On that bench in Dorothy Lane Market she tried to tell me it, but she couldn’t. She opened her mouth—but all she got was "I have to tell you.." It was an hour later and we were at Carillon Park, on this stone ring that goes around the carillon, and Jules had her head in my lap and I was feeling the sun. It was just a blue, blue sky.
"I have to tell you something. It’s nothing big," she added, so I wouldn’t start thinking that we were breaking up or that she had AIDS or one of those things.
She sat up. She wanted to be sitting up to tell me this. She wanted us to be on equal level.
"My brother died when I was younger. This is kind of a sad story..so..I’m not asking for your sympathy or anything. Ok. I don’t need that. So—I’m just telling you this so you can better understand me. And you do..you do understand me. You understand be better than anyone I know—better than anyone I’ve ever met. Even my mother. It’s true. She has no idea who I am. But. When me and my brother were younger..when we were..he was fifteen I was seventeen." She stops.
"..So this is like three years ago," I say.
"Yes," she says. She tells me the rest of it looking in my eyes. "When he was fifteen and I was seventeen we were in a car..and I was driving. And.. We went though an intersection and..I..crashed the car. Into another car. That was turning. And my brother died. Ok. It was just the two of us in the car. No one else..in the other car..died. No one else was hurt. It wasn’t even that bad of an accident! But that’s what happened." Jules is smoothing the front of my shirt. "And that was my only brother. Who only got to live to be fifteen. Because of me. So. That’s what happened. Ok?"
She’s looking at me like she wants forgiveness—which I obviously can’t give her. And she’s crying now. She’s crying freely, which is something Jules does not do. When she’s angry at me, sure—or when she’s really happy, she might give a tear then. But for her to grip my shirt and just look into my eyes and open up on the stones by the carillon, and let that come out, straight between us, with no guard and no holding back, to just let those tears and those sobs and those fights from when she was seventeen—and her brother was fifteen—to let those come through the gates..well..it’s the openest I’d seen her.