I open my mouth again, wanting to say so much, but the thoughts devolve into a jumble of words and sadness, too messy to string together. I tighten my grip on the headstone, everything building and building until my broken brain finally erupts. A sharp, stabbing pain courses through my temple as tiny flashes of light radiate inward from the corner of my eye.
Holy fuck.
“Once upon a time there was a boy…,” a voice says from behind me, the words soft enough, gentle enough, to send a scattering of goose bumps up my arm.
At first, through the fog of pain, I think it’s Kim. Another hallucination. But the voice isn’t hers.
I turn quickly, expecting to see someone, but I’m met only with the rustling trees. My vision blurs, then clears. Pain bounces behind my eyes, so I slam them shut, rubbing my temples until it fades enough for me to reach into my pocket and pull out a Tylenol bottle.
I struggle with the child-lock lid before I finally free two pills into my palm and dry swallow them.
But the voice isn’t gone. “He was sad and alone,” it echoes behind me.
This time when I turn around, my head is clear enough that I see a girl in a sunshine-yellow pullover standing a few steps away, by the sea of pink flowers. She has long, wavy brown hair that seems to blow softly in time with the trees behind her.
She studies me with such uncertainty that I have to wonder if the voice came from someone else. But we’re the only two people here.
I rub my eyes and try to get them to focus. Something about her is… familiar. Did she go to Ambrose? I don’t think so. I knew just about everyone who went there, and I definitely think I would remember her.
“Hi,” I say, raising my hand in the world’s most awkward wave.
She turns to look over her shoulder, as if she’s searching for the person I’m actually waving to.
“Do I know you?” I ask when she turns back to look at me. I’m still trying to place her face, my brain running through sports camps and football games and hallways. She shakes her head no, and though I could swear I’ve seen her before, I don’t press the point. “Did you say something? Just now?”
The girl hesitates, her hazel eyes wide with curiosity. Or maybe surprise. Or maybe confusion that I just had to wrestle with a child-lock lid for a whole minute and a half. “I… didn’t think you’d hear me,” she says.
I take a step closer to her, noticing a smattering of freckles along the bridge of her nose. “I heard someone talking. That was you?”
She seems cautious, like she’s unsure whether or not to answer. Her eyes search mine.
I should turn back to Kim’s grave, the whole reason I’m here, but instead words come tumbling out of my mouth. “Once upon a time, right?”
Her eyes lock on mine, and the five words hang between us.
She pushes her hair behind her ear, face flushing. “I… tell stories,” she says as she lightly touches one of the pink flowers.
“Stories? Like… fairy tales?”
“Yes,” she replies, looking back up at me with a small, pleased smile. “Just like fairy tales.”
“That’s cool,” I say as I stop across from her, the pink flowers between us. The toe of one of her yellow Converse traces a small circle in the dirt. When she doesn’t say anything else, I start to talk again.
“What’s your name?” I ask, but her voice overlaps mine, asking, “Does your head hurt?”
My head? I reach for my scar. I thought my long hair was covering it.
I trace my fingers along it. The pain still lingers, but it’s more distant now. “How did you—”
“Marley,” she says, our words overlapping yet again. “My name is Marley.”
Marley. The name’s not familiar, but her face is.
“I’m Kyle,” I say, trying to keep us on one track of conversation instead of two. “Kyle Lafferty.”
She nods and studies my face for a long moment before saying, “Food helps. With headaches.” My gaze lingers unconsciously on her mouth, her lips delicate and pink, curved up at the corners like two rose petals. “Maybe you should eat? It’s lunchtime,” she continues.
A quick, sharp pain darts across my temple, gone before I can even reach up to touch it.
“Do you… want to get lunch?” she asks.
“Oh,” I say, finally catching on. My stomach sinks. I’m not here to make friends. I’m here for Kim. I shake my head and start to turn away from her. “No. Uh, I should go—”
“But you’re hungry,” she counters.
I open my mouth to object, and as if on cue, my stomach lets out a long, low growl. Perfect. Marley smothers a smile. I have to fight the urge to smile back as a laugh tries to make its way out. It’s such a foreign reaction to me right now, to laugh. But it feels… good.
And she’s right. I am hungry. But… going with her to get lunch would mean leaving before I finish talking to Kim. Even though I have no idea what to say, it doesn’t feel right to do anything else.
So if I can’t do that, I should probably just go home.
“Thanks, but I really can’t,” I say, limping past her down the path as I head toward the gates, defeated.
“Oh. You’re leaving,” she says. Something in her voice makes me turn back around.
I’m more than ready to start my long walk home, but she pushes her hair behind her ear, her hazel eyes expectant.
Keep walking.
I want to, but I feel rooted here, my feet completely disobeying my mind.
Marley takes a step closer to me, but when I don’t say anything, she stuffs her hands in her pockets and looks away.
Maybe she’s lonely? A graveyard isn’t exactly a cool place to hang at lunchtime.
I guess I can relate to that. My social life for the last three months has been hanging out with my mom. Sometimes Sam, more recently, but mostly my mom. Probably not the most normal thing an eighteen-year-old guy could be doing, but I don’t even know how to be normal anymore.
I glance at her again. I mean, it’s just lunch. I was going to go home and eat some cereal or something anyway.
She gives me a small smile, as if she knows what I’m thinking. “So…,” she prompts.
“Let’s get lunch?” I ask.
The wattage of her grin could power nine suns. Her eyes seem brighter, the hazel color bolder. More vibrant. Greener.
It’s contagious. Suddenly I’m smiling too. My first real smile in months. It feels good to make someone happy for a change.
“I would like that very much,” she says, and the two of us head down the path together, toward the big iron gates. I hesitate, looking back at Kimberly’s grave as we leave. I don’t know what I expected would happen, but this is definitely not it. I promise her I’ll come back, that I’ll know what to say next time, but her voice stays silent.
9
A few minutes later, I stop short when I realize where we are.
Here? Really? Of all the places I could’ve taken us to, my feet automatically led me to this one, the winding paths of the park giving way to…
“Oh, I love this pond,” Marley says.
I glance sideways at her. “You’ve been here before?”
She nods, and a puzzle piece clicks into place. Maybe that’s why she’s familiar. I must have seen her when I was here with Sam and Kim.
The pond was one of our favorite spots, mostly since it was usually pretty empty in the evening, and definitely empty at night. With no lights around the perimeter, the entire dark pool of water and the trees around it were usually ours and ours alone. We drank bad champagne out of red Solo cups when Kim earned her spot as cheerleading captain, and Sam stood on the rock in the middle, pumping his fist, when he was named to All-States after a killer junior season.
Sometimes Sam and I would come alone if we were killing time after practice, or Kim would meet me here to work through whatever we were fighting about.
Now I wonder if they ever came here, alone. If this was the spot where Kim told Sam about
Berkeley.
“But I go to that side,” Marley says, drawing my attention back as she points across the pond to a small army of ducks, their orange feet standing out against the green blanket of grass. “That’s where my ducks are.”
I don’t know if my eyes are playing tricks on me, but I swear on my good leg that the grass looks greener over there. It’s a stupid metaphor, but I need an excuse to get away from our bench and this clawing feeling in my chest.
“Let’s go to your side, then.” I start walking that way, my eyes meeting Marley’s as I nod across the pond.
I stop to readjust my crutch, and when I glance up, I see that Marley is already halfway around, leaving me completely in the dust.
“Hey!” I call out to her. “Where’s the race?” She spins around to look back at me, her long hair catching in the breeze, the sun outlining her face. It’s like an engineered Instagram photo come to life. A perfect shot that would usually take a hundred tries to get.
I pull my eyes away and point a few feet off the path to a small snack shack, a red-and-yellow sign plastered to the side. “Let’s get lunch,” I say, repeating the words from earlier.
She grins. We head over, slower now, to the small stand, where each of us buys a hot dog and fries. I get a Coke, but Marley goes for their iced tea with mint, grown fresh at the small community-run garden in the park.
“Mint iced tea is my favorite. Especially in the summer,” she says as she glances past me to look at the yellowing trees along the path, the first signs of fall starting to appear all around. “I’ve only got a few weeks left to enjoy it.”
I try to balance my plate and watch as she gets an extra tiny paper plate for her condiments. She carefully divides the ketchup, mustard, and mayo on it with a barrier French fry between, her brow furrowing with serious concentration.
“What’s with the division? You think mustard and ketchup don’t get along?” I ask as we sit on the sparkling green grass on her side of the pond.
“I like to think of it as… each deserves its own space,” she says, tucking her foot under her leg as she holds up a fry.
So, because I’m an asshole, I dip one of mine into the mound of ketchup on my plate and drag it straight through the mayo. She grimaces as I pop the whole thing into my mouth.
“Okay, but did you taste the French fry at all?”
I chew, frowning as I swallow. Full mayochup taste, but not very much fry. I couldn’t even tell you if it’s made of potato.
I watch as Marley carefully touches the very tip of a French fry to her ketchup before she takes a slow bite. “Sometimes… less is more.”
I shrug and force myself to look away, in the direction of the cemetery. I remind myself I’m just being polite. Doing a good thing. It’s not like I’m ever going to see her again.
But the guilt starts to bubble up with every passing second, the food becoming tasteless.
This is not why I came here. I came to say goodbye to Kim, not to learn proper condiment protocol from a random girl I met inches away from my girlfriend’s grave.
Ex-girlfriend, I correct for the millionth time, even more frustrated.
What am I doing?
I quickly finish off my hot dog, abruptly standing as I push my fries over to her. “Uh, you can have the rest of these,” I say, avoiding her eyes, because I know if I meet them, I’ll probably stay. “I have to go. My mom needs help with—”
“Maybe I’ll see you again,” she says, cutting off whatever lie I was in the middle of coming up with. Like she sees right through it but doesn’t care. She gives me a small, shy smile.
“Maybe,” I say, though I’m almost certain that she won’t.
I turn on my heel and limp away down the path.
* * *
I’m still thinking about the divided condiments and her small dusting of freckles and the green grass by the pond when I walk in the front door almost a half hour later. As if on cue, my mom’s head pops out of the kitchen to greet me, the door barely closed behind me. She eyes my pressed button-down and dress pants.
“Did you finally go to the cemetery today?” she asks, her grip tightening on the spatula in her hand. I let it slip after Sam left that I was thinking about going, and she’s been asking me about it every day since.
“Yeah,” I say curtly, but I don’t elaborate. It wasn’t exactly a rousing success.
“I’m just starting dinner. We can talk about it.”
“I already ate,” I say as I keep pushing toward my room. I’d rather rebreak my femur than talk about my day.
I hobble down the basement steps and pause in front of my closet to put my jacket away. When I open the door, my eyes land on the box tucked into the back corner.
The box filled with what they were able to salvage from my car after the accident.
I pull it out and place it on the floor of my room. I sit across from it for what feels like hours, trying to work up the courage to open it. If I couldn’t get anywhere at the cemetery today, I could at least try to do this.
I find myself staring at a piece of filmy white fabric peeking out from underneath the folded corner. I don’t know what it is, but something about it makes me afraid to unfold the flaps. To see what else is inside.
I work up the nerve to reach out and peel back the layers. As I slowly sift through the contents, the bit of fabric unfurls into a scarf. Underneath it, a purse. A single shoe.
Tiny parts of her, never to be worn again. Never to be wrapped gracefully around her neck, or slung around her shoulder, or kicked off into the corner of my room after a night out.
I dig some more and find the disco ball ornament, completely intact.
I hold it up so the light from my bedside table reflects off it and sends tiny shards of light around the room. A jolt of pain slashes across my scar, and I see the tiny disco ball ablaze as the headlights of the truck rush toward us, the freckles of light dotting Kimberly’s horrified face. My heart rate picks up and my vision blurs.
I drop the ornament, closing my eyes, the pain receding as the memory fades away.
When I open them, my eyes land on a small velvet box at the very bottom. Carefully, slowly, I pick it up and open it to reveal the charm bracelet. I wrap my fingers around it, the cool metal sitting gently in my palm.
My finger traces the charms, finally making its way to the empty links, the spot I saved for our future memories. Memories that she would’ve made alone, at Berkeley.
Now I’m the one making my own memories without her.
I think of Sam’s words the other night at my house. What Kim would’ve wanted. Of my mom and her “Always forward. Never back.” Of Marley, standing by the pond. Our pond.
I place the charm bracelet carefully back inside the box and put it away. It’s too soon. I went today because I thought it’s what Kim would have wanted.
So why does every new minute still feel like such a betrayal of all the old ones?
10
A few days later I find myself back at the cemetery, at Kim’s grave, just wanting to feel close to her. Not in the creepy-vision kind of way, but in more of an I-don’t-know-what-else-to-do kind of way.
I lay a fresh bouquet of tulips next to my wilted irises, but a larger bouquet of them is already resting against the headstone. I wonder how many bouquets Kim’s parents left before I even came once.
At least this time I brought the right flowers.
I take the silky scarf out of my pocket and drape it gently over the headstone, returning it to its owner.
“Well, Kim,” I say as I pull away. “Like always, I’m finding it difficult to figure out what it is exactly you want. I keep thinking I know, but…”
I pause, half expecting her to answer me, but there’s only the sound of the wind in the trees, the leaves rustling above me.
I sit down and rest my back against the headstone, silently waiting for a moment of clarity. Five minutes pass. Then fifteen. But nothing comes. And the same questions roll through my head
like a news ticker that can’t unloop.
I look around and spy the sea of pink flowers two plots away. Pushing myself up, I let my curiosity get the best of me.
I reach out and touch one of the flowers, the petal soft underneath my fingertips.
“Stargazer lilies,” a voice says from beside me.
Jesus Christ. I jump, nearly having a heart attack as I look over to see Marley standing next to me, her long hair pulled back with a yellow hair tie. She plucks the Stargazer I was touching, her hazel eyes studying it.
My eyes study the headstone nestled within the pink blooms.
“My sister. Laura,” Marley says softly, before I can ask.
“She was my hero. Loved me just the way I was,” she says, as if we’re picking up a conversation we’d already begun. She places the flower on top of the headstone. “It didn’t matter to her if I was different. Or sensitive. Or quiet.”
She looks up at me, and I can see finally where the intensity in her eyes is coming from. It’s loss, buried in the deep hazel, a familiar pain wrapped around the irises. I know that pain. It’s like looking in a mirror.
“I wanted to be just like her,” she adds, breaking the gaze and turning her face back to the flowers.
“How old were you when she—”
“We’d just turned fourteen.”
We? But before I can ask, she answers that, too.
“Twins,” she says.
Shit. “What happened?”
“Oh, I don’t tell sad stories,” she says. Then she smiles sadly, and it’s as if a curtain drops behind her eyes.
All right, then. That’s clearly a sensitive topic. We stand in silence for a long moment.
“Oh!” She slips the yellow bag she’s carrying off her shoulder and surprises me by pulling a single flower out of a side pocket. Her eyes clear, and she holds it out to me as if I asked her to bring it.
Cautiously, I reach out and take it, inspecting the circular yellow center, the petals around it perfectly even and white. I actually know this one.
All This Time Page 6
