His Bookmark Is Still on Page Ninety
I can't finish his book for him, and I can't move it either.
My brother died sixty pages into a prison break.
He never found out that the prisoner gets out.
The book was The Count of Monte Cristo, a secondhand paperback the thickness of a brick, bought for a dollar fifty from a library sale because Danny had decided, at thirty-four, that he was going to become a person who read the classics. He announced this the way he announced everything, over the phone, mid-chew, like a press conference nobody had requested. “Ten pages a night,” he said. “That's the system. Ten pages a night, I finish it by Christmas.”
He texted me updates like sports scores. Page 30: this guy is about to get married, nothing bad better happen to him. Page 52: something bad happened to him. Page 74: HE'S BEEN IN PRISON FOR TWENTY PAGES WHEN DOES THE REVENGE START. I told him to keep going. I had read it in college. I knew what was coming, the tunnel, the sack, the sea, the treasure, four hundred pages of the most satisfying revenge ever printed. I told him nothing. Some gifts you give by shutting up.
The last text came on a Thursday. Page 89, staying up for one more chapter, this old priest guy better not be lying about the treasure.
The aneurysm was Friday morning. He was tying his shoes for a run. Our mother found him in the hallway with one shoe on, and the paramedics said it would have been instant, which is the word they give you to hold, and you hold it... because it is the only thing they have.
Nobody warns you about a loved one's unfinished book. People warn you about the closet, the phone contact you cannot delete, the voicemail you will save until the phone company loses it for you. Nobody mentions that you will walk into your brother's apartment to help your mother pack it up, and see a fat paperback on the nightstand with a gas station receipt sticking out of the top, and come apart completely, not at the photos, not at the jackets... but at that.
The bookmark was at page ninety. The receipt was for two coffees and a lottery scratcher. He had read up through page eighty-nine, closed the book on a Thursday night the way he had closed it eight nights running... and fully intended to come back.
Page ninety, in his edition, is the middle of the prison chapters. The old priest and the tunnel. The plan.
Danny died inside the plan.
I took the book. My mother packed his kitchen and I stood in the bedroom and put that paperback into my bag like I was stealing evidence, and neither of us said anything about it, because in those weeks we had an unspoken system where each of us was allowed one irrational object. Hers was his single running shoe. Mine was a nine-hundred-page novel I already owned.
For a year it sat on my shelf and I could not touch it. I mean that almost literally. I dusted around it. Moving the bookmark felt like unplugging something. Reading past it felt worse, like walking through a door ahead of him, letting it swing shut in his face.
But I could not leave him in prison either. That was the thing I could not explain to anyone at the time, not my husband, not the grief group with its circle of folding chairs. My brother was stuck in a cell on page ninety, twenty years into a sentence for something he did not do, and I was the only living person who knew there was a tunnel.
He is one page ahead of me, and I intend to keep it that way.
Here is what I did, and I am not sorry. On the first anniversary, at three in the morning, I took his copy down, sat in the reading chair by the window that had been his chair whenever he visited, and finished the book. All of it. The escape, the sea, the island, the treasure, the long delicious ruin of every man who wronged him. I read for two nights and most of a Sunday. When Dantès finally climbs out of the sack and swims for it, I cried the way you cry when nobody is coming to check on you, big, ugly, honking sobs, because he got out... he got out... and my brother never saw him get out.
And when I finished the last page, I turned back to page ninety and put the gas station receipt exactly where I found it, coffee-side up, and closed the book.
I know how that sounds. It felt like a betrayal and a rescue at the same time, sneaking ahead through the whole story and then coming back to sit next to him in the cell. Somebody in my grief group said, “So you finished it for him,” and I said no, no, that is exactly wrong.
I finished it without him.
That is the crime. The bookmark going back is the apology.
Later I wrote about it, badly at first, then less badly, one of those pieces about memory that you write with your jaw clenched. I posted it on a community wall for poets under a name that was almost mine, and the replies undid me all over again. A woman whose father died halfway through a crossword she still keeps, 14 across, unsolved. A man whose wife left a murder mystery face down on the arm of the sofa, and four years on, he still does not know who did it, and will not look. Dozens of them. All these paused stories in all these houses, all these people standing guard over an open page.
Grief has an official vocabulary, closure, processing, moving through the grief and out the other side, and none of it has anything to say about page ninety.
There is no other side of page ninety.
There is just the daily decision about what you do with a stopped book.
What I do is this. I bought my own copy, same edition, same cover with the sword and the ridiculous font. I read it every couple of years, slowly, ten pages a night, the system, and every single time I stop at page eighty-nine.
The last thing on page eighty-nine, in our edition, is the priest and the young man deciding to dig. Tools made of nothing, a tunnel measured in years, two prisoners choosing, against all arithmetic, to begin. That is the final sentence my brother ever read, and when I reach it I read it twice and close the book.
The two copies sit together on the shelf by the window now, his and mine, one page apart. His bookmark is a gas station receipt at ninety. Mine is a boarding pass at eighty-nine. Anyone tidying that shelf would think it was clutter.
It is not clutter. It is my brother, one page ahead of me, the way he was for thirty-four years, about to find the tunnel.
Any night now.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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