“Hang on,” Elizabeth said. Beau’s breathing gradually became more regular, but he still couldn’t talk. Sobs choked his words.
My cell phone rang again, and I looked to where Elizabeth had placed it, on the table near my chair, in the light of the table lamp, beside William’s journal.
I thought of EZ dying in William’s arms, his life force slipping from his eyes. I thought of Kenny, who William had called Haybale, and who died from a one-in-a-million shot. I thought of the others who stepped on land mines and booby traps, and I wondered how anyone could ever accept the death of someone so young. How anyone could saddle up and move out as if it had never happened.
They couldn’t, of course. No one could.
So William and those marines simply refused to accept death. Not just once. They refused death over and over and over. I looked again at Beau, his body sagging in his mother’s arms, and I understood. For the first time, I truly understood. And I wondered if reality had crashed upon my family, upon Beau, as it had crashed on William that summer.
Chris’s death was tragic on so many levels, it was hard to comprehend. It seemed unreal, like we were all actors on a stage, waiting for the curtain to fall so we could drop that fourth wall and go back to being ourselves, back to our lives. I kept waiting for Chris to walk in the door with that big grin and give me an even bigger hug. “Hey, Mr. B.,” he’d say. Chris had been like a second son to me and Elizabeth. He’d been at our house as much as his own during the past eighteen years.
But he hadn’t been our son. Our son was home, alive.
I felt a deep regret that just days before, I had been thinking that Beau didn’t yet understand loss, that we had made his life too easy, that he didn’t even understand disappointment. I kept thinking of William Goodman’s admonition that summer and about what he had written in his journal—that while he had never accepted death, he had also never avoided death. None of us could. Even though he’d made it home alive, death had followed him. I wondered if, in my anger and pettiness, I had somehow brought this loss upon Beau, as crazy as that sounded. But a lot of what William had written sounded crazy. And yet, it had all been true.
Elizabeth and I reached out to Art and Josephine but our calls went to voice mail.
As Beau’s friends, and some parents, hurriedly came to our home, Elizabeth did what she’d always done. She fed them. At least, she put out food. No one ate much. No one drank. We barely talked. The young men, Chris’s friends, hugged and cried. They looked stunned, disbelieving, uncertain what to do or to say. They weren’t supposed to experience mortality, not at that age.
Seeing their pain made me think of my own experiences at their age, of driving home after I’d had too much to drink or getting in a car with someone drunk. I thought of how quickly my friends and I could have died, or killed others, maybe another high school student like Chris, who had his whole life ahead of him. Only by the grace of God had neither happened, but maybe, as with William and those other marines, I had only been fooling myself. “You don’t cheat death,” William said in the garage of that remodel during one of our talks. “You think you do, but you don’t. Death finds you.”
Eventually Elizabeth and I went to the hospital to console the parents of Peter Oxford. The Carpenters were not there. Chris’s body had already been taken to a funeral parlor, and the Carpenters were making arrangements for their son’s wake and burial.
We returned home. Just after midnight, Art called my cell phone. I didn’t know what to say. What do you say? He asked Elizabeth, Beau, and me to come over. We agreed.
After dropping Mary Beth at her cousin’s, we drove to the Carpenters’。 Art answered the door looking lost. He embraced Beau and the two men cried. “He loved you, Beau,” Art eventually said. “Chris loved you like a brother.”
“I loved him,” Beau said.
Art released his embrace. “I was so relieved to hear you were not in the car, Beau. I thought you both died.” Art looked to me. “Why wasn’t he in the car, with Chris?”
“It’s Mary Beth’s sixteenth birthday. Elizabeth made plans. Beau chose to go to his sister’s party.”
“I didn’t want to go,” Beau said. “I wanted to go to the game, with Chris.”
“I’m so glad you didn’t,” Art said, but he looked to have lost his train of thought, and I wondered if he was thinking what I had thought when I heard the news. If Beau had gone to the game, he would have driven Chris. Chris never would have been in Peter Oxford’s car.