by Alexa Land
“They knew you wouldn’t understand.”
“Hell no, I don’t understand! How could they be okay with what you did?”
“They started out hating me as much as you do, Cole. Your mom wouldn’t even speak to me. I tried for years to talk to her after I got out of prison, because I had to apologize.”
“What good would apologizing do? My dad is still dead!”
“I know. I live with the guilt of what I did every single day, and I deserve that pain. I made a terrible mistake. I got behind the wheel of my truck when I was drunk, and your dad died as a result of it.” Glen looked devastated as he said, “I hate myself so damn much for that, Cole. But I want you to know I never took another drink after that day, and after I served my time in prison, I got my life together. That doesn’t mean I deserve your mom’s forgiveness, or your Gram’s, and I don’t deserve yours. But somehow, by some absolute miracle, Sonya forgave me anyway. It didn’t happen right away. Neither did falling in love. I know you must feel betrayed right now, but they didn’t mean—”
“Don’t tell me what I feel, because you have no fucking idea! You can’t begin to imagine what it felt like to lose my dad when I was just twelve years old! You also have no clue what it was like to watch his death tear my mom to pieces over the next several years. You don’t know how fucking terrified I was, thinking any day I could lose my mom too, because the grief was too much for her!
“You also don’t know what it was like trying to deal with all of that while getting dropped into the center of this shithole, where I got to be the only black kid, and the only Jewish kid, and one of only two gay kids in this whole goddamn town!” Cole threw his arms out to the sides and yelled, “It was fucking open season when I landed here, Glen! Every bully and bigot within fifty miles zeroed in on me, as if I had a huge target on my chest. And you know who put me here? You! I had a great life in Chicago. I had a dad and mom who loved me, and I felt safe. You took so much more than my father, and that’s already unforgiveable! Absolutely, utterly unforgiveable!”
“I know. God, Cole, I’m so sorry.”
“No. You don’t know! That’s my point! You have no fucking idea! You didn’t just destroy one life when you made the choice to get behind the wheel! The shock waves tore through my mom, and they tore through me, and fuck you for somehow convincing her to forgive you! You don’t deserve her forgiveness! You don’t deserve anything!”
Cole turned and walked away, clenching and unclenching his fists like he was fighting the urge to punch Bowmer in the face. In the next moment, he took off at a dead sprint. I ran after him.
He was so fast. Cole routinely ran over sixty miles a week, and it was tough to keep up. But no fucking way was I going to let him deal with that bombshell alone. It was too much, right on the heels of losing his grandmother.
So I ran flat out, ignoring the burning in my legs and chest. The gap between us kept widening, but I just pushed harder. I had to keep sight of him. He couldn’t carry the burden of that much grief by himself. No one could.
Cole was more than a block ahead of me as we wound through the dusty streets of downtown Gomsburg. At one point, he darted in front of a car, and the driver had to slam on her brakes. My heart, which was already pounding wildly, stutter-stepped with fear. She missed him by about two inches. Cole just kept on running.
After five or six blocks, the streets gave way to open space. The land around Gomsburg was flat and ugly. What at one time must have been lush, green farmland now lay fallow. A huge machine meant for irrigation hunched in the field, like a broken-backed dinosaur left to die after its world ended. The whole town was so sad, so dead, so lifeless. How had Cole grown up here? The town, like the soil around it, was too anemic, too depleted to sustain life. How the hell had he survived?
Cole was a couple hundred feet ahead of me when he froze in his tracks. A few seconds later, I saw what had stopped him. The city cemetery sprawled out around a trio of ancient oak trees. Cole’s shoulders slumped, and I slowed to a walk and gasped for air.
He hadn’t intended that as his destination. I was sure of it. But there it was.
He slowly approached something at the edge of the cemetery. Once I realized what it was, I whispered, “No, no, no.”
The open grave had been freshly dug. Beside it was a small mountain of dry, weedy soil. It wasn’t ready for the funeral. Not yet. The workers must have been on break. They’d left a tool box beside a small excavator.
As I got closer, I saw a crude, wooden cross laying on the ground, which would serve as a temporary grave marker until a headstone could be ordered. There were two words, scrawled by a sloppy, careless hand: Nell Hirsh. They hadn’t even spelled it right.
Finally, I reached Cole. His chest rose and fell as he stared at the scene before him. After a moment, he murmured, “She deserved better than this.”
“Cole, are you okay?”
He turned toward me and shook his head. All the anger had drained away, replaced with utter devastation. He pulled off his glasses and met my gaze. There was raw agony in his eyes, but still, I was surprised when a sob slipped from him.
In the next moment, Cole dropped to his knees. His slender body shook as sob after sob wrenched itself from him. All the pain of the last twenty-four hours, or maybe the last fifteen years, spilled from him in a torrent of despair.
And then he did the most amazing thing. It probably wouldn’t have seemed amazing to anyone else. But I knew how huge it was, coming from the boy who fought his battles alone. He reached out to me the way a child would, holding both arms up as his eyes begged for help. My heart swelled as I fell to my knees and crushed him to me. I felt every emotion in that moment, love and pain and joy and heartbreak. It was all mixed together. I didn’t try to make sense of it.
Cole felt so fragile as his body trembled in my arms. He sobbed for what could have been minutes or hours. It didn’t matter which it was. He cried as long as he needed to, and I held on tight.
When his tears finally lessened, I sat on the ground and cradled him like a child. After a while, he whispered, “I miss my Gram.”
“I know, baby. I do, too.” I gently brushed his hair back from his face.
He said, “She was taken from me the same way my dad was, with no warning. I just talked to her on Sunday. Everything seemed fine.” I rocked him gently.
After a while, he said, so quietly, “How could my mom do that? How could she let that man into her life? And how could she keep it from me? How could Gram?”
“They probably kept it from you because they couldn’t stand seeing you in this much pain.”
He shook his head. “Don’t make excuses for them.”
I kept stroking his hair, and after a few minutes, I asked, “What do you want to do about the funeral?”
Cole sat up and looked around. I pulled his glasses from my pocket and polished them on the hem of my shirt before handing them to him. He stared at the rough grave, and after a pause, he said, “I need to be at Gram’s funeral. It hurts that she lied for my mom. I thought my grandmother and I were always honest with each other. But I’m not going to let this color my memory of her. Gram was a good person, and my mom put her in a terrible position by making her keep her secret.”
He got to his feet and I did too, and we both brushed the dry earth from our clothes. He looked around and said, “Gram deserved so much better than ending up for all eternity in Gomsburg, Idaho.”
“That’s not where she is,” I said. “It’s just where her body ended up. Gram’s all around us, in the sun, and the breeze, and that nice big oak tree that’s shading this grave.”
Cole nodded and whispered, “You’re right.”
“You know what, though?” I scooped up the crooked, misspelled cross and said, “This is no way to honor her memory.”
I broke the cross apart and glanced heavenward as I stuck the pieces in my pocket and murmured, “Sorry. No disrespect intended.” I raided the big tool box next to the excavator, wh
ich contained several slats of the wood used to make the crosses. Working quickly, I fashioned a handful of them into a Star of David and fastened it together with a hammer and nails. Then I mounted the whole thing to a picket, found the permanent marker among the tools, and decorated the front of the star with careful lettering and several little hearts. When I was finished, it read: Eleanor Nel Hirsch. We love you, Gram.
I pushed the picket into the slightly loosened soil at the head of the grave and said, “That’ll do for now. I’m sure your mom ordered a nice, permanent stone.”
When Cole turned to me, he looked like a lost little boy. As I gently wiped a smudge of dirt from his cheek, he gestured at the Star of David and said, “Thank you for doing that. Gram would have loved it.”
“You’re welcome.” I straightened his black silk tie for him and asked, “Are you ready to head back?”
“I don’t think I can handle seeing Bowmer again.”
“I doubt he stuck around after that.”
“Yeah. Probably not.”
Just then, the gravedigger walked up to us while shoving the last corner of a sandwich into his mouth. He was a huge guy, maybe six-foot-four and about our age, with buzzed-off blond hair and a filthy tank top. He nodded to us as he picked up a shovel. Cole acknowledged him with a tilt of his head, and we started to walk away.
But then, Cole turned back to the gravedigger and said, “I know you. You’re one of the assholes who used to call me a fag and beat me up every day after school. Lonnie Fulbright.” The blond guy glared at him, but Cole just shook his head and said, “Ten years later and here you are, still stuck in Gomsburg, Idaho, digging graves in rock-hard soil and ninety degree heat. Man. Talk about karma.” Lonnie looked like he wanted to tear him apart, but my boyfriend just took my hand and walked away. I fought back a smirk, while mentally giving Cole the biggest high-five ever.
*****
Cole and I both sat with Gram in the final hours before her funeral. I’d been glad to learn Doc Brown had stepped back in and stayed with her when he saw me run after Cole. I asked Doc if he could find me a guitar and was pleasantly surprised when he returned with one not ten minutes later. “The pawn shop across the street is full of ‘em,” he explained as he handed it to me. “It seems like instruments are the first thing people let go of when life takes a bad turn.”
“They’ve got it wrong,” I said as I rested the guitar on my knee, plucked the strings one by one, and made adjustments with the tuning pegs. “You need music more than ever when times get tough.”
Doc left us alone with Gram, and once the guitar was in tune, I started to play every Beatles song I knew. Cole watched me for a while, and then he said softly, “I never knew you could play the guitar.”
I grinned a little. “Of course I can. I grew up in a commune, remember? An acoustic guitar was the equivalent of a complete home entertainment system.”
He mulled that over before murmuring, “I bet it was a beautiful way to grow up.”
“It was. As a kid though, I thought my family and friends were totally weird.” I started to pick out the tune to Hey Jude and smiled again. “I was right, by the way. We were weird. The part I got wrong was thinking that was a bad thing.”
*****
A few hours later, a handful of people and the Craigslist rabbi joined us for Gram’s service. Glen Bowmer had the sense not to attend. Sonya sat on one side of the room with her friend Virginia, Doc Brown, and a couple in their fifties who’d both worn plaid shirts. The man who owned the funeral parlor stood off to one side with a well-rehearsed sympathetic expression.
Cole and I stood at the back of the room, and he kept his eyes locked on the casket. I kept wondering if he was going to bolt again, since he hadn’t wanted to sit down. After the service, Cole and I, and Doc, and the man in plaid served as pallbearers. We carried the casket through the back of the building to an attached garage and loaded it in a hearse. Then we retrieved the van and drove six blocks to the cemetery for the conclusion of the service.
After the last words had been spoken and the coffin was lowered into the ground, Cole turned away from the cemetery and took a deep breath. I gathered him into my arms, and he held on tight as he buried his face in my shoulder. A little tremor went through him, and I closed my eyes and rubbed my cheek against his hair.
A couple minutes later, Doc came up to us and said, “Boys, can I speak to you for a moment?” Cole sniffed and turned his head toward the doctor, but he didn’t let go of me. I noticed the three of us were all that remained at the gravesite. “Mrs. Ealy wanted me to give you this,” the man said as he held up a set of keys. I took them from him and dropped them in my pocket as he explained, “She wanted me to tell you she’s going to be staying with her fiancé for a few days. She said you can stay in your grandmother’s house while you’re in town, and that she won’t be bothering you while you’re there, because she knows you’re pretty mad at her right now. She also said if you want to talk, all you have to do is call.” Doc rubbed his white mustache as he stopped to think a moment, and then he said, “Oh yeah, I just remembered the other thing. Your mother said you should go through your room and Gram’s stuff and take whatever you want, because she’s going to be emptying the house and putting it on the market.”
Cole whispered, “She’s wasting no time.”
Doc handed me a business card and said, “If you need anything, anything at all, don’t hesitate to give me a call. I wrote my home number on the back for you, since I’m only in the office a couple hours a day.”
“Thank you for everything, sir,” I said as I pocketed his card. Then I remembered something and blurted, “Oh, the guitar! I left it in the funeral parlor. You probably want to return it to the pawnshop so you can get your money back.”
“Nah, you keep it,” he said as he turned and started to shuffle toward an enormous, beige, 1970s-era Cadillac that was parked at the curb. “I heard you playing, and it sounded real good in your hands. I figure you’re that instrument’s only chance, if you know what I mean. If you don’t take it with you, it’ll just live out the rest of its days silently in that old pawnshop. Seems a shame when there’s so much life left in it.”
I called after him, “In that case, we’ll swing by the funeral home and get it. Thanks again.”
We took a last look at Gram’s grave as the sun disappeared behind the distant hills. Two men were shoveling dirt onto her coffin. Cole had to turn away.
“If staying at Gram’s is too much for tonight, we can drive to the nearest city and get a hotel room,” I said. “Or we can just head home. Whatever you want.”
Cole met my gaze. “I want to stay at the house. I’d also like to take a couple days and pack up a few things to bring back home with us. Gram had some mementos and old photo albums….” His voice trailed off. I kissed his forehead, and then I put my arm around his shoulders and guided him back to the van.
Chapter Fourteen
Nel Hirsch’s 1950s-era home was nestled against the base of the foothills, about five miles outside of town. At one time, it had been part of a sprawling potato farm. But the acreage had been sold off decades before, and like so much of the land surrounding Gomsburg, the fields hadn’t been cultivated in years.
The ranch-style house, with its cheerful red brick façade and tidy yard, seemed to exist in an oasis amid that barren landscape. Clusters of flowers and bushes thrived around its foundation, and two baskets dripping with fuchsias hung from the rafters of the front porch, framing the entryway. Two dozen decorative, colorful solar lights dotted the yard, giving the place a whimsical feel, while several sheltering trees rustled in the light breeze.
Though the home looked warm and welcoming, a glance over my shoulder at the endless expanse of nothingness was anything but. We were remarkably isolated. The nearest neighbor was over two miles away, and at this distance, the lights from town weren’t visible. I was glad someone had thought to leave on the twin porch lights bracketing the front door, because the
moon and those little solar yard decorations weren’t doing much to light our way.
Cole and I had been standing out on the driveway for a solid minute, while a million emotions played in his dark eyes. After a while, I said quietly, “We don’t have to do this, Cole. If it’s too much right now, we can find someplace else to sleep tonight. Then we can go through the house in the morning, or in a couple days, or whatever you want.”
He looked so lost when he turned to me and asked, “What do you think I should do?”
I took him in my arms and said, “I think you should go inside, sweetheart, and take a hot bath, and get a good night’s sleep. You’re so tired right now, and until you get some rest, all of this is going to seem totally overwhelming.”
He nodded, and I grabbed our hastily packed bags from the back of the van and guided him to the porch. Once I unlocked the door, he stepped into the foyer and murmured, “It hasn’t changed at all.” A narrow table stood just inside the door, decorated with a vase filled with wildflowers and a lumpy, red ceramic bowl, which held a set of keys. He ran a fingertip over the edge of the bowl and said, “I made this for Gram when I was about eight. It’s so bad. I can’t believe she kept it on display all this time.” Cole turned over the gold-toned key fob in the bowl, revealing a photo of him and his grandmother, taken when he was maybe fifteen. Then he whispered, “How am I going to get through this, River? I’ve only made it two feet inside the door, and I already feel like my heart’s being ripped out of my chest.”
“You’ll get through it one minute at a time. I’ll help you. Which way is your room?” He pointed through the living room to our left, and I asked, “Is there a bathtub down there?” When he nodded, I shifted both bags and put my arm around his shoulders, and then I led him through the living room and down a hallway, which was lined with pictures of Cole, in chronological order from infancy to the present. At the end of the hallway was a photo of Cole and me with his mom and grandmother, taken in a booth at Nolan’s Bar and Grill during one of their Hanukkah visits.
