Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

Friday night was like a bad dream. Only, you wished it could be a bad dream, so you could wake up. Only, I couldn’t really sleep, so there was no waking up. On Saturday morning, I called my dad. I thought none of us had thought to call him and our step-mom the day before, but Phyllis had. Dad told me to come to his place, that they were just fixing breakfast, and I could join them. But I didn’t feel like it. I’d told Bruiser I’d meet him for coffee later ... only I didn’t want to go back to the Starbucks where we’d been Thursday morning. I didn’t really want to go back downtown at all. So we met at De Caf Bar about 11 a.m. He didn’t look like he’d slept anymore than I had.

He told me he’d talked to Jazz earlier, and they were going fishing the next morning, if Pete and I wanted to go. I didn’t know ... fishing is a mindless thing you can do to keep your mind off your troubles ... unless once upon a time you’d been on an extraordinary fishing trip with a guy who has now been murdered.

It was like that with everything — for the past year or so, everything I’d done had revolved around Torstein, and now there was nothing I knew to do that didn’t bring up vivid memories of him, just at the moment when I least wanted to think about him. What had he been trying to tell us? Ferdy’s question from Thursday morning was more real to me on Saturday than it had been then ... “What’s it all been for?” What had it all been for? We’d been enchanted by Torstein, and while he was with us, we felt our lives were worth something, that we were doing something worthwhile, maybe for the first time in our lives! Now he was dead.

Maggie called me around noon. She was crying on the phone. As best I could understand her, she said:

“Oh, Andy, Andy. Ferdy’s dead.”

“Ferdy’s dead?” I said, and the whole phrase really was in italics, I mean, Ferdy? “Why would Nikolai—”

“Not Nikolai,” she said, trying to speak more clearly now, and more loudly, although I could tell she was still crying. “He killed himself! He’s dead, and he killed himself.”

God, that wasn’t what I wanted. I couldn’t forgive him, not so soon ... but I hadn’t wanted him dead.

I thought about what Torstein had told us, and I knew we’d failed already. He’d always said love. He’d always said forgive. What if any one of us had been strong enough to say to Ferdy, “It’s okay, man. You didn’t mean for this to happen”?

Would he still be dead? One dead guy had been enough. Had our failure to love just added to the body count?

I hung up the phone with Maggie, and told Bruiser what she’d said. He shrugged. I think maybe after losing Torstein, he was numb. I told Maggie where we were, and she said she would come, but she wanted to go by the park first. People were leaving memorials at the park, she said.

I know these days, when a celebrity dies, it’s the thing for the adoring public to leave memorials at his front door or wherever they think it’s appropriate — like all the wreaths and roses and teddy bears at Windsor Castle when Princess Diana passed away, or all the glitter and gloves people heaped in front of Michael Jackson’s rental home. I know it’s how people share their grief and pay tribute to the one they feel they’ve lost. But I could only think of a handful of people who had really, meaningfully lost Torstein, and I didn’t think any of them had been in the park this morning leaving a cross or a sympathy card or some kind of green doll’s coat as a tribute. I didn’t want to see that. I didn’t want anyone who had just followed Torstein around — or worse, just seen him on TV — acting as if they were grieving with me.

Looking back on that now, my irrational anger that other people actually felt bereaved (or acted bereaved!), I don’t even recognize myself. How could I have been so narrow-minded as to think that Torstein had to have stayed at your house or gone on a fishing trip with you in order for him to mean something to you? He hadn’t been mine, just my friend. What he’d had, what he’d said, it had touched people all over the city, certainly all over downtown. But at the moment it seemed to me another Selena scenario: now that he was dead, everyone was going to claim they’d been his biggest fans.

Everything had turned to rubbish for me.

When Maggie came, she gave me and Bruiser both a big hug. She was so fair-skinned, she looked like Snow White in general (but for the auburn hair). Today, you could tell she had been crying, and not sleeping, because there were dark circles, like a lavender thumbprint, in the delicate hollow under each eye. Her normally pale skin looked on the verge of gray. She asked about Pete; everyone was worried about him. She told me she was conflicted about Ferdy — she’d been angry with him, but she hadn’t wanted him to die. We told her what he’ said to us at the crypt, how Torstein was just supposed to get beat up and goaded into taking some action, going on television ... It sounded so stupid. Could he really have been so blind?!

That made Maggie cry again, and I remembered Pete telling me that I was terrible at comforting women. I’d tried to learn something about it from Torstein, but I was still not very good at it. At least this time I put my arm around Maggie’s shoulder .

When she stopped crying, she said someone had made a beautiful chalk drawing of the dragonfly coat in the center square of Patriots Park, and people had brought flowers and cards and left them there. Ariel Prince had been there, she said, recording new footage for her retrospective on Torstein. She’d done two news pieces on him, and this was sure to be a beautiful cap to them. The plan had worked out for her, either way.

Maggie said Len had taken Angel and Sully to the shore for the day, to try to get Angel’s mind off her grief. Caroline had actually called her parents for the first time in 10 years, and asked them if she could come home and bring her son. They’d never even seen their grandson.

“Jack called me and said everyone is invited to go fishing tomorrow. Fishing!” She snorted.

“I’m going,” I said. “Why not? Get out of the city. You should come. Bring Van and Sully. We need the break.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I’m not getting up at dark-thirty though.”

“Aren’t you?” Bruiser said. “I was up at dark-thirty this morning.”

“Yah,” she said. “Maybe I will. But I want to visit the grave again. I keep thinking: this isn’t real. He can’t be dead. How could he be? He was more alive than any of us. Maybe if I go there, and see the crypt again, I’ll believe it. Angel wants to go, too.”

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