“Jay,” he says.
I slide down a hill and draw my bow and arrow, triggering the slow-motion mode. I release two arrows in quick succession. Both hit the beast’s energy core, drawing heavy damage and narrowing its HP counter to a sliver.
“YES!” I say.
“Your Tito Maning called.” He pauses. “Jun is dead.”
My fingers slow, but I keep playing. I’m not sure I heard him right. “Wait—what?”
Dad clears his throat. “Your cousin Jun. He’s dead.”
I freeze, gripping the controller like a ledge. I suddenly feel like I’m going to be sick. On the screen, the mechanical creature mauls my avatar. My life drains to zero. The camera pans upward, mimicking the soul’s skyward path.
The words finally land, but they don’t feel real. I was just thinking about my cousin last night. . . .
“That’s impossible,” I say.
I sit up and shift so I’m facing Dad. He’s still wearing his nurse’s scrubs, and his salt-and-pepper hair is disheveled like he’s been running his fingers through it. Behind his glasses, his eyes are bloodshot. I glance at the time again. Mom’s at the hospital, and he should be, too.
“I thought you’d want to know,” he adds.
“When?” I ask, my chest tightening.
“Yesterday.”
I’m quiet for a long time. “What happened? I mean, how did he . . .”
I can’t say the word.
He sighs. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What?” I ask. “Why not?”
“He’s gone. That’s it.”
“He was seventeen,” I say. “Seventeen-year-olds don’t randomly . . .”
He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “Sometimes they do.”
“So it was random? Like a car accident or something?”
Dad puts his glasses back on but avoids looking at me. He says nothing for a few beats, and then quietly, “What would it change if you knew?”
I don’t answer because I can’t. Doesn’t the truth itself matter?
I should be crying or throwing my controller down in anguish—but I don’t do any of this. Instead, there’s only a mild confusion, a muddy feeling of unreality that thickens when I consider the distance that had developed between Jun and me. How do you mourn someone you already let slip away? Are you even allowed to?
Since I don’t know, I mirror the disturbing calm of my father, as I always do. We share the space, the silence. But on the inside, I’m a plane with failing engines.
“He’s gone,” Dad repeats after some time. “That’s it.” And then a nervous laugh escapes his lips.
I try to process the information. Jun is dead—his life has ended. And here I am, sitting in my living room on the other side of the world, a can of Coke on the coffee table, playing a video game on an enormous, wall-mounted flat-screen TV, college on the docket.
Dad wanders away.
“Wait,” I call after him, “can we get there in time for the funeral?”
He stops. Over his shoulder: “There won’t be one.”
Confusion hits me like a wall. “Why not?”
“Your Tito Maning doesn’t want to have one. The way he died . . . it wasn’t . . . it’s not our concern.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
But he’s already gone, probably retreating upstairs.
Left alone, my confusion turns to anger, which starts to grow with nowhere to go like the roots of a plant in too small a pot. I finally drop the controller and bury my face in my hands. I take a few shaky, deep breaths. But my heart continues to race. My jaw stays clenched. My stomach remains knotted.
I think of all the letters we wrote each other over the years. What did his last one say? I don’t even remember.
But this I’ll never forget: I left it unanswered.
HOW HE LIVED
Not sure how long I sit there. I don’t remember turning off the console, but at some point, I realize the TV screen is blue, searching for input. Like a zombie, I drag myself upstairs. The door to my parents’ room is closed.
I knock. Dad doesn’t answer.
I knock again. Nothing. I try the handle. It’s locked. I sigh. “What happened to Jun?”
Silence.
“Dad? Please, tell me,” I say, my words too thin, too pleading. Like a stupid little kid.
Still nothing. Is it possible he’s on the other side of the door, covering his face with his hands and crying quietly? Probably not. I’ve never seen him cry once in my life.
Giving up, I retreat to my own room. I reach under my bed and pull out the Nike shoebox way in the back behind some old board games and the worn-out camo-print book bag I used in middle school. I brush dust off the lid and then open it. The smell of old paper and ink blossoms beneath my nose.
After my family’s trip to the Philippines when I was ten, Jun wrote me the first of what would become many letters over the years. This shoebox contains all of them stuffed inside haphazardly, each one written on the kind of yellow paper from a legal pad. I dump them out and sort them chronologically as I search for the last one. Can it really be possible that the person who sent me all of these is no longer alive?
At this very moment, are the letters I wrote him sitting in a box somewhere, never to be opened again? I’m not sure how many I sent. Definitely not as many as Jun because I wasn’t great at replying. I might go two or three months before sending one, but Jun’s arrived twice a month like clockwork. Every now and then, I’d ask again if we should message each other over email instead because there was almost always a season’s lag between when they were sent and when they’d arrive. Plus, I think I would have replied more often online. At first, Jun insisted we write actual letters because they were more real. But later he revealed that Tito Maning didn’t allow him or his sisters to have social media or even their own email accounts.
Eventually I find the letter I’m looking for, the one dated the December when we were fourteen, shortly before Jun ran away from home.
But I’m not ready to read it yet, so I set it aside and reread a few at random.
Soon enough, my cousin feels alive again. His voice rings in my ear, and his face floats in the paper just beyond his words where he swam in the kind of feelings and thoughts most people spend their lives trying to mask from others or from themselves. I remind myself that he’s dead, that I’ll never have the chance to write to him again—but it’s difficult to drop an anchor in that reality.
I start to feel untethered. I grab my phone and begin to text Chris, but I decide to call instead because I need to hear another human’s voice. Except he doesn’t pick up. Ever since he got a new boyfriend, he’s been MIA. So he’s probably out with him or busy doing whatever a subsea engineer does on a Saturday instead of answering calls from his little brother. I glance at the time and decide to try my sister next, figuring it’s late enough in the day that she’s probably recovered from whatever college party she was at last night.
Em answers midway through the fourth ring, just when I’m about to give up.
“Hi, baby brother,” she says, voice groggy. I’m glad to hear it. Things were pretty rough between us for a long time. But after she moved out, I actually found myself missing her sometimes.