Near Monochrome Rainbow - Saylor Skidds

I don’t know the exact day my best friend died. I only know the day I found out. It was Mother’s Day.

We were supposed to go to my grandmother’s for lunch, but nobody was in any hurry to leave. My mom was on the phone and showed no

sign of getting off any time soon.

I had settled in the dining room with a bag of goldfish, figuring it would be a while. I assumed Mom was returning work calls. She was a

church musician, so work never really seemed to be over. Weekends were when she was called the most. 

The call was more of the same until I heard her say “Oh, my God.”

On a work call, Mom talked a lot. On this call, she mostly said variations of “Okay,” “I can’t believe it,” and “Sure.” She kept glancing at me in

the dining room with an odd look on her face. I looked back at her blankly.

She had said “Father,” when she picked up the phone, so I knew she was talking to a priest.

She had also said “I’m so sorry,” at some point, so someone had died.

I had just narrowed who had died down to Father Anthony, a priest who was friends with my Dad, when Mom hung up the phone.

“That was Father Richard.” 

“Uh-huh.”

“From Jonathan’s church.”

“I know.”

“Jonathan jumped off the Newport Bridge.”

I did try to cry. In any situation where it was socially acceptable to be flat-out sobbing, I was dry.

Stupid stuff could have me weeping on the floor. I cried more at getting a 50 on a math test than I ever did for him.

The most I could manage was a single sob that sounded more like a shaky exhale.

And then we were off to my grandma’s for a Mother’s Day lunch.

When we got there, my great-grandmother was in the living room watching a movie on TV. I have no idea

what the movie was about, but when we sat down to talk to her, it was playing a melodramatic scene in a hospital.

“Let’s not watch this right now,” Mom said, and switched the channel.

I momentarily forgot that I had any reason to find this upsetting. When I remembered, I hated myself.

In the coming days I would repeat “Jonathan is dead,” in my head to keep the memory fresh.

I don’t know if you can call someone your best friend if you don’t speak to them or see them for more than four years and no longer have

anything in common.

But I was always one of those kids whose face behind the title “Best Friend” was constantly in flux from year to year.

He was my last best friend before COVID took away my ability to form relationships that lasted longer than six months.

I spent most of that Mother’s Day tuning out the people around me and clinging to as many snippets of him as I could.

I had to show we had been close, and I had a right to feel the way I did.

Jonathan had white-blond hair and reddish spots up and down his skinny legs.  We went to the same tiny Montessori school.

There were seven kids in the whole middle school class, but he was the only other kid in the same grade as me.

I wanted to be grouped with the older boys who talked about cool, non-Catholic things like Overwatch. But that didn’t change the fact that

we were stuck with each other.

All the school’s furniture was made of matching blond wood. We called teachers by their first names and had recess in the woods.

The school was in the back of a shopping center. The building across from us had a daycare.

The employees at the daycare would take the kids around the shopping center in a few wagons Jonathan called the baby parade. 

The unit the school was in used to be a church. There was a small office off the lobby that turned into our library.

As the school got bigger, two extra rooms were added to the back. 

Another side effect of the growth of the school was the increased need for transportation. That’s where the van came in.

It appeared when Jonathan and I were in eighth grade, toward the middle of the year.

It was dark blue, with four rows and scrapes along the sides from kicked-up gravel. The inside was filthy gray and stained with oil.

The interior had a perfectly round hole in the ceiling that reached up into a dark void between it and the roof of the car.

But the more pressing issue was that one of the seatbelts in the second row didn’t buckle at all.

“One of the middle schoolers has to go in the second row.” Said Jodi, one of the elementary teachers.

“What?” I asked.

“You have seniority, and you’re the tallest. So, if you sit there, you’re in the least amount of danger of any of the students.

It’s only fair. Just try to hold the seatbelt close to your body. Now hurry up, who’s going in?”

“Why does anyone have to sit in that spot at all?” Jonathan asked.

“We don’t have enough room or time to do anything else. There isn’t a way to fix it. Hurry up!”

“Seems unfair that the oldest kids have to die.” Jonathan muttered.

That was our lot for the rest of the van’s tenure. 

The van turned out to be troublesome in other ways as well. But this trouble was educational.

At the start of the year, Jodi decided to have her husband Tom start teaching us a version of Home Economics.

One of these lessons was on how to jumpstart a car. We practiced this in the parking lot, using the van to start Jodi’s Subaru.

I was afraid to do it myself because, when we were done, I immediately forgot which colors were supposed to attach to which.

I was terrified of blowing something up.

That December we had to drop off the canned goods from our annual food drive. I rode in the van.

Tom was driving. It wasn’t my turn to sit in the second row.

We were about a mile away from the school when Tom pulled the van into a gas station. I saw the Subaru following us in.

Jodi was driving.

Tom turned around in his seat. Jodi poked her head in through the driver’s side door. 

“I need two eighth graders to help me get out the jumper cables.”

“It’s time to practice your skills!” Said Tom.

I was in the back, embedded between two little kids in booster seats. Jonathan was in the unlucky seat, so he had to get out.

Jodi opened the Subaru trunk. They were just reaching to get the kit when Tom revved the engine.

Jonathan climbed back inside, rolling his eyes, and we made it back to the school.

The next time we had problems with the van was after a trip to the aquarium. I

t was my turn to sit in the second row. I was reaching to the third row to help a younger kid unbuckle their seats.

One started fiddling with my buckle while I wasn’t looking. Eventually, he pulled out two quarters and a penny and showed them to me.

Jonathan was already walking to the front door.

“Come look at what Brody did to the buckle.” I called.

Jonathan reached over my shoulder and grabbed the seatbelt. He started to slide the seatbelt into place. The two parts fit together

completely fine.

“Of course.” He threw up his hands. The seatbelt clacked against the door.

We were constantly bickering and joking and just with each other, all the time. He acted

more like my brother than my actual brother did. My actual brother and I felt like two only children forced to live together..

Jonathan tried to convince me of obvious lies.

We once had to do an assignment on fact- checking a paranormal website dedicated to an alleged species of octopus that lived in trees.

He spent over an hour trying to convince me it was real. But I’m still not sure whether he was being earnest or just contrary. 

When we were in seventh grade the school had a science fair. The projects were completed in groups.

Jonathan and I were grouped together.

Our project was to make invisible ink out of different types of fruit juice and see which worked the best.

We did the experiment in the library because it was the only room that had enough outlets for the heat lamps we needed to use.

I don’t remember the jokes Jonathan told that day now. But I do remember shaking with laughter.

I cut the fruit we’d squeeze out to make the different kinds of invisible ink. My hands kept slipping. 

“What’s that smell?” Jonathan asked. 

I had somehow gotten a single drop of juice on the bulb of one of the heat lamps.

My first idea in this situation was not to unplug the lamp but to try to wipe off the seeds with a paper towel.

Jonathan started laughing. I let out a wheezing chuckle.

“And what if that was hydrochloric acid?” Jodi appeared in the doorway without making any noise. I hated it.

Jodi continued to lecture and told us to clean up the experiment. The minute she stepped out of the room Jonathan started mimicking

her.

We got to continue the experiment a few days later. . We ended up having to set up the remaining fruits on the carpet. I spilled more juice.

Again, Jodi made us stop. 

We had to play the recorder together for music class and despised it.

Both of our families were Catholic, so we never had to explain any of that to each other.

We had the same terrible, scratchy handwriting, and had trouble in school because of it.

He also sailed boats and wanted to be a priest. That came later, after high school and COVID changed everything.

He was in the stage of training before you start studying to become a priest. I don’t know what it’s called.

Mom often played music at his church. She had talked to him about it a couple of times. That’s how I found out. She had to relay it to me.

It wasn’t part of the Jonathan I knew. It was information tacked on later.

Father Richard had called my mother to ask if she would sing at Jonathan’s memorial. She said yes.

It had to be a memorial because it was a suicide. And because his body was in the middle of the bay.

The memorial was a few days after Mother’s Day. I took the day off school and went with Mom to the school she worked at.

The memorial was too far away, and there wouldn’t be enough time for Mom to drop me off at school before she had to get back to work. 

The memorial was at his church. Father Richard’s church.

Jonathan once told me it was the church where the Kennedys had gotten married. It wasn’t.

The church where the Kennedys got married was in Newport, thirty minutes away. The church’s stained glass windows were all nautical.

The one behind the altar showed Jesus walking on water on one side and a lighthouse on the other.

The sanctuary felt like the inside of an old sailboat. Most of it was dark wood with heavy beams and large, industrial joints.

The windows at the front and back were big, but the ones along the side walls were little. Not a lot of light came in.

The Newport Bridge was in view most of the ride there. It stretched over the water in an arc like a nearly monochrome rainbow. Mom and

I both avoided looking at it.

When we got there, it was packed. Jonathan’s family had a special escort. There was an overflow room in the basement.

Mom and I sat in the choir loft with the other musicians. Mom sat with them by the organ, and I sat toward the front near the railing.

When she wasn’t singing, she came over and sat next to me on a folding chair, putting her hand on my back. I think she was expecting me

to cry. I didn’t.

Nobody could discuss the cause of death.

Father Richard’s eulogy talked about how great a priest Jonathan would have been.

How we shouldn’t think of Jonathan’s death when we looked at the bridge. Or drove on the bridge or were around the bay at all.

Instead, we should think of his loving, outstretched arms. To most people, I imagine it was heartwarming.

But for me, the fact that he referred to it as Jonathan “slipping away” marred any value I could have derived from listening to him.

I honestly don’t know why I expected any level of honesty.

I had a fantasy in the back of my head that the memorial would give me an explanation. Some way to know why.

Some way to fill in the gaps of the years I had missed. In the coming months I had elaborate daydreams about one of his brothers calling

me and it all making sense.

I didn’t know much about his two younger brothers. When I visited his house I saw them as little kids, and therefore beneath my notice.

The only thing I knew about them was that they were mad at the church.

I grew up hearing stories from Mom of priests who ran off with younger women, or organists who groped their cantors. I thought priests

and the men close to them were capable of anything.

The memorial ended abruptly. No body meant no burial.

Even though I found aspects of the church bizarre, I could tell how the disruption of the normal routine of wake-funeral-burial was

jarring to the people around me.

Jonathan’s family left the church first. From my position in the loft, I saw his youngest brother’s face go red with the tears he had tried to

hold in. I could feel an unspoken “That’s it?” in the air around me.

One of the cantors took Mom and I through a cramped hallway to a side door so we could avoid the crowds.

We ran into a small clump of people from the overflow room who had the same idea.

As we waited our turn to get out the door, I noticed a “Choose Life” sticker on the bottom of a flight of stairs above my head.

And then we were outside. It was warm and drizzling. The sporadic raindrops were pinpricks against my clothes and skin. 

In the car Mom decided to answer the question my brother asked on Mother’s Day.

“Big bridges like that often have cameras. So, the state troopers probably have avideo of him.”

This was the last piece of information I needed to understand why I was so surprised: it was so showy.

I had never thought of Jonathan as much of a performer. I had this fixation that the suicide method would reflect his personality.

I knew he liked water, but this seemed so extreme. I would have hated having a video of the suicide to remember me by.

I also imagined it would be a pretty crappy way to go. I had wanted to die before, but I had never fixated much on the method.

Not that I didn’t contemplate it, but I viewed it more as a means to an end that I should make as painless as possible.

This was the opposite of painless. And gross, too.

It was like dying on a freeway, but you couldn’t have your body peeled from the pavement.

You would rot with an endless stream of cars passing over and crushing you. I couldn’t do it. I never thought he had it in him.

Shows what I know. About the current, or most recent him, anyway. But he was always surrounded by the ocean.

When we got back to the school where Mom worked, I was supposed to stay and help her get ready for her elementary schoolers’ chorus

concert. I tried to fake sick so I could get out of it, but she looked so annoyed at having to arrange transportation for me that I decided to

just be honest. I told her I was tired and miserable. Dad eventually picked me up and we spent the rest of the night watching the Celtics.

I haven’t had to drive over the bridge yet. Thank God. I’ve only had to ride along. When I do, I pretend I can pretend it isn’t happening.

I don’t bother telling anyone. I almost think he’s only a show I’m putting on in my head.

Most of the time I don’t think about him at all. There aren’t meltdowns. I don’t cry, or yell, or scream in fear whenever I’m nearby.

He doesn’t take over my body the way he’s supposed to.

He’s just a small pit in my stomach, a small persistent ‘something’s wrong’ who follows me until I reach solid ground again.

I cross from land to that slight feeling of weightlessness and back. But when I’m close to him, I need to pretend I’m always on the ground.

I wonder where he jumped from. I could find out, with the footage from the cameras. But I like having his last moments be a figment of

my imagination. And it’s not like he’s there anymore.

They got his body out a while ago. I don’t know where it is now. In my mind he’s still in the water.

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Saylor Skidds is an English major at UAlbany from Rhode Island. Saylor is a sophomore, and their first time being published in ARCH was Fall of 2025. In their free time Saylor enjoys reading, sewing, and volunteering at the library.