Where were you when he was injured?"

In a blind fury I rushed, shoving roughly through them, sure that I would die if I had to endure the space of another breath filled with their questions or the dazzling brilliance of their cameras. My vision was blurry and my pulse racing, thudding in my veins until I was running giddily away from them, not caring where I was going, only desperate to be out of their vision. I ended up behind my house, panting weakly and fighting back gulping sobs. It took me several seconds to calm down enough to realize what I had done. I could still hear them out front, comparing thoughts on me or placing calls to editors on their cellular phones, and all around me there was nothing but my empty backyard and the circle of forest and neighboring lawns that had always before seemed so protectively enveloping. Right then it was suffocating, though, making it impossible for me to breathe or think, and there was no where I could go. The reporters were out front, the back door was doubtlessly locked, and from what I could see the nearby lawns were abandoned. After checking my hypothesis, I realized that the sliding glass doors leading from the kitchen to the backyard were indeed bolted, and that all the windows on the lawn side of the house were shut. There was nothing I could do, and nowhere I could go. The tears finally won out, and I sunk, shuddering with sobs, onto the back steps. You were all I could think of as I cried, as a thousand tiny fragments of our history together floated through my mind: you under the stars, silhouette silvered with light; you holding my shaking hand and whispering soothingly to me on the chairlift the one time you talked me into trying skiing; you pulling Zoë onto your shoulders so she could see over the crowd and to the Tulsa Zoo’s penguin display. Most of all, I kept thinking of Old Orchard, how you had saved me that summer day so long ago, and how badly I wished you could have been there to save me today.

I might have been there for hours, because even after I had cried until my throat was tingling and my eyes were on fire, at last drained of tears, I had still not moved. I could hear them occasionally, laughing or talking, slamming their car doors or opening soda cans with a crunching fizz. Tulsa's reporters were apparently tailgating in front of my house, and I was the lion they were waiting to see pacing aimlessly behind bars. I don't really remember what I thought about when I was out there; it's all a mash of anger and sadness, but I remember thinking that my watchers must have called for back-up when I heard a new car engine gasp to a halt somewhere nearby. I peered through the sliding door and into the kitchen, past the table cluttered with newspapers and cards, and squinted through the glass panels of the front door. I recognized your mom's car immediately, but I wasn't sure if I should be relieved or even more horrified at this turn of events.

She could distract the reporters and I could get back into the house, but I didn't want anyone, not even your mother who I loved just like I loved my own, to see me swollen from crying and in my battered pjs. I clutched the shirt, too baggy even for you, around me and curled myself back against the cool solidity of the doorway. I could hear a flurry of activity as the reporters shouted questions at your mother, not entirely different from the ones they had been asking me.

"What was Zac doing driving home that late at night? Do your children have curfews?"

"How is the rest of your family handling this?"

"When will the burial services be held?" Your mother didn't answer any of them, instead I could watch her advancing, steadfast and unyielding, past the clutter of press. She walked up to ring the bell on my front door.

After a few moments with no answer she had called out, "Lydia? I called your Mom and she said you were here. I just want to drop some of Zac's things off for you. Can I come in?" Still no answer came from the house, and I could see your mom shifting her weight uncertainly. She still hadn't noticed me watching from across the kitchen, and I wasn't sure what to do. She looked like an angel, I thought, her impossibly long and smooth blond hair shifting with her every movement, her face a mask of self-imposed serenity. "Lydia? Please baby, answer the door…I'm worried about you."

I finally knocked with my flattened hand against the back door, not wanting to leave her standing out there in the scrutiny of the reporters. When she saw me her face slipped and twisted, her eyes beginning to glisten with unshed tears. She hurried away from the door, and I could see her trying to subtly wipe her fists across her eyes. The howl of the reporters started up again as she stepped away from the door, but stopped as your mom headed around the corner of my house and into the backyard. They didn't dare come here, didn't dare totally abandon their charade of respectable behavior, and so they let her go unharrassed.

I gathered up the hem of your shirt and rubbed it across my face, trying desperately to erase the tear stained paths on my cheeks and quiet my still runny nose.

She silently rounded the corner, not speaking until she was standing only feet in front of where I still huddled against the back door. "I'm so sorry." Her voice cracked on the last word, and I could see her working hard to stay strong for me. You mother always wants to be everyone's mother, and I know that seeing me like that was just as painful for her as it would have been if it was you or Taylor or Isaac or Zoë.

"They ambushed me and I didn't know what to do. They were so loud and I was afraid of their questions…" despite my best attempts to remain calm, I quickly escalated towards hysteria and my words came faster and faster. " I didn't know what to do." She held her arms out to me, apparently not trusting herself to speak.

I started crying again as I stood and stepped into her hug, shaking with nerves and having sat too long in one motionless position, afraid to draw the attention of the reporters. At that moment I felt some of the tension melt away from me as I finally leaned on someone, finally gave up trying to act unhurt and just let myself react to what was happening all around me. "I still can't believe any of this is happening," I hiccuped my way through a few words after the embrace at last soothed me enough to speak.

"The back door is looked?" she inquired softly, gathering my hair in one of her cool hands and pressing a gentle kiss against my forehead.

"I didn't want to go back out front because I knew that they were there so I just sat down," I answered, clenching my eyes shut against another barrage of tears.

"The front is open, though?" I just nodded. "You wait right here, Lydie, and I'll go in the front and open this one up."

"You can't do go back out there! They're still there.. I heard them!" I probably sounded a little panicked, or at least I sure felt like I did. You mother just rewarded me with a watery smile.

"I'm used to this sort of thing, sweetie. We spent a lot of years dealing with people like this, and if there's one thing I learned it's that all you have to do is ignore them and they'll give up." I can't remember exactly what she said to reassure me, but it sent ghostly whispers through my mind of all of those times I had seen you and your brothers trying to hide your faces on the cover of the National Enquirer, or playing Frisbee when you thought you were alone in an alley behind the Trump Plaza in New York City. This was how you spent a lot of your growing up years, I guess. Hunted like this, always afraid of what would show up on the news or in the paper. I don't know how you survived it… I don't know how I will survive it.

As she marched back around the corner and into press’ range of sight, I could hear them screaming at her again. "Diana! Diana!" They tried again and again, but she remained silent until I could see her climbing the porch steps and coming to face the door. Our gazes met, and I could see her harden, see the lines of her face smooth out as she frowned, an expression I had once thought totally foreign to anyone in your family. She had made it so far without giving them what they wanted, years without breaking down and demanding that they leave her family alone. But right then, I saw her give up on it. I saw the pain of knowing that her golden child was forever gone to this world take over, and I saw the certainty that life could never be the same beat back her instincts.

She turned slowly to face the pack of press, her back straight, her posture unforgiving and proud. "I know that we asked to be noticed, to be part of your world." She began, her voice different than I had ever heard it, fierce and angry. "I know that by being successful and by having our history, we have opened our lives to people, for good or bad, and I would not ask this for my family.  But please, I beg of you, leave her alone. She's just a little girl, and she did nothing to deserve this."

That must have been when they took the picture that ended up in Tulsa World, when she put herself in their line of fire in an attempt to protect me. Who knows, maybe it worked, because it wasn't, after all, my picture under the headline, "local youth dead; family mourns."

-Lydia

Letter 11-

Zac-

I've taken to carrying a notebook with me everywhere I go, a receptacle within which I try to recapture the shreds of our shared past that are always echoing in my mind. I don't know why I write so obsessively, but I've guess it's not really that surprising. Somehow I've always felt like if I didn't write things down they had never really happened, like the only way to really appreciate the world around me was to capture it in words that would never be lost, never be misplaced, never fade like a memory could. So that's it, probably. Because above all else, I write because I want to remember you. I don't want to forget one expansive grin, one introspective glance, one dirty joke, or even one single breath. All of these things added up to form you, they were building blocks that nature and genetics and maybe even God had spent a billion years perfecting, crafting, honing until you shone like no one else, until you were brighter than any star in the sky.

I'm scribbling away in the dark, still sitting in the driver's seat of Bob, as you had affectionately dubbed my car in honor of Mr. Magee's old convertible. I've pretty much given up on the concept of lines, and despite my best efforts I can feel these hurried words wavering across the paper, untouched by reason or legibility. I bet I won't even be able to read this tomorrow morning, but it doesn't matter. I have to get it out, pin down the scene that's running through my head so it can't escape.

I told my mom that I was going over to Angie's and I really started to. I drove down the block in the gathering dusk, took a turn onto Peoria and headed out to the pleasant suburbia past Brookside, but I stopped here on this hill. I can see it all, the arrow straight streets of our city, the distant, undistinguishable darkness of the plains beyond it, and the stars shivering low above it all. You would remember the spot, I'm sure. I've rolled down my windows and the thick, heated late August breeze that never seems to abate is gliding through the car—ruffling the pages of the notebook upon which I write, tugging my hair out of its loose ponytail, causing my keys, still in the ignition, to twinkle softly with light and sound.

Remember how we used to drive around? Just the two of us? Tonight it all seems so close, almost like I should look over and see you slumped in the passenger seat, staring at the brightness of Tulsa rivaling the smattering of cloudy stars that grace the deep navy sky. The black-dark road at night must hold some kind of magic, I think, some sort of glamour that tricks the eye and the soul into suspending reality. No one could touch us on our rides; no one would want to. We were liberated from time, set off in our own little dream world, free to concentrate on nothing but each other, on nothing but the words.

In any other time, or in any other place, focusing so completely on you would have felt wrong. It would have been overstepping our definition of what we were, and it would have been crossing boundaries erected willfully by our claim of 'just friends.' But here, hidden by the impenetrable depth of midnight, we shared everything.

I remember telling you my dreams, and how you would whip up some crazy neo-Freudian reasoning for them. You would tell me your fears and I would do my best to make them go away.

"In one hundred years I'll never be remembered," you would whisper a variant of this at some point of almost every one of our rides. "Or, even worse, I'll be the baby Mmmbop boy. I'll be the one who helped dumb down music in the '90s, the one who opened the door for troops of pretty faced marionettes…"

It was an uncomfortable place for you to be, I know, afraid to live a life like everyone else's, yet afraid to be different for the wrong reasons. You didn't want to be another faceless mass of wasted potential, a drone who slid through history—a worker, a husband, maybe even a father—yet never really made an impact. I can't help but think that maybe this very dreaded eventuality had comforted you a little, though. You still could be another nameless face in the crush of humanity, there still was the possibility of slipping anonymously into a reality that didn't set you apart as something used up, something that maybe was once special but now just another relic, another Rhino music CD retrospective.

"It's not true," I would always say, in a voice so hushed and tender it hurt, knowing you'd never tell anyone else how you really felt. This certainty made me feel honored, and chosen. It was me. I was the one person in the whole world who you knew would understand, and I loved that feeling of being above all others—of being so trusted by you, who until me had been taught to trust no one. I think you felt the same, and I think you treasured my love just like I did yours.

That's what it was, you know. Love. But we never admitted it, even though it maybe wasn't even the type we were so damned afraid of. It was the kind of love that made us be able to share a glance and know instantly what was on each other's mind, the kind of love that meant you were always there when I needed you.

Where are you now, I wonder? Heaven? Do they have a waiting period? A quarantine to make sure you don't carry some taint or some soil of this world into the next? I once read a book that said in heaven you could eat anything you wanted and sleep with famous people. What sacrilege, eh? Your mom would probably have passed out at the suggestion, but if Heaven is supposed to be such a great place I can't imagine the typical vision of clouds and harps cutting it for you. I can, however, quite clearly see you eating tray upon tray of your father's meatballs, which of course would be served in every restaurant in your personal afterlife. And look out Cindy Crawford. Poor girl.

In the car, watching you tear yourself to pieces with worry and uncertainty, I would sometimes reach out. It was never something I planned, never something I could stop, but nothing else in the world has ever felt so right to me as running a hand down your slightly prickly cheek or smoothing your eternally messy hair back into its golden waves. "I'm not going to be anything, Lydia."

"You are, Zac," I would plead, "you already are. You're so much, you just don't see it. Every day you make people happy... you do card tricks for the waitresses at Harry's, you give Zoë piggy backs on your back yard, you share the way you love to read with all those kids at the library…"

"It's not enough. I need to be something, not just Zac Hanson. I need to be… anything." You would be so frustrated, so afraid, and once I remember you pressing your cheek to my hand. On that night we sat right where I am, touching in the dark, distanced in our own space and time, far from our everyday lives and their restrictions.

"Just by being you, just by seeing the world as you do, you are making it a better place. Maybe there won't be a monument with your name on it in Washington, DC, but that doesn't make you any less of a hero, Zac. When Zoë looks at you it's in her eyes, you know. If you learn to see that, you won't have to be so afraid…" I would try to explain over and over again how you made Zoë happy, how you made me happy, how the glow of you touched everything in your life and made it special, made it clean and safe and strong.

"I don't know what to do. Why am I even here? Should I be a missionary? I owe God for this life he's given me, but I don't know how to repay him," You had mused softly during that one night that hovers in the forefront of my thoughts.

Tulsa was a toy map glittering in its precision beneath us, just as it is right now. It was winter then, and each light was embraced by a rainbow halo, a cloak of blue and gold and silver twisted and tiny. That's what made me stop here tonight, beneath the spilled cosmos of glowing stars and before the unbroken calm sheen of the Arkansas River. The memory of another night in this place is so thick that I almost can't write fast enough to keep up with it.

"You know what? If your God really gave you your life, then he must have had a plan. He knew what he was doing when he created you just like you are; he had some reason for you to be here. And it will find you." I wanted to believe that so much, and I still do. That somewhere there is a roadmap for every life, set out just as clear and evenly paced as the streets of Tulsa. It would be so easy to hope that there was reason behind this rhyme, that we couldn't really blunder through the so-precious time we have on this earth, never finding or touching anything permanent, anything real. It's the ghost of that night that's burning my mind right now, incinerating it into a thousand volcanic slivers, crumbly and ashen.

What I said inspired you, I guess, because in one fluid motion you had thrown open your car door and hopped out. "What are you doing?" I remember asking, flustered and confused in that special way that only you can be at the root of.

"Come on." The old passion had crept back into your voice by the time you had walked all the way around the car to open my door with a squeal of hesitant metal, shrugging your shaggy hair from your eyes and holding a hand out to me. Our breath had turned to mist before us, the silvery haze of life creeping skyward from our lungs, as you tugged me onto the roof of the car. I can still remember the sharp pain of the frigid metal biting through my jeans and the way you sighed as you sat cross-legged, entranced by the diamonds of glitter all around us.

We just watched for a long time, until my fingers and my nose were numb, but neither of us seemed to even dare breathe until you finally broke the silence: "People used to see shapes in the stars. I never understood the constellations, though," you had admitted. "They just never fit with what I see."

"And what is that?" I had asked, shivering a little, but weak with desire to know the answer to my question. I didn't mean just to inquire what the patterns of the stars seemed to be for you, I guess, but I really wanted to know what the pattern of life was for you. Zac, you were so happy; you were so strong for everyone that needed you. But inside, you were even more scared than they were, you were afraid that you were worthless and that you didn't have the capability to be valuable. It took me a long time to realize that even when you smiled on the outside, on the inside you were so incredibly sad.

"I don't think they're supposed to be part of a big picture, really. They aren't bears or hunters of twins at all, because each one is its own miracle. They're a thousand billion years of chemistry and fate, all balled up into a pinprick of light, so they don't belong together like connect the dots. Each one is too precious to see as anything but a single work of magic." Someday I guess maybe you would have been a poet. I could never think of anything like that. I'm not built to treasure every single instant like you are—or were—to see that everything is so wonderful and so precious.

"Yeah." The word was inadequate somehow, but it was all I could say. We didn't talk again that night, but instead drank our fill of the half divine and half human light show visible from the highest hill in Tulsa. I can't believe I'm sitting here without you, or that I'm watching from a distance as thousands of lives are being acted out in our city, and that yours isn't one of them.

Maybe that's why I have to write this all out, why I have to capture your words and your memory. It may not be made of stone, or dreamed into existence by a famous artist, but these words, this sadness, and this love... they are your monument.

--Lydia

Letter 12

Zac-

Taylor showed up at my house today, and I don't know what to think about it, other than that he's an insane jerk. No matter how much I try to stop, it's impossible to even slow the nasty thoughts about him that are spinning through my mind, speeding my pulse and making my chest tight with anger. I know he's gone through a lot, and that I'm not the only one who feels like their world has been destroyed by what has happened to you. The more I think about it, though, the more I just really feel like he's run out of excuses.

The day—up until the doorbell interrupted me while doing the dinner dishes, that is—had almost seemed soothing, like the unbreakable calm that comes after a tornado, all clear skies and gentle breezes. I was feeling calm for the first time in almost a week, daring to hope I could go to bed tonight without fearing what I might see when I closed my eyes.

My newfound serenity began this morning when my mom had finally put to rest our long-running argument about me returning to school, calling the registrar's office and withdrawing me from the courses I had signed up for the fall semester. I can't help but be glad, even though I know we can't afford to loose the portion of my already-paid tuition that won't be refunded. I haven't felt this kind of release since I was a ten year old who hadn't done her homework, hiding under a comforter in the milky rays of an early winter dawn, dizzy with relief when her school was announced as one of the blessed few to be closed due to snow.

I know my mom is right and that I should go back, but I just can't do it. I can't stand leaving after what's happened, can't stand going on with my life when I know that you haven't been granted the privilege of doing the same.

When the doorbell rang my mind had been delightfully numb and my thoughts pleasantly empty of everything but the feel of the warm, sudsy water on my hands. I had been half afraid to answer the door, thinking my afternoon's press-free run to the Hideaway to pick up my check had been a fluke. Not only had the reporters not given up on me, I thought, but they had also grown more bold in their attempts to snare an interview. I waked through the cluttered living room, thinking that if you could see the mess in there you would be teasing my mom mercilessly, squawking "it's a very good thing" in that high, flat voice you used to mimic Martha Stuart.

I had hesitantly peeked through the front door, careful not to expose myself through the glass paneling as I scoped out the porch, hoping that whoever was there had given up and gone away in the time it had taken me to dry my hands. If I had even vaguely suspected who had rung the doorbell I would have known he hadn't left—Taylor never gives up when there's something he wants.

Of course even then there was no question that he wanted something, even as I watched him pacing, a tiger in its cage, across my front porch, his gaze riveted unwaveringly on the door. He had managed to disappear whenever I was around since I had overhead him talking to you at the hospital, and I had never been quite sure if it was intentional or mere accident. It's not as though I had seen all that much of him under normal circumstances, anyway, but his absence seemed glaring to me now that I suspected a motive.

I found myself opening the door against my better judgement, and at the furious protest of my every muscle. I guess a lot of this detail is coming to me in retrospective, but even when I heard the squealing of the screen door as Taylor advanced I realized that I had already made one mistake today. This morning hadn't been the calm after a tornado; it was merely the eye of the storm.

I had no idea what to do when confronted with the piercing blue of his eyes, sharp in the half darkness and intensified by the smudged, bruised looking rings that surrounded them. Should I have said hi? Told him to get lost? Cried? All three of these options seemed like viable possibilities as I watched him step forward, half you, half an unfathomable stranger. I was saved, though, protected from the absurd need to begin a conversation by an anxious clearing of his throat.

"My mom said she dropped some of Zac's stuff off here the other day." He didn't acknowledge my presence at all, instead speaking to a fixed point in space several feet above my head. I couldn't help but feel sorry for Taylor as I watched him fidgeting on my front porch, running his hands again and again through his unwashed hair and straightening the too baggy, paint stained tee-shirt he wore.

"She did, actually," I answered, the words of his reply running over my cautious sentence. I guess he didn't care what I had to say.

"I want it back." It took me a second to even realize he was speaking, and even longer for my sluggish mind to assimilate the meaning of his words.

"What?"

"I want the stuff back. I didn't get a chance to go through his things before she gave them away. There's some stuff…" he paused for a minute and I stepped back, partially in shock and partially in reaction to the claustrophobia that overtook me as he continued to lean in closer, stepping over the threshold and into the living room. "There's some stuff I don't want to part with."

I don't know for sure why Taylor seemed so glaringly alien and out of place in my cluttered and threadbare living room. Maybe it's because there's something about him—some delicate facet of his perfect bone structure, some artistic sensibility of his lanky form, some singeing heat radiating from his luxurious golden tone—that makes everything around him seem shoddy and mundane. When seen in contrast to the infernally angelic physical beauty that is Taylor, everything else seems wrong, imperfect, shabby: the rooster knick-knacks my mother obsessively collects are poorly made and dust covered; our worn plaid couch had probably came from K-mart a decade ago, and is pathetic and ravaged; the slightly warped hardwood floor of the kitchen is stained and unswept.

"She didn't give me much, mostly just pictures of me and Zac and a couple of his books." He finally looked at me, and the words of denial that had been forming in my mind shriveled and died. Taylor's eyes were bloodshot and red, like he had been crying for hours, for days, for lifetimes. I couldn't say no.

I walked through the living room, past the kitchen, and down the hall to my tiny bedroom, half hoping that he wouldn't follow. I wasn't so lucky, though, and the silence that washed over us was several adjectives beyond awkward as he trailed behind, striding blindly through the rooms in which I grew up. I found myself praying that my mother would come home from her trip to the grocery store, certain that she could soothe him, undoubting that she would know how to touch him and what words to say to bring him a degree of the peace he has been long without. Right then all I really wanted was for her to stop him from taking what I had left of you.

There was no sound of an engine in the drive, though, and no slamming of a car door trumpeting her arrival, so I stepped clumsily up on my twin bed, stretching to reach the top shelf of my bookcase, and grabbed the small cardboard box your mom had dropped off.

Weird that I feel like I just made such a huge confession by telling you where I had put the shoebox. You know what that means, right? You would understand that up there your memory is with everything I hold sacred: the battered envelope of photographs of my mother and father when they were still together, still happy; the soccer ball sent to me by Mia Hamm after NBC ran that news segment on the Comets' state championships; the labyrinth I had made in a middle school shop class; the Fodor's French guide book you had given me to hold for you. Do you remember that day?

The first thing I think of is the November sunlight, and how it filtered down around us, looking weak and pale, like it had traveled through the density of a thousand tears just to reach us. That isn't a very cheery way to describe the cool, yellow glow, but that day I wasn't exactly in a cheery mood, so I suppose my memory is excusable. I had gotten home from my first college interview not ten minutes before you arrived, and I had been lying at the edge of our lawn ever since.

I had been embraced within a musty smelling pile of brittle fallen leaves, watching the wavering silhouettes of the few of their compatriots that were still clinging bravely to heavenward reaching branches.

"You look like a college viewbook," you had said, startling me out of my dazed reverie. You were probably right, now that I think of it. Red cardigan sweater, black and red plaid skirt, and dark tights do seem to scream of the creative fiction that is a viewbook, those progegandas created by a public relations department to look how college should be. Never how it is, I've since learned. The viewbook is always pretty pictures of pretty people sitting around enjoying themselves in pretty places, but the things that aren't shown are probably be the ones that would really matter most to any prospective student: the stress, the binge drinking, the tiny cinderblock dorm rooms and the lousy food.

I was like a viewbook in more ways than the superficial then, fumbling through a quest to find a college that would please both my mother and me. She wanted Oral Roberts—correction—she was salivating over Oral Roberts. I could live at home to save money; I would get an amazing education amongst a bunch of people who believed in the same God that she did. Those were pretty much all the reasons why I hated the idea right there. Staying in Tulsa was not part of my master plan at all, and I hated the suspicion that was building in me that I would actually end up attending ORU, whether I wanted to or not.

"There are some obvious reasons for that." The tremor of anger and fear that must certainly have shaken my voice probably didn't come to a shock to you, because after all that's why you where there, unannounced and uninvited, throwing yourself with a soft grunt onto the leaves beside me.

"Well? How was it?" I can't remember another autumn quite like that in Tulsa, all cast in brilliant shades of yellow, red, orange, and gold. If there is a God, I think times like that must be created when he's cleaning out his workshop, using all the leftover bits in one brilliantly short lived display of creative prowess. It seems like I can remember thinking that I could almost smell the color, crackly and lingering like the unmistakable scent of lightning.

"It was fine." Odd how words can mean one thing when you see them on paper like this, but they can say something completely different when heard. I'm relatively sure that anyone who had witnessed my cold, dead response would have been well aware that "fine" was not what I had wanted out of the occasion. I had half hoped for "terrible," maybe even for the good fortune to get kicked off ORU's campus, asked never to return. That would certainly have made my life all the simpler.

"Bummer," you flipped onto your stomach, rattling the leathery leaves and watching me as I continued to regard the leafy patterns on the washed out blue sky above us. You weren't sure what to say, but the sympathy in your eyes was more than enough, and before I could even fully return to my misery I found myself smiling.

"It's silly to make such a big deal out of this," I had finally admitted, kicking at the leaves and sending fluttering into the air a fiery shower of them.

"This is the rest of your life, though," You had whispered, transferring your gaze to the colorful results of my motion. "Favor?"

"Anything," I put everything into my drama queen answer, all my worries, fears and uncertainty.

"I got a book today, but I don't want to take it home. I don't want my mom to see it." Your confession was faint, uncertain. I fully expected the your contraband material to be some dirty magazine, but instead of producing a Penthouse from the depths of your blue backpack you had held out for my examination a thick, Eiffel Tower fronted, Fodor's guide to France.

"That's it? Why don't you want your mom to see it?"

"The same reason why you can't tell your mom that ORU is your worst nightmare. She wants me here, to stay in Tulsa, to go to college here and to live down the street so I can attend family barbecues every Sunday. Taylor and Isaac have already escaped, so I think I'm her only hope left from the three of us." You were flipping through the lightweight, glaringly white pages of the tome, running your hands over maps of the metropolitan, pictures of Notre Dame, and scientific breakdowns of how many Francs make up a dollar. "She's worried that we're screwed up because of what happened when we were young; that we were tainted back then so we won't ever be really happy. She wants to watch out for me, in short, just like every other mother in the world."

"Were you? Tainted, I mean?" We never really talked about your days as 'Zac Hanson', that creation of circumstance and collective imagination. To me you were always just Zac, my friend who just happened to be able to play the drums like a pro.

"Isn't everybody tainted when they grow up? I mean… there's no one perfect way to guarantee happiness, and I think I have just as good a shot at it as anyone else. Maybe other people grew up living their whole lives in one house, maybe other people didn't work ten hours a day when they were eleven years old. But most other people have never been interviewed by CNN or heard their name called on Grammy night, either." You finally settled on a section of the book, your attention focused on a picture of an oddly shaped ivory building.

"That's Sacre Coer," you had explained, drawing on the knowledge of many visits to Paris. "It's incredibly beautiful, built up on top of this hill that you can see from practically anywhere in the city. It's so white that it's almost blinding when the sun reflects off it, and I used to think it looked like a giant softserve vanilla ice creamy."

"Sacred Heart, huh?" I shoved myself over, nervous at first to get so close to you. I eventually gave up, though, and rested my head on your shoulder, allowing me a better vantage point to see the pages of the book you held aloft.

"You have to come with me, so you can translate until I figure out the language. 'Merci' is the only word I know." You had said it with that slight Oklahoma accent of yours, rounding out the 'I' to sound like you were begging for mercy.

"Mere-see," I remember carefully annunciated for you, exaggerating the pronunciation.

"Mere-see." I could feel your chest rise and fall with every breath as I lay there, surrounded by your warmth.

After searching for another page, you had speculatively said "this one you would love most of all," sliding one arm under my shoulders and circling it around me. Back then, before the word had real meaning to me, I had thought I wanted to die. I didn't think I could ever feel so happy or so safe as when you unselfconsciously wrapped me up in the smell, the touch, and the feel of you. "It's stuck a courtyard right in the middle of this block of office buildings, and it looks so out of place in a sea of parking spots and pitted cement. That just makes it all the prettier, though." You paused for two breaths, leaving me a little jealous of all the opportunities you've had. I've never been anywhere in my life—other than to the beach and once to LA to visit my grandmother—and you have done literally everything there is to do, and literally gone everywhere there is to be.

"What's really so awesome about it is what's inside, though. Downstairs the walls are all painted these totally unimaginable shades of red and blue, so bright it's hard to believe that they belong in a church. And upstairs…it seems like there are hardly any walls. All around you is stained glass, and it's so beautiful that it always made me want to cry."

I was enraptured in your words, caught in the sound and sensation of them like a five-year-old being serenaded with her favorite bedtime story. "If you go at this one certain time of day, right after dawn, the sun shines in all the windows at once and it's like nothing else in the whole world. Everything is the colors of the glass, and you're set adrift in this ocean of red, blue, and green so thick that it's almost hard to breathe."

It was kind of scary to hear the dreamy tone in your voice as spoke about it, confirming my suspicions that our time together might be limited. "You're really going to go, aren't you?"

"You'll hold onto the book for me until I need it?" You had ignored my question, craning your neck to look down into my face.

"Of course I will."

A breeze came up before I could even finish speaking, rustling the leaves around us and liberating a few of their tree-bound compatriots, sending them sailing on elaborately choreographed earthward spirals. "Did you know that if you catch a falling leaf before it hits the ground, you get to make a wish? You had set the hefty travel guide down and slid away from me, leaving life suddenly a very much colder place.

"You just made that up?" I had half accused, half asked as you grabbed my hands and sent me rocketing to my feet with stunningly little effort.

"Nope. It's true. Just like blowing out the candles on a birthday cake or wishing at 11:11"

Anyone who actually catches a leaf, I decided that day, is more than entitled to a wish. Even when you're completely and utterly positive that you know right where a leaf is going to fall, it inevitably changes paths, ending up hitting the ground feet away from the location you had staked out for it. We had strategized at first, following the sloping descent of the leaves with our eyes until they were just above our heads, then stretching out, intending to pluck them from the sky. Soon enough we gave up on that stunningly ineffective tactic, though, and instead simply raced around, first indiscriminately stalking one leaf and then another as they rained down all around us.

By rights we each should have received a wish that day, but I guess I wasted mine. Taylor saw the Fodor's guide on my shelf and took it down, flipping through the pages and wrinkling his nose as two faded, dried out leaves fluttered to my carpeted floor at his feet. "I'll take it all," he had said. "Give it back later."

-Lydia

Letter 13

Dear Zac-

"'Farewell,' she said. 'I hope you hear many more songs’—which is the best way she could think of to say good-by to a butterfly."  That line keeps running through my head, a solemn chant that I can't escape.

I went over to Ledgewood Estates for a little while today, despite my horror at the prospect of coming face to face with Taylor, intending to drop off a stuffed teddy bear my mother had bought for Zoë. It was good to see your mother her answering the door, to hear her sweet, solid voice, to smell her no-nonsense scent of baby shampoo and Dove, to reassure myself that you and everything about you hadn't just been a dream.

I don't think I've ever felt as comfortable as I do in your house, maybe not even in my own. There's something in the air there—something always noisy, always cluttered, always crackling with activity—that attracts me. It's like magnets, I guess. I'm calm, quiet and still, so of course I feel drawn towards my polar opposite: you and your family.

when I first climbed the back stairs up to Zoe’s room, clutching the small brown bear in one hand, she, usually so like you, so outgoing and friendly, had seemed like a different little girl, subdued and shy. She had sat, legs tucked up underneath her, on the crayola-bright blue rug of her bedroom, playing with a battered and bruised Speak and Spell which looked old enough to have belonged to Ike. "What is the opposite of white?" Inquired the computerized voice of the game, sounding a little the worse for the wear.I had just stood on the threshold watching her, knowing full well that Zoë had felt my presence but not wanting to interrupt her. "B", "L", the machine recited as she cautiously pressed its keys, her waist length white-blonde hair curling out of control all around her. I waited for her to ponderously seek out the letters with her tiny hands, her back held stiff and straight. "A", "C", "K." The voice stuck a little on the K, stuttering hollowly through the unnaturally neat room for an instant.

"Zoë?" Your mom had come up stealthily behind me as I watched your little sister, a sad smile on her face. Zoë still didn't look up for several seconds, instead busying herself by listening to the congratulatory "good job" emanating from the Speak and Spell. "Lydia came by to see you, and she brought a present for you from her mom. Why don't you put that toy away for a little while?"

Your mom, her hand strong at the small of my back, exerted just enough pressure to force me to step warily into the room. I didn't want to move, I guess because I felt a little of her shyness. What could I say to her, when all I could think about was how not to not cry at her every motion? She reminds me so much of you, you know. Not that it's surprising; you were always her idol. For you she watched a thousand screenings of Star Wars, for you she devoted all of her time to becoming the finest wing Tulsa's pee-wee soccer league has ever seen, for you she had sought out the isolation of her stuffy third floor bedroom on this day, heavy with summer and honeysuckle and the sound of children laughing and splashing in a neighbor's pool, all drifting through the open window.We regarded each other in silence for a few moments, taking stock. Her unblinking blue eyes were shadowed by dark rings of sleeplessness and reddened with shed tears, and she somehow looked so much more tiny and fragile than I ever remember her being. "Hi, Zoë." I finally managed against the weight of her stare. "What's up?"

Her attention shifted back to the Speak and Spell before she quietly replied, "I’m playing."

"She's been having a tough time," your mother breathed in my ear. "We haven't even been able to get her into the bathtub since Tuesday." It struck me as weird that she told me that, I think mostly because it was like she was talking to another grown up.

There's a solidarity between the non-kids in the world, some sort of it's-us-against-them common expectation of understanding. Those few words, that little confidence, proved to me that she really does see me as an adult, an equal someone who could understand. It wasn't a comfortable sensation, Zac, or a privilege I feel like I want. I just wish I could be like Zoë, able to put life on hold just because I know it can never be the same. But I can't hide, because I'm a grown up, and I’m supposed to know how to deal with this. God, I so don't though, not at all. I cry all the time. I cried after leaving your house, as I sat in the parking lot of Burger King, my forehead against the hot plastic of Bob's steering wheel, burning with helpless tears. I don't want to be an equal right now, maybe not even ever again.

Your mom had stepped out of the room, pulling the white-painted door shut behind her. I walked to Zoe's side, slipping into a sitting position on the rug next to her. Every toy except the red Speak and Spell was neatly organized on those low-rising bookshelves that line her walls, every dirty article of clothing that would normally have been balled up in a riotous heap on the floor had miraculously disappeared, and Zoë's bed had even been made, the flowered spread pulled high and smooth across the twin frame. Your little sister, the tiny ball of energy that never stops moving and never stops talking, was like a stranger to me.

"Do you like that game?" I finally asked after she had answered several more of the Speak and Spell's inquiries.

"Not really." There was no emotion in her words, and no explanation in her tone.

"Then why are you playing it?"

There was no answer for a long time, so long I thought that she was going to ignore me. "There's nothing else to do. Mommy's busy. Nobody else is home and I found this in…" her voice disappeared and she blinked rapidly, still not taking her eyes off the deep black screen before her. I looked over her shoulder at it, watching the unnaturally straight lines that constructed the Speak and Spell's neon green letters winking in and out of existence. In the thin line of blank space between the brightly colored buttons and the display was a name, written in childish characters with a wide black marker: Zac Hanson.

Zoë resisted as I pulled her into my lap, struggling ever so slightly against my grip, as I wrapped my arms tight around her delicate frame. "My mom sent this for you," I whispered, giving her the teddy bear as she finally settled against me, sliding ever closer and coming to rest her head on my shoulder.

"I love you, Lydie." She barely whispered, a sad, sweet angel winding her tiny hands into my hair. "Please don't leave me."

"I love you too, Zoë. And when someone loves you they don't ever leave, not really." I don't understand how I ended up here, how it is that this is my life. How has any of this has happened to me, or to you, or to your family? We're just people, and no one deserves to hurt like we do. We don't deserve to be caught up in some crazy drama that we didn't audition for, didn't want to be a part of, didn't even dream could exist before it inescapably swooped in to take over the everyday of our lives.

"They do too leave! Don't you see? All the time! Zac's gone and he loved me. Tay is leaving, and he said he loved me, too." She was clutching tight at me in rapidly cresting desperation, panic sudden and fierce like a tornado, the shreds of her aloof coolness dissolving into the salty tears that were rapidly soaking through my T-shirt.

Her fears are so much like my own, and I wonder if this is how your mom feels, too? Abandoned and betrayed by so many things she always believed in, always trusted?

"Sometimes bad things happen, things nobody can control. And this is one of them. I know that Zac would have given anything in the world to stay with you, anything at all." I rocked slowly with Zoë curled up on my lap, my breath constricted to almost nothing by the anxiety of her grip, but not willing or able to move her.

"Tay's leaving and he doesn't have to. He got his plane ticket back to L.A. yesterday…he doesn't love me…" Her words all ran together, a jumble of uncontrolled misery and terror.

"He loves you so much, Zoë. You know that." She can’t even remember a time when Taylor lived at home, can she? He's probably almost as much of a stranger to her as he is to me, almost as much as an unsolvable enigma.

"Nuh-uh." She muttered, a little spent, maybe even a little comforted, but still leaking slow tears. I can't even believe I defended him; Taylor is the biggest jerk I've ever met, a megalomaniacal monument to self-centered creep-hood. I can't even believe that I wish I hadn't defended him. When there's a six year old you love very much having a nervous breakdown in your arms, all of a sudden it's anything to make the pain go away.

"He has to go back to his home, sweetie. He's got a job to do and people who depend on him there. But that doesn't mean he doesn't love you."

The silence hanging all around us stretched to fill the space of many heartbeats before Zoë spoke again. "He yelled at me today for going into Zac's room. He said I was a brat." It was a quick confession, but nothing she could have said would have made me want to hurt your brother quite like that. The torture chamber is too good for him, for making her cry, for making her unhappy.

"He's just so sad, Zoë." I made excuses for him, just like I knew that you would if you could. I guess now, hours later when the heavy weight of my anger is finally abating a little bit, I can admit that Taylor really does love you. You've always been a part of him, and now you're gone and he's left torn and empty and hollow. But lashing out at us, me and Zoë and your mother and your family, can be doing nothing but make him hurt worse. "Being sad doesn't make it okay for him to yell at you, but sometimes people just don't know how to handle what they feel."

One of her hands finally slipped from my hair to find its way toward her mouth, the thumb sucking habit everyone thought ended years ago being taken back up. I gave Zoë another squeeze, smoothing her heavy curls away from her face. "You know what I bet would feel really good right now? A bath. You can have bubbles and everything, and if you want I'll even read to you for a little while."

"Anything I want?" Her clinging made it nearly impossible to move, but after much prodding she was finally standing before me, leaving us eye-to-eye.

"Anything." She picked out The Last Unicorn, of course. Your favorite book, resting on one of the shelves right beside her bed, battered and worn after a thousand readings. We went through the whole thing, all 200 pages, me sitting on the toilet lid, her lost all but a tiny face in a sea of sweet smelling strawberry bubble bath.

"'Farewell,' she said. 'I hope you hear many more songs'—which is the best way she could think of to say good-by to a butterfly." Is the only line that I can remember.

-Lydia

Radio Interlude 4-

"A memorial service for Zac Hanson will be held at Tulsa Interdenominational Church this Sunday afternoon. 19 year-old Hanson died of wounds received during a car accident early this week. At Friday's press conference close Hanson family friend Ashley Greyson read from a prepared statement. "Zac did more in the time he had here on Earth than so many of us will do in a lifetime: he lived every moment of his life trying to make the world a better place for the people around him.  He will be greatly missed." Hanson is being widely remembered throughout the media, an outlet once accused of abandoning his pop producing family after their fourth album sold only 200,000 copies in 2000."

Letter 14

Zac-

I went into a record store today with Angie, one of those hippie places in Brookside that always smell like patchouli and echo with the twinkling cascades of the plastic beads that hang inevitably at every doorway.

We had separated in the cramped, wooden-floored aisles—Angie to discover some treasure of 80s rock, me too search for a reduced price version of Billie Holiday's greatest hits—and when her voice interrupted my Verve years inspired reverie, I jumped.

"Lydia? About the thing tomorrow…" I'm glad she didn't call it what it really is. I don't think I could have taken it; it would have hurt too much to hear, to admit, to believe. "Are you going to say something? I know Diana would like you too, but, I mean, everybody would understand if you didn't want to." Angie's words died, leaving the sound of her voice cold and abandoned in the air between us.

I just can't imagine it. Can't imagine sitting in a room thick with your family and friends, saying an actual goodbye, the real kind that I wouldn't ever be able to take back. Zac, you know I want to say something, right? You know that I have in me one thousand stories of you, one thousand instants so precious as to be burned in my thoughts, a lifetime worth of day-dreams and funny jokes and fever sharp passion.

Okay. That's it. I'm freaking crying—again. I didn't want this to be a sad letter, because what happened in the store wasn’t like that. I've been worrying about the service ever since I heard about it, dreading the fact that I might betray your memory just by being me. I can't say anything. I know it. But today, for the first time in a long time, I had smiled. So that's what this is going to be about. The smile.

It was on the radio, ironically enough: "Everything's Going to Be All Right," Bob Marley.

I don't think that any of us will every be able to hear that song without thinking of the Reggaefest, not me or you or Angie or Taylor. It was a good time, a rare time, a time together with no fights, no egos, and no attitudes. Our odd little group had hung out, the four of us together, because Angie will always be my best friend that's not you, and even though a lot of the time I think both you and I would rather have been Taylor-free, Angie couldn’t seem to survive without him. The Reggaefest probably fell right in the worst time for their relationship—the depths of their rocky mutual obsession were not a pretty sight, especially right before its end. Looking back, it seems like they must have both known by that point that what they had was over, and maybe it was their attempts to deny this fact was what kept them connected at the lips for almost the entire day. Actually, now that I think about it this was probably why there was no fighting: their mouths were otherwise engaged.

I had been wary of the ride to Oklahoma City, and you were, too, judging by the looks you shot me as we packed Angie’s car with maps, blankets, and a picnic lunch. You didn't have to say anything to communicate your thoughts, and I didn't have to say anything to agree with them: three hours squeezed into Angie's old Nissan seemed for both of us like a thing not so distant from torture.

Remember the fairgrounds? They were so brilliantly colored, a field of green decorated by every kind of concession and every kind of person imaginable. It was wild, all the noise, all the crowd, all the sticky August heat and the dizzy smell of pot and sunblock. I don't think I've ever seen so much tie-dye in one place as I did on that day—swirling reds, blues, and purples seemed to adorn every article of clothing from shorts to scrunchies to bikini tops.

Ahh. Bikini tops. I wonder if you would remember the one Angie wore that day, paired with those ridiculously short cut-offs she loves so much? You certainly were well aware at the time, let me tell you. I had seen right away that your eyes kept sliding back in her direction, traveling along her smooth, pale skin and settling at exactly the two body parts that boys for some reason seem to find so fascinating. It took me a lot longer to realize why I was noticing, though. Or why my chest was tightening up more than a little, or why I felt the need to divert your attention from Angie and her performing mammaries as often as possible. I was jealous. Wildly, crazily, nauseously jealous.

We had sat on a scratchy gray wool blanket pulled from the recesses of the Nissan’s trunk. Cross legged and side by-by-side, we all faced the make-shift stage, home to a band of dred-locked Jamaicans and their polished steel drums that glinted blinding bright in the sun.

I've never really been a big fan of reggae, but you sure were. Ziggy and Bob, in all of their psychedelic hued glory, were all over your walls, your stereo, and occasionally even that broad chest of yours in the form of your favorite T-shirt. It was fun to be there, though, fun to hear the music with its exotic beats and strange, monotonously chanted lyrics, all accented heavily with a foreign world of white sand and strife that I can barely imagine.

Of course, I will admit that I was a little distracted by your distraction. Not that I would ever tell another living soul, but sometimes I wish I could be like Angie. While every inch of her crazy exhibitionism was neatly displayed in that tiny triangle top, I was covered with a conservative Gap T-shirt, striped lollipop blue and orange. I can't even believe I said anything to you, though. Chalk it up to the smoke that seemed to hover in a visible mist in the still air above the audience, but I had to say it.

"You know," I whispered in what I had hoped was a calculating breath on your exposed neck, leaning in close enough to smell your shampoo and hear your quiet recitation of the words of the current song, of course nothing but "Everything's Gonna Be All Right." Before I spoke you had been swaying, quietly fascinated with the thudding drums that drove the song, but your motion stopped at my words. You bent so close, listening to only me over the roar of band and audience. "You could drool a little less visibly over Angie's top—or lack thereof, I should say."

I had expected a guilty giggle from you, or maybe raised eyebrows—even annoyance. Instead all I could think about today in the music store was how you slid around on the blanket to face me, filling my vision with the nearness of you. "How come you never wear things like that?" Your voice was quiet and low, a simple out-rushing of breath, and I immediately realized you were serious, probably at the outer limits of your capability for the concept, even. We were both frozen in reciprocated contemplation, trapped in a staring impasse that neither of us seemed willing to break. I felt your eyes, bleached of their chocolatey depths by the bright sunlight, on me then in a way I never had before. It was like…a physical thing, that glance, like when that creep looked at me at Old Orchard, his consideration touching me everywhere all at once and without my consent. Only with you I wasn’t afraid, or nervous or hesitant. God. I loved it so much, to be for that second the center of everything you saw.

Why don’t I wear things like Angie does? I didn't know. I still don't. Why did you like things like she wore, leaving her nearly bare? I didn't know that, either, and I don't think I really have much of hope of figuring out either of those mysteries.

I can't help but think that you knew that my teasing breath on your skin had been intentional, and that's probably what prompted you to move backwards, coming to a pause just far enough behind me to rest your slightly prickly chin on my shoulder before you spoke. You certainly learned how to use that big, beautiful body of yours to its best effect, haven't you? No girl in her right mind wouldn't have responded to the feel of you so close, the heat of your skin on hers.

After a few seconds I swear I couldn't tell the rhythm of the drums from the beating of your heart; both sounds had resounded through all me, impossibly far away and yet everywhere at once, completely surrounding me in their even, steady cadences. You had luxuriantly stretched your legs out next to me, your scratchy jeans just grazing my bare legs, and I thought at that moment, with your unkempt hair shivering along my neck, that maybe it would be worth turning into Angie if the comfortable feeling of you all enveloping me could just go on forever. Dumb, huh? Maybe you felt a little bit the same, though, because you didn't move for what I remember as the longest time.

I had almost been lulled into forgetting your question when you had nudged at me with your chin, prompting me to answer anything, to answer with the only words that I could pull from my softly numb thoughts. "Um, because I don't like to be naked?" I had tried to keep my tone playful, because I didn't want to alert you to the fact that I had noticed you touching me. I didn't want to scare you away, I guess, didn't want to make you think that a simple act of your perpetually impish affection had to be a big deal. And most of all, I desperately didn't want you to move.

"You'd look gorgeous in it, you know. Better than Angie." It was apparent from the quiver in your uncertain tone that at some point the situation had fallen out of your control. We never really talked about each other like that, did we? I suppose it was one of the reasons we were able to stay strictly platonic friends for so long. I suppose we had thought that we were saving our insane, intense, devoted friendship from something physical, from something hot and burning, from something maybe only here and now.

We must have sat like that, wrapped around each other and breathing only the shallowest of breaths, for an entire song, both too afraid too move. I finally grew used to the warm pressure of you against me, and I remember thinking that perhaps I finally had built up an immunity to the tingling rush of your touch. Even as this possibility had echoed through my thoughts I discovered it returning tenfold with your hand, cool and callused, as it brushed ever so faintly against my suddenly highly sensitized neck. I could feel each and every centimeter of your skin on mine; I could feel the soft friction of your motion; I could hear your breath catching in your throat.

"You're pretty how you are, though. So pretty you don't need things like that to get attention," you had murmured without thought and without intent, pausing your caress to measure the contrast of your still nearly winter-white flesh against my perpetually ocher hue.

You pulled back then, and it felt like winter without you. Like even if I had been wearing inches of wool, and even if I had been buried beneath feet of blankets, I would still have been shuddering with the rapid cold invading the center of me. You had just gathered my hair, though, pulling it back off my shoulder with one, gentle motion before returning your chin to its former position. And then I was warm again, and then you were everywhere again. There was no more barrier between us; your cheek was against my sensitive neck, sweet and soothing.

I don't think I've ever sat that still before in my life. Well, at least not since extended afternoons playing hide-and-seek in grade school, not since the breathless excitement of the chase, not since the tipsy knowledge that one false breath or too-sudden motion could bring an end to the delirious game. I could tell you weren’t thinking any more as you draped an arm around me, not even casual anymore but more like unaware, the soft tips of your fingers rubbing tenderly at one of the three tiny birthmarks I have near the indentation of my collarbone. I can almost feel it right now, your hand slipping beneath the collar of my shirt for what I remember as a fraction of a heartbreaking second.

The song ended then, and the tide of music receded, leaving in its wake appreciative silence heavy through the crowd.

The void left by the absence of the tranquil wall of music and voices had startled us back into the real world, I think leaving both wondering what the hell we were doing. That's how I felt, anyway, when I realized that we were right there in front of the world, not hidden away in some dark car, not alone on the road at night. It was too much; it was too weird; it was too different. You had hastily removed your hand then, pulling away from me so fast you seemed near loosing your balance. Your had posture sharpened, too, the unthinking slump of your shoulders straightening just as I felt mine doing. All that was left of the moment was awkward conjecture, and we were two sleepwalkers torn from the comfortable daze of an insubstantial dream.

"Thank you." I finally said, I think maybe as much as a song later.

"Sorry." You had sounded sheepish as our gazes locked, apologetic for the over-stepping of pre-ordained boundaries.

"That's okay." You had moved even further away then, probably due to the inquisitive glances both Angie and Taylor had begun shooting in our direction, but I still think you heard me when I added softly, half giddy and half joking, "you can call me pretty whenever you want."

It had made you smile one of those long, lazy grins that felt for all the world like the sun shattering through a heavy layer of fog, and I found myself following your lead, even though for the next ten minutes I was too embarrassed to cast more than hesitant glances in your direction.

I couldn't tell you what had finally made you throw your arm across my shoulders, bumping against me with a tiny, relieved snort, but I can tell you I didn't mind.

We had been like that for awhile before Angie had caught my attention, spreading her hands questioningly open before her. I had just rolled my eyes, and I had just smiled a little more. 

Call me paranoid, though, because I'm pretty sure that you had kept checking out her chest.

That's all I can think of right now, what a boy you always were, how completely beyond anyone's ability to tame or maybe even really understand.  The memory of that day makes me so happy, makes me smile. But I don't think that's quite the story for me to tell tomorrow.

--Lydia

Letter 15

Zac-

I'm all alone in the powerful dark of my bedroom, writing by the neon brilliance of my clock radio. I've been watching the numbers spiral higher and higher for the past hour, and the moment I have been waiting for is finally about to overtake me. There... now it has happened. The brutal glow has changed its shape, moved on for another day, grown to read 12:00. Thank you God for it being over. Finally.

Your mom had called last night and reminded us not to wear black. It seemed like a kind of bizarre request, at least to me. The only time I've ever seen an event like today's had been in movies, or maybe afternoon TV, and in them it always seemed as if the world had gone grainy film noir from sorrow. People wore gray, white, and black; they had hats and gloves and cried into dainty handkerchiefs, the real kind that you wash, not throw away. So maybe in some way, that had colored what I expected of your wake.

Instead, it was almost like any other Sunday service that I've attended with your family; People came dressed in their best clothes, their bright colors forming a swirling sea of reds, blues, creams, and yellows on the vast green lawn that stretches all around the church. It was nice, really, and as I sat in the passenger's seat of my mom's car I watched them, transposed upon my own reflection in the rolled up window, as they milled around in small groups, their relaxed behavior distant and foreign.

I didn’t move, just stared, and by the time I had consciously realized my inactivity, my mother had walked around the car and pulled my door open. I was numb as she waited for me to get out, slamming the door behind me with a heavy, no-nonsense thud that made me jump.

Maybe the memorial didn't turn out to be the TV show I had envisioned, but that doesn't mean that I didn’t feel like I was on the other side of a curving, dark screen, watching people go about existences that might as well have been fiction.

I'm sitting here, desperately trying to remember all the little details of today, but I can't. It's all a blur to me: the steeple that I can see even now, in the black of my midnight bedroom, gleaming cold and bright as it cut like a scalpel through the washed out early afternoon sky; the gentle hum of the conversations that took place as people began to file into the Church, somehow ringing painfully loud, brash, and garish; the way the inescapable smell of flowers made me dizzy as my mom and I were waved forward to sit on one of the very front pews with your family.

They're a little like a prism, I guess, these last 24 hours. Bits and pieces of time project themselves haphazardly and unavoidably across my thoughts, fractions of images and moments and breaths.

Your mom's nails were bitten to the quick, and she wore the same green sundress as I had seen at Rachel's Christening.

Your dad had stood tall and so straight as he shook hands with the people who streamed past his position in the main doorway, thanking them for coming and stopping to talk with everyone he saw.

Zoe's patent leather-covered foot had continually pounded the solid wood of the pew in front of us, a skinned knee covered with a camouflage Band-Aid and left exposed by her short blue dress.

Angie cried when she saw me, little hiccuping sobs that I wished I could join her in.

That's it. That’s all I can drag from my mind, even after an hour of trying: little shattered bits of a past that hover trapped between my desire to remember and my need to forget.

Well, I remember those things and the pictures. They were everywhere, snapshots of practically every moment of your life, all pasted to poster board and propped up around the alter where your minister began his speech. "Today we gather here not only to mourn a profound loss, but also to celebrate a life so well lived," he said. Each of those words had wrapped like an anaconda around me, tightening my chest and making me feel like I needed to be sick. I didn't listen for long; instead I had focused on the pictures in an attempt to soothe my racing heart.

There were photographs as you as little toddler, streaking joyously naked across the front lawn of your parent's old house, your aunt Sam chasing several frantic steps behind you, diaper clutched tightly in one hand, bottle of baby powder in another. You were with your boy scout troupe, cherubic and devilish all at once, dark with sweat and proudly standing in front of a teepee built by hand over the course of one, roasting August day. You were there in extreme close up at eight or nine, tongue sticking intentionally out at the camera, your face painted in red and black, in a confederate flag, before one of Taylor's soccer games. The picture that caught me the most, though, was taken when you were probably eleven or twelve, right in the midst of Hanson hysteria. It was in dreamy black and white, showing you silhouetted against the graceful concrete poetry of New York City's skyline, leaning your forehead contemplatively against the glass of a penthouse suite. That one seemed somehow the most you, more than the outgoing, loud little boy that appeared in so many of the other photographs. You could be like that, sure, but you could also be so quiet, so still. It made me think of how you used to stare, unmoving, at a single painting in the Philbrook museum for hours, just drinking in everything about it until a guard inevitably would arrive to make sure you were okay. The active pictures of you are nice, but they don’t even seem to hint at how you valued every moment so much, every laugh and every revelation in thickly layered lilac oil paint.

A few of the pictures had even included me. There was one of us wet and tangled together after a particularly vicious water fight right after we met, and one I don't think I've ever seen before. I can’t even remember when it was taken, but in it the two of us are sitting together directly beneath the huge Tiffany stained-glass skylight in the solarium of which your mother is so proud. It must have been a sunny day when the picture was taken, because in it we were tattooed brilliant in every shade of the rainbow, stained bright with arabesque leaves and extravagantly curving golden flowers. We were caught in a blur of action, both frantically grabbing at a deck of playing cards arranged in a telltale double solitaire pattern on the hardwood floor between us.

After awhile of your minister’s monotone ramblings people got up one at a time, and spoke. They were harder to ignore than the staid voice of the clergyman, and even as I focused on that picture of us blazing with color I couldn't shut them out. Their words were added to the giddy kaleidoscope of sensation and memory that boiled everywhere I looked and everywhere I listened, leaving me blind and paralyzed, with my eyes fixated on your smile repeated a billion times all around me: smiles from rainy childhood days years before we were to meet, smiles all the way up to Zoe's birthday party last month.

Sebastion, your roommate freshman year in college: "One night I had been working in the computer lab for at least 16 hours straight, and come morning Zac somehow managed to get into the security-access only building and drag me away from my midterm. He made me go out into the parking lot with him, and made me sit on the roof of his car and to watch the sunrise. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like the world turning gold all around us."

Your next door neighbor, Mrs. Finney: "Each summer of our marriage, all 35 of them, my husband Tom had planted a garden in our backyard. It was never been huge and it was never prefect, but it was always beautiful. When Tom died last fall I swore that I would keep the little plot of land up, because I knew that he could never be happy, even in heaven, if he thought that weeds were choking his hard-earned flowerbeds. When spring finally came, I bought everything I thought I needed—marigolds and gladiolas and lemon verbena—but I just could just never plant anything. I must have tried a hundred times, but the flats all sat there, untended and unwatered, until finally Zac came over to offer his services. He planted the entire garden that afternoon, made of it a sweet scented sea of green and yellow that I know even Tomas would have been so proud of…"

More people spoke, I know. I just don't know what they said. I couldn't take it, the riot of color and sound and smell and sorrow that sent the world twisting out of control around me, sent smudges of dark across my vision, made me feel like I was going to faint and vomit all at once. So I left, sliding away from the reassuring pressure of my mother's hand on my elbow, away from the curious eyes of everyone around me, to explode gasping into the back parking lot, feeling my chest thudding erratically with furious breaths as though I had just run a thousand miles.

I kept moving away from the Church, away from their words, until finally I was out of the parking lot and stepping into the high, reedy grass of that empty field across the street where the Easter egg hunt is held every year.

I heard him before I saw him, your brother who looks so light but is so dark. "Ironic that we're the two out here." Taylor was leaning against a low stonewall, dressed in black from head to toe, a half burned cigarette held in the caressing grip of one impossibly delicately veined hand.

I could barely even respond, could barely even catch my breath. But as I stood there watching him, my frenzied hysteria began to fade little by little until I found myself suddenly able to swallow long, cool droughts of the summer-soft air. "What?" I finally asked. "Why ironic?"

"Because we're the ones who loved him the most, and we're not even going to be there to say goodbye." His answer was chilly and calculated, cold and downright mean.

A week's worth of anger, not-so well hidden and not-so well expressed, thickened my next words before I could even think about what I was saying. "Taylor, you are the biggest asshole in the world. What gives you the right? The right to hurt any more than the people in there? We all loved him. Sometimes I think everyone he ever met did. Neither you or I are anything special because of it!"

"Come on Lydia, why don't you just say it?" Taylor asked preternaturally cool and distant, a different man than the one who I had watched kiss Angie a thousand times, a man more like the one on that first night when we met. I just stared, wondering how his eyes could be so pure, so clear so completely unshadowed, when every inch of me felt, and looked, like I had survived the end of the world. My hair hasn't been properly brushed in days, my clothes are suddenly not quite fitting, rather hanging on me, sagging in waves of fabric made suddenly unnecessary by rapid and unintentional weight loss. The things that show the most about me now, though, are my eyes. I can't even look in the mirror because I can't face the garish betrayal that seems to be written all over their black depths.

He looked at me then, for the first time that day. It was a measuring gaze, seeking and conquering, the kind of which only he is capable. That look was like the smoke he exhaled then, a plume of dirty gray vapor that swirled around us, entering every molecule of my clothes, inundating my hair, imprinting it's dark, heavy smell all over me, marking me as its own.

"Why don’t you just say what every person in there knows, all those people in that church, everyone who is pissed off that their fat, comfortable lives are interrupted like this." Taylor's eyes slid gracefully away and upward, his gaze lost in the cloud of smoke that was only slowly diluting in the still air. He continued to lean on the rough stone wall that runs the perimeter of the field, his nonchalance sharp and flinty against the bright sunlight of the early afternoon. "Why don’t you just say that it should have been me?" His cocoon of perfect calm remained unshattered, and at first I thought I hadn’t heard him right. How could he say something like that? How could he say it in the same tone used to order coffee, the same tone used to chart the tiny, everyday occurrences in life?

Other people might have said those words. And even I have thought them. You were just too much Zac, too much for the world to loose: too much sunshine was stored in your caramel eyes, too much happiness in that wicked grin. Without you, a huge sum of generosity and caring has forever been subtracted, unrecoverably removed, from the earth’s grand total.

I may have heard some of my own suffering was in Taylor's words, some of my suspicion that someone like me—someone quiet and uncertain, someone perhaps without that much of a future to speak of anyway—would have been a more affordable loss. I would not be missed like you are.

For me, this line of contemplation had been the worst. It had been the sleepless nights, gritty with lack of rest and hard with unwelcome thoughts. It had been the worst doubt, the absolute lowest on my trajectory of self-loathing. And those letters inspired by my version of Taylor's words had all been scribbled through gales of desperately bitter tears.

But for him it was matter-of-fact. The words rolled from his tongue, easy and certain, annunciated in his hybrid accent, always Oklahoma around the edges.

"Why don't you say that this damn funeral—and that's what it is, Lydia, no matter what my mom wants it to be. Don't even kid yourself—would be so much easier if it was for someone else?"

I felt like I should have been angry at his words, at his automatic assumptions about me and about everyone at the memorial. I even sought out hurtful things to say, looking for some verbal weapon to take long-dreamed of revenge for all of his self-importance. But without willing it I found myself backing down, coming to wonder what the point of all of it was. Something became clear to me this afternoon, I guess: On the surface it's always seemed obvious to me that Taylor has been positive that the world revolves around him. Your loss is turning things around, though, breaking down the walls he’s hidden behind and bringing to the surface of him the fact that even if he may act like he’s completely self-important, it’s only because he feels the exact opposite. And maybe he always has, even through all those years of idolization. He might have intended to be at the focal point of his every action, but at that moment today I was positive that in truth his cosmology simply revolved around his mental comparison of the two of you, of his dark as it was defined by its contrast to your light.

He looked at me in expectation, waiting for the harsh words I had been preparing, waiting for a fight. But the only thing in the whole world that I knew for sure then was that I didn't want to fight any more. "Taylor," the softness of his name seemed to startle him a little, and he raised a delicately graceful hand to his mouth, puffing again at his cigarette. All I could see as I watched him was the almost imperceptible tremor that stuttered in his motion, that and the ocher red nicotine stain that spread along his first two fingers, marring his perfect, California pale skin. They were his battle scars, I guess, so different from the ones that I fear I'm developing, but nonetheless plain to see when I finally realized where to look.

"It was luck. Bad, stupid luck that hurt us all. But wishing it was different can't help. All it can do is make you crazy." I found myself pleading with him for some reaction, desperate for some clue about how I could make him hurt even just a little less.

Another wispy exhalation of smoke later he began again, searching other routes for the fight he apparently felt like he needed. "If I died, there would be no you. No one left hollow by my loss, no one for them to fixate their damned pity on." He gestured towards the church, towards the faint whisper of song that floated through its open windows, carrying with it the smell of magnolias, the smell of sadness. I flinched a little at the fury that was suddenly turning his voice glossy and piercing, speeding his cadence and turning his words hateful.

His next drag on the cigarette was abrupt, and he began to move all over—a tiger in a too small cage—the jostling of his legs and the rhythmic nodding of his head spending pent-up nervous energy. "Someday you would have realized that you were meant to be together, you and Zac; maybe it even could have been today. Maybe right at this very second you would have woken up and stopped lying to yourselves, maybe now is when you would have started to deal with the fact that you’ve always been the missing pieces in each others' puzzle." Taylor shot a fleeting look my way, one that I could tell he thought I wouldn’t notice, gauging my expression before continuing. "There’s this whole future that everyone in the entire world has been predicting for you ever since you were sixteen: wedding receptions, baby showers, kindergarten graduations and an entire fucking blissfully happy Ozzy and Hariet life. But now your fate is dead. Gone with him."

His words were doing exactly what I think he wanted them too, stinging, hurting, bringing me a little closer to tears with each pointed remark. But you know what? They—those impending tears— weren't for me and what I’ve lost, and maybe not even for you. "Taylor, please stop." I whispered. "Just… stop." For the first time ever, I touched him. I sat myself down by his side on the stone wall, so close I could feel him stiffen with uncertainty.

He had seemed so human right then. Which sounds weird, even to me, but Taylor's always been this lofty, untouchable vision: a skittish creature for which nothing was ever quite enough, nothing was ever quite on level of bright-burning life. Or at least that's the way I've always seen him, being first and foremost your best friend and perhaps letting my own thoughts be colored by your unshakeable adoration. He's really just as flesh and blood as we are, though, and the defeated slump that followed close in the footsteps of his tension finally proved that.

The silence between us was complete and thick, punctuated only by the distant murmur of whatever was happening in the church. From there the simple, whitewashed building looked incredibly fragile, a teetering gingerbread house constructed by shaky, young hands, an oddly impressionistic Eiffel Tower outlined in wavy, frosting lines.

I told him the truth, then. The truth I don’t think anyone else knew or even suspected. "We knew, Taylor. I mean, a few days before the accident it happened. That thing you're talking about… that realization happened."

That was what it took to break him, those exact words. "I'm so sorry. God." His voice disintegrated into the softest of sighs as he spoke, the faintest of whispers on my skin. "I'm so sorry." He turned to look at me, not even bothering to hide his rapidly pooling eyes, the redness of which only made them appear all the more profoundly blue. I don’t know why, but something about that moment made me feel better than I had in a long time. I felt like there was some hope for me, after all, like there was maybe a way to break out of this flat spin that I hadn’t even suspected in the past.

"But Taylor, that's the one thing that I don't even want to be sorry about. Zac always knew how much I loved him, but I'm so happy we actually said it before…" It was my turn to tighten up as he pressed himself closer to me, comforting with his heat.

We didn't realize when the service had finally ended, each of us too wrapped up in our own thoughts, until soft strains of a new kind of music made their way from the church. It wasn't them singing anymore, not your friends and family, not the people who know to miss you. It was Bob Marley. It was "Everything's Going to Be All Right." Twice in as many days must mean something, right?

-Lydia

Letter 16-

Zac-

"So it's been awhile." That's what you always said, in a voice shaded with sorrow and regret, when we went more than a few days without talking. In all the time we were friends, all the years of going to colleges hundreds of miles apart, all those years of busy days filled with schoolwork and jobs, I don't think even a week passed without us seeing each other, or spending a Saturday afternoon on a marathon phone call that would last for hours and hours. Remember that? We'd talk about everything, spending hundreds of dollars a month to share silly things: what we ate for breakfast, overviews of our classes, whether dandelions smelled and how we wished we could be together.

In the month since your memorial I don't think I've said thirty words to anyone but Zoë. Bizarre that my biggest confidant is five years old, but when I'm around her the cloud of silence that always seems to cling to me seems to thin, maybe even diffuse a little.

The less I say to our moms or to Angie—and every day I'm shocked anew by how unnecessary to life the spoken word is—the less it feels like I have to say. They all want something from me, I guess, some assurance that I'm going to be okay, but I can't give that to them. Right now I'm not so sure about that myself. Sometimes I almost forget what happened, sometimes I almost feel okay; but I still avoid them whenever I can.

I can barely stand the weight of the concern in their gazes and their words, in the quiet way they lock gazes and shrug whenever I'm around, measuring some invisible strand of sadness in me and finding it too long, too thick, too thoroughly embraced to be challenged.

With Zoë it's different. When we're together I don't have to be strong for me; I have to do it for her. And that's what makes it so much easier, so much less painful. I can just concentrate on smiling and giving the right answers and making her happy instead of trying to make myself happy, a prospect I'm not so sure is even possible anymore.

It's been a month since the memorial, three weeks since the last time I saw Taylor, a month and a week since the last time I was whole.

A conversation your older brother and I had keeps echoing through my thoughts. His words and his misery are still on me like the smoke of his cigarette, and my head is always so full of the two of you that it hurts—when I'm taking an order at The Hideaway, where I usual work ten or twelve hours a day; when I'm at home, reading a book or just staring out my window at ever-approaching fall; when I'm hanging out with Angie, watching MTV or shopping—you fill me up so there's no room for anything else.

I haven't let myself think about certain things so much, and maybe that's why I haven't been able to write for so long. Did you think I haven’t written because I had forgotten about you? Because I had nothing left to say? Hardly.

I've wanted to write; I've needed to write, but all it has taken lately to send me into a fit of clammy shivers is the sight of a blank sheet of paper. Eventually I just gave up trying, but today I'm scribbling so fast my hand is already sore and I've barely filled a sheet of paper.

I went to your house this morning, intending to take Zoë to her swimming lesson at the Y, but when I got there the place was a shambles. All it took to put an end to the afternoon's plans was one missing swimsuit—pink and blue stripped, size 6 girls—and while I was supposed to be helping in the search I wandered off. I didn't really think about where I was going, but when I ended up in the sunroom I knew that had been my destination all along.

I stood in the doorway and I watched the blocks of color and light that were rained down by the skylight as they burned the hardwood floor brilliant, remembering the mystery picture that I had seen at your memorial. We had been sitting there, in that luminescent square, apparently too transfixed by each other and by our game of cards to even know that the shot was being taken. Now that I look back I can see that we spent a lot of time like that, too involved in each other to notice the fact that there was a world around us.

If I needed a reason, if I needed a cliché, I guess the one of choice would be that I did it for old time’s sake. I must have walked into that room, sheltered only by windows from the deep green forest that surrounds Ledgewood Terrace, because I could remember doing it a thousand times before; I must have stretched out in the shadow of that skylight just because the tingle of its color on my skin was so familiar. That probably really is the reason, but as soon as I sat down it was like I could sense you all around me, your smell, your touch, your taste.

The distance separating me and all of those afternoons we had spent on that floor, talking and dreaming, was so slight that I swear that I was right there, right in the hazy August afternoon three days before the accident.

There's something amazing about being in the center of that perfectly regular square of color cast on the hardwood, turned coloringbook bright by the whims of the sun and the stained glass. That day we had laid side by side on our backs, and I remember just drinking in the comforting feel of the colored light on our skin.

"I don't know." I heard the memory of your voice in my head today, all thick with playful concentration, laughter a barely hidden undercurrent in your words. "I always thought pick up lines were cool. I mean, how could I resist a woman coming up to me and saying, 'I'm like milk, I'll do your body good'?"

"You pervert," More than a month ago I had laughed, kneeing you in the side before rolling over to lay flat on my stomach. Today and then both I had busied myself tracing the narrow demarcations of black between the patterns and shades of light temporarily cast upon the floor. "But I do have to admit that I've always personally been fond of: 'did it hurt?' and of course the hit-on-ee would say 'what?', after which the hit-on-er would say 'when you fell from heaven.'"

"How about, 'do you wash your pants in Windex?" I had felt the contraction and expansion of your chest with every breath as you sprawled next to me, our sides just touching.

"Well? I bite. What's the rest?" I had resisted as long as I could, but finally caved in, shaking with laughter even before you spoke at the oh-so-serious look on your face.

"Because I can see myself in them." You had finished with a flourish, and I watched in seeming-slow motion as a wide grin that spread in slow degrees across your face.

"Well, Zac, that was terribly original of you. Apparently all of your best lines are straight from the supermarket." Not much of a recovery, but not bad I suppose considering how hard it was to think with you so close.

"I do have a lot of supermarket experience. That was, after all, where I picked you up." Your tone had been so authoritative, and I remember thinking I could see your future. Not really, of course, not in the tangible Dionne Warwick kind of way, but instead as if you had slipped forward into adulthood before my eyes. Capable, intelligent, understanding. You'd be all of them as a real, true grown-up, I thought, but any adjective that would ever fit you would have to find its foundation in the smile that twisted at the corners of your lips and wrinkled the edges of your eyes, the gleeful shadow of some impossibly wicked cherub.

"That barely counts, buckaroo. You haven't even stepped up to bat and I believe we both know that the sole purpose of a pick up line is to…well… pick someone up." You were always easy to tease, weren't you? And you enjoyed it, I think, enjoyed the attention.

Today I could practically feel the air that had retreated in your wake as you flipped over more than a month ago, sliding onto your side to peer down at me, exposing all of that preternaturally blond hair to the shadings of the skylight and leaving my face veiled in the dark blue shadow of you. I lay waiting for what I thought was an inevitable smart-ass answer, but nothing was forthcoming. Instead you just stared, that grin slowly fading before flickering into extinction.

"Maybe I used the wrong line, then. Maybe I should have said you were beautiful, or that I loved you. But I guess I didn't love you; not then, anyway." A month ago when you said these things I didn’t want to think about what you meant. Now, though, I feel like a fly caught in the web of your words. It was a change, right then, a crossroads so literal that we both felt it, pulled in two different directions by two different fates.

Silence had prickled through the room, too heavy for either of us to even contemplate interrupting. "Not then?" I finally whispered, trying with every bit of my will to look anywhere but into the unavoidable cinnamon brown of your eyes.

"Not then." It was a simple answer, I guess, but exactly the right one. It made me feel—I don't even know, don't even think I have the words to explain. It was warm, and pleasant, and tingly, to lay so close to you and hear you say such sweet things. Never in my life have I left as comfortable around anyone as I feel around you—felt around you—like I could tell you absolutely anything and never worry about any of the billions of tiny dangers that seem to come with sharing yourself completely with another person. At the same time it was such an insane thrill to be near you, to never really know what was going to happen next, to never know what you would say or what you would do.

"What you said was the best pick up line." I focused on your heat against me, calming my raging mind with the predictable rhythm of your heartbeat. "'I won't abandon you.' All women should be so lucky to hear that at some point in their lives."

"You remembered?" I can't ever recall you, unflappable Zac Hanson, sounding so surprised as you did right then. You mustn't have realized that for me that moment at the grocery store had been a lot, even before we grew close, and I certainly couldn’t have even fathomed the possibility that the same might have been true for you.

"Yeah, but I still prefer the one about heaven." I had done my best to pull our conversation away from serious things, because I found the direction of our words a little scary. We had been the same to each other, best friends, for so long that I didn't want to risk it. Some things can't be unsaid, some bridges can't be uncrossed, and it felt too much like we were beginning something.

The fear, I guess, was in that every beginning had an end, and I couldn't bear to think of loosing us, loosing the special way we could be around each other. "I had no idea 'I'll never abandon you' was a pick up line, though." I had closed my eyes, breathing in the scent of you, stamping it in my mind and remembering it so well that I could almost feel it surrounding me today. "You deserve some credit for being sly."

"It wasn't a pick up line." You were deadly serious, your voice ringing with a quiet certainty I had never heard before.. "It was the truth."

I wish I could know what you were thinking, that for at least that one afternoon I could have seen the world through your eyes. It seems to me that everything in the world was different for you: that maybe the colored light that hung over us, a gauzy veil, was a little bit brighter, that maybe the heavy smell of your mother's stargazer lilies was a little bit sweeter, that maybe I was even a little bit pretty.

"Would you ever," your lost some of its self-assurance, disintegrating into rapid uncertainty, "I mean…would you be okay with you if maybe someday I was…up to bat, as you so delicately put it?"

It's weird to look back on that day and remember it so totally, and to have these two utterly contrary sets of reactions. At the time I was a little freaked out by what you were saying, so much so that I remember sliding away from you, almost out of the range of the skylight, even, and flipping onto my back, hands beneath my head. Now, though, when I think about the almost painful intensity of your gaze and the faint sigh that escaped your lips when I moved away, it sends chills through me.

What I had told Taylor at the memorial was true. We really did have that moment, that realization that we belonged together. That's my favorite part of that day to think about, and that's what played through my mind again and again this afternoon as your mother and Zoë mounted their great bathing suit hunt.

"I don’t know. Would you like to be up to bat?" I had asked as you followed me across the floor, stopping your advance only when you could lean above me, just as close as before, if not more so.

"Would you like it if I was?" The question was returned without so much as a thought, and it seems somehow that the world slipped into time lapse photography around us. Everything blurred together as the passage of time swirled, an entity entirely separate from and excluded by the rectangle of light in which we floated: the distant sound of cars on the highway became a constant soft roar, no longer distinct and individual; the wavering intensity of the skylight's imprint on the floor was both bright and dark, never changing from moment to moment, but never exactly the same, either; the sun’s rays slanting through the windows on the west side of the house moved over us in a fluid, unstoppable wave of brilliance.

"I think that I might kind of like it, even." I could feel your gaze shivering across my face, and despite the sudden sensation of movement encompassing us, I couldn't tear my eyes away from you. Your skin was so tan, your eyes so bright, your lips so perfect, that I just watched in silence as you began, impossibly slowly, to lean towards me. I'm surprised my heart didn't explode as I traced the contours of your lips with my eyes, overtaken with the sharp need explore them, to finally find out what they would feel like on my skin. You were everywhere; my senses filled up with the substance of you, the smell of your hair, the whispery-moist heat of your breath on my lips. I wonder if the wait for that kiss was as painful, as eternal, as all encompassing, for you as it was for me?

If in your eyes I had stretched to encircle the entire world, the way you had in mine; if you had also become aware that everything that mattered and everything that was important was contained within one person.

"Lydia?" You had moved to trace one finger along the curve of my neck, its gentle pressure on my skin driving me slowly crazy. My name was a query, a request for permission for the kiss I could practically feel already, smooth and tender on my lips.

A wavering of my expression must have been your answer, a slight inclination of my face towards yours, a hint perhaps hidden in the way my eyes slid closed as you ran a strong hand from my shoulder to rest at the swelling of my hip, just high enough to touch the line bare skin above my jeans that was exposed with every breath.

Then it began, the absolutely, intensely, insanely indescribable sensation of a kiss so long delayed, of a display of emotion founded upon years of love and respect, that I can still feel it quaking through me it even now. We melted together, on the unyielding floor beneath the skylight, and I still can't imagine any two people more precisely matched, people living lives built of two totally different but completely inseparable rhythms. Before I could even think, our arms were around each other, encasing us in a dizzy cocoon of lips and hands and touches far to tender to be real.

Could it have been as blissful as I remembered today, lying once again on the light-patterned floor? You tasted so good on my lips; your hair felt so soft running through my fingers. I think I have lived in that moment for more than a month, always holding it in the back of my mind, a talisman against all that could ever go wrong, against all that could ever be hurtful.

"Kiss me," you had murmured, breathless into my neck, stroking your hand up and down my side in time with your every steamy breath.

"Why ask?" I had managed the words while carefully choosing the most delicate, sweet spot at the edge of your hairline to smooth my lips across. We huddled together, closer than I ever imagined possible, and we watching each other with a ridiculous hunger. I realized then that I had wanted them—those kisses, those touches—for so long, and that the grueling wait had served only to strengthen the need, the intensity that left us both shaking, trembling with heat.

"Because I can't believe this is happening. Because later I want to know you wanted it too." Could that be what you said? It was. It was. Oh God, it was.

"Then kiss me, so I'll know the same thing." The faint touch of your lips on mine was soft, too soft, too tender and ethereal. In response I pulled you toward me, so forward with what I wanted that it still makes me flinch a little. You didn't mind, though, instead allowing the kiss to deepen until their flawlessness made me want to cry, both then and now.

From there on we let ourselves escalate too fast, too out of control, and it didn't even occur to me to mind when your hands finally wandered up under my shirt, didn't occur to me to mind it when you slid above me, pushing me against the hardwood floor with the force of your desperation to further our closeness. "Can I?" You had begged, tugging with one hand at the hem of my T-shirt, the other up underneath it, drawing luxurious swirls along my bare ribs.

I've imagined a hundred possible answers since that day; in my mind I've said yes, I've gone with my feelings instead of my head. But I had never been touched like that, and I knew you had. You had always been in love with love, and we had long been close enough for me to hear the stories of your past, ones dotted with the touches of other girls long before we met. I was more reminded of your experience with every second, reminded by the way you knew exactly what I wanted to feel as you moved against me. As sorry as I am for what I said next, I really believe you understood.

"Do you want to... just because you want to?" I kept my eyes closed as I remained locked in your dreamy embrace, but I could still see your flushed face. The multicolored light that you were bathed in, I imagined, might have been so out of place in fragile Parisian cathedrals built of nothing more than air and glass. "Or do you want to because it's me?" A second of silence, ruffled only by our ragged breaths.

"Because it's you. You know it's always been because it's you," the kisses, shivery deep and slow, resumed for a moment, spending the leftover heat from our closeness. "We can't then. Not until you don't even wonder. Not until I can prove it's you."

There was nothing else to do than to say it. So I did. "I love you, Zac. So much."

"Did it hurt?" I can still practically feel the line of soft kisses you had trailed along my cheek, ending with your lips soft on mine.

I was laughing to myself when you finally moved away and I answered, "what?" knowing full what was coming.

"When you fell from Heaven, silly." You snuggled against me for several moments of silence, but the words that I wanted so badly to hear finally came: "I love you, Lydie."

Like I told Taylor, I would never wish that afternoon away, no matter how much the memory might burn. I would never wish it away.

-Lydia

Letter 17-

Zac-

When I was little, Aunt Irene was on a New Age kick. My earliest memories of her involve crystals and chakras and meditation, all things that make only the most limited of sense to three-year-olds. The one thing that has stuck with me from those days of tofu and hemp t-shirts, though, is her telling me—voice distorted with that Texas twang she had developed after twenty years or more living in Old Orchard—"whenever you're afraid, or worried, or sad, you just go find a tree, Lydie-baby. They have these amazing, powerful auras all around them that will make whatever is wrong go away, and make everything okay again."

I guess that memory explains why I was outside l