Out of Breath
Page 18
But he is already turning, walking away. I shout after him, “What happened, Roman?”
He doesn’t answer. And it doesn’t matter. She is gone. Just like Stacey. And nothing will bring her back.
There is still one more thing I came here to do.
I remember that at my mother’s burial, my grandmother had given me a shiny blue pebble to place on her headstone. She told me that flowers die, but a stone—a piece of the earth—will last forever.
My grandmother is gone now, too, and I am not sure whether she knew that I never put that little pebble on my mother’s headstone. I had taken it eagerly, but I had been so distracted that day that I must’ve forgotten—I discovered it in my pocket a week later, in the car as my dad drove us to Houston. By then it was a different memory, a memory of everything else that would soon disappear.
But I held onto that stone, and now, I pull it out of the little inner pocket of my running shorts, where I’d put it for luck. I place it on her headstone. From now on, it belongs here. From now on, I will make my own luck.
Then I make my way to Stacey’s grave. The ground is still soft; the sod laid down above her has not yet taken root. I take the medal from around my neck, and I lay it across Stacey’s headstone.
The sky is clearing as I slowly walk back into town. Back to my little cottage. To David and my job. To Alex. And into a future of unknowns.
Blair Richmond is the pen name of an author
from the Pacific Northwest.
Stay tuned for the next book in the trilogy,
coming in 2012. For news and updates, join the
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