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Marvin

"Go home, Marvin." 

  They had taken Whizzer away hours ago, but Marvin still sat there in the chair, next to the empty hospital bed, staring into space. It didn't seem real, somehow. The bar mitzvah. The wild frenzy. The flat, continuous piercing sound that had marked the moment that the hand Marvin had been holding no longer belonged to Whizzer, but just a shell. It had all seemed so far away. 

  "Marvin." 

  He finally found himself glancing up. Charlotte was standing on the other side of the empty bed, lab coat askew, hair rumpled, and eyes dull with fatigue. "You need to go home," she said again. "You've been sitting there doing nothing for hours."

  He couldn't bring himself to speak. 

  Charlotte sighed and sat down on the bed. "Please." Her face had lost the aloof, professional expression it often had, and her eyes were speaking to him with real heart, showing the pain underneath. "Please, Marvin. Go home." 

  She reached across the bed and took his hand, guiding him gently to his feet and walking him across the room, down the stairs, through sterilized white hallways. Everything seemed a buzz around him, except Charlotte's warm hand leading him forward. He didn't know if he could have moved without it, but the next thing he knew, he was sitting in the passenger seat of a car. 

  Charlotte got into the seat beside him and started the ignition. 

  "What are you doing?" Marvin was finally able to ask. 

  "Taking you home," Charlotte replied, eyes glued to the rearview mirror as she put the car in reverse and backed out of the hospital parking lot. "I don't trust you to drive in your state." 

  "Don't you have to work?" 

  Charlotte met his eyes. "Some things are more important than work." 

  Marvin lapsed into silence again. The roads and neighborhoods outside his window were familiar, and his memory went back to all the times he had driven through here with Whizzer in the passenger seat, Whizzer who would never sit in the passenger seat again. 

  "I am so dumb," Marvin said softly. 

  "Yeah, we've all got our moments." Charlotte didn't take her eyes off the road. 

  "It was my fault Whizzer got the sickness." Marvin felt his voice, sour and dry, almost unrecognizable, the voice of someone in too much pain to feel anything else. "Mine, Charlotte. If I hadn't - if-" He couldn't finish the sentence. 

  "Life does its thing." Were those tears in Charlotte's voice? "People come. People go. People live and die. There's no way to be ready for it. Hell, I deal with it every day and it's still as much of a stranger as it's always been. You can blame yourself, or you can feel sad and accept that no one lives forever." 

  "But why Whizzer?" Marvin knew he sounded like a petulant child, but he didn't care. "Why him?" 

  Charlotte turned to look directly at him. "I don't know."

  Marvin's house was brightly lit and cheery-looking, which for some reason made him furious. The world should be dark and cold now that Whizzer wasn't in it. 

  The kitchen was exactly as he'd left it the day he and Whizzer had gone to play racquetball. It dawned on him that in the three or four - or had it been more? - days since he'd been home. He'd been so preoccupied with Whizzer that he hadn't even considered anything about himself. 

  When was the last time he'd eaten? He opened the fridge, almost aimlessly, and located a pint of strawberry ice cream. Whizzer's favorite. He was probably the only person in the world that liked that stuff. Marvin took a spoon and sat down on the couch, devouring ice cream. He relished the way the cold burned his teeth and mouth, not even tasting it mostly. It just felt so good to eat, to take away all his problems with taste. 

  But he spotted something on the couch beside him that made him pause with a spoonful of ice cream halfway to his mouth. 

  Marvin had been the one in the relationship that worked; Whizzer was the stay-at-home, night owl, energetic one. Every morning, Marvin got up at 5:45 to make a cup of coffee, get dressed, have a bagel, and head to work. Whizzer had enjoyed leaving little notes all over the house for Marvin to find; in his favorite coffee mug, wrapped in the red tie he wore more often than not, tied around his toothbrush with a rubber band, taped to the window looking out over the front yard. Sometimes he'd find them in the morning, sometimes when he got home from work and Whizzer was still at racquetball practice. Your shirt looks good today. You make me happy. Wash the dishes. These were only a few of the affectionate notes he found. 

  The day of Whizzer's collapse, Marvin had gone to work as usual, finding a note nestled in the egg carton and another pinned to a hanger in his closet on his way. His boss had let him out early, and he'd gone to play some racquetball with Whizzer, who had been looking a little off for a few weeks, but Marvin had thought maybe it was just stress or lack of sleep. He hadn't had time to go home after Whizzer had to be rushed to the hospital, and hadn't been home since. 

  The strawberry ice cream slipped from the spoon and landed with a soft thud on the carpet, but Marvin hardly noticed; he was staring at one end of the sofa, where a little piece of yellow paper lay open on the cushion. Words were written across it in pen, big enough for him to read from here, in a handwriting all too familiar.

  I love you. 

  Marvin shattered.