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In the beginning of the world there was nothing, and at the end there will be nothing again. It’s the in-between shit that fucks you.
#
Sometimes, Carmy wishes Michael was still alive so he can kill the dickhead himself.
He even imagines what he’d say. Selfish. Entitled. Asshole. Just because you want to die doesn’t mean you get to take the whole family down with you. Doesn’t mean you get to leave a Mikey-sized hole behind and watch us scramble to patch it before the whole ship goes down. You can’t just fucking bail when shit gets hard, you dumb motherfucker, Carmy wants to scream, but who is around to hear him? It’s really only silence that responds. An empty that did not exist before.
Sometimes, Carmy is sure Michael never really loved him.
Nature, it is said, abhors a void. He remembers this much, at least. By any means necessary it will seek to fill it. Ms. Jablonski had said that in seventh grade science, or maybe it was Aristotle. Same difference, really.
Carmy’s not sure that the thing inside of him can properly be called a void. It’ll expand until his chest feels full to bursting, like his ribs might collapse, his heart might give out. It always takes long moments for him to remember again how to breathe, and even then he has to inhale around it, this thing that’s stuck in his lungs, or caught in his throat, or stinging behind his eyes.
(Same difference, really.)
He tells this to Tina one day when they’re out back, grabbing a smoke. He’s trying to share. Be open. Sugar’s really into it. The Al Anon people are really into it. Carmy hasn’t figured out if he’s into it, but he does watch for a reaction to gauge how fucked up he’s being right now.
Tina freezes, cig dangling between her fingers, very carefully not looking at him. “That’s not good, Jeff,” she says simply. Smoke billows from her mouth as she speaks, and she gives it a moment before taking another drag.
So a 7. On a scale of 1 to 10.
“But don’t you ever get that way?” he pushes. “You’re just—you’re so pissed at him you could dig up his body and choke him out yourself?”
“No body to dig up, Jeff. No head.”
It’s such a simple statement, said with so few frills, but it’s enough to take his breath away. His hand fists against his tightening heart. The stifled sob is a monster, trying to tear free. He almost chokes on it. No, no there wouldn’t have been the kind of PG television corpse, unblemished and whole, would there? Not with the gun he used. Not with where they’d found the body. That coffin is another un-empty void.
Carmy hadn’t gone. How would he have known?
Mom had wanted a Catholic burial, Nat had told him after. They wouldn’t give her one. Suicides, you know. Funny. You can go to heaven a serial killer as long as you repent, but killing yourself? Eternal damnation. Not that the Berzattos were ever a particularly religious family—they’d done all the expected rituals, confirmations and Catholic school and pendants of Anthony of Padua for the boys—but it figures that the one time Mom wanted to do something traditional, it’d still find a way to get fucked up by one of her wayward sons. She would deny it if you told her, but Nat always was the favourite.
Too much like your fucking dad, Mom used to say whenever Mikey would get into trouble. She’d lick her thumb and try in vain to wipe some scabbed over blood off of Mikey’s face, to comb through his dark waves, to keep him under control. If he could see you he’d be so proud . It hadn’t been a compliment. Carmy had been young, still just a baby with chubby legs and a halo of yellow curls, back before his hair had darkened and his mom had stopped calling him angel, but he does remember how hurt Mike had looked.
Aw, come on, ma. Don’t say that. Always that half-rueful shrug, always that grin, the one that can make you forgive anything. Anything, except this last.
“That boy,” Tina sighs, leaning back against the panelling of the Bear, “Cabrón. He was in so much pain, you know? You could see it, like it was manifesting physically or shit.”
“Probably withdrawal,” Carmy says, and the words taste sour and uncharitable in his mouth. “Probably deserved it.”
Tina fixes him with a critical eye. “Now you know you don’t mean that,” she says, but her voice is soft.
She’s right, of course. It’s just that anger is easier than pain. Anger is the shield and it is the sword and Carmy is bloody and bruised and crawling off the battlefield. He wants it to stop hurting, but he can’t stop picking at scabs, just to check if they’re still sore. In Sparta it used to be that mothers would tell their sons to come back from war victorious or dead, and yeah, it’s brutal, but he gets it now. It’s fucking easier to mourn when your heroes die heroes. More rational.
Some losses you never really come back from. Some losses are harder to bear because they’re too human, too flawed.
“He was a good kid,” Tina says. When Carmy looks sceptical, she adds a contemplative, “Usually.”
“Good kids don’t sink their restaurants three hundred grand into debt, T.”
“Good kids can still make bad choices, Jeff. But he left this place to you, didn’t he? Must’ve known you could turn shit around. Must’ve really believed in you.”
“Shouldn’t have,” Carmy says around a long drag of his cigarette. “Stupid.”
“Stupid,” Tina agrees. She pats him gently on the arm and it’s kind of unbearable, he kind of wants to cry. He doesn’t, though. Just stares blankly into the distance like it’ll give him answers. Voids don’t have answers. You just stare and stare and imagine that the nothing is staring back. “But he trusted you, Jeff. I think, at the end, he only trusted you.”
#
It’s Michael’s birthday again, except it’s not, because Michael is never going to turn 44. He’ll be 43 forever, and it’s fine for now, but in twelve years, Carmy will be older than his brother ever was. He’s never known a world without Michael in it. Never knew a space his brother did not walk into first, never made a leap without Mikey there to soften the landing. Now he has a loose-fingered grip on the neck of a bottle of beer and he’s tipping back the dredges. It dribbles down his chin and slips down the collar of his shirt.
It’s weird, it’s circular. November 15th will always be Michael’s birthday. Michael will never have another birthday. But November 15th will still come. How is that possible? How does that even work?
“Fucking psychotic,” Richie says. He lowers himself into a deck chair. There are bags under his eyes and dirt beneath his nails, and he’s squinting at where Carmy’s mom has mustered up a crowd of mourners and is cutting up birthday cake while soaking in their sympathy and comfort. She’s crying, her shoulders shaking so theatrically they can see her from clear across the yard.
“You can say that again,” Carmy murmurs. When Richie offers him a cigarette he takes it, leaning in for a light. It tastes sweet, it tastes bitter. It tastes heavy on his tongue. He holds the smoke in his lungs for a long moment before breathing it back out. He leans back and gazes at the sky overhead, which is a blue so brilliant he can pretend that’s the reason for his smarting eyes. “She loves this shit.”
“Mikey would’ve loved it too,” Richie says. He sounds old and sad and tired, so tired. “All these motherfuckers gathered here to give him attention.”
“Fucking asshole,” Carmy says.
“Yeah. Fucking asshole.”
They watch the clouds laze, low and laden, lachrymose. Huic ergo parce, Deus—bits he still remembers from the Sacred Heart Academy for Boys—dona eis requiem. Requiescat, requiesco. Children run across the dry, yellowing grass—it is late autumn and there is no green left anywhere—and there is a boy with yellow curls and a boy with wavy black hair and they are laughing, screaming in that unrepressed way children do when they are truly happy and it makes Carmy’s teeth hurt. It makes him want to run inside and throw up in the upstairs bathroom, the one between his room and Michael’s, which always used to smell of Mom’s sickly seashell potpourri. It’ll be acid, a mouth full of bile, but he’s used to that. It’ll feel good—or at least it’ll feel better. Like he’s in control of something, anything, for once. Fuck. He swallows around the lump that’s formed in his throat, that stings his nose. His voice comes out choked anyway.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Richie turns, bleary eyed. The way he shakes his head is instinctive, the long searching pause for an answer. He scrapes a hand down his jaw and, for a moment, he looks on the verge of tears. But then he closes his eyes and the expression passes. “I don’t fucking know, cousin. What do you want me to say? I don’t fucking know and I didn’t—I didn’t—no one thought it was gonna be this way, Carm, okay? I thought he’d pull through and he’d be here and fuck, he’d be alive. I was busy and Mikey was killing himself and not everything is about you.”
“Yeah, but some shit is, cousin. You were the ones who cut me out. You left me alone in New York. What the fuck was I supposed to think?”
Richie deflates. He sighs, takes a deep drag from his bottle. “You were the baby, Carm. He didn’t want you to watch him dealing with that shit.”
Somehow, this doesn’t make it better.
Because here’s the problem, right, Carmy’s already mourned his brother. Somewhere in the half-decade and eight hundred miles between them, he had already buried, already grieved. But there had always been an expectation that they would get through this. That there was a destination at the end of the long tunnel, whether it was ten years or fifteen or fifty. Someday, Carmy would be good enough. Someday Mikey would see.
#
The problem with death, though, is that there’s no getting through it.
Death just is.
It changes you irrevocably: the air you breathe is not shared any longer, the moon that wanes and wanes and never waxes again, the earth on its axis will still spin, but never with quite the same weight.
There’s no going back, or around, or beneath.
#
He could say all this, but he doesn’t. Instead, he just says, “Yeah.”
The sprinklers turn on. It’s too cold to water any lawns; someone must have fucked with them. The kids shriek, racing to get out of the freezing cold and their soaked down jackets, and Carmy sits. He sits and wishes it were summer again, summer twenty years ago or twenty years from now, before any of this had ever happened or long after it has passed, but he’s still in the thick of it, a rabbit caught in a patch of bramble, rending skin from flesh in an effort to get out, more mangled the more he tries to escape. And with all of his years at Noma, his years at CIA, all the countless people calling him wunderkind, genius, best chef they’ve ever worked with, Carmen Berzatto can’t think of a single way to skin that rabbit and still keep it alive.
#
When your brother—half your father, really—cuts you out of his life, you get back at him by filling the emptiness with Michelin stars and James Beard Awards and being better, so much better, than the shithole you left. You fill it up with heartburn and a sour throat and food that won’t stay in your stomach. The little control you have.
When your brother blows his head off on the State Street Bridge, how the fuck are you supposed to get even? Any spite feels instantly petty, but it’s not as if you stop feeling it. Fuck you, Michael, this is what you left me with? Fuck you, Michael, I’m not cleaning up your damn messes. Fuck you, Michael, maybe I’ll burn your fucking house down, did you ever think of that?
The satisfaction is less, somehow, when you can’t imagine him regretful or contrite. There’s no one to imagine. No smiles, no reward, no customer to please. There’s just Carmy, who hates himself, and this restaurant that’s running itself into the ground in search of some greater purpose, some meaning.
He wakes up for the fourth night in a row at 3 a.m., when the fuzzy streetlamp outside casts a dim glow on the body next to his. She’s awake too, but she doesn’t speak. She only blinks quietly in the still, eyes wet and dark, and takes his hand to press a chapped kiss along his knuckles. He doesn’t speak either, just buries his nose into her neck, taking the time to burnish her chestnut skin with his mouth. Her soft, fluttery sighs are enough to drive away any oblivion, at least for a little while.
#
On a rare day off, cocooned in blankets and warm morning light, he and Sydney share a joint in her bedroom. He’s never enjoyed weed, has always preferred the warm haze of tobacco to the marajuana high of a brain on a two second lag from a body, but they are both grieving and it dulls the ache.
The Beef is gone and the Bear has not yet started. They are suspended in strange liminality, little dust motes that hang in shafts of buttery sun, there and not, here and away. Lingering between a past that has not yet gone and a future that has not yet come.
“It’s a one day at a time thing,” Sydney says, carding her hands through his hair. He’s lying in her lap, looking up at her while she looks at the photograph on her bedside table, a mother who has also died and is also not coming back. “A staying in the present thing. You know? It’s good to not worry about shit that hasn’t happened yet. I mean yeah, there’s always gonna be problems, but you gotta just let them be problems.”
“Yeah,” he says, knowing she’s right but wishing he didn’t. Thinking, endlessly, about three hundred thousand dollars worth of debt feels like taking action, but all it really is is a reason to chainsmoke. “Yeah, heard, chef.”
“Yeah?” She shifts her weight forward onto her knees, dumping him unceremoniously onto the girlishly bright patchwork of her comforter. “Seriously.”
“Yes,” he insists.
She allows this, flopping down next to him and taking his hand. For a long minute they are both quiet—Carmy filled with the desperate longing to be seven and play pretend again, to pretend nothing’s wrong, pretend it’s all okay. She smells of sunshine, of warm sheets, and she is pulling one of his arms up to admire the ink.
“What’s that one?” she asks, pointing at a pair of cherubs that perch there, balancing a sun between them, dancing, happy, and God, it’s fucking useless to hide, isn’t it? Not when there’s so much around to bring it back.
Carmy releases the breath he’s holding. “It’s Nat and Mikey,” he says, feeling foolish. “There, see?”
“Oh,” Sydney says, and runs a finger along the ruffled wings of one of the angels.
“I see him sometimes,” Carmy confesses. “My brother. Like he’s a fucking ghost.” He doesn’t know why he says it; perhaps the weed is making him honest. There’s a part of him that’s relieved it’s out and a part of him that’s terrified it’s going to send Syd running. He’s nuts, he’s gone mental, a verified 10 out of 10 on the not-okay scale.
“It’s the stress, maybe,” he appends quickly, as if that makes this any less weird. “Dude didn’t even look like him. He was five-five with this light brown hair, but there was—it was this something about the way he moved, you know? Could’ve sworn it was Mikey.”
“You miss him,” Sydney suggests, “and you wish you could see him. It’s your body, just like, filling your needs.”
“I don’t miss him,” he says. He is petulant, and it is embarrassing. “I’m pissed.”
“Carmy, he was sick.” Her voice is so heartbreakingly soft, and tender, and he wishes it weren’t. Wishes she could hit him hard so his outsides matched his insides. She won’t though, not even if he asked, and he does occasionally think about asking. “He was sick and you’re hurt.”
“This fucking sucks,” he says. He sucks in another lungful of weed. He’s not some baby, still clinging to the worn, fraying edges of his older brother’s henley. “I’ve already done this shit before. I’ve already grieved. Why won’t it just—leave? Some days, Syd, I barely feel human.”
Syd smiles a little half smile. “Hasn’t anyone told you healing is a spiral, not a line? You always feel like you’re treading old ground, but you’re never in the same spot twice. That’s what the ladies at the group therapy my dad made me attend used to say.”
“It’s like…” He takes a moment to weigh his words. “It’s like if I let myself stop hurting, he’ll really be gone. If I acknowledge that I can be fine, that I can be happy without him—that’s betrayal. And I don’t think I can do that.”
“Do you think suffering will bring him back?” she asks pointedly. And then, gentler, “Maybe it’s not a void. Maybe it’s proof that Michael was once here. That you loved him. People don’t just stop being here because they’re gone. Maybe that’s what a ghost is: grief trying to make itself known.”
Maybe you’re grieving the future you thought you had with him.
#
Mornings at the Bear are always a quiet, intense affair. Everyone working, prepping, washing, slicing, cooking. The braise has been going for sixteen hours, until the meat is fall-of-the-bone tender. He tastes the stock, rich and savoury, the kind of thing the Tribune had called the celebration of a well-lived life in this new incarnation of the beloved neighbourhood joint. Berzatto honours his family’s legacy while forging new paths forward for himself and his team of old-timer staff by keeping the best of the old while forging ahead with the most inventive of the new.
It’s funny.
He had never really thought of it as honouring Mikey. And yet he sees his brother everywhere. Carmy can feel him in the gaps. In the blue of Richie’s eyes, ever wary, always on guard. In the flick of Marcus’s wrists as he adds a final pinch of salt to gooey batter. In Tina’s laugh, in Sydney’s silence, and sometimes, even in his own restless sorrow.
It’s all Mikey, somehow.
Carmy’s not sure if it makes everything better or if it makes everything worse—but at least it means he isn’t gone.
Negative space is still space. And it’s still filled with something, even if that something is emptiness.
And maybe someday he can learn how to live with that.