Jordan sat in his computer chair and rubbed his eyes weakly. He stared out his open door across the hall to his father's room. He was going to do it today. The sick, deep back portion of his mind had been counting down the days to today. He was ready to get up and do it.

A memory snagged him, making his legs too weak to stand and carry him into his father's room. It was a flash image of him in his black suit standing in the cold rain. How fitting, he had thought, that it should be raining. It was as if the heavens were mourning. His father stood beside him and a person he didn't know was speaking in a grieved voice. The small crowd, all in black, surrounded his mother, who was concealed in a dark brown box. 
 
Casket, his father had corrected him several times that day. It's called a casket, not a box. 
 
When his mother died, Jordan had thought his father would quit his truck-driving job and get something that didn't require so much time. But his father had made the decision that he was old enough to take care of himself after school and the days he wouldn't be home. Jordan knew then that his suspicions of his emotionally distant father were true: he didn't really care for his son all that much. But then, his son didn’t care for himself all that much, either, so he couldn’t blame him.
 
Jordan got up from his seat and headed into his father's room. He opened the closet doors and then dropped to his knees to pull a shoebox out from underneath the bottom shelf of a bookcase. The bookcase was still full of his mother’s shoes. Oddly enough, they held strong onto the smell of her. But the shoebox did not. 
 
He was ready. 
 
He was friendless, anyway. When he finally returned to school after his mother's death, people he assumed were his friends had gone out of their way to ignore him. Apparently, emotions were taboo these days. It didn’t make much sense anymore, the world. He hadn’t seen that many days of it in the first place, but he knew there used to be a time where people didn’t use people. Where consolidation was abundant for those who had lost much.
 
He opened the box and picked up a revolver covered in light wrapping, which he figured was his father's vain effort to conceal it. It was already loaded, he had checked before. He was ready. He was certain. 
 
He handled the gun carefully, then tried to figure out how to use the damn thing. Suddenly, a blaring ringing emitted in the otherwise silent room. He yelped and dropped the revolver back into the box. He paused for a moment, making sure it wouldn't fire off by mistake. Then, bearings gathered, he looked over to the phone on his father's bedside table. He jumped as it rang again, then feverishly put the wrapping over the gun, put the lid on the box, and shoved it back into the closet. 
 
He answered the phone, but hello would be the only thing he'd say into it.

*  *  *

When Jordan arrived at the hospital, a nurse showed him to his father's room. Over the phone, he had been told his father was involved in a bad car wreck, after which he immediately biked to the hospital. Before he had hung up, though, he had had the desire to ask the lady on the other line just what could have possibly happened to his father. He drives a truck, for Christ’s sake. Did he hit three buses?
 
His father was unconscious and severely battered in his hospital bed. Jordan gave a scared cry and turned away. He heard a nearby doctor telling him all sorts of medical jargon and something about his father struggling to stay alive. Something like that. But his mind’s eye was concentrated on something else: an awful image of his father’s truck falling, falling. No doubt that’s what had happened. He fell off a bridge or something. A very tall bridge, Jordan’s mind showed him. And now he was struggling to survive, the doctor he hadn’t looked twice at was telling him. He had fallen… and had come this close to falling through the world. 
 
His mind reeled. To his father, to his mother, to his plan involving the shoebox. His plan! What idiocy was he thinking with that plan? Here his father, his dad, was fighting to live and all his focus in the past hour had been devoted to giving up. 
 
A wave of white-hot sorrow washed over him, burning him for a moment from the inside out, and he felt the uncontrollable urge to apologize. He was sorry! He was stupid, he didn't know... he didn't think. 
 
He pulled up a chair beside his dad's bed and sat there. He contemplated how close he had been to being alone. How close his dad had been. He leaned his head against his dad's bed rail and decided to stay. He didn't have anywhere else to go, anyway.