True North

by Robin Huber

  The only thing that’s missing is Brandon.

  When I saw the cemetery yesterday, it caught me off guard. I wasn’t ready to go see him yet. But today, I’m ready. I think.

  “I’m going to go see Brandon today,” I say tentatively to my mom, who sits up over her plate of scrambled eggs and gives me a small smile.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want some company?”

  “No. I want to go alone, if that’s okay.” I sip my coffee, hoping she doesn’t mind.

  “Yeah, honey, that’s okay.” She lowers her eyes to her newspaper again. “I think it’s a good idea.”

  I finish my oatmeal, take my bowl to the sink, and head upstairs to get dressed. I take a quick shower and pick out my outfit—a sundress and sandals for what will certainly be a warm day. I curl loose waves into my hair, which the humidity will likely knock out, and let them fall down my back anyway. I take a little extra time with my makeup, which I carefully inspect in the mirror.

  He can’t see you.

  I roll my eyes and grab my purse.

  * * *

  I walk through the cemetery, holding a bouquet of blue hydrangeas—Brandon’s favorite. Once, when he was little, he picked all the blue hydrangeas in our yard because he said blue was his favorite color. My mom got so upset because there was nothing left but stems. I smile, remembering his little voice.

  I walk under the giant oak trees, noticing the way the sunlight illuminates the Spanish moss that hangs from their wide, weepy branches, casting shadows on the sprawling green lawn that’s covered in headstones. Some of them lay flat and others stand tall. In between the graves, the manicured grass is sprinkled with flowering crepe myrtles and magnolia trees that are in full bloom. I close my eyes and breathe in the smell of my childhood. Just like the salty marsh, the delicious lemony scent of the magnolia blossoms warms my heart. The sunshine on my shoulders is another welcome comfort.

  It’s been years since the last time I made this walk, but I follow the familiar path to Brandon’s grave. When I see his headstone, my heart falters, pushing aside the nostalgic thoughts of my childhood. I take a deep breath as I get closer and try to swallow down the guilt that’s suddenly choking me.

  I shouldn’t have stayed away so long.

  I drop my bag on the cement bench by his grave and kneel down in front of his marble headstone, tracing my finger over the words engraved in it.

  In Loving Memory

  Brandon Thomas Dalton

  March 28, 1991 – August 15, 2012

  If tears could build a stairway, and memories

  a lane, we’d walk right up to heaven and

  bring you home again.

  “I’m so sorry, Brandon. I’m so sorry,” I cry over and over, pressing my palm to the cool marble. I’m racked with guilt, not just because I haven’t visited his grave in so long, but because I’ve barely even spoken to him the last few years.

  I let the tears flow out of me until the heaviness in my heart begins to lighten. I’ve cried more in the last two weeks than I have in the last two years, but each time I have a breakdown like this, I feel a little bit better.

  With a final ragged breath, I place the flowers on top of his headstone and turn toward the bench to get a tissue from my bag, but I’m startled when I look up and see a man standing behind me.

  I blink up at the tall stranger, who’s staring at me with golden brown eyes. His wavy brown hair is falling slightly over his forehead and his square jaw is clenched tight. His cupid’s bow lips are pushed into a small pout and his broad chest and shoulders are bouncing up and down under his white T-shirt. I’m intensely aware that I’m breathing just as hard. My heart feels like it’s in my throat, racing like a wild stallion. I watch his full lips part, but he doesn’t say anything. After a long, silent second, he drops his head, turns around, and begins to walk away. And I’m flooded by an emotion I haven’t felt before—a mix of elation and grief. It washes over me like a tsunami, bringing a fresh wave of tears with it.

  “Gabe,” I call, and he pauses. “Please...don’t go.”

  His shoulders rise and fall a few times, and then he turns around and slowly walks toward me again. My thoughts stammer around my head as I take him in. My Gabriel, but bigger. Much bigger. The muscles in his arms and shoulders are thick and well defined. And his face...it’s the face I know, but more sculpted, more masculine. Beautiful.

  He stands in front of me and all I can do is stare up at him in disbelief. I forgot how tall six-four is. He towers over me. “Gabe,” I say his name again, still shocked.

  “Liv,” he says my name curiously, but it’s like a thousand symphonies playing in my head. “What are you doing here?” His voice is deeper than I remember, and he has a strong southern drawl. Was it always that strong?

  “Um”—I shake my head and glance at Brandon’s headstone—“I’m visiting my brother. I...needed to see him.”

  “I mean, what are you doing in St. Simons?” He looks confused.

  “Oh. I, um...your mother didn’t tell you? I’m back. I moved back. Yesterday, actually. I’m staying with my parents. I don’t know for how long, but—” I force myself to stop rambling. “I thought my mom would have told yours...”

  He stares at me silently and my eyes follow his long, tan arms to a six-pack of beer that he’s holding in his hand. I didn’t notice it before, probably because my eyes were too busy taking in the view of his face. I eye the bottles curiously.

  “For Brandon,” he explains. “I come here sometimes.” He shrugs his wide shoulders. “I like to have a beer with him and...talk,” he says tentatively.

  “Really? You do that?” I fight back more tears and force a small smile.

  He nods and shoves his other hand in his pocket. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were—I should go.”

  “You don’t have to,” I say impulsively. “You can stay, if you want.” As soon as I say it, apprehension replaces my initial shock.

  “Um. Okay,” he says with equal reluctance.

  My bewildered heart is doing laps inside my chest. It’s exalting and exhausting at once. I think I might be feeling every emotion, and maybe some that haven’t been defined yet. I eye the beer in his hand again, hoping alcohol might numb whatever unnamed feeling this is. “Mind if I join you?” I don’t mean to intrude on his alone time with Brandon, but I was here first. This is technically my alone time with Brandon.

  He shakes his head and hands me a bottle. I take it and sit down on the bench, and I watch him twist the cap off another bottle and place it in front of Brandon’s headstone. I choke a little on the lump in my throat, but swallow it down. He sits beside me and opens a beer for himself with the comfort and ease of a grown man who probably drinks beer regularly—not only at parties, like when we were in college.

  A man. So strange. He’s twenty-nine now. I didn’t expect him to look like he did the last time I saw him—it’s been seven years—but I can’t stop staring at him. His thighs are wide in his jeans and even his hands look bigger wrapped around his beer bottle.

  “Want me to open that for you?” he asks in his deep voice, pointing to my beer.

  “Thanks.” I hand it to him and he twists the top off with ease.

  We take turns sipping our beers, neither of us speaking, until the silence is too much for me to take. I have so many questions, but I don’t know how to ask any of them. They’re too intimate to ask a stranger, someone I don’t even know anymore.

  But he’s not a stranger.

  I peek up at him. He’s Gabe. The boy I fell in love with when I was sixteen. The boy I thought I was going to spend my entire life with. The boy I nearly lost and spent the better part of a year taking care of and nursing back to health. The boy who broke every promise he ever made to me.

  I take a few deep breaths to steady myself and then I turn to face him. His eyes meet mine and his lips part like he wants to say something. But, like before, he doesn’t. He just stares at me,
making my stomach twist with angst that reminds me of the months I spent after the accident trying to coax him out of the depression he fell into. He was consumed with sadness and guilt over losing Brandon, but the shame he endured was more debilitating than his injuries. News stories that covered the accident made him out to be some sort of monster, disregarding his spotless record and high academic achievements. They only saw the mistake he made, and they didn’t allow for redemption.

  Although most people in our small community offered words of sympathy and reassurance, Gabe was trapped beneath the weight of the occasional dirty look or unforgiving comment. Just as the media had done, Gabe allowed his mistake to erase everything good in his life. Including me.

  As the sadness, guilt, and shame turned to embarrassment and anger, it was hard to find the line between depression and TBIPD. Traumatic Brain Injury Personality Disorder.

  It was a risk we were all aware of, but as time passed, it became evident that Gabe’s personality had been affected. It didn’t matter how many times I told him that I loved him, that everything would be okay, that he would get better over time, he didn’t believe me. He didn’t want to believe me. He gave up on the hopes and dreams we shared, he gave up on college, and he gave up on me.

  His injury affected more than his personality, though. It impacted his motor skills and his cognitive thinking. It was disheartening, to say the least, to see someone who’d aced all his college math courses struggle to solve a simple equation. But over time, it slowly began to come back to him. I was sure he’d be able to return to Raleigh and finish college, that we’d be able to finish college together...eventually. But he made it clear that he didn’t see a future with me anymore.

  I’ve spent seven years quietly agonizing over what happened between us back then, wondering how he could stop loving me so suddenly, how he could cut me out of his life so abruptly, wondering what I did, or what I could have done differently. And now, after all this time, there’s a chance I might actually find out.

  Part of me is terrified to ask Gabe anything. I don’t know how he’ll react and I don’t want him to leave. The fact that I feel this way, after everything that happened, scares me even more. But I can’t sit here with all these unanswered questions festering and eating away at me. I used to know everything about him and now I know nothing. It’s overwhelmingly frustrating. I don’t know if my Gabriel is in there or not, but that’s who I’m going to talk to, because he’s the only Gabe I know.

  “You’ve changed since the last time I saw you,” I say, smiling softly over my nerves. “You look different.”

  He gives me a tentative smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “You look different too.”

  I look down at my lap. I’ve gained ten pounds since college, but I like being a little curvier.

  He sips his beer and says, “You look good, Liv.”

  I press my lips together and try to ignore the butterflies that flock to my stomach. “So do you.” I look at the place in his hair where he had surgery. “You can barely see the scar now.”

  “Hence the longer hair,” he says, looking up toward his forehead.

  “I like it. It’s different, but good.” I smile softly and look down at my lap again.

  After a few uncomfortable seconds, we both say, “So—”

  “Sorry, go ahead,” Gabe prompts.

  “Oh, um, I was just going to say that I heard you’re working with my dad now.”

  “Uh-huh.” He sips his beer.

  “Uh-huh,” I repeat, looking up at him curiously. “What exactly are you doing for him?”

  “I’m helping with a new furniture line.”

  “That’s great, Gabe.”

  “It’s not really what I thought I’d be doing. But as far as being a physical therapist goes...well, let’s just say that if I never see another PT for the rest of my life, that’d be just fine.” He laughs grimly and I let out a strangled sigh. He underwent so much physical therapy after the accident. Just thinking about it dredges up a lot of stressful memories.

  “What about you? I heard you got your English Lit degree. You putting it to good use?”

  “Trying.” I keep my answer short. The last thing I want to do is talk about how I went back to Raleigh and finished college without him.

  “I’m glad. You always were a bookworm.”

  I smile over the ache in my heart. He knows me better than anyone and has an index file of my history at his fingertips. I glance up at him and see a glimpse of the boy I used to love in his eyes, and the shards of my broken heart scrape painfully inside my chest, making it difficult to breathe. I chew the corner of my mouth and say impassively, “I don’t work on books.” Like the rest of my adult life, my career hasn’t gone as planned.

  “Oh.” His eyes move off to the distance, but I can see the disappointment in them, and it fills me with sadness. The accident changed the trajectory of our lives, but Gabe changed the trajectory of mine even further. Did he really expect me to go on with the plans we made together...by myself? Did he really think I could? The thought fills me with frustration and hurt. Especially now.

  I always imagined what this day would be like. I imagined what Gabe would look like, what I would say to him. I assumed he would be fragile—like he was after the accident. I thought I might actually feel sorry for him. But he’s not fragile. He’s strong, so much stronger than I ever could have imagined. And I don’t feel sorry for him. I feel angry.

  “Well, it’s not too late,” he says, oblivious to the storm brewing inside me.

  Yes, it is. It’s seven years too late.

  I pick at the label on my beer bottle, trying to still the emotions that are sloshing around inside me. But I can’t. I realize now that I’ve been perpetually stuck for seven years, not because I was in Raleigh, or because I didn’t love my job—or Travis for that matter—but because I never got the closure I needed to move on.

  I loved Gabe unconditionally. There’s nothing he could have done that would have changed that. And if I’m being honest with myself, there still isn’t. I’ll always love him for who he was before the accident. And I’ll always forgive who he became after it, because it’s not his fault.

  As much as I want closure, as much as I need closure so I can finally move on with my life, I’m not ready yet. Maybe I’ve been fooling myself all these years, clinging to a glimmer of hope that something could change, that somehow things could go back to the way they were, but I’m not ready to sacrifice that hope for the sake of forgiveness.

  “I’m sorry”—I shake my head and hold in a breath that promises to bring a flood of tears with it—“I thought I could do this, but I have to go.” I grab my bag and stand up. I suddenly have the urge to get as far away from him as possible. “It was good to see you,” I squeak out, leaving him sitting alone with a confused look on his face.

  I don’t look up until I fall into my car and shut the door. Asking Gabe to stay was a knee-jerk reaction, an automatic reflex triggered by seven years of separation. I was just so happy to see him again. I was overwhelmed. But I wasn’t thinking about the consequences.

  I drop my head to my steering wheel.

  That was not what I imagined at all.

  Chapter 6

  Gabe

  I sit alone on the bench by Brandon’s grave, frozen by the painful truth that Liv couldn’t stand to sit next to me for another second. It’s what I feared, what I expected, but it still hurts so damn much.

  I’d do anything to go back and change our last day together. If she only knew that. If she knew how much it hurt me to say the things I said to her. But it was the only way to get her to go—so she could start living her life and stop wasting it taking care of me. The accident took away my future, but I’d be damned if it was going to take hers too. It hurt like hell to tell her I didn’t love her anymore, but it was deserved pain. At least, I thought so at the time.

  I was so messed up back then. Guess I probably always will be, to some extent. But it got p
retty ugly those first few months after the accident. I struggled with Brandon’s death. We all did. But the physical and mental challenges I faced during my recovery didn’t help my state of mind. Aside from the fact that my head looked disfigured and my leg was in a cast up to my hip, I struggled with my motor skills. I couldn’t button a shirt or tie my shoes, I couldn’t hold a pencil. Frustration doesn’t even begin to describe how that felt. Later, when the cast came off my leg, I still bumped into everything. There were so many bruises on my body, it looked like I had some sort of blood disorder. That went on for months.

  I spent so much time in physical therapy that year, I didn’t have time to think about much else. But I eventually regained my motor skills and I learned how to walk in a straight line again, thanks to the physical therapists who stuck with me, no matter how much of a pain in the ass I was. And then I had plenty of time to think about how badly I messed up my life...and Liv’s.

  In the beginning, my parents kept the news stories hidden from me, along with my phone, seeing as how I could barely hold it, so I didn’t see all the social media posts and commentary that labeled me a murderer. But it was only a matter of time before I saw what people were saying. Once it got out that I had been racing, people from near and far said I deserved what I got and that my head injury was karma getting back at me. Some said I deserved to lose my future. Even those in my own community, who knew it was an accident, looked at me differently. It’s been nearly eight years and I still remember the fear, shame, and guilt of seeing my picture embedded in the news stories. Brandon and Liv’s pictures made it into a few of them too, and I couldn’t look at them without feeling nauseous.

  Liv was by my side, broken arm and all, stitches stretched across her cheek for weeks, while I recovered in the hospital. My only comfort was that she was there, usually curled up in a chair she’d pushed up against my bed. We held hands and cried together over Brandon, and I would hold her as best I could when she climbed up into the bed next to me and sobbed on my chest. The nurses tried to separate us a few times, but they eventually gave in when our parents intervened. I think they all knew the only way we were going to get through losing Brandon was together.