Chapter 43
Quill
Ink Butterfly
Meadow Ambience
Natural Sounds Selections, Zen Sounds,
Natural Sound Collection
One might think that the Maplecrest Cemetery was an exclusive luxury resting place.
At least, that was how the grounds looked, resembling a park filled with linden trees, oaks, stone statues, fountains, canals, and hedge mazes.
But the huge graveyard on the outskirts of Maplecrest collected all the corpses from the five surrounding towns.
“Are you sure you want to walk?”
“Do you want to carry me?”
I bit my tongue.
Throughout the entire ride, I had bombarded him with facts about deceased writers, and he had listened to me with a smile. Only now did I gradually realize how uninhibitedly open my mouth had been, just because I had lost too much blood.
He was right. I should sit down, go home, and start a movie marathon with Lara, but for the first time in ten months, I felt able to enter this place. And I didn't want to let this opportunity pass me by.
“I could?”
Baffled, I looked at Davian, who immediately fixed his gaze on the path ahead.
“Friends help each other.”
Friends. The fact that he emphasized it spoke volumes.
He wanted to carry me there, but he would never admit it. He was decent. He did the right thing.
“If blood leaks from the bandage, I’ll drive you to the doctor.”
It sounded like a warning. Concerned, yet as if he would drag me straight to the car if the slightest red spot appeared on the thick white mummy wrap that my hand was.
The pain was noticeable as soon as I applied pressure, which was why I hadn't bent my hand since then. Not even my fingers.
Father had hit me right between my index finger and middle finger, and I was already wondering how I was going to take notes at university from now on.
When I spotted the subtle gravestone, I stopped. All thoughts vanished.
Meet you at the Graveyard
Cleffy
Here she was. The reality I had been running from for months. Six feet under.
My vision blurred as I read her name.
Sorry I didn't bring you flowers, Mama.
Davian stopped too, but I turned away from him, so he had to step beside me.
“The woman who was a welcome distraction for Joseph.”
He was silent. The only silence in this world that felt comforting.
The feeling of being too fragile for this world intensified, and I wanted nothing more than to rest my head against his shoulder, to hold on to him, but I couldn't...
Davian interrupted my thoughts by running a hand down my back, resting it on my waist before pulling me toward him. My head automatically landed against his shoulder and an overwhelmed sigh escaped my lips.
Fuck, this man.
He let go of my waist, placed his hand on my right arm instead, and gently stroked it up and down.
“She would have liked you,” I managed to say before my voice broke at the end of the sentence and Davian pulled me completely into his arms. “She would have liked you, but it's too late,” I sobbed, burying my face in his neck, clawing at his shirt with my uninjured hand, decorated with ink writing.
Davian was careful, stroking my back before pressing his lips into my hair.
I listened to his steady, albeit quickened, heartbeat, letting it calm me, breathing in his intoxicating scent as subtly as possible.
“I would have liked to have known her,” he said after a while.
“She would be forty now.”
Davian snorted.
I looked up.
His jaw seemed... tense?
“She would be the same age as Lily.” He swallowed and I stared, fascinated, at his Adam's apple in front of me. “Lara's mother.” I looked up again, took a step back and brushed my hair back behind my ear. “But never mind…”
His ex seemed to be on his mind. Something that should have left me with a heavy feeling, but all I felt was pity.
Davian shoved his hands into the pockets of his black suit pants, staring at the rounded gravestone in front of us, and I turned back to the grave.
Another Day in Paradise
Siddhartha Khosla, Carol Kuswanto
“Schildhauer. Was your mother also of German descent?”
Smiling sadly, I allowed myself to remember her voice and the tears that followed.
She had always sung songs from her homeland to me. In our mother tongue. Disturbing songs, like Maik?fer flieg. Disturbing, just like the German fairy tales that had been used to teach children manners and life lessons back then.
Der Suppenkasper and Max & Moritz were just two of countless bedtime stories that my father had burned at some point. They had been heirlooms from my grandmother, bound in red and brown linen, and decorated with real gold embossing. Among them had been fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm.
“She was from Germany. She worked there as a circus performer. At some point, her circus came to the USA.” Davian listened, his gaze fixed on the gravestone. “She worked as an acrobat and had many admirers who sent her flowers after the show... until she fell.”
She used to have countless pictures from that time.
Pictures that were now hidden in the Richters’ attic.
I would have liked to show them to Davian, to look at them myself once more, to remember a vibrant woman who had fallen in love with life.
A woman I never had the chance to meet. She had already died before I was born…
“She had to find something else to do, couldn't do gymnastics anymore, couldn't do any strenuous sports. So she left the circus life behind.”
From then on, things went downhill.
“Joseph and she met in a bar where she was trying to make ends meet. I would love to know what sweet nothings he whispered in her ear to get her to let him fuck her through the beds of expensive hotels.”
Davian looked down at the ground, but I just stared at the inscription on her gravestone.
Josephine Schildhauer.
She deserved better.
“I was an accident. Not for her, at least not at first. She hadn't expected me, because her injury had actually robbed her of the ability to have children. She always called me her little miracle.”
I smiled sadly, close to tears.
“But he didn't want me, started to hate her from the day she chose me. He wanted to pressure her into aborting me, revealed to her that she was just a cheap affair, and it shocked her so much that she ran away. But he found her and offered her money to get rid of me, which she refused.”
Davian seemed lost in thought, as well focused on her name.
“He stayed. After I was born, he came to the house he had bought for us every other weekend to tyrannize her, and stare at me as if I were a failed experiment that he still had to figure out how to get rid of.”
He had often scolded me, forbidden me from doing many things, and even yelled at me back then whenever I had painted on the walls, laughed too loudly, or torn holes in my clothes while romping around in the garden.
“Until I started school, he tried to ignore me, came to sleep with my mother to escape his life as a lawyer and not have to worry about his reputation for a few hours.
But he didn't love Mama. He just fucked her. Three times a day for a minute. Whether I was there or not. Until she started drinking.”
Davian's stare burned into my cheeks, but I continued.
“When I turned seven, Mama stopped calling me her little miracle. My grades were bad, I often came home late from playing with the neighbor kids in the woods, got into fistfights with boys at school, and no matter how often my father forced me to do my homework, I didn't get better, only worse.”
That time had been the best of my life. I had often played in the woods until ten in the evening, imagining that I was in Wonderland with all my invisible friends, where we had made plans against Captain Hook, wearing antler masks.
The neighbor kids had never existed because they hadn't wanted to play with me.
“He didn't ignore me anymore. Because I had his last name and the teachers knew him. That bothered him. He wanted me to be good, to not stand out. At least not in a negative way. But I disappointed him. Too many parent-teacher conferences. Too often at risk of failing. Too often crying instead of obediently nodding and doing what he told me to do.”
Davian looked back at Mama's gravestone.
“Whenever he could, he trashed my room, destroyed everything I had painted and crafted, tore up my reading books, threw dishes. At Mama. At me.”
I hoped I wasn't overwhelming Davian.
“Mama cried every day, drank more and more.
And even after she won custody of me, it didn't stop.
I let her be, hoping things would get better, doing the housework for us.
For a while, when she couldn't get out of bed, I made her canned soup every day until she had enough strength to buy alcohol again. But nothing changed.”
I grimaced through my tears, not wanting to break down again.
“One day, I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, asking her why we didn't just go to Germany to her family and start a new life there.”
I shook my head, remembering the woman in the smelly clothes, the greasy hair, and the stench of alcohol that still made me feel nauseous to this day.
“Her eyes were so empty. She laughed and all she said to me was, There are no new lives, Spatz. There is only one life. And my life is over.”
My voice broke. And again, I felt Davian's gaze on me.
To say it all aloud felt unbearably painful. And yet, strangely liberating.
Without Davian, I probably would have taken it to my grave.
How could I ever thank him for being there? For listening? For caring? What had I done to deserve him?
The truth? I didn't.
“That was the time when she always said she would drive to a bridge and jump. But she never did.”
I had made sure of that.
“Three years ago, she started eating less and less. She was in the emergency room twice for alcohol poisoning. She even locked herself in...”
“She locked you out,” Davian interrupted me.
I dared to turn to him.
“Lara told you about that?”
He pressed his lips together, looked at the ground, and scuffed his black leather Oxfords on the earth.