Forever 21

I don’t know too much detail about Phil’s story. I don’t want to ask him; he doesn’t need to re-live it. I don’t think he trusts reliving it. What for, I think he’d say? He works to find his peace, building his world, brick by brick. I think that’s what men do. Me – I spent a year sitting in the rubble, ashes in my hair, moaning when I wasn’t wailing. Phil tries not to go to the dark place. I am there enough for the both of us.

What I do know is that he’d taken a walk that night; that he remembers exactly where he was when he thought of how earlier that day, I’d jokingly said, “Hey. Where’s your son? I’ve been calling him, he hasn’t called me back.” That after he got home, there was a knock on the door (I don’t know if the bell rang) and he’d thought, good, it’s probably Philip. That instead, it was the police. That after they told him, he called his friend Larry and asked if he’d ride with him in the police car to Nadiya’s because he had to go there to tell me.

When my phone rang, I thought it was Natalie calling to finish what she started. Instead I saw it was Nadiya, which was odd because Nadiya never called, she texted. I answered the phone and she said, “Denise?” and I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “Phil is here,” and the simple equation (Phil is here + 10pm) – Philip = fucking X took no time to compute since I blasted down the stairs screaming, “My son my son!” and I heard Phil running up the stairs and I was still screaming, “My son my son!” and we were both on the second floor landing where I’d flung my phone and dropped to my knees, crawling around the floor screaming, “My son, my son!” and I was waiting, waiting, for Phil to say, “Calm down, it’s not that bad” because it couldn’t be, not really, it had to be that I went straight to panic because this is my child and then when Phil said it wasn’t that bad I’d be able to bear whatever it was because I’d already gone to the worst possible place, which it couldn’t be, not really, and I was waiting, waiting, for the relief of Phil’s words. But there was no relief, there was my husband, sitting on the landing, taking me by the shoulders, saying to me, “They found him…”

 They found him.

No, no, no, oh God no, no.  No!

I don’t remember what I said or when I stopped screaming or how long we sat there.  I didn’t want to compute what I was supposed to be computing. Philip is a light, a joy – my joy. Lights don’t go out. They just don’t. I had entered the unholy quiet of the tragic. I couldn’t scream it away, because it was true. It was true.  I lifted desperate, pleading eyes to Phil and asked softly, softly, “But…how?” Maybe they missed something. Maybe I could see they got it wrong. I pictured Philip in the backseat of whatever car he’d been in, victim of the stupid (possibly drunken) teenage recklessness of some other kid, when Phil said, “Drugs.”

I started to fall. Except I still hadn’t gotten up.

“Drugs?” I whispered. “But wha…”

“Heroin.”

“Heroin? Heroin? He was shooting heroin?”

Phil shook his head. “He snorted it.”

You could snort it? Heroin? You could snort heroin?  But it’s Philip, don’t you see; it’s Philip, this can’t be, it’s Philip, it’s Philip. FOR GOD’S SAKE, IT’S PHILIP.

And yes, yes it was. It was Philip.

Philip.

© 2013 Denise Smyth