Page 67 of Keep Me

I stopped saying it after the third time. It was not going to become true no matter how many times I put it into the grass.

I split the flowers into two and laid half at the base of the angel and half against my father’s stone, and that was when I saw it. The grass around the angel was cut close. Not the lazy trim of the rest of the cemetery, where the mower came through when it came through. Close, and even, and tended, in a careful ring that stopped exactly where my mother’s plot ended and the neglected world resumed. And pressed into the earth at the foot of her, half sunk with age, a small clay pot. It held flowers, and fresh enough that the last of them had only just finished dying.

Someone had been coming here. For years. For eighteen of them. Cutting the grass close, or paying someone to, and bringing flowers and taking the dead ones away and doing it again, quietly, on no schedule anyone announced. I searched my mind. I guess I had noticed the flowers changing, and the grass being cut, but I had never questioned it. It felt insignificant to what I was already trying to process when I was here. Fresh flowers and cut grass do not quite compare to your mother’s bones in the dirt beneath you.

I put my hand flat on the trimmed grass. He filled a feeder every morning. And he came here. He came here and he tended the ground over the woman he’d loved for eighteen years past her death, and he never told me, the same way he never told me about the diagnosis, the same way he never told me the feeder was hers, the same way he never told me he thought I was worth locking behind my own name in a wall.

I had spent days furious at him for the silence. For the eight months. For choosing not to hand me the truth. I had stood in this exact cemetery with a bottle and screamed that he had left me for her, that at the end there had only been room for one name, and it had not been mine.

I understood it differently now, kneeling in the grass he had kept. Blair said it about Zane. Fate sets the table. Nobody sits down without choosing to, and nobody keeps choosing, morning after morning, year after year, because they were forced to. The feeder was not obligation. The flowers were not an obligation. It was a vow so old it had stopped needing its reason, a thing he did every day because the doing of it was how he stayed married to her across the one distance nobody crosses back over.

And the silence. The eight months.

He did not hide it because he did not trust me. He hid it the way Henry framed those three nights soft and romantic for Zane, because the truth was too heavy to hand to someone he loved and could not protect from it any other way. He could have told me in September and given me eight months of watching him disappear. Eight months of hospital math, of scans, of me memorizing the exact rate at which a person leaves. Would I have given up? Would I have still tried so hard to know him if I knew there was a timer? Would his words have meant as much to me? He chose instead to give me eight more ordinary dinners. Potatoes from the market on Fourth. A hug. Love you. A photograph on a porch. He spent his last good months making sure I would remember him standing up.

That was not him failing to choose me. That was him choosing me the only way a dying man gets to. In advance. In secret. In a vault and a feeder and a ring of cut grass I was only now, too late, learning how to see.

Anwen, at the end. The last word. I had made it a verdict. She won, I had thought. She got the last of him. I was angry at my dead mother for being the gravity that takes everything around me. If she had not died, would I have been so sad? If I were not so sad, would I have been around people that hated me, at the lake house that weekend, drinking to numb everything? If my mother had not died, would I have been happy? Would the bad thing still have happened to me?

And the last thing she took was my dad’s final thought.

But he asked for me first, the nurse had said so, he asked for me first and then he reached for the love that had shaped his whole life. Both were true. He wanted his daughter and he wanted his wife and he was allowed to want both, and there had only been air enough for one more word, and the word was a promise he’d been keeping every single morning since the day I was born.

He did not leave me for her. He was just, finally, going to where he had been sending flowers for eighteen years.

“Okay,” I said, aloud, to both of them. “Okay. I get it now.”

I stayed a while longer. I did not say much. There was not much left that needed saying, and they had never needed me to fill the silence, either of them, the angel, or the man beside her. I just knelt in the grass he’d kept and let the June sun come down and felt, for the first time since that fated middle of the night of the phone call, something that wasn’t grief and wasn’t guilt and wasn’t pain. Something like the peace he’d been trying to hand me in a photograph.

“Happy anniversary,” I told them. My parents. “I hope you’re together somewhere. And I hope you’re looking over me. I don’t know how many more times I can rebuild everything I thought I knew. Maybe… I don’t know, maybe you both can stay with me. Just a little. A bird or a butterfly, whatever you want.”

I felt my face scrunch as the sharpness of grief pushed through my chest. “I’m sorry this is how life was. I’m sorry this is how our family’s story went. I know it’s not what either of you hoped for. I mean, who would? It’s not what I hoped for either. But… maybe in the next life. We can find each other and know each other. The way it might have been. Maybe in a different life mom’s car doesn’t crash, and maybe you could know me the way you never did. And maybe I don’t get raped, and maybe dad doesn’t get cancer. And maybe, in another life we love each other the way we should have.”

I went quiet, feeling the tears on my skin and I did not rush them away or try to erase them. I just let them be.

“I’ll be okay, though, in this life. I think I’ll be okay. I have Zane. I have Austin. And Cassidy and Blair. I don’t have you two here to love me, but people love me. And I have people to love. I think… I think that means I’ll be okay.”

I closed my eyes and breathed as deeply as I could. None of this was fair, but unfairness doesn’t make the world stop. And if the world is spinning then I must walk it. Then I stood, brushed the dirt from my knees, and turned to go back to the living. And I saw them.

Not at the gate anymore. They had moved while I wasn’t looking, drifted a few rows over into a part of the cemetery I did not know. They were standing in a loose cluster around a stone I couldn’t read from where I was. Cassidy. O, his arm around her. Gavin, shoulders curled in. And Zane, a little apart, his head down.

I knew before I understood. My body knew, the way it always knew things first. I walked toward them. The stone came clear one word at a time as I crossed the grass. Henry.

I stopped a few feet back. Nobody had heard me come. They were just standing there, the four of them, the quiet of old grief, people who come here together and stand exactly like this and don’t need to say anything because they’ve said it all across five years.

And I understood, completely, the whole story. They had all been his first.

Cassidy, who spoke for him, who kept the perimeter around everyone’s grief because she was the only one close enough to do it. O, who looks at the sunsets for him. Gavin, whose one beer and no more traced back to a funeral I had not attended for a boy I had not known I’d known. Zane, who carried him in a suitcase across years and never once opened the letter because opening it meant there was no more of him left to find. Blair, who had known his innocence and tied it to her own.

The people I loved. They had loved Henry before they ever loved me. They were his people, and they had become mine, and I had spent this whole grief believing I was the common variable, the Dead Sea, the thing that swallowed everyone who came close, when the truth was standing in front of me in a cluster around a gray stone.

I hope you find them, Seren.

He’d written that. In the letter. I hope you find them, I hope they see you the way you’re meant to be seen.

I had found them. I had found every last one of them. Not despite the wreckage. Through it. Through him. He had loved these people and then he had gone, and in going he had left them behind like a set of coordinates, and they had drifted into my life one by one without any of us knowing we were all standing in the same current, pulled by the same lost moon.

“Seren.” Cassidy had turned, seen me. Her face did something soft and careful. “You don’t have to. If you want to go back to your—”