Page 37 of Keep Me

“He spent twenty-one years filling that stupid feeder for a woman who’s been dead since before I could even know her,” I said, and something in my chest was starting to move now, slow at first, like a tide deciding which direction to turn. “He kept her stone clean. He bought her an angel. He never once bought me anything that wasn’t supposed to replace the fact that he couldn’t look at me without seeing her. And when he had thirty seconds left in his whole life, he didn’t ask for me. He asked to go be with her.”

“Seren, that’s not—” Zane started.

“Don’t.” I did not look at him. “Do not tell me it’s not what it sounds like. I do not want it explained right now. I want a cigarette.”

The silence that followed had a different texture than all the silence before it.

“Seren,” Zane said again, low, careful. “You quit. You haven’t smoked for over a year.”

“I am aware of how long it’s been, Zane. I know how to count. I also know my dad is dead and I do not care how fucking long it’s been.” My voice did not rise. It did not need to. “Austin.”

Austin looked at Zane. Zane looked at the ground. Neither of them looked at me for a second, and then Austin reached into his jacket and pulled out the pack he always kept on him out of habit more than need these days, and he didn’t ask me if I was sure, because he knew better than anyone that being sure had stopped being the point.

He lit it for me.

The first drag hit the back of my throat like an old argument, familiar in a way that should have scared me and did not. I sat there in the dirt in my ruined dress, and I smoked at my father’s grave while my mother’s angel watched, and something underneath my ribs that had been sitting very still for days finally started to seethe.

“He had time,” I said, to no one, to both, to the lily, to the dirt. “He had eight months. Eight months and he spent them filling out trust documents and signing his name on things and he never once sat me down and said, Seren, I’m dying, I need you to know this while I’m still here to tell you. He let me sign papers for an inheritance I didn’t know I was already getting. He let me think he was happy. He let me believe—”

My voice broke somewhere in the middle of believe, and the thing under my ribs stopped seething and started erupting, and I dropped the cigarette into the dirt and reached down instead, my fingers closing around a fistful of grass, roots and soil and all, and I tore it up and threw it at the fresh black earth in front of me.

“I thought I had time,” I said. Another fistful. Another throw. “I thought I had time, I thought I had time, you said after finals, you said Sunday, you said call you Sunday, and it’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not FAIR—”

I do not remember deciding to scream it. I just remember the sound leaving me, raw and ugly, nothing like grief is supposed to sound in a quiet cemetery on a Thursday afternoon, and my hands kept finding grass and kept finding dirt and kept throwing it, small handfuls landing uselessly across the lily, across the wood, across all of it, like if I just made enough of a mess maybe someone would finally have to clean it up, maybe someone would finally have to come back and explain.

Austin had gone very still, his hand frozen halfway toward my shoulder like he did not trust himself to touch what I had become.

It was Zane who finally moved. He did not say my name this time. He did not ask if I was ready, did not count down from anything. He just got down into the dirt with me, wrapped both arms fully around my shaking body, and lifted, and I let him, because there was nothing left in me to argue with, no perimeter, no inventory, no ledger of subway tiles or wobbling stools left to hide inside.

I do not remember the walk back to the car. I just remember being cradled in Zane’s arms like a child who was just rescued from a burning building. He was the firefighter and I was the orphan whose entire family had burned alive.

I remember the sky was the wrong color for what had just happened to me, too bright, too ordinary, completely unbothered. I remember the angel, small in the distance behind us, still watching, still waiting, the way she had always waited.

And somewhere between the grave and the car, the last working part of me, the part that had been counting tiles and measuring inches of red sugar water and keeping the whole machine operational simply stopped.

I went quiet.

Salt

I am the Dead Sea.

I used to think that was a metaphor. A pretty arrangement of words I had built for myself, sitting on a porch with the cigarettes I do not smoke anymore, trying to explain to no one in particular why I felt like a thing instead of a person. I am the sea. Always changing. Always the same. I let myself believe, for a while, that it was just a feeling, the kind that eventually leaves you alone. The water that leaves your skin after you get out of the waves.

It was not a metaphor. I understand that now, the way you understand a diagnosis. It is simply an exact description of the chemistry.

The Dead Sea does not kill anything dramatically. That was the part people get wrong when they hear the name and picture something violent. It does not drown you, not really. The salt content is so high that drowning is not even available to you as a choice. You float. You float and you float, weightless, suspended, and for a while it might even feel like peace, like you have finally found the one body of water that will hold you up without asking anything in return. You can finally rest here. You can close your eyes and give the weight of your pain to the salt water, and it will hold it all for you.

But nothing lives in it. Not one fish. Not one plant. The water that holds you so gently, so generously, is also the water that nothing can survive inside of for long. It is not an accident, the floating and the killing. It is the same density. That was the part I never understood as a teenager, thinking pretty, looping sentences I thought were sad. Fullness and emptiness were never opposites in me. They were the same thing wearing two different coats. I am so full of salt that I cannot be entered by anything that wants to live, and I am so empty of anything else that there is nothing in me to interrupt the process.

I had been doing the math for days, even when I did not know that is what the staring at ceilings was. I thought I was counting the subway tiles, but I was not. I was understanding that math is math and it is never wrong. Here is the sum.

My mother got in first. She did not know what she was stepping into, how could she, she was the one who filled the water to begin with, before there was a me to become it. She lasted twenty-six years. Then a turn in the wrong direction on a wet road, and that was the end of however long she might have lasted otherwise. I used to think that one did not count, since the water had not fully formed yet. I did not think that anymore.

There was a boy, once, in a graveyard, who told me I got it. Who sat with me for three nights and never asked me to be light and never gave me lightness, and made me feel, for the only time in my whole life, anonymous and seen in the same breath. I did not know what happened to him. I built myself a theory once, that he just finished whatever he needed to finish and moved on, the way boys do. I had never once let myself consider any other ending. That was its own kind of math.

Jax came next, and stayed the longest, and did the worst damage. The whole time I was convinced that he was the one drowning me, when the longer I sit with this, the more I understand the water was doing what water does. I was not just unlucky to find him. I built the kind of sea a thing like him swims toward. I had spent three years in therapy trying to believe that was not true. Lucy would tell me it still is not. I was too tired today to argue with her properly, but I was also too tired to lie to myself the way I usually do. I used to lie like I breathed but now I was underwater and I could not gulp anything else down.

And now my father.