From High Enough

by Tom Sokolowski

Nearly a dozen years to the day our father abandoned us, the drill sergeants, clueless about the details of Adam’s suicide, hastily bused me from Fort Leonard Wood to St. Louis. There, an old couple wearing matching camo Crocs forcibly shook my hand. During a layover in Atlanta, someone bought my Crispers at Chili’s. And, everywhere, thank you for your service replaced hello. I felt the urge to tell these people my brother was dead. How did they not know?  

Ubered home from the Daytona airport and stripped of my fatigues, I sat at the kitchen table beside a sympathy basket of pears and cashews and chocolates, prodding a bowl of half-heated ziti that Mrs. Fost from across the street had made, and listened to Mom explain that Adam had pitched himself from a five-story parking garage on the University of Florida’s campus. 

The horror of plummeting to death.  

  “Let’s not talk about that,” I said, dropping my fork. “Have you eaten, Ma?” 

She gave a hydroxyzine-zonked shrug from the head of the table. Behind her was the antique china cabinet topped by Pop’s memorial flag. Pop was my father’s father, and that flag, triangled in its display case showing ten stars, was the only presence my father had in the house for most of my life. 

“Ma,” I said, nearly ready to snap two inches from her face. “You’re sure about the note?” 

“Yes.” 

“Who searched his place?” 

“Police. Roommates,” she said. “I just can’t go there.” 

I called Uncle Owen, and it was true. Mom wasn’t mistaken. Adam hadn’t left a note. At least, no note had been found.  

I woke early and took Mom’s Civic to fetch strawberries and cantaloupe and melon dew. With a bowl of fruit and a plate of scrambled eggs on the table, I turned on the lamp beside the couch in the living room and said, “Eat something.” 

“Why?” 
I pulled Mom by her forearms, and she tottered to her feet with her stained nightgown scrunched above her knees. Her Gorgonesque hair was sweetly sour. I wondered when she’d last brushed her teeth. Then, at the table, Mom forked a few bites, and I explained that Gainesville was barely two hours, that I’d get Adam’s things, check for a note myself. There had to be one. 

“I can’t go,” she said. 

“I know.” 

# 

A drive along State Road 40 through the Ocala Forest brought me to Cypress Shores Apartments right off I-75, four miles west of the University of Florida campus. The complex was a parking lot maze bound by palm trees and identical three-story, gray clapboard buildings. Paul, a lanky acne-faced kid who I’d recognized from Adam’s high school days, greeted me. We stood awkwardly near the galley kitchen. As if at a garage sale, a blender, an air fryer, a stack of thin pans, and a chrome juicer were displayed on the counter. Adam’s things. 

“Was Adam acting differently?” I asked. 

“No,” Paul said, eyes up in thought. “But he was spending a lot of time with some girl.” 

I didn’t know anything about Adam’s acquaintances, but the last I’d spoken to him was three months prior.  

“Madison,” Paul said. “Don’t know her number. Or a last name.”  

He showed me to Adam’s room. I shut the door behind. The desk was a permanent, oversized shelf attached to the wall. The bed was made, the laundry basket empty, not a sock on the floor. The room smelled like damp cardboard masked by tropical Febreze. I sat on the mattress. Mold speckled the windowsill like coughed up blood. Free of a bookshelf, a hundred or so books stacked against the wall like a bar graph. I didn’t know anything beyond the classics, and, of the classics, I didn’t know much. I thumbed through The Old Man and the Sea. Adam never read when we lived at home. All he ever did was lift weights and play basketball. 

I searched Adam’s backpack: chemistry goggles, a couple of calculators, a notebook partly filled with trigonometric derivatives like a foreign language. Coding gibberish sprawled across the opening pages of a second notebook. There were messy sketches of pulleys and triangles and another notebook with a few pages of much the same: blocks and bridges and cantilever beams with arrows all over denoting forces. It seemed Adam had quit on all of it. At the end of a red composition notebook was an upside-down heart containing Hi followed by a jigsaw of doodled flowers and giraffes and ice cream cones. A massive smiley face sprawled at the bottom of the page, X’s for eyes, a tongue flopping out of the still-upturned parenthesis mouth. Text circled the face the way peace, love, kindness curved around the nuclear disarmament sign of a hippie’s tie dye t-shirt that I’d seen in the airport. I rotated the notebook to read: Look within to see we are without salvation. 

The backpack restuffed, I turned on Adam’s laptop. The history was cleared. His cellphone, I’d learned from Uncle Owen (being pulverized in Adam’s pocket when he hit the pavement) had yielded nothing. I cubed a couple cardboard boxes, unhangered shirts, cleared the closet, and loaded the car. Back in the common area, Paul sat on the couch, watching Armageddon on TNT, mostly, I assumed, to be available for me.  

“Madison, you said?” I asked, inspecting the shiny juicer. “The girl?” 

Paul nodded. I took a seat in a plastic kitchen chair below a dusty bulb and searched Adam’s friends on Instagram. There was no Madison. I searched all social media for a Madison that went to University of Florida and was met by an army. 

“Did he have class today?” I asked. It was a Wednesday. 

“Sure,” Paul said. “At one. I’ve got a lab the same time.” 

I drove, parked in a garage I suspected was the one, and Paul showed me to a red brick building that held Adam’s first class, engineering statics. “His second class is just across the way,” Paul said, pointing past a lawn where kids lounged in hammocks and teetered on coffee-table high tightropes strung between pines. 

I took a seat at the front of the lecture hall with at least two hundred seats. The professor showed up a minute before the scheduled start. Out of breath, a combover going renegade, he offloaded his bag at the podium as if filled with gold he’d carried across some desert.  

“Excuse me,” I said. 

His eyes flicked up at me but his head stayed oriented to the computer monitor.  

“My brother was in this class,” I said. “He died Friday. I’d like to speak to the students.” 

“You’ve got the floor, son.”  

The room was full of nerdy boys with cartoon gators on their shirts. Each cluster of rows held only a handful of girls, maybe. 

“My brother was the student who threw himself from the parking garage,” I said. “I know you’ve heard the story. If there is a Madison here, or anyone else that knew him, please contact me.” Students walked in late as I finished. I chalked my name and number on the board and quickly repeated my plea. The professor checked his watch like I was costing people money.  

I made the same announcement to the second class, calculus three. After, there was a break in Adam’s schedule. I got a coffee and hoped for a text from Madison. Students swarmed the union. Stuck up ROTC kids sauntered with their patrol caps too far back like baseball hats. Even then, I hated the army, the zombified privates, the prison of uniformity. Most days I thought of walking out of the barracks and getting picked up by the MPs or simply punching the commander in the face. How had I spent those final months of my brother’s life locked up in training suited for chimpanzees? I’d known Adam even less those last couple years. His going away to college made it difficult. But I’d never properly looked out for Adam. I was five years older: enough distance that we didn’t challenge each other growing up—enough that, despite our father not being around, we never truly knew each other. Our unfamiliarity may have been symptomatic of our father’s absence, or we were just strange for being strangers.  

With Paul’s written directions, I struggled to find Adam’s final class and was five minutes late. I walked to the front of the room. The professor asked, as if I were deranged, “Hello?”  

I went through it: “My brother was in this class. He—” 

“You can have time at the end, but you cannot interrupt now.” 

“Look. I’ve already interrupted.”  

“Do I need to call security?” 

“I just need a goddamn minute.” I turned to the class and nearly shouted my spiel, took a marker from the podium and wrote my information on the board. The professor stared with his arms crossed. The class applauded my exit.  

Down the hall, someone called from behind, “Wait.” 

I turned to a girl trotting after, ponytail swaying back and forth as if propelling her. She wore gym leggings and a baggy tank top under a lime green rain jacket. A laptop and textbook tucked precariously in her armpit and a half-zipped backpack hung on one shoulder. She reached me, hastily reorganized her belongings, and said, “I knew your brother.” 

“Madison?” 

She took a moment. “Yes.” A cleft lip scar made her look serious, much more serious than what her light, eager intonation conveyed.  

“If you need to finish the lecture, I’ll wait.” 

“No, no.” 

“Have you eaten?” 

The only real sit-down place in the student union was an Applebee’s. With a capless, chewed-up pen from her green jacket, Madison drew cat faces on a napkin. I imagined her drawing on the corner of Adam’s notes in the middle of a lecture. Drawing that dead smiley. Did it irk him?  

I thought Adam would have certainly been interested in her. Her figure was nice, and even then, in that jacket and baggy tank, hair in a slightly greasy ponytail, no makeup to hide mild acne, Madison had my thoughts rolling embarrassingly. I hadn’t properly spoken to a woman in months. But how could I think of sex? 

The waiter came. I ordered an IPA, my first drink in months (being sequestered at military police school). Madison ordered a margarita. 

I was halfway through my beer in a blink. “How’d you meet Adam?” 

“A group project.” 

“Were you romantically involved?” 

  “We weren’t like boyfriend-girlfriend.” Her lips stretched up and to the left, bunching her left cheek with a couple creases and a thick dimple—an unbalanced smile anchored by her lip scar.  

When our food came, Madison dropped her pen and handled a chicken sandwich. She licked sauce from her lips with an appetite strange for such a meeting.  

“I’m trying to understand why he did it,” I said. 

“Adam was always withdrawn and complex,” she said, chewing. “It’s terrible what happened.” 

That may have been true, but Adam was never tormented. 

“Have you ever thought about how you’d do it?” she asked. 

“Do what?” 

“You know.” 

“What kind of question is that?”  

She sipped her margarita. “I don’t think I could jump like he did. I can’t imagine jumping from a parking garage. I fell from a treehouse once,” she said. “Five stories don’t seem enough. Could you imagine if he was in the hospital right now, barely hanging on?” 

“I’d be thankful.” 

She napkinned her nose. “When I first heard, I was so mad. Not because of what he did. But for doing it with such risk. If he had paralyzed himself. Or worse. People have survived falls from airplanes for fuck’s sake. Can you imagine that?” 

I admitted that I couldn’t. 

“I couldn’t stop reading about jumpers,” she said. “Is it okay that I talk honestly? Are you okay with that? Your brother always appreciated truth.” 

“Go ahead.”  

“Did you know that in construction, plenty of deaths from falls happen at just six feet? Can you believe that? Six to fifteen feet is very dangerous. I guess people aren’t too careful at that height. But even a four-foot fall could kill you.” 

I didn’t understand what she was getting at. I breathed. “Did Adam ever suggest he’d do this?” 

She let out a little chuckle before straightening her face, realizing the rudeness. “What intelligent person doesn’t? I’ve talked about it. I don’t seriously consider it. I guess, when it comes to suicide, it’s hard to differentiate musings from serious inquiry.” 

She couldn’t be more wrong. How had Adam gone around with this Madison? I started to consider that him going around with her explained his suicide. Mostly, not knowing what to think, I was overcome with the urge to get back to my training company, to return to a world without decisions, a world where the unstable ones are easily picked out.  

“Would you like to go to the zoo?” she said. “There’s a great little teaching zoo run by Sante Fe. Me and Adam would often visit. He loved the animals.”  

# 

In the Civic, Madison switched on the college radio station and hummed along to some terrible low-fi band trying to sound like the Cure. At the zoo ticketing booth, I took out my military CAC and, Madison, her college ID. I glimpsed the first name on Madison’s card: Jessica. The cashier handed them back without charge. 

Through the turnstile, I asked, “So what’s your real name?” 

She chuckled. “Madison is my middle name.” She stopped at a patch of purple aster growing around a short palmetto beside the sidewalk. She picked a flower and tucked it above her ear like a pencil. I thought about asking to see her ID, but I stuffed the thought away, and we walked a mulch path with a thick rope running through wooden posts, separating the visitors from the cages.  

Squirrel monkeys spider-manned through their artificial canopy. Madison told me they were Adam’s favorite and began waving at a monkey with a baby on its back as if it would recognize her while I was trying to get rid of this idea that Madison had pushed Adam off the parking garage. I didn’t really believe she pushed him, but I had a scene lodged in my head. The monkeys squealed in chase, and I imagined Madison helping Adam onto the four-foot concrete ledge surrounding the top parking garage floor, Adam forming a T with his arms out while she supported him with her palms on the back of his thighs, Adam lowering his arms as his muscles synced to the breeze, a stark silhouette against a baby blue sky. They counted down together. Three, two—  

“Do you want to know how I’d do it?” Madison asked.  

“Do what?” 

“You know.” She drummed her fingers along a wood post. “I couldn’t fall like Adam. I get sick climbing a ladder. I always thought of a warm bath with opened wrists as a romantic way. Medical things don’t gross me out.” She frantically freed an arm from her green jacket as if the sleeve was burning. She displayed a scar running along the pale underside of her bicep. “I fell from a treehouse and was basically impaled by a branch. The stitches never bothered me—” 

“Hey,” I cut in, suppressing a jangly impulse to physically shake sense into her. “What did Adam tell you about his family?” 

She tied the jacket around her waist. “He didn’t talk much about you. He never complained or bragged about family. I think most people do one or the other.” 

I followed her to the next exhibit. Otters hugged each other in an artificial pond. Jessica? Madison? Was she some freak fascinated by the suicide of a classmate, taking an opportunity to latch onto the story?  “What did he tell you about our parents?” I asked, thinking that surely Adam would’ve mentioned our father who’d disappeared for years, only to send occasional letters and birthday cards documenting how he was getting himself together, that he would return to our lives soon. 

“Adam was private in some ways and very exposed in others,” she said. “He didn’t dwell on the past.” 

“What did my brother look like?” 

She laughed and turned to me. “Huh?” 

“What did he look like?” 

“Like you,” she said.  

True but an obvious guess.  

“How tall was he?” 

“I don’t know. Six feet?” 

“Color of his hair?” 

“Sandy.” 

My line of questioning was silly, she’d probably seen him in class, Googled him. What question could prove she knew Adam? Could I have proved I knew Adam through conversation alone? 

“Would you like to come to his apartment?” I asked. “There’s books of his I don’t have room for.”  

# 

Paul was home, on the couch, copying notes out of an organic chemistry textbook.  

“You know Madison?” I asked, waiting for Paul to say that the woman with me was a stranger.  

“I don’t,” Paul said, standing. “Adam talked about you.” 

They shook hands. How hadn’t they yet met? 

  “You don’t know each other?” I asked.  

“I guess Adam kept his friends separate,” Madison joked.  

“I wish we were meeting under other circumstances,” Paul said. 

I led Madison to Adam’s room. She ran her hand against the entryway wall made narrow by the adjoining bathroom, picked a book off the top of the pile, and hopped on the bed. I sat in the desk chair within arm’s reach of her. Her forehead shined. Her eyelashes were incredibly long. Her rested, slightly puckered lips planted the slightest dimple on her left cheek and made that lip scar a tiny sickle. Her ear still held that stupid purple flower.  

The red composition notebook with the dead smiley face stuck from the backpack like a bookmark in a book. I thought of the heart, Hi written in inflated letters, the dead smiley face, that nonsense about salvation. If she could tell me what was on that page, I’d know she was the one. Then again, if she didn’t know, that proved nothing. 

“You look so much like him,” she said, leaning forward to free the jacket from her waist. The scar on her arm stretched. She looked at the back cover of the book she’d grabbed, All Quiet on The Western Front. “You ever think about war?” 

“I’m in the army,” I said. Of course, at the time, I had a child’s conception of combat. 

“It’s hard to imagine the loss of so many people. Could you imagine losing your entire family?” 

“Just about.” 

“I know war can’t be as bad as we imagine it.” 

Of course, I had no idea what she was talking about now. 

She gathered the pillows against the headboard, propped her legs on the bed, and scooted comfortably. “I think there’s diminishing sadness regarding death. When someone dies close to you, you become comfortable with the idea. Part of you wants to die too. You gain a nice quiet feeling. Proximity breeds affection in these things.” Shoes on, she set her right heel on the toes of her left. 

“How about I kill you?” 

She uncrossed her feet and straightened. 

I stood. “How do you want to go?”  

“Relax, dude.” 

“Strangled? Smothered with a pillow?” My voice quivered. “Should I bash your face against the headboard?”  

“This isn’t funny.” 

I kicked a stack of books. They avalanched, sprawling over the carpet with covers bent under the weight of pages. I breathed. “What do you know about salvation?”  

“Salvation,” she said, as if remembering. She took the flower from her ear and twirled the stem between her thumb and pointer, helicoptering the petals. “Salvation. There’s no salve for the nation. That’s about all I got.” 

“Who are you?” I asked. “You don’t know my brother.” 

“You’re right.” 

A jolt. I had her. 

  “He’s dead,” she said. “I knew him.” 

Right then I could’ve dragged her by her ankles and left her on the doormat. I wanted to be back in my barracks, to be mindlessly scrubbing carbon from a rifle, to be in a world, that had rules and order, that made some sense.  

“Don’t cry,” she said. 

“Take whatever you want.” I left the apartment, started Mom’s Civic, and tried to stop myself, reasoning I couldn’t leave Madison or Jessica or whoever she was in that apartment. But I did. 

# 

The funeral was Saturday. Mom sat at the front of the repository room, near the coffin, wearing a black dress and a pearl necklace and looking held together. 

My father sat alone in the back corner of the other side of the room as if magnetically repelled by Mom. His head was down, face pale from a fresh shave intensifying his gauntness, thin long hair between hunched shoulders as if he was working to withdraw deeper into his blue suit that was two or three sizes too big. He was only recognizable by how he stood out, it’s true. 

I approached my father from behind so as to remain standing. “You’re allowed to be closer,” I told him.  

He stood and faced me. “I’m sorry.” 

For what exactly he was apologizing, I wasn’t sure. But I’d had enough of strangers, of making sense of the world. I held my stare and did not speak.  

“Okay,” he said and edged to the last chair in the second row and stared at the casket. 

I swallowed and took a step forward, thinking I had to say something, but Uncle Owen grabbed my shoulder and squeezed to let me know he was there. I stood, wondering if Adam would still be alive had my father been around. What would have changed had I stepped into that role for my brother? 

Months later, still very much naive to the bristling horror of life but beginning to understand the impossibility of pinpointing what drove Adam to jump, I returned home, a beret on my head, freshly graduated, and found in Mom’s garage the books and school notes and boxes of other trinkets I’d left in that apartment. I went through Adam’s things again. Torn out and missing was the final page with that doodled dead smiley face in the red notebook. In its place was that purple aster pressed flat against the back cover. I peeled the flower free.