Derek, Dead by Jack Patrick

Listen to a podcast of Jack Patrick’s “Derek, Dead.”

There’s a voiceless organ in my grandmother’s house that I’ve only ever known for a place to put framed photos of the dead. Aunts and uncles whose names I confuse sit on that grayed, oaken organ, propped up like tombstones, as if there were something other than quiet keys buried below. Whenever I walk by the organ I hold my breath, a habit from when I was a boy, in the backseats of cars passing cemeteries.

I had an Uncle Derek who died when he was seventeen, long before I was born. He was two years older than my mother, and the only time she mentions him to me is if Piano Man starts up on the radio. Whenever it does, she looks blankly out of the windshield, changes lanes and tells me, this song was my brother’s favorite. I don’t know much else about him. I know that a few years back, my Grandma received a letter on his birthday from an old friend of his telling how she still thinks back to whatever it was he made her feel that can stay with a person thirty years. I never read it but I’ve named her Kristen. He’s sometimes mentioned in the talks that pass on after dinner, at my grandmother’s house while she makes coffee, and his name is followed by a subtle silence that leaves me alone as they pause to remember.

When I was younger and living with my grandmother, I would invent things about Derek, using the only pieces I knew about him, a song and a photo. The photo is formal, a portrait of my uncle wearing a tuxedo, his senior picture, taken a few months before he died. It’s sort of fuzzy with age, the photo, and it almost looks as if dust has settled into the lines of his smile, blurring his ageless eyes. Because of the portrait’s blur, and I think because I’ve never actually seen another version of him, I can’t tell for certain whether it really is a photo or just a commissioned painting, something that’s never troubled me, I don’t know why.

I used to lie in bed in Derek’s old room, in his mother’s house, and try to imagine who he was. I invented baseball games he had, bottom of the ninth, down two, striking out. I invented my grandfather laughing with him afterward, smiling that his son knew what it meant to swing and to miss. I invented best friends, promises kept, proms danced, cigarettes smoked out of my mother’s room’s window, his younger sister holding a hand over her heart and swearing secrecy.

I invented girls for him. Girls he brought to the Friendly’s down the street for strawberry milkshakes, Kristen’s favorite. I wondered, late into school nights in my still-seventeen year-old uncle’s room, whether he ever had sex. I decided he had. He would know what it was to swing and not miss. He would know girls whose faces I stole from my own classmates, girls I would never touch the way he did.

Derek went away to a boarding school his senior year. I’m told he offered to leave after three years of crimes I can only see in the dark, looking up at the same ceiling he used to watch. I saw him once steal out of his window, my window, and walk seven blocks down Poplar to sit under a nightblue tree with a girl whose hair shone black in a streetlight. She was crying, wronged somehow terribly, and he only set down with her and touched her hair, whispering things I’d forget by morning. When he got home, my grandmother was sitting by the door, rocking, wrapped in yellow lamplight and a red blanket she’d knitted herself. She cursed him for keeping her up, on a Wednesday, asked was he crazy, what the hell was he doing all night, it was three in the morning, did he know? He couldn’t tell her. She wept. It happened again and again, as many times as I had nights to wait up and make it so.

His grades were poor. My grandfather spoke to him softly after dinners about tolls taken on his mother and what it is to own up to mistakes. They were talks of the future set carefully with smiles. One evening, he knocked and stepped slowly into his parents bedroom and asked permission to own up, to leave and to make things right.

He was diagnosed with Leukemia while away at boarding school. I can’t remember learning this, the specific time and place, just having learnt it somehow and knowing it was real and not mine, the way it was with the girls he had. My grandmother lashed out at whatever doctor told her Derek would die, flung the phone at the receiver and bit venom into herself for letting her only son leave home to school, to die; this is mine.

It’s a strange thing to look at my uncle’s portrait, feeling he’s older, as I’ve always felt, knowing he’s younger. He is still seventeen. I’ve had more girls than he has. I’ve known his mother and sisters longer than he ever did, something I never meant to happen.

His portrait is still on my grandmother’s gray organ, an organ whose quiet keys he once coaxed carnivals from on sunny afternoons, under the meandering dust caught in a window’s sunbeams, in the dark of my long, adolescent school-nights. As I look at his portrait, his confident smile, tragic bowtie, I still can’t tell if the picture was taken or painted, and the uncertainty gives me a peace I cannot understand.

Inevitably, I invented his funeral. It’s in December, and the snow falls fiercely in white, taut wheels. Kristen Pincciotti is there, her black hair flecked with snowflakes, crying over Derek’s casket, her first, thirty years before I would hold her hand after a junior prom. My grandfather doesn’t cry. He looks up into the falling, blowing white and squints. He presses my grandmother’s hand. Tolls are taken. She loses her faith for months or more.

Virginia speaks to her brother in dreams, turns seventeen, is made Homecoming Queen, leaves home for college, is made a wife, a teacher, mother, and one day, as Piano Man’s harmonica sweeps out of the radio, she looks out of the windshield, changes lanes, and doesn’t tell me, this song was my brother’s favorite. I hold my breath until she does, something kept from when I was a boy, in the backseats of cars passing cemeteries.

About the author:

Jack Patrick has lived in Arlington, VA for seven months now. He is once previously published in Penn State’s Literary Magazine, “Kaliope.” He graduated from that same university with a BA in English in 2008. He likes swimming in rivers best.