“I know,” I said. Then his sisters and their mess of kids showed up and piled into the kitchen. I got up and hugged both his sisters and then watched the kids run around the kitchen with their sorely needed surplus of noise and movement, excited molecules bouncing against each other and shouting, “You’re it no you’re it no I was it but then I tagged you you didn’t tag me you missed me well I’m tagging you now no dumb butt it’s a time-out DANIEL DO NOT CALL YOUR BROTHER A DUMB BUTT Mom if I’m not allowed to use that word how come you just used it dumb butt dumb butt,” and then, chorally, dumb butt dumb butt dumb butt dumb butt, and at the table Gus’s parents were now holding hands, which made me feel better.
“Isaac told me Gus was writing something, something for me,” I said. The kids were still singing their dumb-butt song.
“We can check his computer,” his mom said.
“He wasn’t on it much the last few weeks,” I said.
“That’s true. I’m not even sure we brought it upstairs. Is it still in the basement, Mark?”
“No idea.”
“Well,” I said, “can I…” I nodded toward the basement door.
“We’re not ready,” his dad said. “But of course, yes, Hazel. Of course you can.”
•••
I walked downstairs, past his unmade bed, past the gaming chairs beneath the TV. His computer was still on. I tapped the mouse to wake it up and then searched for his most recently edited files. Nothing in the last month. The most recent thing was a response paper to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Maybe he’d written something by hand. I walked over to his bookshelves, looking for a journal or a notebook. Nothing. I flipped through his copy of An Imperial Affliction. He hadn’t left a single mark in it.
I walked to his bedside table next. Infinite Mayhem, the ninth sequel to The Price of Dawn, lay atop the table next to his reading lamp, the corner of page 138 turned down. He’d never made it to the end of the book. “Spoiler alert: Mayhem survives,” I said out loud to him, just in case he could hear me.
And then I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out my cannula so I could smell better, breathing him in and breathing him out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest burning until I couldn’t distinguish among the pains.
I sat up in the bed after a while and reinserted my cannula and breathed for a while before going up the stairs. I just shook my head no in response to his parents’ expectant looks. The kids raced past me. One of Gus’s sisters—I could not tell them apart—said, “Mom, do you want me to take them to the park or something?”
“No, no, they’re fine.”
“Is there anywhere he might have put a notebook? Like by his hospital bed or something?” The bed was already gone, reclaimed by hospice.
“Hazel,” his dad said, “you were there every day with us. You— he wasn’t alone much, sweetie. He wouldn’t have had time to write anything. I know you want…I want that, too. But the messages he leaves for us now are coming from above, Hazel.” He pointed toward the ceiling, as if Gus were hovering just above the house. Maybe he was. I don’t know. I didn’t feel his presence, though.
“Yeah,” I said. I promised to visit them again in a few days.
I never quite caught his scent again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Three days later, on the eleventh day AG, Gus’s father called me in the morning. I was still hooked to the BiPAP, so I didn’t answer, but I listened to his message the moment it beeped through to my phone. “Hazel, hi, it’s Gus’s dad. I found a, uh, black Moleskine notebook in the magazine rack that was near his hospital bed, I think near enough that he could have reached it. Unfortunately there’s no writing in the notebook. All the pages are blank. But the first—I think three or four—the first few pages are torn out of the notebook. We looked through the house but couldn’t find the pages. So I don’t know what to make of that. But maybe those pages are what Isaac was referring to? Anyway, I hope that you are doing okay. You’re in our prayers every day, Hazel. Okay, bye.”
Three or four pages ripped from a Moleskine notebook no longer in Augustus Waters’s house. Where would he leave them for me? Taped to Funky Bones? No, he wasn’t well enough to get there.
The Literal Heart of Jesus. Maybe he’d left it there for me on his Last Good Day.
So I left twenty minutes early for Support Group the next day. I drove over to Isaac’s house, picked him up, and then we drove down to the Literal Heart of Jesus with the windows of the minivan down, listening to The Hectic Glow’s leaked new album, which Gus would never hear.