Page 4 of The Significance of Moving On

Where could Tom be?

He’s never not shown. Never.

The more I think about it, the angrier I get.

Twenty-five minutes pass before the driver pulls into the driveway.

Tom’s car is parked by the garage.

Lights are on inside.

And when I open the door, I hear the faintest chords of Chopin’s nocturne in E minor. It has a longer title I never remember, but that’s neither here nor there.

Gritting my teeth, I climb out of the minivan and walk around back to the hatch to remove my bag.

The heavy suitcase rolls behind me, catching on the cracks in the sidewalk leading up to the porch. We live in a beautiful two-story brick colonial. Tom and I looked at probably twenty houses before we settled on this one. Even though I’d been living with our father at the time, Tom involved me in everything.

Which begs the question, why is my brother inside listening to blaring decibels of Chopin when he should’ve been at the airport picking me up?

I unlock the door, swing it wide and yell, “Tom!”

Chapter Two

“What the Hell, kid?”

For every summer for as far back as my memories go, even when I’d been living with our father and we’d come to visit, my brother’s shown up at the airport smiling. The first thing out of his mouth—“What the Hell, kid? You’ve gotten taller… smarter… prettier”… any manner of positive adjective he could throw out. And I loved it. Loved him.

We’d sit for hours in the lush, green grass of his backyard. He’d pull his shoes off, I’d pull off mine, and we’d ruffle our toes, laughing at the tickle while he told me about every moment of the year we’d spent apart; his travels, the people he’d met, sights he’d seen. Tom lived such a glamorous life.

No amount of citronella could keep the mosquitos from stinging and biting. But as the sun would begin to dip below the horizon, casting over the yard the same glorious purple shadow I’d longed to see each summer, the entertainment began. First the crickets chirped, frogs croaked, and in the years we were lucky enough, the cicadas buzzed the background music for the main attraction, the bobbing and dipping and spinning light show—the dance of the lightening bugs.

Those were the happiest times of my life. My big brother was eighteen when I was born. We share a common father but not mother and his mother was none too pleased to find out about me. But he didn’t care. Tom loved me. That’s all I know. No matter how screwed up our families were, he loved me.

So someone needs to explain to me, goddammit it, why I’m sitting on the front porch clutching his last goodbye to me in my hands while the paramedics load his lifeless body into the back of the ambulance?You fucked up, Tom? Really? I’m eighteen years old now—hardly a child. We could’ve figured it out. Why didn’t you just trust me to help you?

I hate Chopin.

I hate poker tables and gambling debts.

And I hate him being so stinking selfish that he’d leave me sitting at the airport wondering what the hell was going on, while he’d been here, taking his last breaths on this earth all alone.

Now I’ve got no one.

I want to cry but my body’s dried up like a desert wasteland. No tears. No saliva to swallow. I’m dry. Parched. Empty.

Even so, it’s hard to watch the ambulance pull away with no lights flashing. There’s no reason to have them. A uniformed police officer appears to my left, stepping too close, taking up too much of my personal body space. He becomes this vortex sucking away the air surrounding me too quickly with his questions—so many questions.

He has them.

I have them.

What I don’t have are answers.

The next forty-eight hours go by in a blur. Food won’t sit. Sleep won’t take. And then there’s a pen. A document. And a signature of next of kin. Signing means the truth, he’s really left me. Forever. And for what?

Before my brain really has the chance to process any of this, the hospital is gone, Tom is in the morgue and the cab I guess I must have called rolls to a stop in front of his house. The place was to be my home for the summer, but now it’s a beast; an ugly, snarling beast striking fear into my heart from simply looking on it.

The driver seems decent, trying to engage me in conversation, but there’s just no way. Pushing the fare through the partition without speaking effectively shuts him up, and that’s it. He’s gone now, too.

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