by Dani Atkins
“Cathy didn’t look too pleased that you’d offered me this lift.”
“Cathy’ll get over it.” Okay, that was clearly another conversational no-no. But he didn’t drop the theme entirely.
“Cathy and I … you knew about that, didn’t you … I mean before tonight?”
I gave a shrug that I hoped looked nonchalant.
“Sure, Sarah mentioned it … in passing … ages ago.”
His voice suddenly dropped in tone, sounding less self-assured than he had all evening. There was an echo of the boy I had known so well.
“And you were okay with that, were you?”
I may have hesitated for a second longer than I should have, before replying in a tone that was striving for breezy.
“Well, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
He straightened suddenly in his seat, flicked on the ignition and headlamps, and with a briefly instructed “Fasten your seatbelt,” reversed, at speed, out of the parking space. Clearly not the answer he had been hoping for.
As we left the car park, he pointed the car in the direction of my hotel.
“I’m staying at the—”
“I know where you’re staying,” he interrupted.
Oh, this was terrific. Now I had made him mad. At that moment I’d have given anything to have swapped this ride for the tattiest, smelliest cab that could be imagined. I sought for an innocuous topic, but came up empty. There were too many landmines in our history to make chitchat possible. In addition, the painkillers I’d taken for my headache had yet to kick in, so if we had to conduct the fifteen-minute journey in total silence, then so much the better.
I wasn’t going to be that lucky.
At the first set of traffic lights, Matt caught me rubbing my fingers against the bridge of my nose to try to ease the pain.
“You really do have a headache? It wasn’t just an excuse?” I heard the doubt behind the question. It made me snappier than I should have been.
“Yes, I really do.”
“There’s a twenty-four-hour place up ahead, would you like to stop there and pick up something for it?” The unexpected kindness took me by surprise.
“No, it’s fine. I’ve got some pills.” Not that they appear to be working anymore, I silently added.
Several more minutes passed and I was hoping we’d avoided the awkwardness, then he tossed a live conversational grenade.
“Cathy and I … it’s not that serious, you know. More of a convenience thing … I just wanted you to know that.”
I was too stunned for a moment to know how to respond. Eventually I replied: “I very much doubt that Cathy views it that way. Not from the look on her face as we left the table together. And why would you possibly imagine I needed this information?”
He sighed, and I could see he was struggling to find the right words.
“It’s been hard tonight, seeing you again. All of us together again.”
With one notable exception, I thought, but I let that pass. He gave a laugh that had no humor in it.
“It’s just that all night I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I was sitting next to the wrong person.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Should I feel flattered by the compliment, or offended that he was declaring such feelings when he was still clearly in a long-term relationship with someone else?
“Matt, I think you’re just getting caught up in the nostalgia of the reunion, or something. You’re confusing the past and present here in a pretty drastic way. We were just kids back then.” My voice lowered and trembled slightly. “Something terrible happened and things changed. We changed.”
“We’re not kids now,” he vowed, and without warning, his hand left the steering wheel and reached over to cover mine on my lap. I jerked it back as though I’d been burned.
“No. Don’t do that. You’re with someone else, you’re not free …” I carried on quickly when I saw he was about to offer something then: “And even if you were, it wouldn’t be any different. I still feel the same way as I did when we split up.”
That drew his attention from the road and he turned to stare at me in disbelief.
“Are you still blaming yourself about Jimmy? Dear God, tell me that isn’t true. Not after all these years.”
“How long it’s been is immaterial,” I began, wondering how many more people in my life I would have to keep justifying this to. “If he hadn’t been trying to rescue me, then he’d still be here now.”
“And you wouldn’t be.”
I shrugged.
“So this is how you intend to repay that debt? By shutting yourself away like some dried-up old spinster all your life? Christ, Rachel, you’re only twenty-three years old!”
The speed of our car increased exponentially with his anger.
“And do you think this is what Jimmy would have wanted, for you to commit yourself to living a life all alone?”
“I’m not alone,” I refuted, sounding a little too much like a sullen teenager.
“Well, have there been boyfriends?”
His attack stung, and I mindlessly sought to sting him right back.
“Hardly.” I swept back my hair to reveal the scar by the light of the streetlamps. “Not exactly a turn-on, now is it?”
He swore then, several times, my words seeming to have made him angrier than anything I had said before.
“Don’t you do that to yourself. Don’t bring it all down to that.”
The car jerked sharply into a narrow graveled forecourt, and I noticed with surprise that we had reached my hotel. He braked sharply in a little flurry of gravel chippings. His rage seemed to fade away with the thrum of the engine, and he swiveled toward me, reaching across the space between us to lift my chin and tilt my face toward him.
“This scar …” His finger traced down its raised white-lightning path, almost reverently. “It’s nothing. It’s not who you are.”
I pulled back from his touch, scared by the intimacy. I was tired, I told myself, and in pain, otherwise I would never have allowed him to have got that close. “Your girlfriend doesn’t think it’s nothing. She thinks I should get it fixed.”
“Cathy can be … a little thoughtless. She only said that because she’s afraid of you. And jealous.”
“She’s what? But why?”
“Because she knows I’ve never really got over you. That whatever she and I might have, it’ll never be enough. There’s no future in it for us.”
Things had gone much too far. I pushed him back so he was more squarely in his own seat.
“And there’s none for us either, Matt,” I answered firmly. “Please don’t say this stuff to me, not again. I don’t want to hurt you, and whatever she might think, I don’t want to hurt Cathy either. If you’re not happy with her … then leave. Don’t use me as the excuse. I’m not the solution to your problems.”
“It’s not that—”
But I wouldn’t let him finish.
“Look, Matt, I don’t know where this has all come from, but whatever you think was going to happen between us, well, it isn’t.” I tried to temper the rejection so the remains of the weekend would be at least bearable. “Part of me will always …” I hesitated, anxious not to use the word love, “have feelings for you. You were an important part of my past. But that’s it. An awful thing happened, not just to Jimmy, but to all of us. And this, this feeling that I can’t be with anyone … for now, at least … well, this is how I deal with it.”
“It’s hiding. Not dealing!”
I stayed silent. That one had been used on me before. But his next words could not be so easily ignored.
“And you really think this is what Jimmy would have wanted? To see you by yourself? For Christ’s sake, Rachel, he was so in love with you he sacrificed his own life to save yours!”
I gasped, struck by a pain inside my heart that dwarfed my headache to a mere irritation. He saw my reaction and was stunned by it.
“What? You didn’t know? You couldn�
��t see it written all over his face whenever he looked at you?”
This was too much. To hear this again, for the second time in one day, was more than I could bear. I shook my head in denial, my eyes blurring with tears.
“You’re wrong. So wrong. We were friends … just friends,” I whispered softly.
“For you, maybe. But not for him. Everyone else could see it. It was so obvious.”
I was so confused that my pained brain could hardly function.
“It’s not true. I would have known. And he never said anything … not once, not in all those years …”
Something stirred at the back of my mind. An elusive memory, just out of reach.
“Why do you think he hated me so much?”
“He didn’t hate you.” I jumped to my lost friend’s defense, but even as I uttered the denial, I had to acknowledge that there had always been a frisson of antagonism between the two of them.
Once more Matt reached out, securing my face between his strong hands. “I had you, and he didn’t. There must have been times when he found that unbearable.”
My heart twisted at the pain I had unknowingly caused. This didn’t make anything better at all. It made it a million times worse. I pulled back before he could kiss me, for I was certain that was his next move.
“I can’t do this, Matt. Don’t do this to me. It’s just not fair.”
By this time my scrabbling hand had finally found the door handle. I flung open the door, allowing cold December air into the car. I was unbuckled and out of my seat before he could join me on the passenger side.
Perhaps he could see the distress he’d caused, or perhaps the brighter illumination from the hotel allowed him to see I really did feel as sick as I’d been claiming, for he sounded conciliatory.
“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, Rachel.”
I shook my head.
“Just go. Go back to the restaurant. Back to Cathy.”
He nodded, but he didn’t look happy.
“Will you be all right?” His eyes searched my face in concern. “You don’t look very well.”
“I’ll be okay. I just need to sleep off this headache. I’ll be fine.”
I could sense his reluctance to leave me, so I summoned up a manufactured smile from some unknown well of strength. “Go.”
He smiled back. “I’m not going to give up on you, you know,” he promised, getting back in his car. “You drove me off once but I’m not going to give in so easily this time.”
“Go,” I repeated, the entreaty threaded through with a note of desperation. And at last he did, the car sweeping across the forecourt and disappearing into the darkness with a flash of brake lights as it entered the flow of traffic.
As I wearily mounted the three stone steps to the hotel’s foyer, I couldn’t help but think his parting comment had sounded more like a threat than a promise.
WHEN I FINALLY swiped the key card into its slot and entered my hotel room, I was surprised to see that it was only a little after ten o’clock. It felt much later. I kicked off my shoes and sank gratefully onto the bed. Drawing a pyramid of pillows up behind me, I switched off all but the bedside lamp and lay back with my eyes closed. The headache was still at fever pitch, and I was afraid it had settled in for the night. I also knew it was far too soon to take more painkillers; at this rate the bottle would be emptied long before the wedding. I had to start rationing.
I tried for fifteen minutes to clear my mind, but it refused to empty. The day kept spooling through my tortured head in slow motion. I saw again and again the look in Janet’s eyes as she spoke of her dead son and told me how much I had always meant to him. I heard again my own denial, the same denial I had uselessly echoed to Matt when he had made the same claim. I couldn’t believe they were both right. That everyone had been right.
Was it really possible to have been so blind, to have missed such a vital truth in our relationship? These were impossible questions to answer. And the tragedy of knowing I would never, could never, be sure was crumbling my resolve not to allow my thoughts to reach out for Jimmy. I needed him now, at this moment, more than ever; to hear his voice, to look into the smile that always lived in his eyes for me.
Without pausing to make a conscious decision, I swung my legs off the bed and groped around for my shoes. The lateness of the hour didn’t worry me. I knew there was only one place I could go now to ask these questions, to say what I had to say.
THE NIGHT HAD turned even colder when I walked past the bemused doorman who had bidden me good night only twenty minutes before. The cold wind numbed my face as I turned and began walking swiftly down the street. If challenged, I could always claim that I’d taken the walk to find relief from my headache, but in reality I needed an altogether different kind of solace. And the location held no horrors for me. How could it? There was nothing to fear from a ghost when they were someone you loved.
The dark streets were almost deserted; it was too cold and too late for an evening stroll. My shoes crunched on pavements already beginning to glaze with a light frosting of ice. When the wind bit into my face with icy fangs, I burrowed my chin deeper into my scarf and walked into its jaws with steely determination.
I faltered for a second when I rounded the last street corner and the church came into view. It stood alone at the top of a hill, with no shops or houses nearby. Its closest neighbor was the town’s railway station, and that stood almost two miles away. Even on a clear day, the red-brick station building was completely obscured by the churchyard’s high iron railings. Its isolation was perhaps meant to engender a feeling of peace and tranquility, but on this dark December night neither of those emotions was foremost in my mind.
As I approached the large arched gate, I wondered what I would do if it was locked. Climb over? I looked up and surveyed the height of the fence … no, that wasn’t going to happen. Come back in the morning, I supposed. Yet the urgency to make this very real and physical connection with Jimmy was so strong I didn’t think I could wait until first light.
The gate swung open on well-oiled hinges. Strange, I’d felt sure it was going to creak and make the cliché complete.
Once inside the churchyard I felt my courage waver slightly. Was it an act of total madness, to be wandering around a graveyard at this time of night? Wasn’t this just the sort of behavior I’d always ridiculed heroines for in the movies?
A noise from an approaching car startled me, and instinctively I ducked behind a large oak tree to avoid being picked up in its headlights. I wasn’t sure if I was actually committing a criminal offense—like trespass—but winding up at a police station, trying to justify my actions, was not how I planned to end the evening. As soon as the car was out of sight, I drew away from the tree and walked with renewed purpose toward the rear of the church, where the small graveyard was situated.
There weren’t many graves in this part of the cemetery. The larger, older section was around the other side, and I supposed the large crematorium in the next town might account for the comparatively few new markers I could see in this more traditional place of rest. But I knew that Janet would have wanted somewhere close by to visit her son. The easiest way to find him would be to look for the best-maintained plot.
I didn’t have to look at many before I found what I was searching for. Just long enough to read half a dozen moving and heart-wrenching epitaphs as I walked among the granite headstones. DEAREST HUSBAND, BELOVED GRANDMOTHER, MUCH LOVED FATHER. So much grief, so many tears, the frozen soil was saturated with sadness.
Jimmy’s grave was slightly to one side, clearly newer than its neighbors. The headstone was sparkling white marble that seemed to glow under the winter moon’s iridescence. I walked around and steadied myself for a moment before reading his inscription.
JIMMY BOYD
LOST TOO SOON AT 18 YEARS.
CHERISHED SON AND LOYAL FRIEND.
OUR LOVE FOR YOU WILL LIVE ON FOREVER.
A sob broke from me, so raw with grief it s
ounded more animal than human. I felt my knees buckle and I sank onto the cold grass beside his grave. I had come here hoping to voice all of my feelings, but none could reach the surface through the molten lava of pain. I had believed that over the years I had finally accepted Jimmy’s death, but I realized now that all I had done was put a thin plaster over a gaping wound. I was incapable of words, only able to rock slowly back and forth on my knees, repeating his name over and over again.
It was too painful. I wasn’t strong enough, either physically or emotionally, to cope with this grief tonight. It was madness to have come. Still hiccupping soft sorrowful sobs, I started to get to my feet and then swayed forward, only stopping myself from falling by flinging out my hand onto the ice-slick turf. My head felt suddenly strange, too heavy for my neck to hold. Then, giving a small helpless cry, my supporting arm gave way and I fell forward onto the cold, unyielding ground beside the grave.
The pain from my head now encompassed my entire neck and shoulders, and I wondered if I had somehow struck myself on a rock when I fell. But the cold grass beneath my cheek was clear of any obstruction. Very slowly, trying to minimize each movement of my head, I inched back my arms until both hands were flat on the soil on either side of me. I tried to lever myself up but my quivering forearms would not comply. After several abortive attempts, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to get to my feet that way.
Suddenly the danger I was in was terrifyingly obvious. I was lying, sick and virtually immobile, in a deserted graveyard. No one knew I was here; no one was going to miss me—not until the morning at least. I could die here. The thought, so terrifying, managed to pierce through the viselike pain in my head. I had no idea how long it took to die of exposure, or hypothermia. But I did know that I wasn’t going to give up and lie down to die beside the boy who’d lost his life while saving mine.
Trying to ignore the agony in my head, I tried to roll gently onto my side. My progress was slow, each movement sending a paralyzing spasm from my neck. I stopped several times to gather my breath, finding the strength to continue not in my desire to live, but in the knowledge of what losing me would do to my father.
