I heard rain splattering and the jingle of a wind chime—the one hanging next to Matt’s front door. My hair was plastered to the side of my face. Before I rang the bell, I raked it back with my fingers and tied it in a knot. It had been long then, but now its weight was unfamiliar. I was used to it tickling my jaw.
He answered the door, so the screen was between us. He was wearing his gym shorts—his name was written on the front of them, right above his knee—and a ragged T-shirt that was a little too small. He had dark circles under his eyes—darker than usual, that is, because Matt always had a sleepy look to his face, like he had just woken up from a nap.
He glanced over his shoulder to the living room, where his mother was sitting on the couch, watching television. He drew the door shut behind him, stepping out onto the porch.
“What is it?” he said, and at the sound of his voice—so hollowed out by grief—I felt a catch in my own throat. In the memory as well as in the visitation. It never got easier to see him this way.
“Can you get away for an hour?” I said.
“I’m sorry, Claire, I’m just … not up for hanging out right now.”
“Oh, we’re not going to hang out. Just humor me, okay?”
“Fine. I’ll tell Mom.”
A minute later he was in his old flip-flops (taped back together at the bottom), walking through the rain with me to my car. His gravel driveway was long. In the heat of summer the brush had grown high, crowding the edge, so I had parked on the road.
Matt’s house was old and small and musty. He’d had a bedroom once, before his grandmother had to move in, but now he slept on the couch in the living room. Despite how packed in his family was, though, his house was always open to guests, expanding to accommodate whoever wanted to occupy it. His father had referred to me as “daughter” so many times, I had lost track.
His father had died three days before. Yesterday had been the funeral. Matt had helped carry the coffin, wearing an overlarge suit with moth-eaten cuffs that had belonged to his grandfather. I had gone with Anna and Jack and all our other friends, in black pants instead of a dress—I hated dresses—and we had eaten the finger food and told him we were sorry. I had been sweaty the whole time because my pants were made of wool and Matt’s house didn’t have air-conditioning, and I was pretty sure he could feel it through my shirt when he hugged me.
He had thanked us all for coming, distractedly. His mother had wandered around the whole time with tears in her eyes, like she had forgotten where she was and what she was supposed to do there.
Now, three days later, Matt and I got in the car, soaking my seats with rainwater. In the cupholder were two cups: one with a cherry slushie (mine) and the other with a strawberry milk shake (for him). I didn’t mention them, and he didn’t ask before he started drinking.
I felt struck, looking back on the memory, by how easy it was to sit in the silence, listening to the pounding rain and the whoosh-whoosh of the windshield wipers, without talking about where we were heading or what was going on with either of us. That kind of silence between two people was even rarer than easy conversation. I didn’t have it with anyone else.
I navigated the soaked roads slowly, guiding us to the parking lot next to the beach, then I parked. The sky was getting darker, not from the waning of the day but from the worsening storm. I undid my seat belt.
“Claire, I—”
“We don’t need to talk,” I said, interrupting. “If all you want to do is sit here and finish your milk shake and then go home, that’s fine.”
He looked down at his lap.
“Okay,” he said.
He unbuckled his seat belt, too, and picked up his milk shake. We stared at the water, the waves raging with the storm. Lightning lit up the sky, and I felt the thunder in my chest and vibrating in my seat. I drained the sugar syrup from the slushie, my mouth stained cherry bright.
Lightning struck the water ahead of us, a long bright line from cloud to horizon, and I smiled a little.
Matt’s hand crept across the center console, reaching for me, and I grabbed it. I felt a jolt as his skin met mine, and I wasn’t sure if I had felt it then, in the memory, or if I was just feeling it now. Wouldn’t I have noticed something like that at the time?
His hand trembled as he cried, and I blinked tears from my eyes, too, but I didn’t let go. I held him, firm, even as our hands got sweaty, even as the milk shake melted in his lap.
After a while, it occurred to me that this was where the moment had ended—Matt had let go of me, and I had driven him back home. But in the visitation, Matt was holding us here, hands clutched together, warm and strong. I didn’t pull away.
He set the milk shake down at his feet and wiped his cheeks with his palm.
“This is your favorite memory?” I said quietly.
“You knew exactly what to do,” he said just as quietly. “Everyone else just wanted something from me—some kind of reassurance that I was okay, even though I wasn’t okay. Or they wanted to make it easier for me, like losing your father is supposed to be easy.” He shook his head. “All you wanted was for me to know you were there.”
“Well,” I said, “I just didn’t know what to say.”
It was more than that, of course. I hated it when I was upset and people tried to reassure me, like they were stuffing my pain into a little box and handing it back to me like, See? It’s actually not that big a deal. l hadn’t wanted to do that to Matt.
“No one knows what to say,” he said. “But they sure are determined to try, aren’t they? Goddamn.”
Everyone saw Matt a particular way: the guy who gave a drumroll for jokes that weren’t jokes, the guy who teased and poked and prodded until you wanted to throttle him. Always smiling. But I knew a different person. The one who made breakfast for his mother every Saturday, who bickered with me about art and music and meaning. The only person I trusted to tell me when I was being pretentious or naive. I wondered if I was the only one who got to access this part of him. Who got to access the whole of him.
“Now, looking back, this is also one of my least favorite memories.” He pulled his hand away, his eyes averted. “Not because it’s painful, but because it reminds me that when I was in pain, you knew how to be there for me … but when you were in pain, I abandoned you.”
I winced at the brutality of the phrase, like he had smacked me.
“You didn’t …” I started. “I didn’t make it easy. I know that.”
We fell back into silence. The rain continued to pound, relentless, against the roof of my car. I watched it bounce off the windshield, which had smeared the ocean into an abstract painting, a blur of color.
“I was worried about you,” he said. “Instead of getting angry, I should have just told you that.”
I tried to say the words I wanted to say: Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I wanted to smile through them and touch his arm and make a joke. After all, this was his last visitation. It was about him, not about me; about the last moments that we would likely share with each other, given that he was about to die.
“I’m still worried about you,” he said when I didn’t answer.
I didn’t carry him to this memory; the memory. It was weird how much intention mattered with the visitation tech, in this strange space between our two consciousnesses. I had to summon a memory, like pulling