Solar Eclipse

There was a time when I thought my biggest fear was spiders. Don't get me wrong, I am afraid of them, just not in the way that can qualify them as my biggest fear. It didn't even take me that long to realize. See, spiders would make me scream and jump and even cry a little if they were big enough, but at the end of the day, if it was between me and them, I could still run up and squash them, even if I did feel squeamish afterwards. I thought that the screaming and crying part was what made them my biggest fear, but then there was this one time when I was maybe 10 when one of the boys—one of the ones that was more Sammy's friend than mine—put a spider on my shoulder that was about the size of a nickel. I screamed all right, but instead of panicking, I just flicked it off. The thing was, it landed on Sammy's little brother. Now, "little" was a funny thing to call him, because while he may have been two years younger than us, he was also half a foot taller than both Sammy and me. And let me tell you, when I saw that big lug shriek and flail and cry and beg for help, that's when I realized spiders weren't the scariest thing after all, not to me.

Around 13 I started worrying about my own mortality, and not at all of my own volition. There was a group of us standing around the paletas cart just a few blocks from our neighborhood. Sammy and his little brother were there and had just gotten their treats. The three of us were about to break away from the group and start walking back home when there was this loud screeeeeeeeeeech right across the street. I turned in time to see the impact of a shitty little cornflower blue pickup and a shitty little white sedan, a head-on collision with an accompanying BANG! that I felt more than heard. Something went flying out of the sedan like there was no windshield at all, and it flew so fast all I could see was a weird red-and-white blur. I thought it might have been a basket of laundry until it hit the pavement and skidded to a stop, all blonde hair and limbs bent every which way but the right ones, red splattered all over and swelling underneath. I dropped my paleta and ran home screaming just like Sammy's little brother with the spider (I'd learn later that Sammy, his brother, and the rest of the boys stayed and stared at the wreckage until the cops showed up and made them go home). I knew my house would be empty this early in the afternoon, so I bypassed it for Sammy's down the street. His mom was at the door within seconds of my assault of it, and she wrenched me into her arms, cooing, "Mija, mija, no llores, ay, no llores, está bien, mija, está bien," over and over until I calmed down enough for her to ask me what happened.

I couldn't sleep for weeks without nightmares, and in the nightmares I was always that blonde boy. It could have been me. It could be me any time. Just here one moment then flung out a window when I least expected it. I agonized over car rides for months after that, worried that I'd be the next one stuck to the pavement for the boys to stare at. I didn't think anything could be scarier until my dog died.

I'd never lost anyone remotely close to me before, and dealing with the mortality of my childhood pet far outweighed the imagined scenarios concerning my own. There were two big reasons for this: For one, this was real, and for two, it hurt. At two-months-shy-of-14 and particularly privileged despite being Black, I'd only dealt with the physical pain of skinned knees and jammed fingers and stubbed toes. I'd never even suffered a broken bone before, though Sammy had and his good-natured humor throughout the experience made it seem like no big deal. Thus, heartbreak was far, far worse than I could have imagined. It was a big, empty hole that throbbed in my chest and wouldn't go away, just sat there and brought tears that wouldn't stop. My parents understood that I was hurting, but they didn't seem to feel it themselves—whether they were hiding it for my benefit or had just seen this sort of thing dozens of times with dozens of aged animals over the course of their ancient lives, I'd never be sure. They were there, but not in the way that I needed. And Sammy refused to come over for months—my dog had been as much his as he'd known her just about as long as I had. So, I was alone in my misery, and I was certain I'd never recover, which made me terrified of the idea of ever having to lose anyone else. Forget my own mortality, what if this happened again, but it was my dad or my mom or Sammy? How could I survive losing any of them when I was barely surviving this? I knew then that there couldn't be anything in the world that could shake me the way losing a loved one did.

And then Sammy's mom died.

It happened the spring after I turned 16. It was cancer, and it was slow until it suddenly wasn't. I'd had no idea she was even sick, let alone that she'd succumbed to it. Sammy didn't show up for school one day, and everyone kept asking me where he was. It tore at me that I didn't know since we were the type who never ditched without the other. I went to his house straight after school to find out what was up, and his dad answered the door, which was also unusual because he should still have been at work.

"Hola, Papá. Sammy está aq..." It was right then that I noticed the pained expression on his face, the hardened jaw of a man trained not to show too much emotion no matter how much he needed to. I shook my head. "Wait, what's wrong?" I'd learned Spanish for fun, also to communicate with Sammy's parents better, but mostly for fun. This wasn't fun, so my language reset to default. "Where's Sammy? Is he okay?"

"Mija." The man's voice cracked, which made tears spill from my eyes before I even knew what happened. Then he told me in a shaky, agonized tone that his wife was gone. It'd happened just that morning. He was not the comforting sort the way she had been, so I cried into my hands in a heap on his doorstep, and he stood there and let me. I don't know how much time passed before he told me Sammy was in his room if I wanted to see him, but I nodded, wobbled to my feet, and… stopped.

Sammy's mom just died. There was no way he wasn't crying. This weird ball of panic tightened my chest, and I stood there frozen. Sammy who laughed off a broken wrist, who stayed back to gawk at a dead boy in the middle of the street, who shrugged off bullies, who was immune to the fall of Mufasa. Sammy who I didn't see the day my dog died, who avoided coming over for ages afterwards so he wouldn't have to think about her. We'd been friends for a decade, and I'd never seen him shed a single tear. Today was about to change that.

Except no the hell it was not. I made up some flimsy excuse that I had to go tell my parents what happened, which was stupid because they weren't even home yet, but I went with it, and ran off anyway. For days I made up excuse after excuse for not going to see him, until the day of the wake. I actually tried to get out of that too, but my mom would not hear of it.

"You don't have to look at the body," she assured me on the drive to the funeral home. I didn't correct her, didn't say that the idea of the body didn't bother me. I simply stared out the window, hoping but not hoping too hard that a truck would run a light and send one or both of us flying through the windshield. My mortality, my mom's mortality, the mortality of any and everyone involved in such a crash, and the spiders that might crawl in and over us as we lay there waiting for help, none of that was that scary to me in that moment.

There were so many people at the wake, some I knew from school, a few of Sammy's cousins that I'd met over the years, but most were family that I didn't recognize. My mom patted me on the shoulder and left me to find Sammy's dad. My eyes found the casket, the thing that should scare me the most right now. I walked toward it, stopped a few feet away, and stared. She looked peaceful, but gaunt. It occurred to me then just how long it'd been since I'd seen her. I should've known something was up when Sammy started refusing to hang out at his house.

Sammy.

He was here somewhere, but my eyes stayed locked on his dead mom because it was easier. I stepped a little closer and watched her lie there like she was asleep. It was fine. I could stand there until it was time to go. No problem.

But then there was a nudge at my shoulder, and I bit back a scream because I thought it was him, you know? And I wasn't ready. But it wasn't. It was his gigantic little brother.

His face was splotchy from crying, and he sniffled, which was fine, just fine. I'd seen him cry hundreds of times when we were younger. I could handle this. I told him I was sorry, and hugged him tight. He kind of melted into me; such a big kid, but so frail right now. He thanked me, and I prayed that we could just stand there together and pretend there was no one else to think about, but right away he said, "He won't talk to anyone."

He didn't have to say who. It was obvious. My heart lurched, and I made a weird, noncommittal noise in response.

"I think he'll talk to you, though," he went on, which made that lurching feeling happen again, more violently this time. "He's over there." I watched him point through an open set of double doors where there were a bunch of empty dining tables covered in white cloths. Empty except, of course, for Sammy.

His back was toward us, toward the casket and everyone in the room, and his shoulders were shaking. My fight or flight kicked in, and I took an involuntary step backward. I only stopped myself from running away completely by some absolute miracle.

"Could you try to talk to him?" There was a worried crinkle between the younger boy's brows, and his eyes were tearing up again. He was sad about his mom, sure, but right here and now, he was more worried about his big brother. I imagined everyone was. Sammy was always the brightest light in the building, the one that talked way too much, but you didn't mind because he also always made you laugh. If he hadn't spoken in days…

"Please." It was so small coming out of such a big person—only 14 years old, but already 6'2"—I would have laughed if this was even kind of the appropriate time for it. He held my gaze for a long moment, silently pleading with me to fix his brother, saying without saying, "You're our only hope."

But his only hope was a scared little girl herself. I let my eyes drift to the other room again, lock on Sammy's shaking back. A deep, shuddering breath somehow made its way into my lungs as I steeled myself to face the thing that I now understood terrified me more than anything I'd ever thought I feared before.

Not spiders. Not my mortality. Not the mortality of my loved ones.

I held my breath and took a step forward.