Scribblings From the Dead

We called it Homeplate—the tiny hunting cabin in the foothills skirting the Nielsen farm at the edge of town, because it was safe, a haven, where we could all unwind without judgment, without the pressures of home and school dogging us...

Inside, we found Rhea Nielsen, huddling in a corner, reading Byron by the light of a single candle burned to a nub. She said it was her hiding place first. Her grandfather had built it, and she went there to be alone, but we could come in if we wanted. After that, we hung out there most afternoons.

We rarely talked to Rhea in public, though I often wanted to. She was so self-contained, with an unapproachable reserve. She went everywhere alone. We thought she wanted it that way. She never told us she was dying.

After the funeral, we stayed away from Homeplate for a while, but Noah finally made us go back. Said he had things to say to Rhea, and he was right. But it turned out to be Rhea who had the most to say.

Noah rattled the knob and leaned heavily against the decaying wood. The door opened, groaning on its rusted hinges. Pale light streamed through the windows and fell across the dusty table, playing cards, gum wrappers, poker chips…and a small black book. “Dude, is this yours, Noah, Max?” McKay, asked, grabbing it.

Noah snatched it out of McKay’s hand. “No this is Rhea’s. We should give it to her family.”

McKay yanked it back just as fast. “Not yet! She left it here. She knew we’d come and find it. Whatever it is, she wanted us to read it first.”

Crowding around the dusty card table, McKay opened the book, and began reading the words of a dead girl.

A year ago, when Rhea was suffering with headaches, a doctor had found a growth on her brain. It was inoperable, and growing. She hadn’t wanted to tell people. Rhea wanted to reach for things without having them handed to her out of guilt. She didn’t want to die before she had to.

She dropped a lot of truth bombs—told us we were loud-mouthed, thick-sculled, insufferable…and she loved us. Then she addressed each of us individually. And we couldn’t think of another way but to tear these pages out of the book, because we all wanted our own page.

I can’t speak to what she said to those other stooges, but her words to me took the dampened, hopeless wick of my life and ignited it to a flame. At the end of the letter, she left an account number with these words:

Don’t reject my dying wishes out of guilt, Max. Take the money. I want you to make a plan and become what it is you were meant to be, whatever that is. It’s you’re decision.

I never wanted you to know about the tumor, Max. I wanted you to be authentic. And I’ll always be glad to have known you loved me, naturally, without any pressure from me or anyone else. Now you know I loved you, too.

We swept and cleaned up the cabin as best we could, and then we brought the little book to Rhea’s house, and gave it to her mother, telling her about finding Rhea in the cabin and how we had all been hanging out together for months. She hugged us and we cried.

We didn’t keep up after high school, Noah and Mckay and me. We went our separate ways. But I met McKay by chance at the airport and we had a beer together. He looked sharp, with the air of someone who knows what he wants and where he is going. But he didn’t have much to say, or had too much to say. Either way, it took him a while to work himself up to, “Do you ever think about her?”

“All the time,” I swallowed through a tightened throat. “You obviously do.”

He paused. “She paid for my first two years at school,” he said. “I couldn’t have done it without her help. It was the first time anyone—anyone believed in me.”

I blinked surprise. “She did? I thought it was just me.”

He chuckled. “I wondered. She’d never really singled me out, after all.”

My jaw went slack, “She told you that, too? She said she loved you?”

Now McKay grinned. “Love of her life.”

I put my head in my hands. “I always thought it was just me she felt that way about. You realize, I was completely smitten…”

“And I wasn’t? She was everything.”

We were silent for a moment.

McKay finally spoke. “I bet she did the same for Noah. I bet she cleaned out her college fund and gave us every last penny. Then she told us all she loved us to give us the confidence we needed to reach for something.” He strained his spine. “So help me that’s what I've done.”

I thought to myself how I’d done the same. Probably Noah had, too. “I heard Noah got permission from her mother to publish one of her essays. It won a prize.”

He nodded. “Well deserved. And you know what? I don’t think any of it was a lie.” McKay said. “I think she meant every word she wrote.”

I agreed. “You don’t waste words when you’re gripping life with both hands.”