Sunsets #3
Anwen, at the end. The last word. I had made it a verdict.
She won, I had thought. She got the last of him.
I was angry at my dead mother for being the gravity that takes everything around me.
If she had not died, would I have been so sad?
If I were not so sad, would I have been around people that hated me, at the lake house that weekend, drinking to numb everything?
If my mother had not died, would I have been happy?
Would the bad thing still have happened to me?
And the last thing she took was my dad’s final thought.
But he asked for me first, the nurse had said so, he asked for me first and then he reached for the love that had shaped his whole life.
Both were true. He wanted his daughter and he wanted his wife and he was allowed to want both, and there had only been air enough for one more word, and the word was a promise he’d been keeping every single morning since the day I was born.
He did not leave me for her. He was just, finally, going to where he had been sending flowers for eighteen years.
“Okay,” I said, aloud, to both of them. “Okay. I get it now.”
I stayed a while longer. I did not say much.
There was not much left that needed saying, and they had never needed me to fill the silence, either of them, the angel, or the man beside her.
I just knelt in the grass he’d kept and let the June sun come down and felt, for the first time since that fated middle of the night of the phone call, something that wasn’t grief and wasn’t guilt and wasn’t pain.
Something like the peace he’d been trying to hand me in a photograph.
“Happy anniversary,” I told them. My parents.
“I hope you’re together somewhere. And I hope you’re looking over me.
I don’t know how many more times I can rebuild everything I thought I knew.
Maybe… I don’t know, maybe you both can stay with me.
Just a little. A bird or a butterfly, whatever you want. ”
I felt my face scrunch as the sharpness of grief pushed through my chest. “I’m sorry this is how life was.
I’m sorry this is how our family’s story went.
I know it’s not what either of you hoped for.
I mean, who would? It’s not what I hoped for either.
But… maybe in the next life. We can find each other and know each other.
The way it might have been. Maybe in a different life mom’s car doesn’t crash, and maybe you could know me the way you never did.
And maybe I don’t get raped, and maybe dad doesn’t get cancer.
And maybe, in another life we love each other the way we should have. ”
I went quiet, feeling the tears on my skin and I did not rush them away or try to erase them. I just let them be.
“I’ll be okay, though, in this life. I think I’ll be okay. I have Zane. I have Austin. And Cassidy and Blair. I don’t have you two here to love me, but people love me. And I have people to love. I think… I think that means I’ll be okay.”
I closed my eyes and breathed as deeply as I could. None of this was fair, but unfairness doesn’t make the world stop. And if the world is spinning then I must walk it. Then I stood, brushed the dirt from my knees, and turned to go back to the living. And I saw them.
Not at the gate anymore. They had moved while I wasn’t looking, drifted a few rows over into a part of the cemetery I did not know.
They were standing in a loose cluster around a stone I couldn’t read from where I was.
Cassidy. O, his arm around her. Gavin, shoulders curled in.
And Zane, a little apart, his head down.
I knew before I understood. My body knew, the way it always knew things first. I walked toward them. The stone came clear one word at a time as I crossed the grass. Henry.
I stopped a few feet back. Nobody had heard me come. They were just standing there, the four of them, the quiet of old grief, people who come here together and stand exactly like this and don’t need to say anything because they’ve said it all across five years.
And I understood, completely, the whole story. They had all been his first.
Cassidy, who spoke for him, who kept the perimeter around everyone’s grief because she was the only one close enough to do it.
O, who looks at the sunsets for him. Gavin, whose one beer and no more traced back to a funeral I had not attended for a boy I had not known I’d known.
Zane, who carried him in a suitcase across years and never once opened the letter because opening it meant there was no more of him left to find.
Blair, who had known his innocence and tied it to her own.
The people I loved. They had loved Henry before they ever loved me.
They were his people, and they had become mine, and I had spent this whole grief believing I was the common variable, the Dead Sea, the thing that swallowed everyone who came close, when the truth was standing in front of me in a cluster around a gray stone.
I hope you find them, Seren.
He’d written that. In the letter. I hope you find them, I hope they see you the way you’re meant to be seen.
I had found them. I had found every last one of them.
Not despite the wreckage. Through it. Through him.
He had loved these people and then he had gone, and in going he had left them behind like a set of coordinates, and they had drifted into my life one by one without any of us knowing we were all standing in the same current, pulled by the same lost moon.
“Seren.” Cassidy had turned, seen me. Her face did something soft and careful. “You don’t have to. If you want to go back to your—”
“No,” I said. “I want to be here.”
I stepped into the cluster, and it opened for me, the way it always did, without anyone deciding to make room because the room was already mine. Zane’s hand found the small of my back. I looked down at the stone.
Henry. The dates. Seventeen years, that was all he got. And underneath, an epitaph someone had chosen for him, because unlike my father he had not arranged his own.
There is beauty everywhere. He taught us to see it.
Austin came up beside me. He had not known Henry the same way, and it showed in the way he held himself, a step back from the others, present but not inside the grief the way they were inside it.
He put his hand on my shoulder, and Blair came to his other side, and we stood there, all of us braided together over a boy in the ground who had done the braiding himself and never got to see it hold.
I thought about his last words. The ones that closed the letter.
Remember me.
A boy who sat in the dark with me. A dad who tried before he was gone. A hummingbird feeder filled for twenty-one years. I remembered them. I would not stop.
Notice me.
A boy, at a new school, at seventeen, who could not stop looking at a girl before he had a single reason to.
See me.
A stranger in a graveyard who asked nothing. The boy who saw beneath my mask.
Trust me.
The people standing around this stone. The ones who came without being asked. The ones who would keep coming.
I had been remembered. Noticed. Seen. Trusted. All four. I had spent so long believing I was a thing that ended people that I never noticed I was the thing they had all, every one of them, chosen to keep.
Henry asked to be remembered. He is. He’s the whole reason. He’s underneath all of it.
“Blair,” I said quietly, still looking at the stone. “You said something. In the kitchen. About whether he knew.”
“I did,” she said.
“I wonder if he knew. That we would all end up here. Like this.”
Blair was quiet for a moment. Austin’s hand found hers.
“I think,” Austin said, before she could answer, in the low even voice he used only for the truest things, “this might have been Henry’s story the whole time. And we are just the ones who got to finish it for him.”
Nobody said anything after that. We just stood there together in the June light, all of us, the living and the boy who had gathered us, in a cemetery I had walked alone ten thousand times and never understood I was not alone at all.
The wind moved through the old trees. Somewhere beyond us, time was sitting at a table, and beside her sat my mom and dad, and Henry.