This is my hope, I wrote in my journal that first year, that the bonfire will continue as a memorial for Ray-Ray and to mourn for others who pass away in the years to come.
Edgar had made it to the bonfire every year, and since the intervention had failed, I hoped this year’s bonfire would be one more chance to help him back on the right path. I wouldn’t give up on him. I was consumed by an emptiness I tried to fill however I could: through prayer, meditation, journaling. For the first time in many years, I struggled to sleep at night, worried about Edgar and Ernest. At such times I always felt that an epiphany was about to come to me, but I was never able to put my finger on it. One night some months earlier, thinking Ernest had quit breathing in his sleep, I turned over in bed to see that he was in fact awake, staring up at the ceiling with the fear of someone who had been struck repeatedly across the face. “I dreamed about dead people,” he whispered, immediately closing his eyes and falling back asleep. The next morning Ernest had no memory of it, but the moment haunted me.
When I did manage to sleep, I often dreamed about Ray-Ray as a young child, maybe five or six years old. I never dreamed of him as a teenager, even though he was fifteen when he passed. In these dreams he would be missing, and I couldn’t find him. Ernest and I would show up at a gymnasium to pick him up, and he wouldn’t be there. Or we would be at a crowded park somewhere, searching for him. Those dreams were the hardest.
I had another recurring dream, about a man carrying an owl. I wondered who he was, this stranger. He was silent and kind, offering me beads or a piece of warm bread, a cup of dark wine to drink. There was nothing romantic or attractive about this, and certainly nothing suggestive about my feelings toward him. If anything, he appeared as a traveling monk, maybe a spiritual man, dressed in ragged clothes and holding the owl on his arm.
“It sounds like you’re dreaming about Skili,” Irene once told me. “He’s a ghost or bad spirit. He brings bad news.”
But I didn’t tell anyone about my dreams of Ray-Ray appearing in the form of a bird. When I woke and sat outside on the back deck in the mornings, sometimes a bird would fly near and land in the grass, cock its head as if watching me. It made me miss him terribly.
Sitting at the dining room table, I closed my notebook and turned off the light. I felt my way in the dark down the hall to our bedroom and got back into bed. My mind was alive, racing with thoughts as usual. Tomorrow the foster boy, Wyatt, would be coming into our home, this house made of strong brick and rock. This house able to withstand bad weather and furious winds throughout the years, with its stable roof and walls and plaster that tightened when the earth moved. This house, our house, that creaked and ticked with the passing of time, welcoming the voices of strangers and the company of spirits whose laughter lifted like smoke through the chimney. I wondered how such a place remained firm, intact, solid, throughout its years of soaking up all the crying and pain, the laughter and longing, all the memories birthed from my swollen belly.
Edgar Echota
SEPTEMBER 1
Albuquerque, New Mexico
RAE AND I ATE in silence. Actually her name was Desiree, but I called her Rae, like my brother’s name. We were living in a cheap rental house with dirty windows and bugs behind the refrigerator and in the bathroom. I needed help. My drug supply was low. I knew I was spiraling into a meth addiction, and I took oxycodone, too, or whatever I could get. Everyone knew what was happening to me, how horrible I’d started to look and how bad my addiction was becoming. Doing pills had started as a way for me to avoid feeling miserable all the time, but the more I used, the more depressed I became. It was a fucking nightmare. I was only twenty-one and already at a dead end. Rae was about to leave me. I knew I was getting worse because I could look anyone in the face, even her, and tell a long, elaborate lie. It made me feel awful, even though I knew I was a terrible liar anyway.
We stared into our plates, moving pasta around with our forks, pausing every so often to drink cheap wine from plastic cups. We barely ate anything. Light slanted in through the windows, pulsing particles of dust. The house ached with a sense of dread for me—I could feel it everywhere, on our street, or in every New Mexico town surrounding us. I wondered whether something bad was about to happen to me. I pictured other people like me, fuckups getting high and avoiding their own loved ones, looking out their windows with longing and terror, afraid of their lives falling apart. Thinking this made me feel better.
It was like this night after night. I had followed Rae to art school a year earlier, back when I still felt hopeful about our relationship and my future. I kept my drug use a secret for months, meeting people in the park or smoking when Rae was gone and I was in the house alone. It didn’t take long for Rae to notice that I was becoming overly thin, developing tooth decay and skin sores.
At the table I had a sudden coughing fit, bringing a napkin to my mouth, which made Rae stand up and take her plate to the kitchen sink. I heard the water from the faucet come on, then the grind of the garbage disposal. Her silence was a presence designed to put me on edge, a way of communication to reinforce what I feared would happen soon: that she would leave for good. Once Rae left, I knew I would be truly alone, since I had been pulling away from my family for months. Ever since they showed up for the intervention, I had been promising to go to rehab, and I wanted to go because I knew how much sadness and worry I had caused them. But I couldn’t bring myself to check in, and now I was way too embarrassed to go back home and face them.
I set my fork down and watched Rae rinse dishes in the kitchen.
“Put on Ornette Coleman,” she called out to me. “The record we were listening to last night.”
I downed my cup of wine and went over to the turntable to put on the album. I put the needle on the record and, as the music played, picked up the album cover and looked at it. Rae once said Ornette Coleman was the spitting image of her dad, who had been a jazz drummer himself. Maybe that was why she wanted to listen to it. Her dad had introduced her to free jazz in New Orleans, where Rae spent summers growing up. He died when she was a teenager. When we first met, we had bonded over our experience losing a family member. Death brought us together, that’s what we always joked.
I sat on the couch and listened to the frantic shrill of the trumpet, the wild cymbals and drums. Listening to jazz revved me. I could drum my hands on my lap for entire songs, long periods of time, which was something I did almost every time we listened to music. I could imitate Charlie Watts, Stewart Copeland. That drummer from Cheap Trick with the cigarette hanging from his mouth. Rae hated when I did this. She stepped out onto the back porch to smoke and talk on the phone. I never knew who she was talking to. I wanted to care more than I did, but our relationship had become so routine and dull that I never felt the desire to ask. When she came back into the house, she told me my mom had called her.
“What did she want?”
“I’m tired of making excuses for you,” she said. “Call her yourself. The anniversary is coming up.”
“I plan on going,” I said, but I didn’t know if I wanted to go home or not. I knew Rae was pulling away from me. I wondered whether she was cheating on me, although she had never actually given me any reason to be suspicious. All she wanted, I think, was some sort of physical tenderness from me, or maybe a sign of empathy, which I never gave her. I knew deep down it was my fault she was pulling away, but I almost wanted her to for some reason. I couldn’t understand why I would want to punish myself.