It’s also clearly in a bad neighborhood. I don’t know Richmond very well — hardly at all — but the houses here are all in disrepair and all the stores have bars over the windows, even during the day. Tents dot the sidewalk, and I’m pretty sure I saw a drug deal go down on the way here.
Not that I should be surprised, given why I’m here in the first place.
Caleb parks his hatchback, jerks up the parking brake, turns to me.
“We’re all fucked up,” he says, softly. Despite myself, I smile.
“Thanks,” I say, and give him a quick, chaste kiss.
We talked the whole car ride over. Or rather, I think I talked for most of it and he listened: the Javier I remember as a kid, the big brother who taught me to roller skate, who helped with my homework, who used to drive me to my friends’ houses sometimes.
I talked about the brother Bastien and I both adored, who was sweet and gentle and kind. The brother who loved to draw, who had notebooks filled with sketches, who used to win every art show he entered in middle and high school.
And I tell him how he used to fight with my father. How he joined the football team just to get my father’s approval. How, suddenly, my father was his biggest supporter who went to every game, learned every cheer.
He didn’t apply to college. He didn’t apply to art school. He joined the Marines straight out of high school, the only other thing he ever did that my father approved of.
Caleb and I walk up to the entrance holding hands, because there’s no point pretending we’re just friends. The whole walk from the parking lot, I can practically feel my father’s eyes burning a hole through the back of my hand, he’s looking at us so hard.
“Hi,” I say, when I get up to them. “You remember Caleb, right? How’s Javi?”
“Alive,” says my father, stepping forward, offering Caleb a handshake while Bastien gives me a hug.
“Sir,” Caleb says behind me, and I fight back a smile.
“He’s already sucking up,” Bastien whispers. “Dad’s gonna hate him anyway.”
“Stop it,” I whisper back.
“Thanks for bringing her,” Bastien tells Caleb when he releases me, shaking his hand as well.
“Of course,” Caleb says, and takes my hand again. My father looks at it, looks at me, and then leads us through the doors of the hospital.
The inside isn’t nicer than the outside. We walk past a gift shop that’s got a crack running the length of the plate-glass window, masking tape over it. The tile floor is mismatched. Here and there, a fluorescent light flickers.
Bastien drops back to walk beside us, lets our dad lead the way down hallway after hallway, always walking as if a drill sergeant is watching.
I turn to my brother.
“How is he?” I ask, voice low, dread and anxiety knotted in my stomach. “And don’t just tell me he’s alive.”
I shoot a quick glance at my father’s back. I’ve spent a lot of the last nine or so months trying to, if not forgive him, reach a place of some understanding, some acceptance that he did what he thought was best.
It’s quickly going out the window, now that I’m here. Now that I’m going to have to look my older brother in the eye.
“Please,” Bastien mutters, then takes a deep breath.
I squeeze Caleb’s hand, without really meaning to, and he squeezes back.
“He’s bad, Ollie,” Bastien says, simply. “He’s not Javi any more. He doesn’t look like Javi. He doesn’t talk like Javi, he doesn’t...”
We’ve come to a stop, my father standing outside the door to a hospital room, arms folded, facing us. Bastien, Caleb, and I are ten feet away, and it’s obvious that we’re trying to talk without him hearing us, but I don’t care.
“He wasn’t Javi when he left,” I say.
“He was more than he is now,” Bastien says. “Someone found him on the sidewalk in front of a 7-11, sitting on the curb, doubled over. The only reason he’s not dead is because he was holding the dose of Narcan he couldn’t use in time, and whoever called 911 gave it to him first, then ran off.”
I look at the door to the hospital room, my father standing in front of it, and suddenly I’m afraid of what I’ll find. I’m afraid to look at him like this, afraid to confirm what Bastien just said, that Javier is really gone.
Next to me, Caleb is silent and I squeeze his hand again, grateful, because there’s nothing he could say right now and he knows that.
“I need to ask you a favor,” I say, looking up at him.
“Anything.”
“Would you mind waiting while we go in?” I ask, softly.
“I can do that,” he says.
“I don’t want you to meet him like this,” I say, the words rushing out, a little faster than I mean them to. “I don’t — it’s not fair to him, or to you, for you to meet him now. You should meet him once he’s in recovery, once he’s —”