Gone

The rain is coming down hard now, the ground turning to mud beneath my feet. The smell of clean, wet grass and night is in the air, the full moon overhead still somehow present, even though it’s no longer even visible through the thick clouds. I inhale deeply, willing my head to be cleared and all this to go away, trying to control my shivers from the cold water running down my neck and back and soaking through my black dress. I feel something brush my side, and turn. Luke is standing behind me, draping his coat over my shoulders. “It’s okay,” I begin, but he shakes his head firmly, and I meekly accept. I don’t have it left in me to protest. I hug the heavy black coat around me, grateful for the warmth.

There’s a crack, and a bolt of lightening splits the sky, making everyone jump. There are murmurs, barely audible above the thrumming of the rain and the howling wind, and an uncomfortable shifting among the sea of black umbrellas that have unfurled themselves. Even the preacher has broken off his monotonous oration, to look worriedly at the sky.

People are breaking off from the crowd, hastening over to cars as another lightening bolt flashes overhead, coupled with a deafening thunderclap that I swear I can feel reverberating in my bones. Someone presses an umbrella on me, I don’t know who, and I numbly nod my thanks as they duck into a car. My fingers are clumsy with cold as they press the button on the handle and the umbrella opens with a wet ‘fwap,’ flicking little droplets of water lost in the downpour.

“This is getting dangerous!” yells the preacher, shouting to make himself heard over yet another thunderclap. “The storm’s close. We have to stop. We can finish the service tomorrow, if it clears up.”

I feel myself nodding again, and behind me, Luke says, “Yes, of course,” in a defeated, drained monotone. Tucking his Bible safely under his coat, the preacher goes to talk to the couple across from us, the only people remaining in the cemetery.

I walk forward, slowly, unbelievingly, put a hand on the wet wood of the coffin, with raindrops pinging off it.

What did her body look like?

I squeeze my eyes tightly shut and turned away, willing the image, any image, out of my head, trying to preserve my memory of her, alive, smiling, laughing, living, not as some cold body in a wooden case, decaying beyond recognition, until all that was left was a skeleton, stripped of flesh and life, no different than anyone else.

A cemetery is a pretty morbid thing, when you think about it. You look six feet under the ground, and you see a bunch of dead people, cold and lifeless, their bodies rotting away, worm-eaten flesh stuffed inside a suit or a dress by some undertaker or morgue worker. Why do people even bother? When your body is so far gone you aren’t even recognizable, why keep it around? It’s only a painful reminder that you’re gone, and that all that’s left of you is a pile of bones.

“We should…” Luke’s voice is husky, and he’s blinking rapidly as he turns away from the coffin and the hole in the ground beside it. I follow his eyes to her parents, standing there in the rain, her father with his lips pressed tightly together, holding her mother close, her mother’s face invisible beneath her sodden black veil.

Taking a deep breath, I turn back, place my hand flat on the coffin, close my eyes. And I remember her. Just her. “Goodbye,” I say, so softly no sound emerges at all, it’s just my lips moving silently. Opening my eyes, I look down at my clenched fist. Numbed by the cold rain, I’d practically forgotten it was even attached to my arm. I open my hand, and slowly, reverently, take that single red rose and lay it on the coffin, ignoring the blood from where the thorns had gouged into my flesh trickling down my hand to mingle with the rainwater and drip to the ground. With another quick glance at the wooden case that holds her body, the hole in the ground they’re going to put her in, the dirt they’re going to cover her up with until they forget about her, I turn away. My legs are moving automatically—I can’t summon the will to make them move by myself—as I walk over to Luke’s car and around to the passenger side, close the umbrella with shaking fingers, and get in.

We’re sitting in my living room. I’m on the couch, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees, staring into the warm mug between my hands without really seeing it. Luke is in the armchair, leaning back into it with his eyes closed, his chest visibly rising and falling as he breathes deep, inhaling the vapors of his own steaming mug of chamomile tea.

I take a sip of my own, feeling it burn as it goes down my throat and not caring enough to flinch. I’m just grateful for the sensation. I don’t even know why I made the tea, now. I think I just needed something to do with my hands. I haven’t had this stuff since before college, when my grandmother would make it whenever I was stressed.

The silence is heavy, and both of us are lost in our thoughts, or our not-thinking. The only sound in the room is our slow, deliberate breathing.

I’m thinking of anything but her. To distract myself, I look at Luke. It’s been maybe a year since I’d seen him. I wonder how long it had been since he’s seen her. Alive, I mean. I think they’d been on pretty good terms, for exes. Things had ended fairly cleanly between them, maybe one of the few “mutual” break-ups I’d ever seen. One day, they’d looked at things and realized that neither of them were feeling, and they more-or-less went back to being friends.

He’s really outgrown his geekdom though, Luke. He used to be a nerd—not bad-looking for a nerd, but still a nerd. Looking at him now, though, you’d never know he can juggle five tennis balls behind his back. He’s fit as hell, tall, his dirty-blond hair darker than it was and combed neatly over his ears, with a strong face and the barest hint of a moustache. He’s wearing an old baggy T-shirt and a pair of flannel pants that I lent him when he changed out of his sodden black suit, and I’m dressed in basically the same, my “off-hours” wardrobe. As I’m looking, he sits up and opens his eyes. I know he sees me staring. I sigh and look back into my tea.

“You okay?” he finally asks, breaking the silence.

“No,” I answer bluntly, my eyes still fixed on the chipped blue ceramic mug in my hands.

There is another long silence. “Is this my fault?”

Luke looks up sharply. “What?”

“I said, is this my fault?”

“Of course not.” Luke stands, comes over to the couch and sits next to me. “None of us thought—”

“She used to talk about it a lot,” I say. I can’t bring myself to say the word ‘suicide.’ “I feel like… God, I don’t know… Like I should have seen it coming, should have been able to tell…”

I glance over at Luke, and he’s clenching and unclenching his hands, staring into space. “She mentioned it to me once or twice, but I never…” He trailed off helplessly.

“I can’t…” I find my mouth moving again, almost independently of my mind as the words I’ve been wanting, needing to say come tumbling out. “I keep feeling like I should have been able to do something, like it’s my fault, like I wasn’t making her life worth living. She was… God, I don’t know what I’ll do. She was my best friend. She… I loved her.”

There’s something wet on my cheeks. The tears that had eluded me since I’d found out have started. I haven’t cried since I’d gotten the call, from… Jesus, I don’t even remember who. Seems like our whole grade called at some point to see if I knew. Like some fucking piece of gossip. And I was feeling like a monster because my best friend was dead and I hadn’t shed a single tear for her.

There’s something warm on my back; Luke’s hand, just resting there in a show of solace. And somehow that just sets me off. I start sobbing in earnest, because there’s no way to get rid of this gaping hole I have in myself except to hope that the tears wash it out of me, somehow. My shoulders are shaking, and I’ve given up trying to control it; my grief rocks my whole body.

Hands tug on me, and I meekly comply, tears still streaming down my face. Luke pulls me into him, wraps his arms around me, and stills my shuddering as I cry my eyes out onto his sleeve.

I draw a deep, ragged breath, and release it. I look over my shoulder, and see the wetness on Luke’s face, at the corners of his blue-green eyes, and abruptly realize how selfish I’ve been being, somehow thinking that her death had only affected me. God, what an idiot.

I turn and put my arms around him and pull him in, trying to project the aura of comfort and warmth and safety like he had done all day, for which I was grateful to the core. And trying to be like she was to me, to everyone, and even if there’s no way I could ever match that, I’m going to try, because she was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Under my hand, I feel Luke’s body heaving as his own tears finally come. And his grief is a fresh reminder to mine. My best friend is dead.

But my eyes stay dry, even though I was expecting more tears. I haven’t experienced a death before, not really, not of someone this close. But when a vague friend died, back in sixth grade, for that one or two days I mourned her before it drifted out of my 11-year-old mind, there had been a constant lump in my throat, so many tears that it had felt impossible to shed them all.

But never this. Never this empty, lonely, guilty, self-pitying, shocked, numb hopelessness, this incompleteness. It hurts so badly, something torn out of my soul, but at the same time, here I am, looking on, looking down at myself, not really there. I’m lost. Totally and completely lost. Without her.

Eyes shut tight, I lay my head onto Luke’s shoulder while he sobs into mine, and I will it all away. But somewhere, even as I wish with all my might that it isn’t true, I know. She’ll always be in my heart, there’s absolutely no denying that.

But she’s gone.