Page 44 of Keep Me

The anger did not resolve. I want to be honest about that, even now, even after. It did not crest and break and leave me lighter the way television promises healing is supposed to work. It just sat there, unfinished, the way most of my anger always had, waiting for somewhere to go that I hadn’t built yet.

Somewhere in the middle of it, something else surfaced. It did not come from anger, but from my body. The feeling of sitting on wet grass, the blades transferring their dampness to me. Feeling the chill in my bones but somehow, not minding it. The feeling of my hands grasping the bottle. I remembered another version of me in this graveyard who felt these same things. A girl who was in pain but not yet broken. Not the way I am now. Sophomore year. A boy I never learned the last name of, sitting a few feet away from me on cold ground that did not ask either of us to explain ourselves.

Alex. I hadn’t thought about him in years, not beyond the careful version I had handed Lucy in that one session. But now, drunk, tonight had loosened the memory enough to let it come up in chunks instead of in the tiny pieces I usually allowed it.

He had asked who the angel was. I had told him. My mom. And he did not flinch, he just let the silence hold the way it was holding me now, alone, except it was not really alone, because some ghost of him was sitting here too. I missed him in the dull, useless way you miss a stranger who was kind to you exactly once. I did not know him. I did not know where he was. I only knew that some nights, when the grief got too loud for even a headstone to hold, some part of me still went looking for his ghost.

I took my phone out before I could think too hard about it. Zane picked up on the second ring, his voice alert. “Seren?”

“Hi,” I said, and even I could hear how loose the word came out, how the word dragged a half-second longer than it should have.

A pause. I could hear him sit up, the small shift of fabric, a man going from horizontal to vertical in half a second. “Where are you, are you okay?”

“The graveyard.” I did not hide. There did not seem to be any point. “I’m okay. I just wanted you to know where I am. In case.”

“In case what?” His voice had gone careful, the kind of careful that meant he was doing math in his head, running through every version of me that scared him.

“In case you worried,” I said. “Not in case anything happened. I’m not… Zane, I’m just drinking. I walked here and I’m sitting between my parents right now, which is a sentence I never thought I’d say, and I just didn’t want you to find out tomorrow that I did this alone and didn’t tell you.”

The silence on his end lasted long enough that I could hear my own heartbeat in it.

“Okay,” he said, finally. “Thank you for calling me.”

“You’re not mad?”

“I’m not mad, of course, I’m not mad.” A breath. “I want to come get you. I want to be there with you.”

“I know.” I picked at the grass beside my knee, the same restless motion I’d had since I was small. “I’m not ready for that. I just needed you to know where I was. Is that okay?”

“It’s okay,” he said, though I could hear how much it cost him to say it that easily. “Are you safe where you’re sitting? Is there anyone else there? Are you close to the road at all?”

“I’m fine, Zane. I’m not going to fall in a hole.” A small, surprised laugh came out of me, the first one in days that didn’t feel manufactured. “I’m between my parents. It’s actually the safest I’ve felt all week.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, and when he did, his voice had dropped to the tone he used when he was choosing every word that came out of his mouth. “I miss you. I know you needed the space. I’m not arguing with it. I just miss you so much it’s stupid.”

“I miss you too,” I admitted, and the alcohol made the admission easier than it would have been sober. “I do. I just can’t have anyone watching me right now. Even you. Especially you.”

“I know.” Another pause. “I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t hurt a little. But I get it.”

“You always get it,” I said, and meant it as the compliment it was. “How do you do that?”

“Practice,” he said, and there was something darker underneath the word, something I was too drunk and too tired to chase down properly. “I’ve had a lot of practice understanding people.”

“What do you mean?”

He was quiet for a second too long. “I just mean I know grief, too, Seren.”

“I know you do,” I said softly, looking up at the angel, at the raw dirt beside her, at the whole wrecked geometry of everyone I’d ever lost arranged around me in the dark. “Just in a different way.”

Neither of us said anything else for a while. I could hear him breathing on the other end, ten minutes away and choosing, every single second, not to close that distance even though every instinct in him was clearly built to do exactly that.

“Stay on the phone with me a little longer,” he said, eventually. “You don’t have to talk. I just want to hear that you’re still there.”

“Okay,” I whispered, and leaned my head back against the cool stone of my mother’s angel, the phone warm against my ear, my father’s grave unfinished beside me.

For a long time, neither of us said anything at all. I could hear him breathing, the rhythm I had fallen asleep to for years. Even through a phone, even between two graves and ten minutes away from him, he settled me.

“Tell me something,” I said, my voice slurred at the edges. “Anything. I don’t care what. I just want to hear you talk.”