There's a front yard in Liberty Street with grass so tall it reaches the ankles of those who stand on it. Inside the house, a woman in her forties looks for a suit, the type of suit one would wear to a funeral. She needs it for her older boy.
She walks up the stairs to his bedroom. Her eyes sting and she doesn't try to hold back the tears. She misses him too much. She wishes she could go back in time and change things. She thinks if maybe she hadn't let him go that night, she wouldn't miss him so much.
Framed to the door, wooden letters spell the boy's name: FINN. Under it, the names ARCHIE, ACE, and MILO were added with a black sharpie in different handwritings. The woman cries even more.
Inside, everything's the same. The boy didn't make his bed. Didn't clean his desk like she had told him to. Didn't do his laundry. His mother can't seem to find enough room in her to both rage and cry. She decides on the latest.
Her hands touch the old skateboards the boy turned into shelves, the frames of him with his younger brother, with his friends, his volleyball team. Her heart turns into a wasp's nest and everything stings.
There's the photograph of Finn smiling after winning a volleyball championship, hands covering his face while Archie tries to yank them away. The one of Finn at the skate park jumping over Archie with his board. The one of them at the beach, both of them covered in sand. One of them cuddling on the old sofa.
The mother keeps going in a violent wiping of eyes, pressing at the puffy red blotches, crying, getting it all out, touching everything she can.
Her face spills despair onto the floor, she thinks she can't do this, not alone, not without him. Her hands find a book on the bedside table. The Song of Achilles. The book looks like it has been read more than once. The corners of some pages have been folded and inside some paragraphs are underlined.
She looks confused. Her hands hold the book like it does not belong in this bedroom, like holding a seashell in the middle of the woods. She closes it, opens it again, reads the name written on a corner of the title page, and then takes it away to her own bedroom, where she hides it under her mattress. Then she goes back for the suit.
YOU ARE READING
One for the Team
Mystery / ThrillerThe body of a missing student is buried in the woods. But only a few know this. At first, it was just a running joke in the hallways of Northwoods High, a lowbrow school in a lower brow town. Finn Sexton never really thought the joke was funny, but...
