Kevin

The last time I saw Kevin alive was December 19, 1999 - eight years ago tonight. I only allow myself to think of him one time a year. Any more than that, and I'd fall apart. I’ve never tried to write about him before. Maybe eight years is long enough - maybe the wounds have scabbed over. God knows, eight hundred years wouldn't be enough for them to heal.

Kevin had gotten sick in March. He was diagnosed with lymphoma in May. By September, it had spread all throughout his body, and the chemo wasn’t working. The day after Halloween, the doctor found a tumor on his temporal lobe. When Chris, Kevin’s brother, called me that night and uttered the words “brain surgery,” I threw up.

Kevin spent most of November in the hospital, undergoing radiation treatments. His long, golden hair fell out in chunks at night when I would brush it. Chris and I would sit beside his bed and hold his hands until he fell asleep, and then we would sneak out to the car and drive up to the falls. Chris would drink vodka and stare up at the stars, refusing to speak, ignoring me when I spoke to him. I would chain smoke and cry.

Kevin and Chris had been my best friends since before I could remember, and I loved them as much as anyone can love at seventeen. I would have died for them, and they would have killed for me, and that was enough for all of us. The thought of losing Kevin terrified me. We were so entwined that I felt sure I would die along with him, and that thought was not nearly as distressing as the nagging doubt that I might not.

We never talked about it. We were young, remember, and we held fast to childish notions. When you’re young, you believe in a way you can never seem to recreate as you grow older. You believe in miracles, and in magic, and even when proof is offered that these things do not exist, you believe in spite of that, because life so far has taught you that the game is always saved at the buzzer, and every story has a happy ending, that it's only the middle that's sad. Up until the very end, we still firmly believed that this was only the middle.

They released Kevin from the hospital two weeks before Christmas, and we spent the time holed up in the family room of his parents’ house, stoking the fire when it threatened to die and watching every holiday special that came on the air. No one demanded we do anything - no one bothered us at all. Perhaps our parents knew more than we did, for they didn’t insist Chris or I go to school. We just sat.

Surgery was scheduled for the afternoon of December 20th, and the evening before, Kevin asked us to drive him up to the falls. Chris and I eyed each other skeptically - the path was rocky, steep and uneven, and Kevin had been confined to a wheelchair for weeks. But Chris had never quite managed to deny his brother anything, and so, with his chair in the trunk of Chris’s car and enough blankets and coats to warm a small third world country, we went.

And maybe we knew then that things weren’t going to turn out for the best this time - that the guy in the white hat wasn’t going to ride off into the sunset. We knew something, I’m sure of it, because Chris tossed me the keys to the car with hands that shook badly and for the first ten miles or so, I would have sworn it was raining, until Kevin, sitting shotgun next to me, reached out to wipe my tears away.

We hit snow just past the lake, and I pulled over to let Chris drive. By the time we reached the parking lot at the trail head, the world was a blanket of white and the heater was going full blast.

Without a word, Chris pulled the car into the empty lot and went around back to get Kevin’s chair. I felt hot tears slide down my cheeks as I watched Chris half lift his brother into the wheelchair - when had Kevin gotten so weak?

My mind wandered, and I remembered other days, before Kevin had gotten sick, when the air had not been so cold. I remembered nights after high school football games when we’d climb into the car and drive up here and spend all night perched on the rocky ledge above the falls, smoking Marlboros stolen from our parents and getting drunk on Boones Farm Wine. Kevin used to run down this path ahead of Chris and I, laughing and teasing, calling for us to hurry up, asking what was taking us so long.

But Kevin wouldn’t be winning any races tonight.

So we walked in silence, Chris navigating Kevin’s chair along the icy footpath, slipping and sliding on the half frozen leaves that littered the ground. The steady rush of the creek sang us a lullaby as we walked, something ancient and timeless and pristine, all at once. We knew, as we walked, that we would never walk here again, that this path and this creek would become sacred, hallowed, consecrated, and that to return would be sacrilege, somehow - that to return would be to defile the memory of the perfection that we shared that night.

And perfect we were then, if only for a few hours. We were young and wild and beautiful, and maybe we honestly thought we were immortal. I’d like to believe we knew better, even at seventeen - I’d like to believe that we were intelligent enough to know that actions carried consequences, and that life held no guarantees - but the truth is, we were so young, and when you’re young, everything is forever.

Somehow, we made it, although when I think about it, I couldn’t quite tell you how. The snow was thicker up here, and Kevin was shivering beneath the heavy quilt Chris had wrapped around him. On a ledge high above the falls, Chris spread a blanket on the ground and I helped Kevin slide from his chair onto it, wrapping my arms around him, needing his comfort as much as he needed my warmth. As if in another life, I felt Chris sidle up behind me, laying his chin on my shoulder, and when I felt his tears, hot on my neck, I knew.

They say that growing up is done in stages, that there are many life lessons you must learn, that maturing is a slow climb up a high hill. I know this to be false. I grew up that night, all at once, the moment I realized that my best friend had brought me here to tell me goodbye.

Chris squeezed me hard around my waist, and I knew that he knew as well. Kevin pulled from my grasp and turned to face us, and Chris was my only lifeline, and I couldn't have let go of him if I'd tried.

I didn't try.

Kevin opened his mouth to speak, and for a fleeting second, I wanted to scream at him to shut up, not to say a word. I wanted to run - never stop, never look back, forget that he had ever existed - anything to avoid the pain of hearing Kevin say goodbye.

But I didn’t run, of course, and although I tried to scream, nothing came out but a strangled cry and a flood of tears that turned to ice and burned my cheeks.

He touched my hair, just once, and offered what I assume was meant to be a smile. “It’s okay,” he said in a voice I had never heard before. I didn’t believe him then. I don’t believe him now.

He looked out over the water for a long time, his eyes blank and far away, and at the time I was far too selfish to realize how hard this must be for him. He wasn’t just saying goodbye to me - he was saying goodbye to the world, to the falls, to the night sky and the promise of what waited around the bend. Kevin was saying goodbye to life, and I know in my heart that I made it harder for him that night.

But Kevin was my friend, my best friend, and he had never even known the definition of the word selfish, so it was no surprise that he let me rage and storm at him. I called him every name I could think of. I told him that if he loved me, he would fight - that if he dared die, I would know for sure that he had never loved me at all. I found my screaming voice hiding somewhere beneath the tears and I used it to it’s full advantage, and when I was done, when the sobs had died away to sighs and hiccoughs, he drew me to him and kissed the top of my head.

“You’re just mad,” he said with a small smile, and if I close my eyes right now, I can still hear his voice. “You don’t mean it. I know it doesn’t seem important now, but later, after everything, remember that I said it, okay? I know you didn’t mean it.”

Behind me, with his arms still wrapped around my waist, Chris broke down completely. “Stop, Kev,” he said, and I’d never heard him beg before that night. “Just stop. You’ll be fine, and tomorrow night we’ll laugh about it.”

“I love you guys, you know,” Kevin said with another one of those sad smiles. “I love you guys so much.”

He put his arms around both of us, and we held each other for a long time. Eventually, the snow stopped, and Kevin’s shivers intensified, and Chris bundled him back into his chair. The drive back to my house was pure hell. No one spoke. Like the road in front of us, the words, too, had frozen.

As Chris pulled into my driveway, the panic settled somewhere in my chest and made it hard for me to breathe. I knew what Chris had tried to deny - I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Kevin wouldn’t make it through the surgery tomorrow, knew that this, right now, was the last time I was ever going to talk with him - and I didn’t know what to say.

But he surprised me - he was always good at that. Without the aid of Chris or the chair, he climbed out of the car, took me by the hand, and walked with me to the front door.

I'd heard, many times, about a walk taking forever. I never knew it could really happen. The twenty feet from the car, up the path, and to the door stretched on, and on, and on. A million years passed, and in them was every moment Kevin and I had ever spent together - every hug, every fight, every tear.

It was Kevin's life that was ebbing as we walked, but it was mine that flashed before my eyes. I was six, with a broken leg in a cast, and Kevin was running down the street after the ice cream truck, hell bent on getting me that Drumstick I wanted. I was eight, and I'd run away from home, but it was dark, and I was cold - and there was Kevin in his Nascar pajamas with a flashlight, standing in his front yard, guiding me home.

Ten, and Kevin was giving me my first kiss - not because he wanted to kiss me, but because I wanted to kiss Bryan McKinney, and Kevin was my practice dummy. Twelve, and Kevin was behind me, his hands over my eyes, guiding me down to the treehouse he'd built for me just beyond the old creek bed. Fourteen, and all dressed up for my first high school formal, crying in the commons with Kevin's arms around me - Bryan had shown up with Laci Simms and I was devestated. Fifteen, learning to drive Kevin's daddy's old Ford on the back 40 of his property, Kevin beside me "Slow it down, you're gonna hit a tree." Sixteen, in the parking lot outside the high school prom, a bruise on my right cheek from my date's left hand, and Kevin pinning him up against the wall, threats and murder in his bright blue eyes.

Seventeen again - walking the last few steps with Kevin by my side.

I reached for him, and he wrapped his arms around me one last time, and I inhaled his scent - something wild and fresh and passionate, like a river that would never be tamed, or a field of wildflowers grown out of control.

“I love you,” he said again, tilting my face to his. “As long as you remember that, I’ll never be gone, okay?”

“I love you, Kevin,” I whispered. I kissed his cheek and, with every ounce of strength I possessed, I turned my back on him, went in the house, and closed the door.

At 11:34 the next morning, just before he was scheduled to go into surgery, Kevin called my cell phone and left a short message.

“I love you. I’ll always be around.”

One hour and seven minutes later, at 12:41, Kevin was pronounced dead.

I only think about Kevin one day a year. Today is that day. Eight years later, the tears still come as hard and as fast as they did the night we sat above the blue and below the black and tried to say goodbye.

True to his promise, I hear from Kevin every now and again. He hides just out of sight - in the shadows, or in the moonlight, or in the sunbeams - and he smiles.

Wherever he is, I always know he’s smiling.