43. Cookies
Cookies
Guilt and grief are two of the most precarious things a human being can feel.
The pair often waltzes together to an accompaniment of change, altering the person bearing their weight.
If you’d have asked me a year ago, I would’ve laughed and told you I was far too old to be changed.
At seventy-eight, I would’ve assumed I had already suffered everything the Lord had tasked me to, when we lost our little girl, not even a full year into her beautiful life, and after that, when I’d nearly lost my husband to drink.
The Lord hadn’t blessed us with any more children, but a shop in a small town took us in with open arms. Soon enough, my husband stopped visiting the bars, stopped coming home drunk and miserable, and the world gave us a boy.
Not ours, but perhaps in need of some love, we had plenty to share and nobody but each other to give it to.
Gideon Bell would stop by after school most days for a few cookies, and soon enough, he’d bring a sweet little girl with sad eyes and bright smiles that couldn’t have been more different from him.
The Lord’s plans were funny that way.
My hands shake as I take the rolled napkin from my coat pocket, unfolding it as my husband pats my back.
Never one for much comfort, Bill Johnson has always given it in his own way.
Silently and without fanfare. I’d come to appreciate it over the years.
When a tear drips down my aged face onto the top of a chocolate chip cookie, I try to wipe it away.
“Come on, Loranne,” Bill urges softly. “You’ll catch a cold.”
Like every week, the thought of leaving them here alone, another two children lost to the cold dirt of a cemetery, sends more tears spilling from my eyes.
Of course, I know they were grown. Demons and heartaches of their own.
But where the rest of the town seemed fit to lay them here and try to forget, there is space within my heart that will never stop aching for Gideon Bell and Audrey Fisher.
Not what the news or that the detective made them out to be, but the little boy who learned to fake his smiles and the little girl with an abundance of them.
The young woman who painted the windows of our town and the man who returned for the young woman.
It would be easy to be mad at Gideon for what he did to her, to all the people he hurt.
If I were under any illusion, Audrey wouldn’t have wanted to be exactly where she was that day. That’s where the guilt comes in.
Tricky thing, guilt.
I would’ve fought to hold her tighter that day in the shop.
Fought to have checked on her when I heard he’d been picked up.
She’d been a nervous mess, frantic and wispy in a way I’d never seen her; she knew.
I realized after we’d heard… she’d known that day the monster her best friend had turned into; she must’ve felt such an awful love…
loyalty to go home to him despite it all.
When she smiled at me, and lied, I should’ve sat her down and held her.
Made her tell me what had her so afraid.
“Oh, Bill,” I mutter, gasping as I cling to the cookies in my hands.
His only response is a thick clearing of his throat; I don’t dare turn around to see the evidence of his own grief.
A proud man like him wouldn’t stand for it.
My back aches as I step forward, laying the treats down on each of their graves, side by side.
Another thing the town had balked at, but since there was nobody left who cared enough…
not for either of them, it was easy to step up.
No funeral, just a broken and confused town, sitting in their rage and grief as they were lowered together into the ground.
“Let’s go home,” Brill grunts from behind me.
I don’t argue, even though leaving feels horrible, unforgivable even.
He takes my arm as we walk away, my eyes straying to Abigail Bell’s grave just down the path, Maynard Fisher’s on the other side of the plot.
One thing is for sure. The last snowmen Audrey painted that day will stay on my windows until Bill and I rest here too.
And I’ll never stop wondering how something as beautiful as love could become so terrifying.