The Beautiful Between - Alyssa B. Sheinmel [54]
I’m putting the picture away when my phone rings.
“I’m downstairs.”
“I’ll be right there.”
He’s already finishing a cigarette when I get downstairs. When I hug him, it smells like he hasn’t stopped smoking all day today. Once, he made a joke that it was ironic that Kate’s illness made him smoke more, rather than discourage him as one might think. “You know,” he added when I looked at him blankly. “The whole cancer connection.” At the time, we’d both laughed. It shouldn’t have been funny, so our laughter was guilt-ridden.
“I’m glad to see you,” I say.
“Me too,” he says.
“Do you want to—”
“No. I don’t. Let’s just not talk about it yet.”
“That’s fine too.”
Jeremy lights two cigarettes, passes one to me. A few weeks ago, he got us both fingerless gloves, just for smoking, and we’re both wearing them now.
“Jeremy.” I say his name slowly, and I wait until he is looking at me to continue.
“I shouldn’t have not called.” I don’t know why I say it like that, so I say it again, better this time: “I mean, I should have called.”
Jeremy nods.
“I’m so sorry.”
Jeremy drops his cigarette on the ground and crushes it. He looks up, blinking. I wonder if he is trying not to cry. I am.
“Let’s not worry about that now,” Jeremy says finally. “I don’t want to worry about that right now. I just want to be here. Okay?”
I nod. “Okay.”
Jeremy lights another cigarette. “The funeral’s so quick,” he says, exhaling.
“I know. It’s a Jewish thing. My mother told me.”
“She never struck me as particularly religious.”
“She’s not. But I think her parents were.”
“So she’d know, then.”
“Yeah, she’d know.”
Jeremy looks up as he takes a drag from his cigarette. “I didn’t know,” he exhales.
I nod. “I guess you only really find out when it happens to you.”
“Unless you’re religious.”
“Right.” I pause. “Did you know Jews don’t send flowers?”
He shrugs. “No one told my parents’ friends that. The house reeks of lilies. We were going to run something in the paper about ‘In lieu of flowers, send a donation to the American Cancer Society,’ but we weren’t fast enough.”
“Guess not.”
“You know, until, like, this morning, I always thought that ‘in lieu of’ meant almost the exact opposite of ‘instead of.’ I thought it meant … I don’t know, like, ‘By way of flowers, please send them to the American Cancer Society.’ Like, ‘Send flowers there for their sick people, ’cause our sick person is gone, so send them to people who can still appreciate it.’”
I laugh unexpectedly. “Oh my God, so did I! Once my grandmother was having a party and I asked her what she was having in lieu of food!”
“Liar.”
“I swear to God. She laughed at me and told me what it really meant.”
Jeremy grins wide, and then the grin fades into one of his crooked smiles.
“I’ve been Kate’s big brother for as long as I can remember—I was only four when she was born, even though I always felt so much older than she was.” He takes a sharp breath in and exhales slowly, and I wait for him to go on. “And now I’m not a big brother anymore. And, I don’t know, I guess that was always the first thing I thought of myself as being.”
I want to tell Jeremy that he’s my big brother, even if it’s not the same thing. That even though we’re the same age, I look up to him and he seems years older, wiser, and more worldly than I’ll ever be. But I know it’s not the same, so I keep quiet—except for my sniffling, which I pretend is only because of the cold and has nothing to do with the tears hanging on to the edge of my eyelashes.
“It’s good to be here,” Jeremy says, and he puts his arm around me and we stand like that, in the cold, for a long time. I know I’m crying and I suspect he is too, but I don’t look up at him to see. The next day, I won’t even remember his leaving or my coming back up on the elevator and getting into bed. No, the last memory I have of that evening is of standing close to Jeremy in the cold, watching his breath come