There is a boy on the roof of a Holiday Inn, wearing a Spiderman t-shirt and holding a large glass pickle jar brimming full of rocks. He is throwing the rocks off the roof, one handful at a time, sending them through the air with all of his strength. Tears are spilling from his eyes, flooding his face and sliding down the mottled bruise on his right cheek. His hands are dirty from the rocks, and his face is dirty too, from where he's rubbed it. “I hate her,” he says as he throws them. “Hate her, hate her, HATE her.”

I had watched this boy, my brother, collect these rocks -- digging them out of ditches, uprooting them from the roadside, scrambling after them in the parking lot. He had arrived to school most mornings, weighed down with smooth pebbles, jagged bits of charcoal, and dull grey stones -- he had even made me carry some of them, when his pockets were too full. Most boys I knew collected Pokemon cards or action figures or those beyblades that spun in circles, but not my brother -- he collected rocks.

He would bring them back to the hotel room after his day of foraging, and dump them in the pickle jar he had taken from the recycling center. But, as he had informed me many times, he only took them out of his pockets after he had carried them around for a full day, enough time to give them a name -- names like Dax, or Flinder, or Yem, names that did not mean anything to anyone else.

On rainy days, or days when our mother left for work and told us to stay inside, he took out his collection, would spill the rocks over the floor, and stare at them, or sort them into groups, or drop them back in the jar and listen to the CLUNK as they hit the bottom until Joey and I told him stop.

And he had the jar with him now, on this roof, and he was throwing his precious rocks down onto the street below, crying as he did it. I watched his rocks fall, and I imagined them hitting the pedestrians -- it would seem to them like it was raining rocks, I thought, and my brother was the storm cloud.

Below us, on the second floor of the hotel, in room 214, my youngest brother Joey was laughing along with Spongebob, and munching on Cheetos. The white sheets on the bed, I knew, were streaked with orange where he had wiped his fingers. And in the bathroom, the door locked, my mother was losing herself, was leaving us behind. She was the one my brother hated, the person he cursed with each throw.
At some point, while Joey was laughing, while Spongebob was playing on the TV, while my brother threw his rocks, while I stood and thought of storm clouds, our mother began to convulse, the poison raging through her veins like wildfire. I imagine it often, can picture it so well, the jerking of her body, the final shudder following her last breath. This and much more I can picture, even though I was up on the roof and she was below me.

When the pickle jar was empty, my brother launched it through the air as well, and we heard it smash as it hit the pavement below.

He looked at me, his eyes laced with red, and he said, again "I hate her."

This time I said, "Me too."

For years afterwards, I would connect the dots between my words, “Me too,” and my mother’s death; that was the deciding moment when the God above decided to take my mother. If I hadn’t said it, if I had said instead, “I love her,” then she would have been spared.
My brothers would draw their own lines, connect different dots. My older brother would come to believe that if he could just find all of the lucky rocks from his collection, all of the rocks he threw off the roof, than our mother would come back. If he hadn’t thrown those rocks, he said to me, the rocks that held the world together, than our mother wouldn’t have died. For a long time afterwards, Joey would scream whenever Spongebob came on: Spongebob and Mom dying, they were joined together in his mind.

I often have dreams about that roof of the Holiday Inn, only instead of watching a kid with a Spiderman t-shirt, I am with my mother, who is standing on the edge. I cry out to her -- I tell her I love her, I beg her to come away from the edge, and she turns around, and she smiles at me, and I can see her so clearly in my dream, the gap between her front teeth, her weathered face, her dark eyes, and she is so beautiful and I say again, “I love you.” And for a minute I think she will come to me, but then she shakes her head, sadly, and turns away again, and launches herself off the edge, her arms stretched wide. Then I can hear a smash as she hits the pavement, like the Pickle jar breaking, only this time it is my mother’s soul, cracking, fragmenting, splintering, shattering, and I am standing on the roof alone.