Page 93 of Goodbye Days

Pierce takes over driving and Melissa holds Eli’s jar. I keep considering what I can contribute. What revelation I can offer. I’m coming up blank. My mind is void and my thoughts won’t take shape for me to hold.

Pierce keeps shifting in his seat as if he wants to say something. “Every time I drive now, those last moments haunt me.”

Melissa makes a little noise of disgust. “Pierce.”

“I imagine what Eli saw in the split second before the trailer of that truck grew in his field of vision until it was all he saw.”

“Please don’t be morbid. Not today.”

Pierce gives a bitter, sardonic chuckle. “Yeah, because our son, Eli, who didn’t own a piece of clothing that wasn’t black, and who started asking for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark as a bedtime story at age four, would be so offended by my morbidity.”

“I’m not talking about Eli.”

“Sorry, isn’t that who this day is about?”

Melissa shakes her head and raises her hands in an I-just-can’t gesture.

I’m going full Dr. Mendez on this. “It’s okay,” I say. “We—I can handle it if talking about it helps. Don’t worry about me.”

“I’m all right too,” Jesmyn says.

Pierce catches my eyes in the rearview mirror and gives me a firm nod. Then he throws Melissa a triumphant look.

She stares forward and ignores it. “Say what you need to then.” Her tone is frigid.

I’ve seen Pierce and Melissa sparring intellectually before. That was always part of the landscape over at Eli’s. But this seems more pointed and personal. I suddenly wish Dr. Mendez were actually here rather than my attempts to channel him. He’s the intellectual equal of both, and he could defuse things.

“I wonder if he had any awareness of what was happening, if his consciousness survived even for a few seconds. Or if one minute everything was bright and normal, and the next minute everything was black.”

“Well, (A) how would the answer to that change your life in any way, and (B) how the hell are these guys supposed to help you answer it?”

“I’m not asking a question, Mel, I’m simply stating that I wonder. Am I not allowed to express curiosity over something near anybody who can’t decisively banish said curiosity?”

Melissa starts to respond.

“Eli believed in God,” I blurt. Everyone shuts up instantly. We’ll be set if, between Jesmyn and me, we can keep remembering dramatic revelations every time Pierce and Melissa start to go at each other’s throats. Even Jesmyn looks expectant.

“Maybe,” I continue. “Sort of.”

Pierce looks flummoxed. “He never expressed that to us.”

“That could be because you derided religious people as idiots every chance you got,” Melissa says.

“That is absolutely unfair.”

I speak louder. “Once, I don’t remember what we were doing. Going to a movie or something. Eli and I were talking in the car. I don’t know how we got on the subject, but we started talking about God. And I knew you two were atheists, so I was surprised when Eli goes: ‘What if there’s a god who’s so much bigger and more powerful than anything that he builds universes like ships in bottles, and no matter how far you look or reach, you can’t see or touch outside the bottle? So you have no idea that God exists. You have no way of proving that God exists. But he’s there. Or maybe our whole universe is just a big computer program that God is running.’ So yeah. Maybe he believed in God.”

“Well, he was entertaining the possibility of the existence of a god. Which wouldn’t make him a theist, necessarily; it would make him an agnostic.” Pierce has a wounded, vexed expression. I can guess, from my experience revealing new information to Nana Betsy, what he’s probably thinking.

Melissa’s expression is similar to Pierce’s. “Carver’s point,” she says tersely, “if I understand him correctly, was that Eli didn’t necessarily share our belief system and he had constructed his own. I didn’t know that about him. Obviously neither did you.”

“I wish he had talked to us about it,” Pierce says.

“I wish we had created an environment more conducive to that,” Melissa says.

Pierce shakes his head.

“I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault,” I say. “Eli had stuff that was his and his alone. Or that he talked about with only a couple people.”