After Eli (18 page)

Emma and Jim had a girl baby in January, and they named her Rain. They got married in the spring, just before planting time, and I was the best man. Now they’re talking about baby number two.

This year I’ve got Miss Walker in English class, and she gave me a copy of
Walden
by Henry David Thoreau. It might just turn out to be my special book, she said. A man who spends his time making the earth say blue potatoes might hit it off with a man who made the earth say beans.

“What?” I said.

“Chapter seven,” she said.

Then she assigned me an essay on it.

Being out didn’t turn out to be as awful as I thought it was going to be. After a while Ryan Baker started coming over to sit with me and Walter in the cafeteria, and then we picked up a couple of girls, and then all (three) members of the rocket club, and a kid from Brazil who’s a chess whiz in Portuguese.

Peter Reilly’s now on his eighth serious girlfriend, and we’re civil to each other.

I don’t hear from Isabelle anymore. She’s moved on. We all have. It’s just hard that moving on sometimes means leaving people behind.

I wish I could say that I’ve come to terms with what happened to my brother Eli, but I haven’t. I don’t think I ever will. I think about how things would be different, how much he would have done if he were here. For every person killed, Walter would say, so many parallel universes get snuffed out. In my Book of the Dead, there’s Henry Moseley, a British scientist who was so brilliant that everybody thought he was headed for a Nobel Prize. Instead, when he was twenty-seven, he was drafted, sent to fight in World War I, and shot through the head and killed at the Battle of Gallipoli.

After that, the British government pulled its head out of its ass and decided to stop sending all their scientists off to war. But by that time it was too late, and the world we might have had if Henry Moseley had stayed in it was long gone.

Like the world we might have had if Eli could have stuck around.

Mostly, though, I don’t think about Eli dying anymore. Maybe the old Egyptians were right that dying is a journey from the world of the living to whatever comes next, and that it takes a long time. It’s the same for the survivors too, and for me, my journey’s done. I think that maybe all this time with my Book of the Dead, I’ve been building a bridge between the world with Eli in it and the world without him, and now I’ve crossed over and I’m on the other side. I’ve reached what Walter calls closure, about which I guess Walter was right after all.

I don’t know where Eli is. But I can tell you this: his heart was lighter than that stupid feather. That old Egyptian Gobbler thing didn’t get Eli.

Walter once told me a quote from a Roman poet named Virgil. “Death twitches my ear.
Live,
he says.
I am coming.
”

“If you’re trying to make me feel better,” I said, “telling me that a guy with a scythe is lurking just around the corner is not helping. You are terminally creeping me out.”

Walter said no, it was a good thing. It was saying, make the most of your tomorrows, because life doesn’t last forever. Eli would have said that.

Which makes me think of Jennie Wade, the girl who got killed by mistake at the Battle of Gettysburg, when a bullet came through the kitchen door while she was kneading dough. The day after she died, her mother took all that dough and baked it into bread. It made fifteen loaves of bread.

When I first heard that, I thought it was pretty heartless, just baking after your daughter died as if nothing at all had happened. But now I think it was the right thing to do.

Because life goes on and people have to eat.

In November, the November after Isabelle left, I went for one last time to visit Eli’s grave. The wind was blowing out of the north, and the sky was gray and angry looking. Fall was pretty far gone. If a storm came that night, I figured it would take down the rest of the leaves.

“I’m not going to keep my Book of the Dead anymore,” I said.

The wind gave a little gust like an answer, and a whole bunch of leaves blew across Eli’s grave. I sat there for a long time.

I thought about how lucky I’d been to have Eli for a brother. I thought about all the stuff he’d tried to teach me. I thought of how, because of him, I had Jim and Emma and Walter and Miss Walker, and how because of him, Mom and Dad and I were working on being a family again. I thought how much I’d always miss him, and how I’d never forget him and how I’d carry his memory with me all my life.

If I ever had kids, I’d tell them about him. And I thought how I’d do my best to see that all those bright tomorrows he’d left me that should have been his didn’t go to waste.

“I swear and double-swear on a two-foot stack of Bibles,” I said. Like I was making a pact between Eli and me.

By the time I got up, my knees and fingers had gone stiff, and it was getting cold. I reached over and patted the top of Eli’s stone, gentle, like I’d sometimes seen Coach Bowers pat a football player’s shoulder after he’d played a really good game.

“Good-bye, Eli,” I said. “I love you.”

And then I headed home.

Many thanks to Cynthia Platt, my creative and kind-hearted editor; to Mike Miller and his science class, for so neatly solving the problem of E.T.; to Ethan Rupp, for averting computer disaster; and to Mary Lee Donovan and all of the wonderful people at Candlewick who make books possible.

REBECCA RUPP
is the beloved author of more than a dozen books for young readers, among them
The Dragon of Lonely Island
,
Sarah Simpson’s Rules for Living
, and
Octavia Boone’s Big Questions About Life, the Universe, and Everything
. About
After Eli
, she says, “Benjamin Franklin once said, ‘There never was a good war or a bad peace.’ As a writer during the Revolution, he knew what he was talking about. As another writer in a time of war, I set out to capture the feelings of the young people who have been exposed to it — their fear, their loss, and ultimately their hope.” Rebecca Rupp and her family live in Swanton, Vermont.