Page 68 of Keep Me

“No,” I said. “I want to be here.”

I stepped into the cluster, and it opened for me, the way it always did, without anyone deciding to make room because the room was already mine. Zane’s hand found the small of my back. I looked down at the stone.

Henry. The dates. Seventeen years, that was all he got. And underneath, an epitaph someone had chosen for him, because unlike my father he had not arranged his own.

There is beauty everywhere. He taught us to see it.

Austin came up beside me. He had not known Henry the same way, and it showed in the way he held himself, a step back from the others, present but not inside the grief the way they were inside it. He put his hand on my shoulder, and Blair came to his other side, and we stood there, all of us braided together over a boy in the ground who had done the braiding himself and never got to see it hold.

I thought about his last words. The ones that closed the letter.

Remember me.

A boy who sat in the dark with me. A dad who tried before he was gone. A hummingbird feeder filled for twenty-one years. I remembered them. I would not stop.

Notice me.

A boy, at a new school, at seventeen, who could not stop looking at a girl before he had a single reason to.

See me.

A stranger in a graveyard who asked nothing. The boy who saw beneath my mask.

Trust me.

The people standing around this stone. The ones who came without being asked. The ones who would keep coming.

I had been remembered. Noticed. Seen. Trusted. All four. I had spent so long believing I was a thing that ended people that I never noticed I was the thing they had all, every one of them, chosen to keep.

Henry asked to be remembered. He is. He’s the whole reason. He’s underneath all of it.

“Blair,” I said quietly, still looking at the stone. “You said something. In the kitchen. About whether he knew.”

“I did,” she said.

“I wonder if he knew. That we would all end up here. Like this.”

Blair was quiet for a moment. Austin’s hand found hers.

“I think,” Austin said, before she could answer, in the low even voice he used only for the truest things, “this might have been Henry’s story the whole time. And we are just the ones who got to finish it for him.”

Nobody said anything after that. We just stood there together in the June light, all of us, the living and the boy who had gathered us, in a cemetery I had walked alone ten thousand times and never understood I was not alone at all.

The wind moved through the old trees. Somewhere beyond us, time was sitting at a table, and beside her sat my mom and dad, and Henry.

Stone

The porch held the last of the light, gold going amber going gone, and neither of us moved to turn on a lamp.

Everyone else had left an hour ago. Cassidy first, then Blair and Austin, then O and Gavin, the whole family of us dispersing back into their separate cars the way a leaf in autumn finally lets go. Zane had made tea nobody drank. It sat cooling on the railing between us now, two mugs, steam long gone.

I watched the feeder. Full. The bully with the crooked tail feather had already found it twice today. Everything seemed still.

“Can I ask you something,” I said, “and you have to actually think about it before you answer. Not just say the thing that will make me feel better.”

Zane turned his head. In the dying light his eyes had gone dark and warm and a little burnt at the edges. “Sure.”

I looked back at the feeder. It was easier to say to something that couldn’t look back at me.