Dirt #2
Someone touched my elbow, gently, a question disguised as a gesture.
I understood, distantly, that this was the part where I was supposed to speak.
I had written nothing. I had thought about writing something, sitting at the kitchen island at four in the morning with the envelope and the granola bar and the two phones for company, and every time I picked up a pen the only sentence that arrived, fully formed, refusing to leave room for any other, was: he filled it every morning.
That was not a eulogy. That was just true.
I did not think I could say even that much out loud without my voice doing something I wasn’t prepared to let it do in front of forty strangers in navy suits.
I shook my head, just slightly. The priest moved the service along without me. I felt guilty. I had ignored my duty. I felt a flash of anger that my dad had done this; he made our relationship too complex and painful to eulogize. That was not fair.
Zane spoke instead. I don’t remember most of what he said.
I remember his voice catching once, hard, in the middle of a sentence about steaks and dinners and a man who learned how to hug at the end of his life when he had never managed it at the beginning.
I remember him saying my father had been trying, right up until he was not given any more time to keep trying.
I remember the way his jaw worked after he stepped back from the small podium, like he was chewing on something he could not spit out in front of an audience.
It was somewhere in the stretch after that, while the priest’s voice rose again into whatever came next, that I noticed Zane had stopped looking at the casket.
His eyes had drifted, fixed on some point past my shoulder, off to the right, beyond the edge of the canopy.
His hand on mine tightened too, just slightly, just enough that I noticed it the way you notice a change in air pressure before a storm you can’t yet see.
I did not follow his gaze. I was too busy watching the way the wind moved the priest’s vestments, counting the seconds between each gust, filing the data away in the same ledger as everything else.
Zane’s hand found my shoulder a half-beat later than it should have, like his attention had been somewhere else and his body had to catch up to where the rest of him already was.
I did not ask him what he was looking at. I do not think I had the capacity, that morning, to wonder about anyone’s eyes but my own.
The casket began to lower. The machinery made a low, mechanical whine and the wood disappeared into the dark by inches, by feet, until it was gone, and there was only a rectangle of black earth where a person used to be visible and now was not.
Here it was. The moment that was absolute.
The moment that I became officially abandoned. I am alone now.
Someone handed me a single white lily. I do not remember whose hand it was.
I held it for a moment, and then I let it fall, and it landed at an angle across the dark opening, pale against all that turned soil, and somewhere very far away from my own body I thought he is going into the ground five feet from a woman who has been waiting years for him to finally arrive.
They are together now. And I am here, alone.
Zane’s arm came around my waist. I let him hold the weight I was not using.
The mourners began their slow procession back toward the cars, voices lowering into that hush people reserve for walking away from open graves, and I stood there longer than everyone else, looking past the canopy, past the fresh black dirt, toward the pale shape of my mother’s angel keeping her same watch, the only witness in that entire cemetery who had been doing this far longer than today.
Everyone left eventually. That is the thing about a grave.
It only holds a crowd for as long as the crowd can stand to look at it.
You can leave but they never do. They are always there, under the dirt.
Stuck. Just like me. Stuck here, looking at both of my parents in the ground.
Time is a predator and it is hunting me; I am trapped in its cage.
“Seren.” Zane’s voice, close to my ear. “We should go, baby. You’ve been standing for a long time.”
I did not answer him. I did not know how to explain that my feet had decided without consulting the rest of me, and the rest of me had not found a good enough argument to overrule it. My feet were here, and they were planted like trees and unless we cut them at the root, I was stuck.
Austin tried next, his hand landing warm between my shoulder blades. “Come on, love. Nothing left to do here. Let’s get you somewhere with a chair that isn’t made of dirt.”
I stayed where I was. The dirt chair was fine. The beds were made of dirt here, too, and people lay in them forever.
Blair came and stood in front of me for a while, her eyes doing a slow, careful pass over my face. She didn’t say anything in the end. She just touched my arm once, the same light touch from the restroom at the pier and let herself walk back toward the cars.
Cassidy held on the longest. She did not try words at all. She just stood beside me, matching my stillness with her own, until even she ran out of whatever reserve lets a person stand quietly next to someone else’s grief without flinching. “Whenever you’re ready. There’s no clock on this, Seren.”
There is always a clock on everything. Time is hunting us all and we should be scared. I did not tell her that.
Time did the thing it does when nobody’s measuring it properly.
It did not pass in minutes. It passed in temperature, in the way the gray morning thinned out into a whiter afternoon, in the slow movement of shadows from one side of the headstones to the other.
The grass dried out from the morning dew.
My knees forgot what it felt like to bend.
Somewhere behind me, a groundskeeper’s mower started up and shut off again, deciding, apparently, that today wasn’t the day either.
It was somewhere in that long, undivided stretch of standing that I noticed them.
A few rows over, near a section I did not have reason to pay attention to, three figures stood close together, heads down.
Cassidy. O, whom I hadn’t even realized was in town, his hand resting on the back of Cassidy’s neck.
And Gavin, taller than both, his shoulders curled in around himself.
They were not looking at me. They were not looking at anything I could see from this distance, just down, at the ground in front of them, the three of them forming a small, private circle.
I watched them for a while. I did not wonder what they were doing.
I did not have room that day to wonder about anyone’s grief but the two that belonged to me, the old one and the new one, standing on either side of where I was rooted.
After a while they walked away too, Gavin’s hand briefly pressed flat against the top of the stone before he turned. Then it was just Austin and Zane.
They did not try to move me again. They just stood a few feet back, the two of them, doing that thing men do when they don’t know what to do with their hands, shifting their weight, glancing at each other over my head like they were passing a silent vote on whose turn it was to try something.
Neither of them tried anything. They just stayed.
Eventually my knees gave out the rest of the way, and I sat down in the dirt.
The black wool dress soaked up the damp ground, the cold of it climbing up through the fabric and into my skin, and I did not move to stop it.
Forty percent synthetic blend does not negotiate, I thought, distantly, and almost laughed, and did not.
This felt like home to me. The damp grass and all the dead bodies below me. Part of me lives here and always has.