Chapter 5
Five
MARIS
I’m not the only Martinez in town. Not by a long shot.
I am, however, well and truly cut off from the rest of them.
Disowned and living in the ancestral house is kind of neat if you think about it because I wasn’t really a fan of my Aunt Clarice or her shitty kids Ben and Dylan.
They’re two of the most selfish men in town, and their wives and their kids suck even more than they do.
It’s just one giant ball of suck.
The wind howls and I duck my head. It’s late. Just after ten o’clock. I shouldn’t be out at night but I’m on my way to see the family that I do love. There’s no helping it. Not with the day it is.
October seventh. My eyes sting with water from the heavy wind, or at least I tell myself that’s what it is. It’s not because of the other thing.
The other thing being that today is the anniversary of my parent’s car crash.
The anniversary of their death and the beginning of when my life started to go down the path that led me here.
I tuck the bouquet of flowers closer to my chest to shield them from the frigid sea wind.
It’s silly, I know. I’m going to leave the bouquet of daffodils and daisies at my parents’ graves anyhow.
It’s not like the wind isn’t going to destroy the blooms and leave them a brown mess by the next morning but I can’t help it.
My eyes keep right on watering while I open the iron gate leading into Mariner’s Rest and slip inside the cemetery.
I’m here late because of work, but that’s not the entire truth.
The newspaper can run on its own more or less.
I have a half dozen employees who don’t care all that much what people in town think or say about me, at least to the extent that they won’t quit just because I’m the one running it.
They might not be inviting me over for dinner or doing more than a simple hello or head nod out in public but my signature is more than fine for their checks, and because of that they’ll never quit.
Four of them, Josie, Greg, Lyle, and Mary have been with the newspaper since my granny ran it.
Fat chance they’ll leave before they keel over.
I could run over someone right in front of them and they’d look the other way, which to be honest is kind of a perk when you think about it.
If I ever have to hide a body, I know exactly who to call.
God knows Josie has no compunction about offing someone.
Rumor has it that she killed her first husband when she caught him cheating.
One day he was there, drinking a pint with everyone down at the Scarlet and heading off with a woman that was definitely not Josie.
That night was the last time he was ever seen.
I always wondered why people accused Josie when the woman could have been the reason he never came back.
“Maybe he left town to be with her,” I’d said one time to my granny while we worked on a piece together.
My granny was strong, smart, and above all things skeptical. She’d also grown up in town right alongside Josie and her husband.
“She did it,” my granny said, her silver head never lifting from the notebook she was writing in. “You watch yourself around Josie. Just because she’s old doesn’t mean she’s not mean as a snake but she’s loyal.”
Granny was right. Josie was mean as a snake and she was loyal.
She’d help me hide that body and show up for work at eight o’clock on the dot.
I smile thinking about my granny, or as the town knew her, Nora Martinez.
I loved her with all my heart. Learned everything I knew about writing from her, it was an honor to take over the newspaper too.
The fact that it was still going strong showed that I’d learned exactly what I was meant to from granny.
Even if no one wanted to have anything to do with me they wanted the Call to survive.
Isla founded The Vesper Point Call and for one hundred and forty-one years it has been passed down through the family, mother to daughter.
I know if my mom was still living she would have been the one staying late with me tonight to ensure tomorrow’s paper was fit to print.
I bite my lip and hold the flowers closer.
She isn’t though. That’s why I’m here walking alone to her grave.
I walk faster, not wanting to linger too long in the cemetery alone, at least that’s what I’m telling myself.
I’m not scared of being here alone. I’m scared of being with my thoughts alone.
Tonight is already bullshit. I’ll go to bed thinking about the wreck, seeing those flashing lights when the cops came to the house to tell us, repeating and replaying the last moments I had with my parents over and over until I fall asleep.
No doubt I’ll wake up screaming from a nightmare as the cherry on top.
I scowl and my mood turns black. By the time I reach my parents' graves in the far corner of the cemetery, I want to scream.
I want to kick over a headstone and smash one of the empty vases that sits on a headstone nearby.
I don’t do any of that though. I take my fury, my rage at it all, how unfucking fair this is that I have to go on alone in a world without them and I bury it just like I always have.
I swallow the bitter taste down and take in a swallow of ice cold air.
The wind blows leaves into my face and I hear the thud of a branch falling in the woods just beyond the iron fence of Mariner’s Rest. The town keeps everything spick and span, lovingly tended to, but this part of the cemetery is older than the rest.
This is where my family has been laid to rest since the town was founded. Things are older here. More delicate. I sink to my knees in front of the double headstone and bring out my flowers.
“Mom, Dad,” I start, the words getting caught in my throat like a piece of food I didn’t chew. I cough and try again. “Mom, Dad, I miss you,” I whisper and lay the flowers down.
Dylan and Sofia Martinez
Loving Parents, Beloved Children, Eternally Missed
Always Side by Side
My eyes burn with the tears I’m holding back but I don’t hold them back like I’ve trained myself to do since I was twelve years old.
I hate crying. I’ve always hated it. How could I not when I learned that crying does nothing.
No matter how many tears you shed and prayers you scream, begging, no one is ever going to answer you.
There’s no magical fix or hero to save you and stop your tears. Crying does nothing, and that’s why I fucking hate it.
But today is October seventh. It’s their day. The last day that I had them, so right now, I let my hate cool enough to let the tears come just like I do every October seventh. If not today then when?
I lean forward on my hands. A sob rolls through my body and I wobble forward like a table that just lost a leg. I have to crawl forward enough to lean against the headstone to stay upright. The stone is cold, I can feel it through my coat.
“Fuck!” I slam my hands against the granite headstone and shake my head.
“You weren’t supposed to go,” I tell them, repeating the words that I’ve said ever since my world ended twenty years ago.
I keep going, keep talking like I’m following a script and maybe I am.
Stuck in a fucking timeloop that I can’t break where everyday I miss them, everyday, I look for them, and everyday it’s still just me.
Alone.
“It was supposed to be me.”
Those six words hang in the air before another gust of wind blows them away and into the woods.
I know it’s dumb. Stupid. If it had been me and not them they wouldn’t have lasted.
Statistics show when a couple experiences child loss the odds they divorce skyrocket.
If it had been me they would be here now, but they wouldn’t be together.
My parents loved me more than anything. If I was gone—they wouldn’t have been able to carry on like I’ve done.
I used to think that meant I didn’t love them as much as they loved me.
I pointed to the fact that I kept on living, that I found joy and laughter, that I loved my friends, my grandmother, that I had any will to love at all, as evidence that I didn’t love them.
That I couldn’t love them the way they had me.
That was the proof that I was wrong inside.
I shouldn’t have been able to go on if I loved them, right?
“I’m sorry,” I tell them. “I’m sorry. Mommy.
Daddy. I’m so fucking sorry. Please.” I lower my head, hands coming up to pull at my hair while I drown under the weight of my grief.
It settles over me like a familiar blanket, a security blanket is what it is.
I’ve grown so used to carrying it with me that I don’t even notice it anymore.
The times that I do realize it’s there is when it’s not.
When I’m happy. Those rare moments when I can breathe without feeling like my lungs are full of lead, like sand hasn’t settled into my hollow fucking bones.
I pull on the edges of that fucking blanket, curl into myself and let it hold me tight while I cry.
If I pretend enough, it’s like my parents are holding me.
Hugging me and for a little while I don’t feel so alone.
Little by little, my tears slow and finally stop. When I’m able to lift my head, my eyes are puffy and my hands are freezing, my body stiff from how long I’ve sat here in the wind and cried for them.
I pull my phone out to check the time. The screen blinds me when it flashes to life and tells me it’s just after midnight.
“Goddamn it,” I mutter, rubbing my eyes. I’ve been out here for too long. I don’t come out here often, mostly because it’s too painful but also because I know what it would look like in town if I was in a graveyard on the regular.
“There goes the murderess.”
“Bet she’s out there casting spells.”
“She’s crazy. Who creeps around the graveyard like that?”
“God rest her family’s souls. You know she’s putting a curse on them out in that cemetery.”
I know what the town would say because I’ve heard them say all of those things and more when I was here after granny passed away.
She’d been gone a year when I stopped being me.
I didn’t know where else to go but to her.
I could only take so much whispering before I snapped and I think I’d reached my quota in Vesper Point after what I’d done.
I stand up and put my hands on the headstone.
I run my hands along the top of it. “I’ll visit more,” I promise them, knowing I won’t before I head off towards my granny’s grave.
It’s just a few down the row, but it’s closer to the front of the cemetery where the graves are newer.
I smile when I see the familiar outline of the weeping angel at her grave.
She arranged for a statue, a monument she said would keep her company when I was too busy.
The angel has been working overtime with how scarce I’ve made myself here over the past two years.
“Granny, how are you?” I ask and drop down into a crouch to swipe a bunch of leaves away from her headstone.
There’s a few weeds too that I see and I get to work pulling them up and tossing them off to the side.
Mariner’s Rest is well-tended but it never hurts to help.
I’m yanking on a weed and debating telling her about the man next door, but in the most censored way possible so she doesn’t find out that I pushed him or that I hid from him like a psycho when he waved at me, when I hear voices.
At first, I think they’re from the road.
Mariner’s Rest is within walking distance from my house, only half a mile away on account of the town’s first settlers choosing this location to put distance between Vesper Point proper and its dead.
For a long while, the cemetery was the only other thing out this way besides Vesper House.
Over the years the town sprung up around it and so did the winding road that leads up to it from town.
Now, there’s neighborhoods and houses all along the road and folks walk along it laughing and talking on their way to someone’s house.
I hear the voices again. Whoever is coming this way isn’t paying a social call.
Whoever is talking is talking fast and loud.
I tilt my head as I listen to the voices now.
There’s a shout and someone else yells back.
I used to sit in this graveyard with my granny listening to the passerby chatter on the wind.
That’s how I know those voices aren’t coming from the road.
They’re coming from the graveyard.
Someone else is here with me.