My memories from then are so hazy and incomplete because I was just barely in kindergarten. I can’t get my shit together now, but she did it all while taking care of a kid.
“How did you do it, Mom?” I ask her. “Kim said that night that I didn’t know how to be myself without her, and I’m starting to think that she’s right.”
“I’m still doing it. One step at a time,” she says. “Always forward. Never back. Just like you’ll do.” Her eyes grow serious. More serious than I’ve ever seen them. She reaches out and pulls me in for a hug. With her face buried in my neck, I can just barely make out her whisper. “You’ll fight to come back.”
Always forward. Never back.
I think about that as I unpack the groceries and smuggle the pizza rolls into my mini fridge in the basement. She said I’d fight my way back. But I’ve never had to fight alone. Through the shoulder injury, through pregame jitters, through tough classes at school, I always had Kim’s support.
Kim told me that night that I could move forward without her.
The thing she didn’t tell me was how.
I pick up the photo of us from the homecoming game and sit down on my bed. Her smile glitters up at me.
My forward always had her in it. We had already signed up for classes at UCLA, my schedule mirroring hers, even though she was the only one with some idea for a major. But I thought there would be time to figure out the specifics for me. To figure out what I wanted, Kim alongside me the entire time.
I guess, if I think about it, I didn’t have much of a plan for myself. More of a plan for us.
Even if I could picture it, there’s no way I can move forward now, haunted by the ghost of my girlfriend.
Ex-girlfriend, I correct myself. And somehow that makes it worse. Like I don’t have claim to the grief inside me. Just the blame. Even thinking of Kim haunting me makes me feel like a dick. She didn’t want to be with me in life, so why would she spend her time following me now? I toss the photo of us down on my bed, realizing there’s only one other possible answer for what happened tonight.
One that actually makes sense.
Maybe I’m just going crazy.
Maybe that’s what I deserve.
7
“Well?” I ask Dr. Benefield first thing Monday morning. “Am I cracked?” My mom scheduled the appointment to prove to me I’m not crazy.
She clicks her penlight off and slides it into the pocket of her white jacket as she shakes her head, giving me an amused smile. “No. You suffered a significant loss, and that could be manifesting in unexpected ways.”
“Like being haunted by Kimberly?”
“Like… seeing what you want to see,” she corrects, holding up her iPad to show me my brain scans from this morning. “Look.” She flips back and forth between a healthy brain and my brain to make some point about how I’m “just fine.” My mom cranes her neck to see the images, but I don’t even bother to look.
“Our brains are magnificent machines,” Dr. Benefield adds, closing the iPad. “They’ll do whatever it takes to protect us from pain, whether that’s physical or emotional. There’s nothing wrong with yours that time won’t heal. Okay?”
To protect us from pain? How is seeing my dead girlfriend protecting me from pain?
She looks at me until I comply with a nod, then pulls out a prescription pad and a pen and scribbles on a page before ripping it off and holding it out to me.
I take it from her, looking down at her handwriting. I expect to see a gibberish prescription name, but instead it says: Chill out. It’s not really happening.
Great.
“Kyle,” she says, and I look back up, meeting her no-nonsense gaze. “The visions you’re having, they’re not real, okay? They’ll fade when you’re ready. I promise. But for now, when they happen, you take out that prescription. Read it, remember it, believe it.”
I nod, but her words don’t reassure me. Fade? What happens when even this last trace of Kim fades? When I see her, I feel crazy, which sucks, but I also see her. And I’m not ready to lose that.
* * *
After we get back home, my mom heads to work. I pour myself a bowl of Lucky Charms and slide into a spot at the kitchen table. For a while it’s just the sound of my noisy crunching, but then I swear I hear a muffled voice, the words difficult to make out. I pause, the spoon halfway to my mouth, my ears straining.
“Mom?” I call out, my voice echoing around the empty house. Did she forget something? I listen harder and realize the sound seems to come from below. My pocket.
When I pull my phone out, noise is crackling through the speaker. Oh man. Who did I butt dial?
“… Sam,” the voice says as I lift the phone to my ear, the words finally becoming clear enough to hear. I open my mouth to respond, but he keeps going. It’s a voice mail. “I don’t even know if you’re going to hear this, but I gotta tell you, I’m scared. And before you laugh, asswipe, I’m serious. You’re scaring us.”
The voice mail cuts off and the screen lights up, showing the string of other unheard messages.
I stare at my phone in the palm of my hand. My thumb lingers over the green call button so long that the screen goes dark. I swallow hard, then shove the phone back into my pocket.
It isn’t until after I’ve finished my cereal, cleaned off the couch in the basement, filled an entire trash bag with food wrappers, cleared out all the dishes and glasses from next to my bed, and done every conceivable chore I can think of that I have the balls to call him back.
The phone rings for so long I’m not even sure he’ll pick up, rightfully pissed at me after my months of ignoring him.
But he’s Sam, so even though I don’t deserve it, he answers.
* * *
Sam drains his whiskey, then picks up the flask to peer at it, his face curious. I watch him, taking in the tired look around his dark eyes, the patchy five-o’clock shadow that I’ve literally never seen on his face.
Normally, I’d tease him about it, but he’s been all one-word answers since he got here fifteen minutes ago, no matter what I say.
My conversational skills are clearly tanking hard after an entire summer alone.
“What, uh, made you decide to stick around here?” I ask, nodding to the blue-and-gray T-shirt he’s wearing, from the local community college. I know he got into a few state schools, so I’m not sure what exactly changed his mind.
He raises one of his eyebrows at me, and I see something I’ve only rarely seen in our lifetime of being friends.
Mad Sam.
“Things haven’t exactly been rainbows and sunshine for me, dude. One of my best friends died and the other dropped off the face of the earth,” he says. After a beat, his expression softens. “I had no idea what was going on with you. I had to keep checking with your mom.”
I take a long sip of the whiskey, my throat burning, but it helps the words come easier. “I’m sorry, Sam,” I say.
And I am. But I owe it to him to be honest.
“I know I was a shitty friend, but I just… couldn’t. I couldn’t be around you. I couldn’t be around anybody. Sometimes I think maybe I still can’t.”
I feel his eyes appraising me. “You look like shit,” he says finally, gesturing to my wrinkled shirt, overgrown hair, weirdly curly beard.
I shrug, not particularly caring what I look like. Kimberly isn’t here to see me. She was always the one who’d tell me that I looked like an animal if I wore sweats to school. That maybe there were clothes other than gym shorts. What does it matter now if I shave or brush my hair or wear a clean shirt? What did it matter then, if my ass was always going to end up here?
“Well.” Sam sighs, and the last of his anger seems to roll off his shoulders. “I’m glad we didn’t lose you, too, even if you do look like shit,” he says as he tips the flask in his hand and pours more into his glass.
He grins and nods to the flask. “How’d this make it through customs?”
“Found it in the bag
s from the hospital,” I say, nodding to the closet where my mom moved everything after disposing of my bloody and tattered suit. “Mom must’ve missed it.”
I know I could take the out. Keep the conversation here on whiskey and bullshit. But his words are still in my ears. Something about them feels wrong.
“You’re glad you didn’t lose me, too,” I repeat, shaking my head. “Sometimes I wish it had been me. Sometimes I feel like I’m waiting for her to walk right through that door.” I look across the hallway to the couch, the empty gray cushion. “Waiting for things to go back to normal.”
Sam’s face gets serious, just like it used to when he’d start the chant in our football huddles before a big play. “Me too,” he says, his voice firm. “That’s why we can’t forget her. We have to stick together because we’re the only ones who will keep her memory alive. That’s what Kim would’ve wanted.”
What Kim wanted. I used to think I knew what that was better than anyone. But I didn’t. Sam did.
I think about all the conversations that happened behind my back. How he knew how she really felt. What she really wanted.
“How long did you know?” I ask him. “About Berkeley?”
He pauses, but instead of answering, he hangs his head. “I’m sorry. I should have told you.”
“Yeah,” I say simply. But I think of what Kim said in the car about breaking up. About her going to Berkeley. Would you have let me?
Did he think that too?
He watches me for a long moment, and when he realizes I’m not going to explode, he continues. “I know that night was bad, but she loved you. You have to remember that.”
I let those words sink in, making my head swim more than the alcohol. The “loved” past tense is still just as jarring as it was that night. And it’s too much to unpack right now.
Sam doesn’t stay much longer. We move to safer territory, talking about his plans for this semester, the upcoming UCLA football games, even though I haven’t had it in me to catch up on any preseason coverage.
And then, as he leaves, I promise to not be an asshole and text him more.
But after the door closes behind him, I find myself reopening it a few minutes later and stepping outside, a light chill in the late-summer air. It takes me a second to realize I’m walking to the pond, the half-finished whiskey flask in tow as I limp along the path to the park. I sit at the water’s edge in the shade of one of the huge looming willows, looking out as the afternoon sun reflects off the surface of the water and sends twinkling light all across it.
Gently, the wind blows, tugging at my hair and bringing with it a voice. A whisper. The words are too soft to make out.
I look around, trying to find the source, but this time I’m not surprised when I’m met with nothing—just the green grass around the pond, the trees lining the shore, and a feeling I can’t shake. What Sam said keeps running circles in my mind, like laps after a confiscated bag of peanuts.
I’m not worried about forgetting her. I never could. But how the hell am I supposed to know what she’d want me to do? How she’d want me to be without her?
The voice fades with the breeze, and I run my hands through my hair, wondering how I can possibly stand on my own when I feel so damn unsteady.
8
I stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, tucking the hem of my white button-down securely into my pants as I give myself a final once-over.
My hair is still a mess, long and overgrown, but the patchy beard of the last three months is gone, and the new aftershave I bought before graduation has finally been put to use. The scar on my forehead has faded, and the redness is now a soft, far-less-noticeable pink.
I wouldn’t say I look good, but I do look like I’m trying.
Plus, I don’t want to go see Kimberly looking like I’ve “never heard of something called a shower.”
I smile to myself, remembering the athletic banquet at the end of junior year. I showed up straight from a touch football game with Sam. She roasted me with that before we even set foot inside, then pulled out a comb from her purse to slick down my hair in a way that only she could somehow manage.
It’s always like this, some memory rooting me to the spot, stopping me in my tracks.
But Sam was right last week. I have to go and see her. I can’t let her think I would forget her.
Sighing, I head out of the bathroom door and into my bedroom, determination turning into uncertainty as my hand hesitates over a bouquet of irises, the purple petals shockingly bright for such a heavy day.
Am I really ready for this?
I think back through the weeks since Mom decided to take my door off its hinges. I guess I feel stronger in some ways. I’m actually going to my PT appointments. Replying to Sam’s texts instead of ignoring them. Not having a freak-out every time I see Kim in empty chairs and across the room and in places she couldn’t possibly be.
But today I’m actually going to see her. Going to the cemetery and standing in front of a gravestone with her name on it and trying my very best to figure out what exactly she’d want me to do.
And now that the moment is here, I’m scared shitless. The same stomach-dropping feeling I had when not-actually Kim decided to show up next to me during that football game two weeks ago. What’s going to happen when I’m actually near her?
I mean… I could do it tomorrow. Or even next week. After my mom gets home from running errands, I could even call Sam to… put it off. I’d just be putting it off.
“Don’t be such a little bitch, Kyle,” I mutter, and I head up the steps and out the door, hoping the super-long walk to the cemetery will be enough time to pull myself together.
Only, of course, today it feels like a block.
Too soon the wrought iron gates come into view, big trees casting shade over the sea of gravestones, a heavy sadness in the drooping branches. I slow down as I walk along the path, taking in each headstone while I put off my destination. Mothers, fathers, sons, grandparents. Even kids.
Fuck, I do not want to be here.
Some of the plots are carefully maintained, fresh flowers looping around the stone, trinkets from friends and loved ones placed underneath.
Others are overgrown, no one left to look after them.
Will Kim’s grave be okay? I sure as hell hope so. While I don’t mind looking uncared for, I don’t think I could stomach seeing anything of hers that way.
I wouldn’t want it looking like… well… like this one.
I stop to study a small headstone with dead ivy crawling over the corners, the inscription just a single word: GOODBYE. No name, no date, nothing.
Damn, that’s sad. My head sears with pain and I have to steady myself, squinting at the individual letters, both of the o’s, the e, until the burning slowly starts to pass.
I wonder what kind of person a headstone like this belongs to. If anyone even remembers them.
When all of the pain dissipates, I pull a purple flower from the bouquet in my hands and place it carefully on the lonely headstone. I don’t really know why I do it, but it just seems like someone should. Especially since the grave next to it is surrounded by a sea of pink flowers growing as far as the plot allows. The big triangular petals are vivid and eye-catching. I really don’t know how I didn’t see it first.
I lightly touch one of the flowers. I think I recognize them from my mom’s garden. She tried growing them a few years ago, their smell strong enough to waft through our kitchen window on summer mornings.
But what were they called?
I’m about halfway through the alphabet of the dozen flowers I do know when I realize how hard I’m delaying.
I urge myself along. Come on, Kyle.
I continue on the path for a few more steps, my mind drifting from those pink flowers to the GOODBYE headstone. Something about it feels wrong. Why exactly? I’m so in my head that I almost miss it.
KIMBERLY NICOLE BROOKS. REST IN PEACE.
The wind is knocked right ou
t of me.
Her plot isn’t overgrown or neglected. In fact, there’s a massive bouquet of blue tulips already there, the color rich enough to hold a twinge of lilac at the base of the even petals.
Blue tulips.
I look down at the irises in my hand. Shit. Blue tulips were definitely her favorite. I can hear her now, telling me that she loved them because they matched her eyes.
Irises were just the first flowers I ever got her. If Kim were here, she’d refuse to talk to me for the rest of the day. Or the week if she was feeling especially salty about it.
God, I loved her, but I hated when she did that.
Love her, I correct myself. I will always love her. What the fuck is wrong with me thinking about that right now?
I put my sad bouquet of irises next to the tulips, and my hand finds the coarse gray stone. My fingers trace her name, the past few months leading to this moment.
“Kim…”
I stop, placing my whole hand on the headstone, all of the feelings I’ve kept bottled up hitting me at once. I can’t do it. I can’t be here. Not yet.
But I take a deep breath and try to start again.
“I… I don’t believe this.” I shake my head, throat burning. “I can’t believe it. But I face it every single day when I wake up and you’re not here.”
There’s a stab of pain in my temple, radiating out from a single point, almost sizzling. I rub it with my fingertips and fight to continue.
“If I could do it over, I wouldn’t have gotten so angry at the party,” I say finally. “I wouldn’t have forced that conversation in the car. I would have listened when you said you wanted…”
To turn around and not see me there. I swallow, her words echoing around my head. They still hurt, but it’s a softer pain than what I’m used to.
And this isn’t about my pain.
“I would have given you the time apart that you wanted. I would have… I would have let you drive,” I say with a harsh chuckle. “You would have definitely laughed at that,” I say, almost hearing the sound from somewhere just out of view. Almost.
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