by R. K. Ryals
Swallowing sudden tears, I followed his lead, our feet moving through the house until they rested at the end of Gregor’s hospital bed. His eyes were closed, but they opened when Heathcliff cleared his throat. My uncle’s dull gaze brightened when he caught sight of the two of us.
“I thought maybe,” Heathcliff glanced at me, and then at Gregor, “that you’d like to chaperone your niece’s prom, sir.”
For a long moment, Gregor stared as if it were the first time he’d ever laid eyes on me, tears filling his gaze. “God, when did you become a woman, Hawthorne?” he breathed.
My eyes watered, my smile meeting his abrupt grin.
“Susie!” Gregor called, his raspy voice breaking on the words. “You’ve got to come see Hawthorne. Looks like an angel, she does!”
Susie appeared in the doorway. “That she does,” she replied, grinning, her gaze flicking over us before moving to my uncle, a peculiar look passing through her eyes.
Heathcliff glanced down at me and winked. “Now, all we need is music.”
Susie shook herself and clapped. “I’ll turn on the radio!”
Heathcliff’s hand rose, stopping her. “No, it’s okay. I’ve got it.” Fishing in his pocket, he pulled out an iPod. “I’ve got some stuff on here that will work.”
Stepping away from me, he set it on the table next to Gregor, pausing just long enough to press a few buttons. Music spilled out of it, the first song an old, slow one.
Offering me his hand, Heathcliff breathed, “Dance with me.”
I glanced at Uncle Gregor. He was watching the entire scene, his cheeks flushing. There was something odd about his eyes, and I ignored Heathcliff’s hand. Stepping toward the bed, I leaned over it, my gaze on Gregor’s.
“Are you okay?” I whispered.
Gregor blinked, his eyes finding my face. He seemed to have a hard time focusing, his breath coming heavy when he said, “Dance, Hawthorne. I’d really like to see you dance.”
My lips brushed his forehead, his skin so fragile now I was almost afraid to touch him. “I love you, Dad,” I murmured.
I don’t know why I said it. I’d said it before, and then fallen back into the routine of calling him Uncle because the word was less awkward for us after all these years, but now Dad just seemed more appropriate.
“I love you, too,” he answered, grinning. “Now dance.”
I turned, and Heathcliff met me at the side of the bed, his arms embracing me. The music on the iPod had changed, the song an upbeat one, slow but full of amusement, and Heathcliff pulled me into a series of twirls. My feet stumbled, and we laughed, my gaze coming up to meet his.
“I’m not going to be good at this,” I said.
Heathcliff shrugged. “You don’t have to be. You just have to smile and enjoy it.”
And we did. We danced, and we laughed, the music carrying us across the floor. Uncle Gregor laughed with us, and then fell silent, his bright eyes watching as we circled around the room, my bare feet spending more time stepping on Heathcliff’s socks than on the floor. He twirled me so that my feet lifted, rising in the air. The shock of it made me giggle, the music cocooning us. For the first time in weeks, the room was bursting with happiness, with smiles and beauty.
It was a moment I was never going to forget. I’d always remember how much, in that instant, I loved Heathcliff. I’d remember how handsome his face looked lifted in amusement.
The music played, songs Heathcliff sang along to while I hummed, and we danced. We danced until our feet were sore, and the sun started to set, sending golden rays through the windows to light up the room.
It was then, while we danced and while our laughter rose to the ceiling that Uncle Gregor passed into a coma, his spirit ready to depart on gold, music, and joy.
Chapter 18
There are no words big enough to describe grief. It’s an incredibly lonely, empty place, a large hole that swallows your soul and threatens to destroy it. It’s a dark place with no light that blinds you, deafens you, and crushes your spirit. It’s a place full of memories you’re afraid to lose.
I was in that place. No amount of tears washed away the loneliness. No amount of screams chased it away. There were simply memories, an avalanche of memories that I desperately needed to hold onto.
There was so much that death didn’t prepare me for. It didn’t prepare me for the storm that would break my will. Uncle Gregor’s passing sent me to my knees and left me there.
The day he died, it rained. It rained so hard that the yard turned into a muddy mess, the vehicles that pulled into the drive sloshing through water, their metal bodies highlighted by lightning. The air screamed with me, thunder rolling, crashing over me like a bowling ball of pain.
It was twenty-four hours after my impromptu prom, and I was still wearing the dress, my hair wild, my feet glued to the wooden floor next to Gregor’s hospital bed. His body had been taken, and there were people surrounding me, people helping clean the room while others worked in the kitchen, making food and conversation. I knew most of the men and women who came through, but I didn’t see them. The tears blurred my vision, my heart stuck in a strange limbo between needing to live and wanting to join Gregor.
Sometimes, I stood. Other times, I knelt. Most of the time, I cried, silent tears trekking down my cheek. Mams’ voice circled me. After a phone call from Heathcliff, she’d arrived just after Gregor’s death, her commanding voice taking over where my voice had ended. She didn’t try to console me. She didn’t even approach me. She just took over, guiding people to where they needed to be.
I think she knew I was lost.
This part of my life wanted to destroy me. It’s true that death finds us all at some point, but the heart doesn’t care about that. It simply grieves.
I felt like a tornado. I’d grown up being afraid of the kind of storms that brought funnel clouds. There’s nothing more terrifying than hiding in a basement, bathtub, or closet wondering if Mother Nature’s enraged thumb would land on your house. Grief kind of felt like that.
My entire body was a maelstrom of funneling emotions that imprisoned me. There was nowhere for them to go. Somewhere inside of me, there was a calm place, a quiet center, the eye of the storm, but I couldn’t find it.
People came and went, but only one presence truly stayed with me. Heathcliff. Mostly, he stood next to me, sometimes kneeling on the floor when I couldn’t stand. At first, he didn’t even attempt to hold me, but then I reached for him. I’m not sure why. In many ways, I didn’t want anyone. I just wanted to hurt, to spend my grief the same way I’d lived my life, with just Gregor and me.
But at some point, I did reach for Heathcliff, and he embraced me, his arms tightening.
“You’re not alone,” he said against my hair.
He never left. He, along with his grandmother, stayed at the plantation with me, their comforting presence surrounding me. Mams made phone calls, talked to the funeral home, and set up things I wouldn’t even have known how to set up. All I had to do was sign papers.
“He had everythin’ lined up,” Mams’ told me that first Gregor-less night. “His insurance covers everything. All you have to do is help me make a few selections and sign a few papers.”
I was getting good at putting my signature on paperwork through a haze of tears.
Vaguely, I remember showering and changing, my heavy, tear-drained body falling onto my bed. Downstairs, people moved around, Heathcliff’s voice mingling with his family’s. They’d taken me under their wings, but all I could do was stare blankly at the window above my window seat, my fist clutching my stomach, my knees drawn up to my chest. The tears made my body too hot for blankets and too cold to be warm.
The light from my window started out dull and full of threats, changing with the day, the gray crawling across the floor, up my walls, and then back across the floor again before being snuffed out by scattered storms. Lightning flashed.
This was grief. This was pain.
Outside, it raine
d.
“For my sake,” I sobbed. “You’ve got this, Hawthorne. For my sake.”
Downstairs, music played, the sound of Heathcliff’s guitar both sad and healing. He made more mistakes on the instrument than he got right, but it eased the pain some, filling the screaming silence in my head with something more.
“Be brave, Hawthorne,” I told myself.
I wish I could say that I was able to pull myself together, to make it through my uncle’s passing with poise and grace, but there’s a huge difference between knowing you’re going to lose someone and actually experiencing the loss. There was no grace in my tears, no poise in the way I walked, and no beauty in the way I ranted at my walls.
In many ways, I think people need to be angry before they can be accepting. I was angry, so very angry at death and life and people who had the kind of happiness that had been robbed from me. It didn’t matter how unfair that sounded, how selfish it seemed to make me. I was angry, and so I yelled at the invisible people in front of me, blaming my missing parents, happy people I respected, myself, and even Gregor.
I yelled, swore, and punched my bed.
Outside, it rained.
The day of the wake, Heathcliff stood in front of my open bedroom door, his gaze on my sprawled figure.
“It’s okay to fall, Hawthorne,” he said. “Sometimes it takes hitting rock bottom to find the strength to climb back up the mountain.”
Sitting up, I stared at him, my hair even messier than usual, my face swollen, my head pounding from too many tears.
“You don’t know,” I scolded. “You don’t know how it feels.”
He leaned against the open frame. “No, I don’t. I wasn’t very old when I lost my grandfather, and I certainly haven’t lost a parent, but the words sounded good in my head.” His gaze traveled down my rumpled sheets. “I’ll be here to help you though. I may not understand, but I’ll help hold you up while you’re in the process of falling.”
I didn’t think there were any more tears left in me, but a few trickled down my cheeks any way. “I can do this, Heathcliff. I can.”
The smile he gave me was a soft one. “I know you can. For his sake and yours.” He entered the room and offered me his hand. “It’s better to let it all out than to keep it in. Come on, I can’t keep you from stumbling, but I can certainly cushion the fall.”
My tear-filled eyes found his face before falling to his shoes. He had on his sneakers, the old shoes going well somehow with the jeans and dress shirt he wore. It should have clashed, but it didn’t.
Another tear fell. “You have good shoes, you know,” I said.
It amazed me how close I’d become to Heathcliff. All because I’d noticed his shoes, and he’d followed me home from school one day.
“Yours aren’t so bad either,” Heathcliff replied.
There was no more room in my heart for heartbreak. “Can you promise me something?” I asked.
Heathcliff kept his hand held out toward me. “Anything?”
My gaze moved up to his. “When you leave, wear a new pair of shoes. Don’t walk away in these.”
He froze, but his hand never wavered. “I promise.”
My fingers met his palm, and he pulled me effortlessly to my feet, his shoulder supporting me. In retrospect, Heathcliff was always offering me his hand, his fingers pulling me from the darkness. Death was making me poetic, opening my eyes to things I wasn’t sure I would have noticed before.
Heathcliff stayed with me, helping as I changed clothes before walking with me to the stairs and the cars beyond the house. His family waited on us, their vehicles following us to the wake.
There wasn’t much that could be said about my uncle’s viewing, the funeral that followed, and the procession to the cemetery. There was an incredible show of support, most of the town coming out to wish me well, some of them following us to his gravesite while the rest either went home or to the plantation to set up a small meal.
To be honest, I kept searching the crowd. It would have been a dramatic occurrence, an interesting story to tell I suppose, if my eyes had fallen on the two people I was looking for. But, despite the faint hope and fear, I never saw my parents. They wouldn’t have known to come, and in truth, I would have hated to see them there. Maybe I hoped they loved Gregor more than they’d cared to stay with me.
In the end, when the day was finished, I found myself grabbing Heathcliff’s hand, my fingers squeezing so hard I was sure my nails left impressions in his skin.
“Don’t go,” I whispered.
“I won’t,” he promised.
Outside, it started to rain.
Chapter 19
My love story sort of ended with Gregor’s death. I remained at the plantation, and I returned to school, finishing out my senior year the way my uncle had wanted me to. Heathcliff often spent the night with me, coming in after working with a duffel bag slung over his shoulders. I’d have supper ready because cooking was something I was used to doing, something I’d always done for Gregor and me.
Every night, Heathcliff and I would sit at the table and eat before doing school work and heading to bed. There was a distance growing between us. It was natural I guess, and I think in many ways, I’d always known it was coming.
Life had a funny way of separating people. Uncle Gregor’s death had changed me, and Heathcliff’s dream for the future was building a wall between us. People change. Relationships change. We were changing, and our relationship wasn’t moving forward with those changes.
I was learning something about being broken. Like a shattered dish being glued back together, I didn’t look or feel the same way I had before I’d fallen apart.
In a weird way, mine and Heathcliff’s relationship ended a lot like it began. In silence. We drifted apart, and one day he just quit coming to the plantation. The only thing keeping us together were our shoes and last period English class. Our feet often touched in the aisle, even after our relationship ended. It was as if we’d never quit being a couple, we’d just returned to that beautiful, quiet place where we’d first met.
There was no animosity between us. The truth was, he was leaving, and we both knew it. He didn’t want to hurt me, and I didn’t want to hold him back, so the only place we could go from there was back to the beginning. To silence and touching shoes.
Graduation day loomed. I learned through Rebecca, who’d started staying with me not long after Heathcliff quit coming, that Max Vincent had enlisted in the military. It should have surprised me, considering Heathcliff’s love for working with metal and parts, but it didn’t. It made sense actually. He liked saving things, he liked piecing stuff together, and he’d always wanted to see the world. He also looked up to the grandfather he’d lost as a child. I’d discovered that while spending time with him in the building in the woods, and his grandfather had quite the military career.
I was proud of him.
Two weeks before school ended, Mrs. Callahan’s mirror assignment was due, and I spent the night before its deadline sitting on my bed, my hair pulled up and a notebook splayed open before me. My mirror sat next to it.
Heathcliff and I had spent a lot of evenings talking about Mrs. Callahan’s assignment, even writing pieces of it for each other, but tonight it was just me. Me and a piece of paper, the empty blue lines staring at me with bated breath.
I looked into the mirror, my stormy eyes meeting my reflection, my upswept wild, strawberry-blonde hair turning me into a human dandelion, a few freckles sprinkled over my mostly clear complexion. My appearance didn’t matter. I suddenly understood Sylvia Plath’s poem more than I’d ever understood it. No one interprets a poem the same way. That’s the beauty of poetry, but this assignment wasn’t about a poem. It wasn’t even about the mirror. It was about how we viewed ourselves, and how that view can change with time.
Picking up my pencil, I started to write, my heart bleeding down my arms and into my fingers, the words that formed becoming a sprawling mess of gray lead blood. I wrote a
nd I wrote until there was nothing left in me, nothing except a clean slate ready to be re-written on.
The next day, when last period English class came to an end and Mrs. Callahan called for the assignments, I stood with everyone else, my hand going to Heathcliff’s arm. He’d stood next to me, and he froze.
In the front of the room, students were placing the papers on Mrs. Callahan’s desk and leaving, but I held Heathcliff back, my gaze finding his shoes.
“I’ve got this,” I told him. My words broke the silence we’d once again come to depend on.
“What do you mean?” Heathcliff asked.
“Trust me,” I said. “It’s time for you to trust me. Just go. I’ve got this.” There were two copies of the paper I’d written the night before, my fingers still sore from writing it once and then re-writing it, and I handed the extra one to him. “Take this and go.”
He accepted the paper, and I walked away, approaching Mrs. Callahan’s desk without tripping despite the sudden trembling in my body knowing Heathcliff watched.
The rest of the students were gone, and the teacher looked up at me, an expectant smile on her face. She started to speak, but I held out the assignment in my hand, the paper shaking visibly.
“I know this wasn’t a group project, but Max Vincent and I worked on it together,” I said, clearing my throat. “Well, I did the actual writing, but we’ve worked most of the past semester working on bits and pieces of it.”
Mrs. Callahan took the paper, her gaze going over my shoulder before glancing down at the assignment. The title on the first page caught her off guard, and she threw me a look. “I admit I’m intrigued,” she said. Throwing one final glance over my shoulder, she added, “I’ll take it. Whatever grade you get, Max will get, too.”
Nodding, I left, passing a stunned Heathcliff where he stood just inside the classroom door. He was staring down at the paper, his eyes moving over the words. I didn’t stay to find out what he thought. I knew what he and Mrs. Callahan were reading, and my lips curled into a smile as I pushed through the door at the end of the hall, my feet bursting out into a sunny day. A new beginning.