“Okay,” Melinda called through Luci’s open door. “I’ll just park up the street.”
Luci, her eyes still on Colby’s window, closed the car door and walked toward the house.
*
Inside, the wake was in full swing. People were eating and drinking, wandering around the main floor and conversing in hushed tones. The traditional floor plan of the Craftsman — with the living room situated across from the dining area — was perfectly designed for formal occasions such as this.
Luci attempted to slip in through the open front door and dart up the stairs. However, the moment she entered, Candace spotted her. Colby’s mother swooped over to grab her by the shoulders and fake-kiss her on each cheek.
“Luci!” Candace cried for the benefit of her mournful guests. “Ah, Luci. Colby’s little love. Thank you for coming.”
John, Trina, and Zoe stood waiting behind Luci. A solid guard at her back. Candace impatiently waved them farther into the house. They ignored her by casting their gazes in the direction she indicated but not moving.
More guests arrived.
“You come see me before you go,” Candace said. “I have something … Colby, my boy, would want you to have …”
Luci nodded as she delicately disengaged herself from Candace’s grip. Colby’s mother now seemed to be actually choking on actual remorse that had finally cracked through her veneer. Luci pushed away the reciprocal emotion that she felt rise underneath her own facade. She needed to hold on just a few hours longer. Just until sunset. Then, one way or the other, it would all be definitively over for her.
Vanessa appeared out of the dining room crowd to rub Candace’s back and greet the guests waiting behind Luci’s wall of friends.
Luci, thwarted from her upstairs trajectory, crossed in the opposite direction, through the living room toward the kitchen.
Abram, who was sharing a bottle of expensive single-malt scotch with a group of dads huddled around the TV — including Luci’s stepfather — impeded her passage. “Luci! You hanging in there, kiddo?”
“Yes, Mr. ... Abram.”
“Good, good. You see the Canucks beat Philly 2—0 last night?” Though he clapped Luci on the shoulder as he asked the question, he was already turning back to the other men. “Luci’s brother, Pete, is on the farm team —”
“What is wrong with you?” Candace shrieked from the entranceway.
Luci — along with Abram and the entire room — turned to see Candace swoop down on Colby’s father.
“Your son is dead. Dead! Dead! And you’re talking about hockey! All you do is drink and watch TV. You haven’t even cried!”
People shuffled uncomfortably and quickly distanced themselves from the couple. Luci took the opportunity to slip back the way she came, behind her wide-eyed friends — John was actually frozen with a cucumber tea sandwich an inch from his open mouth — and upstairs. She’d already seen Colby’s parents in action, even before her boyfriend’s suicide, and she had no interest in seeing it again.
Also, time was short. The sun set early this time of year.
*
The echoes of their fight followed Luci up the stairs. More voices rose to join the fray as other adults tried to intercede, but no one really knew what to say or do. Pictures of Colby and Cicely lined the stairwell, so Luci chose to stare at the carpet runner that protected the hardwood of the treads.
She had to pass by the — thankfully — closed doors of Colby’s and Cicely’s rooms as well as the main bathroom to get to Colby’s parents’ room, which was at the end of the long hall. The house boasted four bedrooms upstairs and a guest suite downstairs — but then, all the homes of Luci and her friends did. The neighborhood might not be cookie-cutter identical, but its affluence was obvious all the same.
The door was slightly ajar, which was good, because Luci didn’t want to feel as if she was breaking in and stealing any more than she already was. The stealing was justified. The room, its decor gender neutral and recently tidied by the house cleaner, was so large that the king-sized bed looked stupidly small.
Luci made a beeline over the thick carpet to the antique dresser against the far wall. Despite its plushness, the perfectly clean carpet didn’t have any vacuum lines. Luci’s mother would be jealous. She was always going on about how her housekeepers never seemed to do as good a job as other peoples’. She only hoped she wasn’t leaving footprints as she leaned over to open the jewelry box on the dresser.
She lifted the top section out of the box to reveal a velvet case. Colby had shown her this case and its contents — his mother’s antique jewelry collection — one day when his parents were out. It had just been a make-out ploy on his part, but because she loved all things with a connection to the past and romantic symbolism, Luci had been pleased with the gesture. And then rewarded him well and fully on his parents’ bed.
She stared down at the antique rosary nestled in the velvet case. Then she took it, tugging it over her head and around her neck. It was a tight fit, but it hid beneath the high collar of her hated black dress and no one would get it off her easily. She returned the empty case and closed the jewelry box, hoping she’d be able to return the rosary without Candace having yet another loss to mourn.
Then she retraced her steps out of the room.
*
After closing the door softly behind her, Luci crossed from Colby’s parents’ room back along to a door she’d skipped the first time she passed through the hall. The room she wasn’t sure she even wanted to enter. The closed door bore a jigsaw-puzzle sign that spelled the name ‘Colby’ in colorful letters. Luci knew she should stop staring. She knew that this sign didn’t even remotely represent her dead boyfriend, but she felt as if she was frozen. The light would be still be on inside, though she couldn’t see so from the hallway where the thick carpeting blocked any bleed … was it his bedside table lamp?
Only a few more steps, she urged herself. Still, the doorknob didn’t turn beneath her resting hand, nor did the metal warm to her touch. She hadn’t been aware of being so cold —
“Even you couldn’t make him happy.”
Though she knew who had spoken, Luci slowly pivoted away from Colby’s bedroom door to see Cicely standing in the open doorway of her own bedroom across the hall. Cicley turned and crossed to her bed. The rumpled covers made it obvious that she’d been sitting there for some time. Cicely’s eyelashes were spiky and slick with her unshed tears. Luci tried to tamp down the inappropriate relief she felt at the rude — quite nasty, really — interruption. She tried to not relish the distraction.
“Everybody thinks you’re so perfect. So pretty,” Cicely said. Her fifteen-year-old sneer was practiced and faultless. “But even you couldn’t fix him. Why didn’t he let you fix him? Why did he need all that … that …”
Luci couldn’t think of anything to say to Cicely that would make finding her brother dead any better. The siblings shared a bathroom. Colby must have known that Cicely would be the one to find him. It was a terrible thing to do to his little sister. An event that would haunt her forever after. Luci turned away and pressed her forehead against Colby’s bedroom door. If she pressed hard and long enough, would the jigsaw ‘C’ forever emboss itself into her forehead? Did she want it to?
“Empty bags of blood and buckets,” Cicely continued. “And … and he cut himself all over. Like some sick ritual.”
Luci hadn’t needed this extra image added to the images she’d already conjured. She was quickly sliding into the emo realm, and it didn’t suit her or her life at all.
“I know you know why.” Cicely started to sob.
“I don’t, really,” Luci finally responded. “Not in a way that makes any sense.” She was talking more to the door than to Colby’s little sister. “I have to do something, but then I’ll come back. Okay?”
“I don’t care,” Cicely cried.
“I’ll come back.”
Cicely curled into a ball on her bed and buried her face in her ru
ffled purple pillow.
Luci, thankful to still be moving through her grief and not incapacitated on her own bed, turned the door handle and slipped into Colby’s room.
*
Colby’s room didn’t look any different from the last time she’d been here … four days ago now. Still, she took a moment to just stand and stare. She had to take these moments. She had to understand the choices they were both making. She’d thought they could build something between them, something that a poet would one day choose to immortalize …
The walls and ceiling were painted black and covered in neon-white handwritten death-poetry quotes. Colby had always heavily favored Tennyson, while Luci adored the words of Browning and Keats. She’d read something into that, once — something that was obviously just whimsy on her part, because reality was so pained and dark now.
She moved past the bureau. The black paint on the antique was already flaking off. Colby had said that one side had gotten scraped when his family moved from back east. She ran her fingers across and along the books that lined the top shelf of the bookcase as she approached the bed. Colby had mixed the King James Bible, a satanic bible, and the Koran in with books on witchcraft, mythology, and — oddly — Darwin. She didn’t understand his filing system. The entire second shelf was occupied by Victorian poetry, along with a number of secondhand books she’d bought him.
Colby’s bed wasn’t made. The sheets were black, but the duvet was an old Star Wars print — from the first movie, obviously. He’d thought it ironic, given his carefully constructed outward persona, but it wasn’t. The bedside lamp was still on. Luci knew that no one else had been in the room since Colby’s death, otherwise the bed would have been straightened and the clothes hung. It was rude for him to have left the light on like that, when he knew he wasn’t coming back from the bathroom. Of course, it was rude to kill himself in the tub and have his sister find him, so the lamp didn’t really matter at all.
Luci knelt beside the bed, flipped back the messy sheets, and pulled a carved wooden box out from underneath the frame. She thought the carvings might be Celtic, but it was what Colby kept in the box, not the box itself that mattered.
Still kneeling, she placed the box on the edge of the bed and flipped open the lid. She tossed a bottle of black nail polish, a couple of chewed black pens, and a condom onto the mattress.
Then she gathered Colby’s collection of rubber-band-wrapped poetry-and-love-note-filled register rolls into her hands. She carefully dug through past school awards, action figures, and old pennies to make sure she had every last one. These were her and Colby’s words. No one else ever needed to read them.
She stuffed the love notes into her book bag, stood, swiftly crossed to the lamp before she could think about it further, and clicked off the light.
*
Luci dodged various faceless adults who patted her on the shoulder and murmured condolences as she passed through the living room. She noted that her friends were huddled together as a group by the cookies and pastries in the dining room, so she’d chosen to loop to the kitchen by way of this route. The adults were still annoying.
She had a plan, and she didn’t need to get distracted now.
The caterers had taken over the kitchen. Luci imagined it hadn’t seen this much activity since Colby’s family moved in. She dodged one guy carrying a tray of food, as she pretended to need something from the fridge. The second caterer finished plating her tray of cookies and left.
Luci darted over to the knife rack, grabbed a large chef’s knife, and placed it in her book bag.
She then hustled over to the back door that led to the yard, the pool, and the garage. After glancing over her shoulder to determine that she hadn’t drawn any attention, she slipped out of the house.
Outside, a boy’s bike was carelessly propped against a neat pile of firewood. Candace had actually tripped over this bike two weeks ago while carrying groceries in from the garage. Colby had been grounded for a week.
Perfect.
*
The sun was setting. Not that Luci could see it from the low vantage point where she now sat, but the gray day had gotten darker and darker as she’d biked to the graveyard.
She’d walked the bike along the path as far as she could, then propped it neatly off to the side as she continued across the grass the few steps to the fresh grave. Her uncle — her mom’s brother — was buried somewhere in this cemetery. It was pretty, but all the headstones were flat mounted, so she wasn’t a true fan. It was too tidy, too understated for something as dramatic as death.
Luci sat cross-legged on the grass at the foot of the freshly filled grave. This would hopefully ruin her hated black dress. She’d turned off her phone before she’d even climbed onto the bike. She wished she’d grabbed her jacket, but that would have telegraphed her intentions far too much.
This was something only she could do. Why, she didn’t know, except that no one else would understand.
She pulled the rolls of love notes out of her bag, which she’d slung across her chest while biking and didn’t bother to remove now. Again, she made sure that she had retrieved every last one.
One at a time — taking a brief moment to read a snippet of each — she unrolled note after note until she was surrounded by waves of red-streaked white paper. Each rolled note was covered in two alternating handwritings — Colby wrote in black ink and she wrote back in pencil. She and Colby had discussed love and death in Victorian poetry for the last four months, ever since Luci had turned around in English lit class and scrawled her first note across Colby’s test paper.
Luci had thought her arguments and love poem quotes were slowly wooing Colby.
She’d obviously been wrong.
She folded her hands in her lap and tried to ignore the chilly spring evening. She tried to be peaceful, to think of nothing at all now. There were no more arguments to make.
The ground of the grave began to shift and move.
Luci didn’t bother screaming. Even though she’d been hoping it was a prank or a joke. And when it wasn’t, and when he was actually dead, she hadn’t known whether to hope his claims were real or pray they weren’t.
Two pale hands appeared in the loose dirt. Hands she’d once wished he’d use more … once wished he’d been more adventurous with his caresses …
Colby, covered in dirt, pulled his upper body free from the grave. His face was tortured, stretched across his cheekbones and jaw as he fought free of his burial site. Then his too-pale skin smoothed into a too-perfect mask of his former self. He opened his eyes, but they weren’t his eyes anymore. They were twin pools of swirling blood.
Utterly rabid, Colby pushed off his hands, launching himself across the edge of the grave toward Luci.
She didn’t flinch.
However, Colby did — right before his teeth closed on the rosary she was wearing around her neck. She’d pulled it out from her collar to make sure he’d see it.
“That my grandmother’s?” Colby asked. His teeth were still a breath from Luci’s tender neck.
“Yes.”
“Logically, that shouldn’t work with me. I’m agnostic.”
“I know you say you are.”
Colby grinned at her. Then he backed off and sat on his haunches over top of his grave, as a cat would.
Luci had always been more of a dog person.
“What are you doing here?” her newly-risen-from-the-dead boyfriend asked. “You wanted nothing to do with this, remember? Change your mind? Want to join me?”
“Is it everything you ever wanted?”
“Now? With you here? Yes, yes, yes.”
He flipped backward, landed on his feet, and bowed to Luci. Then he tried a handstand and a cartwheel. His hand landed awkwardly on the neighboring headstone and the corner snapped off under his fingers. He laughed, wrenched the entire plaque from the ground, and crumbled it into dust between his hands.
“Look at me! The strength. The agility. The power!”
“Yes,” she answered. “It’s amazing what you can get off the Internet these days.”
“And you thought it wasn’t real vampire blood ... plus, you totally annoyingly sound like my parents.”
“I am quoting them.”
“I hate it when you do that, and don’t tell me I sound ‘just so teenage typical’. Look how I’ve reinvented myself! Darwin over God; I’m living proof —”
“Living might not be the best word —”
“No one will ever tell me what to do, ever again!”
“They’re your parents, you know. Telling you what to do is kind of their job.”
“Fuck them! I’m going to suck the last drop of blood from their still-beating hearts!”
Luci sighed.
“Oh, I know you don’t like it when I talk like that. Don’t worry — I’ll make the actual death part quick. I’ve got to eat, don’t I? Better to slay evildoers.”
Impossibly quickly, he was once again by her side.
Luci flinched. She was unprepared the second time.
“Umm … you smell good,” Colby said, as he gently tugged Luci to her feet.
The paper rolls crumpled beneath their dirty shoes. Luci doubted that Colby had even noticed them. She doubted that such things meant anything to him now.
Colby pressed his lips to her wrist and inhaled deeply. Then he did the same at her elbow … then up her arm … to nuzzle a kiss just beneath her ear.
Luci sighed with a tired sort of ecstasy.
Colby turned his head to hover his lips over her mouth.
She leaned into him, closed her eyes so that she couldn’t see the blood whirling in his, and whispered, “I left you a note. In your pocket.”
Delighted — as a child getting a new toy would be — Colby pulled the rolled note from his pocket. As he read, the smile slowly slipped from his face.
’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
The Kiss: An Anthology About Love and Other Close Encounters Page 31