There was a fire in the car and his body was so badly burned and beat up that they had to use dental records to confirm that it was him who was driving.
It was a closed casket because the accident left his body and face too mangled to display. I hate the fact that I never got to see him. A rude old man who probably should've retired years ago called me and turned my whole world upside down. He said that the records were a match and that it was my brother.
He gave me a number to give to the funeral home, urging me to get him out of the morgue quickly. Apparently, summer was coming and it was going to be a busy time for the department, lots of bodies.
If this had happened in person, I probably would've punched him in his face. But as it happened over the phone, all I could do was hang up and shake in disbelief.
6
Jacqueline
I climb into bed and darkness comes over me. I close my eyes, but I can't shut out my thoughts. I went to the Redemption Club, but I didn't find redemption there.
Not yet.
This isn't something that I have ever done before. I was always a good girl. I had boyfriends of course, but no one that serious or long-term. I had been single for almost a year, dating casually, having one-night stands with the guys I met at bars and dating apps. No one stuck.
I wouldn't say that I was looking for anyone in particular. Not at all. More like a distraction.
That's what it was like in graduate school, at least it was for me. Those of us who weren't involved with anyone else would meet up at a bar. We'd drink, we'd try to go home with someone, but then Michael died.
After the dust settled, so to speak, my friends tried to get me out of my funk. They tried to help me forget, not about my brother, but about the pain.
I'm not sure it is possible to do that. Not so soon, but again, I craved distraction. That's why I watched so many hours of television and read so many books, anything that took me away from this pain.
When Allison first told me about Redemption, she said something in passing like, "Did you know that Dean and Melanie went there?"
I asked her more about it and I was curious, of course, not just as a journalist, but as a human being. I found it fascinating that couples and people in committed relationships would go to places like that to explore their sexualities.
We didn't mention it again until she and I got drunk one night on too many wine coolers and played Truth or Dare. I had asked her to tell me the one thing that she’d never told anyone and she told me that she’d gone to Redemption.
"What was it like?" I asked, excited and a little bit shocked.
“I don't know it was, liberating, you know? It was like the veil had been lifted and you didn't have to play these games that you do at a bar,” she said with a sigh. "Do you like him? Do you just sort of like him? Does he like you? How far will this go? And then the ultimate game of all, will he call? Will you call? Do you even want him to call? Because, come on, let's be frank, most of the time the answer is no.”
Allison laughed, tossing her hair from side to side.
I folded my legs underneath my butt and leaned closer to her. "Okay, tell me everything."
She licked her lips and held up her wine glass in front of her as if she were holding court. "Well, the couple I told you about, Dean and Melanie, they invited me. They sort of vouched for me to get the invitation."
"But I thought you had to be in a relationship.”
"No, generally there’s a whole screening process for people who are couples who are interested. But single women, they're what they call unicorns because, you know, very few single women want to go to a place like that."
"What about single men?" I asked.
"Many, many want to and very, very few are ever allowed. Otherwise, it'd just be a whole sausage party.” She tossed her hair again and took another sip of her wine.
Allison McGivers is my friend from Dartmouth College. We were roommates for the last two years of school and we moved to the city together. And by the city, I, of course, mean New York.
But six months later, she found a guy and wanted to move out to live with him and this beautiful single life where we both took the city by storm ended in a little bit of a disillusionment when I couldn't pay my rent. She had paid two months ahead but I couldn’t find a roommate that I didn’t hate so I had to downsize to a studio that cost $1500 a month and wasn't worth $500.
And that's when I realized that it'd be better for me if I even rented something in Brooklyn or Jersey City and commuted because commuting, after all, wasn't too bad. But that was a huge hit to my pride.
It is hard to explain to people from other places, but somehow living in Manhattan made you feel like you were part of something bigger, at least that was what all the television shows and movies told me.
That’s not to say that people elsewhere were less but I thought that my dreams had a much bigger chance of coming true if I lived in New York.
And what was this big dream? To be a writer. The only job I was able to score, even with my Ivy League degree, was a receptionist at the same media conglomerate that Allison worked in. I worked more than the standard eight hour day. I got paid barely forty grand a year, hardly enough to pay off my loans from a private university, but that was fine.
I was good with that. This job was going to lead to another one, maybe in publishing.
Of course, I never did an internship in publishing and that's required, but how the hell was I supposed to make enough space in my schedule to work for free for someone for forty hours a week for a whole summer or semester, just in hopes of landing a mediocre paying job as a copywriter, or maybe an assistant to an assistant to an assistant editor?
But that's the thing about being in your early twenties. You don't really know what's going on and just have to figure things out. So, I continued to live my life kind of in limbo until I decided to pursue my master's degree in journalism. That way I could possibly get a job doing something with writing and put my fiction on the back-burner.
"Hey, are you listening to me?" Allison snapped her fingers in front of my face, and suddenly I remembered that we were having a conversation, about what I couldn’t remember. "Do you want to hear about Redemption?"
"Yes, I do. Everything," I said.
"Well, I went there, I met with this woman called Cassandra and she laid out the rules after my application was approved.”
"Application?" I asked.
She nodded her head vigorously, "Yes. I think I have filled out smaller applications for college."
"Wow. What did it require?"
"Just a lot of information about who you are. It's all very confidential, but yeah, you also have to submit this video, talking about your intentions for going to Redemption. I have a feeling that they just wanted to see your face, make sure you're not a troll.” She laughed and stumbled up to the counter to get more wine.
"Why didn't you tell me about this earlier?"
"Ah, because you would have told me not to go?"
"Yes, that's true.” I nodded.
"Listen, you're always the sensible one doing your own thing. So, you know, I don't know where you stand on that kind of thing."