“YOU OKAY?” KRISJEN asks.
I empty my books into my locker, pulling out my Spanish book and my copy of Othello for homework tonight. “I’m fine.”
Liv stands across the hall, chatting with Chloe, and I hear laughter. I glance over my shoulder, trying not to look like I know exactly where she is every moment. Chloe leans in and greets Jessa Washington and Erin Merluzzi who approach. Girl certainly makes friends fast. They strike up a convo in their small group, Liv smiling and like…actively-fucking-participating.
“Are you sure?” Krisjen’s voice is low. “You look like hangry, like you haven’t eaten in days and you’re going to morph into something outrageous if you don’t get to dine on an unbaptized baby soon.”
I shut my locker and close my bag, tearing my eyes away before Liv sees me looking.
“Clay…” She touches my arm.
But I pull away. “I’m fine.”
“Did you tell her you loved her?”
I snap my eyes to Krisjen who stares me in the eyes, dead-on.
“I don’t.” I drop my eyes, fiddling with my bag. “It just felt really good. I don’t know, I’m…” More laughter echoes behind me, and I look over my shoulder, watching all four girls head down the hall away from me. Liv doesn’t spare a glance my way as if she actually never noticed that I’m right here. I swallow. “I’m just confused.”
“Are you?”
Oh, shut up.
I walk away without saying goodbye and leave school with most of the other students, Liv probably staying late for rehearsal again.
She didn’t even look at me. She hasn’t looked at me in days, as if she wasn’t begging me not to leave her bed last weekend. Gone. Done. Over. She’s surviving.
And from the looks of it, surviving well. For someone who had a chip on her shoulder about the new girl, she’s making her a bestie awfully fast. She has people now.
And all I want is her. What the hell happened?
I drift to my car and drive home, my head wracking with pain from holding back tears all day. But I finally let them go.
I haven’t eaten in two days. I can’t stop thinking about her. If she called right now, I would rush to her wherever she was for just a chance at one more night.
God, I miss her. Why can’t she be more patient? Why can’t she give me that? Why does anyone need to know? How was she so willing to give me up over me just wanting her to myself for a while longer? Was it too much to ask not to be rushed?
Just be understanding. Just love me. I loved her so good. It should’ve been enough.
Forgetting my bag in my car, I trudge through my front door, not noticing anyone or any sound as I traipse up the stairs with a weight almost too heavy to carry on my shoulders. I enter my room, close the door, and head over to the bed. I collapse and roll, pulling the comforter over me as I bury my head inside.
I’ll get over it. First loves never last anyway. I knew it would hurt when it eventually happened.
It won’t always feel like this.
But the idea of Liv getting over me makes the tears stream harder and faster. I hate this feeling in my stomach. I hate the thoughts whirling in my head like a tornado of someone else making love to her and dancing for her and waking up to her.
I hate it so much my mind starts to tilt, and I’m angry. Even though I broke up with her, and this is all my fault, I’m angry with her so much that I want to fucking make sure no one compares to me. That she’s miserable forever, unable to forget me. No one else will be able to make her happy. No one will feel like me. She should’ve waited for me.
I don’t know when I fall asleep, but when I wake up, the sunlight streaming through my windows is gone, and the room is dark. I blink my eyes, my head still aching, but I register voices. The ones that woke me up.
“Get out, then!” my mom yells. “Get out! Run to her.”
“It’s not about her!”
I sit up, my eyelids heavy and tears dried on my face as I listen from inside my room.
“I’m not even in love with her,” my dad says. “Goddammit, Regina!”
“Just leave!” Footfalls hit the stairs. “All you care about is yourself. You’re always gone anyway.”
“And you’re here?” he retorts. “Is that what you think? I can’t do this anymore! I’ll be back for the rest of my stuff.”
Something breaks, a door slams, and I hear a car start.
I throw off the covers, bolting from the room. “Dad…” I pull open my door and race down the stairs, seeing my mother standing in the foyer as headlights skim from one window to the other outside.
I run to the door, open it, and leap out into the driveway as his taillights speed farther and farther away.
“Dad!” I cry.
No! I hurry to my car, reach inside, and pull my phone out of my school bag, dialing his number.
“Baby, no!” Mom calls out.
But I shake my head, all the rage and despair and heartache pooling into a fucking boiler inside my gut, and I can’t stop myself.
He left me. He didn’t talk to me or say goodbye or…
I head back into the house, walking and not even paying attention to where I’m going, only that my mom stumbles after me in tears.
I hear the line pick up, and I’m speaking before he says a word. “Don’t come back.”
“Clay…” he whispers, and I can hear the tears in his throat. “Baby, I…”
“Clay, baby,” I mock. “I…uh, uh, uh…God, enough!” I roar. “Just say you found a new life, and you don’t want us anymore! Just have a fucking backbone! I hate you! Say it, so we can finally be free of you! Say you don’t want us anymore!”
My eyes burn so hard I can barely keep them open, but I feel good for a hot minute, having someone to take this out on.
“Listen to me,” he says.
But I don’t. “Don’t come back,” I grit out. “We were always this weak, weren’t we?” I head up the stairs. “Without him, we’re nothing, and pretty soon, it will be as if he never existed!” I rip Henry’s portrait off the wall in the hallway, my mother sobbing behind me. “As if we never were a family!”
I cry so hard, but I can’t stop myself. I drop the phone, charging down the hallway and pulling all of our pictures off the wall, the glass in the frames crashing onto the floor.
“Clay, stop!” my mom begs.
“It was always a house of cards!” I hiss. “Because we’re weak! We were always weak!”
I was always weak, and now I’ve lost everything. I wanted to be perfect and for what? For this?
I growl, taking our family portrait—the last one with Henry in it—and slam it onto the floor, the whole thing shattering.
My mother grabs me, but I flail, running away. “Leave me alone!”
I scurry down the stairs, out the door, and past my car, racing into the night. I don’t know where I’m going. I have no money, no phone, but I don’t care about anything anymore. I don’t care if I never come back. I gave up the one thing that made me feel alive—made me excited for tomorrow—and with her I could’ve withstood anything.
But now, everything is foreign. School, my home, even my skin.
I run until the air in my lungs hurts, and I can’t tell if it’s sweat or tears on my face, but when I stop, I realize I’m in front of Wind House.
I head around the back, down the small incline at the side of the home, and up to the back door. The hall light glows inside, and I don’t know what time it is, but maybe she’s in there. I’d forgotten my keys and everything.
I knock hard, hoping there’s work tonight, despite the fact that I’m actually wishing someone has died so I have something to do.
I knock again and again, ready to crumple onto the ground, because I can’t keep my legs under me.
The door opens, and Mrs. Gates stands there in her scrubs. I gasp in relief and try to push past her.
But she stops me. “Clay, no.”
I wipe the tears on my face. “I can handle it. I’m fine.”
She doesn’t know what’s wrong, but she can see I’m upset.
I try to veer around her, but she fills the doorway. “Clay…”
“Please!” I plead, pushing past her. “I need to be here.”
“Clay, it’s a child,” she rushes out as I pass.
I stop, staring at the floor but not seeing it.
Children don’t come through often, but when they do, she makes sure I’m not present. Maybe it’s because of Henry. Maybe it’s because she knew my parents weren’t aware that I come here, and the death of a child, even ones I don’t know, will be hard.
I don’t turn around to look at her, merely raising my gaze to the steel double doors ahead. It feels like my heart is floating in my chest as my stomach roils.
I keep walking, hearing her rush after me. “Clay, please.”
But I ignore her. Pushing through the doors, I enter the room and see the boy, a small body outlined under a sheet.
He’s uncovered down to his stomach, and something spills down the drain, but I don’t look to see what.
I walk over.
“Clay…”
I know she’s worried, but I don’t know… Maybe I’m just too numb tonight to be scared anymore. I need to do this.
Approaching the boy’s side, I see his wet, brown hair slicked back, his jaw slack, and his eyes partially open, the brown pupils foggy.
She’d just washed him. Water still runs down the drain underneath the table, and his palms face up at his sides. There’s dirt under his nails and scratches on his forearm, probably from playing with his cat or dog.
A lump grows in my throat, always finding this part hardest of all. The evidence of their lives. Bruises, skinned knees, old scars, chipped nail polish…
A tear spills over as I look down at his skinny arms. “He’s, um…”
“Like Henry,” she says, seeing what I see. The coloring is different, but they’re about the same age. Ten or eleven.
“What happened to him?” I ask her, still letting my eyes roam for any evidence of violence.
“He drowned,” she replies. “He was swimming at the Murtaugh Inlet. Got swept into the current.”
It isn’t unheard of. We swim a lot in Florida. Drownings happen.
The hard part is that it’s not a quick death. He would’ve been aware with every second that passed that help wasn’t coming.
Like Henry.
“His brother was making out with his girlfriend in his car and didn’t notice for ten minutes,” she whispers, her throat thick.
I almost feel sorry for him, too. A mistake that will haunt him forever.
And I’m here. Alive. Healthy. Continuously making problems worse, because I act like I don’t have a clue.
I smooth back his hair, everything at home forgotten for the moment, because somewhere out there in town is a devastated family who will never see their son smile again.
I draw in a deep breath and swallow the tears that want to come as I raise my eyes to Mrs. Gates. “Embalming?”
“Yes,” she tells me. “There will be a viewing on Thursday followed by cremation.”
I nod and pull the rubber band off my wrist, sweeping my hair up into a ponytail. “I’ll take the lead.”
We work for the next two hours, not talking other than her instruction here and there. I can’t look him in the face when the needles go in, feeling the bile rise, because it’s hard not to see Henry on the table. We prepare him to stay preserved until the funeral, and I’ll come back in a couple of days to take care of the cosmetics and dress him, but the embalming process takes longer with me here now, because it’s like the first time I’m doing it all over again. What mattered most to me with Henry was that Mrs. Gates was gentle with my brother. I take extra care with this one.
“Did I ever tell you that I lived in New York for a time?” Mrs. Gates says across the table.
I meet her eyes as we work.
“I loved it.” She smiles a little. “Too cold, but it was a lot of fun. That’s where I studied to become a funeral director.”
I think I knew that, but I can’t be sure.
She shuts off the machine. “It’s one of the best schools in the country for mortuary science.”
Mortuary science?
“I can get you in,” she says. “If you want to go.”
I stop, locking eyes with her. My first instinct is to laugh or scoff. I can’t tell people I’m an undertaker. It’s not romantic like an actor or an artist, or heroic like a lawyer or a doctor.
But then, most people haven’t seen what I’ve seen here, either. Mrs. Gates is there during one of the most important times in a person’s life.
“You have a strong stomach,” she tells me. “You empathize. You care. I think the best people to help us say goodbye are the ones who’ve had to do it themselves.”
I keep working, listening.
“You know what these families need.” She drops tools to the tray, picking up another one. “Funerals aren’t for the dead, after all.”
They’re for the survivors.
The idea is ridiculous. Everyone will laugh.
My grandmother would have a cow.
But then, I look down at the kid, Mitchell Higgins from the name on his file, and know that tomorrow I could be him.
If not tomorrow, next week. Next year. Five years from now, because no matter when, it is coming.
“I know your parents want you to go to Wake Forest,” she says, “but if you decide your life should go a different path, I’ll sponsor you.”
Sponsor me?
“You work here on vacations and give me two years after you’ve gotten your degree,” she tells me, “I’ll pay your tuition.”
