"Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name."
-Rainer Maria Rilke
It was the blue and white lights he noticed first. It was dark enough so they flashed into his room from across the street. He yanked the earphones from his ears and got up, abandoning the math book on his bed as he fell against his window. Cops cars and an ambulance were lined out in front of Cole's house and he could see uniformed men carrying a gurney out of the front door. The body was fully covered.
Everything in Dawsons mind blurred into an in-distinctive haze and an awareness that could only be christened as absolute, raw fear drowned him from within his own body. He hurried so quickly out of his room and down the stairs that he nearly face-planted onto the floor when he missed the first two steps.
He saw the front door, but not the obstacles in his way, only his goal. The fear was a blackness that was rapidly trying to consume him. That he felt a desperate need to stop.
"Dawson!" he only barely heard her from where she and his brother stood in front of the window by the door. He had no time to talk to them. He had to stop the blackness. The horrible fear. He grabbed the handle and flung the door open throwing himself across the porch and down the steps. He fear-fueled panic was obliterating his sense of reasoning. "JIM!" his mother yelled from the threshold. He noticed his father then, charging him from where he stood by the mailbox with a circle of some of the other neighbors.
His fathers arms wrapped around him in a grip that was unbreakable, stopping him from making it across the street. Dawson was barely thirteen then, not nearly strong enough to fight a full-grown man. "Get off of me!" he was screaming and his father braced him in a way that made him fall to his knees beneath the tree-house."GET OFF!" all he could see were the lights. The gurney. His imagination drawing the most gruesome conclusions.
He was crying. Sobbing. It was coming out of his eyes like uncontrollable vomit. He felt the most real and crude sense of fear that it weakened him and he felt his psyche teetering on the brink.
"Dawson! Dawson sweetheart he's fine." his mother was on her knees beside him, touching his hair gently. The shake of her voice was unnerving. David stood behind them all a few paces, crying also. He'd never seen his brother in such a state. "It's his father. Mr Henry. Cole is fine. He's fine. He's with his mother talking to the police." her words rushed together as she tried to calm her hysterical son.
Dawson let himself go then. He stopped fighting and went weak in his fathers arms. He propped his palms on the wet grass and breathed. He still cried though. It wasn't something he could stop just yet. The relief was so severe it hurt.
"My God." his father said, still holding his son, worried he may charge at the scene across the street again.
Mother and father looked at one another over their hunched-over son, shaken to the very marrow of their bones at such a display. They knew it wasn't right. It wasn't a natural response. He should have hurried down the stairs, called for them, asked them what was going on. That would have been normal. This, wallowing uncontrollable frantic child, was not.
The local news had gone on a spree. Covering all they could on the suicide and people talked for weeks after.
Dawson learned later that Cole's father had hung himself. A week before the birthday of Vince Henry, Cole's older brother, who'd died years ago at their first home.
