by Tawna Fenske
“Dead,” Meg repeated, and Kyle realized it was the first word either of them had spoken in three minutes. She sounded like she was testing it out to see how it sounded. Not good, apparently. Her eyes filled with tears and he watched her throat working to swallow the lump he could guess was just like the one that had been lodged in his throat for the last twenty minutes.
“Dead,” Kyle confirmed. “So now’s really not a good time.”
“My God, Kyle—I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I heard it was just a simple procedure and I thought—”
She stopped there, not vocalizing what she’d thought, but giving Kyle a pretty good idea just the same. Tears were spilling down her cheeks in earnest now, and part of him wanted to pull her into his arms, to offer her some small measure of comfort or to claim some for himself.
But this was Meg, for God’s sake.
Meg.
She was still beautiful, even with red-rimmed eyes and her nose running like a faucet. He should offer her a tissue or show her the door but he just stood there like a moron noticing the way her auburn curls still fell in chaotic ringlets around her shoulders and her pale-blue T-shirt clung and dipped and curved around breasts he’d always done his damnedest not to look at.
Dammit, what kind of jerk was he? Was he seriously ogling her while his brother was being wheeled to the hospital morgue by an orderly who looked like Napoleon Dynamite?
It’s not like this is the first time you’ve had inappropriate thoughts about Meg.
Which was true, but now was hardly the time to do it again.
“Look, I don’t know what to say,” he said.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Meg choked out. “If I’d known—”
A door burst open at the end of the hall, and Kyle swung his gaze away from her and toward the stampede of relatives descending upon them like a pack of bison. Aunt Judy, Uncle Arthur, a cousin whose name escaped him at the moment but he felt pretty sure rhymed with snot. Scott? Lamott?
Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you?
He spotted his mom at the head of the pack with puffy eyes and a crookedly buttoned blouse. She wore one navy shoe and one black one, and the sight of his sophisticated mother looking so undone made Kyle’s heart ball up like the wad of Kleenex she clenched in one fist.
Meg gave a muffled cry beside him, and Kyle turned to see her gripping the balloon ribbons hard enough to carve deep grooves in her fingers. Her mouth fell open and she took a step back as the mob drew closer.
Kyle looked back at his mother, not sure whether to hug her or get out of her way. He was saved from doing either as his mom’s gaze landed on Meg and she thrust one manicured finger toward her former-future-daughter-in-law.
“You!” she barked, her eyes glittering with fury and tears as she swung her gaze from Meg to Kyle. “What is she doing here?”
Ten minutes later, Meg sat sobbing in the driver’s seat, her hair glued to Jess’s lip gloss as she tried not to get snot on her best friend’s cashmere sweater.
“Oh, sweetie,” Jess soothed. “You couldn’t have known. I’m so sorry.”
“I just—dead,” she repeated, not able to come up with any word more suitable than that.
Then again, that one pretty much summed it up.
“I’ve spent the last two years hating him for sleeping with Annabelle,” she choked out. “Just when I was ready to stop hating him—”
“I know,” Jess soothed, petting Meg’s hair. “I know. Two years of hating him and a few days of trying not to hate him is still no match for nearly ten years of loving him.”
Which was true, Meg knew, though it was hard to categorize exactly what she felt now. Grief? Loss? How could she feel those things for someone she hadn’t seen in two years? Someone she’d actively despised, then gradually forgotten, or at least tried to forget. They could have even become friends again, in a perfect world.
“I never got to say I was sorry,” Meg said. “For leaving him at the altar like that. I never apologized.”
“So you’re even,” Jess said, “for the fact that he cheated on you and didn’t think to tell you about it until the night before the wedding. And the fact that you’ve spent the last two years working your ass off to pay for the wedding that never happened.”
“It was my choice.” Meg drew back from the hug and mopped her nose with a stiff Burger King napkin. “No one else should have been stuck with the debt when I was the one who called off the wedding.”
Jess shook her head, and Meg could see she was biting back the urge to argue, or to call Matt a cheating, spineless dickhead. Now was hardly the time for that, so Jess settled for handing her another napkin.
“Between the cheating and the debt, don’t you think that cancels out the runaway-bride thing?” Jess asked.
“I have no idea. Where’s the manual on the checks and balances of adultery and aborted weddings?”
Jess gave a small smile and tucked a curl behind Meg’s ear. “I keep it on a bookshelf in my living room. It’s right next to the wine cabinet. Come on, I’ll show you. But first, get out of the car.”
“What?”
“You’re in no shape to drive. Give me the keys.”
Meg looked down at her hand and realized she was holding the keys in a death grip, along with the strings to the damn balloon bouquet. She dropped the keys into Jess’s palm, then unraveled the ribbons from around her hand.
“Holy cow,” Jess said, poking the deep rivets furrowed into the flesh of Meg’s fingers. “What were you doing with these?”
“Practicing my skills with a garrote, apparently.” Meg winced and felt a fresh surge of guilt rising in her throat. Making a wisecrack about strangulation mere minutes after her ex-fiancé’s death had to be up there on the list of things that would get her a one-way ticket to hell.
Meg let go of the ribbons, releasing the balloon bouquet into the backseat before turning and pushing open the driver’s side door. Her legs were still shaking as she made her way around the car while Jess scooted over the gearshift and got into the driver’s seat. Meg slipped into the passenger seat and buckled her seatbelt, numb to the motions of it all as Jess cranked over the engine.
“It’ll be okay, honey,” Jess said as she backed out of the parking spot. “Is there anyone you need to call? Mutual friends or his college roommates or something?”
Meg thought about it, then shook her head. “It’s not really my place, is it? I’m not part of the family.”
Not anymore, she thought, recalling the coldness in Sylvia Midland’s eyes when she’d spotted Meg outside her son’s room. Even the aunts and uncles she’d met only a handful of times had looked like they wanted to drag her down the hospital hallway by her hair. She could hardly blame them. The last time she’d seen them, they’d been dressed in suits and summer dresses, watching slack-jawed as she turned and bolted from the church, knocking down pew bows as she ran.
They looked like they hated me, she thought. Then and now. The idea was hardly surprising. Wasn’t that why she’d kept her distance all this time?
On her own side, Meg’s family and friends had few kind words to say about Matt. When she was still reeling from his confession and desperate to explain why she’d fled her own wedding, she’d told them about Matt’s affair. It was the sort of thing she’d normally keep private, not wanting to air their dirty laundry or add fuel to her own fear that she’d done something to drive him to cheat in the first place. But she’d told her whole family in a moment of weakness, and the story spread as quickly as their new disdain for Matt.
So they’d drawn the battle lines cleanly between her family and his, unfriending each other’s colleagues and cousins on Facebook and cutting each other’s faces out of family pictures.
The thought gave her a momentary pang of sadness. Part of her had missed the Midland family Christmas cards and his mother’s coq au vin and the quilt rack she’d felt obligated to return.
But she’d never told anyone what she’d misse
d the most about being cut off from the Midland family.
Meg’s brain filled with the stricken look on Kyle’s face as he’d stood there outside his brother’s hospital room. She closed her eyes for a moment. It was enough to flush a fresh wave of tears from her eyes, and Meg opened them again to let the tears flow.
Jess reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’ll take a shortcut. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Thank you,” Meg whispered.
A purple and black polka-dotted balloon bopped her on the side of the head, and Meg shoved it away, crowding it into the backseat with the rest. The motion pushed more balloons forward, creating a burst of brightly colored Mylar shapes bumbling their way toward the front of the car.
“Stop!” Meg shouted.
“It’s okay,” Jess said, ignoring a shark-shaped balloon that bumped the side of her head as she turned down the side street leading away from the hospital. “It’s not bothering me.”
“No, stop the car,” Meg said, frantic now to get rid of the cheery orbs pushing and bobbing and reminding her that nothing would ever be the same again. She grabbed the ribbons as Jess slowed the car.
“What are you doing, Meg? You can’t just let them go. They’re hazardous to wildlife,”
“I know,” she said, pushing open the car door before Jess brought the car to a full stop in the bike lane. “I just need to get rid of them.”
She staggered onto the sidewalk with her fistful of balloons, thinking this was how people went crazy. One minute you’re making friendly overtures to your ex and the next minute you’re stumbling teary-eyed down the road with a balloon shaped like a banana beating you in the back of the head.
Meg looked around while Jess sat silent in the driver’s seat, waiting. She couldn’t pop them. All that racket seemed inappropriate when they were idling here less than a mile from where Matt took his last breath.
Off to the side, a metal bench sat waiting for bus passengers. Meg hurried over, kneeling on the asphalt to cinch the ribbons around one of the legs. Her fingers felt numb and useless, but she managed to tie the knot and stand up again, her knees still wobbly.
There. She surveyed her work, then nodded. Someone else would find them and claim them. Someone else would take them to a sick relative who’d smile and laugh and reach up to touch the plump, colorful shapes.
She turned back to the car and moved around to the passenger side, winded and spent as she dropped into the passenger seat again.
“Feel better now?” Jess asked.
“A little.”
“Probably better than that dead pigeon you almost stepped on.”
Meg turned in her seat to look behind them as Jess pulled away from the curb. Get well soon! the balloon commanded the corpse of a gray and green bird.
Meg closed her eyes and slid down in her seat, wondering if pigeons mated for life the way doves did, wondering if she had any right at all to feel this undone.
CHAPTER TWO
Kyle’s hands barely touched the steering wheel, his whole body looser than he actually felt. He’d had twenty-four hours to digest the news of his brother’s passing, which mostly left him feeling like a complete fuckup at this whole grief thing.
Shouldn’t he be tense? Or teary-eyed or ripped in two? He felt all those things, to some degree, but mostly he felt numb.
He’d left his mother’s house right after breakfast, determined to escape the crying and arguing and muffins that left greasy puddles in their cardboard box. He didn’t fault his family for their grief. It just didn’t look anything like his grief.
Turning the car down a narrow side street, Kyle realized he had no actual destination in mind. Instinct had taken him back toward the hospital, which made no sense at all. Matt was long gone from there, probably in a crematorium at the funeral home or something. He tried to picture it in his mind, hoping the image might tap into the fountain of grief he knew should be bubbling inside him.
Instead, he found himself wondering what a crematorium looked like.
You’re losing it, man.
He blinked to clear his head, turning to look toward the hospital even though Matt wasn’t there anymore. His eyes landed on a droopy balloon bouquet tied to a bus stop bench on the side of the road.
Get well soon! a shiny balloon declared over the body of a dead pigeon. Kyle stared at the balloons. They looked like the ones Meg had brought yesterday, but that was silly. They couldn’t be hers. His mind just wanted an excuse to latch on to an image of her.
He didn’t realize he was smiling until he caught sight of his own reflection in the rearview mirror. Then he felt like a dick. What the hell kind of guy smiles the day after his brother dies?
He tried focusing on the dead pigeon instead, hoping to conjure some tears even if they were for the wrong reason. Dammit, he owed Matt some show of emotion.
But the memory of that bird just led him to another one of Meg. Thanksgiving Day, more than three years ago. The weather had been dreary and the whole family had gone out for a post-meal walk. She’d spotted a dead dove on the ground, then looked up to see a second bird on the power line above. Her eyes had filled with tears, and Kyle stopped walking to make sure she was okay.
“They mate for life,” she’d said.
Matt had caught her hand in his, tugging her along. “Come on, you’ll get bird mites.”
But Meg had pulled her hand free. “Doves mate for life,” she’d repeated, looking from the dead bird to the live one cooing overhead. “That one must be the partner.”
Kyle remembered feeling something heavy and hot pressing against his chest. He’d looked at her face clouded with sentiment, and he’d ached to take her in his arms.
But he hadn’t, obviously. For crying out loud, she’d been on the brink of becoming his brother’s wife. The most he could offer was a squeeze of her hand as he moved ahead and fell into step beside his parents.
But he’d seen tears glinting in her eyes over pumpkin pie that evening and knew she was thinking of the bird.
He shook his head now to clear the rest of the memory. The part he’d wondered about ever since. He turned the car down another narrow street. He hadn’t realized where he was driving until that moment, but now it all made sense. Pathway Park. It was one of Matt’s favorite spots. He used to boast it was the best place in Portland to ogle joggers in skimpy sports bras and short shorts.
As Kyle pulled into the parking lot, he had to admit his brother had a point. A buxom brunette trotted past wearing something that looked more like an eye patch than a sports bra, and Kyle tried not to stare as he got out of the car.
Remembering the ducks that paddled the river looking for handouts, he rummaged in his backseat looking for a pack of crackers or something to throw for them. He found a Ziploc bag of marshmallows and tried to remember how they’d gotten there. A camping trip with Cara; that was it. They’d made s’mores and snuggled under a green wool blanket just a few months before they split in August. The memory seemed hollow, like it belonged to someone else. Kyle clenched the baggie in his fist and wondered if ducks ate marshmallows.
He shoved the car door shut and turned toward the park. The air was somewhere between crisp and comfortably tepid, and he smelled crumbled leaves and river water on the light breeze. His boots sank into soggy grass and the squish of it beneath his soles gave him an odd sort of comfort. He took a few steps forward, glancing at the blonde in a pink sports bra who bounced past on his right.
“Hey, there,” she called grinning at him over her shoulder. “Love that shirt.”
“Thanks.” Kyle looked down to see he was wearing the same plain white T-shirt he’d dug out of the hamper the day before. He looked back up to see the blonde jogging in place a few feet away.
“Let me amend that,” she said, brushing a perfect sheen of sweat from between her breasts. “I love the way you fill out that shirt.”
“Uh, thanks?”
The blonde laughed. “My name’s Stacey, and if you’
d like to go out sometime—”
“Actually, Stacey, now’s not a great time.”
“I didn’t mean now, silly. Obviously I’d want to shower first.” She shot him a suggestive look, probably waiting for him to say something flirtatious about the shower.
But Kyle just stood there, biting back the urge to tell her he wasn’t in the mood for a soapy grope-fest with a stranger the day after his brother died. Then again, his brother would have been the first person to hit on a woman no matter who died. Maybe this was a sign from Matt.
“Maybe later,” Kyle said, shuffling past her and making a beeline for the north end of the park. There was a bench he remembered on a ledge overlooking the river and a path fringed with evergreens. Matt always liked sitting there, claiming it had the best view of the joggers. The female joggers. Kyle wasn’t in the mood for ogling, but he did feel like finding a connection to his brother.
What he didn’t expect to find was Meg.
He spotted her instantly, her rust-colored ringlets blowing behind her as she sat silhouetted against the river, shoulders hunched in a chocolate-colored poncho he knew would match her eyes. He stood there for a few beats, staring at the back of her head, wondering what drew her here to this same bench he’d been aiming for.
The river twinkled like broken glass in the faint haze of sunlight seeping through the clouds. A pair of swans chugged past near the riverbank and Kyle remembered the doves again.
Meg turned then like she knew he’d been watching her. He was right, the poncho did match her eyes, and though they were a little puffy, he was relieved to see they looked dry. At the moment, anyway. She blinked at him, then gave a small wave. He was walking toward her before he’d made up his mind to do that.
“How did you know?” she asked, her voice soft as the underside of a maple leaf.
“Know what?”
“That this was our spot.” She shoved her hands between her knees and gave him a sheepish sort of smile. “Matt and I used to come here all the time. He said he found the ducks soothing.”
