My mother’s grave rests beneath a large willow tree with limbs that fan around it. There is an easy breeze that moves the leaves and scatters small white buds across the ground from a nearby crepe myrtle. The trees shouldn’t be in bloom. It is All Saint’s Day and November has brought in breath that fogs in air and the slight hint of flurries on the wind. Still, for my mother, the flowers bloom, the trees are bright with green leaves and the crepe myrtle showers her with white flowers like fairy dust.
It is the first time I have seen her marker. She lies next to her parents, they, next to theirs; all were fiercely proud of their heritage but felt that Cavanagh was home. They didn’t need burying in Ireland to remind them of who they were. My injuries had been too severe to attend her funeral and until today, I hadn’t managed to visit her grave. Had it not been for Ava calling to tell me the headstone had been laid, I would have ignored All Saint’s Day completely.
But I did not need Ava to join me. She would have cried, would have expected me to do the same and then there would have been too much wine, too many reminisces about the past. My first thought was self-preservation, to avoid all of that completely, so I called Joe. He immediately asked to go with me.
It is a beautiful headstone. There are large, elegant letters that mark her name, birth and death date. Beneath a picture of her are the simple words from Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods”:
Even nothing cannot last forever.
I believe she had a very real love for Neil Gaiman. It was either Gaiman or his character, Shadow Moon. She had a tendency to fall in love with fictional characters, a habit that she passed down to me. We’d discussed her tombstone once, mine as well. I wanted “Now I can sleep” on mine, but she told me no one really appreciates gallows humor anymore. She wanted the Gaiman quote because she believed that the beyond, the afterlife, was something none of us could truly measure. It was endless, or it was quick, or it was a huge space of nothing and everything all at the same time.
Joe stands next to me staring down at the marker. His shoulders are slumped and I get the feeling that he wants to cry. I know he’s trying to compose himself, that he thinks I wouldn’t appreciate his tears. So I grab his hand and tilt my head against his shoulder.
“It’s okay, Joe. You can cry if you want to.”
He touches his fingertips to the headstone to stroke my mother’s picture. “She was so beautiful, was my Evelyn.” There is visible wetness under his thick eyelids, but he does not sob, does not openly weep.
I refrain from correcting him. She hadn’t been his Evelyn for a long time. It would be futile to remind him of that. He knows what he did. He knows the whys even if I don’t. In this moment, he mourns, experiencing all the emotions I have over the past five months, likely more of them. I can only imagine what it’s like to love someone so strongly that you commit your forever to them. I can only imagine what it is to create an entirely new person with the one you love, to see yourself and the one you love most in the world reflected in the skin and bone and soul of a baby. It must be overwhelming. It must be wonderful - or maybe it’s was none of those things for Joe. He did leave. He abandoned us and part of me has to believe that this raw emotion he’s experiencing now is coiled with a great amount of guilt.
I try to drive these morose thoughts from my mind. Whatever happened between my parents, I sense his love, his anguish and I see that the loss of her is very real and very sudden for him.
I move in next to Joe and take his hand again. “She…she never found anyone else, you know.” His eyes are glistening, small tracks of tears sliding over his cheeks. “She never really tried.” I watch him, curious. “What about you?”
He takes a breath and his fingers grip tight against mine. “I’ve never loved anyone or anything like I loved Evelyn. I didn’t want to leave, did I? I would have never left had I been given a choice.”
“What happened?” It was such a simple question, but it holds in its depth the weight of tomorrow. What if I didn’t believe him? What if his answer didn’t justify his leaving?
“I made a stupid mistake before I met your mother, sweetheart. One that she couldn’t forgive. One that I couldn’t make amends for.”
I think about asking more, desperate as I am to know the truth. But I hesitate and in those few seconds, the moment passes. Behind me I hear Ava calling my name. She and Sayo are approaching and already I can see the tears thick in their lashes. They join us and I receive their tight hugs. To my utter shock, Ava comes next to Joe, embraces him and they share a moment crying over my mother’s tombstone.
I think about my mother in that moment, about the way her hair felt like spun silk, about her laugh, deep and raspy, and the way she danced to old jazz records late at night when she thought I was asleep. For a second, remembering her, I don’t think about her last moments or her blood-covered face lying against the headrest of the car. I just remember her as she was—beautiful, brilliant and full of hope for me and for what tomorrow would bring. It’s those thoughts that I cling to as Joe and Ava’s sobs echo around the cemetery.
I was nineteen when my mother went on her first date in six years. It had been six years of her endlessly discovering new hobbies in an effort to pass the time. Six years of watching the faint wrinkles on her face deepen, of putting off her friends’ efforts to match make. Finally, when I’d completed the last track meet of my college career, my coach worked up the nerve to ask her out. Initially she refused, passing out excuses like a Kindergarten teacher doles out stickers. “Oh, no, thank you though, I’m just too busy.” Or, my favorite, “I couldn’t possibly, Autumn needs me to help her study for finals.” There had been many invitations that came her way, but each was declined, each not given a second thought.
Finally, she had been convinced. I asked her why she hadn’t dated, why she insisted on keeping to herself, avoiding men altogether. “I’ve been married once, Autumn, I don’t need to repeat that mistake.” Then she stopped, gawked at me as though someone else had taken control of her voice; someone else had forced her to speak.
“Did I really just say that?”
“You did, Mom.”
Despite everything Joe had put her through, the heartbreak, the betrayal, she’d always told me that having me had been the best thing to come out of her marriage. I was the light amid the fog, she said, the brilliant reward for every tear shed, every night spent crying alone in her bed. She said she’d do it all again, even knowing what the end result would be, if it meant having me as a daughter.
That night, she got up from our small kitchen table and called my coach to accept his offer. It didn’t lead to anything, none of her dates would, but she learned to step forward into the unknown. She risked more breaks in her heart because, in the end, even the very worst of them would yield something worth smiling about.
I wish I had her strength, her positive outlook.
I hold her picture in my hand, rub my finger against the high cheekbones and pointed chin of the black and white image wishing desperately that she was here. She’d tell me to take a chance. She’d tell me I was being silly, that Declan was a good man and that this date tonight might bring me at least one laugh, one memory to recall even if it lead nowhere else.
But she isn’t here. She can’t encourage me. She can’t tell me to stop sitting in my bedroom, alone in my underwear debating on whether or not I should bother getting dressed. She’d tell me to answer the door when Declan knocks.
Instead of my mother, it’s Sayo’s annoying banging that fractures the quiet of my apartment. I don’t bother to answer, but it isn’t like that will deter her. I should really move the extra key, but knowing my best friend as I do, she’d find it.
“You’re such a bitch,” Sayo says as she barrels into my bedroom.
I blink at her, grabbing my robe when she enters. “Well, yes, but why specifically now?”
“I was knocking, didn’t you hear me?”
Sighing, I prepare myself for the lecture I’m sure is coming. “I’m not going. I can’t.”
Sayo puts her hands on her hip and cocks her eyebrow up. She’s going to yell. She always yells when I say something she doesn’t like. But when she speaks, her voice is low, biting, yes, but she doesn’t scream at me.
“You lost a bet. If we lose the Dash, we’ll all be forced into the auction.” She sits next to me on the bed. “A date with Declan isn’t really a loss, Autumn.” I’m surprised that she’s not yelling, that her anger has, in fact, completely disappeared. “You like him.”
“I don’t want to.”
She wraps her arm around my shoulder and we let the silence fill the room. Everything I’ve endured, all the epic levels of crap, Sayo knows. Since we were teenagers, Sayo was the only person who knew everything about me. My accident, losing my mother, building this mammoth wall around my heart, Sayo is well informed on all of it. She’s my secret keeper.
“It won’t be so bad, you know.” She nudges me up and pulls her arm away from me. “He’s funny. He obviously likes you and most of all, Autumn, he isn’t Tucker.”
I can only manage to stare at her, searching her eyes for the truth, wishing that what she’s saying is more than a hope. I need a promise. “I know he’s not, Sayo. I know he’s nothing like Tucker.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I don’t want it to get complicated.” I scoot back to rest against my headboard. “Tucker and I, God, it got bad.”
Sayo nods and I suspect she’s remembering the hundreds of times I’d called her at ridiculous hours, crying, sobbing, yelling about one fight or another Tucker and I had. She saw the darkness between us. She saw it when I refused to see anything but the fantasy of what I wanted our relationship to be.
She exhales, her shoulder coming down into a slouch. “It was bad, Autumn.” Her fingers are cupped together. “I was so scared for you when you were with him.”
“Why?”
“You know why.” Sayo turns toward me, pulling her knees to her chest. “Stable relationships aren’t filled with screams and shouts, not like that. They shouldn’t be about control and power. You know that now, but back then, God, Autumn, it was scary.”
The street light outside of my window flickers on and the dull yellow light blinks in and out. I know Sayo hated me sometimes when I was with Tucker. She’d tell me over and over how unhealthy our relationship was. “Good boyfriends don’t keep you from your friends,” she’d say. Or “It’s not normal for boyfriends to demand to know where you are at all times or instigate fights when a guy smiles at his girlfriend. Tucker’s dangerous.”
“I know it got bad,” I say, still watching the window. “I let it get bad.” Finally I face Sayo again. “That’s what scares me about Declan. I don’t ever want to be that girl again and he makes me feel—” I close my eyes, taking a breath. “When I’m around him, just hanging out in the library or training, anytime, I get butterflies.”
“But that’s good. That’s normal.”
“Is it? I’m not so sure. I used to get butterflies with Tucker and then they turned into an all-consuming swarm. I don’t want a swarm, Sayo. I’m not sure if I want any of that, but Declan, he doesn’t give up. He doesn’t know what can happen. He doesn’t know how attached I can become. He also has these mid-century ideas about protecting me from the vile, loathsome Tucker Morrison.”
Sayo laughs. Before she can respond, my cell chirps with a text alert and I click on the message and instantly smile. Declan.
Wear something casual. And tight. And low cut. No, just something comfortable. #CantWaitToSnogYou
Sayo scoots next to me and stares down at the screen. “He’s funny.”
“He’s insufferable.”
“Yeah, but if you didn’t like him, you wouldn’t tolerate him.” I can’t disagree. I can’t seem to ignore the wild flutters in my stomach at his message. Sayo watches me reread the message. “Don’t think of the swarm. Not yet. Worry about the swarm later. For tonight, just have fun. Let yourself laugh. You haven’t done much of that lately, friend.”
I know she’s right, that I’m likely overthinking this one date with Declan. Still, my wall is held tight, warming the swift heat of the anger I can never seem to let go of. The anger that has been growing since the day Joe left. “I know you’re right,” I tell Sayo. “It’s just hard not to think about what happens next.” I grab her hand. “I really do like him.”
Sayo’s face shifts somewhere between a sad smile and a weak frown. “Then just like him. Don’t think about tomorrow. Enjoy tonight and let yourself laugh.” She stands, smoothes her jeans down her legs before she leaves my room. “And for the love of God, Autumn, let the guy kiss you. Let him kiss you a lot.” She walks out of my room and I hear her taunt echoing behind her. “God knows you could use it.”