First Comes Love (6 page)

So it was both fitting and gut-wrenching when we returned home from the hospital the morning after the accident to find Nolan leaning against his black Tahoe parked haphazardly in our driveway, his front door open. As my parents and I got out of our car and neared him, he must have been able to tell that something was wrong—
very
wrong—yet he calmly asked, “Where've y'all been? Where's Danny? We're supposed to shoot hoops at ten.” He was eating a glazed donut and licked his thumb, waiting for a reply.

I held my breath, and looked at my father, still wearing the crumpled suit from his business trip, his red tie stuffed into his pocket. He started to answer, but then put his head down and hurried into the house, my mother clutching his arm. Nolan stepped out of his truck, his smile fading.

“Meredith?” he said with a questioning look. “What's going on?”

I was only twenty, not even old enough for a legal drink, yet it was clear that I would be the one to tell Daniel's best friend that he was gone.

“Daniel was in a car accident last night,” I said, somehow finding my voice, though my throat was constricting, my heart pounding in my ears.

“Is he okay?” Nolan nodded, as if cuing me for the right answer. “He's going to be okay. Right, Meredith?” He nodded again, his eyes wide.

I took a deep breath, then made myself say it aloud for the first time:
Daniel died
.

Nolan stared back at me, his face blank, as if he hadn't heard what I said or simply couldn't process the meaning of my words.

“A truck hit his car at the corner of Moores Mill and Northside,” I numbly reported, still in shock. “He was wearing his seatbelt, but his internal injuries were too great. They said it happened fast….He didn't suffer at all.”

I repeated the words exactly as I'd heard my mother tell my grandparents:
He didn't suffer at all.
I wanted so desperately to believe it was true, but would always doubt it, always wonder about Daniel's final thought and whether he knew what was happening to him.

Nolan collapsed sideways onto his front seat, his long legs hanging out the door, his untied high-tops planted in the driveway. I held my breath in horror, as he let out a string of obscenities, his voice a low, guttural moan:
My God, no. Jesus fucking Christ. Oh fffuckkk. Christ, no.

My instinct was to flee, escape the sound and sight of Nolan. But I couldn't leave him. So I finally walked around the front of his car, opened the passenger door, and climbed in beside him. Only then did I register how cold I was, and that I had left my coat at the hospital.

“Can you turn on the heat?” I asked quietly.

Nolan shifted in his seat, pulled his door shut, and turned the key still dangling in the ignition. The radio came blaring on before he silenced it with his fist, then followed that up with a hard punch to his dash, splitting open his knuckle. I reached into my purse and handed him a tissue, but he didn't take it. Blood trickled down his hand and wrist as he announced that he was going to take off.

“You're leaving?” I said, suddenly panicking, dreading going into my house, literally afraid of seeing Josie, knowing that we no longer had a brother. That it was just the two of us.

“I think I should,” he said. “Right?”

I shook my head, staring at the bag of donuts on the seat between us. “No. Please come in.”

“Are you sure? Shouldn't it just be…family?” Nolan's voice cracked as tears began to stream down his face.

“You
are
family,” I said. “Daniel would want you to come in.”

A
LMOST EVERYONE DESCRIBES
the immediate aftermath of death the same way—as a surreal blur, at least for those in the inner circle, in charge of the details. I watched people come and go—close friends, neighbors, and relatives, including some I barely knew. They dropped off food, offered condolences, cried. Mom and Dad picked out a coffin and a cemetery plot with the lady from the funeral home and planned Daniel's service with John Simmons, our longtime pastor. Dad sat in his office and wrote the eulogy, a glass of whiskey on his desk.

Meanwhile, I can't remember Nolan ever leaving, though he must have gone home to sleep and shower. At my parents' request, he sat in the living room with Daniel's computer, going through all of his contacts, emailing and calling his college and medical school friends, one by one. He even phoned Sophie, within hours of her plane landing, and I listened to his conversation, marveling at how he said all the right things, how much Daniel loved her, how special she was to him. He pored through our family photo albums, putting together a collage that would be displayed at the wake. And when there was nothing left to do, he simply sat with me in stunned silence, the forever of it all just starting to sink in.

It was hard to call him a comfort exactly, because nothing could console any of us at that point, but there was something about his presence that was reassuring. He was nothing like my brother, but he was still a strong and powerful connection to him, and I could see so clearly why Daniel had loved him.

A
BOUT A WEEK
after the funeral, and the day before I returned to Syracuse to finish my junior year of college, Nolan stopped by to say hello and, in his words, “check in on everyone.” Standing in our foyer, he glanced up the staircase as I told him my mom was already in bed with a migraine and my dad was at the office, working late.

“And Josie?” he asked. “Is she back at school?”

“Not yet. She leaves next week….I don't know where she is tonight,” I said, thinking it was par for the course, before the accident and especially since. I wasn't sure where she'd been going or who she'd been hanging out with, but I had barely seen her for days. We had yet to talk about that night, where she had been or how she'd found out, and I was starting to get the feeling we never would. That Daniel's death was going to push us further apart than we already were.

Nolan shoved his hands in his pockets, looked at me for a few seconds, then asked if I wanted to get a bite to eat. Feeling both surprised and strangely flattered by the invitation, I said yes. For the next hour, we drove around Buckhead, trying to decide where to go, vetoing restaurant after restaurant before we finally settled on the OK Cafe, a brightly lit Southern comfort–food diner. Choosing a booth in the back, we ate barbecue and macaroni and cheese, drank sweet tea, and talked about everything but Daniel. Instead Nolan asked me questions—basic ones—as if he hadn't known me my whole life, which in some ways I guess he hadn't.

“Why'd you pick Syracuse?” he asked. “I've never known a single person from Atlanta to go to Syracuse. Except you.”

“Isn't that a good enough reason?” I deadpanned.

“Seriously?” he said with a smile, both dimples firing.

“Yeah, actually. Kind of,” I said, smiling a little myself. “Plus they have a really good drama school.”

“Oh, that's right,” he said. “You're a theater girl. You were in a lot of plays at Pace, weren't you?”

I nodded and said that was my thing—one of the reasons I had chosen to go to a different high school from my brother and sister.

“Daniel was proud of you.”

I stared down at my plate, trying not to cry, as Nolan distracted me with more rapid-fire questions. “So you want to be an actress?”

I nodded again.

“But you're so shy,” he said, something people often said to me when I told them what I was studying.

“I'm not really
shy
. I'm an introvert.” I went on to explain the difference—the fact that being around people didn't make me uneasy, I just preferred to be alone most of the time. “Daniel was an introvert, too. He was selective about who he spent time with….He loved hanging out with you.”

Nolan smiled, as it occurred to me that maybe he wasn't just being nice by inviting me to dinner. Maybe I was a comfort to him, too, his closest connection to Daniel.

“How else are you alike?” he asked.

I hesitated, unsure of what tense to use, the present for me, or the past for him. “I have his OCD. And his GPA.” I smiled. “Though you can't really compare neurosurgery and Shakespearean theater…I'm smart, but he was way smarter.”

“What you study has nothing to do with your IQ.”

“True,” I said, though I was still sure Daniel's had been higher than mine—higher than anyone's in our family.

“You two are more alike than you and Josie, aren't you?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, she's a straight extrovert. Party girl. But it's weird….I'm more like Daniel, but he was closer to her.” I felt a stab of jealousy, then guilt for feeling jealous. “Daniel was drawn to people like you…and her.”

“Fuckups?” He smiled.

“Happy people,” I said, wrapping my hands around my warm mug, having switched to coffee. “Fun people. You could always make him laugh.”

Nolan's lower lip quivered.

“I heard him tell Sophie that you were going to be his best man. One day.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you already knew that, didn't you?”

“Yeah. I guess I did,” he said. “But
he
was the best man. The best friend you could have. God. All the times he had my back…the messes he got me out of…”

I mustered a smile, recalling some of the funny stories in Nolan's eulogy, how he had so perfectly captured Daniel's loyal, solid essence while painting himself as the foolhardy sidekick.

“I still can't believe it was him—and not me,” Nolan said. “God, I wish it had been me.”

I shook my head, although I'd had the same wish about myself.
If only it had been me,
I'd thought more than once,
then my parents would still have a daughter to spare.

L
ATER THAT NIGHT,
when Nolan dropped me back at the house, he asked if he could see Daniel's room. I hesitated, feeling uneasy. I had yet to set foot in his room and knew that my parents had only been in there once, and that was only out of necessity, to get Daniel's burial clothes. But I said yes and the two of us walked silently into the house, then upstairs and down the hall to my brother's closed bedroom door. My heart raced as I turned the knob and peered inside. The room was dark, the shades drawn, and for a second, I actually found myself praying that we would find a miracle: Daniel asleep in his bed, the whole thing a bad dream. But the sight of his creaseless comforter and tight hospital corners confirmed our nightmare.

“Jesus,” Nolan whispered, as we took a few tentative steps into the room, our eyes adjusting to the dark. I tried to speak but couldn't begin to think of what to say. There was nothing to say.

But Nolan found something. “I don't think I've been up here since high school. It looks exactly the same.”

I nodded, grateful that my parents hadn't redecorated our rooms the way a lot of parents did when their kids left for school—and wondered if they ever would now. Nolan and I looked around, taking visual inventory of Daniel's bookshelf lined with paperback novels and tennis trophies and signed baseballs and his snow globe collection. We studied the framed baseball jerseys hanging on his walls and the collage of photos tacked to the bulletin board and the stack of medical books on his desk. His suitcase was open and neatly arranged on an ottoman in the corner, and I could see the pajamas Josie had given him for Christmas, the tags still on them. I stared at the jar of Carmex on his nightstand, sitting on top of Malcolm Gladwell's
The Tipping Point,
an index card slipped inside, somewhere around the midway point. I had a sudden urge to read the page he had last read, but didn't dare touch anything. I could tell Nolan felt the same, as if we were standing before a roped-off room in a museum, staring back into history, the end of a young man's life, a moment frozen in time. We looked and looked until there was nothing left to observe, and then Nolan took my hand in his, pulled me to his chest, and wrapped his arms around me. “I love you, Meredith,” he whispered in my ear.

Of course I knew what he meant—and in what way he loved me: a fond, surrogate-big-brother way. But the words still caught me off guard, along with the goosebumps that rose on my arms as I whispered it back.
I love you, too, Nolan.

In that second, I could no longer deny what I had been trying to deny for weeks, maybe even years: I had a crush on Nolan. It was absurd on so many fronts. Even the
word
was flimsy, silly, and stupid amid our monumental loss. Beyond the fact that Nolan was too old and
way
too good-looking for me, he was my brother's best friend, off-limits
before,
and certainly now. Besides, how could I be attracted to
anyone
so soon after my brother's death? It was the kind of inappropriate thing that would happen to Josie, not me. And yet, there it was—as unmistakable as my clammy hands and racing, guilty heart.

I looked away, telling myself that the whole thing was probably in my head, some sort of delusional reaction to grief. Post-traumatic stress. It would pass. And even if it didn't, nobody would ever know. I would never tell him. I would never tell
anyone.

“We better go,” I said, backing away from him.

“Yeah,” he said, running his hand through his hair, looking rattled. “I better head out.”

A few seconds later, we were back downstairs in the foyer, saying an awkward good night.

“So you're leaving for school tomorrow?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Tomorrow morning.”

“Okay,” Nolan said, giving me a quick hug followed by a peck on the cheek. “Take care of yourself, Mere.”

“You, too, Nolan,” I said.

“I'll keep in touch, I
promise,
” he said as sincerely as you can say anything.