Page 58 of Keep Me

He did not say anything. He just stood there with my hand on his back, breathing, until the breathing became something that did not need managing anymore. The letter lay between us like something spent. Like it had done the work it was always going to force us to do and now it just needed to rest.

“I noticed you on my own,” Zane said. His voice had dropped into something quieter and more deliberate. “I want you to know that. Whatever you are thinking right now, I need you to know I noticed you before any of it.”

I looked at him. He said it was to counter whatever I was thinking, and that was something he did a lot. He interrupted the pattern, stopped the loops to head off my spirals. He was usually right, but this time it did not fit. I was not thinking anything. He was. He was interrupting his own loop.

“The first time we really spoke, you were at a party. You were drunk. You were laughing at something that didn’t reach your eyes, and you had this way of being in a room like you were gravity. Or like the moon and everyone was just reacting to your pull.” He exhaled. “I noticed you. Not because of Henry. Not because of a dream. Because you were the most interesting person in any room you walked into, and you had absolutely no idea.”

“Dream? What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to make sense out of the way his words were tumbling out so quickly.

He looked at me cautiously, and I could see the wheels turning. He was hesitating. I knew whatever he was about to say was something he had bet on never telling me. “You’re going to think—” He stopped. “Actually, I don’t know what you’re going to think.”

“Tell me,” I said.

He was quiet for another second, like he was deciding the order of things. Then he started.

“It was a while after I transferred to West Bridge. I had a dream about Henry. We were at the cliffs,” he said. “The lake. The one I took you to. The one he found. I knew it was a dream while it was happening, but it didn’t feel like one. It felt like a place I’d been allowed to go back to.” He looked at his hands. “Henry was there.”

I did not say anything.

“Not the way he was at the end,” Zane said. “Not the way he looked right before he did it, when you could see it on him if you knew what to look for. He looked like himself. Like before.” He exhaled slowly. “He was smiling. The real one.”

“What did he say?” I asked, carefully like whatever he said could break like the mug against the floor.

“He told me it wasn’t my fault.” Zane’s voice stayed even, but I knew the evenness was costing him something. “I told him he was wrong. I told him I could have done something, could have seen it earlier, could have said the right thing at the right moment.” A pause. “He told me it wouldn’t have changed anything.”

I pressed my palm flat against my sternum again without deciding to.

“And then he said—” Zane stopped, looked at the ceiling briefly, and came back. “He said I had to let go. He said I had to forgive him and forgive myself and move forward and I told him I didn’t know how.” His jaw moved. “He said… He said to search for beauty. That wherever I found it, I should stay there.”

It feels like nothing is beautiful anymore. I remembered Henry saying that in the graveyard. “And then?” I asked because I could tell we had not reached it yet. The thing he had never told anyone. I could see it in the way he was standing, braced.

“He started to disappear,” Zane said. “The way it happens in dreams where you know you’re running out of time, and you can’t stop it. I was trying to hold onto it, hold onto him, and he was already going, and then he stopped.” Zane looked at me directly. “He said, one more thing. He told me to listen to him.”

The kitchen was completely still.

“And then he said, don’t let her fall, Zane.” He said it quietly. It was the thought he had been tumbling around for so long it had gone smooth. “Just that. No name. Just don’t let her fall. And then I woke up.”

Neither of us moved. I looked at the note. Henry’s writing flashing like a picture in my mind.

You won’t fall, Seren. I’ll make sure of it.

And like a collision, like a car crash in my mind, I understood what Zane was spiraling about. Had Zane seen me on his own? Or did Henry tell him to? Had Zane caught me because he wanted to, or because it was a twisted form of Henry’s fate?

“I didn’t know what it meant,” Zane said. “I told myself it was grief. I told myself my brain was filling in the blanks because it could not handle the silence he left behind. I tried to let it go.” A beat. “I couldn’t let it go.”

“Why did you think it was about me?” I asked, very carefully.

“You were so sad, Seren,” he said. “You were so fucking sad, and I saw how sad you were. I was worried… I have been worrying about you since before I understood you. After the dream, I went to see him. First time since the funeral. I stood at his grave, and I talked to him and I said goodbye and I turned around and…”

He looked at me. “There you were. Standing in front of an angel. Crying the way you do when you think nobody is there. Completely silently. Like you had made peace with everything a long time ago.”

I tried to picture what he was saying, tried to remember the day he was talking about, but I could not. It felt strange to hear him describe a memory of me that felt like I didn’t live through.

“I almost came to you,” he said. “I stood there trying to decide. And then you turned and walked away, and you were gone before I could.” He looked at his hands again. “I went over to the angel after. I read the name.”

“My mom,” I said, like I had to confirm it for some reason.

“Anwen Garcia,” he said quietly, and like it always is, my mother’s name was a paper cut to my heart.