My mom started dating a man named Elliot when my friend Elliot died. If I asked her for the timeline, I’m sure she would remind me that she was seeing her Elliot a few weeks or even months before mine died. But when Elliot died, I became aware that my mom was seeing someone named Elliot. 

Her Elliot was a thirty-three-year-old Coast Guard living in Oregon until he moved to somewhere in Texas. From her reports, he initially wanted to see her in the daylight. He wanted to go to the beach or to lunch, but she refused and would only see him at her house at night.

“What would they think of me?” she would say.

It was a small town, so word spread quickly. Reputations were established. She didn’t want to be seen as a mistress on top of the hill fifteen minutes from the ocean. She would later complain about their situation. 

“I’m not being taken seriously,” she would tell me. “He is seeing me just for sex.” 

She would follow the statements with the knowledge that she had caused this.

I never met her Elliot, but she knew mine. Elliot and I had been friends since we were seven, when my mom took us to the movie theater to see Robots. My mom bought us one large soda. When we were sitting in the seats, feet dangling during the previews, I asked if the straw on the left was mine or his. He answered by sticking both straws in his mouth. 

In the first year following his death, I mentioned him in conversations regardless of the truth. If someone was talking about an artist, I said that my friend Elliot loved that artist. If someone played a song, I said that my friend Elliot loved that song. If someone said they recently went climbing or wanted to go climbing or asked if I liked climbing, I would say I’m scared of climbing because my friend Elliot died from the force of a rock. 

In the first year following his death, I moved into my mom’s house to get time and space to write stories for my graduate school applications. Her Elliot had just been stationed in Texas. She informed me when I moved in that he was going to visit her when he returned to Oregon. He had a kid, an ex-wife, and friends in Portland, an hour and a half east of us. Eight months later, she shooed me to my room downstairs; Elliot was on his way over. 

I heard her footsteps above me. I heard her unlock the door and say something. I knew he was a larger man, but I didn’t hear anything besides my mom walking, pouring a drink, speaking, and then moaning. She sounded more fearful than delighted. At least there was never an “Oh, Elliot.” 

When the sound ceased, I went to sleep. She sent a text at 7 am telling me that it was okay for me to come upstairs because he had left. When I went upstairs, I found her resting on her side, wound tightly in bedsheets.

“How was it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

She rose from bed pretty quickly after that and drove to the beach to collect sand dollars. Elliot had told her that he was going to be in town for the week. But she didn’t receive any messages after that morning. She listened to guided meditations about letting go. She envisioned a dandelion and blew out what she didn’t want to hold onto anymore. It was all Elliot. A month later, he texted her that he’s sorry. He had lost his phone in Oregon. He’s back in Texas now.

“That fucker,” she said to me. 

It was always that fucker. And, I deserve better! My mom would tell him to leave her alone. Or that’s what she told me. My mom also said it was heartbreaking for her to see his name on her phone, so she blocked him. A few weeks later, she would confess that she had heard from him. She must have blocked the wrong number. 

“Why don’t you stop responding?” I asked. “Or not let him come over?”

“I don’t want to be lectured,” she would say. “You get it. You’ve let someone back”

In the first year, I had dreams where Elliot arrived at his own memorial service. His face, really his eyes, looked like they did when we were kids. He was illuminated by a brightness, a smirking one, that made it seem like he was in on a joke no one else knew. He looked at me like there was something stuck to my back. 

After he died, people posted paragraphs about him. A girl he dated who I never met wrote something about this brightness. She related him to a sunflower. I found myself internally editing these posts. He’s actually extremely judgmental, remember? I wanted to respond. But no one is going to write that in an online memorial forum. 

When Elliot died, my mom said, “He was a good kid.” 

“No, he’s a fucker.”

The year at my mom’s house concluded with a portfolio of stories about death. I spent a year trying to capture Elliot. I tried to describe his smile as he watched me complain about people and places and not getting what I wanted while not being sure exactly what that was. Elliot kept a list of what he wanted, full of goals that spanned years. He wanted to run the Silk Road. He wanted to implement better recycling programs. He kept the list pinned to the back of his bedroom door. I tried to remember that list. I tried to refrain from saying it should have been someone else, that it should have been me, that his life had more value and promise than anyone else’s.

I received rejections from all of the graduate programs I applied to. I moved across the country. I got drunk and cried on the stairwell outside my apartment that I shared with strangers. 

“Oh no, you didn’t bring him up, did you?” a friend said to me on the phone. 

“People are dead only when their name is spoken for the last time,” a peer once said.

We were reading a story about a woman who was coping with the death of her brother. Her ears perked up when someone said his name as she thought they were calling him, introducing him back to life. She wished she could say it with the same ease. 

“I want to call his name, say it out loud like the hostess says it: quick and easy. Dale. Hey Dale, what are you doing? Dale, want to come over? Dale, can I come over? Dale, will you, can you?” Joanne Nelson writes in “Still Life.”

I thought the story was well-written, but I didn’t think much beyond that. When Elliot died, I flipped through school notes so I could find it. I would exclusively read stories about dead friends, dead family. I would reread a text from our old roommate.

“You know, he thought of you like a sister.”

Elliot has a twin sister. I have an older sister. Once, at a party, someone asked me if I would jump in front of a train for her, and I stalled. I thought too seriously about the question. Well, when would we be in that situation? 

“I know she wouldn’t do it for me,” my sister interrupted. “But I would jump in front of a train for her.”

In the third year following his death, I met someone who got it. My boyfriend’s brother Dylan was fatally struck by a train seven years ago. When I visited his parents’ house, I wandered from the bathroom as I brushed my teeth, finding myself in Dylan’s room.

“Does it feel weird to be in your parents’ house?” I asked him.

We were sitting with our legs entwined on barstools. The bartender had just apologized to us for our canned beers costing eight dollars. 

“I don’t think about it any more than I already do,” he told me.

Whenever he mentions Dylan, the air gets thicker, more viscous, or that’s how I imagine it. The a dips down. Music slows to a warbling pace. The beer never empties. I squeeze his hand like I wanted someone to squeeze mine. 

In our youth, Dylan and I enjoyed the same computer games. When I had dinner with his mom, she told me the cheeses Dylan liked to get when they went to the store. His school drawings are strung along the walls. I look at family photos where there are three siblings instead of two. 

A name belongs to one person. Elliot is not my brother or my mother’s lover. Elliot is my friend.

When we were twenty-one, Elliot and I lived together in a white house with green trim. Before our other roommates moved in, we sat in the kitchen and admitted to loving each other when we were seven. I told him how I hated it when he got that girlfriend in middle school, how they shared those pink wristbands, and that hope I felt a few weeks later when he stopped wearing his.

As roommates, he would get mad at me for placing the peanut butter jars in the garbage instead of washing them out and recycling them. I would get mad at how he tossed aside women when he left the country and still managed to regain their love when he returned. When he returned, he would get another job to buy another car. Three of those cars got stolen. 

It’s been four years. I’m still living on the other side of the country. When I visit my mom, I notice the abundance of sand dollars that line her driveway. Elliot has seen other women but says he hasn’t. Then he confesses that he has, but it doesn’t mean anything. My mom tells me that it’s done. She deserves better. A few weeks later, she will call and complain about his inconsistent texts. 

“I thought it was over?” 

I hear her sharp intake of breath from three thousand miles away. 

“It’s like a death,” she tells me.

I tell myself to breathe then. Is it like a death only because there is an absence? I can’t send Elliot a text saying, “Why don’t you call me anymore? I feel like you don’t love me. I feel empty.” When my mom does it, her Elliot calls. 

“I am lonely,” she tells me.

“I get it.”