Christian puts his hand over mine.
“Clara,” he says quietly. “I think it’s time you told me about what happened in Italy.”
So I tell him. I tell him about how, this one night in Rome, on the metro, of all places, we ran into this guy, and Angela totally freaked just looking at him. How she sneaked away that night to see him, and didn’t come home until morning. How he turned out to be Phen, the mentor angel she’d told me about before, but he was clearly more than her mentor. I tell Christian about how Angela desperately wanted me to like Phen, but I just couldn’t. I saw Phen for what he was—a gray soul, weary with the world. How I didn’t think he could truly love her, but Angela loved him, and acted like she didn’t love him, so she could keep seeing him and call it casual.
“So what do you think?” I ask Christian when I’m done with the story.
He shakes his head. “I think this changes everything.”
8
WHEN I MET YOUR MOTHER
It’s a few weeks later, winter break, and I’m standing next to Christian, holding his hand as we watch Walter’s coffin being lowered into the ground. Snow is coming down, thick and heavy, blanketing Aspen Hill Cemetery. The circle of faces around us is familiar, all members of the congregation: Stephen, the pastor; Carolyn, who was my mother’s nurse; Julia, who’s an all-around pain in the butt, if you want my opinion, but at least she’s here; and finally I settle on Corbett Phibbs, the old Quartarius who was my high school English teacher, who looks especially somber, his hands folded as he gazes into the grave. He must not be that far away from this fate himself, I think. But then he glances up at me and winks.
“Amen,” Stephen says. The crowd of mourners starts to clear out, everybody headed home in case the storm (because it’s December in Wyoming) becomes a blizzard, but Christian stays, so I stay.
The snow, I’m pretty sure, is Billy’s doing. She’s standing on the other side of me, wearing a long white parka that makes the shining black of her hair look like spilled ink down her shoulders, and the snow is swirling around her, drifting down as she stares at the hole before us with an anguish in her eyes that makes me want to hug her. The snow’s her way of crying. It’s hard to see her this way when normally she’s so strong and steady, so quick to make a joke to break the tension. At my mother’s funeral she smiled every time she met my eyes, I remember, and I was oddly comforted by that, as if Billy smiling was proof that nothing truly bad had happened to my mom. Just a little death, is all. A change of location.
But this is her husband.
They start to fill in the grave, and she turns away. I reach out and touch her shoulder. The sharp, aching chasm of her grief opens up in my mind. So little time, she thinks. For all of us.
She sighs. “I need to get out of here.”
“Okay. See you at the house?” I ask. “I can make us some dinner.”
She nods and hugs me, a stiff hug.
“Billy—”
“I’ll be all right. See you later, kid.” She strides off through the snow, leaving a trail of dark tracks behind her, and after she’s gone, the snow lets up.
Christian doesn’t say anything as the men work to fill in the hole. A muscle moves in his cheek. I step closer, until our shoulders touch, and I will my strength to flow into him the way his came into me the day we buried my mother.
I wish I’d known Walter better. Or at all. I don’t know if more than three sentences ever passed between us. He was a hard man, always guarded, and he never quite warmed up to me or to the idea that I was involved in Christian’s vision. But Christian loved him. I can feel that, Christian’s love, his hurt now that Walter’s gone, his sense of being alone in the world.
You’re not alone, I whisper in his mind.
His hand tightens in mine. “I know,” he says out loud, his voice hoarse with the tears he’s holding back. He smiles and looks at me, his eyes dark and red-rimmed. He reaches to brush snow out of my hair.
“Thank you for coming here with me,” he says.
A bunch of trite responses spring to mind—you’re welcome, don’t mention it, no problem, it’s the least I can do—but none of them feel right, so I simply say, “I wanted to come.”
He nods, glances briefly at the white stone bench beside his uncle’s grave that serves as his mother’s headstone. He takes a deep breath, and lets it out. “I should get out of here, too.”
“You want me to go with you?” I ask.
“No. I’ll be all right,” he says, and for a moment there’s the shimmer of tears in his eyes. He turns away, then pauses and turns back. He smiles in a sad way and gazes straight into my eyes. “This is going to sound weird and inappropriate, probably … but will you go out with me, Clara?”
“Out where?” I ask stupidly.
“On a date,” he says.
“What, you mean now?”
He laughs like he’s embarrassed. “God,” he says, then covers his face with his hands. “I’m going home.” He uncovers his face and smiles at me sheepishly. “But maybe when we get back to school. I mean it. An official date.”
A date. I flash back to prom two years ago, the way it felt to stand in the circle of Christian’s arms while we danced, enveloped by his smell, his warmth, gazing up into his eyes and feeling like I’d finally broken through with him, that he was finally seeing me.
Of course, that was before Kay had a meltdown and Christian opted to take her home instead of me.
He sighs. “I’m never going to live that down, am I?”
“Probably not.”
“So that’s a no, then?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I mean no, it’s not a no. It’s a yes. I will go out with you.” I don’t even need to think about it. With us it’s always been forest fires and formal dances and funerals. Don’t we deserve something normal for once? And it’s been more than six months since I broke up with Tucker. It’s time, I decide, to give this thing with Christian a shot.
“I’m thinking dinner and a movie,” he says.
“I’d love to go to dinner and a movie.”
And now we suddenly don’t know what to say to each other, and my heart is beating fast, and the men are shoveling the last layer of earth over Walter Prescott.
“I’m going to—” I point up the hill toward my own mother’s grave, a simple marble headstone under the aspens.
He nods, then shoves his hands in his pockets and makes his way down toward his truck. I watch him drive away. When he’s gone, I climb the hill, pausing on the concrete stairs that I saw so often in my vision last year. The cemetery seems different to me now, in the snow: uglier, colder, a gray, deserted place.
I stand for a few minutes, looking at my mother’s grave. There’s a smudge of dirt on the top corner of the headstone, and I rub at it with my gloved hand, but I can’t get it to come clean.
Some people go to cemeteries to talk to the person who died. I wish I could do that, but the minute the words Hi, Mom come out of my mouth, I feel stupid. She’s not here. Her body, maybe, but I don’t really want to think about her body here, under the earth and snow. I know where she is now. I saw her in that place, walking into the sunrise, making her way from the outer edge of heaven. She’s not here, in that box, under the ground.
I wonder if, when I die, I’ll be buried here, too.
I walk to the chain-link fence at the edge of the graveyard, stare past it into the snow-filled forest beyond. I feel something then, a familiar sadness, and I know who has joined me.
“Come out,” I call. “I know you’re there.”
There is a moment of silence before I hear footsteps in the snow. Samjeeza emerges from the trees. He stops a few feet from the fence, and a sense of déjà vu washes over me. I throw up a mental wall between us, blocking him from my mind. We stare at each other.
“Why are you here, Sam?” I ask. “What do you want?”
He makes a small noise in the back of his throat. He has one hand in the pocket of his long leather coat, and I wonder if he’s fingering the bracelet I gave him, my mother’s bracelet, the only thing he has left of her.