Love Story #3
I did not say anything.
“Not the way he was at the end,” Zane said. “Not the way he looked right before he did it, when you could see it on him if you knew what to look for. He looked like himself. Like before.” He exhaled slowly. “He was smiling. The real one.”
“What did he say?” I asked, carefully like whatever he said could break like the mug against the floor.
“He told me it wasn’t my fault.” Zane’s voice stayed even, but I knew the evenness was costing him something.
“I told him he was wrong. I told him I could have done something, could have seen it earlier, could have said the right thing at the right moment.” A pause.
“He told me it wouldn’t have changed anything. ”
I pressed my palm flat against my sternum again without deciding to.
“And then he said—” Zane stopped, looked at the ceiling briefly, and came back.
“He said I had to let go. He said I had to forgive him and forgive myself and move forward and I told him I didn’t know how.
” His jaw moved. “He said… He said to search for beauty. That wherever I found it, I should stay there.”
It feels like nothing is beautiful anymore. I remembered Henry saying that in the graveyard. “And then?” I asked because I could tell we had not reached it yet. The thing he had never told anyone. I could see it in the way he was standing, braced.
“He started to disappear,” Zane said. “The way it happens in dreams where you know you’re running out of time, and you can’t stop it.
I was trying to hold onto it, hold onto him, and he was already going, and then he stopped.
” Zane looked at me directly. “He said, one more thing. He told me to listen to him.”
The kitchen was completely still.
“And then he said, don’t let her fall, Zane.” He said it quietly. It was the thought he had been tumbling around for so long it had gone smooth. “Just that. No name. Just don’t let her fall. And then I woke up.”
Neither of us moved. I looked at the note. Henry’s writing flashing like a picture in my mind.
You won’t fall, Seren. I’ll make sure of it.
And like a collision, like a car crash in my mind, I understood what Zane was spiraling about. Had Zane seen me on his own? Or did Henry tell him to? Had Zane caught me because he wanted to, or because it was a twisted form of Henry’s fate?
“I didn’t know what it meant,” Zane said. “I told myself it was grief. I told myself my brain was filling in the blanks because it could not handle the silence he left behind. I tried to let it go.” A beat. “I couldn’t let it go.”
“Why did you think it was about me?” I asked, very carefully.
“You were so sad, Seren,” he said. “You were so fucking sad, and I saw how sad you were. I was worried… I have been worrying about you since before I understood you. After the dream, I went to see him. First time since the funeral. I stood at his grave, and I talked to him and I said goodbye and I turned around and…”
He looked at me. “There you were. Standing in front of an angel. Crying the way you do when you think nobody is there. Completely silently. Like you had made peace with everything a long time ago.”
I tried to picture what he was saying, tried to remember the day he was talking about, but I could not. It felt strange to hear him describe a memory of me that felt like I didn’t live through.
“I almost came to you,” he said. “I stood there trying to decide. And then you turned and walked away, and you were gone before I could.” He looked at his hands again. “I went over to the angel after. I read the name.”
“My mom,” I said, like I had to confirm it for some reason.
“Anwen Garcia,” he said quietly, and like it always is, my mother’s name was a paper cut to my heart.
“And I stood there in the rain, and I thought about how hard that must have been for you, and I thought about how heavy it must be, and I thought, oh. It’s her. It was always her.”
He looked up at me. “But… it wasn’t because he told me to find you.
Not because I was following some instruction.
Because I had already been looking at you for months and not knowing why I couldn’t stop, and suddenly the dream had a face.
” I could tell he was saying the words exactly as he was realizing them.
He was projecting them to me as soon as they became clear to him.
I thought about that year. Standing at the graveyard alone, the way I always did. Not knowing there was a boy standing at another stone watching me go, holding a dream he did not have a name for yet. Not realizing the other boy that had disappeared from the graveyard was there all along.
“We were so close to each other,” I said. “And we didn’t know.”
“We didn’t know,” Zane said.
“I thought he stopped coming. I thought he just left me alone, left the graveyard to me. I waited for him, for a while.” I was doing the same thing as Zane, organizing my thoughts in the open air before I knew where they were landing.
“I didn’t know. I just thought he stopped coming. I wondered where he was.”
“He was always in the graveyard with you, Seren,” Zane said the brutal sentence so delicately it took a second to understand what he had said. “He was always there with you.”
I thought about every night I had walked through that gate and down the path and settled at my mother’s feet and talked to stone.
Every night I had looked around the cemetery and felt alone in it.
Every time I had reached for the memory of three nights and a boy who sat close without crowding and thought: at least there was that.
At least there was once a person who sat here with me.
He had been there. Every time. He was always there.
Feet from the angel. Under the ground. While I sat with my back against stone and reached for him. He was so close I could have touched the grass above him without moving very far.
“I didn’t know,” I said, and my voice came out strange, thin in a way I did not recognize. “I went back, he wasn’t there, and I thought the good version. I let myself think the good version.”
“I know,” Zane said.
“He wasn’t passing through,” I said. “He wasn’t leaving to find something better. He was already—” The sentence would not finish itself. I tried again. “He was already gone.”
The cruelty of it was blinding in a specific way, not sharp like fresh grief, but vast, like standing at the edge of something and only then understanding how deep it goes.
I had been carrying him in my chest as a warmth, the one untouched memory, the three nights that cost me nothing, and the whole time he had been in the ground and I had been sitting on top of him telling myself he had found his way out.