The World Without Us Read online

  “Yeah, that’s me.” He made a face. “That costume was my mom’s idea. The year before, I was a pepper shaker.”

  He sounded sort of bitter, and a frown creased his forehead. I wondered what was wrong. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s do something.”

  “Maybe.” He sounded reluctant.

  “Okay, not trick-or-treating. But we could make something cool for the kids, like a graveyard kind of thing. Then you’d still get to hand out candy.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “We’ll see. Let me talk to my mom, okay? She might want me to stay home.”

  “This is my place,” I said, pointing.

  He stared. “No way. You did those?”

  I nodded. “Yup.” A row of carved pumpkins, more than a dozen of them, sat grinning and leering and frowning along the front path. We did it every year, me and Vicky and Bill, and this year, Suzy too. It had become kind of a tradition, and I loved it.

  “Awesome.”

  We walked along the path and I pointed at a big pumpkin perched on the bottom step. “That’s my best one. You like it?” I’d carved a cat, back arched, against a background of a full moon and a tombstone.

  “That’s amazing. How d’you do that?”

  I grinned. “I drew it on paper first, made a stencil. Then you just scrape off the skin and keep scraping until the pumpkin shell is really thin, so the light glows through where the moon is, and the cat’s like a silhouette. It looks really cool when it’s lit.”

  “Wow.” He studied the pumpkin for a long moment, then looked up at the front steps, at the red front door and the gray wooden porch. “Nice house.”

  “Come on in,” I said.

  Another Chance

  Vicky was working at the computer, which lives in a corner of the living room, but she swiveled her chair around when she heard us.

  “Mel?” She tucked her short brown hair behind her ears and looked from me to Jeremy.

  “Hi, Vicky. This is Jeremy.”

  “Hi. Just let me save this…” She turned back to the screen, clicked a few keys and stood up. “Nice to meet you, Jeremy. You guys want a drink or something? I’ve just made a pot of coffee; it’s probably ready.”

  “Coffee would be great,” I said. I’ve been a coffee drinker since I was about eight. It used to horrify my friends’ parents that Vicky and Bill let me drink coffee, but it didn’t seem to have done me any harm. We only ever had decaf anyway.

  We all headed into the kitchen. Vicky pulled three mugs out of the dishwasher and poured coffee into them while I got milk out of the fridge.

  “None of us take sugar, so we never have a sugar bowl,” I apologized. I heaved a five-pound bag of sugar out of the baking cupboard. “So if you take sugar…”

  Jeremy grinned. “Yeah, that should be enough.”

  “So you two are at school together?” Vicky asked.

  I nodded. “Yup.”

  “You’re a sophomore too?”

  “Junior,” Jeremy said, and we carried our mugs over to the kitchen table and sat down.

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters, Jeremy?” Vicky asked. She could talk to anyone easily. She’d told me that she used to be shy, and that she still considered herself an introvert, but she sure knew how to put people at ease and strike up a conversation. Unlike me.

  But Jeremy suddenly went quiet. He stirred sugar into his coffee, slowly and deliberately. “Um. No. No, I don’t.”

  “An only child, like Melody,” Vicky said. “I am too, actually. Funny, when I was a kid that seemed so unusual. But I guess big families are the exception these days.”

  “I had a brother,” Jeremy said abruptly. “Lucas. He died two years ago.”

  I stared at him, my mouth hanging open.

  Vicky stopped wiping the counter and sat down at the kitchen table with us. “I’m so sorry, Jeremy.”

  There was a silence, and I wondered if Vicky was going to ask how he died. I wanted to know, but I wasn’t about to ask.

  “Had he been ill?” she asked. “Or was it an accident?”

  “He drowned,” Jeremy said. “At St. Pete Beach.”

  Vicky closed her eyes for a second, and when she reopened them, they were shining ever so slightly. I hoped she wasn’t going to cry. “How awful,” she said. “It’s every parent’s worst nightmare, I think, losing a child. I am so sorry, Jeremy. How old was he?”

  “Thirteen.” Jeremy shrugged. “It was awful, but…well, it was two years ago. I’m okay, Mrs.—”

  “Vicky. Call me Vicky.” She stood up again, taking the hint. “Well, can you stay for dinner, Jeremy? Bill should be home soon—or not. His schedule’s a bit unpredictable.”

  I gave a snort. “He doesn’t have a schedule. It’s his work habits that are unpredictable.”

  Vicky laughed ruefully. “That’s true, I’m afraid. Sometimes he stays at the university until midnight, working on a paper. Other times he’s home so much you’d swear the man was unemployed.”

  “I’d love to stay for dinner.” Jeremy gave her a particularly charming smile, and I thought to myself that he could be an actor, or a politician. This was a side of him I’d never seen before. Not phony, exactly, just kind of polished. “So what about you, Vicky? Mel mentioned that you do a lot of volunteer work.”

  Vicky looked at me, eyebrows raised slightly. She knew I generally avoided bringing up the subject of her work, having had a few too many arguments about the topic. “I run an advocacy group. We petition against the death penalty.”

  “Cool.” Jeremy grinned at me, and I felt a flicker of nervousness. It suddenly seemed important to me that my mother liked him. That she didn’t think he was too smooth or that he was kissing up.

  “You don’t have to agree just because she’s my mother,” I said irritably. “Vicky can handle an argument, believe me.”

  Vicky looked at me, eyebrows raised, but didn’t say anything.

  “Actually, I do agree,” Jeremy said. He was looking at my mother, not at me. “I mean, I don’t know what I think about the death penalty. I go back and forth, to be honest. But I think it’s cool that you do that. Most people just complain about things but don’t do anything.”

  Vicky smiled at him. “Well, a lot of what we do could probably be described as complaining. We’re trying to present a strong, unified voice to oppose state-sanctioned cold-blooded killing.”

  “That’s the thing, isn’t it?” Jeremy said. “I mean, it’s disturbing that it is planned and deliberate and coldblooded, but it’d be worse if it wasn’t. I mean, if it was impulsive? If the government had executioners who killed people in a rage? Or, you know, vigilantes who took the law into their own hands?”

  “Either way, people are killed,” Vicky said. “And some of them are innocent.”

  “What about the ones who are for sure guilty?” Jeremy asked. “I mean, say there’s a ton of witnesses? Or what if it’s a totally horrific kind of crime? Kidnapping and torturing and killing a kid, for example. Videotaped evidence, no shred of a doubt. Do you ever think that maybe some people really do deserve the death penalty?”

  Vicky shook her head, and I braced myself for a speech I’d heard at least a thousand times. “I don’t think we understand what makes people do the things they do. Almost everyone who ends up on death row comes from a pretty rough background.”

  “Tell him about what you used to do,” I said. “You know. The court stuff.”

  “You can tell him yourself,” she said.

  “No, you’ll explain it better.”

  Vicky’s expression hovered between amused and annoyed, but she turned to Jeremy. “When Mel was little, I used to do assessments in death-penalty cases. Getting their family history, documenting abuse they’d experienced, their exposure to traumatic events. Looking for mitigating factors that could be used to argue for a reduced sentence. And every single one, without exception, had survived truly horrible things. Child abuse, poverty, neglect. Some of them were born already damaged by fetal alcohol
syndrome and then abused by their families and betrayed by the foster-care system. Yes, some of them have done terrible things, but there’s a reason they became who they are.” She paused, looked Jeremy in the eye. “And it’s the same society that has let them down that then kills them.”

  “But aren’t they still responsible for their actions?” Jeremy argued. “I mean, not everyone who has a bad childhood becomes a murderer.”

  Vicky nodded. “Sure, lots of people overcome their pasts. But when you look at these men’s histories—a few women too—it’s hard to argue that the responsibility for their actions lies with them alone.”

  The front door opened and I heard Bill kicking off his shoes. I mean that literally: he wears these slip-on shoes that most people would only wear for gardening, and when he comes home he kicks them ten feet down the hall and tries to land them in this wicker basket that was originally meant for the cat.

  “Hi, honey,” Vicky called out.

  Bill wandered into the room, a file folder under one arm and a book in his hand. He’s such a stereotype of the absent-minded professor, right down to the corduroy jacket and suede elbow patches. Bill was one of those genius kids—he started university at fourteen, graduated at seventeen, had a doctorate by twenty-one—and he told me once that he had deliberately cultivated a certain image because he wanted to be taken seriously. He even used to smoke a pipe, but he gave that up before I was born, thank god. The jackets he kept, because they were comfortable and because he hated shopping.

  He claims that he doesn’t care about image anymore. Just be yourself, Mel. Don’t waste your energy worrying about what other people think, he always says. Nice idea, if you could just switch that kind of thing on and off.

  “Bill, this is my friend Jeremy,” I told him.

  He put the folder and the book down on the kitchen counter and looked at me, then at Jeremy. “Nice to meet you, Jeremy.”

  “Nice to meet you too, Mr.—”

  “Bill.” He nodded distractedly at Jeremy, then turned to face Vicky. “You won’t believe what they decided at the faculty meeting today. Unbelievable.”

  Jeremy looked at me, and I rolled my eyes. “Want to see my room?”

  “Sure.” He stood and followed me up the stairs and through the door at the top. Then he stopped, staring. “Wow.”

  Basically, I have the whole upstairs to myself, except for one small space, which we call the spare room but which is really more like a storage unit. Our house is almost a hundred years old but totally not heritage, since every inch of it has been redone. My room is huge and open concept: two bedrooms knocked into one by the people who owned the house before us. One end is set up like a living room, with a couch and TV and PS3; the other end has my bed and dresser and a walk-in closet. There’s a bathroom right off the bedroom, and skylights over my bed.

  “This is your room? You have your own freaking apartment?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Unbelievable.” Jeremy ran his hand along the shelf of PS3 games. “You’re a gamer? I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

  “Not so much anymore. From eleven to thirteen or so, it was pretty much all I did. I guess the interest kind of burned itself out though.”

  He picked up one case. “Huh. A LEGO Harry Potter game?”

  I took it out of his hand and put it back on the shelf. “Like I said, I was eleven.”

  He grinned at me. “So where do your parents sleep?”

  “Downstairs. Their bedroom is what would normally be the family room or den or whatever. It’s got a fireplace. It’s nice.” I could hear myself sounding defensive. “It was their choice, okay? It’s not like I kicked them out of their room or anything, okay? We moved here four years ago, and my parents said I was old enough to need my own space.”

  “Wow.”

  I flopped down on the couch. “I know. Vicky and Bill are cool.”

  “How come you call them that? Instead of Mom and Dad?”

  “Dunno. Always have done.” It seems strange to me that most people don’t use their parents’ names. I can’t imagine calling Vicky Mom. It would be like her calling me Daughter or calling Bill Husband.

  “Weird,” he said. “My mother wouldn’t go for that.”

  “Families are different.” I shrugged, and there was a long silence. Finally, I cleared my throat. “So, hey, I never knew about your brother.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “How come you never told me?”

  “Never came up.”

  “Yeah, ’cause you never brought it up.” I sat up straighter and tucked my feet under my butt.

  Jeremy sat a couple of feet away, perched on the arm of the couch. “It’s kind of a hard thing to work into a conversation. Like, yeah, so did I ever tell you about the time my brother drowned?”

  “Seemed easy enough to tell my mother,” I said. I knew I was being stupid, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

  “She’s pretty awesome.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does that mean? You don’t think so?”

  “No, I do.” I chipped at the nail polish on my thumb, flaking it off in bright, shiny scales. “She’s great. They both are.”

  “You look like your mom, you know.”

  “You think?” I guess I do, sort of. We both have thick blondish-brown hair—hers is shorter and blonder, because she gets it highlighted—and brown eyes. She’s taller, though, and curvier, and more stylish. I looked like a boy until I was twelve, and still would if I cut my hair and wore a baggy sweatshirt.

  “You totally do. Anyway, she’s cool. You’re lucky. I mean, seriously.”

  “I know. Jesus, Jeremy. Enough already.”

  He raised his eyebrows and leaned away from me exaggeratedly. “Whoa. Okay, what’s wrong?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing. Just, you know, sometimes…”

  “They’re not as perfect as they seem?”

  “No. They are. Well, not perfect, I guess, but they’re pretty great. It’s just that sometimes it’s a lot to live up to. You know? Like, I feel guilty if I’m not perfectly happy and confident and…I don’t know. I just don’t want to let them down.”

  Jeremy frowned. “I bet they wouldn’t see it that way.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Of course they wouldn’t. They’d be sympathetic and understanding and they’d tell me for the gazillionth time how much they love me and believe in me.” I sniffled, unexpected tears prickling my eyes. “Just… sometimes I think they see me as better than I really am. That’s all.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he reached out and took my hand between his. “Poor little rich girl,” he said, mocking but gentle.

  “We’re not rich,” I said automatically.

  He looked around my room, eyebrows raised, and I felt my cheeks get warm. “I didn’t mean money,” he said.

  I pulled my hand away. “You totally changed the subject.”

  “I did? What were we talking about?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Your brother.”

  “Lucas.”

  Jeremy was six feet to my five four, and his perch on the arm of the couch made him even taller. I had to lean back and look up to meet his eyes. “Tell me about him.”

  “He was two years younger than me,” he said. “He’d have turned fifteen this month.”

  “Mmm.” I wondered if I’d been with Jeremy on Lucas’s birthday. If he’d been thinking about him and hadn’t said a word to me. “What was he like?”

  “Mr. Normal, you know? Everyone liked him. Teachers, other kids. He was smart but not freaky smart. Good soccer player. Getting into skateboarding.” He nodded at my shelf of games. “Spent a lot of quality time with his Xbox.”

  “Were you guys close?”

  He shook his head. “When we were younger, I guess we were. Not so much in the last couple of years.” He gave a short laugh. “I was too weird for him.”

  “Freaky smart?”

  “Just freaky, I gue
ss.” Jeremy made a face. “He figured I’d be bad for his reputation when he got to high school.”

  Only he never did get to high school. “What happened?” I asked. “I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay. I just wondered.”

  “How he died, you mean?” His mouth twisted mockingly. “People always want to know that.”

  “I didn’t mean to be nosy,” I said.

  “Human nature.” Jeremy was silent for a moment. “What do you believe, Mel? About death, I mean.”

  I stuck my fingertip between my teeth and bit down on the nail. Bad habit. The thing is, what I believe didn’t seem like it’d be much comfort to someone whose brother was dead. “Um, I’m not religious or anything,” I said lamely. “So I don’t know. I mean, you can’t really know, can you?”

  “I believe we come back.”

  “Like reincarnation?”

  “Yes. I think life and death are a cycle. A wheel, you know?” He made a circling gesture with one hand.

  “You think Lucas has been reborn?” I said, trying to sound neutral.

  “Or will be. Yeah.”

  “Huh.” I tried to remember what little I knew about reincarnation. “Um, as a person? I mean, you know…”

  “Not as a cat or a bug? Yeah, as a person. I don’t buy the whole hierarchy thing, where you move up if you’re good and down if you’re bad. That’s just social control, right?”

  “Like heaven and hell,” I said. “Gives people a reason to behave themselves.”

  He looked at me for a long moment. “I don’t think murderers come back as cockroaches or anything, but I do think it makes a difference, what we do in this life. That’s what I don’t like about the whole heaven and hell idea. It gets people all focused on some afterlife, as if that’s what’s important. But with reincarnation, we just come back to this same world. So whatever we do, the effect we have in the world, it all matters.”

  I nodded.

  “And it means you get another chance,” he said. “To do things right. So in my next life, I’ll take better care of Lucas.” He gave a short laugh. “Because I sure fucked that up this time around.”

  That evening, after Jeremy went home, I had a weird conversation with Vicky. I was brushing my teeth when she knocked on my bathroom door. “Mel?”