These things always start with a phone call
The phone rang about 2:30am PST. A ringing phone at that time is never a good thing — a friend in need, a drunk ex, an accident, always bad news. I wasn’t so trained to fear its ring as I am now, but disciplined enough by the constant phone calls as my great-grandmother died over the course of the first months of the year. The phone is in my bedroom but not next to the bed so I tumbled and scrambled to reach it. Reach it quickly so as not to disturb the children in their room, my mother-in-law in the guestroom, leaving at 6am after a five day visit. I reach it in the middle of the second ring and hear my mother’s weary voice. I think something has happened to my father.
“Leigh, Andrew committed suicide.” Not my father. My brother.
[Here is where I might tell you a little something about my brother. What he looked like, what our relationship was like, how this had come to pass. I might tell you about the compression of time and space. If this were a movie, Andrew and his 22 years might flash in quickly cut poignant images. Or there’d be a long agonizing silence as the camera slowly zooms in and pulls back simultaneously Scorcese-style, to reveal me surrounded by darkness in vastly changed circumstances clutching the phone in my hand. But for now, you will just have to accept those four words — my name, my brother’s name, an irreversible act spoken at once full of matter of fact…]and abject horror — out of my — our — mother’s mouth, across a relay of towers and signals in the middle of our shared night.]
What comes next is shadowy as the bedroom where the movie camera light doesn’t shine. I made it to the foot of my bed. I sit. Michael puts his hands on my shoulders. My mother and I exchange words, not “talking” exactly, more like telegrams from undisclosed locations. I don’t recall what was said. I don’t recall if my father came on the line. I don’t know how the words ended or remember how the phone got put back on its base.
But then the rising nausea of disbelief. I tumble and scramble to the bathroom and throw up.
Throwing up usually makes things clearer. But not so much now. Then. I must’ve cried. If I did, I don’t know if it was loud or soft. Probably soft because I wouldn’t’ve wanted to wake anyone up. But Joan, Michael’s mother, is now awake, frantically asking what’s going on.
“My brother Andrew committed suicide.”
Over the coming days (into the weeks and throughout the first year) I would say those words often. Speaking them in person or on the phone. I texted them, emailed, facebook messaged, scribbled them on paper. A lot of times apologizing to friends why I couldn’t or didn’t do something or why I was somewhere else (I can’t meet you for lunch…I can’t make that deadline…I’m sorry that I can’t be there…). But I weighed when and how to speak them and always listened carefully to the tone of my voice. Ready to modulate if my voice crackled and I sounded out of control or if it was too loud and aggressive like I was trying to bludgeon someone (only once did I wield them that way). Whenever I spoke them, they always came out fast kind of tumbling after each other. But so so drawn out as if they were snowballing down a mountainside or falling down a long flight of stairs.
…
Drawn out and I couldn’t seem to get outside of them, I just tumbled down right after them.
No matter what my tone of voice, speaking those words could always sound so manipulative and so I often averted my eyes when I spoke them so as not to embarrass the listener/ hoping to convey my lack of expectation. This is information not a request. And those words I would come to find were hard and heavy and precious, like keeping a rough cut diamond under my tongue. Everytime I spoke them I felt like Superman handing out samples of kryptonite.
