Dirt #3
“Seren.” Austin crouched down in front of me. His eyes were rimmed red and had been for two days now, and up close I could see the exhaustion sitting under them. “Talk to me, kid.”
I looked past him, at the fresh dirt, at the lily someone had set there gone slightly brown at the edges already.
“He’s there because of her.” The words came out flatter than I meant them to, or maybe exactly as flat as I meant them to.
“He didn’t even fight it, Austin. He just let it happen.
Eight months and he didn’t tell anyone, he didn’t tell me, and the only word he had left at the end was her name. Not mine. Hers.”
Austin did not say anything.
“He spent twenty-one years filling that stupid feeder for a woman who’s been dead since before I could even know her,” I said, and something in my chest was starting to move now, slow at first, like a tide deciding which direction to turn.
“He kept her stone clean. He bought her an angel. He never once bought me anything that wasn’t supposed to replace the fact that he couldn’t look at me without seeing her.
And when he had thirty seconds left in his whole life, he didn’t ask for me. He asked to go be with her.”
“Seren, that’s not—” Zane started.
“Don’t.” I did not look at him. “Do not tell me it’s not what it sounds like. I do not want it explained right now. I want a cigarette.”
The silence that followed had a different texture than all the silence before it.
“Seren,” Zane said again, low, careful. “You quit. You haven’t smoked for over a year.”
“I am aware of how long it’s been, Zane. I know how to count. I also know my dad is dead and I do not care how fucking long it’s been.” My voice did not rise. It did not need to. “Austin.”
Austin looked at Zane. Zane looked at the ground.
Neither of them looked at me for a second, and then Austin reached into his jacket and pulled out the pack he always kept on him out of habit more than need these days, and he didn’t ask me if I was sure, because he knew better than anyone that being sure had stopped being the point.
He lit it for me.
The first drag hit the back of my throat like an old argument, familiar in a way that should have scared me and did not.
I sat there in the dirt in my ruined dress, and I smoked at my father’s grave while my mother’s angel watched, and something underneath my ribs that had been sitting very still for days finally started to seethe.
“He had time,” I said, to no one, to both, to the lily, to the dirt.
“He had eight months. Eight months and he spent them filling out trust documents and signing his name on things and he never once sat me down and said, Seren, I’m dying, I need you to know this while I’m still here to tell you.
He let me sign papers for an inheritance I didn’t know I was already getting.
He let me think he was happy. He let me believe—”
My voice broke somewhere in the middle of believe, and the thing under my ribs stopped seething and started erupting, and I dropped the cigarette into the dirt and reached down instead, my fingers closing around a fistful of grass, roots and soil and all, and I tore it up and threw it at the fresh black earth in front of me.
“I thought I had time,” I said. Another fistful. Another throw. “I thought I had time, I thought I had time, you said after finals, you said Sunday, you said call you Sunday, and it’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not FAIR—”
I do not remember deciding to scream it.
I just remember the sound leaving me, raw and ugly, nothing like grief is supposed to sound in a quiet cemetery on a Thursday afternoon, and my hands kept finding grass and kept finding dirt and kept throwing it, small handfuls landing uselessly across the lily, across the wood, across all of it, like if I just made enough of a mess maybe someone would finally have to clean it up, maybe someone would finally have to come back and explain.
Austin had gone very still, his hand frozen halfway toward my shoulder like he did not trust himself to touch what I had become.
It was Zane who finally moved. He did not say my name this time.
He did not ask if I was ready, did not count down from anything.
He just got down into the dirt with me, wrapped both arms fully around my shaking body, and lifted, and I let him, because there was nothing left in me to argue with, no perimeter, no inventory, no ledger of subway tiles or wobbling stools left to hide inside.
I do not remember the walk back to the car. I just remember being cradled in Zane’s arms like a child who was just rescued from a burning building. He was the firefighter and I was the orphan whose entire family had burned alive.
I remember the sky was the wrong color for what had just happened to me, too bright, too ordinary, completely unbothered. I remember the angel, small in the distance behind us, still watching, still waiting, the way she had always waited.
And somewhere between the grave and the car, the last working part of me, the part that had been counting tiles and measuring inches of red sugar water and keeping the whole machine operational simply stopped.
I went quiet.