Nobody in Particular(85)

When Molly appeared and told me she couldn’t find Oscar, I had managed to focus. Even through the mist, I knew the tone of her voice was unusually urgent. I couldn’t quite steer myself, but with Molly leading me by the hand, I accompanied her on her search as the rooms spun and spun and became one with one another.

The room we found him in was dark, and quiet. There were no lights to blur together in there. Just a bed, with a boy, and a wall for me to lean on. I think, looking back, Molly was asking me for help for far too long before I remembered what the word meant. That was the first moment of clarity—the first moment I took Oscar in. Even in that state, I knew I was looking at something very, awfully wrong. His head was thrown back, exposing his neck, and his mouth and eyes were open as he took in a single rasping breath, but he wasn’t looking at Molly. Everything stopped, and I stared and stared, because I knew that the wrongness meant I had to do something, but I simply couldn’t remember what.

In my memories, I stared at him like that for perhaps an hour. Realistically, it couldn’t have been more than a second. I remember whispering, “Wait…” but I can’t be sure if Molly ever heard me. It wasn’t an instruction, anyway. More of a plea to the universe to undo whatever had been set in motion. Then Molly was grabbing at him, and shouting, and the room wasn’t empty anymore. My bodyguard, Elizabeth, rushed to the bed to examine Oscar. I found Eleanor by my side, speaking into her phone. That was when I remembered that one should call emergency services when one finds their friend in an empty, dark room looking like a corpse.

I wanted to go to Molly, but every time I pushed forward, I was dragged back by someone. I became surrounded by murmurs, and shouts, and the room filled further and further. Then someone attempted to empty everyone out, and that was when Eleanor had tugged on me and urged me to leave. I did not. Then Alfie had appeared, and his face was inches from mine, and he’d locked eyes with me. “Rosie,” he said. “We have to go. Now.”

I didn’t know, then, exactly what was going on. But my brain had formed one clear understanding. Molly was terrified, and Molly was almost within my reach, and I wasn’t leaving without her. So I grabbed the doorframe and gripped it with white knuckles until my friends stopped trying to pry me off. Alfie disappeared then. Eleanor did not.

The room wasn’t dark anymore by that point. I can remember walking toward the bed, and Molly grabbing me, using me to keep herself standing. I remember how badly her hand was shaking. And I remember Oscar’s eyes. They should’ve been looking at me, but there was nothing there.

“We watched him die,” I whisper to Molly.

She looks at me sharply. “Yeah.”

We watched it. He was alive, and then he wasn’t. And there was nothing we could do. Not by the time we found him. One moment he was everything, alive, and smiling, full of worries and hopes and a future. And then he was nothing. Like a lamp switch.

On, then off.

I wanted another chance. I wanted to do it differently, all of it, because it didn’t feel possible that the worst thing, the worst possible thing, could have happened in the span of only a few minutes. It didn’t seem fair, and therefore, it didn’t seem real.

Hasn’t seemed real.

But it is real.

Oscar doesn’t get a life anymore. He’s gone, and I will never speak to him again. Nor will Molly. We will never run into him at a gathering. We can’t send him a message and ask to see him.

There is no him.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t … I can’t … I’m sorry, Molly. I just didn’t … I couldn’t, but, I should have…”

It happened, didn’t it? I watched someone die. Not someone. Oscar. I watched as Molly screamed for him. I stared at his body, only flesh and bone, still warm from the blood that was pumping through it until it wasn’t.

And Molly. God, Molly.

“Then I left you,” I say. “I wouldn’t leave you while it was happening, then I left you after that night anyway.”

“Rose…”

“I just couldn’t think about it,” I say. “I know I needed to, but I couldn’t.”

“I know,” Molly says.

“No,” I insist. “I mean, I just … collapsed inward. You needed to talk about that night and I just … I—I couldn’t. It was like I was short-circuiting.”

“I understand.”

“It wasn’t normal. Every time I tried to think about it—and I mean every single time, Molly—the channel changed. I completely abandoned you, and you were in so much pain, and I felt nothing.”

Molly’s eyes are glassy, and she arches her neck to stare at the ceiling.

“You should still hate me,” I say with conviction. Molly climbs onto the bed, and I realize with a surge of revulsion at myself that she means to reassure me. “Don’t,” I gasp, sitting up with a start. “It’s not your job to comfort me.”

It was real.

The fact settles somewhere in my throat, and I have the sensation of being strangled from the inside. When I finally manage to force the breath from my lungs, it comes out in a thin sob—a sound I wasn’t expecting at all. I raise my hand as though to muffle myself, but it settles on my collarbone, and I hunch over as I gasp for another breath. For the first time, my mind allows me to understand that I watched my friend die, and he’s never coming back. I’m here in the moment, feeling all of it, and it weighs too much to stand under.