Page 32 of The Strawberry Field
The sunlight refracted across the rippling water, turning it red and gold, and I remember thinking it looked like fire. Not blood. Fire. And still I sat there, unmoving.
Then I heard my own scream, sharp and primal. Like it came from somewhere outside of me.
Jake turned Tommy over on the boards and started compressions. Tommy's lips were blue. His chest was still.
Jake yelled his name again and again.
Whispered please until the word cracked in his throat and broke apart.
But Tommy didn’t wake up.
I fell to my knees beside them. Jake’s arm shot out, holding me back.
He didn’t say anything, just shook. And cried without tears.
Later, they said it was the wiring.
A short in the lift.
A fault no one knew was there until it was too late.
Tommy had touched it barefoot, soaked in sweat, laughing. Reaching for the cable with all the ease of having done so a hundred other times.
And then he was gone.
Just like that.
One moment, he was the sun at the center of everything, and the next moment, he was a silence none of us knew how to carry.
Jake never left his side. He sat there, shaking, until the ambulance came. He didn’t speak.His eyes were hollow.
He’d tried to save Tommy. He did everything he could.
But I saw what it did to him.
How it shattered something inside him.
The boy who tried to save my brother. And couldn’t.
I know part of him died that day. And a part of me died that day too.
Not just the part that loved Tommy.
But the piece of me that believed the world was safe.
The piece of me that believed anything, or anyone, could be saved if you tried hard enough. It was a lesson I would learn again.
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
—C. S. Lewis,A Grief Observed
Chapter Twelve
Sawyer
I START CLEANING the kitchen not long after Jake drives away.
I need something to do, something to focus on that isn’t the look on his face when I turned down his invitation. That flicker of hurt. The one I hadn’t meant to cause but did anyway.
