YOU CAN SHARE THIS by Maria Zorn
On a red-eye flight hurtling toward New York City, I observed my sleeping mother’s face. The glow of the reading light she’d forgotten to shut off illuminated the gentle slope of her nose, the pink moles on her cheeks. The plane was oddly silent, minus the toneless hum planes always make. Something about the quiet made it feel like this moment would never end, that I’d get to gaze upon her forever, counting the pores on her forehead. She seemed familiar but foreign, someone I didn’t know but very much wanted to, almost like I had a crush on her.
It had been eighteen months since my mom called to tell me my brother had died. Six years since my dad shot himself, four since my mother’s father hanged himself. Our pile of dead men was so tall we couldn’t step over them. We needed a stool.
I was nearly twenty-three, the oldest my older brother would ever be. We were headed to the city to celebrate my birthday. How did my mom feel about this, I wondered, her youngest becoming as old as her oldest? He and I were finally going to be twins, which we’d been telling strangers in bars we were for years. Everyone believed us. Tall, broad-shouldered, the gravelly voices, the throaty laughs. We moved our heads too much when we talked, like chickens. It’d be even worse when I turned twenty-four, impossibly more tragic to be older than Tomm would ever be. Had my mom considered this yet? I wished I knew.
I always wanted to be like my mother. I imitated her bubbly disposition, I had her same broad smile and frizzy hair. When I got my braces off and discovered that my teeth, though straight now and without large gaps between them, did not look like hers, I felt ripped off. Her teeth were perfect, and I’d worn my rubber bands and threaded floss through the wiring of my braces so that I would resemble her. But my teeth, as it turned out, were smaller, my smile gummier. My frizzy hair typically remained frizzy even if I tried to beat it into submission with a blow dryer, but she could tame hers into soft blonde curls that fell around her square jaw.
My mom and I worked as a team to survive my father and then to help Tomm survive his own recklessness. We passed our first mission and failed our second. After Tomm died I could hug her, I could press her into my chest until I felt her rigid body soften, and then several months later I could hardly stand to look at her. Her eyes reflected back all of the guilt and anguish I was desperately attempting to stave off. This trip felt like the kind you take when trying to reconcile with an ex, in a sense. I had spent most of my life feeling certain that nothing could ever come between my mother and me, but now I was not so sure. No belief was unshakeable anymore, no love unconditional.
***
When my mom told me that Tomm went to sleep and didn’t wake up, her voice sounded like she was controlled by a ventriloquist. I could picture her mouth jerked open, slammed shut. Her poor jaw. I was living in New York with her and my brother, but on a trip to Phoenix, visiting my partner. My mom’s ex-boyfriend found me at Target, where I was shopping for socks, and made me come with him so I could answer my mom’s call someplace quiet, as if the news would be more palatable if we escaped the store’s fluorescent lights. After she told me, I wanted to offer her some kind of balm, but I couldn’t conjure anything up. All I could do was argue.
“Why? How? How? How does a twenty-three-year-old fall asleep and not wake up? A twenty-three-year-old doesn’t fall asleep and not wake up.” I wanted to shake her through the phone because didn’t she care enough to even guess what had happened? How was she so quickly accepting this new fate?
“I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry,” she said.
I felt like I was a child again, getting screamed at by my father. When he’d yell, I wouldn’t meet his eyes and insist he be different. I’d instead look at my mom and think: Why aren’t you making this stop? Can’t you do something? I was twenty-one now but I still wanted my mother to be a god. She didn’t have an answer to any of these questions. The only sound on the other line was a sharp inhale, one meant to usurp a sob. I pictured the ventriloquist who was making her say these words. Nothing was her fault, obviously, and this deflated my rage. We were both silent for a while. Then, the only words I could mold with my tongue were her words, parroted back to her: “I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry.” I said it again and again. I mourned my mother in that moment just like I mourned my brother, for she would never again be the same person; now, always, a woman who once held her son’s still body in her arms.
When she hung up the phone to speak with the police, I locked myself in the bathroom and knelt on the tiled floor in front of the toilet, waiting for vomit to come. I tried to focus on the way the grout pushed into the skin of my knees. Time passed, and then my boyfriend Chris’s voice was on the other side of the door saying, “Baby, let me in.” I crawled to the handle and twisted the lock. He’d been at the gym and was wearing sweaty shorts. He closed the door behind him and sat on the ledge of the bathtub. I licked his calf to taste its salt. I told him Tomm had gone to sleep and didn’t wake up, but that I didn’t understand why. At some point Chris transferred me from the bathroom to the car and I was told my mom’s ex-boyfriend was buying me a ticket to New York for that evening. He offered to buy Chris a ticket too, but Chris declined. I don’t remember the ride to Chris’s house, whether I texted my mom, if I packed my clothes or if he did. I can vaguely recall sitting cross-legged in the bed of his old pickup truck, eating a Filet-O-Fish sandwich from McDonald’s in the hundred-degree afternoon heat. There was, apparently, a drive to the airport and a flight out of Phoenix and a cab ride into the city. There was a key to find in my purse and there were steps to walk up to get to our apartment. How all of this happened is unclear to me. I had been picked up like a pin and dropped 2,400 miles away. In memory, there is only the bathroom, rank with Chris’s sweat, then the fish sandwich with its slimy yellow cheese, then walking into my mom’s arms, clutching one another like we’d fall into quicksand if we ever let go. The first few days after it happened, we couldn’t stop looking at photos of Tomm. He is a tiny blur from running in circles yelling, “Green grapes, green grapes,” a phrase he loved to shout for some reason when he was three; he is hunched over a pile of toys, showing me how to play with Barbies, teaching me how to give them names and backstories and problems; he is wearing a Roc-A-Wear gray velour tracksuit with freshly buzzed hair and tinted glasses, holding a folded-up piece of paper containing lyrics to a song he’d written; he is gothic, then a raver, then cloaked in a mink stole; then he’s prancing around New York City wearing six-inch platforms, his hair dyed platinum blonde, midnight blue, DayGlo orange. Each photo is of someone we lost. We lost hundreds of Tomms.
Tomm got a tattoo that said my way on the side of his left hand two days before he died. He had heard Frank Sinatra’s song and decided this was a sentiment he wanted on his body forever.
His friend Leslie accompanied him to the tattoo shop in Williamsburg. Before they went in, they went to the bar next door and ordered pickleback shots. Leslie had written my way in her notebook multiple times in slightly different handwriting – slanted, jagged, loopy – and Tomm selected one. He posted a photo of himself getting the tattoo, and in it his eyes are downcast, serenely admiring his new ink. He looks like someone who wants to let this tattoo heal, then get another one, and another one.
My mom, Tomm’s friends Billy and Leslie, and I returned to the tattoo shop the week after Tomm’s death. We had the original slip of paper on which Leslie had written my way. “Do you remember tattooing this on someone last week?” we asked the artist.
“Of course,” he replied. “Is there anything wrong with his tattoo?”
“He died,” my mom said.
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry.” The man was very tall and had tattoos that went from his neck all the way up to his bald head, meaty red roses hanging off of thorny vines.
We told him that we would like to get the same tattoo as Tomm. As the artist prepared his station, we went to the bar next door and ordered pickleback shots. Why the pickleback, when you usually order champagne or a gin and tonic or a spicy margarita? I wanted to ask him. I didn’t know we liked pickleback shots. Strange.
When we went back to the tattoo shop, the artist was blasting Frank Sinatra’s song on surround sound. The tattoo gun whirred loudly but the music was louder. And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain, Sinatra crooned. When it was my mom’s turn, I could hardly stand to look at her. I’d never seen another human look more hopeless than in that moment, not even in movies. She was too sad for tears. Her whole face looked like someone had grabbed it and pulled it downward. The tattoo artist started to cry.
During the days that followed, my new tattoo still puffy and red, I aimlessly walked around the city like a zombie, I took the subway to nowhere. Back against the hard plastic seat of the E-train, I saw Tomm sitting across from me with his legs in a figure four shape, the pussybow on his black blouse fanning out from his collarbone like flower petals. His head was tilted slightly to the right. He was appraising something, but what? The outline of his body was entirely serrated. You couldn’t touch him without getting cut. I didn’t get off the train until he disappeared. Never quite figured out what he was thinking.
My mom and I struggled to grieve together. We both knew that our combined sorrow was too large for any container available to us: the apartment, the street, the city. When one of us became emotional, the other became stoic in an equal but opposite measure. One crumbled, the other held her breath. Then switch, then switch, again. There was no collective exhale. I didn’t know what to say when we were in a room alone together. I wanted her to be an antidote but instead she was evidence, this human who birthed and raised us, that Tomm was once here and now he was gone.
If the memory of Tomm was serrated, then the memory of my grandfather was polished and smooth like a nickel. I could turn him over in my hand whenever I chose. My dad was slippery, covered in oil. If I pictured them all side by side on the subway, they didn’t seem like they knew one another. A wide-backed old Polish man in a flannel shirt, twinkly blue eyes, so sentimental that he’d stand at the end of his driveway and cry whenever our car pulled away at the end of a visit. A forty-six-year-old with hands shaking, bags under his eyes, every feature could be described as shadowy, a man who grew up on welfare, became a millionaire, then lost it all and grew addicted to alcohol and opioids. The first hanged himself after his wife died and the second shot himself because he believed he was never going to get better, he was never going to be able to stop tormenting us. And then, of course, there was Tomm. A nightcap after a Grindr date, went to sleep and never woke up.
I wanted these deaths to fit into one another tidily, like Russian dolls. I wanted each one to make more room for the next. I wanted my mom and I to become better at grieving every time, and instead it felt like my entire body was made of overstretched muscles. We did not have the capacity for this. We were too battered.
The toothpaste hardened in the sink bowl was Tomm’s. I knew this to be true because it bothered me that he didn’t rinse it off and I told him this a hundred times. I stared at the blue calcified lump and wondered if I could make it soft again. If I hit it with a blow dryer, maybe that would do it. But then what? Would I rub it into my skin like a lotion? Yes, that’s exactly what I’d do. How could I explain this desire to anyone, even my mother? I kept staring at the sink and the ceramic gleamed white. There was no toothpaste. I’d imagined it.
I kept walking past the Molly Wee, a rank Irish pub we tolerated solely due to its proximity, where I once paid Tomm five dollars to drink a bottle of Miller High Life. Five dollars plus the cost of the beer, that is. He’d sat across from me wearing a black and white Mongolian lamb vest so voluptuous he was nearly drowning in it and we giggled over how hilarious he looked with a beer in his hand. “You need to be on TV,” I told him.
“I know it,” he’d said.
After he’d finished his beer Tomm ordered us a round of Hendricks gin and tonics, then a second, third, fourth. That night we didn’t mind that the bar smelled like the urine of a man who had consumed both Seagram’s 7 and a vitamin B tablet. We’d clasped our hands together, elbows resting on the sticky epoxied wood table, and told each other: I love you, I don’t know what I’d do without you, you’re the best sibling in the world. Our eyes welled. Tomm’s fingers were reddish-purple from the cold, from his poor circulation. I hadn’t known how it was possible to worry about him like a second mother, but idolize him the same way I did as a child. He blinked his big eyes, his eyelashes thick and dark and grouping together like Twiggy’s from the tears that clung to the ledge of his lids. I remember thinking how beautiful he was, even with his eyeliner all smeared like that. The sides of his icy fingers cooled mine, which had warmed from the Molly Wee’s wheezing furnace. He’d felt already partly dead. In three more months, he’d be completely.
I was certain I’d die right there on the gum-smeared pavement if I saw that neon Miller beer sign one more time, the sadness would just sweep me right into the gutter.
I look back now and my actions feel impossibly selfish, but I told my mom I couldn’t stay in New York with her. I was too broken to see Tomm’s shadow all over the city. On Eighth Avenue, the sex shop where we bought poppers to sniff on our way to parties; on Thirtieth Street, the pizza place from which we ordered delivery in the winter despite that it was located directly beneath our apartment. My mom clung to the city as much as I fled from it, dusting every surface for his fingerprints.
When I was back in Arizona, I went to dive bars that Tomm would’ve hated. Checkered floors, dartboards, stickers covering every square inch of the bathroom stalls. There was no trace of him there. Drunkenly fighting with Chris in alleys littered with overflowing dumpsters, I could convince myself, even if just for a second, that none of it had happened. Chris was fourteen years my senior. He had massive muscles and wore ripped tank tops that exposed his nipples as he bent to scoop ice at his bartending job. He slicked back his ringlets with pomade and wore a bandana as a headband, perhaps to cover his receding hairline or maybe it was just part of his brand. I started dressing like him: combat boots, ripped skinny jeans. I bought a New Order band t-shirt. I felt certain there was a shape I could contort myself into that would make Chris love me more if only I tried hard enough. It felt good to have a job, it felt good to be a different person.
I requested a copy of the toxicology report from Tomm’s death. My mom said she didn’t want to know anything more, but I hungered for answers. The letter took weeks to arrive and when it did, I couldn’t open it. It sat on my bedside table next to a stack of unread books and my yellowing retainers. I slept on the opposite side of the bed from it, as if it might explode during the night. When I finally worked up the courage to unseal the thickly stuffed envelope, I stared at the list of things that killed my brother: Xanax, Adderall, alcohol, cocaine. I knew he consumed these things. But then I saw heroin. It was not cocaine then, the white powder sitting beside him when he died, but this. Should I tell my mom? The word bore into my skull, heroin heroin heroin heroin until, when she and I were catching up on the phone about who knows what, I just spat that fact out, as if it were information that could be relayed in any old way, as if it wouldn’t obliterate her. She responded, “Hmm,” softly, like she’d consider it.
I wrote about the losses of my grandfather, father, and brother during this time, in the context of inheritance. When I read the words later it seemed as if I had forgotten that it was my maternal, not paternal, grandfather who died by suicide. His death was related to my father’s only in that they both were suicides and they both impacted my family. Outside of that, they were like an apple and a chinchilla. Packaging all three men together made me feel better when I wrote it down though, a line of dominoes that fell. The inevitability of it softened the guilt that I hadn’t done enough to prevent the deaths from happening. This notion made things easier and harder at once, because at the same time: I didn’t want Tomm’s death to be inevitable. I wanted it to be the most specific tragedy there ever was.
Chris would come home from his bartending shifts at 4AM to find me in our bed, still awake. He used to put on classical music when he left for work to soothe his old bulldog. The dog’s former owner had been sent to prison and he was extremely anxious as a result. He came with the name Deez, as in “deez nuts.” Now, instead of typing: relaxing music for neurotic dog into YouTube, Chris put on an infinite loop of Tom Rosenthal songs and left me lying board-stiff on my back. Stripes of light would come in between the blinds and crawl down my belly as the sunlight waned. My mom had discovered Tom Rosenthal on the first plane ride she took after finding Tomm’s body. His songs made her think of Tomm, so they made me think of Tomm. If the songs meant something to her, they meant something to me. I don’t know why I couldn’t tell her that. I knew she was lying awake too, steeping in hurt with her phone by her side. Was grief lessened when shared? We were too scared to find out. What if it doubled when shared, like joy?
At night I’d stare at the red onion skin of my shut eyelids and think: Why did you tell him he was driving you crazy when you were in Vegas together a few weeks before he died? So what if he was trying to buy PCP off someone at the pool, you shouldn’t have shamed him. Why didn’t you act more remorseful when you borrowed his favorite pencil skirt and ripped it when you were getting out of a cab? Why did you say you didn’t want to live in New York just because you knew it would hurt him? He adored the city like a lover. If I had been more patient, he’d still be alive. If I had been kinder, more supportive, more loving, harder on him, easier on him, I could have snatched the heroin right out of his nose.
Blame is covered in porcupine pins. Sometimes it feels like we have to toss it around after someone has died until we find the right person to catch it and hold it and we can watch their hands bleed and feel better until we remember that the dead human we love is still made of fine dust now.
My brother was named after my dad. Thomas. These deaths were related, sure, but was it inheritance? I pictured the brother who ends up like my dad. He has well-defined biceps and drinks whiskey and is mean to his girlfriend. That brother dies from an overdose, and it feels like tragedy begetting more tragedy. That brother is not my brother. And yet.
When Tomm cried, he fanned his face like his palms were paper fans. Driving the Toyota Camry that he hated because it was gray, not black, he’d grip the steering wheel daintily with his right hand and dangle a Parliament Light 100 out the window with his left, he’d shimmy his bony shoulders as he belted Britney Spears. When he danced he seemed boneless, he grew extra limbs, joy spurted out of him. He was effervescent. He considered legally nixing the “Jr.” that followed his name, he added the extra “m,” Tom and Tomm, different.
Tomm did not routinely use heroin, but he drank too much, treated pharmaceutical drugs like they were Skittles, never ate enough. He numbed his feelings with alcohol, shushed his past with pills. His death was self-inflicted but seemed accidental, like that of a child who runs out into the street to get his ball without looking each way and gets hit by a car. Or no, maybe a child who keeps throwing the ball into the street.
Did tragedy beget more tragedy? Sometimes I thought about grabbing the biggest rock I could find and letting myself sink to the bottom of a very deep lake. Stay there. How my hair would undulate underwater, a peaceful way to go I’d read. And then what of my mom? Tragedy begetting tragedy begetting tragedy.
My mom stayed in New York for several months after Tomm died. She wasn’t sleeping much at all and would often go for threeor four-hour walks around the city in the middle of the night. A close family friend came to stay with her and this was how she could escape his watchful eye, sneaking out like a teenager. Before Tomm died, this would have made her feel unsafe. Now, she didn’t care. While I thought of suicide in a more concrete way, I wondered if this was her own way of flirting with death. Choosing a dark street to walk down, seeing what happened.
She called me quite often, and I updated her the way I would a distant great-aunt, not the person with whom I used to share every detail of my life. I felt she was too fragile to hear about how I was actually doing. Whenever I considered initiating contact, I thought about how much she loved Tomm, how good a mother she was. I pictured the time she got into a car accident on her way to work from crying so hard after having to leave her sick baby boy at daycare; I pictured her covertly driving around the elementary school playground during recess to make sure Tomm wasn’t getting bullied for being gay again; I pictured her pushing the locksmith away from Tomm’s door when he finally got it open, protecting the young man from what he was about to see: her son’s dead body. Or perhaps she was protecting Tomm one last time, giving his corpse a few more moments of dignity before he would be poked and prodded and investigated. Lit on fire. My arm would freeze, suspended in the air with my phone in my hand. How could I possibly lessen her pain? I was the person who was supposed to bring her the most solace, and instead I brought her none. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her, I thought. It was that I loved her too much. I buckled under the weight of it.
Sometimes, Chris would prop me up like a ragdoll when he got home and say: “Take a few deep breaths, drink some water, we’re walking the dogs.” Wearing his giant t-shirt and boxers, I’d stumble around the block and listen to him talk, incoherently interjecting random questions as if he were Google. This habit of mine reminded me of the Wikipedia rabbit holes Tomm and I would go down when we were high together. All we needed was our first search, then we’d click a link embedded within the webpage, then another.
Mount Vesuvius, epigram, Niko Kazantzakis. Who was Niko Kazantzakis? He once said: I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
“Who wrote Still Life With Woodpecker?” I asked Chris.
“Tom Robbins.”
“Did you ever show Tomm that video of Klaus Nomi?”
“Uh yup, I think I did.”
“What type of bird is that chirping?”
“Mourning doves.”
“Morning like sun or mourning like death?”
“Mourning like death.”
“No really,” I said.
“Really.”
One night he pulled me out of bed but didn’t reach for the dogs’ leashes. He said, “Follow me,” and walked past our bookshelf made of cinder blocks and two-by-fours, through the kitchen, out the back door. Dawn cloaked our dusty desert yard in gold and there was a smattering of pastel purple bits in the sky, muddled blackberries. Chris unsheathed a Japanese sword he’d found at the bar that night, long and curved, and used two hands to pass it to me. He pulled a watermelon seemingly out of nowhere, tossed it up into the sky, and shouted: “Slice!” as I swung murderously at the fruit. He picked up the two halves and threw one up, then the other. We continued on like this until my bleary eyes couldn’t spot the last remaining hunk of green speckled rind, chest heaving. I went back to bed feeling both empty and sated, like I’d accomplished something grand. I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
Every platitude offered was glib and stupid. I didn’t care that people were trying. How terrible an era to grieve, when you’re in your early twenties and laughably self-involved. No one had ever experienced a similar loss, of this I was certain. I received Facebook messages that someone’s uncle had died earlier that year, that Tomm was in a better place, that their sister’s coworker’s brother just passed away and would I be willing to give them advice? Ah yes, just what the newly bereaved long for, to be a volunteer psychologist. I banged on the keys of my laptop like a toddler, then reprimanded myself. What they are offering is love. Take it, give it, please. I responded, eventually, to each and every message. I told people how sorry I was for their loss, I thanked them, I talked to their sister’s coworker whose brother had just died and told her things I didn’t yet believe, like: you’ll be okay in time.
Find an unhealthy relationship with which to preoccupy yourself, I wanted to say. Hide from the people who love you most. Externalize your locus of control. These strategies were not therapist-approved, but she asked how I got through it, didn’t she?
Tomm’s memorial was held in New York City on July 24th, nearly two months after he passed away. It would have been his golden birthday. He was supposed to be in Greece – proof that he didn’t mean to overdose, proof that he regretted trying heroin that night. He was meant to be on a sandy beach for a friend’s wedding, drinking ouzo, splashing in the water, blue and white checkered tablecloths, platform sandals, octopus, he loved octopus, he’d be eating octopus, he was so fucking excited for this trip.
Before the mourners arrived, we gathered with Tomm’s closest friends on a white leather couch in a white loft in Chelsea that was so bright it burned my eyes. Leslie projected a video compilation she’d made of Tomm on a white wall. There he appeared, so large that we could live inside him. The video begins with him getting ready to bungee jump in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He’s on a platform hundreds of feet above the ground, palm tree fronds bouncing gently in the breeze below him. His eyeliner is quite smudged. He’s wearing a black tank top that has a crucifix on it with a note tied around the top that says: “BRB!” I’d gone bungee jumping at the same place a few years before. It almost felt like it was somewhere that I could go meet him. If I went now, he’d come soon. He’d be right back.
The man assisting with his jump reads out instructions to Tomm.
“Number one: put your hand like this:”
Tomm wraps his long fingers around the scaffolding.
“Number two: stand on the edge, like this.”
Tomm doesn’t let the man get to number three before he says, “Throw yourself over?” He’s drunk. He says this with a smile, with a wink.
After the service, Tomm’s friends wanted to go out. The plan was to meet at the Boom Boom Room, on the roof of the Standard Hotel. My mom didn’t want to go. Chris and I went back to the apartment with her and waited awkwardly for her sisters to come, so we could go party without leaving her alone. The living room felt like a hospital waiting room. Chris had gotten mad at me a few nights before because I didn’t want to stay out with him. Watching him sing “Thunderstruck” at a karaoke bar in Midtown versus back in Phoenix didn’t feel revolutionary. I didn’t understand why he needed to be out so late doing the same things he did at home. He’d told me I was being selfish. You do realize I’ve never been to New York before, don’t you? Telling him my brother had just died felt so obvious as to be insulting, so I kept my mouth shut and did what he wanted.
When my mom’s sisters got to the apartment, I stared at her vacant face before we left. I will not be choosing you tonight, my actions told her. I hope I said I was sorry.
My mom and her ex had broken up the night Tomm died. He wanted her to be a stepmother to his young children, to move back to Arizona, but she refused to leave Tomm. When she did move home months later, she asked Shane to give their relationship another chance. He said no. He’d already started seeing someone else. She began running every day, up and down the canal behind her house. Her dirty tennis shoes held her upright, except for when they didn’t. We didn’t live together anymore and I couldn’t let myself imagine what this compounded grieving process looked like for her. So mostly I just pictured her spending all day every day running.
Once, we got drunk together and I held her as she cried about losing Shane. How cruel it was that she was not allowed this anodyne. Another man on the pile. He wasn’t dead, but she still had to grieve him. Not a stool. She needed a ladder.
I saw my mom living and mourning and moving through her days on her own and said to myself: I do not want that. I stayed in my relationship with Chris for far too long and devolved into the worst version of myself: jealous, histrionic. Maybe I believed I was training my mourning muscles. I knew that there was no chance we would work out, so when things were good I was preemptively depressed about how much it was going to hurt to lose him and when things were bad, I thought: not yet not yet not yet and did everything possible to fix us, to throw myself down like a human patch.
When I finally left, I sobbed as I packed up my things. At first his eyes welled up and he asked me not to go. Once he realized I was really leaving, he hardened. “Okay tiger,” he said, like he was a Little League coach. “Get moving.” We’d been together for over two years by then. With his arms crossed, he stood watching me as I packed all of my belongings into reusable grocery bags. I carried them out to the car by myself.
I moved back in with my mom and pushed through the following weeks and months like wading through thick seaweed. Losing Tomm made every other anguish in my life seem like a minor inconvenience: a fender bender in a CVS parking lot, accidentally buying decaffeinated coffee, my favorite pen running out of ink. But it did not shrink my parting with Chris. The energy I spent attempting to hold our broken relationship together was reallocated to pining for him. I saw my mom living and mourning and moving through her days, less alone because I lived with her but still proverbially alone, and she seemed to be doing better and better. There was more color in her face. She didn’t run as much as I had imagined, but she did run a lot. I wanted to be like her, but my feet felt like bricks.
When I got invited to go out to bars in Old Town Scottsdale by girls with whom I went to high school, I’d get black-out drunk. I’d wake up in my bed––sometimes in the outfit I went out in and sometimes naked with one arm fully submerged in a bag of Doritos––and have no idea how I got there, or how I got the purplish-yellow bruises that would appear on my knees several days later. Once, my mom woke to the sound of me choking on my vomit. She rolled me over, cleaned me up. The next morning, she expressed her concern over my recent behavior. She told me that even though I was in pain now, one day I would be okay again and I had to remember that. She told me that when she felt her saddest, she’d think about how upset Tomm would be to see her so broken up. She pulled herself together for his sake. These did not feel like glib, stupid platitudes, finally.
“Please, please talk to me when you’re feeling down,” she said. “Talk to me when you’re feeling anything.”
We went to dinner, and I swear Tomm’s ghost was in the seat beside us. Tomm loved Pita Jungle. A falafel wrap was one of his favorite drunken indulgences, plus they had cheap wine and poured it with gusto. We paused our conversation when Tomm would have produced some funny comment, set our forks down and looked at the empty chair. I felt affronted, and I think my mom did too, that our server didn’t leave a wine glass out for Tomm. How could she not see him?
Not many people looked like Tomm. He was angular and androgynous with round eyes and full lips. He swayed when he walked, like a cat. When we did catch someone who resembled him even obliquely, we became obsessed. I rewatched the same episode of Schitt’s Creek over and over, the one where David and Patrick go on a hike and David is a big pill about being in nature and then Patrick asks David to marry him. How Tomm would’ve put his hands in front of his face just like David does, just so, if he were ever proposed to.
My mom found excuses to go to the post office to see the young trans woman who worked there and had the same protruding clavicles and slender arms as Tomm. Everyone was going to be getting a letter. She’d call me each time after she went, telling me every detail she learned about Sophie.
A realization began to unfurl itself: my mom and I were on the same team, united by our magical thinking. We were mother and daughter and we were grieving humans and we were two single women who were getting over painful breakups and we were roommates and we were friends and we were the only remaining members of our nuclear family unit and we were the closest people to Tomm Zorn, the only two who remembered the exact angle at which he threw his head back when he let out a cackle. Probably she would rub his old toothpaste scum into her skin, too. The losses we’d experienced together before did not make room for this one, as I had hoped. Tomm’s absence left a crater in us both. But I wondered if we could invite one another over to our respective craters, if we could plant zinnias and make couscous and refinish an old dining room table, spruce them up and then cut a trap door that led from mine to hers.
Once, high, I started to type how to grieve into Wikipedia, but when I got to how to gri–– the site suggested How to Grill Our Love, a Japanese manga series. There was no page for how to grieve. There was only grief. Under grief, there was a link for another page: grief (disambiguation). Disambiguation? The removal of ambiguity by making something clear.
I wanted to feel better but I didn’t want to forget Tomm. These desires felt complicated to hold in one palm. I began going to yoga, and at the end of class my instructor sometimes led us through a body scan meditation. I’d lie on my back with my feet splayed out to the sides like a corpse, and scan Tomm’s body instead of mine. His dark lashes, his thin neck. I always thought his hands could’ve been in a magazine advertisement. Narrow knuckles, never had a hangnail. I could still picture him, crystalline. My palms facing up toward the ceiling, I waited for a sign.
***
I hadn’t been to New York since Tomm’s memorial. The city lights looked just like tinsel as our plane approached the tarmac, permanently dressed for a celebration. The Uber ride to Chinatown––the neighborhood where my mom and I were staying, the neighborhood in which Tomm died––felt like gradually lowering myself into a Jacuzzi that was several degrees too hot. I had the urge to ask our driver to slow down, even though traffic had brought us to a crawl. I felt certain I’d been inside every building we passed, thousands of them. I needed to look inside.
The next morning I went on a walk on my own, to nowhere in particular. I found myself on a quiet street, all things considered. The honks from cars and music from open windows were still audible, but there was hardly anyone on the block. Mostly what I could hear was the faint echo of people chanting. I followed the sound until I found an inconspicuous temple––I nearly walked past it. The door was open, letting in the smell of garbage and cigarette smoke and letting out the sound of mellifluous voices. I felt hypnotized and stood very still by the door, out of sight. I inhaled the smell of cigarettes. Tomm had picked up the habit at thirteen and never stopped. His clothes always smelled slightly of smoke, but cigarettes clung to him in a different way than other people I knew who smoked. I thought they smelled stale and acrid, but he never did. The small hairs inside of my nostrils cleansed his scent of the harsh odor and turned it into an expensive perfume, like alchemy. Cigarettes didn’t remind me of death, they reminded me of life. I closed my eyes and listened to the chanting, and when I opened them, a black feather came into my peripheral vision, floating down in front of me so slowly it reminded me of a cartoon. It was fluffy––not a crow’s, not a pigeon’s. It looked like it came from the ostrich-feather-trimmed robe Tomm had bought as a swimsuit coverup several years earlier. I caught it in my open hand.
When I got back to our Airbnb, I sifted through tea bags that were arranged in a fan-like pattern on a gold tray and prepared cups for my mom and me. I sat on the windowsill and felt the heat from the mug spread like a glow across my palms. It felt like remembering something, like I hadn’t experienced the sensation of a temperature change in eighteen months. I watched as my tea bag floated in my cup, and I was reminded of drifting on a lazy river at a Scottsdale resort with Tomm when we were seventeen and nineteen. Every year since coming out in high school, his swim trunks had gotten shorter and shorter, exposing the Naired pearly white of his thighs. Floating beside him, I commented that I’d missed a stray pubic hair along my bikini line when I was shaving. He misinterpreted this to mean the pube was no longer connected to my body and therefore could, conceivably, fall off of me, swim the requisite few inches between our tubes, and jump onto him. He leapt from his floatie in a flash of flailing limbs, all elbows and knees, that created a glittering splash, interrupting fellow river-goers luxuriating peacefully by with their strawberry daiquiris in hand. He paddled to the edge and dramatically pulled his body out of the pool and onto the wavy beige pavement that was steaming from the sweltering heat, gasping for air like someone who had very nearly escaped drowning.
“It’s attached to me, you idiot!” I yelled through bouts of chortling, my inner-tube bouncing gently as my shoulders shook. I craned my neck to continue watching him as I floated away. He was laughing now as well, lying flat on his back, dark curls glistening with droplets of water, gazing with squinted eyes up at the cloudless sky.
I had the impulse to pat my hands up and down my torso and legs as if checking for knife wounds, seeing if this memory had caused anything to ooze. Instead, impossibly, I felt the feather in my pocket. It pressed into my thigh. I kept my fingers wrapped around my mug and turned my head to look at my mother, who had her eyes closed, sunlight bouncing off her face. “Can I share something with you?” I asked.
Maria Zorn’s work has been published in Longreads and West Branch.