Learning to Live Without Him Chapter 1
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You know, I've always heard about people writing books on their lives and I always wanted to know how on Earth do they remember everything ? But as I write this book now I see how the memories just flood back to ya. My name is Leonardo Richards and this is our story.
The silence came in the summer of 1969, the summer I turned fifteen and my whole life basically went spinning off its hinges.
Looking back on it now, I want to say the quiet was a warning, or maybe just a symptom of how broken we all were. Before that July, our house had a pulse. It wasn't perfect, it was never perfect-but it was loud. You could hear Julian's heavy basketball sneakers thudding against the front porch, or the rusty screen door slamming shut, or him laughing at some ridiculous joke he made up just to make Dad smile. Julian was the only one who could do that, ever since Mom died. He was the golden boy, the straight anchor holding our messed-up family together.
And then, just like that, he was gone. One reckless driver had taken him away from this world.
The silence in the house was so loud it makes my ears ring to even try to remember it. It sits in the corners of the kitchen, it hangs over the dinner table, and it follows Dad around like a ghost. Dad doesn't even look at me anymore. When he does, it's like he's looking right through me, pissed off that the universe took his favorite son and left him with the disappointing consolation prize. Me.
Set against the sweltering, claustrophobic backdrop of Bethel, Mississippi-a small, hyper-religious town where everybody knows everybody's business and judges it too-this is what happened after. To the outside world, Julian was everything. The straight anchor of a fractured family, a star athlete, and the only child who could coax a smile out of our father after Mother passed away. I'm Leonardo, his fifteen-year-old younger brother. I lived entirely in his shadow, and to be entirely honest I didn't mind at all. But since we're being honest, I've carried a secret that felt heavier than the midday heat: I was gay, a truth I'd known with absolute certainty since I was nine years old. In the town of Bethel, who I was is considered a horrid, unpardonable sin.
I spent most of my days trapped inside my own head, wearing this stupid, oversized flannel shirt even though it was ninety degrees outside and the air felt like wet wool. The heat in this town was suffocating, but the flannel was my armor, like Julian used to be. If I kept myself covered up, if I kept my eyes glued to the scuffed toes of my sneakers, maybe the people in the town square wouldn't see right through me. Maybe they wouldn't see the truth. Because the truth was basically a death sentence in a hyper-religious place like Bethel.
For six years, Julian was my only lifeline. He was the only person who knew how to guide me through the terror of my own skin, the only one who stood between me and Dad's crushing judgment, or the hostile eyes in the church pews. But Julian isn't here to protect me anymore. His chair at the kitchen table is shoved completely against the wall, empty. I'm entirely on my own now, and I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to survive.
With a grieving father who cannot bear to look at me, I must find a way to survive the crushing isolation, confront the hostility of the town, and find the courage to pull up my own chair to the table, like Julian would.
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The ONE thing about dying in a small town is that everybody shows up to your funeral whether they loved you or not.
They came in their Sunday clothes, the women fanning themselves with paper programs from the funeral home, the men sweating through their jackets even though it wasn't even near noon. Julian's casket sat at the front of the church, closed. Nobody had asked me if I wanted it open. Nobody had asked me anything at all but I went and did it anyway.
I sat in the front pew with my father on one side and an empty space on the other where Julian should have been. Not should have been as in he belonged there with us. Should have been as in he should have been the one sitting, breathing, sweating through his own church jacket while someone else lay in that box. Someone else who wasn't the only person in the world who knew what I was and loved me anyway. The only person I cared about.
The preacher talked about heaven. About God's mysterious plan. About a young man taken too soon but called home to glory. I watched a bead of sweat roll down the back of Mr. Calloway's neck three rows ahead of me and tried to feel something besides the hollowed-out ache that had replaced my stomach. His kid was driving the car that crashed into Julian, some party they had gone to and came back intoxicated.
My father didn't cry. He hadn't cried once. Not when the sheriff came to the door. Not when they brought Julian home. Not when he identified the body. He had gone somewhere inside himself, retreated to a room I couldn't find the door to, and he hadn't come out since, just like he'd done when Mother passed. The man sitting next to me looked like my father. He had the same broad shoulders, the same square jaw, the same calloused hands folded in his lap. But his eyes were empty, cold. Someone had blown out the light behind them and locked the door.
I wanted Julian. Not the Julian in the casket. The real one. The one who used to sneak me comic books under the dinner table. The one who taught me how to throw a football even though I hated it, because he said it would keep the other boys from asking questions. The one who found me crying in the backyard when I was twelve, after I'd realized for good and certain that I was never going to want a wife, never going to be normal, never going to be saved.
Julian hadn't told me to pray about it. He hadn't quoted Scripture. He'd just sat down next to me in the dirt and said, "I don't care what the preacher says. You're my brother and I love you, and God's gonna have to take it up with me if He's got a problem with that."
He was sixteen when he said that. Sixteen years old and already braver than every grown man in this town put together.
Now he was eighteen and dead, and I was fifteen and alone, and God apparently didn't have a problem with any of it. The irony of life, ain't it.
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The funeral ended the way funerals do. People said words that meant nothing. They shook my father's hand. They patted my shoulder. I stood next to my father like a shadow, nodding when people told me how sorry they were, how much Julian had meant to everyone, how the whole town was grieving.
Nobody said what they were really thinking. That it should have been me. That the wrong brother died. That Julian was the golden one, the athlete, the charmer, the straight arrow pointed directly at a bright and normal future, and I was the strange one, the quiet one, the boy who wore oversized flannels in hundred-degree heat and never looked anyone in the eye for too long.
They didn't have to say it. I could feel it radiating off them like the heat off the asphalt outside.
Dwayne Porter was there with his parents, he was a word I dare not say in such a holy place as this church. He caught my eye across the fellowship hall and held it just a beat too long, his mouth twitching into something that wasn't quite a smile. We'd gone to Sunday school together since we were five. He'd been Julian's backup quarterback. He'd sat three rows behind us in church every Sunday for a decade. And I knew, with the kind of certainty that sinks into your bones and stays there, that with Julian gone, Dwayne was going to be a problem for me.
I looked away first. That was always the rule. Don't hold eye contact. Don't draw attention. Don't give them a reason.
Julian had taught me that, too. Not in words. In the way he always stepped between me and the other boys when the locker room talk got too rough. In the way he changed the subject when our father started in about girls and dating and when I was going to find myself a nice young lady. In the way he made himself big, loud, impossible to ignore, so that nobody would look too hard at the small quiet boy standing in his shadow.
Without him, I didn't know how to be invisible the way people are used to. I only knew how to be alone.
I put the last rose on the casket before they filled the hole. Every shovel of dirt thrown on my brother was like a fragment of my heart being taken away.
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The house was worse than the church.
At least at church there were people. Casseroles and condolences and the low murmur of voices pretending everything was normal. At home there was only silence and my father's footsteps on the hardwood floor, heavy and slow, like he was walking through water.
We ate dinner at the kitchen table without speaking. My father had made eggs. They were burned on the bottom and runny on top, and he ate them without tasting them, staring at the empty chair across from him. Julian's chair. Nobody had moved it. Nobody ever would. It sat there like a monument, like a wound that refused to close.
"Your brother," my father said suddenly, and I froze with my fork halfway to my mouth. It was the first time he'd spoken directly to me in three days. "He was a good boy."
"Yes, sir."
"He was strong. He was righteous. He walked with the Lord."
I didn't say anything. Julian had walked with the Lord, sure. He'd also walked with me down to the creek on summer nights when I couldn't sleep, when the weight of my own skin was too heavy to carry alone. He'd sat with me in the dark and talked about nothing-baseball scores, school gossip, what he wanted to do after graduation-just to remind me that I wasn't the only person in the world. That someone still saw me.
I didn't think my father was talking about that Julian.
"I expect you to carry on his legacy," my father said. His eyes were on me now, and I felt the weight of them like a hand on my throat. "I expect you to make something of yourself. To be the kind of man he would have been proud of."
I nodded because that was the only answer he would accept. But I didn't know what that meant. Julian's legacy was being everything I wasn't. Strong. Confident. Normal. The kind of boy who kissed girls behind the bleachers and meant it. The kind of boy who would grow up to marry a pretty wife and have pretty children and sit in the same church pew his father sat in until he died.
I could pretend to be that boy. I'd been pretending for six years. But pretending was exhausting, and Julian had been the only person I could stop pretending around.
Now he was gone. And I was so tired I could barely damn breathe.
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After dinner I went to Julian's room.
My father hadn't touched it. The bed was still unmade, the sheets tangled the way Julian always left them. His football jersey hung over the back of his desk chair. His Bible sat on the nightstand, a layer of dust already settling on the cover. The room still smelled like him-sweat and cheap deodorant and something else, something I couldn't name, something that made my chest tighten until I had to sit down on the edge of his bed.
I didn't cry. I hadn't cried since the night he died, and that had been in the bathroom with the shower running so my father wouldn't hear. I'd learned a long time ago that crying was dangerous. Crying drew attention. Crying made people ask questions. What's wrong? Why are you upset? Are you a sissy? Are you weak? Are you-
I stopped the thought before it could finish. I'd gotten good at that. Stopping thoughts before they went somewhere I couldn't follow.
I picked up Julian's Bible instead. It fell open to a page he'd dog-eared, and I saw his handwriting in the margin: *For Leo. In case he needs it.*
The passage was Romans 8:38-39. I knew it by heart. *For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.*
Julian had underlined the last part twice. And underneath it, in his messy handwriting: *Nothing can separate you either. Not even this. You're still my brother. You're still loved. - J*
I closed the Bible. I couldn't look at it anymore. Because Julian had been wrong. Death had separated us. Death had taken him and left me here, in this empty house, with a father who couldn't stand to look at me and a town that would eat me alive if it ever found out what I really was.
I put the Bible back on the nightstand and turned off the light. I didn't want to see his handwriting anymore. I didn't want to remember that someone had once loved me without conditions.
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Three weeks passed. Maybe four. Time moved strange after a death-slow and fast at the same time, days blurring into each other like watercolors left out in the rain.
My father went back to work at the hardware store. I went back to school. Nobody talked about Julian anymore. That was the rule in Bethel. You got your grieving done at the funeral, and then you moved on. Death was sad, but wallowing was weakness, and weakness was next to ungodliness.
I learned to move through the halls without being seen. Head down. Shoulders hunched. Books pressed against my chest like a shield. Dwayne Porter and his friends watched me from their lockers like wolves watching a limping deer, but they hadn't done anything yet. They were waiting. I didn't know for what. Like they were testing me, even I couldn't name for what.
The only place I could breathe was the woods.
They stretched out behind the church, past the graveyard where Julian was buried, past the old fire road that nobody used anymore. If you walked far enough, you hit a creek-wide and slow-moving, the water brown with clay, the banks lined with willow trees that bent low like old women praying.
Julian and I used to come here when we were kids. We'd catch crawfish and skip rocks and pretend we were explorers in some unknown wilderness. Julian always let me be the one to discover things. "Look, Leo! A waterfall!" even though it was just a trickle over some rocks. "Look, a bear track!" even though it was just a dog's paw print in the mud. He made the world feel bigger than it was, more magical, less like a cage. That was his specialty, I suppose.
Now I came alone. I sat on the same fallen log Julian used to sit on, and I watched the water move, and I tried to feel something besides the weight.
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The day everything changed was a Saturday.
It was hot. The kind of hot that makes the air feel like soup, that sticks your shirt to your back and sends the cicadas into a frenzy. I'd been sitting by the creek for maybe an hour when I heard footsteps behind me.
My whole body went tight. I turned, expecting Dwayne. Expecting fists. Expecting the thing I'd been dreading since the funeral.
But it wasn't Dwayne.
It was a boy I'd never seen before. Black. Around my age, maybe a little older. He was carrying a book wrapped in brown paper, and he stopped when he saw me, his whole body going still the way a deer goes still when it catches a scent it doesn't recognize, like it smelled danger.
We stared at each other in uncomfortable silence.
I should have said something. Should have apologized for being here, should have gotten up and left, should have done the thousand things white boys were supposed to do when they encountered Black boys in places that didn't belong to either of them.
But I didn't move. And neither did he.
"Sorry," he said finally. "Didn't know anyone was out here."
His voice was careful. Measured. The voice of someone who'd learned a long time ago that the wrong tone could get you killed.
"It's fine," I said. "I was just-" I didn't know how to finish the sentence. *Just sitting here? Just trying to remember how to breathe? Just wishing I was dead instead of my brother?*
The boy didn't leave. He was still watching me, his eyes sharp and assessing, like he was trying to figure out if I was a threat.
"That your brother?" he asked.
I blinked. "What?"
"The grave. The new one. Up by the church. Big fancy marble tombstone." He nodded back toward the cemetery. "Flowers are still fresh. Somebody's been visiting it. Figured it was you."
Nobody had asked me about Julian in weeks. Nobody had said his name. And here was this boy I'd never met, standing in the woods, talking about my brother like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"Yeah," I said. My voice came out rough. "That's my brother. Julian."
The boy nodded. He didn't say *sorry for your loss* or *he's in a better place now* or any of the other things people said when they didn't know what else to say. He just nodded, like he understood something about grief that the casserole-bringers and hand-shakers never would even grasp the concept of.
"I'm Samuel," he said. "Most people call me Sam."
He didn't step forward to shake my hand. That wasn't how things worked between white boys and Black boys in Bethel. But he didn't leave either. He just stood there, at the edge of the clearing, the brown paper package still pressed against his chest.
"Leonardo," I said. "Leo."
And for the first time since Julian died, I felt something shift inside me. Something small. Something fragile. Something that might, if I wasn't careful, turn into hope. I felt that even in this horrid town of Bethel, Mississippi 1967, I still had a chance of experiencing something normal.
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