Yen Radecki were raised across three continents and are now based in Japan, where they teach English and write poetry and fiction in their spare time. Their writing has previously appeared in STORGY Magazine, Ibis House, and Baby Teeth Journal. Online, they can be found at @yenradecki.
The wake was being held on Saturday afternoon at Jay’s parents’ house, so the four of us drove down together that morning.
It wasn’t that none of us could get there on our own — although Arjun certainly would have struggled to get his scooter going fast enough for the freeway — but that it made sense to go together, the same collective front as seniors as we had been freshman year. We stood around the gas station before setting off, filling the car and pooling our ignorance like pocket-change between us. None of us had met Jay’s parents before, and I was the only one who knew Jay’s sister — but we could all agree on the existence of Bucky, a childhood dog glimpsed in the corner of more than one Facebook picture.
“Labrador?” Libbie guessed, squinting at the phone screen as she guided the pump to the car’s gas tank.
“Golden retriever,” Marco corrected, taking the phone back to peer at the screen. “Wait, that’s diesel, right?”
Once the car was full, Marco went inside to pay as the rest of us fumbled for loose bills to contribute. It was quarter past seven, and the sun was just visible through the haze of gasoline, shivering its way into the sky beneath the station’s peeling awning.
“We’re getting coffee, yeah?” Arjun asked as Marco made his way back towards us. We piled into the car and began shucking layers like peeling corn. “Somewhere that isn’t Timmy’s?”
“No one’s rooting for Tim Horton’s.” Libbie was settling into the front seat, fiddling with knobs to clear the windshield. “And of course we’re getting fucking coffee.”
As the only one in possession of a car large enough to fit us comfortably, Marco had volunteered his Chevrolet for the task, and Libbie, the only one who’d driven further than Gravenhurst before, had reluctantly agreed to drive it. By tacit agreement, I sat up front to help her navigate, while Marco and Arjun slumped from side to side in the back, and occasionally against each other’s shoulders, thumbing idly at their cell phones. The sun was high by the time we pulled off the ramp onto the freeway, sliding around the windshield to glare over the brushland, and the extra macchiato I’d accidentally ordered at the drive-through sat untouched by the gear shift, equally steadfast.
“Music OK?”
Arjun was leaning forward between the two front seats, fingers hovering over the radio’s dial. Libbie glanced over and shrugged.
“Sure.”
In Marco’s car, it was the radio or nothing. With a practiced hand, Arjun flicked us past Christian rock, Ici Musique, and a handful of crackly, indigenous local stations speaking a language I didn’t know. I leant my head against the car window as the speakers competed lymphatically with the hum of the wheels below.
We were headed to Redbridge, Ontario, where Jay’s parents lived. It was where Jay had been raised, and where they’d fled by coming to U of T, and we’d joked together about it back in the day, its barren appearance on Google Maps: a single road, a general store, trees and trucks and campervans dotted along the roadside like hopeful hitchhikers. None of us had ever expected to see it in real life. Though Jay had never said so, it had always been understood that they went by a different name back home, and that returning for the holidays had been not dissimilar from a brief vacation in inferno.
In fact, the only positive thing I could remember Jay mentioning about Redbridge was Lake Nipissing. The town wasn’t right on the water, but it was close enough for a trip; close enough to make it one of the only viable outings growing-up. In the summer of Jay’s twelfth year, they’d gone there fishing with their father—caught a pickerel within an hour, and cried until it had been released. It wasn’t until later, driving license acquired, that the lake had become Jay’s properly, a spot for them to smoke and sext and swim. On Facebook, you could still see one of their jaunts there in their profile pic: Jay wet-haired, red-eyed, and happy, now eternally.
Beside me, Libbie leant forwards and thumbed at the car’s touch screen.
“Alright, straight for like, three hours, and then we’re looking for Highway 63. Trout Lake Road. Wow, they’re really leaning into the whole hillbilly thing.”
The car swayed over a rumble strip, rattling my teeth. The sun was lower on our left now, and it striped dust through the car in searing beams. In the back, I could hear what sounded like a Funny or Die skit. Inside, the air was hot and thick and still.
It wasn’t a long drive, only four hours or so in total, but it had been a while since any of us had been on anything that could even charitably be called a road trip. There just wasn’t the need, living where we did: Marco in res, and Libbie so close to class you could see the cross on St. Michael’s College by hanging your head out of the bathroom window, as we’d discovered one afternoon toking. Jay lived further out, but in practice they spent more time at Arjun’s place or at mine, just two stops from the Sandford Fleming building on Line 1, and more than once, I’d come back from class to find them still asleep on my futon, a winter coat tugged on as a blanket.
“When does it start?”
It had been long enough since the hillbilly comment that I stirred like I was waking. In the rear-view mirror I could see Marco sitting up too: his breath had fogged up a neat circle on the back-left window.
“Midday,” Libbie said. She was the one who’d done all the correspondence and planning. “I don’t know when it’ll wrap up. Maybe an hour or two? I figure we can stop for food somewhere on the way back; don’t think there’ll be much by way of dining.”
I stared at the GPS for a moment: the little white arrow of the car, fording flat shapes in grey and green. The road we were on wasn’t named, just numbered.
“Did Jay ever mention anything much about growing up here?”
“Nothing good,” Arjun said. He was looking out the window, the pupils of his dark eyes juddering as he watched the trees sail past, like some kind of personal strobe light.
“I think it basically sucked,” Libbie elaborated. “I don’t think there’s much to do out here unless you really like fishing. Or hunting. Or like… tilling the field.”
“Ah yes,” Arjun said. “Jay’s three favourite pastimes.”
“What about people?” I said. “Grandparents still alive on their mother’s side I think, right?”
“Father’s,” Libbie corrected from beside me, and briefly looked over. “Why?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. Trying to think of what to say.”
“At the wake? You’re speaking?”
“They asked me to.” Begged was probably the right word for it, but it seemed an ugly thing to detail. “I guess they wanted a friend to do it, since the funeral’s family-only.”
“Sophie…” She didn’t have to say anything else, but she did anyway. “How much thought have you given this?”
I’d thought about it, but only indirectly, the way you might avoid looking straight into the sun.
“I’m only asking because I’m not sure how Jay would feel. You know?”
Arjun made a noise of surprise from behind me. “Why wouldn’t Jay want Sophie to speak?”
Marco answered before anybody else could, sitting forward and wedging his shoulders into the gap between the two front seats. “Probably the same reason we weren’t sure if we should even go today.” His voice was still husky with sleep; the first time he’d spoken since Huntsville. “Because nobody there knows the first damn thing about Jay, and they wouldn’t be coming to the wake if they did.”
Libbie was watching the road in the side-view mirror, and she finished changing lanes before answering. “You don’t know that, Marco.”
“Like hell I don’t.”
“Dude,” Arjun breathed, “come on. I’m sure Jay’s folks aren’t perfect, but nobody’s are.”
“Perfect?” Marco repeated. Sitting forward the way he was, I could see his face properly for the first time all morning: the places he’d cut himself shaving. “You think that’s what they were holding out for? The fucking Brady Bunch? Jay’s piss-poor excuse for a family is the reason we’re here right now, you know that, right? Literally the only reason.”
“You don’t know that,” Libbie said again, and Marco sat back finally with a thump.
“It’s the only thing I do know.” His face turned back towards the window. “And you all do, too. Fuck. Whatever. It’s fine.”
It wasn’t, but then it hadn’t been since Tuesday, when I’d woken up to find a message on Facebook from Jay’s sister, only the first line visible in preview: there’s no right way to say this. A little more wrongness wouldn’t change much of anything. On the radio, an excitable Quiznos customer made obscene noises over a chipotle sub, and Libbie leant over to turn it off.
“It’s your call, Sophie,” she said. We were pulling off the freeway now, the rhythmic beat of the tires gradually slowing to a stop as we lost speed over the asphalt. I heard a squeak behind me as Marco eked open his window and wind rushed in. “But even leaving aside everything else, I don’t know if it’s going to be possible, to talk about Jay without ever calling them anything.”
I shook my head and Marco made a sound so sudden it seemed involuntary.
“Don’t you guys think Jay’s family deserves to know who they’re mourning?”
“Look, maybe, but do you really think a wake is the right time for that conversation?”
“OK, so not when Jay’s dead, not when they’re alive — when exactly were you thinking?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Marco,” Libbie snapped, finally lifting her eyes off the windshield. It was impossible to see from the angle of the passenger seat, but I imagine their eyes met, briefly, in the rear-view mirror. It was a good thing we were off the freeway. “What’s the matter with you?”
“The matter with me? I’m the only one who —”
“How about respecting Jay’s wishes?” It was Arjun, cutting through Marco’s hysterics with the practiced mildness of a physician. They’d shared a room together freshman year, while Marco was still hopped-up and over-compensating, doing lines in bed with hook-ups while Arjun studied econ in the bathtub. “If Jay didn’t tell them, I’m guessing there was a pretty good reason.”
“No shit, there was a reason; like maybe how their family are Westboro Baptist-level psychos, and you guys just want to let them get away with it?”
The mechanical femininity of the GPS interrupted with terse instructions to make a U-turn.
“Shit,” Libbie said, glancing between the display and the windscreen. “Marco—when did you last update this thing?”
In the sudden silence, Marco’s shrug was audible. Libbie heaved a sigh and steered the car off onto the side of the road, scraping to a sharp stop over the gravel.
“Has anyone got reception? I’m going to need someone to talk me through Maps since this GPS hasn’t been updated since Prohibition.”
“I’ve got one bar.”
“Here, I’ve got two.” Arjun held his phone over Libbie’s shoulder, and Libbie took it and passed it over to me.
“We need to turn around.”
“Terrific,” Libbie said, already guiding the battered Chevrolet back across the lane markings. “Now can we shelve the bullshit until we get there, please? There’ll be time for a pissing contest over who loved Jay best later.” There was a beat when nobody said what anyone was thinking, which was mainly that Libbie would come dead last in that contest, so of course she didn’t care when we held it.
Now that we were off the freeway, the scenery was getting downright pastoral. Trees crowded in on one side of the car while water stretched out on the other, sidling close and then rolling away until it was just a blue-grey glint behind vacant billboards. We passed rusted mailboxes abutting roads to nowhere, clearings of dismantled cars and jacked boats half-covered in tarp. I tried to imagine Jay growing up here, the awful dull comfort of it, where everything was flat and there was nothing to follow but the powerlines. The closer we got, the more I could feel the others trying too.
Redbridge, when we reached it, was too small to have a sign. The only warning that we got was the local general store: a stout wooden building with a peaked attic and a small flag taped to a traffic cone out front. The cursive B had been freshly repainted. Libbie slowed the car to a crawl and rolled down her window to stick her elbow out. For some time now, we’d been the only car on the road. Arjun leant forwards in the back to read the clock on the dash.
“Shit. We’re early.”
I rolled down my window too and looked out. Google Maps hadn’t lied: Redbridge was a single street as far as the eye could see, punctured errantly with wide dirt roads that led off to clusters of thinning spruce trees. In the distance, I could see pylons and broadleaf trees: sleet grey road meeting muddied sky like the horizon line over a sea of dust. Somewhere beyond my sightline, on this little patch of earth, was Jay’s family home, with Jay’s family inside it, mourning a son they’d never known.
Libbie was half out of the window now, Arjun’s phone held close as she squinted at Street View.
“Well, good, ‘cause it looks like this place doesn’t do street numbers.”
“Of course it doesn’t,” Marco muttered behind us, and the car came to a sudden stop.
“Want to give me a hand instead of bitching about it?”
“Sure. I’ll get out and walk.”
“Me too,” Arjun said, clicking off child-lock. “I want a smoke before this thing starts.”
This was how we arrived: in slow, drunk diagonals down the street, while Arjun and Marco followed the tire tread, sharing a cigarette and shivering. Jay’s family home was an old pine two-story with a front veranda and an unkempt lawn out the back—the kind of predictable family white-picket where terrible things happen in adaptations of Stephen King. A small group of adults was huddled beside the mailbox in muted clothing, thumbing at phones as big as bricks. One of them raised a hand as we pulled up, in welcome or in warning.
The box had been placed in the living room, weighed down with flowers and reeking of patchouli. Jay’s mother, Eileen, stood at the door greeting people with pathological efficiency. None of us missed the way she looked over Arjun during introductions, up and down, up and down, as though a second viewing would resolve the discrepancy. Meanwhile Jay’s father stood at the buffet, cossetting puff pastries on a paper plate, and watching it all, atop the casket, a framed photograph had been placed: a baby-faced Jay at their first communion, squirming in their suit, pupils dilated by candle flame.
Afterwards, the four of us drove to Lake Nipissing at my suggestion. Although it was cold, the lake’s surface wasn’t yet frozen, and Marco took off his shoes and sat down on the rocky shore to wet his feet. The rest of us stood there in silence, the loss of Jay growing heavier and heavier inside us until I wasn’t sure that the car would start again when we piled back in.
“Sorry,” I said. The word was caught and dragged away in the wind, and I turned around to repeat it. “Sorry. I thought—this seemed to be somewhere Jay liked, so I thought we should come here.”
“It was a nice idea,” Libbie said, but I think we all knew it for what it was—an inadequate salve for still open wound. As though we could host our own, second wake by coming here; as though such a gathering, without Jay’s family in attendance, would be any better than the one we’d spent all day disparaging. “But I’m tired, and it’s freezing, and I could just about eat a horse.”
She shook out the car key on its ring as Arjun flattened a cigarette beneath his shoe.
“I’m going to go get the motor running. See you in a bit.”
They left us there, me and Marco: like they thought an apology and a handshake might be in order. Instead, we just looked out together across the water. The opposite bank was so distant we might as well have been at the edge of the ocean.
“You think Jay saw any of that? The wake? Everything?”
“No,” Marco said. He lifted his legs slightly and looked down at them, how the water had pasted down the long dark hairs of his ankles and shins. “I think they’re dead, and they didn’t see anything.”
I looked sideways, along the coast, where the water worked at the rocks it hadn’t changed yet. It reminded me of Jay’s profile pic, the similar shoreline on which they’d posed, dripping, and made the peace sign with their fingers. The thought of the image was comforting: Jay pixelating across my phone screen in eternal defiance of the bale-eyed boy in his Sunday best who would adorn mantels north of Algonquin. Nothing written in stone, nothing written in ink. Death hadn’t suddenly made Jay static; hadn’t suddenly pinned them down to any one thing. Under ground as above, they would remain unfinished: like Schrödinger’s cat, only consistent in the moment of viewing. Marco had simply been watching when I happened to blink. But now the coffin was closed, and no power on Earth could reopen it.